The Myth of Normal 183

creation. They differ also in the degrees of ostracization and punishment society has inflicted and continues to inflict on them. These acute differences of degree do matter, and we should not flatten or erase them. But they do not change the fact that the addiction process has certain intrinsic features known to all who live it. It spares no one, not even people at the top. That includes those whose destructive habits, in our culture’s topsy-turvy value system, are spun as “success.” Nor do these differences obviate the fact that most of us “normal” citizens bear far more resemblance than we’d be inclined to admit with those we deride or pity for their more severe or glaring dependencies. It’s not even a fine line that separates “us,” the upstanding, from “them,” the downtrodden: it’s a made-up one. Here it helps to remember the severity spectrum when it comes to trauma. All kinds of suffering, from the less obvious developmental wounds we have called small-t to the more overt big-T traumas, can cry out for addictive pain relief. Again, trauma/injury is about what happens inside us, and how those effects persist, not what happens to us. An inquiry into “Why the pain?” has to leave space for the kinds of emotional injuries that may elude conscious recall or, much more often, seem unremarkable to the person doing the remembering. It is not uncommon for people to tell themselves they enjoyed a “happy childhood.” As long as life is going reasonably well, we may lack any reason to question this narrative. When addiction is present in oneself or a loved one, some inquiry is definitely in order.[*] Looking inward with compassion, most people will be able to locate themselves somewhere on the trauma/psychological-injury spectrum. Genuine happy memories do not rule out emotional suffering, but the usual bias is to recall the former and to suppress awareness of the latter. It has been my experience that even people with the most insistent “happy childhood” narrative will, if asked the right questions, very quickly come to realize that their autobiography has been riddled with blind spots. In 2015, the writer and theater artist Stephanie Wittels Wachs lost her younger brother, Harris, to an overdose. She herself is a self-acknowledged