The Myth of Normal with Gabor Maté, MD
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You're listening to the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. In medicine, we usually think of diseases as abnormal. ALS, MS, Crohn's disease, breast cancer. These are all pathologies that need to be fixed, cured, or at least managed over time. But today's guest, Dr. Gabor Mate, argues that these diseases are actually a normal and even expected response to the highly abnormal way that we live our lives. Yes, we all come to the table with a different genetic endowment, but more than our genetics, Gabor argues, chronic disease is driven by the way we eat, work, interact with each other or don't, the way that we were raised and treated by our parents, and perhaps most profoundly, the way that we relate to ourselves.
Gabor elucidates this argument in his latest book, which he co-wrote with his son Daniel Mate. It's called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. You may have already heard of Gabor Mate. He's a tremendous figure in the medical world, a renowned speaker, best-selling author, highly sought-after person for his expertise on a range of topics, including childhood development, stress, and addiction. He's written several best-selling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction, and has co-authored a book called Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. and his works have been published internationally in nearly 30 languages.
Reading Gabor's latest book really prompted me to think about the mind-body connection and the way that our souls and ourselves are intimately bound up with the neurohormonal immunological apparatus in the body. At the end of the book, Gabor offers a way to think about healing that I thought was really beautiful and actually offers a lot of hope for those of us dealing with chronic disease. But before our chat, I asked Gabor to read an excerpt from his book, The Myth of Normal. Here is Gabor Matev.
For better or worse, we humans have a genius for getting used to things, especially when the changes are incremental. The newfangled word to normalize refers to the mechanism by which something previously aberrant becomes normal enough that it passes beneath our radar. On a societal level then normal often means nothing to see here. All systems are functioning as they should. No further inquiry is needed. The truth as I see it is quite different. The late David Foster Wallace, master wordsmith, author and essayist, once opened a commencement speech with a droll parable that well illustrates the trouble with normality. The story concerns two fish crossing aquatic paths with an elder of their species, who greets them jovially.
Morning boys, how's the water? The two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over to the other and goes What the hell is water? The point Wallace wanted to leave his audience pondering was the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about. He could have been articulating this book's thesis. Indeed, the lives and the deaths of individual human beings, their quality and in many cases their duration are intimately bound up with aspects of modern society that are hardest to see and talk about, phenomena that are like water to fish, both too vast and too near to be appreciated. In other words words, those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal or the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny.
Thus my central contention. My core intention, accordingly, is to offer a new way of seeing and talking about these phenomena, bringing them back from the background to the foreground, so we might more swiftly find their much needed remedies.
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