The Myth of Normal 180

but why the pain. This is the question neither the prevailing disease-based medical paradigm nor popular prejudice can possibly answer or would even think to raise. Yet without it, we can have no clue as to why this affliction of mind, body, and spirit is so rampant. To map the hard and inhospitable terrain from which addiction springs, it’s worth asking the people who have traversed it. Listening to their lived experiences leaves one with no confusion about what needs to be soothed, and why. We lack the space to chronicle all the tragic origin stories of the many individuals I interviewed for this book, from the well known to the unknown; what follows is a brief and representative sample. When the Canadian hockey legend Theoren Fleury was fourteen, his coach began sexually abusing him. “He started a routine whenever I was over—masturbate on my feet, then give a blowjob, then let me sleep.” And that was far from all, he told me. In his chaotic family of origin, with an alcoholic father, he had no one to turn to. On the contrary, he was desperate to make his economically downtrodden and emotionally dysfunctional parents happy. Years later, earning millions of dollars a year as a scrappy offensive star for the New York Rangers, he was hopelessly addicted to alcohol and cocaine. The opiate-dependent surgical specialist Bruce also lived through a childhood bereft of nurturing. “My father was not present,” he said. “I did not have a father in my life, growing up. He walked out when I was quite young, four years old. And my mother was too young to assume the duties I needed from her. My mother had me when she was sixteen, and she just was a child herself, essentially. I lived my formative years really not having any support. I lived with a lot of pain.” The world-renowned photographer Nan Goldin, who says she did drugs “most of my life,” was eleven when her older sister died by suicide at eighteen. “That was a huge defining trauma for me,” Goldin says. Defining, but not primary. “I grew up in a very neurotic family,” she recalls, understating things by some magnitude. “There was constant turmoil around my older sister . . . Some of my earliest memories were