Is the norm really existent?

Yesterday I planned to spend the time between a lunch and dinner appointment in the NLB reference library reading up on 2 subjects, play therapy for children and Greece mythologies (to enhance my experience when I visit this coming December).

In the end I ended up spending hours reading the views of a psychologist called David Smail after stumbling across his book. He can be considered as one of the anti-psychiatry believers who think that at best psychotherapy only works when the psychotherapist becomes a friend of the patient providing encouragement and support. He feels that society is responsible for much of the distress and neurosis amongst people.I probably need to spend many more days in the library (the book is only for reference and not for loan) to understand fully where he is coming from.

In the first section he talks about the obsesssion in individuals about the norm or perceived norm (The Myth of Normality), often indoctrinated by tv commercials and the media. For example, I can imagine what the media tells us a normal family is like; gorgeous looking couple, smart and pleasant kids (sometimes including healthy and smiling grandparents) enjoying carefree moments together, be it relishing the fragrant rice, relaxing in a beautiful apartment filled with the fragrance of the right air freshener, enjoying the smooth ride of a saloon car or airplane, or for that matter smiling into a fridge filled with the freshest meat and green. Teenagers and youths too are supposed to be active, fun loving, good looking and smart. So you have slim and porcelain skinned girls swinging their sleek shiny hair, mucho men slipping into jeans and shirts, young and good looking people having fun and the time of their life together. What if your life does not seem to be like that? But no one wants to tell others their lives are not like that because every one else's life seems so.

A lot of distress, Smail says arises when people "are afraid they appear as 'abnormal' or even 'crazy'... Many people live their life in a kind of perpectually terrified comparison with a non-existent norm". He says many of us are really "very unlike what we are supposed to be" but "unless you have a lot of courage and strong belief in yourself, you are not likely to conclude that it is the norms themselves which are wrong".

This reminds me of a woman I engaged with whilst interning at the FSC, She told me she would not share her unhappiness with her friends not even with her own sisters. In her case she does not want her siblings to know of her misery living with a man who has violent mood swings because they appear as a wholesome family to outsiders. We are always so ashamed if we fall short of the perceived "norm". Perhaps that explains the power of "normalising" which is one of the things we do when counselling. For example, we tell people who are grieving a loss that it is alright to feel so terribly sad because that is part of the normal grieving process. Believe it or not people can also be distressed because they have perception of what they should NOT be feeling.

Smail posits three laws that if understood fully would save everyone a lot of anxiety:
1)"Absolutely everybody wants to be liked (law 1)

2)Everyone feels different inside (less confident, less able, etc.) from how they infer other people to feel (law 2)

3)Few honest and courageous people who have achieved anything of real value in life do not feel a fraud much of the time (law 3)"

I got to spend many more days reading this thick book with small prints.
(By the way the NLB's Lee Kong Chian Reference Library has so many reference books which are not for loan. So no worries that you don't know what to do when you retire. You may want to buy a HDB resale flat at the Bras Basah Complex just next to the NLB. In addition, the view at the high floors of the library is superb. You can see the explanade, the flyer and the 3 tablets of the IR (like Moses' tablets haha)).