This book is an absolute Must-Read! If you are planning on having children, please read this book! If you are unhappy in your life but don't know why, over-react to little things, have trouble waiting for anything, Please read this book! 

Here are some basics and quotes, hopefully with enough context to be helpful: 

1. Babies shouldn't have to cry, as one mother states, "He doesn't have to cry, he just grunts and reaches…" (p.x) 

2. Babies need constant contact, not constant attention. "Babies that don't have this are keyed up with undischarged energy from spending so much time out of contact with an active person's natural discharging energy field." (p.x) 

3. This doesn't mean parents should be overly permissive. "If permissive parents do not distinguish between desirable and undesirable acts, the child often behaves more interruptively and disruptively." (p.xv) This refers to older children, not children in their first 2 years. 

4. Children do not need to be the center of attention. "her real need for them to be engaged in living their own lives as adults, with her in the midst." (p. xvi) 

5. Deprived children, deprived of the first 2 years of in-arms experience, can end up living one's life "in the self-imposed equivalent of a prison yard," (p.xvii) because the fear cuts off freedom of action. 

6. Our needs are not met, as opposed to the "character defects" concept of the 12 steps: "In light of the continuum concept, a person seeking help is an inherently 'right' creature whose species-specific needs have not been met and whose precisely evolved expectations may have been greeted and treated with self-righteous denial or condemnation by those whose role should have been to respect and fulfill them." 

7. "I hope that this new edition… will help to allow 'unimpeachable instinct' increasingly to inform our very suspect ideology." (p. xix) 

8. Visiting people in other cultures, she noticed, "the unreal quality of its people was accounted for by an absence of unhappiness … they did not distinguish work from other ways of spending time." 

9. We don't need to be unhappy to be happy: We need to un-learn the idea that "unhappiness is as legitimate a part of experience as happiness and necessary in order to render happiness appreciable." 

10. She observed people who would use modern technology when helpful, but would not be willing to 'do any work they did not enjoy, nor pursue a task after it had become tedious' to get them. 

11. "We are now fairly brought to heel by the intellect; our inherent sense of what is good for us has been undermined to the point where we are barely aware of its working and cannot tell an original impulse from a distorted one." 

12. As a result of our needs not being met, especially the first 2 years, we experience "resignation as a result of utter hopelessness" and this "serves to numb the original expectation that conditions will be found in which the sequence of expectations and fulfillments may proceed. " 

13. If a baby is left to cry for too long, they experience "utter bleakness without time or hope." 

14. Without the experience needed the first 2 years, a person is "crippled by a lack of confidence of a full sense of self, of spontaneity of grace. " 

15. "What a baby encounters is what [it] feels the nature of life to be. Each later impression can only qualify to a greater or lesser degree, the first impression, made when he had no previous data on the external world." 

It's really, really worth reading the book! I've just pulled out some key concepts… On a final note, and particularly relevant to Community of Healers: "Being the animals we are, we cannot but tend toward fulfilling our expectations no matter how irrational a tangle our combinations of deprivations make of our actual behavior…More direct use of continuum principles, however, is indicated. There is reason to believe that the missing experiences can be supplied to children and adults at any stage. " 

Here's a button to buy "The Contunuum Concept".