The myth of normal, p.43
The Myth of Normal, page 43
Let’s briefly revisit the issue of the “happy childhood,” which is so often professed regardless of later challenges with illness, addiction, or emotional afflictions. The point in accessing a more well-rounded history is not to engender self-pity, nor to wipe the genuinely good times from the record. It’s this: to make peace with our inner tormentors, we have to first understand them against the backdrop of their origin stories. This is the compassion of context.
I was once asked to provide expert testimony in a murder case where the accused, a chronic alcoholic, having been interviewed by three psychiatrists, was reported to have grown up in a happy environment. Ten minutes into our jail-cell conversation he told me that his father had been a heavy drinker, his mother depressed. When he was four, his arm was broken and his hair set on fire by his brother; later he was bullied in school. It had never occurred to him—nor to the forensic specialists who had accepted his “happy” story without further inquiry—that the actual history might contradict, even debunk, his whitewashed recollections. Nor was he being insincere: it was all he knew. He was probably holding tight to certain genuinely pleasant moments, a curated slide show of memories that he had titled “My Happy Childhood.”
The myth of the happy childhood doesn’t require such obvious extremes for its cracks to show. Recall Dr. Erica Harris, self-confessed workaholic and a survivor of leukemia, a double lung transplant, and a life-threatening, drug-resistant, blood-borne infection. At one point in our conversation, she remarked: “I was blessed with what most people call a very happy, blessed childhood. We were well off financially, I had a ton of friends, and so I wasn’t bullied—I didn’t have any of those big life circumstances. But at age twelve I had a really hard time.” A family conflict left her sad, confused, and bewildered. This, she believed, was when her traumatic wound was sustained.
Actually, the self-disconnect had occurred long before then, in her “very happy, blessed childhood,” as revealed by my next question. It’s one I regularly pose to clients and participants, and I’ll now put it to you, the reader. Anyone whose conscious recall is of a happy childhood—a category that may range from innocuous to idyllic—and yet is confronting chronic illness, emotional distress, addiction, or struggles to be authentic, is particularly invited to engage with it:
When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in?
Notice your answer, and also your feelings around it. If, as in Erica’s case, the answer is “No one” or indicates anything other than the presence of a consistently available adult “someone,” an early disconnect was surely at play. (A loving older sibling can in some ways stand in for a parent, but it is unlikely they can fully replace a parent. And even then it signals a disconnect from the adult caregiver.) No infant refrains from emoting to the parents precisely what he feels or from signaling when she requires help. The failure to do so later in childhood is a developmentally abnormal adaptation—for some a truly devastating one, which undergirds the woundings that follow.
Thus, the suppression of early sorrow is not limited to overt trauma or abuse. I have never treated or interviewed anyone with chronic physical illness or mental affliction who could recall sharing unhappy feelings openly and freely, without restraint, with their caregivers or any trusted adult. This is a feature of life that most happy-childhood memories filter out, for the simple reason that we have an easier time recalling what happened than remembering what did not happen but should have. The pleasant memories we do recall, though genuine, are two-dimensional, missing the depth and the fullness of the child’s actual experience. Until we can reestablish a link to that inner third dimension, we lack the depth perception to see ourselves in our totality, and healing and wholeness are blocked.
For those still unmoved by this notion of “nobody to talk to” being traumatic, I’ll illustrate the point via my conversation with Dr. Harris, who was not subjected to maltreatment, nor ever came close to it. I offered my customary thought experiment, encouraging her to step outside herself and imagine another child, namely her own, in a similar position. Our conversation, prototypical in my experience, went like this:
“If you, as a parent, found out that your kid had an emotional shock at age twelve such as you experienced, but didn’t talk to you, how would you explain that?”
“That they didn’t trust me.”
“What does it feel like for a kid not to trust their parents?”
“That would be really terrible. It wouldn’t feel safe and secure. Like you were on your own, very alone.”
There, then, was Erica’s “very happy, blessed childhood,” as actually lived. And none of it means that her parents didn’t love her or wouldn’t have done anything in their power for her well-being. It means only that some essential disconnect had happened earlier in that relationship. It didn’t begin all of a sudden when she was twelve, even if that’s when it hit home for her.
Finally, people often make comparisons that unfairly denigrate their own experience. Though you may be justifiably grateful for your lot, the fact that others have suffered “more than” you does not diminish by one iota your own pain, nor erase its traces in your psyche. Levels of trauma are not to be evaluated, much less graded on a bell curve. You may, for example, have reassured yourself along the same lines as Erica did: “We were well off financially, I had a ton of friends, and so I wasn’t bullied—I didn’t have any of those big life circumstances.” “And fortunate you were,” I customarily interject. “But just imagine for a moment your little niece or nephew sobbing to you, ‘I feel so sad and alone and confused and I’m afraid to tell Mommy or Daddy about it.’ Would you, if you wished to be supportive, dismiss this little one with ‘Come on, what’s the problem here? Think of all the children who are having big life circumstances, like hunger or abuse or bullying. By contrast, you have nothing to complain about.’ Is that what you’d say to them if you wanted them to know their feelings were safe to feel, that they were lovable no matter what?” I have yet to hear anyone respond in the affirmative: when I put it to them that plainly, they’re finally able to hear in it the absurd double standard enforced against the self.
* * *
—
As we wrap up, a bedtime story:
Once upon a time, our wholeness was lost to us when our all-star team of inner friends—Guilt, Self-Hatred, Suppression, Denial, and the rest—came aboard to keep us safe. We were barely involved in the hiring process, and mostly we didn’t notice them as they went about their business. Like a cadre of reality-TV design experts, they set about remodeling our personalities so that we’d make it out of childhood in one piece: beautifying certain rooms and boarding up others, installing alarms, locking the cellar door. But their success at keeping us intact required that we emerge into adulthood with core parts of ourselves walled off. They were good at their jobs.
After many years of living in this stuffy, segmented home, we came to long for a more spacious, better-ventilated existence. So we thanked the experts for their service, and sent them out for a well-deserved sandwich. And we devoted ourselves gently but diligently to a new task, the literal antidote to the psychic dismemberment required of us long, long ago: the task of remembering ourselves.
Chapter 31
Jesus in the Tipi: Psychedelics and Healing
The only cure I know is a good ceremony.
—Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
One morning, not long ago, I was fired from my own retreat by a group of Shipibo shamans. The night before, in the steamy heat of the jungle, these men and women had known nothing about me; by dawn, they understood everything they needed to draw up my walking papers. They did so for the well-being of the health professionals who had flown from many parts of the world to work with me, and to my eternal benefit.
To get to the Temple of the Way of Light, you transfer in Lima for a ninety-minute flight to Iquitos in northeastern Peru. From there you travel down the surging Nanay River, an Amazon tributary, through the lush rain forest, intermittently floating past small villages on the bank’s edge. Occasionally the river branches narrowly enough that you can touch the verdant tropical vegetation.
The day we arrive, it has been raining heavily. We don Wellingtons to trudge through the forest paths, where the reddish muck is deep in spots. More than once the footwear I’ve been given, several sizes too large, gets stuck, leaving me to rely on our Shipibo helpers to lift me, extract my captive boots, and ease me back into them again. After a forty-five-minute hike through the dense, drenched woodland, the track narrows as we climb a hill to reach our destination.
I have been invited to this place to lead a healing retreat for health care providers from four continents, from countries such as Romania, Britain, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The attendees are psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, family doctors, and internists. There are twenty-four of us in all, that being the maximum occupancy of the maloca, the thatched communal hut where the ayahuasca ceremonies will take place. Many facilities in Peru and other countries in the Amazon basin offer such ceremonies, some in full good faith and integrity, others more interested in the dollars the tourist trade provides.[*] The Temple of the Way of Light is widely known as one of the better ones. It is run by an Englishman, Matthew, whose personal salvation owes much to the plant and the traditional practices around it. The shamans are Shipibo people native to Peru, as are the staff who assist in the ceremonial buildings and the dining and meeting halls. The temple staff work closely with the Aboriginal healers, taking care to honor their traditional ways while trying to provide a meaningful and digestible experience for their mostly neophyte Western clientele. There are usually some international volunteers as well.
I have been facilitating retreats that use the bitter drink brewed from the mystic ayahuasca plant for over a decade. These events combine the Amazonian tradition of vegetalismo, an ancient and highly sophisticated system of plant healing, with my Compassionate Inquiry therapeutic approach. The plant sessions are conducted by shamans at night; usually I attend, ingesting la medicina along with the participants. My work begins earlier in the day, helping people formulate their intentions for the ceremony. An intention might take the form of a thorny personal issue they want to illuminate, a difficult emotion they hope to explore, or an inner quality they wish to nurture with the medicine’s help. The following day, I help them process and integrate whatever revelations, thoughts, emotions, visions, nightmarish apparitions or dreamlike wonders, sensations, physical discomforts, or sheer ennui they had experienced as the shamans chanted to the circle and performed their energetic healing.
Over the years I have become adept at this work of facilitation, helping people overcome depressions and addictions and to heal from physical conditions. For whatever reason, as others pass through ayahuasca’s portal, I find myself highly attuned to the nature of their stumbling blocks and the nuances of their breakthroughs, intuitively able to guide them as they carry their new, fledgling insights back to their ordinary plane of consciousness. I am inspired and moved by the transformations to which I regularly bear witness, transformations that gratifyingly ripple outward into people’s lives, far beyond a weeklong retreat.
When it comes to my own transformation, it’s a different story. All my life, no matter what breakthroughs I’ve beheld or helped potentiate, a glum certainty has dominated my outlook on my own healing prospects. I have participated in many dozens of ayahuasca ceremonies without believing that much could happen for me, and usually find my pessimism rewarded: nary a vision or visitation, no ancestors or spirit animals, not even one deep thought, just some mild nausea and the wish that more were happening. To be sure, a handful of moving experiences have left me with deepened gratitude or appreciation for my life’s many blessings, but for all that, even these positive encounters with the plant have not shifted my mind’s wondrously stubborn Eeyore setting.
We enter the first ceremony, the twenty-four of us, joined by six Indigenous shamans—three maestras and three maestros—all five feet tall at the most, dressed in white, with belts and sashes of vivid colors. Each of us will be visited by each of them in turn: six personalized chants for each participant. Interspersed with periods of silence in the dark maloca—not counting the night creatures that chirp, ribbit, and hoot all around us—are hypnotic incantations in the Shipibo language’s ancient cadences, at once gentle and powerful. Under the influence of the acrid brew, these chants can take on synesthetic qualities: some people see images, while others experience the syllables as body sensations or travel in their minds to long-buried memories. A few are like me, and experience the disconcerting absence of these things.
Each time a shaman sits in front of my mat, I steel myself, silently daring them to do their worst. Go ahead, I think, try to break through the barricades of this psyche. Knowing full well this is an unhelpful attitude doesn’t deter that inner voice from speaking first and loudest. Predictably, nothing happens except the usual frustration and disappointment. (Which, I would point out if I were coaching someone else, is hardly “nothing.” Any experience at all in such a ceremony can be rich with teachings if approached with compassion and curiosity: easier preached than practiced, evidently.) Much of the time I’m almost dissociated, barely conscious of the chants or the goodwill being directed at me. The next day, after the appropriate sleep and food, the group gathers and I do my usual laser-guided counseling. As people describe their experiences of agony or joy or confusion, I guide them to make sense of their visions and help them connect the plant’s teachings to their own life histories. In my role as healer and teacher, I can easily leave behind all cynicism: the retreat is not about me. All is going well.
At lunch Matthew pulls me aside. The shamans want to meet with me, he says; the group of them has delegated two spokesmen to deliver a communal decision. Through an interpreter, they give me the news. “You have a dense, dark energy our icaros[*] cannot penetrate,” they say. “That energy pervades the room, so it impairs our work with the others. We cannot have you there.” Before I can respond, they add that I may not work with the group even in the daytime.
To say that I’m taken aback is an understatement. My ego is not liking this at all—haven’t these people rearranged their lives to come from all over the world to the rain forest specifically to work with me? Surely there must be some workaround, some compromise. The shamans are unmoved. “Even during the day,” they explain, “your energy would have a disturbing effect on the others, and more importantly, you would be absorbing their griefs and traumas. As a médico,[*] you have obviously done that for so long, working with troubled people, and you have done nothing to clear that out of yourself. And, long before that, we all sense you must have suffered a big, big scare very early in your life; you haven’t gotten over it yet. That is why your energy is so dense.”
Until last night these shamans had never heard of me. Apart from knowing me to be a doctor, they are familiar neither with my origin story nor with the work I do in the world. And yet they have read me with absolute accuracy. Even through my dismay, I immediately feel and understand that they are right. “We can help you,” they promise. Despite their assurances, I have strong doubts they will succeed. And yet it is not deference alone, nor blind faith, that impels me to follow their lead. Something in me, it seems, is relieved to be relieved of duty.
For the next ten days I am socially distanced, as it were, from the retreat. I remain isolated in my cabin, except for mealtimes in the hall, when I do not interact with the participants; they are, luckily, in the able hands of an American colleague of mine. Throughout my psychic quarantine, I meditate, read spiritual books, do yoga, walk the rain forest paths, and contemplate. Assorted mental and emotional reactions to my strange situation come and go. And every second night, in a ceremonial hut all to myself, one of the shamans pours me the medicine, then chants to me and only me in Shipibo for more than three hours. He blows smoke, waves his arms above me, lays hands on my chest or back. Mostly he chants in his native language, but at times he incants Catholic hymns in Spanish, invoking Espíritu Santo, Santa María, and Jesús over my Hebraic head. His voice, now plumbing low baritone depths, now an insistent nasal tenor or keening falsetto, is indescribably supple and beautiful. In the murky dark of the maloca, this small man looms like a giant. Each day I feel myself lighter, my mind less preoccupied. Still, for the first four of those ceremony nights, no visions come, no deep experiences, only a growing sense of ease and gratitude.
The fifth and final ceremony over—so I think—with the anticipated non-results, I nevertheless feel cleansed and thankful. Via the interpreter Publio, I converse jovially with the maestro. Abruptly, mid-sentence, I throw myself on the mat—or rather, I should say, I am thrown facedown with sudden, involuntary force. At long last, the medicine is driving the bus and I am its helpless passenger. I am finally, indisputably, blessedly not in control.
Later they tell me I remained prone for nearly two hours. To me it might have been two days; in the vision’s vortex, there was no sense of time. All the while, cross-legged, still, and silent, Publio and the shaman sat vigil next to me. I need not, indeed cannot, describe what I experienced, but I remember the transcendent joy of it.
