I recently finished The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Mate. The book is a treatise on trauma; it describes at length what trauma is, the causes and effects of trauma, and how to heal from trauma. The lessons and insights from this book have provided me with a set of mental models and practices that I’ve already integrated into my life. I recommend it to anyone curious about trauma as a psychological phenomenon, how it relates to the self and culture, and novel approaches to healing. A summary of the key arguments from the book are below, followed by some of my own thoughts and personal experiences.
What is Trauma
Trauma is somewhat of a nebulous thing that is hard to concretely define, kind of like love. The book does a great job of breaking it down, first discussing what it is not, and then providing a definition and mental model that help the reader understand its nature.
Trauma is often conflated with stress in everyday language. They share some characteristics, but they aren’t the same thing. Both stress and trauma may lead to similar physiological effects such as autoimmune disorders and insulin resistance, as well as mental conditions such as anxiety and depression. However, they differ in locus of affliction and duration. Stress is a physiological response of the body to what is happening to you in your environment; it has an external locus of affliction and environment-dependent duration. Fix the environment, and the stress response dissipates.
On the other hand, trauma is what happens inside you; it is a psychological response to adverse experiences and therefore has an internal locus of affliction. The duration is environment-independent in the sense that improving the environment does nothing to heal the wound.
The essence of trauma is a fracturing of the self; a psychological dismemberment into parts expressed that comprise the conditioned personality everyone sees, and parts suppressed as mitigation to the perceived threat they pose to the social attachment required for survival. The fracturing occurs subconsciously, altering the architecture of our psychological ground.
The figure-ground phenomenon also exists in our psyche
This alteration leaves an imprint on our psyche that is triggered whenever we subconsciously perceive similar adverse situations as adults. Even if we are consciously aware that our survival is not at risk later on, the subconscious imprint may perceive a similar threat to our survival, and tries to protect us by shutting parts of ourselves down or activating maladaptive behaviors or beliefs.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate” — Carl Jung
Finally, trauma is persistent. Once our psyche is fractured, it remains that way unless and until it is made whole again. In other words, time heals all wounds, except for trauma. Why? Because humans prioritize survival above all else, and trauma is a potent, persistent expression of that survival instinct.
Causes of Trauma
We tend to constrain our conception of trauma to things like natural disasters, war, severe neglect, and physical abuse. But restricting the definition to catastrophes would imply trauma consists of infrequent external events. Dr. Mate argues that overt tragedies cause only one form of trauma called “big-T” trauma. Big-T trauma occurs when bad things happen to people. Things like sexual abuse or loss of a parent. The other form, called “small-t” trauma, occurs when good things don’t happen, specifically when the core psycho-social needs of a child go unmet. These needs of early childhood are: emotional and physical attunement of parents, a sense of unconditional worthiness of that attunement, a sense of safety in expressing authentic emotions, and agenda-free, person-to-person interactive play.
Dr. Mate argues that the inclusion of small-t trauma with big-T trauma suggests that we should not view trauma as a rigid yes/no, but rather a spectrum that everyone is on. This does not discount the fact that some people endure more trauma than others, but rather that everyone should honestly look at their own experience and expect to find some evidence of trauma, and that many of our maladaptive behaviors and destructive relationship patterns in adulthood can be traced back to unresolved trauma.
Effects of Trauma
Dr. Mate presents many potential downstream effects of trauma, supported by research and anecdotes from his clinical experience. Some of the effects, if proven to be causal, would be quite alarming and would necessitate a shift in our approach to treating many afflictions that pervade modern life. He provides evidence that many cases of chronic illnesses such as cancer and autoimmunity, as well as mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and addiction may have a root cause of unresolved trauma. This seems reasonable, since we know unresolved trauma persists through time, and therefore all of its downstream destructive habits and self-abnegation cause persistent damage to our bodies and minds.
Healing Trauma
So far this book may seem pretty bleak. Humans have an instinctual response to the environment that occurs when we have zero control over it that leaves a persistent imprint of subconscious behaviors and thought patterns that not only cause chronic disease, but also pass down to our own children.
The good news is that we can do something about it.
We know what trauma is – a fracturing of the self. Healing is a process to restore wholeness of the self. To integrate the repressed emotions and parts of our selves with our conditioned personality so that we may finally live according to our authentic essence.
So how do we heal? What does it look like? The book describes various things within our control we can do in order to restore ourselves. Before I review those though, there are two things described in the book that should be avoided: blame and comparison.
Blaming someone for our trauma, even if what they did undeniably caused big-capital-T-all-caps-TRAUMA!!, is antithetical to healing, because it implicitly assumes the problem is the person instead of what the person caused to happen inside of us. Healing is not about being right and using that as justification of perpetual victimhood. Placing blame on one person or event ignores the possibility that trauma is systemic in our collective subconscious and that unsocial behaviors levied upon us by others are they themselves the shadow of an accumulation of unresolved trauma in their own life. We are not responsible for what other people do to us, but we are responsible for how we relate to their actions.
Similarly, comparing your trauma to others isn’t helpful for healing either. Just because someone may have had a harder life than you according to some cultural measuring stick, doesn’t invalidate your own harmful experiences. Telling yourself “I should be happy, I had it pretty good, especially compared to this person over here” only induces guilt and shame. It is a further rejection of your emotions rather than a reintegration of them. Comparing in the other direction doesn’t help either. If we think our traumatic experience is so much worse than others, it can give rise to jealousy, resentment, self-pity and even self-aggrandizement. None of these mindsets provide any true healing at all.
After highlighting some things to avoid in the healing process, the book goes on to describe some concepts and techniques that you can use to regain your whole self. One of these concepts is the “4 A’s”. Healing involves the development of each of these 4 A’s in our life:
- Authenticity. In order to heal, we have to start listening to our self and shed our self-abnegating social character. Some social attachments may not survive the authentic expression of ourselves, but new attachments will be made based on who we truly are.
- Agency. When we reframe trauma as something that happened inside us, it allows us to let go of the particular events that led to it. This means that we no longer have to be controlled by the subconscious impulses that trauma causes; we can have control over our lives again.
- Anger. Healthy anger is expressed in the moment, not repressed down inside us. Healthy anger represents a decisive “no”; a boundary that we have to learn to honor.
- Acceptance. This means being present in the moment, and not resisting the emotions that may come with it, uncomfortable as they may be.
Another key concept is awareness. Since trauma takes place subconsciously, you have to bring the wound into conscious awareness. This requires intention, hard work and a serious exploration of the self. You have to ask yourself hard questions; questions you initially may not want to know the answer to. Dr Mate provides a few examples that you can use (from his compassionate inquiry process):
- What am I not saying “no” to that I should be? When did I sense a “no” but repressed it?
- How does my inability to say no impact my life?
- What bodily signals have I been overlooking?
- What is the hidden story behind my inability to say no?
- Where did I learn those stories?
- What am I not saying “yes” to that I should be? What have I wanted to do, create, or express, but haven’t out of fear?
Getting truthful answers to these questions is difficult due to how buried some of these wounds can be in our psyche and how much pain and fear they trigger – some memories can be so utterly suppressed that we have no conscious recollection of them ever happening. Due to this inherent difficulty, the book recommends both therapy and psychedelics (in a therapeutic setting) to help peel the psychological onion and to guide the exploration and integration of emotions that bubble up into our conscious awareness.
Despite the systemic nature of trauma in our lives and culture, and the myriad adverse consequences it has on us, the message of healing is hopeful: it’s not about what happened in the past, but how we relate to our past. If we are willing to do the work, we can resolve our trauma and live the life of wholeness that we are meant to live.
Personal Thoughts
This book is long, but well worth the time if you are interested in learning about trauma and ways to heal. One of the main contributions of the book, in my view, is the conceptualization of what trauma is. I only had a vague notion of what trauma was before, but now I understand it in a way that allows me to identify and label it, which helps to bring awareness of and separation between trauma and myself.
Also, this post tends to focus on the childhood causes of trauma, but the book explains that trauma is not restricted to just children. The same fracturing can and does happen in adults as well.
The section on psychedelics resonated with me as well. I have experienced first hand the “emulsifying” effect that psilocybin mushrooms have between the conscious and subconscious. Daily life consists of the same patterns playing out over and over, like traffic that creates deep ruts on a dirt road. These ruts become so deep that it makes turning onto other roads impossible. Psilocybin is like a great flood that erodes the ruts down into a level surface, providing smooth passage to the other roads once again.
I do disagree with some of the book’s claims that capitalism causes or (at least perpetuates) trauma. My main contention is that the author doesn’t actually define what he means by “capitalism”. Based on the arguments he presents, I think his definition of capitalism means the “modern credit-based financial system led by the hegemonic power of the Federal Reserve and the United States”. If that is the case, then I disagree with him on his definition of capitalism and not so much that his notion of capitalism perpetuates trauma. Indeed, I think our fiat credit-based financial system, propped up by exponentially increasing debt and debasement of our currency is the root cause of the inequality, division, and populism in our culture today. If we take capitalism to mean “free markets”, then the system we have isn’t really capitalism. The system we have today bails out banks that are too big to fail (privatized gains, socialized losses). The system we have today features a cabal of unelected central planners to distort the price of money. I have more to say on this topic, but this post is already long enough, and it really deserves a dedicated post (or series of posts).
Despite these disagreements, the book is well worth the read. The depth of discussion regarding the various facets of trauma, as well what we can do about it in our own lives, leaves the reader empowered to start living according to their authentic self.
Thanks for reading,
Connor