The Whippoorwill

Author’s note: the client, Timmy, has agreed to share his story. This courageous act is meant to draw others into their own stories, as vulnerability responds to vulnerability and hope responds to hope. Some identifying information including name, gender, age, and locations may have been changed to give a measure of protection. 

In early August, 2024, it’s cold up on the summit of the Grand Teton. But then, at just under 14,000 feet above sea level (13,775 to be exact) it never really gets warm. Just… less cold, here at the height of summer. The view is a rare one, shared by only the very few who are either addicted to the sport of alpine ascents, the fit bucket list climbers, or the lucky underprepared optimists who thought to themselves, I bet I could climb that mountain. 

Timmy falls somewhere between those last two categories. Being here on the summit, looking over Jackson Lake and the miles of forest leading North and East up to Yellowstone and Westward to the rolling mountains and winding hint of the Snake River as it slides in Idaho, has been a dream he thought would never be possible. 

That his climbing team would include his wife, a woman from his childhood that he recently reunited with, and her new husband would have been beyond comprehension only a few short months ago.

Bzzz bzzz. A text message slips into Timmy’s phone during the few short minutes spent taking in the view. That reception is possible in such isolated and holy places is a crime of its own, but this text was divine timing, it read: “Gents, happy one year since our epic endurance ruck together. Hope you all are well.”

It just so happened that the very morning of his summit of the Grand was one year to the day when Timmy and a handful of other men completed a 24-hour endurance ruck in Georgia. One year since he heard the whippoorwill’s call. 

—

When Timmy first reached out to me to begin work together he explained that he had a sexual past that he had never worked through and that he was learning about the effect trauma can have on the present. We jumped on a call to meet virtually, since Timmy’s skill set enables him to work a variety of jobs, all of which seem to involve heavy machinery of some sort and almost always in remote areas. 

I felt curious before our first meeting. The details in the enquiry email were vague enough to not be condemning if someone else received it, which left plenty of room for me to speculate.

Something I tell my clients came to my mind: be vulnerable and honest when sharing about yourself, or else others will make up a story about you… and it will likely be the wrong one. I proved my wrongness once again. 

Timmy has an easy smile and bright eyes. Over our many months of working together, he would rotate through a limited number of flannel shirts worn over a graphic tee of some kind. In his mid-30’s, he was leaner than I expected considering his sedentary work. I would later ascribe this to his large family of origin and large family of his own with his wife. He looks like a cowboy, the kind who is likely to pay for a cup of coffee for you in the early hours at the local diner, and you wouldn’t know that he needed those four dollars for gas for the drive home. 

Oh, and his sexual trauma that he needed someone to help him walk through? It was the story of the many girls that he abused in his youth.

Now, before you stop reading here I’ll add one more piece of data that wouldn’t come to light until weeks later: Timmy’s first memory was of the birth of his younger brother. Or rather, the body of his newborn brother locked on the other side of the porch door, while he wept and asked to see him. I hope I have paused your vilifying of him, for a moment. 

—

When working with clients I eventually take us back into the family of origin in search of a few things: what was their first memory? What was the attachment and attunement like in their home? Were mom and dad both there? Siblings? 

Was abuse present, drugs, divorce, violence… or was their’s a story of neglect and abandonment, either physically or emotionally? 

In Timmy’s case, his story began with a tearing loss of the very thing he longed for most: a younger brother. As the youngest of several kids, Timmy remembers praying for the arrival of his brother during his mother’s pregnancy. What followed was a traumatic and complicated delivery that ended not with the brothers embracing, but with his brother dying. 

The loss left a hole in Timmy, and over his childhood years he would experience a family culture that was more interested in putting in an honest day’s work than in noticing their youngest son and his need for connection. 

Timmy was eager to press into the hard parts of his story, and over time he began to feel the fruit of the healing balm of tears, of words to his younger self, and of putting perspective to the void he felt within him. Eventually, he began to reach out to some of the women that he had perpetrated against. 

This was handled very delicately and always involved third parties. On several occasions Timmy found himself in a room with the father or the mother, and sometimes the survivor. Sometimes he was asked to listen, to hear about his effect on their story, and offer his repentance. Sometimes his story was asked, and the boy who felt alone and filthy was seen and understood for a moment.

Sometimes forgiveness was offered. Sometimes it wasn’t.

—

A year ago Timmy signed up for an endurance ruck in Georgia. From what I have been led to believe, a ruck is when adult men pretend to do the boring parts of being in the military: lacing up combat boots, loading a pack with significant weight, and not-quite-walk-not-quite-jog their 

way forward. This event was kept very small with simple rules: begin moving at sunrise and don’t stop moving for 24 hours. 

So much of endurance events are about the battle of the mind, and this event was no different. Our bodies are wired for survival, which is why our brains light up when we eat food with lots of sugar, salt, or fat. Pushing really hard physically puts us at risk of going beyond our caloric reserves, which our body doesn’t like, so our minds begin to give us all sorts of emergency signs when we exert ourselves. 

Learning to push through those signs takes time. It takes courage. And it’s eerily similar to the way our mind reacts to pushing into the hard parts of our trauma. Don’t go there, you will die. You can’t handle this. Better to stop, to do something else, to sit on the couch and numb with a bag of potato chips and a show. 

Every time that voice pops into our heads we have a choice: agree with it and pull back, or push through into uncharted territory. As a therapist, I would hope that when we choose to push forward it is with kindness and resources, but even with those at our aid it can still feel like being asked to jump from an airplane without a parachute. After all, our bodies have an impossible time differentiating physical pain and emotional pain. 

—

Back on the Grand, Timmy watched his wife work her way down the trail with his childhood friend as company for conversation. The night before had been a profound experience. Lying in the saddle of the mountain, watching the stars pass overhead, Timmy had felt a closeness with the Father heart of God. He felt called to that mountain, he knew love, deeply, for himself and for those in his world like never before. Still not quite to the summit, Timmy took a moment to imagine the two women passing the miles on the trail in each other’s company. 

The friend was one of the survivors of Timmy’s actions twenty years ago. 

She was one who had reached out to him, who had been willing to sit in a room and offer her story. She had heard his account and witnessed his tears of regret. She had offered her forgiveness. Not her acceptance of what had been done, to her or to him. But she had forgiven the boy who had harmed her. 

A few months later she had asked to be introduced to one of his friends, and they ended up getting married. 

We have no idea what stories we walk by on the trail.

—

After rucking through the Georgian wilderness for what seemed like hours that would not end, Timmy and his merry band of fellow endurance-aspiring friends were led up a long hill. The night was dark and no one had a watch, save the leader. The mind games were taking their toll. 

That it is darkest before the dawn is of little consolation for someone living those hours. Each step forward required everything of Timmy, and upon reaching the top their guide turned them around and started marching them back down the hill. That’s it, I’m done. If he tries to make me walk a step further once we reach the bottom I am out of this. I can’t take it. 

It took around two hours to reach the bottom of the hill, all the while Timmy battled with the voice. He told it to shut up. He told himself that he was going to continue to complete the mission that he had set out to. He clung to hope that he had more to himself than the voice believed.

They reached the bottom of the hill and continued walking. They crossed a creek, and continued walking. Then, out of the dark, the whippoorwill cried out. 

The trifold trill, heralding the coming of dawn mere minutes away. Timmy had made it through the night. 

—

One year later, on the summit of the Grand Teton, he read the text on his phone: Gents happy one year… Hope you are well. And Timmy was. He was in holy company, smiling as the whippoorwill sounded again.

Phantasia

I am thinking of a fantasy of mine: I leave the world behind that I currently work in and become a captain of a scuba diving boat. The divers have just gone under the water and I can see their bubbles disrupting the surface all around me. It’s calm and sunny, with turquoise water of different shades all around me. It smells of salt and soft music plays over the handheld radio taped to a railing. 

The boat rocks from side to side and I breathe in slowly. For the next hour I will let the boat drift along with the current, keeping a lazy eye out for the buoys that the divers will eventually send up during the end of their dive. Peace. Solitude.

Clients often share their fantasies, eventually. First we have to work through the connotations of the word itself: fantasy. It seems imbued with sexuality and immorality, and for many that is exactly where their imagination goes. But the root of the word is from an old French word: fantasie, which goes back even further to the Greek phantasia, meaning “imagination” or appearance”.

Now we are getting somewhere. Imagination and appearance. The gap between what seems to be and what could be. That sentence alone is the shoreline of many a heartache.

So why talk about fantasies in sessions? There are plenty of reasons, and I’m sure that Freud would go about it slightly differently, but the one that I am interested in is that our fantasies reveal our pain, if we are willing to look closer.

The client who fantasized about the kind woman at his daughter's gymnastics class. They imagined not a sexual moment, but a calm one: where he sat on the couch and watched a game of Sunday football while the sunlight warmed the room and the kind woman sat at his side, content and present.

Another imagined a fire burning down her office building to the last scrap of a 2x4, somehow including all digital data as well, so there was nothing to use to rebuild the company. She’d be free at last to buy the trailer, load up her dog, and drive to Glacier.

A veteran client imagined being back on base in Bagram, Afghanistan. He’d hear the warning sirens sound that a missile strike was underway and need to take shelter at his post. “I would rather face down a rocket than my own family, anyday” he admitted to me.

Perhaps another story comes to mind: the temptations of Christ in his 40 days in the wilderness. At the end of his fast he is presented with three separate invitations, three separate fantasies, to tempt him. Stones into bread, safety from harm, and conditional rule of the earth. In this case the fantasies are presented as temptations from outside himself, and it is worth considering that this may also the case for us, at times.

I would guess that you are already seeing it: that the phantasia is not about the thing itself, but acts as a trailhead to the current pain. The first is longing for kindness and peace in his own marriage, the second feels trapped and has lost the ability to see a way to change through their own means, the third longs to feel capable and clear in their responsibilities, and little kids make us all feel out of our depth at times.

My own phantasia is an invitation to be curious about why I feel unable to rest in my regular life, why solitude sounds relieving, and perhaps why I might benefit from some gentle rocking (which is healing for trauma).

May you be curious about your own images of relief. When you picture what could be instead of what is, ask the second question: what pain is this exposing that I have been ignoring?

The Price of Connection

Author’s note: names, gender, age, and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of any clients mentioned.

Christopher is a bright young man in his late 20’s. He constantly drops fantasy and film references into his speech, testing to see if I will catch him when he pivots from using Star Wars as a reference to ET with that sly grin creeping in at the corner of his mouth. Sessions with Christopher often feel like an invitation to verbally play a game of cat and mouse, and the only real stakes are me looking like I missed out on more time in front of a TV in my childhood. So, pretty high.

Behind the banter and the sly grins is a looming pattern: Christopher is trapped by perfectionism, people pleasing, and profound self-criticism.

Of course, that isn’t what led him into my office, instead we began with all the symptoms: migraines, anxiety, small panic attacks, lethargy, simmering depression, and burnout. Like many clients, we needed to be curious about the source of all of these day-to-day experiences before we could begin to attach more clear labels to them. What began as a cry for help with difficulty sleeping due to anxious thoughts eventually became a clearer picture: Christopher believed at his core that it was his job to perform, to put his needs last, to stifle his emotions for the sake of connection with others.

Feel like I am describing you? I certainly related to his story, and would think to myself at times: we should probably switch places… there are parts of my inner world that still need care here.

Each of us paid a price for connection — what was yours?

As children we are wired for connection. Our very survival depends on it. In their work Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered, authors Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz cite a study done on infant mortality. They found that when newborns are not held, when they are not met with eye contact and human interaction but are instead left to lie in a cradle until their next feeding, they die. The medical world calls it “failure to thrive.”

Because connection is so vital for our survival we will do whatever it takes to ensure that we get it. As children we begin to build our pattern without ever thinking about it. Daddy sees me and smiles when I do well in sports? Mom shuts down when I am too loud or too needy? The other kids notice my dirty shoes instead of my laugh?

There are so many ways that this plays out, but for Christopher it was simple: the family is barely staying together as it is, so don’t you dare add any extra pressure to it.

Play this out over time and migraines make a whole lot of sense.

Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, puts it this way, “A child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother's love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress emotions.”

The journey back to experiencing a full range of emotions and a balanced sense of connection is there. But not until we are able to name what we have come to believe is the price of connection, grieve what was learned, and begin to practice curiosity for what our true self looks like.

The Bit and the Hackamore

“I feel stressed. I am responsible for everything, and I can barely stay focused or present in the room” a client recently told me, imagining the week that he was headed in to. For the sake of his privacy (and so my clients don’t get the idea that I cherry pick their stories to make teaching points – I absolutely do) I have removed this clients identifying information. The reality is, it could have been any one of them or any number of my friends. I’ve said that same phrase myself.

The idea here is that stress feels unavoidable, perhaps even responsible. There is so much that needs to be done: that project we are a part of at work isn’t moving along as fast as it was supposed to, we need to go grocery shopping and things don’t cost what they used to, the kids have soccer practice and school starting back up, my partner is fried from their week and we need to help alleviate their load… 

The world of stress management is a profitable business. Pray. Meditate. Exercise. Eat well. Sleep better. Think positive. Keep that blood pressure down. Nothing quite caused my blood pressure to go up like hearing that it was too high and I needed to “relax immediately or it will get worse.”

Here’s a question that I doubt you have thought of: how is stress serving you?

It’s a jarring question. One that I would guess most of us would initially shrug off with, “it’s not serving me, I’m trying to get rid of it.” But the deeper reality is that some part of us is choosing the heightened state of stress, consciously or unconsciously. 

At some point we learned that the only way to take care of ourselves is to be hyper aware of all the tasks we need to do. We need to anticipate the future to better handle it. We need to use the hot burning fuel of stress and performance to get everything done.

Being aware is one thing, keeping our engines running at 7,000 rpm in the name of responsibility is another.

—

In the world of horsemanship, of which I am far from being an expert, it is common to use a bit to control a horse. The bit is the metal part that goes into a horse's mouth, sliding behind the teeth, which connects to the leather straps that run back over the head. These lines are then held and tugged to the right or left to turn the horse. 

If you have been around horses at all this is almost certainly the tool that was being used. The metal bit dates all the way back to somewhere around 1300 BC, but it isn’t the only way to control a horse. Illustrations dating back another hundred years indicate that bitless bridles were used first, for the first two thousand years of domesticated horsemanship, and are being used again.

One is called the Hackamore, and is a rope that fits around the nose of the horse, using knots to give pressure for the horse, rather than cold metal on warm tongue.

It’s a kinder way to guide the animal, but it also surrenders some immediate control. The Hackamore demands a higher level of connection between the horse and the rider. It requires time and skill. The more work that the rider has put into training the horse, to connecting with it through repetition and focus, the less pressure the rider needs with even the hackamore.

—

If you are tracking with me you likely know where I am going: the metal bit is the fuel of stress, fear, and anticipation. It works. But it’s painful and damaging and sacrifices the slow work of connection for the quick outcome.

In this metaphor we are both the horse and the rider. One part of us has the reigns and feels responsible for our productivity and performance, the other part acts under the guidance. I am all for the support of prayer, movement, silence, sleep, nutrition, mindfulness, and counseling to mitigate stress. But if you asked yourself today, how is stress serving me? Have I been using a bit or a hackamore on myself? I wonder if you might find a kinder, more connected, pace.