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

by Gabor Maté

The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.” Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world. It can even determine whether or not we are capable of rational thought at all in matters of the greatest importance to our lives.

Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.

“Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”

have thus exhibited what is called response flexibility: the ability to choose how we address life’s inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges. “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote the psychologist Rollo May.[12] Trauma robs us of that freedom.

We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.

“superautonomous self-sufficiency,”[*] which means exactly what it sounds like: an exaggerated and outsize aversion to asking anything of anyone.

Stress can show up in two forms: as an immediate reaction to a threat or as a prolonged state induced by external pressures or internal emotional factors. While acute stress is a necessary reaction that helps maintain our physical and mental integrity, chronic stress, ongoing and unrelieved, undermines both.

The renowned American stress researcher Bruce McEwen[*] popularized the word “allostasis” to capture the body’s attempt to maintain inner equilibrium in the face of changing circumstances.

“staying the same amid change.” We cannot do without it, and so our bodies will go to great lengths to maintain it—even to the point of long-term wear and tear if stresses do not abate. Such strain on our body’s regulatory mechanisms, which McEwen dubs “allostatic load,” leads to an excessive and prolonged release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, nervous tension, immune dysfunction, and, in many cases, exhaustion of the stress apparatus itself.

“chronic psychological stress has a negative impact on immune cell function and may accelerate their aging.”[14] In other words, stress ages our chromosomes, and therefore ages us.

What distinguishes our earliest attachment relationships—and, crucially, the coping styles we develop to maintain them—is that they form the template for how we approach all our significant relationships, long after we have grown out of the do-or-die phase.

Or a child may internalize the idea that “I’m lovable only when I’m doing things well,” setting herself up for a life of perfectionism and rigid role identification, cut off from the vulnerable part of herself that needs to know there is room to fail—or even to just be unspectacularly ordinary—and still get the love she needs.

If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel.

For reasons we have already begun to glimpse, many children in our culture are shut off from their authentic feelings.[*]

She is not to be accepted for who she is, only for how she is. Here’s the problem: even if the parent wins the behavior-modification game, the child loses. We have instilled in her the anxiety of being rejected if her emotional self were to surface. This exacts a heavy toll on both physical and mental health. While the expression of an emotion can be inhibited, or even its conscious experience blocked, the emotion itself is energy that cannot be obliterated. By banishing feelings from awareness, we merely send them underground, a locked cellar of emotions that will continue to haunt many lives.

Mothering a child may be a mandate from Nature, but mothering a grown man is both unnatural and impossible.

The same goes for us: no emotional vulnerability, no growth.

Apart from impeding maturation, the shutdown of vulnerable feeling reinforces the sense of emptiness.

If we label this depression of feeling a disease, we risk not recognizing its original adaptive function: to distance oneself from emotions that are unbearable at a time in life when to experience them is to court greater calamity. Recall what I called the tragic tension between authenticity and attachment. When experiencing and expressing what we feel threatens our closest relationships, we suppress.

Either way, repressing the rejected emotion is the surest way of escaping overwhelming levels of vulnerability, of avoiding a too-painful rift between oneself and the ambient world.

“The political system seems to be failing as much as the economic system,” Stiglitz writes in his 2012 book, The Price of Inequality. In the eyes of many, he continues, “capitalism is failing to produce what was promised, but is delivering on what was not promised—inequality, pollution, unemployment, and most important of all, the degradation of values to the point where everything is acceptable and no one is accountable.”[23]

Canadian physician Dr. Clyde Hertzman[*] minted the concept of “biological embedding,” by which he meant precisely what we’ve been looking at in myriad ways in this book: that our social environments and experiences, in his words, “get under the skin early in life,” shaping our biology and development.

As the Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates tersely asserts, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” In other words, the very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of the racist. Though racism’s impacts are real, in physiological or genetic terms race does not exist.

I asked Daniel Siegel what draws people to follow leaders who exude hostility and an authoritarian streak, such as a Donald Trump. “People may actually feel excitement that someone in the public eye is expressing aggression or assertion, the opposite of impotence,” the psychiatrist and mind researcher said, noting how such traits can feel empowering to those in whom a sense of real power is wanting. “It’s like a child wanting to be with a parent that will protect them. There is a sense of ‘I’m going to be safe and everything is going to be okay.’” What Dan describes is also a sense memory, an indelible and usually unexplored imprint from childhood, a longing stored in the bodymind and activated by present-day insecurities projected into the political realm.

On the liberal side, idealizing leaders as kind, supportive, caring, and inclusive can be another form of displaced longing for attuned parenting.

When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement toward wholeness. Notice that I do not define it as the end state of being completely whole, or “enlightened,” or any similar psychospiritual ideal. It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot. Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval.

When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not trying to change or “better” them.

True healing simply means opening ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and, as we are able, perform an honest audit of the impacts of those injuries as they have touched both our own lives and those of others around us. This can be exceptionally difficult, for myriad understandable reasons. No matter what degree of discomfort our illusions cover over, the truth hurts, and we don’t like hurting if we can help it—even if we sense that something better could lie on the far side of the pain.

More than that, the heart also has its own nervous system.[*] The verbal-thinking cerebrum has arrogated to itself the honor of being the only brain, falsely so. Actually, it shares the distinction with the gut and the heart. In other words, the heart knows things, just as surely as a gut feeling is also a kind of knowing. In fact, the gut’s neural plexus has been appropriately called a “second brain,” as has the heart. Thus we may speak of three brains, meant to function in concert, with the autonomic nervous system connecting them all. Without that heart- and gut-knowledge, we often function as “genius-level reptiles,” in someone’s apt phrase.[*]

If the heart is our best compass on the healing path, the mind—conscious and unconscious—is the territory to be navigated. Healing brings the two into alignment and cooperation, often after a lifetime of one hiding behind or being disregarded by the other.

None of us need be perfect, nor exercise saintly compassion, nor reach any emotional or spiritual benchmark before we can say we’re on the healing path. All we need is readiness to participate in whatever process wants to unfold within us so that healing can happen naturally. Anyone, no matter their history, can begin to hear wholeness beckoning, whether in a shout or whisper, and resolve to move in its direction. With the heart as a guide and the mind as a willing and curious partner, we follow whatever path most resonates with that call.

The lack of authenticity makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability or regret, depression or fatigue. When any of these disturbances surface, we can inquire of ourselves: Is there an inner guidance I am defying, resisting, ignoring, or avoiding? Are there truths I’m withholding from expression or even contemplation, out of fear of losing security or belonging? In a recent encounter with others, is there some way I abandoned myself, my needs, my values? What fears, rationalizations, or familiar narratives kept me from being myself? Do I even know what my own values are?

There is no freedom in having to be “good” or the most talented or accomplished, or in the need to please or entertain or be “interesting.”

Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning.

Are you afraid you will stumble? Guess what: you will. That’s called being a human being.