Therapy In Films
'End Game': Lessons in Trauma
I love the film End Game. It’s exciting, funny and sad; and although I had to watch it three times before I really understood what was going on, like any great film it left me thinking about the deeper issues of life.
The aftermath of the ‘Snap’ and seven year ‘Blip,’ where people all over the universe disappeared, created mass trauma on a global scale. The opening scene of End Games shows Steve Rogers, (Captain America) facilitating a therapy group. He of all people seems to have weathered the Blip remarkably unscathed. I am sure this is because he had to come to terms with a far more devastating realignment of his life previously, when he woke from a seventy year sleep to find everyone he had loved had died. Banner (the Hulk), like Rogers had faced his ‘demons’ previously (after the Avengers Age of Ultron), and seems to have found new purpose and growth from the disaster. His failure to become Hulk when he most needed to, rather than driving him to despair, has led him to innovate and create a Hulk /Banner hybrid.
Other Avenger characters are not so resilient and epitomise the stages of grief. Thor, who is in denial and suffering from PTSD, has become an alcoholic recluse. He is now a pathetic figure who has been reduced to shouting at children over the gaming head set rather than fighting intergalactic monsters. Barton, clearly stuck in anger, has become a vicious indiscriminate killer. Tony Stark (Iron Man) after an initial breakdown, has become a recluse and withdrawn from the world. The thing he feared most has happened and yet somehow he has survived as has Potts; so the need for his iron shield around the world has gone. All his cleverness and science could not stop the inevitability of Thanos. His purpose in life is now about making Potts and his daughter happy. Black Widow (Romanoff) seems lost and depressed, and is clinging on to managing the Avengers, although it seems an empty and pointless exercise.
However, unlike us mere mortals, facing and living through their loss and trauma is never really going to be an option for the Avengers. To undo the ‘undoable’ they create a time machine and change history. Anyone who has experienced crushing loss and debilitating trauma will have wished that they too could go back in time and do likewise. Strangely though in trauma work that is exactly what we seek to do in order to move on. Trauma is ‘stuckness’, an inability to process the unimaginable. The reason we experienced trauma was because what happened to us was so horrific we could not accept it is as reality and had to create an alternative reality where the horror could exist away from us. Almost like another universe or time line.
To assimilate trauma history doesn’t just have to be remembered, verbalised and processed but rewritten. We don’t use a literal time machine nor do we have access, like the Avengers, to infinity stones where we can snap our fingers and undo all that was damaged and destroyed in our past, yet symbolically we do. Believe it or not the infinity stones which the Avengers must locate and use to undo the Snap have meaning in trauma therapy.
Mind stone: The mind stone enables the one of wields it to change perceptions in others. And to move on from trauma we must be able to change how we perceived what happened. Childhood trauma was experienced through the eyes of a much younger self. As an older and hopefully wiser self, we must help the child stuck within us to see the disaster through our current hindsight. We did survive, it was not our fault, it is not going to happen again. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' Hamlet
Time stone: This gives the wielder the ability to rewrite the past and this is the stone we most need in trauma work. How do we rewrite the past? By revisiting the memory and changing it. When I do this with children I use visualisation. I help the child to access a safe place in their mind, and then to visit a hall room of memories. They enter the door of the traumatic memory and find themselves in a cinema. They watch the film of what happened to them knowing it is just a memory and not reality, and then they step into the film and like in End Game, they rewrite it. They then re-watch the film, with an alternative ending, the ending they created. In this way we change history. ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain.’ Macbeth
Power Stone: The power stone gives strength to endure and to destroy. Anyone who has sought to face traumatic memories knows that it cannot be done without persistence, great courage, endurance and the ability- when the time is right- to destroy the walls of the defence mechanism. No therapist can wield this stone on behalf of the client. It must be found and utilised by them alone. ‘The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.’ 2 Corinthians 10:1.
Soul stone: This is the stone of resurrection, and what a beautiful picture to describe what happens to the personality when it emerges from the frozen tomb of trauma to experience new life and feeling. And it is not just the personality that is resurrected but hopes, dreams and relationships. ‘One thing is about to be finished, but here is something that is only begun.’ Alan Paton, Cry God the Beloved Country.
Space stone. A stone that opens portals to other worlds. Trauma creates blockages in the brain and personality. Part of trauma work is to help the traumatised person to integrate the fragmented parts of the personality and join up what has been blown apart by pain and dissociation. It is a little bit like opening portals in a diverse universe to connect what has been lost and misplaced.
‘They will come back, come back again, As long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think he would squander souls?’ Rudyard Kipling
Reality stone. This is the stone of illusion that changes fantasy into reality. ‘Reality is often disappointing. That is, it was. Now, reality can be whatever I want.’ Thanos, End Game. We know that when our past is full of grief, betrayal, and pain that fantasy can be a refuge. Children who suffer from severe trauma can be divorced from reality. The reality stone therefore is helpful because only by painting a different picture of reality can they be pulled back into it. We don’t have to live in fantasy in order to survive. We can enter the world of the real as long as we can see it through different eyes- not the eyes of the traumatised wounded child- but of new optimism and hope. Trauma can bend us out of shape. Love can remake us. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world,’ Tennyson, Ulysses.
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'Frozen': Lessons In Love
Anyone who has any contact with children cannot have failed to notice the huge impact Disney’s film Frozen has upon them. There is something ‘true’ about its characters who appear to resonate with children, and I am sure this is why the film has been such a huge success. For me it beautifully depicts the destructive power of fear and the redemptive power of love and hope. Where to begin?
Being Let Down
I was intrigued by the rejection Anna experiences through Hans. His cruel dismissal of her expectations of true love are unexpected and confusing. When I first watched the film I thought Disney had just added this bit on to make the plot more interesting, and had not thought through the psychology of the characters properly. But there was something about Hans treatment of Anna that resonated and intrigued me. Apparently Hans was written as a sociopath who mirrors the character he associates with:
‘Hans was written as "sociopathic" and "twisted" … For example, Hans mirrors the behaviour of the other characters…. the audience had to feel ...(Anna’s) feeling something but not quite understanding it ... Because the minute it is understood, it deflated.’1
The film shows feeling but not understanding, being let down and confused in expectations, not only by a figure of romantic love but parents and carers. I was talking to some young women recently, one of whom had been badly let down by her parents and the other by her boyfriend. ‘Is there any pain like a broken heart?’ I asked. ‘No it really hurts,’ was the reply. Yet the film shows through Anna that that to be defeated by rejection and give up on love is not the answer.
Anna is reckless in her love and is undeterred by the slammed doors in her face. She is mocked for her impulsiveness; but it is she and not Elsa who understands that life without love is no life at all. We watch her standing outside Elsa’s palace with her hand raised to knock but not knocking. ‘Does she not know how to knock?’ Olaf asks. In the end love overcomes fear. For even though Elsa’s power is very strong...strong enough to kill… Anna’s unquenchable love proves to be the fire that overcomes Elsa resistance and melts the winter in the end.
Distorted Perception of Reality
Elsa is frozen and locked away by fears of what she has done and is capable of doing. Many of the young women I talk to are afraid not only of their own power but the power others have to hurt them. ‘Why are you are shutting yourself away?’ I asked a young woman recently. ‘Is it because you are afraid of what others will do to you or that you feel you are too unworthy to be with them?’ The answer was: ‘All of the above.' But the exhortation Elsa lives with to, ‘conceal don’t feel it, don’t let it show,’ resonates with a deeper probably less acknowledged fear for most adolescents. What will happen if I really let my emotions out? What will happen if I allow my true self to show? No wonder the liberated line in Elsa’s song ‘the cold never bothered me anyway,’ has become a catchphrase for so many young women.
Other fears are nameless and hard to pin down. Not knowing what we are afraid of but knowing that there is something out there that must be feared so everything becomes a threat. Yet these fears are usually rooted in some terrible loss or traumatic event. The world that was friendly suddenly looks distorted and hostile.
Frozen is based loosely on Hans Christian Andersons, ‘The Snow Queen.’ This is a strange but wonderful story of the quest to find and restore the true essence of a loved one without being deterred by the cost or difficulties. The beginning of the Snow Queen describes a broken mirror which is shattered in space into a thousand pieces and then falls to the earth. It gets into people’s eyes and hearts, changing their view of the world so what is beautiful and good suddenly seems horrible and repulsive. If ever there is an image of the distorted world view that mental illness can create it is this.
C.S Lewis writes in ‘Surprised by Joy’ how at one point he believed everything good was imaginary and reality was a horrible shadow of the dream:
‘Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.’
What he discovered was that it was not reality that was the problem but his perception of it.
The Power of Love, Hope and Forgiveness
What melts the frozen heart within Anna? The love between herself and Elsa, a love based on knowing who the real Elsa is and not the monster she is perceived as being. ‘Don’t be the monster they think you are,’ says Hans but it is only Anna who believes and knows who Elsa really is, and it is that knowledge that drives her on. She alone believes Elsa has the power to undo the damage she has caused and can use her power for create good and not destruction. ‘We’ll reverse the storm you’ve made,’ she tells her.
I was recently talking to a young mother imprisoned by her fears. We were discussing Frozen. What is it that melted the winter in the end? Love. For love is what motivates a person to overcome their fears. What is it that had caused her to make so many positive changes in her life? Love for her new baby. This is transforming her from a scared young woman into a resourceful adult. For, ‘there is no fear in love and perfect love drives our fear.' 1 John 4:8
2. Surprised by Joy: C.S.Lewis
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'The Dark Knight Rises'-in the pit with you: Lessons in Depression
One scene in one film I go back to again and again in the counselling room is the pit prison scene in The Dark Knight Rises. I know of no better analogy of what clinical depression and suicide ideation can feel like for the client and the helplessness this can evoke in the therapist. Up there is blue sky and life, down in the pit prison is despair and hopelessness that seems inescapable. Trying to jump out not only results in failure again and again, but serious injury. The pit is not living, but existing in an emotionally torturous state where injury and death can come at any time.
Bruce (Batman) is put in the pit by the villain Bane. Bane tells him that the pit was once his home, where, ‘I learned the truth about despair.’ He talks about the hope in the pit which is, ‘Hope…of a man who has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom.’ He goes on to say, ‘There can be no true despair without hope.’ Bane like all villains has allowed suffering to distort his view of the world, and he himself has swallowed lies and speaks lies, and he is lying about hope. It is true that, ‘hope deferred makes the heart sick,’1 however; despair is not the place of deferred hope but the absence of it all together. In fact deferred hope, although a place of immense pain, is also a place of growth and transformation. Time and time again I find myself saying to children, ‘Let the sadness speak to you, let it teach you.’
In the counselling room before I get to deferred hope I find I must tackle the negative thoughts children have hoarded about themselves, others and the world. So battling the lies of ‘Bane’ is a recurring task when working with suicidal and depressed children. Bane wants Bruce to sit in the pit contemplating how he has let down and failed those he most cared about. He plays a news feed from Gotham to show the devastation he has wrought to torment Bruce. This is akin to the images the depressed child plays over and again in their heads with a self blaming script attached. Anyone who has unpicked the critical self destructive voices in a child’s head will know that self doubt and self blame are in the uppermost. The bully may not be an external monster like Bane, but an internal critic or internalised abuser from the past, but the outcome is the same-torture not of the body but as Bane explains, ‘torture of your soul.’
A girl suffering from depression recently told me, ‘I know I am being punished for something I did as a child, although I don’t know what.’ As this girl is not even a teenager yet and still very much a child in my eyes, I found this statement all the more heartrending.
Who do the children blame when life goes wrong? Not the people who hurt and crushed them. Even after we have written down and challenged their negative thoughts, even after we have laid out their life story in losses and spread them out on the table showing the catalogue of sadness and wrongs that others have inadvertently and deliberately inflicted on them; even then the reluctance to let go of the idea that it is all their fault is immense. Why is this?
Because if I believe that suffering is random and can be inflicted by the hands of others, I can’t control it. But if it is my fault, even if that causes me to want to punish and kill myself, somehow the world makes more sense.
‘I thought I deserved to be six feet beneath the earth For all the things I've done, the things I've said The choices made that I regret.’ Mercy, Maverick City Music
Bruce does eventually emerge from the pit by trying not with his strength, but with will alone. A wise man in the pit tells him he keeps failing the jump because he does not fear death. It is the fear of death that will make him get to safety. Bruce tells him that although he does not fear death he fears dying in the pit and watching helpless as Gotham is destroyed. That is his motivation to get out. Likewise many of the children I work with do not fear death. Partly that is because they have not comprehended what death is, but partly it is because they fear life more. Finding something that motivates them to leave is the key to their recovery. They may hate being depressed but some part of them is keeping them there and embracing the darkness and sadness and will not let go. This is not about a conscious choice, it is far more complex than that. I tell the children that all they have to do is will to stay alive, will to get better and the rest will eventually follow. It is not about feelings or actions but the will alone. Choose life. That’s it.
Bruce learns that the only person to make the jump did so without the safety rope. It was freedom or death literally. So he also takes that terrible and brave step to freedom, relying on not on his ability, not on the rope to support him which he discards, but on his absolute determination. I choose life, I choose it against all the other alternatives. There is no going back down there.
To turn back and to give up on the journey through depression is the greatest temptation the client faces. Better to lie down and watch hope fade than to see hope crushed again and again. If the therapist is not careful they can assimilate this hopelessness and feel like giving up on the client also. Bruce had help in the pit and that’s why he makes it. A fellow prisoner bathes and tends to his wounds, teaches him how to endure and survive there and gives him the wisdom to eventually emerge and become free. Until that time the companionship he offers saves his life. And so that is where I begin with every depressed child, not by encouraging them and cheerleading them to get better, not by chiding them for being despondent and hopeless, or even challenging the lies of ‘Bane’. No it is my primary role to sit with them in the darkness and listen to their tears and hold their despair and sorrow with them. ‘You are not out of this yet, but you are not alone,’ I tell them. ‘I am on this journey with you and while you are stuck in the pit I will sit with you.’
Recently when speaking to a parent of a depressed child who was at her wits end at how to help her daughter, I used the example of the pit prison. ‘Just be with her, just listen and try to understand. Don’t try to fix her or give solutions. Just let her know you are there for her and love her no matter what she is feeling.’
‘I am a failure because I am depressed.’ This is what I hear again and again from children. ‘My parents don’t understand, I disappoint them because I’m not better. I make them sad.’ And again and again I tell them, ‘If you had cancer, if you had or broken both your legs, no one would expect you to run a race. Your pain and your wound is on the inside but that doesn't mean it is not there. Be patient with yourself and be kind.’ Sometimes waiting and watching is the greatest healer, and the permission to be sad.
The step out of the prison begins when the child is finally ready to forgive themselves. Those who have come up from the pit of despair, guilt, regret, abuse, betrayal and loss know the truth that in order to be free we have to leave behind the past and the guilt and regret that goes with it. For when we finally walk away into the blue skied sunshine, the only thing we have lost is the power of our past to haunt us. That is left in the pit. Maybe that is why we had to go down there, to discard what we could no longer carry through life. It is buried and we emerge renewed. For then we have learned it is not our mistakes and failures or the wrongs others have done to us that follow us. It is goodness and mercy for: ‘Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.’ 2
1 Proverbs 13 v 12
2 Psalm 23 v 6
'Watership Down': Lessons on the Journey
I read Watership Down aged eleven and before I watched the 1978 film. Both were wonderful in different ways. The book awed me and kept me gripped until the end. The film I found frightening and haunting. If you had asked my eleven year old self what Watership Down was about I would have said, ‘Rabbits and what rabbits are really like.’ I might have added that it was about survival and adventure. I would not have had much else to say. As children my sisters and I kept rabbits and after reading the book I couldn’t see them quite the same and I wanted to set them free until my Dad explained to me that pet rabbits are not like wild rabbits. Still I wasn’t convinced. Surely locking up creatures that were made to run with such glorious abandon was cruel.
I have pondered the meaning of Watership Down many times since then, and of course numerous articles have been written about what metaphors and analogies it contains. The message it brings to me now is of a great quest, a journey that is mirrored in the counselling room. The rabbits went on a physical journey to leave one imperfect and doomed home to find another that is better. In counselling the children also go on a journey but an inner one. It’s a journey I witness but cannot undertake for them. I am a guide that has gone on my own journey, and can point the way, that is all. The journey the rabbits undertake is full of dangers, trails and trials and it tests them. It tests their character and develops it. The rabbits that arrive on Watership Down are not the same as they were when they left their old warren. Hazel becomes a true leader and puts aside his self doubt and discovers a courage that he did not know he had. Bigwig learns humility and to value the strengths of others, strengths that aren’t always apparent such as Blackberry’s cleverness or Fiver’s intuition. And Fiver has to learn that his foresight and insight are important, and that he should share these even when he is misunderstood, doubted and ostracised for speaking the truth. My sister used to tell me that I was like Fiver, and she was right; but in reality we all have a Hazel, Bigwig, Blackberry and Fiver inside of us; and we need to utilise their gifts on the journey into the depths of our personality; and if we are to emerge as stronger and more integrated human beings each must be listened to and play its part.
The start of the journey-dealing with loss and what no longer is
‘And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.’ George MacDonald, ‘Phantastes’
The rabbits are propelled towards the journey through fear of what is coming if they stay, discontent with what is and a longing for what could be. At the beginning of the BBC adaptation of the book we see this longing. Even before Fiver shares his dream, Hazel is talking about how he longs for special food which he finally finds and is then denied by the Owsla. Years ago I heard a speaker talk about what causes children to run from home and live on the streets or spend vast quantities of time there. He spoke about the push from terrible things at home, and what was missing in the home environment such as a consistent father figure or safety; and the pull of what is available on the streets such as a sense of belonging in gangs, as well as drugs and other promises of happiness, however false. One of the most startling things I have ever learned about loss is that we can grieve for what we never had. Usually children do not do this until adolescence when they look around and realise that their childhood experience was not ‘normal’, what ever that is. Countless times I have heard a child talk about their experience of sexual, physical or emotional abuse and say, ‘I thought it was normal until…’ Ah those untils! The moments of revelation that pull us suddenly from blind acceptance to desire for change. Whether the intolerable situation is one of our own making like the prodigal son sitting in his pig pen chewing on his husks remembering his father’s house, or like Orpheus realising he must go to the depths of the underworld to recover what he lost; in all of us at some point a cry comes up for something else. Something we used to have and lost, or never had and should have had, or even a fear of what we might encounter if we stay; and so the journey begins.
‘All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something long ago or further away or still 'about to be'’. C.S. Lewis, ‘Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life’
It takes courage to start the journey, ‘The funny thing is that you feel terrified to stay and I feel terrified to go.’ 1 Fiver is the one who tells us we must leave. He is the inner voice of intuition and self knowledge that speaks to us in our denial and misery until we eventually listen to him and go. But it is Hazel with his courage and wisdom that enables us to start at all. All children have a Hazel within them but sometimes they cannot find him, and so I become his voice until they do. When children first come to me I tell them that they are not alone in their pain anymore and that I am with them. But I also tell them I will go at their pace and although at times I will coax, encourage and challenge, I will never push them or force them to go where they are not ready to go. Of course it is a very fine line between encouraging and pushing, and sometimes I haven’t got it right and gone too fast; or allowed children to manipulate me into being complicit with them in their inertia.
The middle of the journey, perseverance and embracing the in-between
'I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.' George MacDonald, ‘At the Back of the North Wind’
There always comes a point in the counselling when the child is faced with a difficult choice…to persevere and go on or to give up. It’s usually after a few sessions when we are no longer uncovering their past but addressing it. At that point I speak to them about filing and processing the trauma. All trauma is ‘live’, living and present, a stuckness, and the only way it can become ‘dead’ and past is for it to be processed. To process we have to look at it and that is like facing a monster they have been running from for a very long time. It’s not just the child that can falter at this point, I can as well. There are some children I find myself reluctant to see, or I encounter a heaviness and sense of helplessness in their sessions. I know then that I am about to cross ‘the bar’, the invisible divide that separates the shallows of the known and understood to the unknown depths of the unconscious. In a way that process is a journey home to the true self from the fragmentation and lostness of the trauma. Despite all the horror and difficulties of it, it is worth it:
‘For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar. ‘
Tennyson, ‘Crossing the Bar’
So there is the temptation to stay in a place of half a life, of not feeling, engaging or growing but just existing. The rabbits fall into this trap when they stay for a while in the warren of snares, a place of immense ease and comfort but of danger and death. It is an escape from reality and Fiver alone speaks to them of what it really is. He tells them that they haven’t arrived yet, that they must press on and that he can see their destination. But they are tired and weary of travelling and the warren seems so comfortable. The only way for them to move on is to accept that what they think is safety is in fact a lie.
One of the most difficult things I have to do as a therapist is to help a child separate between fantasy and reality, because when I do, I see the sudden realisation in their tear filled eyes of what is and what can never be. They have to let go of their fantasies; the fantasy that their abusive parent will one day become a good parent, that the boy or girl who treated them with such cruelty and disrespect actually does love them and will come back for them; the fantasy that the dead loved one isn’t really dead. ‘Would that the dead were not dead!’2 I have to help them accept that some of what they have lost cannot be repaired or be recovered, and so moving from the warren of snares is out of the cocoon of denial into acceptance of the truth. Acceptance is the final step towards healing and yet it is the hardest to make.
‘He said, ‘I will forget the dying faces; The empty places, They shall be filled again. O voices moaning deep within me, cease.’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in forgetting lieth peace.
He said, ‘I will crowd action upon action, The strife of faction Shall stir me and sustain; O tears that drown the fire of manhood cease.’ But vain the word; vain, vain: Not in endeavour lieth peace…
He said, ‘I will accept the breaking sorrow Which God tomorrow Will to His son explain.’ Then did the turmoil deep within me cease. Not vain the word, not vain; For in acceptance lieth peace.’
Amy Carmichael, ‘In Acceptance Lieth Peace’
At this point I tell the child to celebrate the space between what no longer is and what is yet to be. That space is not an empty place, although it is wilderness of doubt, pain and endurance. It is a place where we hunger and thirst and sometimes want to give up. It is a place where we feel we are getting nowhere and going round and round on some interminable hamster wheel revisiting the same bleak scenery and where nothing changes. I speak to the children then of the inner journey. I tell them that although it might seem that they are going nowhere, inside they are travelling great distances. They are changing just like the rabbits, and when they finally emerge from the darkness of depression, loss and trauma they will be irrevocably different.
‘Looking for my ticket to a higher place I can see my chance begin to fade One step forward and two back again I wish the wind would carry a change
Looking back I see I had the flame in me I'm the wind that's carrying a change.’
Christina Perri, ‘Burning Gold’
The end of the journey
‘To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear! To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloud that dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.’3
Of course we never really reach the end of the inner journey of discovery and change, not if we continue to learn and grow. But we do get to a place of rest where the inner turmoil ceases and the monster of the past no longer haunts us, and where we finally learn to accept ourselves with all our faults, and to accept others with all theirs. And we learn to open up our hearts to love again, and to manage our fears and anxiety so that they can no longer stop us from doing and discovering and fulfilling our dreams. But the journey goes on as surely as our story does.
‘No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.’ George MacDonald
One of things I often to say to the children I work with is that one day after they have left school and moved on I will bump into them in town. They will have their partner and children with them and they will be all grown up and I will hardly recognise them. It’s a scenario that they love and their eyes light up with joy as I describe it. ‘You will have two boys,’ I say, ‘with a smile just like yours.’ ‘No no,’ they reply, ‘I will have a girl and boy.’ ‘Your partner will be pushing the pram and you will both proudly show me your sleeping baby.’ ‘But no’, they say, ‘I will be with my Mum.’ ‘You will be at university and home for a break,’ I predict. ‘But no,’ they protest, ‘I will be working in London and a very successful lawyer.’ And so it goes and we laugh over the possibilities and the laughter chases some of the shadows away. And of course for me this is not a fantasy because it has happened to me time and time again. And each time I bump into a young adult who used to be a child who was full of despair and see them happy and content, I hold that memory in my heart and it gives me hope for every child I encounter in the counselling room who has no hope. And I tell them the end of their story, as captain Holly tells Fiver, ‘You knew the story before it was told.’4
‘I will be walking one day Down a street far away And see a face in the crowd and smile Knowing how you made me laugh Hearing sweet echoes of you from the past, I will remember you.’
Amy Grant, ‘I will remember you’
So when do we know that we have arrived? The journey goes on long after the children have ended the counselling room, but they no longer need me as guide because they have found their own inner Hazel. Sometimes a sudden unexpected new loss or trauma takes place and they need to come back for a while and sometimes they return because they have lost something they found in the counselling room. The place of improved mental health isn’t the ‘home and dry’ they thought it would be. ‘You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.’5
Mental health is something none of us can take for granted, but the journey in the counselling room hopefully equips the child for what ever sorrows and difficulties they will face ahead. When I explain this to children I draw a long line on a page and put the child’s age almost at the beginning and then the age 90 years at the end. I show them the small distance they have come along that line, and how far they have yet to go. I explain that all the loses, sorrow and pain that they have endured in the tiny space up to where they are now, is not going to be the pattern for the rest of their lives. Of course sorrows do come in legions, but some children bear so much in the first early years of their lives- when they were so unprepared -and even sometimes before they could even verbalise their pain, that to survive that means they can survive anything. ‘What ever is ahead of you,’ I say ‘is nothing compared to what is behind you and you survived. And you did survive.’ I then see the light dawning in their eyes that their normal to date is not normal, and that it is true, there are better things ahead. For, ‘Weeping may remain for the night, but joy comes in the morning.’ 6
1Blackberry, Watership Down, Richard Adams
2,3,4,5 Watership Down, Richard Adams
6 Psalm 30 v 5
Frozen II: Lessons in Loss
Frozen II is a strange film and I didn’t understand it the first time I watched it. This wasn’t helped by the fact that one of the children I took to see it got bored half way through and ran off and threw her shoes about, and so consequently I missed most of it. One part of the film though has stayed in my mind and come back to me again and again. It’s the scene where Anna realises Elsa is probably dead and has just watched Olaf melt away. She is in a place of absolute despair and deep grief and sings a song about doing the next right thing. Can there be anything more full of pathos than her words?
‘But a tiny voice whispers in my mind "You are lost, hope is gone But you must go on.”’ 1
It did not surprise me to learn that those lines and the whole song had been written by Anderson-Lopez, drawing inspiration from Lopez’s experience of mental health and that of two members of the Frozen team, one who had lost a son and one who had lost a daughter. The pain and wounds from the shock of sudden loss whether it’s an end of a relationship, a death of a loved one or loss of health, liberty, career or reputation; is different from that of historical trauma or ongoing depression (although it can trigger those things). With one word, one phone call, one wrong turn, we step into a different universe. Einstein discovered that time is relative, and those who mourn find that grief distorts time. W.H Auden’s poem, ‘Funeral Blues,’ depicts this beautifully because it summarises the perplexity and rage the bereaved feels that their universe has shuddered to a halt but the rest of the world rushes on. In the counselling room though the child can at last be still and sit with their grief for a while. It’s also a place where someone will sit with them and acknowledge the momentousness of what has happened.
Of course there is no prescribed response to loss and everyone’s response is different; but it is common for there to be an initial numbness and disorientation, and Frozen II depicts this not only in Anna’s face, tears and words, but in her initial hunched inactivity, ‘This is empty, this is numb.’2 We feel her despair. Her words, ‘The life I knew is over, the lights are out,’ 3 are an echo of Auden’s:
‘The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.’4
Every counsellor knows that you cannot sing songs to a troubled heart. You can not tell a person who feels like they have lost the very reason to breathe (‘He was my North, my South, my East and West,’5) that all will be well and their life will return to normal, because of course it won’t. A sense of normality will return eventually but it will be a different normal. As Anna says: ‘When it's clear that everything will never be the same again?’6 Out of the ashes they will have to try and rebuild their life, and unlike in the film there will be no resurrection or restoration of what was lost. The only resurrection will be that of purpose and eventually there will be return of hope and joy like flowers buried long under winter snow. But not everyone finds the same joy in life again. Some scars are lasting, and in those early days of grief the possibility of a new dawn seems all but impossible, ‘Can there be a day beyond this night?’7
However, in the thawing of Elsa and resurrection of Olaf, there is mirror of the renewal of the life within every person who suffers deep loss and yet finds a way to love and live again. Amidst the ashes of their hopes and dreams and the destruction of the life they thought they would have but will no longer have, they find something precious and beautiful- a new but different self, one that would never have existed without the loss. Something I find myself telling children again and again is that suffering however painful and destructive, can be transformative. I talk about how the pivotal moment of grief that spun their life onto a different course, like a boat tossed off course by a storm, can be the one thing that sets them on their destiny. I speak to them of Nelson Mandela emerging from his prison cell to become president of South Africa and to heal a broken country, Joni Erickson learning to live with paralysis and so finding a voice that has touched millions, and Katie Piper coming to terms with her disfiguring acid wounds and moving on to help others find healing within a similar situation. No matter how terrible, how cruel, how senseless their history it can be a source of hope, inspiration and healing for others.
‘Lifted out of the ashes I am found in the aftermath,’
Aftermath, Hillsong United
‘What will you do with your story?’ I ask them and that is usually the first time they have dared to think positively about the scar upon the landscape of their lives. Valleys and mountains are scars of upheaval created by glaciers, floods and erupted volcanoes. Forests bloom because of fires that tore mercilessly through them many years ago releasing seeds and thinning foliage. Yet the aftermath is such a hard place to survive. It seems to kill all life and suffocate all happiness. Who would build anything on such bleak landscape? It takes courage, determination and most of all persistence. Anna’s song sums this up so perfectly:
‘How to rise from the floor When it's not you I'm rising for?’8
The conclusion she comes to is the advice I give to every child sitting in the dark weeping immobilised by fear, and pain.
‘Just do the next right thing
Take a step, step again.
I won't look too far ahead
It's too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step.’9
Just breathe in and out. Take one step then another. Moment by moment we can bear much. For suicidal children we set a date, a check in point. Sometimes this becomes a contract between the two of us, but mostly it’s a visual point on the horizon that they aim for. ‘What’s the harm of giving it a few more months?’ I ask. ‘Let’s set a date and see how you feel then and see what’s changed.’ And then when they get there we set another date and so step by step we trudge on together.
‘So I'll walk through this night Stumbling blindly toward the light.’ 10
But in the end what are they walking towards? Is there any light at the end of ‘valley of the shadow of death?’ What will they emerge to? I cannot guarantee them a pain free future or one without more tears and heartbreak. The hardest lesson that all children have to learn is of impermanence. Relationships will end and people will leave and die, health will fail as will youth. Accolades will fade and achievements will be forgotten, possessions will be lost, stolen and destroyed. Olaf who is so fragile that heat can melt him, and who disintegrates when Elsa freezes, but then is reborn (for water has memory); paradoxically is the one to remind us of what is truly lasting in a world of loss, ‘I just thought of one thing that’s permanent – love.’11
Love surmounts death. Love will exist when all else ends. For love will live in our hearts when those we loved have gone. Shakespeare told us that it is an ever fixed mark and star to every wondering bark, St Paul tells us that it never fails, the writer of Song of Songs tells us that many waters cannot quench it and rivers cannot wash it away. When we open our heart to love we open our heart to pain and loss, ‘To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken,’12 but we also open our lives to what is truly lasting and will never end.
1,2,3,6,7,8,9,10,11 Frozen II, ‘The Next Right Thing’
4,5 W.H Auden, ‘Funeral Blues’
12 C.S Lewis, ‘The Four Loves’