Soul Loss

In this blog when I mention the word “soul” please think of the Oxford English Dictionary definition where a soul is defined as “the principle of life, commonly regarded as an entity distinct from the body;  the spiritual parts in contract to the physical.”  We all have a soul and unfortunately for some of us a part of our soul has gotten lost or has gone into hiding.

Soul loss can occur to anyone at any time.  Among the indigenous people of the world it is generally understood that serious traumatic life experiences can cause the soul to fragment and for a soul fragment dissociate resulting in a phenomenon generally known as 'Soul Loss'.  Soul loss an adaptive coping mechanism that helps an individual survive and continue to function after terrible experiences.

We are all different and have different levels of soul resiliency and so the triggering traumatic event may be different for each person, and some people, fortunately, never suffer soul loss.   However, common causes of soul loss include:

• physical, emotional, or sexual abuse,

• childhood molestation,

• a bitter divorce, a shocking betrayal,

• sexual assault,

• serious surgery,

• a terrible car accident, or

• an experience that is so personal at the perceptual level that no one else would know that a trauma had occurred.

Take the case of Bill (name changed).  He was the oldest of three boys aged 6, 5, and 4 in the late 1950s the summer when his parents were separated by work.  His father, a college student at the time, took a job in a laboratory on the other side of the country leaving his wife home alone with three young and hard-to-control boys.  One day the boys were playing with their mother’s jewelry box and accidently dropped several cherished items down the cold air return in the floor into a coal-fired furnace.  The mother in a furry declared that she was going abandon the boys and was never coming back.  Bill, being the oldest, instructed his younger brothers to sit in front of the back door and to not let their mother abandon them.  Bill took his position by the front door and by his admission protected the door so firmly that his mother finally curled into a ball of the floor and sobbed. 

Hours later a neighbor stopped by and found the mother unresponsive in a fetal position on the floor.  It turned out that she had suffered a nervous breakdown.  She was taken to the hospital, the three boys where farmed out to friends’ homes, and Bill said that his childhood ended that day.  He walked to each home where his brothers were sleeping to check on them and said that, “It was my job to keep the family together until my dad came home 3 weeks later.  By the time he returned I was a man with no childhood.”

When I met Bill he was a serious man is his late 50s who said that he couldn't ever remember smiling or playing, and that he had a very difficult time being trustful in relationships, always afraid of being abandoned.  Bill had suffered a traumatic event as a child that resulted in soul loss.  After discussing the event and the shaman’s approach to dealing with soul loss he asked me undertake a soul retrieval journey for him.

This post has gotten sort of long so I’ll tell you about the journey to find his missing soul fragment in my next post.  Until then, live in peace with Pachamama, Intitayta, and your ancestors.  May they smile upon you and walk with you.

Dr. Dave