The Hero’s Journey

Part 3  The road of trials

Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms where he must survive a succession of trials.  This the favorite phrase of the myth adventure.  It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals.  {J. Campbell  Hero with a 1,000 faces)

Campbell recognized the profound import of the human psyche’s resistance to awareness when he wrote, “Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid in the end to a restriction of consciousness.”  One of the most profound characteristics of trauma and loss is the shock and numbing of our feelings and our inability to integrate this overwhelming emotional experience into our consciousness.  Because of the suddenness  and shock, it is not possible to take it all in at one time.  It is like trying to weather a tsunami in a canoe.  I literally walked around for 10 years unable to feel any feelings.  A dead man walking.

  As I have worked with trauma survivors over the years I have come to understand that this inability to feel is not a conscious decision to deny reality.  It is the survivalist part of our brain which cannot process the emotional impact of the event all at one time.  The loss is too devastating, the impact too large.  Again, Campbell writes with keen observation:  “It becomes a boundary experience, the uttermost edge of the earth, the crisis, the Nadir, within darkness the hero discovery:  assimilates his opposite (his unsuspected self), the deepest chambers of the heart.”  Reclaiming the lost injured parts of myself was my task.

And so, here I was  at the moment of truth, on the precipice of the wound:  staring into the abyss, my deepest defenses rebelled at feeling the pain all over again. In popular parlance, “I just didn’t want to go there again.”    Denial is a very important dynamic of the trauma-grief experience. And trauma creates a special form of denial: it is called dissociation. After trauma we exist in the tension between denial and feeling.  In order to grieve, we must feel and re-experience and relive all the feelings and emotions associated with what happened.  This is healing, this is integration.  However, the problem for me as well as everyone is that when we try to reconnect with the feelings, the very attempt may in some cases trigger the trauma; feeling as if it is happening all over again, we may start having instrusive recollections, unwanted thoughts, flashbacks, and be flooded with old feelings.  This is where the unconscious begins to “leak” feelings which begin to surface.  I experienced it as playing hide and seek with myself. This is why trying to explore the unconscious  leads to resistance.  If the whole experience is dissociated, i.e., split off from awareness and hidden in deeply repressed memory files, it requires a skillful approach, and often professional help is beneficial to have someone serve as a guide, a facilitator for the journey. I certainly did. The problem in a nutshell is that the trauma aspects of the experience must be dealt with before true grief work can begin.

So the first step for me was  to at least Recognize the wound, name it, describe it, and get comfortable talking about what happened. I told my story over and over again.  Which led me to Re Cognize, which is to say, think differently; see it in a different way. Then the next step was to try to remember, I call it the step of Recollection: recall, remembering fragments initially and as work progresses more of it can be recalled and brought to conscious awareness.

This is truly the journey of trials:  old feelings, old memories, fragments, thoughts that seemingly come from nowhere.  One client talks about sorting through her dead husband’s clothing: he died suddenly while on a bike ride.  Old pictures, and memorabilia, it was like walking through a mine field: being continually blindsided.  There were many things which blindsided me.  For example, I went to a Carroll Burnett movie thinking it was a comedy and half way through her child died.  There are so many triggers:  babies, anniversaries, cemeteries. Just living makes it inevitable that there will be triggers.  With my client, each item would trigger a memory, a feeling, and then she would grieve some more.  Sorting, crying, remembering, and setting it aside and resting.  It takes time to sort and truly integrate this material.  I found keeping a grief journal to be very helpful.  I also found that my dreams helped me access the more difficult feelings by analyzing the metaphors which came in the form of stories.  My theory of dream work is that the unconscious mind works on things, problems, issues, and then forms them into scripts, stories and messages which surface.  We need to pay attention to them.  Recurring dreams are particularly significant.

I once complained to my therapist that dealing with this was like trying to overhaul an engine while trying to complete the Indianapolis 500 race.  Others I have talked with report that it can be disorganizing, uncomfortable, and difficult to do while trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy.  Grief work requires pacing, we need time to grieve, time to rest, and time to integrate the discoveries we make.  I found that no matter how hard I tried, I could not break through the brick wall of my defenses.  I learned that the wall could only be taken down one brick at a time.  I learned an important lesson, respect our defenses.  Each of us grieve at our own pace, and in our own way, depending on our tolerance for the feelings and life circumstances.

This is the mysterious relationship between suffering and transformation. Feeling our pain and reconnecting produces gains in consciousness.  Gains in consciousness mean that we will live with more awareness and insight and are less driven by unconscious impulses and feelings.  It also meant that my inability to feel was lessening.

Success at this stage will lay the foundation for work in later stages. Mourning cannot progress without accomplishing the tasks of Recognizing and Recalling. Mourning is sequential: one stage is dependent on successful resolution of the previous one.  It is deeply personal, and as we go inward we get to know ourselves and come to an understanding of our personal histories all the way back, if we have difficult histories, all that old pain must also be healed because it is inextricably linked to the trauma and also determines how we grieve.

For example, I had an abusive father who ridiculed me for crying. “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.” Feeling a deep sense of shame at any weakness made it very difficult for me to feel my feelings.  He also ridiculed me for needing, for my dependence on others.  “Real men do not cry.  Real men do not show their weakness.  Real men do not need others.”  This is the mantra of fathers raising their sons in the 1950’s.  It has left a lot of men wounded and unable to heal because of the shame of weakness, tears, and need for others.  We are deeply afraid of appearing weak and needy.  This, of course makes it hard on relationships and the cost is a loss of intimacy.

As I have worked with these varieties of wounds and explored my own responses to wounding I learned that what made healing different was the individual who was wounded. All wounded persons are unique, their situation is unique, and their response to the event is a function of their particular coping style (how we learned to deal with feelings as children) and resources uniquely available to them. If we are to heal, the wound must be addressed through careful and compassionate understanding.

Healing is truly  a discovery process, a road of trials, as we work our way through resistance, and come to terms with our strengths, areas of difficulty and resistance. By dealing with this ambivalent perspective, tension between what life really is…and the way we would like it to be leads to more realistic views of ourselves, taking responsibility for what has occurred post trauma is all a part of the transformation of consciousness: integrating lost memories, feeling painful feelings, and making sense of things. This eventually leads to a new level of understanding and acceptance and a more meaningful world view.  This is the subject of my next blog.