The Myth of Normal: there is no comparing suffering.

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

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“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.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“One of the things many diseases have in common is inflammation, acting as kind of a fertilizer for the development of illness. We’ve discovered that when people feel threatened, insecure—especially over an extended period of time—our bodies are programmed to turn on inflammatory genes.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“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,”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body. Oddly, this self-estrangement can show up later in life in the form of an apparent strength, such as my ability to perform at a high level when hungry or stressed or fatigued, pushing on without awareness of my need for pause, nutrition, or rest.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You haven’t suffered like I have”—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively. We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Our other core need is authenticity. Definitions vary, but here’s one that I think applies best to this discussion: the quality of being true to oneself, and the capacity to shape one’s own life from a deep knowledge of that self.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not. —János (Hans) Selye, M.D., The Stress of Life”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“A society that fails to value communality — our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us — is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human. Pathology cannot but ensue. To say so is not a moral assertion but an objective assessment.

"When people start to lose a sense of meaning and get disconnected, that's where disease comes from, that's where breakdown in our health — mental, physical, social health — occurs," the psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry told me. If a gene or virus were found that caused the same impacts on the population's well-being as disconnection does, news of it would bellow from front-page headlines. Because it transpires on so many levels and so pervasively, we almost take it for granted; it is the water we swim in.

We are steeped in the normalized myth that we are, each of us, mere individuals striving to attain private goals. The more we define ourselves that way, the more estranged we become from vital aspects of who we are and what we need to be healthy. Among psychologists there is a wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of. These have been variously listed as:

- belonging, relatedness, or connectedness;
- autonomy: a sense of control in one's life;
- mastery or competence;
- genuine self-esteem, not dependent on achievement, attainment, acquisition, or valuation by others;
- trust: a sense of having the personal and social resources needed to sustain one through life;
- purpose, meaning, transcendence: knowing oneself as part of something larger than isolated, self-centered concerns, whether that something is overtly spiritual or simply universal/humanistic, or, given our evolutionary origins, Nature. "The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature." So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844.

None of this tells you anything you don't already know or intuit. You can check your own experience: What's it like when each of the above needs is met? What happens in your mind and body when it's lacking, denied, or withdrawn?”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Chronic rage, by contrast, floods the system with stress hormones long past the allotted time. Over the long term, such a hormonal surplus, whatever may have instigated it, can make us anxious or depressed; suppress immunity; promote inflammation; narrow blood vessels, promoting vascular disease throughout the body;”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Whereas individual people can become dislocated by misfortunes in any society, only a free-market society produces mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning, even during periods of prosperity.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“I used the f-word. I said, ‘Fuck your statistics.’” “Good for you,” I offered. “That probably helped extend your life.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The same goes for us: no emotional vulnerability, no growth.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Time after time it was the “nice” people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Is it possible nevertheless that our consumer culture does make good on its promises, or could do so? Might these, if fulfilled, lead to a more satisfying life? When I put the question to renowned psychologist Tim Krasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. "Research consistently shows," he told me, "that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society."

He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC — American corporate capitalism: it "fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition."

There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things.

As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates.

Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body and soul.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“the parents’ primary task, beyond providing for the child’s survival requirements, is to emanate a simple message to the child in word, deed, and (most of all) energetic presence, that he or she is precisely the person they love, welcome, and want. The child doesn’t have to do anything, or be any different, to win that love—in fact, cannot do anything, because this abiding embrace cannot be earned, nor can it be revoked. It doesn’t depend on the child’s behavior or personality; it is just there, whether the child is showing up as “good” or “bad,” “naughty” or “nice.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“This Harvard research provided further striking evidence that emotional stresses are inseparable from the physical states of our bodies, in illness and health.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child,” writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Tellingly, the degree of protection offered by married status was five times as great for men as for women, a finding that speaks to the relative roles of the genders in this culture,”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Creatures with poorly self-regulated stress reactions will be more anxious, less capable of confronting ordinary environmental challenges, and overstressed even under normal circumstances. The study showed the quality of early maternal care to have a causal impact on the offspring’s brains’ biochemical capacity to respond to stress in a healthy way into adulthood. Key”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The meaning of the word "trauma," in its Greek origin is "wound." Whether we realize it or not, it is out woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs out ways of thinking about the world. It can even determine whether or not we are capable or rational thought at all in matters of the greatest importance to our lives.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“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.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Here’s what Buddha left out, if I may be so bold: before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds.”
― Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Like our other needs, meaning is an inherent expectation. Its denial has dire consequences. Far from a purely psychological need, our hormones and nervous systems clock its presence or absence. As a medical study in 2020 found, the "presence [of] and search for meaning in life are important for health and well-being." Simply put, the more meaningful you find your life, the better your measures of mental and physical health are likely to be.

It is itself a sign of the times that we even need such studies to confirm what our experience of life teaches. When do you feel happier, more fulfilled, more viscerally at ease: when you extend yourself to help and connect with others, or when you are focused on burnishing the importance of your little egoic self? We all know the answer, and yet somehow what we know doesn't always carry the day.

Corporations are ingenious at exploiting people's needs without actually meeting them. Naomi Klein, in her book No Logo, made vividly clear how big business began in the 1980s to home in on people's natural desire to belong to something larger than themselves. Brand-aware companies such as Nike, Lululemon, and the Body Shop are marketing much more than products: they sell meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand.

"That presupposes a kind of emptiness and yearning in people," I suggested when I interviewed the prolific author and activist. "Yes," Klein replied. "They tap into a longing and a need for belonging, and they do it by exploiting the insight that just selling running shoes isn't enough. We humans want to be part of a transcendent project.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture