The Myth of Normal 88

an automatic and compulsive concern for the emotional needs of others, while ignoring one’s own; rigid identification with social role, duty, and responsibility (which is closely related to the next point); overdriven, externally focused multitasking hyper-responsibility, based on the conviction that one must justify one’s existence by doing and giving; repression of healthy, self-protective aggression and anger; and harboring and compulsively acting out two beliefs: “I am responsible for how other people feel” and “I must never disappoint anyone.” These characteristics have nothing to do with will or conscious choice. No one wakes up in the morning and decides, “Today I’ll put the needs of the whole world foremost, disregarding my own,” or “I can’t wait to stuff down my anger and frustration and put on a happy face instead.” Nor is anyone born with such traits: if you’ve ever met a newborn infant, you know they have zero compunction about expressing their feelings, nor do they think twice before crying lest they inconvenience someone else. The reasons these habits of personality, as we might call them, develop and grow to prominence in some people are both fascinating and sobering. At root they are coping patterns, adaptations originally formed to preserve something essential and nonnegotiable. Why these features and their striking prevalence in the personalities of chronically ill people are so often overlooked—or missed entirely—goes to the heart of our theme: they are among the most normalized ways of being in this culture. Normalized how? Largely by being regarded as admirable strengths rather than potential liabilities. These dangerously self-denying traits tend to fly under our radar because they are easily conflated with their healthy analogues: compassion, honor, diligence, loving kindness, generosity, temperance, conscience, and so forth. Note that the qualities on the latter list, while perhaps superficially resembling those of the first, do not imply or require that a person overstep, ignore, or suppress who they are and what they feel and need. True compassion, for example, is an equal-opportunity