The Aslan Institute, which is where Jupiter Center is located, is a community of healers who share a common vision supporting the evolution and improvement of ways of seeing, thinking and being in our lives. It’s a pretty cool place to work. I consider myself lucky to have found it. Earlier this year, we had a Holiday party. Everyone at Aslan was asked to dress as an archetype (here’s the wiki link for “archetype:” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype). I came as a modern twist on the archetype of “The Wanderer,” best personified by the character Odysseus in the Homeric epic, The Odyssey. My modern twist proposed that today, we would not see Odysseus as a lost king without a kingdom (in the original story from about 3,000 years ago, Odysseus got lost on his way home from the Trojan War and his army was essentially killed off on the way). Today, Odysseus, the Wanderer, might best be personified as a hobo, someone riding the rails, lurking on the edge of communities always on the outside looking in. Part of our job to get ready for the party was to come up with a statement that captured the idea of the archetype. This is what I wrote:
I get lost in the forest,
When I am surrounded by all the trees.
I move around; move away from the trees,
So I can see the whole forest, and see myself too.
The wanderer lives this way—lives outside the forest, never really entering to be with the trees (us). Why? Maybe because he or she cannot find a way to stay connected to the community, to a steady life, to a fixed location. Maybe because he is schizophrenic. Maybe because he is resigned to a place of not belonging. In the mental health community, this might be called dissociative. The condition of “dissociative identity disorder” can be a devastating handicap. It sometimes arises as the result of deep, long-lasting, inescapable trauma, especially childhood trauma. In a less pronounced way, living outside the forest can also be a sign of attachment issues, which can result in a perpetual state of detachment. This might be the result of abandonment or severe neglect at a very young age. In these cases, a person may not be able to experience living in the forest. Or, they may simply find it unbearable to live in the forest, so they live alone, detached, isolated, and in that way, as comfortable as they can manage to be.
I know from personal experience the distinction between using this capacity to dissociate (leave the forest) as a tool versus letting it control you, keep you separate, isolated, lonely, detached and disconnected. As a child suffering near-daily beatings for years on end, I had to find a way to survive. I hid. I couldn’t hide in a room. My father would find me. I couldn’t hide behind anyone. No one was big enough for many years to stand up to him. So, how did I hide? I hid within myself. I removed my sense of “being” from the experience of being beat. I became so good at it, I made the decision to no longer let my father make me cry. So, I didn’t cry. No matter what he did to me. I cried later, after crawling off to my bed. In this way, surprisingly, I managed to keep my dignity, my sense of self, of wholeness, without allowing these experiences to crush me or fragment my personality.
Dissociation from my father beating me was a very effective tool to survive with my sanity. Later in life, though, I continued to rely on dissociation to my detriment—when it wasn’t necessary, and became harmful to me and my relationships. I also see this problem in many of my clients who have suffered from their own kinds of trauma. Women who had to dissociate from the experience of rape as children continue to dissociate during sex with the adult partners they love knowing that continued dissociation from them is destroying their relationship. They don’t know how to stay in the forest and enjoy the intimacy of their relationships. Intimacy sends them running out of the forest, every time.
In my therapy work, I try to glide back and forth into and out of the forest with clients; and in the process, help them do the same thing in their lives. I try to imagine as best as possible what it would be like to experience what they experience, how it would be to have a certain memory, or dream, or be a participant in a fight with their spouse. I then ask them to step back with me and take a look at how their experience is affected by time, age, circumstance, history, and the constantly evolving nature of their relationships with friends, family and other contacts. We move back and forth together.
I advocate leaving the forest whenever possible, if even just for a moment, as long as it doesn’t simply become an escape hatch from difficult situations or experiences. It is a tool, but it is not a place to be. We must live in the forest, where we remain connected to others. It is our natural state to be connected. We leave the forest for only just a little while and then must come back into it, to be mentally healthy, whole, and happy. The main benefit of removing ourselves from a situation is that we can then “see ourselves in it,” in the situation. This allows us to see how we act with others and how they act with us. We can more easily take responsibility for our actions and decisions. We can more easily hold others responsible for their actions and decisions. We can see ourselves as separate from others so we can maintain good boundaries, not allowing ourselves to simply react, but be more proactive.
Some clients have trouble ever leaving the forest, responding to one thing at a time, lost in the maze of their lives because they cannot plan beyond the current set of seemingly overwhelming issues. Some clients leave the forest as an escape, by using alcohol or drugs, or something else that will numb them. This doesn’t actually help them leave the forest even though it might feel that way. It is more like going to sleep in the forest. You wake up just as lost as when you started drinking or getting high. Some clients cannot seem to find a place to be in the forest—they can’t “get in.” These clients are often surprised when I tell them that in one sense, their capacity to be dissociated can be a real tool for healing and improving their lives. They are essentially “too good” at leaving the forest, and leave it when they might be better off staying. But, at least they know how to leave the forest, which means they can more easily see themselves as they are when they are in the forest. They can step back from their relationships and situations more easily, if also too easily.
Perhaps I do what I do as a therapist because I started out living most of my childhood outside the forest, and have had to learn how to live in the forest. So, I am a kind of wanderer now with my clients—wandering in and out of their lives, as I have done with my own life, helping them along the way to learn either how to leave the forest if that’s what’s needed for that client, or helping them find a place within the forest to live if that is what that client needs.
As is the case with many mental health issues, balance is essential to be able to leave the forest by removing ourselves mentally from a situation when necessary while living in the forest and staying connected most of the time. This is a balance between two different ways of being, of seeing, of responding in the moment to the always changing, ever unpredictable, and yet hopefully also engaging relationships we maintain in our lives.
