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

by Gabor Maté

Your personality is not you; you are not your personality. The mystery of who we truly are lies somewhere beyond the veil of personality. This does not make the personality “false,” any more than clothing is true or false. Unlike clothing, though, “taking off” the personality, or perhaps just some parts of it, appears to be out of the question because it seems like who we are. The point is not that we should (or can) suddenly strip it all away in the name of authenticity. It helps, however, to remind ourselves that it does not define us. We were not, to channel a popular song, born this way.[*]

The personality is an adaptation. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and conditioned coping styles, including some that do not reflect our true self at all but rather the loss of it. Each personality takes shape according to how one’s particular temperament reciprocally interacts with family, community, and culture. It may not express our real needs, deepest longings, and truest nature, but rather our attempt to compensate for our estrangement from them. “We suffer from a case of mistaken identity. Our culture has sold us a bill of goods about who we really are,” writes marital/family therapist Dick Schwartz.[1]

The other piece is compassion. To inquire compassionately takes openness, patience, and generosity. Think of how you would treat a struggling friend or loved one in their time of need, the leeway you would grant them to be confused, perplexed, frustrated. Being compassionate to yourself is no different, except that it’s often harder to practice. In compassion there is no exhortation that we should be other than the way we are, only an invitation to inquire into the what, how, and why of the beliefs and behaviors that do not serve us. I would never tell anyone that they should be compassionate with themselves. Compassion brooks no “should.” In any case, our defended, walled-off parts do not respond positively to such demands—why would they? It is far kinder and more effective to bring attention to the lack of self-compassion, to notice it and be curious about how it presents in one’s life. Once seen, it softens, allowing one to investigate its long-ago origins and present-day impacts.

Question #1: In my life’s important areas, what am I not saying no to? In other words, where did I, today or this week, sense a “no” within me that wanted to be expressed, but I stifled it, conveying a “yes” (or a silence) where a “no” wanted to be heard?

Admittedly, the realities of modern-day work can blur the distinction: we may rationally decide that holding on to a job requires saying yes to demands that tax us, demands that we would rather rebuff. All too many people find themselves in such situations for the sake of sheer economic survival. In such cases, we can ask ourselves whether the price we pay is worth the stress thereby incurred. That millions lack the freedom to even raise that question is a social problem of vast proportions. But for many among us, the absence of the “no” does not serve either our personal or economic well-being. Only you can know which denial of “no” characterizes your own situation. Even so, just getting clear that we are consciously and purposefully accepting a situation that incurs chronic stress is already a step up from doing so automatically.

Question #2: How does my inability to say no impact my life? You will find this impact lands in three main spheres: the physical, the emotional, and the interpersonal.

Resentment can be seen as the residue of things unsaid, feelings not honored. The word “resent” comes, after all, from the French ressentir, meaning “to feel again.” And again, and again, and again, in our minds and bodies, until we get the memo.

The question here would be “What do I miss out on in life as a result of my inability to assert myself?” Possible answers include fun, joy, spontaneity, self-respect, libido, opportunities for growth and adventure, and on and on.

Question #3: What bodily signals have I been overlooking? What symptoms have I been ignoring that could be warning signs, were I to pay conscious attention?

Likewise, in people who are completely identified with their roles in the world, the “no” has a hard time breaking through the soundproof armor of identity to make itself heard. We confuse ourselves with our worldly job descriptions—doctor, therapist, teacher, lawyer, CEO, man of the house, supermom. Hence this third question, inviting us to proactively consider what the body has been telling us all along, how it is trying to draw our attention away from our conditioned identity and toward what we really need. This may very well prevent the body from having to shout at us more loudly or to initiate a more disastrous crash.

Question #4: What is the hidden story behind my inability to say no?

Some examples of familiar stories: Saying no means I can’t handle something. It’s a sign of weakness. I have to be strong. I have to be “good” to deserve being loved. If I say no, I’m not lovable. I’m responsible for how other people feel and what they experience. I mustn’t disappoint anyone. I’m not worthy unless I’m doing something useful. If people knew how I really felt, they wouldn’t like me. If I turned down my friend/spouse/colleague/parent/neighbor, I would feel deservedly guilty.[*] It’s selfish to say no. It’s not loving to have anger.

Question #5: Where did I learn these stories? No one is imbued at birth with a sense of worthlessness. It is through our interactions with nurturing caregivers that we develop our view of ourselves. If, because of their own trauma, they treat us badly, we take it personally. If, for whatever reason, they are stressed or unhappy, we take that personally, too. Awareness of our parents’ distress, which as young children we could not have alleviated, can lead us to question our own value, even if we were assured verbally that we were loved.

Question #6: Where have I ignored or denied the “yes” that wanted to be said? If stifling a “no” can make us ill, so can withholding an authentic “yes.” What have you wanted to do, manifest, create, or say that you have forsaken in the name of perceived duty or out of fear? What desire to play or explore have you ignored? What joys have you denied yourself out of a belief that you don’t deserve them, or out of a conditioned fear that they’ll be snatched away? As with the unspoken “no,” ask yourself: What is the belief keeping me from affirming my creative impulses?

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?” In other words, we endeavor first to get to know these irksome aspects of ourselves and then, as best we can, to turn them from foes to friends. The truth is, these disturbers of our peace have always been friends, strange though it may sound. Their origins were protective and beneficent and that remains their current aim, even when they seem to go about it in a misguided way.

Most chronic guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and exactly one response. The stimulus is that you, child or adult, wish to do something for yourself that may disappoint someone else. This could be a true misdeed, such as stealing or behaving in a way that violates a moral principle; far more often, however, it’s nothing more than a desire to act in accordance with an innate impulse, from asserting your boundaries to expressing a negative feeling to even having that feeling. Making no distinction, guilt hurls at you the same epithet for all of them: selfish. Caught in a time warp, this overstaying friend cannot discern between then and now: it interprets every present-day interaction—be it with a spouse, child, parent, friend, doctor, neighbor, stranger—through the filter of your earliest relationships.

Anyone whose conscious recall is of a happy childhood—a category that may range from innocuous to idyllic—and yet is confronting chronic illness, emotional distress, addiction, or struggles to be authentic, is particularly invited to engage with it: When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?

Once upon a time, our wholeness was lost to us when our all-star team of inner friends—Guilt, Self-Hatred, Suppression, Denial, and the rest—came aboard to keep us safe. We were barely involved in the hiring process, and mostly we didn’t notice them as they went about their business. Like a cadre of reality-TV design experts, they set about remodeling our personalities so that we’d make it out of childhood in one piece: beautifying certain rooms and boarding up others, installing alarms, locking the cellar door. 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. After many years of living in this stuffy, segmented home, we came to long for a more spacious, better-ventilated existence. So we thanked the experts for their service, and sent them out for a well-deserved sandwich. 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. Chapter

“The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” he once said, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.”[3]

Ultimately your greatest gift to the world is being who you are—both your gift and your fulfillment. —A. H. Almaas, Being and the Meaning of Life

The first thing I learned in Peru—and here I mean direct learning, not stacking more facts on the woodpile of knowledge—is that healing is outside the thinking mind’s wheelhouse. For one thing, the mind by its nature is a house divided: our personalities contradict themselves constantly. In my case, part of me always held out hope, even if a theoretical kind, that I might someday, somehow, have an “enlightenment” moment, the big-ticket aha, while another part was stowed away, stoking cynicism and pessimism. Spirit, by contrast, is one with itself. Our minds, our learned knowledge, can store healing principles worth remembering and can even help lead us toward experiences that heal. There will come a time, if we wish to go “all the way,” when these trusty protectors have to recuse themselves at the door and allow a less sophisticated, more vulnerable element, stripped of armored certainties, to enter.

“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.”

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...

The point is not the big aha, but the arising—sudden or gradual, however it comes—of the consciousness that holds the mind but doesn’t mistake itself for its contents.

“In the Lakota idea,” Mehl-Madrona told me when we met to discuss this book and the possibility of collaborating in some healing events, “we need to celebrate and support people who are ill because they’re the canaries in the mine. They’re the ones who are showing us that our society is out of balance, and we need to thank them for taking that on and doing it for the rest of us. All of us need to participate in their healing, because if not for them, where would we be? We’re all responsible for whatever ails them. We have the responsibility to contribute to their healing for everybody’s benefit.” What a bracing old/new thought: a society in which all have responsibility for the health of all, where the illness is seen as the manifestation of shared experience. A culture like ours has much to learn from ones that take our biopsychosocial nature as a given.

“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.”

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up”—another penetrating observation from Baldwin that could accurately describe almost any place on earth.

It is never redundant to remind ourselves that the Chinese phrase for “crisis” is a compound of symbols for “danger” and “opportunity.”