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

by Gabor Maté

He could have been articulating this book’s thesis. Indeed, the lives, and the deaths, of individual human beings—their quality and in many cases their duration—are intimately bound up with the aspects of modern society that are “hardest to see and talk about”; phenomena that are, like water to fish, both too vast and too near to be appreciated. 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. That is my central contention. My core intention, accordingly, is to offer a new way of seeing and talking about these phenomena, bringing them from the background to the foreground so we might more swiftly find their much-needed remedies.

It is sobering to realize that who we take ourselves to be and the ways we habitually act, including many of our seeming “strengths”—the least and the most functional aspects of our “normal” selves—are often, in part, the wages of traumatic loss.

In whatever form, disconnection is prominent in the life experience of traumatized people and is an essential aspect of the trauma constellation.

“What was so remarkable about my encounter with cancer,” V told me, “was that the whole journey from waking up after a nine-hour surgery and losing several organs and seventy nodes—I woke up with bags and tubes and everything coming out of me, but for the first time in my life, I was a body . . . It was painful, but it was also exhilarating. It was like, ‘I’m a body. Oh my God, I’m here. I’m inside this body.’”

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.

Blame becomes a meaningless concept the moment one understands how suffering in a family system or even in a community extends back through the generations. “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain,” wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who showed the decisive importance of adult-child relationships in shaping the psyche. No matter how far back we look in the chain of consequence—great-grandparents, pre-modern ancestors, Adam and Eve, the first single-celled amoeba—the accusing finger can find no fixed target. That should come as a relief.

Trying to keep awareness of trauma at bay hobbles our capacity to know ourselves. Conversely, fashioning from it a rock-hard identity—whether the attitude is defiance, cynicism, or self-pity—is to miss both the point and the opportunity of healing, since by definition trauma represents a distortion and limitation of who we were born to be. Facing it directly without either denial or overidentification becomes a doorway to health and balance.

Caroline had exhibited what has been called “superautonomous self-sufficiency,”[*] which means exactly what it sounds like: an exaggerated and outsize aversion to asking anything of anyone.

The dominant assumption in our culture is that genetic inheritance determines the better part of our destiny, who we are, what we suffer from, and what we are capable of. In 2000, at a White House briefing, Bill Clinton proclaimed the findings of the Human Genome Project “the most wondrous map ever produced by humankind,” adding that “today we are learning the language in which God created life.” The new science, the soon-to-be ex-president predicted, “will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human disease,” leading to cures for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer “by attacking their genetic roots.”[*] Two decades later, we know that little of the sort has happened.[1] And for good reason: genes are not, in fact, life’s language, any more than a scrambled alphabet or a randomly arranged dictionary is a Shakespeare play, or a musical scale is equivalent to a John

Seen this way, disease is something external with its own nature, existing independently of the person in whom it shows up. Given where that perspective has gotten us, it is time to consider a new one.

Disease itself is both a culmination of what came before and a pointer to how things might unfold in the future. Our emotional dynamics, including our relationship to ourselves, can be among the powerful determinants of that future.

Although both needs are essential, there is a pecking order: in the first phase of life, attachment unfailingly tops the bill. So when the two come into conflict in a child’s life, the outcome is well-nigh predetermined. If the choice is between “hiding my feelings, even from myself, and getting the basic care I need” and “being myself and going without,” I’m going to pick that first option every single time. Thus our real selves are leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction where we secure our physical or emotional survival by relinquishing who we are and how we feel. The fact that we don’t consciously choose such coping mechanisms makes them all the more tenacious. We cannot will them away when they no longer serve us precisely because we have no memory of them not being there, no notion of ourselves without them. Like wallpaper, they blend into the background; they are our “new normal,” our literal second nature, as distinct from our original or authentic nature. As these patterns get wired into our nervous system, the perceived need to be what the world demands becomes entangled with our sense of who we are and how to seek love. Inauthenticity is thereafter misidentified with survival because the two were synonymous during the formative years—or, at least, seemed so to our young selves.

If we are not made to feel important for just who we are, we may seek significance by becoming compulsive helpers—a syndrome I know intimately.

Here’s something else I’ve come to know, which I hope will be heartening for you as it is for me: it is not only necessary to leave blame and guilt behind on the road to healing, to move from self-accusation to curiosity, from shame to “response ability”—it is also and always possible. “What changed for me is that I realized that I had a choice,” Anita Moorjani says. “When you are conditioned to do something, you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Not even aware that you’re suppressing yourself, because you’re in survival mode.” The onset of inauthenticity may not be a choice, but with awareness and self-compassion, authenticity can be.

— Now that we have cleared away the thicket of mistaken beliefs about addiction, gotten a sense of what it does for people under its sway, and begun to consider what sorts of life experiences would make those “perks” so palpable and attractive, I propose to pull back the curtain even further in the next chapter. It is yet another myth—at once convenient and highly damaging—that in our world there is a category we can label “addicts,” designating some identifiable group of poor, unfortunate souls, and then, neatly segregated from “those people,” there are the rest of us “normal” folks.