Part 4: Fate and Destiny: The Two Accords of the Soul
This is my fourth post in a row. If you want to read the others, you can do so, although it is not necessary to read them in order:
1. Where I Come From: My Origin Story.
2. The day my uncle drove me to the Psychiatric Hospital.
3. Understanding Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES).
I spent a lot of my life trying to escape the reality of my childhood trauma. After spending a year trying to be the obedient son who imagines he can save his father and be the family hero, I had finally reached my limit and told my mother that I didn’t want to continue the Sunday drives with my uncle to visit my father at the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital.
My father was committed to “treatment” when I was five and I spent a year of terror visiting my father. On the last visit, my father asked my uncle, “Who is the child with you Harry?I felt devastated that my father didn’t even know who I was. I was told he was in hospital getting better and my visits would help him. But it was clear he wasn’t getting better and I felt like I had failed my father by not being able to heal him and I failed my mother when I refused to be “her brave little man” and help my father.
When children are asked to take on adult responsibilities, we do our best to do what our adult caregivers ask of us. We want to be like the superheroes we see in the movies or read in our comics. When we inevitably fail, we take it personally. We feel guilt and shame and often blame ourselves.
We often try to escape from the impossible bind we find ourselves in. My mother continued her own escapades. As a child it never occurred to me to ask why my mother didn’t visit my father or why I became her stand-in. I just continued with the program until I couldn’t do it anymore.
Like many children who experience early trauma, I pushed the memories down into my subconscious. I tried to erase the past. When the kids at school asked about my father, instead of telling them he was committed to a mental institution, I told them he had died. We can’t escape our past, but I didn’t know that when I was young. I had to escape to survive.
It took me a long time to learn that what we deny or try to bury from our past does not go away. They return to our dreams as nightmares or appear in our relationships as the demons of fear, anger, jealousy, blame and shame.
Some trauma survivors have great difficulty becoming successful adults. Their trauma and the impact it has on their brain function causes them to have major issues with self-esteem, difficulties with relationships and problems with career success. Others seem to become superstar achievers.
This was true for me. I took a lot of pent up energy and put it into achieving success. I became a sought-after therapist, author of several best-selling books, married, had a child, and adopted a child as we had agreed upon when we were freshmen. I battled illness, depression and suicidal thoughts. It wasn’t until mid-life that I began to deal with my childhood wounds.
I attended a number of men’s gatherings, with Robert Bly, Michael Meade and James Hillman. Hillman’s book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, it helped me better understand my childhood wounds, the demons I was running from, and the soul calling I was searching to find.
“THE The code of the soul says Hillman, “it’s about that calling, that sense of destiny. These kinds of announcements and memories define biography as strongly as memories of abusive horror. but these more enigmatic moments tend to be shelved. Our theories favor the traumas that we are tasked with dealing with. We are less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused catastrophes that misshaped us.”
Hillman wants
“To resurrect the untold twists and turns that turned your vessel into the eddies and shallows of meaninglessness, bringing you back to the feelings of destiny. Because that’s what’s lost in so many lives and what needs to be regained: a sense of personal calling, that there’s a reason I’m alive.”
He believes that we come into the world with a specific destiny and many key experiences in our lives, even those we may consider traumatic, are in service of that destiny or calling.
“For centuries,” he says, “we’ve been looking for the right term for it call.”
He mentions the most famous:
- The Romans called it yours genius.
- The Greeks, you demon.
- Your Christians guardian angel.
- For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna.
- Plato named it example, a basic form that encompasses your entire destiny.
One of our ways genius or demon we are known by our names or nicknames. The story in our family was that when I was born my parents were sure I was going to be a girl and when I showed up they didn’t come up with the names. My father decided to name me after his deceased nephew, Elliot. My mother didn’t like the name and cried for three days until she agreed to go with Yannis’ choice, after her dead father. My official name became John Elliott Diamond.
Growing up I didn’t like the name. They called me Johnny, which didn’t sit well with me. When I went to college I changed my name to Jed. It felt short and sweet, strong and powerful, subtle and a little mysterious. I’ve been Jed ever since. For most of my life I was angry at my parents for thinking I was going to be a girl and naming me after my dead relatives.
Upon reflection, I realize that the entire process was in service of my unique destiny and calling and guided by my unique demon. Actually, I have a lot of feminine energy. My wife and I joke about it. I am very intuitive, I cry easily, I am emotionally aroused to extreme highs and rapid lows, and I empathize with others easily. These qualities have helped me to distinguish myself as a healer. My name Elliott connects me to my ancestry though my father’s line and John connects me to my mother’s heritage. The name I chose, Jed, expresses my own unique sense of self.
Another aspect of my family history that falls into place when viewed through the lens of destiny is my early experiences with depression and my father’s hospitalization. For most of my life I viewed my entire experience of visiting my father as unnecessary and traumatic. I blamed my mother for making me leave, I blamed my father for abandoning me, and I blamed the world for having to grow up too soon and not having the family care I imagined all the other kids had.
Life Lesson #7: Each of us has a destiny or calling in life.
Like most professionals, I have a business card. Mine say: Jed Diamond, PhD, Helping men and the women who love them since 1969. I have always talked about the beginning of my career coinciding with the birth of our first son, Jemal, on November 21, 1969. But reflecting on the work of James Hillman, I realized that my destiny or calling is as a healer of men and their families and in actually I started in 1949 when I went with my uncle to visit my father in the mental hospital.
Even at the age of five I had the opportunity to see what really happens inside a psychiatric hospital, to think about why men have “nervous breakdowns” and how all this affects families. Even my own bouts of depression and mania can be seen as “on-the-job training” for my life’s purpose, rather than simply a product of genetics, upbringing, or the inevitable effects of childhood trauma.
I have come to believe that our guiding purpose in life is to reclaim our full life story and get in touch with our true calling.
Life Lesson #8: Traumas and tragedies that happen to us are not punishments or problems to overcome, but life lessons for us demon.
My parents were not traditionally religious but definitely Jewish. If they had one patron saint it would be albert einstein who said,
“The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice, and a desire for personal independence – these are the characteristics of the Jewish tradition that make me thank my stars that I belong to it.”
In Jewish tradition there is a story that our entire life story is part of our destiny. Before we are born, our whole life is shown to us by the angel, Lailah. And the moment the child emerges, the angel taps his finger on the child’s lip, and the child forgets what he showed him. The small indentation below our nose on our upper lip reminds us that we each have a destiny to find and follow.
“We have to watch childhood very carefully,” says Hillman, “to catch the demon early in action, understand its intentions, and not hinder it.”
Hillman concludes with the following implications:
- Recognize the call as a primary fact of human existence.
- Find the common sense to realize that accidents, including heartache and natural vibrations inherited by the flesh, are necessary and help fulfill it.
- A call can be postponed, avoided, lost at intervals. It can also completely overwhelm you. Anything? eventually it will come out. She makes her claim. The demon doesn’t go away.
In his book, Fate and Destiny: The Two Accords of the Soul, Storyteller Michale Meade says,
“Fate includes those things that are woven into the fabric of our souls from the beginning. Fate can be seen as limiting, limiting or even imprisoning us. In seeking to live our destiny, we inevitably encounter the obstacles of our destiny. Fate and destiny are an archetypal pair within every soul.”
Consider your fate, our wounds and injuries. What pain from the past have you repressed or tried to deny, minimize or forget? What old tragedies have come up from time to time to destroy your peace, comfort and joy? Could the tragedies and problems from your past really be at the service of your demon? Learning about our calling and the demon in our lives demands our attention forever. The small indentation on the upper lip always reminds us that our work is not yet done. Who knows, maybe the journey will continue after we die.
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