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

by Gabor Maté

Our society reinforces men’s sense of being entitled to women’s care in a way that almost escapes being put into words. I refer here to the automatic mothering women provide their male partners, the emotional sustenance that forms the invisible mortar of many heterosexual relationships: a very conventional dynamic that speaks to how tenacious gendered social constructs are, how thoroughly steeped we are in them. Some men are aware of the care they receive only in its absence and experience intense resentment when it is withdrawn; for example, when their female partner is preoccupied elsewhere, as when children are born. Many a woman has complained to me that her spouse becomes distant and punishing when she so much as catches a cold. As I observed in family practice, the children may lose out on maternal attention when the husband demands mothering energy from his partner. (It goes without saying that the father’s stable attunement with his kids is also compromised when he assumes an infantile role in the partnership.) Oftentimes the mother loses vitality or develops physical or emotional symptoms signaling her body’s rebellion against being overtaxed, imposing further strain on both her and her dependents. I confess that what I “observed in family practice” mirrored the scenario played out in our own home, especially when our children were small. Nor is it a dynamic I can honestly relegate to the past. I interviewed Rae, the world’s leading authority on this subject. “It’...