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Health & Nutrition20 min read
The Myth of Normal
by Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté
Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Published: November 3, 2022
4.6 (1156 ratings)
Table of Contents
1
what’s in it for me? discover how society’s idea of “normal” is making us sick.2
the clash between attachment and authenticity leads to a fractured self.3
stress wreaks havoc on the body, setting the stage for disease.4
our culture generates chronic stress and the conditions for illness.5
trauma often begins in childhood because society undermines our developmental needs.6
your health is an expression of the life you’ve lived and the context surrounding it.7
healing is about finding a pathway to wholeness.8
final summaryBook Summary
This is a comprehensive summary of “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté. The book explores trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture.
what’s in it for me? discover how society’s idea of “normal” is making us sick.#
Introduction
gabor maté, md and daniel maté.
the myth of normal.
trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture.
in the 1990s, the cleveland clinic was witness to a strange phenomenon.
despite having fairly brief contact with patients, the nursing staff could often predict who would develop als, a degenerative autoimmune disease that attacks nerve cells in the brain and spine.
they would write comments in each patient's chart like, probably has als, she's too nice, or no way, he's not nice enough.
to the astonishment of the neurologists, these predictions were almost always correct.
in the decades since, research has supported the nurses' observations.
the title of one published article states, patients with als are usually nice persons.
and it's true for other diseases too.
in 2000, cancer nursing looked at the relationship between anger repression and cancer.
but how could a personality trait like niceness predict disease?
for world-renowned physician dr. gabor maté, the answer lies in trauma and chronic stress.
in fact, these factors often underlie much of what we call disease.
drawing back on his decades of experience as a physician, dr. maté has set out to debunk common myths about what makes us sick.
in these chapters, we'll explore his powerful critique of how our society fosters illness and one possible path to healing based on compassion.
in particular, dr. maté calls on us to stop seeing disease as an expression of individual pathology.
instead, people with illness are a living alarm, calling attention to the fact that what passes as normal in this culture is neither healthy nor natural.
and what is abnormal, addiction, mental health, and illness, is actually a reasonable response to the conditions of trauma and stress in which many of us live.
the clash between attachment and authenticity leads to a fractured self.#
the clash between attachment and authenticity leads to a fractured self.
at 27, miok ikaro developed a rare and painful autoimmune disorder called scleroderma, where the connective tissue throughout the body hardens.
it left miok bedridden and unable to move.
she felt so much pain and despair that she wanted to end her life.
while miok's condition vexed doctors, she began to look to her childhood for answers.
born in korea to a single mother, she was given up at six months.
she was then adopted by an evangelical couple in the u.s. who raised her in a strict environment.
for years, she suffered sexual abuse by her adoptive father, memories of which she had repressed.
as miok began to confront her past, she realized how much emotional pain she had been stuffing down.
to cope, she had learned to channel her energy into being hyper-functional and indispensable at work, often carrying the pressures of everyone around her.
while miok's disease is rare, sadly, her story is not.
like the als patients at the cleveland clinic, these traits of self-sacrifice, suppressing negative emotions, especially anger, and high concern for social acceptance, are common in patients with autoimmune disease.
so what's going on here?
for dr. mate, it exemplifies what happens when two fundamental human needs, attachment and authenticity, are put into conflict.
attachment is your core need for emotional proximity and love, but you also need to be the author of your life based on deep knowledge of your authentic self.
in miok's case, the trauma of separation and sexual abuse was so painful and alarming that she had to disconnect entirely from her memories and her emotional self.
at some point, she learned that working hard and being useful was a safe way to gain acceptance.
this is the split self.
there are the parts of yourself you believe are acceptable, and there are the rejected parts.
when miok learned to reconnect with those once rejected parts, she began to heal.
today, she is off all medications and can walk, travel, and even hike again.
in the next chapter, we'll explore how this split self sets the conditions for disease.
stress wreaks havoc on the body, setting the stage for disease.#
stress wreaks havoc on the body, setting the stage for disease.
so we've seen how the conflict between attachment, our need for connection with others, and authenticity, our need to be true to ourselves, can lead to a fractured self.
we suppress certain parts, like our emotions, in order to win approval or affection.
the toll this takes on one's health is significant, and the key here is stress.
because constantly suppressing your emotions and needs activates the stress response.
to better understand this, let's take a look at what happens to a body under stress.
an emotional stressor first activates a complex network of connections.
think of a major highway system with many interchanges.
between the hypothalamus, which is the brain center responsible for keeping your biological systems in equilibrium, and the pituitary and adrenal glands, which release stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
prolonged or chronic stress leads to an excessive release of these hormones, exhausting the entire system over time.
you also know the havoc stress wreaks on your nervous system because you've likely experienced those tense jitters before a big presentation or an exam.
what's worse, this stress inhibits your body's natural defense against sickness.
when functioning properly, the immune system floods in to attack a foreign substance and then dissipates.
but stress suppresses the signals that turn it off, leading to chronic inflammation.
when the immune system attacks healthy cells, it's called an autoimmune response, like als or meoch's scleroderma.
lastly, stress can even affect our dna.
telomeres are tiny structures that protect chromosomes from fraying, kind of like the little plastic anglets at the end of your shoestrings.
these telomeres shorten as we age, but if they become too short, the host cell can become impaired.
scientists have found that stress and adversity significantly shorten these telomeres, prematurely aging our cells and prematurely aging our cells and making us more prone to illness.
as we can see, emotional stress is inseparable from the physical state of your body.
dr. mate calls this the mind-body unity.
while the stress response has evolved to help you survive, we'll explore in the next chapter how modern social conditions can keep it constantly activated.
our culture generates chronic stress and the conditions for illness.#
our culture generates chronic stress and the conditions for illness.
think back to a moment to high school biology.
remember the petri dish?
that shallow, transparent container used for growing bacteria or fungi cultures?
a petri dish is used to create the right environment for organisms to thrive, the right balance of light, temperature, and nutrients, and the absence of toxins.
if the environment is off, whatever is being cultured may not survive.
after decades of treating patients, dr. gabor mate has come to see that the petri dish we all live in, in other words, our culture, isn't ideal for human flourishing.
in fact, it's toxic.
it breeds the chronic stress that forms the basis of many of our ailments.
consider economic insecurity.
most people have had to work harder and more hours to keep up financially, leaving less time for family.
for many, their jobs, which is a major source of self-esteem and purpose, feels precarious.
it feels like they could lose it at any moment.
but even the global middle class hasn't had a hard time.
according to the organization for economic cooperation and development, the middle class has been under increased pressure since the beginning of the 1980s.
groups facing discrimination have far worse health outcomes.
a 2020 study by dr. brad greenwood and colleagues found that a black baby's risk of death at birth increases two-fold if their doctor isn't black.
and a canadian study showed that women have worse outcomes than men after heart surgery because they have to go back to caregiving duties earlier.
they simply do not get the same time to rest and heal as men.
for dr. mate, all the stress and disconnection we feel is further exploited by our consumerist culture.
think about all the advertising campaigns that set out to make us feel insecure and insufficient in order to sell us products that promise to fulfill our needs.
what's worse, we have far less influence over our collective destiny than the elite.
a recent study found that when a large majority are in favor of a particular public policy, it's rarely implemented if the economic elite are against it.
when we take a step back, it's no wonder that people are experiencing more stress than ever.
trauma often begins in childhood because society undermines our developmental needs.#
trauma often begins in childhood because society undermines our developmental needs.
here's the thing about a society that causes so much stress.
children feel it most.
that's because parental stress easily transfers to their children.
consider a study by sonia lupion and colleagues.
the study found that a child's stress hormone levels rise if their mother is under economic stress.
and there's good reason for this.
a child's development makes them extremely sensitive to their environment.
what happens in these formative years sets the foundation for everything to come.
their health, brain development, and future relationships.
a child's primary developmental need is a secure and reliable attachment to caregivers, one with warm, attuned, and consistent interactions.
poor attachment or stressed and distracted interactions can lead to shaky emotional and mental development.
considering this, you might imagine society would do everything in its power to provide a non-stressful environment for childbirth and child rearing.
yet that couldn't be further from reality.
first of all, there is the stress of feeling alone and unsupported in raising children and the economic pressure parents often face today.
but alongside this, parents also take cues from a culture that centers child development around the needs of society rather than the needs of the child.
it begins with over-medicalizing birth practices that often deny women's agency in the process and lead many to experience obstetric trauma.
then, the integral contact that a child needs with caregivers in the first few months of life is undermined by parental leave policies.
for example, one quarter of american women return to work just two weeks after giving birth.
then, there are the parenting guides that subvert parental instincts by encouraging disconnection and punishment.
dr. benjamin spock's influential guide, for example, encourages parents to sleep train infants by leaving them to cry it out.
the requirement here is for the children to adjust to the demands of society's work schedules.
a culture that undermines children's need for secure attachment creates the condition for the sort of embedded chronic stress that comes with self-fracturing.
this is the basis for trauma, an emotional and psychological woundedness that we can carry throughout life.
your health is an expression of the life you’ve lived and the context surrounding it.#
your health is an expression of the life you've lived and the context surrounding it.
the template for dr. mate's lifelong depression was set in his childhood.
he was born into the trauma of nazi-occupied hungary and his jewish grandparents were killed in auschwitz.
his young mother, fearing for her baby's health, sent him to live with relatives who found safer hiding conditions for him.
but when the two were reunited later, he wouldn't so much as look at his mother.
today, dr. mate understands that his response to the trauma of separation was reasonable and adaptive.
his detachment and emotional repression helped protect him against feeling such unbearable pain again, much like mieuk's repressed memories of abuse.
he can also now see the ways in which he absorbed his own mother's trauma from living through those horrible events.
but still, like with all children who experience trauma, it embedded itself in his nervous system and his mind, influencing his behavior well into adulthood.
when we treat mental illness, like depression, as a mere disease, we miss the opportunity to understand the purpose it once served.
many of the addiction patients dr. mate has treated first started to turn to drugs or alcohol as a way to escape their emotional pain and early trauma.
understanding the source of suffering, like trauma, adversity, and stress, as the social conditions of living in a toxic culture, helps put sickness and disease in a different light.
within this new framework, sick bodies and minds are more like sirens.
we might look in the mirror and see that we are more like sirens.
we might look at what disease and mental illness are expressing about the life and social context that they emerge from.
we have a tendency to think of mental illness as something that just springs up one day, completely out of the blue.
but what if instead we saw illness as a process, a journey that may connect back to the earliest days of one's life and extend all the way to the present?
what if someone who is sick is in the midst of a transformation and is being called to look honestly, with an open heart, at the wounds that they carry?
healing is about finding a pathway to wholeness.#
healing is about finding a pathway to wholeness.
while detoxifying our culture is beyond the scope of this chapter, there is still a lot of cause for hope.
because healing is possible.
for dr. mate, healing is the natural movement towards wholeness.
if the conditions for disease begin with the separation from the self, emotions, and others, then it makes sense that one solution is to reintegrate these fractured parts.
this process involves acknowledging our suffering and the suffering of the world and learning to confront the wounds that have caused this disconnection.
a powerful strategy that you can begin to use in your own life is an exercise called compassionate inquiry.
compassion is an attitude that accepts what is and the person you are.
in other words, there is no should.
it allows for genuine and open inquiry, where you don't presume to have all of the answers.
this is a practice to try daily or weekly at first.
it involves answering some introspective questions and it's best to write out your answers by hand.
the first things to ask yourself are, when do i struggle to say no in areas of my life that matter and how does that impact me?
when have i denied following my urge to say yes?
these questions are about identifying the ways in which you deny your emotions and needs and prioritize others.
then you can ask, what bodily signals have i been ignoring?
what symptoms could be trying to give me a warning?
in these questions, you're focusing on the mind-body connection, identifying where the emotional stress is held in your body.
next, try to identify the hidden story behind your inability to say no.
where did you learn these stories?
this is about untangling the narrative so that you can see how your responses and behaviors once served you.
and that's it!
the goal of this healing work is to learn to heal your authentic essential self.
once you've achieved that, you can free yourself from the automatic responses and adaptations to stress, adversity, and trauma that keep you disconnected.
final summary#
Conclusion
you've just finished our chapter to the myth of normal by dr. gabor mokhte.
because we're born into an environment that centers around the needs of society rather than those of the parents and children, many of us experience small and large traumas of all kinds.
to cope, we split from those painful emotions, rejecting parts of ourselves and turning away from loving connection.
the source of mental illness, addiction, and disease often trace back to those inner wounds and the stress they lock in our bodies.
despite many societal advances, disease and mental illness are still on the rise.
but the medical system rarely considers the whole life of a patient or their inner emotional world when providing treatment.
instead, it isolates the biology of the disease from its social context, trying to cure the illness so that we can get back to normal.
but what is normal?
it may just be the very thing that is making us sick in the first place.
thanks so much for listening.
if you can, please leave us a rating.
you can find the rated button on your screen right now.
and i'll see you at the next chapter.
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