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

by Gabor Maté

“The journey,” Will Pye said to me, “is to find the gift in the challenge. It impelled me to practice and cultivate the capacity to consciously choose the meaning of all that was happening.”

born this way.[*] b. The personality is an adaptation. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and conditioned coping styles, including some that do not reflect our true self at all but rather the loss of it. Each personality takes shape according to how one’s particular temperament reciprocally interacts with family, community, and culture. It may not express our real needs, deepest longings, and truest nature, but rather our attempt to compensate for our estrangement from them. “We suffer from a case of mistaken identity. Our culture has sold us a bill of goods about who we really are,”