How to Skin a Gorilla: No-Dogma Recovery

Guest post by Kelly Thompson

I’m in a Zoom workshop with Laurie Stone and Richard Toon when Barbara, one of the eight participants, mentions she’s writing about taking a tour of the Museum of Natural History in NYC and viewing the gorilla exhibit.

“There are 28 dioramas,” Richard says. It turns out he’s a museologist, someone who studies museums. “Akeley’s gorillas.”

Barbara first brought it up as an aspect of someone’s critique of her writing. They wanted her to reveal how it impacted the narrator (her) when the tour guide commented that it was too bad the gorillas had to be killed in order to make the dioramas, along with mention of skinning the beast and shaping the muscles and other gruesome details. I Google Akeley and gorillas, and Google tells me that Akeley applied skin to a finely molded replica of the animal’s body, thus elevating taxidermy from a craft to an art.

Akeley sculpted a 1/12th clay model of his ultimate mount, I read. Next, he created a lightweight, though sturdy, mannequin using papier-mâché, clay, and wire mesh, sculpting the musculature in active poses to precisely reproduce the original sculpture before mounting the animal’s skin — its original pelt — which was then sewn up seamlessly. Imagine the process of collecting the animals first: killing, measuring, photographing, skinning, de-boning, preserving, and packing them for shipment.

But what caught my attention was Richard’s comment: “Oh yes, someone wrote about these gorilla dioramas and how every single one of them mimics the nuclear family.”

So, in each of the 28 dioramas, a nuclear family — in other words, a dominant male beast looms in the center, his female mate and two gorilla offspring in various poses reside in the foreground.

Someone mentions the patriarchy. And Richard says, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”

But what strikes me, because I’ve been writing about losing my religion, is that last thing. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Skin laid over the armature. Taxidermy elevated to an art. This is how it begins. Losing Your Religion.

Losing one’s religion is not something one comes to voluntarily. It took getting sober in a 12-Step program at 30 and a long time after that to peel the skin back.

I don’t know about your mind, but mine can make a religion out of anything.

It dawned on me, after years of 12-Step practice, that I had brought my early conditioning — and the black-and-white thinking of the religious cult that shaped me — into the rooms with me. I interpreted the 12 Steps (and the rooms) through the lens by which I perceived the world and the beliefs I brought with me, mostly unconscious.

Though I left the cult at 15, the brainwashing I received as a child did not loosen its grip for many decades, even as I fought against it. Deep emotional conflicts remained.

I eventually recognized that the frameworks or methods we use to get us to enlightenment are only vehicles. Like a finger pointing to the moon, in which we mistake the finger for the moon, wisdom traditions point to the non-conceptual. When we mistake the tradition for what it points to, we get dogma or doctrine at best. We can make the doctrine our higher power, when it’s just a vehicle.

Born and raised in the Bible-based 2x2 sect, I found that the 12 Steps and The Big Book, in which patriarchal terminology and the vocabulary of the era are embedded (think Heavenly Father, Creator, Maker, masculine pronouns, a chapter to the wives, etc.), reflected much of the conditioning I was raised with. The saving grace in them was the permission to define a higher power for myself, rather than being force-fed the God of my fathers.

Still, I was limited in my ability to comprehend a higher power beyond the totalizing indoctrination of my childhood. It was only with consistent practice of the Steps that the conditioning began to fall away, and spiritual principles were revealed. The paradox is that my own dogmatic thinking was transformed.

Certainly, the rooms are filled with dogmatic thinking. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be needed to begin with. For me, addiction was centered in the mind. The only thing that was wrong with me was what I thought was wrong with me; I had an entire system of beliefs about myself and the world I’d internalized — a hundred forms of self-delusion based on fear.

How do we recognize conditioning in ourselves? Indoctrination? It’s so unconscious.

The first awareness is to recognize who I am not: I’m not my mind. Mind, too, is only a vehicle. The more I find out for myself who I am NOT, the closer I get to who I AM.

Before getting sober and working the Steps, and for a long time after, I was caught in it. But gradually, as promised in The Big Book, the Steps became a working part of my mind. Rather than replacing the religion of my childhood, they gave me a scaffolding, a ladder to the Self, and helped me recognize and release old ideas and beliefs belonging to the small self.

The mind is a beautiful thing when rightly directed.

I tend to believe now that when I interpret a religious teaching as dogma, it points me to the areas where I think dogmatically. That’s not to say that religion or churches are not full of dogmatic people, teachings, and thinking. It’s just that the truth underlying religion or wisdom traditions, when correctly understood, has never been about dogma or even doctrine. That’s the paradox. Once you know, the method or vehicle you took to get there dissolves, and I think that’s the very definition of liberation.

Here’s one thing you can do to explore this: Find a tree and sit beneath it. Set aside the word “tree.” Just observe.

When you get caught in thinking about the tree instead of being present to the tree, let go of the word again. Experience what we call a “tree” instead of the word for it.

Just for today. Give it five minutes.

Keep practicing. One day, that being we call a tree will appear in place of the word, in place of the concept of tree. I thought you’d never notice. Ecstasy. It’s like they’ve been waiting all of eternity for me to join in communion.

How about you?

We’d love for you to share in the comments:

• Have you noticed how past conditioning has shown up in your recovery? In what ways did it manifest, and how have you explored — or even shifted — it over time?
• In your journey to sobriety, have you ever had a moment where the method or process you were following dissolved, and you experienced something deeper or more transformative?

And if you found this article helpful, please leave a clap or 50. It lets others know there’s something useful here and will help us grow this community.

Kelly Thompson’s work has appeared in Memoir Land, BOMB, LARB, Guernica, Proximity, Fatal Flaw, Yoga Journal, and more. She is the founding editor of The Rumpus Original Column: Voices On Addiction and an LCSW. Subscribe or follow her on Substack at: There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was).

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