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Chaos and the Big Sleep

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“Everybody is somebody—but on any given day there is somebody who feels like nobody. At the end of the day, the question is “Does anybody care enough to walk alongside the one who feels like nobody long enough to help them feel that they are somebody again.” —KW

You can’t change the way you grew up. Mary Main, a professor at UCal-Berkeley suggests that people learn to engage in a cohesive coherent narrative of their life. What I think this suggests is that if you are an addict it is important to not just look back and identify all the acting out you have ever done. But dig in and look at the relationships with people in your life that connect to why you do what you do and who you are. It’s sort of like making sense of the chaos and learning to connect with yourself in this endeavor.

Chaos makes this hard to do. People who grew up with crazy chaos often carry a little crazy with them their entire lives. Chaos puts to sleep the awareness of living life through healthy alternatives. The way you survived is what you replicate later in life. Your habits for survival are tattooed on your bones.

Therapy teaches you to talk about your chaos. You can learn a lot intellectually about what happened—the abandonment, the disorganized attachment, and all the systemic dynamics about your dysfunctional past. But most of us who grew up in craziness will die with some of it still inside. Sometimes I wonder if this is why I will die an addict.

I, like many addicts, grew up in an environment that was so dysfunctionally complicated that it is exhausting just to talk about it, and I have been talking about it for years. Every abuse headline is connected to subheadings that guaranteed crazy living for mere survival. It’s been said that addicts learn to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. Is there any other way for an addict to survive a complicated abusive past? The web of instability is so complex that to endure required that you fall asleep to healthy behavioral options and live in a trance-like state to what is real.

For example, I grew up in a large family. The ubiquitous presence of sexual abuse impacted our family in every dimension. There was sexual abuse perpetrated by pastors and leaders at our church. There was sexual abuse that was pervasive in our family. The church I grew up in was a cult. There was patriarchal domination of men toward women in our home and church. In a cult, church life and home life environment become one. You must develop the capacity to fall asleep to the reality of what surrounds you just to survive. When I shared my sexual abuse by the pastor of our church to responsible leaders, they concluded that my parents who had attended the church for 40 years were troublemakers and shunned them for 3 months. You would have thought that victims treated in this way would sever relationships and find another church to attend. My parents didn’t. They went to sleep about the reality of what happened to their children and to themselves. Once, many years later I asked my mom about the church shunning her and my dad regarding the sexual abuse and she responded that it never happened. Of course, it never happened when you fall asleep to reality.

My parents fell asleep to the injustices that intruded their lives because they were overwhelmed with the history of abuses that took place in their own family of origin. If you don’t face and address injustice, the only way to survive is to fall asleep to the realities of abuse and domination that penetrate you and the people you love.

My parents ignored what was going on in their family by singing gospel songs like “When We All Get to Heaven” or “Victory In Jesus” in order to ignore the hell on earth that had pervaded every aspect of their lives. How is this so different than the way our society ignores the lies and deceit proffered by politicians, religious leaders, and cultural icons about what is real? Rather than sifting, sorting, and researching truth, most of us choose a media service to do our thinking and fall asleep to the incongruence of our own hypocrisy and those who lead us.

For those who choose to no longer ignore the emperor who wears no clothes, waking up takes commitment to truth and honesty. It also takes time. The effort to wake up requires that you stop doing what keeps you asleep. It’s no wonder you are sleepy if you keep taking sleeping pills.

You will need to stop your own crazy thinking like trying to do more to keep from being less. Slowing this locomotive down is no small task.

You will have to address your mistaken beliefs that exist and have created blocks to intimacy with yourself and others. Mistaken beliefs have been tattooed in your heart as a way of surviving the craziness of your childhood. When you do more and have more it is difficult to accept less and think you are more. Material gain is like booze. There’s nothing wrong with either one as long as you respect that both can make you drunk. Driving your life drunk is scary whether you are intoxicated with booze or the disease of more.

The only way to stop the chaos is to wake up from the big sleep. Nothing changes until it is real. When craziness is complex, waking up means to slow life to examine the inconsistencies, face your hypocrisy, and address your incongruence.

People talk about making America great again. Yet, if everybody, who knew somebody who felt like a nobody, was willing to walk alongside to wake them up from the chaos and craziness, maybe that would hold promise to a great future for the first time. Together, we can be somebody once again.

Talkin’ Trash

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“Here I am – Do You See Me.”

 —KW

Blown by the wind without notice

Others just like me become my blanket

Gathered in a desolate corner

Invisible until we become so many

Scorned with disgust from others

Would someone please rid me of this filth?

There’s a trash can—put me there

Make me out of sight

Make me invisible like the night

But you can’t, cause I’m here just like you

I’m the reality of  your imagination

I’m dog shit

People shit

The wrappers of dreams to make me disappear

Straws for smack and blow to get you to forget

But here I am—

You can’t forget me, you must do something about me

I’m the writer who paints your park benches

Your trains, your overpass bridges

Got stuff you don’t get in carts on permanent loan

Sleep in places that scare the hell out of you and me too

Others just like me—in the heat and cold, moan and groan

Wash away the crust 

I’m just like you

Broken family, broken dreams

Close your eyes and listen 

It’s all the same—so it seems

Just talkin’ trash

Just talkin’ trash

No one wants to be invisible or forgotten. Being unwanted and uncared for is worse than being hungry with nothing to eat. When people are objectified their essential self is invisibilized.  People objectify others as sexual body parts to be pursued and conquered or as sources to achieve power, fame, or fortune.  People who are takers and not givers reduce relationships to what’s in it for me.  Solutions to social dilemmas require a giver mentality. Objectification is about taking. It’s about wanting what you want when you want it.  It’s about going through the world seeing only what you want to experience and ignoring the suffering that challenges others.

From Martin Buber’s book, I and Thou, it can be emphasized that when you engage others and the world around you as an “it” you organize and manipulate the world only as you want to see it.  Human suffering, social dilemmas, and environmental challenges become obstacles to ignore while material and relational pleasures become objectified. An “it” mentality is a pathway to becoming alienated from the world around you as it is. Buber wrote, “To look away from the world or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.” There is a sense of spiritual connection that occurs when what you see and experience in the world around you connects with what is in you. It becomes a source for “thou” relationships which holds great respect for others problems and challenges in life.

Everyone needs a safe and trusting community to be seen. Here, vulnerability and trust are serendipitously expressed through our grief, joy, and challenge. I don’t know anyone who exemplifies this truth more than Sally, a client I once had. 

Sally had every reason to isolate and avoid the community when she first came to see me in my office. Emotionally, she was fragmented. She suffered horrendous physical, ritual, and sexual abuse from her parents who were involved in a cult. Her parents solicited her to other members of the family and cult. She experienced everything that would make a family unsafe. She fled from this frightful gruesome family to a life on the streets. 

While learning plenty of street savvy, she also learned to stuff her sorrows and the sadism she’d experienced throughout her childhood with a cocktail of addictions. When she initially sought professional counsel, she experienced more abuse and betrayal from those who were supposed to be healing and safe. She learned to deaden herself to the world at large and to disconnect from the community. Eventually, she decided to attend our intensive outpatient program, which involves sixty-five hours of therapy in 8 days. 

When she began her plunge experience, there was no trust, only desperation. However, as the days unfolded, her barriers began to come down. Maybe it was the intensity of one session after another beginning at 7:00 a.m. and continuing until 8:30 p.m. It could have been the many different approaches that her relentless counselors used. Whatever it was, she reached a watershed point where she decided to open her heart to the possibility of healing. As she progressed throughout the week, she decided that this would be her last attempt to find hope. She decided that she would do whatever it took to get healthy.

As she became committed to healing herself, she committed to integrating her fragmented inner self. She embraced the emotional pain that dominated her life, rather than medicate it with addiction. She resolved to attend 12-Step meetings to address her compulsive behaviors. Though dominated with fear and full of anxiety, slowly she shifted and allowed her 12-Step community to become a touchstone and signpost for reality in her recovery. Sharing her brokenness in the community provided relational safety for Sally. 

When there is relational safety in the community, anything and everything can be explored and sifted and sorted through. Pain becomes the fellowship’s touchstone and signpost indicating an imbalance in life. The community provides a sound studio to listen to pain’s message. Common shared brokenness is its draw, not common likeness or interest. Becoming emotionally naked by sharing our deepest feelings and secrets is commonplace and expected. It’s a space where we can fit in and be accepted as we are. It is a sanctuary in which to learn how we can wear our own skin well. It’s a space to accept our own acceptance while staring at imperfection. It is a place to grow ourselves into adult maturity and discover inner brilliance. 

Today, after many years of recovery and therapy, Sally has carved out a commitment to a 12-step community based on a shared brokenness that has proven supportive and sustaining. Today, though she continues to work out her emotional brokenness, she has become an inspiration to those who work with her professionally. She has become a leader in her field of expertise. Her husband and children continue to benefit from her resilience and commitment to her healing journey. 

Recently, she told me her recovery life has rendered her 1,000 percent improved. She echoed that without a community to share her deepest feelings of brokenness, in concert with therapeutic intervention, her road to recovery would have led to a dead end. 

There are thousands of Sally’s in the world around you including the homeless. My wife Eileen and I have chosen to live in a neighborhood where homeless people live all around us. Each morning we walk our dog through our neighborhood streets. We pick up trash and dog poop with our sanitary gloves as we make our way. Along the canal that we walk there is graffiti painted on park benches and backyard walls. There is trash all around including dog and human feces. At first, it was disgusting. Over time, I have learned that the trash has a voice that represents the many unfortunate ones. The trash is their voice to tell me and you that  “I am here. Don’t forget me. Please see me!” 

Do you know someone you would describe as forgotten? When you drive to work, worship, or play, do you notice the street people in your community? Not knowing what to do with misfortune, many look away from the homeless, choosing to deal with discomfort by distancing themselves from it. What about the person at the grocery store who shuffles by with a blank stare on his face? Do you think of him as invisible? 

Today every piece of trash I pick up, I hear the voices of so many on the streets and elsewhere saying please treat me as a “Thou.” Just talkin’ trash!

Why Tell the Story

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“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”— Maya Angelou

There is an interesting phenomenon when things happen that hurt. People don’t want to talk about it. When sexual abuse happens children become silent. It is common for a child to want to hide from the reality of abuse. They don’t tell anyone because they think the behavior is their fault. For many the story is not told for many years. For some, it is never told. 

When I disclosed to the church judicatory officials about the details of clergy sexual abuse perpetrated toward me and others, the church blamed my parents for being troublemakers. The judicatory official told my sister, through my dad, to keep her mouth shut after she had confronted another person, who had made inaccurate remarks about the abuse. My dad followed orders and my sister kept quiet. I learned only a few months ago about the inappropriate behavior to my sister from the church official. It has been over 50 years since the abuse took place! 

The tendency to remain silent when abuse and injustice takes place occurs at different levels of our society. For example, a recent 50-state survey of Millennials and Gen Z participants found that over 60% did not know 6 million Jews were killed. Approximately half (49%) of them have seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany). 

This troubling trend is assisted with a mentality of embracing the improbable and ignoring the obvious which exists in many dysfunctional families. If you don’t talk about it, somehow it doesn’t exist. It’s out of sight, out of mind. This thinking contributes to abusive behavior being passed from one generation to another. 

The reason to tell the story is to stop the abuse. Secrets carry the shame to the next generation. Shame influences the creation of abusive behavior that dominates others. Abuse hides in secrecy. 

Telling the story stops the crazy-making. When silence covers abuse, healing stops and reparations do not happen. It is imperative that the stories of abuse be told. This includes physical, sexual, religious, emotional, and intellectual abuses. To avoid the stories is to pass the mantle of shame to the next generation who will suffer the past generations’ unwillingness to speak to the issue. It likely recreates the abusive dynamics in their own day and time. It takes courage to stop an abusive and unhealthy legacy. Some day your children will thank you for doing so. 

The deepest truth is found by means of a simple story. To me, the greatest single tool for my personal healing has been my own story. Powerful stories of healing are housed in average everyday living. Contained within every life story is the truth that liberates. This is why Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been so powerful for so many for so long. Within the community of alcoholics, there are “shared stories.” Each unique story is tied together through shared weakness. Nothing changes until it becomes real. No one goes through childhood and avoids disappointment and other hurts. 

There are “Big T” and “Little T” traumas. All are significant. The accumulation of major/minor traumas creates a pool of pain that must be drained for personal healing to occur. That pool of pain encompasses the average everyday experiences of our childhood that were hurtful, whether major or minor. Understanding the impact of these “minor” traumas in average everyday living takes focused effort. 

Many of us sort of walk “around the dead dog” in the living room when it comes to recognizing unmet emotional needs from ordinary past experiences. It takes courage to tell our stories and deepen our awareness of what is real. We are often afraid to unravel the uneventful uncomfortable times of our past. We fear that if we do so, our notions of reality will disintegrate, and all that we have always thought to be true will crumble into nothingness. Yet, personal healing demands that we tell our story to uncover the meaningfulness that exists when we allow ourselves to lean into the pain. 

Carl Jung concluded that every person has a story. When derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration come when people discover or rediscover their personal stories. Voicing our story is that important! One author declared that stories are memory aids, instruction manuals, and moral compasses. Sue Monk in The Secret of Bees wrote that “stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we are here.” 

Collective and individual healing is dependent upon you and I telling our story.

Desperation—Without it There’s No Change

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A calling is an inside force to be, create, or achieve a life experience that has not been realized. It is an exploit that cultivates bliss. Even once realized, there is a conscious enlightenment that you are doing what creates deep satisfaction within your soul. 

Callings are often missed in life for many reasons. Many people die with the music that resides within never expressed. There are a myriad of reasons why this is true. I would like to suggest only a few that I think matter most for you to consider. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote about people living quiet lives of desperation. Many never pursue their calling because they live their lives without marshaling their desperate lives. Rather than being dominated by quiet desperation, why not quietly move the energy of desperation in the direction of your favor? You don’t have to allow the days of your life to slip away into meaninglessness. If you grew up the way I did, you have every reason to feel desperate. In my recovery, I had to learn to take feelings like dread, depression, malaise, anger, shame, loneliness, and desperation and transform them into something helpful rather than hurtful. You will too. 

I have been reading Let the Record Show by Sara Schulman, a historical narrative for the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Schulman chronicles the influence and impact of those within the organization who in many cases sacrificed their very lives in pursuit of effective treatment for those suffering from HIV and AIDS. Even though there are tragically far too many deaths around the world from AIDS that are now treatable, the scientific advances that save lives today would not have been in existence had some members of ACT UP not paid the ultimate price of dying in the attempt to save others and their own lives. Schulman’s record is a narrative of desperation. Without it, the hope for healing from HIV + would have never been realized. Clearly, the annals attest to the value of desperation that existed within the calling of many thousands who mostly lived in gay and lesbian communities around our country in the 1980s and 1990s. One cannot read the accounts written of sacrifice and desperation without being inspired by their acts of service toward humanity. 

During the past three decades, I have treated many forms of addictive behavior. I have never been successful in helping an addict overcome their destructive behavior without that person being desperate. The 12-step community identifies the experience as “hitting bottom.” It’s the place where you decide down deep that you have had enough. It could be poverty, abuse, a bad marriage, addictive behavior, physical condition, etc., you name it. Only when you are desperate to change your life situation will you access the resources to transform your existence. You take the experience of desperation and move it from being victim to victor. You move the negative energy toward a positive result. You put pictures of past gloomy days of hopeless desperation in your mind that motivate you. You determine in the deep recesses of your soul that, no matter what, you will not repeat those days of hopeless desperation in your addiction or other plight of life. You become hungry and urgent with intervention. You decide to walk to hell and back to create the change you envision. You will put up with whatever discipline, behavioral change, and discomfort necessary to change the desperate environment that creates misery in your life. 

Schulmann chronicles this sense of desperation to have been most powerful in a collective community sense. Desperation is the average, common component in everyone’s life necessary to experience transformation toward discovering their own brilliance.  Without it, there would have been no ACT UP. Desperation is the component necessary to make peace from war, healthcare for all, and overcome poverty in our communities. Desperation fans the flame of personal and community will. 

Callings are stunted and fade from realization when individuals fail to redirect their desperate lives toward transformation. While you cannot do the individual work for another to redirect their desperation, collectively we can change the horizon and landscape that provides more possibility. I believe there is a calling within the community for individuals to answer. We cannot help everyone but we can take time to help others redirect desperation into transformation. The 12-step community identifies these actions as  “acts of service” that constitute living out the 12th step. 

Callings are muted by discouragement. We tell ourselves “If my situation just wasn’t so desperate!” The truth is that without your sense of desperation, nothing ever changes and callings are never answered. 

Are you feeling desperate about relationships that hurt, addictions that dominate, physical conditions that need to change, or feelings that overwhelm you? Move your experience of desperation into transformation. Become desperate to create something different. Decide you will do whatever it takes to end addictive behavior, compulsions with food, procrastination, and negative behavior that keeps you stuck and mutes your response to the calling that beckons within your soul.

Everybody Has a Story—Here’s a Piece of Mine

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I grew up in a family of 9 children and my parents raised my oldest sister’s 3, so essentially there were 12. My parents became religious—zealously so. Life revolved around the church. During all the meetings, projects, prayers, fasting, and evangelistic endeavors, we were on the front row. Everything was a distant second to attending whatever the people of the church were doing. If my parents were not in church, they were working their ass off. Dad always had 2-3 jobs and mom was the church janitor and cleaned offices and houses, all to keep their heads above water. It was the only way they knew to keep it all going at home. Of course, everyone worked. I got my first job at age 7 and bought my own school clothes from age 12 on. It was a necessity but also an escape from my mom picking out stuff I didn’t want to wear.

The church I attended was a cult. Every member of my family was abused by the church—all 14 family members. Apocalyptic obsession, “we were in/you were out” mentality, mind-altering trance, and funky theology of perfectionism fueled the other traits that make up a cult. As a kid, once you experienced all of that, the last thing you wanted your friends to know is that your family was entangled with all of this shit. So isolation became a lifestyle. Separated from everyday living created vulnerability and accessibility to the abuse doled out by the organizational hierarchy. In our family, the abuse included religious, physical, verbal, emotional, and sexual. Church leaders were considered God’s anointed so when confronted the plaintiff was accused of being the perpetrator, trying to stir up trouble for God’s anointed. When the pastor was outed for sexual abuse, members of the church reversed the accusation and attacked the children who were molested for defiling the pastor. A true cult? Oh yeah!

So what did I do as I grew up? I became one of them. James Baldwin once wrote “It’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice of your own murderers because you believe the same things they do.” So, what did I do, I became a pastor in the same sect with the same emphasis on religious abuse if not physical and sexual abuse. I became a zealot toward saving souls for Jesus just like my parents were, only yet more intense. I was ordained to uphold vows of selfless love toward others, self-sacrifice, and personal purity—always an emphasis upon purity! As clergy, whenever you met with the echelon leaders of the church during annual meetings, there was the piercing question “Do you believe and practice the doctrine of heart purity?” Of course, everybody innocently lied and said “Yes”. Many of us painstakingly tried to be pure with ridiculous results!

The apostle Paul had his moment of truth on the Damascus road with a blinding light. You can read about it in the New Testament. I had mine in a padded cell of a psychiatric ward in Denver, Colorado. After years of participating in a cult as a child and drinking the Koolaid of exclusivism, I pounded my Bible till my fists were bloodied in recognition that God had abandoned me and the church was never supportive and protective with any degree of reasonableness.

You would think that with this reality one would detach and move on with life. But, the tentacles of cultish doctrine entangled my life existence. It took another 8 years to unravel my soul from the underpinnings of cult belief and practice till I was able to free myself and seek other employment to feed my family.

For the next 27 years, I further distanced myself from the mentality and impact of cult living. It has been like living in the desert in a porous shack and trying to sweep all the sand out of your house. There is a continuous struggle with flashback recollections, relational experiences, and inner voices that trigger vivid memories as numerous as tiny grains of sand that constantly invade the caverns of my mind. As I age, there is less cultic sand in my mind and distorted grit in my mouth to grind. I anticipate some sand to always be present.

After over 30 years of ordination in cultic praxis, I decided to detach. Ordination involves an elaborate process and ceremony with you being anointed by the hierarchical leaders stating that you will follow the organizational beliefs, and practices in clergy duties and in everyday lifestyle. If you don’t, you can be defrocked. The list of those defrocked are many. However, if the church fails to reflect the same practice, essentially there is no accountability. The church can defrock the pastor for malfeasance but no one can defrock the church. I decided to do that.

I created a de-ordination ceremony in my backyard. I began with the Serenity Prayer. I included a Billy Talent video “Devil in a Midnight Mass” commemorating my sexual abuse. I read a sacred poem I wrote about lifelong shame entitled “Stalking the Lion King”. I read sacred writings written by Native Americans. I read emotion-focused letters, putting hierarchical abusers in an empty chair. Sometimes I gave them hell, Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I was emotionally indifferent. I read several inspirational, life-affirming poems, some written by me, some by others. I meditated on personal affirmations.

Then I conducted a burning ceremony where I burned the Creeds, my ordination papers, my earned theological degrees, and the book of rules and regulations called the “Church Manual”. I conducted a smudging ritual to remove the negative energy and burned sage to rid my space of undermining spirits.

I concluded by writing the abusive acts committed toward me and the community that I experienced by the church on small sticky notes and attached them to a wind lantern. I lit the wind lantern and watched the practices of human oppression perpetrated in my church experience float away. I wish to be gone forever but probably not. I do have a commitment to myself to no longer be my own oppressor that the church was to me that began in my youth.

So that is a piece of my story! What is yours? What can you learn from your story? Here are a few suggestions to consider:

1. There is personal healing power in every story—yours included. The greatest tool for healing is found in your personal story. Embrace it. Explore it. Be brave and allow the pain of your story to teach you what you need for healing. Carl Jung concluded that when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration come when people discover or rediscover their personal story.

2. “Life is meant to be lived forward, yet is only understood backward”—Soren Kierkegaard. Plan for tomorrow. Live in the now. Understand through contemplation of yesterday. There is great insight from the past for those who are willing to courageously sift through the rubble of family and relational experiences. You are not your past experiences. You can transform your future by internalizing wisdom and brilliance that can only be found through the archaeology of past relational encounters. You don’t have to spend your life navel-gazing. Yet you learn so much about your future journey in life from yesterday’s weather report.

3. No one passes through childhood into adulthood unscathed. As a therapist, I sometimes hear patients tell me they had the perfect childhood. This always triggers suspicion. Folks are folks. Every parent makes mistakes. There is no perfect childhood environment. It is not helpful to poke and pick looking for excuses and blame. It is helpful to de-romanticize childhood and parents so that you can anchor yourself in your own adult parenting skills. In therapy, we distinguish big “T” traumas from small “t” traumas. You may not have experienced major traumatic issues as a child, and you may need help identifying the small “t” traumas that keep you stuck in your false self. Your false self is that which you want to be, wish were true but in reality isn’t. It becomes a way of seeing the world in distortion and false impression. Leaning into clarity of missed childhood needs, even from caring parents is an important part of your evolving story.

4. Detach from the hurt and embrace the healthy. Detachment is a process not an event. There were many personal steps I took before detaching from the unhealthy hierarchy of the church. Your rendezvous with detachment is unlikely to focus on the church. You will need to create your own journey. It may be circuitous but it will be personal, and if you go the distance you will create equanimity in your life and healing in your heart.

In The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd wrote “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.” Don’t let your life story remain untold. Allow it to lead you to personal healing and transformation. It is the reason you are here.

Polarization

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Polarization is a problem in the world. Us versus them is a mentality that has always existed.  The criteria for who is in and who is out are determined by those who have the power.  Historically, the criteria for acceptance has been tragic. Jewish people were rejected by the Third Reich in Germany, who determined that the entire race should be exterminated. African Americans were once considered only 3/5th human in America simply because of the color of their skin. Racism, sexism, patriarchy, ageism, etc exclude some and include others because of someone’s definition about who is acceptable and who is not.

When I was a kid I tried to hang out with only Cub fans. If you liked the St. Louis Cardinals, there was something wrong with you. My dad was a blue-collar worker and we were Democrats. We prayed for those who were Republicans and wondered why! We thought that the Pope was the antichrist. There were 3 areas of our town: Elm Ridge, where the rich people lived; Grant Park, where the poorest lived, and then the rest of us. We learned to categorize people by their address. We looked up to the folk in Elm Ridge as successful. They were the “haves.” We fought to keep our address out of Grant Park where the “have nots” lived.

Judgmentalism has separated people throughout my life. There was the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the 1950’s. Famous people like Paul Robeson, who was a great black athlete and actor, was ostracized and accused of being Communist because he refused to bend to popular opinion. There were Christians who thought the world was going to end in a ball of fire in the early 1960’s. They were scoffed at by scientists and ostracized as Holy Rollers. Now, scientists push the alarm of a catastrophic global warming, and many of those same Christians scoff and ostracize the scientists.

Polarization is a challenge to recovery. Healing requires integrating both the best and the beast within each person. In community, us versus them undermines the healing process. Judging others’ social status or recovery progress paralyzes the potential for transformation. It requires each person to recognize their own dark behavior in order to have compassion for other people’s struggle. It is by recognizing compassion and identification that transformation occurs. 

No one escapes childhood unscathed. I have learned that working through abuse requires the acceptance of a victim/victimizer dynamic that exists in those who have suffered abuse. When you have been victimized it is important to face ways that you have victimized others, perhaps not in like kind but in like principle. 

It is critical to confront behavior where you selfishly wanted what you wanted when you wanted it. It is important to face the impact of feelings and consequences that your behavior created for others and experience the gravity of their plight  because of your actions. Then, you focus on forgiving yourself which simply means to let go and not hold the behavior against yourself. It also means to stop the hurtful behavior. When you do this, you become less polarized from those who have victimized you. By accepting your own dark behavior you can create compassion for the dark behavior of others who hurt you with perpetrating abuse. Through common shared brokenness you can experience healing and forgiveness which can produce freedom from the abuse. 

Essentially, this controversial process can be framed as a way of getting out of an emotional prison that an abuser’s behavior created. Some have described it as a healthy selfish way of forgiving the son of a b**** who perpetrated pain and devastation in your life. You don’t have to be friends with someone who has hurt you. However, polarization is less likely because you have addressed in principle the victimizer dynamic in yourself that also exists in the perpetrator who has hurt you.

When this does not occur, communities remain fractured and polarized. Perpetrators, like sex offenders, are excluded from their communities. Some people think that if we segregate, isolate, or polarize people, then somehow we become a safer community. I don’t see evidence that this is true. 

Through my work at Psychological Counseling Services, we have witnessed transformation and healing by bringing victims and victimizers together. When sexual abuse is the issue, careful consideration of healing factors are assessed for both victim and victimizer before such integration takes place. Through 25+ years of engaging this process, I have observed and facilitated healing and transformation for both victim and victimizer. Regarding betrayed partners, we have integrated them with addict betrayers for many years. I have listened to partners who have shared that listening to the heart of an addict who is not their partner has been helpful to cultivate compassion and healing toward their own addict partner. On the other side of the coin, I have listened to addicts state that hearing the heartache of a different betrayed partner helped them to deepen empathy toward their own betrayed partner.  

When we face each other’s pain we promote healing and transformation and eliminate polarization. This makes far more sense to me. 

I do not think there is just one way to heal trauma from abuse. There are many alternatives. I do believe that polarization has splintered communities throughout our country. Judgmentalism through categorizing and labeling people has been detrimental to healing in our country. I suggest that we overcome judgmentalism and polarization toward others through identification of common-shared brokenness with shared accountability and consequences.  

Take time to be curious of someone who is unlike you or represents a position you vehemently disagree with.  Notice how judgment comes up and simply sit with gaining an understanding of another person’s plight and position about life. You don’t have to change your mind about how you think. But, you can find a way to connect with someone who sees things different than you do. A way to overcome polarization is to integrate common-shared brokenness through listening to a different perspective.  

Shame—The Ear Worm that Dominates the Reality of an Addict

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“There’s a lion and when he roars he’s telling me I ain’t no good–It’s not just what I could, but he’s bitching what I should.” (Stalking the Lion King—Kw)

Shame is like a sticky music song syndrome that works its way into your mind and quickly forms a noose around your neck with the design of choking the authentic reality out of you. It all begins when you are very young.

I grew up in a very religious household. The clergy of the church I grew up in during my lifetime were servants from hell. The first pastor was in my life from birth to the 8th grade. He was a very abusive man. I have a lot of memories that were not pleasant. There were times he would challenge resistors to his leadership to a physical fight out in the parking lot of the church. Once he attempted to undress me when I was a second grader in front of the congregation. He said he wanted to use me, as an illustration, to describe “a gutter drunk” he was trying to save from hell.

When I was a kid, I wet the bed and was embarrassed that others would know. Once, this “saintly” pastor coaxed me into going to summer church camp and vowed to prevent others from knowing that I struggled with wetting the bed. In turn, he suddenly announced to the entire camp that I wet the bed and was a “pee-baby” during a morning flag-raising ceremony. There’s a long list of abuse and antics that this clergy person did and no one held him accountable. My parents would only say “Had it not been for this pastor, we wouldn’t have a church today”! He ran out all of the incorrigibles and the troublemakers so that he would be the only thug left to save souls. Well, it took a long time but thank God, or someone, that particular church is now defunct and out of business. Upon reflection, it’s settings like this during early formative years that shape and mold young minds with the earworm of shame-driven messages that dominate in later years. James Baldwin was right when he wrote “It’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.” Shameful earworm messages work this way in your life.

After the preacher from hell finally retired, we got another one. Our new pastor was young and he related much better to the youth of the church. As a matter of fact, he related too well. He molested at least three of us and I am convinced there were many more. He disfigured the lives of so many kids that required more than a “born again” experience to ever restore. For many, it scarred and marred for life. Sexual exploitation is the abuse that keeps on giving, not just in the victim’s life but in generations to come because of the shroud of secrecy around the shameful behavior. Do you have experiences of exploitation that you have never talked to anyone about? Then you know the earworm of shameful messages that eat away at you and silently become transplanted into your next generation.

Shame that was ever present with my parents was transferred to every one of us kids. I experienced it around my inability to perform in sports. I was a great practice player but during actual games was dismal. Shameful earworm messages like “You can’t do this, who do you think you are” dominated and created miserable results.

I also experienced it around my sexuality. The only girl I ever dated as a teenager was in the church I attended. When it came to sex, shame pretty much dominated my thoughts and actions. Of course, there was no one to talk things out regarding healthy sexual experience or the crazy sexual abuse I had known previously. Under the cloak of shame, the earworm message would say that masturbation would send you to hell and that sex would be something you would automatically know what to do on that magical honeymoon night. Any other thought about it was considered dirty, disgusting, and to be condemned.

The earworm of shame would constantly ring “You must be more to keep from being less”. With the ring of shame, there is never a moment when who you are and what you have achieved is enough. No time to sit back and enjoy except for the rush you might experience while seeking more.

When I was little, my brother, Steve, and I used to mow very large lawns, 2 to 3 acres, with a power hand mower. We would take a pasture-size section and divide it in half. Then each of us would see who could mow their section the fastest. As we got closer to the finish we would mow faster and faster in an attempt to win. Eventually, each of us would be running. I remember how tortuous it felt toward the end. But, when it was finally finished, there was such a relief and adrenaline rush that felt great, win or lose! I would later try to addictively construct that adrenaline rush throughout my adult life. Truth is that the earworm of shame is often transformed into the adrenaline that comes from conquest and accomplished performance. It is a formative piece toward the development of addictive behavior.

I was often told that I would not succeed or be special in any way. It would always make me mad. I remember my business teacher in high school telling me that I would fail and be least likely to go to college. In college, my academic advisor told me that I would be a traditional “9 to 5” kind of guy and nothing special. To his point, I only wish I was a “9 to 5” kind of guy. It would have helped me live a more healthy life.

I have always had a burning desire to succeed in my life. I must admit that it became distorted in ministry in such a way that I lost myself and my way. Upon graduation from Seminary, my wife Eileen and I moved to Denver Colorado to work in a large evangelical church.

I was determined to learn to be the very best pastor I could be. I did a 2-year internship with absolutely no compensation. We lived off the 9 thousand dollar salary Eileen made working for an insurance company. I worked crazy hours. I would begin at 7 am and work until 10 pm. Then I would help clean the church from 10 pm till 2 am. During those days, Eileen and I would sleep in a gathering room at the church that was identified as “the Parlor”. I have always been embarrassed to tell people I did all of that for no pay. I wanted to be the best. There is this unrelenting subconscious need to correct the message from the earworm of shame that “I am not deserving” and that if I would keep driving myself that somehow in the end I would be enough. But, when I got to the end of the accomplishment, it was never a big deal and the approval I sought was elusive.

The dynamic of shame is all-inclusive. I have been working on this for 33 years of recovery and still must do recovery work simply to accept that what I am is enough. As a professional, I have noticed that I am not alone. Most recovery “gurus’ I know struggle with the earworm of shame in a similar way. The drive for notoriety, power, and possessions shelter this need to be more to keep from being less. There are times that this struggle becomes blatantly obvious through arrogant and socially unacceptable behaviors by some gurus. Sometimes, I have actually encountered folks who have never written a recovery book or even read one who have best exemplified managing the earworms of shame in their lives.
Earworms are common phenomenon to everybody. Shame has a way of sticking earworm messages in our hearts for a lifetime.

I am wondering if you are aware of shameful earworm messages that incessantly dominate and drive you toward addictive behavior? What shameful experiences did you have while growing up that set the foundation for the earworm of shame to drive you to your addiction later in your life? Can you identify the coping strategies that you have created in an attempt to avoid the shameful earworms that ring down deep in your heart?

Gestalt theorist Fritz Perls once said that “nothing ever changes until it becomes real”. Identifying the painful earworm messages of shame is the beginning of interrupting the pattern and creating a pathway that leads to serenity.

Limits

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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” 

― Steve Jobs

Limits are difficult for type A, entrepreneurial people who like to insist on getting things the way they want it. And when they don’t, that’s when the color comes out in their behavior. Some people become green with envy, red with rage or a host of other colors demonstrating frustration, anger and exasperation. Some show ugly intolerance, making deleterious demands with iterations that reflect sophomoric immaturity. There is a mentality in the social milieu of our country that disdains limitations. There is an emphasis upon becoming a limitless person. Yet I have discovered great benefit to living within the context of personal limits. 

Boundaries are synonymous with limitations. Living within the framework of boundaries has saved more than one addict from deepening the hole of destructive behavior. 

Metaphors for the value of limits are all around us. I grew up in east central Illinois. To go home, I often fly from Phoenix to St. Louis. From the airport, I take Interstate 270 around the city of St. Louis leading to the I-70 bridge over the Mississippi River that parallels the old Chain of Rocks Bridge that has been shut down and abandoned for decades. After crossing the Mississippi there is another bridge that goes over a canal built for commercial barges to navigate safely through the Chain of Rocks. 

This canal is designed to be wide enough to accommodate the barge traffic with a steep shoreline. It is plenty deep so that commercial traffic can navigate with no problem. For me, this canal channel is a metaphor to recovery. There is no danger of the barge becoming impeded or stuck in shallow waters. The canal is designed and properly sized for typical commercial barge traffic. Within its confines, each barge is safe from the hazard of shallow waters. 

As long as addicts stay within the confines of healthy boundaries and respect limitation, they are safe from the hazards that lead to addictive acting out. It’s only when an addict ignores limitations that he or she gets into trouble with addictive acting out. Work addicts frequently lose themselves in the conquest of pursuing more to keep from being less. At some point, one more acquisition only adds meaningless content to an overstuffed portfolio. Ego grows while awareness of personal brilliance dims. 

I often hear complaints from work addicts who resent the need for limitation and boundary. Yet, true to the metaphor,  individuals who honor and respect limitation discover that they can go as deep within the boundary as they want. Rather than think horizontally, I want this, that and the other, consider the unexplored depths of going deep within.  It’s by respecting our limits and going deep within the heart that we have the opportunity to know ourselves best. Canadian poet Shane Koyczan declared that,“To discover the thing you’re brilliant at you first must explore meaningfulness in average experiences of life.” Limitations are the common stuff of every day living. Everyone has limits. The common frame of mind of “having your cake and eating it too” is often unrealistic. Limitation is the average awareness that all must embrace. Rather than stretching yourself to conquer more and more, consider plunging deep within the heart of average everyday experience and mine your own personal brilliance from within.   

Reflection:

  1. What personal limits have you tried to ignore?
  2. If you were to honor your limits and go deep within, what does your personal brilliance tell you about who you are? 
  3. Does the word “average” only connote assessment and judgment of performance to you?
  4. If average meant commonplace experience, what every day happenings do you minimize in your chase for achievement and success? 
  5. In what ways do your personal limits offer benefit rather than a burden toward developing personal brilliance?

Understanding Crazy Living

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“I’m on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen.
It’s not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.” By Charlie Sheen

Addiction is all-consuming. Brilliance is lost to the twisted, distorted perspective that says, “I am the essence of brilliance.” Audacious self-importance keeps a person stuck. Now in reported recovery, Sheen may well speak from a different place than he once was.

I remember watching Charlie Sheen on 20/20 television show when he said, “I just didn’t believe I was like everybody else. I thought I was unique.” The public self-destruction of Charlie Sheen was painful to follow in the news. The descent from being the highest-paid American television actor on primetime ($1.8 million per episode on Two and a Half Men) to being HIV positive and suspected of threatening to kill a former fiancée all was very sad to his most loyal fan base.

Addicts are an odd lot. Rapacious, loner, renegade, charismatic, luminary, chic, and disgusting are among the many adjectives that describe those who suffer from addiction. During my professional experience, I have treated individuals who have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to escaping what they don’t want to feel. I have listened to a medical professional describe having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner numerous times and confessing that they cannot get enough of what they really don’t want. Some have spent millions of dollars on a cocktail of experience with sugar daddy prostitutes, alcohol, and opiates and then blew their brains out! I have spent time with workaholics who literally experienced tremors, excessive sweating, nausea, and diarrhea from simply withdrawing from the rush of adrenaline that comes with the art of the deal. The merry-go-round lifestyle of most addicts is dumbfounding and would make anyone dizzy just listening to the staggering story of out-of-control behavior.

Why? Gabor Maté has been so helpful with this question. He suggests rather than why the addiction, why the pain? A simple question that requires the courage to go deep under the surface and examine family-of-origin, social mores, economic conditions, etc that promote escape through addiction. This post will focus on family of origin.

As a kid, I always wondered if I was crazy. I created a make-believe friend who would walk alongside me and I could talk and feel safe as I walked up and down the railroad tracks of the Illinois Central. I once printed fliers warning of the end of the world and tried to give them to people I cared for and loved, fearing they would perish in hell. When my Little league coach was killed in a train/car crash I literally put my ear to the ground and thought I heard his screams in hell because when he died he was a Catholic! I was taught that Catholics weren’t Christian. I ran out of a minor league baseball stadium believing that it was going to blow up. And once I cut a 12-inch gash on the top of my right arm from my wrist to my elbow. I learned to soothe myself each night with masturbation. It was my only constant soothing source.

Later in life, I learned to hide and minimize these earlier childhood experiences by focusing on pleasing others, by being zealous in my Christian faith and by working harder than anyone else I knew. My work addiction and sex addiction flourished to a point of being out of control. Once I worked 120 hours in one week and averaged 80-90 hours per week as a minister “serving” God. Sex addiction became a way for me to medicate the crazy work schedule for which I was complimented for sacrificing for the sake of God’s kingdom.

Depression was never felt because I was too busy and tired to feel it. I used work and sex to be a way of holding back depression. However, like trying to hold a beach ball underwater, inevitably depression sprang forth and debilitated the existence of my life. Paralyzed with depression and unable to function, I had lost 48 pounds in six weeks and was suicidal. Hospitalized I found myself in the proverbial padded cell contemplating how I got there.

I thought about all the crap that my family and I had gone through in the church, and a wave of rage came over me. There were memories of a lot of sexual abuse. I felt the shame that manacled me and all of my siblings. I thought of the complexity of everything I knew about the church and its abuse. I wanted to throw up, but I did not. Rather, I began hitting my Bible with my bare fists. I struck my Bible again and again until my knuckles were bleeding. When I finished, I was exhausted. Not from the physical act of hitting but from tapping into all the rage, hate, and shame that had enveloped my life like a wet blanket for so many years.

Soren Kierkegaard once said, “life is meant to be lived forward but it can only be understood backwards”. Since being hospitalized for major depression, I have launched a lifelong exploration to understand why I suffered such debilitating depression. Somehow I had to make sense of the physical, sexual, emotional, and religious abuse I experienced. I wanted to know why I was an addict. I never signed up to be one! Learning about my family’s dysfunction helped me to convert and integrate unbelievably painful and abusive behaviors, perpetrated to me and from me, to a healing experience that made sense to me. This pursuit imparted wisdom which promoted self-compassion and empathy toward others.

It made sense that I would have a make-believe friend as a young boy. Being the youngest of five boys in a family of nine, I never experienced fitting in or acceptance by my older brothers. Every attempt to impress was thwarted or sabotaged. Any win I ever achieved in sports over an older brother was derided and shamed. If I didn’t want to play I was criticized for being a big baby. I once pitched a perfect game in baseball and was criticized for that! So fantasy became my refuge. Having a make-believe friend who was nice to me made all the sense in the world. Figuring out that I grew up in an evangelical cult helped me understand my over-the-top evangelistic fervor and fear. Think about it. If you were a young kid and sat week after week listening to a preacher tell you horror stories about people who died and went to hell, and that the world would end any day, you would probably do some type of crazy behavior.

Paradoxically, cutting myself felt soothing. It relieved tremendous emotional pain inside. It was a way of telling someone I was in distress, and cleaning myself up was a manageable problem, but the craziness in my life was not. Masturbation became a constant predictable source of relief in a world of chaos when I was a kid.

Listed are a few considerations to unravel your own craziness:

  1. Listen to your feelings — they are the voice of the universe talking to you about your life imbalance. Shame, hate, anger, depression, and resentment are powerful feelings you tend to want to avoid. Rather than run from them, embrace them. They will tell you what you need and your wise mind will suggest how to meet that need if you will but listen!
  2. Look backward for understanding your addiction behavior. You might find the meaning that could save your life. Nothing changes until it is real. Careful examination of your family of origin can help you make sense of your current destructive behavior. Actions and behaviors that seem crazy from one perspective will make sense from another. Understanding will help cultivate adult insight and compassion which creates acceptance and meaningfulness.
  3. Trying to fill the empty hole inside with a cocktail of experience (performance, work, alcohol, drugs, etc) from the outside is like a little kid who can’t get enough sugar. There is never enough! Unmet developmental needs from childhood are wounds that must be scrubbed. When ignored they create a pool of pain that triggers destructive behavior to sedate the emotional pain that exists. Grieving unmet needs from an early age is a way of discharging the suffering that gets locked in childhood. If the wound is not scrubbed and cleaned then the infection of arrogance, wanting what I want when I want it, contaminates and spreads through selfish myopic behavior. Adults give their power to the immature child within to make decisions and run the show. You will need to grow yourself up, take the reins from the small child, and enable your wise-mind adult self to make the decisions and empower you to sit with painful discomfort and resource your healing.

When you look underneath the addictive behavior, it’s never crazy and always makes sense. It is not healthy sense but nonetheless, there is rhyme and reason to what seems crazy-making. Only when you unravel what’s behind your own crazy-making behavior will you be able to answer the question “Why the pain?”

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