Gabrielle Sullivan

“It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You haven’t suffered like I have”—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively. We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“A necessary caveat: in foregrounding the role of biographical factors in disease, we must be mindful to avoid blame or guilt. “Some people see lupus as an external attacker,” a British woman with lupus has written. “But I prefer to think I did it to myself . . . Too much striving, too much living on the edge, too much stress. Yet despite the consequences, I wouldn’t change how I lived my life. It is who I am, so this disease is who I am too.”[26] There is wisdom in that view, but I also hear an unwarranted self-accusation and an all-too-characteristic lack of self-compassion. No person is their disease, and no one did it to themselves—not in any conscious, deliberate, or culpable sense. Disease is an outcome of generations of suffering, of social conditions, of cultural conditioning, of childhood trauma, of physiology bearing the brunt of people’s stresses and emotional histories, all interacting with the physical and psychological environment. It is often a manifestation of ingrained personality traits, yes—but that personality is not who we are any more than are the illnesses to which it may predispose us.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“The more severe and the earlier the trauma, the less opportunity response flexibility has to become encoded in the appropriate brain circuits, and the faster it becomes disabled. One becomes stuck in predictable, automatic defensive reactions, especially to stressful stimuli. Emotionally and cognitively, our range of movement becomes well-nigh sclerotic—and the greater the trauma, the more stringent the constraints. The past hijacks and co-opts the present, again and again.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“As I stated earlier, blame is inappropriate, unmerited, and cruel; it is also unscientific. But we have to take care not to fall into an easy fallacy. Asserting that features of the personality contribute to the onset of illness, and more generally perceiving connections between traits, emotions, developmental histories, and disease is not to lay blame. It is to understand the bigger picture for the purposes of prevention and healing—and ultimately for the sake of self-acceptance and self-forgiveness.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture