Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Page of Swords by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image, a person in a purple tunic with green leggings and red lace-up boots is standing on a hill in holding a sword as if it were a baseball bat. There are flully white clouds in the background and a blue sky. Birds appear to be flying in the shape of the sideways 8, infinity symbol.
I feel like I’ve been saying this again and again but it’s still true: I’ve been going through a hard time that I can trace back to the January before Tarot for Change came out. About two years ago. A lot of it has to do with the emotional difficulty of learning new things and integrating them into an existing understanding.
I’m more apprehensive in a lot of ways, but more courageous in my studies. I go places more often that disrupt what I know, and am not as afraid to do so as I was. I’m only recently understanding the prismatic nature of memory and history. “What happened” depends not only on who you ask but how you ask it, and what frameworks of meaning a given witness is using to describe what they’ve seen.
A couple weeks ago during the first weekend of a yearlong narrative therapy training I’m enrolled in, one of the instructors Gene Combs said something about how when you ask a question you’re defining a territory. I am coming to understand that even the presumably benign act of asking is an imposition. A question can be just as consequential as a statement if not more, since it’s often easier to experience as neutral.
It’s been a couple years of regular ruptures. Learning things that decimate other things I thought I knew. The stress I’ve felt around this is, I think, a natural consequence of learning. I see it as a good sign. To feel like you know is an opulent thing in a messy, nonsensical world. It’s so cliché, but cliché is often true: The less you know, the easier it is to think that you do.
Psychologists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman have defined rupture as “the sort of happening that challenges all of one’s capacity to make sense of life. No frameworks of understanding developed up to the point of rupture are able to completely explain or contain the new situation” (2010).
The recent talk I gave on The Magician (which is available in the Offerings feed if you’re a paying subscriber) was in part to do with rupture. I wanted to suggest that the magician could be an ally in such times. I remembered after the talk that The Magician is sometimes depicted as a juggler, which is an image I really connect with.
The following is a free write containing a few of the balls I’m juggling that feel important. They don’t feel disparate, but I don’t know how to arrange them in a cohesive way just yet. For now, they’re ideas I need to park somewhere.
Story work is not about curing. This is related to a lot of things I’ve written about. I did a few Offerings on Perceval’s visit to the grail castle last year, a story inside a story that could be a tale unto itself in which a young knight dreams of not healing. Who would dream of not healing? Only a fool.
Nestled inside the larger story of the grail legend, this tale begins with the main character Perceval’s visit to the grail castle, where he sees the wounded grail king and the grail itself. He says nothing and does nothing (which he’s later informed was a mistake, but that’s not part of this story). He sleeps on what he’s seen and when he wakes up everyone’s gone.
A lot happens after that, but I wanted to know what would happen if I considered those scenes as a standalone story. Was there wisdom in Perceval’s not doing the perfect thing that would bring the total healing?
I wanted to know this because I’ve been primed in so many ways—not the least of which are a Catholic upbringing and more than a decade in various behavioral health settings—to expect redemption, remediation, a cure in the presence of a wound. I’ve wondered a lot about how these dominant narratives have affected the work that I do, especially clinical work and how I understand my role as a therapist.
I think a lot about the physiological nature of trauma, mostly thanks to people like Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine. I’ve been wondering about dialogue-driven meaning-making work—which is the kind that I do—and what the role of that is or might be, in post- or ongoing-trauma care, if it’s true that trauma is stored in the body.
What I took away from both van der Kolk and Levine’s books when I read them years ago—The Body Keeps the Score and In An Unspoken Voice, respectively—was that talk methods were somewhat futile in the face of trauma recovery; because trauma is stored in the body and therefore cannot be accessed through conversation alone. But there’s something about this metaphor of the body as score-keeper—like a machine—that bugs me.