The Labyrinth of Trauma / A 5 part series

Anything that can be loved can be saved — Alice Walker

Many centuries ago in the Americas, healers and warriors of great skill traveled north and south along long-forgotten roads to learn from teachers of many medicine traditions. One tradition, from peoples in the south, constellated around what was called a snake dance ceremony.

At its heart lay a test. A poisonous snake would bite, causing a state of destabilization so powerful that any memory of the ceremony vanished. The requirement was to transmute the poison and usher it out of the body.

What made the ceremony remarkable was its second condition. The poison would not kill a practitioner who failed. Instead, they would live out the rest of their lives with no knowledge of what they had lost, exiled from themselves and from the patterns that structure reality. Memory itself would collapse, and a state of invisible disorientation would settle in for the duration.

I reflect on this practice often because of how closely it mirrors what happens to our bodies and minds when we experience trauma. Like those bitten in the snake dance, we find ourselves destabilized to such a degree that remembering what it was like before the trauma becomes almost impossible, and the biology of our bodies and minds is altered in ways we cannot easily see.

As a species, we possess an extraordinary capacity to adapt, even to profound disruption. The capacity becomes its own trap. We adjust so thoroughly to living in a state of trauma that we begin to mistake survival for living. The line between adaptation and resignation blurs, and in the blurring, the memory that another way was ever available to us fades into the background.

In all my years of working with trauma, rarely does someone come to the work aware of how much injury they are carrying, unless they are approaching rock bottom. The nature of trauma obscures our ability to recognize its presence, which makes the true extent of our own suffering nearly impossible to gauge from the inside.

From where I sit, the confusion between surviving and thriving has become so widespread that the memory of our bloodlines, our communities, and ourselves in a pre-trauma state has largely disappeared. The ease with which we once accessed our higher cognitive and imaginative capacities has given way to a near-constant state of subtle or extreme nervous system activation that keeps our heads down, our immune systems weak, and our spirits far from mighty.

I call this endemic trauma. Like a thick fog settling over a landscape, it has become so pervasive that we only see it when we learn to look at our world from strange and unpredictable angles.

…

There is a story of a Native American soldier who went off to fight in the second world war. He was captured first by the Germans, then later by the Russians, and held in captivity for years. When he was finally liberated, he no longer spoke in any language that made sense. He did not speak Russian, English, German, or his native tongue. He spoke in an incomprehensible babble. The army did not know what to do with him and released him to his people. When he returned home, he continued to speak in this language of babble.

He was brought to the elders, who with little deliberation tied his body in ropes and dropped him in the cold lake on their land, which upon first glance seems mighty cruel. How could his aunties and grandparents and brothers toss him in the water to surely die?

Well, something else entirely is happening here than we might expect, a move that makes our modern sensibilities pull back. The peace and harmony, self-compassion and mindfulness we love so much today may not always be the way in. In the beginning of a trauma healing journey, what a person actually needs can be far more direct and enduring than the current landscape is prepared to offer. . 

Rumi put it this way, in two lines that cut like a blade forged in ancient fire.

We have been busy accumulating solace.Make us afraid of how we were.

The fog of trauma creates a strange depth of comfort. We learn how to make a home in it. We do our daily meditation practices, go on our spiritual retreats, hypnotize ourselves to be hyper-motivated and positive, and across all of it we remain seduced by the very limitations that bind us.

Down deep at the edge of memory, beneath all that solace, lives what I call a primordial rage. A species of wrath that, wielded well, can cut right through the fog. The rage does not suddenly heal us. What it does is get us out into the light of day, where it ignites the greatest and most important muscle of all, the muscle of will.

There is another tale I often share, from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can say about my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said, "If you will, you can become all flame."

Many of us aspire to live in the model of Abba Lot. We look to establish a successful and peaceful life marked by balance, equilibrium, and spiritual evolution. There are plenty of handsome and beautiful people out in the world ready to help us achieve the life of Abba Lot.

Or we can choose the flame. We can ignite our uniquely dangerous and uncompromising muscle of will and demand nothing less than complete freedom and total victory. With work and commitment, we can remember our bloodline inheritance. The dream our ancestors hold for us to be mighty beings, passing on life and protection to our descendants as one link in an eternal chain.

The community that bound our babbling soldier never forgot this promise, even after centuries of violence visited upon their people. If their brother was unable to break free of what had destroyed him and find his will to live, his will to shout out with rage and fury - Help! Free me of these ropes! - he was - in the mind of his community, better off dead than alive in a state of complete incomprehension and forgetting.

Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to J. Glenn Gray's The Warriors, put it plainly. Life is not the highest good. 

If you will, you can become all flame.

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Jonathan Shay spent decades at the VA in Boston working with Vietnam combat veterans, and his two books, Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America, stand apart in the trauma literature because he refused to separate the clinical from the mythological. His central argument is that the Iliad is the most precise description of combat trauma ever written, more accurate than the DSM, because Homer had access to a seeing that modern psychiatry and the constellation of industries serving the evolution of consciousness, personal growth and enlightenment have largely lost. 

Trauma, in the context of Homer, is a civilizational mechanism operating at every scale at once, from the warrior's broken body to the household's ceremonial architecture to the polis itself, and he understood that no single scale could be healed without the others. In other words, trauma is a foundational function of civilization as opposed to a feature, which - as we let this depth of reckoning sink in - will uproot most or all of our assumptions about trauma and its healing. 

Shay went into Homer the way a practitioner goes into a master text, looking for the working vocabulary the field had forgotten. He came back with four Greek terms that hold the entire narrative arc of the Illiad. Themis, the right moral order of things. Menis, the wrath that rises when themis is violated. Oikos, the household that must be restored for a genuine return to completion. Metis, the practical cunning required to navigate a world whose forces are larger and more devastating than any single actor can control. These four words, when woven together, deliver an unbreakable orientation into our world, and the trauma working through it. 

And while Shay's work is often read as being about only soldiers, it is much more than that. The Iliad and the Odyssey render foundational truths about war, betrayal, return, and the ceremonial architecture required to bring all of us home, beyond our own individual healing into the full constellation of reality itself.

Shay's first book, which sees Achilles at war in Vietnam, teaches us what destroys warriors. Relentless violence alone does not do it. Warriors break when commanders, leaders, and decision-makers, whether near the fray or far from it, violate what every soldier knows to be right. Shay names this primordial betrayal a rupture of the moral order itself.

In this context where themis is violated, Achilles does not break from fear. He breaks because Agamemnon, a man whose rank is unearned, leverages that rank against Achilles, a man who has earned the right to speak and act in the world through the cost of his body and deeds. The wrath of Achilles rises like an inferno out of the asymmetry of justice in that moment, from the enforcement of authority unearned over true power earned in violation of the moral order of the universe. 

Shay's second book follows Odysseus home and asks what a genuine homecoming requires beyond the simple act of survival. We learn that what completes the journey home for Odysseus is the restoration of oikos, the household, and with it the capacity for trust, belonging and civic life. 

The Greeks built ritual structures around this return. Weddings that marked the crossing from one life stage to another. Funerals that gave the dead their passage and the living a container for grief. Harvest ceremonies, civic festivals, household rites, daily observances that held a life inside its proper order. These structures formed the infrastructure of oikos at every scale, from the individual body to the polis, and they held the weight of what ordinary life requires of ordinary people.

Modern civilization has largely abandoned this infrastructure and the consequences extend far beyond the warrior class. Veteran and first responder suicide and domestic violence represent one visible edge of the abandonment. Chronic illness, addiction, the collapse of family and community, the erosion of the capacity for sustained work, all of these are expressions of the same loss, and the same depth of trauma. Sending anyone back into civilian life with no consistent ceremonial container for what they carry is the condition most people now live inside, whether they ever saw combat or not.

Trauma is not something that happens to soldiers while the rest of us watch from a safe distance. Trauma is the baseline condition of nearly everyone living inside a civilization whose operating logic is war and the consistent violation of themis. All of us - whether we are farmers, merchants,  mothers, fathers, children or warriors at the edge of battle -suffer the cost.

How else could a three-thousand-year-old story be preserved in song and oral tradition across millennia before anyone wrote it down? The listeners kept the story alive because they saw themselves in it, and the recognition ran through every station of life that gathered around the fire to hear it. The story of civilization leading with the wrath of Achilles and completed in the reestablishment of oikos at the end of the Odyssey belongs to every listener across thirty centuries.

The wrath that follows betrayal is the organism's response to a world that has revealed itself as fundamentally unjust. The same wrath burns in our own world like fire, and Homer is clear about what is to be done with it. We must master menis or we will consume ourselves. Our challenge is that mastery does not come through peace, love, and harmony, as our ancestors will be quick to tell us. Lead with peace, love, and harmony in the face of what we are up against and we will be run over by a Sherman tank. 

Homer and our ancestors and all our traditions did their best to prepare us for the task, which is to work with the full fury of civilization in order to bring forth life, and to enact the covenant that binds us to our ancestors, to our descendants, to the earth, the sky, and all of creation. That covenant is oikos. Menis either destroys it or restores it, and there is no other way but through.

What Homer saw and what the Greeks knew is what we are called to see again. The restoration of oikos is not a private therapeutic project nor an expression of spiritual attainment. It is the reestablishment of the household at the scale of a life, a family and a community that requires the quality of seeing the Greeks called metis, the practical cunning that navigates a world whose forces are larger than any single actor can control.

The knowledge required to do this work exists and has existed for millennia. It has been transmitted through cultures that understood healing as a civic, physical and ceremonial matter, held inside lineages that knew what they were doing. The forgetting is recent. The forgetting is also the reason the current trauma landscape reaches for whatever shortcut or silver bullet the market provides. 

Across this series, we will build the clarity and capacity required to act with metis and reestablish the household of our lives, our families, and our communities.

Neurophysiology comes first, where the mechanisms of coherence and fragmentation become visible at the level of tissue, fascia, and neural architecture. We will leverage metis to enter into the dangerous territory of trauma healing from the early findings and subsequent cowardice of Freud to the current fascination with psychedelics. Here we will establish the biological and historical dimension of the labyrinth.  

The mythic and epigenetic dimensions come next, from Exodus to The Maya and Borges into the question of bloodline healing and the vector of trauma transmitted over multiple generations.

With the biological, historical and mythical elements established, Antifragility and Post Traumatic Growth follow, introducing us to the specific capacity that emerges when a system reorganizes under pressure rather than being shielded from it. Renormalization group theory opens from there, where the mathematics of how patterns scale from individual body to civilization come into view.

This moment humanity is currently experiencing can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or walk through the door belongs to you. If you take this opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, to take care of yourself and others, then you will go through the portal. When we walk through the door, we have a new worldview because we faced our fears and hardships.

— Hopi Chief White Eagle, 2021