Expecting the bazaar and cruel behavior we received to be the norm, not knowing that most others never experience it.

I took it because it's all I knew.

My take anyway.

In this context, I think " getting someone to accept boundary-crossing behavior as normal."
Grooming involves just that. That way, when the perp takes things overtly sexual, the target gives less or no resistance.

My mom " normalized" an innocent but...well ...wacky behavior of her own...she flossed her teeth. At the dinner table. In restaurants. Yep.
Just whipped her floss right on out and did her thing...
I was about 27 or so when mom pulled out the floss and I just...well..." Mom! Mom, that's weird! Don't floss at the table mom! Wait till you get to the car or something!"
My brother joined in... I mean, we were all laughing, including mom...and she did quit, but if we annoy her in restaurants she threatens to floss...
Anyway...

Yep. I agree with jewells and hylie. Weird behavior that you get used to and just learn to live with. I would add that "learning" to live with it means if you question it and say, "that weird" then you get punished for questioning it.

And punishment can be nagging, belittling, insulting, hitting, spanking, isolating, yelling, shaming, embarrassing (like threatening to floss at the table), threatening someone close you to, taking away necessities, or putting conditions on love and acceptance.

Pretty much when someone in a power position (parent, older sibling, Church leader, police officer, teacher) decides to approve of you when you accept their nutty behavior...it causes you to normalize their behavior because you don't get "in trouble" if you just shut up and live with it.

I was made to believe I was the weird one because I used the bathroom without permission...at home...when I was 8. I had to ask my dad if I could go and sometimes he would tell me "no, you don't need to use the bathroom. you used it an hour ago and you don't need to use it again."

If I went without asking him or after he said no, he would tell me I needed to go to the doctor to get looked at because I pee too much or he would say he wanted to watch me go to the bathroom to prove I really had to go. Rather than be punished like that and talked to over and over and over...I just asked permission every time and was grateful when he said it was okay. I not only learned to live with it...I thought every dad behaved that way.

Like Alan, I assumed everyone's dad acted like mine, and all older sisters were like mine, and that it was how all households ran.
A few did, it's true.
Most idd not, but it's not like I tok a survey of them. I was a kid, growing up, and just doing what I did---school, chores, etc.---and didn't think about big concepts like "nomral" or "usual".

When I did? Yeah, that was a shocker.

Thing is, where I grw up? Things that were "normal" included non-working dads after Big Steel collapsed---- so Dad *choosing* to be unemployed wasn't so far away from "normal" unless you knew he chose it--- Mom drinking? Who didn't? But she had an addiction....

It was those lines blurring and being crossed.... from "Okay" to "Not okay".... taking that behavior or mentality that step into the Dark Side.

In short, "Nomralizing" to me is "making normal what was abnormal" --- either b/c you don't now it's abnormal, or you do know, and make it "normal" in your head so you can survive it.

I may be totally off base, however.

I had an encounter with this the other day. I was on the phone with my daughter, who was stressing about being called a lier about her life experiences.

After talk to her about for a bit we came to a conclusion. In trying to give her the best upbringing I could, we did A LOT of things. By the time she was 8 she was the archery champion of the region. She was also collecting first place awards for equestrian medieval games for her age bracket. She competed in sword play competitions, ax throwing, and medieval cooking and camping as well as costume making. We went to several conventions a year. Some we just went to play, some we were part of the people putting on the convention, sometimes we were selling merchandise.

By the time she was 12 she was working 10 hour days on a till at the Renaissance Faire handling thousands of dollars a day in cash. By the time she was 18 she was running half of the Entrance Gate at the Faire with a crew of 12 people (several older than her) working for her.

She did not get her drivers licence until she was 18 (I could not afford the $400 class for her to get it earlier), but she can and has pulled trailers as small as 4x8 and as big as my stock trailer... 20ft? Granted I am better at parking the bigger trailer, she she hauls it just fine.

So, yeah, by the time she moved out at 22, my daughter has done more than many people do in a lifetime. She does not understand how people can go through life without this much experience while her grandmother cannot imagine how she could possibly have this much experience.

So she is having to learn how to normalize what she talks about, so people don't just dismiss her as tell falsehoods...

yadlim

In this context, I take it to mean the first thing you said. At least, that's how it resonates with me. Like when my family and I were living through the war I grew up in. Since it went on for 6 years, the rationing of gasoline and meat, the fact that our bread turned weird colors because they were adding stuff to it to make the flour go farther. In time, all of that started to seem "normal" to us.

My favorite story about this is by Julio Cortazar. In his short story called "The Southern Thruway"

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~scolas/Teaching/Reading%20and%20Class%20Notes/jcsouthern.htm

he wrote about a traffic jam outside of Paris, and exaggerated how long it went on. After months turned into years of sitting in gridlock, people forgot where they lived and where they were going, and just settled down to live in their cars right there on the freeway. Eventually, they stopped using their real last names like "Smith" and "Jones" and instead referred to families according to the brand name of the car they lived in. So John Smith became John Renault because he lived in a Renault now in the permanent traffic jam city on the freeway.

I think it was Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment who complained that "humans can get used to anything."'

Everyone has done a wonderful job of this description of normalizing... I agree with everyone... Here is a recent event that happened to my family that I think is a perfect example of this word in its context...

My daughter and I had a play date at our apartment pool we invited her friend who came with her mom and dad and 2'yr old brother. My daughter & her friend are 7.

The father was so rude and disrespectful to his little girl and his wife slashing them and ignoring their NO's and STOP's. My daughter said to him, "we have a no splashing people rule" and he said "oh really?" Like that was a shock to him, then I said "yes we do it is even on the sign beside the pool" well about 10'minutes later he splashed my daughter so hard she was coughing from getting water up her nose... And I said to him, "please don't splash my daughter, she doesn't like it"

The mother turns to me and says... He is so used to playing with boys because we where just visiting my family who have tree boys and he was running around splashing everyone! Then she says to him, see girls don't like to be splashed. Well she could see the look on my face for sure so she continues to "normalize" his behavior, she tells me, "he never learned to swim so he kicks his feet really hard on the surface of the water I don't know why he does it but my daughter does it too!" I saw her daughter swim and she did not splash people, HE was slashing on purpose with his feet acting like a shark with his hands up like a fin, he could swim perfectly normal I saw him do it!!! But she was normalizing his behavior because he had been grooming her in this manor for soooo long... He also pulled his fully clothed two year old into the hot tub which the kid was so scared to get in. And lied to his wife about it twice, I didn't pull him in he just fell, this jerk told his wife on two seperate occasions that he didn pull his son in the water when I saw him do it!!! And also the mother never asked him if the baby got pulled in... He just offered up the lie compulsively, stratigically because he was trying to normalize lying to his son and wife!!! This is what a predatorial pedofile relies on, the normalization or erratic behavior by all members of the abused child's family...!!!

Guess what... That little girl has so many issues, she lies and manipulates and is a terrible friend to my daughter. In fact my daughter decided we would not have them over any more...!!!
Which is perfect with me...!!!

So their is a little real time situation of "normalizing" that I just witnessed last Saturday...

Even though I have plenty of examples of normalizing in my own history...this one is just readily available to me as I have been trying to process what I witnessed...!!!

It sounds like this father was the one who acted like a 2 year old on this play date. Geez. No, arguments can try to "normalize" it all they want to, but it's not normal to have to supervise the ADULT in such a situation. Glaring good example.

No kidding muji he totally acted like a bad little toddler!!! So frusterating and sad to watch

Thanks all. I think I get it now.

I have spent much of my adult life abroad and in immigrant communities so that I have to worry about "normalizing." Nobody expects "normal" from a foreigner... I can just relax and let my freak flag fly.

OK, so now I wont feel bad about bringing up the Bruce Cockburn song "The Trouble with Normal (Is It Always Gets Worse)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kybkiiAKMOY

Love the "freak flag fly" comment!

If you take the math concepts, I suppose it's throwing out the positive and negatively skewed outliers so the "norm" is not affected.

Our lives are the outliers. So to normalize would be to overlook those extremes for whatever reasons just to appear -- to us or others --"normal."

That's my take on it.