Peter was frustrated. For weeks he had been embarrassed by his teacher in front of other students. Most would consider that approach “Socratic” and think nothing more of it. Yet Peter received the instruction quite differently. The subject was school pictures and the embarrassment was non-payment. The lesson was to remember your responsibilities as a student, one of which is to follow instructions. This “deterrent” of public humiliation is designed to effect the target as well as the spectators and frankly it is pretty successful. That approach does little to examine cause and effect, reason and response or any other supportive understanding that might have led to a situation in which a child needs to be humiliated. In the case of Peter, he had irresponsible parents who cared not to supply the money for the pictures that they already possessed and had put into frames and wallets. On a fall morning, just minutes from a new day of chortles and jabs by students and the teachers, Peter decided to be a little more forceful in his request to his mother for picture money. After all he had been taught through parental example that this was an effective approach to getting one’s way. As the conversation between Peter and his mother intensified, their voices subsequently became louder and louder. That high decibel exchange awakened the man of the house who had only been asleep a few minutes having just got home from the night shift. He made his way down the hallway and into the den demanding to know of the commotion. “He wants money and I don’t have any”. “You should not have keep the pictures then!” Peter snapped to his mother. His father, who had a zero tolerance policy for back talking, gnashed his teeth and turned toward his son. In a swift and powerful  move, his father raised his fist and landed it square on Peter’s cheek. It was that quick. Peter plunged backward under buckling legs and collapsed to the floor, his head meeting the corner of the wall as it fell with his body. His father had swung so hard that he lost his balance and fell forward and in synchronicity with Peter. He landed on Peter’s chest in a kneeling fashion and that appeared to my mother as a continuation of the assault. She leaped to her feet threatening to call the police and yelling, “get off!”.

Abuse. There is a raging debate in all circles of thought about it. Enlightenment and The Information Age have organically brought about a conversation regarding abuse that until now could not have occurred. Psychologists have studied abuse and its effect on its victims. Law Enforcement have evolved to address abuse in a proactive, rather than reactionary, way. Primary and Secondary schools have adopted changes in policies that would not have been seriously considered just a few decades ago. I was a child a few decades ago and I was a victim of abuse. I am not alone and the sad reality is that we children in those decades suffered abuse under the guise of discipline or Biblical principle - “spare the rod and spoil the child”. Maybe you are one of them. You might know someone who has such a history. Perhaps you are a recovered abuser yourself. It could be that you want to know more to help you identify your history. Whatever the reason I am glad you are here and I hope you stay until the end.

It is important to mention some key items regarding the information contained herein. The story told here is true with only enough exceptions to maintain anonymity, et al. It will be told in first person. As an appendix to the story there will be opinion offered on some of the elements contained in it. It is opinion only but is supplied from experience and is offered to help you identify your own unique situation and whether abuse was involved and to what extreme. There will be information on advocacy groups, help lines and other useful information should you wish to expand your reach in the area of abuse. Now, open yourself to the story and immerse in a way that can help you relate. We’ll see you on the other side.

My mother was born into a family of reasonable means. Her mother and father were both handsome. Folklore had it that her mother was descended directly from the line of George and Martha Washington, a fact I never considered true. Mom even went so far as to assert that the rocking chair where my grandfather sat with elbows on knees had been in the very home of that presidential family. It would have been a tragedy anyway if that chair had fallen through history that way, from Washington to washout in just a few generations. My mother worked from home as a hairdresser while she raised the children. It was commonplace to have several women in our little kitchen sitting under head dryers that looked like set props from a 60’s sci-fi flick. They flipped through magazines they pretended to read and gossiped about people they pretended to know. The whirring of those head appliances kept the house from being quiet and so the din that bellowed from her part-time profession was integrated into my life courtesy of the tenderest of the five senses. There were more pleasant sounds to come for me but just then and just there it was dryers and gossip. In one of those chairs sat my grandmother on my mother’s side. It was 1974 and she was getting her hair done by my mother. During this gossip session the style appointment never ended. While in the middle of a sentence my grandmother supposedly hanged her head down and died, chin to chest in the chair. My mother mourned that loss annually. She received no consolation from my father because he was incapable of doing it. My father came from a family just up the street and from a long way back These fine folks were generations into the rich earth of the Americas and had practically no connection to the homeland abroad, what ever that may be. My father recalled a woman with my father who thought that grass in the yard was a sign of laziness and so she spent her time in that field of a lawn sweeping and churning dust piles into the air. The porch attached to the house was typical of a Georgian house; it spanned in depth enough to allow a chained swing and ancient rocking chairs that crackled when employed for their purpose. It was also large enough to contain the thousand parts of a motorcycle of some kind and that motorcycle belonged to my father. He had broken his leg in a recent car crash and was passing the time of healing by dismantling and cleaning the bike. My grandfather came onto the porch from the house and began picking up those parts of that motorcycle and tossing them into the yard methodically and deliberately. Since the yard was nothing more than freshly swept red clay the parts of that bike bounced across that landscape collecting particles of dirt and whatever the way a chocolatier rolls nuts onto brownie dough. After several thuds and thumps of machine parts speckled resulted in a speckled lawn my dad took notice and leaped to his good leg and forearmed his father against the front door. I suppose that reaction would be expected from him; the pattern of high temperament and irrational behavior is a subdominant trait running through the veins of our blood and lineage from time immemorial. My father’s face sunk ghostly white and the hazel dinner plates his eyes had become upon realizing his grave mistake lent an odor of fear my grandfather smelled. Quickly lifting and punting his leg toward my father’s knee the old man sent the already broken leg bowing backward like the hind leg of a horse. Lesson learned. 

My parents grew up in an area of Georgia that was near Atlanta but this was the Antebellum “Gone with the Wind” Atlanta not the metro city it is now. Slavery had ended less than 80 years before and every self respecting southerner was still smarting from the ass whooping the carpet baggers had given them during the “War of Northern Aggression” as I heard it called. My father recounted frequently that the north had won the war but did not claim their prize: The slaves, now freed, lived amongst their former captors and the only difference from prewar to post war were the names designate and the physical chains that no longer bound them. The south at that time in American history was suffering enormous growing pains and was struggling to integrate the two peoples in that region of the country. Race riots, race murders and mock trials were slowing progress and great men such as Martin Luther King would rise to the occasion, martyring themselves for the God given right of their people to breathe free air and soak in free daylight. Yet during that commotion much of the south continued as-is with no regard for the political upheaval that was happening in the big cities. It is in one of these tiny places that my mother tragically frequented and in which my father had found his second one and only love. With her Ford Mustang parked outside, my mother sat in the booth of a greasy diner feeding her two young children. She was herself a child barely 17 but had already lived a life that made her look 25 or 30. She was divorced and had two kids in tow and was staying with her mother for a while. Pictures tell us that my mother was quite the looker. She had streak black hair that swirled into a bun, stabbed with a hairspray covered mother of pearl hairpin. Her thick eyeliner was tracing her baby blues and she had a smart look about her face. She was endowed in a way that made her beautifully graceful yet strong and independent as one would see a liberated woman in the predawn of the 1960’s. My father was fresh out of his own failed marriage and was up to no good as usual and while laughing at something irrelevant to our tale he glanced across the formica and chrome soda bar and saw her sitting there. He got up, walked his crooked walk to her and sat down. The conversation was short but intense as he blatantly told her then and there that he was going to marry her. A story like that would otherwise seem ludicrous except for the fact that my father was seeing the world through the prim of undiagnosed Reactive Attachment Disorder and clinging to a stranger was more commonplace than not. A chase ensued and was curtailed by my mother and at that time I no longer existed. 

I wondered at that moment what my father would think of me now, riding a bicycle versus his motorcycle and my wind-smart spandex versus his metal lined leather jacket. Today I was a man he would not have recognized anyway even if we shared a coffee table at a greasy spoon or drank the same beers at a sleazy watering hole. If we are separated physically from one another, time will do the rest, creating differences in people that make them deja vu strangers when they meet again. As I bared down toward the next hundred miles I realized I was chasing an end I had not yet seen. I had seen the finish line the day before but I had not seen it from a finisher’s point of vantage. Likewise my mind and memory had seen my father before but I only knew him as his child, not as his contemporary and I had yet to encounter the opportunity to do so. We seemed distant already when we were proximal to each other so I wondered if I would even recognize him in a crowd if I saw him now. My father, a non-decorated Army Air Force recruit spent six years stationed a mile from his house. Though uneventful and nearly fruitless that stint in the military got him a job at an airline as a mechanic. He used to tell us he would have been a pilot if it had not been for his injuries resulting from the terrible accident during his teen years. As a child seeking a hero I believed it. I had to believe it because there had to be more than what I knew of him. His description through the eyes of this son (should I still be a boy) would go something like this. Tony, not short for Anthony, was the only boy born in a family full of sisters. That fact did not detract at all from his masculinity. His disposition would suggest he couldn’t care less. He was medium height and build, weightier than his father but carried the same scowl on his face. He was adorned with beautiful chestnut brown hair that was just wavy enough and it stayed that way through all the years of gray. He seemed to have a kind smile but they eyes never changed. Glassy-eyed as his mother, the tell-tale traits of his alcoholism included his eyes not to mention the red blotchy skin about his neck and chest that was reflective of a body under poisonous abuse. His sleeves were short no matter the shirt and all the ones that he owned had three completely useless buttons from the collar down. He wore brown pants. He always wore them because they were uniform pants and they stayed on him from morning till night. His work shirt stayed tucked and every other one did not. He would occasionally ask for a hug from us but it had to be administered to him on the couch where he sat; he didn’t even lean forward so that I could get my arms around his neck. He would announce a bear hug and squeeze me until I thought he was serious. I would look at his hands after that and ask him about the many scars on them. I looked past the sunspots as just another feature of his strong hands. To curl your fingers with his was to know the difference between slender tender fingers that held only pencils and those that continually repaired the world upon a shoulder, one hammer or screwdriver at a time. I would trace my fingers through the ancient scars that crossed his veins and listen to him tell the story of their origins as if he were describing a painting by Chagall. The tenor of his voice was gingerly yet tattered and carried the breath of a smokers lungs. He often sat with his hands loosely crossed atop his head and somehow managed to keep them there effortlessly. Socks were for work and bare feet for home as his toes were always hung in the air and acted as a gunsight through which he would watch Johnny Carson on the television. On the work nights when he was tired, he closed his eyes the way a cat would and mumbled “mm-hmm” to what ever we said or asked and that afforded us many late summer nights away from the house. 

When I write of him this way I can concede a smile to him because the contrast to his typical self was relationally pleasant and those few moments are the ones I can remember when I want to forget the rest. Dad was a Jekyll and Hyde. He was mostly the violent maniac and infrequently the intellectual pacifist. Grocery days were a good example of that. It seemed to anger him to have to buy groceries and he believed that overpricing was common and held a great suspicion for anyone selling anything. He assumed the cheat first and acted that way. One night in 1975 he went for groceries. We kids didn’t see him or notice him leave but we knew he had returned. It was a night as black as sackcloth and hot as hades. The rain battered the ground so hard it sounded like a mix between heavy applause and the final round if a prize fight. Humidity added wetness to the drops as they fell and they all seemed pregnant even to their own weight. The lighting flashed frames of a violet daylight and the whip crack of the thunder stayed close. It was just one of those ferocious Georgia rainstorms. From the den my mother heard the station wagon cut engine. She went from a sit to a brisk walk with nothing in between and scurried to the door, summoning my sister to follow. She wanted to be available and ready at the door and her anxiety and cold stare let me know that there was at least one time in the past when she wasn’t. Mother unhooked the spring-loaded screen door and propped it open and outward with her foot, her toes straining from the weight of that strong spring and heavy wood. I tilted my head to see around her and I saw my father, raging against the night, cursing the rain and embracing paper bags which were weakened and soaked by the maelstrom. The rain was so heavy that the bags had entered into such a state after only a few steps from the tailgate of the car to the door. He thew curses into the night air and screamed unintelligible instructions to whomever was at the door; he couldn’t make a face or figure because his eyes were curtained with water and the room was lit only by the night. He charged toward the shadowy figure that was my mother almost juggling the bags, marching his knees into the air with each step, embarrassingly losing a fight with control gravity and weather. In the south, everyone used the same ketchup and a fresh bottle of ketchup was a rare thing in our house. Oftentimes, the farther we got into the month the more watered-down the ketchup got. Well tonight he had the big glass ketchup bottle that was sure to last the whole way until next payday. It seemed like slow motion when the reflection of the moon slid down the side of the rotating bottle, wet and slick as it left his cradling arm and splashed then shattered on the walkway. The bottle bled out rapidly into the torrent of water that was trailing across the step and onto the grass. It was the most sensational death of a condiment I had ever seen. As if by predetermination my father raged at the sky as it shot a streak of daylight across his menacing eyes. All I could think was that we were next. It was immature the way he was unable to segregate events, people and places. 

They couldn’t have held on forever;  time was the enemy because in time, things happen. In time, things can’t be reformed. In time all is forgotten but the memories never leave. They tuck themselves away and add season the tastes of life so that anything is part of them and they are a part of everything. 

In the next room I lay very still looking at the ceiling. I wouldn’t avert my stare and the ceiling would liquify to pitch and become unseeable. I would refocus in a moment to find it still there. I would gingerly cradle my ear on the bedrail attempting to make no noise whatsoever but to articulate the muffled conversation that was leaking from the den and under the door to my room. I was in the top bunk as always. My brother was just below and asleep according to what I could hear of him. Then again, he may have been listening too, as quiet as a field mouse, as quiet as me. When I slept the windows to the outside were on my right. They were those kind of vented windows that cranked open with the twist of a broken lever, thump-ticking with each revolution. Although the dew would have helped, the glass was frosted by design and edged with silver metal. There were two such windows and I was always chilled. I spent many nights obsessed with those glass panes and the shadows they projected by full moonlight. This bedroom as we called it was actually the laundry room. Remember there were five of us plus parents and just the three bedrooms. So on the rare occasion that laundry was being done it was a spectacular event. We had the standard Whirlpool top loader of the era; a steel drum with a centrifuge referred to as an agitator. It would still run with the lid open and so I would watch the water cascade from the gullet of the signature seventies pea-green washer canister down into the basin. I would prop my armpits on the edge of the washer and tip-toe my hands to the waterfall and watch it swirl around my fingers. There were thick hairs of lint fluttering in the torrent and I would pull them off now and then as if to free them from some kind of drowning captivity. Soon the water engulfed the laundry and the agitator started to swing its hips to and fro and the imbalance of the machine animated it on that slanted floor as if it heard a Russian Line Dance. Its feet hopped and tapped as it pulled on its corded leash until the leash was fully extended. When the spinning stopped my mother would come in and shove the proletarian back into place. Laundry nights were not sleep nights. 

It is in that utility room and in that bed where my first memory of dissonance between my parents and me occurred and it resulted from my time in the womb. As the story was told my twin enjoyed sitting on my foot as we teeter-tottered in the uterus, resulting in a slight deformity in my left leg which forced my foot, whether I was sitting standing or walking, to point its toes toward 10 o’clock indefinitely. In an effort to correct the defect I was fitted with a pair of metal shoes that were connected by the inside arch to an unbendable rod. This contraption was designed to straighten my feet to a parallel set and it nearly worked. As I grew I would learn to what extent it did or didn’t work but for now it was nothing more than a confining nuisance. As my mother would later recall, I often got out of bed and staggered myself toward the door that separated our linen castle from the lion’s den. My mother, wishing to remain uninterrupted, would put me back in my bunk and ask me to remain. I did not as any ne’er do well child wouldn’t. Soon I was back to the door and back to bed. I had done this several times I suppose because the solution my mother settled upon was to use two of my father’s neckties to secure each shoe to its nearest bedrail. That sort of confinement did not settle me and so I untied those knots, made my way back to the ground and back to the door. It was at that moment that my mother entreated the spirit of the final solution and used a set of belts to tie my wrists to the posts above my head. While in my figure X confinement I was at the mercy of the shadows cast upon the windows and the forms they made in my dark room and in my morose mind. I looked out through the cold window and spotted what was most certainly a violent monster of the dinosaur variety whose sole purpose was to have me as a dinner guest - as the dinner. Loblolly pine trees, when flourishing, hold their thin fingers of wood at the end of their branches almost cupped as if to harness a few extra raindrops when the time was opportune. Yet at night and in the winter, their foliage missing, the needle-less skeletons that used to be trees became hideous beasts with voracious appetites for young defenseless children. Imagination and fear collected to assure me I had been spotted by one of the beasts and its wind animated branches waved morbid hellos to me. Since fear leads to fear I conjured this menace in my mind over and over and each time it was more ferocious than before. It was coming for me and I was strapped to my dinner plate of a bed by my insolent caregiver whose final decision was to leave me there shivering and utterly vulnerable. Oh I screamed. I screamed for her. I was reprimanded with a quick smack and a stern talking to. The memory in my mind of that event stops there and fades to black.     

    From the earliest age I can remember, stress, anxiety and fear were part of me and part of who I was.  God was angry with me and punished me. At least that is how it seemed. I came from a sizable family. We were comprised of a mother and father, four brothers and a sister. We stretched in age from 5 to 14, my stepbrother being the oldest followed by my stepsister, my brother my twin and me. I didn’t know my step siblings were “step” anything. Nobody talked about that and my world only had a momma and a daddy. So these were my siblings and that was all. Our house was modest and typical for a ranch style dwelling with three bedrooms. It was constructed in the 1950’s as best I can tell. The floors were wooden and popped and could guide a marble to dead center no matter where in the room it was released. The carpets were worn and the walls were papered in one style or another depending on in which room you were situated. The den as we called it would have been part of the kitchen except for the molded arch that separated the two rooms. In that den the construct of what I was to be began to take shape. Each of their words, each action and each thought petrified as it happened. Under the velvet black and silver walls my mother and father sat impudently on the couch and pushed at the edges of their world as if in a shrinking balloon. They bickered and fussed about how to keep the balloon from suffocating them and looked in every direction for a fall guy. They barked at each other.  The tree monster never ate me. 

That didn’t mean there weren’t monsters around. It got me thinking about what exactly is the makeup of a monster? Monsters are not born they are made and monster is made by other monsters. It is like placing a trap down and catching a mouse. Sure you got the mouse but is that the only one? So you put two traps out and wait. If in the morning both are decorated by freshly deceased mice then you have got yourself a problem. I had a problem such as that only I was a player in both roles. Sometimes I laid the trap to see what I could catch and other times I was caught with no escape. The earliest monster I remember was my grandfather. I can best picture him sitting in a chair with his elbows on his knees and his v-neck t-shirt hanging on his lanky torso as if it would rather have been somewhere else. Yet it too was trapped and so it played its part. The man that sired my father was of average height and a wiry build. His forearms were impressive and from the height of a five-year old looking up his arm was like seeing the broad face of Stone Mountain and his tattoo presented its message through his hairy arm with precise black deliberate clarity. The corded rope hugging the anchor had its message; he was in the Navy and his arm said so. The Navy for him however was not the one seen in films or talked about in war books. His Navy was comprised of a steel and cement square housed inside a practically unsinkable vessel during the build up toward what would be the greatest war the world had ever known. Giant stoves and towering pots of steel were his scenery. That would have been the 1930’s and he was in his prime. He was one of those Cracker Jacks in the kitchen and so he made chow for thousands of shipmates every day. When he left the Navy he picked up with a spirited Irish woman whom he would marry and that event is what eventually led to me. 

I was in that den area next to the kitchen and it was Christmas time. My ornery grandpa was watching us play. As my brothers and I became rambunctious as children occasionally will he would roll a news paper into a baton and swat it toward us growling, “Im gonna get on the warpath!”. It was a clear reference to Native Americans who considered their war parties a time of great honor and dignity; a time when the men moved out toward the serious threat from an enemy tribe, taking the warpath to victory. This little man carelessly transformed the meaning of that word into a threat by an unhappy man in an unhappy place to unhappy children. After swiping his paper at us he leaned back and slipped his finger into the handle of his coffee mug. The thick ceramic was tinted tan from the years of coffee and he sipped from it attentively. No one was allowed to use that much but him. The joke was on him though. That mug outlasted him by a few decades and I used it plenty of times. It must have been a night where my mother was not cooking chicken because when he smelled chicken of any kind he would turn and leave straight away. I think it was the thousands of chickens he cut up to feed the seafaring mob. Tonight was a dinner of some kind and he had been invited. He carried on conversation with my parents, sometimes wielding a crooked smile that to me looked more sinister than a smile would otherwise appear on any other man. A lucky strike cigarette, sans filter, would inevitably be stuck to his dry lips as he spoke and he squinted his right eye from the resulting plume of smoke they way Pop-eye did with a pipe. Now I was a very young boy when I remember him there but he seemed more a stranger than a paternal figure. He didn’t relate to the kids very well and that same disposition moved thematically through all his relationships which typically ended up broken. So how was he such a terrible man? What made him a monster was not his size nor his appearance. What he was capable of doing was beyond imagining based on his appearance alone. Once when my father and he were working on a car they crisscrossed a pair of fence posts through a chain and carried an engine across the back yard and onto the driveway. They counted a cadence like they had done that a hundred times. One, two, drop. Lift, one, two, drop. The weight of the engine made it movable only by bursts of their strength which lasted for two steps at a time. Still, a 70 year old man carrying an engine is pretty impressive. We joked about whether or not he was really 70 because he was born on February 29 of a leap year. Theoretically he was in his teens. That small fact helped me to find a record of him during a family tree activity I did many years later and without it I might not have known any family that preceded him.  His wife, my grandmother, knew the wrathful capability of “Pop” as we called him. He apparently beat her regularly and both of them spent much of their marriage looking through the bottoms of liquor bottles and seething with the hate of Baoul toward each other.  Any physical connection they had outside of abuse was probably most akin to rape and submission by fear. He would carry that trait outside of wedlock and for years after . She was not at our house when he was and her visits to us happened at other times without him. Attributes distinctive of furtive alcoholics dripped from each of them in motion and appearance. Glassy red eyes peering through clouds of cigarette smoke looking only for something or someone to condemn made them feel human; they could bring others down with them and thus not feel so alone together. Her hands always held cigarettes and she was already hunching over. She wore a green peak lapel polyester patch pocket coat that smelled like a wet ashtray. She shuffled when she walked and her dentures whistled when she talked. Her nostrils were almost always flared as a compliments  to her coarse words. It is from these loins that my father was born. 

On the highway leading out of town there was a property resembling a daycare combined with a small ranch. This was the counseling center I had sought from a directory and that I chose for proximity alone. This decision was a culmination of several others that had been made over the last few years and which, as a result of those choices, compelled the visit. I turned into the driveway and passed a wooden sign, stenciled by hand and written to the child as an audience. As I crested the rise the playground confirmed what the sign suggested; this counseling center catered to children. I was embarrassed and humiliated at the thought of a grown man going to a child-care counselor. Yet as I slowed to turn and park I realized that I was practically a child walking in there, just as the children were. The grounds were designed for serenity and relaxation. The playground and picnicking areas had tributaries that winded through the rich forest. The office was a small log home with several offices and few windows. Just inside the doorway was a secure check-in check-out area. Just past there was a waiting area that resembled a comfortable living room complete with fish tanks coloring books footrests. The consistency of the at-home feeling was disrupted by the several types of literature relating to mental health, addiction, abuse, etc etc etc.
I turned off the engine and reviewed the pre-work documentation I completed. I had this form sent to me from the center and I worked on it in at the desk in my apartment. The forms were typical; name, age, race, sex et al. Sections following presented questions about anxiety, depression and general status concerns. It was all drill and drone until I got to the one question that I had never been asked. It surprised me that it hadn’t. “Were you a victim of child abuse?” That question freight-trained me right in the solar plexus. I physically dropped from the chair to my knees and the papers clung to my hands as I fell away from the desk and they scattered on the floor. My pencil skipped out of my hand and rolled away on the hardwood under my knees. My chin was in my chest and I was slumped forward as if in a vesper, squeezing my eyes together in an attempt to block what my memory was working to conjure . It was to no avail as memories summoned from deep in my psyche moved toward me in thick and full dimension and vivid color. My mind leaped backward to the time I was too short for a kitchen counter and surged forward through time, whipping blended colors past my eyes and then stopping at this time or that time, that year or the other. I felt as if I was pushed forward from the center of my back by a strong force. My legs and arms fell numb and my head whiplashed backward at each thrust toward a memory. I saw the memories happening in real time but there was no sound. There was a blur to every image as if grease were smeared on my eyes. Just as I began to engage in the memory I was whipped backward into a mist that occluded the memory, rotated around and thrust forward again to a new scene. I relived each one splendidly and painfully; I was seeing them as they were for the first time. They were scenes of abuse. They were answering the question my words and thoughts could not muster; “where you a victim of child abuse?”
I opened the car door, tucked my papers under my arm and stepped out. I felt dizzy and anxious as if it were the first day of grade school. My heart double thumped and then plummeted to no beats at all. I realized I was holding my breath. I sucked in some fresh air and steadied myself. I was taking the first step toward the rest of my life; a step toward recovery or self destruction. I opened the door and stepped inside. The door ushered me in courtesy of a swift fall breeze that sent leaves and wind across the threshold. “Mr. H___”, the receptionist said, “your counselor could not make it today and would like to reschedule”. I was devastated. My social anxiety employed itself and handed me off to the door. I went back to my car, opened the door and fell into the seat. My chin revisited my chest and I wept. I decided to call inside. I phoned the receptionist and told her that I had waited twenty years to summon the strength to come here and be weak. I entreated her find me a counselor tonight. After ten minutes, a counselor drove to the parking area and turned in. My first inclination was to shrink and duck under the dash so that she would not see me but she did not look anyway. She didn’t know I was there. My cell phone rang, I answered and traced my steps back inside. The buzzer rang and I was ushered into the waiting room next to the pleasantly swimming fish in their delightful aquarium. I had heard of “fish therapy” to help with stress etcetera so I was not surprised to see it here. The couch where I say was first-run 1980’s fleur de lys in predominantly daisy yellow. I natural colored wicker table was centered in front of the couch and it contained reading material but not magazines for newspapers. Pamphlets of a few varieties were fanned on the desk and covered several topics relating to the psychiatric well being of children and teens. The counselor who was to see me came out and asked for my patience while she started a pot of tea. I thought to myself, sure. What is a few more minutes after a lifetime? Enjoy yourself. Have your tea. Witch. She walked from the hairy shag carpet that stretched wall to wall to the square of vinyl that was the kitchen. I watched her make her tea and doing my own behavior study. I am such a smart ass. She disappeared around a molded archway to the other side. I turned my attention back to the room. It was cozy and intimate though not very small. The brown paneled walls had the obligatory quotes of inspiration and other fluff such as pictures of waterfalls and photos of bunches of balloons with no handler. I settled myself enough to hear a whirring which I traced to its origin in the corner. Apparently offices such as this employ these little sound machines that emit a white noise. The machines are calming I guess but I think their purpose is to mask the horrific noises and screams crazy people make in therapy. That thought was interrupted by the good therapist who asked that I follow her into her office. I fully expected a chaise or couch but there were only chairs. Two red chairs sat opposed to the Mrs. L___’s desk. They were identical except for the pillows which were not symmetrical to one another in their positions on the chairs. I sat down and looked at her. She asked questions and I answered them. She asked first about what it was that triggered my visit. I thought before speaking. I was uncomfortable. It is typical of me to be the professional behaviorist in a crowd. I am the one who correctly identifies and predicts the behavior of others. This skill came to me over the years of having to attempt what behavior my father the devil would display next. I second guessed all my first guesses such as where to sit or what to say. Should I cross my legs? Am I fidgeting? What tells does she already have that shows my hand? The reality was she thought nothing of that nonsense. The counselor reviewed my papers. She pre-tripped herself, checking for pertinent answers in my pre-quiz. This is what I told her.
The switch in life from reactionary to controlled action begins with understanding the very first behavior or thought and ends with the millionth one. Imagine if you will a control board in front of you and there is a switch on the dashboard. It is toggled down to “reactionary” and all that must be done is to switch to “controlled action”. I have seen this switch on the dashboard my entire life. I have seen my future self through the prism of my father’s behaviors and felt doomed. I have wallowed in the “what is” while not even understanding the “what could be”. I told her that if I could not get a hold on this “ailment” now and at this time I was not interested in living that life any more. It was this moment. This was my chance for change. As I began to share information with her I was in a moment of self-realization; no one knew what was inside of me because I kept it there. Not only did no one deserve to know such intimate things about me but it would be a waste of time to lay my mind on someone else. As I heard the words come from me and spoken by me for the first time I began to whimper like a child. I felt vulnerable and helpless. I was in the room with someone I did not know. I was saying and feeling things I had never felt. Yet since I had reached a point of no return I employed the skill I had as a sufferer of Reactive Attachment Disorder and told her almost everything. The hour passed quickly and she asked if I was okay to drive home. I said that I was and when I got home grabbed some beers and drank myself to sleep.
Our next appointment was a week later. We talked more - that is, I talked more - and at the end of the hour she had reached her conclusion. She suspected that I had a condition called “dysthymia”. Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “a persistent state of mild depression”. Indeed, to speak lightly. The diagnosis was was a relief. I had spent my entire life calling “depression” a pile of total bullshit. Fake sickness like that was a sign of weakness and an out for people to avoid culpability for their idiocy or their behavior. Yet now it was apropos and a relief. Labels had been part of me because everyone used labels either to identify me or make reasons for themselves about me. So I asked her what was to be done. She said of course that I should have talk therapy. That is when talking about your problems makes you feel better. More importantly it is about vocalizing things to better understand them, identify them and treat them. This is where I yell rat. If I could talk through and identify concerns and fix them I would not have dysthymia. I have more than a few examples in my life when this has failed.
In 1979 I was in fifth grade at an elementary school in our fairly nice middle class neighborhood. The teacher whose name I cannot remember left for some reason and the class had a substitute teacher from nearly the beginning of the school year. Our new teacher was named Mrs. M___r and to me she seemed a hundred years old. In actuality she was probably in her middle forties. She wore her hair in a bun and the deep black of it was accented with streaks of gray that started at her temples and swirled all the way into the bun. She layered foundation and pressed powder makeup on her face along with an over applied rouge. The foundation color was lighter than her neck and it was easy to notice. Her typical outfit on a school day was a skirt suit of some color with a camisole underneath and black flats for shoes. The day I remember finds her in a crepe suit with a white shirt. She was a polite woman, demure even. To say I was a behavior problem for her would be an accurate statement. I interrupted her teaching, rambled incoherent smart remarks, made jokes at her expense for the laughter of the children and disrespected her greatly. It had gotten to the point of cruel and even the other kids knew. They had stopped laughing at the crudeness days ago. It was not her fault. Since no one deserves that treatment neither did she. So why did I do it? Earlier I mentioned Reactive Attachment Disorder. This is a psychological condition that is developed through experience with abandonment and distrust. A sufferer of this ailment with display distrust of practically anyone, indifference even to loved ones or utter and complete instantaneous relationships with strangers or new people in his or her life. “Irrational” closeness to unknown people is a classical symptom of this. As one who has this disease I can describe it this way. Since the ones I trust the most cannot be trusted there is no harm in expecting the same distrust in anyone. With no concern about rejection because it will happen a relationship can become strong nearly immediately. When the recipient of this relationship “heaviness” moves to an appropriate emotional or physical distance it is received as rejection and thus expected. In the case of our Mrs. M___r, she was the sad sack that was dumped into my world to replace the teacher to whom I had become attached and who had now abandoned me. I focused my hurt and rage at the current placeholder we had to call a teacher and she unduly suffered the little menace that was me. I can still picture in my mind her soft voice and her moist sad hazel eyes the day she confronted me. She told me to stay after school. I presume it was arranged that I miss the bus. Perhaps it was a day when I rode my bicycle through the woods to get to class. Regardless of the reason, I had to wait out a school day to hear what ever it was that Mrs. M____r was going to say. The time had finally come as the last bell rang and my classmates shuffle-stepped out the door in one anxious group excited about school being done for the day. I could not revel in such simple joy now. I was to be disciplined. She was clever and new that a sit and talk would prove fruitless as it would be too intimidating for me and possibly for her as well. Our task together was to move the desks in the room to the corners and sweep up the floor of dirt, dust and debris. We took to that chore almost immediately and outside of general instructions on how to sweep the area she said nothing for several minutes. A dust cloud had been swirled up by us and our brooms swept us toward one another before I could recognize that it had happened. “Russ”, she said as she sidearmed the broom flagpole style with a slight lean - and this is I was ready for; the beat down - “why do you treat me like you do?”. To a bystander her question would have sounded pathetic. Yet to me it was pitiful. She pitied me. She knew at least that I was damaged goods and he unsuccessfully held back tears told me so.