52 pages • 1 hour read
Gabor Maté, Daniel MatéThe Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
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BetaPart 5, Chapters 30-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary: “Foes to Friends”
This chapter looks at the main obstacles to the process of healing. These, according to Maté, are guilt, self-loathing, self-rejection, and self-destructive impulses. There is also the denial or blocking out of emotional memory and pain. Such obstacles are more than just beliefs, existing as “clusters of related mental processes” (430), including memories and emotions. According to Maté, the way we should deal with these blocks is not by resisting them. Rather we must rest with them, accepting and understanding them for what they are, namely psychic defense mechanisms. By doing this, we can turn them from “foes to friends” (431). Rather than banishing them from ourselves, we learn that they can be reallocated to a healthier role in our psyche. For example, remorse for misjudged actions can be healthy as it leads to self-knowledge and change. However, healthy remorse can become ossified into unhealthy and unproductive guilt. In this case, we heal not by denying guilt-like feelings, but by acknowledging their original function and trying to realign them in accordance with that function.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Jesus in the Tipi”
Maté retells the story of a life-changing experience he had on a healing retreat organized with Shipibo shamans in the Amazon basin in Peru. At the retreat, Maté combined his therapeutic approach of compassionate inquiry with participating in the ceremony of taking a plant with psychedelic properties, ayahuasca. During the day before taking the plant, Maté helped people “formulate their intentions for the ceremony” (449) and the personal issues that they wanted to resolve through it. The following day, after the ceremony, they discussed what they saw and experienced under the influence of ayahuasca. Despite helping others achieve breakthroughs under through the plant, Maté was unable to achieve any breakthroughs himself. However, on this retreat, the shamans picked up on Maté’s “impenetrable” energy and told Maté that he must be isolated from the group until he has dealt with his own inner obstructions, which were obstructing others. They call this a “psychic quarantine” (420). After five days separated from the others, he was given the ayahuasca plant again and had a breakthrough.
Chapter 32 Summary: “My Life as a Genuine Thing”
Maté talks more about his experience in Peru and about how, although he had heard about spiritual transformation, until then he had not felt it. He learnt from this “transcendent” (463) experience three things. First, there is a form of understanding that transcends the rational, conscious mind, but which may transform the conscious mind’s awareness of itself. Second, as Maté says, “I learned that I could not have planned this” (465). In order to experience what he did, he had to simply go into the experience with open eyes and give up trying to control his experiences. His being temporarily separated within his own retreat was the way this control was relinquished and the reason he was able to experience what he did at that time. Third, in order to do the first two things, he had to give up his role as a leader and a healer.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Unmaking a Myth”
In the final chapter, Maté asks how this society, with its “culturally manufactured misperceptions, prejudices, blind spots and health killing fictions” (481), can be changed and what can be put in its place. Maté states that he has no definitive blueprint in terms of what a new social order would look like, however, any progress toward a healthier society will depend on adhering to the four principles outlined in the book. These are: seeing medicine as biopsychosocial, seeing disease as a teacher, understanding the primacy of attachment and authenticity, and engaging in self-inquiry on an individual and social level. He also says that before changing the world, we must first have addressed the truth and problems in our own hearts and minds. We must also be willing to be disillusioned, to see through illusions about the way society really is.
Chapters 30-33 Analysis
At first glance, what Maté calls his “reverence” (454) for psychedelic substances like ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, and LSD may appear perplexing, for he has spent much of the text, as well as much of his career as a doctor, addressing the negative effects of drugs on people. Yet, not only does Maté tolerate psychedelics, but he claims that they have helped many take “major steps forward on their way to authenticity” (455). It is necessary, then, to ask why he thinks this is the case and why he views them as different from other drugs.
One reason is that psychedelics produce intensely personal experiences. Their effects vary greatly depending on the individual using them, as they emphasize memories and feelings unique to that person. For example, while on ayahuasca, Maté saw the word “BOLDOG” (453) written in the sky, a reference to his childhood in Hungary. The reason for this is that psychedelics “open” or enhance a person’s existing individual consciousness. In contrast, conventional drugs like alcohol or heroin narrow or obliterate consciousness and therefore the individuality of the experience. As Maté puts it, “[T]here is a membrane between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind,” and “psychedelics open up that membrane” (460). They thus allow into consciousness any repressed and potentially painful emotions and thoughts, which can then be fully felt and processed. As such, psychedelics can help us come to terms with past traumas and help us to see ourselves more fully. This is why Maté believes psychedelics can be an important tool in the pursuit of individual authenticity and healing.
More than that, argues Maté, they can assist in the wider challenging of societal norms. Just as psychedelics and the pursuit of authenticity more broadly allow us to strip away our individual illusions, so too might they be able to strip away the illusions and myths of our culture. They might be able, “from a place of possibility” (482), to facilitate a collective challenging of what Maté sees as our individualistic and materialistic Western culture. Thus, they can help establish the outline of a society more in tune with human needs and health. Of course, to rely on individual transformations to accomplish social change may appear optimistic at best, naïve at worst. Yet, as Maté suggests, it may still be one of the few routes toward a healthier society.
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