Finding the Cure
A little brain chemistry and Greek mythology shedding light on childhood wounds
The “cure is in the wound” is an idea I’ve come across multiple times. The phrase is not worth googling. You’ll find a quote from the Bible with an imprecise citation and you’ll find some literal interpretations, literally referring to physical wounds and healing. My meaning here is metaphorical, as I am thinking of emotional or psychological wounds, the kind that torment a person everyday, that inflame when triggered and cause a person to react from the amygdala, that part of the brain that releases adrenaline and cortisol in response to fear and anxiety. The amygdala senses danger—not necessarily some kind of external, real-time danger, but very possibly an imagined one based on past trauma. According to Ryan Dowd, who does training for de-escalation1 tools in the workplace, the amygdala also activates when a person feels disrespected. Dowd’s training largely focuses on homelessness and how to recognize and de-escalate triggers when talking to homeless people, but the training is applicable to everyone. We all have amygdalas. As he says, rightly, homeless people usually have a tremendous amount of trauma and so for them, the triggers are amplified. Just a bad day for a non-homeless person equates to a worse day for a homeless person. Also, homeless people experience disrespect and people ignoring/dismissing them, making them feel invisible and unimportant, on a regular basis—often several times a day. So while these kinds of triggers are painful for everyone, for a homeless person this happens so often that by the time you encounter that person, and you trigger them somehow, even if unintentionally, it might be the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, as I completed Dowd’s Homeless De-escalation Training for work as a librarian, I was repeatedly struck by its applicability to multiple and common situations in everyday life. I’m going to give you one example from his training. I think it opens the door well towards a real understanding of how this works in every human being. In his talk, Dowd evokes the infamous Will Smith/Chris Rock “slap at the Oscars.” This is a perfect example of a person (Will Smith) being triggered on several points which are very common agitators of the amygdala. Dowd points out some key factors that set the stage for a triggered amygdala, one of these being an audience. Chris Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, on stage at the Oscars, in front of a huge live audience and for an even larger remote audience via television. Just because Will Smith is wealthy and a celebrity, that doesn’t mean he is immune to “fight or flight” impulses when he gets triggered. Of course, Dowd was not taking sides or accusing anyone. He merely pointed out the psychological process at work: the joke, the trigger, the laughter from the audience. Then he showed Will’s taped apology after the event, where he talked about hardly remembering what happened, because it was “foggy.” A “foggy” memory is a classic symptom after an amygdala trigger. A person literally seems to have somehow “lost it.” It’s very common to say things like, “I don’t know what came over me.” I want to elaborate on that idea—what indeed comes over us? What is it that is being triggered? What is the wound and what is its traumatic source? This is exactly what I’m working on with my therapist—pinpointing the triggers and tracing them to their source. This has been critical in building my awareness, although I’ll admit that it’s difficult to ‘catch it’ in the middle of the action, so to speak. That is the goal, though. If you recognize it after it happens, that’s only the first step. You have to keep going. Bring it into a meditation or do some journaling. Just get it all down. How did you feel? Notice the physical symptoms. Did a particular part of your body feel painful or heavy? I usually feel the heaviness in the solar plexus or in the hollowness in the stomach. Sometimes I feel pressure around the face and head, as if I’m being closed in; when I feel that, I start to panic. I feel scared, and “fight or flight” kicks in, overwhelmingly in favor of flight! But you can’t always flee. If you can’t get yourself out of the situation, you have to use other calming tools. This is when a therapist might suggest breathing or counting. Doodling works well for me. Just moving the pen on the paper, forming shapes, sketching lines, will take the edge off. That might be enough to get you through the situation until you are able to more meaningfully address the issue. Maybe you just sit down and try to think of something pleasant—something to get the dopamine pumping in your brain. Just saying my dog’s name has a calming effect on me. Dopamine is one of the hormones in the prefrontal cortex, which, in contrast to the fight-or-flight amygdala, is the more rational part of the brain. Once you start acting from the prefrontal cortex, you can think clearly. The body calms down. You de-escalate. Once I’m in the prefrontal cortex (and I know I’m being very untechnical here) that is the point when I start to be ok. That’s when I can start my meditation or journaling—I do one or both, depending on the situation I’m in. I have to do this practice everyday because, even though I’m increasingly aware of my trigger points, I don’t always catch it in a timely manner. I heard one spiritual teacher put it like this: “Are you catching it like a car at the top of the hill or only after you’ve begun to roll downward?” I always think of driving in San Francisco. Once you’re motoring down the hill, it’s going to take a lot of work to make the car stop. You might not be able to stop in a timely manner; you might get almost to the bottom before you can stop and turn the car to drive sensibly along a flat road. Maybe you’re able to stop the momentum but not before you’ve done some damage—busted up your tires, hit another car, or let “road rage” (another classic amygdala, “I don’t know what came over me” episode, usually triggered by fear, which leads to anger) take over your brain.
Most people are going through life unaware of their impact in the world. They have no idea how their words, facial expressions, and laughter are affecting other humans. That’s why I don’t rely on others to know my triggers. Even if they could be aware of my trigger points, the expectation would be tantamount to asking them to walk on eggshells. I really think this is something that we all should do for ourselves. I realize it might not be work that everyone wants or needs to do. Maybe you don’t have trigger points. Maybe you never “fly off the handle.” (You’re lucky!) Or maybe it’s just too scary, the trauma too intense, with or without a therapist. For me, it is essential work because the more aware I become, the more I recognize the patterns, and those patterns give me clues about the very meaning of my existence. What is that thing, what is it, and why does it keep showing up over and over again? There has to be a reason, even if the point is just for me to heal that wound and move on.
Astrological healers call it the “Chiron wound.” It refers to the very source of the pain that keeps haunting your life. It torments you. It lives in your head, festers, cries out, and is triggered again and again. The “cure is in the wound” is the metaphor for the healing that needs to take place in order for you to gain clarity and move on. Chiron was a half-god in Homer’s Illiad, a centaur who excelled in the healing arts. Chiron himself suffered two severe wounds. The first wound, as outlined by Dr. Neel Burton, was associated with the trauma of his conception and birth. He was the child of a rape—of the oceanid Philyra by Cronus, godhead of the Titans. Abandoned by both parents, he was raised and educated by Apollo. Right off the bat, we have a traumatic origin story followed by rejection. Then there is the lifelong conflict embodied in the centaur—the horse legs and the human torso. This is the struggle of being two things in one, not quite belonging to either group. Burton has an interpretation of the myth of Chiron and why it encapsulates so well the universal scope of childhood wounds: it is because Chiron himself focused on healing the “original wound,” finding within it the “source of motivation, even of inspiration, that leads him to great insight and achievement.”2 Like Chiron, we too can find the cure by ‘going to the wound’ and exploring for the source. Burton quotes the poet Rumi, writing about Chiron:
Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself
Begins to gallop on the Way
….
Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That’s where the light enters you.
The second wound Burton refers to is the one that led to his death: an arrow fired by his friend Herakles, accidentally hitting and fatally wounding Chiron. Despite being an expert healer, Chiron could not heal this wound, and yet as an immortal, he was unable to end his suffering through death. He thus made a bargain with Zeus whereby Chiron exchanged his immortality for the freedom of Prometheus. Burton compares this to modern euthanasia: “Chiron’s stoical decision to die in the face of unbearable and incurable pain, especially in light of his immortality, raises profound, and surprisingly modern, ethical questions about euthanasia and the desirability of immortality, questions that have never been more pertinent than today.”3
In Chiron’s story, there is so much that is familiar. He was the child of rape and rejected by both parents, but while these two things alone might seem like incurables, it was the training he received from Apollo which gave him the tools to understand how to overcome such painful foundations. Had his parents never rejected him, he would not have been adopted by Apollo; and then Apollo could not have taught him the medicinal arts. In other circumstances, he might have been wild and a hunter like the other centaurs. Yet the tragedy laid the groundwork for what became his real genius and the way that he found purpose in the world.
https://homelesslibrary.com
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202102/the-myth-of-chiron-the-wounded-healer
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202102/the-myth-of-chiron-the-wounded-healer