In the late 00′s, I was made aware of the Hero’s Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it’s the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief—or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero’s Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero’s journey is life in the “doomed village”: things look normal and sound normal, but something’s profoundly wrong in the world, and it’s about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun my head around was realizing my emotional traumas were imposed on me by someone whose subconscious was abusing my Hero’s Journey instinct to make me walk through his pain to slay his demons for him. After that, I was able to let go of his narrative thread and try to find where I’d dropped mine five years before.
In the late 00′s, I was made aware of the Hero’s Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it’s the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief—or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero’s Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero’s journey is life in the “doomed village”: things look normal and sound normal, but something’s profoundly wrong in the world, and it’s about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun my head around was realizing my emotional traumas were imposed on me by someone whose subconscious was abusing my Hero’s Journey instinct to make me walk through his pain to slay his demons for him. After that, I was able to let go of his narrative thread and try to find where I’d dropped mine five years before.