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

No person is their disease, and no one did it to themselves—not in any conscious, deliberate, or culpable sense. Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories, all interacting with the physical and psychological environment. It is often a manifestation of ingrained personality traits, yes—but that personality is not who we are any more than are the illnesses to which it may predispose us. (pp. 83–84)

I’ve long understood that most, if not all, illnesses in these broken times (my own included) are ‘diseases of civilisation’, such that they would not only be rare in healthy cultures, but would also be imbued with meaning that points towards a path of healing (and a likely cure). The Western medical approach—stemming from the misguided belief that mind is seperate from body—that treats disease (even what we call ‘mental illness’) as purely physiological, and to be ‘fought’ with medication or other physical interventions, rather than as a natural and necessary process related to the whole life experience of the person, is a large part of the problem. To quote from a book I love, The Alchemy of Illness (1993) by Kat Duff:

Allopathic (meaning “against suffering”) medicine and psychology take an aggressive stance against disease with the explicit aim of eliminating pain, illness, and infirmity from our world and lives. This is a heroic ideal. It is infused with notions of superiority, expectations of conflict and conquest, that reflect the imperialistic ethos of our culture. (p. 37)

I’ve fallen into that trap many a time, thinking that the next treatment or diet or expensive supplement will be the thing that does the trick (not that such things can’t be helpful). But the truth is that physical and emotional dysregulation are symptoms of underlying causes, often stemming from adverse childhood experiences; and just about everyone has been affected by some degree of trauma—little ‘t’ if not big ‘T’. This trauma is being unwittingly passed on, generation to generation. No wonder the dominant culture is a mess.

What if we saw illness as an imbalance in the entire organism, not just as a manifestation of molecules, cells, or organs invaded or denatured by pathology? What if we applied the findings of Western research and medical science in a systems framework, seeking all the connections and conditions that contribute to illness and health?

Such a reframing would revolutionize how we practice medicine. Rather than treating disease as a solid entity that imposes its ill will on the body, we would be dealing with a process, one that can’t be extricated from our personal histories and the context and culture in which we live. (p. 89)

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022) by Gabor Maté, with his son Daniel Maté, is an extraordinary and comprehensive book that moves ‘from cell to society’ in its analysis of illness, trauma, addiction, and pathways to healing.

I appreciate books like this in which the author has an honest, confessional approach. Maté not only admits to the things he did wrong and deeply regrets as a physician, because the medical system simply did not teach him any other way; but he also relates the truth about his own depression, workaholism and emotional dysregulation, stemming from his traumatic and deprived childhood in postwar Hungary, and the affect this has had on his family. Even in his late seventies, his learning and healing journey is ongoing—which surely shows us that it is never to late to start on our own healing way. 

I was particularly shocked by the section that discusses birth trauma and obstetric violence, especially the story of an indigenous Canadian woman in labour, taunted and abused by nurses just minutes before her death. My jaw literally dropped. That such racist and misogynist cruelty could take place in a hospital, from people who are supposed to care, was truly awful to read. And that this violence affects women in the process of bringing new life into the world, impacting not only on their ability to mother in healthy ways, but on the infant’s experience of life from the very moment they are born, points directly to the source of the problem. When the natural process of birth is unnecessarily interfered with, harm results at the societal level. Maté writes:

The issue is autonomy, an indispensable human need. Birthing practices express the hidden or overt values of a culture in terms of who wields power and how much genuine control people are able to exercise over their own bodies. Modern research finds that maternity-care interventions may disturb hormonal processes, reduce their benefits, and create new challenges. What then, I asked Sarah Buckley—a New Zealand-based physician, advocate, and author of a highly regarded overview of the normal physiology of childbearing—explains the rapidly growing rates of medicalized interference? I expected an answer based purely on medical concerns. In fact, her response was sharply perceptive as to how acculturation into the much broader myth of normal takes place. “Doctors,” Dr. Buckley said, “are the agents of our society’s expectations that we imprint on mothers, when they are very open and vulnerable, that technology is superior to the body and that women’s bodies are intrinsically bound to fail. It really is obvious that the culture wants to impress upon women this view of their bodies as inherently defective and needing high-level technological care.” And that will carry on, she added, “into how she brings up the child to be in accord with the demands of the culture.”

Though systemic sexism tilts the playing field against women in particular, there is also a more specific cause of unnecessary medical interference, one foundational to the Western medical view: a distrust of natural processes and fear of what can, may, or will go wrong. (pp. 150–51)

When it is the culture as a whole that creates the circumstances in which the symptoms of illness and addiction become the body’s way of saying no (to paraphrase the title of Maté’s 2003 book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress), it can seem like an impossible task to find a solution. Yet there is hope. Maté makes it clear that we are not controlled by our genes, and therefore stuck in inescapable patterns of behaviour or disease. Rather, we are epigenetic beings. The environment—our circumstances and experiences, and crucially, how we respond to them—determines the expression of our genes. If we can change our environment, and our attitude towards it—if ‘we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward’ (p. 366)—then we can change a great deal about ourselves, and ultimately the culture at large.

Just as illness is a process, so is healing:

When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement towards wholeness. Notice that I do not define it as the end state of being completely whole, or “enlightened,” or any similar psychospiritual ideal. It is a direction, not a destination; a line on a map, not a dot.

Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval. In fact, our modern self-improvement culture—which has to a large extent been co-opted by the same consumerist forces responsible for the conditions we have been chronicling—can too easily obscure or complicate the healing journey. When we heal, we are engaged in recovering our lost parts of self, not tying to change or “better” them. As the depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin told me, the core question is “not so much looking at what’s wrong, but where is the person's wholeness not fully realized or lived out?”

This process of self-retrieval, or reaching towards wholeness, though it may have milestones, is continuous and lifelong—and unique for everyone—and it is helped along by our feeling and imaginative capacities. As Maté says, ‘The intellect becomes a far more intelligent tool when it allows the heart to speak; when it opens itself to that within us that resonates with the truth, rather than trying to reason with it.’ (p. 364)

I love that Maté mentions Bill Plotkin and other explorers of the mythic realm such as Michael Meade, and that he is unafraid to relate his experiences of ayahuasca ceremonies, and the possibilities of other psychotropic medicines, alongside other psychospiritual approaches to illness. Modern medicine’s ignorance of (or refusal to see) the emotional, social and spiritual origins of illness prevents it from ever finding the true causes. As Kat Duff has written, quoting Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell, ‘a long personal or cultural history that has repressed the pagan gods encourages illness.’ (The Alchemy of Illness, p. 53) Without contact with the wild source of everything, we get lost, and things begin to fall apart.

Healing, as process or journey, is available to us at any moment, if we cultivate the will to keep bringing our attention back to dysfunctional beliefs and thought patterns, peering courageously into our pasts, whilst believing in the possibility of a different future.

The idea is to retrain the brain, to strengthen through conscious effort the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to break out of a past-based trance and repatriate us to the present. Any repetitively self-deprecating thought pattern can be worked with in this way.

The method is an experiential one, requiring commitment and mindfulness. It needs to be not only done but fully experienced. Only when attention is present can the mind rewire the brain. “Conscious attention must be paid,” Jeffrey Schwartz insists. “Therein lies the key. Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention. Paying attention matters.” (p. 424)

This idea of attention echoes what Iain McGilchrist has said: that attention, far from being just a ‘cognitive function’, ‘is actually nothing less than the way in which we relate to the world. And it doesn’t just dictate the kind of relationship we have with whatever it is: it dictates what it is that we come to have a relationship with.’ (Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World, 2019, p. 28)

Reading The Myth of Normal has been yet another reminder for me to re-devote my attention to what matters, and to rediscover the healing path I had mislaid for the past several years. It was always there, waiting for me to set foot on its dark and unknown way once more.

As Paul Shepard says in Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998):

Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interaction between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It’s possible to do it badly. It’s also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continuously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages. (p. 38)