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

by Gabor Maté

The source of that sense of overweening power soon began to surface. “My parents went through a really hard time when I was eleven,” Caterina recalled. “They would have horrible fights at night . . . and they would scream at each other. My dad would cry to me . . . understandably, because he was going through a lot, and we were really close.” That “closeness,” really an unhealthy lack of boundaries that psychologists call “fusion,” had persisted throughout Caterina’s formative years. Harmful as the dynamic was, in Caterina’s mind it was her moral duty to protect her parents: she wore her inability to hold her family together like a badge of shame, proof of her unworthiness. Absorbing a parent’s sorrow is not the Nature-given responsibility of a child. “The reversal of roles between child, or adolescent, and parent, unless very temporary, is almost always not only a sign of pathology in the parent but a cause of it in the child,” wrote the great pioneer of attachment research and personality development, the British psychiatrist John Bowlby.[19]