2011 NADT Conference Countdown Blog

October 25, 2011

Will you stand with me in the fire?

This is a provocative invitation. An injunction, a command. We invite each other into the dangerous territory of relationship. Fire implies pain, transformation, alchemy. Do we burn for a purpose? Will you join me in this crucible, this place of suffering and hope? We take each other's hand, each other's gaze, and move into the flame. I wonder if you will reveal yourself to me and I to you. What will we endure and how will we fare? Suffering does not always yield forgiveness, or enlightenment.

Nearing the end of my second year in the Firehouse, otherwise known as the Post Traumatic Stress Center, New Haven, I am coming through the fire which has forged my identity as a drama therapist/trauma therapist. I came as green wood, flexible, untried. My instrument has been refined through an encounter with fear and pain, my clients' and my own, unlike any I had experienced before.

A google search on “How to Fire Harden Wood Spears” yields the following. “Fire hardening has been used for ages to produce primitive edged weapons such as spears. Hardened wood was used as an emergency substitute for flint weapons during the Stone Age. The skills necessary to create a fire-hardened wood spear are taught in survival courses, making this age-old process useful in emergency situations.”

When we are in a fight for our survival we are asked to open ourselves to the pain of labor. We loose something in the exchange. We are disillusioned. We gain a deepened understanding of what it is to be human, the scope, breadth, depth, and possibility. The wonder, the awe. Victim and perpetrator exist in the same universe, a universe which, according to Tantric philosophy (to quote fellow drama therapist Mira Rozenberg), says yes to everything. 

I believe that it is this understanding that we ultimately offer our clients. A torch in the darkness, fire contained and utilized, we burn our passion brightly. Jean d'Arc, another beautiful borderline who went up in flames (to borrow Cecilia Dintino's hypothesis), is my companion in this journey. Which is not to suggest that we give in to our temptation to martyr ourselves to the work. But like all great art, and those lives which have become legend, we can benefit by metaphor. I go to battle with the trauma that holds my clients' minds captive. This requires my courage and perseverance, tolerating the intensity of proximity, and at times, leaves me burnt out. After the fire, water, to revive the senses. What is your well? I drink deeply in community, in mothering, in the beauty of art and nature, and in meditation, the still center where I expand infinitely, loose my sense of significance, where all is one. These are the gifts that fire has brought me. 

What has it brought you?

Emily Burkes-Nossiter, MA

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