Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair. -Dr. Irvin Yalom, When Neitchze Wept
In life there will be wolves.
Cute, furry, cuddly wolves.
Angry, foaming-at-the-mouth, teeth-bared Little Red Riding Hood wolves.
So, what do we do when we’re thrown to the wolves?
My friend Tripp Hudgins (you should check out his Substack) reminded me of a story recently.
The people of Gubbio had a wolf problem. It was attacking their livestock, and eventually it turned against the people.
As expected, the villagers were afraid. With a killer wolf roaming in the darkness, they were so afraid they refused to leave town.
Enter Francis.
Francis of Assisi got word of the problem and decided not to avoid it. He went out to meet the wolf. So Francis walks out beyond the city walls to find the wolf.
And the wolf finds him.
According to the old Franciscan legend, the animal comes charging toward Francis with its mouth open.
Francis makes the sign of the cross, holds out his hand, and says:
“Brother Wolf.”
That’s right, he said Brother. He made the threat family.
And, with sincere honesty, firm kindness, and an almost Disney-princess-like way about him, he starts a dialogue with the wolf. Now, it’s not the kind of Cinderella story where you talk to the animals, engage in a memorable music number, and everyone decides it was all just a misunderstanding.
Francis speaks truth.
“You’ve hurt people.
You’ve caused pain.
You’ve done harmful things.
You’ve killed.”
The wolf does not deny it.
But Francis looks deeper. The wolf is hungry. Starving.
Francis strikes a deal with the wolf. He promises him that the people of Gubbio will feed him, if the wolf will cease terrorizing them. The wolf agrees by putting its paw in Francis’s hand, which I believe makes the deal legally binding.
As they walk back to town, I can imagine the townspeople: angry, hurt, scared, everything in them wanting to fight, flee, or freeze. Yet somehow, this plan works.
The people feed the wolf.
The wolf stops attacking them.
And according to the story, Brother Wolf lives peacefully among the people of Gubbio for the rest of his life.
When he eventually dies, the townspeople mourn him.
Like every good legend, this one lays out the story of psychological transformation.
We can’t keep running from wolves.
If you’ve seen the pain the wolf can cause. If you’ve been a victim of the wolf. Heck, if you’re human. It makes sense that every instinct and impulse in you wants to run, hide in the shadows, or find new destructive weapons. Perhaps even take a wolf-focused Krav Maga class. You’ll lie to yourself. Cheat yourself out of joy. You’ll do anything not to face the wolf.
But come on.
We know what that kind of behavior keeps getting us. We know the kind of life that gives us. We know that fear only floods the heart; it fails to wash despair away.
So, we work the steps.
Our first step will take fearlessness. We either leave ourselves open and willingly walk toward the wolf, or we put down the defenses and patiently wait until the wolf shows up again. In either case, we refuse to retreat to self-soothing, to our addictions, to our safe hiding places that are really less like refuge and more like comfy coffins.
We face the wolf.
And I hate to say it, but facing the wolf won’t be enough. You will need more than fearlessness for this work. You’ll need courage. Courage is about choosing to live out your values even when you are faced with risk and cost.
It will take courage to recognize the wolf is part of your family. It will take courage to find your way to calling the wolf brother. This is a critical step. Because, when we can recognize our relationship with the dangerous thing we refuse to face, we can learn what is truly ailing us. We do not excuse the bad behavior. We do not endorse any harm or violence, but we do practice contemplative listening. We listen to what is underneath the pain. We listen to the part of us that is deeply hungry. We listen to our groaning that is too deep for words.
Then we feed what is hungry.
Sure, it will take a village. It will take a constant returning to our values and a disciplined compassion, but the only way we keep our hunger from causing harm is to commit to doing what it takes to meet our needs. You can call it shadow work, integration, or maybe just call it being responsible.
In any case, the work is the same: we have to stop pretending the wolf will disappear simply because we refuse to look at it.
Unfortunately, more often than not, what we exile does not become any less dangerous; it just becomes hungrier.
What Francis did was remarkable and necessary. He made peace with the wolf not by pretending it had never bitten anyone. He made peace by facing him, being in relationship with him, noticing its hunger, and finding a way of feeding that hunger that wouldn’t cause harm.
I believe the desire for healing and transformative psychological change is asking us to do the same: to become responsible for our hunger by becoming aware of what trembles beneath our fear, what groans in the depths of our soul, what we keep grasping for. We have to learn to feed these parts of ourselves before the people around us become our next meal.
With time, the wolf will change.
Not because we conquered it.
Not because we starved it.
But because we finally learned how to sit beside it long enough to understand what it had been asking for all along.
About the author: Daniel Gutierrez, Ph.D., LPC, CSAC, is a Contemplative Existential Psychotherapist, Mental Health Researcher, Professor & Brother to a wolf.
