Why did Jaycee Lee Dugard, held captive for 18 years, not leave, or even use the phone, when she had the chance? Why do battered wives keep returning to the husbands who beat them?  Kidnapped by domestic terrorists, why did Patty Hearst help them rob a store?  Why did Stalin’s brutal dictatorship produce good Communists and the Inquisition produce good Catholics?  Why did so many people cooperate with the Nazi’s?  Why do people who are taken hostage by terrorists quickly identify with them, a phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome?  All these events have a common denominator: our human nature.
 
We are primates, and like other animals we have survival instincts that tell us how to find food and shelter, reproduce and compete for survival of the fittest. They also tell us how to respond to dangerous situations: physically, we can flee or fight; psychologically, we can get control of the situation or seek the approval of those who have control.  If you are the one with a gun, then you control the situation and decide who lives and who dies. If you don’t have the gun, but get the approval of the man with the gun, he may shoot the person next to you, but maybe not you.  These powerful instincts are unconscious and are not moral or immoral, but amoral; our normal human nature allows us to do anything to survive. 

Physically weaker, confined, isolated, dependent and brutalized, Jaycee’s only survival option was to seek the approval of her captors and accept her life as “normal.”Just as Muslim women, who live in similar circumstances, accept their lives as “normal.” Just as, when Western Europe was a brutal theocracy, from the Pope on down, people came to accept the burning alive of people in the village square as “normal.” Just as, for centuries, we accepted slavery as “normal.” Just as the “bad cop” creates fear in a suspect, who then bonds with the “good cop” and cooperates. Just as today, politicians attract supporters by warning people of imminent terrorist attacks or losing their health insurance.

Our survival instincts are all-inclusive.  Not only do they help our bodies survive, they also help us survive mentally.  To prevent a mental collapse, when our experiences are too traumatic, last too long and we can’t make sense of them, the brain automatically separates out information associated with the experiences and stores it in our unconscious mind — out of sight, out of conscious mind.  We shut down emotionally, adapt – and survive.

And then the police find  the kidnap victim, the gates of the concentration camp are opened,  a prisoner is released  from jail, soldiers return home from the war and an abused child grows up and leaves home – with heads full of repressed memories, what quantum psychology calls unintegrated information.  Because this information concerns our survival, our brain has red flagged it as too important to forget. If phase one is managing to survive, and phase two is adapting to the situation and accepting it as “normal,” phase three, which completes the experience, is retrieving the information – and the body gives us a simple, efficient  way to accomplish this.
  
To remind us that we have unfinished business and to motivate us to take action, the body generates stress and causes us to repeat the past.  Then, rather than talking about our problems, we retrieve this information in the form of pictures, which is the preferred language of the unconscious mind.  When we do, the brain responds immediately, producing immediate results in freeing us from the past and stimulating normal personal growth, which includes enjoying life, accessing our individual power and achieving higher consciousness.
 
When a bone fracture heals, the new bone that is generated at the site of the break is stronger than undamaged bone. So also, we can emerge from traumatic experiences not only stronger but also wiser. Like psychiatrist Victor Frankl, who survived three years in Nazi concentration camps, at some point, as we progress, we also will conclude that we would never have chosen the experience, but we don’t regret it, because of what we learned.  Now that Jaycee’s “normal” has changed, and she is free to begin the healing, within her are the means to turn something horrendous into something magnificent.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”

- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, AD 121-180

Here is a reality check into what it means to be old in America, and it doesn’t look good. According to the US Census Bureau, more of us are living longer. Our present life expectancy is 76 – 80, and by 2030, people 65 and older will make up 20% of the US population (71 million). When you reach 65, you will have an 80% chance of acquiring at least one chronic condition (most probably arthritis), and a 50% chance of having two. In addition to short term memory loss, there is the dreaded Alzheimer’s, which affects 10% of us over 65 and 47% of us over 85. When you get old, you can expect unrelenting deterioration of your physical health, mental faculties and quality of life – and soaring medical expenses.

So, is there anything good about getting old? Based on my recent experience at age 73, my response is a resounding, “Yes!”

By 72 I fit the aging profile (arthritis, two hip replacements) and shared my displeasure with my friend, William, then 87. “I’m younger than you,” I grumbled, “but now I have your symptoms: short term memory loss, can’t concentrate and I’m depressed and preoccupied with death. All I do is read novels, watch Netflix movies and eat ice cream. Remember, when your mother was on her death bed and told you: ‘Sonny, life is ‘bullshit?’ Well, she got that right. Do you think maybe we have Alzheimer’s?”

Now a year later, I discovered that rather than Alzheimer’s, I had been experiencing a normal life passage, one of several that occur throughout our adult lives. The first passage is adolescence, when, at about age 13, we begin to leave childhood behind. The second passage, which occurs around age 35, is the infamous midlife crisis, when we leave youth behind. The third passage occurs around age 50, when we confront the imminence of old age. When we actually reach old age, at around age 70, the challenge is to leave everything behind and confront death.

Each of these passages is a window of opportunity, which opens the way for us to progress to higher levels of maturity; when we do, we acquire new knowledge and abilities. When we successfully navigate “The Last Rite of Passage,” we achieve the highest level of a mature, adult consciousness – peace.

Ideally, we should proceed through these four tumultuous stages of personal growth in a timely manner. Two things hold us back: unresolved childhood traumas and holding on to the beliefs and concepts we acquired from our cultural indoctrination. Until we overcome these impediments, we remain psychological children, compelled to repeat the past, acting out the roles assigned to us by our particular culture, unable to think for ourselves.

When I freed myself from the past and self-actualized myself during the late middle age passage (early fifties), I did not anticipate another psychological crisis. Consequently, twenty years later, when I began to experience The Last Rite of Passage, I had no idea what was happening. I spontaneously began to review my life, from childhood to the present, my successes and failures, times when I was happy and times when I despaired. I recalled the significant people in my life, the good guys and the bad guys. Most of all I grieved. When I looked in the mirror and saw the old woman looking back at me, I grieved for the loss of my youthful good looks and physical strength. I grieved the loss of my work with clients and that my brain was too old to come up with new insights. Most of all I grieved the loss of my daughters; whether they died first or I did, I would inevitably lose them. No wonder I was depressed.

The epiphany that caused my symptoms to disappear occurred when I was watching one of my Netflix films, an Argentinean movie, Common Ground, which is based on a novel by Lorenzo F. Aristarain. The main character is a university professor named Fernando, who is forced into early retirement. Throughout the movie, Fernando philosophizes about life. His soliloquy about death exactly described my state of mind for the past year. “A ha! It’s not Alzheimer’s! It’s not a clinical depression! It’s not even personal! It’s just another life passage!” How silly of me not to realize that, of course, there must be a passage that marks the end stage of life!

Here is Fernando’s soliloquy: “The lucid man can live as long as he has a drive for life. That dark instinctive force can be lost. Then it’s necessary to call on something like faith, and to invent a reason, a goal, to replace that lost animal impulse with a cold, rational will. But that will is hard to keep up. Suddenly, for no reason, it burns out, it disappears. It’s then when you go on or quit. When you can or you cannot. And if you can’t, there is no guilt. The love of others, our love for others, it doesn’t matter. If we can’t go on, things go on without us. Everything passes, absence passes. We know death before we die. It’s an ancient routine, a common end. A wish-for end awaited without fear, for we have experienced it many times before. Nothing matters.”

My “depression” disappeared the instant I read Fernando’s words translated in the movie’s subtitles. My normal high-energy sense of well-being returned, deeper and stronger than before. Thoughts of death receded from the forefront of my mind into the background. My behavior changed. Instead of not purchasing anything because “I will be dead soon,” I bought some new clothes and a new computer, became more physically active, began to write again, and hired a tech to upgrade my computer skills.  The increased individual freedom and power that emerged produced subtle changes in my relationships. Emotionally, I felt at peace, a spiritual experience that I will not attempt to describe.

You may think it strange that simply being able to make sense of an experience could have such a big effect. However, our brains are programmed to try to interpret our experiences in a way that makes sense. When we cannot, we acquire repressed memories that bind us to the past. After three years in Nazi concentration camps, Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, instituted a new method of psychotherapy that is based on helping people make sense of their life experiences. You could say that Fernando was my therapist, who helped me make sense of the confusing experiences associated with The Final Rite of Passage.

We are born naked and, for sure, we take nothing with us when we die. When we let go of everything during The Final Rite of Passage, we prepare ourselves for death and before we die, we get to enjoy the new abilities that emerge. Having nothing to lose puts us in the most powerful position of all to deal with life’s challenges. We acquire an empty mind, the Zen mind, which enables us to experience reality in a way that is beyond words – what is, is. Paradoxically, when we experience death, we enjoy life more than ever before, even though it consists of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (There is more to “nothing” than meets the eye.) Of all my new experiences, the one that affects me the most is a new kind of love that emerged, which is deeper and more profound than I can possibly describe. Although I experienced this love first with my daughters, I notice it spilling over into other areas of my life.

When we make the last passage, like a ship that has cast off the last line that secures it to the dock, we are free to sail away.