THE 8 PATHWAYS: PATHWAY 4
Trauma
Trauma is the curse of our civilization with new legions constantly being recruited. Trauma is a scourge lodged in the psychological core and like the TV show, Dr. House, it requires precision to identify its roots and treat it successfully. One size does not fit all. Unworked trauma gives birth to a myriad of maladies, many of which are self-destructive and ego-dystonic. It works behind the scenes, even in people of good intent, offering a hook for autocrats to set their traps. Trauma work restructures the psychological foundation itself, and nothing less will do, but it requires radical honesty about the damages that have been done!
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Millon’s DSM IV book, on sale here.
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Trauma contaminates the soul and creates very particular damages to the core. Proper testing maps that damage and specifies the most effective place to “dig” in order to improve the situation, necessary to root out the invisible trauma bond.
Systematic Abuse
Insert Copy As Needed
Quick Overview: This monster represents the cycle where someone's own trauma turns into a need to make others suffer in turn. A stark visual for discussing intergenerational abuse and why some people can't tolerate others' happiness.
What happens when a traumatized person decides to create more trauma and torment anyone who crosses their path, just because life let them down!This monster does exactly that, sewing the heads of his victims onto his own body so he can continue tormenting them.It is a massive culmination of negative energy – powerful, scary, idiotic.But this exists in this world.There are soul-less beings who need to make others suffer to help compensate for their suffering, thereby perpetuating all that is wrong! They're only "happy" when others are as unhappy and miserable as they are.
In my experience, abusive parents often want everyone to be at least as miserable as they are. It bothers them deeply if someone is happier than they are. This can be true of those who abuse children too: seeing the joy in a child only reminds one who dead they are inside and the anger comes up. If you can make the child, the happy one, miserable, get them to cry, you can relax and forget about how dead you are inside. It’s weird, it’s complicated, but it’s about tormentation: how torment lives on and on and on unless someone breaks the cycle. Sometimes I think we have no idea how many people carry this anger gene inside them, how many feel jealous and angry when others are happy or satisfied with life. It’s just all so hidden that we easily miss it, but it can also be at the roots of movements where “brown shirts” start to dominate reality, a constant danger in the world, a virus that never seems to get extinguished.
Quick Overview: Built for work with veterans, this figure embodies the horror of combat and the reluctance many veterans feel to discuss it. Useful for opening conversations about PTSD, survivor's guilt, and processing war-related loss.
This toy is perfect to assist people with PTSD from living in the war zone and facing horrors that they never want to talk about.
Five years ago we took my father to Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. My father was in the Air Force during World War II and was stationed in Hiroshima shortly after the bomb blast to work in the airport control tower. As he was coming out of a plane in the exhibit, at the top of the stairs leading down, the guide asked him for a memory of the war. He stated that the moment he left the plane upon landing in Hiroshima, the smell of all the rotting bodies from the bomb blast hit him. We had never heard this memory before and only recently even knew he had been in Hiroshima and toured the blast site. It is very common for veterans to have little or no interest in discussing their horrific experiences in the theater of war.
This toy embodies the horror of war well. If you are still alive, you have to fight, you have to be prepared to kill. At the same time, you may see the body of your friends and buddies in pieces around you: one moment bumming a cigarette, the next dead and gone. The horrors are war can linger far into one's life and the circumstances are few where it feels appropriate to say anything about it.
Perhaps this toy can be helpful in working with veterans, providing a focus for talking about personal losses during the period of serving one's country and being prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice and knowing those who have.
Quick Overview: Based on the horror-film urban legend, this figure opens conversations about historical racial trauma, vengeance, and how injustice can calcify into myth passed down through generations. It's a strong entry point for therapists and educators addressing racial trauma, grief, and the long shadow of violence.
He discloses that "Candyman" was Daniel Robitaille, an African-American man born in the late 1800s as the son of a slave who grew up to become a renowned painter. After he fell in love with and impregnated a white woman, her father sent a lynch mob after him. The mob sawed off his right hand and smeared him with honeycomb stolen from an apiary, attracting bees that stung him to death. His corpse was burned in a pyre erected on the site where the Cabrini-Green Homes were eventually built.he painter out into a field where he chained him to a log, sawed off his painting hand with a rusty saw, and then stripped him to his waist and covered his bare chest with honey so the bees would come and eat his flesh away.Candyman was originally a freed slave who was also a skilled portrait painter. A plantation owner hired him to paint his daughter's portrait. Unknown to him, the painter and daughter fell in love. When the plantation owner discovered their affair, he was engaged and drug the painter out into a field where he chained him to a log, sawed off his painting hand with a rusty saw, and then stripped him to his waist and covered his bare chest with honey so the bees would come and eat his flesh away.
In the film series, he is depicted as an African-American man who was brutally murdered for a forbidden 19th-century interracial love affair; he returns as an urban legend, and kills anyone who summons him by saying his name five times in front of a mirror. People typically take this step because someone in their life is abusing or harassing them and they want relief - which Candyman certainly provides. However, the person who summons Candyman usually ends up done in by him as well - just like any time we summon up our deepest wounds, rages, and horrors to get us out of a jam. Candyman embodies the horrible humiliation, rage, shame and anger that many have stored up in themselves because of the abuse they have went through. In most the rage is thoroughly walled off; in others it leaks out; in yet others, it explodes like a grenade, taking out whomever is near!
Many of us have a Candyman inside. If you ever work in a prison, you will meet many of them firsthand as well as hear stories of the explosions and vengeance. This toy can help explore this dilemma and help determine the size of the atomic bomb some carry in their depths and begin discussions as to how to manage it, contain it, or defuse it (if possible).
This is especially relevant in a world where more and more despots are seeking power. They typically seek to connect with the rage in people as their base of power. The less aware a person is of their internal rage, or the less they know how to manage it, the more it is available to be exploited by others. Just think of all the movies you've seen where powerful people hire Candyman types to protect them or take out their competitors. And, if you can find good citizens who are totally unaware of their wounds inside, and nothing leaks out ever, you’d got Class AAA followers to boast of and to certify your own claimed lack of malfeasance.
This toy is also a tool for exploring racial bias and violence. How the skills of people judged to be inferior are welcome as long as they don't think they can partake of the good life and resources of those who are their superiors. This appears to be a tragic historical dilemma that never seems to fade away, but keeps being renewed somewhere in the world on a daily basis. (Read Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE for further elucidation of these ideas and concerns, and then some!)
Perps & Victims
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Quick Overview: Part of a four-piece set built on classic 1920s German horror films, this figure explores controlling behavior that masks unaddressed inner turmoil. It's suited to discussions of family control dynamics, denial, and how untreated pain gets displaced onto others.
work in the Mendendez family members-recdent TV shows
This collection of four exquisitely crafted toys, based on two German films from 1920, capture the basic dynamics that lead to violence and addiction: the servant mentality, passive-aggressive patterns, trauma bonds, perpetration, ego-level ignorance of core-level pathology, and others!!
Dr. Caligari is the controlling Burgermeister who is writhing with demons beneath his splendid cape. His refusal to address his own issues guarantees evil.- displaced as it may be by coming out through Cesare. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more than a horror masterpiece – it has been hailed as one of the most important films ever. If nothing else, it certainly defined the gothic look for the better part of a century. Caligari, a mysterious carnival hypnotist whose very presence heralds doom, is sculpted in authentic detail. Open Caligari’s body to find a strait jacket composed of writhing demons. The set features a detailed carnival base that replicates the feel of the film. Dr. Caligari’s demons guarantee Cesare’s trauma bond.
Cesare looks great – he’s talented and handsome, with a taste of Michael Jackson about him, but his soul is controlled by Dr. Caligari. A trauma bond is his ugly fate. Cesare is a strange sleepwalker able to see into the future, but his travels with Caligari’s carnival also spell death and horror for those whose path they cross. This Cesare figure is articulated and includes a weapon. The diorama base features a twisted, impressionistic streetlamp, an eerie country bridge, and an unconscious damsel in imminent distress, or perhaps already dispatched, emblematic of the bloody trail Cesare always leaves behind him, in spite of his efforts and hopes to the contrary.
Abusive parents can imbue their children with trauma bonds – a destructiveness of self and/or others that horrifies the very person carrying out the destruction - “What got into me? Where did this come from?” Violence gets wired into one’s DNA and you live out the unresolved horrors and misdeeds of your forbearers. Sometimes we have to look elsewhere for the root causes violence as it can roll down through the generations and ruin the hopes of the young. Systematic abuse is often the culprit! Dr. Caligari has Cesare under his spell, murdering Caligari’s enemies and even Cesare’s own beloved. Those with trauma bonds typically leave a bloody and tragic trail behind them as they course through life.
DR. CALIGARI ALONE
This toy by itself offers many possibilities in terms of ego-dystonic behaviors, hidden worlds, the contaminated core, abusive parenting and others. It’s all explained in the back-up/training materials. In fact, if we had special psychological x-ray glasses, this is how some fathers would look. Under their cloak of respectibility is something demonic that poisons their children. Where does it stop? Which generation? This toy - Dr. Caligari - is great for having that conversation!
It’s hard not to think of the father of the Menendez boys in this context. What helped those boys become who they were? The father who got angry not because his sons did something illegal, but because they got caught! Getting caught impacted his reputation in the community, made the father feel shame and want to move away until the crimes had faded in people’s memories. The father figures in one’s life, if there are any, can do great damage or great good! Young people need validation, positive mirroring: they need to be seen. One things of Avatar where a compliment is to say: I see you! Feeling invisible does damage and it is the job of parents to validate their children, to see them, to protect them, to recognize and encourage their talents and strengths. A tall order for some parents unfortunately!
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