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Thought of the Week Archives
September 2000
September 4, 2000
There is one more reason why it is believed that it is easy to learn
the art of living. This reason, in contrast to the previous one, is deeply
unconscious. It lies in the belief that man is not important, or to put
it differently, that living is not important. This belief must necessarily
be unconscious because it contradicts the prevailing and generally accepted
ideology of the importance of human life. It is not generally notice that
this ideology covers the fact that man has become an adjunct to the machine,
a part of it which cannot (yet) be replaced by a mechanical part, and
that he does not rule the machine, but it and the whole economic system
rule him. That he is important as a cog that is necessary for the functioning
of the whole but not as an alive, rich, productive human being; that he
has become a commodity whose value lies in his saleability. He is to function
well and has to be alive and satisfied to the degree and in the kind that
is necessary for his functioning. Indeed when "functioning well" has replaced
"being well," why should it be worth making an effort to learn "the art
of living."
- Erich Fromm
- from an unpublished paper, The Essential Fromm (p 18-19)
September 11
In gauging the veracity of a call, using the terms "true calling" and
"false calling" is a more useful criterion for discernment than the more
common "higher" and "lower" callings. These latter terms, so deeply brined
in religious overtones, suggest that a true calling emanates from the
higher place and a false one from a lower place, and this is an illusion
and a mistake.... Calls emerge as readily from the ground as from the
sky, as much from the exhortations of the common life as from our spiritual
ideals. Dreams and symptoms and hidden passions -- those fountainheads
of our callings -- all grow in the dark, and dark nights of the soul are
just as instructive as days of wine and roses, if not more so.
...
Attempts to divide ourselves into divine [the call is from or of God]
and not divine break us apart. Better for our overall composure to focus
on whether a particular call has integrity or not, whether it makes us
feel more or less authentic, more or less connected to ourselves and others,
more or less right, not morally but intuitively. Better to ask whether
a call will give us a feeling of aliveness, which, as mythologist Joseph
Campbell argued, is more important than even meaning for people to experience.
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life," Campbell
explained in The Power of Myth. "I don't think that's what we're really
seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...of
the rapture of being alive."
- Gregg Levoy
Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (p. 39)
September 18
Editor's Note: I am studying the relationships between narrative
therapy and the Heroic Journey and am reading material on treatment for
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This excerpt by Tom Williams, Director
of the Post-Trauma Treatment Center in Aurora, Colorado, suggests to me
that there are interesting parallels between cognitive restructuring in
PTSD treatment and the Journey, especially the call.
Cognitive Restructuring
Survivors of trauma tend to remember the traumatic situation in an
unchanged way; their initial perception of the event is the way they continue
to view it, as if the traumatic event were frozen in their memories. The
healing process involves thawing those memories and looking at them realistically.
Because the memories have a very negative focus, the goal of cognitive
restructuring is simply to look at the original trauma in a different
light.
For example, a SEAL (Navy special warfare teams who are highly trained
to work behind enemy lines) whom I was treating was the assassin for his
SEAL team; he was an excellent shot. He called himself a "murderer." In
discussing the concept of a murderer" with him, I suggested that in fact
he was a "killer," a less pejorative and more accurate term. What he was
doing was not illegal and was in fact not only condoned but ordered by
his seniors. It was a major breakthrough in therapy when he started to
call himself simply a "killer" instead of a "murderer."
The first step a client seems to go through in cognitive restructuring
is one of confusion. That is a very positive sign that he or she is beginning
to doubt the original perceptions of the situation and is realizing that
perhaps the trauma has other aspects that have been ignored, forgotten,
or devalued. I make a point of letting my clients know why this confusion
is a good sign, a sign of change. When dealing with survivor guilt, it
is important to find out what kinds of words people use to talk to themselves
when they are thinking about the trauma situation, and to help change
these words.
Tom Williams
"Diagnosis and Treatment of Survivor Guilt"
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: a handbook for clinicians (ed.
Tom Williams, Psy.D., published by Disabled American Veterans)
Comment: Cognitive Restructuring and the Heroic Journey
by Reg Harris
I describe the Heroic Journey pattern as a process of disintegration
and reintegration. During the "challenges and temptations" stage of the
journey, weak, ineffective, or restrictive attitudes, perceptions and
behaviors are literally stripped away from the initiate. These elements
constitute the "story" or "personal myth" the initiate has constructed
for him or herself; it is the framework for living and perceiving life.
The Journey disintegrates this personal myth so that a new, more effective
myth can be built in its place.
It seems to me that what Dr. Williams describes in this excerpt on
treating PTSD parallels, in many ways, the pattern of the Journey. As
he wrote, "the healing process involves thawing [the memories of the trauma]
and looking at them realistically." His goal is to look at the original
trauma in a different light, which could mean helping the client build
a new "myth," a new story about the trauma which allows him or her go
to on with life.
He also describes the first step a client seems to experience in cognitive
restructuring as confusion. In the Journey context, confusion is natural
because the old "myth," which is what the initiate has used for construction
meaning and sense in life, is disintegrated. As a result, there is no
framework, and the initiate is, essentially, floating, confused, until
the new structure can be built. In PTSD therapy, helping the client through
this healing process of cognitive restructuring is the therapist's job.
In the Journey, helping the initiate through this process is the job of
the mentor.
This excerpt also points out the importance of words. I naming experience,
we give it shape and meaning. When we can rename it, we can see it in
a different way, give it new meaning. Thus, we give it new meaning in
our lives.
The call to the journey is, more or less, a traumatic experience. It
shakes up our known world by introducing an unknown and incompatible element.
We must either restructure our personal myth to explain or assimilate
the disruptive element, or we must protect ourselves from it with repression,
denial or other defense mechanism. Relying on the defense mechanism is
a short term remedy. The trauma, like a psychic boil, will fester and
grow until we lance it with conscious awareness ("thawing the memory,"
as Williams writes) and start the healing process by rebuilding our personal
myth to assimilate or accommodate it.
This is the process of life, which the Heroic Journey describes: a
continual process of establishing psychic equilibrium, having that equilibrium
upset, and reestablishing equilibrium on a higher or more inclusive level.
We can view literature and film in this way, as a real experience rather
than an exercise in literary understanding and analysis. Tim O'Brien wrote
in The Things They Carried that "Our stories can save us."
This is how the save us. By telling, retelling and restructuring our
stories, we "thaw the memory," we return to the source of the trauma/call
and work on it until we make it part of our myth. Otherwise, the pathogenic
traces of the trauma/call fester and keep us from moving on with our lives.
As writer Russell Banks said in a radio interview, "They say you can't
go home again, but you have to go back just so you can leave."
- I am interested in your reactions to this idea and your views on
the subject. Please share them with me at feedback.
September 25
Our relationship to our own actions, our sense of attachment to their
outcomes, our capacity for openness to much deeper processes, are the
issues here.
...[Chetanananda] delved more deeply into the thrme of the quality
of life that emerges when we learn to free ourselves from our efforts
to manipulate and control outcomes. Why is this important? Because the
very effort to control events means that we restrict ourselves and others
to the current level of our own imagination. We fail to recognize other
possibilities inherent in a situation because we are too busy trying
to make it turn out the way we think we want it to. We stifle the deeper
creative potential that Life Itself embeds in every event. We miss those
moments of grace when true inspiration might flash forth, illuminating
unforseen and unimagined outcomes that are, in fact, altogether possible.
Linda L. Barnes, editor, in the introduction to
Will I be the Hero of My Own Life?, by Swami Chetananda.
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