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

by Gabor Maté

One of the earliest and, for many, most challenging steps in programs like Alcoholics Anonymous is to entrust one’s life to the care of a higher power, whatever one understands that term to mean. Whether we know it or not, we all seek our higher power. 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. A. H. Almaas, whom I’m fortunate to call a mentor, calls these broken connections “holes.” “Allowing ourselves to tolerate the holes and go through them on the other side is more difficult now, because everything in society is against this. Society is against essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don’t try to fill yours the same way.”[1] “I don’t see society as an enemy,” he clarified when we spoke. “It’s more like society is asleep. It just doesn’t know. Some knowledge of it may arise through religion, where there is at least an awareness that there is more to us than the usual physical thing. The spiritual drive wakes up in a human being at s...