The Erymanthian Boar

When Grief Grows Teeth

Having successfully completed his third labor, King Eurystheus has decided things just haven’t been difficult enough for Heracles. He’s upped the ante, and for his fourth labor Heracles must capture the Erymanthian Boar and bring it back to Eurystheus alive.

Curious, isn’t it? That this is the second creature Heracles has been ordered to capture rather than kill, but unlike the beautiful Ceryneian Hind, the boar is not something to be approached with patience and a gentle hand.

The Erymanthian Boar is enormous, vicious, living it’s best life out there terrorizing the countryside.

On his way to Mount Erymanthus, Heracles stops to visit with the centaur Pholus, who lives in a cave on the mountain. Unlike many of his kind, Pholus is civilized, hospitable, and eager to share a meal and conversation with Heracles.

Intrigued by the Heracles’ adventures, Pholus pulls out a very large jar of wine he offers to share with his good buddy.

The wine, however, belongs collectively to the centaurs, and when Heracles opens it, the smell carries across the mountain. The other centaurs come charging in, furious that Heracles touched their booze without asking. They attack Heracles, and Heracles defends himself by popping off shots with the arrows dipped in the Hydra’s poisonous blood.

After taking part in this gnarly bar brawl, Heracles gathers up his stuff and continues on toward the boar.

Unlike the Hind, the Erymanthian Boar has zero intention of running from Heracles.

The boar is locked, loaded, and ready to rumble.

Probably nursing a nasty hangover, Heracles decides he doesn’t really want to fight this pig. Instead, he drives it back up the mountain and into deep snow, where its enormous body and powerful legs become a disadvantage. The boar struggles through the snow, exhausting itself as Heracles continues to push it farther into the frozen landscape.

Eventually, the animal is just too tired to go on. The boar goes down, and Heracles is able to capture it

Now, this part is wholly my interpretation, but I’d like to think perhaps Heracles is the inventor of the “hog tie.” I know I’m wrong, but it’s funny, so I’m keeping it. I’m also envisioning him having strapped this pig onto his shoulders like a backpack, trudging back to Mycenae, while the boar squeals and screams wee, wee, wee… all the way home.

Still shrieking and kicking its little trotters, Heracles walks through the front door of the palace with his prize, but the noise is so great and the boar is so big—probably having pooped all over Herc, because one must imagine the logistics of actually toting an unwilling boar somewhere it doesn’t want to go—Eurystheus is absolutely terrified. He didn’t actually want the boar, he asked for something he was certain was impossible, hoping Heracles would die.

Remember, King Eurystheus is a devotee of Hera, who wants nothing more than abject failure for the Mighty Heracles.

Faced with the impossible, Eurystheus comes up with the only reasonable solution available to a mighty king confronted with an enormous, furious boar.

He hides in a pithos.

Heracles has just dragged a monstrous murder pig halfway across Greece, and Eurystheus has noped himself into a bronze jar.

We can ask ourselves all day long why a puny mortal man thought hiding in a jar would save him, but that’s an article for another time.

Today, we’re talking about Heracles’ fourth labor, and how it applies to us in the here and now.

If you’re reading this and are someone who’s ever experienced grief, you’ll know that at some point, the sadness grows teeth.

You’ll hear about the stages of grief, and one of the steps we experience as we process the event that caused our pain, is anger.

Sometimes we’re angry because a loved one died. Sometimes we’re angry that the person who hurt us has never taken accountability, or has never been punished for their actions. Sometimes we’re angry at ourselves. Sometimes we’re angry at God, the universe, our families, the medical system, a boss, a co-worker, the asshole who cut us off in traffic, or the woman in the grocery store who looked at us funny on a day when we were already hanging on by a thread.

No matter the circumstances or cause, at the root of it, we’re angry because something happened that should not have happened, and there will come a day when our grief becomes a big, feral pig wearing a collar that says:

RAGE.

Imagine yourself after having experienced a devastatingly painful event, and how going to visit someone you trust, someone you call a friend, makes you feel safe enough to tell them what happened. If they’re a good friend, they listen and let you uncork, cry, scream…

But sometimes that’s not enough.

Telling one person just isn’t enough.

When we feel wronged, especially those of us recovering from narcissistic abuse who have been told to be silent, who were gaslit into doubting our experiences and our reality, who’ve spent years suffering in silence, isolated with no friends or family who even cared to ask what happened to allow us the opportunity to hear our side of the story, we want everyone to know what happened.

Very often, very naturally, we go looking for other people who will understand why we’re so angry.

Hello, to Facebook groups and those late-night internet rabbit holes where we make a post about what happened to us and suddenly discover twelve thousand strangers who have experienced something eerily similar.

This feeling becomes a vital part of our journey because we realize we’re not alone. In the moment, it can feel like a profoundly healing experience, especially if we’ve spent years being told we’re overreacting.

That we’re too sensitive and misunderstood the situation.

That if we stayed so long, it couldn’t have been that bad.

That we should just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, get over it, be grateful it wasn’t worse, and move on.

Suddenly there’s a room full of people saying, “Oh, girl. I know.”

You read their stories, tell your own, leave a comment to say what you wish someone would have said to you. Someone responds, validates you, tells you what happened to you wasn’t okay or normal, and for a while, being angry together can feel amazing.

It’s exactly what you needed, because it’s lonely when everyone around you wants you to stop being angry because it makes them uncomfortable.

Having to smile and put on a professional face because anger doesn’t get those bills paid? Exhausting and infuriating.

There’s real value in discovering you’re not the only person who has experienced loss. There’s value in hearing language for experiences you couldn’t previously name. There’s value in realizing the thing you thought was uniquely wrong with you, may actually be evidence that you survived something legitimately horrible.

But let’s pause for a moment and remember the myth.

Heracles didn’t stumble upon the centaurs and then wander away unaffected.

He opened the communal wine, and in doing so—by no fault or intention as it was Pholus who offered to share the wine—called in the centaurs who were pissed at him for touching their stuff.

Not everyone has resources, or friends, or the ability to see a counselor or a therapist every week. We use what we have available to us, and sometimes the only thing available is found on social media.

I’m not saying don’t go there.

Go.

Absolutely go and join these support groups, but be mindful that you’re there with other people who are angry in their own way and in different stages of grieving something.

Most of them will understand you. Some will offer resources, share helpful tips and tricks, and give you opportunities to examine your own experience through unbiased eyes.

Some will disagree with you. Others will tell you what you should have done and have opinions about what you should do next.

Some of these people will be furious on your behalf, and some of them will be mad at you for doing what was right and safe for YOU. For speaking about your experience that touches something in them that activates THEIR inner Boar.

They’ll rampage for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the fact that they’ve forgotten their experience is not your experience.

Their morality is not your morality.

Their threshold for forgiveness is not yours.

Their boundaries are not yours.

It’s about here that Pholus’ part in the myth becomes interesting to me.

When the fight’s over, he goes for the arrow.

That small, tiny projectile that seems harmless enough to pick up and examine, the way we sometimes sit with a comment or someone else’s story and examine or compare it against the thing that wounded us.

We start asking ourselves:

What if I look at this one more time?

Maybe if I figure out exactly what happened, then I’ll understand why it happened.

If I can just understand why, maybe then I’ll know if I did or said or felt the right thing.

Or the wrong thing.

We become so fixated on the arrow called WHY, we forget it’s poisoned.

There are questions that help us understand ourselves, and there are questions that quietly turn into self-punishment.

Hopefully, we leave the centaurs—not because it was wrong to stop and share stories and wine with them, or because we’re not allowed to be angry—because we’re on a mission to heal beyond the pain and trauma, and become more than the experience or person that caused our grief.

We have our own Labor to complete.

Hopefully, hearing someone else’s story helped us recognize something in ourselves, or reminded us of the Hydra’s Immortal Head we buried, whispering the truth we needed to hear.

Maybe we discovered a question we hadn’t thought to ask, because in the past, asking questions has been the catalyst for getting shot full of metaphorical arrows.

Maybe we learned that there are other ways of understanding what happened to us.

Unfortunately, more often than not, we leave those centaurs feeling angrier and more confused than we did before, because those people aren’t ready to keep going. To dedicate themselves to The Labors Within and feel safer staying where they are.

There is no way I can ethically sit here and say, “Follow Heracles’ labors and know this is the right way to process your grief,” because there is no right way, no linear line to get through grief to peaceful acceptance.

But this is where I think the story of the Hind matters.

We can’t chase or hunt our way out of survival mode.

Imagine finally getting close enough to that beautiful creature inside yourself that has spent years running away from the dangerous lions, finally convincing her that you’re safe, that she’s safe and it’s just Dwyane in a lion costume, finally learning how to sit quietly enough that she doesn’t bolt, only for a new enormous beast to come crashing through the trees.

Pretty sure you’ve experienced at least one time when things finally felt like they were turning bright side up.

You were feeling happier, healthier, safer in your skin; you got yourself a treat at Starbies and the barista handed you the drink with a ‘it’s on the house, babe,’ that made your DAY! You got a raise, paid off your cell phone and the bill dropped in half…

And then BAM, the hot water heater explodes, the repair guy says you’ve got mold and asbestos to deal with, and the financial hit is so huge you fall right back into depression.

You could be at the grocery store and see a little girl getting yelled at by her mom, and seeing that happen takes you right back to that day when your mom yelled at you in the grocery store.

That memory—seeing yourself as a child through the eyes of an adult—is a trigger, and you find yourself so angry on that little girl’s behalf, and that the emotion follows you long after you leave the store.

Life will always happen, and the change from sadness to anger can happen anytime, anywhere, without warning.

It’s then we discover our inner landscape contains more than one creature, and we’re reminded that we’re only on the fourth Labor, with many more to go.

But for me, that’s the point.

No matter how it feels, you’re not back at the beginning.

You’re still here.

You’re still moving forward.

It’s the determination to keep going, knowing that after everything we’ve already survived, this next monster is smaller than it seems, and we’re capable of the impossible because we’ve done it over, and over again.

We’ve spent our entire lives being taught that feeling is dangerous, that having emotions means we’re selfish, unacceptable, weak, or powerless, the moment those feelings finally show up, our subconscious mind—our survival instincts that have kept us alive through 100% of our worst days—kicks in and does exactly what Eurystheus does.

It sends someone or something more powerful than us to deal with it.

Sooooooie, that Rage? She’s a big pig, she’s got tusks sharp enough to cut a bitch, and she’s ready to throw down.

Anger is loud.

It’s intimidating and powerful enough to destroy, to distract other people and us from the truth behind the rage, which is:

I’ve been hurt, and I don’t feel safe to be vulnerable, or let you see me in pain.

Consider the last time you felt ANGRY.

Not small, mild-inconvenience angry.

Angry, like you want to throw a plate or scream and stomp your trotters until everyone around you flees in terror so you can finally have a moment of peace.

What would it feel like to consider that anger isn’t the thing keeping you from healing?

What would it feel like to think about that pissed-off pig as the protector of your grief? The warrior standing between the softer version of you that’s been hit by a poisoned arrow, and the person or memory that inflicted the wound?

I think for those of us experiencing loss, intentional or voluntary estrangement, the aftermath of choosing to break cycles and become more than the people who hurt us, the lesson of the Erymanthian Boar isn’t that we need to hide from our anger or stifle it.

The Boar represents the part of us that needs to be angry in order to heal.

Our anger is allowed to exist.

Our rage is allowed to exist.

The part of us that is absolutely feral and furious about what happened to us deserves to be seen, heard, and understood.

Sometimes we can’t access the softer feeling underneath the anger while we’re still learning what it actually means, what it feels like, to be able to regulate our emotions, or even name them when we’re feeling them.

It takes time to recognize anger is the alarm and be curious about it enough to look around at what’s happening in our environment to make us uncomfortable, instead of letting the anger rampage across the countryside.

We can’t always lovingly welcome the Boar in and gently say, “I hear you. What are you protecting me from right now?”

Sometimes the Boar is charging around the room, knocking over furniture, shitting all over the carpet, screaming, FEEL THIS, DAMMIT!

Heracles doesn’t post up and yell at the boar, or drop a deuce in the middle of the field to get its attention.

At least, not so far as the myth goes…

He chases it back up the mountain into the snow, until it’s too tired to fight.

Exhausting your anger isn’t what we’re going for, though. Recognizing the anger as an alarm going off, alerting us that a softer voice within needs to be heard?

This is the way.

If you’re a mom with toddlers, or you have younger siblings, or niblings who have had a raging meltdown in reaction to being told their blue sippy cup is dirty but the pink one is clean and full of yummy juice, you’ll know what this boar sounds like.

It’s screaming so loudly you can’t actually hear yourself think, let alone identify what the problem actually is, because the pink cup and the blue cup are exactly the same.

As far as solving the problem? Until that blue cup is clean, full of the appropriate beverage, and in the hands of that tiny, red-faced, screaming child, as far as they’re concerned the sky is falling, someone touched the Elf on the Shelf with their bare hands, and Peppa is bacon.

A lot of us who are children of unstable, unregulated, emotionally stunted parents will hear the phrase “parentification” during therapy or counseling.

If you haven’t heard it, parentification is when a child has to become the parent because the adults around them aren’t able or willing to do the parenting. We learn to manage everyone else’s emotions, keep the peace, take care of practical things, and put our own needs aside because there simply isn’t room for us to be the child.

So we stopped needing.

We stopped feeling.

We learned to be small and quiet, how to do for everyone else before doing for ourselves.

Now, here we are all grown up. We’ve accepted that being numb and surviving is no longer a state we’re willing to live in, that we are worthy of needing things and deserving of care, but we’re having to be parents to our own inner child who wants the blue cup, not the pink cup, possibly while being the parent to our actual children who want the green cup, and…

It’s a lot of cups.

It’s easy to forget or slip back into old habits when we get overwhelmed.

I’m considering that phrase, ‘the things we say in anger are usually the truth.’

I’m imagining that part of us that’s been pushing the truth down into a jar, afraid of what will happen if it’s allowed to come through the front door. That fears speaking the truth, because in the past it was only ever used against us.

But now there’s no holding it back, and underneath all that rage, there’s a softer voice that needs to be heard.

That’s been waiting all this time to say:

I was hurt.

I was scared.

That wasn’t okay.

I needed someone to protect me.

The Hind and the Boar belong in the same landscape.

The tender part of us deserves protection.

The angry part of us deserves to be heard.

Maybe the mission is learning how to sit in the woods of our inner landscape, balancing the frightened Hind in one hand, holding the reins of a pissed-off boar with the other, and being curious enough to ask each of them why they’ve shown up and what they have to say.

Healing doesn’t mean choosing which creature gets to stay.

I think it’s learning how to bring them both home and letting them know, it’s safe to be here.

However, safe doesn’t mean letting your emotions run amok without boundaries.

A wise person once said, “You can have your say, but you won’t always get your way.”

The Boar can be angry. It can stomp around, snort, squeal, be the security system that tells us something is wrong, but it doesn’t get free rein of the house.

You have the power to get snoot to snoot with it and say, “This is our home, and everyone who lives here deserves to feel safe. So if you shit on my new rug, scare the deer, or start tearing down the walls, you’re going in the jar for a time-out.”

And with that, we’ve discovered together that sometimes healing goes hand in hand with boundary enforcement, animal husbandry, and self-written permission slips of mythic proportions.

Heracles still has eight more Labors to go, and spoilers, King Eurystheus has learned absolutely nothing about what happens when you send a demi-god in a lion costume out into the wilderness with a problem and vague directions on how to solve it.

We’re off to the Augean Stables next.

You can bring the pig, but all service animals are required to be leashed during the tour.