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When the Landslide Takes Us Down
- Carl R. Nassar
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
Three summers ago, I sat in a workshop led by my Italian colleague, Mariella Assunta Giusti. She asked the room: When does childhood end?
She didn’t wait for a response. The answer is simpler than you think, she explained, and harder than you might imagine. We leave childhood when we stop trying to go back, back to the parents we needed and didn’t get, back to the past we wished would have been.
How do we do this? We become brave enough to grieve, to look straight at what happened in our childhoods that never should have, and at what should have happened but never did, and stay with our sorrow…instead of trying to get anything back.
I’ve carried Mariella’s words with me ever since, and I hear their echo in the opening verse of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”:
I took my love, I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
'Til the landslide brought me down
That’s what Mariella was telling us: turn around, look honestly at your own reflection, and let the landslide (the grieving) take you down.
Recently, I’ve begun to understand all this in a new light.
The call to adventure…to solve the unsolvable
When you and I arrive into this world, we’re ready for forty-six people to scoop us up and hold us tight, pressing us to their chests for nine hours each day. We’re ready for these forty-six people to hurry to our side when we cry, arriving in twenty-five seconds or less, offering a comforting presence. That’s the world our minds expect because two million years of life in villages (small bands of thirty to 150 people raising children together) wired us for nothing less.
We’re greeted instead by two parents living in a consumer culture that demands they make it on their own. They can’t possibly give us what we expect, because two exhausted people can’t be a village. This is our ordinary world, insufficient from our first breath.
So childhood becomes a call to adventure, a call to solve an unsolvable problem: how do I turn two people into the village my mind and heart ache for?
A road of trials…each step dismantling a version of ourselves
Off we go, walking down a road of trials. It’s made up of six childhood steps, each an attempt to solve the unsolvable, each destined to fail.
It starts with patience: we wait, certain our parents will soon become the village we need. But the waiting stretches on and nothing changes, so we shift to protest: we kick, scream, cry, throw temper tantrums, because these are social signals telling our parents to come close. And it works, for a moment… but they don’t stay, because they have jobs, bills, dishes, and exhaustion of their own. Protest is failing, so we turn to performance, the most costly trial: we study our parents’ faces and learn to become the child we think they want: funnier, quieter, tougher, sweeter, whatever earns their gaze… but still, nothing, and now we’ve lost track of who we actually are.
Enter consumer culture, offering two more trials. First, its army of advertisers promises us, children who trust what we’re being told, that if we just purchase the right stuff, all will be well: with a new frisbee, Dad will step outside and play with us. And if we add the sparkling hula hoop, Mom will join in too. But when the frisbee and hula hoop arrive, Dad and Mom don’t. So consumer culture brings us to school and teaches us that achievement earns visibility, and soon we’re convinced doing more will get us seen and then our parents will finally stay. Again, no luck.
We give it one more go. We pinpoint the moment in our past we’re sure broke everything, the divorce, and we try to undo it, trying to bring our parents back together. We’re certain this will take us to the life we’re meant for…but the place we’re trying to return to only exists in memory, softened and simplified.
This is Campbell’s underworld: a series of reasonable steps, each one failing, each one dismantling a version of the self we’re sure could win. There was The Patient Child; the Loud Child; the Performing Child; the Child with the Right Things; the Child Who Achieved Enough; and The Child Who Could Undo The Past. One by one, they fall away.
This dismantling is painful, but after twenty-five years sitting across from people as a therapist, I can confidently say: Dismantling is not the tragedy; fighting against it is. When we resist the dismantling, it can’t do its work. We end up stuck in three of the trials, performing, purchasing, and producing, hoping one day these will finally pay off.
When the landslide brings us down, we’re freed to rise up and rebuild.
Today, reflecting on Mariella’s words from her workshop three summers ago, I understand them through the lens of lost villages: growing up means surrendering the hope that our parents will become the village we’ve always needed; and giving up on the belief that any of the childhood trials, the ones we once embraced with all our might, can take us to that village. As Mariella instructed, we have to grieve what we needed but never received, the village that was our home for two million years, imprinted in our minds, still in our souls.
Or in the words of Stevie Nicks, we must let the landslide take us down:
Well, I've been 'fraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm gettin' older, too
Ah, take my love, take it down
Oh, climb a mountain and turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
When the landslide brings us down, we’re freed to rise up and rebuild. That’s what happened to me when I was just six years old.
What the dismantling makes possible…not emptiness, but insight and action
One December afternoon, crouched on the carpet with my friend Michael, our action figures in full battle, Michael suddenly drops his toy, points to the Santa Claus figure on the shelf, and smirks, You don’t still believe, do you? I shout back that of course I do, because what kind of question is that? But Michael’s words have planted seeds of doubt, and they quickly spread. By nightfall, tucked under covers, I’m mourning the loss of the red-suited man I’d believed in my entire life, the man I’d written heartfelt letters to, penned in crayon.
I lie there, sinking into post-Santa grief, when something flickers in the back of my mind: If that jolly old man is out of the picture, then who’s been leaving gifts under the tree? That’s when I see it: It’s been Mom and Dad this whole time. They’d intercepted my letters to Santa, read my Wish List, pushed through crowded malls to find hidden treasures, and wrapped each one…just for me.
Now, my tears aren’t from sorrow; they’re from awe at the love that’s been here all along, working behind the scenes. I leap out of bed, eager to wrap Mom and Dad in the biggest thank you my small arms can deliver. Because for one magical day each year, they did it, they were my village.
This is what the dismantling makes possible: not emptiness, but insight. We see our parents not as the village they keep falling short of being, but as two people who loved us with everything they had, two people who, one day each year, pulled off something magical. And…
When we finally grieve the loss of our dream world, we make room for the beauty hiding in the world we’ve been given. Rather than trying to turn two exhausted people into a village, we start showing up in places where groups of people gather, on pickleball courts and in knitting circles, slowing down with others, lingering where we once hurried, hearts open. In time, we discover among them a disparate group of people who feel like they belong to us, and we start weaving, stitching them together, creating a village of our own making.
Stevie Nicks’ song ends with a return to the hills:
Ah, take my love, take it down
Oh, climb a mountain and turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Well, the landslide will bring it down
Oh, the landslide will bring it down
It’s the same imagery from her opening, but this time it doesn’t sound like fear; this time, she’s welcoming the landslide.
MythBlast authored by:
Carl R. Nassar, PhD, CIIPTS, is a writer, researcher, clinical trainer, former university professor, and psychotherapist. His writing is part-science, part-story, exploring what both research and lived experience have taught him… that our sweetest ending is not individual triumph, but reunion, a return to connection, kinship, and the village. Carl lives in Colorado with his wife, Gretchen, and their daughter, Kaila. www.carlnassar.com
This MythBlast was inspired by the Initiation stage of the hero's journey and The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work.
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