Continued from The Myth of Normal (book review) – Part 2 …

Chapter 24 – We feel their pain

Donald Trump’s cartoonishness, the havoc he wreaked on the US political system, and the cultural tumult around his ascendancy can too easily obscure what a sad, thoroughly wounded person he is.

Page 350

I had not expected to find a sentence on this book, let alone the best part of a chapter, which might be reduced to “Donald Trump didn’t get enough hugs as a child”. That’s a foolishly reductive easy of putting it, yet, there it is: perhaps there is room for compassion for this man who terrifies so much of the world by his capriciousness and mendacity.

He had a horrendous upbringing, which could have caused a complete disassociation with empathy and reality.

However, we expect our leaders to be “tough”, and it seems as those will favour authoritarian leaders most seem to be those that are most traumatised themselves.

Trauma begets trauma.

Chapter 26 – four A’s and five compassions

Like it’s fellow natural state, love, authenticity is not a concept but something lived, experienced, basked in.

Page 375

I tried to explain what love meant to me. I failed miserably. Words just don’t do it justice. Love is another such lived experience, a way of living, rather than a one off accomplishment or event.

So with authenticity. It’s a way of life, not an single action. It’s being loyal to one’s own feelings and values.

The lack of authenticity makes itself known through tension or anxiety, irritability or regret, depression or fatigue.

Page 376

Both my husband and I related to this passage; we have both compromised who we are – betrayed our authentic self fit one reason our another, and suffered the consequences of anxiety, depression, regret, irritability, and we have lived with tension in it marriage for almost as long as we’ve known one another.

I feel that I share a responsibility for creating an environment where were can both be or authentic selves.

Chapter 28 – before the body says no

This chapter investigates Compassionate Inquiry, meaning gently asking where feelings and behaviours come from. It’s not asking oneself to make any changes (yet), just to gently save kindly look into this within ourselves. The author suggests that just asking of ourselves may take some if the power out of it.

They then ask five questions. Without repeating the entire book here, the section then asks what we have denied our own authenticity, or own wants and needs, in saying “yes” when we really needed our wanted to say “no” (or vice versa). Examples are agreeing to work extra when rest was needed, or to help a friend when there were already other plans, or (and this is appropriate to my relationship) not saying “no” to sex when something wasn’t right. That last example is an area that my husband and I need to investigate – he says that he’s agreed to things he did not want to.

There is also a mention of his toxic resentment is to one’s soul sand body. In Al Anon (the friends and relatives companion organisation to AA) has a saying: “resentment is like drinking poison in the hope that the other person will die”.

Finally, the self abnegation of not saying “yes” to something when one really wanted to. I have said “no” to a lot of things from a fear of upsetting my husband. Then I felt resentment at missing out.

Chapter 30 – from foes to friends

There was a lot in this penultimate chapter that spoke to my experience in Al Anon.

The truth is, these disturbers if the peace [unhealthy attitudes and behaviours] have always been our friends, strange though it may sound. Their origins were protective and beneficent and that remains their current aim, even when they seem to go shit out in a misguided way.

Page 431

Al Anon members are gently suggested to consider their unhealthy attitudes and behaviours as tools that have out grown their useless, or have maybe grown to big and need paring down.

Maté suggests that we recognise these old behaviours for what they are: adaptations to protect us as a child that have hung around and won’t leave now they are no longer required.

When a young person’s world is in turmoil – when things fall apart and the centre cannot hold … there are two working theories that a child can adopt. One is that her little world is terribly awry and misshapen, her parents incapable of unwilling to love or care. In other words that she is unsafe. The other, which wins it eventually every time, is that she – the child – is flawed.

Page 436

Maté used a child as an example, since a child’s mind is most plastic and susceptible to this kind of adaptation, and I would say that both my husband and I have such an adaptation from childhood. From childhood it seems that most people that I know have been wounded in this way in one degree or another – I find it rarer when people don’t carry something over from their childhood with them.

When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?

Page 443 (italics in the original)

Matë here asks ask if us who profess to have had happy childhoods to consider this question. My answer was upsetting. Kim going to write in detail about this somewhere else though!

My husband sometimes minimises my childhood experiences because they weren’t as abusive as those which they survived. I hate making comparisons between myself and other people, that way lies either arrogance or despair.

Chapter 31 – psychedelics and healing

This chapter recounts an adventure the author had in a health retreat in the Amazon jungle where a group of indigenous shamans (I do not know the correct term) conduct ceremonies with a psychedelic plant to help their patients heal from trauma – sexual abuse, PTSD, and other mental or physical disorders.

The author then expands on the healing potential of psychedelic medicine to heal and reintegrate those disowned parts of themselves (my paraphrase). My friend, Tacitus, occasionally uses LSD to help him recover from trauma and the trials that life throws at him. He had suggested that my husband try them also.

It’s something to talk to my husband about. It’s also something if like to try for myself – just to see what happens! Reputedly, these things are not chemically addictive: however I have no experience and nobody who would be willing to help, so I guess it’s not going to happen.

Chapter 32 – my life as a genuine thing

This chapter digs into the spiritual aspects of healing and wellness. I was stopped by this sentence:

Among the challenges of healing ourselves personally and of bringing healing to our troubled world is being dark long enough to allow our true selves, that “still small voice” we read it in the King James Bible…

Page 477

Shortly after my mum started the morphine regime that would help her move from this life into whatever happens next, she asked for a particular hymn “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”, and she explicitly quoted her favourite line:

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier

I cry whenever I hear that hymn. It is so beautiful and so meaningful.

I didn’t realise that it was based on a quote from the King James Bible:

And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice

1 Kings 19:12

This hymn was sung at my Nan’s funeral also, and many others too.

My mum was finding peace and that’s what she was communicating to us. She didn’t want to die. She was grief-struck to be leaving us, but she was at peace with her own mortality.

When my time comes, I hope that I can face it so courageously.

Chapter 33 – unmaking the myth

As it turns out, it is often the individuals who defy conventional normality who are the healthy ones.

Page 496

Rather a nice thing for a eunuch with ASD traits to read!

There are many things that I take from this book, central of which is the dual primacy of authenticity and attachment. Both are equally required for health.

The book is anecdotal and shouldn’t be taken as a scientific document, yet it gives an awful lot to think about:

• What the book does we retard as normal and therefore acceptable about our society should be neither of those things.
• That there are inherent flaws in capitalism that create system disadvantages for large groups of people.
• The role of stress and trauma in physical illness.

I enjoyed this book and loved the many ways that it challenged me to think. It is long though!

Its a book that I would like to pass on to friends to read and discuss.