Inspire Change SEASON 7-291 The Myth of NormalWhat Gabor Mate Teaches Us About Healing in a Sick Society

This week on Inspire Change, Gunter dives into a meaningful conversation about what is normal? He breaks down what Gabor Mate teaches about healing. This mindful discussion is inspired after reading Mate's book: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté is a Hungarian Born/Canadian physician. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development, trauma,[2]and potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, including autoimmune disorders, cancer, ADHD and addiction. Maté's approach to addiction focuses on the trauma his patients have suffered and looks to address this in their recovery. In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Maté discusses the types of trauma suffered by persons with substance use disorders and how these disorders affect their decision-making in later life.  

This week we offer our Gratitude to listeners in South Carolina, particularly in Summerville and Charleston. You have put South Carolina at #2 in the USA  list of states turning in and promoting Positive Social Change.   Once again thank you and don’t forget to like, share subscribe and follow and being a big part of Inspire Change with Gunter’s efforts at Transforming Men and Transforming Lives.


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Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there in the USA!

The entire team at Inspire Change with Gunter would like to bring attention to our neighbor listeners to the south of us in Mexico!  Particularly all of you in Mexico City for this week's gratitude journey.  Congratulations!!  For the first time you are only 5 spots away from the "Top Ten Global Listeners List" as you made it to #15 .  Thank you/Gracias  to each and every listener.   We appreciate everyone of you and are grateful for your likes, shares, follows and subscribes, but most of all for you continuing to inspire positive social change!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(00:47):
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(01:09):
work together to inspire change. Now. Thank you for your
continued support, and let's keep inspiring change together.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
You're listening to Inspire Change, the broadcast that strives to educate, motivate,
and empower men to challenge traditions of masculinity to guide
us through the intricacies and intersections of emotions, relationships, and
male identity is renownced psychologists, author and speaker Gunter Swubota.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
This is Inspire Change.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Before I begin the actual podcast, I would like to
respectfully acknowledge the gategor people of the Order Nation, who
are the traditional custodians of the lane on which I work.
I would also like to pay my respects to their
elders past and present. Welcome everybody to another episode of

(02:02):
Inspired Change with Gunter. I'm your host. Welcome everybody to
another episode of Inspired Change with Gunter, and I'm your host, Monsmimota.
I'm a psychologist, author, and I'm the founder of Making
Good Men Great, a framework for men's growth and recovery

(02:23):
from patriarchy. So today I want to share with you
my reflection is on a book that has deeply resonated
with me. Now. I read it a while ago, and
because of my research at the moment, I'm revisiting quite
a lot of literature that I've been reading, and it's

(02:44):
one of them, and I believe that if you will
read this book, it will resonate with you as well.
The book's called The Myth of Normal Trau about illness
and healing in a toxic culture, and it's written by

(03:05):
a man that I deeply respect, doctor Garbel MATTEI he,
amongst others, is one of those people that are I
hold in the high esteem because of intellectual depth that
it brings to the table. What makes this book powerful
and provocative is that it invites us to question the

(03:27):
very society we live in exactly the same way that
I do, and to challenge what we've been told is
normal and to ask what if normal is actually making
us sick. So for the next twenty minutes, I'll walk
you through three big ideas from the book, how they

(03:49):
connect with my own work or defining masculinity and patriarchy,
and what we can all take away as we strive
to heal both person and collectively. Now, remember I've stipulated
that personal is political. This fits into this framework. So

(04:10):
let's take a dive into the myth of normal. Matte's
central thesis is in fact deceptively simple. That is what
we call normal in our culture. The way we live, work,
and relate to each other is profoundly abnormal. If our

(04:32):
aim is health and wholeness, we live in a society
that prizes productivity over presence, competition over connection, and suppression
over expression. As Martee writes, in a culture that is
fundamentally disconnected, it is the well adjusted who are actually

(04:56):
maladjusted because they've adapted to dysfunction. It points to rising
rates of chronic illness, mental health disorders, addiction, loneliness not
as personal failures, but as inevitable symptoms of a toxic environment.
In his words, illness is not a random misfortune. It

(05:23):
is the organism's way of saying no to what no
longer serves it. Now. This is a deeply healing reframing.
It's also confronting. It asks us to stop seeing suffering
as a personal weakness and start seeing it as a

(05:45):
signal something about the way we're living needs to change.
When I think about this through the lens of masculinity,
I see parallels everywhere. How often have I seen men, clients, colleagues, friends,
break down under the weight of expectations to be silently stoic, strong,

(06:12):
self reliant. They come to therapy not because they're broken,
but because they've been forced to adapt to a broken system.
And so the first question we need to ask is
what version of normal have I internalized. Trauma fundamentally is

(06:39):
not what happened to you. Okay, So this is the
section that I really want to get across. One of
the most profound insights in the myth of normal is
Marte's definition of trauma. He writes, trauma is not what
happens to you. It's what happens inside you as a

(07:05):
result of what happens to you. This is crucial because
it shifts the conversation from external events to internal processes.
Trauma is not just about catastrophic events like abuse of violence.

(07:26):
It's also about chronic, subtle disconnection. The child who doesn't
feel seen, the man who can't express sadness without being shamed,
the woman who learns her worth is conditional on pleasing others.

(07:47):
In short, trauma is what happens when our authentic cells
are exiled in order to survive. Now, you might ask, well,
why does this matter? Because so many men I've worked
with Carrie trauma without knowing it. They say things like,

(08:09):
I didn't have a bad childhood, nothing dramatic happened to me,
and yet so many are cut off from their feelings,
are afraid of intimacy, are addicted to work, or substances
or iract with anxiety, or have fallen to the black

(08:30):
dog depression. Trauma, as Martee explains, lives in the body.
Messel Vondercolt puts it really well when he says the
body keeps the score. It sits in our body as tension, inflammation, rigidity.

(08:53):
Healing then is about coming back to ourselves. This is
where mindfulness, self compassion, and therapy come in and where
movements like Making Good Men Create is so vital because

(09:15):
healing from trauma isn't just about looking back. It's in
fact about creating new ways of being, new ways of
relating that honor who we really are. So what is

(09:37):
it that healing needs to take place? The idea is
fundamental healing requires a culture shift. This is what I've
talked about in Making Good Men Create. In order for
men to recover from the ravages of patriarchy, we need

(10:02):
in ourselves to deconstruct the internalized, introjected expectations of patriarchy
and create a new way of being. You know, if
I want to get academic about it, it's about another
or new ontology. Ontology is about being. It walks us through,

(10:26):
you know, the ideas that are related to being. Now
I see that proposition not just one that resonates in
the lines and the tunes with my own thoughts, but
in of itself. It's probably the most radical and hopeful

(10:46):
part of the myth of normal, which is Mattthe's assertion
that healing isn't just an individual journey, it's a collective journey.
He writes, the question is not just how to heal ourselves,
but how to create a culture that doesn't make people

(11:09):
sick in the first place. This resonates so deeply with
my own vision for social change, because we can't talk
about healing men without talking about healing the culture of patriarchy. Now,
healing the culture of patriarchy actually requires a deconstruction. We

(11:39):
can't really talk about emotional health without questioning a system
that rewards aggression, suppresses vulnerability, and punishes connection. Mattey challenges
us to reimagine our values, which is exactly what I

(12:01):
talk about in Making Good Men Great. We need to
shift our values from dominance to corporation, from exploitation to care,
from isolation to community. In Making Good Men Great, I

(12:23):
talk about dismantling the five pillars of patriarchy, territory, hierarchy, acquisition, competition,
and combativeness, and to take the next step replace them
with relational values, empathy, equity, collaboration, and care. When we

(12:45):
do this work, not only do we heal ourselves, but
we create ripples like those in a pond that heal
our families and communities and in fact our societies. And
that to me is the most inspiring takeaway from Matte's book.

(13:07):
We need to remember that we are not powerless. Each
choice to live more authentically, to connect more deeply, and
to question deeply what we've been taught to really critically
think about it. It contributes to a larger movement towards ceiling,

(13:29):
and we need it in this space right now. You know,
we have people in power who are not just immoral,
their criminal and they try to hide an under the
guise of being victims. Trump neta, Yahoo has. They have

(13:52):
mobilized the society to drink the call aid to see
themselves in fact there's victims, and then before they have
the autocratic solution to homogenize their societies. It doesn't matter
whether you're brown, black, if you're not white in the

(14:14):
United States, you are seen with suspicion. Ice is ravaging
communities in the Middle East. They see the Palestinians as
something lesser, and I appreciate those Israelis who are fighting

(14:35):
against this. But like all autocrats, Netta ya who has
a stranglehold on the system at the moment, and that
needs to be dismantled. But this is not the only
place I could talk about. Putin in Russia, Auburn in Hungary.
You know, Albur's been very clever in his way of operating.

(14:59):
He took a very democratic society that had shed themselves
from the shackles of communism, and he's just created another autocracy,
another corrupt dictatorship. Now, hopefully there are signs that his

(15:19):
stranglehold is starting to lose its script, and hopefully, like
in many places, people will rise up again. But the
constraints on creating healthier societies are not diminishing, they're in
fact growing, and we've got to stay on top of it.

(15:41):
Creating solutions to deal with immoralities like anti Semitism doesn't
mean applying immoral solutions to that, like robbing people of
the freedom of speech, robbing academic freedoms. We need to

(16:03):
keep in mind that we're working towards societies that are
more inclusive, they're more distributive, they're more cooperative, and that
requires courage on all sorts of different levels. And that
is part of the idea of creating healthy societies where

(16:25):
economic inequities do not dictate people's attempts to survive, but
rather creating economic opportunity allows people to begin to thrive.
So let's reflect a little bit on this. What are

(16:47):
we talking about? So as I come to the end
of today's episode, I want to leave you with a
few reflective questions. Aspects of normal in your life might
actually be unhealthy. Journalists, The next question is where do

(17:09):
you still feel disconnected from your body, your emotions, and
your community. What would it look like for you to
live in alignment with your authentic self? So take a
moment this week to sit with these questions, journal about them,

(17:32):
talk about them with someone you trust, And if you
haven't already, I highly recommend you to pick up a
copy of The Myth of gimbal. Let it challenge you
and by all means, let it inspire you. Most importantly,

(17:54):
in some ways, you need to remember that healing is
not a destination. It is a practice, and as Marteo reminds, us.
None of us can do it alone. Together, let's keep
dismantling what's toxic and begin to build what's life giving.

(18:19):
So thank you for joining me on Inspired Change with Gunter.
I hope that you found today's episode meaningful. Please rate
and subscribe on your favorite platform and share it with
someone who might need to hear this message. So this
is me gone to signing off for another episode until

(18:41):
next time, Keep inspiring. Love to hear from you, and
if you're interested, please check out my work on www
Dot voter dot com or www Dot Goodman Great dot com.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
Thank you for listening to inspire change. A broadcast is
for us to educate, motivate, and empower men to challenge
traditions of masculinity.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
For more information on the

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Making good Men Great movement, or for individual or group
coaching sessionps with Gunter, visit Goodmen graat dot com