For the past few years the most rewarding work I’ve done is with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Attending parole hearings as an ombudsman, working one-on-one with inmates preparing for their parole hearings, meeting with recently paroled men through the Louise Eustace Fellowship. I’m fascinated by how different these man’s lives are than my own, and have come to appreciate their perspective on a world that’s far less generous than the one I inhabit.

Last fall I received an invitation to participate in a Jericho Circle Weekend Intensive. I was familiar with Jericho Circle as a program that helps inmates come to terms with the traumas they face, and offers the opportunity to understand, reframe, and supersede their trauma as a path toward rehabilitation. I knew it included weekly meetings in prison, as well as weekend retreats that mix outside community members with inmates. I also knew that completing Jericho Circle was a noteworthy factor towards achieving parole. I did not know that Jericho held weekends beyond prison walls, nor who put my name on the invite list. Nevertheless, I signed right up to spend my 71^st birthday weekend immersed in the Jericho experience.

I arrived at the Clara Barton Summer camp compound on a dreary February Friday night, open to whatever possibilities Jericho might offer. Jericho is a confidential experience, and so I will not offer any specific names or traumas shared. Suffice to say that 47 people, some formerly incarcerated, some psychologists and social workers, some general citizens like me, convened in a large circle to engage in group exercises designed to draw us nearer to each other while surfacing our histories. On Saturday morning we also broke in to small groups of eight where we explored individual demons.

Small circle sessions were hours long, a core principle of Jericho being to take whatever time is required to unearth the trauma. A corollary is the certainty that the root of relieving any trauma lies deep within, adjacent to the trauma itself, and that healing occurs upon confrontation and reframing the pain.

Over the course of the weekend, folks in my small group visited the pain of an alienated coworker, the hurt of an uncaring sibling, the doubt of a new father, the closure sought from a father who chose to move away and die alone, the anxiety of releasing the legacy of a lifetime’s work. The visitations were intense, and often involved forms of reenactment. They also followed a general pattern, as sharing evolved into one person identifying a particular strain of pain, which the group encouraged, then supported, then acted out and pursued to catharsis. At one point we made a train line of supporting pressure, another time we were birds flying in V-formation trading off leaders. For one role play I was tapped to be someone’s father, to sit center circle and silently accept the hurt from a son who felt rejected. Each exposition ended with us in a tight circle, embracing the sharer as they sobbed in release. I felt empathy for each individual as they did their work. And a growing sense that I had no intertest in being the center of such an experience.

By Sunday morning I realized that I would not offer sharing. That it would be disingenuous for me to relate the kind of trauma my fellow participants clearly felt, because I don’t feel anything as acutely as they professed. Was it because my life has been without trauma? No. I could match many of the injustices they related. Was it because I’m too emotionally shut down? No. I felt my companion’s emotional angst, and even cried along with them. Why then, did I not want to dig into my core and excavate the fundamental pain of my existence?

There is an elemental difference between the way I experience the world and the type of release Jericho Circle offers. Every person, in doing their work, found a place within themselves that’s inhabited by unremitting pain. Total agony. The coworker was conniving. The father was cruel. The sister was mean. The legacy was futile. And yet, as I listened to each tale, I felt myself wondering: perhaps the coworker had legitimate reason? Perhaps the father wanted to spare his child? Perhaps there had been some joy growing up with the sister? Perhaps it’s not our purview to define our legacy; that’s for others to do.

The more I pondered my experience, the more disconnected I felt from the Jericho Circle. I realized that my mind is too attuned to deciphering the grey, to allowing other possibilities, for me to find comfort in painting such a bleak world. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the only way to joy is through grief, or that I have to feel pain in my body as a pathway to comfort. I intellectualize pretty much everything, think things through, study and analyze, often at a distance. I extrapolate meaning from my thinking, and, time and again, change my perspective—and my behavior—as a result of analysis. My emotional constitution, and how I nurture it, is very different from the model espoused by Jericho Circle.

I’m glad that Jericho works for many, and I imagine it resonates most deeply with folks whose traumas are much more serious than mine. We need multiple avenues to self-acceptance and inner peace.

I left the weekend in an excellent state of mind. Not because I’d worked through any trauma. Rather, because I came to understand myself better, by choosing not to go there.