Shrink-wrap Sunday 1.9.22

The Sacred, The Profane... and The Candles in Our Windows

Sunday morning greetings from newShrink, and welcome to what has turned out to be the year’s first Shrink-wrap!

This is one of those editions where one story, subject or theme with intense psychological and soul dimensions grabbed and clobbered me at midweek, grew to unanticipated depths and directions, and utterly dominated newShrink by writing time.

It’s been a tension of opposites probably only Jung could enjoy… though peerless Pulitzer-winner cartoonist Kevin Siers captures it above with remarkable comic clarity.

Siers’ cartoon frame on the left expresses the focus of my passion, concern and the sacred part of today’s title. (The cartoon frame on the right… doesn’t.)

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Initial spark for the intense response in multiple directions and levels was a classic NPR parking-lot-moment: One interview by stellar journalist Mary Louise Kelly with U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) on the Wednesday eve of the first anniversary of the Capitol siege and riots. A lot more, with the interview as a reference point, is below.

about that title…

The sacred and the profane of today’s title has two relevant references. First is from anthropologist Mircia Eliade’s book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. (subtitled The groundbreaking work by one of the greatest authorities on myth, symbol and ritual.)

Cover image from the Eliade book The Sacred and the Profane

And in the late 19th-early 20th Century, the French philosopher considered the “father of sociology,” Emile Durkheim French, used the phrase for what he considered the fundamental purpose of religions: To delineate between what is sacred (holy or numinous according to other thinkers) about human existence as separate and different from the merely mundane aspects of daily life. (Profane here is not necessarily obscene or vulgar aspects — as today’s associations such as profanity might suggest. Just the mundane, everyday-life stuff versus the soul’s highly charged/high-octane.)

some definitions…

A couple of words have origins and meanings I find significant or helpful both for today’s Shrink-wrap discussion and to listen and read for in news stories — especially those about the January 6 Capitol riots.

🌀One is sacred, which shares the common Latin root sacre, meaning holy or consecrated, with the word scar (along with sacrum, that “sacred bone” on which we sit when we do Yoga.) Thus this relationship is a deep and ancient one — both archetypal across time and cultures and embodied within our individual skins — between our wounds, the scars that remain from them and that which is most holy in human experience.

🌀For me that scar image comes even more compellingly alive when we add the original purpose and ritual of tattoos, sometimes used as war paint: That of emphasizing and marking our wounds, via the scars that healed over them, making them sacred signs of strength and healing.

🌀As Hemingway put this, we become “stronger in the broken places.” For Leonard Cohen, a “crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” And there’s a genre of Japanese ceramics in which cracks in pottery pieces are delicately filled creating intricate patterns in gold.

🌀The other word of interest is vigil — a search I’m glad the Siers cartoon prompted with its title. From the Latin, it means awake, in watchfulness. As used today a vigil is a period of intentionally keeping awake during the time usually spent asleep, especially to keep watch or pray.

🌀So in this sense vigils are sacred time and space, often accompanied by candles not only as ritual but assisting us in that watchful awake-ness. (Here I’m reminded of that precious lumbering parade of awake-and-connected elephants of the signature William Stafford poem at the close of each newShrink post!)

🌀 However, another derivation of vigil has opposite connotations of particular relevance when we are trying to follow and make sense of such mass incidents of reactivity and violence as the January 6 siege. That is vigilante — which is essentially a person or type of action in which that watchfulness is taken to its irrational, cognitive judgment-impaired extremes.

🌀This is important from the standpoint of clinical psychology, for hyper-vigilance with its related paranoid, irrational behaviors is a defining symptom of such diagnoses as Acute Traumatic Stress Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, by the way, are not the same things) and the host of other anxiety disorders growing at alarming rates across American age groups and regions.

🌀What this looks like as we read and follow news about and after the January 6 Insurrection is: The many mass denials of fact about events we all could see for ourselves in real time, astonishingly large buy-in to lies not just big but gigantic, alignment with leaders obviously against rational self-interest, sunny-side-up denials of anything bad at all, and most of all intense projection of blame and attack on others. This is how people with untreated, unacknowledged trauma behave.

I’ll be writing more in future newShrinks about trauma in its many dimensions.

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The week has had a vast range of news, and not all of it profane! As part of coverage most of us have likely taken in by now, I particularly recommend the PBS/Pro Publica Frontline piece, “American Insurrection” as well as Robert Hubbell’s January 6 Today’s Edition newsletter with an interesting parallel to American Revolution-era colonists, titled “What You Fight For Matters.”

Note: You can access a range of originally planned and gathered headlines, highlights and links on various aspects of the January 6 Insurrection anniversary and investigation, COVID 19 and other news on the website by clicking the couch logo at the top of this email or accessing directly from a browser at newshrink.substack.com. The post is titled “News Headlines & Links 1.9.22.”

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the sacred

As conventional wisdom holds that all politics is local, perhaps it follows that all trauma and suffering is, ultimately, personal.

This simple yet powerful quote from the memoir Unthinkable could be part of a core-values statement for what newShrink is about.

In addition to the January 6 attacks, a year ago this month marked the Inaugural start to the Biden presidency two weeks later… and for me it began a final winding-up of conceptual phases to bring newShrink to life. All with the common theme of tracking, reclaiming, taking on a battle for the soul of America (and, it is my hope, ourselves.) A core element of Biden’s well-known and long-scrutinized story of return and rise in politics — more than once — has been his own trials-by-the fire of unthinkable loss.

Now to Congressman Jamie Raskin and his new memoir, out Tuesday:

Mary Louise Kelly’s introduction to the gripping NPR interview:

“It is hard to wrap your head around just how difficult a year Jamie Raskin has just lived through. Raskin is a Democratic congressman from Maryland. He's also a husband and a dad. And to understand how those two facts thread together, you need to know this - that one year ago today, Raskin buried his only son, Tommy Raskin, who had just died by suicide. The very next day, January 6, Jamie Raskin was at the U.S. Capitol as it was attacked and ransacked by a mob of Trump supporters. Well, instead of retreating into his grief, he decided to channel it, to lead the impeachment effort against President Trump for inciting the violence. And then when that effort was behind him, he sat down and wrote about it all in a new book titled Unthinkable.”

From the Tuesday NPR book review:

“The siege propelled Raskin to a new mission as the lead House manager of former President Donald Trump's second impeachment and now as a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.

In some ways, Raskin became one of Democrats' congressional first responders to the events of Jan. 6, present at several key turns in the efforts to ensure that such an attack does not happen again.” Raskin writes:

"I have learned that trauma can steal everything from you that is most precious and rip joy right out of your life. But, paradoxically, it can also make you stronger and wiser, and connect you more deeply to other people than you ever imagined by enabling you to touch their misfortunes and integrate their losses and pain with your own."

Here, from Raskin in the Mary Louise Kelly interview. When asked about the note left by his son Tommy, a brilliant rising-star at Harvard Law School passionate about justice and environmental causes who had long struggled with depression:

“Tommy said to us, please forgive me. My illness won today. Look after each other, the animals and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy. And it's the first thing that Sarah and I read every morning when we wake up…

…It's the last thing we see when we go to bed. And every day, I find new things in that note. And Tommy left us a huge number of beautiful essays and poems and plays and speeches. But that note is just pregnant with meaning, and it is indeed the roadmap for the rest of my life…”

When pressed about his having accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s appointments of the leadership roles in impeachment and investigative hearings, plus writing a book amid such staggering grief, Raskin described his deep and enlivening sense of Tommy’s presence in each of these efforts that pulled him out of a near catatonic state:

“[L]ook after each other means we have to take care of the people in our immediate, intimate circles, but it means we have to take care of everybody, and we have to take care of the democracy that makes it possible for us to be in a society that looks out for the mutual benefit and good of everyone.”

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I’ll now follow the Raskin interview with an intensely personal, for me breathtakingly similar, back-and-forth text conversation that I happened to find myself having during this writing time. (Jung and others might describe it as synchronistic, numinous… sacred.) It’s with one of the couple of people on the planet who are forever dearest to me, Allison Rash Miley. She and her husband Rob lost their precious daughter Claire in a freak jet-ski accident on Lake Norman in July 2019. She asked me to share as many of her thoughts here as I wish, citing reasons for wanting that, having Claire known and remembered, and much more, that echoes Raskin. Here is Allison, verbatim, on Jamie Raskin and his unthinkable trial-by-fire so like her own:

“I want to read the memoir 
Child loss is an instant community as you know 

So many books out by grieving parents who aren’t writers or [psychologically] aware… and what a story he has.”

“One thought on those who’ve suffered driving needed change - i think they have a different kind of courage, because they have nothing left to lose. Don’t care what people think. Don’t care if they are liked, only care about what really matters. The circle is smaller but deeper. A completely different life perspective. For me anyway.” 

“I don’t actually know him obviously, but it’s like immediately I do. I know and feel and am drawn to that space in him that mourns in such a deep and guttural way. Because I know.” 

“And I do think often and have written in my ongoing notes about how those who have known deep loss have a keen ability, if they embrace it, to create change in the world that matters long-term. They push for laws, policies, create programs with lasting impact because something deeper and stronger inside drives them. Rob and i talk about what that is for us.”

“After we texted I read an article with a few excerpts of how he [Raskin] described Jan 6 - his daughter and her husband were there with him! The terror he must have felt. And also was really drawn to the story of how people post their actions to support his son’s ask in his last note to take care of the animals and global poor. A ‘give Claire’s love’ ask in action. Really special how people all over have responded.”

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Echoing Allison and Jamie Raskin is my former Pacifica professor Dr. Robert Romanyshyn, whose book The Soul in Grief: Love, Death and Transformation is a memoir of his journey through the 1994 sudden death of his loved first wife at age 46 and his since finding deep love again, says:

“It is true that we grieve because we have dared to love. But it is also true that we love because we have learned how to grieve. The love that springs anew from grief is more free of fear than love that has not yet been tempered by loss and in its embrace we recover our citizenship in the cosmos.”

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Each of these in different ways express the premise and a core concept of a book by my former professor, 30-year practicing depth psychotherapist and dear friend Dr. Cynthia Anne Hale: That it is in what she has termed the red place of our deepest woundings and wrestling with our shadow aspects that our healing and the way forward also lie. Her book is The Red Place: Transforming Past Traumas Through Relationships and her website is imaginalways.com.

Along with a range of depth psychologists I highly recommend hearing, Cynthia is presenting a talk,  "Listening from a Depth Perspective: Illuminating Different Realities" at the Thursday session of this week’s online seminar Fear, Anger, and Discontent in Challenging Times at the New York Jung Center that begins tonight with Thomas Moore. Click the links for registration information.

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now about those window-candles…

Two quirky nudges from the psyche early this past week involved candles, one just a vivid dream image along with an undefined but brightly lit onscreen cartoon. And the other: Mysteriously counter to my as-usual, enthusiastic removal of all Christmas stuff, indoor and outdoor lights by nightfall on January 6 Epiphany, I have so far been unable to remove or stop lighting the window candles at sundown. Suddenly, they just need to be on…!?!

Meanwhile, with “dry January” resolution time upon us and long pandemic-aggravated problems with alcohol and other substances on the rise, I had long planned a segment to revisit then expand on something I inadvertently left out of a December 19 segment quoting C.G. Jung on “How to Live and the Origin of ‘Do the next right thing.” The full quote had closed with:

“If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious — your soul.”

What I omitted was that this idea, and Jung’s correspondence with Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, were foundational to the “steps” of AA and particularly its spiritual/soul grounding in Step 2.

The examples of Bill Wilson, a host of others in the recovery community and wounded-healers — which all of us are — across the spectrum of soul psychology and beyond further expand the scope of today’s theme of transformative change through, not despite or by avoiding, our deepest shadow and wounds.

Then the timing with my January files brought an example from a year ago that made me smile. This full front-page obituary piece by my former Charlotte Observer colleague and friend Jim Morrill is a worthwhile and inspiring read:

“Phil Howerton, Mecklenburg judge who overcame his own trials to help others, dies at 84”

“A former Marine, Howerton was a lawyer, prosecutor, public defender and judge with degrees from Davidson, Princeton and the University of Virginia. He had eclectic interests. He was an unpublished novelist, a voracious reader, an expert fly fisherman and a woodworker who crafted elegant reproductions of antique furniture…

… But his “happy place” was ever the courtroom…

“[And] in the mid-1990s, Howerton started the county’s first drug court. With so many defendants suffering from drug or alcohol addiction, the idea was to get them treatment and follow through.

Howerton was candid about his own addiction. He took his last drink in 1988.

“He was himself in recovery and that always seems to make people better at dealing with folks with drug and alcohol problems,” said former N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Burley Mitchell, who helped take the idea statewide. “He was just tireless in promoting drug treatment courts and running his own. And I know he saved many people.

Howerton’s legacy and programs like it live on in Mecklenburg County as well as others across the state and nation — many of them with some version of Jung’s and AA’s Bill Wilson’s “next right steps” in their names and acronyms.

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As a summary note reflecting on each of these heard from today — Joe Biden, Jamie Raskin, Allison Miley, Robert Romanyshyn, the late Phil Howerton — from the standpoint of the soul they are the initiated, those who have been through fire and emerged forged and transformed by it.

Perhaps they are holding the candles for us.

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(Whew.) Now to leave you with a lighter note: The loons are back on the cove!

Of course this picture illustrates little to nothing. For what identifies them as loons are those deep, long dives they make only to resurface across startling distance underwater — disappearances that in the adult birds seem alarmingly endless. The young ones like these are even harder to catch in photograph at the surface, as they’re practicing constant sequential short shallow dives. Then in quick succession they pop up one by one, only to start the whole thing again like the silliest giggle-worthy cartoon. The other cool thing is, these are back after having first spent winter into spring 2021 here, joining the resident blue herons and mallard ducks the only time in 25 years here. The long, deep-diving adults are my favorites — who right now are some combination of drill sergeant and diving coach drilling youngsters in the art of loonhood.

So OK. The above paragraph officially identifies me as a classic target for “OK, BOOMER!” ridicule from the human youngsters… as in “Notice how they start paying a lot of attention to the birds…”

And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.

🦋💙tish

🌀🔵🔷🦋💙

… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”