Heroics

Heroics
By Gary Reece

Watching the 2012 Olympics from London inundated all of us with the epic drama
of individuals performing amazing fetes of  athleticism, and countries celebrating the achievement of their athletes represented by their number of medals.  It is easy to get caught up and  identify with the “ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat.” To strive for something with a single mindedness all of your life and then put it on the line with the whole world watching:is truly engaging.  It all comes together, supreme focus of heart, mind, body, and spirit in one performance.  We saw a plethora of gold medals, and heard national anthems; for a two week period we vicariously participated in the pageantry and theater of heroics.  It was all  heightened by the slickness of the telecasts and the production of events to fit into prime time.  There was a compelling narrative telling the stories of athletes like Oscar the double amputee competing with able bodied runners, or a lone woman from a Muslim country competing for the first time.  Or barefoot Kenyans running in the Marathon.  It appealed to our emotions and kept us tuned in to the next impossible scene.  And then it was over.  Television became kind of flat and ordinary agaln, back to real life.

This contrast got me thinking about the whole idea of heroics and how we worship the spectacular, and celebrate extraordinary individuals doing amazing, unusual things.  Things we can never do.  We raise them to levels of adulation and heap huge amounts of money upon them. The term Hero is used  so casually and we are quick to anoint someone as the hero de jur.

This is  the point  I wish to make, there is a level of heroism that is seldom seen or  acknowledged  of individuals doing things not on camera.  Oh we see a story occasionally about another soldier coming home with devastating injuries and we on the anniversary of 911 parade our heroes.  But, I wondered if perhaps we have been seduced by the glitz and glamour of high production values and TV ratings.

Is it possible, I wondered that there is a theater of heroics all around us, but we just are not aware of it, that heroism can be found in the way ordinary people face extraordinary circumstances?   That in fact, perhaps our central calling, is to raise our own  lives a level of heroism, where we make decisions, find something worth living for and elevate our lives to a level of significance which brings occasional joy.  I wondered how many of us are doing things to earn the feeling of heroism?  The kind of heroism, I envision takes place on the boundary, on the edge of life where there are no gold medals but instead what is at stake is our mortality.  The way we face up to challenges and trauma certainly calls for courage.  This, for me, has a greater resonance and ring of authenticity.  For example.

One of the most common but overlooked traumatic events which affects literally thousands of Americans everyday takes place behind closed doors and is given in muted tones.  What?  A trauma that literally affects thousands of families every day and the perpetrators are getting away with it?  And it’s legal?  What is this scourge?  Call Eye Witness News, breaking news!   It is the conversation that begins in soft and measured tones.  It happens daily, a family is told their child has Leukemia, or your child has a rare, unpronounceable heart disorder.  In my case it was a conversation I had with my doctor, “Gary, we found something, its going to have to come out.”  The pronouncement had the impact of a sledge hammer.  Stunned, too overwhelmed to even think rationally, to formulate a question, I let him talk as the whirlwind spun my mind into dark, catastrophic scenarios.  I hear words like surgery, tests, x rays, CT scans, blood tests, all the indignities of being dehumanized and processed through encounters with cool, professional medical technicians who have seen it all before.

When I got home, my mind cleared and a quote came to me, from Ernest Becker, “The prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind.  The fear of death haunts the human  animal.”  It certainly does!  It changes everything in a moment, we are not always aware of our having to die,  in fact most of us see it as a theoretical possibility, an abstraction, but when the realization breaks through in the boundary experiences we are thrust into, “we see the world differently.”

The psychological impact of these sorts of encounters leave people feeling stripped of their humanity, vulnerable, shocked, terrified, confused, lost and so very alone: singled out from the herd.  First protest, “its not fair! Why me?“ Then denial, then terror and feelings of helplessness  followed by despair. The dawning dread often blooms into shock  when we are given an unfavorable diagnosis by our physician.

When it sinks in, it is the realization of our not being able to preserve our lives, a sense of our helplessness and futility of our fate which exposes us to naked anxiety and despair. Alone, feeling unsafe and betrayed by my body, I stoically accepted what must be done and submitted to the procedures.

When my doctor told me I had to have surgery because I had stage one  Colon Cancer, I felt like I had been jerked out of the safety of my little boat that I had been paddling around in so sublimely unaware of the dangers lurking within, taking for granted so many of life’s pleasant offerings,  like we all do.  

These existential moments of crisis which threaten our very lives, make us acutely aware of our fragility, our mortality, vulnerability, and dependency.  Seeking to regain control and manage my terror, I engaged in a flurry of activity, got things done, got my Will in order, talked with my children, and did what the doctor ordered.  This was 5 years ago, and I  to my amazement, survived and got on with my life.

I was lucky, the surgery was successful, and I am now cancer free, but in the meantime I had another conversation two years later. This time it was about a bone infection in  my foot due to diabetes.  This conversation was a “to be or not to be talk.”  I could have my left foot amputated or die of slow blood poisoning. I put the decision off for two days.  Three years later, after months in a wheel chair, walker, and being fitted for a prosthesis, I am back to normal.  (Well, some would argue that I have never been normal.)

What have I learned?  Life is precious, I am fragile, I have good friends, and my family is there for me.  I decided I was working myself to death, and so I retired.  I made many lifestyle changes.  I exercise daily, lost 50 pounds eat well and started doing some things I’ve always wanted to do, like writing.  I stopped working myself to death and retired.  I spend my days going to the gym and last year traveled with my son to Yellowstone and took lots of pictures.  I have also gone to Sedona, and camped with my grandkids at Big Sur.  I take great joy in my hobby of Bonsai and created a Japanese meditation garden for myself.

I now see the theater of heroics differently.  I don’t give much thought to the spectacular, celebrity driven, entertainment created heroes.  I see these as contrived  and view them as failed heroics.  My hero theater is everyday life.  This is where I see the human spirit ennobled by small acts of love and nameless acts of transcendence.  There is a man at the gym who every day brings his son in a wheel chair--he has cerebral palsy.  He patiently helps him get on an exercise machine, helps him move the weights, and then goes on to the next machine.  There is a man who comes everyday in a walker and gets on and off the machines by himself.  He has ALS.  Look around, every person is a story, some may be walking right by their opportunity for heroism, they are just not aware, their lives pass before their very eyes without  them ever seeing the significance of their hero drama.

This, for me is the heroics of everyday life.  It is people saying yes to life, to their circumstances and confronting their mortality, facing it and finding a way to live in spite of it.  These people redefined heroics for me.  I would not have gotten through my ordeal without my good friend Jack carrying my wheel chair up and down the stairs, loading me into his  car, having me over for dinner on Christmas Eve and taking me to the movies.  Or my son and daughter stopping their lives to come and be with me.

And now the next conversation has already taken place.  My daughter Michele has been talking with her doctors and will be having surgery in September. She is already discovering the miracle of friends lining up to help.   This blog is for her.

Life on the edge is terrifying, we are so very mortal.  It can happen so suddenly and capriciously, to get jerked out of our comfortable boat, oblivious to the dangers all about us.  This is the theater of heroics.  Its not about gold or celebrity, these are distractions, they seek to entertain, distract and keep our eyes diverted from what is going on all around us just below the level of our consciousness.  The skull is always present at the banquet, so says William James, and I say all we can do is look it in the eye and smile.

The Legacy of Trauma: Unhealed wounds

The Legacy of Trauma:  Unhealed Wounds
By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

We have witnessed another large scale traumatic event which in its concentric circles of victimization will traumatize not only individuals, but an entire community.  Aurora Colorado gets added to the list of unbelievably tragic events:  Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, 911, Tsunami, all are recognizable by just a word or letters.  What is not understood is that those who were the first responders also are impacted because they are “tough, highly trained professionals just doing their jobs.”  First responders after all of the events cited above have higher levels of addiction, depression, suicide, and failed marriages than ordinary citizens.  Why?  Because of the seldom recognized  and little known reason that they are terribly affected by what they do.

They are more vulnerable to trauma effects than the other victims because they are exposed to a high level of blood, horror, and devastating wounds they are expected to cope with.  We call them heroes, and they are, but that appellation does not immunized them from what they experience in the trauma scene.  They will be haunted by what they saw, smelled, touched, and waded through in their initial response.  They as well as all other victims are endanger of ending up with unhealed wounds.  The legacy of incomprehensible terrorizing, horrifying violent attacks against our humanity, communities and collective psyches is the very real danger of lasting and crippling wounds.  The first responders I have worked with are also in danger because of a culture of machismo which leads them to believe they should be “strong and invincible” unaffected by the events because to feel and be hurt by what they have participated in would leave them feeling like the rest of us: vulnerable and fragile, so they say they are “fine” and function right through the pain and horror.  It is only later that they are not fine.

The risk of these horrific, violent kinds of trauma, is that all affected become stuck, or frozen in time. An unhealed wound is by definition a failure or distortion of  the tasks of mourning and healing of psychic wounds due to trauma.  This failure to grieve a loss, this failed resolution can happen at any stage in the recovery process.  Another risk is secondary trauma, which can be attributed to insensitive media members violating the privacy of victims in their race to cover the event.

Recovery involves essentially 4 phases.  The first stage is Recognition.  The primary symptom of being stuck in this stage is either numbness or a total absence of feeling.  This is the residual of shock with feelings of unreality:  victims often remark that it felt “surreal, as if it wasn’t happening.” This is because the event is too overwhelming:  our psychological defenses cannot process that level of feelings all at once.Trauma by definition is an overwhelming experience that renders us shocked and helpless.

If healing is to take place it must be Recognized and the victim must find a way to work through denial and numbing.  This cannot be done all at once or merely a superficial, Yeah, it happened and I moved on.  This is still denial.  The worse the trauma the longer it will take to begin to feel and process what happened.  The risk at this stage is to our ability to feel anything, to  remain in a state of emotional deadness.  At one event I participated in, I did a critical incident debriefing  with a team of first responders to a plane crash at an airport.  One of the responders recounted that he couldn’t get the smell of the burned bodies off his skin and found himself taking a dozen showers.  Others reported similar experiences and found it helpful to talk about it together.

It should be stated that all of our reactions to unspeakably  high levels of violence are normal reactions  to abnormal situations.  This leads us to the second stage of mourning:  Recall, remembering.  This is when the very appropriate feelings of sadness, rage, emptiness, horror, confusion, regret, guilt, and failure begin to surface.  It is not uncommon for individuals to get stuck at this stage.  I have talked to individuals who walked around for years after the event stuck in rage.  They just can’t get past it.  Others become perpetually sad, their grief is worn like a second garment.  It becomes a part of their every waking moment.

Remembering and recall are critical to recovery because without them their can be no healing.  In order to heal we must be able to remember what happened, but not only remember but to recall and experience the feelings associated with the traumatic losses and residual effects.  This is what it means to grieve.  To permit ourselves to acknowledge the loss in its stark reality and work through all the difficult feelings.

This sets the stage for the next step.  Reconciliation.  What I mean by this is to actively work through the entire event and make sense of it by dealing with all the conflicting feelings and ways in which the event shatters our  beliefs and assumptions.  These events are horrific and shatter our view that life is orderly, just, safe, and meaningful.  When an insane person walks into a theater and begins shooting, this violates all of our assumptions about life and shakes our foundations.  We don’t feel safe, we fear for other acts of violence, we realize our vulnerability and go into a frenzy of trying to make ourselves and communities safe from random acts of violence and realize that we can’t because it keeps happening.

There is no timetable for mourning.  The myth that time heals all wounds is just that, a myth.  We all deal with loss in our own individual ways and each person experienced the event uniquely.  And because of this the task of rebuilding and reattaching is done at an individual’s own pace depending on how they were affected, what was lost, and their own resilience and community resources.  And it must be said that recovery depends in large part on the quality of the recovery environment.

In a community wide event, the entire community must come together and mourn collectively and be aware of the risks of mass tragedies.  Because we exist in community and our attachments to that community are what make us human it is critical that community leaders recognize the power of community in healing and that individuals not try to heal alone.  It is always inspiring to me to see the impromptu memorials which sprout up as if by magic at the site of the tragedy.  Rituals can be powerful ways to collectively mourn.

There are many signs of unhealed wounds.  Some things to watch out for are:

1)  A tendency to be hyper sensitive or to over react to anything having to do with the event.

2)  Restlessness or inability to relax and the need to be compulsively busy.

3)  Fear of recurrence and feelings of vulnerability.

4)  The tendency to over idealize the dead and enshrine them, remember they were human just lie us.

5)  Rigid, compulsive, ritualistic behavior that takes over your life.

6)  Persistent thoughts and preoccupation with elements of the loss.

7)  Blocked emotions,  Inability to feel or a constricted range of emotion.

8)  Inability to talk about anything related to the loss/avoidance.

9)  Relationships marked by fear of intimacy and fear of future disappointment.

10)  A pattern of self-destructive behavior or risk taking.

11)  Development of reliance on substances or abuse of medication.

12)  Chronic experience of numbness, alienation and isolation.

13)  Chronic anger, depression, irritability, intolerance.

14)  Total absence of mourning.  Acting as if nothing happened.

15)  There is a very long list of bodily symptoms:  insomnia, weight loss,
        anxiety,  and stress related illnesses.

The question I am most frequently asked is, “but why do we have to dwell on it?”   “Why don’t we just put it behind us and move on?”

Answer:  Avoidance leads to further complications and unhealed wounds.  Grieving is hard work, but necessary to restore our broken relationships, shattered communities, and wounded minds and souls.  We heal through the process of courageously facing, exploring, feeling, and talking with others.  We make sense of what has happened, face the insanity and meaninglessness of horrific violence and embrace our humanity.  In so doing we affirm the power of love and healing in our relationships with each other.

Trauma: Hidden Epidemic

Trauma:  Hidden Epidemic
By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

     Loss, disappointment, failure and grief are normal and natural accompaniments to the human experience.   Bereavement, the response we have to grief and loss is also familiar to most of us. However common loss is, few of us have learned how to deal with it well. There are many types of loss. There are losses that occur due to normal passages in life, changing jobs, losing jobs, divorces, children leaving home, aging etc.  These also leave scars and contribute to the cumulative effect of life stress.  With each primary loss there are also secondary losses.
      Some losses are the unavoidable results of the human life cycle.  To live is to experience loss.  Most losses are survivable and individuals move through them and restore balance to their lives.  It is estimated by one expert that there are approximately 2 million deaths a year in which 8 to 10 people are affected.  This means that there are as many as 16-20 million new mourners every year.  This expert also notes that at least 1/3 of these individuals will suffer the consequences of complicated mourning, or in other words fail to fully recover from the loss.
      There is another class of loss, however, which presents even greater risks and challenges: Traumatic Loss. In the past decade we have experienced an amazing number  of catastrophes. These catastrophic events have left survivors by the millions with traumatic effects from which they might never recover.  Several come to mind.  We can start with 911, then in random order others spring to mind, Oklahoma City, Colombine, Katrina Hurricane, Joplin Missouri tornado, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and Haiti earthquake.  Then add wars and civil unrest to the discussion:  the Mid East events: Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the genocide in Africa and global terrorism.
This is what I believe constitutes the hidden epidemic, with the epidemic comes its hidden victims.   I think it is because perhaps we don’t think of these as traumatizing events because they are so ordinary, frequent,  and on such a massive scale.  But think of the definition of Trauma.  DSM IV “The person develops characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor  involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury or other threats to one’s physical integrity or witnessing an event that involves death, injury or a threat to another person or one’s family or close associates. And the person’s response must involve intense fear, helplessness or horror.  To put it more succinctly,  it is an overwhelming event producing helplessness and terror.  These events are now serial and complex which compounds the effect.
     Clearly all of these events fit the definition, and then add to the list all of the children living in refugee camps, and all of our returning veterans who have experienced events way beyond the definition of trauma and we have an epidemic of unprecedented proportions.  We are in danger of having a whole generation of  victims of severe trauma.
     This is the new age, the new reality affecting our consciousness and perhaps blunting our sensitivities. Can it be possible that through the process of unconscious accommodation that we have become desensitized?   Is this the new normal?
     While the actual experiences of trauma and mourning and its inherent demands have not changed over time, what has changed is the context in which they now occur.  This changed environment is charged with the potential for complicated grief and mourning: unhealed wounds.  The reason for this is quite simple; conditions creating complicated mourning have become more prevalent and wide spread.  Unnatural and violent death is now occurring with less of a social context in which it can be integrated.  The social conditions under which we exist are characterized by increased violence, accidents, terrorism, disaster, holocausts, plane crashes and natural disasters.   The result is victims living side by side, unaware of their wounds. We live in anonymous neighborhoods. Our whole social milieu and dynamic has changed.  Indifference to violence and increased homicide rates in all of our urban areas might reflect this new malaise.        The fort Hood rampage is symptomatic of this unseen trauma effect.
     The loss of the extended family, single parent families, anonymous neighborhoods, and urbanization result in the loss of the experience of community.  Add to this the loss of mental health resources, and the result is more wounded people with fewer resources and opportunities to successfully transition life’s many challenges.
     Lack of resources, lack of awareness, lack of community, and a lack of knowledge regarding the potential harm of living with unhealed wounds leaves many people accommodating to their wounds and living with addictions, depression, fractured personalities, failed relationships, physical health problems, self-destructive behavior, suicide, violence, child abuse and unfulfilled potential.
     I have devoted my entire career as a psychologist to studying and treating trauma and bereavement.  I have experienced many different forms of traumatic loss and participated in many workshops and community disaster responses.  I have also worked with hundreds of victims of trauma.  What I am left with is the awareness of the challenge of raising community awareness, educating individuals to their condition and trying to create opportunities for addressing their wounds.
     One thing I have discovered  in my career is the certainty that it is the quality of the recovery environment which in the long term determines the outcome of recovery. If it embodies the necessary conditions for healing then the outcome is much more favorable.  These conditions are found in the best forms of human community.  Communities bound together by compassion, empathy, intimacy, and trust: and they must also be intentional and bound together by commitment to common values.
     One recent experience led me to understand and appreciate the role a Covenantal Community can play in the healing of persons.  I was called by the Rector of local Church to see if there was anything I could do to help them deal with the sudden loss of two of their most loved members due to sudden death.  I consulted with the Rector and we planned an experience to help the entire community deal with their loss. We gathered in the fellowship hall; shared a meal, and I talked about loss and bereavement and I encouraged them to talk about what they were experiencing.  It was a good time of feelings being expressed, stories told, and sharing of wounds.  Following this experience we went into the sanctuary and took communion.  After the experience, the Rector and I reviewed our experience together.  She stated, “This was the most seamless expression I have ever had of what the original church must have been like.”  That and other experiences like it left me with the conviction that these kinds of shared experience present a wonderful opportunity by the very nature of their structure, values, and founding purpose to be an intentional healing community. At times like this I am  reminded of a quote by Scott Peck:  “It is only in and through community that the world will be saved.”
I will write more about complicated bereavement and PTSD in my next blog.  For those interested you can contact me through my e mail:  gwrphd@verizon.net.  My book:  Trauma  Loss and Bereavement is available by contacting me.

Creative Mythology: The healing path

The Hero’s Journey:  Creative Mythology, the healing path

“The mythogenic zone today is the individual with his own interior life, communicating through this art with those out there.”  (Joseph Campbell-Creative mythology)

I was sitting and watching the basketball playoffs and was channel surfing during a commercial and there they were again, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers talking.  It was a conversation that took place 30 years ago.  I sat transfixed again, still resonating.  Campbell, “We are still myth makers, our existence is founded on metaphors.  Without them we have nothing. Moyers, “What do you mean nothing?” Campbell, “Metaphors are how we make sense out of things, they are what bind us together.  Metaphors through mythology bind our communities together historically.  Yet every generation needs to create new metaphors.  It is up to the individual because, “In our present world environment of the intermingling religious communities, nationalities, and races, social orders and economies, there is no actual community in depth anywhere . . . . It has become a deranged, demythologized world. (p 91)
Here we are immersed in a world of failed mythologies.  And the hero is standing amidst the ruins asking the most pressing question.  Why? And why me?
Bewildered, shocked, lost, the internal compass broken, the landscape bleak and meaningless, a post apocalyptic world.  Recently I went to see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot for the 3rd time.  It opens on a barren stage, two actors in ragged clothing, one speaks hauntingly, “There is nothing to be done.”  And then to defend against this realization they manically run around trying to find some meaning in order to keep them from going insane or killing themselves while waiting.
In order to live we must find a way to make sense of what happens to us.  We must have a  meaning frame which gives us a sense of significance purpose and a reason to live.  From the first campfire, man has sat and told stories that tried to place him in some context of meaning amongst the vast, frightening, mysterious world.  He created language and painted on the walls of his caves and told stories.
It is imperative that we make sense, find significance and purpose.  If the old myths do not work, then we must create new metaphors which are worthy of commitment and passion.  It is essential to our healing.
I found the most difficult part of my journey to be allowing myself to believe in anything and to care about anything.  Making sense of what happened and finding a way to reconcile the old with my current experience was challenging.  I found that a life without faith and purpose is a life  of despair and meaninglessness.  I often joked about Camus’ Sisyphus, I was doing a lot of boulder rolling.  The cynical laugh as I embraced the absurdity and randomness of my life.
In my struggles I found a book written by James Fowler which I discovered in 1999 (I date books when I buy them).  He writes in his book Stages of Faith: “Only with the death of god can we experience a new and more adequate one to emerge.  Thus substantive doubt is a part of the life of faith.”  He writes very perceptively, “the opposite of faith is not doubt but Nihilism.  Nihilism is the inability to imagine any transcendent environment and the despair about the possibility of meaning.”
Despair is hard to live with.  I wandered around  like this with my dead gods and empty world for 10 years.  Gradually the fog lifted as I read and continued searching.  I began to see that I needed to build a new world.  One that I could care about, invest in and believe.  Curiously enough, my awakening came one morning when I awoke and looked up at my bedroom ceiling.  I saw garish orange, yellow, and avocado colored flowers. (very 70’s) I realized how much I hated them, I jumped out of bed and went to the hardware store. Long story made short, I spent the next 5 years restoring my old house--built in 1916.  By rebuilding my house I was metaphorically rebuilding my life.  I took charge,  made decisions about what I liked and what really made me comfortable.  I empowered myself, I began to care about things, my things.  I took an interest in landscaping and plants.  This project also restored my relationship with my son and daughter.
All the while I was doing this I maintained a very important relationship with my lifelong, great friend who continually fed and nurtured my soul and intellect with reading suggestions.  This gave me direction and new language for old problems.  He recently shared his journey when he published his book:  Just another Buddhist Christian.  Through his friendship, reading and therapy I was able to restore my shattered life with a new and more coherent narrative.
The healing path led inward to old wounds, and lost faith, dead gods, and a world that appeared haphazard and random.  I had to make sense of it all and reconcile my feelings and shattered beliefs.  And now I continue evolving as I live in the creative mythogenic zone and share the emerging metaphors of faith, and try to create a community of searchers:  still camped around our fires around the world.  Fowler calls it Good Faith.  It is characterized by trust and loyalty--a covenantal community of companions bound by our shared trust in and loyalty to transcendent centers of value and power.  Faith in spite of death and meaninglessness.  It is something to do while waiting and in the waiting we tell each other stories as we travel the infinite inner horizons of our lives: leaving our marks and drawings on the walls.

This ends my four part series on the Hero’s Journey.  In the future I will continue writing and I will put my writings on a web page.  I will continue writing about trauma and healing as well as all the other things which I find fascinating in the world of psychology, mythology and human behavior.  Some of the writings will be short essays and I will soon publish a longer piece on Faith and Crisis.  I hope to hear from fellow travelers and enter into interesting conversations as we create a community of mutual concerns.  Keep your camp fires burning!  Shine a light in the darkness.

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.

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.

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.