The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture

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Somewhere in the book one of Gabor's patients said that addiction saved his life and it shook me to tears. I spent my whole life blaming all my flaws and downfalls on my addictions. They were the reason I wasn't well-educated and didn't go to University, the reason I lost friends and disgraced family, but in all honestly, my vices are the only reason I stayed alive. That unendurable pain and confusions as a 16-year-old is the reason I found refuge in alcohol and drugs and they became the soft pillow I'd cry into every night. As Europe’s social crisis mounted (only relieved with migration to settler colonies), foreign societies were reduced to raw materials (colonial plantations) and even cheaper body parts (slaves, “coolies”) to feed Western industrialization. This is capitalism’s materialism, to fulfil the viral logic of endless private accumulation; this abstract, asocial mechanization has only grown to haunt our social imagination since 1818 Frankenstein, from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times to 1999 film The Matrix. DR. GABOR MATÉ: Yes. So, healing, again, if you look at the word origins, which I often do, comes from a word for wholeness. So healing actually is a movement towards our wholeness. Now, if trauma is a split from ourselves, for example, a split from our bodies, as in the case of V, who had to disconnect from her body to survive her childhood, then healing is that reconnection with ourselves. And if trauma is not the terrible things that happened to us, but trauma is the wound that we sustained and are carrying, that’s a very positive message, because it means that that wound can be healed at any time. You see, if the trauma is what happened to me, now 77 years ago, that my mother gave me to the stranger, that will never not have happened. But if the trauma is what I made it mean, the wound that I sustained, that I wasn’t a lovable, worthwhile human being, that wound can be healed at any moment in all of us.

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. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Maté, could you elaborate on what you’ve been talking about now, namely the relationship between individual — the effects of an individual and social trauma? You said in a recent interview, quote, “Being left with an emptiness and insatiable craving creates addiction in the personal sense, and capitalism in the social sense.” And both these are taken to be coping mechanisms for the experience of trauma. If you could explain? The Myth of Normal is a book literally everyone will be enriched by—a wise, profound and healing work that is the culmination of Dr. Maté's many years of deep and painfully accumulated wisdom.” —Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus RUSSELL BRAND: Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. They were two traumatized people fighting to govern a traumatized world. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?The Myth of Normal is a book literally everyone will be enriched by – a wise, profound and healing work that is the culmination of Dr, Maté’s many years of deep and painfully accumulated wisdom.” –Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus So the last and longest section of the book explores what we called pathways to healing, or pathways to wholeness. That’s the meaning of healing. There are many different pathways. There’s no one size fits for all. It needs to begin with the recognition that how we’re living and how we are relating to ourselves and others is not healthy. It may be the norm in this culture, but it’s neither healthy or natural, and there are better ways. And the same thing is true for our culture. And the essential first step is what I call being disillusioned. Now, people usually think of disillusionment as discouraging and somewhat negative. No. Would we rather be illusioned or disillusioned? Would we rather see the world through rose-colored glasses, not seeing what’s in front of us, or would we rather deal with reality the way it is? In the final chapter, I quote James Baldwin, the great, great James Baldwin, who said that not everything that’s faced can be healed, but nothing that’s not faced can be healed.

Then there’s parenting practices that focus on trying to control the child’s behavior without in any way trying to meet the child’s needs. The human child is born with certain needs, for unconditional loving acceptance, for being held, for the capacity to experience all their emotions with parental support. In this society, those needs are denied over and over and over again. And most of our children spend most of their time away from their parents, so they lose the connection with the parent. Do we wonder, then, that the child’s circuits of anxiety and panic in the brain are activated and extra overactivated? These are natural consequences of an unnatural culture. By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Maté, you speak in the book about unresolved traumas. So, in the examples that you’re giving now, or indeed in the case of trauma more generally, if one can speak generally about trauma, what kinds of practices can lead, if at all, to the resolution of a trauma?

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And in the book, I give many examples of people who are faced with serious diagnoses, written off by Western medicine, but they have a powerful transformation in their relationship to themselves. They regain that connection to themselves that they lost as a result of trauma. And as a result, their illness takes very surprising trajectories, sometimes miraculous. And so, in the book, I talk about women with rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis who are told that you’ve got this disease for the rest of your life, and it’s just a physical disease, nothing we can do about it. When they realize that both the rheumatoid arthritis and the multiple sclerosis have to do with trauma and stress, for which, by the way, there’s all kinds of research evidence, completely ignored in medical practice — but when they realize that how they live their lives, that the disease is not an accident, the disease is a manifestation of how they live their lives, informed by their unresolved trauma — when they deal with the trauma and they develop a different relationship to themselves, all of a sudden the disease lightens up for them, as you expect it would, once you realize that the mind and body are inseparable. Now, what actually happened here? All that happened was that my artist wife, typical of an artist, was the middle of creative flow in her studio, and she forgot that her husband was arriving home at the airport. What was triggered in me, however, was the wound of a 1-year-old infant who was abandoned by his mother in an effort to save my life, actually, but the meaning I made of it is that I wasn’t lovable, that I wasn’t wanted. And even 71 years later, when this woman on whom I’m relying to be there for me doesn’t show up, the woundedness of a 1-year-old infant shows up. And that’s what my friend Peter Levine calls “the tyranny of the past.” And so, these early wounds — in my case, the sense of abandonment — could still show up seven decades later over a relatively trivial incident. RUSSELL BRAND:* So, you’re sort of a bit like in The Matrix when Neo sees everything’s made out of numbers. You look at people, and you see all their trauma and damage. It points to sooooo many things wrong — that even when it attempted to fluff and smooth out the wrinkles—provide insight and support for how we all might DO BETTER…

AMY GOODMAN: Gabor, I was wondering if you could take some time and talk about your own journey from trauma and how it shaped you, as an infant in Nazi-occupied Hungary to where you are today, and how that has influenced who you are. Having devoted the majority of the book to the manifold problems of trauma, the author turns to the question of healing. It is possible to begin this process at any point by changing one’s perspective, and people have done so even after undergoing the most appalling experiences. The author emphasizes that there is no single route to healing but offers some guidelines involving authenticity, agency, anger, acceptance, and compassion. Some people see their disease as a teacher or companion, embracing the life lessons it has to teach. This means they are able to undergo a process of healing, even if they cannot be cured.What we’re looking at here is the mass engineering of addiction. And we’re not talking conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy reality. That’s how it works. But, of course, from the point of view of profit, it works, because people are going to buy junk foods, that are going to kill them or make them ill. But these companies don’t care. They just want — it’s not that they’re trying to kill you, as I say in one chapter of the book; they just don’t care if you die, because what really matters is profit. So, this society runs on people’s sense of deficient emptiness, where more and more is what they think is needed to fill that hole inside themselves. Now, the emptiness that you refer to, in a society that tells you that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t look good enough, that you don’t have enough, that you don’t own enough, that you haven’t attained enough, creating this sense of emptiness is the fuel that runs the consumer society, where never is there enough. You always have to have more and more. You have to attain more and more, obtain more and more. So, basically, it’s a highly addictive culture that feeds off people’s addiction to drive its profits. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Gabor Maté, you say in the book, in fact, that there are no clear lines between normal and abnormal. Could you explain what you mean by that and how you understand the spectrum along which these things lie? Wise, sophisticated, rigorous and creative: an intellectual and compassionate investigation of who we are and who we may become. Essential reading for anyone with a past and a future.” —Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated a) Peterson, a clinical psychologist (although his massive popularity was spurred by politicized media from his 2016 YouTube videos critiquing a Canadian gender identity discrimination bill).

ex. see Ch.8 of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate: The institution [ The Royal Society, the pioneering scientific academy founded in 1660] was at the forefront of Britain’s colonial project, sponsoring voyages by Captain James Cook (including the one in which he laid claim to New Zealand), and for over forty years the Royal Society was led by one of Cook’s fellow explorers, the wealthy botanist Joseph Banks, described by a British colonial official as “the staunchest imperialist of the day.” [emphases added]--Instead of only critiquing science’s values (Peterson), what is capitalism’s value system? (See later). Furthermore, Peterson can only counter his vague science-materialism by proselytizing the immaterial values of the Christian Bible, a non-solution when he accepts capitalism (will the Bible be sufficient for capitalist profit-seeking, besides selling Peterson’s self-help books and filling arenas for megachurches? What will this do to traditional values?). The sad irony is that Peterson also blames “postmodern/neo-Marxist” ideology for destroying his traditional values, when the only Marxist book (pamphlet, really) he seems bothered to read identifies the capitalist culprit: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch [i.e. capitalism, with its singular endless profit-seeking, competition’s “creative destruction”, boom/bust volatility] from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind. [- The Communist Manifesto; emphases added; sadly, the last bit has not occurred for reactionaries like Peterson] AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about how you view this, and how this — not just this country, the world can heal, especially focusing on youth?

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And these early wounds of ours, well, so, that’s one way that it showed up. It shows up in my relationship to my work. So, I was a workaholic physician for many decades. Why was I a workaholic? Because the message I got as an infant under the Nazis was that the world didn’t want me. And if the world doesn’t want you, one way to cope with it is to make yourself very important, become a helper, become a physician, because now they’re going to want you all the time. But that’s very addictive, because you keep trying to prove to yourself something you don’t believe in the first place, which is that you’re wanted. And so that the more people rewarded me with — either financially or with their attention or their gratitude for my medical work, the more I needed it, the more I became dependent on it. So, it shows up in so many ways. These early wounds show up in so many ways. It shows up in our relationships, in our marriages, in our relationship to our children, in our relationship to our work. It shows up in politics, as we’ve seen during COVID. So, these early wounds in my life had had wide-ranging implications, as they do in the lives of many people. AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Gabor Maté, the acclaimed Canadian physician and author, with his son Daniel, of the new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté will be appearing tonight here in New York City at the 92nd Street Y, where he’ll be in conversation with Tara Westover, the author of Educated. By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts , a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. I’m being ‘gut-honest’ here when I say that I felt this book was extremely overwhelming…pointing to more things that don’t work than for providing any real concrete - joyful hope or transformation.