Time in the Abyss
I recently spent some time away from the places I know as home. The experience granted me a perspective that I may not have come to had I remained within the familiar comfort of my known world, and I’m grateful for that time and even for the challenging trials that came with it. I won’t go into specifics of the experience, but it was something I’d been dreading in the days and weeks leading up to it, and it was really hard. It was hard because it stirred up thoughts and feelings akin to those I experienced in the darkest periods of drinking or early recovery. Though I couldn’t articulate the root of this sense of disease a year ago, I recognized disconnect and a lacking sense of self esteem as the underlying causes of everything I was feeling this time. At times I found it hard to stay mentally awake and present in a way that I’m able to channel more easily when I’m with my people, connected and in close proximity to the important communities in my life. Disconnection appears in many shapes: fear, shame, loneliness, despair, ennui. In these forms, it’s not always easy to recognize the contagious origin of our suffering, so it’s hard to alleviate the symptoms effectively. Writing has always helped me process difficult emotions and mental chaos, so I was filling up a composition notebook with the contents of my head when I reached a train of thought that really helped me gain the perspective I needed to use this experience as one of growth rather than regression.
I got to thinking about the idea of the abyss in the epic hero cycle, a concept introduced by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The epic hero cycle present in Homer’s Odyssey has been on my mind a bit this year because the journey is what is known in Greek as a nostos - a homecoming. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, faces the task of finding his way home across the Mediterranean after the decade long Trojan War, which - though devastating - results in a long awaited, divinely assisted victory for the Greeks. Even before this week, I felt that the nostos hero journey deserved some attention in the world of recovery. In recovery - in life - we are all tasked with this same mission, whether our minds consciously register it as an item on the agenda or not. Our spirit lives in a constant state of exile and wandering in this broken world and seeks a way home. This longing for home accounts for all number of spiritual diseases, everything from boredom to complete despair, and often we don’t even realize what is lacking in us and causing such distress in its absence. We are homesick for the state of conscious connection we were born into. Recovery of that state is the true hero journey of every human.
When Campbell gave us the epic hero cycle, he did so to facilitate a deeper understanding of the place of heroes in the mythologies of our world. The thesis guiding The Hero with a Thousand Faces asserts that the archetypal heroes of world myths share a common structure in their stories. This fundamental structure of what Campbell called “the hero’s adventure” consists of certain stages and features that seem essential to multiple mythologies. The monomythic hero cycle looks something like this: the hero ventures forth from his known world following a call to adventure. This call presents in different forms, but the hero’s embrace of this invitation initiates the beginning of the experience that truly defines the hero and sets him apart from the average mortal. I like the simplicity of this beginning, because it emphasizes that heroism lies in accepting our calling in life. We are born great, but we have to accept that greatness in order to actualize it.
We are all called to some form of recovery, because we are all destined to live in true connection to others, to ourselves and to our higher power. Simple acceptance of what we are called to do is in our nature. Following the call to adventure, the hero encounters trials or obstacles - varying in size and difficulty - that function in two ways: to challenge and to teach. The trials hinder progress on the path to recovery, but they also give the hero an experience that informs him of himself and his place in the world. The greatest of these obstacles is called the abyss, because it is the lowest point in the hero’s journey. In most mythologies, the abyss is not only an emotional low, but a physical depth as well. It often takes place in the underworld or a state of unconsciousness mirroring death. It is in the abyss that the hero encounters the greatest threat to his or her continuation of the journey and fulfillment of the mission. The heroism here lies not so much in conquering this opposition as it does in honestly engaging with the darkness and emerging from it.
The hero emerges from the abyss in what Campbell calls the resurrection stage: the hero surfaces with strength and insight, but still with much of the journey still to come. There are more trials to be overcome before the homecoming stage and the final obstacles present there. In this last stage, the hero enacts what is called nemesis or justice. Nemesis is the name of the Greek deity of justice, so in bringing about justice in the circumstances of his home upon returning, the hero acts in accordance with a power greater than himself, even if he is the mortal hand bringing about the concluding touches to his mission. Along with these stages, there are a couple elements crucial to the hero monomyth. The hero acts with the aid of a mentor, usually divine assistance. The name mentor comes from the Odyssey; Athena, the goddess of wisdom, took the name Mentor in one of the human forms that she assumed while in the service of guiding her hero home, and humanity has kept her name as a title. The hero also exhibits what we call hamartia - literally ‘missing the mark’ - a flaw that can prove fatal in the wrong dose. Odysseus’s flaw is hubris - excessive pride. Pride in itself is not a crime, but in excess and when it aligns with egotism, it can be devastating to successful recovery.
So this is the hero cycle: a call to adventure, trials, an abyss and resurrection, more trials and a homecoming. All presided over by a mentor and threatened by the hamartia of our hero. There’s a bit more to it, of course, but that’s the quick version we give ninth graders being tasked with the adventure of reading Homer for the first time. For the Odyssey, the epic hero cycle looks like this: the call to adventure comes with the conclusion of the Trojan War when Odysseus faces the adventure of bringing his men home to Ithaca. The trials are typical of anyone returning home from a long day or decade of work: a storm at sea, crazy wind gods blowing his fleet off course, a cyclops encounter, Scylla and Charybdis, the island of Circe, the land of the Lotus Eaters, more storms, more sea, Calypso (women and monsters are obstacles; just go with it), and the many restless young men drinking all his wine and trying to marry his wife. His abyss is a quick trip to the Underworld - a sort of pool of souls in this epic - from which he emerges with greater knowledge of his mission and having accomplished a feat unknown to mortal men. He arrives home and exacts due justice there with some controversial choices, but that’s a whole other discussion.
My years as an English literature teacher have conditioned me to situate many experiences in my life as if they were structured to fit into the epic hero cycle. I’d always thought of the abyss as the rock bottom kind of circumstances I’d been dealt or put myself in: situations in which I felt that I was either going to die or might even prefer death to getting up and facing another day. I’ve felt that way a few times, but a constant in each of them was the reality that I wasn’t on any sort of conscious mission to recover my life at the time. Not only was I a bit lost with regards to my place in the world and in my communities, but I also wasn’t capable of looking at my situation honestly and bravely. I did everything in my power to ignore the fearful reality and failed to effectively communicate my need for help. I was still in the war stage of my life, not yet ready to answer my own call to adventure.
We - the heroes - are not perfect at the outset of the cycle. Far from it. When we begin the hero cycle of recovery, we’ve just been through a war and bear with us the lingering trauma of that experience in addition to all the same unresolved character defects that made us stumble before.
It’s important to make a note about trauma here. Trauma is our physical and emotional response to the often deeply distressing experiences that happen to us. Trauma does not happen to us; we experience trauma in response to experiences of a wide variety. I’ve heard many people who’d been in active addiction for years comment afterwards that they never really experienced any trauma that would have led to their drinking. I think it’s easy to discount the reality that addiction itself creates and intensifies a cycle of self-induced trauma that is just as legitimate as any trauma from harm inflicted by other parties. Addiction is a war, and war is traumatic. So, like Odysseus on the shores of the sacked city ofTroy, when we step from addiction to recovery, we’re stepping into the postbellum chapter, taking with us the fresh experience of our war into the beginning of our recovery journey. Odysseus sets out to recover the home life that has been waiting for him across the sea just as we set out to recover the sense of conscious connection that is our birthright. And this is easy for neither us nor Odysseus. Imagine setting out on the ocean with no GPS coordinates or iPhone weather app to guide or give a sense of what to expect out there on a writhing force of nature whose depth no one can fully know. That’s kind of how we feel setting out into recovery. We know where we want to end up, but it’s a little less clear how we’ll get there.
Our true abyss is different from the rock bottom of war because it takes place as part of this journey in which we do have a sense of our destination and a motivation to reach it.
I think that the abyss is supposed to echo the feelings we had from the war. It’s a reality check that recovery is no easy feat and a reminder of the horrors we chose to leave behind when we accepted our call to adventure. Those horrors are still very real because at any point in our hero cycle we can choose to give up in our efforts and slip back into the familiarity of the war with our addiction. Unlike Troy, the disease is alive even if we’re not actively engaging with it. So when we accept the experience of the abyss - whether we chose to enter it willingly or not - we’re acknowledging the reality of where we’ve been and what we stand to lose if we fail to live with gratitude for the process of recovery. I wrote about gratitude in a previous essay; it involves an active practice of cultivating the blessings in our life, acting on them rather than sitting back and passively enjoying them. For example, the feelings we experience in our abyss might remind us of the painful isolation that defined our lives in active addiction. Practicing gratitude for the newfound sense of connection we have in recovery involves practicing consistent communication with the people with whom we’ve developed stronger relationships with in the process of recovery.
Just as gratitude is essential for the recovery process, trust in and acceptance of some order in our lives is crucial. I don’t love the phrase “everything happens for a reason”, because it sounds like it’s saying that tragedy happens purely to teach a lesson or achieve an end of some kind. I do believe meaning and growth can come from everything, so I guess that’s just another way to word the expression. So if everything that happens can contribute to our development, the onus falls on us to trust in the time and place of everything, even the abyss, in our recovery process. In the epic hero cycle, the abyss serves a functional purpose and holds deliberate space in the hero’s journey. The hero needs the abyss to become the person capable of the homecoming. Every author who has ever created a hero story intentionally writes in an abyss experience for this exact reason. Even the greatest heroes we know today are great because of their most difficult experiences, the extent of which we will never be privy to because the abyss is emotional and mental as well as physical. If we can access this kind of thinking in our hardest moments, we have the opportunity to make meaning of hardship.
When I was away, I experienced that kind of immobilizing mental defeat that makes me want to curl up in the fetal position and just wait it out. I used to get that way a lot when I was drinking. I didn’t like how I felt and didn’t believe I could do anything to change my circumstances, so everything in me just wanted to give up. This time when I experienced this state of mind, I had a few new thoughts. Maybe they came about because of the work I’ve been doing in recovery, but I like to think God just sent them into my head because He thought I needed some help. I thought “this is why people are thinking of me and praying for me.” It’s always nice when people say they’ll pray for you or be thinking of you, but I usually don’t think much of it beyond that. When I considered it this time, the thought of others praying for me gave me a sense of connection and comfort I didn’t used to have. The other idea that really helped me came from my thinking about the hero cycle. I decided that if if this was going to be my abyss, then it had been placed in my life by God for a reason. And that reason was likely not to curl up and wallow. I realized that if I was going to trust in a power greater than me having a plan for my life, then I had to figure out a way to use the time given to me for something that could contribute to my recovery. I’m not sure if God wanted me to think about the Odyssey and the epic hero cycle for two weeks, but it happened.
One of the hard parts of sobriety is the raw feeling of everything that alcohol used to numb. I struggle to be present with the painful feelings. My mind still resorts to escape tactics, so I tend to check out a bit, not always realizing that I do it. This need to escape is a fundamental animal response to discomfort. Our body has been programmed to avoid pain in order to survive. Our minds do the same thing. So the confrontation of uncomfortable feelings, although necessary for proper healing, isn’t something we innately know how to navigate. In Campbell’s monomyth, the abyss of the hero cycle often takes places in the foreign realm of the underworld; this crossing into a subterranean realm is known as a catabasis (or katabasis) - literally to go down or descend. The physical setting of the underworld places the hero in territory he normally would have to die to access; it is both horrifying and impressive, a nightmare and a feat. The idea here is that it takes a superhuman endeavor to enter and then emerge from the experience. Superhuman just means something beyond the capacities of the average human. The human or animal instinct is to avoid pain; our superhuman response is to trust that we can survive the pain and be stronger for it. For us, this capacity for superhumanity lies in our willingness to trust in a power greater than ourselves and honestly confront the darkness we fear most in ourselves. This effort of trust and bravery is the only way we will make it through the abyss without it turning into another cycle of war and trauma.
It’s on us to acknowledge that in many ways we create the abyss experiences in our lives. That’s one of the hardships of it: coming to terms with the wreckage that we’ve created and dealing with it honestly. It would be so easy to just go straight from the war to the home we’re seeking. If Odysseus had the choice between ruby slippers to click himself home and a decade long journey by sea, he probably would have chosen the former option, but he wouldn’t have undergone the character growth that his journey leant him. Odysseus enters the realm of Hades to seek help from Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, and he encounters many souls of the dead in addition to that of the prophet. The souls he meets evoke horror, shock and the pain of grief because they return to him from the war and from his home. They are the heroes he admired and relied on, the mother he didn’t know was lost to him, the spirits of men and women who seemed larger than life and too vibrant for death to claim them. They are ghosts of his past and reminders of both war and loss. Our experience of feelings such as shame, guilt, grief, depression and despair - rooted as they are in past wreckage or trauma - reflect this same experience of encountering ghosts. Despite the horror involved in it, we can learn from this experience. Odysseus has gone to seek help - a big move for him since he normally likes to take care of things on his own. Asking for help requires him to set aside his ego and make himself vulnerable as he prepares to accept whatever guidance the prophet offers him. Our hero receives direction to appease the god whom he had angered with his hubris and violent revenge on a less than welcoming Cyclopean son of Poseidon. He also receives a sense of how his homecoming will look and a reminder of his responsibilities as a leader, a king, a husband and a father. He is forced to look honestly at himself, and he is able to emerge from the darkness of Hades into the world he left.
The departure from the abyss isn’t the end of our journey, but it is a resurrection from the low point back into our familiar realm. Risen from the underworld, Odysseus still faces incredibly difficult trials, but he accepts these circumstances as his reality and moves forward with greater self knowledge and a clearer sense of how to get home. He has to accept that he cannot save all his men, but he knows he will return home and he knows to arrive there with humility rather than arrogance. The abyss grants a resurrected perspective on the present. It gives us the freedom from our ghosts and our defects; they’re still real, but we’re able to see them for what they are rather than letting them define us.
The promises set out in the Big Book state that we will know “a new freedom”, and until recently I didn’t really appreciate this part. I thought this new freedom just meant freedom from having to drink, and I was happy enough with that, but they were just words to me. Words are great. I love them. But these were just words in the way that “I love you” is just a beautiful phrase until you’ve really known what it means to love and be loved. For me, it’s a freedom to trust in a purpose and in people and to let myself love and live without questioning my worth. I know who I am today, and I choose to accept things as they are and trust in some order to everything.
The reality is that we’re not the epic heroes of Greek mythology or any mythology but our own. We don’t have metered verses to tell us when we’ve made it through the abyss or to contain the extent of our wanderings. We have to accept that we don’t know most of what’s going to happen in even the next hours of our lives. We may think we know what our personal catabasis entails, but we might find in time that another one has arrived that’s even more difficult to endure. We may not be epic heroes, but choosing to live despite hardship, to love despite loss, and to trust despite fear is pretty heroic. Personally, I found it helped me to think of myself as an epic hero experiencing her abyss rather than just cry. Heroes do cry - ask Aeneas or Achilles - but they get up and keep going too. Loss needs to be grieved. Fear deserves to be recognized. Shame should be explored. Depression and grief require patience. It helps to know there’s something greater coming if we can find it in us to engage with our discomfort rather than seek to escape it.
