The Myth of Normal

About

On trauma's profound effect on society, in the sense of 'very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being in the most serious of ways'.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Normal-Illness-Healing-Culture/dp/0593083881#customerReviews

Is Mate any close to identifying real solutions, such that his 'the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives' includes open, inclusive collaboration on the economy that translates into growth mindsets and abundance everywhere, leapfrogging scarcity-mindset issues of poverty, hierarchy, and war?

k8

• 131 a traditional view of self-interest would be enhancing one’s connection and membership in the community, to everyone’s benefit.
• 128 When all is said and done, the individual [is] genetically determined not to be genetically determined,” Book - Biology of Freedom.
• 127 This is why, in seeking a vision of a healthier world, we had best disabuse ourselves of any fixed, limiting beliefs about what we’re all about, and instead ask, What circumstances evoke which sorts of outcomes?
• The nature of ournature is not to be particularly constrained by our nature. -Sapolsky

k1

• but once you become aware that you have choices, you can exercise those choices.” Notice that he didn’t say “once you spend decades in therapy.” As I will present later, we can access liberation via even modest self- examination: a willingness to question “many of the truths we cling to” and the “certain point of view” that makes them seem so real—as a famous Jedi master’s Force ghost told his dispirited young apprentice
• 48 - The news gets better: seeing trauma as an internal dynamic grants us much-needed agency
• Wolynn is the author of the aptly titled It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
• Trauma Alienates Us from the Present
• Here’s what the Buddha left out, if I may be so bold: before the mind can create the world, the world creates our minds.
• Trauma limits learned response flexibility. Trauma Fosters a Shame-Based View of the Self. Trauma Distorts Our View of the World.
• Traumas represent a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma.
• If, despite decades of evidence, “big-T trauma” has barely registered on the medical radar screen, small-t trauma does not even cause a blip.
• There is another form of trauma—and this is the kind I am calling nearly universal in our culture—that has sometimes been termed “small-t trauma.” I have often witnessed what long-lasting marks seemingly ordinary events—what a seminal researcher poignantly called the “less memorable but hurtful and far more prevalent misfortunes of childhood”—can leave on the psyches of children. [7] These might include bullying by peers, the casual but repeated harsh comments of a well-meaning parent, or even just a lack of sufficient emotional connection with the nurturing adults.
• Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the presentmoment’s riches, limiting who we can be. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self. Until seen and acknowledged, it is also a barrier to growth. In many cases, as in mine, it blights a person’s sense of worth, poisons relationships, and undermines appreciation for life itself. Early in childhood it may even interfere with healthy brain development. And, as we will witness, trauma is an antecedent and a contributor to illness of all kinds throughout the lifespan.

Intro

• “Distress about climate change is associated with young people perceiving that they have no future, that humanity is doomed,”
• 20 - in 2019 more than fifty million Americans, over 20 percent of U.S. adults, suffered an episode of mental illness.
• 19 - 60 percent of adults have a chronic disorder such as high blood pressure or diabetes