Book Review: The Myth of Normal
A book review . . . The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
By Gabor Mate, MD and Daniel Mate
It could be said that this book is a depressing compendium of all that is wrong with the world today. However, I think that the authors manage a tone that is at once light, serious, informative, and hopeful. Rather than bringing you down, I think this book will give you hope that we can do better.
Do I recommend reading it? Oh, very much yes!
If you haven’t heard of the author, here is what you should know about him. Dr. Gabor Mate is a Vancouver physician who is known internationally for his research and speaking on trauma and harm reduction. He has written books on addiction, ADHD, and illness, always from a trauma-informed viewpoint. He also made a documentary titled The Wisdom of Trauma. His most recent work puts all of these topics together and broadens the view to the whole North American culture. He writes with clarity and compassion, quoting a wide range of people who have survived and thrived after trauma.
Almost daily, I hear my clients blaming themselves for doing this thing or that. Perhaps they are working too hard, suppressing their emotions, prioritizing money over relationships. My response is often to say, “Of course you do these things. Do you realize that our culture has encouraged you to do that? Our culture rewards us for doing things that aren’t healthy. We are expected to suppress emotion, disregard trauma, numb ourselves, and just keep following all the steps.” Most of the time, this strikes my clients as news. The idea that even pop-psychology is encouraging us away from the things we really need is a new and strange idea, indeed.
In the Myth of Normal, Gabor unpacks all of that. He goes through topic after topic, from addiction, to delivering babies, to serious illnesses, he spells out the many ways that our current culture gets it wrong and misses the point.
Why would I want my clients to read a book about all that’s wrong with the world? Because most of my clients seem to believe that they have single-handedly messed up their own lives, and I strongly believe that is never the whole story. Most of the issues that we face every day are actually much larger than us. I don’t intend that to be depressing. Rather, I hope that it’s illuminating. And I hope that it takes the pressure off.
In order to truly change our lives and the lives of those we love, it helps to see the whole picture. It can help to recognize that there’s a reason why it feels like you’ve been following the rules and yet things still aren’t working out for you. There are deep problems with “the rules”.
If we aim to live healthy, vibrant lives and be our authentic selves, we will need to better understand the culture we are trying to live in so that we can consciously decide how much of that culture we truly choose to subscribe to.
Dr. Gabor Mate shines a light on our culture and helps us see some issues that have been staring us in the face for a long, long time. He helps us consider that there are options about how much to choose to participate in “normal”. And there is a lot of space for people who have the energy and the vision to build things better.
One of the themes in the book is the importance of vulnerability. Gabor states that “nothing in all of nature ‘becomes itself’ without being vulnerable: the mightiest tree’s growth requires soft and supple shoots, just as the hardest-shelled crustacean must first molt and become soft. The same goes for us: no emotional vulnerability, no growth.” He goes on to say that a lack of vulnerability also causes a sense of emptiness, boredom, a lack of intimacy. Without it we can’t have curiosity or learning. We are driven to distraction, overstimulation, and addiction. Doesn’t that all just look like our culture? Our culture has not been set up to encourage us to be vulnerable, nor does it make it safe for us to be vulnerable. Instead we develop the many ways that we respond to our trauma, the many protections that help us avoid vulnerability. And there we become stuck.
One of my favorite studies that Gabor mentions in this tome looks at the mental state of mouse moms and dads. Researchers took healthy male mice and exposed them to stressors like constant light and fox odors. Then they mated them with happy female mice and then separated them again. The happy female mice provided “perfectly good mothering” to the babies, but the babies “showed impaired stress-response behaviors and blunted stress hormone patterns.” This kind of genetic effect is called epigenetics and it is oh so real. Notice that in this study, the male mice were not genetically prone to stress and depression. They selected healthy mice for the study and gave them stress. Just the sperm from a stressed dad was enough to affect the babies.
I don’t share this study so that you’ll feel doomed or destined to keep your depression for all your life. Instead, I’d love for you to read this book, and take a step back from your individual life and to see a wider lens. You are not entirely responsible for where you have arrived in life so far. We did not all start on the same line. We are not all running the same race. If we want to continue with the race analogy, then I should add that we’re running something much more like a mud race than a jaunty little neighborhood 5 km.
How is that view supposed to be helpful? Well, somehow, when clients arrive in my office and unpack their struggles, they often seem to be saying, “Yes, I am so incapable of living a decent life that this is the mess I’ve gotten myself into. It’s entirely my fault that I am not living a life free from struggle and pain. I should have done better than this by now. I haven’t done well. I suck. Please fix me.”
This is when I respond and say, “You know, I don’t think that this is the whole story. I think you have been working harder than you’ve realized. I think you have done better than you thought. Most of your frustrations with yourself are exactly how humans are designed to respond to challenging circumstances so far beyond their control. You might have been viewing so many of these challenging circumstances as normal. Dr. Gabor Mate says that our culture’s ideas about “normal” aren’t healthy; they aren’t helping you. Our cultural norms are not actually designed so that you can succeed at this. And yes, I can help.”
Somehow, when people are able to see that they didn’t run their own lives into the ground on their own, something shifts. They start to believe in themselves again. They start to reject the pieces of culture that don’t bring them life. Things start to get just a tad easier. When we stop thinking that we are the problem, we gain the power to become the solution.
Dr. Gabor Mate wrote this book, no doubt, to summarize his life’s work. This summary is a painting, full of detail and hope. It is a map for us to get our bearings. Before we can build a better future, we need to more clearly see where we are and what we’re working with. This book is where that starts.