Lucas Stopper: self-imposed exile: healing or harming?

 We discussed in class a couple of weeks ago about self-imposed exile as it relates to veterans of war who feel they must “walk off the war” they have fought in order to heal. I thought this was a very interesting and rich discussion, and I loved how it connected to myths such as Apollo killing Python as well. In my Later Middle Ages class, we just wrapped up discussing the story of Abelard and Heloise, two people who were in a relationship that was filled with passion and was very publicly controversial, which ended in Abelard being castrated and the two of them becoming a monk and a nun for the rest of their lives. Throughout their letters to each other, it is clear that both of them feel a need for forgiveness and cleansing from their past life of sexual indulgence, and yet neither of them feels as though they have been completely forgiven by God, and even Heloise, who at this point was a very devout abbess (the head of a nunnery), felt she could not even forgive herself for her past sins. This truly got me thinking: must an exile be self-imposed in order to truly have the cleansing effects on the psyche that it often does? Based on this outside reading I did, I feel that this must be the case, as Abelard and Heloise were both ripped away from their lives into exile by no choice of theirs, and this retreat from secular life did not nearly have the healing effects that perhaps a journey across the Appalachian Trail may have. Heloise suffers quite a bit of mental torture during her time as a nun, clearly showing that her forced exile did not heal her in any way. This led me to the conclusion that one must choose for themselves to retreat from society in order to truly be healed from their past traumas.