The Myth of Normal 35

years to raise them to be men. I will do anything in my power to raise them to be men.” “‘Profane,’” I repeated. “What exactly did you say?” “I used the f-word. I said, ‘Fuck your statistics.’” “Good for you,” I offered. “That probably helped extend your life.” “Well, that’s what I said to him.” Caroline laughed. “I said, ‘Fuck your statistics. I need those years to raise them to be men.’ He walked out of the room. He didn’t appreciate my language. He thought I was a crazy, vulgar woman. I’ve often wanted to look for that doctor—he has since moved to California—and tell him that my boys are now twenty-four and twenty-five. One’s in grad school at Princeton. The other one went through a difficult period, pulled himself up, and will be graduating with three degrees, on the dean’s list.” Caroline’s outburst at the unsuspecting physician was out of character. All her life she had fit the profile of the nice person who avoids confrontation. “My way was always being the caretaker, being needed, always coming to somebody’s rescue, a lot of the time to my own detriment,” she told me. “I never wanted to have conflict with anyone. And I always had to be in charge, making sure everything was okay.” Caroline had exhibited what has been called “superautonomous self-sufficiency,”[*] which means exactly what it sounds like: an exaggerated and outsize aversion to asking anything of anyone. A quick note: Nobody is born with such traits. They invariably stem from coping reactions to developmental trauma, beginning with self-abnegation in early childhood. Such suppression takes a lasting toll, a process we’ll explore more fully in chapter 7. “I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component,” the pioneering neuroscientist Candace Pert wrote in her 1997 book, Molecules of Emotion. By “psychosomatic,” Pert did not imply the modern, often derisive dismissal of disease as a neurotic figment. Instead she meant the word’s strict scientific connotation: having to do with the oneness of the human psyche (mind and spirit) and the soma (the body), a oneness she did much to measure and