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

by Gabor Maté

“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,” wrote the psychologist and visionary Wilhelm Reich.[3] 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. George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan depicts the heroic life and death of the young peasant girl Joan of Arc, whose visions and “voices” inspired her to lead the armed revolt against the English occupation of fifteenth-century France. “Oh, your voices, your voices,” the French king Charles VII says at one point to Joan with envy and frustration. “Why don’t the voices come to me? I am king, not you.” “They do come to you,” Joan replies, “but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.”