I wonder, now, why in the midst of my shattered life I was drawn to something so esoteric as mythology? What possible connection could there be between mythology and trauma? Looking back through the lense of my history and life experience, it seems that somehow, intuitively, the Hero's Journey resonated unconsciously with my experience of desolation, hopelessness and despair. Campbell wrote: "For those in whom local mythlogy still works, there is an experience of accord with the social order and of the harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work, or if working produce deviant effects--there follows inevitably a sense of both dissociation from the local social nexus and quest within and without for life--meaning. When this occurs a point of no return is reached. The result is a spiritual disaster which is symbolized in the "Grail Legend" as the wasteland: a landscape of spiritual death." (Creative Mythology)
He was speaking directly to me! In this wasteland, I realized I felt totally alone, empty, helpless, hopeless and alienated. My world seemed no longer just, predictable, controllable, or meaningful. The benevolent, well ordered world controlled by an Omnipotent, All Knowing, and Loving God had turned on me that Sunny, Sunday morning. It had gone malevolent. Reeling from shock, numb, and confused because of what I experienced as the Ultimate Betrayal, I staggered through the days to come: my wife and I managed the funeral, an incredibly small lwhite box lowered into the ground. And then I went back to work. Life forever changed, my compass broken, I wandered in a bleak wilderness unable to fathom what happened: wondering, how to make sense of a seemingly random, vicious, meaningless attack on my family? Again, Campbell described the death of my faith: "A dead or sluggish faith, without ever having abandoned it, we no longer feel it efficaciously in our lives." (Creative Mythology)
As time passed my suffering flattened out, I became a driven robot. I worked long hours to distract, dissociate and distance myself from my feelings and tried to regain a sense of control and competence. At least I could work and make money, spending it faster than I could make it, however. Disconnecting from feelings and frenetic activity are typical responses to trauma: This is often where addictions and thrill seeking behaviors are born: "deviant effects." At least my brain was functioning and as is typical of me I stayed in my head and intellectualized. I began to read as a way of trying to make sense of it all. I even studied the suffering of others and became a trauma expert. I even wrote a book about it!
I saw through the window of other trauma survivors that suffering is the common bond and Wasteland a powerful metaphor. As I watched others reeling from one type of disaster or another on TV talking about what happened. We all seemed to ask the same questions. Why? And why did this happen to me?
Trauma does this, it shatters the foundations, the assumptions which bind our individual and collective experience, and are the web of meaning which unify our life together: that make sense of our lives. Again, perceptively, Campbell says that the 4 functions of mythology are (1) to awaken us to the mystery of llife, (2) to hold a mirror up to nature and interpret it: cosmology, (3) to establish a moral order to make life together possible, and (4) the most vital and critical function of mythology is to "foster a centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity, an accord with himself, his culture and his universe." (Creative Mythology)
Making sense of what happened, is the first order of business in coping with trauma. Again, he spoke to me across time and space: "The only true wisdom lives far from mankind out in the great loneliness, and can only be reached through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others." Victor Frankl a concentration camp survivor, wrote: "if we can find a why, we can find a how."
Mythology, then, is "the literature of the spirit." From the stories of legend we see clues, signposts in the land of suffering. For Campbell, "suffering is the principle theme of classic mythology. The secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed. I realized that I must embrace my suffering instead of running from it. In order to rebuild my life, I realized needed to create a new cathedral of belief, new icons, it must be mine, it must arise from my own experience, grounded in the lessons of suffering. With an awakened consciousness I discovered that I must find away to reintegrate my shattered beliefs, my disconnected feelings, my life needed to get back on track. I must find, I realized, a way to bring life to the wasteland. It must begin by sowing seeds of hope and learn to care and believe again. But in order to do this I needed to go through a process of rebuilding, and restoration. This meant I had to grieve what was lost. What I have discovered in the ensuing years is what the path of restoration, healing, andd transformation looks like. More about this next time.
