Note on the text: I used The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Mate, M. D., with Daniel Mate as published by Avery in 2022.
It all starts with waking up; waking up to what is real and authentic in and around us and what isn’t; waking up to who we are and who we are not; waking up to what our bodies are expressing and what our minds are suppressing; waking up to our wounds and our gifts; waking up to what we have believed and actually value; waking up to what we will no longer tolerate and what we can now accept; waking up to the myths that bind us and the interconnections that define us; waking up to the past as it has been, the present as it is, and the future as it may yet be; waking up, most especially, to the gap between our essence calls for and what ‘normal’ has demanded of us (497).
Trauma is a very complex thing and healing from it is an equally intricate and, at times, beautiful process. Beautiful because it involves us getting to know ourselves on the deepest, most fundamental, of levels. Gabor does a wonderful job here of highlighting just how awful the effects of trauma are and how one can heal from it to go on and live fulfilling lives as their authentic selves.
Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and this is especially true when it comes to speaking about trauma. Because trauma isn’t so much about what happens to you as it is what happens in you. The kid who, experiences the trauma of unstable housing and moving around a lot and yet sees that as an adventure experiences a different type of trauma from the kid who sees it as proof that his world is inherently unstable and something to be afraid of. A traumatic event occurs when our relationship to either ourselves or our environment is disrupted and irrevocably shifted. A woman who previously had no fear of the world gets raped and now is afraid to go outside for example, or a child who after getting beat by his dad for failing English class now develops a perfectionist attitude because he feels like he is otherwise unworthy of being loved and respected.
Sometimes individual’s change in attitude is sudden and at other times it might be more gradual, but in any event the person who exited the traumatic event is not the same person who entered into it. I say it might be gradual because often the change that happens happens at a more unconscious level, but that doesn’t change the fact that trauma is, at its core, “about a loss of connection- to ourselves, our families, and the world around us” (23). Trauma affects us in very central ways. That which we call a personality is really a “jumble of genuine traits and conditioned coping styles” (409). Which is to say that certain aspects of our personality are inherent to who we are as people and other emerge as a way to cope with whatever our living conditions are, as in the examples I mentioned above. Which is why healing from trauma involves bringing a level of consciousness and awareness into the life of the person in question. Trauma takes our power away by often times forcing us to be people that we wouldn’t otherwise be. Healing means taking that power back so that way we can choose to be our most authentic selves and live lives that line up with those values that we hold most dear to our hearts. Which is why the first step in healing from trauma involves taking an honest account of who we are, what is happening in our lives, and how do we feel about that. An examined life is not worth living because “as long as one does not examine oneself one is completely subject to whatever one is wired to do, but once become aware that you have choices [then] you can exercise those choices” (35).
But first let’s take a step back and talk about just how real the effects of trauma are. Dr. Gabor goes into excruciating detail about the links between trauma and one’s physical health. He, for example, cites studies that link post traumatic stress disorder to higher rates of breast cancer, and how grief can affect the immune system (42). He also cites people who, in a very practical way, saw what their body was going through as a reflection in some way of their mental health. Just listen to what Julia said about what her rheumatoid arthritis told her about herself:
it was my body’s way of saying ‘wake up, wake up.’ You’re not helping yourself holding this much rage and anger inside’. Rage and anger are not feelings I want to hold onto, but I do see them as guides that let me know that something in my life is out of balance. I get rheumatoid flare ups maybe once a year now. When one shows up, I just accept that it’s here and there is something I can do about it, something more to learn from it” (392).
What we are witnessing here is how her disease has lead to understand herself better in a more holistic manner which in turn has enabled her to live a more fulfilling life.
The point is that trauma is real in every sense of word. It affects us both physically and mentally which is why
any movement towards wholeness with acknowledgement of our own suffering. . . . True healing simply means opening up ourselves to the truth of our lives, past and present, as plainly and objectively as we can. We acknowledge where we were wounded and [to the best of our ability] perform an honest audit of the impact of those injuries [both to ourselves] and those around us” (363).
What he is talking about here is acceptance. That in order to start to heal from our trauma we must be able to accept it for what it is instead of “resisting the truth or denying or fantasizing our way out of it” (380-381). Now that doesn’t mean we have to condone it. Accepting is not the same as condoning. We can accept that something did happen while wishing that it didn’t. What trauma does in large part is force us to become something that we are not as a way of adapting to the new reality. It can therefore lead us to become inauthentic versions of ourselves and force us to live lives that we are not proud of because those lives don’t reflect who we actually are. Healing therefore means taking back that power and re-giving ourselves the ability to choose who we want to be: “the exercise of agency is powerfully healing” and the assertion of that agency starts with us “renegotiating our relationship with the personality traits [that] we have [used to identify ourselves with]. . . . There is no freedom is having to be good or [talented] or in the need to please or entertain or be interesting” (377-378). We have to have the freedom to be who we want to be simply because we choose to be that person, not because we are (or were) pushed by forces outside of ourselves to be someone that we do not want to be. It takes a profound amount of introspection and honesty to realize that we are not the person we would like to be and to change that. But that is what it means to heal.
It requires a a certain amount of intentionality and focus because you have to consciously undo what for the most part has been subconsciously building in your head for years. You have to look at your trauma and the beliefs that came out of it and judge if those beliefs still serve as well as they once did. Although the traumatic event was outside of your control, your current reaction to that event is not. The beliefs about yourself and/or the world that came out of that event are not facts and so they can be changed. Take for example an abused child who is now an adult. As a child because of the abuse they suffered they decided not to trust anyone. They became incredibly self sufficient and so mistrusting of others that they don’t ever reach out for help or let anyone in in a meaningful way. Healing from the initial trauma means that as an adult that child has the ability to step back and see if that belief still serves him and if it’s reflective of who he wants to be. Or does he want to be more trusting of people and rebuild his boundaries in such a way that he can let at least some people in and perhaps not be so lonely. He can decide what kind of person he wants to be.
Healing from trauma, to bring it back to the quote that started this post, means “waking up” to who you are. It means fully accepting what has happened to you and making the decision to be who you are despite that. Understanding and fully accepting who you are, and living a life that is in line with those principles, is without a doubt the most meaningful and powerful thing that any of us can do.
