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

by Gabor Maté

Taking the latter half of the name first, what does it mean to inquire? If genuine, an inquiry is an open-ended exploration. It requires, first and foremost, humility: allowing, with Socrates, that we do not already know the answer or, better yet, the very real possibility that we haven’t yet happened upon the right questions. Accordingly, in what follows I recommend you do your best to suspend, at least for the moment, whatever you believe you know about yourself. In this heyday of superficial pop psychology, self-knowledge is most often a case of the personality being an expert on the subject of itself, rather than the deeper, more intimate kind of knowing that can illuminate darkened corners of our histories, the better to see our present predicaments clearly. This is what we are inquiring into here. We are out to know ourselves, not merely to know about ourselves.