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

by Gabor Maté

“Genes affect how sensitive one is to environment, and environment affects how relevant one’s genetic differences may be,” the leading geneticist R. C. Lewontin has said. “When an environment changes, all bets are off.”[14] Some people will feel more pain and will therefore have greater need to escape into the adaptations that mental illness, or addiction, represent. They will have more need to tune out, to dissociate, to split into parts, to develop fantasies to account for realities they are unable to endure. But that’s a far cry from saying that they have a heritable neurobiological disease. These are the children that Tom Boyce, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, describes as orchids, “exquisitely sensitive to their environment, making them especially vulnerable under conditions of adversity but unusually vital, creative, and successful within supportive, nurturing environments.”[15] The same “sensitivity” genes that in a stressed environment can help potentiate mental suffering may, under positive circumstances, help promote stronger mental resilience and therefore happiness.[16] Sensitive people have the potential to be more aware, insightful, inventive, artistic, and empathic, if their sensitivity is not crushed by maltreatment or disdain. The most sensitive of our kind have made some of the most lasting cultural contributions; many of these have also suffered the most intense pains during their lives. Sensitivit...