Reviews - The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

1.32k reviews for:

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté

4.2 AVERAGE

madhav_makes's review against another edition

4.75

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

ewrodriguez's review against another edition

4.0

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

abby_hanft's review against another edition

5.0

Highly recommend. A super eye opening deep dive into what we’ve all just accepted as “normal” in ourselves and our society.

jennmcdo's review

4.0

hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

I love this book for helping me see all the ways that trauma is in our lives. And understanding that a lot of the time, so much of my life is out of my hands. So much of my stress and sadness lately has been around feeling so out of control with so many of our systems feeling so many people. He gave good ideas about how to move through those feelings in a safe way. I think my next steps might be to learn new ways that can actually help support or build new systems so that the world is slightly more fair.

kellyfurr's review against another edition

2.0

Full disclosure: I only listened to about half of this. It's long and repetitive and I felt like I got the gist of it 8 hours into the 18-hour audiobook. I don't necessarily disagree with any of the research presented. Yet I don't care for the tone of the book. It's alarmist and fatalistic and overly simplifies complex issues. Summary: everything about modern families and society is deeply damaging to kids. The author tries several times to make his intentions clear that he is not trying to mom shame, but the rigid stances on the importance of several years of breastfeeding and the repetition of how terrible time-out and cry-it-out methods are for kids make it hard to not hear it that way. My opinion is that this is a doctor who is using his position to make a broad social commentary beyond the scope of his practice that has no benefit to the reader other than to cause hopelessness. I'd pass.