Review
"In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté takes us on an epic journey of discovery about how our emotional well-being, and our social connectivity (in short: how we live), is intimately intertwined with health, disease and addictions. Chronic mental and physical illnesses may not be separate and distinct diseases, but intricate, multilayered processes that reflect (mal)adaptations to the cultural context that we live in, and the values we live by. This riveting and beautifully written tale has profound implications for all of our lives, including the practice of medicine and mental health."--Bessel A. van der Kolk MD, President, Trauma Research Foundation, Professor of psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine, #1 New York Times Bestseller: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
"Gabor and Daniel Maté have created a magnificent resource for us all in The Myth of Normal, a powerful, in-depth, science-packed, inspiring story-filled opus that helps us see how stress within our culture shapes our well-being in all its facets. By carefully reviewing medical and mental health through a wide lens of inquiry, they challenge simplistic views of disease and disorder to offer instead a wider perspective on human flourishing that has direct implications for how we live individually, at home, and as a larger human family. A thorough and inspiring work of the heart, this book urges us to question our assumptions and think deeply about who we are and how we can live more fully and freely, harnessing the power of the mind to bring healing and wholeness into our shared lives on Earth."--Daniel J. Siegel, MD, Clinical Professor, UCLA School of Medicine, Executive Director, Mindsight Institute, New York Times bestselling author of IntraConnected: MWe (Me plus We) as the integration of self, identity, and belonging
"Wise, sophisticated, rigorous and creative: an intellectual and compassionate investigation of who we are and who we may become. Essential reading for anyone with a past and a future."--Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author, Educated
"Gabor and Daniel Maté have delivered a book in which readers can seek refuge and solace during moments of profound personal and social crisis. The Myth of Normal is an essential compass during disorienting times."-- Esther Perel, Psychotherapist, Author and Host of Where Should We Begin
"Gabor Maté articulates bluntly, brilliantly and passionately what all of us instinctively know but none of us really want to face: the entire social construct of the world we’re living in is deeply flawed, with toxicities on every level. Yet though the book makes clear what’s so terribly wrong, it also points to how we can make it right. Maté is a guide through the dangerous forest of our minds and our society, not letting us ignore the darkness but ultimately showing us the light. The Myth of Normal is exactly what we need."--Marianne Williamson, New York Times bestselling author, A Return To Love
"The Myth of Normal is an astonishing achievement, epic in scope and yet profoundly down to earth and practical. I believe it will open the gates to a new time where we come to understand that our emotions, culture, bodies and spirits are not separate and wellness can only come about if we treat the whole being. I will read this book again and again."--V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of The Vagina Monologues and The Apology
"The Myth of Normal may forever change the way you view your life experiences, and how they can shape your biology. But more importantly, Gabor Maté points us to a path of desperately needed communal healing."--Elissa Epel, PhD, Professor, UCSF, co-author of best seller The Telomere Effect
"In this brilliant, compelling and groundbreaking book, Gabor Maté unveils the societal trance that has blinded us to the death-grip of pervasive trauma in our world. He shows that this is not our 'personal' trauma. It is sourced in a culture that undermines meeting our basic needs for connection, authenticity and meaning. Drawing on his decades of pioneering clinical work, fascinating contemporary science and contemplative wisdom, Maté offers us a way to bring clear seeing and a greatness of heart to the crisis of our times."--Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion
"Gabor and Daniel Maté offer a powerful and surprising redemptive path out of the toxic illusion of 'normalcy.' This remarkable and revolutionary book will profoundly impact the wellbeing of self, society, and our earth at a time when wisdom and compassion are essential for our common survival."--Rev. Joan Jiko Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center
"At a time so many of us are struggling physically and psychically, Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal is a godsend, providing wisdom and realistic hope. Maté is a revolutionary thinker and gifted writer whose work has always inspired me. The Myth of Normal is no exception. It’s no exaggeration to say that this groundbreaking book can help us heal as individuals, families and a society."--David Sheff, author of NYT #1 bestseller, Beautiful Boy
"As if Gabor Maté hasn’t done enough already by depathologizing addiction, autoimmune diseases, and ADHD; now, in this magnum opus, he challenges us to expand our minds even further. In The Myth of Normal, he asserts that those problems, and the many other social ills that plague us, are not only related to the traumas we suffered but are also symptoms of the toxic nature of our materialistic, isolating, patriarchal, and racist culture. What’s remarkable about this beautifully written book is not just that he makes that bold contention, but how well he backs it up with an amazing amount of scientific research, compelling stories of his patients, and moving disclosures from his own life. Our culture is, indeed, very sick and I don’t know of a better diagnostician of and physician for it than Gabor Mate. This book contains a prescription that, if we have the courage to follow, will heal us all."--Richard Schwartz, PhD creator of the Internal Family Systems Model
"The Myth of Normal is a book literally everyone will be enriched by - a wise, profound and healing work that is the culmination of Dr, Maté's many years of deep and painfully accumulated wisdom."--Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus
"This gripping book builds upon two key truths for our time, that everything is connected, including psychic wounds and physical illnesses, and that these are not anomalies but ordinary, even epidemic, in the society we’ve built. The Myth of Normal is a powerful call for change in how we live with, love, understand, treat, and think about each other, by someone ideally situated to map the terrain and to give us some valuable tools with which to navigate it."—Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me
"In this wide-ranging and beautifully written book, Gabor Maté and his co-writer son Daniel offer an acute diagnosis of what ails our culture and a blueprint for personal healing, while pointing the way to what is required to create a more hospitable, human-friendly world for ourselves and our children."--Dr. Shefali, New York Times bestselling author and clinical psychologist
"Gabor Maté’s latest book is a guide to self-awareness, social insight and healing that is deeply personal and utterly transparent. It merits becoming this generation's The Road Less Traveled. Written with fluid, crystalline prose, profound wisdom, great humor and hard-won humility, in my two-word summation The Myth of Normal is Fiercely Tender."--William M. Watson, S.J., D.Min., President & Founder, Sacred Story Institute
"The Myth of Normal is a detailed and wide-ranging look at what we all need to know--but all too often fail to live into--when it comes to human health, sanity, maturation, and happiness. It's also a clear-eyed examination of the benefits, triumphs, limitations, and blind spots of our health and mental health care system."--Resmaa Menakem, bestselling author of My Grandmother's Hands, The Quaking of America, and Monsters in Love
"The Myth of Normal is a tour de force journey into the dissonant experience of being human in our aberrant and toxic modern culture. The journey is both heart-rending and exalted in its underlying purpose—to heal the rift from our authentic selves and the collective trauma that stifles our natural expression and joy. If you are ready to do the brave and life-shaking work of examining the truth of your life and the culture that we are literally in the death grips of—this is your read."--Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD, MHS, ABoIM
"The Myth of Normal presents a unique perspective in viewing what we see as 'normal" and opens up a way to wake up to what is real and authentic in our lives. Gabor and Daniel Maté have written a compelling book which will challenge your views and help lift the veil of illusion to what is truly happening in your mind and in your body."--Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Happiness
"With rigorous research and painstaking detail, this book by esteemed physician Gabor Maté is a tour de force manifesto of how trauma impacts not just our individual bodies and psyches but our whole society. The Myth of Normal plants seeds for revitalizing what we consider 'normal' and giving ourselves permission to say no to what is making us unnecessarily sick."--Lissa Rankin, MD, New York Times bestselling author or Mind Over Medicine and Sacred Medicine
"This, Gabor Maté's magnum opus, is essential reading for us all. A genius writer, he gives it to us straight: From the mindbody to the body politic, we learn how loss of authenticity takes its toll psychologically, physically, spiritually, and socially."--Julie Holland, MD, author, Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, From Soul to Psychedelics
"Every once in a rare while a book comes along creating a new vision of the world, illuminating for us that which until now has been invisible, yet as vital to our health and well-being as water is to fish, oxygen is for our bodies, and love is for our souls. This work is such a tour de force, a humbling and brilliantly written exposition of what deeper healing requires."--Jeffrey D. Rediger, MD, MDiv, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School, Author, CURED: Strengthen Your Immune System and Heal Your Life.
"Gabor Maté is brilliant and passionate, tender and fierce, writing with an urgent honesty. His analysis is comprehensive and penetrating, combining deep scholarship, hard-earned clinical wisdom, personal trauma, and practical suggestions. This is a masterwork that reads like an intelligent thriller, highlighting our challenges with dramatic clarity while showing the way to their solutions. A must-have book for anyone interested in their own mind, in how our world got so crazy, and in the better future we can forge together."--Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness
"In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté exposes what happens when society becomes the addict, and how can we heal as a society. This is a book for our times--no, rather it is the book for our times. An illumination to therapists and healers, it is much more than that...Read and discover.”--Peter A Levine, author of Waking the Tiger and In an Unspoken Voice
"A sweeping analysis of the relationship between illness, trauma, and capitalism...Maté marshals an impressive amount of research to outline an original and persuasive vision of health focused on environmental influences and the interplay between the mind and body."--Publishers Weekly
About the Author
A renowned speaker and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté is highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books, including the New York Times bestseller The Myth of Normal, the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, and Scattered Minds: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It, and has coauthored Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. His works have been published internationally in nearly thirty languages.
Daniel Maté is a Brooklyn-based composer-lyricist who has received the Kleban Prize, Cole Porter Award, and Jonathan Larson Grant. His musicals include The Trouble With Doug and The Longing and the Short of It. Other shows in development include Hansel & Gretl & Heidi & Günter, Middle School Mysteries, and an adaptation of the Russell Banks novel The Sweet Hereafter. He is the host of the YouTube program Lyrics To Go and runs a "mental chiropractic" service called Walk With Daniel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
The Last Place You Want to Be: Facets of Trauma
It is hard to imagine the scope of an individual life without envisioning some kind of trauma, and it is hard for
most people to know what to do about it.
-Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life
Picture this: At the tender age of seventy-one, six years before this writing, your author arrives back in Vancouver from a speaking jaunt to Philadelphia. The talk was successful, the audience enthusiastic, my message about addiction and trauma's impact on people's lives warmly received. I have traveled in unexpected comfort, having been upgraded to the business-class cabin, thanks to a courtesy from Air Canada. Descending over Vancouver's pristine sea-to-sky panorama, I am a regular Little Jack Horner in my corner of the plane, suffused with a "What a good boy am I" glow. As we touch down and begin to taxi to the gate, the text from my wife, Rae, lights up the tiny screen: "Sorry. I haven't left home yet. Do you still want me to come?" I stiffen, satisfaction displaced by rage. "Never mind," I dictate tersely into the phone. Embittered, I disembark, clear customs, and take a taxi home, all of a twenty-minute ride door-to-door. (I trust the reader is already gripping the pages in empathetic outrage at the indignity suffered by your author.) Seeing Rae, I growl a hello that is more accusation than greeting, and scarcely look at her. In fact, I barely make eye contact for the next twenty-four hours. When addressed, I utter little more than brief, monotone grunts. My gaze is averted, the upper part of my face tense and rigid, and my jaw in a perma-clench.
What is happening with me? Is this the response of a mature adult in his eighth decade? Only superficially. At times like this, there is very little grown-up Gabor in the mix. Most of me is in the grips of the distant past, near the beginnings of my 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. In fact, it is so deeply "underlying" that many of us don't know it's there.
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. It can even determine whether or not we are capable of rational thought at all in matters of the greatest importance to our lives. For many of us, it rears its head in our closest partnerships, causing all kinds of relational mischief.
It was in 1889 that the pioneering French psychologist Pierre Janet first depicted traumatic memory as being held in "automatic actions and reactions, sensations and attitudes . . . replayed and reenacted in visceral sensations." In the present century, the leading trauma psychologist and healer Peter Levine has written that certain shocks to the organism "can alter a person's biological, psychological, and social equilibrium to such a degree that the memory of one particular event comes to taint, and dominate, all other experiences, spoiling an appreciation of the present moment." Levine calls this "the tyranny of the past."
In my case, the template for my hostility to Rae's message is to be found in the diary my mother kept, in a nearly illegible scrawl and only intermittently, during my first years in wartime and post-World War II Budapest. The following, translated by me from the Hungarian, is her entry on April 8, 1945, when I was fourteen months old:
My dear little man, only after many long months do I take in hand again the pen, so that I may briefly sketch for you the unspeakable horrors of those times, the details of which I do not wish you to know . . . It was on December 12 that the Crossed-Arrows forced us into the fenced-in Budapest ghetto, from which, with extreme difficulty, we found refuge in a Swiss-protected house. From there, after two days, I sent you by a complete stranger to your Aunt Viola's because I saw that your little organism could not possibly endure the living conditions in that building. Now began the most dreadful five or six weeks of my life, when I couldn't see you.
I survived, thanks to the kindness and courage of the unknown Christian woman to whom my mother entrusted me in the street and who conveyed me to relatives living in hiding under relatively safer circumstances. 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. At his clinic he observed ten small children who had to endure prolonged separation from their parents due to uncontrollable circumstances. "On meeting mother for the first time after days or weeks away every one of the children showed some degree of detachment," Bowlby observed. "Two seemed not to recognize mother. The other eight turned away or even walked away from her. Most of them either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and expressionless face." It may seem counterintuitive, but this reflexive rejection of the loving mother is an adaptation: "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." In many children-and I was certainly one-early reactions like these become embedded in the nervous system, mind, and body, playing havoc with future relationships. They show up throughout the lifetime in response to any incident even vaguely resembling the original imprint-often without any recall of the inciting circumstances. My petulant and defensive reaction to Rae signaled that old, deep-brain emotional circuits, programmed in infancy, had taken over while the rational, calming, self-regulating parts of my brain went offline.
"All trauma is preverbal," the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has written. His statement is true in two senses. First, the psychic wounds we sustain are often inflicted upon us before our brain is capable of formulating any kind of a verbal narrative, as in my case. 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." As Peter Levine explains, "Conscious, explicit memory is only the proverbial tip of a very deep and mighty iceberg. It barely hints at the submerged strata of primal implicit experience that moves us in ways the conscious mind can only begin to imagine."
To her credit, my wife will not allow me to get away with pinning the entire blame for my arrivals-gate hissy fit on Nazis and fascists and infant trauma. Yes, the backstory merits compassion and understanding-and she has given me an abundance of both-but there comes a point when "Hitler made me do it" won't fly. Responsibility can and must be taken. After twenty-four hours of the silent treatment, Rae had had enough. "Oh, knock it off already," she said. And so I did-a measure of progress and relative maturation on my part. In times past, it would have taken me days or longer to "knock it off": to drop my resentment, and for my core to unfreeze, my face to relax, my voice to soften, and my head to turn willingly and with love toward my life partner.
"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.
What Trauma Is and What It Does
Trauma's imprint is more endemic than we realize. That may seem a puzzling statement, as "trauma" has become something of a catchword in our society. To boot, the word has taken on a number of colloquial valences that confuse and dilute its meaning. A clear and comprehensive reckoning is warranted, especially in the field of health-and, since everything is connected, in virtually all other societal domains as well.
The usual conception of trauma conjures up notions of catastrophic events: hurricanes, abuse, egregious neglect, and war. This has the unintended and misleading effect of relegating trauma to the realm of the abnormal, the unusual, the exceptional. If there exists a class of people we call "traumatized," that must mean that most of us are not. Here we miss the mark by a wide margin. Trauma pervades our culture, from personal functioning through social relationships, parenting, education, popular culture, economics, and politics. 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?
A more basic question comes first: What is trauma? As I use the word, "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" is how I formulate it. Think of a car accident where someone sustains a concussion: the accident is what happened; the injury is what lasts. Likewise, trauma is a psychic injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s), triggerable at any moment. It is a constellation of hardships, composed of the wound itself and the residual burdens that our woundedness imposes on our bodies and souls: the unresolved emotions they visit upon us; the coping dynamics they dictate; the tragic or melodramatic or neurotic scripts we unwittingly but inexorably live out; and, not least, the toll these take on our bodies.
When a wound doesn't mend on its own, one of two things will happen: it can either remain raw or, more commonly, be replaced by a thick layer of scar tissue. As an open sore, it is an ongoing source of pain and a place where we can be hurt over and over again by even the slightest stimulus. It compels us to be ever vigilant-always nursing our wounds, as it were-and leaves us limited in our capacity to move flexibly and act confidently lest we be harmed again. The scar is preferable, providing protection and holding tissues together, but it has its drawbacks: it is tight, hard, inflexible, unable to grow, a zone of numbness. The original healthy, alive flesh is not regenerated.
Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. 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. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self. Until seen and acknowledged, it is also a barrier to growth. In many cases, as in mine, it blights a person's sense of worth, poisons relationships, and undermines appreciation for life itself. Early in childhood it may even interfere with healthy brain development. And, as we will witness, trauma is an antecedent and a contributor to illness of all kinds throughout the lifespan.
Taken together, these impacts constitute a major and foundational impediment to flourishing for many, many people. To quote Peter Levine once more, "Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering."
Two Types of Trauma
Before we go on, let's distinguish two forms of trauma. The first-the sense in which clinicians and teachers like Levine and van der Kolk usually employ the word-involves automatic responses and mind-body adaptations to specific, identifiable hurtful and overwhelming events, whether in childhood or later. As my medical work taught me and as research has amply shown, painful things happen to many children, from outright abuse or severe neglect in the family of origin to the poverty or racism or oppression that are daily features of many societies. The consequences can be terrible. Far more common than usually acknowledged, such traumas give rise to multiple symptoms and syndromes and to conditions diagnosed as pathology, physical or mental-a linkage that remains almost invisible to the eyes of mainstream medicine and psychiatry, except in specific "diseases" like post-traumatic stress disorder. This kind of injury has been called by some "capital-T trauma." It underlies much of what gets labeled as mental illness. It also creates a predisposition to physical illness by driving inflammation, elevating physiological stress, and impairing the healthy functioning of genes, among many other mechanisms. 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. All these are among the criteria for childhood affliction in the well-known adverse childhood experiences (ACE) studies. Once again, the traumatic events themselves are not identical to the trauma-the injury to self-that occurs in their immediate wake within the person.
There is another form of trauma-and this is the kind I am calling nearly universal in our culture-that has sometimes been termed "small-t trauma." 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. 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. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune of the sort mentioned above and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied. Such non-events are what the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott referred to as "nothing happening when something might profitably have happened"-a subject we will return to when we consider human development. "The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child," writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein.
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.Highlighted by 1,481 Kindle readers
