I learned a new word the other day.
As a wordsmith and Rhetorician, this always makes me happy.
The word: entelechy.
That dude Aristotle talked about it, some say even coined it.
Philosophically, it means “that which realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential.”
In other words, it is potential and realizing it, but it is possible, there is an actuality involved. It can happen. Potential so often can stay in its own corner of possibility and hope, never coming to fruition.
I dwell with this as I started to read Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger, one of his many books on trauma.
He writes, “Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social and spiritual awakening and evolution. How we handle trauma (as individuals, communities, and societies) greatly influences the quality of our lives. It ultimately affects how or even whether we will survive.”
He also comments that through this course of his career that he has had the
“…privilege of witnessing and participating in the profound metamorphosis that trauma can bring about.”
Reading this, I’ve reconsidered, yet again, the entelecheia—I don’t know if I’m using this ‘correctly’ but I’m still gonna go with it—of trauma.
Much of my journey has become sitting at this point, owning my story, transforming from my trauma, my own metamorphosis, as Glennon Doyle puts it: “how to spin this shit into gold.”
It doesn’t mean I’m thankful for my trauma and grief, or consider it a blessing or “meant to be” or “God’s plan” or a trite, dismissive “it didn’t kill me, so it must have made me stronger” bull shit. Nor do I think anyone else should have to develop such approaches to willing embrace the clusterfuck of shit storms they had delivered to them through their lives.
Still, we can learn from moments without dismissing the pain and gravity of them. We don’t have to believe they were predestined, sent from God.
(If we do, I can understand why people believe that God is one evil mother fucker. I also think those people make me sad, because while we want to harbor in that safe and false sense of security that everything that happens was meant to be, we also assume we understand God’s purpose and that the Divine Creator is our puppet master.
I reject this. God-He/She—gave us free will. They are able to transform unspeakable pain and tragedy into blessings and transformations, but it doesn’t mean they orchestrated it.)
But owning trauma is owning one’s story and—like Peter Levine suggests above and others like Brene Brown and countless others have stressed— there is deep, profound power in vulnerability, at being at our lowest, our most broken, in such a tender and fragile state, either because what has happened around you or what you have done to yourself, or a combination of the two…
Either way, these “rock bottom” moments, often times framed as such by addicts or those struggling with addiction to substances, I think can also be understood from the context of people who experienced trauma and complex grief as well. At least for some. There are many types of trauma and stories involving it.
I also tend to think that a good percentage of addicts are those trying to survive and cope with grief and trauma. Others who are trying to survive, to live with mental illness with other unspeakable imaginable pain.
The point is that the clear cut lines or distinctions between these categories—trauma and grief and mental illness and addiction and poor coping mechanisms, have grown ever more blurry to me. I must admit.
Much like water colors, when you see a child add the red to the blue, hoping to keep them separate, but they flow, bleeding into each other, becoming hopelessly, permanently purple.
Maybe we just haven’t identified the purple yet.
We are simply trying to make sense of peoples’ very complex realities, the complicated layers, comprising their whole selves.
In any case, here’s to the entelechia of it all—collectively and individually.
This !!