Recovery and enlightenment can come through many channels: through arts, books, film, poetry, in a dream or during a psychedelic experience, it may come as a result of a symbolic death.
One of the most powerful experiences that I encountered was given us by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a great film director and a very peculiar advocate for psychological trauma awareness.
I find the viewing of his movie "Santa Sangre" to be a kind of rite of passage for people who seriously want to recover or to understand what it means to be blessed with adverse childhood experiences.
The stormy nature of childhood trauma contains many different moments of attachment, despair, guilt and variety of compulsory behaviors in various forms and sequences. Thus, the compulsory behaviors of the adulthood are the continuations of those patterns that helped one survive in the childhood.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky we see a pattern of guilt, a desire to break out of a cycle of poverty and a compulsive behavior. Throughout Dostoevsky's work we see fairly mature young adults or mature men and women (mostly men, due to patriarchal nature of the society where he lived) who struggle through the 'vices' and come up with more compulsive behaviors to repress the old ones. In the end, some characters find spiritual contempt either in incarceration or in the moment of death or in a life-long repentance.
In Alejandro Jodorowsky work we see how those behavior sequences are formed in a relatively balanced and untraumatized human being. We see how a child clings to his or her natural attachments to reality: to a reference points, such as a mother figure, a father figure, the safety of home. And the stormy nature of the surrounding continuously alters child's sense of time, and distorts their social perceptions, causing them to have flashbacks and further alienating them in society.
As a society, we love our universal tragedies, whether they were created by Homer or Shakespeare or if they were created by biblical and evangelical writers. A tragic story that everyone can relate to is commonly preserved as an archetype or a powerful narrative for unification.
I showed this film to several very traumatized people that are trying to recover. All of those who are no justifying their attachments to things that traumatized them and are ready to let go of them, usually relate to the story. Those who are not ready to let go usually perceive it as nothing more then another unsettling horror movie.
This is a very powerful dividing line in recovery. It is very important to recognize this line, both for people who are seeking recovery and people who work in social and welfare services. The line tells us who to help first and who is ready to receive help.
I find that many semi-autobiographical Alejandro Jodorowsky movies to be very appealing universal tragedies that speak to those who are actively seeking recovery from childhood trauma.
We all occasionally reach out to the universal tragedy and center our empathy around it. Many of us try to see a part of ourselves in the sacrificial lamb.
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