I met Lee at a gathering, a celebration for a friend who had finished his Nursing degree at age 50. Lee was an 80 year old man, soft spoken, unassuming, and quiet among animated conversation. Eventually, Lee started asking insightful questions about the state of the world, about politics, and about how others perceive the path of our economy. I was intrigued by his cogently practiced and kindly idiosyncratic phrasing. Lee directed a question toward me. Our views soon interlaced as we repeatedly exchanged the baton of discussion.
When I shared my belief that all understanding is story, that each of us lives from our personal storied ecosystem, Lee’s eyes lit up. He said “Yes, we are a storied people”. His tone conveyed it all. He’d believed in our storied nature for a long time, perhaps before I was born, and he said it with such familiarity that I felt excited about our common ground and confident in our meaningful connection. Lee’s insights were surrounded and supported in his life’s odysseys of inner and outer exploration. At our first meeting we arranged to continue our discussions on the phone, where Lee shared several of his experiences.
I learned that in the late 1960’s, while Lee was in his late 30’s, he had worked as a Physician in Ethiopia. He returned to the United States to complete a Psychiatric residency, then he began his series of intriguing contracts as a Psychiatric Consultant. Some of his most consequential contracts were with the major Churches. These Churches hired Lee to interview both clergy and church members who had committed unfortunate and sometimes tragically criminal acts. He was commissioned to gain understanding regarding their motivations through interviews, and these interviews contributed to Lee’s insights regarding people and their storied nature. When he learned about the broad history of their lives, about the events these people had witnessed and the stories they were living, he came to believe that he could have acted as they had acted. As Lee put it: “but for the grace of God”. Lee empathically understood the condemning path of their stories.
A few weeks after meeting Lee, and after a few phone conversations, he invited me to visit him and his wife on the other side of the state. When I arrived, we seamlessly commenced with four days of entrancing conversation. I noticed how invited, even embraced, I was feeling. I suspected that this had much to do with Lee’s counseling skills. Intrigued, I asked Lee if his deportment was a consciously trained skill. Lee said that people have told him about his calming effect. He said that his style had likely grown from a combination of his slow nature, of how others interpret him, and thorough his own unconscious shaping from years of counseling. Then he both humbly and insightfully offered up “his round shape”, that his round “Teddy Bear” appearance has an nonthreatening effect to which people respond. This was only part of the influence. As we continued, I watched for other clues.
Now that you know more about Lee, about his sincere, thoughtful, and insightful nature, I’ll tell you about something specific he contributed to our (your and my) story discussion. His contribution came when I told him something that feels true for me. I said: “For me to feel healthy and kind in a relationship, I need to feel capable and secure in risking loss of the relationship. Only then do I have the room to take risks for mutual growth”. Lee echoed my thought. He said he believed that this made relationships with parents particularly difficult, and that:
“To free ourselves of the storied influences of our parents, each of us must free our parents of our childhood storied images of them, and resurrect them as human”.
Lee invites us to create a more congruent story of our parents, create room for their humanity, and to free both them and us of frozen storied images generated when we were too young to appreciate their humanness. Forgiveness is the key to freedom, and freeing them of our storied condemnation is necessary for forgiveness. Lee also reminded me that the meta-story of death and resurrection has been part of human psyche long before the Christian story. The role of sacrifice, of letting go to make room for living growth, is a meta-story that has been acknowledged as essential by most (or all) cultures. Ideas have a life of their own. We benefit from making room for their graceful death so that, like rainforest trees, they can become the nurse logs for new and healthier storied growth.
Lee’s comment about freeing our storied parents is metaphorical, and points toward more general freeing from our story condemnation. Releasing attachment to old stories is a kind of story death, it needs to be done with care, and we need to be ready to replace/resurrect our relationships with more generative and congruent stories. Carl Jung (and later Joseph Campbell) described death and resurrection as transpersonal symbolism, symbolizing experiences that transcend ego-functioning, experiences necessary for moving us through stages of psychological growth. I’ll continue with our trope of transformation, of death and resurrection, in the next posting.