Mental Maps vs Reality | Lessons In Humility And How To Become Wiser

In loving memory of my dad, Hank Passafero, and all of the souls who left us this year.

Dear friends,

Last Thursday night I attended an All Soul’s Eve ceremony at the Boulder Waldorf School to honor the people in our lives who died this year.

Taking a tall tapered candle from the table outside, I stepped into the dark gymnasium. Rows of chairs sat facing two sand filled boxes holding the lighted candles of those who had already arrived and were sitting reverentially in their seats. Kneeling down, I tipped the naked taper into the flame of a large candle standing between the two rows of boxes; as soon as it was burning on its own, I placed mine into the one on the right, where it joined the others in a visual symphony of flickering little fires that illuminated the night.

For an hour we sat in quiet contemplation as the number of tapered candles grew; as artists played piano, guitar and cello; as the names of those who died this year were spoken aloud; as poetry was read, and movement performers danced across the floor expressing so much without saying a word.

There was no clapping, because this was not entertainment; this was a genuine effort to build a bridge between this world and the next; between forgetting and remembering; between the living and the dead.

Do you see this, dad?!

Your death is the reason I’m finally here at one of these dang events you loved so much and always wanted me to attend. Are you happy?

My dad has been on my mind a lot lately, and I am continually humbled by the gifts and lessons he left me with when he died in April.

More than all the other experiences in my life (and there have been many that contributed to this particular life lesson), the events surrounding my dad’s death taught me the importance of questioning our assumptions and stepping outside our mental maps…where we just might be graced with the healing balm of truth.

As human beings, we live inside of stories nested within stories.

Whether those stories are religious and spiritual in nature, or scientific, or both; whether we’re aware of the stories we’ve adopted, or not; whether they’ve been chosen consciously, or constructed subconsciously; there is no escaping the fact that human beings use story and narrative to derive meaning from - and to make sense of - this finite gift of life.

Our mental maps, however (the stories we use that govern our behaviors) rarely match reality.

The distance between our mental maps and reality is, I would argue, the root cause of nearly all human misery.

Which means if we want to be more happy than miserable; if we want to resolve pain effectively; if we want to heal trauma; if we want to build a world worthy of human dignity; then we should make every effort to align our mental maps with reality to the highest degree possible. And since this is a near impossible task, there is one mental map which I will offer at the end of this letter that we could all adopt in order to consistently aim at the highest possible good.

The fact that my dad became my greatest teacher in this arena is poetic; and ironic; like a divine comedy that points to a tragic truth.

Shaking my head in bewilderment and wonder, I’ve often found myself crying and laughing at the same time when I think of my dad.

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Last December (2022) my dad asked my mom to take him to the hospital in the hopes they could figure out why his balance had suddenly declined so dramatically that he was falling nearly every day. His right leg was amputated, and for the past four years he was able to move around the house with the help of a wheelchair, a prosthetic limb, and my mom - his devoted wife and caretaker.

When he entered the hospital in 2022, his mental faculties were still very much intact; for years he had refused nearly all medications, including painkillers, so he had his whits about him; and despite the daily challenges he faced he was generally full of cheerful optimism and gratitude for being alive.

The hospital stay, however, quickly turned into a nightmare; and by the time my mom got him released back into her care in January, it was clear to me that my dad was likely approaching death; and I had a choice to make.

For weeks, I deliberated whether or not to go see him.

That it was even a deliberation is something I’m not proud to admit to you now (and, I forgive myself - it was a complex decision involving a whole lot of history, and other family members too).

While our relationship had its phases of connection and closeness, my relationship with my father was the most perplexing and painful of my life. He was the epicenter of my universe as a little girl. There was no one I felt safer with. He taught me to wrestle and raise butterflies; took us to national parks to admire the beauty of nature; and (with my mom’s help) he created the most magical festivals and holidays a child could ever hope to experience. But then, a series of troubles visited our family that included a few serious traumas for me, and at ten years old our bond shattered.

The harder I tried to resolve these hurts over the years, the worse things seemed to get; until I reached a breaking point while visiting everyone in 2018 and made myself a promise: “I’m never coming here again.”

Looking at the photo above, my heart swells with love; aches with sorrow; and tightens in remorse. Tears spring into my eyes, and I wish I could leap into that photo and give my dad the biggest hug.

✦ ✦ ✦

I was there in South Carolina when my dad had his leg amputated in 2018.

Stefan was with me, and we visited him in the hospital before leaving for California. It was a very poignant, tender and painful meeting for all three of us. If I had known what I know now, I would have gone about things so differently.

But I didn’t know.

And so…

During that hospital visit I held fast to my long hurting heart, walling myself off from my dad in guarded self protection. With as much tenderness as I could muster given the festering wounds of recent events, I acknowledged this shocking new reality he was facing; tended to him for a couple of hours, and said goodbye. My genuine intention was to never lay eyes on him again in this life.

Six months later I cut off all contact and didn’t speak to him for two years.

My heart breaks writing these words today.

My mental maps were so very wrong.

For over thirty years I believed that my dad was physically and emotionally lazy; that he cared more about his coins and his books than he did about his own children; that he was deluded about the nature of reality, causing him to live in a fantasy world instead of here on earth with the rest of us; that he was angry, stubborn and prideful…it’s a long list - the unforgivable sins of a father, seen through the lens of a daughter’s irreconcilable pain.

And then he went to the hospital in 2022, where they did an MRI of his brain and we all found out - for the very first time - that my dad had a decades old, long standing brain injury. Specifically, the emotional processing center of his brain had apparently sustained a grave injury early in his life; and it had never recovered.

My mom wondered aloud to me on the phone whether a near drowning accident at nine years old could have been the cause; and in a flash of understanding I suddenly saw my dad’s entire being - his deeply feeling, sensitive nature; the many challenges life bestowed upon him; the coping mechanisms for unbearable pain; and the genuine deficits that were not his fault. He appeared before me as a complete whole, and everything made sense.

We would later find out from his siblings that my dad experienced not one but FOUR near drowning events during his childhood. One, in particular, probably dealt him the brutal blow: at nine years old, he was swimming in a lake with a wood pier near the shore. Lord only knows what he was doing down there, but his head got caught between two log pilings underwater, and he began to drown.

Luckily, his older brother saw the commotion in the water, and came to his rescue. In order to get him unstuck and save his life, however, my uncle Lenny had to kick my dad’s head from the front - hard.

Given what I know about the nervous system, and how the brain and body work together to automate our survival programs, movement patterns and social behaviors, upon learning this information I finally had all the answers I had spent a lifetime looking for.

No wonder my dad avoided physical exertion! The brain injury also explained why he had such a hard time putting emotions into words; why he avoided relationship conflicts like he avoided open water swimming; why painful bodily experiences like diabetes and neuropathy filled him with a sense of helplessness and terror; why he often froze inside instead of tackling his many physical and relationship troubles head on; and why it was impossible to talk to him about any of these things in a rational manner.

Without a properly functioning emotional processing center, we can’t think about, talk about, or “process” any life events that are coupled with emotions.

My dad still felt emotions deeply, of course, but he was unable to to think about them rationally. And without this ability, he toggled between two behavioral options that we all grapple with, but without the capacity for seeing the third door available to the rest of us:

1) he could act out his emotional impulses without thoughtfully pausing first or using his mind to consider the consequences of certain behaviors, or

2) he could act out the automated survival programs dictated by his nervous system that would give him the best chance of physical and social survival.

Option #1 was only exercised when he was backed into a corner by someone else.

My dad had little capacity for the middle way, or third door, that is available to those of us with a functional brain: the ability to use thought as a mediator between emotions and behavior. He spent his adolescence and entire adult life not realizing that he had the emotional processing power of a nine year old.

I decided to go see him, and I am so grateful I did.

While I was there, I learned that my dad could process his emotions through stories. No one had ever told him his own story in such a way that he could conceptualize it imaginatively, sequentially, with both logic and feeling - until I did (very unintentionally).

No wonder he loved to lose himself in imaginative worlds! Science fiction novels, history, movies, myths annd legends, ancient coins, and the esoteric teachings of Rudolf Steiner - who conceptualized cosmologies and the spiritual realities underpinning the material world - gave my dad the means to place himself inside the context of a larger story: the story of humanity; the story of the world.

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Maybe we could give each other a little more grace.

Imagine living your whole life not knowing you have a brain injury.

Since it’s not a visible or obvious injury, you assume - along with everyone else in your life - that you have the same abilities and potential as any other human being; only, you don’t. You have to play the cards that life handed you, without being able to read them.

Imagine that you feel everything as deeply as other people - pain and pleasure, anger, love, joy and sorrow - but you don’t have the capacity to think logically about those feelings; so you have difficulty putting them into proper (adult) context; you can’t express them in coherent ways to the people in your life; or respond appropriately to the expressed emotions of others.

You know that there’s something different about you, but you have no idea what it is; and the frustration is so unbearable at times that you lash out in anger; only to feel deeply ashamed afterwards.

Social life beckons to you as an open field of potential playmates, adventure and love, yet it constantly presents you with a minefield of unresolvable conflicts - difficulty making close friends, or rooting yourself in community; relationship ruptures; betrayals, abandonments and breakdowns with parents, siblings, partners, colleagues, children and grandchildren - but you have no idea why, or how to be any different than you are.

I may not know you, but I’m guessing you know exactly how this feels - even if you don’t have a brain injury. This probably describes most of humanity.

It’s hard enough to change our survival programs and patterns with an intact brain; for someone like my dad, it would have been like climbing Mt. Everest blindfolded and handcuffed.

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What is a mental map?

A mental map is a story we’ve constructed in order to “make sense” of various life experiences for the purpose of determining our actions in a given context.

We project these mental maps onto our bodies, other people and the world as a whole, and then we act out these stories as if they are true.

Rarely do our mental maps match reality. Which is a real problem, because it means that nearly all of our behaviors - when we get injured, when we fall ill, when we feel hurt by other people, when we try to help someone we love - are predicated upon stories that aren’t true.

If my dad had known that he had a brain injury…

If we had known…

How much unnecessary pain, confusion and turmoil could have been avoided? How much love, patience and compassion could have been cultivated instead?

The moral of this story is not a recommendation for all of of us to go out and get our brains scanned.

The moral of this story is that every human being, regardless of brain processing power, is working with genuine deficits - and most of the time these deficits are invisible.

Maybe we could give each other a little more grace?

Maybe we could regard each other as intrinsically worthy of reverence and love?

Maybe we could get curious instead of judgmental?

What if we acted as if the truth was knowable?

Because untold stories are unfolding every day - all over this planet in the natural world; in our neighbors houses; in the hearts and minds of our loved ones; inside our very own body - and we would behave so differently, if we only knew the truth; if we had the whole story; or at least, enough of it to see clearly.

The first thing we would need to do in order to embark on a quest to apprehend the objective truth - about everything from our own body and the whole human organism, generally speaking, to the specific people in our lives and the state of world affairs - is to step outside our subjective mental maps and make ourselves into humble students of these living phenomena.

We could adopt a mental map of openness and curiosity.

We could act as if we don’t know what’s true while pursuing the truth with conviction that it is knowable.

The truth about my dad was there all along, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. No brain scan necessary.

I may have had my physical eyes intact, but I couldn’t see (behold) my dad as he really was; I was too busy projecting stories onto him. My mental maps blinded me to the truth.

Now, in every picture of him that I look at, I see it all: the omnipresent pain and lifelong confusion behind his eyes; a gentleness of spirit that was used to raise butterflies, turn book pages without bending a single one, and carefully handle thousands of ancient coins; an exuberant love of life determined to shine radiantly, no matter what; zero victim mentality; the longing to be seen and loved…

I was blind, but my eyes were opened - while my dad was still alive!

For four months we shared memories, we reconciled the past, we cried, we healed together, and when he died I was able to let go with a peace in my soul that I never expected.

I love you, dad.

Hank Passafero
money historian, butterfly gardener, storyteller, magic maker, father, husband, brother and devoted Michaelite
February 28th, 1949 to April 15th, 2023

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If someone in your life also died this year, please share their name below and I will hold them in my heart with you.

Maybe - share a fond memory, or a fun story, or a gift they bestowed upon you. We can honor their memory and their life by acknowledging their best virtues and incorporating those virtues into our own ground of being, and in doing so - allow them live on. 🌟

With love,
Elisha