The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

BATB score: 6/10 🧡

*reader discretion advised* max advanced level reading skill required; this book about trauma can actual cause trauma in readers

Best to: an in-depth analysis on how our toxic society makes us claim “this feels good. I want more” instead of the more valuable meaning of life “this feels good. I am contented. I am complete.”

Best as: “The perceived need to be what the world demands becomes entangled with our sense of who we are and how we seek love.” - 500 pages of supporting evidence of this statement

Best for: if you don’t want to have kids because you believe this world is a bad place, read this book and you would absolutely not have kids 😂

Best quote: “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.”

“We have instilled in her the anxiety of being rejected if her emotional self were to surface.”

“Health is particularly corroded by your nose constantly being rubbed in what you do not have.”

“The more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day.”

“When it comes down to it, all additional incentives can be summed up as an escape from the confines of the self, by which I mean the mundane, lived-in experience of being uncomfortable and isolated in one’s own skin.”

“Whatever the degree of injury, all addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory.”