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https://tim.blog/2022/09/09/dr-gabor-mate-myth-of-normal-transcript/
In the new book, are there any chapters or concepts, anything at all that you really hope people do not miss? I know that’s perhaps a strange way to phrase it, but I’ll leave it there as a starting point.
Dr. Gabor Maté: No, that’s good. Thank you. Well, it’s almost like I felt I could just print the title, the title page, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and just have people write their own books. Just have a bunch of empty pages. So I think the message is reinforced through the whole book. What we think is normal in our society from the point of view of human needs and human evolution is absolutely abnormal. And therefore, when we think of abnormalities in terms of illnesses and dysfunctions and diseases and so on, these are normal responses to abnormal circumstances. And the biggest loss you and I have already talked about. This is a society that from the very beginning, from in utero onwards, put stresses on human beings, that they lose contact with themselves.
And the essence of trauma is loss of contact with yourself, loss of connection to yourself. And that’s reinforced through parenting practices, the parenting advice people get. You and I already talked about that. It is reinforced in the school system where it’s all about competition and evaluation rather than relaxation and learning. We are judged all the time by our externals, like how we look, what we achieve, how smart we are, how fast we are. We’re not accepted for who we are with our flaws and our vulnerabilities. Society caters to those false needs so that for God’s sakes, people are botoxing themselves because they’ve learned that how they are is just not acceptable.
People are on Facebook presenting a false image of themselves because they believe that how they are and who they are is not good enough. We’re sold all these products and are manipulated into all these activities that are all attempts to fulfill some deep hunger in ourselves that is missing because we’ve lost our true selves. We are manipulated into buying products and eating foods that are actually toxically, addictively unhealthy. And this happens with the full awareness, even — not only the awareness, the employment of modern science as to how to get people hooked on cell phones or junk foods. Our politics reflects very traumatized people reaching the top, enacting policies that then create more trauma for large numbers of people. In other words, this is a society that for all its wealth, scientific ingenuity, incredible progress in science and medicine, has fundamentally got disconnected from the essence of what it means to be human beings.
And we suffer. There’s an article in The New Yorker about the alarming rise in childhood suicide, the mysterious rise in child — there’s nothing mysterious about it. Kids are stressed because of the conditions of this culture, all the lonely people, as the Beatles sang, all the lonely people. The number of people lonely has doubled in the last 30 years. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness. Loneliness kills. It’s as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of causing illness or potentiating illness and death. There’s so many ways in which this culture is abnormal, and it’s causing people to be not well.
And so that message, that’s the essential one that I hope people won’t miss. But I doubt that they will, if they read the book. And the big message is, Tim, is we don’t have to be that way. It’s not our true nature. We’ve been sold a bill of goods about what human nature is. Human nature is not like that. And precisely the reason there’s so much dysfunction is because we’ve got disconnected from our true nature. We don’t have to be. We can find our way back. We can embrace it. And we’ll be lot healthier, both as a group and as individuals.
