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

by Gabor Maté

As we saw earlier, the antidote to the hypnotizing influence of normality is authenticity: finding meaning in one’s inner experience, unobscured by societally promulgated fictions—prime among them what Daniel Siegel calls “the lie of the separate solo self.” That falsehood is the ultimate abnormality. From where I stand, a life devoted to seeing through such a traumatizing nontruth, dwelling and creating outside its bounds, is a life lived well.

It all starts with waking up: waking up to what is real and authentic in and around us and what isn’t; waking up to who we are and who we’re not; waking up to what our bodies are expressing and what our minds are suppressing; waking up to our wounds and our gifts; waking up to what we have believed and what we actually value; waking up to what we will no longer tolerate and what we can now accept; waking up to the myths that bind us and the interconnections that define us; waking up to the past as it has been, the present as it is, and ...