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

by Gabor Maté

The question for most of us is not whether to be angry but how to relate in a wholesome way to the feelings that naturally ebb and flow with life’s tide, anger included.

Acceptance begins with allowing things to be as they are, however they are.

we endeavor to just be with it. In doing so, we foster an aligned relationship with the actual, present moment.

Sometimes accepting ourselves starts with facing that we don’t know how we feel, or that our feelings are mixed. Rejection of any part of our experience is an unnatural self-rejection, one that nonetheless feels normal to many of us. You’ve made some serious mistakes? You find yourself filled with hatred, or resentment, or confusion? These, too, are candidates for acceptance; underneath them there is always pain.

Interpersonal compassion necessarily involves empathy, the ability to get and relate to the feelings of another.

We can learn a lot about our own emotional-injury history by observing in what situations, and toward whom, our naturally open and supple hearts

tend to harden and shut down.

Self-pity takes a kind of solace in seeing oneself as an unfortunate character, beleaguered by fate. It undermines healing by reinforcing the stories that keep us ensconced in a world of hurt, and by discouraging responsibility for our own point of view.

We ask, without judgment, why a person or group—any person, any group—would end up being the way they are and act the way they do, even or especially when we are vexed or perplexed by it. We might also call this the compassion of context.

The willingness to seek the why before leaping to the how is the compassion of curiosity and understanding in action. Though it is called for in every instance of chronic suffering, whether in the personal or social realm, it can be challenging in practice.

Questing with clear eyes to find the systemic roots of why things are the way they are takes patience, curiosity, and fortitude.

In chronicling the events of his own life, Thistle, along with fellow writers and artists of Indigenous Canada, is reclaiming a compassionate context for his people—in both the familial and national senses of that word—to exist and be seen in the world’s eyes, and their own.

If you are not sure what I mean, the next time you feel intense judgment toward anyone, check in with your body states—the sensations in your chest, belly, throat. Does it feel pleasant? Unlikely; nor is it healthy for you. The lesson is not that you shouldn’t judge, since it’s not you that’s doing it but rather your automatic mind. To judge yourself for judging is itself to keep the wheel of shame spinning. The opportunity is to inquire into your judgmental mind and body state with compassionate curiosity. Healing flows when we are able to view this hurting world as a mirror for our own pain, and to allow others to see themselves reflected in us as well—recognition paving the way for reconnection.

“When you have a lifetime of emotions that you have been running from,” writes Helen Knott, “it seems like once they catch up they will gang-beat you and leave you crippled in an alleyway.”4 That need not happen. The compassion of truth recognizes that pain is not the enemy. In fact, pain is inherently compassionate, as it tries to alert us to what is amiss. Healing, in a sense, is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain. In this way, compassion is a gateway to another essential quality: courage.

That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to; and yet, in that pain, there is freedom.

There is more to each of us than the conditioned personalities we present to the world, the suppressed or untrammeled emotions we act out, and the behaviors we exhibit. Understanding this allows for what I call the compassion of possibility. I don’t mean possibility in the hypothetical, future-dwelling sense, as in “maybe someday,” but as a present, alive, ever-available inherent quality. Possibility is connected to many of humanity’s greatest gifts: wonder, awe, mystery, and imagination—the qualities that allow us to remain connected to that which we can’t necessarily prove.

That’s what the body is calling us back to, through indicators emotional or physical. Symptoms and illness are the body’s way of letting us know when we have strayed from that core. “My experience is that when parts of us can’t get through to us otherwise, they don’t have a lot of options, but they do have the body,” Dick told me.

At such times, she has numbness of the skin, which she sees as a perfect metaphor for some emotion she may not be permitting herself to feel. “This is that red light,” she said, “telling me, ‘Okay, stop. Go back to yourself.’ And that’s exactly what I do. At that moment I stop, because in the last years I’ve learned, when I feel it, even a little bit, I stop. I relax. I meditate. I go to see how I feel, what it’s telling me. And the moment I discover what it is—maybe it’s some emotional pain, maybe I’m sad about something, maybe it was some trigger that took me somewhere and suddenly I’m not here—then I come back to myself. The moment I discover it, that moment the symptom disappears.”

The teaching from her trajectory is not that anyone should follow her radical choices, but that it’s possible to gain the capacity to accept life as it actually is, the authenticity to search for our own truth in all situations, and the agency to choose our response to whatever occurs. Rounding out the four A’s, there is healthy anger, which flashed in Donna’s declaration, “What’s not coming back is me.” Her journey into self is not over. “I work daily at maintaining my authenticity,” she says.

allowing myself to be real about everything that was going on now in the present, but also in the past. And allowing

myself just the space to express it all.”

But the biggest change was that, for the first time in her life, she allowed herself to feel the entire range of her emotions, releasing a lifelong pattern of repression. She fully gave herself over to her grief and shed tears of despair.

What I really needed was just the space to experience all of my emotions, with no pretense—no pretense, for the first time. I needed to feel the hurt of it all.”

These people who get better really change their beliefs about themselves or their beliefs about the universe.”

In all cases, people voluntarily and with relentless courage underwent a painful but ultimately exhilarating shedding of a second skin, the blend of adaptive, self-abnegating traits I cataloged in chapter 7, on attachment versus authenticity, and grouped also under Erich Fromm’s term “social character.”

The centrality of reorienting identity in the direction of the authentic is among her essential findings.

The challenge we all face is: Can we acquire that learning before life forces it upon us? Do we have to wait to “suffer into truth”?

Here, then, is another sense in which healing is an upstream journey: it necessarily involves the full-hearted acceptance of the inevitability of our passing and the determination to experience all the days and moments that lead us to our earthly exit.

As he described himself, his pre-disease personality lined up with what I have seen in everyone with his condition: what we have earlier called superautonomous self-sufficiency, the shutdown of feelings and the almost phobic refusal to seek help or emotional support from anyone.

He had brought into harmony parts of his essence that might have remained fragmented and discordant without the unasked-for invitation his disease presented him with.

Major calamities of body and mind are only the latest and loudest summons from essential parts of ourselves we have lost touch with.

a. Your personality is not you; you are not your personality.

b. The personality is an adaptation.

It may not express our real needs, deepest longings, and truest nature, but rather our attempt to compensate for our estrangement from them. “We suffer from a case of mistaken identity. Our culture has sold us a bill of goods about who we really are,” writes marital/family therapist Dick Schwartz.

c. Our bodies do keep the score.fn2 If the authentic self can be covered by many layers of limiting self-belief and conditioned behavior, it is never obliterated. It continues to speak to us through the body. We can learn to heed the messages the body sends by learning its language. d. The personality, and the loss of our essential nature, is not personal.

Each of us, then, while responsible for our own healing journey, and bound to grapple with our own personality’s particularities, can also take heart in knowing that we are engaging with a universal dynamic—a tale as old as time, to quote the theme song to Beauty and the Beast, the beloved Disney musical about unlikely transformations and recovering one’s essence.

Writing by hand rather than typing helps create a sense of connection with yourself, while keeping the digital distractions at bay.

In no way does compassionate inquiry seek to stigmatize genuine altruism. It is the habitual, unwilled selflessness ingrained in many people’s personalities, the kind that takes a heavy toll, that we are gently bringing to the fore.

More generally, ask yourself: With whom and in what situations do I find it most difficult to say no? Even if I say it, do I do so reluctantly, apologetically, or with guilt? Do I beat myself up about it afterward? There is a world of difference between a considered, conscious “yes” and a compulsive suppression of a “no.”

In such cases, we can ask ourselves whether the price we pay is worth the stress thereby incurred. That millions lack the freedom to even raise that question is a social problem of vast proportions. But for many among us, the absence of the “no” does not serve either our personal or economic well-being.

On the physical level, we are talking about bodily warning signs such as insomnia, back pain, muscle spasms, dry mouth, frequent colds, abdominal pains, digestive problems, fatigue, headaches, skin rashes, loss of appetite, or the urge to overeat. On the emotional plane, this inquiry yields answers such as sadness, alienation, anxiety, or boredom. The

Resentment can be seen as the residue of things unsaid, feelings not

honored. The word “resent” comes, after all, from the French ressentir, meaning “to feel again.” And again, and again, and again, in our minds and bodies, until we get the memo.

In our culture of mind-body bifurcation, many of us have become accustomed to ignoring the body’s messages.

What feeds our habitual pattern of denying our “no” is what I call the story. By this I mean the narrative, the explanation, the justification, the rationalization that makes these habits seem normal and even necessary. In truth they sprout from limiting core beliefs about ourselves. Most often we are not aware that they are stories.

“What must I believe about myself to deny my own needs this way?” The answer, even a speculative one, will likely be very close to the mark. Our stories, though neither objective nor accurate, are always internally consistent with our behavior and our experience.

Most of us, given a choice, would rather live a life of conscious power and cultivated fortitude than one of unwilled strength.

The intention in looking at the past is not to dwell on it but to let go of it.

The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.

“What is in us must out; otherwise we may explode at the wrong places or become hopelessly hemmed in by frustrations,” wrote that wise medical scientist János Selye in The Stress of Life.4 I’ve learned this lesson well. Whenever something in me demanded to be uttered and I gave it no expression, I suffocated in the silence. The books I have written, including the one now in your hands, came from heeding the call of what in me needed out.