The Cost of Normal

What if some of what we see as normal is actually the cause of what we see as abnormal?

We are inclined to look at things as an individual's problem. A child who won't sleep. A teenager who refuses to eat. A kid wildly different at home than at school. A nearly-middle-aged adult who can't seem to launch. A family that has become fragmented.

We diagnose each in isolation. Manage, accommodate, medicate, control, discipline, intervene...

Then we move on to the next problem... I mean, person.

But what I'm seeing more and more lately is what happens when we stop looking at these as isolated problems, and start to look for patterns.

What if some of what we're calling problems isn't dysfunction but information about the conditions people are living in?

Take the mental health crisis, for example...

This is turmoil within, visible from the outside:

• Sleep disorders.
• Anxiety disorders.
• Eating disorders.
• Chaotic attachment (clingy and resistant – or violent– flipping back and forth.)
• Masked personalities: compliant and sweet and quiet in one place, out of control and enraged in another.
• Dissociation, and more often, using technology to isolate and dissociate from reality.
• Loneliness and social isolation (basement adults who never 'grow up and move out.')
• Sneaking out, and running away.
• Promiscuity, drug and alcohol use in early (even pre-) teens. And middle age.
• Vulnerability to gangs and cults.
• Parent and family alienation, refusing to stay in relationship with the people who would naturally be their core sense of safety and belonging.

Have you seen any of the opioid crisis, yet? Homeless camps? Little kids with anxiety diagnoses? The mental health crisis is plaguing the Westernized world: Alarming jumps in suicide rates across surprising age groups...

We can't ignore this anymore.

We can't keep saying, 'well, it was done to me, and I turned out fine...' or 'they'll live.'

We can't keep swimming around in a fishbowl of tremendous stress, while pretending we're in the open ocean.

We're not fine.

All the markers are there.

We applaud (rightly) the people who transform their lives, heal, and make it out of the chaos... but we can't keep focusing on how great it is that a very small portion of the population has the resources, the inner strength, the liberty to step out of the mess and heal.

It's too small a population making it out ... and most are making it out scathed. Desperately and sometimes horrifically scathed.

We can do better than this.