I've often told people suffering from bad reviews that such feedback is the result of attempting something great. In the throes of Resistance, it is easy to listen to the demons of self-doubt. After all, as a client suffering from gambling addiction once told me, "The Devil speaks to you in your own voice." It is comforting to see that in the history of myth-making, nearly every hero has a moment in which he Refuses the Call to Adventure. The Refusal of the Call is not a sign of weakness, though it may feel that way at the time. If you are willing to believe that life unfolds according to essential patterns of human experience, then you must believe that in order for the audience to believe your adventure is all that great, they must first see you cower in gut-rendering fear. The shadow side of great ambition is that deepest of all questions for the hero: "Do I have what it takes?" In psychoanalysis, it is often hard to separate whether big dreams are a compensation for self-doubt, or whether fear merely attends all important quests and serves to keep us alert, humble, and respectful of the undertaking.

So what is it that lets us accept the Call? Sometimes it's when the earth is giving way behind us, and we simply have to charge forward to save our lives. Sometimes we cry out in fear and a mentor appears. We think we have to do things by ourselves and forget that every Indiana Jones has his sidekick. Sometimes we have to believe in magic — not in a get-out-of-jail free kind of magic that compensates for our defects. But magic of the sort that appears when a gesture on your part shows the universe you are ready to use the Force.

What Great Adventure are you resisting right now? And are you waiting for disaster to catapult you forward? You wouldn't be alone. Have you considered looking up your old teachers? (I mean this in the most folkloric way.) Sort out the difference between chasing your tail and a proper rain dance.

Obama as Jedi KnightThe more I delve into Joseph Campbell's outline of the Hero's Journey, the more amazed I am at how psychoanalysis is more a story about a journey than anything to do with a medical procedure. We can take a blood sample and determine all types of things at a medical level. But we can't determine self-esteem, connectedness, or emotional freedom in this way. It always comes back to a narrative, a story about oneself. At a conference I attended recently, "Focus on Emotion," it was reported that one of the best determinants of good parenting was the mother's ability to tell a coherent story about herself. I think that's a wonderful definition of our project in therapy — to develop a coherent story about oneself. So I am planning here to investigate what a complete psychotherapy / psychoanalysis might look like from the perspective of the Hero's Journey. Here's the outline, per Campbell:

Departure and Separation

• World of the Common Day
• The Call to Adventure
• Refusal of the Call
• Supernatural Aid
• Crossing the First Threshold
• Belly of the Whale

Descent, Initiation, Penetration

• Road of Trials
• Meeting with the Goddess
• Woman as Temptress
• Atonement with the Father
• Apotheosis
• The Ultimate Boon

Return

• Refusal of the Return
• The Magic Flight
• Rescue from Within
• Crossing the Threshold
• Return
• Master of the Two Worlds
• Freedom to Live

Would every treatment follow this course? I don't think that is the best way to look at this. I think the outline is more useful as a structure through which to view a life, with different parts of this journey being enacted between client and therapist. It would be too simple to say the client is the hero and the therapist is the Merlin character who pops up every time the hero gets in a jam. It is more likely that the hero will encounter both allies and demons in the person of the therapist, as well as in herself. At least, that would be the mark of a deeper, more psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy.

Consider the Call to Adventure. So much of the therapeutic struggle has to do with integrating the desire to stay the same with the desire to be somebody new.  So Luke Skywalker stays on the farm. He knows how to tend to the animals. We are all tending a miserable plot of land on a distant planet in some way. We all know what "good enough" looks like. And then we are constantly facing various calls to adventure. What would make us want to be a Jedi? It may be in the form of boredom, grand invitation, or sheer desperation but something moves us to enter a strange new world. Something makes us agree to become a Jedi knight. Even though we know we may be killed. Perhaps therapy is that strange new world. Or maybe it's grad school, or a committed relationship. Or surrender to something we at least consciously believe we hate. What the Hero's Journey offers us is reassurance that as a human being — a myth-making animal — our adventure will bring us into contact with new mentors, our worst fears, new levels of skill and consciousness, and an opportunity to bring home an elixir that may set people free. At least until the next adventure.

Threshold guardians? What are those? This is a concept from The Hero's Journey by Joseph Campbell. I've been finding this term useful in talking to clients about various blocks, impasses and general stuckness. The threshold guardian is the figure in any great story that initially appears to block the protagonist from moving forward. It may be the bouncer at the club that the criminal has just disappeared into, blocking the detective. In The Wizard of Oz, it's the Wicked Witch of the West and her scary monkeys that may send Dorothy to her peril. What Campbell says these figures represent psychologically is the parts of ourselves that hold us back. In some legends, the guardian can be seen as instrumental in teaching who we will need to be in order to face what lies in store for us. In other stories, the guardian ensure we are fully committed to entering the next level of our lives. Considering that every figure in a story acts out a part of ourselves, the work of going through has to do not necessarily with barreling through the sentinel — though it may — but rather inhabiting the body and soul of the blockage. The well meaning people in our lives say, "Don't be so hard on yourself." This takes us nowhere. When a client can fully experience his investment in being hard on himself — because its the only way he can feel parented, or the only way he can trust he will not harm someone, or its the only way to feel he did everything possible to achieve his goals — that is when there is softening, and then movement.

Whenever another celebrity takes a fall as Tiger Woods is doing right now, there is this mad rush to diagnose the current victim of media bloodthirst. In this case, they're saying Tiger has a sex addiction, or a woman problem. Thankfully, some people are starting to talk about what it is like to be practically the only man of color in a white man's game. 

But people are still missing what I think is the real issue, which is what happens when people spiral way up beyond their comfort zone. It's not just that Tiger excelled in a sport long dominated by the gin and polo set. You also have a person saddled with outrageous financial compensation, a real game-changer. The purse for golf championships exceeded $250 million during Woods' era. Add to this the relative lone-ranger like attitude Woods adopted and you have all this glory and no one - really - to bounce this off of. I am not saying Pity the rich athlete. I am merely saying that there is a thermostat inside of everyone and a self-sabotaging move was bound to emerge. 

To really understand what is happening, you have to give Tiger a little more credit. If you asked him 15 years ago, "What kinds of things bring a superstar down?" he probably could have told you. I don't see Tiger as having a woman problem at all. What I imagine is that he had a problem with the heights he reached. I don't even think self-sabotage is the right way to understand it. When you consider his initial pleas to the press "I'm human - everyone makes mistakes." you have to wonder, perhaps this was his way to finally come back to earth. 

So when you are trying to understand self-sabotaging behaviors in yourself, don't ask yourself what's wrong with you. Don't try to fix yourself. The real question is, "How do I keep my feet on the ground amidst all this potential success?"