The Myth of Normal 66

turn lack the confidence to insist that their intuitions and insights about themselves contribute to the process, much less guide it. Had Mee Ok’s doctors inquired along these lines when she presented her distressing symptoms, they would have learned that she had sustained two major abandonments by the end of her first year. She was born in Korea to a single mom who placed her in an orphanage when Mee Ok was six months old. At one year of age, she was adopted and brought to the United States by an evangelical couple who reared her according to the strictest fundamentalist principles. Before Mee Ok was ten, her adoptive mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Sometime in her teenage years, her father, in a fit of religious remorse, confessed to her that he had sexually abused her for much of her early childhood, from age two onward. She had completely repressed these memories, secreted them and all associated feelings—pain, terror, rage— deep beneath the surface of her awareness. As we will see later when we discuss healing, Mee Ok’s improbable recovery, veritably a deathbed resurrection, owed everything to her confronting this long-buried trove of hurt. Upon the emotional graveyard of what she could not afford to feel, Mee Ok erected an impressive edifice: a positive, can-do persona that not only kept her from experiencing her despair and impelled her to ignore her own needs, but also helped her achieve success beyond what she really believed was her due. In her job as assistant to the world-renowned professor, the grown-up Mee Ok found her work stressful and would habitually bear the tensions and pressures of everyone around her. “I was really not myself while I was there,” she said. “I was always having to operate as a more highly functioning person than I really was.” Such hyperfunctioning on top of hidden inner distress is a recurring theme among the many autoimmune patients I’ve encountered in my years of practice and teaching. Just prior to the onset of her agonizing joint inflammation, Mee Ok was in a complicated romantic partnership whose many ups and downs took a psychic toll and culminated in a wrenching breakup. All the lifelong hurt she could not allow herself to experience, all her terror of abandonment, showed up in her reactions to the loss of the relationship. It was a full-body grief