Apr 1, 2026

You're not broken. You adapted.

What Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal reveals about leaders, burnout, and the cost of performing yourself into the ground.

By Mees Loman · Loman Leadership · Reading time: 6 minutes

I first read Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal during a period when I was doing a lot of work on myself. Not the aspirational kind — the uncomfortable kind. The kind where you start to understand why you function the way you do, and why some of the patterns that got you far are also the ones quietly costing you everything.

The book hit differently than I expected.

Maté is a physician and trauma expert, best known for his work on addiction and the mind-body connection. In The Myth of Normal, he makes a sweeping argument: most of what we call mental illness, chronic disease, and burnout is not a personal failing. It is a logical, predictable response to a culture that systematically separates people from themselves.

For anyone who works with leaders — or who is one — that argument is worth sitting with.

"Normal" is making us sick

The title is a provocation. Maté's point is that the behaviours we accept as normal in Western society — relentless productivity, emotional suppression, identity built on achievement — are a profound departure from what human beings actually need to be well.

He is not talking about extreme cases. He is talking about the everyday experience of the high-functioning professional who cannot stop working, who struggles to say no, who is excellent at taking care of everyone except themselves.

Sound familiar?

"The question is never 'what is wrong with you?' The question is always: 'what happened to you?'"

This reframe is deceptively simple. It moves the conversation from diagnosis to history. From pathology to adaptation. And for leaders especially, it opens a door that most have kept firmly shut.

You didn't develop your patterns by accident

One of Maté's most useful distinctions is between 'big-T trauma' — the dramatic, obvious events — and 'small-t trauma': the quieter, cumulative experiences of not being seen, of learning that love is conditional, of adapting yourself to fit an environment that couldn't hold all of who you were.

Small-t trauma is everywhere. And it is the engine behind most of the leadership patterns I work with.

The founder who cannot delegate — not because he doesn't trust his team, but because his sense of worth has been tied to being indispensable since childhood.

The executive who drives standards relentlessly and cannot understand why her team is exhausted — because perfectionism was the thing that kept her safe when nothing else did.

The leader who is brilliant in a room and completely alone the moment it empties.

These are not character flaws. They are adaptations. They worked once. They may still be working, in certain ways. But they come at a cost — and that cost accumulates in the body long before it shows up in a performance review.

The body keeps score

Maté's medical background gives this book a weight that purely psychological frameworks sometimes lack. He draws on decades of research to show that emotional suppression — particularly the chronic inability to say no, to feel anger, to acknowledge need — is directly correlated with physical illness.

The body does not lie. When the mind has learned to bypass certain emotions, the body finds other ways to express them.

I work with a lot of leaders who are physically fine — until they aren't. Who perform at full capacity — until they crash. Maté helps explain why that pattern is not random, and why the crash is not a surprise to anyone who knows how to look.

"Burnout is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is a sign that something has been wrong for a long time — and the body has finally run out of ways to compensate."

What this means for leadership

The implications for how we develop leaders are significant.

Most leadership development focuses on skills. Communication. Delegation. Strategic thinking. Feedback. These things matter. But Maté's framework suggests that the most important work happens one layer deeper: in the relationship a leader has with themselves.

Specifically:

A leader who cannot feel their own needs cannot accurately read the needs of others.
A leader who has learned to suppress discomfort will build a team where discomfort is also suppressed — and unaddressed.
A leader who derives their identity from performance will, consciously or not, demand the same from everyone around them.
A leader who has never learned to say no will eventually have their body say it for them.

This is not soft. This is the undercurrent that determines whether a team performs sustainably or burns through its people every eighteen months.

The way back is not a programme

Maté is careful not to reduce healing to a checklist. What he describes is closer to a reorientation — a gradual process of reconnecting with the parts of yourself that got set aside in the name of survival and success.

He calls it re-enchantment. Finding your way back to curiosity, to the body, to genuine emotion, to what actually matters to you underneath the performance.

In my work, I see this happen in different ways. Sometimes in a single session, when someone finally names something they have been circling for years. Sometimes slowly, over months of deliberate work. Sometimes in a room full of people, when a team decides to stop pretending and say what is actually true.

It is never tidy. But it is always, in my experience, the most important work a leader can do.

What I take from this book

The Myth of Normal is not a leadership book. But it might be the most important book a leader can read right now.

It reframes burnout as a message, not a malfunction. It reframes difficult patterns as adaptations, not deficiencies. And it asks a question that I think every leader eventually needs to sit with:

Who were you before you learned to perform? And what would it mean to lead from that person?

That question is not comfortable. But in my experience, it is where the most durable change begins.