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

by Gabor Maté

There are many ways of working with the tall tale of unworthiness. Some teachers suggest positive affirmations. Personally, I have found that such messages seem to evaporate precisely when I most need them. We should not underestimate how entrenched and insidious this conviction of unworthiness is, or how difficult it is to dislodge with words. We were almost literally hypnotized into it. In a neural framework, as the biologist Bruce Lipton explains, it’s a matter of brainwaves. Delta waves, the brain’s lowest frequency, predominate in our first two years, then theta waves ramp up until we are about six. “A child under seven is predominantly in theta,” he told me. “Theta is a hypnotic state, and it’s how you absorb all this stuff for seven years. Just as under the spell of a hypnotist, you believe whatever messages you get.” Only afterward does the state of conscious awareness and logical thinking associated with alpha and beta wave activity come on line. “We download our perceptions and beliefs about life years before we acquire the capacity for critical thinking,” Dr. Lipton writes. “Those perceptions or misperceptions become our truths.”[1] From such truths, we will henceforth generate our concepts about ourselves in the world. More precisely, from such untruths.