Coyote is a ... renegade ... an outlaw symbolizing all that is untamable; ... he is sometimes a man, sometimes a god, sometimes an animal; a restless trickster, inquisitive, obscene, adventurous and diabolically challenging — a desert Mephistopheles.

Just for the fun of it and because it’s his nature, Coyote will hide outside your house at night and wait until you’re asleep. Dressed in a bearskin, he’ll sneak in through the screen-door, steal your TV and turn over all your furniture just to laugh at your expense and blame it on Bear.

Similarly, a psychotherapist treating those still using, newly sober or years into recovery may notice characteristics of this trickster in alcoholics and addicts. Slipping into your office under cover of darkness (his denial, your lack of awareness or experience), he wears the skin of another animal (depression, anxiety; marital, work or health problems) and steals something (good will, good judgment, compassion or patience). Like many people in crisis, he creates havoc in your professional life (violating agreements, canceling appointments or failing to maintain sobriety) and blames the problem on someone else (work, stress or lack of others’ understanding).

Coyote has another problem similar to that of many practicing alcoholics and addicts. He is incapable of understanding the pain he causes himself and others because he cannot admit his own flaws. The alcoholic’s difficulty may be the result of inebriation, hangover, blackouts or, in chronic late-stage patients, permanent brain damage. Fear of being arrested for using an illegal substance or being stigmatized because of his habit often causes the addict to hide his drug use.

To maintain his distorted sense of reality, Coyote blames others for his problems and holds tight to his blindness. The alcoholic or addict defends against the growing tide of substance-related problems by embracing denial.

Coyote and His Reflection

One day, when Coyote was out wandering in search of food, he came to the top of a high hill. As he looked down toward the valley below, he saw a lake. He saw the sun shining in the water. He saw a cloud of bugs. Coyote’s stomach grumbled and reminded him of how hungry he was. “I don’t want to eat just bugs,” Coyote thought. “I want to eat fish.”

And so Coyote made his way down the hill toward the lake. The tall, tall grass made a swishing sound as he brushed against it. His hurried steps across the wet sand sounded like scratchy sandpaper. Stopping at the edge of the lake, Coyote looked out across the water at the swarm of bugs and the jumping fish.

His stomach grumbled again, and he licked his lips. Then he looked down at the water and saw his reflection. “Yelp!” he shouted. “There’s a monster in the lake.”

Coyote was so frightened he jumped straight up in the air, and when he landed, he ran back across the wet sand, through the tall grass and hid behind a big, black rock. “Hmmm!” Coyote thought. “No monster.”

All of a sudden, out of the corner of his eye, Coyote saw Antelope wander across the sand. She paused at the edge of the lake, carefully looked around, leaned her long, graceful neck down and took a drink of water. Antelope took another drink, looked around and casually walked off.

“Maybe the monster ran away,” Coyote thought, and remembering his hunger, he walked through the tall grass, across the wet sand and down to where Antelope had been. He saw the fish jumping to catch the bugs, and once again he saw his reflection. “The monster is back!” Coyote yelped, and just as he was about to run away he heard a frightening sound.

“Who is making all that noise?” croaked a voice.

“It’s the monster!” cried Coyote. But before he could flee, the voice spoke again.

“I’m no monster,” the voice croaked. “I’m just a frog.” And Frog leaped from the bushes where he had been sitting and landed on the sand near Coyote’s feet.

“Well,” Coyote replied indignantly, “you have a croaky, ugly voice and you’re ugly too.”

“If you don’t like what you see,” croaked Frog, “why don’t you just close your eyes?”

And so Coyote closed his eyes, bent his head down and took a very long drink. With eyes closed, he saw nothing, and nothing tried to catch him. And nothing scared him.

“Hah!” Coyote laughed out loud. “I’ll bet I scared that monster away.”

And this is how alcoholics and addicts live from day to day — eyes closed, drinking, using — and blind to a disease that can destroy their own lives as well as the lives of those close to them. Working with alcoholics and addicts is about pointing to the water, looking in together and not drinking or using. It is about facing the pain of life stone-cold sober. It is about helping alcoholics and addicts find another way to confront the monster without telling them to close their eyes.

Coyote and Addiction

As Coyote’s way is bound to his nature, the addict’s predisposition is strongly linked to biology.

A growing body of identical-twin studies, genetic-marker studies and physiological comparisons between sons of alcoholics and control groups lends strong weight to the theory of genetic addiction.

Goodwin, comparing twins separated at birth and raised either by their biological parents or by their non-biological adoptive parents, found that sons of alcoholics had a four-fold increase in their risk of alcoholism.
In one of the early genetic-marker studies, Blum found a high correlation between alcoholism and the D2 dopamine receptor gene.
Schuckit described a variety of genetically linked effects including the different ways in which sons of alcoholics metabolize ethanol, with a decreased sensitivity to the acute effects of ethanol and a different level of muscle tension while intoxicated.
While the technology to treat alcoholism and drug dependence on a genetic level may eventually be discovered, at this time in history, the problem of treating a disease that seems to have a mind of its own defies easy resolution.

Coyote is cunning, baffling and powerful, and dependent patients describe their alcoholism and drug dependence with the same words. One patient, a woman in her early twenties, said her addiction was “lying and waiting” for a moment of her inattention. Another, a forty-something man, with complete sincerity told how his addiction spoke to him and said it tried to convince him that he had the strength to take one drink and stop there. Looking far older that the sixtieth birthday he just celebrated before his appointment, a grandfather insisted with absolute certainty that he was unable to control his drinking. He said he knew he would die if he continued; yet he wondered, mischievously, if maybe there wasn’t some magic I might give him so he could keep drinking ... just a little.

An alcoholic said to a man sitting at the bar, “How do you do it? Every couple of days you come in here and have just one drink.”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “If I feel like it, I stop in here after work. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. If I do, sometimes I have a beer or a glass of wine and other times I’ll just have a soda. Then I go home to my wife and kids.”

“Amazing!” replied the alcoholic. “If I could drink like that, I would do it all the time.”

Because Coyote can be at one moment very charming and the next infuriating, we might forget that his cleverness almost always leads to his downfall. Through his defensiveness and rationalizing, Coyote delays his suffering, deprives himself of knowledge and claims to know everything. For the therapist under the influence of Coyote, a subconscious assumption of omniscience may be a clever way to avoid a discomfiting silence or a patient’s deepening confusion and pain. In trying to understand, I may rush to judgment, assuming I know what the patient is feeling, and thus react too quickly with an interpretation, a comment or even a comforting word.

Coyote and the Therapist’s Shadow

A therapist’s delusion of omniscience, manifesting in a tendency toward interpretive reductionism, has both a light and dark side. On the light side, for example, while listening closely to my patient describe a dream, I may see an image or a personal association, linking my capacity to feel, be touched or moved in much the same way that a tuning fork placed close to a guitar will ring sometimes. It has nothing to do with the patient’s pain, and voicing my experience may not be helpful to the situation.

The dark side of the therapist’s omniscience can be the attempt to defend against the enormity of a patient’s pain by reducing it to a concept or a clever interpretation. Superficially, it feels like all I want to do is tell my patient, “I understand.” But if I am completely honest with myself, I often discover secret enjoyment in being clever. At times my comment may help identify a similar experience or professional reference, but I may also draw unnecessary attention to myself. In my cleverness I may seem like a veritable shaman, but I may also have usurped an opportunity for the client’s self-discovery that often emerges out of pain.

As a therapist, I struggle with the knowledge that if I enjoy being clever, omniscient or heroic a bit too much, my unconscious need to appear magical may take precedence over my patient’s need to struggle. I may want to talk and explain what I see in the hope that my knowledge alone will heal and I will be relieved of the need to hear another personal horror. And yet ironically, after years of experience of groping in the dark in my clinical practice, I am finally realizing that the heart of recovery and the soul of the relationship between a therapist and patient is not born from the hero’s magic but from a shared conscious suffering. “In the history of the collective, as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness. This gradually brings liberation from imprisonment ... and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing.”

“Coyote is a partner in that liberation ... he forces the hero to be conscious. One would not exist without the other. They are the great symbolic antagonists of world mythology, each opposing and undoing the other. Yet in their reconciliation lies the hope of mankind for vitality and wholeness.”

Ironically, because Coyote is so vigilant, he has uncanny insight into other people’s flaws. While his clarity is admirable, the arrogance that follows his insight clouds his empathy for those around him. Consequently, even though he may have something of value to offer, Coyote is often shunned. In this way, Coyote, as he appears to me in my work, has taught me that being right and being helpful are not necessarily the same thing.

Coyote Becomes the Moon

For as long as there was time, someone was the moon. But in this telling, the moon was stolen. How it got stolen is another story. Anyway, because no one was the moon, it was dark at night. After a while the animals got tired of walking around in the darkness and they all got together to discuss the situation.

“Who will we get to be the moon?” the animals asked.

“What about Yellowfox?” one of them said.

“Yes.” They all agreed. “Let’s ask Yellowfox.”

Yellowfox agreed and became the moon. But he shone so brightly that it was just as hot as daytime. So the animals asked Yellowfox to come down.

“Who will we get to be the moon now?” the animals asked. As soon as he heard this, Coyote thought how wonderful it would be to be the moon so he could look down on the earth and see what everyone was doing.

“What about Coyote?” someone asked.

“Yes,” Coyote said, “of course I will be the moon.”

So Coyote went up and became the moon. He was neither too hot nor too dark. He looked down at the earth below and saw everything. And he couldn’t keep it to himself.

“Who is that cheating at the moccasin game,” Coyote shouted, “and who is that stealing meat from the drying racks?” he called out.

No one likes being found out so easily. After a while, the animals got together and asked someone else to be the moon.

“The moon is supposed to be silent,” they said. But of course that hasn’t stopped Coyote from snooping into other people’s business ever since.

Forced to cultivate an awareness of the Coyote in myself as well as my patients, I have come to recognize that Coyote’s greatest delusion, that he knows everything, is frequently my own delusion as well. Although I know with great certainty that I will never destroy him, I try to at least recognize him when he comes into my office, sniffs the furniture and plops down beside me, smiling.

The very act of writing this article, of describing an aspect of alcohol and drug dependence in symbolic terms, has many limitations. While evocative, Coyote is not scientific. While powerful, he does not lend himself to either statistical analysis or healthcare budget proposals. He cannot be measured, tested or evaluated. He cannot be bought, bound or dissected. A Coyote antidote will never be found because Coyote cannot be killed.

References
1. Sandner, D., Navaho Symbols of Healing. Healing Arts Press: Rochester, Vermont, (1979).
2. Henderson, J., A Psychological Commentary, in The Pollen Path by Margaret Schevill Link, Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, (1956).
3. That Tricky Coyote! by Gretchen Will Mayo. Walker and Company: New York, (1993). From the story “Boo! Coyote,” as told by John Duncan, A Ute from White Rock, Utah recorded in 1909.
4. Goodwin, D.W., “Studies of Familial Alcoholism: A Review.” J Clin Psych, vol. 45, 12, sec. 2, pgs. 14-17, (1984).
5. Blum, S., Noble, E., Sheridan, P., et al. “Allelic association of human dopamine D2 receptor gene in alcoholism.” JAMA, vol. 263, pgs. 2055-2060, (1990).
6. Schuckit, M.A., “Genetics of Alcoholism.” U.C. Davis Conference Symposium. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, vol. 9, 6, (November 1985).
7. Eliot, T.S., “The Hollow Men.” The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Chosen by W.B. Yeats, Oxford University Press: New York, (1937).
8. Henderson, J., The Masks of God; Primitive Mythology. Viking Press: New York, (1959).
9. Luckert, K., The Coyoteway: A Navajo Holyway Healing Ceremony. University of Arizona Press, (1934).
10. “How Coyote Was the Moon,” a story from Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children by Caduto, M.J. and Bruchac, J. Fulcrum, Inc.: Golden, Colorado, (1988).