Fr. Tim’s Book Reports

Small attempts to share some of my reflections on what I’m currently reading.

Book Report #1

August 16, 2023

A brief advisory statement: This book report talks about and uses the language of “trauma.” Please take care of yourself. 

I have been dreaming up this little column or book report for a little while as a way to share with you all, the St. Barnabas community, where my mind is wandering, meandering, or exploring and to strike up a conversation with you. My heart comes along for this journey too. And the book I’ve just picked up has a whole lot of heart. Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (New York: Avery, 2022) is an ambitious and spirited plea to turn our attention to the toxicity of our culture and how we can seek healing in a smart and informed way. 

Maté should know. A family practice and palliative care physician, Maté has spent twenty years practicing medicine and ten of those working with addiction and mental illness in downtown Vancouver, BC. He is a survivor of the Shoah (Holocaust), born in Budapest in 1944. Maté speaks movingly of this traumatic time in his life, even though he might not consciously remember it. Quoting a diary entry his mother wrote when Maté was just fourteen months old, we learn that she gave him away to a Christian woman for six weeks; it was a matter of life and death. His heartbroken mother wrote after the event, “Now began the most dreadful five or six weeks of my life, when I couldn’t see you” (MN, 17). Maté sees here the roots of his trauma, an invisible phenomenon buried so deep within many of our psyches that we don’t even know it’s there (MN, 16). 

So the diagnosis of the toxicity of our culture starts with the seemingly unavoidable phenomenon of infant trauma. But what’s our culture? What is abnormal about it? And what is trauma?

Maté promptly points out that in our western, postmodern and - although he doesn’t say this it’s probably implied - North American culture, we are obsessed with our health and at the same time deeply unhealthy. A paradox which isn’t such a paradox when you think about it. We all tend to project unconsciously our deepest sources of fear and shame onto external realities. If we are ashamed of our health, whatever “health” means to us, and we are unconscious of our shame, we will project it onto other things that appear to us as magical solutions to a problem we’re unaware of. 

And so there is something very amiss, and we are blind to it. Here’s how Maté puts it, “It is my contention that by its very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways, as they have done with increasing force over the past several decades” (MN, 3). Just as a lab-made “culture” is intended to be a fruitful and healthy biochemical breeding ground for some organism, our culture could be a healthy and fruitful breeding ground for us. But it isn’t. Just as if a lab culture were toxic it would not promote the flourishing of the organism it was created for, so our culture is not promoting our flourishing. 

Perhaps this isn’t surprising to us; and maybe we shouldn’t expect our culture to promote human flourishing. But why not? Have we become cynical about the possibility that we can create a culture, even if that starts with our families and local communities, that is life-giving, true, beautiful and good? 

Maté is clear-eyed but no cynic. He believes there is a path forward, a path towards healing. And it starts with us attending to some of the “invisible” aspects of our culture which are difficult to talk about it (MN, 7). Chronic illness, in this light, becomes less a normal part of life and more a predictable side-effect of a diseased culture that does not cater to our deepest physiological, mental, and spiritual needs (MN, 8). So where do we begin to identify these invisible toxic entities? 

For Maté, it begins with trauma. Trauma is “an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events…trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events… [and] not the events themselves” (MN, 20). It is a lasting injury that becomes lodged in our nervous system, not our conscious awareness, and can be triggered at any moment (Ibid). Maté distinguishes between capital-T Trauma (as in PTSD) and lower-case-t trauma, which is all the little ways we are hurt and neglected in our infancy and childhood (MN, 22-25). Trauma is not stress; nor are all stressful events traumatic. But stress can trigger a traumatic event. Trauma separates us from our gut feelings, causing those who experience it to have difficulty expressing their feelings and feel connected to their bodies. Additionally, it limits what’s called our “response flexibility” - that capacity to choose how we respond to life’s “inevitable ups and downs, disappointments, triumphs, and challenges” (MN, 29). We become a bit “programmed” to respond to events through patterns of behavior we are not consciously choosing, which robs us of our freedom. We also become more conditioned to feel shame, resulting in a diminished capacity to experience compassion for ourselves (MN, 30). But we can’t really assign “blame” for this: “parent-blaming” is “inappropriate, inaccurate, and unscientific” (MN, 30). Much of trauma is inter-generational and passed down from parent to child, and on, as Mark Wolynn has written about. It’s not so easy to identify where and how these things begin. By the way, does that resonate with the idea of original sin (hint, hint)?

As I make my way through this book, I will continue to write these book reports (and more!) My hope is that this can foster conversation and reflection in our own community and with your families and friends. How can we continue to grow as a community of healing that feels confident enough to take the time and energy to attend to the invisible forces in our culture that impede our flourishing as minds, bodies, and souls? In what ways can we begin this process in our own family and personal lives? 

Here’s a possible place to start: if trauma is inherited, collective and passed down through the generations, how do we understand the story of Adam and Eve in the opening of Genesis? Can we approach Adam and Eve with compassion, and extend this compassion all the way down to our parents, and ourselves? Perhaps the place to start is with our very distant ancestors, who were hurt and also healed. Take up the opening of Genesis, and ask yourself, “in what ways have I inherited the trauma of Adam and Eve? And how can I cultivate compassion for them and for myself?”