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.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
The inner journey
The Wasteland: lost, empty, and bereft of faith, and lost hope, in it I felt trapped, no exit! When I realized that there was no way out, that it was indeed the pathless way in the forest; that Campbell was right in defining it as the very essence of being lost. In this place I had only one way to go, instead of finding a way out I realized in a moment of clarity, I must go inward. As a psychologist I had told many clients, the solutions are always within, it was about time to follow my own advise: I had to become the wounded healer and must heal myself.
Again, I turned to Campbell: "The solution if it is to be found is inward, to the dark and unknown regions of the unconscious mind." This is what I call the dead zone, the land of repressed memories, dissociated feelings of grief and loss: a deeply fragmented self. This was where the impulses, the compulsions, the inability to trust, care and feel were being housed like a vault in the basement. I once had a client who went to get something out of a safe deposit box which belonged to her father who died. But she had lost the key; and the bank had no record of its existence because it had been opened a long time ago. She like me, had no access, no key to what had been put away a long time ago.
But we do have a key: "One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light." The inward journey begins by paying attention. The first step is to stop the noise of the inner world and notice feelings. It is Awareness that leads to awakening: pay attention to dreams, as Campbell views it, dreaming is like fishing in the vast ocean of the unconscious. Freud calls dreaming the royal road to the unconscious. By stopping my world we must pay attention to fleeting images, memories, dreams and only partially felt feelings.
Awareness brought the Recognition that I must address my wound. "The Hero's Journey begins with the call--the wound". This is always the beginning of healing and transformation. By facing our wound, we stop running, avoidance, and all the other failed defensive strategies. And when this happens, we can take the first courageous steps into the land of the lost self.
The first step happened completely by accident. Sometimes that's the only way it can happen. I was having lunch with my son and daughter, when my daughter asked me to tell the story of the family secret. Niki's death had never been talked about. I hesitated a long time, stunned, but saw the necessity and opportunity to talk about the black hole left in our family life. I told them the story of her death and how difficult it had been to handle it for both her mother and myself. It in fact led to the divorce which also amplified their own difficulties.
Then my daughter took the next daring step. "Dad can we go see where she is buried?" And so we went to the cemetery. We located the burial site; she was buried in a special area just for children. And then the healing moment: we stood at the grave site: ground zero, and held each other. I had never gone back to the grave after the funeral. It had been so many wasted years. That's a lot of running, avoidance, and repression. But with that first step the inner journey took a major step. Transformation can only happen through facing, recognizing and addressing the wound.
Again, I turned to Campbell: "The solution if it is to be found is inward, to the dark and unknown regions of the unconscious mind." This is what I call the dead zone, the land of repressed memories, dissociated feelings of grief and loss: a deeply fragmented self. This was where the impulses, the compulsions, the inability to trust, care and feel were being housed like a vault in the basement. I once had a client who went to get something out of a safe deposit box which belonged to her father who died. But she had lost the key; and the bank had no record of its existence because it had been opened a long time ago. She like me, had no access, no key to what had been put away a long time ago.
But we do have a key: "One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light." The inward journey begins by paying attention. The first step is to stop the noise of the inner world and notice feelings. It is Awareness that leads to awakening: pay attention to dreams, as Campbell views it, dreaming is like fishing in the vast ocean of the unconscious. Freud calls dreaming the royal road to the unconscious. By stopping my world we must pay attention to fleeting images, memories, dreams and only partially felt feelings.
Awareness brought the Recognition that I must address my wound. "The Hero's Journey begins with the call--the wound". This is always the beginning of healing and transformation. By facing our wound, we stop running, avoidance, and all the other failed defensive strategies. And when this happens, we can take the first courageous steps into the land of the lost self.
The first step happened completely by accident. Sometimes that's the only way it can happen. I was having lunch with my son and daughter, when my daughter asked me to tell the story of the family secret. Niki's death had never been talked about. I hesitated a long time, stunned, but saw the necessity and opportunity to talk about the black hole left in our family life. I told them the story of her death and how difficult it had been to handle it for both her mother and myself. It in fact led to the divorce which also amplified their own difficulties.
Then my daughter took the next daring step. "Dad can we go see where she is buried?" And so we went to the cemetery. We located the burial site; she was buried in a special area just for children. And then the healing moment: we stood at the grave site: ground zero, and held each other. I had never gone back to the grave after the funeral. It had been so many wasted years. That's a lot of running, avoidance, and repression. But with that first step the inner journey took a major step. Transformation can only happen through facing, recognizing and addressing the wound.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Hero's Journey: Shattered Icons
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.
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.
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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