 | A WRITER'S WIT |  W. J. Brennan |
MY BOOK WORLD
Maté, Gabor, with Daniel Maté. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. New York: Avery, 2022.
Maté’s thesis is that Western medicine has assumed for a long time what is “normal,” and what is not. He contends that our physical and physiological lives are severely affected by what happens and what does not happen to us in our childhoods:
“Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being, seen and accepted, even by loving parents. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune . . . and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied” (23).
This struck a chord (ha) with me concerning my childhood. My parents met my physical needs but didn’t have much sensitivity to my wishes to learn piano. I harped (ha ha) for four years on the topic until, at age ten, I was finally rewarded with lessons (and a $150 piano which I treasured). But their lack of interest in my “attunement” meant that they didn’t care much for my sensitivity as a musician, an artist, or human being. They kept trying to interest me in more “masculine” activities, meaning they did not accept me for who I was. It was a conditional “love,” if you want to call it that. My saving grace, through the years, thankfully, has been the help I received from three talented psychologists: one when I was twenty-four, one when I was in my fifties, and one I see currently in my seventies. Making myself more “loveable” to myself, I believe, made me less available to suffering major diseases or even middling chronic ones.
Maté’s contention is that most all disease is caused by mental or psychological stress that alters the body, making its autoimmune failure more likely one will suffer illness.
There is so much more that Dr. Maté offers to the reader in these 562 pages, but I do want to cite one statement he makes near the end of the book:
“At present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession—albeit a resistance more subliminal than deliberate, more passive than active. In the dozens of interview I conducted with medical colleagues for this book, including recent graduates, virtually one of them recalled being taught about the mind-body unity or the profusely documented relationship between, for example, trauma and mental illness or addictions—let alone the links between adversity and physical disease” (487).
I wish all adults in the world could read this book and be pushed to take care of their total health, not just the physical being (if that)—seek out doctors who do see a connection between the mental and physical body and treat their patients accordingly.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rod McKuen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Boyne
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lorene Scafaria
FRI: My Book World | Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi [Emmett Till]
Maté’s thesis is that Western medicine has assumed for a long time what is “normal,” and what is not. He contends that our physical and physiological lives are severely affected by what happens and what does not happen to us in our childhoods:
“Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being, seen and accepted, even by loving parents. Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune . . . and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied” (23).
This struck a chord (ha) with me concerning my childhood. My parents met my physical needs but didn’t have much sensitivity to my wishes to learn piano. I harped (ha ha) for four years on the topic until, at age ten, I was finally rewarded with lessons (and a $150 piano which I treasured). But their lack of interest in my “attunement” meant that they didn’t care much for my sensitivity as a musician, an artist, or human being. They kept trying to interest me in more “masculine” activities, meaning they did not accept me for who I was. It was a conditional “love,” if you want to call it that. My saving grace, through the years, thankfully, has been the help I received from three talented psychologists: one when I was twenty-four, one when I was in my fifties, and one I see currently in my seventies. Making myself more “loveable” to myself, I believe, made me less available to suffering major diseases or even middling chronic ones.
Maté’s contention is that most all disease is caused by mental or psychological stress that alters the body, making its autoimmune failure more likely one will suffer illness.
There is so much more that Dr. Maté offers to the reader in these 562 pages, but I do want to cite one statement he makes near the end of the book:
“At present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession—albeit a resistance more subliminal than deliberate, more passive than active. In the dozens of interview I conducted with medical colleagues for this book, including recent graduates, virtually one of them recalled being taught about the mind-body unity or the profusely documented relationship between, for example, trauma and mental illness or addictions—let alone the links between adversity and physical disease” (487).
I wish all adults in the world could read this book and be pushed to take care of their total health, not just the physical being (if that)—seek out doctors who do see a connection between the mental and physical body and treat their patients accordingly.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rod McKuen
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | John Boyne
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Lorene Scafaria
FRI: My Book World | Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi [Emmett Till]
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