Depth Recovery grounds its perspective of recovery as a cyclical process in the myth of Persephone. The mythos of Persephone is vast, and shares a plethora of images that one can analogously attach to the addiction – recovery experience. For the purposes of this reflection, we will focus on her abduction into the underworld.
Persephone can be seen as both young men and women in the early stages of addiction. As she frolics in the fields picking flowers, acting as though nothing can touch her ; so too I have seen a population of young men and women hubristically approach open air drug markets, homelessness – and soon find themselves in unfamiliar territory.
Hades himself opens the earth to grab Persephone and bring her down into the underworld. Might the drug dealer on the corner be committing the same abduction to us today? The myths are alive, and the Gods are not dead…
Now apart of the underworld, Hades attempts to condemn her there for life, by offering her something to eat to relieve her hunger. Tricked, Persephone eats a handful of pomegranate seeds, and as a result is condemned to spend half the year in the below, and half up above. Again, we see the trick of Hades in the verbiage of the drug dealer – “I’ve got just what you need”, “kiss your problems good-bye”, “one hit and all your worries will be gone”. Vulnerable, we accept the “seeds” from the dealer, and soon find ourselves attached to the underworld.
Our relationship to the underworld is important to bring into question. Typically, when we experience this state we are referring to feelings such as despair, depression, or melancholy to name a few. In our unconscious Western ego we immediately feel the need to fear the underworld and its inhabitants, or Hades himself. And similar to Hercules, we attack, and try to beat, kill, and make our way through it. This is where we might learn something from the Persephone myth in relation to recovery. The work of recovery is not to beat, kill, and make our way through the underworld – it is to learn how to inhabit it.
It is in this way that I have been discussing the idea of recovery with clients as of late ; the ability to navigate the underworld without reaching for its fruits. And what are its fruits – comfort, relief, warmth, reassurance, ad infinitum. While one works on learning how to navigate these experiences, one to realizes that recovery does not mean negation of underworld experiences. In the progressive fantasy of recovery, experiences of the underworld can be seen as “set backs”, “concerning”, and one can be made to feel a failure. Through the lens of Depth Recovery, these events are understood as necessity; Ananke.
The necessary events that one endures on the path of recovery; break ups, losses, endings, beginnings, etc., are the salt which provides the unique flavor, and seasoning to their recovery. Each persons experience of the underworld is unique, and hence necessary. In the cyclical process of restoring the soul, we return again and again to that familiar land – that of our wounds, our sufferings, our deepest fears, and that sense of feeling close to death.
