5 Takeaways from The Myth of Normal

In May I read The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, by Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, and found it incredibly helpful. One of those books that had content I needed and was able to absorb.

Here’s 5 of my favorite parts:

1. On denying our needs.

There is so much in this book that I loved and found helpful. Some of it is just a better explanation of simple concepts I was able to hear this time. Like this one - Maté notes how as infants, babies, toddlers, none of us struggled to express that we had wants and needs and desires. While those needs and wants and desires might have been for the most simple of things - food and comfort and sleep - we were able to make it known that we had them. Loudly. Babies are so loud.

So how did we go from that confident yell for needs to becoming individuals who struggles to express a want, and often to even know what we want in the first place?! An interesting point. Maté asks a question then that has been heavy on my mind since, he asks, “what must I believe about myself to deny my own needs this way?”

And ugh, golly, that got me.

At the end of the book there is a section with a series of questions he suggests we ask and answer regularly. One of which is “where have I ignored or denied the ‘yes’ that wanted to be said? … what joys have you denied yourself out of a belief that you don’t deserve them, or out of a conditioned fear that they’ll be snatched away?” Well worth frequent consideration.

2. Attachments

Maté talks about childhood a lot, for good reason, and one part really stuck out for me about attachments. We attach, like just about every species does, to the caregiver we interact with most/first. Then, we tend to split from our caregivers while we are youths as our peer group becomes a more influential attachment.

I was a pretty lonely kid. Spent a lot of time in my own company. I was outside a lot. I’m not sure where my mom was a lot of the time, which could just be that I don’t remember, I was a kid and kids don’t usually keep track of adult business that much. Anyway, I don’t remember feeling that “ideal” mother daughter connection thing. I also don’t feel that, aside from a couple people, that I had that much of a friend group. So in the way Maté talks of that “typical” path of ditching parental influence to follow the influence of the peer group, I didn’t feel that either.

This book made me consider if I suffered an attachment void entirely. Not attaching to my caregiver in an ideal way, not attaching to a peer group as a replacement for the caregiver and so I didn’t attach to anyone but the void. Jk. That’s a little dramatic, but I do wonder if how quickly I have in the past been devoted to romantic partners, and emotionally a little reckless is how that void is manifesting for me.

On the other hand, I think one of my strengths is how willing I am to be devoted to people. Fully loyal, fully theirs. But, of course, I need to be careful. I don’t know (yet) how to healthily attach to people that I am in the care of, that I care for, that care for me. This section helped me to notice some things about that which I hadn’t nailed down before.

3. Addictions

Maté has a lot to say about addiction - I didn’t realize he had written a whole book about it already which I haven’t read (yet). Things in this section of importance to me were about understanding that addiction is there because of pain. Pain is what the questions should be focused on addressing.

“Only people in pain long for anesthesia” he says at one point. Quite clearly put. It would be better if we could try to solve the issue of why we or another are searching for relief or comfort for a pain of some kind, rather than trying to medicate and smooth over. We ought to be focused on figuring out how to treat and heal from the core, as we should. A difficult thing in this world.

Put another way, in that section he asks us to consider what we might find addictive - not limited to substances. And further, to ask ourselves - what is the addictive substance or behavior providing and fulfilling for us or the addicted person. Helpful to me to hear it phrased that way.

4. “Trauma is about broken connection…”

At the end of chapter 30, just about the last few pages of the book (before the bibliographical references and index of course), Peter Levine is quoted, “trauma is about broken connection. Broken connection to the body, broken connection to our vitality, to reality, and to others.”

Maté expounds and says “it’s impossible to overstate that so long as we are alive and of sound mind, reconnection remains possible. We do not require the past for that, only the present.”

I found this so comforting and helpful. Reassuring. It can feel so isolating, so cemented and conclusive and permanent to feel trauma. As if it is final and never to be mended, just farther away in time. Of course connection is what it is that we all really want, what we need. Connection over everything. As long as we are living and thinking we can reconnect. I love that. Its seeing the possibility I needed to see.

5. With our minds we construct the world we live in.

This seems to be a theme for my life right now - or maybe just the thing I am focused on internally. I was listening to a discussion between Hanif Abdurraqib and Ross Gay (two of my favorite thinkers and writers) in which one of them emphasized how important it is to be an “active participant in our own becoming” which is a wording I really needed. I think it is the same thing Maté is stating, that ultimately with our minds we can help understand and recover our selves. Doing that work will realign us and allow us to continually create our world going forward. I love that.

Often this was a difficult read. It triggered some wounds, helped push me towards things I had been avoiding considering, and it was also intensely reassuring. I feel like what I have been doing on my own has been in the right direction. But now that I know the experts about it, like Maté, I can do more and in a better way, to help myself. And it’s so nice to know the things I read and took in actually are making a real difference in my actual life.

Healing is a process not a destination. It is a recovering process. A “natural movement towards wholeness” as Maté phrases it, and that makes it feel a bit more manageable. If we are moving towards wholeness then we are in the process of healing and recovering.

Recovering as in obtaining our lost parts again. As in self retrieval towards wholeness.

This was an exceptional read for me. Very helpful in this part of my progress towards wholeness. Hope, if any of this resonates for you, that you’re able to find it useful.