The Myth of Normal
Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic World
Gabor Maté
With
Having read it
★★★★★
Compelling.
Insightful, understandable, revealing and empowering for the experiences and knowledge it covers and allows its readers to really think and take on board the approaches and learnings raised and offered.
It is written by a physician (and co-authored with one of his sons) who knows his stuff and has experienced and helped many a group and its individuals during his career; his knowledge and compassionate curiosity assists and powers his realistic, honest and meaningful attitudes and approaches to many an issue and those that are explained in this book. Western medicine has its benefits but its mechanised methods, driven largely by capitalism, tend to limit and overpower a more human, more spiritual possibility to healing so as to better assist and empower the individual that is dealing with trauma, illness or disease.
Suppression of innate knowledge is one of medicine’s unfortunate tendencies.
Here’s another complementary passage from The Myth of Normal that makes clear the opposite of how complementary things get used (and sold to us):
Adjacent to politics – increasingly overlapping with it, in fact – is the vast expanse of entertainments, professional sports, fads, and obsessions that we call popular culture. Indeed, one social function of pop culture is to divert people’s attention from things that really do matter; imagine if all the energy now expended on analysing the private lives of celebrities or the detailed intricacies of sporting events were, instead, devoted to mobilising populations to collectively tackle the great issues of our age.
Anyway, to conclude, this book is well worth your reading time and certainly, the hardback I borrowed from my library to read was, despite its tome-like appearance, a fine example of good typesetting – font sized and leading – that made reading a physical book a decent experience, although its contents did really help too and I’ll mostly let the publisher off for the not easy to read, centre-aligned chapter titles and quotes!
(Some of what gets covered in The Myth of Normal, about some people taking a different path from the expected (Western medical ideal) in dealing with and recovering from trauma and disease, reminded me of the brilliant book (and experiences documented in it) by Raynor Winn, Landlines, which extols and champions a similar mindset to tackling difficulties of the body and mind.)
A good passage
How lovely it would be if the democratic ideal of ‘we, the people’ creating the society in which we wish to live were true. It’s certainly a dream worth pursuing. But believing in it is not nearly enough. It will not and cannot come to pass until we reckon squarely with how things are today: it is we who are made in the image of our distorted, disordered, denatured world – the better to keep it running, even as it runs us into the ground.
A second good passage
Alienation is inevitable when our inner sense of value becomes status-driven, hinging on externally imposed standards of competitive achievement and acquisition, and a highly conditional acceptance – I should say ‘acceptability’ – in others’ eyes. With the erosion of the middle class in recent decades, people who judged themselves in terms of worldly success have sustained a perceived loss of worth. The promise of the middle-class dream has largely evaporated, to the distress and deep anger of many. But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience a devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values run counter to the need for meaning, for purpose beyond self-serving endeavours.
There are no moral fingers to wag here. Objectively, it is the case that centring on the self’s evanescent desires to the exclusion of communal needs results in a diminished connection to our deepest selves, which is to say the parts of us that generate and sustain true well-being.
A third good passage
As with authenticity, capitalism sells a bogus version of agency through personal-power mantras like ‘Be all you can be’ and ‘Have it your way’. Personal choice becomes a brand, with no attention paid to the contexts in which those choices are made. Often the freedom being advertised is the dubious freedom to choose between this or that identity-burnishing product or service that will not, cannot, satisfy us. Nor does agency mean some sort of false omnipotence or ultimate dominion over all happenings and circumstances. Life is so much bigger than us, and we do not forward our own healing by pretending to be in control where we’re not.