The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

“I had been a stereotypical good girl, overachiever, top of my class, always pushing to develop my talent and intellect, not to satisfy me but to be accepted by others,” she told me. That relentless pressure, she learned, manifested in her medical conditions. She had to let it go.

The dilemma is this: What happens if our needs for attachment are imperiled by our authenticity, our connection to what we truly feel? What happens, in other words, when one nonnegotiable need is pitted by circumstance against the other? These circumstances might include parental addiction, mental illness, family violence and poverty, overt conflict, or profound unhappiness—the stresses induced by society, on children as well as adults. Even without these, the tragic tension between attachment and authenticity can arise. Not being seen and accepted for who we are is sufficient.

If we are not made to feel important for just who we are, we may seek significance by becoming compulsive helpers—a syndrome I know intimately. And here’s the final part of the disappearing act: as mentioned, in our culture, many of these compensations for what we lost are seen as not only normal but even admirable. Valued as “strong suits,” they too often encase and wall off the authentic self by assuming its guise.

Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete. They are professional shorthand for describing constellations of symptoms a person may report, or of other people’s observations of someone’s behavior patterns, thoughts, and emotions. For the individual in question, a diagnosis may seem to account for and validate a lifetime of experiences previously too diffuse or nebulous to put one’s finger on.

Literally what separates those of us who do suffer from those of us that don’t is what happens to us during our lives.”

In an atomized, materialistic culture people are induced to take everything personally, to see their own mental and physical distress as misfortunes or even failures belonging to them alone.

An impending loss of food supply, for example, is a major stressor for any creature. So is, for our species, the absence or threatened loss of love, or work, or dignity, or self-esteem, or meaning.

We can do nothing about the world that created our mind, that may have instilled in us limiting, harmful, untrue beliefs about ourselves and others. However—and here’s the good news I alluded to—we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward. The capacity to heal is born of the willingness to do just that, to take on that responsibility. Such willingness is not a once-and-for-all declaration but a moment-by-moment commitment, one that can be regenerated when we lose touch with it.

I have always believed—and “believed” is not a strong enough word here, because I’m speaking of a conviction more powerful than belief—that within everyone there is the potential for development and growth, no matter what they have experienced, believed, or done. And then there was me, the lone exception! Such is the power of the mind: it can rigidly maintain its convictions for a long time even when such views are self-defeating, contrary to experience, and even dissonant with other, neighboring beliefs.

None of us need be perfect, nor exercise saintly compassion, nor reach any emotional or spiritual benchmark before we can say we’re on the healing path. All we need is readiness to participate in whatever process wants to unfold within us so that healing can happen naturally.

The intention in looking at the past is not to dwell on it but to let go of it. “The moment you know how your suffering came to be, you are already on the path of release from it,” the Buddha said.