honor

Adam sat in the driver's seat of his car staring out the front window at the lake in front of him. The lake before him mirrored the frozen stillness of his despair, its surface a deceptive calm hiding depths as turbulent as his own psyche. His entire life felt like it had been run by a demon that he believed lived in his spine and his soul. This entity, as he called it, was tenacious and equally vicious as it berated his very being nonstop, all day, and every day for four very long and difficult decades. This entity and its behaviors had ruined all his relationships, his physical and mental health, his happiness, and caused several mental breakdowns, including the one he was presently experiencing. He believed, through and through, that he was possessed.

He gazed at the water with glazed eyes, empty mind, and numb body as he considered driving directly into the lake to end the relentless struggle and pain. He was, in truth, so frozen that he could not even hold the steering wheel. Instead, from somewhere very deep within his inner body a teeny, tiny voice exclaimed "no!" And then, "NO!" It was as if a long-dormant seed of self-preservation had suddenly sprouted, pushing through the dense soil of his despair with surprising vigor.

In truth, Adam was a gentle soul riddled with a deeply exiled shame that he embodied from a father who made sure that he knew how disappointing he was. How Adam, his only son, could never measure up to his standards as the father he was meant to be and the son he was meant to have. That shame became the young boy's identity as he gave it deep meaning within his measly sense of self. This became his relational trauma with self and others and caused so much firefighting havoc, that in retrospect, it was amazing that Adam still lives.

In his adult years, Adam had grown to enjoy a pleasant relationship with his father, and this confused him further. The irony wasn't lost on Adam - that the man who had planted the seeds of his self-hatred was now tending to a garden of reconciliation. Yet, the roots of shame ran deep, nourished by years of internalized criticism and disgust. He could appreciate his own father's trauma and dilemmas, but what Adam could not understand, and what drove him to desperation, was that his attachment system, nervous system, heart, and body were in concert with each other and habituated to expect and receive the familiar shaming. He shamed himself and then hated himself for that too. This encoding of a distorted chemical reality was intolerable and unconscious, so his mind could only identify it as a deep disturbance called an entity, like a child looking under the bed for a monster.

On this day however, after hearing that 'no,' Adam realized that he needed more help.  Epiphanies, Adam mused, had a cruel sense of timing – arriving just when one foot was already off the cliff's edge. But perhaps that's when we're most ready to hear them. He turned the key, started the car, and slowly, as if in slow motion, drove away from the lake.

Adam attended weekly meetings with his therapist from his car as it had become a place of safety as much as it was a potential means to flee. He discovered the entity was not an entity after all and as he began to unmerge from the core emotion of shame, neutrally observing it with a rare softness, he began to see and appreciate how intolerable it had been for him as a child. Unraveling years of emotional knots proved to be a Gordian task, but Adam approached it with the patience of a man who'd glimpsed the value of his own life. He knew, just like all of us, that he came to life, to his family, to be loved, and in the absence of this care, he lost connection with his purity and innocence.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of his former self, Adam emerged not unscathed, but beautifully scarred – each mark a testament to his resilience and growth. He now lives with a vitality that only love and forgiveness can provide. His demon likes to visit less and less, but when that happens, he can relate to it from compassion and skill as he had learned how to depotentiate the harsh emotions with ones that he favored. He could even look back at all the broken bridges in his life and love himself the same. Adam's recovery was nothing short of remarkable, and his life began to reflect this transformation in ways that he had only dreamed of.