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

by Gabor Maté

I was thirteen in 1957 when, along with nearly thirty-eight thousand fellow Hungarians, refugees from a brutal Stalinist dictatorship, my family and I were welcomed with open arms by Canada. The North really seemed true and strong and free, in line with the words of this country’s national anthem. What I didn’t know and what no one was speaking of was that in the same year, even as we were adjusting to the advantages of life in British Columbia, a four-year-old First Nations child, Carlene, had a pin stuck in her tongue on her first day at a federally mandated, church-run residential school not far from where I lived. Her crime had been to speak her Native language in the classroom. For an hour this little girl could not put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips. Soon after, years of sexual abuse began. By age nine Carlene was an alcoholic and later became dependent on opiates to soothe her pain. We met at a healing ceremony not long ago and that was when, sobbing and trembling with emotion, she told me her story. I thought I had heard everything. I had not. Now a grandmother and years sober, she grieves to see her grandchildren suffer the throes of addiction. For her, our national anthem was a cruel hoax: there was no “true North strong and free!” Nor is there yet.