Summary: Reading Gabor Mate’s recent book, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture” is like having my own Dumbledore Pensieve from the Harry Potter world where one is able to dip into this bowl of liquid and gas to go back into moments of lives to see more clearly what time and the mind have clouded. In its pages, he and his son and co-author Daniel hold up a wholistic lens to lives like mine and others, including their own, that help me to see the where and the whys I went wrong and what has brought change and hope and healing.
A sentence that has been said, in a surprised tone, by many an addict in 12 step groups I have been in, is one that I too can say: “I had a happy normal childhood.” With the quick addition: “At least it seemed normal at the time. I was lucky. I didn’t go through what so many suffered.” All true, and as Mate illuminates, all incomplete. What was or seems normal, especially to a child, doesn’t equate with good, with healthy. Especially when life events like trauma and addictions and sexuality were taboo, we couldn’t let them be the norm they really were. So from the culture of the 1950s TV shows to the lived experiences of families struggling silently in the wake of two horrendous world wars and the shadow of a feared nuclear war to come, we created, or at least strongly reinforced, the myth of what’s normal.
We do this in personal lives still today. We are too quick to be defensive of our past and so we minimize and relativize our pain. When we don’t face the “small t traumas,” the so-called minor traumas, over time they grow into the large T Trauma for us and others. Also, we don’t understand or know, or we deny, how the major traumas of others, even generationally and culturally, affects us and shapes how we respond to the “normal pains of life” that come to us. We think of it as blaming others and don't want to go there, rightly, but in doing that we don't learn and grow for ourselves and others. We are still letting blame take charge.
Mate writes that, after all, “trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” This means it can be distracting to recovery to try to place our pain on a grand scale that weighs them against others. It means we don’t have to have been brought up in a literal war zone, or had the most abusive childhood in our neighborhood, for adverse effects to turn into lasting traumatic responses or emotional wounds that fester and grow. Yes, others have had it worse and need attention and resources, especially for those without privileges that give them access to resources.
But it is the reaction that matters as much, it seems, as the action. In fact, the more obvious to others our trauma is means we might get help to address it quicker. If we intentionally downplay our own pain it only compounds it and the silence gives it what it needs to grow worse and worse. My self-narrative of having a happy childhood and feeling the need to maintain it (all true in a very real sense, and yet obviously I still got off track from an early age) was itself an unhealthy response along with addictions of self-soothing the pain and pressure of the “normal childhood”. These normal happy kids like I was do not then learn resilience, as might others with more visible or culturally recognized wounds. This is not, God forbid, to try to justify or minimize the horror of what many children faced and were coerced into, which I did not; it is just a warning that if we make normal what is still hurtful, especially repression and secrecy and not seeking help, like all things then the more usual pains and struggles of life will escalate into the unusual.
That is one of the main takeaways from this book and what drives the choice of its title: what is normal often should not be normal. What was “normal” in my life and the lives of many of my friends and schoolmates? Corporal punishment including but not limited to the switch or belt or other implements and which leave bruises and cuts and shame and the frog-in-the-slowly boiling water experience of emotional numbness to empathy and cruelty. And sexual abuse in many lives even then, or as in mine early sexual acting out consensually with others that was nevertheless shame-producing. And we experienced in our own way what many still do, not being taught emotional literacy, too much screen time, not being taught sexuality at all but especially the role of communication in sexuality and the primary role of intimacy in sex, also not seeing healthy conflict, and not having others to check in with emotionally and to whom we could turn when troubled by feelings and actions.
We knew, or we learned later, and often were told at the time, that as bad as we might be “having it” (that strange all-encompassing term for our experience of life as a child) our lives were probably so much easier as children than the ones our elders lived, and theirs before them. No doubt. But what parents before seemed not to know, and probably did not, was how their own worse childhood lives--which they might seriously try to not pass on and succeed in doing so to a degree--still left the invisible marks of “normalcy” on top of the visible marks. Inheritance was not just of the various traumas but the response of repression and normalcy to the traumas. Blame is useless because it can never land on any one person or one generation and becomes a poor substitute for responsibility and breaking cycles. We need the reminder as William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
As a result of these bad “norms” that could not be addressed as simply unhealthy practices passed down to us and through us, too often they were seen as abnormal. So secret and compartmentalized lives grew in response during adolescence and deepened in adulthood, an adulthood that for addicts has too many markers of one who is in fact still stuck in that very adolescence when the addictions first started manifesting themselves.
When we say “trauma is normal” it used to mean that the “being normal” in fact erased the trauma. Now “trauma is normal” means it has been “trauma all the way down” for us, our parents or guardians, their parents or guardians, all the way back. That it is being named now more broadly will cause some to react and see this as weakening the impact of what is “truly traumatic” and they will believe it disempowers people, spreads victimization identity, and makes work, so to speak, for the helping professions. But it appears rather to be expanding the bandwidth of explanations for what ails us and gives us more helpers and more tools to use. Again, it is in the same way that we now approach physical illness with a broader bandwidth of understanding the roots of disease and what affects life expectancy so that better outcomes in one area—such as natural and built environmental factors, reducing adverse childhood events, improving economic equality—result in better overall health and well-being. I suppose throughout history there have been healthier and unhealthier ways of dealing with trauma, just as there are now. But one thing about history is that it can become clearer, more truthful, the further we are from it. This gives us more tools now to try to keep it from being so traumatic “all the way on” through our descendants or the lives of the descendants of the people we affect.
We now know that trauma separates us from our bodies, from gut feelings, and this separates us from each other, from intimacy emotional and physical, and separates us even from the body around us called Nature, called Community. This shrinks our world and our lives and hinders our mental and moral flexibility to respond to what life throws us. Trauma makes it easier to turn to unhealthier than to healthy practices and habits. Trauma in its collective form—generationally experienced, and culturally experienced as racism and sexism and classism and economic scarcity and the destruction of the natural and the built and social environments that are supposed to support our daily life in neighborhoods and families—is part of the oft-studied “social determinants of health” that shorten our life expectancies as surely as genetics and life choices.
What is poisonous to our health then (add to the list above also the specific manifestations of those generalities found in more extreme everything, drugs, pornography, isolation, growing civic violence, extreme income gaps and everyday stress when it is all combined in such a "connected 24/7 world") and we can see and feel how the abnormal is still being made normal today at an accelerated rate.
Mate uses the helpful term of “biopsychosocial” to indicate how we and this world fuse to shape us as the person we are. This replaces the focus on the autonomous I, the mind as the self alone, the too individual emphasis that cuts off our understanding of ourselves as wholistic beings. This helps us then see addictions as more than simply the bad moral choices of individuals. It moves us away from the mechanistic way of thinking of ourselves which can lead to thinking of addiction like a bad part that only has to be replaced for us to work again.
Seeing addiction and recovery both as more like ecological systems—because we are like that too, more a “we” than an “I”—leads to longer lasting health than quick fixes. It helps us to focus on all the strands of the larger system affecting us. It also helps us to see the disease in “the disease of addiction” as more than just what happens in and to an individual biological person in the workings of brain chemicals alone. When the psychological is added to the biological, and the social and cultural is added inherently to that concept of the I too, then disease, he says, also becomes too limiting of a lens for addiction even though it has been an improvement over how we viewed it earlier. And one additional way to keep this expansion in our understanding of addiction and recovery growing is to always also see and address the spiritual as part of the psychological.
Part of the book that shows this connection of self and systems is the exploration of epigenetics. Epigenetics is a term with wide uses, and still under study especially in psychological uses. It refers to various triggers that turn genes off and on. They may be the ways our biology responds to our cultural ancestry, to our environment and family histories. It is why we need to study all these parts of ourselves as part of recovery and the prevention of addiction and other toxic responses in the lives of our descendants. Epigenetics may result in ways we are susceptible to neurochemicals, but if so they are also ways we can respond to stress in healthy ways.
This is what I see in recovery work: people learning how to be more adaptable, resilient, innovative even in changing the patterns of their life. We are getting back in touch with a reigning part of the nature of our human nature when we do this, according to Robert Sapolsky, a Standford biological research professor whom Mate cites. And yet he has added that “our nature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature.” Certainly, addicts know this. We eschew constraints on our behavior, in attempts to live lives free of constraints, without facing how our actions are so closely tied to the “biopsychosocial” environmental factors of our brain chemistry and toxic cultures present and past. We continue our dangerous habit of denial if we only stop in recovery at the denial of our bad choices.
In Part Two, I will look at the ways the Mates find for breaking free of these deeply engrained and deeply toxic normalcies.