The Perfect Storm
I watched The Perfect Storm for the first time this week, and it reminded me so very much of the sort of turmoil that occurs inside the soul in trauma cases. Imagine one hurricane. Then imagine two hurricanes, meeting and combining.
I discussed this with a client who could understand the analogy. She had erupted like a volcano through the autumn and then cooled like a radioactive rod through the spring, slowly, atom by atom. But she was better. She was healing.
I discussed this with another client who lived the storm last week. It raged, it rained (she had cried for years), and then it crescendoed into rage and ‘an awesome spectacular’ hurricane of resentment and detestation as she relived her family pain. But she was healing. She felt better.
I discussed this with someone who blew like a storm to the point she could not eat, could not sleep, could not talk. Then she caught the flu and is now very ill. But she is calmer in her soul and is no longer ripping her family to shreds with her irritability and her desperation.
I am reminded of another client who I saw as a standard lamp on full blaze, but the plug was not plugged in. He was using cocaine to keep his light bulb burning, but how long could he keep that up? Like a hurricane, he went round and round. How deep is his pain anyway?
I am reminded of a little girl aged about six, crying alone in her room, desperate for someone to knock on the door and ask ‘are you alright?’, But of course, no one ever had. The woman she is now is crying like a hurricane and swirling round and round in her pain. How long can she keep that up? How deep is her pain anyway?
I have just finished reading Wilbur Smith Hungry as the Sea. The hero is a salvage tug boat captain who has to enter a hurricane and salvage a broken down oil tanker in the eye of the hurricane. He gets most of the crude off the tanker, but one quarter of a million tons is trapped by the ship in her death throes. So our hero detonates the crude and the resultant fireball collapses the hurricane. Great read! It has left me thinking of hurricanes and the Perfect Storm, and how closely our emotional life parallels nature.
20.8.07 - See also Peter Chappell on Trauma Personally I think emotional literacy, alongside spiritual literacy, is the most important form of intelligence and that it’s opposite, the consequence of emotional illiteracy, man-made trauma in all its forms, which at worst manifests in genocide and war, are the greatest source of ignorance and suffering. I think emotional intelligence is second in intelligence to spiritual intelligence and both are critically important today.
