from Cary Tennis

My challenge to a therapist is this: "Tell me something I don't know. Surprise me." When I am led to see things that startle me, of which I had no inkling, that is priceless self-knowledge. And that can happen.

One thing you probably don't know about yourself is just how deeply you have been wounded. You cannot know this yet; in fact you have wisely prevented yourself from knowing this yet. It is as though, in a dream, we look down and see that we have been disemboweled; it is a moment of absolute terror; but we see that we have been disemboweled and yet we are fine! How can this be? How can we be so grievously wounded and yet smile peacefully and continue with our knitting or our guitar playing or whatever we are doing in our strange dream? We can do that because armed with the exquisite knowledge of the dream world we know that nothing can truly harm us, that we are spirit matter, that our consciousness is not affected by the disemboweling, and that it is only our severe waking attachment that causes us so much paralyzing fear.

Believing the wound is too deep to be seen, you have clouded your own sight from it. But you don't need to. There is someone who can guide you to the cliff edge from which that wound can be viewed at a safe distance, and you can see that it is just a wound to your spirit self, not your actual belly, and you can relax.

Another thing you probably don't know is just what archetype of yourself has come to the fore and is now running the show; this business of archetypes, or sub-personalities, is strange and tricky, and a person can sound like a crank for talking about them, but I'm just a writer using his imagination. A good therapist whose language and understanding are rich with myth and intuition can help you find the vantage point and language with which to view and express what you have gone through. When you can see, feel and express what has happened, then you can get better and feel better. It's pretty straightforward. Maybe you will speak of these things in the language of archetypes or maybe in some other way.

To me, it would make sense for a kind of warrior archetype to come to the fore in such a terrible time. The warrior in you would see your mother as an enemy to be vanquished, but since she is dead she cannot be vanquished, so she stands as an eternal adversary, and you are eternally stuck. So there must be some other archetype who can come to the fore to help. The other archetype might be your female, mothering self, who could let go of your mother, or it may be the dark, grieving, avenging self, who could split her sides in wailing but lead to peace, finally. If it is the warrior who is guiding the show, no wonder you are stuck. The warrior can do nothing about the past.

That is my hope for you. I think we often need to work emotionally through symbols and archetypes. These archetypes may be real or they may just be metaphors for stages of development. But it is useful to talk about these things as warriors, princesses, mothers and so forth.

So how will you get through this? With help. It is the kind of help that can guide you on a journey. It isn't so much about making individual choices about Dad No. 1, Dad No. 2 and so forth. It is more about learning what actually happened to you when you were broken as a teenager by your mother's death, and how you still have to heal from that, and how when you learned about your mother's love for this other man it further complicated and deepened this old wound. That's what it's about. And, as I say, that is my hope for you: that you can find the right person to guide you through this charged and explosive terrain.

You may need to back off on the drinking and drugs to get through this. If you are habitually blunting your feelings, you will not develop the fine feel for your inner life that you are going to need. So if you cannot afford therapy, you might consider joining a group of grief survivors. You also might consider joining a 12-step group. All this powerful emotion may make you feel like you're going mad. But you're not going mad. You're just a human feeling things.

You suffered a terrible blow as a child. In many ways, you are still a child. You were prevented from moving on. You are stuck. But you are not lost. You are right here with us. All you have to do is grow, and get help growing.