Living With Trauma: The Healers, 30

"Each man kills the thing he loves." Yes, those dreadful words from the song I heard sung by the legendary Jeanne Moreau in the French film Querrelle. This is key to understanding what is wrong with us, because this is the very essence of toxic masculinity. I have seen this over and over again and I have seen this in myself. And you know something else, Gentle Reader? Neither are women immune to this destructive and perverse trait. But regardless of the gender of the person embodying this characteristic, I believe it to be essentially masculine. So, we have throughout history this drama of love and death, love and death again. In Ancient Sumer and other parts of pre-Christian, pre-Muslim Middle East, parents were expected to sacrifice their first born child (usually a son, I think), and bury him under the foundation of their house or the city wall. In Aztec Mexico it was often the strongest and best warriors and prisoners who were sacrificed to the gods. The Aztecs must have lived in a state of chronic and permanent collective anxiety given the perfidiousness of their gods who always seemed poised to pull the plug on the universe if they didn't get enough human sacrifices to satisfy their hunger. I think that this sense of anxious unease is characteristic to our most ancient humanity. Rather than receiving and accepting life as a gift, it seems that our earliest ancestors must have grasped at life as an entitlement that could be snatched away from them at any second. They weren't going to give up that which they could never have given themselves. if they loved anything, it was as possession and food. It was somehow to be disempowered and killed in order to be possessed and eaten. A lover of birds, myself, I have often felt horrified and creeped out, that until very recently, naturalists, ornithologists and bird artists always shot and killed the birds they wanted to draw, paint or study. They didn't seem to think they were doing anything wrong, so embedded in human nature has been this instinct to kill, possess and consume. This of course spills over into our relationships with one another. The stalking male, the abusive boyfriend, the guy who murders his wife, these are all playbacks of this archetypal disease in our human nature. But this does not have to be our destiny and I think that we can confront and reverse in our natures this force of death and destruction. As an old friend said to me once, our huge problem as human beings is that we hate ourselves. I think that knowing and understanding that we hate ourselves is key to overcoming this hatred, of ourselves, and how we project it onto others, thus creating the enemy. Our work as healers begins always with ourselves: recognizing our smallness and our brokenness; accepting that we are not gods; accepting and celebrating that we are weak and small while embracing in a spirit of glad humility every opportunity to grow and improve. Accepting and celebrating life as a gift, not an entitlement, but a beautiful gift from a giver who loves us, who is himself and herself, love. This is a lifelong work, but it has to begin somewhere. Let it begin with me.