the Myth of Normal

In a recent online interview, Gabor Maté told Tim Ferriss he had been planning The Myth of Normal for 10-12 years before Covid-19 forced him to cancel worldwide speaking engagements and stay home, giving him time to process the data and interviews he had gathered, and interweave his research with his personal story, his family’s, and – most importantly – humankind’s collective trauma. His son Daniel collaborated by reading the text, suggesting improvements in style and clarity of argument, crafting some sections from his father’s notes and making appropriate contributions of his own, notably in Parts II and V.

Citing Galen of Pergamon, “The best physician is also a philosopher”, Dr Maté asks why our collective health is deteriorating, despite significant advances in medical science, exposes how much we normalise in our society that is neither healthy nor natural, and proposes ‘a new vision of normal that nurtures the best in who we are’.

Maté was born in 1944 Hungary to Jewish parents. Their living conditions were so dire that his mother asked a stranger to take him to a relative in better circumstances. Baby Gabor was traumatised by separation from a loving mother who wanted the best for her son. As one of the Jewish minority, he was bullied at school until his family left Hungary for Canada, in 1957. He qualified in medicine, became a family doctor, and subsequently worked for 12 years with drug addicts in Vancouver, coming face to face with the plight of Indigenous Canadians, the First Nations of the country that had welcomed him with open arms. He speaks with the voices of both victim and healer in a well-referenced book that is accessible to a wide readership.

Part I explores trauma, beginning with a trivial incident that ignites the author’s abandonment wound, triggering an outdated childhood adaptation, so that he withdraws from the present moment to rerun a past wound. He invites readers to consider where they fit ‘on the broad and surprisingly inclusive trauma spectrum’, then defines what trauma is and is not, and describes its various effects. Freeze trauma, previously known as ‘detachment’, was barely acknowledged, let alone understood, before recent ground-breaking work by Peter Levine and others. Maté comments on the multigenerational nature of trauma without blaming genetics for our psychological difficulties because genes “are turned on and off by the environment”. Genes may make us susceptible but they do not predetermine our lives. In this section Maté describes the machinery of stress, epigenetic markers, energy flow, and much else. He highlights the importance of our contradictory needs of attachment (emotional closeness) and authenticity (being true to ourselves) and counsels us to leave behind blame, guilt, and shame, as we embark on the healing road.

As a doctor, Maté appreciates the achievements of medical science, but recognises the pitfalls of treating the symptoms of illness without inquiring into contributing circumstances and working with people in their social context. In Part II, he criticises his profession’s approach to pregnant mothers, which contravenes their natural instincts when giving birth, and he acknowledges his own compliance with medical school training until he woke up to the harm it was doing to mothers and babies. Their relationship is hampered by popular parenting advice that ignores the emotional needs of small children. Education is pivotal to building a wholesome society, and Maté emphasises the importance of constructive play and healthy emotional expression and social interaction as well as useful skills and academic grades—a theme he returns to in Part V.

Freeze trauma is an insidious state of being that can linger for decades, stifling our progress, even when we have acknowledged our adverse childhood experiences, analysed them and lived a well-intentioned life. Such withdrawal is fuelled by cultural traditions that inhibit overt displays of emotion. So the workaholic Dr Maté would come home depressed, grumpy, and unresponsive to his wife’s efforts to bring a smile to his face. Her anxiety was transmitted to the baby in her womb, while their elder son Daniel lived in a permanent state of insecurity and suffered recurrent nightmares. The trauma of Gabor and Daniel is touched upon here and in Part V. More will no doubt be revealed in their 2023 publication, Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Adult Children and Their Parents, a learning journey for father and son, to which Daniel makes a 50% contribution.

Workaholism can be addictive like drugs, alcohol, moneymaking, gambling, retail therapy, and political ambition. Maté provides ample evidence that such addiction is stoked by trauma. Addictions are coping mechanisms we adopt to stem our pain and defend ourselves from that which is unendurable. They are central to Part III, and Part IV examines “The Toxicities of our Culture” that support addiction. We are bio-psycho-societal beings, indispensably connected to each other. Yet a former British PM is handsomely rewarded for giving talks that bleach “the ‘social’ out of society”, side-lining chronic health problems as individual lifestyle choices, thereby detaching political leadership from social responsibility. Britain’s recent appointment of a Minister of Loneliness has not escaped attention. American and Canadian leaders get similar drubbings for ‘othering’ people of colour and Indigenous communities, accepting sponsorship from fossil-fuel companies and ignoring their detrimental impact on the climate, rating competition higher than cooperation, disregarding gender prejudice, and valuing profit above all else: ‘greed is creed, and health nothing but collateral damage.’ The tone is hard-hitting.

The final section of the book, Part V, explores “Pathways to Wholeness”. Citing the Greek tragedian, Aeschylus—‘we must suffer, suffer into truth’—and recognising that the Covid-19 experience has unmasked many of the iniquities of our society, making more people aware of the need to transform what our society considers normal, Maté presents a set of guiding principles to help our individual healing journeys. If past histories have devalued our sense of self-worth, especially ‘in a society that capitalises on people’s sense of inadequacy’, we need to reprogramme ourselves, to be with our own suffering and the suffering of others because, in the words of playwright and physician Anton Chekhov, ‘It is compassion that moves us beyond numbness toward healing’. Self-compassion loosens our tightness and opens our minds to others with curiosity, recognition and possibility. We share our interconnected pain and pursue our search for truth, however painful the process. We need to become a more trauma-conscious society, and Maté specifically targets the medical, legal, and teaching professions. He devotes a chapter to showing how shamans can enhance the performance of Western doctors, not only by introducing psychedelics to assist healing, but also by showing doctors how to clear the toxic energies they have absorbed from sick patients. ‘Shedding toxic myths of disconnection from ourselves, from one another, and from the planet, we can bring what is normal and what is natural, bit by bit, closer together’. This is the message of a book that is huge in scope and deep in content.