A HYPOTHESIS OF EVERYTHING: YOU ARE HERE

Chapter 1: Your Psyche and the Hero of Your Story

PART 4 of 5

Fortunately, professionals dealing with matters of the psyche can treat that fear and soften the hardened shell. First, fear responds to light and love. It wants to run into the shadows and darkness and hide in shame, but its position is weakened when exposed or when you become intimately connected to someone else. Second, fear responds to truth and authenticity. Therapists dedicate their profession to helping their patients experience the security of truth and authentically wrestle with their symptoms. Fear bows to authority. When confronted with authority, fear will often stop and submit. Parents can interrupt the trajectory of a child’s fear-identity by a spanking or imposed isolation, or even a glance of acknowledgment. A trained priest will use authority to exorcise a demon out of a possessed victim or command the fear-identity to cooperate. Self-help seminar leaders use a similar strategy through coaching participants. The military has no use for your identity and uses authority to compel submission.

The United States Department of Veterans Affairs reports that veterans are substantially more likely to die by suicide than non-veterans. The reasonable notion is that negative traumatic memories cause this. However, I think that it’s more than that. The release of the suppressed identity back into the psyche away from the military’s structured discipline, coupled with traumatic memories, creates a judge, jury, and executioner scenario. The core hero doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

Lastly, ingesting chemicals can alter fear and is another common solution for professionals and amateurs alike. I believe that artificially manipulating hormones, such as serotonin with medication, are risky. Still, it’s better to have a numb patient that isn’t killing themselves. The road to healing can begin.

Chemical dependence to subdue the fear identity’s ravaging nature covers a much greater span than only drugs prescribed by doctors. From an early age, we are taught by example to rely on what we can consume to make us feel relaxed or more alert or a little more numb to our pain – even as benign as sugar or caffeine. So, naturally, chemical addiction in many forms is a culturally facilitated solution to manage survival.

So, where is the good news? I don’t know that there is any. Your identity is big and ugly and intends to destroy your life. Your core hero is tiny in comparison, like the story in the ancient scriptures of young David against a giant Goliath that seems to grow bigger and more powerful every day.

In other words, YOUR plot is right on track. There is very little chance that your hero will be the champion in your life and lead you to happiness. Yes, you have an intriguing story. It’s full of scandal and drama and betrayal and resentment and death and destruction. That road is wide and everybody is traveling on it. But that’s not what you want your future to be. It’s not the story of your life that you want others to tell after you’re gone. How do I know? I know because you already thought of your hero at the beginning of this chapter. If you can imagine your hero, you can relate to your hero. And you can discover that YOU are the true hero of your story and are uniquely qualified to win against all the odds.

When trauma happens, your identity hides for a few seconds while your core hero manages it like a pro. And then, your identity shows back up again to complain about it and blame others. The point is that your hero is the first on the scene, not your identity. The lesson to learn is that each trauma is an opportunity for love and truth to take over. Notice it or remember when it happened, you had a type of power not usually packaged into your identity. Love and truth were heroically at work. 

We witnessed this on a societal level with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the beginning, every nation on the planet was in trauma response mode. The collective hero in us rose to occasion with decisive actions. The goodness of humanity was singing from the balconies and open windows to calm the neighbors, and generous citizens gave extraordinary contributions to care for employees hit hardest by the loss of business. Beer manufacturers set aside part of their operations to make hand sanitizer to give to first responders. Thoughtful people posted patterns and instructions online for thousands of citizens to cut and sew masks to send to front-line workers in hospitals, fire stations, and emergency clinics.

The biggest question is, “why can’t we be like this all of the time?” The answer is because our collective identity craves complaining, blaming, suspicion, shaming, equity, and playing the victim. Our national psyche looks a lot like our own and is on full display in every news and social media platform on the planet.

Trauma summons the hero. The crisis or the series of crises in our favorite stories and myths call the hero to spring into action. Think about it. Clark Kent has a job at the Daily Planet for a reason. The media is always the first to know when something terrible is happening. It is the tragedies that pop the buttons on Clark Kent’s white dress shirt to expose Superman. When your fear identity engages useless speech to deflect trauma, you lose the opportunity to overcome it and find meaning in the responsibility of embracing it. All that remains is the shame and blame and self-pity you see in the mirror.

Your fear identity is perfectly satisfied with mediocre and boring. But life doesn’t give you that – it traumatizes you with the death of loved ones, loss, betrayal, resentment, shame, bitterness, and tragedy. There are significant problems to solve. Your fear identity convinces you that it has everything under control, but look at the results. Are your addictions designed to help you win at life? Is your anxiety providing forward movement on any level? Is your all-consuming egocentric mindset connecting you with positive people or finding love?