The King Must Die: Embracing Recovery and Healing

We are all recovering from something. Whether it is a life of trauma stored in the body, tendencies to ignore oneself to take care of others, substance addiction, self-neglect, racism, perfectionism, isolation, disordered eating, avoidance, debt, illness, depression, anxiety, stress, etc.; we all have something from which we have the opportunity to recover our true selves. Because suffering is an inevitable part of human life, and humans have the capacity for self-awareness and change, we are all primed for recovery and healing. Normalizing this helps us break the stigma around being in the struggle. Coming out of isolation, embracing the healing journey, and sharing it with others humanizes us all.

There is a book by Mary Renault called The King Must Die. I read it many years ago, as well as its sequel, Bull from the Sea. The story follows Theseus through his journey of becoming. It is a rich and enchanting story, filled with adventure, love, passion, action, and transformation from a unique and ancient cultural perspective. As I ponder that story, I am struck by how the beginning is the end. Theseus is to become a leader, a man, a human who has faced himself and truly lived. But first, the king must die. While this may seem contradictory, for the story to begin with death, anyone in recovery from trauma or addiction can attest that every story of becoming begins with death. Death of who we thought we were. Death of the survival strategies that had been running our lives. Death of the fantasies to which we attached ourselves and served faithfully. Death of denial and false fronts. Death of the illusion and hiding places. Death of the performance in lieu of self-honest living. Death is step one. Only then can the adventure begin, because only then are we actually here.

In the brilliant and heart-wrenching film, Sherry Baby (2006), starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, we witness Sherry’s story lived within the illusion and the survival strategies after having served a prison sentence related to drug abuse. We watch as she encounters the pieces of her past that she has survived with those strategies and how hard it is to let them go. We come to understand why she learned to be someone other than her true self. The connection between trauma and addiction/self-defeating patterns is made starkly clear. We see the incredible challenge she undergoes as her survival strategies become ineffective and she is brought to her knees. We see her grasping for something, anything, to save her from facing herself and the pain and grief she has been avoiding. At the end of the film is the beginning of Sherry’s actual journey. The “king” dies. She finally stops. She asks for help. She sees the insanity and realizes no one is coming to save her from

it. Just like Theseus, being led to his ritualized death in The King Must Die, Sherry knows there is nowhere to run anymore. The beginning of her true life is the death of the idea that she can somehow survive and with the false king on its throne.

Another film that provides an example of healing and recovery is The Painted Veil (2006), starring Naomi Watts and Ed Norton. This is a story of love addiction. Love addiction is a process addiction rooted in unhealed attachment wounds, most often from early experiences in life. These attachment stories replay and repeat in unhealthy love relationships, leading to familiar, yet painful, emotional and psychological turmoil. In The Painted Veil, we see the love addict (Naomi Watts) and

the love avoidant (Ed Norton), and the power struggle between them. They are mirrors for each other, pulling out of the shadow everything the other wanted to keep hidden with immature survival strategies. We see as the story unfolds that neither of them could have psychologically grown up without going through their storm of chaos, struggle, and loss that freed each of them to embrace their true selves. The love addiction was the false king that had kept them from authentic living, but it was also what led them right into the process of healing and recovery.

Tumbleweeds (2000), starring Janet McTeer and Kimberly J. Brown is another film showing the journey of love and fantasy addiction. It is the tale of a mother and daughter, being tumbled through the successive episodes of the mother’s search for love and stability in relationships with men. There was a fantasy that some love relationship would save her from herself and then everything would be okay. This pattern was probably set in motion early in life for the character through emotional neglect, abuse, or abandonment. We watch as the mother’s wound story repeats

even while we see the lovely, bright light she is trying to shine through. We see the

daughter, affected and exasperated, yet attached to her mother  in spite of it all (like all of us raised by humans who are struggling). Only in the end of the film do we see the mother begin to realize that the only place left to search was within, and the love and stability for which she was searching is what she already had with her daughter. She comes to step one. The false king must die so her true life as a woman and a mother can be born.

When we begin a recovery/healing process, we find ourselves powerless over the survival strategies we have come to depend on to get by in life. The survival strategies themselves have become our “king.” We learn to serve this false king because we believe that if served and prioritized, it will help us get through the inevitable difficulties of life. This “king” is placed at the center of the life, and then, like a magnetic core, all aspects of life begin to constellate around it. We are usually not aware of this happening. By the time life helps us face it, we might not even remember or have ever known who we are without that “king.” The cost of serving the king becomes our very lives. The false king ruling our lives is built of coping, and that coping is what we do in reaction to stress. So, the ruler to which we have turned and pledged our allegiance, is merely a collection of reactions to people, situations, and experiences that overwhelmed us. Coping becomes a substitute for the authentic self, and eventually the line between self and coping blurs, especially in situations where the stress we are coping with is chronic, life-shattering, or cyclical.

Our most concretized kings are set on the throne in response to early or intense trauma experiences. It is understandable that we place these false kings in a position of dealing with life for us, because we were most often children/teenagers with no other choice to survive that for which we were wholly unprepared. Another factor is that often we weren’t taught to or allowed to stay with feelings and express them. We were not shown how to feel deeply the troubles of life and hold tight to our values and our community to move through it while securely fastened to acceptance and surrender. Rather, we witnessed the adults around us living in their own coping strategies to survive, and we were caught in their wake. Authentic and joyful living in acceptance of the ups and downs of life is not commonly modeled.

In other instances, things sometimes happen in life (like sudden, tragic loss) and we are simply not equipped to handle it. The self-system is overwhelmed and coping takes over completely – our true self afraid and in hiding, sure another threat is around every corner. In those situations, we wake up, sometimes years or decades later, wondering how many red lights we ran while we were lost in dissociation. All of this is part of the human experience. We live in linear time. We experience the unexpected. We are raised by people who have not been here before. We have a very unevolved society fumbling around in the darkness of duality. Even though we are all fed some fantasy that we are supposed to be “perfect” and never struggle and be the best at everything we do, the truth is that we are all blindsided by life at some point or at many points along the way. We are all recovering and healing from something.

Our lives are the stories we are living through to grow, learn, and heal. These stories of recovery and healing occur across all identities, socioeconomic statuses, geographical locations. No one is immune. We are humans, we will suffer, and when we are ready, we can heal and recover. We may fear letting the false king go because we have nothing built in us to be an effective successor and we have been conditioned in an individualistic culture to think we have to do it alone. This is where recovery and healing become our lifeline. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s definition of recovery is as follows: A process of

SAMHSA's Wheel of Recovery

change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential. When we stop and face ourselves, we come to distinguish between our coping strategies and our values, and we work to constellate our lives around our true values and principles. This reorientation allows us to situate in our own lives as ourselves and accept guidance and support from others. We improve our health and wellness gradually, over time. Some people place addiction recovery in a category separate from other healing processes. We don’t always realize that any pattern that is difficult to change and continues to hurt us is an addiction. We can even be addicted to feeling bad. We can be addicted to guilt, fear, self-sabotage. Healing and recovery are for everyone.

Recovery and healing are about progress, not perfection. Through recovery and healing practices, we gradually learn to turn toward an authentic set of values, community (whether a recovery community, a therapist, a support group, a church community, or a friend group built around a wholesome activity), and connection to something greater. That something greater can be anything beyond our comprehension. For me, the Living Universe of which I am a part is my something greater. I experience my own existence as a part of the fabric of the existence of everything. That brings me the understanding that I am never alone, but a thread that is inextricable from all of the energy in existence.

In her 2024 film, This is Me, Now: A Love Story, Jennifer Lopez brings to light her journey of recovery from love addiction. She shares with viewers the messy ways in which her love addiction played out self-abandonment learned early in life. She shows the discomfort and eventual tenderness she experiences facing herself and her patterns, turning toward her inner child, and accepting her role as the new, loving parent to her self-system. This film depicts how the true self has been waiting for us to slow down and stop. The false king had to die and she had to grieve it.

Only then can she see that it was her true self from which she was running all along. People in her life know it and see it, but she has to go through her process before she can see it. Once she does, things begin to change. She opens to a path on which she will become important enough to herself to start living patterns of healing and wellness rooted in connection to her true self.

In healing, every person has the freedom to discover what values/principles, community, and something greater works for them. Over time, the false king loses its shine and becomes more of a “wizard of oz” character. We might still grapple with its proclamations of old – but we see it for what it is and have something else to which to turn: the true self that was left behind and undeveloped. It is usually small and weak at first. While our true self has been waiting for its chance, it needs time and consistent support over time to take shape.

At times we may experience a part of us clinging to the old, false king and running back for one more selfie at the throne. But another part is emerging as we heal and constellate around self-honesty and willingness to face ourselves. This is why healing and recovery, while painful and confronting, are fulfilling and rewarding in indescribable ways. We learn to tolerate reality. We learn to be in our own lives without running away or shutting off. We practice telling the truth. We see that what we had thought was living was just surviving, and we felt so alone. As we walk the path, knowing the king must die, we also know death will bring life anew, with strength to take the next step.