Vincent

¡Hola! Everybody...
Caution: you may not want to read the following story. Seriously.

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-=[ Letting Go of Guilt ]=-

I have written about guilt before. In a way, I believe guilt (along with ignorance) should be considered one of the deadly sins because it’s responsible for so much suffering.

I usually make a big stink about my birthday -- celebrating it and letting as many people as I can know about it, but it wasn’t always that way. Many years ago, my stepfather, Vincent, a man I loved and saw as a surrogate father, committed suicide in the early morning hours of my birthday. He put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Just like that...

I’m asleep in a drunken stupor. I’m vaguely aware of someone trying to shake me awake. I think it’s Vincent, but I’m not even sure if it’s him or a dream. Annoyed I shrug him away and tell him to leave me alone, and I crawl back under his car. He tells me he really needs to talk to me and I tell him, or the dream, that it can wait. To leave me the fuck alone.

It was the day before my birthday and we were living in Houston. It was Friday and my stepfather had picked me up from work and I asked him to stop by the liquor store to stock up for our usual Friday family get-togethers. In retrospect Vincent seemed a little different that day, more pensive, and we spoke on the way home. He told me a lot of things: how he was feeling pressure to maintain the quality of life; he spoke of disappointments -- he spoke about a lot things.

I was surprised because Vincent was the type of man who never complained. He was cut from old school: never let them know how you feel. He was a rock. He was a worker. Vincent was made of the stuff that made this country. He got up in the morning worked very hard, and he provided. That’s what he was taught a man was supposed to do. But he would never really talk about what was going on in his mind. He was a stoic in that sense. He did what he had to do without complaint.

On the way home that day we talked and we explored how maybe we can do things differently. I was working and I could help him financially (he wouldn’t accept money from me) and that he should let my mother know about the financial problems and stop trying to put up a façade that everything was fine.

When we got home that day, there was no one there -- everyone had left to go fishing. My mother’s an avid fisher and it wasn’t unusual for her to round everyone up and go crabbing or fishing. At the time, my sister and brother, as well as myself, were all staying in the house. My sister, had a live-in lover, as did my younger brother. Actually, my sister had only recently moved out, but she was there all the time. My other sister, lived nearby and was always around. We were a tight-knit extended family that spent a lot of time together.

That day, when I got home and went to wash up, I found a bloody pair of panties that had been left in the wash basin by my brother’s live-in girlfriend, whom I couldn’t stand. I showed this to my stepfather, who was outraged and it just fueled the whole conversation about letting people know there things were going to change, blah, blah, blah.

And we drank…

Towards the end of my drinking, I became what’s called an “ugly drunk.” I could get confrontational and say and do and say spiteful, hurtful things, and start shit, and that day was no different. By the time the rest of the family showed up, both Vincent and I were well into a quart of Bacardi and I was in rare form. Before the night was over, my brother and I almost came to blows (he took exception to me calling his girlfriend a pig), and Vincent argued with moms. Finally, my mother threw me out of the house because, “ I was acting like a garbage can.” Actually, she tried drop-kicking me but I was too fast for her. I don’t know where she found the strength, but she picked up this huge potted plant and threw it at me, barely missing my head.

I went to my sister’s house which was nearby in the same sub-division and started talkin’ shit there until, mercifully, I went to sleep under my brother-in-law’s car in the garage. No one knew I was there.

I am awakened by a cousin. “We’ve been looking for you, Eddie! Something terrible has happened! It’s Vincent! Hurry!”

I wake up thinking there’s been a fight or major argument but I’m completely unprepared when I see my mother’s eyes -- I see it all in her eyes and I’m wrenched into sobriety. My mother only manages to say, “Oh Eddie… ” or something like that. Nothing prepares me for the next time I see my dear Vincent, an incongruously neat bullet hole in his temple. I scream out in denial because I can’t accept this -- this can’t be... And I hold his head in my hands and beg him to wake up.

Outside the hospital, my brother challenges me yelling out, “It’s your fault! If you wouldn’t have been startin’ your shit this would’ve never happened… ” And he goes on a harangue for what seems to me too long and all I can do is stay quiet. And every word is like a knife into the very heart of me. When I try to form the words, nothing comes out, I have nothing, I’m empty inside, as if the very life force of me has been sucked out.

The details are hazy, but I remember someone trying to wake me up. I thought it was Vincent. He kept calling for me to wake up and he tried to take my arm, but I shook it off, telling him to leave me alone. I’ll never be sure if this really happened because I was so drunk. Was I dreaming? Was it really Vincent trying to wake me up and telling me he wanted to talk to me, or did I make the whole thing up? I don’t know…

All I know is that sometime in the night one of my cousins found me and told me to get up quick because something terrible had happened. I looked at my cousin and she saw my anger and said, “Get up, Eddie, Vincent shot himself.” I’ll never forget those words.

They rushed me to the hospital and the last time I saw Vincent he was already dead. A part of my mind couldn’t wrap itself around that. There was my mother crying and everybody else and there was Vincent dead, having shot himself in the head in a drunken stupor/ rage. What’s worse, he did it in front of my youngest brother, his son Vinnie, who was maybe 5-6-years-old. He locked himself and my little brother in his car and blew his brains away.

At the hospital, it got ugly. My brother confronted me and told me that it was my fault because I had gotten drunk and instigated a series of events that ended tragically. Vincent wouldn’t have shot himself if it weren’t for me, he said. And I looked around and while the rest of my family didn’t say it outright, no one disputed it either. I jumped at my brother, the rage welling up in me was uncontainable.

Looking back, I can’t blame my brother. Our lives were irrevocably, senselessly changed that day, and it was something unfathomable, it was impossible to make any sense of it. I know that in my own heart I also felt Vincent’s death -- it was my fault.

They say that all suicides are accompanied by a psychological phenomenon known as psychache. Psychache refers to the pain, anguish, and psychological hurt in the psyche, the mind. Truth is, Vincent had attempted suicide before, but was unsuccessful. Sometimes when he drank, he would lose it completely. There were demons inside of Vincent -- who knows what lurked in his mind? What traumas he harbored? And while things weren’t all that smooth, he was experiencing the most success ever.

But I took my brother’s words to heart and I couldn’t forgive myself for Vincent’s death. From where I stood, I killed him. I created the circumstances leading to his suicide by fighting and inciting Vincent. Vincent’s actions that night almost destroyed my family; the repercussions would be felt for years. It was my fault as surely as if I had put that gun to his head.

Tragically, suicide is not as uncommon as we think. Within the United States, suicide ranks as the eleventh leading cause of death among the general population, the second leading cause of death among 25-34 year olds, and is the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year olds. Of the 240,000 annual suicide attempts, most do not end in death and despite the frequency of suicide, there is a huge social stigma attached to it.

I left Houston as soon as I could, returning to New York and distancing myself as much as I could from my family. I was unable to face the hurt, the destruction, but no matter how much I ran, I lived with that guilt in my heart for so many years. I can honestly say that Vincent’s suicide marked the beginning of my personal descent into hell. For many years after, I became more and more self-destructive, gradually surrendering to my dark side, throwing myself into an addiction that knew no satisfaction. And whenever I thought about changing, or doing something to save myself, my guilt was there, something I could flagellate myself with, ensuring that I would never feel worthy of some measure of sanity, some peace of mind.

I like to say that feeling fucked up is habit-forming, and it is -- you can rewire your brain for misery if you feel fucked up long enough. I couldn’t change in part because I didn’t feel worthy. I was unworthy in all areas of my life. I was a failure as a father, as a son, a lover, a brother, I was someone who never fulfilled his potential -- all these things drove me and my addiction. Most of all, I felt so guilty for my mother, who suffered so much.

Guilt is a completely different thing than remorse. In our culture, “guilty” is a verdict hammered out by a judge in court. And if no one else punishes us, we look to punish ourselves, in some way or another. Guilt for me meant punishment deep inside my psyche. It created in me my own psychache.

Today I know that Vincent’s suicide wasn’t my fault, but it took me a long time to get here. I also had a lot of support and did a lot of “inner” work therapeutically and otherwise. And still I almost didn’t make it. I too attempted suicide once and when that failed, I tried to get others to do it for me. But I’m here today, and I can celebrate my birthday and not be angry with Vincent for taking what I thought was the easy way out. For so long, I was so angry with Vincent. How could he do such a thing? How could he leave us? I still miss Vincent, and today I still love him…

Today, I know I can never really know why Vincent did what he did. Today, I try to honor Vincent’s memory by remembering all the good he did while he was here: his selflessness, his compassion, his commitment to providing for us -- five children, four of whom weren’t even his own.

Vincent always encouraged me to use my intelligence. He would take me to his co-workers when I was a child and announce, “This is my son and he’s real smart. Ask him any question -- go ahead.” LOL! It was a lot of pressure and I hated it when he did that, but nine times out of ten, I would get the answer right and Vincent would beam with pride. He paid for my cherished encyclopedia Britannica because, although he never had a formal education himself, he understood my intellectual curiosity needed to be nurtured. My greatest hope is that he really understood what he meant to me -- to all of us.

I guess the most difficult part of my journey was convincing myself that I deserved forgiveness and absolution. For so many years I lived with this crippling guilt. Then one day, I realized that if I wanted live, I would have to let go of the guilt -- forever. That was the day I broke out of my inner prison.

Love,

Eddie

Sons and Lovers

¡Hola! Everybody…
Could you imagine yours truly in the Deep South, line dancing with an impossibly tall, impossibly gorgeous, outrageously horny cowgirl?

Well, believe it, it’s happened and more than once. I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a bed with women from Down South. When I lived in Texas, for example, I was like a kid in a candy store. The women were fine and friendly! LOL

As is usual for me on Thursdays, I will be away at the women’s prison all day. Later this evening, I will be attending a free Terence Blanchard concert. If you’re going to be there, give me a shout out. I’ll be wearing powder blue shirt and pants with a cream raw silk jacket.

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-=[ Sons and Lovers ]=-

“Maybe you’re just like my mother
she’s never satisfied.
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
when doves cry.
-- Prince, When Doves Cry

Some of you may recognize today’s title, borrowed from the great D.H. Lawrence classic. Part of the novel’s significance is in its use of psychological themes and its exploration of how our early childhood relationships impact later ones.

I know a woman who will only respond to me if I am cruel towards her. Acts of kindness, expressions of affection, only serve to drive her away. No sooner as I become uncaring or distant, or utter an unkind word, she’s on me like the proverbial white on rice.

This woman seeks ways in which to feel unworthy and when she succeeds, it’s almost as if she’s asking to be punished. At her core, she is an extremely unhappy and miserable individual. At one time in my life, I would have fit her personality perfectly, playing the abusive and manipulative lover to her tragic heroine (she’s a victim in all this), but I’ve long ago moved on from that form of relating. The result being that it cuts down on the poosie I get, but also affords me some measure of sanity. *grin*

You may already be forming an opinion on this woman, or you may be thinking of someone you have met who approximates this type of behavior, but before you go there, keep in mind that we all play out relationship patterns. We all possess “neurological imprints” from our formative experiences that compel us to act in certain ways.

We learn from our early experiences the pleasure love can offer, and the pain. We repeat and repeat these lessons all our life. Some of us may even be able to say, “Oh boy! Here we go again.”

But sometimes these repetitions are outside our awareness.

And oftentimes the lessons we learn are not so wonderful.

I have a friend who is incapable of forming true intimacy. She will abruptly distance herself and walk away. She seems to be saying, “I’ll leave you before you leave me.” And I often wondered what compels her to leave what she loves before it can hurt her until I learned of the trail of loss and abandonment of her early life.

I was observing an older mother with her young son and she kept pushing him away, telling him to leave her alone, not to bother her. I also watched as he banged on her locked bedroom door in rage and pestering her for attention. And I wondered what he would be doing with a woman twenty years from now; what his needs will and what he will want women to do to him.

It is our nature to possess a compulsion to repeat. In psychoanalysis, it’s called the repetition compulsion. It impels us to repeat what we have done before, to attempt to recreate an earlier state of being even when that state is painful. This compulsion impels us to transfer the past – our earliest longings, our defenses against those longings – to our present. Indeed, transference is most like a map we carry within us and sometimes those maps are outdated and map out a landscape that no longer exists.

In this way, who and how we love are like summer TV reruns – unconscious reruns – of early experiences that have left deeply embedded neurological imprints. And whether we chose to play victim of victimizer, the fact remains that we will all act out the same old tragedies unless we bear our awareness and create newer, healthier imprints.

The little boy, for example, may play out his experience of impotence as a passive, submissive lover. Alternatively, he may play out his rage as a wife-beating husband. He may instead choose his mother’s role and become a cold-hearted beg-me-for-it-biatche partner. That little boy may eventually marry the psychological spitting image of his mother, or he may work her over until she becomes that mother. He, for example, he may ask his wife for the impossible and when she refuses him, he may rage, “You always refuse me – just like my mother!”

I realize that making the following admission is somewhat dangerous because there are women out here that would love to take advantage of this insight, but I’ll offer it anyway. You can only hurt me as much as I allow you. For a long time, I would be attracted only to emotionally unavailable women. I’ve had some of the most beautiful women come to me and practically throw themselves at me, but I wouldn’t pay them any mind and chase after a less attractive (both physically and otherwise) woman who would then withhold love from me. It was a painful pattern. Part of a continuum of patterns that would see me move through clinginess to cold-hearted ma’fucca.

We repeat the past even when we are consciously trying not to repeat it. Repeating the good makes sense, but I think we all have trouble understanding the compulsion to repeat what causes pain. Freud attempted to explain this compulsion as part of a shaky concept called the death instinct. I think it makes better sense to see it as a hopeless effort to undo – to rewrite – the past. Put simply, we repeat the past because we hope that by doing it and doing it again and again that this time it will be different. We keep repeating a past in which we were helpless and acted upon in a dysfunctional attempt to master and change what has happened.

In repeating painful experiences we are refusing to put to rest the ghosts of our childhood (our neurological imprints). We continue to desire for that which cannot be – a father’s attention, a mother’s love. I have an actor friend who told me that no matter how hard they clap for her now, they will never clap for her then.

We have to let go.

We love because it is the only true adventure and because without a sense of connectedness die and we whither. As humans we possess the gift of insight – we are life being aware of itself. This awareness includes an awareness of ourselves as a separate entity, of our own short lifespan, of the fact that against our will we were born and against our will we will die. All this makes of our separated existence an unbearable prison. We would become insane if we could not liberate ourselves from this existential prison and somehow connect…

Loss is necessary – there can be no love without loss. However, it is through our love that loss can be transcended.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Lifetraps]

¡Hola! Everybody…
You see, there were seven words you couldn’t say on television…

So George Carlin said them all at Milwaukee’s Summerfest in 1972 and was arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws.

I woke up this morning to discover that comedian George Carlin had passed away. I love Carlin’s work. I loved his passion for pushing the envelope, his passion for free speech. Mostly I loved Carlin’s irreverent look at those things we as a society take far too seriously. He was able to articulate the Grand Cosmic Joke in a way that made us laugh with him and at our terminal self-importance.

You will be missed Mr. Carlin, but the waves you caused while here will continue to affect our lives…

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Patterns

“In baseball, the object is to go home, and be safe—‘I hope I’ll be safe at home!’”
-- George Carlin

Imagine, if you can, being thrust into a strange world. One moment you’re in the familiar world, the world you have always known and the next, everything and everyone you know has disappeared. You find yourself in a land of strange giants that walk by you without acknowledging you. You begin to cry, it’s so frightening, and when you’re asked, you find that you can’t describe who you are, or where you’re from.

All you can do is cry…

That’s how I remember feeling when I was a little boy and was lost. I was an active child and my when my mother stopped to talk to one of her friends, I walked away and became lost. She would eventually find me at the local supermarket eating an ice cream, but to me that was a terrifying moment. My mother expressed surprise that I could remember the incident. I couldn’t have been more than three years old. But I remember it clearly: it was winter, a cloudy gray day in New York City. I remember the horror of being lost – of thinking I had lost everything I knew of the world.

The thing is that most of my childhood was filled with the feeling of being lost – of the feeling that there was no safety. My parents fought a lot and I was often in the middle of it. My father was an addict and there was violence and abuse in my childhood. In addition, because I was the oldest, I often felt that I had to take care of things. I often acted as a surrogate spouse to a mother who was impulsive and sometimes acted irresponsibly.

I would like to state at this moment that I do not blame my parents for the person I am today. In fact, everything that is good about me is a direct consequence of my parents’ influence on my life. I feel so strongly about this that I honestly feel that even if I were to carry my mother on my back for the rest of her life, I would still fall far short of the debt I owe her.

The point of bringing this up is to illustrate and important factor: We continue to repeat the pain of our childhood. This is one of the core insights of contemporary psychology. Freud called it repetition compulsion. The child of an alcoholic grows up to marry an alcoholic. The abused child grows up to marry an abuser or becomes an abuser herself. The sexually molested child grows up to be a prostitute. The overly controlled child allows others to control him.

You might think this unwise. Why would we re-enact our pain – repeatedly? Why don’t we build better lives and break free of the destructive patterns of our lives? The fact remains that we do re-enact our pain. Almost everyone repeats negative patterns from childhood in self-defeating ways. Healers are constantly confronted with this basic truth in their work. Somehow, we manage to create in adulthood conditions similar to those that were so destructive in childhood.

Life patterns are made from deeply held beliefs about ourselves and the world learned early in life. These patterns, or schemas, are crucial to our sense of self. To give up our belief in a schema would mean to surrender the security of knowing who we are and what we think we know of the world. Therefore, we cling to it, even when it hurts; they are comfortable and familiar. In a very weird way, they make us feel at home.

For a long time, two major lifetraps (schemas) for me were abandonment and emotional deprivation. To be truthful, though I have been able to transcend these two lifetraps to the point where they no longer run my life, both of these lifetraps still hold a powerful attraction for me.

For a long time, this was not the case. For me, my abandonment issues get played out in the arena of romantic relationships. The lifetrap (or schema) of abandonment is the feeling that people you love will leave you, and you will end up emotionally isolated forever. Whether it’s people you love leaving or dying, or preferring someone else, you feel that you will be left alone. For me, this feeling was a lot like my childhood experience of being left utterly alone and vulnerable.

The irony of this lifetrap was that I would often play out my fear of abandonment, causing people to leave me, or becoming attracted only to emotionally unavailable women.

My other major hang-up was the emotional deprivation lifetrap. Emotional deprivation is the belief that your need for love will never be met adequately by other people. You feel that no one truly cares for you or understands how you feel. What would happen is that I often found myself attracted to cold and ungiving people, or I would become cold and ungiving myself. All this would lead me to form relationships that were ultimately profoundly dissatisfying. The emotional deprivation lifetrap creates a huge feeling of emptiness and loneliness, of emotional disconnection.

As I stated before, I no longer play out these patterns (at least not as often), but they still hold a powerful attraction for me because my early childhood experiences wired me for such relationship patterns. Lifetraps are lifelong patterns of relating that are self-destructive. They almost take on a life of their own and struggle for survival. If you were to have known me then, it would’ve broken your heart to see me get abandoned over and over again.

In order for a child to thrive they need their basic needs met. Without these basic needs, children have to develop a defense mechanism that helps us make sense of the world. That’s how these patterns develop. A child that lacks safety, a connection to others, a sense of autonomy, self-esteem, freedom for self-expression, and realistic limits will develop dysfunctional behavior patterns.

Some lifetraps are more core than others. Issues arising from basic safety are the most problematic. People who are abused or abandoned as children are the most fragmented *grin*. There is nowhere they feel safe. There is an underlying sense that at any moment someone they love might hurt them or leave them. There is a deeply felt sense of vulnerability. It takes very little disrupt their balance and their moods are erratic, and they tend to be impulsive and self-destructive.

The first step to stopping the lifetraps (or patterns) is to identify them. Lifetraps work actively to organize our experiences. They operate under cover in subtle ways to influence how we think, feel, and act. Because lifetraps are so hard to change, the fist step is to understand them so that we can recognize them. In naming your patterns, you get a better understanding of them. This insight is only the first step.

There are several other steps involved in breaking the patterns of suffering we all create. I will write about this in some future post. If anything I have written today sounds like something you would like to learn more about, check out one of the best books about change I have ever read, Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns. You can also visit a website on Schema therapy (click here) with a presentation and resource page for finding therapists practicing this orientation. In addition, Tara Bennet-Goleman wrote a great book, Emotional Alchemy, fusing Buddhist practices with Schema Therapy. I took some workshops on Schema Therapy and use aspects of it in my own work.

This whole approach changed my life for the better. today, I no longer seek out emotionally unavailable women, nor do my abandonment issues hold the same power they used to.

Love,

Eddie