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

by Gabor Maté

“I have answered the question ‘Have I done enough?’ positively,” Peter said during a recent conversation. “I have done enough. But ‘Am I enough?’ I’m still wrestling with that one.” I smiled in recognition.

“We download our perceptions and beliefs about life years before we acquire the capacity for critical thinking,” Dr. Lipton writes. “Those perceptions or misperceptions become our truths.”1 From such truths, we will henceforth generate our concepts about ourselves in the world. More precisely, from such untruths.

Find a place to sit and write, preferably a quiet place. With this exercise, too, you’ll want to keep a handwritten journal.

In doing so, you put the story in its place, gently taking it off the nonfiction shelf. It is no longer an ironclad law to be resisted or an accusation to be refuted:

just a thought, painful or dysfunctional though it may be. Odds are, the thought will come back—at which point you’ll relabel it again, with calm determination and mindful, vigilant awareness.

“It’s not how you feel; it’s what you do that counts.”

The purpose of refocus is to teach your brain that it doesn’t have to succumb to the old, tired story.

Feel your own body state as you consider the space the belief has occupied in your mind. The impacts live right there, in your physiology, as surely as they do in your actions and relationships.

You have values. You have passions. You have intention, talent, capability, a desire to contribute, perhaps a latent sense of purpose or calling. In your heart there is love, and you want to connect that with the love in the universe.

what is the life you really want? What do you choose to create? Write down your values and intentions and, once again, do so with conscious awareness. Envision yourself living with integrity, being able to look people in the eye with compassion for them—and for yourself. The road to hell is not paved with good intentions; it is paved with lack of intention. The more you relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue, the freer you will be to re-create. Are you afraid you will stumble? Guess what: you will. That’s called being a human being.

To conclude, a word to the wise—or those who wish to be. If we remove the hyphen from “re-create,” we are left with the verb form of “recreation,” as in “play.”

My life has not been about fixing what is broken. It has been about engaging in a loving and tender archaeological dig back to my true self.

Alas, the quest for wholeness is not reducible to any one or two (or three, or twenty, or fifty) practices, modalities, or approaches. Far from a one-and-done proposition, returning to ourselves is a road we choose, with all the twists and turns and seeming cul-de-sacs that come with following—or indeed, forging—an uncertain path. In my experience we are never as close as we hope, and never as far as we fear.

Everything within us, no matter how distressing, exists for a purpose; there is nothing that shouldn’t be there, troublesome and even debilitating though it may be. The question thus shifts from “How do I get rid of this?” to “What is this for? Why is this here?”

We need not fear, avoid, reject, or suppress these “undesirables”; in fact, we merely delay our emancipation from them when we do. It isn’t them but rather our desperate efforts to keep them at bay that levy the heaviest toll on our mental or physical well-being. Once we see these seeming inner antagonists for what they are and let them be, they tend to respond in kind and begin to let us be. Agency is gained not through resistance to ourselves but by way of acceptance and understanding.

Their reason for being, mind you, is anything but stupid. Although they cause us pain now, they first came along to save us. Their presence is in fact an unmistakable sign of the deep intelligence of the human bodymind. And fortunately, healing does not require their disappearance, only their realignment—or perhaps their reassignment. What matters is that we, rather than they, are in the lead.

Left unchecked, it augurs physical or mental distress, as we have witnessed in stories throughout this book. Many people suffer a corrosive, automatic guilt and shame if they so much as contemplate letting others down, treating their own needs as valuable, or acting on their own behalf.

Both states come bearing gifts: on the one hand, exhilaration and creative flow; on the other, the gift of rest, of embracing my limitations. Neither one ever takes over for long. It’s a big deal, I’m finding, to know that your mind is not your enemy.

As we have said, the trauma is not what happened to us, but what happened inside us as a result. Peter Levine reminds us that “trauma is about broken connection. Broken connection to the body, broken connection to our vitality, to reality, and to others.”

We can always work with the here and now, even if the long ago is locked away.

Every time we are triggered—which is to say, caught up suddenly in an unwanted, puzzlingly overwrought emotional reaction—that is the past showing up: an echo of our childhood as we actually experienced it, if not how we consciously recall it. There are ways to retrieve such encoded memories by using present-moment emotions and body experiences to find their origins.fn4

The point in accessing a more well-rounded history is not to engender self-pity, nor to wipe the genuinely good times from the record. It’s this: to make peace with our inner tormentors, we have to first understand them against the backdrop of their origin stories.

When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?

“And fortunate you were,” I customarily interject. “But just imagine for a moment your little niece or nephew sobbing to you, ‘I feel so sad and alone and confused and I’m afraid to tell Mommy or Daddy about it.’ Would you, if you wished to be supportive, dismiss this little one with ‘Come on, what’s the problem here? Think

of all the children who are having big life circumstances, like hunger or abuse or bullying. By contrast, you have nothing to complain about.’ Is that what you’d say to them if you wanted them to know their feelings were safe to feel, that they were lovable no matter what?” I have yet to hear anyone respond in the affirmative: when I put it to them that plainly, they’re finally able to hear in it the absurd double standard enforced against the self.

But their success at keeping us intact required that we emerge into adulthood with core parts of ourselves walled off. They were good at their jobs.

And we devoted ourselves gently but diligently to a new task, the literal antidote to the psychic dismemberment required of us long, long ago: the task of remembering ourselves.

To be sure, a handful of moving experiences have left me with deepened gratitude or appreciation for my life’s many blessings, but for all that, even these positive encounters with the plant have not shifted my mind’s wondrously stubborn Eeyore setting.

For one thing, the mind by its nature is a house divided: our personalities contradict themselves constantly.

“We live in a world that is split,” the Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield told me, “and so our psyche is split. We make money by going to work, and we take care of our bodies in the gym, and we maybe take care of our psyche a little bit in therapy, and we do the arts when we go to a concert, and we do the sacred by going to church or synagogue or mosque or something like that. They’re all in compartments, as if the sacred was somehow separate from the work that we do, or the music that we make.”

The longing manifests in many ways: our desire to belong; our drive to know our purpose in life; the urge to escape the limitations of our conditioned, self-centered personalities; our taste for transcendent experiences. Unfortunately, in our culture we are taught to seek fulfillment by filling ourselves with evanescent externals. It cannot be done, for what we are missing within cannot be replaced from without. The emptiness dogging us emanates from the places where we have lost contact with our deepest selves.

The spiritual drive wakes up in a human being at some point. It’s mysterious when it wakes up: sometimes it wakes up by itself; sometimes it’s triggered by something happening outside, by listening to somebody or reading a book. When the spiritual drive or curiosity wakes up, that’s when one yearns to find out more about what a human being is beyond the limitations society normally understands, recognizes, and tries to enforce.”

Yoga, brief meditation sessions, the occasional psychedelic experience, contemplative silence, reading the spiritual classics of many faiths and disciplines, and listening to the contemporary masters have all helped as I stumble my way toward deeper truths.

“I am feeling a spaciousness inside me, like outer space or the ocean.”

“I was sitting in a creek in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” she recalled when we talked, “and all the butterflies were coming down the creek, and the sun was glinting off the water, and I just knew that everything was okay. It was one of those epiphanic moments where time was suspended and I was okay, and I was alone, and I might always be alone, but everything was all right.”

“When I walk,” she said vibrantly, “there is no tomorrow. Yesterday is gone … there is only here, now. I listen to the forest speak, the mountains, the water. I hear their voices. Trees become family. Rocks become living beings that you know, and you’re happy to see.” Walking has also instilled in her a new sense of what it means to be resilient. “I know without a doubt that I can breathe through anything, every single difficult thing that surfaces. In whatever headspace that may come to me in my day … I can sit, and I can write, I can draw, I can garden, I can do the dishes. I can bring myself back to my breath, and I’m okay. And I’m going to be okay, and it’s me.”

But any activity that brings us back to our own nature—which is, of course, but one expression of Nature writ large—unencumbered by gadgets and digital obsessions, can be a fount of refreshment.

People can get well. But before a person can do so, he or she must often undergo a transformation—of lifestyle, emotions, and spirit—besides making the necessary shifts in the physical body.”2

“There is only one common rule valid in finding your special truth. It is to learn to listen patiently to yourself, to give yourself a chance to find your own way which is yours and nobody else’s,”

Listening for our “special truth” is among the most daunting of challenges amid the clamor of our increasingly noisy world—a world that isolates even as it discourages healthy solitude. The quest is age-old.

The ancient and modern practices of mindfulness encourage and allow space for that voice to emerge, by separating us from and enabling us to observe the cacophonous traffic in our minds without being seduced, overwhelmed, or intimidated by it.

Mindfulness practices have also had the documented benefits of reducing inflammation, reprogramming epigenetic functioning, promoting the repair of telomeres, reducing stress hormone levels, and encouraging the development of healthier brain circuitry.4 Mindfulness even reduced the disease progression in patients with ALS:5 the mind-body unity in action once again.

“I would never bet against the human heart,” the psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher Rick Hansonfn5 told me.

“For most of human history, our relationships with the natural world had been based on metaphors.”

Nature’s signs. Michael Meade has a beautiful phrase for the kind of collective knowing that dates back as long as we’ve been around: “a thought in the heart.” My own heart resonates with the thought that—despite all apparent evidence to the contrary—there is in all of us an essential aspect that cannot be extinguished.

They all derive from the core principles of this book: biopsychosocial medicine, disease as teacher, the primacy of both attachment and authenticity, and, above all, fearless self-inquiry, here on a social scale.

I would also call it the optimism of heart and soul, which are the birthplace of will. These nonrational parts of ourselves know things about human potential and the nature of life that are untouchable by even the smartest intellect.

What if our intention, as parents, as educators, as a society, was to raise children in touch with their feelings, authentically empowered to express them, to think independently and be prepared to act on behalf of their principles?

It all starts with waking up: waking up to what is real and authentic in and around us and what isn’t; waking up to who we are and who we’re not; waking up to what our bodies are expressing and what our minds are suppressing; waking up to our

wounds and our gifts; waking up to what we have believed and what we actually value; waking up to what we will no longer tolerate and what we can now accept; waking up to the myths that bind us and the interconnections that define us; waking up to the past as it has been, the present as it is, and the future as it may yet be; waking up, most especially, to the gap between what our essence calls for and what “normal” has demanded of us. We are blessed with a momentous opportunity. Shedding toxic myths of disconnection from ourselves, from one another, and from the planet, we can bring what is normal and what is natural, bit by bit, closer together. It is a task for the ages: one that can redeem the past, inspire the present, and point to a brighter, healthier future. It is our most daunting challenge and greatest possibility.