Summary of The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture E-Book

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• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

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Summary of The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

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Gabor Maté's The Myth Of Normal is a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. It examines how chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise in Western countries, and how trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and minds. Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing.

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Summary of The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté's The Myth Of Normal examines the causes of illness and offers a compassionate guide to health and healing.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Page title

Summary of

The Myth of Normal

A

Summary of Gabor Maté’s book

Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a

Toxic Culture

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Why Normal Is a Myth

(And Why That Matters)

The most important details in this text are that health and wellness have become a modern fixation, with multibillion-dollar industries banking on people's investment in self-betterment. However, our collective health is deteriorating, and how can we prevent and heal the many ailments that assail us? As a physician for over three decades, I have come to believe that behind the epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, is something amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and the ideological blind spots that keep us from seeing our predicament clearly. This book discusses the connection between our health and our social-emotional lives. It argues that our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, and that our concept of well-being must move from the individual to the global in every sense of that word.

The analogy of a biochemical broth used to promote the development of an organism is helpful. The most important details in this text are that our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry, and that it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation. In the United States, 60 percent of adults have a chronic disorder such as high blood pressure or diabetes, and over 40 percent have two or more such conditions. In Canada, up to half of all baby boomers are on track for hypertension within a few years. Among the young, non-smoking-related cancers seem to be on the rise.

Rates of obesity, along with the multiple health risks it poses, are going up in many countries, including in Canada, Australia, and notably the United States, where over 30 percent of the adult population meet the criteria. Mental health diagnoses are escalating in the Western world, with depression and anxiety being the fastest-growing diagnoses. Millions of North American children and youths are being medicated with stimulants, antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs, which have long-term effects on the developing brain. Globalization is introducing conditions hitherto found in "developed" countries, such as ADHD among children in China. Climate change is a magnified version of the existential threat that nuclear war has posed since Hiroshima, and young people are feeling betrayal and abandonment by governments and adults.

This suggests that our culture is toxic and that we have become accustomed to so much of what plagues us. This book's title refers to "normal" in a more insidious way. David Foster Wallace's parable of two fish crossing aquatic paths illustrates the trouble with normality. He argues that the lives and deaths of individual human beings are intimately bound up with the aspects of modern society that are "hardest to see and talk about"; phenomena that are both too vast and too near to be appreciated. The book's central contention is that those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out for our scrutiny.

The most important details in this text are that our culture's skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world, and that our current medical paradigm reduces complex events to their biology and separates mind from body without appreciating their essential unity. This shortcoming does not invalidate medicine's achievements, but it severely constrains the good that medical science could be doing. Additionally, ignorance of what science has already established is a calamitous failure handicapping our health systems. The medical world has been unable to metabolize the evidence that living people cannot be dissected into separate organs and systems. This has led to a lack of understanding of health and illness, which is an expression of an entire life lived.

The past two centuries have seen remarkable medical advances, such as the drop in the incidence of polio, HIV, and COVID-19 pandemics. However, the rapid development of vaccines has been a triumph of modern science and medicine. The problem with good news stories is that they lull us into false passivity. The real problem is an impoverished, out-of-date perspective that cannot account for what we are seeing. This book aims to offer a new vision of normal that nurtures the best in who we are.

It follows the concentric circles of cause, connection, and consequence that influence how healthy or unhealthy we are. Trauma is a foundational layer of experience in modern life, but one largely ignored or misapprehended. This book aims to lift the veil of common knowledge and received wisdom and unfasten the myths that keep the status quo locked in place. Real-life stories and case studies of people who have shared their journeys through illness and health are used to illustrate the science and its health implications. Healing is not guaranteed, but it is available and is required at this point in Earth's history.

Part I

Part I

Our Interconnected Nature

The Last Place You Want to Be: Facets

of Trauma

Trauma is a complex phenomenon that can cause mischief in relationships. Pierre Janet first described it in 1889, and Peter Levine has written that certain shocks to the organism can alter a person’s biological, psychological, and social equilibrium. In the case of the protagonist, the template for their hostility to Rae’s message is found in the diary their mother kept during their first years in wartime and post-World War II Budapest. John Bowlby observed that many children showed some degree of detachment when they met their mother for the first time after days or weeks away. Trauma is preverbal, as it is often inflicted before our brain is capable of formulating any kind of a verbal narrative.

Even after we become language-endowed, some wounds are imprinted on regions of our nervous systems that words and thoughts cannot directly access. Peter Levine explains that trauma is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. It can have a lasting impact on a person's life, but it can also have a negative impact. Trauma is a psychological injury, lodged in our nervous system, mind, and body, lasting long past the originating incident(s). Unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological, that constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people.

It fragments the self, blights a person's sense of worth, poisons relationships, and undermines appreciation for life itself. Trauma is an antecedent and contributor to illness of all kinds throughout the lifespan. Two types of trauma are the automatic responses and mind-body adaptations to specific, identifiable hurtful and overwhelming events, such as abuse, neglect, poverty, racism, and oppression. Capital-T trauma occurs when things happen to vulnerable people that should not have happened, such as a child being abused, violence in the family, or a rancorous divorce. The most important details in this text are the distinction between big-T and small-T traumas.

Big-T trauma is characterized by overt distress or misfortune, while small-T trauma is characterized by a lack of emotional connection with the nurturing adults. Small-T trauma can leave long-lasting marks on the psyches of children, such as bullying by peers, the casual but repeated harsh comments of a well-meaning parent, or even a lack of sufficient emotional connection with the nurturing adults. Trauma is a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world, which is the essence of trauma. Peter Levine explains that trauma is about a loss of connection to ourselves, our families, and the world around us. Comparisons fail, as there is no sense nor value in gauging our wounds against those of others.

Trauma is not the same as stress, physical and/or emotional. It is only if it render The most important details in this text are that trauma limits response flexibility, which is the ability to choose how to address life's inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges. V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, recounted her sexual abuse by her father as a young girl and how her body was no longer hers. This disconnect from the body is caused by chronic hunger and dysentery, states of acute discomfort threatening and distressing to adults, and the terrors and unrelenting emotional distress of her mother. V experienced a sudden at-home-ness in her physical self after a nine-hour surgery and losing several organs and seventy nodes.

Jaak Panksepp once said that emotions emerge not from the thinking brain but from ancient brain structures associated with survival. The most important details in this text are that trauma limits response flexibility, which is the ability to choose how to address life's inevitable ups and downs, its disappointments, triumphs, and challenges. Trauma imprints don't rule the day, and if circumstances dictate that these natural, healthy impulses must be suppressed, their gut-level cues (the feelings themselves) will have to be suppressed as well. Trauma limits response flexibility, and fosters a shame-based view of the self. Shame is a powerful force that can lead to a loss of compassion for oneself, and some individuals may even achieve great social, economic, and political status and success.

Trauma can also distort our view of the world, leading to aggressiveness, selfishness, and grandiosity. The most common form of shame in this culture is the belief that “I am not enough.” Trauma can also distort our view of the world, leading to aggressiveness, selfishness, and grandiosity. The Buddha left out the idea that before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds. Trauma, especially severe trauma, imposes a worldview tinged with pain, fear, and suspicion, and can blind us to real and present dangers. We are being collectively flooded with influences that exploit and reinforce trauma, such as work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, and multiplicities of entertainment sources.

Helen Jennings, a sixty-seven-year-old resident of the B.C. Interior region, is caring for her two grandchildren, their father having died of an overdose and their other son suffered the same fate. Trauma is in most cases multigenerational, and the chain of transmission goes from parent to child, stretching from the past into the future. The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small. Mark Wolynn's book It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle explains how trauma can shape who we are and how to end the cycle.

Helen's eldest grandchild has faced problems with substance use, behavior, and learning difficulties, but she is able to be present for him much more warmly and effectively than she ever could be for her own sons. Wolynn explains that seeing trauma as an internal dynamic grants us much-needed agency. If we treat trauma as an external event, it becomes a piece of history we can never dislodge, but if it is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, healing and reconnection become tangible possibilities. The most important details in this text are that trauma exists in the collective sphere, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history, and that it is visited upon some groups with disproportionate force, such as on Canada’s Indigenous people. The traumatic legacy of slavery and racism in the United States is another salient example.

Living in an Immaterial World: Emotions, Health, and the Body-Mind Unity

Caroline, a resident of the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, was diagnosed with early breast cancer more than three decades ago. She had multiple courses of chemotherapy and by the time of her conversation, the cancer had reached the palliative stage. She radiated deep satisfaction with how things had gone and had gained two unforeseen decades to raise her kids. Candace Pert wrote in her 1997 book, Molecules of Emotion, that virtually all illness has a definite psychosomatic component. Pert coined the term "bodymind" to describe this oneness.

Since Pert's groundbreaking work, the biological impacts of emotions have been extensively researched and documented in many thousands of ingenious studies. A 1982 German study presented at the fourth international Symposium on the Prevention and Detection of Cancer in London found certain personality traits to have a strong association with breast cancer. A British study at King's College Hospital in London also showed that women with cancerous breast lumps characteristically exhibited "extreme suppression of anger and of other feelings" in a significantly higher proportion than the control group. In 2000, the publication Cancer Nursing surveyed the relationship of anger The most important details in this text are that anecdotal observations of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) have been reaffirmed by more formal research. Anger suppression was associated with a diminished effectiveness of natural killer (NK) cells, a frontline immune system defense against malignancy and foreign invaders.

Grief, too, has a powerful physiological dimension. War kills, and so does deep emotional loss. A 2019 study in Cancer Research found that women with severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had twice the risk of ovarian cancer as women with no known trauma exposure. Depression had been associated with elevated ovarian cancer risk, and the impact of stress had been studied. The implications extend far beyond PTSD, since stress and trauma affect many people who do not qualify for that diagnosis.

A Harvard paper on ovarian cancer suggested that women whose PTSD symptoms had abated had less risk for malignancy than women with active symptoms. Dr. Soma Weiss in 1939 informed his audience that social and psychic factors play a role in every disease, but in many cases they represent dominant influences. His integrative perspective and the extensive scientific literature now supporting it still elude conventional medical thinking. Psychoneuroimmunology is a new science that maps the myriad pathways of the bodymind unity, including the connections between emotions and our nervous and immune systems, and how stress might instigate disease. It is predicated on the unity between all our constituent parts: mind, brain, nervous and immune systems, and the hormonal apparatus (the "endocrine" part).

Stress is a mandatory survival function for any living being, and can show up in two forms: as an immediate reaction to a threat or as a prolonged state induced by external pressures or internal emotional factors. The most important details in this text are that acute stress is a necessary reaction that helps maintain physical and mental integrity, while chronic stress, ongoing and unrelieved, undermines both. Situational anger is an example of acute stress being marshaled for a positive purpose, while chronic stress, ongoing and unrelieved, floods the system with stress hormones long past the allotted time. This hormonal surplus can make us anxious or depressed, suppress immunity, promote inflammation, narrow blood vessels, promote vascular disease, encourage cancer growth, thin the bones, make us resistant to our own insulin, inducing diabetes, contribute to abdominal obesity, elevating the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic problems, impair essential cognitive and emotional circuits in the brain, and increase blood pressure and increase blood clotting. Bruce McEwen popularized the term “allostasis” to capture the body’s attempt to maintain inner equilibrium in the face of changing circumstances.

Our bodies will go to great lengths to maintain it, even to the point of long-term wear and tear if stresses do not abate. McEwen's "allostatic load" is a term used to describe the strain on our body's regulatory mechanisms, which can lead to an excessive and prolonged release of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, nervous tension, immune dysfunction, and exhaustion of the stress apparatus itself. Glenda, a Montreal woman, recovered repressed memories of being raped as a young girl, which were accompanied by visceral emotional feelings and physical digestive symptoms such as indigestion, nausea, and gut aches. Her mother rushed her into the house and put her into the bath, telling her that they were never going to tell anyone about this or ever speak of it again. This story highlights the importance of trusting one's own hunches, which tend to synthesize signals from both mind and body.

Glenda's memories of a rape in the bathtub returned at age fifty-three, when her mother crouched on the floor beside her "trying to wash away the rape." Glenda's intuitive understanding of her body and digestive system produced an additional visual layer. The image of the "raging" fire as a powerful analogue for the rage and pain Glenda had to bury away in the deepest parts of herself, given her mother's utter inability to be there for her emotionally. There is strong evidence that childhood traumatic events significantly impact the inflammatory immune system, offering a potential molecular pathway by which early trauma confers vulnerability to developing psychiatric and physical disorders later in life. Glenda's physicians and psychiatrist never asked her about the possible childhood antecedents of her psychic turmoil. Candace Pert envisioned the mind as involving the unconscious flow of information "among the cells, organs and systems of the body." The most important details in this text are that the mind as we experience it is immaterial, yet it has a physical substrate, which is both the body and the brain.

This means that the mind is not a material thing, but its impacts and consequences are material indeed. The opportunity we have today is to create a multivalent health care approach that appreciates the impact of “nonthings” on the “thinglike” bodies we’ve come to be so expert in. This choreography of psyche and soma involves far more than two “partners” contained within one person, but also a vital and underappreciated interpersonal component. If we want a clear and accurate view of human health, we will have to broaden our understanding of “bodymind” to include the myriad roles that other minds and other bodies play in shaping our well-being. Unity, it turns out, extends well beyond the unitary individual.