Another mass shooting dominates the newscape these days and everyone wonders why. Sometimes all we are left are guesses because the shooter will often kill himself as well. But in this case the shooter is still alive so more explanations will surface over the next few weeks and months.
But from what I can tell from the headlines, a number of things happened all at the same time. An increasing frustration and tension in dealing with post traumatic stress syndrome in vets returning from abroad. An increasing divided loyalty between his country and his religion. Anxiety and frustration over a pending tour of duty abroad. All of them various trains laden with enough emotional TNT to create a catastrophe as they crash into each other.
In his book A New Earth, Eckart Tolle describes our pain body. It is that part of us that feels heavy, burdened, stressed. Its emotional flavors are sadness, grief, pent up anger. These can come from emotional wounds inflicted upon us from the past, our childhoods, traumatic events and relationships later in life. Everyone has a pain body. No one is exempt.
Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to describe this part of our psyche. He also warned that if you do not pay attention to what resides in your shadow, whatever is there will simply get activated someday and take over your mind. We’ve all had this experience at some point. We carry around some unresolved agitation and then someone says the wrong thing and we explode. What began as a mouse became a dragon.
As a culture we do not have a sufficiently strong forum that supports understanding and dealing with our shadow contents. There is psychiatry and psychotherapy but research has shown that those who need it the most do not access it. There can be various reasons. Lack of financial resources. Cultural prohibitions about being seen as weak. Cliches that therapy is just mental masturbation and self indulgence. We continue to embrace an ethic of “pulling yourself together” and being “strong.”
It is no coincidence that those whose professions demand being strong and hard and self controlled, the uniformed services, whether they be soldiers, cops or firemen, are most prone to succumbing to powerful shadow eruptions. They work with extremes of human behavior and extremes create extreme emotions.
For the most part, middle America, is able to keep it together. There are no extremes. We have our hang ups that flare up from time to time, but for the most part not much changes. It is just disheartening, especially to the families of victims, when someone “loses it.” They crack under pressure and then show up on CNN.
