The Myth of Normal: Rethinking Mental Health, Illness, and Healing in a Disconnected Culture

What if the way we live, the norms that define our “normal”, are actually making us unwell? In The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, physician, therapist and author Dr. Gabor Maté argues that many of the struggles we call mental illness or disorder are, in fact, deeply human responses to a society that fails to align with human needs. His work invites us to reframe suffering, not as a personal failure, but as a signpost toward a broader, often invisible cultural dysfunction, emphasising the links between mind, body, individual well-being and the broader social environment.

In this wide-ranging conversation, psychotherapist Amy Plant and I explore the relevance of Maté’s ideas for our therapeutic work. We speak about the impact of systemic factors on mental health, the deep sense of disconnection many of us experience, and what it takes to meaningfully work with suffering in a culture that often mistakes conformity with wellbeing.

Jen: Alright Amy, let's dig into it. How did you come across ‘The Myth of Normal’? What drew you to it?

Amy: So, I was familiar with Gabor Maté’s work in general. I had read a bit of Scattered Minds and then this book was recommended by my best friend. She thought it was absolutely amazing, so that drew me in.

I was also at a period in my life and in my work where I could increasingly see what Maté was talking about. Before I even found this work, I could see that people were coming to therapy, increasingly wondering what was wrong with them for having really normal reactions to issues like breakups or stress about jobs. They’d arrive at therapy already having this idea, from the different things they were consuming, that there was some kind of pathological mental health issue at play in how they were feeling, as opposed to the view that it’s totally normal to feel this way. People often believe that there is this mysterious biological mental health chemical thing at play, when in fact you're just a normal person experiencing this level of sadness or fear or worry.

Jen: Right, this reminds me of the way that Maté speaks about chronic illness, mental or physical, as a function or a feature of the way things are and not a glitch. The ways in which we struggle are often a response to the circumstances of our lives rather than some mysterious pathology. We find ourselves wondering where is this coming from? What is wrong with me? When actually these are very normal, appropriate responses.

Amy: Yes, circumstances in an immediate, personal sense and also in a more systemic sense. I think it speaks to the dismemberment of how we live that this notion would be revelatory. Like, if I have a client saying, I get a bit sadder in the winter. Or people who are breaking out in rashes, having an autoimmune response, and being so stunned at the notion that this may be happening because of the environment we’re in. People tend to get sadder in the winter because we're not designed to function exactly how we would behave in the summer. Or you're actually not supposed to be under this enormous level of stress. It’s not just a personal failing that you can't hack the fast paced environment ,or whatever. There's a huge correlation between the repression of emotion and autoimmune diseases, particularly in women.

Jen: Right. So it sounds like a lot of what you are seeing in your work really connects with the ideas in this book, which gave shape to something that already seemed pretty apparent to you?

Amy: Yeah. Things that I was already seeing were having words put to them. The book sort of repeats the same thing over and over again, showing how it manifests in various different spheres and how they're all connected to each other. Honestly, every page of this slaps. It's all highlightable and relatable. To me, the core insight is just the most apparent thing ever: that individual psychological “dysfunctions” as they might be described are actually appropriate reactions to a context. The problems are very real, but how we explain them phenomenologically and how we treat them is off.

Jen: Right. I think it's important to be clear here, speaking as therapists, that when we say that there's nothing wrong with you, or that these responses are normal, we are not undermining or denying that people are suffering. We’re also not saying that you shouldn’t be in therapy or that therapy isn't an appropriate place process this. It absolutely is. Therapy is all about supporting people as they navigate human suffering.

What we are saying though, and what this book is really about, is that we need to move our idea of suffering beyond the idea of individual pathology to something more global. We need to look at how the conditions of the way that we live in our society contributes to suffering and undermines wellbeing in various ways. Your emotional response is not the origin of the problem. The fact that you're having an emotional response isn’t evidence of there being something wrong with you – it’s a reflection of wider circumstances.

Amy: Yes, exactly. It’s not to undermine, it's actually to validate. It’s tricky because when you say, hey, the way that we understand this or diagnose these things is troubling, people might think that you are questioning the validity of their experience and their pain when actually, I think it's a validation. It helps us make sense of what it is that we’re dealing with and where it comes from. When we recognise that a lot of the difficulties are systemic, you might wonder what are we doing in individual therapy? I’d suggest that that is in addition to challenging systemic factors, not instead of, but it's also a way to support the individual agency that we do have.

Jen: Right, totally. You and I talk about this quite a bit, about how our work engages with suffering on the individual and the systemic level. Something that comes up for me a lot is the idea of suffering that we can put our hands on.

Amy: Right, yes.

Jen: I think as therapists we can and should recognise that a lot of the suffering that people experience is heavily connected to systemic factors. I also think that there is a place for advocacy in our profession, that we should be taking note of the systemic factors that contribute to people's suffering and do what we can to advocate for action and policy changes to address those issues. At the same time, there's the question of, well, what is the suffering that I can actually put my hands on directly? Often that happens on the individual level. For us, as therapists, that means sitting individually with a person, getting to really be present with them and offer them understanding and compassion for their suffering, supporting them in moving through that. There's value in that. It’s not “either or”, it’s “both, and”.

Amy: Totally. I also think a lot of suffering that people get caught up in is suffering that we can’t put our hands on. If we think about social media, it's just kind of part of reality at the moment that we witness so much brutal suffering and there’s a real despair around feeling the weight of the world and going, what am I supposed to do? We’re all trying to walk that line between staying aware while managing the despair that comes along with feeling like you can't do anything about it. That’s something I think people are feeling very heavily at the moment, more than ever.

Jen: Right, clients and therapists alike.

Amy: Oh my goodness, yeah.

Jen:  But you know, I think there is a role for therapy there as well. Whatever despair or disempowerment we might feel from things that are genuinely out of our hands, when we're disconnected from ourselves, from our own agency, then we are really disempowered. Part of therapy is supporting people to reconnect with their own authenticity and agency, which we do to reduce individual suffering, but I think there might also be something there, if we care about wider suffering, or things like activism and advocacy, in supporting people to reconnect with their capacity to act on the things they can act on. If we want to do what we can do, if we want to do what's within our control, we need to feel into that sense of agency, which can often feel inaccessible in a society that is, in many ways, driven towards alienation and disconnection from self.

Amy: Right, plus individual suffering matters. I see a lot of people experiencing guilt around their own needs. There's this criticism of the “protect your peace” approach to Instagram as just looking away, but sometimes you need to. If we think about what this book is saying about the emotions, autoimmune diseases, or whatever being an adaptation or an expression of what’s going on, we need to figure out how to decode all of this and deal with how it impacts the self.

We have become so separate from our feelings. People end up mystified by what they feel and what to do with it, wanting to make “bad feelings” go away. I can certainly relate to that impulse, trying to get rid of unwanted feelings. The temptation is to just push them away or medicate them or drown them out. Now I'm not anti-medication, it's absolutely massively helpful, but sometimes then we learn nothing about the origin of where feelings come from. What this book suggests instead is that we see feelings as messengers that are pointing towards something. It's a matter of being able to discern what they're saying. You have to tune into that. The more you obscure it, the harder it becomes to do.

There’s nothing wrong with the emotional reaction people are having, and, in fact it's ideal to have support around that, be it medical or therapeutic. But it matters that we're accurately getting to the source of where these things originate. Do you know what I mean?

Jen: Absolutely. I’m aware I’m stepping way back from the global to the personal here, but I’m wondering whether you could speak a little bit about the personal impact of this book? How has engaging with these ideas impacted you personally?

Amy: So, there are two parts here, personal, personal and personal, professional. In terms of personal professional, it really helped to have such eloquent words put to something I already knew. I was starting to question like, am I mental? What's going on here? It felt like nobody was acknowledging these systemic connections that come up in therapy. So to have that acknowledged was really significant. Also to be able to offer that to clients, which I would've been doing already, but in this more robust, peer-reviewed research kind of way.

The personal impact was massive. I felt like every part of this book was personally relevant to me. I was reading over it this morning before this conversation and almost getting emotional. It's not that I feel like this book would speak to everyone necessarily, but it certainly speaks to those of us who felt, what’s the word, out of place? That might be a bit of a twee term, but what is it I'm looking for here?

Jen: Is it something about being a person who has felt sort out of step, or like there might be something wrong with you, because you don't seem to be functioning particularly well in the way that society expects you to? So it can be really validating to hear this perspective that actually, the problem is maybe not within you? The problem is that the expectations of society don't actually align very well with human functioning.

Amy: Yes! The expectations are very narrow and, like you said, don't align very well with human functioning. Even though a great many people can function within them, can play the part. But then there’s all of what we're discussing here like, why are we all so anxious then? Why is there so much depression, ADHD, autoimmune disease? We’re engaging in the roles that we are expected to engage in, some would say successfully, but that depends on what your definition of success is.

That comes up in the book a lot in terms of people who would be considered to be successful, professionally, socially, everything else - who seem to be able to participate according to expectations, but it comes at a cost. Others struggle way more to participate according to expectations at all. I would be a person who would have struggled way more to participate in the way that was expected. I sort of straight up can't. In some ways I can, but

 it comes at a significant cost and always has.

Jen: That really resonates with me too. I think there's something really helpful for compassion here as well, in recognising that you're damned if you do you're damned if you don't. If you are someone, like you or I, who has felt out of step with societal expectations in various ways or struggled to function in the way that we're expected to function, it can add to your suffering when you perceive that there are others who seem to be able to adapt perfectly well to this, who seem to be to be able to thrive in this environment. That really enhances the “what's wrong with me” piece.

Amy: Right, and I hear clients say that to me all the time as well. I think I forget a lot what a window I have as a therapist into people's personal worlds, how many different people I see experiencing the same or different things. Other people don't have that. So, even for me as a therapist, I can still succumb to the “what is wrong with me?” thing.

Jen: Right, even as a person who gets to see so many people’s unique ways of processing things.

Amy: Yeah. So I will so often have clients be like, everybody else seems to be able to do this. Whereas like, yeah, some are, some aren't. It depends on what you see.

Jen: Right, but I also think part of this perspective is that even the people who can conform and appear to function pretty well – it comes at a cost to them too. The cost is often disconnection from self, or parts of the self, which shows up in all kinds of ways. This is what I mean by damned if you do, damned if you don't: whether you're out of step or in step with societal expectations, there are consequences that come from the ways that we're expected to function.

Amy: True. You see this in different areas, like with addiction in people who seemingly “have everything”, but still are miserable, or still are engaged in some addiction behaviour while they have all the trappings of what would be defined as successful in our society. Imagine getting everything that you think you want, or that you're supposed to want, and still feeling awful.

Jen: Right. Then we're really back to “what's wrong with me?” There's a quote that I jotted down here from close to the beginning of the book that really connects with what we're saying here. It says that “much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural. To meet modern society’s criteria for normality is in many ways, to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our nature”. It also reminds me of the horticulture on the moon chapter. Do you want to say a little bit about that?

Amy: Yeah, so that chapter basically talks about the conditions for functioning as a human. It speaks about motherhood in particular, how motherhood in our society can be so isolating -but motherhood isn’t inherently isolating. It's been made that way, as have very many other things, by the way our society is now. Maté refers to the way we’re trying to live, kind of hilariously, as being like horticulture on the moon. Trying to garden on the moon is going to tell us nothing about gardening and everything about the conditions or the environment required to grow.

I'm jumping a bit here, but he has another great, glib comment about confusing our experiences and their origins. Let’s say, because the treatment for a certain mental health issue is to prescribe a particular thing, the assumption is that the origin of that mental health issue is a lack of that thing. So he talks about, you know, if a shot of bourbon relaxes you, does that mean that you have a deficit of whiskey? Obviously whiskey isn't naturally occurring in the brain, but you get the idea.

Jen: Right, so we’re talking about looking to the environment for causes rather than assuming there’s something internally deficient when someone is struggling. That’s one of the major points in this book, that the conditions of our current societal environment are not conducive to human flourishing.

Amy: Right. Our normal isn’t actually natural.

Jen: So what are the conditions that we're talking about here?

Amy: The most basic stuff. If you're constantly stressed, if you live in a world where the term “cost of living” is a thing, if you're working jobs that you hate, feeling as though you have to act in particular ways in order to be accepted - which is something that is encouraged all the time implicitly - it's like constant stress, constant worry, mass amounts of input, like TikTok, distressing news alongside, like, outfit of the day.

Jen: Right. Or political systems where we feel really stripped of agency –  like so-called “representative democracy” in the face of things like climate change, or Palestine, when these things seem so far outside of our control, we can feel helpless. This all contributes to that increasing disconnection from our own inner cues.

Amy: Right. It’s all just at total odds with what we need to flourish.

Jen: So when we’re thinking about the flipside of that, then, what we do need, this is where Maté talks about what he calls the four As, right? He identifies four needs, or signposts, to return to wellbeing: authenticity, agency, anger and acceptance.

Amy: Yeah.

Jen: Those all resonate very clearly with me and my work as a therapist – and I know they resonate with you as well. I'm imagining for someone who doesn’t spend quite so much of their time thinking about this kind of thing, or doesn't work in the area that we work, some of this might be surprising. I think anger in particular might be surprising to show up there. I'm curious, what would you say about that, if anything? Why is anger on that list of things that we need?

Amy: I mean, 'cause it's legit. You know? It's so legit. Someone might think like, who am I to be angry? But anger is appropriate. It's there to protect you. It's there when it's just like, I don't like this. I don't think this is cool. Now can it be misdirected? Yeah, sure. Same as anything. But anger is the thing that prevents you from sort of just being a doormat, just being passive. It’s about trying to find a way to channel anger because I think that a lot of people can be furious and yet there’s this struggle to accept anger, both personally and kind of societally at large, which doesn't make it go away, right? It just goes inwards and then it's depression, or there's people going around like fuming. There's nowhere to discharge it

 that feels appropriate, but it’s a legit emotion that you need to have, same as the rest of them. A piece of information.

Jen: There’s a really nice definition of healthy anger in this book, which I liked a lot, about anger being a concise and potent no, said as forcefully as a moment demands. Healthy anger is situational. It shows up in a context where you need that self-protective impulse. It has limited duration. It's a boundary defence. It's protective.

Amy: For sure, yeah. It's coming up to defend. You know, the fact that this seems like a surprising thing to come up on the list of needs, or the list of solutions, I think is really connected to the problems that are spoken about in this book. We are so societally conditioned out of our anger.

Jen: There's something there about acceptance and belonging, right? Very often the cost of our belonging, of our attachment to other people, is this disconnection from our own feelings and needs.

Amy: Right. Anger, I think is just a really tangible example of that. It’s one of the obvious ones, but it comes up with the other three As, too.

Jen: Right, we see it with authenticity and agency, for sure. Acceptance is an interesting one, I think. It’s almost a precondition for the others. When we're talking about acceptance here, we're not talking about liking something, or endorsing it.

Amy: Right.

Jen: Acceptance is more about the ability to acknowledge and be present with what is - with the truth of a situation or your experience of it. It is the opposite of rejecting or ostracising parts of ourselves, or parts of our experience that we're not comfortable with, right?

Amy: Yes. It’s like, this is what it is.

Jen: Right, and that’s kind of a precondition for authenticity, agency and anger. I mean, authenticity is about that self-connection, right? It’s actually noticing and feeling what you're experiencing. Agency is about capacity to act on that. Anger is where that becomes a boundary defence, where there's something that's important to you that you have that protective impulse around. The challenge is that we're so conditioned into a state of disconnection with ourselves in order to preserve our sense of belonging. That’s why I'm particularly obsessed with the chapter in this book about that tension between authenticity and attachment. For me, it’s a really eloquent framing of a difficulty of being human – and some of the challenges to connecting with our needs.

Amy: It's interesting, because obviously attachment trumps everything when you're young because that's just what you have to do to survive physically.

Jen: Right. When we talk about attachment, we’re talking about our biological predisposition to maintain our connections with others, which is a very important survival need for humans in particular, because we, as babies, kind of suck, right?

Amy: Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can't do anything for ages.

Jen: Right? Have you seen a baby horse? Those things just go. They come out standing up, ready to run.

Amy: A snake will come out of an egg and bite you. That's actually what they do. They're ready to roll.

Jen: Yeah. Right. A lot of animals are like that. They are born and they're good to go.

Amy: They're running through the forest.

Jen: Yes. We are not like that.  

Amy: Not even close.

Jen: So humans are super reliant on their parents, on their caregivers, for a really long time. We're not just talking infancy here, we're talking throughout childhood. It's a significant portion of our lifespan where we are dependent on others.

Amy: Oh, ages!

Jen: To some extent this remains true throughout our lifespan, right? There are a lot of studies that show that having strong interpersonal relationships has lifelong health benefits. In childhood particularly though, if we don’t have those connections with others, we are, I’ll say it bluntly, super fucked. We need others to survive in a very real, very pressing way. So we are wired to maintain connections with our caregivers, with our parents, as a primary survival need.

The difficulty about that is that the parts of ourselves that are less convenient or palatable, any needs or expressions that might cause someone to pull away from us, even in a small way, register as a survival threat. So we start to put away parts of ourselves that seem to disrupt our relationships with other people. There was a piece in this book which really encapsulates this, about how our real selves get leveraged bit by bit in a tragic transaction, where we secure our physical and emotional survival by relinquishing who we are.

Amy: Right, you sort of have to abandon yourself in order to not be abandoned by somebody else. That's the way that we survive.

Jen: Right, but this is where authenticity comes in. Attachment gets spoken about a lot. What interests me about Gabor Maté’s framing is that intersection between attachment and authenticity, which is less spoken about, but equally important – because authenticity is also a survival need. If we're thinking about health, or the functioning of any life form, we need to have an understanding of what the essential needs of that lifeform are. Authenticity is about recognizing our own internal cues, be that emotional cues, or physiological cues - these are signals of what we need. So when we start to suppress parts of ourselves to keep people close to us, on the one hand, the chances of our needs getting met are heightened, because we need other people. On the other hand, it reduces the chances of our needs getting met, because we don't even know what they are anymore.

Amy: Right. It’s attachment for survival as a kid, when I literally cannot fend for myself without others. Then you carry that into adulthood and it’s tricky, because attachment and authenticity, I wouldn’t even say are two sides of the same coin - they're almost like the same thing. I cannot be securely attached if I'm not authentic. But sometimes I don't know what authentic is, because, who am I? I had to abandon all of that in order to be safe.

If your survival depends on not being who you are, or subverting who you are to be accepted, it doesn't create a real feeling of belonging because the connection will be based on someone you are not, a sanitized or de-fanged version of yourself. I see it in my work with relationships, where people can't connect with somebody else, because it's not possible for me to feel truly safe or accepted if I am still obscuring parts of myself.

Jen: Totally. This really intersects with Gabor Mate's conceptualisation of trauma, which is not unique to him, it's a conceptualisation that he shares with other people, but he describes trauma as an inner injury, any split within the self that happens in response to difficult or hurtful events. It's not so much about the event itself, it's about what happens within someone in response to that. He speaks particularly about how this comes up in our early attachment relationships, if we are not seen and known. He describes this as trauma because it’s an injury that leaves us more limited than we were before, right? There are parts of ourselves that are no longer freely expressed.

Amy: Yeah, exactly.

Jen: So even these arguably “smaller” traumas need to be taken seriously, because they continue to be disruptive throughout the life cycle. If I'm a small child, a tiny baby human, and my parents or caregivers don't see and know me, don’t respond to parts of me, there are parts of myself that I then become disconnected from. It's not only about things that happen - it's about things that don't happen. In not being fully known or accepted, you become more limited, you learn to close off parts of yourself, or respond in a particular way, and then you continue to act that out in other relationships. Every time something happens that even vaguely reminds you of that original injury, you keep acting it out - the past keeps hijacking the present.

Amy: Yes, and you see that even generationally. It's really interesting when people talk about trauma being passed down, that it's biological, environmental, behavioural, all that stuff combined. If our parents don’t receive that acceptance, or that sense of safety,  they don’t know how to do it, they pass it down. If we continue to act out these unconscious patterns, we keep them alive. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about trying to let go of hurt and not to undermine it.  They were asking, like, how do I do that? I was saying that, well, at the moment it's alive in the way that you respond to the world - it's the filter that you put everything through.

Jen: Right.

Amy: So if something happens, it goes through this filter of what happened to me in the past. That’s a protective thing, too, but I respond as though that thing in the past were still happening. I mean, it is still happening in my nervous system, that’s how it feels in the body, so that again, reinforces to me that this is still happening. Trying to act in a different way, it's exceedingly difficult, but we need to try to act, not exactly in opposition to that pattern, but to do something different.

Jen: It's response flexibility, right? Being able to access other options for how we respond. Which isn't saying that there's something necessarily even wrong with the automatic response. We have that for a reason.

Amy: Right. Defence mechanisms serve us.

Jen: Sure. It functions in some context. It certainly functioned in its original context.

Amy: Definitely. Yeah. It just has a shelf life.

Jen: Right. So if we want to be free - we're talking about trauma as something that restricts – freedom means the capacity for response flexibility, to choose other options rather than just living out the past over and over again.

Amy: Yeah. Part of that is recognising that something is a significant point of trauma or hurt. You know, if you feel this huge reaction, it's having curiosity towards that - which is super hard when your nervous system is responding like the past is still happening.

Jen: Totally, when trauma has occurred, often the last place we want to be is in our bodies. The last thing we want to do is actually connect with the feelings that are so overwhelming - and that also really feeds that sense of disconnection from yourself. The difficulty is that our feelings are there for a reason. We need those signals.

Amy: Yes. You become less adept at actually being able to identify what you’re feeling. It's a double edged sword, similar to addiction, where the thing that helps you is also the thing that harms you. We want protection from our feelings, but in protecting myself from them, I'm then less able to assess the messages that are being delivered to me. This is why people who are traumatised are more likely to get traumatised again. Your sense of what is and isn't okay for you is off.

Jen: Right, because you had to switch it off.

Amy: Right. If you're a kid who's coming home to a house that’s absolutely chaos, but you need home for survival, you have to override that sense of fear every time you put the key in the door. So that can become your normal, and lead you into these different situations in which you protect yourself from the feelings that come up, but you might not register the need to protect yourself from the situation.

Jen: Absolutely. Your boundary defences are down. We have feelings because they tell us what supports our survival and what detracts from our survival. We need that. This is why we need our anxiety, our anger, our fear, our sadness. All of these feelings give us information. When the feelings become something that we're disconnected from, all of those signals are down. Part of the core message of this book is that across an ordinary human lifespan, particularly within the society that we are living in, this kind of disconnection from self is par for the course.

Amy: Right, it's a requirement or an expectation of getting by. It's been normalised, but it isn’t normal. If someone hates their job, for example, we might say, oh, well lots of people hate their job. We don't give legitimate credence to how that affects people. Even if we do, there’s the question of well, what do you want me to do about that? So there's all these little micro self-abandonments that we do in order to survive in this society. Your survival looks different as an adult, but the same basic premise shows up in all these different ways.

Jen: Right, so what Gabor Maté is saying is that disconnection from self, suppression of our awareness of our internal cues and needs, is not only happening on a human to human relational scale, right? It is actively encouraged by the expectations of normality in the society that we live in. This is why he calls the book The Myth of Normal. If we are successfully complying with the expectations of what normality looks like, we are engaged in some form of disconnection with the self.

Amy: Right. When I think about that myth, what stands out the most for me is, in a society where hyper-independence is rewarded, just how much we need connection to ourselves, but also each other. We need each other so much. We need safe connections where we can reveal ourselves and be accepted for who we are. There’s research happening now which shows that when mothers have more support, they are more attuned to their babies. Or that people need care, need people, need friends. I don’t wanna be like “The American Journal of No Shit”, but it’s so absurd to me that we need research to reconnect us with this really obvious stuff. We’ve become so disconnected from our innate understanding of what is normal for human wellbeing.

Jen: Totally, and making a conscious choice to turn back towards yourself and to reconnect is not an easy task. As you've said, we need each other, we need support in that process.

Amy: Right. It’s so hard to do these things within a system that is actively thwarting it. I think that also speaks to the role of therapy and making sure that we are supporting people through that process in our work. That how I ground my practice - and it sounds like you do as well, in the validation of these totally appropriate responses that people are having to systems, be they micro or macro, and to support people to have the agency that they can have within those things.

Jen: Right, freedom within constraints. Something I think is really valuable about this book is that it very much acknowledges the socio-political constraints within which we are operating as therapists and as human beings. There's a call to action for therapists there, in terms of making sure that we're being really curious about the way that we're practicing. Are we practicing in a way that is acclimating people to conditions that are actually contributing to their distress? To expectations of normality that actually contribute to disconnection from themselves? Or are we practicing in a way that acknowledges those socio-political realities as constraints and supports people to reconnect with their authenticity and their agency to the degree that that's possible within the world that we live in.

Amy: Totally. That’s what really attracted me to this book. I'll be diplomatic and say there wasn’t enough, but honestly there wasn’t really any of that in my training. With the greatest respect, I think lot of even well-meaning therapists participate in the disconnection by encouraging people to acclimate, which is understandable, but for me, it feels essential to acknowledge these things.

Jen: Right, to acknowledge that connection between individual wellbeing – or struggling – and the broader social environment. It’s not all on you. It's rough out there.

Amy: It's no joke. It's real in these streets.