The Myth of Normal 101

added (italics in the original).[5] An inherent expectation is a wired-in need, something that if denied interferes with our physical and psychological equilibrium, leading to poorer health outcomes—physically, mentally, and socially. Here’s an inherent expectation in action: You walk into a corner store and select a candy bar. You smile as you greet the person behind the counter and say hello. The cashier is having a bad day—perhaps nursing a toothache, a family crisis, or a crushing last-minute playoff loss by his favorite team. He looks at you sullenly (if he looks at you at all), takes your money with a monosyllabic grunt, and brusquely hands you the change. Your physiology alters: you feel tension as your body tightens, your heart rate goes up, and your breathing becomes shallower. You are irritated. Depending on your own state of mind, you might feel angry, perhaps even imagining bad things happening to the fellow. Why? According to the neuroscientist and seminal researcher Stephen Porges, one of our inherent needs is reciprocity, to be attuned with—“well met,” as the archaic greeting goes. It is what he calls a neural expectancy. Our brain may process the lack of welcoming response as an assault, a threat to safety. Our nervous system’s inherent expectation for reciprocity and connection makes sense when we consider how we developed as a species. For most of our evolutionary past, until about ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, human beings lived in small-band hunter-gatherer groups.[6] Indeed, if human existence were measured in the time span of one hour on a clock, we have inhabited newer environments only for the past six minutes or so. Liedloff described these forebears of ours as “people whose good relations are more important than their bargains.” Her direct observations of Aboriginal people in their jungle habitat conform with the vast body of research on huntergatherers as collated, for example, by the psychologist Darcia Narvaez, professor emerita at Notre Dame. We have learned that such groups held values emphasizing hospitality, sharing, generosity, and reciprocal exchange for the purpose not of personal enrichment but of connection. These values were intelligent, time-tested guidelines for mutual survival. And the traditions