This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Is anybody feeling entirely sane and well right now? What’s it like? Are you entirely sure you’ve grasped the situation?

There could not be a better time for the great Dr. Gabor Maté’s new book, “The Myth of Normal,” on trauma big and small and how it becomes part of our personal architecture as we grow up in an increasingly frightening world.

Even as we are obsessed with wellness and bombarded with information — helpful, false, and everything in between — we are missing the point, he says.

For childhood has already marked us. We are the product of everything that has happened to us so far but especially when we were young and fragile. Equally, without the common beliefs and meeting places of old, we live in a world that grinds on the individual human.

This is not good. This is not normal.

What a harsh place the world is right now, political chasms growing wider, women the target of horrific abuse, frightened workers lashing out, rampant disease, economic hardship peeling our nerves, and the backdrop of global heating plus a possible nuclear Armageddon caused by a Russian madman.

I’ll add that the book, co-written with Maté’s son, Daniel, is subtitled “Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” It’s difficult for anyone without a healthy infancy, a stable upbringing and strong family support to fend off life’s blows. (And yet we are not in Ukraine-level agony. Solve this moral puzzle, please.)

Maté, a storied Vancouver physician, cleverly points out what we sometimes forget: humans can get used to anything. That does not mean they should. You should have a home life that is a comfort when your job is a horror. Your job should offer respite when you have family troubles.

Maté writes, “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.”

In other words, your body sends you messages. When you have a spontaneous coronary artery dissection or SCAD — your blood vessels peel from the inside — caused by work stress, it’s the work that has to change. But it won’t. Do you work to maintain social status, that illusory thing? Should you leave? Work from home?

Long COVID is especially instructive because the body sends out sudden alerts that cannot be countermanded. “We will lie down now for two horizontal hours. That is our task.”

It turns you into T.S. Eliot’s patient etherized upon a table. You must pay attention. So listen when your body says lesser things like, “We have a migraine” or “We are nauseated at work.” Your body is hammering on your door.

The medical advances of the last two centuries are impressive, Maté says, but “they lure us into a false passivity.” We need to look at the larger causes of illness, depression and anxiety. Instead of muting the symptoms, we must go to the source. Modern life is making us ill. Let’s change the way we live.

Women get sicker than men, partly because of poor medical care from male doctors, but also because women’s lives are more difficult.

Maté quotes a leading U.S. physician: “Women have it worse” — at higher risk of “chronic pain, migraines, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis.” They have more lupus and lung cancer, depression, anxiety and PTSD.

Girls are more likely than boys to be sexually abused in childhood, a marker that leads to lifelong damage. As adults, they will be sexually harassed in business, the arts, junior hockey, journalism, gymnastics, work camps, tennis, government service, Arctic scientific stations, fire halls, bars, everywhere they go and everything they do.

The body and mind pays a price for having been born female, with a smaller body easy for some men to misuse.

Bad childhoods reinforce bad political choices. What kind of childhood did a Capitol rioter have that he saw Donald Trump as a strong parental figure, a man to admire? This is a “sense memory, an indelible and usually unexplored imprint from childhood, a longing … activated by present-day insecurities projected into the political realm.” Who reveres Pierre Poilievre, mean and vengeful?

I had a bad childhood myself, 18 years of being hyperalert to danger from a violent family member. We all suffered but Britishly never admitted or discussed it.

I turned into an observer, the type of child who was always watching, hypersensitive to small gradations of feelings in others. It was massively useful for journalism. To paraphrase Henry James, “try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”

But it’s rare to find a use for trauma. It’s mostly a dead weight.

I strongly recommend Maté’s latest book, but also his previous work, especially “In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts.” If we could understand our childhoods and the wounds inflicted on us, we could have more compassion for others as they lash out about masks, errant words, hurt feelings.

Healing is possible. You have to look, consider, and come to understand.

Anyone can read Conversations, but to contribute, you should be registered Torstar account holder. If you do not yet have a Torstar account, you can create one now (it is free)

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com