Kevin's Reviews > The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Here’s a fifth and final and most general principle. Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable [“socialization” to society’s “normal”]. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security [a better place in society’s hierarchy]. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity [Maté’s “authenticity”].

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this. This matters, because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four. Rejected children cease to develop, because they are alienated from their peers [Palm meets face. Maté wrote an entire book on how “peer orientation” is indeed a growing problem for healthy development, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, but Peterson conveniently accepts the normal and proceeds from there…].

[…] we should note that almost all those sanctions involve punishment in its many psychological and more directly physical forms. Deprivation of liberty causes pain in a manner essentially similar to that of physical trauma. The same can be said of the use of social isolation (including time out). We know this neurobiologically. The same brain areas mediate response to all three, and all are ameliorated by the same class of drugs, opiates [great…]. Jail is clearly physical punishment—particularly solitary confinement—even when nothing violent happens. [Lovely, using a comparison with prison solitary confinement, recognized as a form of torture, only to later endorse time-outs as “an extremely effective form of punishment”].

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.

The pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a record-breaking bestseller titled Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946, that was hugely influential and largely sensible. In it, he confidently recommended that babies should sleep on their tummies. Dr. Spock had little to go on; but we now know that this advice is wrong, and the apparently trivial suggestion contained in his book, which was so widely read and followed, has led to thousands, and perhaps even tens of thousands, of avoidable crib deaths.

A properly socialized three-year-old is polite and engaging. She’s also no pushover. She evokes interest from other children and appreciation from adults. She exists in a world where other kids welcome her and compete for her attention, and where adults are happy to see her, instead of hiding behind false smiles. She will be introduced to the world by people who are pleased to do so. This will do more for her eventual individuality than any cowardly parental attempt to avoid day-to-day conflict and discipline. […]

When [she] was little, I could paralyze her into immobility with an evil glance. […]

Severe polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Cause? Unknown. Prognosis? Multiple early joint replacements. What sort of God would make a world where such a thing could happen, at all?—much less to an innocent and happy little girl? It’s a question of absolutely fundamental import, for believer and non-believer alike.

None of the specialists who looked after Mee Ok inquired about the conditions—physical and emotional—that preceded her life-blighting illness. This, despite the voluminous research that links stress, trauma, and inflammation, and despite the multiple studies that over many decades have explored such connections in rheumatoid arthritis, in MS, and in other autoimmune conditions. Not only are such possible lines of inquiry not pursued, but they seem to be verboten in mainstream circles. “I’ve come to feel a little bit off the wall when talking about these issues,” a specialist in rheumatic diseases at one of the best-known U.S. teaching hospitals told me. “Since my graduation I have markedly changed the way I practice, because I started observing in my patients the relation between stress and the onset of their disease, and how great a role trauma, psychological and physical, plays in their disease.” This doctor, who requested anonymity for fear of alienating her colleagues (!), has observed firsthand what she calls “remarkable results” among her patients, both in terms of recovery and even, in some cases, getting off medications altogether. [...]

Had Mee Ok’s doctors inquired along these lines when she presented her distressing symptoms, they would have learned that she had sustained two major abandonments by the end of her first year. [...] She had completely repressed these memories, secreted them and all associated feelings—pain, terror, rage—deep beneath the surface of her awareness. As we will see later when we discuss healing, Mee Ok’s improbable recovery, veritably a deathbed resurrection, owed everything to her confronting this long-buried trove of hurt.

Upon the emotional graveyard of what she could not afford to feel, Mee Ok erected an impressive edifice: a positive, can-do persona that not only kept her from experiencing her despair and impelled her to ignore her own needs, but also helped her achieve success beyond what she really believed was her due. [...] Such hyperfunctioning on top of hidden inner distress is a recurring theme among the many autoimmune patients I’ve encountered in my years of practice and teaching.

Just prior to the onset of her agonizing joint inflammation, Mee Ok was in a complicated romantic partnership whose many ups and downs took a psychic toll and culminated in a wrenching breakup. All the lifelong hurt she could not allow herself to experience, all her terror of abandonment, showed up in her reactions to the loss of the relationship. It was a full-body grief response. Once more, none of her history, from childhood to the present day, was considered as admissible evidence by the highly trained experts who treated her scleroderma. “My body was really like a battleground, and I was losing,” Mee Ok told me. Her language resonated with me: I’ve long pictured autoimmune disease as resembling a powerful army invading its own motherland, a violent mutiny against the body. In effect, with no conscious outlet and lacking resolution, Mee Ok’s inflamed emotions rebelled, manifesting in the inflammation of her tissues.

Microbiologists these days speak of “neurogenic inflammation,” stress-induced inflammation triggered by discharges of the nervous system—a system we now understand to be powerfully influenced by emotions. And there is elegant research connecting early adversity, such as the traumas Mee Ok endured in childhood, to inflammation in adult life. [...]

Some clinicians have noted a relationship between rheumatoid arthritis and certain types or features of personality. [...] A case in point is forty-two-year-old Julia, from one of Canada’s prairie provinces, diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age twenty-nine. [...] None of Julia’s treating physicians ever asked about her inner life. Why does that matter? Because such personality patterns as Dr. Robinson and others have observed are reversible and, with them, so may be the disease. Despite having been told the illness would inevitably progress, Julia is now symptom-free and medication-free. “I have beautiful conversations with my rheumatoid arthritis these days—it makes me want to cry telling you,” she said to me. “I’m great.” What could such a statement mean, and why so deeply felt in Julia’s case? We will return to these “beautiful conversations” later, when we look at healing.

Over the last three decades, a global industry has emerged promoting the issuing of official apologies advocating “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” as an important precondition for resolving the deleterious social impacts of intrastate violence, mass atrocity, and historical injustice. Originally, this industry was developed in state contexts that sought to undergo a formal “transition” from the violent history of openly authoritarian regimes to more democratic forms of rule—known in the literature as “transitional justice”—but more recently has been imported by somewhat stable, liberal-democratic settler polities like Canada and Australia. [...]

First, as a critique of the field and practice of transitional justice, Brudholm’s study is “limited to the aftermath of mass atrocities” and to the “time after the violence has been brought to an end.” [...]

In such conditions, reconciliation takes on a temporal character as the individual and collective process of overcoming the subsequent legacy of past abuse, not the abusive colonial structure itself.

And what are we to make of those who refuse to forgive and/or reconcile in these situations? They are typically cast as being saddled by the damaging psychological residue of this legacy, of which anger and resentment are frequently highlighted. [...]

Fanon held a very nuanced perspective on both the potentially transformative and retrograde aspects of colonized peoples’ “hatred, contempt and resentment” when expressed within and against the subjective and structural features of colonial power. [...]

First, far from being a largely disempowering and unhealthy affliction, I show that under certain conditions Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective expressions of anger and resentment can help prompt the very forms of self-affirmative praxis that generate rehabilitated Indigenous subjectivities and decolonized forms of life in ways that the combined politics of recognition and reconciliation has so far proven itself incapable of doing.

And second, in light of Canada’s failure to deliver on its emancipatory promise of postcolonial reconciliation, I suggest that what implicitly gets interpreted by the state as Indigenous peoples’ ressentiment—understood as an incapacitating inability or unwillingness to get over the past—is actually an entirely appropriate manifestation of our resentment: a politicized expression of Indigenous anger and outrage directed at a structural and symbolic violence that still structures our lives, our relations with others, and our relationships with land. [...]

Rather than addressing these structural issues [current institutional and social relationships], state policy has instead focused its reconciliation efforts on repairing the psychologically injured or damaged status of Indigenous people themselves. Sam McKegney links this policy orientation to the increased public interest placed on the “discourse of healing” in the 1990s, which positioned Aboriginal people as the “primary objects of study rather than the system of acculturative violence.”