Blurb:
This episode is a psychological and spiritual exploration of trauma. Guided by the insights of Dr. Gabor Mate, we use the redemption storylines of Twister (and it’s sequel) to explore the effects of trauma and the path towards healing.
Transcipt of episode:
Dear friends, usually, in a typical action monster film, the goal would be to try to get away from the monster, to survive it, or in some ways to slay it. Yet when Twister first came out in 1996, we saw a our heroes going in the other direction: instead of getting away from the monster equivalent – the tornado – they instead chase it, classify it and try to understand it. This itself is an incredibly rare and symbolic dynamic, one that is useful in understanding how we recover from trauma. When we too choose to voluntarily face, and even chase that which we most fear… we might get battered and bruised along the way but ultimately, we become healed. How does this happen? This is the adventure of today’s episode. Before we start, I want to acknowledge that the topic of trauma itself may be triggering for some listeners. Hence, please journey through this episode with prayerful sensitivity, and know that I as the host will try and present in this spirit too.
The storylines of both Twister (1996) and Twisters (2024) are actually largely the same, and for the purposes of this episode, it won’t be necessary to go through a full story recap. Both are excellent movies by the way if you’re wondering, and quite mythical in structure. In summary, the stories begin with the protagonist experiencing some massive trauma through a tornado attack – in the original, Jo loses her dad as a little girl, and in the sequel, Kate loses three of her friends from a miscalculation on her part. The rest of the stories are largely about redemption, learning how the heroines overcome their fear and become storm chasers, tracking tornadoes in order to understand them better and prevent such traumas from happening to others. They eventually of course succeed, and the benefits of their chasing ends up benefiting humanity significantly.
At this point, I’m going to posit something: the reason why these films are so satisfying is because we intuitively know that tornados symbolise more than freak weather phenomenons. In the same way that other giant other-worldly creatures like Moby Dick symbolise far more than a whale, and dragons are far more than mythical flying animals, tornados are far more than columns of wind. I had intuitively known this even as a kid – let me share with you now a little anecdote. When the original Twister came out, the movie completely captured the attention of your then 8 year old host so much so that I announced in class that my dream job was to be a tornado chaser. I then spent the next two years become completely obsessed with tornados, borrowing every book I could find about them, drawing pictures of them, creating sandcastle towns and destroying them with mock dust devils and even creating little simulation tornados by swirling water between two 2L coke bottles. My little obsession didn’t end there though… As I learnt more about meteorology, and wrote to N.O.A.A. in the U.S. and got them to snail mail me flyers about storms, I become obsessed with the weather in general. Soon, I built little weather forecasting stations at home with balloon barometers, plastic anemometers with film canisters and I started collecting pine cones! For those of you who don’t know, pine cones sort of predict the weather, and actually open and close their scales according to the humidity and wind in the atmosphere. This is to protect the seeds inside, and to determine the optimal conditions to release them. Anyway, I soon became quite the expert on clouds and to this day eagerly point out cumulonimbus clouds with anvils to my friends, which is a sure sign a thunderstorm is brewing, and 90% of the time, I am correct. Why am I telling you all this? What started as a childhood fad became very significant later in life too as a young adult, for tornados kept on coming up in my dreams. These dreams would be largely the same story … I was always in a car in the passenger seat, and I would spot a tornado in the field somewhere. I would then have the same two dilemmas … firstly to simply gazing at this rare, natural phenomenon before it disappears, or secondly to try and capture it on footage for others to see – but in doing so miss seeing it with my own naked eyes. Another dilemma was always about how close did I dare go to the tornado, in order to get better footage? If I remained at a distance, I would remain safe but obtain a low res version … but if I got up close, I’d get a high res image, but put myself in mortal risk! And then the dream would somehow end.
It was only later in life, when I started seeing a spiritual director, that I became aware of why I kept having tornado dreams, and why they were so repetitive. If we take the premise that dreams are the unconscious trying to relay suppressed by important truths to the conscious mind, then tornados, for me, symbolised my repressed masculine strength – and in some ways, my anger. When I say strength, I don’t just refer to physical power, but rather my capacity to be assertive, daring and passionate. I could go into a whole testimony about why these inherently masculine traits had been suppressed in my childhood, but suffice it to say that tornados were a very apt image for these things, as I was both in awe of my strength, chasing after it wanting others to notice it, and yet I was terrified of it. And as it goes, as I began to acknowledge and develop these parts of my masculinity in real life, the frequency of my tornado dreams become to decrease and in them , I was always much more bold in going right up the twister, rather than running from them. I’m telling you all this because I want to encourage you to look deeper at the films or stories you enjoy, for if you’re drawn to the same symbols over and over again – there’s probably some important revelation hiding just beneath the surface.
Okay, so now I’m going to dive deeper into how the Twister movies are trauma redemption stories. There’s a line in Twisters that I want to begin with. Recall that Kate is initially hesitant to get back into tornado chasing because when she was a doctorate student, she had underestimated a tornado’s power and as a result, had gotten her three friends killed. This affected her life immensely, and she gave up her passion for taming tornados and instead, stayed safely boxed up as a meteorologist behind the scenes. She hated living this way, but at least it was safe – how many of us can relate with Kate? Halfway through the movies however, when Tyler is speaking with Kate, he reminds her that the Fujita system of rating tornados is actually not based on its size or windspeed, but rather, how much damage it inflicts. This is a wonderful metaphor for understanding trauma. Trauma is not measured so much by what happens to us, but how much damage it does within us. In other words, the same incident happening to two different people can have incredibly different effects. For example, the same car accident can affect a parent passenger very differently to a child, with the parent being merely bothered by insurance, while for a 5 year old, it could result in a lifelong paranoia of getting into a car. Similarly, a divorce can detrimentally affect one child far more than the other. One of the world’s leading writers on trauma currently is Dr Gabor Mate… who says that “trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” However, he also says that the fact that trauma is measured by the wound it inflicts, and not by the incident itself, is actually good news. This is because there is now a separation of a past event from our present experience of it… we are not helpless victims of something in the past. Wounds after all, can be healed… even if the healing needs to happen slowly. If our trauma was merely measure by an incident in the past, we would forever be a slave to it – a victim, or at best a survivor. But through healing, we can be so much more than that.
This is what Tyler was trying to help Kate see. Tragic though her past mistake was, it could not and should not change her present moment. In the barn house scene, he actually believes that her sodium polyacrylate theory could actually save countless lives, but Kate was too wounded to see it… and was hence blinded to the opportunity of her present moment. This is what trauma does to us… it keeps us locked in the past, and unable to function freely in the present or see its opportunities. Similarly, trauma can also make us irrational in situations that actually call for rational judgment. For example, abuse survivors often talk about the swing from fear to aggression if they at all feel threatened by the presence of another, even if the other are not actually dangerous. There’s a scene in the original Twister which illustrates this somewhat. Recall that Jo had lost her father to an EF5 tornado when she was only a little girl – he was sucked out of their storm shelter trying to protect his family by holding down the hatch. Perhaps she blamed herself because she had insisted that he re-open to hatch to let their family dog in too, delaying things. In any case, her passion to redeem her dad led her to obsessively chase tornados in a reckless sort of way, unnecessarily risking herself and ostracising herself from her team. Her tunnel vision also had driven a wedge between her then husband, Bill. The following scene captures an interaction between Jo and Bill. Leading to this point, Dorothy, the science drum full of weather sensors had just been tipped over by an F3 tornado, and Jo was desperately wanting to rush back to the danger zone to put them back in the ruined pack. Bill, on the other had is more sound of mind and wants to stop her from rushing headlong into what would be suicide …
Unhealed trauma effectively locks part of us in the past, colouring the way we live the present moment. But the natural question now arises: how does one heal the psychic wounds of trauma? After all, if we’ve been hurt by something, the instinct is to run in the opposite direction, especially when even the smallest reminder can trigger us. The key lies with the free voluntary choice to face the trauma, and the adequate support to do so. While in most cases the citing event happened to us unwillingly, healing must happen willingly. Giving yourself permission to feel the pain is the first place to begin, for avoiding the pain only makes it worse. Gabor Mate writes that: “The attempt to escape from pain is what causes more pain”. Time as it turns out, doesn’t automatically heal all pains. The gradualness of the healing process is very important to acknowledge though – for too much, too soon can also become overwhelming. Rather, beautiful things happen slowly – this is a law God seems to have baked into the universe. This is where the story progression of the Twister movies are quite accurate. Both Jo and Kate were initially overwhelmed by F5 tornados from their past, and they had to sort of build up their confidence with smaller tornados before they were able to face the final monstrous F5 once again. Face these they did and the difference between the original trauma inducing F5 and the final victorious F5 was their voluntary choice to face it. Having the right support people around them also made a big difference – and it is to this point we now turn.
Psychologist Julian Ford found that the quality of support a person receives immediately after a painful event can greatly reduce the development of trauma, such as PTSD. An example I saw of this is when a little girl I knew got accidently scratched by an enthusiastic family dog. While the dog was clearly just playing, his leaping upon the 4 year old resulted in a scratch to her temple and a fair bit of blood, which naturally led to the girl becoming quite traumatised. However! The wisdom of the dad knew that if the little girl wasn’t rightly supported after the event, her daughter could well develop a lifelong fear of dogs a sort of canine PTSD. So what he did next was pretty cool. He patched up his daughter, soothed her, and then, when she was calm, went back towards the much calmer family dog, wither her in his arms, and together, they stroked the animal. This action would immediately build trust again towards the animal, and as such, would likely prevent any further trauma in her development. All of this is to say that if you meet someone just emerging from a emotionally charged situation – like a car accident, a sudden death, or break-up, ensure that the person immediate support in the aftermath… for the quality of this support may well determine the severity of any long term trauma.
The final reflection I want to offer today ties back to the promise of scripture – that once redeemed, our wounds become the greatest blessings not just for ourselves but for the world. This was certainly true of Christ, whose crucifixion– the most traumatic event in human history – became the entryway of grace through which he blessed the world. By his wounds we are healed Isaiah tells us. Or in the words of Vienna Pharaon: “Our wounds and our gifts are next door neighbours”. In the Twister movies, this pattern is also seen, where the final confrontation of the main characters with their traumas yielded blessings for others too. In the original, Jo and Bill were able to release the Dorothy sensors into the funnel, allowing them the necessary data to create more advanced warning systems and increasing the chances of survival. In the sequel, Kate literally dissipates the F5 using her sodium polyacrylate theory, sparing an entire town of from the whirlwind. It is especially moving when this was achieved, because when the returning Kate initially was confronted with even a small F1 tornado, she froze up and had a panic attack, traumatised by the memory of her slain friends. And yet, by the end, she had found enough healing to drive right into the gargantuan F5 alone, and in doing so look her greatest fear straight in the face. The risk was high… but the rewards are infinitely greater – this is the gospel promise. Going back to the original Twister movie again, I love how after Bill and Jo had successfully delivered their final payload, they are swept up inside the mighty F5 tornado, and there, tied to a pipe, they get to glimpse a sight no living human has ever seen before – the inside of a tornado. Looking up through this majestic vortex into the very heavens themselves, they are rendered speechless in wonder. It’s no wonder that the director chose to play this very piece of music during that scene… for to see the presence of the God within tumultuous suffering… that is truly holy…