The atmospheric river sends down rapids of white flakes, turning the typically earth-tone scene outside of my office windows to black and white. Not having experienced much snow in the past years, I’m once again reminded that this is a weather pattern that invites silence. From my many years of living in the mountains, I remember the way snow muted sounds from echoing in the forest; I sense that now here, too, in the high desert when the falling snow catches the sound of the wind, carrying softly to the ground where it rests in drifts that grow slowly, yet steadily.
I’ve had a goal in my mind for a while to offer reviews of the books I read here, in my blog space. For one, writing about what I’ve read helps to synthesize the material, but even more importantly, I often find myself drawing more intimate parallels between what I’ve read and my own life. In any case, I had a day and so I thought I’d give this a try to see how it feels, sipping coffee and watching the snow fall outside my window.
A few days ago, I finished Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. It wasn’t a book I’d been planning on reading. This past fall, my partner left early one Sunday morning to ride the gravel bike in the great unknown of the Great Basin desert (he doesn’t always tell me where he is going). While he was gone, I went to the gym, I cleaned the house and then…waited. After about six hours, I assumed he was either having the time of his life or he was dead, but in either case, sitting around wondering about it wasn’t doing me any good.
I packed up the car with a copy of Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart and drove up Highway 431 to Mt. Rose Summit and Lake Tahoe, beyond. There’s a beach on the North Shore of the Lake that I really love because A) they don’t charge for parking, B) it’s across from a grocery store, so if you get hungry or thirsty, supplies are an easy walk away and C) I actually really love the view from this particular vantage point, looking across the long axis of the Lake to the impressive Sierra Nevada mountains that frame South Shore.
It was a place I came to in my twenties when I needed space. On my days off from my job, I’d carry a stack of books, a towel, a bottle of water and (sometimes) sunscreen, to spend the day reading, swimming, warming in the sun and repeating that process over and over. In graduate school, when I pursued a degree in French Language and Literature, I returned to this beach to read books not in my native language with the backdrop of the mountain’s stillness.
I returned to the beach with Jack Kornfield’s book feeling lonely and disconnected— somehow 40 years old having not accomplished what I wanted to with my life, but more important than the material disconnection was the one I felt within the frame of my own body. I will return to Jack Kornfield’s book in a future blog, but let’s just say he offered me a loving embrace from his Buddhist perspective that I accepted as I watched families, lovers and other groups of people on the beach, coming to the realization that I was the only one there alone, and that I had always been the only one there alone.
On the drive back home, I absent-mindedly listened to a podcast—music of any kind was out of the question after that sad afternoon—and little by little, the author being interviewed piqued my interest. He was talking about work he did in prisons, speaking with men who had committed horrible enough crimes to earn years behind bars. “These are some of the most sensitive people I have met,” Gabor Maté said, explaining that experiencing trauma (whether understood as Trauma or trauma) is what creates disconnection within ourselves and our lives. In this light, their crimes could be understood not as expressions of violence and hatred toward others (at least at a fundamental level) but instead, as expressions of disconnection and loathing for themselves. No one who loves and respects themselves can act that way, he said.
There was something in that idea that made me set my own sadness on hold and to consider what he was saying. Life’s tragedies, no matter their size, compel us to separate from them in an act of self-preservation. What can be more of a separation that complete and self-imposed solitude? I wanted to know more, and so, when I got home that day, I ordered his book.
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At any given moment, I’m usually reading too much. This is my pile for January.
At any given moment, I am reading at least five things. It’s a bad habit I got into when I was in graduate school, this compulsion I get sometimes to do everything five seconds ago, which means a room filled with half-finished projects that sit around for months at a time, perhaps forever. (Don’t even get me started on knitting, a pass time of the winter months when I just can’t take any more screen time. It’s an exercise in juggling no less than two projects at any one time, that exist in half-finished states until something like absolute annoyance forces me to finish them up.)
Unlike other books, however, Maté’s 500-page tome wasn’t one that was easy to put down. Given its length and heavy subject matter, this is surprising. But Maté didn’t write this book for experts; this book is written for you, me, and everyone out there who’s ever experienced a Sunday afternoon as I did: when you look around your life and ask: how did I get to be so sad and disconnected from everything I care about and love?
I’m paraphrasing and simplifying a lot here (you really should read the book if you are interested in learning more) but whether you’ve experienced what Maté calls “Trauma with a capital ‘T’” or “little ‘t’ trauma”, you have nonetheless experienced something that caused disconnection within your internal system, and that is something that manifests in your thought and behavior patterns today.
What do I mean by disconnection?
As human beings, we have two (often competing) desires for attachment and authenticity.
“Attachment… is the drive for closeness—proximity to others, in not only the physical but the emotional sense as well” (105). Attachment is the desire to belong to “our people.” As children, for example, we want and need to be accepted by our parents. This is true for our very survival: who can provide for us at a time in life when we are not completely able to provide for ourselves? The need for attachment, then, can be understood as one vital to our survival, and so it is deeply embedded into our psychological systems. We need to belong in order to survive.
However, we also need to be ourselves— to express unique natures, desires, thoughts, etc. This is what Maté calls our need for “authenticity.” “Authenticity… is the quality of being true to oneself, and the capacity to shape one’s own life from a deep knowledge of that self” (106). This need is what drives our mental, emotional and physical development. Yet, there comes that inevitable moment when what you want for yourself puts you at odds with what your parents want. (I’m sure we can all relate. Or, if you have kids- I’m sure there have been many moments when authenticity and attachment clash and collide.)
“This clash is ground zero for the most widespread from of trauma in our society: the ‘small-t’ trauma expressed in a disconnection from the self even in the absence of abuse or overwhelming threat…The seed of owe does not lie in our having these two needs, but in the fact that life too often orchestrates a face-off between them” (105-7).
What typically happens, especially in our younger years, is that we learn to suppress authenticity for the sake of attachment. It would be far worse to be without our caregivers, right? And so from an early age, most of us learn to privilege attachment over what we want for ourselves. This is the root of many behaviors that cease to serve us well in our lives as adults: people-pleasing, self-doubt, self-sabotage, and even addiction (behavior partners, Maté argues, are motivated by pain that is otherwise inescapable.)
“It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when. The sources of these scars are most often evident in their shape, so to speak: in may cases, specific traits can be traced to particular kinds of wounding” (109).
Yet, Maté does not stop there. His book isn’t an exercise in blame- blaming parents, blaming you. Instead, from this point of examining trauma and how it often manifests across nearly every human life, he also takes a look at the context within which our lives unfold. Trauma is a part of life; but, importantly, so is healing.
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If “trauma” can be understood as disconnection, then “healing” can be understood as becoming whole. The word has its etymological roots in the Greek word that means precisely that- “wholeness.” Whereas we might experience life as a battle between the heart and the mind (the intellect and our love—our passion) healing can be understood as bringing these two parts of us together.
I was subtly surprised when Maté offers his readers a quote that I have carried close to my heart for most of my life. It appears in The Little Prince, a story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a quote that I read aloud during a speech to school of young women who had been the victims of sexual trafficking, and whom I’d spoken to about determination and hope. "
The intellect becomes a far more intelligent tool when it allows the heart to speak; when it opens itself to that within us that resonates with the truth, rather than trying to reason with it. ‘And now here is my secret, a very simple secret,’ the fox advises the Little Prince in Antoine de Staint-Expuéry’s beloved tale: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’ The intellect can see verifiable facts—provided that denial doesn’t obscure or distort them, as it often does to protect the wounded or pain-averse parts of us…. More than that, the heart also has its own nervous system. The verbal-thinking, cerebrum has arrogated to itself the honor of being the only brain, falsely so. Actually, it shares the distinction with the gut and the heart. In other words, the heart knows things, just as surely as a gut feeling is also a kind of knowing. In fact, the gut’s neural plexus has been appropriately called ‘a second brain’ as has the heart…. [So], if the heart is our best compass on the healing path, the mind—conscious and unconscious—is the territory to be navigated. Healing brings the two into alignment and cooperation, often after a lifetime of one hiding behind or being disregarded by the other (364-365).
I read all of that as snow fell outside my window, I realize that we are not so unlike octopi (one of my favorite books Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith explores these mysterious creatures with the inquiry of investigating consciousness. Octopus do not have a “central” nervous system like ours- their intelligence is spread throughout their bodies.) Of course, the heart has a mind of its own, as does the gut. This makes sense on an intuitive level, and even more so given my practice to ask questions directly to locations that a client indicates may hold knowledge or aspects of an individual experience.
And what might the heart know now? is always a useful reflective question to pose.
Near the end of Maté’s book, he includes some journaling exercises to help readers to begin the excavations of their own traumas, no matter the size or shape of them. In a way, the book is an invitation to reconnect all aspects of your life, to practice an almost Buddhist form of forgiveness and understanding, to accept what was and what happened, and to embrace the person you are.
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Perhaps the most salient passages in the book, for me, come near the end when Maté offers possible methods by which we can heal, both individually and collectively. He invites the reader to look more seriously at Indigenous traditions that saw our lives as an integral part of the natural world, not separate from the cosmos, mountains, and rivers, but instead, in intimate concert with them. Connection, in other words, is the pathway for us: not only connection to ourselves but connection to others, to community, and to the natural world.
Inviting connection into our lives— connection to ourselves, others, the natural world—our pets—is one way to begin the path toward healing.
One way we can invite this into our lives again is to regain knowledge of the myths that have been written as ways of understanding the world— it is, he writes “..a fount of knowledge, a portal to spirit, and one of the fundamentals of any healthy culture” (478).
“When we lose myth…we know less about ourselves, we know less about illness, and thus we know less about healing…. Older understandings of myth also spring from a deep connection to (or oneness with) Nature, which is perhaps why myth-making in the positive sense comes to us naturally…For most of human history, our relationships to the natural world had been based on metphors. Mountains are symbols of strength and constancy; rivers embody change, flow and even life itself. These meanings have profound consequences for how we live, for how we see the world and our place in it. They are the marks of a culture that knows how to read, and heed, Nature’s signs (479).
Connections and creativity- the words I carry with me in the work that I do in the world as a writer and healer. Metaphors hold power; they are our connection to our lived experience, our past, present and future. Healing may not be easy by any means, but in the end, Maté offers a path filled with creativity, curiosity, and even joy.
While healing is a journey and not necessarily a destination, the invitation to connect more openly with parts of myself that I often silence out of habit, to re-connect with the natural world, has opened gateways of insight within me. I have noticed a shift in my personal metaphors for how I understand myself. For the first time in years, my metaphors offer illustrations of wholeness— my personal power as a constellation of stars, for example—signaling that I do not feel separate from various aspects of my personality as I have before.
I also feel a calmness, a grounding, when I realize that I am a part of and not separate from the world. And yet, another layer still: gratitude that the sadness that can occupy an afternoon, a year or perhaps most of a lifetime is not insurmountable, not all-encompassing. As the snow continues to fall, I stand, put on my shoes and begin to shovel the walk.
I am struck by the absolute beauty of the white and quiet snow. The way the flakes settle on tree boughs, the way I intuitively know that moisture is soaking deep into the soil, bringing nourishment for the beauty that awaits us in spring. It is so quiet at first, but I can’t help but notice the promise that hangs in the air, whispering: there will be joy here.