I was sleeping peacefully late one night when I felt someone grab my leg and drag me from my bed onto the floor. My leg was pulled so hard I heard my pajama pants rip down the middle. Looking up and seeing my father, I began to panic as he pulled my hair and told me he was going to kill me. His cursing and my screaming woke my mother, who ran into the room and bear-hugged him until he finally calmed down.
When I was four something else occurred that I could not understand at the time, but that I later attributed to my father’s war experiences. One evening I heard him screaming at my mother and threatening to shoot himself with his pistol. This was the first time I heard him threaten to commit suicide, but it would not be the last. Throughout my childhood, I watched my father lose his grip on reality, and his frightening behavior caused me to struggle with my own sanity. Rage overshadowed his once peaceful nature, and when I heard him complain about violent nightmares, I realized something called war had taken my gentle father from me.
During these early years, I internalized my father’s despair and longed for an escape from his violent behavior. When I was five, this trauma led to my lifelong obsession with war and suffering—when I had a vivid dream that I killed myself. I still remember the dream clearly: I walked through the front door of my house, where I saw both my parents lying dead in coffins. Without thinking, I went to the bathroom cabinet with the intent of stabbing myself in the heart. I opened a drawer and saw a large pair of scissors, but their menacing size frightened me. Next to them, I saw a smaller pair of scissors that my mother used to clip my fingernails. I picked them up, stabbed myself in the chest, and watched as blood covered my hands. Then I walked to my mother’s coffin and laid in it with her, where I waited to die so that my anguish would finally end.
What did this suicide dream mean? When I grew older, my need to understand its meaning caused me to question the nature of all dreams. As I explored my unconscious mind and read books on psychology, I learned that dreams communicate in an ancient language that predates English, Spanish, Latin, and even Sanskrit. This primordial language is not composed of nouns and verbs, but metaphors and symbols.
We have abundant evidence that our brains are hardwired to understand the language of metaphors and symbols. Metaphors are a common form of expression in every culture, and they are used all over the world in daily conversations. For example, if someone in America says, “We must get to the root of the problem,”* the metaphor of a root makes it easier for us to understand the meaning behind the words. By helping us visualize ideas in our mind, metaphors can also create a form of visual learning.
This is why Socrates, Aesop, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and other great spiritual teachers used symbolic language (in the form of metaphors) to express complex philosophical ideas. Symbolic language can help us understand a wide variety of dangerous behaviors, such as arrogance and hypocrisy, which West Point taught me were two of the most dangerous traits a leader can have. When discussing hazards such as arrogance and hypocrisy it is easy to get lost in an abstract academic debate, but Aesop and Jesus were master teachers who used metaphors to make ethics easy to understand.
In the Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare, a slow tortoise competes in a race against a much faster hare. Halfway through the race, the arrogant hare is so certain he will win that he decides to take a nap. Oversleeping, the hare wakes up in shock and hurries to the finish line, where the tortoise has already won the race. Although this fable also contains lessons about persistence and determination, the hare loses the race because of his arrogance. At West Point I learned that arrogance caused the downfall of characters in Greek mythology and Shakespearean tragedy. Furthermore, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many other conquerors became victims of arrogance.
In addition to arrogance, hypocrisy is another dangerous characteristic that causes leaders to harm themselves and those they are supposed to serve. A hypocrite is someone who criticizes the vices of others while ignoring his or her own vices. West Point taught me that hypocritical leaders are dangerous because they do not practice what they preach or lead by example. Jesus described hypocrisy with a simple metaphor: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”1
Although the metaphors used by Aesop and Jesus may sound simple, concepts such as arrogance and hypocrisy are complex ideas that help us analyze unethical behavior. Metaphors can make complex ideas sound simple without oversimplifying them, and this is why humanity’s great spiritual teachers often communicated their wisdom through metaphors. When I learned how to interpret my dreams metaphorically, I saw that they also contained wisdom. Our dreams become spiritual teachers when we know how to read their metaphors. As I became a young adult, I realized that my childhood suicide dream contained a metaphor about something more dangerous than arrogance and hypocrisy—the destructiveness of trauma.
Many people in our society do not realize how destructive trauma truly is, and even psychologists can believe common misconceptions about trauma. In an article written by Eric Jaffe for the Association for Psychological Science, I saw numerous misconceptions about trauma that often go unnoticed. Here is an excerpt:
[Psychologist George] Bonanno has demonstrated through statistical modeling that humans are actually quite resilient in the face of disastrous events. While disasters can cause major psychological trauma that can’t be fixed with a quick and easy solution, over time most people demonstrate an impressive ability to rebound from a frightening incident …
The most common response [to trauma] is actually resilience, Bonanno said. Roughly 35 to 65 percent of people who experience a disaster return to their normal routine shortly after the event and stay there. A recent study of war veterans, for instance, not only demonstrated that roughly 7 percent of soldiers who were deployed developed PTSD, but that 83 percent showed exemplary mental health in the face of potentially traumatic combat situations. Recent research has shown that resilience has also been the most common documented response to events such as a nightmare mudslide in Mexico or the 9/11 attacks.2
Are people really as resilient to trauma as this article suggests? This short excerpt contains many misconceptions about trauma. To explain these misconceptions, I have listed seven factors that increase the severity of trauma:
1. Cause
The article’s first misconception is not distinguishing between different causes of trauma. The article says, “Roughly 35 to 65 percent of people who experience a disaster return to their normal routine shortly after [emphasis added] the event and stay there.” The article then discusses soldiers in war, a mudslide in Mexico, and the September 11 attacks. However, a person’s ability to recover psychologically depends on the cause of the disaster, because a disastrous event is far more traumatizing when caused by a human being.
For example, what is more traumatizing, falling off your bike and breaking your leg or a group of attackers holding you down and breaking your leg with a baseball bat? Even though the physical outcome—a broken leg—is the same in both scenarios, harm inflicted on us by a human being is much more traumatizing than an injury resulting from an accident or natural disaster. What is more traumatizing, being a black family in the South and having your house burned down by a wildfire, or being a black family in the South and having your house burned down by the Ku Klux Klan? Even though the physical outcome—a destroyed house—is the same in both scenarios, the Ku Klux Klan exceeds natural disasters in the ability to inflict psychological trauma on human beings.
If you and your family were hospitalized due to injuries caused by a tornado, it would be less