Art Therapy №6: Work Sets You Free
Breaking the Jewish [cultural] cycle of persecution to take back my mental health. AKA: How @roboteich got his groove back.
I know it sounds twisted, but “work sets you free” is the mantra that turns my thoughts, feelings and behaviors inside out. The sinister Nazi slogan that welcomed 6 million Jews to their death during the Holocaust gives me the clarity I need to break a cycle of self persecution and feel free to be me again. With something as haunting as the Holocaust attached to those words it is shameful to give them any power right? As a Jew I must never forget what the Nazis did to us. I don’t. I can’t. But, I can challenge what I think, and how I let that control my feelings and actions.
As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors I was predisposed to misery. Understanding why exposed me to hope.
The shadow of the Holocaust haunts me. I also have severe anxiety over things that haven’t and continue not to happen; I worry inordinately about getting fired, saying inappropriate things, being a horrible father, husband, son or brother. Those don’t seem related, but they are.
The Jewish culture surrounding our lengthy history of persecution is depressing. I mean that clinically, as in subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events (anxiety) that lead to low mood (depression). The trail of persecution from Babylonia, Egypt, Rome, Spain, Russia, Nazi Germany and modern day France is dreadful. To a Jewish person with inherited depressive disorders it’s downright paralyzing. Yes, I said inherited depressive disorders. If thinking about the past isn’t depressing enough, there’s a great chance our DNA is affected by these traumas, perpetuating a cycle of dread.
The study of epigenetics has shown that trauma experienced in early life not only is a risk factor for developing behavioral and emotional disorders, but that those disorders may be transmitted across generations. Essentially our cells have memories that affect how our DNA is expressed, and how it’s inherited.
It’s thought of as an evolutionary method to engage fight-or-flight in our children in response to what we found out the hard way was a threat.
It’s an interesting topic that needs more data. Proposals and studies like this and this follow the transmission of Holocaust trauma to the boomers and their offspring (me). It’s possible the persecution of our ancestors predisposed the Jewish lineages to depressive neurosis. If we’re setup for anxiety and are then raised in a community whose behavior is driven by it, we’re stuck in an unhealthy cycle.
Anxiety manifests in seriously destructive ways when our brains rely on defense mechanisms to protect us from internalized threats.
From an early age we take part in the Passover Seder, telling a story of escape from cruelty. Remembering the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazi’s in the Holocaust, we powerfully and somberly say “never forget” followed by “or history is doomed to repeat itself.” That. Is. HEAVY. I remember as a grade school kid feeling dread and panic because any day Nazis could come and get me and my family. No evidence suggested that conclusion, but I was told don’t forget, history repeats. It was absolutely real to me. So if I was already genetically predisposed to anxiety, the heaviness of the environment I grew up in exacerbated it.
In times of despair ego defense mechanisms like denial, projection, transference and displacement kick in. Folks tend to protect their own shame by placing it on others, completely externalizing it or denying it all together so they don’t have to feel it. I can think of no greater example of it in Jewish culture than Yiddish.
I’m sadly not joking when I say it makes sense that Yiddish exists to passive aggressively complain about other people. The language has specific derogatory terms for non Jews (goy, shiksa, shegetz), descriptions of all variety of fools for which there is no concise english translation (schmuck, putz, schlemiel, schlemazel) and phrases that the speaker utters for no other reason than to complain about how persecuted they feel about things that just exist (In mitten drinnen, verklempt, oy gevalt). Even the word for belly button is said with disdain (pupik). To all of this my grandmother would probably say “oy vey iz mir!” She’d also say that about the internalized blame that led to an organization like the JPFO.
There is a line of thinking in the community that perpetuates the myth that weren’t it for European Jews gone soft, they’d have taken up arms, there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust. My dad was a card carrying member, I’ve heard the rhetoric. While I may not be liberal in thought about gun ownership, this is extreme. It’s the type of extreme that feels reactionary to a threat. I do understand how a depressed brain gets there though.
For me that extremism was focused on tearing myself down.
I am a classic self-blamer. Five months ago I was convinced I should die because I ruined everything I touched. All that blame felt very real. No one recognized this “truth” but me, until a number of important folks pointed out how distorted that truth was. It seems silly now, but even then I still didn’t believe I could be wrong. It took books, talks, conversations, podcasts, cognitive behavioral therapy, individual therapy, group therapy, art therapy, psych ed, epigenetics, mindfulness and relentless practice to find hope for myself.
I am anxious, and I was depressed. I inherited trauma environmentally and genetically. It has shaped my core beliefs and affects how I may behave in any situation socially, professionally or otherwise. But because I know that, I can relook at the truth vs the awful truth I tell myself. All that therapy, reflection and hippy granola meditation gave me the toolkit to see my personality “disorders” more like personality “abilities”.
The gift of my anxiety defense mechanisms is that I’m humorous and intellectual.
I can rationalize and even smile doing it. It clicked for me when I reappraised the words “work sets you free.” Though I may be predisposed to doom and gloom, knowing I am puts me in control of changing. Through very hard work I have overcome the ways in which I held myself back and experienced personal growth.
In meditation I can picture Rachel Teichner reading “arbeit macht frei”, the german for “work sets you free”, atop the gates of Auschwitz as she entered a life of disease, starvation and forced labor. I also can picture Rachel Teichner reading “arbeit macht frei” atop the gates as she left Auschwitz. I’d like to think she was inspired reading those words. My grandmother physically contained in barbed wire topped fences to die or be liberated, survived to start a new family in the United States. She did the work and from it I blossomed as imperfect as I should be. I am not comparing my suffering to hers, far from it. I am drawing strength from it. That’s the whole point. There is another way to look at one’s depressive mind. One does the work to grow out of it or is consumed by it.
That’s what took my father away, and what motivated me to break that cycle.
The art therapy piece this post grew out of is called a mandala. Mandalas are circular, often ornate patterns on which to meditate. The meditator focuses on the elements of the mandala to find new perspective. I made this to remind me of how hard work leads to growth. The circle is made up of barbed wire to represent the cycle of trauma and persecution that threatened my grandparents physically and me psychologically. In the middle are 12 roses. They remind me of the dozen roses my dad brought home every Friday for my Mom. He had his struggle but still was one of the most empathetic and thoughtful souls who committed acts of beauty. All of those beauties are contained within the circle of wire because my dad never escaped his darkness. If you’re counting though, you will notice to the right side is a thirteenth rose extending beyond the ring of barbed wire. That’s new growth. That’s me or the work it takes to understand the cycle, address it and break out of it.
Fun fact, the words Arbeit Macht Frei were not coined by Nazis. They come from the title of the Lorenz Diefenbach’s novel Arbeit macht frei: Erzählung von Lorenz Diefenbach (1873), in which gamblers and fraudsters find the path to virtue through labour. I like taking back these words, because this whole process for me was like taking back my mental health from myself. By meditating on a stigmatized set of words and returning them to their virtuosic beginning I’ve also restored me to me.
