“Recovery is about living more in truth than in lies… it’s about facing reality and growing up.”
– Pia Mellody
Over 2,500 years ago, in Athens Greece, playwrights like Sophocles introduced a form of theatrical art known as the tragedy. Greek tragedies typically dealt with weighty themes such as betrayal, loss, pride, jealousy, rage, love, courage, honor, life and death. Often these dance-dramas also explored man’s relationship with God and the existential challenges that are part the human condition. Actors wore elaborate masks with exaggerated facial expressions so that their character’s role, emotional state, and intentions might be accessible to the audience. Commonly, one actor played several characters during the course of the theatrical performance, changing masks for each character and sometimes for each scene.
Fast-forward to our lives today and the Greek tragedy might be used as a metaphor for some of the key aspects of recovery from trauma and addiction. Like an actor in a play, often we are reacting to life’s existential challenges according to a script. This script can influence how we move about on the stage of life; it can spell out our roles in relation to others, how we think and feel, and how we act in various situations. From the first moments of conception and throughout development, by way of ongoing interactions between ourselves, others, and the environment, this narrative is written into our psychobiology – it becomes an implicit script in the mind-body system.
Moreover, similar to actors in Greek tragedies, our implicit scripts encourage the use of certain masks or personas. In many ways, this is completely natural and necessary for a life in which we play many different roles. For most of us, the scenes on life’s stage are constantly changing; we may transition from a family mask to a work mask, then to a friend mask, and back to a family mask, all within the course of one day. However, unlike the actors in a Greek tragedy, for us these personas are not distinct, separate people – they are aspects of a single being, linked together by the person behind the masks.
For some of us, our own life resembles a Greek tragedy, with painful experiences of betrayal, loss, abandonment, and trauma. These experiences are written into the mind-body script that tacitly flavors our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Some of these life events can be so traumatic that we don’t even want to look at the script – we would rather not face the reality of our situation, it’s just too painful. Yet, our bodies and minds still play the part, even when we don’t pay attention to the script; something happens on the stage of life and we just react according to our past experiences, maybe without even being aware of the script. Read more
