Prisoners of narrative: A Study of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as an illustration of trauma.

Prisoners of narrative: A Study of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as an illustration of trauma.

“The past is a foreign country they do things differently there”.?This has got to be one of the most famous opening lines of all time written by LP Hartley in the 1950s in his novel The GO – Between[1] .?It's about a young boy’s summer holiday in Norfolk, where he’s taken by a school friend and stays with the family.?The narrator, as an older man, discovers a contemporaneous diary that triggers reflections on half remembered events, where he is used unwittingly as a messenger to facilitate an illicit affair.?He reflects on these events and tries to make sense of them.?It is clear from the start that these events had a far-reaching effect on his life.?

The concept of the past life events being able to exert an influence on the here and now and possibly on the future is well documented throughout literature and culture. Although the events depicted in LP Hartley’s novel are upsetting for the boy and later the man, they wouldn't fall into the category of trauma.?The events depicted in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” on the other hand would fall into the category of trauma.?

The Mariner’s Trauma:

For those who are unfamiliar with the story of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner[2] let me give a brief synopsis.?The poem is about a doomed voyage; the Mariner is the sole survivor. ?A series of disasters befall the ship. They encounter a storm that blows them off course, they are becalmed and, at this point, are dying of thirst.?The Mariner is held responsible by the crew for these because he shot and killed an albatross, and this was thought to have brought the bad luck and subsequent misfortunes on the ship and crew.?As a punishment the Mariner is forced to wear the bird around his neck; his penance as meted out to him by his crew mates.

Eventually they encounter a ghost ship.?There are two figures on the deck of the ghost ship, Death in the form of the grim reaper, who is playing cards with a gaunt sickly looking young maiden who is Nightmare Death – in – Life; the literary metaphor needs no explanation. They play cards for the souls of the crew of the Mariner’s ship and Death wins all the souls of the crew except the Mariner’s.?He is forced to witness his crew mates die one by one slowly.?The Mariner is helpless and cannot save them.??The horrific facial expressions are etched into the Mariner’s memory and cannot be expunged.

When the ship returns to land again, I presume it's England, the Mariner is compelled to wander the length and breadth of the country repeatedly telling the story to anybody he can force to listen; he inflicts it on those around him.?This is his trauma narrative; this is his punishment to live out this trauma narrative. It totally dictates his life and what he does with his life. He is a held captive by the events of the past and that is his nightmare death in life.?He is reliving it daily again and again and again.?It defines him and he’s re-experiencing the feelings that he had during the actual events that he recounts.?He's constantly reminded of the facial expressions of his crew mates and he's aware that he couldn't do anything to save them; not unlike the nurses and doctors working in hospitals during the pandemic.

This is how trauma plays out for the sufferer as a retrospective psychological construct.?By this I mean you've got the event that triggers the physiological and biochemical reactions in the brain.?The brains plasticity is altered which is an important scientific fact to note.?Now, we all experience our internal biochemical and physiological processes as a psychological construct. The brain constructs experiences into the psychological narrative that becomes our reality.[3]

What is PTSD and how does the Mariner’s experience match the criteria?

First there must be traumatic incident. The DSM – 5[4] defines this as: a near-death experience, witnessing actual death learning that a relative has been involved in a traumatic incident. For the Mariner, the voyage would conform to a series of near-death misfortunes culminating in the witnessing of the deaths of his crew mates.?In this his experience is not too different from health professionals and emergency services who are confronted by death as part of their job, or their role dealing with trauma and/or the aftermath of trauma. Healthcare workers have a very particular type of trauma, one that is fuelled by guilt brought on by a sense of helplessness.

The DSM - 4[5] summed it up a little bit better, in my opinion, when it cited, “a threat to the physical integrity of the self or others.”?A threat to the physical integrity of the self, could read as meaning your sense of self. We have a constructed sense of self or who we are and if you are a healthcare worker your sense of who you are is that you save lives; you stop people dying and your self-integrity is this identification.?Your inability to act within your integrity is a powerful driver.

Following the traumatic incident, are symptoms that are grouped into categories of

?·??????re-experiencing,

·??????altered cognitions,

·??????avoidance,

·??????hyperarousal.

First you avoid. You avoid anything that reminds you of the traumatic incident, you will go to great lengths to avoid it. Everything falls out of that traumatic incident, so if you are going into work in an ITU, as a nurse, and you are putting your scrubs on every day and that is where you were traumatised, you are going to want to do everything you can to avoid it.?This maybe tenuous but we assume that the Mariner has quit seafaring when the ship docked.

Altered cognitions, now the guilt that I mentioned earlier, is all part of this symptom grouping. There is a sense a life not being worth living it is dangerous, it is brutish, and it is short. Some people feel that life is dangerous brutish and short anyway, but they have always thought so, this is a marked shift in a cognitive appraisal of life and prospects from those before the traumatic incident.?The Mariner’s wandering retelling his tale is portrayed as a penance suggesting he is driven by guilt; he feels responsible for the deaths of the crew.

Hyperarousal can be getting unaccountably angry and again this is a deviation from the pre-morbid norm.

Re-experiencing, the main feature is persistent intrusive memories. Dreams or nightmares and flashbacks. Flashbacks are not a vivid memory, for someone experiencing a true flashback the time and space continuum is interrupted. The person experiencing a flashback will be transported back into the moment they will be there; it will be around them it is a very vivid very real thing.

The Mariner becomes defined by his trauma narrative. ?He can't go back to a pre-trauma time to make a different set of decisions or take different actions that would give different outcomes. ?Allen Young[6] sums it up succinctly, “PTSD is a disease of time, the disorder's distinctive pathology is that it permits the past memory to relive itself in the present in the form of intrusive images, thoughts and in the patient compulsion to replay old events”.??

Old events playing out in the present; this is where we see the Mariner live out his trauma.?The Mariner’s compulsion to replay old events. Now whether he sees someone to inflict his narrative on or not, we assume that that narrative is going on continually in his head.?The Mariner is doomed to wander alone, tormented with his narrative until he finds some release.?We assume that this will not be death as he is cursed.

We must accept that the past is a done deal we can't do anything about it. No therapy could ever eradicate the trauma memory or the traumatic event.?What it can do is realign your relationship with it in order that it stops exerting such a negative influence on the present and ultimately on the future.

How to help?

Now I can understand you thinking that the Mariner is an excessive example of someone suffering from PTSD, but I can assure you it is not.?I have worked with veteran’s who are wracked with guilt about the lives of comrades lost.?Who have become alcohol dependent, spend periods sleeping rough, are unwashed and unkempt.?Instead of the Ancient Mariner, they are “The Traumatised Veteran.” They may have left the Forces years ago and their veteran status can sometimes be used to justify their choices in the here and now.?A charged question, I know, but as the Mariner chooses to see his life as a penance and is this the same as the veteran described??Now this is the most extreme end of the spectrum, most sufferers are not here, and this is the scenario we want to avoid.

But what can the individual do to help themselves? And this is where I think coaching is fundamental to helping: Firstly, we look at what we have control over, so the past is something that is troubling us is exerting a huge influence on us and is concerning us greatly. We can help the client accept that they have no power to do anything about that.???

What can be done in order to get the best out of our lives??It comes down to a choice at the end of the day.?You have a choice whether to seek help.?This may sound trite, and it is difficult because the person who suffers has got to make a choice whether they want to talk to a stranger which could trigger their symptoms or whether they want to carry on immersed in their own problematic way.?In the end this contributes another problem that is can be as bad if not worse than the initial trauma.?

Having sought help, the next area of control it is adhering to the treatment whether that is psychological interventions such as talking therapies or whether that is medical interventions such as antidepressants that help reduce the symptoms of trauma.

?It still comes down to a choice and making the right choices for you will help maintain your social network which as I’ve already cited is a huge contributing factor to recovery.?By choosing not to engage in behaviours that will sabotage your recovery you are in the inner circle of things that are controllable.?As it expands it gains more leverage, social and occupational structure is maintained. ?Structure throughout work, relationships, and hobbies are hugely powerful in maintaining recovery.

?Future focussed and positive:

The American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan[7] believed that “People's interactions with other people, especially significant others, that is family, determined their sense of security their sense of self, and the dynamisms that motivate their behaviour”.?By paying attention to the previous points, we are maintaining a very powerful means of recovery.?I've mentioned before that Viktor Frankl[8] always maintained that we have a choice. ?He accepts quite readily that we can't prevent acts of brute luck befalling us.?No-one has control over what happens to them, we cannot control that.?What we can control is how we choose to respond.?In his seminal work, Man's Search for Meaning, he asks the question, what has this experience taught me about myself? and I think this is a fundamental idea that that has been taken up in the concept of trauma, resilience and growth.?People can reflect on the traumatic experience, at the right time of recovery, when some of the heat is taken out of that memory and they can correct hindsight biases.?They are able take some very important lessons about themselves, that they are more positive than their initial untreated negative self-appraisal lets them believe.?This enables growth and to resilience of the person.?A lot of work around this has been done by Professor Stephen Joseph What doesn’t kill us[9] . As Frankl cites, that, “[Trauma] gives… ample opportunity, even under the most difficult circumstances – to add deeper meaning…to life.” [10] By helping people to reflect on trauma they can take some positive lessons forward into the future.

What is the coach's role in all this?

The coach is effectively a set of eyes in the air.?Thinking of the expression, “You can't see the wood for the trees” and for people who are experiencing serious emotional turmoil, their ability to think clearly and to define a clear route through their experiences is inhibited by impaired thought processes.?The coach if you like has objectivity due to emotional distance.?The coach can effectively rise above the individual’s experiences in which they are mired and can view the greater topography of the psychological landscape that they're trying to traverse.?The coach can help the individual find a way through by asking questions that get them to reflect.?By reflection and by teasing out the hidden strengths, the resilience of the individual is improved, and we can help them navigate across the topography to that spot over the horizon that they want to reach.?

That's what we can do as coaches by helping the client focus on the things that they are able to control and rediscover their strengths, it is possible to make a real difference to the quality of life in the here and now.?It's not only PTSD but other areas of life too: the terrible job we experience, the awful relationship (social or occupational) we find ourselves in to name just a couple.?These are in the grasp of the individual to change; they just need time to calm down and start to think.?I say just calm down, but what I mean by that is once the heat is taken out of the trauma memories.?Fight or flight mode turns off the thinking part of the brain.?By calming down we bring the brain back online and then exploring the trauma can provide a lot of positives in the form of character traits that have been overlooked such as resilience, ability to act in a positive way under extreme circumstances and that surely is worth pursuing.

?References:?

?[1] Hartley, LP (2004) The G0-Between. London, Penguin Classics New edn.

[2] Coleridge, ST (1834) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, London, Phoenix.

?[3] Suvak, MK & Barrett, LF (2011) Considering PTSD From the Perspective of Brain Processes: A Psychological Construction Approach. Journal of Traumatic Stress: Vol 24 No:1.

[4] APA (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – 5.

[5] APA (2000) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – IV – TR.

[6] Young, A (1997) Harmony of Illusion, New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

?[7] Sullivan, HS (1959) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, New York, Routledge.

[8] Frankl, V (1959) Man’s Search for Meaning, London, Penguin

[9] Joseph, S (2011) What doesn’t kill us: A guide to overcoming adversity and moving forward, Paitkus, London.

[10] Frankl Op Cit.