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

by Gabor Maté

It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You haven’t suffered like I have”—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively.

Facing it directly without either denial or overidentification becomes a doorway to health and balance.

A trauma-informed legal system would not justify or excuse harmful behavior. Rather, it would replace nakedly punitive measures with programs designed to rehabilitate people and not to further traumatize them. “All us criminals start out as normal people just like anyone else, but then things happen in life that tear us apart, that make us into something capable of hurting other people,” writes the academic and former inmate Jesse Thistle. “That’s all any of the darkness really is. Love gone bad. We’re just broken-hearted people hurt by life.”[7] “Unlike in some other countries, here prison is not designed to rehabilitate you,” he told me. “It’s designed to mess you up so that you’ll continue with high rates of recidivism, that’s what I think.”

As it turns out, it is often individuals who defy conventional normality who are the healthy ones.