Meet Dave, Resilience Story #3 Dreams, connections, dreams, jolts of light and resolutions

A sad, sudden death of a close friend – as close as a brother – from a snowboarding accident, a difficult marriage separation, and hitting a religious rock bottom left Dave clutching for answers and wanting to look deeper into where he found himself in an ‘age 30 transition’.

It was at a Wanderlust yoga festival, where Dave experienced a parallel between Christian spirituality and various forms of spirituality linked with yoga. It was at this festival when he shared recent difficult challenges with a friend, he experienced a pivotal moment that challenged him to think differently.

“You really need to watch the stories you tell yourself,” were the words his friend told him, that became one of many pivotal moments for Dave.

This moment challenged Dave to relook, reflect and consider the way he framed how he narrated his life in his mind, and to himself.

Creativity was an important part of his resilient background, especially when he could put himself into different characters and even connect with feelings and experiences he couldn’t usually connect with in his role as a ‘red-bearded man’.

Dave says that some of the reasons he felt unable to express his emotions were because of some of the gender roles and categories he experienced transposed onto him from society, and onto male roles in general. The stereotypes of men being ‘strong’ and ‘provider’, for instance, were difficult forces to push against, and he challenged these forces with creative forms of resilience, such as through acting.

In his darkest times what worked was taking even the smallest of steps towards growth, building on his strengths, even though sometimes it felt incredibly dark around him. Strong, positive connections, such as with his wife, and with other important relationships have also been sources of resilience for him.

A landscaping project where he ‘chipped away’ at the land and slowly but surely used his hands to connect with the earth, built retaining walls, and transformed a physical environment while listening to a series of podcasts that supported him to learn about what was happening in his life and build him up with a strong foundation of knowledge, were also truly pivotal, resilient moments in his life.

During some of his healing journey, Dave had a series of dreams that were similar to the experiences his grandfather experienced hiding from planes overhead during the War before immigrating to New Zealand, and dreams relating to outsmarting ravenous dogs by spraying them with water. It seemed these were ways he instigated resolutions in his life. Some might say these were resolutions in the subconscious mind, which pushed stories into his conscious mind so he could make resolutions with both minds working together. Dave pointed to another powerful theory of Jung and how Jung indicated that dreams and reality are layered together into another reality altogether. The power here, to me, is that Dave then discussed how he resolved the dreams he was having through his subconscious by changing his actions in his dreams. Dave tells me how his dreams stopped once he changed his behaviour in his dreams.

Resilience to Dave was rooted in the belief that ‘if you have something in your life that you’re scared of, it’s important to face this head-on.’ Dave isn’t indicating that we ‘flood’ ourselves with what we are most scared of, but take incremental steps towards facing what we’re scared of.

“[Facing] these things are necessary for your growth, “ he says.

He suggested the archetype of the hero that faces the dragon to get the gold. Dave spoke much about history and ancient religious stories, and how these can have so much richness about our human condition and human experience. How when we learn about history and religious texts, even, we learn about who we are along the way, and even though we may change throughout history, there are gems of truth within these texts that can hold so much truth and richness for us now.

Dave takes resilience a step further in this podcast and refers to the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who I was unaware of (very exciting!) who talks about antifragility, in his book The Coddling of the American Mind. Dave outlines how John defines being fragile, resilience and antifragility through an example of dropping a cup on the floor.

“When the cup smashes, it’s fragile. With resilience, the cup bounces because it’s made of a sturdier material. With antifragility, the cup’s dropped and it gets better. You become antifragile, so you’re better than you were,” says Dave. (A powerful metaphor, and something to dive deeper into resilience and posttraumatic research I say!)

I noticed through our interview how there seemed to be a real intergenerational resolution within the veins of the story that Dave narrated to me. Dave ended up buying and living on land, a beautiful piece of land he describes as ‘set in nature’, close to where his father was electrocuted - an injury that severely impaired his father from when and after it occurred.

The irony I noticed in Dave’s narration of the planes he dreamt of, the hills he referred to where his grandmother grew up speaking an old dialect of German, his grounding himself in nature through the landscaping project, finding gems from ancient stories, and living close to where his father was jolted – it seemed that more than Dave was trying to resolve and heal within this story. It seemed like there was a larger cause at play, and it made me think of how I’ve heard the Māori peoples say that when we heal ourselves, we heal the generations before us. I felt like, if I may so bold to say, that there was some of this occurring within Dave’s powerful story of resilience.

This quote seemed powerful to me and align with this train of thought too, “You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life. It is the summing up of all the other lives that are simultaneously with yours. What you are is an expression of history.” – Robert Penn Warren (World Enough and Time, 1999, cited in Van Der Kolk, 2014, The Body Keeps the Score)

Some of Dave’s story made me think of intergenerational healing and the spark of light within Dave through his ancestral heritage that seemed to continually push through him towards the light (his dad got literally jolted!) in order to resolve old wounds. It makes me think that there is always time for healing, and how we as humans are so systematically connected even with our ancestors before us. For some of us, many of us, the stories of us goes much deeper, it goes ancestral, and our DNA drives us for a resolution that goes much deeper into our roots.

This story Dave told me hit a real nerve of my own, in a very positive, way. It hit home, and makes me only want to continue to dig deeper into our stories of resilience and healing within each one of us, and how these stories have many chapters that have occurred far before we physically touched this earth.

Thank you Dave for sharing your story of resilience, healing, posttraumatic growth, and antifragility with me. Your story is truly one to be cherished and I feel honoured that you told me some of it.

Listen to Dave’s story of resilience on RSS.com

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I have recently started capturing stories from the day after learning this from a course, just a little excerpt that helps me remember, within my senses, something special from the day. Here’s my story from today about my interview with Dave and listening to his narrative of resilience:

The red-bearded man who’s following his lineage. Unwinding the spiral and unraveling ancient stories of ol’. An archetype unto himself. Walking into the darkness, shining only a light held within. Listening for an inner guidance. Learning about lenses that hold truths as to why. Dreaming and waking and resolving dark narratives that he has experienced so true within. His DNA whispers their triumphs as he tramples demons before and behind him. He spins a new narrative from the stories he’s unraveled, and weaves in a new red thread he pulls from his beard. This red thread he sews into a colourful warm fabric for himself and his most loved companions. The fabric keeps him and them warm during the coldest, darkest nights. And when it’s cold and dark, the red thread glows with light and fills them with a warm love that tells them he’s always there. This fabric is a taonga unto itself for his lineage. 16 May 2020