Addiction Counselors as Mentors

Part Three: Cesar

Cesar

Cesar was a solid dude, a good guy. Not the tallest man in the world and a little rough around the edges. Cesar had been to alcohol and drug treatment nine times. Nine times. Alcohol and speed had been his undoing. Cesar would chuckle and shake his head. He got it at number nine, and he got it now. “I know, I know . . . nine times!”

Cesar had been a truck driver, short and stocky with a full-bodied laugh. On occasion, he would flex his biceps, look at them admiringly, glance up, and exclaim with a sly grin, “Check out these guns!” Undeniable.

As part of the recovery process, Cesar was aware of the need to be accountable for his past actions. So, one day out of the blue, in the same green-carpeted, communal office space that Carl and I had occupied, Cesar asked a question aloud to anyone within earshot. The question went something like this:

“What should a person do if they think they may have killed someone in a bar fight years before but don’t remember it but think they did because they read later in the newspaper that someone had been killed the night he had been there, in that bar?

Me: “They should turn themselves in.”

Cesar: “But what if they now have a wife and family? Wouldn’t it harm the family? Was it fair to them? Shouldn’t the person, whoever it was, wait until the children were grown and out of the house?”

There was no clear resolution to this dilemma at the time. I didn’t know it then, but I would learn it later — when you bury your past, you bury it alive. Submerged memories loll in the depths, nine-tenths dead. Unfortunately, Cesar’s memory had made its way to the surface, as nine-tenths dead is not ten-tenths dead. A bummer for sure. Recovery is serious business and like life in general, doesn’t operate on our terms.

Recovery pushes and recovery pulls.

Recovery liberates and recovery confounds.

Recovery is funny and not so funny like that.

When one writes of trauma, Pierre Janet, a founder of modern psychology, wrote, that there were “. . . significant differences between ordinary and traumatic memory.”¹ Likewise, there are shadow memories that are “ordinary,” and shadow memories that are “traumatic.” Bessel Van der Kolk, in his best-selling book, The Body Keeps the Score, spoke directly to this situation when he wrote:

We really don’t want to know what soldiers go through in combat.

We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples — almost a third, as it turns out — engage in violence at some point during their relationship [these are examples of cultural shadow, author].

We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people.

We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places . . .

It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?²

Van der Kolk’s passage speaks to two manifestations of shadow. The shadow side of culture is its turning away from . . . the culture that doesn’t want to know . . . the truth of the violence that exists in its midst. He looks at this from the other side when he observed, that “traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering.” Using depth psychological terms, this material becomes part of the unconscious — as one’s personal “shadow.”

Despite their chaotic and destructive pasts, these three, Carl, Leonard, and Cesar were soldiers of a sort, “wounded warriors” is the term, who through shadow work had become more comfortable within their skins. Their lives weren’t perfect, as there is always more work to be done — insights beget new insights — but their problems were real problems. The scythe had swung close, and they were grateful. They wanted to give away what they had been given: sobriety, transformation, rebirth. The following quotation of Jung’s speaks eloquently to this process:

I always worked with the temperamental conviction that fundamentally there are no insoluble problems, and experience justified me in so far as I have often seen individuals simply outgrow a problem which had destroyed others . . .

. . . Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of his view the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.³

I like to imagine that Carl, Leonard, and Cesar had informally created a narrative, unconsciously most likely, for themselves and their lives, that had helped them move forward. Fear had controlled them for too long. These three made “Narrative as impossible story: story, that forever fails to cure trauma but never fails to try to heal it.”³ That is how they were helping themselves and how they were helping me. They told stories with humor and humility.

They had kept pushing forward into an unknown but more purposeful, spacious, and relationally connected future. Their stories lessened their suffering and it lessened mine. They had hope to give and I had hope to receive. Hope that maybe I too, someday, could stop pretending to be something I wasn’t and be at ease with my unvarnished self.

¹ Bessell Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 11–12.

² C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, pg 91.

³ Richard Kearney, Imagination Now, 140.