Have you tended to compare yourself negatively to others because of a traumatic childhood or other aspects of yourself you view negatively?  Do you ever wonder who the ‘normal’ people are in the world you are supposed to be more like?  I have some good news for you if you answered ‘yes’ to either of these questions and I also review Gabor Mate’s new book, The Myth of Normal below.  

Gabor Mate Sees How Traumatized a Society We Live In

If you’re wondering how things got this messed up in your life and world, Gabor Mate’s latest book helps you get a wide lens on how it’s not just you that is thinking this way.  He takes us on a geological dig of where the trauma started getting ingrained in our society and culture to help us see just how far and wide the experience of societal and cultural trauma goes in time and across the strata of our modern life.  He shows us it’s been bad for a long time, and intergenerational trauma is a real thing we are dealing with.

Gabor Mate Helps People to Realize They Are Not to Blame

One of the big takeaways from the book is how you can realize you have unnecessarily blamed yourself for a lot of the ‘bad’ things you have done and the poor choices you have made.  Gabor Mate helps you realize that it isn’t your fault that you have lived the way you have; it’s all adaptive behavior.  He also makes a good point that despite it being adaptive when we were growing up, our behavior often becomes maladaptive in adulthood.  He talks about how working to become your most authentic self is the key to healing all kinds of diseases, both physical and mental health diagnoses.  Often that relies on working to break free from old patterns by any one of a wide variety of methods, including therapy and recovery work.  

Gabor Mate Emphasizes Not Taking Things Personally

How often have you been attacked or blamed for something that wasn’t your fault?  You took something as a personal attack on you and/or your family and wondered what you could have possibly done to deserve it.  One of the key phrases in The Myth of Normal has to do with really getting the sense deep in your bones that we don’t need to take things that happen to us personally.  There are so many other forces at work in the world and the lives of others that there is no basis for taking anything personally, even in the closest of relationships.  Gabor Mate’s latest book helps empower you to do the work of freeing yourself from the toxic guilt and shame that you may feel at your core, but really has nothing to do with you as a person.  It’s all a result of things that were going on around you as a child that you had nothing to do with.  

Gabor Mate’s Suggestions for Healing and Recovery

There really isn’t one way to heal and recover from just about anything, in Gabor Mate’s opinion.  He does tend to focus on individuals who have gone off all their medications and embraced a non-western medical approach to their recovery.  This may or may not be what you ultimately wind up doing, but the key is having a sense of what he calls agency with regard to your healing and recovery.  Not feeling like you have to be resigned to any one way of healing and recovering from whatever ails you is important.  He also emphasizes that whatever ailments you have, be they emotional or physical, can also be used to help you grow and evolve as an individual.  For example, someone who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis usually needs to pay better attention to their bodily signals with pain and find ways to work with it rather than simply fight it with strong medication or potentially invasive treatments. Often having ways of getting more in touch with your inner self is critical to recover, as well as integrating nature and spirituality into your life.  

If Gabor Mate’s Suggestions Ring True to You and You Need More Help

I am very familiar with the concepts Gabor Mate lays out in this book and can support you in pursuing just about any of the paths to recovery he has talked about.  I’ve been helping my clients on their journey to wholeness for the entirety of my social work career.  If you are interested in working on the emotional aspects of a physical or mental illness and live in Maryland or Texas, feel free to give me a call or fill out the form at the bottom of the page and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can for a free 20-minute phone consult so you can get a better idea of whether I can help you or not.  I encourage you to do your utmost to break out of the isolation that characterizes our traumatized world to start finding your authentic self today!

Visit our page on trauma therapy to find out how Scott can help you recover from all kinds of trauma.  

About the author:  Scott Kampschaefer, LCSW is a private practice therapist in Frederick, Maryland.  He has an extensive background in working with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder at a clinic for older adults with these disorders in Austin, Texas.  He now works with adults and adolescents 14 and up in private practice. His most recent book is titled The 5 Pillars of Addiction Recovery and is available for purchase on Amazon and in paperback on this website.