Trauma: Get Over It

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Underneath this anxiety lies a fundamental confusion about the facts of life. We mistakenly think that happiness and personal growth depend on a lack of threat, that safety equals a healthy body and mind. What trauma teaches us is that the exact opposite is true.

It's a lesson that Sam Keen teaches at an unusual school he runs on his Bay Area farm. Keen, whose 1991 book Fire in the Belly (Bantam) helped launch the men's movement, has for many years taught people -- everyday people with no special gymnastic ability -- how to perform on the flying trapeze. It's a skill that simply requires you to climb a skinny ladder 25 feet into the air, take a leap into space, and rely on the off chance that you'll catch hold of a little scrap of wood hung between two swinging ropes. Not surprisingly, many of his students are paralyzed by fear, even though there's a net to catch them when they fall.

'The object is not to conquer fear, but to become a connoisseur of fear,' he explains. 'We teach our students to identify fear-to be aware of the physical sensations of panic and fear. What happens to them when they finally do go off the platform is that the anxiety is translated into excitement. What was terror becomes joy.'

It is precisely by sacrificing their safety, risking their lives, and facing their fears that Keen's students attain not just the thrill of flying on the trapeze, but also a sense of mastery, competence, and exhilaration.

As a nation, we are paralyzed on the trapeze platform, frozen by fear, unwilling to take a risk in the name of exhilaration.

When the Colombian army released Hector Aristiz?bal after three days of torture, he turned to family and friends for support and eventually resumed his studies, acting, and activism. 'I was able to sustain myself because of theater and political involvement,' he says.

Eventually he moved to California, where he helped found a branch of the Theater of the Oppressed, an artistic movement that seeks to bring about social change through performance. Today, he works with prisoners, with schoolchildren, and in hospice care with the dying and their families.

Over the years, he has come to think of having been tortured as an initiation ritual, a wounding that has marked his life purpose. 'It's one of my many efforts to create meaning out of such an experience,' he explains. 'I was always interested in anthropology, and in trying to understand traditional wisdom and healing, I've come to see that trauma is an effort of the psyche to look for meaning and find truth and enlightenment.'

In his work with young people in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Aristiz?bal has incorporated elements of ritual and initiation to help them overcome their fears and transcend their culturally imbedded inhibitions. Even the simplest ceremonies, like passing an object around the group, or chanting words in unison, show him 'the joy of the kids and their desire for this kind of experience.'

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