American mythologist Joseph Campbell spent decades studying ancient texts and oral stories told in different cultures around the world. Campbell realized that most mythological quests in each culture followed a pattern he called "monomyth".
This thematic instrument was designed with the idea that all of humanity in all its diversity reflects similar existential aspirations and life experiences. They are all part of an unknown larger universe or state of existence. In this pattern, a hero embarks on a journey to kill a monster, recover a valuable artifact, or save someone – the main goal is always to save the world from the end of times or from a great evil.
This journey is full of challenges that threaten both the hero's familiar inner world and the current mission, whatever that may be. Each obstacle that the hero overcomes thematically reveals a different lesson to learn from. The hero grows in skills and self-confidence over the course of the journey. By the time the hero confronts the problem, or whatever serves as the main antagonist of the story, they have evolved into a more superior version of themselves, an evolution that doesn't stop when the hero returns with the prize. This evolution keeps the hero in an enlightened state of grace who is able to understand and deal with the worldly and transcendent way of life.
Campbell described this idea in the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which introduced him to the literary and artistic community. Campbell's three-part portrayal of Hero's Journey was published in 1949 and includes departure (accepting the journey), initiation (confronting and accepting change), and return (maturing and moving forward). This reflects the developmental stages of the human psyche, which include the transition from childhood to adulthood to individuation or full realization of Carl Jung's vision of the culmination of the human psyche – emotional maturation and connection with the transcendent.
In her book The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Practical Mind-Body Tools to Heal Trauma, Foster Resilience and Awaken Your Potential, Arielle Schwartz presents the idea of viewing trauma recovery as the journey of a heroine. Schwartz describes Campbell's hero's journey as a classic plot structure that has inspired a multitude of literary and cinematographic works for generations. Schwartz claims that Campbell's heroic journey can also be applied to trauma healing. People can relate to this trip if they are in a crisis due to a traumatic event, accumulation of stress, or memories of abuse or neglect.
Emotional crises usually lead us to dark and painful places. The hero's journey, argues Schwartz, encourages people to turn this pain and fear into a guiding wisdom for self-awareness and emotional growth.
Healing is a journey
We tend to perceive and pursue healing, happiness, meaning and self-realization as a linear and clear goal. However, these quests are meant to be experienced as a journey and not as a final destination. As the journey progresses, healing can be experienced and pursued. This is because there will always be something to heal in our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. Life never ceases to give us challenges that bring us valuable experiences.
Overcoming a psychological trauma with simultaneous emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth is a journey that can be viewed as both challenging and rewarding. In fact, I would go so far as to say that healing trauma is a sacred journey. It requires venturing into the deeper self to sow the seeds of healing and ultimately bring about a better version of oneself. However, this journey requires a hero. The trauma sufferer is the one who starts this journey, and there is no proxy for the journey.
To venture into the unknown is frightening. Worse still, becoming a hero is a terrible task and a great responsibility. Therefore, many people would prefer to decline the invitation or call for healing because there is something comparatively cozy about this trauma state. People who have had parts of their lives with trauma are used to this state because it provides familiarity. Therefore, some will go on the hero's journey alone, others will do so at a time when they have more support, and others will never answer the call.
From a therapeutic point of view, counselors go together with clients who decide to take the path of healing trauma. The counselors also patiently prepare and encourage those clients who have doubts about their enormous responsibility to embark on the journey. The counselors also understand and comfort those clients who refuse the trip because they are afraid of the pain and are paralyzed by the fear of the unknown.
Trauma-informed counselors understand that trauma is a neurobiological and emotional response to a frightening and troubling experience. Trauma can either be a one-off or prolonged experience that affects a person's views, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors in their daily life. Treatment plans include goals that address the most characteristic consequences of trauma:
Feeling of powerlessness
Dysregulation of the nervous system
Self-devaluation
Separation from oneself
Customers who make the adventurous but painful decision to embark on this journey will find that with every step they take, they build resources and improve their confidence. This emerging growth is critical when it comes to facing internal and external obstacles while embracing change. As customers grow in resources and confidence along the way, they will also see an evolving improvement in their view of themselves, others, and the world. People who live in a trauma react to the living conditions, whereas people who live after a trauma react proactively to the living conditions.
What kind of heroes are needed?
Campbell set the record for doubters. The hero archetype is for anyone who finds the strength to accept the call to travel and persevere despite the overwhelming circumstances they are faced with. This is because they believe in the healing purpose of the trip or are looking for something more meaningful than themselves.
The hero is expected to learn an important lesson from the journey – that life is a constant and contradicting experience of good and bad things, all of which must be willingly lived through. Campbell also portrayed the archetypal hero in various roles: as a warrior, lover, emperor / tyrant, savior and saint. Each of these roles represents a stage of the cosmogonic cycle, a mystical realm in a purely spiritual form that transitions into physical manifestation and returns to the beginning.
The hero-warrior kills the monsters and tyrants of the hero's past and present and leads the hero's community into the future. This type of hero promotes the renewal of life, just as the living God does. The hero lover represents the connection with the transcendent, the relationship between humanity and the divine. The hero emperor rules the earth as a living manifestation of the mystical realm. After all, as a human being, the emperor becomes a tyrant when he learns to love flattery more than a relationship with the divine. The new hero tyrant is then no longer the mediator between the human and the divine. The hero-redeemer bears more than one resemblance to the divine, for they are one. In this oneness and incarnation with the divine, the Redeemer stands above the typical temptations of the flesh and the ego. This hero's mission is to save the world by facing the divine tyranny that the hero tyrant has imposed on the world. After teaching "a new way of being in the world", the Hero-Redeemer confronts this tyranny by sacrificing himself. The saint has a spiritual role and is a hero's highest calling. The story of this hero is the beginning and the end of the cosmogonic cycle – the spiritual creates the physical, which over time returns to its source.
The journey of trauma healing is a mixture of the mythical (fighting the beasts in the unconscious), the spiritual (belief and trust in something greater than yourself), the emotional (knowing and loving yourself), the intellectual (understanding) . and accepting change) and the practical (living beyond the trauma). The role of each hero is an aspect of the archetypal hero in Campbell's monomyth. But do we need them all to achieve enlightenment?
This healing journey requires killing the monsters and tyrants (the sick attachments) of the past and present so that one can move forward with renewed life. Love is also needed to connect with the self and the transcendent. This connection brings wisdom, order and redemption into the chaos of the unconscious. Whatever the task – e.g. healing from the wrongness of others or the self, saving the child-self frozen in time, healing from intergenerational trauma – the path of trauma healing requires specific qualities and steps. These are:
1) Determination to let go of insecure attachments and inclinations.
2) Love to connect with oneself in the emotional and transcendent.
3) Wisdom to understand and integrate the self.
4) Pragmatism in order to live sensibly and yet realistically beyond the trauma.
A roadmap to healing
To live in a trauma means to live in emotional extremes, which represents an impairment of the self-regulation. Therefore, overcoming trauma requires two basic things:
1) regaining nervous / emotional self-regulation, i. H. the ability to face one's feelings and emotions and to understand them instead of avoiding or switching them off.
2) Understand and accept one's own inner self instead of ignoring it.
One third of trauma work consists of teaching clients what causes trauma and how the human body reacts to it. The second third consists of reconstructing the clients' lost sense of security in the face of insecurity and encouraging reconnection with the self in order to regain control over it. As this process develops, clients' confidence and self-compassion grow, which are key elements in overcoming self-imposed isolation from negative perceptions of themselves, others, and the world around them. The last third of the trauma work integrates the traumatic experience by changing the narrative of the adverse experience in the here and now.
The proposed trauma healing roadmap works well in 12 week psychoeducational groups with 90 minute sessions. The idea is to empower qualified participants with a concrete structure and strategies to do the work themselves. Each session is designed to teach group members new coping skills and life strategies to help them:
Create a feeling of security
Achieve emotional regulation
Integrating traumatic experiences
Go beyond the trauma
In his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung wrote: “The shoe that fits one, pinches the other; there is no such thing as a suitable recipe for all cases. ”The same applies to various trauma treatments. Thus, this trauma healing roadmap is adaptable. It is based on a variety of expert work in the interdisciplinary field of interpersonal neurobiology, which seeks to heal trauma by stimulating the neuroplasticity of the brain with positive conviction and support.
Level I: Building security and competence
>> Step 1: Understand yourself and your world. Customers are introduced to a brief self-assessment and the art of journaling. The six-domain self-assessment should be completed with short sentences or single words to spark enthusiasm for journaling. Customers are encouraged to revisit as needed throughout the trip. You can find the rating at https://tinyurl.com/3yumcynf.
>> Step 2: Understand the path to healing. Clients learn what trauma is and what it causes and how the body reacts to it. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study launched to help clients find their ACE score. The positive power of resilience is introduced to give hope and direction to such a complex issue.
>> Step 3: Change your own story. Clients are introduced to the unhelpful thinking styles that prevent them from imagining a better version of themselves and the ABC model (resistance or activating event, beliefs about the event, consequences) to challenge and support their cognitive biases modify. Customers are also guided to set meaningful goals based on healthy personal values and beliefs. They learn that it is better to rely on new healthy habits than just motivation.
Stage II: Establish self-regulation
>> Step 4: Learning to be healthy with others. Clients are introduced to the topic and practice of healthy boundaries. They learn to what extent setting healthy boundaries can alleviate their inner conflicts when saying "no" while building their self-esteem and improving their relationships.
>> Step 5: Improve self-reflection and self-observation. Attachment theory is introduced to encourage self-reflection on patterns of thought, behavior and relationships with others and oneself. Identifying with a dominant attachment style is critical to understanding what it takes to achieve a more secure attachment adjustment. Dan Siegel's concept of "Mindsight" is also presented.
>> Step 6: Learning about self-regulation (body and emotions). Clients are introduced to the skills of tracking, resource building, grounding, and others from the community resilience model to become familiar with their bodies, emotions, and resources. Clients are also introduced to the practice of mindfulness. This step requires two group sessions.
Stage III: Integration of the traumatic experience
>> Step 7: Write the trauma story. Clients are introduced to the process of creating a coherent narrative. In this step, techniques of narrative therapy, narrative exposure therapy or trauma narration can be tailored to the needs of the group (type of trauma).
>> Step 8: Reframing the trauma narrative. Clients are guided to see their narratives from the perspective they have in the here and now. At this point in the journey, clients have gained enough knowledge, confidence, skills, and coping skills to make favorable comparisons and reduce the intensity of their fears and other negative emotions.
>> Step 9: Build self-acceptance. Clients learn to accept and integrate their recast negative experiences as they face the emotional consequences of the trauma (e.g., shame, guilt, self-hatred). Depending on the needs of the group, strategies from acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive processing therapy, transactional analysis or internal family systems can be helpful. In one-on-one counseling, consider referring clients who feel stuck processing their negative emotions to a therapist trained in desensitizing and reprocessing eye movements. This step requires two sessions.
Stage IV: Consolidation
>> Step 10: Transcend trauma. Clients learn that helping others is self-care. Love and connection with oneself and the transcendent facilitate acceptance and integration. Clients are invited to reflect on their path from victim to survivor. Siegel's Mindsight integration levels are easily introduced to motivate clients to persevere on their healing journey in order to be successful in life.
Conclusion
Everyone faces their adverse circumstances in their own way and mourns. Some people become more resilient and smarter the more difficulties they have. Other people remain trapped in trauma and the harassing consequences of their adverse circumstances even after those circumstances have passed.
People who overcome a trauma grow emotionally, intellectually and spiritually on their negative experiences. You are better prepared to face the circumstances and make better decisions. They understand that helping others is critical to their own healing and wellbeing. People trapped in trauma continue to focus on surviving their recurring adverse circumstances and subsequent cycles of emotional turmoil.
The application of this healing schedule also works well in individual counseling, although it takes much longer because the clients' current circumstances tend to dominate the sessions. In any case, therapy is an art. The counselors can help clients connect their current and past experiences and carry out the work suggested in the steps that will target their needs. In this way, individual advice can use the roadmap in accordance with the needs and expectations of the customer. Remember that Phase I is the foundation for the work ahead and that trust, not rush, is the foundation of a successful therapeutic relationship.
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Federico Carmona is a certified clinical trauma therapist and works as a trauma therapist with Peace Over Violence in Los Angeles. Federico works with domestic and sexual violence and child abuse survivors who are experiencing the devastating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, complex trauma, trauma attachment, and related mental illness. Contact Federico at [email protected].
Counseling Today reviews unsolicited articles written by members of the American Counseling Association. For writing guidelines and tips for accepting an article for publication, visit ct.counseling.org/feedback.[19459005
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