How a Psychiatrist Uses Dark Fantasy to Explain Human Trauma
In this article, you’ll discover:
- How a real doctor uses magical worlds to explain how we handle heavy stress.
- The story of Liam, a young man hiding a big secret in a modern city.
- Why facing our deep fears is the only way to truly heal our minds.
- How the author turned his own real heartbreak into an award-winning story.
If you build companies or invest in them, you know all about heavy stress. But sometimes, the intense pressure we face today wakes up hidden pain from our past. It is the kind of psychological burden many high performers try to ignore until it demands their attention.
Today, we are looking at someone who knows exactly how the human mind handles those tough, heavy burdens. Meet Erik Goodwyn. He is not just an incredible storyteller, but a real doctor and Jungian scholar who treats mental health every single day.
Now, he has taken over twenty years of clinical, medical experience and poured it into an epic fantasy book called King of the Forgotten Darkness: A Raven’s Tale. Instead of writing a dry medical text, he uses magic and monsters to explain how we process deep trauma. Erik puts it perfectly:
“This is one of the central features of trauma—that sometimes even if you escape it, you don’t really escape it. It stays with you wherever you go, haunting you.”
The Story of Liam
The book follows a young man named Liam. He is twenty four years old. He works a standard high rise job, moves through completely predictable routines, and lives in a safe, modern city. It seems like a perfectly normal, stable life. However, Liam is hiding a big secret beneath that calm exterior.
He is not actually from this world at all. He escaped from Erentyr, which is a savage, breathtaking, and deeply magical land. He ran away from that realm after witnessing his family being tragically taken from him. Now, his only goal is to maintain a quiet life and keep a blank slate, pretending the horrors of his youth never happened.
Facing the Shadows
For a long time, the protective magic portals between the different worlds stayed completely closed. Liam felt entirely safe from the violence he left behind. Then, his fragile stability shatters when he hears a shocking rumor. Someone from his lost family might actually still be alive.
Driven by a volatile mix of terrifying fear and desperate hope, Liam makes the highly illegal choice to go back to Erentyr. When he returns to this enchanting homeland, he does not just face ancient magic, political tension, and scary creatures. He also has to face the deeply buried anger and unresolved grief inside himself. In psychology, this hidden darkness is called the shadow self. As old instincts resurface, Liam learns that the scariest monsters are not always lurking in the woods, but are sometimes the ones we keep locked inside our own minds.
A Very Personal Heart
This book is certainly packed with thrilling action and incredible world building. But the absolute emotional core comes directly from the author’s own life experiences. In the story, Liam is desperately trying to save his mother. Erik actually lost his own mother to cancer when he was around Liam’s exact age. Being an only child raised by a single mom for most of his life, this loss was an incredibly devastating time. Writing this part of the journey struck right at the center of his own life challenges. However, pouring that raw, real heartbreak into the narrative gave the book a true soul that readers can genuinely feel on every single page.
Why Magic Heals
You might naturally wonder why a highly educated, smart doctor spends his time writing about ancient fairies and powerful magic. Erik firmly believes that fantasy is actually the most realistic kind of storytelling available to us. Our brains naturally use wild dreams, bizarre imagery, and scary symbols to help us unconsciously process hard truths.
The dreaming mind has absolutely no constraints, allowing it to depict our deepest fears perfectly. A dry, academic textbook simply cannot make you feel the raw, bleeding joy and anguish of human life. But a truly good story puts you right in the middle of the action. You get to violently rage at the enemy, weep openly at sudden losses, and cheer wildly for the hero. This visceral experience helps you process your own complicated feelings in a totally safe place.
Real Hope With Muscle
People are absolutely loving this unique, psychological approach to epic fantasy. The novel proudly won the 2025 Literary Titan Gold Book Award, recognizing its outstanding achievement. It has also been prominently featured on AP News and currently holds a brilliant 4.6 rating on Amazon.
Ultimately, Erik strongly wants readers who have experienced severe loss or deep alienation to find real hope within these pages. He does not offer a fake, easily sugarcoated happy ending. Instead, he offers a hard earned, cracked but never broken kind of optimism. It is hope with muscle.
If you are ready to explore this amazing, transformative world, you can easily support Erik and check out his extensive work using the helpful links below!
