The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [31]
The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called “the wound.” The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry’s tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father’s abandonment had crushed his “normal.”
“And I was wounded,” he whispered dramatically. “My dad had ruined my normal!”
The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.
Fortenberry went on, wantonly spinning psychological metaphors in his rhetorical wake. “You know our soldiers in Iraq—one of them occasionally gets hit by friendly fire,” he said. “Say you’re one of those soldiers and you get hit in the leg. You look down and you quickly determine that there’s no arterial breach and no broken bone.”
The crowd murmured again; the phrase “arterial breach” had been a hit. “It’s one of those things where you either keep on going or you lay down and die. So what do you do? You put some gauze on it.”
Within a few minutes we had wandered into a world where your “gauze” was some temporary psychological solution you applied to your “wound” after your “normal” was disrupted. Fortenberry took this set of metaphors and ran with them straight for the hyperbolic end zone, talking about situations when you might add more gauze, or change your gauze, or find out that your gauze was infected—I couldn’t keep them straight after a while. And I wasn’t alone. Within a day a youngish woman during a question-and-answer period raised her hand.
“Yes?” the pastor said. “You in the front.”
“I guess my question is,” said the girl, “like when you have a wound, and you put some gauze on it, and then years later you take it off, and it’s sort of half healed—I mean, what is that? Is that like a scar?”
Fortenberry was absolutely stumped by that question, and I didn’t blame him. In any case, after introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals and gauze, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session.
It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some army exercise or other, only to have the dummy’s chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry’s army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren’t privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the “body” had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.
“My buddy’s not saved. He made a good joke of it,” Fortenberry explained. Then he quickly turned serious and explained that the soldiers on the ground had felt guilty because they’d failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they’d been afraid to look behind the bush.
“So I’m telling you now, as you go into your groups,” the pastor explained, “don’t be afraid to look behind the bush.”
I wrote in my binder: LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH. Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.
THE GROUPS WERE SEGREGATED. Men with men, women with women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was actually a recent graduate of the program. At the beginning of the group stage the coaches were all called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry would call