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

by Gabor Maté

Unless their emotional distress can be shared with and validated by attuned adults, children’s necessary developmental narcissism disposes them to take everything personally.

Thus self-blame, like guilt, is an unflagging protector. Believing that the deficiency is ours gives us at least a modicum of agency and hope: maybe, if we just work hard enough, we can earn the love and care we need.

Many people, stymied by what they believe is a failure to remember, often wonder if this memory gap inhibits their healing. There are a couple of good reasons why the answer is an encouraging no. As we have said, the trauma is not what happened to us, but what happened inside us as a result.

to make peace with our inner tormentors, we have to first understand them against the backdrop of their origin stories. This is the compassion of context.

When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?

I have never treated or interviewed anyone with chronic physical illness or mental affliction who could recall sharing unhappy feelings openly and freely, without restraint, with their caregivers or any trusted adult.

Though you may be justifiably grateful for your lot, the fact that others have suffered “more than” you does not diminish by one iota your own pain, nor erase its traces in your psyche. Levels of trauma are not to be evaluated, much less graded on a bell curve.

Psychedelic medicines are not intended to be taken daily to keep you in a state of altered physiology. Ideally, they can help facilitate your entry into a renewed relationship with yourself and the world, long after you have ingested them, whether in ceremony, as with ayahuasca, or in a therapeutic session, as with MDMA.

Ultimately your greatest gift to the world is being who you are—both your gift and your fulfillment. —A. H. Almaas, Being and the Meaning of Life

The first thing I learned in Peru—and here I mean direct learning, not stacking more facts on the woodpile of knowledge—is that healing is outside the thinking mind’s wheelhouse.

Among their many salutary effects, these extended pilgrimages bring Hughes into the present moment in a way that aligns perfectly with the will to heal.

If we see Native wisdom not as something to be consumed but rather as a rich trove of traditions about ways of living and dying that deserve and demand our humble curiosity and respect, its broad, unitary perspective could round out the dualistic, biological focus of the Western medical mentality.

“we need to celebrate and support people who are ill because they’re the canaries in the mine. They’re the ones who are showing us that our society is out of balance, and we need to thank them for taking that on and doing it for the rest of us. All of us need to participate in their healing, because if not for them, where would we be?

“There is only one common rule valid in finding your special truth. It is to learn to listen patiently to yourself, to give yourself a chance to find your own way which is yours and nobody else’s,” wrote the psychologist and visionary Wilhelm Reich.[3]

Among the challenges of healing ourselves personally and of bringing healing to our troubled world is being still long enough to allow our true selves, that “still small voice” we read of in the King James Bible, or as the Hebraic Tanakh describes it, that “soft murmuring sound,” to be heard.[*]

Myth is a collective expression of one of the most uniquely human qualities: imagination. Far from magical thinking or denialism, imaginative thinking allows us to see beyond appearances and tap into core insights into what wholeness and wellness

At intervals can be seen a glimpse of truth, that daylight of the human soul.

It’s the slogan Gramsci made famous: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’[*]

“Would you prefer to be illusioned or disillusioned?”

there may be things about our “normal,” including our sense of who we are and the nature of our society, that we are reluctant to let go of.

When a false belief falls away, after the ache of loss and sense of being unmoored subsides, I have noticed that something in me relaxes, no longer tasked with squaring circles and holding together impossible contradictions.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”[2]

“The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember,” wrote Jacob Riis almost a hundred years earlier in How the Other Half Lives,

Since trauma is the core dynamic undergirding so much ill health, we need to develop the eyes and ears to spot it to begin with.

We doctors pride ourselves on what we call evidence-based practice while ignoring vast swaths of evidence that call into question central tenets of our dogma.

Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris, a well-known trauma awareness advocate and now the surgeon general of California, is introducing screening for adverse childhood experiences into public health programs in her state.

Despite the documented fact that a large number of prison inmates committed their crimes out of dynamics originating in severe childhood suffering, legal training leaves the average

lawyer or judge even more woefully trauma-ignorant than their medical counterparts. True to its other customary name, morally speaking, ours is a criminal justice system.

have had the blessing to see that everyone who is incarcerated has strengths and they have the capability of loving, if only we gave them the opportunity. It’s not just people that need the healing. It’s the system that has to be indicted and transformed.”

Maggie Kline. “When students feel safe, the regions of the brain for language, thinking, and reasoning are enhanced.”[8]

Unfettered greed, inauthenticity, and disconnection have driven us to such a dark place that it falls to young people to wake us up to what this toxic culture has perpetrated and ignored for so long.

American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton has termed “malignant normality.”

As it turns out, it is often individuals who defy conventional normality who are the healthy ones.

“A study of people healthy enough to be self-actualized,” he wrote in a widely read paper, “revealed that they were not ‘well-adjusted’ (in the naïve sense of approval of and identification with the culture).” These healthy people, suggested Maslow, had a complex relationship with their “much less healthy culture.”

It all starts with waking up: waking up to what is real and authentic in and around us and what isn’t; waking up to who we are and who we’re not; waking up to what our bodies are expressing and what our minds are suppressing; waking up to our wounds and our gifts; waking up to what we have believed and what we actually value; waking up to what we will no longer tolerate and what we can now accept; waking up to the myths that bind us and the interconnections that define us; waking up to the past as it has been, the present as it is, and the future as it may yet be; waking up, most especially, to the gap between what our essence calls for and what “normal” has demanded of us.