The Stress Doc explores transforming two
bookend dreams into a powerful and poignant three-part short story -- about
losing and rediscovering one's mind and voice.
Having
recently given a talk on “Finding Your Voice at Any Age,” I too must walk my
talk, perhaps pitter my patter. Here’s an
attempt to encapsulate a dream into a short story. For me, dreams are not just, to quote Freud,
“the royal road to the unconscious.”
Dreams are like a time machine, enabling travel back in psychic space…or
a time warp jump to some (un)imaginable future.
And sometimes, in paradoxical fashion, there is a space-time,
imaginative stream of confluence of past-present-future. Like now, using a very recent, up-to-date dream to reconnect
to a decades old nighttime visual metaphor-hallucination. And this psycho-existential gestalt of
present and past consciousness ignites a simmering desire: to explore whether short-story writing can be
a part of my creative future? And desire
might not be the right word. Perhaps
it’s a familiar. gnawing obsessive need:
survival in the psychic jungle. Perhaps branching out once again reflects the
wise observation of author and essayist, Adam Gopnik: Repetition
is the law of nature; variation is the rule of life! It’s my inaugural effort; who knows what
subsequent forays will bring, what life may emerge. What do you think? Thanks, MG
Fast
forward forty years…four decades between iconic-existential dreams. Yesterday’s subconscious video probably had
to do with hearing a support group member talk about a traumatic phase of his
young adult life – from losing a two-year old daughter when his ex remarried
(turns out, biologically, the child was not his) to the sudden death of a sister
in a car accident. The 40-something held
it together while sharing; actually, had a fairly coherent, well-ordered
timeline of events, but you could see traces of water in his eyes.
How
would he, a senior, recount the early childhood trauma of his life? As powerful and surprising as the recent
dream, a bookend of sorts to his primal family Holocaust dream-nightmare, it
did not have the same vivid clarity, metaphoric transparency, and grief-like
outpouring of the original. Nonetheless,
he goes back in time; the cloudy mist starts to fade, the memory vault opens, now
the visual hallucination envelops him…
They
are hurriedly approaching an incoming train at the station. In truth, it’s less a train than an endless
chain of WW II, Nazi-like cattle cars bound for some unknown terror. The open doors of the car demand their presence. His uncle is in the lead,
moving at a pace and with a purpose in which he and his mother barely can keep
up. The mother-child tandem is slowed as
they are holding, no, anxiously gripping, each other’s hand. In this desperate, symbiotic clutch, it’s not
clear who is squeezing harder. Only that
the two are locked into a life and death grip; their survival is inexorably
linked to a codependent fate. Hopefully,
his uncle, the boy’s hero, the family member he has always blindly trusted, knows
what he is doing. There’s no time,
there’s no peace of mind, to question what is occurring. He is the good-loyal six-year-old little boy,
without voice, in a silent state of panic, robotically doing what he is
told. His mind has mostly shut down; for
him, it’s a not uncommon traumatic default, disconnected from his feelings, barely
able to notice his surroundings, unable to intentionally focus outward beyond
his own consuming sense of dread. Yet,
being an acutely sensitive child, he is subliminally and subtly absorbing an
emotionally charged land- and mindscape that overwhelms and basically paralyzes
his conscious mind.
But
then, just before they are to enter the boxcar, out of the corner of his eye,
he notices a human figure slumped against a wall and the station floor. It his father…with the emaciated look – sullen
grayish appearance, dressed in a simple, nondescript manner (neither the worn
and tattered rags of one who is homeless nor the stylish manner of dress for
which his father was known), sunken eyes, bony angular facial features – of a
wasted drug addict. While he cannot make
out more details, nonetheless, there’s a deep sadness, a bowed head, arms
encircling bent stick-legs, as if dearly holding onto a mangled two branch life
raft. Ultimately, emanating from his
father’s face and bodily form, a sense of resignation and hopelessness – an
inability to imagine a future worth living.
The boy knows that face and form.
And why is it that only the boy notices his obviously destitute, pale,
and sickly father? Beyond awareness, at
some biologic-psychic conjunction, the existential question echoing deep within:
“Who are you? Who me?!
Finally,
he awakens from his dream, more a nightmare, “inspired” by a mid-late ‘70s television
special, a historical fiction blockbuster about the Holocaust. Actually, his nocturnal drama was less an
inspiration and more an excavation, a subterranean visual metaphor, resurrected,
at the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, from the shadows of his soul. Clearly, the envisaged scene reveals
parallels in his mindscape between a dramatic moment of the Holocaust and the
secretive “survival” dynamics of his family, dynamics emitting toxic emotional
radiation, never acknowledged, let alone discussed throughout his childhood and
teen years. He only learned about his
father’s breakdown and hospitalization, and subsequent “rehabilitation” – the shameful family secret – nearly two
decades after it occurred. The boy has a
tender psyche, teeming with subconscious images and emotions of abandonment and
suffocating closeness, with periods of sheer terror; hallucinatory memories of
being swallowed whole inside a woman’s stomach, his only shelter in the storm. (A little over a year
out of graduate school, in his mid-20s, he shared this memory with a Social
Worker Manager providing him supervision.
Her non-verbal look of upset told him this was DSM diagnostically serious.) Formless, unimaginable, and chaotic questions whirlpool
about the ground of reality, pulling him down, down…until the questions
themselves, along with any self-awareness, go into deep freeze.
Or,
the wake-up dream is a mind-quake revelation.
Never before the Holocaust series has a subterranean video broken his
plain of consciousness, capturing the family dynamic with such startling
metaphoric clarity. And the
unprecedented subconscious eruption releases a shocking tsunami of emotion. Fortunately,
soon after the dream, he was able to cry unashamedly at a woman friend’s house.
On the
surface, this inner drama was mostly repressed.
But in the boy’s childhood, so many stressors triggered the everyday
fear of being exposed or the humiliation of failing. Alas, a well-honed mask meant that his acute
vulnerability and tension was rarely seen (or was usually denied) by his
parents and other significant adults.
There was a poignant exception:
In sixth grade, his teacher, Mr. W, deviating from the class routine, had
the students do a free-form drawing exercise.
Likely startled by the boy’s passionate outpouring, in contrast to his typically
more passive, quietly anxious, too good persona, Mr. W approached him after
class. Trying to connect with the boy,
he says, “You’ll be going into junior high soon; high school is not far
off. Maybe you should think of applying
to New York City’s School of Music and Art.”
His puzzlement quickly morphs into subterranean shame and
self-doubt. Not allowing expression to
seep through the mask, the boy thinks to himself: “Mr. W doesn’t think I’m smart enough to go
to a regular school.” And he continues
his stony silence. And the subject is
never again broached…with anyone. And
another lock is added to the prison cell.
A primal
emotional core of abandonment, emptiness, and loneliness could not be
anesthetized, despite all his efforts, one example, through desperate
masturbation. When combining this “troubling trinity” with trepidation
around speaking up, rarely displaying any form of real angry protest – with
family or bullying peers – the mind-body manifestation was predictable: a seething and numbing inner mindscape would
finally implode with stomach aches, skin infections, difficulty sleeping, etc. Or an inability to concentrate at school or
school work, along with periodic lying, cheating, minor shoplifting (as a young
teen, an obvious cry for help). Now, exploding
to the surface chronic symptoms of anxiety, guilt, and shame and, ultimately, unrecognized
depression – likely both clinical and situational. And icing on the psychic cake: sometimes more, sometimes less overt smoldering
dread along with periodic bursts of panic and terror. The boy’s life invites the paraphrasing of
the three-word alliterative original, now an apt psycho-architectural
axiom: form may also follow family dysfunction!
And
Part II will place his primal hallucination, actually, more retrospective
family X-ray vision, in some historical and psycho-social
context. (The word psycho-social reminds
him that as a speaker after telling an audience he’s a “Psychohumorist, the
immediate punchline: “I let you all
decide where the emphasis on that word should go!” This dream let's him
know from where both emphasis and flow and even his quirky humor stem.) Finally, Part III, will get us current; telling
a tale of a life of running: running
from and running to. And now that he has
slowed his gait, in a semi-retired state, where will his mental motor take him?
Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" ™, a nationally acclaimed speaker, writer, and
"Psychohumorist" ™, is a founding partner and Stress Resilience and
Trauma Debriefing Consultant for the Nepali Diaspora Behavioral Health &
Wellness Initiative. Current Leadership Coach/Training Consultant for the
international Embry-Riddle Aeronautics University at the Daytona, FL
headquarters. A former Stress and Violence Prevention Consultant for the US
Postal Service, he has led numerous Pre-Deployment Stress Resilience-Humor-Team
Building Retreats for the US Army. Presently Mark does Critical Incident
Debriefing for organizational/corporate clients of Business Health Services.
The Doc is the author of Practice Safe Stress, The Four Faces of Anger, and
Preserving Human Touch in a High-Tech World. Mark’s award-winning, USA Today
Online "HotSite" – www.stressdoc.com – was called a "workplace
resource" by National Public Radio (NPR). For more info, email: stressdoc@aol.com.
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