Shadowing Practice: Gabor Maté – Authenticity vs. Attachment - Learn English Speaking with Video

When a child is born, a child has two needs.

The first need is for attachment.

And attachment is contact, connection, love.

Without that, the human child does not survive.

Any mammalian child or even an avian child doesn't survive.

So that as soon as you get past the level of reptiles, the reptile is hatched, the mother is long gone by then,

and the reptile infant either lives or dies dies but there's no attachment to a parenting figure.

As soon as you get to the level of birds now, the baby bird has to have an attachment with the parents, the parents have to be attached to the baby.

Otherwise the infant simply does not survive.

Mammalians even more so and most so the human because we're the least developed, the least mature, with the least developed brains

and the most dependent for the longest period of time of any creature in the universe.

So our attachment needs are enormous, and they remain important throughout lifetime because we have to have attachments to foreign societies, social groups without which we don't survive.

So attachment is a huge need.

We have to connect, belong, be loved by and love.

That's just a basic human need.

But we have another need as well, which is for authenticity.

Authenticity is the capacity, as I said earlier, to know what we feel, to be in touch with our bodies,

and to be able to express who we are and manifest who we are in our activities and in our relationships.

Now why is that?

Well, think of a human being in evolutionary period who's not in touch with their body and their gut feelings.

How long do they survive out there in the wild?

So authenticity is another huge survival need.

Great.

So far so good.

but what happens to a child where the attachment need is not compatible with the need for authenticity?

In other words, if I'm authentic, my parents will reject me.

If I feel what I feel and express what I feel and insist on my own truth,

my parents can't handle it and parents convey those messages unconsciously all the time not

because they mean to not because they don't leave love the child not

because they're not trying to do their best but

because they themselves are suppressed or traumatized or hurt or stressed

so I convey that message many times to my children believe me without without any conscious desire to do so.

In fact, it was the very opposite of what I wished to convey.

But that they're not acceptable the way they are, with their emotions the way they are, that's the message my kids got when they were small.

And most children get that in our society.

Now what does a child do with that?

Well, if I give up my attachment for the sake of authenticity, I lose my relationships on which my life depends.

Therefore, there's no question.

What becomes suppressed is our authenticity, our emotions.

And then we become 25 and 30 or 35, 40, and we don't know who we are.

And somebody asks us, what do you feel?

You say, I have no idea.

And how many times we've all had the experience of having an inkling of a strong gut feeling, but we're ignoring it, we're ignoring it and we get into trouble.

Well, that tells us what happened.

What happened was

that at some point we found out it was too costly

for our attachment relationships to be in touch with our gut feelings.

So then it becomes not our first nature, but our second nature to suppress our feelings, to lose touch with ourselves and to suppress our gut feelings.

And then we pay the cost later on in the form of addictions, mental illness, or any range of physical illnesses.

But it all began with this tragic conflict that children should never be confronted with, but are all the time,

between authenticity on the one hand and attachment on the other.

And even as adults, so many people are suffering because They want to be themselves, but they're afraid to be because they know or at least they fear

that if they're themselves they're going to lose important attachment relationships in their life.

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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