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

by Gabor Maté

The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.”[14] Friedman also laid down as an ironclad rule that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”[15] Note the use of the phrase “social responsibility”: Friedman believed to his bones that self-interested, minimally regulated corporate capitalism is what’s best for everyone. Thus spoke not a mustache-twirling movie villain self-aware of his perfidy, bound to get his comeuppance by film’s end, but a theorist whose still-eminent standing in “normal” political-economic circles speaks volumes about what sort of society we are. Bakan told me that he originally imagined corporations as unhealthy life-forms plaguing “a basically healthy, democratic society.” He no longer believes that. “The pathology has metastasized—the pathogen has infected the host,” he

From a medical perspective Joel Bakan’s comment about the pathology metastasizing could not be more apt. If in the body a cell begins to multiply at the expense of the entire organism, destroying tissues nearby and spreading to other organs, robbing the host of energy, disabling its defenses, and eventually threatening its very life, we call that unchecked growth a cancer. Such abnormal and malignant transformation is now besetting our world, run by a system that seems rigged against life. The abnormal has become the norm; the unnatural has become the inescapable. In the logic of profit, greed is creed, and health nothing but collateral damage. “It’s not that they want you to die,” the endocrinologist Rob Lustig told me in a tone of mock reassurance. “They only want your money. They just don’t care if it kills you.”

Malcolm’s withering questions probe far beyond mental or emotional self-concept. Self-rejection has powerful physiological dimensions that pertain to every aspect of well-being. From an early age it is one of racism’s sharpest and most intimate harms.

The pernicious impact of racism flows from its very nature, which is to see and treat another, in essence no different from you, according to your self-serving, resentful, and twisted fantasy of who they are. The brilliant writer James Baldwin once said, “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a n—— in the first place. If you, the white people, invented him, then you’ve got to find out why.” Recalling the shame I felt as a child at being Jewish, I completely resonate with a powerful formulation by the Black American psychologist Kenneth Hardy:[*] the “assaulted sense of self.” In this state, Dr. Hardy says, “the soul of one’s being gets perpetually punctured . . . It’s when one’s definition of self is defined by someone else. It is when my sense of self is defined by what I am not, rather than by what I am.” He adds, “Who I am thus becomes a response to how I am defined; it’s always in response to something else.”[3]

The racial differences, independent of genetics, defy economic categories: for example, the abovementioned breast cancer risk for Black women cuts across class lines. Around birth, Black mothers are dying at three to four times the rate of non-Hispanic white mothers. And their infants are at least twice as likely to die as white babies—another trend that holds across education levels and socioeconomic status. “Put simply,” warned a recent article in the magazine of Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, “for black women far more than for white women, giving birth can amount to a death sentence.”[11] And how not to be startled at the finding that having a non-Black doctor doubles a Black baby’s risk of dying—the baby’s “penalty,” we might say, for the crime of being born while Black.[12] For white infants the race of the physician makes no difference. In short, it is “racism, not race itself, that threatens the lives of African American women and infants,” a recent review of multiple studies concluded.[13]

And so it is that in Canada, where looking down on Americans is something of a national indulgence, we have nothing to feel superior about. Police prejudice, including brutal violence, is notoriously inflicted on Indigenous peoples and on people of color. Nearly 30 percent of the jail population in this country is composed of Indigenous people, who make up no more than 5 percent of the general population.[*]

Virchow, these days honored as the father of modern pathology, disdained any separation of health from social conditions and culture. “Medicine has imperceptibly led us into the social field and placed us in a position of confronting directly the great problems of our time,” he wrote. When challenged that his advice had more to do with politics than with medicine, Virchow issued his timeless retort: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing else but medicine on a large scale.”

While we Canadians like to pride ourselves on our publicly funded health care system—and rightly so, especially as we peer over the 49th parallel at the law-of-the-jungle morass to our south—research shows that, at most, only about 25 percent of population health is attributable to health care. A full 50 percent is determined by social and economic environments.[20]

An affable forty-seven-year-old with an open smile and earnest demeanor, Gary—a long-time family friend of ours—writes prescriptions for diet supplements and refers people to financial aid workers to help with subsidies and tax problems: anything that could help ease their poverty. He shared a telling anecdote he heard from a social worker. “A physician says, ‘Take this antibiotic three times . . . on a full stomach,’ and I always laugh hysterically, and the women I know who are working poor laugh because they know that, ‘Yeah, three meals, like what’s he talking about three meals? A full stomach?’ Another said, ‘I had an old guy that needed diabetes medicine who lived in a shelter in Toronto . . . He was elderly and had mobility issues, and he didn’t take any of his diabetic medication because the side effect it caused for him was diarrhea, and he was living in a shelter with sixty younger men and two toilets . . . He had no chance of getting to the toilet if he needed to quickly, so he wasn’t going to take his pills.’”

Alzheimer’s dementia, too, seems to affect women disproportionately, just as it does Black people in the United States.[4] That last fact alone ought to give us pause, containing as it does a significant clue as to the sources of such conditions. This book has, after all, been tracing the physiological impacts of developmental needs not being met, of stress and trauma. A consistent theme, beyond scientific doubt, has been that such emotional disturbances frequently trigger inflammation and other forms of physiological and mental harm. We might ask ourselves what burdens, what stresses, could women of any color and class share with Black people as a group? To me the answer is clear: they are both especially targeted by a culture that does not honor but demeans, distorts, and even impels people to suppress who they are. If that is an accurate assessment, we would expect that as these pressures intersect and compound each other, so would the incidence of disease rise. And it does, hugely.[5]

Early childhood mechanisms of self-suppression are reinforced by persistent, gendered social conditioning. Many women end up self-silencing, defined as “the tendency to silence one’s thoughts and feelings to maintain safe relationships, particularly intimate relationships.” This chronic negation of one’s authentic experience can be fatal. In a study that followed nearly two thousand women over ten years, those “who reported that, in conflict with their spouses, they usually or always kept their feelings to themselves, had over four times the risk of dying during the follow-up compared with women who always showed their feelings.”[10] As at home, so on the job. Another study showed that for women with non-supportive bosses, the squashing of anger—a natural adaptation to an environment in which to self-express would be to risk the loss of employment—increased the risk of heart disease.[11]

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’...

When I speak of patriarchy, I mean not the conscious will nor, often, even the conscious awareness of individual men, but a system of power. Although patriarchy is ancient, having arisen with the dawn of civilization, capitalism has comfortably adapted it to its needs—we see that played out in economics, in politics, in all institutions of this society, as in the home. Men pay a price, too, even as they reap the dubious “benefits” of the system that privileges them. When I reduce my wife to an object whose purpose is to keep me satisfied, what role am I casting myself in? An impotent, dependent child whose emotional welfare hinges on Mommy’s willingness to comply with my perceived needs. This child, in an adult body, struts, remonstrates, sulks, and makes demands on his caregiver. He is never sated, never satisfied. Both partners, in their own ways, are powerless.

“To me, the fragility has to do with both the trauma and the injunction against being human,” he told me. “The essence of [toxic] masculinity is invulnerability. The more vulnerable you are, the more ‘girly’ you are. The more invulnerable you are, the more ‘manly’ you are. So the fragility of being a human, the simple human vulnerability, is suppressed. Men are trying to live up to a standard which is inhuman, and they’re dogged by a sense of falling short of that standard over and over and over again.”

“The guys that I treat are all captains of industry who’ve done beautifully in the world and are horror stories in their personal lives,” Real confided. Male domination exacts a high price in both directions, and by all indicators, it costs more than it pays.

All this is more than speculative. Traumatic childhood experience has been shown to bear very directly on adult political orientations. Michael Milburn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, found that the harsher the parenting people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they become to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws, and the death penalty. “We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of a dysfunctional family environment,” he told me. “There was significantly more opposition to abortion, and more support for capital punishment and the use of military force, particularly among males who had experienced high levels of physical punishment, especially if they had never had psychotherapy.” I was intrigued by that last finding. “Psychotherapy,” Milburn explained, “speaks to a potential for self-examination, for self-reflection.”

No child is born with dead eyes: such a look bespeaks a recoiling from seeing what is dreadful to a young soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote somewhere that people lie their way out of reality when they have been hurt by reality, and this is eminently true of Donald Trump’s origin story.

And that’s where the rest of us come in. Abetted and amplified by the profit-driven media machine, political culture plays on our deepest longings for surety, security, and even supremacy, targeting our damaged “inner children” with force and precision. In fact, much of politics is a lot more coherent if we see how people, many millions of them at once, unconsciously look to their leaders to fulfill their own unmet childhood needs. As the cognitive scientist George Lakoff puts it, “We all think with a largely unconscious metaphor: the Nation as Family.”[15]

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. One prominent Democratic-supporting celebrity, the song parodist known as Randy Rainbow, tweeted out a photo of a smiling Joe Biden with Kamala Harris the night she was announced as Biden’s running mate. His caption read “G’night, Mom and Dad. See you in the morning.”[16] People under the sway of such childlike idealizations, even in half jest, are liable to ignore discomfiting counterevidence.

Many others suffer secretly over the course of long and illustrious careers, as in the case of Aretha Franklin, whose sister Erma once said, “Aretha is a woman who suffers mightily but doesn’t like to show it.” Of course, she did display it to anyone with eyes to notice. The revered singer of the self-assertive anthem “Respect” had been more than disrespected in childhood and continued to suffer abuse in her adult relationships. The disconnect is achingly apparent in the stunning concert documentary Amazing Grace, filmed at a Los Angeles church in 1972. With thrilling command and depth of feeling, a thirty-year-old Aretha rattles the rafters and electrifies the crowd. The confident mask only slips when her preacher father takes the pulpit to praise his daughter’s gifts. In the presence of this emotionally cruel patriarch, she stiffens, her face a curious mix of practiced deference and involuntary dissociation, as if she’s not quite in her body—the very same body that had been channeling the divine Word and the sweet ache of longing so transcendently just minutes before. In her music this magnificent artist conjured the power and force she could not wield in her personal life. Her lot was to be legendary in a business and a culture that would rather mythologize than empathize. We avert our gaze from the pain, lest real life intrude on the magic. I will say that I am encouraged by the fact that celebrities such as Alanis Morissette, Dave Navarro, Lena Dunham, Ashley Judd, Ru...

All in all, the system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate our basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from self, others, and meaning. A select few—especially those with the sorts of early coping mechanisms that prime them to deny reality, block out empathy, fear vulnerability, mute their own sense of right and wrong, and abjure looking at themselves too closely—will be elevated to power. There they govern over a majority who so crave comfort and stability, who are so ground down by cynicism and alienation, that they will trade authentic instincts and collective self-assertion for the pseudo-attachment of false promises and soothing charisma. Completing the cycle, our wounded leaders with their blinkered priorities enact social policies that keep conditions how they were, or worse.

And what is healing, anyway? 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.

Any movement toward wholeness begins with the acknowledgment of our own suffering, and of the suffering in the world. This doesn’t mean getting caught in a never-ending vortex of pain, melancholy, and, especially, victimhood; a new and rigid identity founded on “trauma”—or, for that matter, “healing”—can be its own kind of trap. 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.

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.[*]

This may sound grim. Yet the Buddha’s dictum offers a way out, since we remain the ones creating the world we see, the world we think is real, in every moment. And here is where healing comes in. We can do nothing about the world that created our mind, that may have instilled in us limiting, harmful, untrue beliefs about ourselves and others. However—and here’s the good news I alluded to—we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward. The capacity to heal is born of the willingness to do just that, to take on that responsibility. Such willingness is not a once-and-for-all declaration but a moment-by-moment commitment, one that can be regenerated when we lose touch with it. I, for one, have to keep reminding myself to do so. Nor is it an invitation to self-imposed naïveté or blithe so-called positive thinking. It is about the willingness to reconsider our entire view.

Rather, she found a way to exercise the only agency she had, which lay in her own point of view and emotional attitude toward the unchangeable past. Here she explains how, decades later, she forgave Hitler himself. This happened at Berghof in the Bavarian Alps, the location of the Führer’s residence from 1933 onward. “It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of our past,” she writes. “So I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing that part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting mental and emotional energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is.”[2] We could say that she came to “choose” her past, not in the sense of liking or condoning it, but by simply letting it be. “I do not of course mean,” Edith adds, “that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I had clung to and fought for against all odds.” When Bessel advised I could let go of Auschwitz, he meant precisely that I didn’t need to keep clutching the pain and resentment of the past, nor the beliefs I developed at a time when I could not have...

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.

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.

Many of us have learned to minimize our anger to the point that we don’t even know what it looks like. In this case it’s best not to idealize or exaggerate: picturing a bombastic eruption of ire or some righteous, curse-encrusted monologue will not help us. Like authenticity, genuine anger is not a performance. Anger’s core message is a concise and potent no, said as forcefully as the moment demands. Wherever we find ourselves tolerating or explaining away situations that persistently stress us, insisting that “it’s not so bad” or “I can handle it” or “I don’t want to make a fuss about it,” there is likely an opportunity to practice giving anger some space to emerge. Even the plainspoken admission that “I don’t like this” or “I don’t want this” can be a step forward.

Acceptance begins with allowing things to be as they are, however they are. It has nothing to do with complacency or resignation, though sometimes these can pose as acceptance—think of the shrugging expression “It is what it is”—just as stubborn egotism can moonlight as authenticity. Rather, acceptance is the recognition, ever accurate, that in this moment things cannot be other than how they are. We abstain from rejecting or condoning. Instead of resisting the truth or denying or fantasizing our way out of it, we endeavor to just be with it. In doing so, we foster an aligned relationship with the actual, present moment. Acceptance also means accepting how downright difficult it can be to accept. It may seem paradoxical, but true acceptance denies or excludes no aspect of how it is, not even our impulse to reject how it is. Anger, sadness, trepidation, resistance, even hatred—within an accepting attitude, these all have room to say their piece. Sometimes accepting ourselves starts with facing that we don’t know how we feel, or that our feelings are mixed. Rejection of any part of our experience is an unnatural self-rejection, one that nonetheless feels normal to many of us. You’ve made some serious mistakes? You find yourself filled with hatred, or resentment, or confusion? These, too, are candidates for acceptance; underneath them there is always pain. In fact, hatred, resentment, and even confusion can be the psyche’s attempts not to feel pain or sadness. Healthy grief—t...

“Yet, I assure you, the science we have today demonstrates these practices of mindfulness, self-compassion, and compassion are some of the most powerful that exist to change your physiology and to benefit you in your own health, mental and physical, and in terms of your longevity.” Compassion, as both salve and salvation, is not limited to the realm of the individual. If we are to dream of a healthier, less fractured world, we will have to harness and amplify compassion’s healing power.

When we face all the ways we have numbed ourselves, pain will inevitably emerge—in fact, it has been waiting a long time to do so. Of course, the fear of these exiled parts is also natural. “When you have a lifetime of emotions that you have been running from,” writes Helen Knott, “it seems like once they catch up they will gang-beat you and leave you crippled in an alleyway.”[4] That need not happen. The compassion of truth recognizes that pain is not the enemy. In fact, pain is inherently compassionate, as it tries to alert us to what is amiss. Healing, in a sense, is about unlearning the notion that we need to protect ourselves from our own pain. In this way, compassion is a gateway to another essential quality: courage.

“In order to gain possession of ourselves, we have to have some confidence, some hope of victory,” wrote the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. “And in order to keep that hope alive we must usually have some taste of victory.”[5] The compassion of possibility, I would say, is a door we keep open so we can see that victory coming. If we didn’t mistake ourselves or one another for whatever personality features and behavioral traits appear on the surface, “good” or “bad,” if in each person we could sense the potential for wholeness that can never be lost, that would be, for us all, a victory worth savoring.

The diagnosis, he told me, served as a wake-up call. “What did it wake you up to?” I asked. “The finite nature of this life, for one thing. It brought the truth of my mortality into a more felt, easier-to-grasp dimension. While we all know it intellectually, psychologically we function with an avoidance or disregard for the reality of death. After the diagnosis, I’d be having conversations with people in the awareness that this might be the last conversation I ever had with that person. And that creates an extraordinary degree of shared presence, listening, care. So yes, total transformation. Day to day when I get out of bed, there is a practice of fully recognizing the gift of this moment, of this day, of this body, of this breathing happening now.”

“I . . . came . . . here,” he told the group in a voice hoarse, attenuated, and halting, “because . . . I want . . . to live.” As he described himself, his pre-disease personality lined up with what I have seen in everyone with his condition: what we have earlier called superautonomous self-sufficiency, the shutdown of feelings and the almost phobic refusal to seek help or emotional support from anyone.

The aim of healing work is not to shed the personality entirely but to free ourselves from its automatic programming, granting us access to what’s underneath, to reconnect with what’s essential about us. “Liberation,” A. H. Almaas says, “is really nothing but the personality becoming free in the moment; the personality loses its grip, lets itself just relax.”[2] Our genuine strengths remain, with more room than ever before to stretch out and make themselves known.

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.

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.

Seeking to understand the genesis and, especially, the original function of vexatious brain-mind clusters leads us to the first principle of compassionate self-inquiry. 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.

Agency is gained not through resistance to ourselves but by way of acceptance and understanding.

Their reason for being, mind you, is anything but stupid. Although they cause us pain now, they first came along to save us. Their presence is in fact an unmistakable sign of the deep intelligence of the human bodymind. And fortunately, healing does not require their disappearance, only their realignment—or perhaps their reassignment. What matters is that we, rather than they, are in the lead.

Looking back, I see that the experience did not so much instill new beliefs in me, as it did relax and unfasten my personality’s militant unbelief, which can be every bit as fundamentalist as the theistic certainties of ultra-religious sects. The actor and activist Ashley Judd has a terrific phrase for this leap of nonliteral faith: “surrendering to a God you don’t believe in.” —

My particular experience, though under unusual circumstances, was suffused with the universal healing principles that guide this book’s exploration, and which are available to all: the acceptance, the shedding of identity, the choosing to trust the inner guidance against the remonstrations of the conditioned mind, and the genuine agency that springs paradoxically from the willingness to give up rigid control.

Are we seeing things creatively or reactively? Automatic reactions are, after all, the specialty of the traumatized personality, which is the ultimate hammer that only sees nails. Creativity, meanwhile, is about something more fundamental: it starts with seeing that we can create, and then has a feel for what wants to be created. It is a facet of authenticity, a close cousin of authorship.

I say all this not to enroll you, the reader, in my particular political views; only to indicate that, for each of us, there may be things about our “normal,” including our sense of who we are and the nature of our society, that we are reluctant to let go of. My serial disillusionments were painful at the time, to be sure: they meant leaving something behind, something I had cherished and built a part of my world around. And yet I would not trade the freedom that has accompanied each relinquishing of illusion for the comforts I had to give up. When a false belief falls away, after the ache of loss and sense of being unmoored subsides, I have noticed that something in me relaxes, no longer tasked with squaring circles and holding together impossible contradictions. Ignorance may bring a blissed-out tranquility, but that is not true bliss; on the collective level, it can result in great and wide suffering. We do ourselves and the world a profound service when we endeavor to dissolve our illusions and open ourselves to the truths they conceal.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”[2]

Anyone anticipating that the global corporate capitalist system might one day face the truth of its own nature and fundamentally transform itself is in for a long and frustrating wait. Nor will its academic institutions or media be eager to give up their role as its ideological enablers.

Inspired by figures like Thunberg and countless others whose names we may never know, we can revisit our list of the four A’s I laid out in chapter 26 that promote healing—authenticity, agency, anger, and acceptance—and add two more that are required for the pursuit of broad transformational change: activism and advocacy. The last two are socially meaningful ways of synthesizing the previous four, with some added ingredients—solidarity, collective thinking, and connection—to help counter capitalism’s atomizing effects.

These healthy people, suggested Maslow, had a complex relationship with their “much less healthy culture.” Neither conformists nor automatically reflexive rebels, such men and women expressed their unconventionality in ways that kept them true to their inner values, without hostility but not without fight, when that was called for. “An inner feeling of detachment from the culture was not necessarily conscious but was displayed by almost all . . . They very frequently seemed to be able to stand off from it as if they did not quite belong to it.”[14]