03/06/2025
🔄 “Back to Normal”?
Why That Phrase Fails So Many
It’s a common refrain, isn’t it?
The well-meaning wish to "get people back to normal."
We hear it in the aftermath of trauma, illness, or significant life disruption.
It’s a comforting thought, a return to a familiar, stable baseline.
But what happens when that baseline never existed?
What do you return someone to when their lived experience has been a perpetual state of instability, disadvantage, or a cycle of adversity? ❓
This is the profound and often overlooked — challenge in supporting individuals who have never known a conventional "normal."
For many, normality isn’t a lost state to be reclaimed, but an abstract concept — a privilege observed from a distance.
👶 Think of the child raised in chronic poverty, where food insecurity, unstable housing, and systemic neglect are the only constants.
✊ Or the individual navigating a lifetime of discrimination, their identity a battleground against societal prejudice.
Their "normal" is a landscape of adaptation — resilience forged in the fires of survival 🔥 — and a deep understanding that the world often operates with an inherent unfairness ⚖️.
When we offer support aimed at a return to a "normal" they’ve never experienced, we risk several pitfalls:
🚫 We might invalidate their reality, suggesting their life experience is somehow deviant or wrong.
🚫 We might impose solutions that are irrelevant or even harmful, designed for those with a pre-existing foundation that never existed for them.
🚫 We risk widening the gap between our good intentions and their lived truths.
The very idea of "getting back to normal" can feel isolating — a reminder that the starting line for some is not a place they’ve fallen from, but one they were never given.
✨ The true work lies not in restoration, but in creation.
It’s about building something new — something stable, something that offers safety, opportunity, and belonging for the very first time 🧱💛.
This requires a fundamental shift in our approach:
👂 Listening without assumptions
💡 Valuing the unique strengths developed through hardship
🔧 Tailoring support instead of applying one-size-fits-all models
🤝 Building trust and safety through consistency, not conditions
We must equip, not just rescue.
We must empower, not just prescribe.
We must create a future that isn’t a return to anything — but a beginning. 🌱
The aspiration to "get people back to normal" is born of compassion.
But true compassion means recognising that for some, the journey isn’t about returning to a forgotten past —
…it’s about bravely stepping into a future they’ve never had the chance to imagine. 🌅
💬 What does “normal” really mean — and who gets to define it?
I’d love to hear how others are navigating this in their work or life.
