There’s no such thing as normal

I’m currently reading “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Mate, MD. It’s a book that explores trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture according to the subtitle. It looks at mental, physical, and emotional health. I think there’s a spiritual element to this as well, even though the good doctor doesn’t name it specifically because you can’t measure spirituality. But given what he’s writing, I don’t think it’s difficult to throw that into the mix.

This is not a quick read (around 500 pages). There’s lots of science, but it’s not over my head thankfully. Throughout this the theme that keeps coming up is how many people have suffered some kind of trauma or abuse in their life. It’s a large enough percentage that makes it significant. And depending on how you define those terms, that could include everyone — that’s not an exaggeration. The author puts in statistics that there are large percentages of people who suffer ongoing trauma and abuse — meaning a significant portion of the population continue to suffer every day. This is their normal.

This raises the question — what is normal?

I don’t think normal is what most people go around thinking it is. Normal is what most people are experiencing — trauma and abuse. But we aren’t calling it normal. We can call it common though.

This isn’t even talking about the people who cause trauma or abuse. Throw them into the mix and this gets even murkier and messier. There’s a whole lot more people now that we are talking about. These folks are…