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

by Gabor Maté

chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.

That social life bears upon health is not a new discovery, but the recognition of it has never been more urgent.

Assuming the microbes in question start out with a clean bill of health and genetic fitness, a suitable and well-maintained culture should allow for their happy, healthy growth and proliferation. If the same organisms begin showing pathologies at unprecedented rates, or fail to thrive, it’s either because the culture has become contaminated or because it was the wrong mixture in the first place. Whichever the case, we could rightly call this a toxic culture—unsuitable for the creatures it is meant to support. Or worse: dangerous to their existence. It is the same with human societies.

“Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed,”

Along with a sense of betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults, such despondence and hopelessness “are chronic stressors which will have significant, long-lasting and incremental negative implications on the mental health of children and young people.”[14]

In other words, those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny.

If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.

our culture’s skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world, even keeping us from acting on what we already know.

I went beyond the standard repertoire of dry doctorly questions about symptom presentation and medical history to ask my patients about the larger context for their illnesses: their lives.

health and illness are not random states in a particular body or body part. They are, in fact, an expression of an entire life lived, one that cannot, in turn, be understood in isolation: it is influenced by—or better yet, it arises from—a web of circumstances, relationships, events, and experiences.

Because we think in a fragmentary way, we see fragments. And this way of seeing leads us to make actual fragments of the world. —Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones

—Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life[*]

This kind of physio-emotional time warp, preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma, an underlying theme for many people in this culture.

The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.” Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.

Pierre Janet first depicted traumatic memory as being held in “automatic actions and reactions, sensations and attitudes . . . replayed and reenacted in visceral sensations.”[1]

Reunited with my mother after the Soviet army had put the Germans to flight, I did not so much as look at her for several days. The great twentieth-century British psychiatrist and psychologist John Bowlby was familiar with such behavior: he called it detachment.

Can detachment last forever or until addressed?

“I was so hurt when you abandoned me,” says the young child’s mind, “that I will not reconnect with you. I don’t dare open myself to that pain again.”

Oh no lol

Second, even after we become language-endowed, some wounds are imprinted on regions of our nervous systems having nothing to do with language or concepts; this includes brain areas, of course, but the rest of the body, too. They are stored in parts of us that words and thoughts cannot directly access—we might even call this level of traumatic encoding “subverbal.”

“My problem is that I am married to someone who understands me,” I have often grumbled, only partly in jest. Really, of course, my great blessing is to be married to someone with healthy boundaries, who sees me as I am now and who will no longer bear the brunt of my prolonged and unplanned visits to the distant past.

In fact, someone without the marks of trauma would be an outlier in our society. We are closer to the truth when we ask: Where do we each fit on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum? Which of its many marks has each of us carried all (or most) of our lives, and what have the impacts been? And what possibilities would open up were we to become more familiar, even intimate, with them?

“trauma” is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events.

By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves.

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you” i...

Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be.

To sum up, then, capital-T trauma occurs when things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened, as, for example, a child being abused, or violence in the family, or a rancorous divorce, or the loss of a parent.

I have often witnessed what long-lasting marks seemingly ordinary events—what a seminal researcher poignantly called the “less memorable but hurtful and far more prevalent misfortunes of childhood”—can leave on the psyches of children.[7] These might include bullying by peers, the casual but repeated harsh comments of a well-meaning parent, or even just a lack of sufficient emotional connection with the nurturing adults.

Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.

“The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child,”

What the two types share is succinctly summarized by Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”

They both represent a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma.

Levine writes, trauma “is about a loss of connection—to ourselves, our families, and the world around us.

It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering.

An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.

This gives me anxiety because i feel like everything deminishes me. movies, news etc

That is not to say that old traumatic reactions, having nothing to do with whatever’s going on, cannot be triggered by present-day stresses—see, for example, a certain author arriving home from a speaking gig. That is not the same as being retraumatized, unless over time it leaves us even more constricted than before.

Here’s a fairly reliable process-of-elimination checklist. It is not trauma if the following remain true over the long term:

It does not limit you, constrict you, diminish your capacity to feel or think or to trust or assert yourself, to experience suffering without succumbing to despair or to witness it with compassion. It does not keep you from holding your pain and sorrow and fear without being overwhelmed and without having to escape habitually into work or compulsive self-soothing or self-stimulating by whatever means. You are not left compelled either to aggrandize yourself or to efface yourself for the sake of gaining a...

“What are you feeling?” My customary response was an irritated “How should I know?” I faced no such problem on being asked what my thoughts were: on those I am a tenured expert. Not knowing how or what one feels, on the other hand, is a sure sign of disconnect from the body.

Yikes

Alternatively, some people’s disconnection from their bodies manifests as not knowing when to stop eating or drinking—the “enough” signal doesn’t get through.

when trauma’s shackles begin to loosen, we gladly reunite with the severed parts of ourselves.

this: once the hawk is gone, the possum is free to go about his business, his survival strategy having succeeded. A traumatized nervous system, on the other hand, never gets to unfreeze.

Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.[11] [Italics in original.]

response flexibility: the ability to choose how we address life’s inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges. “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight,” wrote the psychologist Rollo May.[12] Trauma robs us of that freedom.

Trauma Fosters a Shame-Based View of the Self

“Contained in the experience of shame,” writes the psychologist Gershen Kaufman, “is a piercing awareness of ourselves as fundamentally deficient in some vital way as a human being.”[13]

People bearing trauma’s scars almost uniformly develop a shame-based view of themselves at the core, a negative self-perception most of them are all too conscious of. Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.

Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.

bold: before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds.

Trauma, especially severe trauma, imposes a worldview tinged with pain, fear, and suspicion: a lens that both distorts and determines our view of how things are. Or it may, through the sheer force of denial, engender a naively rosy perspective that blinds us to real and present dangers—a

One may also come to dismiss painful realities by habitually lying t...

We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.