I Touched the Elephant's Foot and Survived

What I found after sixteen years of not looking.

There’s a massive, solidified mass of material in the basement beneath Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It resembled tree bark and glass when workers first found it. It’s made of corium, the highly radioactive material produced when a nuclear core melts down. It’s a grotesque, wrinkled formation that workers eventually nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.

When scientists finally entered the corridor beneath the reactor eight months after the disaster, sensors showed the formation was so radioactive it would take only five minutes for a person to receive a lethal dose of radiation.

I touched my own version of the Elephant’s Foot yesterday and survived to tell the tale.

Naivete or Hubris (or Both)

My daughters were five and six when their mom, my first wife, took her own life. Sitting them down and telling them their mother was dead is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I’ve replayed that moment in my head endlessly over the years.

I believed so many things that turned out to be wrong. I thought if I just loved them enough they’d heal from the loss of their mother. I thought that if she had to die, it was better that it happened when they were young. I didn’t send them to a counsellor or therapist because I thought rebuilding a stable, loving family would be enough. I didn’t understand the impact of that kind of trauma on a young soul and didn’t bother to educate myself.

Thirteen years later, our oldest daughter died, after dealing with the same kinds of mental health issues as her mother.

In the three years since her death, I’ve replayed every decision I ever made, wondering what I could have done differently and whether it would have made any difference if I had.

At the same time, I’ve never allowed myself to dwell in the what-ifs and if-onlys. I refused to wade into the hell I’ve seen torture so many other grieving parents. When my mind goes there, I always soothe myself by repeating, “Being a great dad is and was the most important thing in the world to me. I did my damn best.”

Logically, both of those things are true. I even believed what I was telling myself. I was always open to the idea that I might have unresolved guilt I needed to work through. But I thought it unlikely because I’d already made sense of it.

It Turned Out to Be Horseshit

About a month ago, in an agonizing therapy session, I realized that was all a steaming pile of horseshit. I wrote about it here:

When I Held Up a Mirror, Hate Was Staring Back

It turns out there’s a radioactive core of guilt eating me alive under the surface. I’d been unaware of it for at least three years and quite possibly sixteen. That’s quite a thing to reckon with, especially for a guy who’s read at least eight percent of ninety percent of every personal development book ever written. I thought I’d navel-gazed my way into a finely-tuned state of self-awareness.

Blind spot, thy name is Jason.

In the month since uncovering how full of shit I’ve been, I’ve been experiencing intense anger. Not the lash-out-and-hurt-people kind. The brooding, internal, hate-filled inner dialogue kind. It’s unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and I haven’t been able to make it stop. It absolutely sucks.

At least it’s not unexpected. My therapist has been clear that things will get harder before they get easier. That’s just how approaching the core wound works. Great.

The Core, Exposed

Regular readers will know that I’ve been doing Somatic Experiencing therapy for about a year and a half. I won’t go into it in this post other than to say it’s been life-changing.

Yesterday, during my session, I sat there connecting with what was happening in my body and hating every fucking second of it. The longer I sat there, the more uncomfortable I became. Often the discomfort passes quickly. Yesterday it only got more intense.

After about five minutes I threw up my hands and said, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore right now.” He asked me what emotions I was feeling and I said I was tired. Tired of having to do this work. Tired of it being so fucking hard. Tired of all of it.

Then I had a powerful insight and started to cry.

“You know man, that’s not what I’m tired of. I’m tired of Chloe being dead. I’m tired of missing her. I’m just tired of her not being here anymore.”

Somehow that led me back to the decisions I made after Cindy died all those years ago. The decision not to get my kids professional help probably contributed to Chloe’s death all those years later.

My soul got held up in front of me like incontrovertible evidence of my failure. The thought that screamed in my face was, “HOW COULD YOU HAVE BEEN SO FUCKING STUPID???”

And there it was. I’d finally peeled enough layers back to get to the core. My connection to it only lasted ten seconds before it was gone, wrapped up in its protective sarcophagus once again. But I’d faced it. I’d touched it. And I know I can do it again.

When I explained this to my therapist, he said, “You touched it and survived.” I started crying again, harder than before.

Through those tears, I found myself looking back at that young dad. He was doing everything he could to keep himself afloat. He’d raised his girls through five years of watching mental illness consume his wife and their mom. It had all taken a massive toll on him. Now he was facing life after suicide with no idea what to do next.

I felt something I’ve never felt before. It only lasted a few seconds, but I felt compassion for that guy. For me. And it was beautiful.

As the session wound down, one last thing became clear. All my rationalization and logic about doing my best had been a protection mechanism, running efficiently in the background without me ever knowing it. How could I have seen it when I didn’t realize there was anything I needed to protect myself from?

The scientists who’ve studied the Elephant’s Foot in the years after the disaster have noticed something interesting. The radioactivity is diminishing. It’s not gone and it’s certainly not safe. But it’s far less lethal than it was in those first months when five minutes meant a death sentence. Time and exposure had changed the equation.

I don’t know how many more times I’ll have to go back into that corridor. I don’t know how long it takes before the thing that’s been eating me alive from the inside loses some of its power. But I went in yesterday and came back out. That’s something I didn’t know I could do.

It felt kind.

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What I found yesterday is another protection system that predates the loss. The loss just turned it all the way up.

There’s a structured process for mapping exactly that, built specifically for men who are stuck after loss and can’t find the thing that’s keeping them there on their own.

It’s not therapy or a group. It’s clarity so you can see how you’re protecting yourself and why it’s making moving forward so damn hard.

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