It was just this morning that I read this excerpt that I am sharing now from Gabor Maté's book The Myth of Normal. And I knew that I would want to share this far and wide because of the hope for growing understanding, compassion and healing, and transformation that this wisdom holds for us individually, in our families and communities, and for us collectively as a human species.
Once, each and everyone of us were born beautiful and precious, as illuminated in this picture that I share below of my twin brother and myself at age three. And then something happened. And we became lost to ourselves and who we most truly, authentically, and wholly are. Many of us — in response to little "t" or big "T" trauma — became addicted, distracted, anxious or depressed, angry or isolated, impacted by a host of physical or mental illnesses, preoccupied with image management and perfectionism, or even committed suicide, as in the case of my brother.
Living in the culture that we do, the norm for the vast majority of us is to adopt limiting personas of what we believe is expected of us and who we falsely believe ourselves to be — ancestral and cultural beliefs which we unconsciously introjected and which initially served us in families and in our society which is imbued with don't talk, don't trust, don't feel, don't be rules. The cost, however, is the loss of our authenticity.
There is no blame here. It simply is what it is. And as we courageously peel back the many layers of our experiences, we come to understand what happened to us — and to our parents and their parents and on back through time — a depth of compassion, consciousness, choice, and empowerment is born. At least this has certainly been my experience.
I do believe in our human capacity to evolve. There is a path to reclaiming our fragmented parts, transforming what we have rejected as inner "foes into friends," and embracing and increasingly embodying our holy sacred selves.
I'm aware that many of us have already long been on this journey. And this is, ultimately, the journey of love... of learning to love and come home to ourselves. And as we wake up, heal and open our hearts in an ongoing way, and come to increasingly embody our sacred wholeness, we become beings more and more deeply imbued with love. Then, together, we can be ever expanding expressions of compassion, wisdom, equanimity, and love — actively doing our part in healing and transforming ourselves, our families, our world.
Please read on....
Bless us all on our human journeys,
💗
Molly
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My brother, John, and myself, 1954.
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Excerpts from the Chapter
"Foes to Friends"
"I don't remember my childhood," I've heard people say. "All these folks with their childhood horror stories... nothing I can recall explains why I behave the way I do." You, too, may have found yourself drawing a blank in the face of tale after tale of adverse upbringings presented throughout this book.
Many people, stymied by what they believe is a failure to remember, often wonder if this memory gap inhibits their healing. There are a couple of good reasons why the answer is an encouraging no. As we have said, the trauma is not what happened to us, but what happened inside us as a result. Peter Levine reminds us that "trauma is about broken connection. Broken connection to the body, broken connection to our vitality, to reality, and to others." That being the case, it's impossible to overstate that so long as we are alive and of sound mind, reconnection remains possible. We do not require the past for that, only the present. That's the first reason we need not despair of healing even if we can't connect the historical dots. We can always work with the here and now, even if the long ago is locked away.
But there is a second, more practical reason: it isn't true that we don't remember. Our memories show up every day in our relationship to ourselves and others, if we only know how to recognize them. Every time we are triggered — which is to say, caught up suddenly in an unwanted, puzzlingly overwrought emotional reaction — that is the past showing up: an echo of our childhood as we actually experienced it, if not how we consciously recall it. There are ways to retrieve such encoded memories by using present-moment emotions and body experiences to find their origins.
The word "trigger" is itself a major clue. It has become something of a rhetorical cannonball, hurled back and forth by opposite sides in many a debate or confrontation, rarely deepening conversations and often ending them. Yet, on a closer examination, it has much to teach us about ourselves. Consider: How big a part of a weapon is the trigger? Minuscule, really; perhaps the smallest visible component. The weapon also bears ammunition, explosive material, often a guidance system, and mechanisms for delivering the payload to its target with the desired force. If, when triggered, we focus our ire only on the external stimuli that set us off, we miss a golden opportunity to examine what ammunition and explosive charges we ourselves have been packing since childhood.
Let's briefly revisit the issue of the "happy childhood," which is so often professed regardless of later challenges with illness, addiction, or emotional afflictions. The point in accessing a more well-rounded history is not to engender self-pity, or to wipe the genuinely good times from the record. It's this: to make peace with our inter tormentors, we have to first understand them against the backdrop of their origin stories. This is the compassion of context.
I was once asked to provide expert testimony in a murder case where the accused, a chronic alcoholic, having been interviewed by three psychiatrists, was reported to have grown up in a happy environment. Ten minutes into our jail-cell conversation he told me that his father had been a heavy drinker, his mother depressed. When he was four, his arm was broken and his hair set on fire by his brother; later he was bullied in school. It never occurred to him — nor to the forensic specialists who had accepted his "happy" story without further inquiry — that the actual history might contradict, even debunk, his whitewashed recollections. Nor was he being insincere: it was all he knew. He was probably holding tight to certain genuinely pleasant moments, a curated slide show of memories that he had titled "My Happy Childhood."
The myth of the happy childhood doesn't require such obvious extremes for its cracks to show. Recall Dr. Erica Harris, self-confessed workaholic and a survivor of leukemia, a double lung transplant, and a life-threatening, drug-resistant, blood-borne infection. At one point in our conversation, she remarked, "I was blessed with what most people call a very happy, blessed childhood. We were well off financially, I had a ton of friends, and so I wasn't bullied — I didn't have any of those big life circumstances. But at age twelve I had a really hard time." A family conflict left her sad, confused, and bewildered. This, she believed, was when her traumatic wound was sustained.
Actually, the self-disconnect had occurred long before then, in her "very happy, blessed childhood," as revealed by my next question. It's one I regularly pose to clients and participants, and I'll now put to it to you, the reader. Anyone whose conscious recall is of a happy childhood — a category that may range from innocuous to idyllic — and yet is confronting chronic illness, emotional distress, addiction, or struggles to be authentic, is particularly invited to engage with it:
When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?
Notice your answer, and also your feelings around it. If, as in Erica's case, the answer is "No one" or indicates anything other than the presence of a consistently available adult "someone," an early disconnect was surely at play. (A loving older sibling can in some ways stand in for a parent, but it is unlikely they can fully replace a parent. And even then it signals a disconnect from the adult caregiver.) No infant refrains from emoting to the parents precisely what he feels or from signaling when she requires help. The failure to do so later in childhood is a developmentally abnormal adaptation — for some a truly devastating one, which undergirds the woundings that follow.
Thus, the suppression of early sorrow is not limited to overt trauma or abuse. I have never treated or interviewed anyone with chronic physical illness or mental affliction who could recall sharing unhappy feelings openly and freely, without restraint, with their caregivers or any trusted adult. This is a feature of life that most happy-childhood memories filter out, for the simple reason that we have an easier time recalling what happened than remembering what did not happen but should have. The pleasant memories we do recall, though genuine, are two-dimensional, missing the depth and the fullness of the child's actual experience. Until we can reestablish a link to that inner third dimension, we lack the depth perception to see ourselves in our totality, and healing and wholeness are blocked.
For those still unmoved by this notion of "nobody to talk to" being traumatic, I'll illustrate the point via my conversation with Dr. Harris, who was not subjected to maltreatment, or ever came close to it. I offered my customary thought experiment, encouraging her to step outside herself and imagine another child, namely her own, in a similar position. Our conversation, stereotypical in my experience, went like this:
"If you, as a parent, found out that your kid had an emotional shock at age twelve such as you experienced, but didn't talk to you how would you explain that?"
"That they didn't trust me."
"What does it feel like for a kid not to trust their parents?"
"That would be really terrible. It wouldn't feel safe and secure. Like you were on your own, very alone."
Then, there, was Erica's "very happy, blessed childhood," as actually lived. And none of it means that her parents didn't love her or wouldn't have done anything in their power for her well-being. It means only that some essential disconnect had happened earlier in that relationship. It didn't begin all of a sudden when she was twelve, even if that's when it hit home for her.
Finally, people often make comparisons that unfairly denigrate their own experience. Though you may be justifiably grateful for your lot, the fact that others have suffered "more than" you does not diminish by one iota your own pain, nor erase its traces in your psyche. Levels of trauma are not to be evaluated, much less graded on a bell curve. You may, for example, have reassured yourself along the same lines as Erica did: "We were well off financially, I had a ton of friends, and so I wasn't bullied — I didn't have any of those big lie circumstances." "And fortunate you were," I customarily interject. "But just imagine for a moment your little niece or nephew sobbing to you, "I feel so sad and alone and confused and I'm afraid to tell Mommy or Daddy about it." Would you, if you wished to be supportive, dismiss this little one with 'Come on, what's the problem here? Think of all the children who are having big life circumstances, like hunger or abuse or bullying. By contrast, you have nothing to complain about.' If this is what you'd say to them if you wanted them to know their feelings were safe to feel, that they were lovable no matter what?" I have yet to hear anyone respond in the affirmative: when I put it to them that plainly, they're finally able to hear in it the absurd double standard enforced against the self.
As we wrap up, a bedtime story:
Once upon a time, our wholeness was lost to us when our all-star team of inner friends — Guilt, Self-Hatred, Suppression, Denial, and the rest — came aboard to keep us safe. We had no choice in the matter, of course, and mostly we didn't notice them as they went about their business. Like a cadre of reality-TV design experts, they set about remodeling our personalities so that we'd make it out of childhood in one piece: beautifying certain rooms and boarding up others, installing alarms, locking the cellar door. But their success at keeping us intact required that we emerge into adulthood with core parts of ourselves walled off. They were good at their jobs.
After many years living in this stuffy, segmented home, we came to long for a more spacious, better-ventilated existence. So we thanked the experts for their service, and sent them out for a well-deserved sandwich. And we devoted ourselves gently but diligently to a new task, the literal antidote to the psychic dismemberment required of us long, long ago: the task of remembering ourselves.
— Gabor Maté
From The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness
and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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