Hollywood Fairytales

Last week there was a movie on TV. I don’t know the name of it and I could bother to find out except I don’t really care however it was apparently the story of the wife of the founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement who also happened to be the founder of the Al-Anon movement which as many of us know is the support group for the ‘victims’ of the alcoholic. Perhaps victims is the wrong word, although I suspect many of those victims would agree with me, however I cannot come up with a better word to describe it.

Anyway, I digress. Through the years I have never been one to watch movies about alcoholics, read books about alcoholics, go to seminars about alcoholics, etc. I was well-versed in the subject matter and I didn’t care to re-hash any of it. I had put it behind me, didn’t need to remind myself.

So they tell me that’s denial. Hmm. Well maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, either way I felt no need, I had no desire to walk that road again even if it was only in memories and theories and statistics born of studies. I was done with it.

And they tell me that’s denial. So be it.

This time I decided to watch the movie. Stop the denial, face it head-on, make myself watch the movie and so I did.

I managed to get about fifteen minutes of watching time out of what was I assume a two hour running time. It wasn’t because it brought back painful memories that I didn’t want to bother with it was because what I saw in that fifteen minutes of viewing time had no relation to my experience and certainly while I cannot know for sure my educated guess is that it had no relation to the experience of the movie’s main subject, the founder of the Al-Anon movement.

Here is what I saw in those fifteen minutes: a woman, dressed neatly in her expensive clothing sitting prim and proper in a chair quietly weeping with her face in her hands (as if nobody can see that) over the pain of it all, never losing her self-control, she was the brave and stoic victim of her husband’s alcoholism, accepting quietly and in a dignified manner the hand which God had dealt her. That’s what ladies do right? Accept the flaws of their man stoically. Now I will say that at one point her father did lose control a little and gave Mr. Alcoholic a good tongue-lashing when our heroine was lying stoically in her hospital bed after (I think) losing a baby, or maybe discovering she was pregnant or whatever it was. That was irrelevant. What was relevant is that gosh-darn, good tongue-lashing her father gave his drunk son-in-law. A good tongue-lashing albeit well controlled and diplomatic.

I have no basis for comparison for that picture because I can emphatically say that was not my experience. That was Hollywood’s presentation of what it is like to live in a home with substance abuse. Neat and tidy, everyone has on their make-up, nobody loses control, there is no yelling or screaming, it’s all so… presentable.

So I got to wondering what it would be like if somebody made a movie that depicted what it’s REALLY like to live in a home where there is a substance abuser. First of all the director would have to have first-hand experience, there is no other way. You cannot depict accurately the dysfunction, and when I say dysfunction I mean out and out CRAZINESS of an alcoholic home without having done it yourself. There is simply no other way. Then, in order to find actors to play the parts you would have to scour the country for Al-Anon meetings attended by trained actors because you simply cannot play the part accurately if you haven’t been there yourself. I would suggest excluding any actor that is classically trained in Shakespeare because that’s just too damned civilized for something like this.

Ok we have our director, we have our actors now it’s time for the screenplay and again and of course the screenwriter must him/herself have come from, well need I say it?

So what’s the screenplay look like? This was a tough one but I don’t think there’s any real, organized story-line, in other words we’re not moving towards any denouement. There are no heroes only people depicted as f**g NUTS and there is quite possibly no happy ending, on the contrary although the potential for an ugly and tragic Hollywood ending is great. I think the movie would be nothing but a string of scenes with people yelling and screaming, things being throw, fights being had, various sorts of abuses being perpetrated, you know what I’m talking about, that real and raw fear and anger and anguish that actual human beings exhibit in times of high stress. People would get hurt in the making of this movie, cameras would be broken, scenery would be destroyed, insurance rates would be exorbitant. You know what I’m talking about, the kind of behavior that the censors would never allow on TV. The kind of behavior that makes you cringe when you see it and causes you deep shame when you think about how you engaged in it.

There would be no Academy Award nominations for this film because we like our Oscars to go actors who can reach deep within themselves and pull out understated and poignant performances but there is nothing understated and poignant about this.  It is ugly and violent and destructive in the truest sense of those words and we seldom if ever hand out awards for ugliness and violence and destruction.

And then I thought nah, nobody would ever pay to see something like that. I know I wouldn’t.

The Unsayable

Why is anything unsayable?

Because of the secrets we keep, that’s why.

We learn right from the get-go to keep secrets. Secret keeping is pervasive among human beings. It is pervasive in our largest institutions - think governments and (need I mention) the Catholic Church. Secrets are pervasive in our work environments, think high-profile, long-term employees leaving the company. We’ve all seen this happen. Never thought he’d leave wow I wonder what’s going on. He sneaks out the door one day, an email is sent out from the high-ups telling us that he’s left and using some stock language to thank him for his years of service and how much we have enjoyed working with him and then he’s gone, never to be heard from again. And the rest of us employees who apparently do not warrant an honest explanation are left to speculate and rumors are left to fly and people are left with an un-easy feeling about their own job security. Secrets.

Secrets are pervasive in our homes. As children we learn from a very young age that we aren’t privy to the secrets our parents keep but we know they are there. Our parents keep their secrets, sometimes between themselves and away from the kids and sometimes they keep them from each other and (worse yet) secrets are sometimes kept between one parent and a child and away from the other parent. When I was growing up my house was constant secrets. My mother has always been a staunch keeper of secrets. Still is.

It is through this phenomenon of secret keeping that so much of our personal experience becomes unsayable.

Unsayable in that we have learned to keep it wordless. Unsayable in that the effect of learned secret keeping causes us to detached internally, psychically from the things that need saying and therefore we lose the connection to those things that need saying simply because we have gotten the message from every direction and however subtly that we are to keep our secrets.

I don’t get it.

I've Got Nuthin

Funny thing about blogs, they don’t really lend themselves to your blogging amigos just dropping by to say hello. Generally comments from those that are good enough to bother to read your thoughts are spurred only by a new post. I think that blogs should have a ‘just stopped by to say hey and wondering why we haven’t heard from you lately’ section.

I have often wanted to say something similar to bloggers with whom I’ve become somewhat familiar when I notice they sort of disappear after having built a reputation as regular posters but haven’t quite figured out what’s the politically correct way to do so without being invited by a new post.

It is one of those bits of phenomena that is always a reminder to me of how utterly impersonal is the internet. People write so beautifully and poignantly about some of the most personal aspects of their lives and I follow and I comment and I frequently recognize similarities to my own personal experiences but in the end I don’t know any of these undoubtedly excellent people. Strange.

I am oftentimes saddened by that aspect of e-connection with people because certainly in some of the blogs I follow I recognize people I would most definitely like to meet and talk with. Unfortunately that is unlikely to ever happen. The internet can bring people so close in proximity by virtue of disclosure of shared experience and yet we are all so far away in terms of geography, in that nobody knows what anyone looks like, in that mostly we don’t know of families and friends and pets and home decorating styles and so on. In the end we all have the sense to guard ourselves from too much internet exposure because, well there are predators out there right and ultimately we’re not entirely sure we want anyone to know it’s us (or maybe that’s just my hang-up).

I have run into a bumpy road recently and I’ve been somewhat caught off guard by it. It’s one of those things that kind of slaps you in the face – actually it was more like somebody walked up to me and gently removed the bag over my head and the blindfold over my eyes but not without first asking for my permission to do so (shout-out to my therapist here)  - and forces you to re-examine every bit of image you ever had about yourself. Freaking therapy man. It’s like a car wreck sometimes. You drive by, you know it’s ugly, you don’t want to look but you just can’t help yourself. Afterward you might not necessarily be sorry you looked but it sure takes awhile to wrap your mind around what you saw.

And I have to admit that I’m left a bit befuddled and unable to write much lately… and I was having so damn much fun just throwing down on paper any old thing that came into my mind. And now bupkus, nothing.  Go figure.

The Evolution of a Tough Exterior

Back in the day racing bikes, and by ‘bikes’ I mean bicycles, were made of steel. Shock-repellent, built to withstand the elements, the rocks that were inevitably to strike, the falls, the crashes and collisions. Steel is strong, rigid and unbending. Built to take a blow.

But steel is heavy and hard to maneuver. Due to its weight it takes effort to move it. It will take a lickin and keep on tickin but at the cost of a lot of expended energy to move it.

Subsequent designs brought to us aluminum. Much lighter and more maneuverable, still a bit rigid but definitely getting better. Certainly it will not take a blow like steel but it is getting lighter. Perhaps a period of sacrificing a bit of 'strength' as a trade for offloading some of the weight and therefore requiring less energy to drag it up those hills.

With the advent of carbon fiber the construction really starts to change, little by little. The concept of what is strong, what is tough begins to evolve. We are moving from heavy and rigid construction designed to repel that which hits it (imagine if you will bullets bouncing off Superman’s chest) to construction that is built to absorb the blows and protect the posterior area of the rider (think crumple zones in cars).

Carbon Fiber and Titanium. Light and maneuverable. Shock absorbing rather than shock repelling. Built to absorb the blows and protect the rider. Very light so it requires much less energy to operate.

A new, different and more gentle concept of what it means to be tough.

The Glue that Binds the Family Together

I need to know, I need to understand how it is that this phenomenon exists that tells us that it is acceptable to need help, to be hospitalized for physical illness but it is shameful, unacceptable, weak to need help, to be hospitalized for mental and emotional illness.

We readily accept that we cannot cure by sheer force of our will a broken bone, diabetes, cancer, and so we seek out medical help, we talk to our friends to get referrals to doctors, we do our research, we involve our families, at least we have no problem telling them. When we walk into the hospital to have our broken bone x-rayed and set we walk in with our head held high, we are not embarrassed, we accept, hell we don’t give it a moments thought that we cannot fix this ourselves and that we need medical intervention or it’s not going to get better. Broke my arm, go to the doctor and get it fixed.

I know, I know, I am asking that age-old question. And yet this strain of thought persists. We don’t readily admit it. If a friend tells us of their own mental anguish we don’t think twice about instructing them to get help. But when we’re feeling our own mental and emotional anguish, when it is our child, our spouse who is dealing with depression, with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, substance abuse then somehow it becomes shameful. We cannot accept this version of ourselves or this version of our child, a person who is attached to us, who is an extension of ourselves, a version of a person who cannot ‘handle’ life, who is somehow not ‘strong’ enough to tackle what life throws at them.

And so when we walk into that psychiatric and substance abuse facility it is under cover of darkness, under a cloud of shame. We do not walk in with our posture ramrod straight and our head held high but we shuffle in quietly, not wanting anyone to know. Nobody calls all their friends and family prior to entering a 30 day rehab stint to tell them that they’re going into rehab and “hey I’ll see you in month, please come visit me if you can” and when we get out our friends and family are not lining up eager to ask us about the experience. “So… tell me all about it, who’d you meet, how was the food, any eligible men, women there?”.

*****

I come from a family where substance abuse has tunneled its way into the very deepest core, it has become one of the threads, that connects, that defines this family and I’m not just talking about my immediate family which is to say my husband and son and my brothers and sisters. My father had a terrible problem with alcohol, his father had a terrible problem with alcohol, some of his brothers had a problem with alcohol, some of his sisters married alcoholics, some of my cousins on my father’s side are alcoholics and I know that at one time or another in their lives a couple of my brothers had a problem with addiction and one of my sisters had a long relationship with a man who had an alcohol problem. Alcoholism has become the glue that sticks to, that binds, that joins all branches of this family together and it keeps attaching itself to members generation after generation after generation.

Substance dependency has attached itself to my son.

There is no doubt in my mind that the glue has found its way onto him through me. I cannot speak to genes, this may or may not be true although I will say that I have found nothing, no piece of literature that convinces me that this so-called ‘alcoholic’ gene is a scientific fact. It is a theory. I only know that somewhere along the line I rubbed up against him and left traces of the glue on his skin. But it isn’t really like that.

Somewhere along the line my psyche rubbed against his psyche and left traces of the glue in his mind, in his soul. The mental and emotional ‘stuff’ that was injected into me as the result of my having an alcoholic parent rubbed up against him, was transferred to his mental and emotional control center by his simply being with me, by simply living in, being raised in an environment by a person who was raised in a house with an alcoholic.

It is not necessary for the X- factor (that’s me) to be an alcoholic themselves to pass the glue on. The X-factor merely has to have had the experience and not bothered to get the help they needed before having their own children and passing on, however unwittingly, the glue.

I never got the help I needed because I was ashamed and I would not accept that first of all I could have an emotional problem. The shame ran deep in my house growing up as it does in so many homes where substance abuse has taken over. I would not accept that I needed help, although frankly if I had managed to figure it out years ago I would have had to figure it out all on my own because again, denial runs deep and strong in these homes. But slowly through the years it became somewhat apparent even to me that it might be just the tiniest bit possible that I was suffering the effects of living with an alcoholic. But I could fix it myself. Through sheer will-power I believed that I could fix it myself, or rather through sheer force of will I believed that I could control my oftentimes volatile behavior and I did, for a number of years I pulled it together, got it under control and got to thinking that I was ok.

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. What is controlled through sheer force of will on one side of the room will manage to find its way out through the cracks in some other wall in that same room. If it throws itself against the wall on the left side of the room and cannot penetrate it figures this out immediately and simply goes to the wall on the right side of the room. No big deal. Can’t get out this door? I’ll try that door.

Problem is and unbeknownst to me at the time my son who was in his formative years of physical, intellectual and emotional maturity was caught up in all the wall-banging and he was getting thrown around the room with me, by watching and hearing and feeling what was emanating from me.

The sins of the father (and oftentimes the mother).

Don’t let anybody ever tell you it’s a gene. It is NOT just a gene.

He is ashamed of himself. Ashamed that he needs help, ashamed that rehab is probably on his very imminent horizon, ashamed that he cannot, through sheer force of his own will beat this addiction. And I cannot convince him that it is not he who should be ashamed but all of us who came before who refused to look, who refused to acknowledge, who continue to willfully and wantonly refuse to look this demon of our family in the eye and say “Enough! It ends here.” There is no shame to be felt in finally deciding to exercise by sheer force of our own will the choice to exorcise the demon that has to this point been welcome in our home.

I Don't Want To Be Perfect

This notion of perfection, I cannot handle it, I can’t do it. Many organized religious doctrines indicate that our life is, or at least ‘should be’ a striving for the perfection of God, to be ‘like God’, to become ‘like God’. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what it means and so I would be, will be striving for something that is out of my reach. Attempting to model myself after some ideal of which I haven’t even the slightest hint of a definition. Any concept of perfection that I can devise on my own can only be flawed because I’ve never seen perfection and I am not perfect. I know the word ‘perfection’ but I’ve never actually seen perfection.  Have you?


We acquire this thing called ‘wisdom’ as we move through life, grow older, deal with the ups and downs, gain perspective, let go of what we cannot, strive to pay attention only to that which we can and I wonder in all of this striving, this hanging on and letting go, I wonder if I really need this thing that appears to be somebody else’s idea of ‘wisdom’. Sometimes I think the acquisition of wisdom is just one more intellectual feather in our intellectual cap by which we measure our spiritual progress.

Ah yes, I am gaining wisdom she thinks to herself and therefore I am getting closer to perfection.

What is that line again? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!

If I am not careful I could really start to believe all those people when they tell me that I possess this ‘wisdom’ thing. It happens and it makes me wince a little, that momentary jab in the pit of my stomach that is discomfort. That feeling tells me "don't fall for this!"  If I attain to, if my desire is for our general concept of wisdom I might be inclined to start thinking that I’m a hell of a lot wiser than I really am and the effect of that will be (trust me on this) a constricting of my sphere of perception. I will stop looking and listening for others and start thinking that yeah, I’ve got it pretty well figured out.

When I start thinking I have it figured out I stop listening for what others hear, I stop feeling what others feel, I stop paying attention, I close my mind and my body to the experience of others and in doing this I stop allowing new experience for myself, when I do this I restrict my own opportunity for the endless possibilities of experience to be had.  I close down rather than open up.  I slip out of 52" high-definition, widescreen color and into 12" low-definition small screen,  black and white.

When, as regular old and flawed people, our minds meet over a shared feeling, when our hearts connect for that instant in mutual acknowledgement of shared experience, shared feeling, whether it be in joy or pain, when we truly ‘know’ the other in this way then we are truly and definitively the image of God. I do not see where ‘perfection’ or intellectual ‘wisdom’ has any part in this.

The Mind is a Terrible, TERRIBLE Thing to Waste... So Don't

What is the purpose of having a mind that has the power to generate thoughts, that is driven to create new ideas if we’re not then going to put those ideas out there for discussion? Consider all the possible thoughts of all of the possible people out there and imagine (if you’re willing) all the good stuff that could come of it if we were all willing to put our thoughts out there.


If we intend only to be drones blindly following the opinions of others or machines like computers who can do nothing but take in information, occasionally regurgitating that information in some other bland and lifeless format then why bother to expend the energy to think at all?

Yes, I know there will be people who disagree, who will look at you funny, call you crazy, even send hurtful insults your way. I’ve been there and I’m still here.

We don’t want to be different, we want to conform… but do we really want to conform?  How many of us harbor a secret wish that we had the courage to speak our minds, to stand by the strength of our convictions, to unleash the creative juices that flow.  We are afraid to stand out, afraid to disagree, afraid to appear insolent or argumentative, afraid that our ideas will not be well received, afraid, afraid, afraid.

Afraid of what? That somebody won’t agree with us?

I do think that one of many definitions of courage involves a willingness to push past that fear of the consequences of self-expression and do it anyway. There will be those who will chastise you for it, strongly at times but my guess is that there will be many, many more who will secretly envy and respect you for it.

And still we don’t. Still we are afraid.

(she says as she anonymously posts to her blog).

Hey, just because I think it doesn’t mean I’m ready to actually do it yet.

Props: Thanks to Little M for the inspiration for this post.