My Trauma Gollum
On victim consciousness and a new narrative
I didn’t actually read fantasy until I was in my 30’s. It was forbidden reading as a child and it is indeed one of the great losses of my childhood. I often wonder how my mind and soul might have blossomed differently had I been able to explore the world through the eyes of the likes of C.S Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. I may not have been blessed with the rich fantasy worlds created by these authors in my childhood but when I first cracked them open to read them to my children, I felt my inner child’s imagination waking from its long slumber.
I remember sitting next to the wood stove late into the night after my kids had gone to bed reveling in the intricacies and otherness of the world that Tolkien seemed to manifest out of thin air. The language, the song, the maps, the detail of it all left me agog with wonder at the mind that had created this realm. A realm so real I felt like I had passed through a portal. I could feel the fear as the Orcs pursed their prey. I could feel the sway of the Ents in the forest. I could feel the glow of Galadriel’s light in my being. I could hear the song of the Dwarves echoing in the caves. But most of all I could feel the desperate pain of Gollum.
I remember the deep sense of sadness I felt after seeing the first movie. While everyone else was raving about the cinematography and epic battle, I felt the despair a child might feel after being told Santa Claus isn’t real. My inner fantasy world that had been painted by the books was blown out of the water by the visual onslaught my eyes had just feasted on. That is not what Orcs are like, I remember thinking. The depiction of Gollum, however, was mesmerizing. This ugly, emaciated, infinitely-isolated, cave-dwelling figure stirred something that was lurking in my own unconscious.
Many analyses of the character of Gollum have been written over the years from all angles. I feel no desire to try to match or even understand these conceptualizations of what Gollum might represent. Rather, I want to examine what this archetype awoke within me. Why, of all of the rich tapestry of beings that Tolkien conjured, did I feel a deep connection to Gollum? The visual of him whispering to the ring in his raspy thin voice, my precious, struck a chord that would reverberate over the next 20 years of my life.
Like all of us I came into this world carrying many lifetimes of past wounds and I have lived through much difficulty in this one as well. Throughout my childhood, unbeknownst to me, I was collecting my traumas and storing them in my treasure chest, ruminating on the evil deeds done to me and the evildoers that had inflicted them. I now know that I was a neurodivergent child with aphantasia, not storing episodic and visual memories but instead clinging to my somatic experiences in an effort to know I was real, to know I existed and to understand who I was. I am pain. I am rage. I am bad. Therefore I must exist, I must be real.
As a child with aphantasia, my imagination was a cobbling together of pictures, people and faces that I actually experienced in the world around me. And it was the same with my sense of self, I only knew who I was by piecing together the emotions, the behaviors and the beliefs around me. Unfortunately, most of the experiences that made up my world carried the charge of pain, abuse and aloneness. With each new painful experience, I added it to the picture of who I was and continue with my ritualistic practice of turning them over and over in my mind, so as not to forget myself. All the while, I was blaming myself or others for the pain it all caused.
I didn’t understand as I began my healing journey what it even meant to have an ego that had formed around the traumas I had collected. I had no inkling that it had become the fabric that my identity was woven into. They just became me, who I am in the world and the cross I was meant to bear. I was, and thought I would always be, a victim. I was held in the powerful sway of the rage, the pain and the fear that had been poured out upon me all of my life. As I sat in my inner cave, rolling all that had happened to me between my fingers I became ugly on the inside, full of bitterness and hatred. My spirit became emaciated and drained of all life. My being became isolated from others and from the spark of my own soul. I became victim consciousness.
Looking back I can see that much of my remaking of myself in my 40’s was about understanding myself and this Gollum that had formed throughout my childhood and teens. I became fascinated with healing trauma and, although I am reticent to say so, I became a trauma expert. I worked with extremely wounded souls much like myself from the get go. Even the clients assigned to me at random while in practicum held secrets of the most horrific abuse you can imagine. And, I sat with it, I listened to it and I continued to absorb it. It felt familiar and deep within, my internal Gollum would grasp onto the pain of others and add it to the pile.
In parallel to my work with clients, I was doing my own shamanic and therapeutic work. As I began to pull on the threads of my trauma, the pain and wounds came rushing forth like a tidal wave and my ego began to unravel right along with the painful past. I began to see the ways in which I had held them close and how they were driving my insatiable desire to heal myself and others. What I didn’t realize was that that letting go of what happened to me in this lifetime and many others was going to involve death — a trauma ego death. I desperately longed to be rid of the pain, the nightmares, the bitterness in my soul. Yet in order to throw them into the fire, the ego I had woven together with my traumas would have to follow.
And so, the battle began between my Gollum who was clinging to the horrible things that had happened to me for dear life and my soul who wanted to be free of it all. Each time I would unearth a trauma or retrieve a lost part of myself, a huge psychological backlash would ensue — a tirade of self abuse, rage and loathing unleashed by my inner Gollum as it attempted to claw back the only thing of value it had ever held, its precious ring — the traumatic evidence that I was real, that I existed.
I’m very familiar and accustomed to this battle as it is one I was fighting daily with my clients. Their ego clinging to the individual pain and wounds as evidence of the wrongs done to them and me reassuring them that they deserved to be released from the chains of the past. When I would ask what would happen if they let go, the answer was always the same, who would I be if I let go. The same was true for me, I did not know who I would be without my precious trauma identity.
The internal shift happened for me on a nondescript day in the middle of a relaxing bath. I lay there contemplating the victim/savior/perpetrator (VSP) dynamic, as therapists are want to do! And the realization of how this existed inside of me, that my own triangle of parts were daily acting out this VSP dynamic hit me like a ton of bricks. My lens was forever changed and I could easily see my deeply ingrained victim consciousness.
Slowly over the course of the next two years, as the earth and the collective continued their own painful process of egoic death, I too was able to let go. My trauma ego dissolved and my relationship to victimhood began to shift. I know I have not been alone in this process. Many of us have experienced this falling away of victim consciousness and are seeing the dawning of something new, creator consciousness. I can see clear as day now (at least most days) that I have the power to create my reality, to choose my response to the world and to harm. My past does not dictate who I am and out of the ashes of this death I am emerging empowered to claim each moment as mine for the making.
I feel a sense of wonder and excitement at creating a new world for myself and for us all really. I wonder if this is how Tolkien felt as he created that fantasy world of his? There is a very particular magic to being alive in a time when the old is falling into the new and to witness the shedding of our old victim consciousness. We have the opportunity, the gift, of being the Tolkiens of the next world. To write a new narrative, a new path forward and a new way of being — one devoid of abuse, hierarchy and separation and instead built on synarchy, unity and wholeness. What about you, what do you want to create, what is the narrative you would like to write?