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.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The Hero's Journey
Joseph Campbell saved my life! He became for me a guiding star. My journey began on a bright, sunny California Sunday morning. I was peacefully going about my life, giving a lecture at a local church when I got a frantic phone call from my wife. Niki is dead, come home! She had found our infant daughter dead in her crib. We were thrust into a darkness I had never known: shocked, empty,alone and filled with an incomprehensible rage. That was February 1971. And now I look back in wonder at how a chance encounter became the start of a terrible, wonderful journey.
One evening I happened to watch an interview between Bill Moyer and Joseph Campbell. I was captivated immediately by his warmth, humor, erudition and encompassing perspective. I found the interchange both illuminating and inspiring. That one encounter led me to a long conversation with Campbell through his books, lectures and videos. Steeping myself in in his world of myths and metaphors got me started on a healing journey into my inner world and out of the darkness. It gave me a fresh window on my bleak world. Step by step, brick by brick I picked myself up and began to rebuild.
I learned that by looking at what happened and how trauma affects people's lives,and how we struggle to regain a sense of meaning and purpose and some sense of normalcy we may understand the process of transformation and healing much better. And how this very struggle for understanding is part of the healing process. This is what I have spent my entire adult life delving into. The Hero's Journey continues to serve as a lense through which I view my experience.
The Hero's Journey as set forth by Campbell, in brief, is a life process which involves 4 stages. Stage one is the Awakening: as described by Campbell in the Hero with a 1,000 Faces, "the call rings up the curtain alsways on a mystery of the transfiguration, a moment of spiritual passsage. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals and emotional patterns no longer fit. The time for the passing of the threshod is at hand" (pg 51) I find this to be descriptive of exactly what happens in the case of trauma. Life suddenly changes and one is forced onto a totally foreign track of life. It feels like the end of the world. We cross a threshold, it is the beginning of a journey! Back then I could not even imagine continuing my life. And as I discovered, the journey required heroism: and I was not sure I had it in me.
Stage2, by crossing the threshold we find ourselves in a dark pathless forest. In folklore and mythology this is often symbolized by ogres, demons and evil spirits located in the nether regions of our unconscious. It is a very dark and forbiding place: for some, even a god forsaken place. As the result of the traumatic event we go beyond the familiar horizons of our comfortable, well ordered life, it is a place where nothing makes sense, shock and numb we wonder why this happened and why it happened to me. There is no time limit in this stage and contrary to common myth, time does not heal all wounds. It is only how we respond which determines the outcome.
Stage 3 Campbell calls The Road of Trials which leads to the potentially healing inner journey and transforming crisis. He writes, "it involves going into the deepest chambers of the heart, where the shattering of the key boundaries of our restricted consciousness are lost." I have found that this part of the journey took me many years to traverse and took a great deal of work on this road of trials. It led me to many people who shared their lives and stories and eventuated in, according to Campbell "a unifying vision of self and life."
This, then, is the healing path, begun in one shattering, shocking experience for me, or for others it may be in a series of experiences, we are thrown aqcross the threshold and boundaries of our lives into a dark and lonely place. While struggling to make sense of the experience, I wrote some poetry. One verse went like this: I stand amidst the bombed out ruins of a cathedral, my holy icons and relics are shattered, the beautiful stained glass windows no longer filter the eternal light. The despair is all encompassing, I am lost, without hope in the shrine of what was my life.
I realized eventually, extending the metaphor, that I had to rebuild, resurrect a new and different cathedral of the self with new icons, beliefs and rituals. This was the healing part of the journey, reinventing myself. I have written extensively about this in my book: Trauma Loss and Bereavement.
This brings me to the reason for this blog. Stage 4 envisioned by Campbell involves the "Commision to return to the world with a message for the restoration of our immediate village, community, or world. This is where I now find myself. I have a desire to share my discoveries and perhaps create a community of Heroes, who are in various stages of their journey and wish to share their stories and collective wisdom. I intend to share with you what I have learned about the very nature of trauma, its paralyzing and devastating effects, how we get stuck in complicated grief, and what the path of healing looks like. And most importantly, how we can transform a shattered and dead world. What this looks and feels like, is of course widely different for all who have trod the path. I will share the stories of other fellow travelers I have known and helped and from whom I have learned so much. I have found that there is healing and hope in the shared story. It is not easy, but it is possible to rebuild our shattered worlds. They never look the same, but can be somehjow more beautiful and authentic. And best of all, it is ours, one we have created out of the rubble. Much like the city of Berlin after world war II. Our consciousness becomes awakened, we feel more alive and when we are thrown across the boundary of the familiar and known into the wilderness we discover what it feels like to be really alive. Our lives can take on new meaning and purpose.
One last thought. There are many ways and reasons that people find themselves on an unexpected life adventure. Not all are caused by trauma. What is often the beginning may be experienced as a vague restlessness, ennui, emptiness and a sense of dis-ease with ourselves and our lives. People often start the journey by entering therapy because they are in psychological distress. Or it may be a life crisis precipitated by divorce, illness, or loss of a job. they have a sense that their life is not working. "It hasn't turned out the way I expected" as so many of my clients have exclaimed. These are more boradly based existential concerns. Nevertheless the quest is still about awakening, searching for meaning and breaking out of our limiting views of life and a healing of our inner fractures and unhealed wounds. Lost in the darkness, we never know how or when we will find the thread that will lead us into the light.
I will write more about this in future blogs.
One evening I happened to watch an interview between Bill Moyer and Joseph Campbell. I was captivated immediately by his warmth, humor, erudition and encompassing perspective. I found the interchange both illuminating and inspiring. That one encounter led me to a long conversation with Campbell through his books, lectures and videos. Steeping myself in in his world of myths and metaphors got me started on a healing journey into my inner world and out of the darkness. It gave me a fresh window on my bleak world. Step by step, brick by brick I picked myself up and began to rebuild.
I learned that by looking at what happened and how trauma affects people's lives,and how we struggle to regain a sense of meaning and purpose and some sense of normalcy we may understand the process of transformation and healing much better. And how this very struggle for understanding is part of the healing process. This is what I have spent my entire adult life delving into. The Hero's Journey continues to serve as a lense through which I view my experience.
The Hero's Journey as set forth by Campbell, in brief, is a life process which involves 4 stages. Stage one is the Awakening: as described by Campbell in the Hero with a 1,000 Faces, "the call rings up the curtain alsways on a mystery of the transfiguration, a moment of spiritual passsage. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals and emotional patterns no longer fit. The time for the passing of the threshod is at hand" (pg 51) I find this to be descriptive of exactly what happens in the case of trauma. Life suddenly changes and one is forced onto a totally foreign track of life. It feels like the end of the world. We cross a threshold, it is the beginning of a journey! Back then I could not even imagine continuing my life. And as I discovered, the journey required heroism: and I was not sure I had it in me.
Stage2, by crossing the threshold we find ourselves in a dark pathless forest. In folklore and mythology this is often symbolized by ogres, demons and evil spirits located in the nether regions of our unconscious. It is a very dark and forbiding place: for some, even a god forsaken place. As the result of the traumatic event we go beyond the familiar horizons of our comfortable, well ordered life, it is a place where nothing makes sense, shock and numb we wonder why this happened and why it happened to me. There is no time limit in this stage and contrary to common myth, time does not heal all wounds. It is only how we respond which determines the outcome.
Stage 3 Campbell calls The Road of Trials which leads to the potentially healing inner journey and transforming crisis. He writes, "it involves going into the deepest chambers of the heart, where the shattering of the key boundaries of our restricted consciousness are lost." I have found that this part of the journey took me many years to traverse and took a great deal of work on this road of trials. It led me to many people who shared their lives and stories and eventuated in, according to Campbell "a unifying vision of self and life."
This, then, is the healing path, begun in one shattering, shocking experience for me, or for others it may be in a series of experiences, we are thrown aqcross the threshold and boundaries of our lives into a dark and lonely place. While struggling to make sense of the experience, I wrote some poetry. One verse went like this: I stand amidst the bombed out ruins of a cathedral, my holy icons and relics are shattered, the beautiful stained glass windows no longer filter the eternal light. The despair is all encompassing, I am lost, without hope in the shrine of what was my life.
I realized eventually, extending the metaphor, that I had to rebuild, resurrect a new and different cathedral of the self with new icons, beliefs and rituals. This was the healing part of the journey, reinventing myself. I have written extensively about this in my book: Trauma Loss and Bereavement.
This brings me to the reason for this blog. Stage 4 envisioned by Campbell involves the "Commision to return to the world with a message for the restoration of our immediate village, community, or world. This is where I now find myself. I have a desire to share my discoveries and perhaps create a community of Heroes, who are in various stages of their journey and wish to share their stories and collective wisdom. I intend to share with you what I have learned about the very nature of trauma, its paralyzing and devastating effects, how we get stuck in complicated grief, and what the path of healing looks like. And most importantly, how we can transform a shattered and dead world. What this looks and feels like, is of course widely different for all who have trod the path. I will share the stories of other fellow travelers I have known and helped and from whom I have learned so much. I have found that there is healing and hope in the shared story. It is not easy, but it is possible to rebuild our shattered worlds. They never look the same, but can be somehjow more beautiful and authentic. And best of all, it is ours, one we have created out of the rubble. Much like the city of Berlin after world war II. Our consciousness becomes awakened, we feel more alive and when we are thrown across the boundary of the familiar and known into the wilderness we discover what it feels like to be really alive. Our lives can take on new meaning and purpose.
One last thought. There are many ways and reasons that people find themselves on an unexpected life adventure. Not all are caused by trauma. What is often the beginning may be experienced as a vague restlessness, ennui, emptiness and a sense of dis-ease with ourselves and our lives. People often start the journey by entering therapy because they are in psychological distress. Or it may be a life crisis precipitated by divorce, illness, or loss of a job. they have a sense that their life is not working. "It hasn't turned out the way I expected" as so many of my clients have exclaimed. These are more boradly based existential concerns. Nevertheless the quest is still about awakening, searching for meaning and breaking out of our limiting views of life and a healing of our inner fractures and unhealed wounds. Lost in the darkness, we never know how or when we will find the thread that will lead us into the light.
I will write more about this in future blogs.
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