Читать книгу Some Assembly Required - Dan Mager - Страница 13
Оглавление“It takes dynamite to get me up
Too much of everything is just enough”
JOHN BARLOW, I NEED A MIRACLE, GRATEFUL DEAD
---------------------------------------------------------------
Everyone has a certain personality style that includes core traits. When these constitutionally endowed qualities combine with the roles we adapt in our family system, it contorts the lens through which we see ourselves and we get a distorted view of who we are. This misshapen self-perception impacts how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
We learn to view ourselves in a way that mirrors how others seem to view and treat us. Unconditional positive regard refers to the elemental acceptance and emotional support of a person regardless of what he or she may say or do. It describes the simple but potent actions, in words, attitudes, and deeds, of accepting someone for who he or she truly is—with all of his or her mistakes and imperfections. Carl Rogers, the founder of Client-Centered Therapy—a humanistic approach that undergirds many contemporary forms of counseling and psychotherapy—considered unconditional positive regard requisite to healthy psychological development and made the therapeutic application of it a cornerstone of his model of helping people.
For most of us, the acceptance and positive regard granted us by others has been conditional. In other words, they are commonly attached to various conditions of “worth.” Growing up we were shown acceptance and positive regard when we demonstrated that we were somehow “worthy,” rather than unconditionally because we deserved it simply by virtue of our humanity. Many of us have had the experience of getting positive attention, acceptance, affection, and love if, and sometimes only if, we behaved to the satisfaction of others.
Because we have natural human needs for acceptance and positive regard, the conditions under which they are given exert a persuasive influence. We tend to mold ourselves into shapes determined by family and social expectations—expectations that may or may not align with our best interests. Over time, this results in conditional positive self-regard/self-esteem, where we may like or even accept ourselves only if we meet the standards others have applied to us. And since these standards are generally disconnected from our individual needs and differences, often we find ourselves unable to meet them or unwilling to accommodate them, and in turn, unable to maintain a coherent sense of self-worth.
Having to hide a part of oneself in order to be accepted and considered good enough on a consistent basis is a form of emotional rejection and abandonment. D. W. Winnicott was a British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst who wrote extensively about this process and how it can affect the way people relate to themselves and others. According to Winnicott, the need to effectively dance to the tunes of others, especially primary caregivers early in life—in denying our own genuine individual needs—obstructs the development of a healthy and congruent “true self,” and results in the formation of a “false self.”
The false self can be compliant, reacting to environmental demands by accepting them willingly and uncritically, or rebellious, opposing, and aggressively rejecting those demands. In either of these configurations, a false self creates an inauthentic set of relationships, even though they have every appearance of being real. Because this is a wholly unconscious process, the false self comes to be mistaken for the true self by others, and even by oneself. Although this false self persona serves a useful defensive purpose, it becomes an enduring mask, obscuring our real nature and creating considerable internal conflict (often underneath the surface of conscious awareness). It can also greatly increase one’s vulnerability to the significant psychosocial problems. Did someone say addiction?
---------------------------------------
I was in fifth grade when the Nassau County police visited Vernon Elementary School, going classroom to classroom with a large display case filled with different types of drugs, all neatly laid out and labeled. We were treated to all of the horror stories steeped in the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. I promised myself that day I would NEVER do drugs—any of them. Bit by bit and substance by substance that promise—which I absolutely meant at the time—disintegrated. I started drinking toward the end of sixth grade, rationalizing that alcohol was different, and that I wouldn’t ever use “drugs.” By seventh grade I was smoking pot.
However risk-laden the path I was on might have been already, seventh grade marked a turning point into darker territory. The three local elementary schools fed into Oyster Bay Junior High School, which placed students in one of four levels based on a combination of grades and standardized test scores. “Honors” was the top of the line, for the brightest kids; “College” was the designation for those considered above average; average students were placed in “Regents,” and then there was a level for kids who were assessed as being below average. It was a curious form of academic segregation—students attended classes almost exclusively within their designated level.
There were approximately three hundred kids in our seventh grade, and only seventeen of us were placed in Honors. I found myself in the midst of the nerdiest, geekiest kids in the entire grade. Even though some of them were friends from elementary school, and as a group they were certainly nice enough, I was in shock; surely there had been a mistake—I didn’t belong there! Most of my close friends were placed in Regents, with a few in College. My sense of being different and of not fitting in discovered a new source of nourishment.
I spent the school year proving to myself and everyone else that I wasn’t like my brainiac classmates, culminating with getting caught in possession of a Scotch-filled water pistol. I created enough havoc that at the conclusion of the school year I was “invited” to leave the public school system—an exceedingly rare occurrence in 1972.
In eighth grade I became acquainted with pills, notably barbiturates. It was also during eighth grade that I was introduced to the wonderful world of opioids, by my mother. We had gone to visit my aunt and uncle for a long holiday weekend when I came down with a skull-imploding headache. Over-the-counter pain relievers had no effect. The pain was so searing and unremitting that my mother decided to give me half a Percodan. As the adults left to go out for the evening, she left the prescription bottle on the night stand next to me with instructions that if the pain didn’t get better I could take another half a pill.
I was still in the infancy of my drug use, but I knew enough to know that if half a pill could be helpful, than a whole one would be better, so that’s what I took. I just wanted the pain to stop and the first half I had taken hadn’t done shit. After what seemed like a few short minutes, my pain dissolved and I was submerged in a luscious, warm, radiant nirvana. I marveled at how delicious it felt. It felt like how I had always wanted to feel.
One of the variables that correlates with the potential for addiction is how someone reacts to the effects of drugs. Research has shown that those who have negative reactions, such as nausea, dizziness, or confusion, are at lower risk for addiction. Those who have more positive reactions, like euphoria, anxiety reduction, or increased energy, are at higher risk.
Somewhere around this time, during a visit to my maternal grandparents in Pennsylvania, my grandmother gave me a laminated wallet-sized card, saying “I want you to have this.” On it in beautiful calligraphy the following words were inscribed: God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference—the Serenity Prayer. The very first time I read those words they had immediate heft and resonance, as well as an inchoate soothing effect. As I looked at the card and read the words again, my breathing became a little deeper and my pulse rate slowed slightly. I may not have been able to grasp the magnitude of their simple and elegant wisdom, but even then I knew the message they carried was important.
My maternal grandparents were steadfast in their support for me. They were the closest thing to unconditional love and acceptance I knew. They were always in my corner—even when I was a complete asshole to my grandmother, as I was on multiple occasions as a teenager. As the eldest grandson, “grandson number one” as he would say, I held a special place in my grandfather’s heart. The two of us were the only avid bowlers in the family. Although he hadn’t bowled in years due to a bad back, whenever I visited, he would take to the local lanes, watch me bowl, and give me pointers.
In ninth and tenth grades I played JV basketball and varsity lacrosse at Long Island Lutheran High School, which was close by and perennially had among the top high school basketball teams in the state. Their teams regularly included some of the most talented players from New York City, who lived with local families during the school year. The varsity coach’s favorite saying: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” The skill-development training in this program was cutting-edge—the drills we practiced and the techniques we honed through countless repetitions would not become mainstream until years later.
The JV and the varsity basketball teams often worked out together. The practices were brutal and the competition fierce. One of the best ways to get better—at anything—is to play with and against people who are better than you are. I was long used to being among the shortest players on the court (unfortunately you can’t “learn” height), but now I was going up against players who were not only much bigger, but whose athleticism was astonishing. Every day I had to play my ass off just to hold my own. I established a niche through hustle play that included sacrificing my body: diving on the court for loose balls and on defense, stepping directly in front of an oncoming opposing player and allowing him to effectively run me over, creating an offensive foul and giving my team the ball. I learned how to fall in ways that minimized the impacts to my body, but the long-term consequences of hundreds of collisions with other players and between my back and the hardwood would later exact its toll.
Sometimes I played with more balls than brains. Once in practice, the varsity center had the ball on a fast break. He was 6′8″, 235 pounds, first team All-New York State, and on this occasion, moving at high speed, focused on the rim, and getting ready to throw down a monster slam dunk, when I (over a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter) positioned myself directly in his path to take a charge. He was a close friend of mine, and off the court, a proverbial gentle giant. When he saw that I wasn’t going to move, his eyes filled with “Are you outta your motherfuckin’mind!!” alarm. In his split-second attempt to avoid colliding with—and possibly permanently damaging—me, he lost his balance and committed a traveling violation. It may have been an episode of situation-specific insanity where I put myself quite literally in harm’s way, but it turned a certain two points into a turnover and gave my team the ball. It was also just one of many instances where I would place myself in positions of high risk for momentary reward.
When I got to high school, I made a conscious decision to try “everything” in terms of mind- and mood-altering substances, and to try enough of each to make an informed decision as to what I liked and wanted to use more of. Though I didn’t get high on days I had practice or games (at least until after the practice or game), overall my drug use continued to progress. I returned to public school in eleventh grade after the new varsity basketball coach at Oyster Bay High School (who had been my lacrosse coach at Lutheran) encouraged me to come play for him. A season of great promise short-circuited when I tore a quadriceps muscle in my left thigh toward the end of an otherwise excellent first game. That injury sidelined me for most of the rest of the season while I went through physical therapy and wallowed in frustration and disappointment as I watched the team play from the far-off distance of the bench.
As much as I was in love with playing, as good as I was, as hard as I worked at it, the levels of physicality and ability I encountered while at Lutheran brought home the limitations of my “upside.” The realization that my participation in sports would never be more than an avocation was a huge and painful loss. As my childhood dream of getting paid to play hoops died, I lost the only real motivation I had for not using, and jumped the line that separates steady recreational substance use from full-on addiction.
I dove headlong into applied neurochemistry, that is, learning through intensive first-hand experiential study how the full spectrum of drugs—alone and in myriad combinations—affected me, as well as how adjustments in dosage modified those effects. I became adept in medicine cabinet archeology, a related discipline that involved exploring and excavating the contents of medicine cabinets wherever I went in order to unearth materials to further my neurochemical studies. Rather than treating my body as a temple, I increasingly used it as an amusement park.
I had started going to bars with older friends shortly after I turned fifteen. At the time, the drinking age was eighteen and it was easy to use other people’s identification as New York state driver’s licenses didn’t yet have pictures. Shit, they didn’t even indicate hair color—for a time I used the ID of a friend who had bright red hair. Pot was ever-present, like paint on the walls, and I remained under its influence as much as I could.
I contrasted the consciousness-expanding exhilaration of LSD with the consciousness-contracting confines of PCP. PCP outfitted me with a perceptual straitjacket, requiring a half-hour to crawl up a flight of stairs. Dozens of acid trips blew open the doors to new universes and let me borrow the keys to some of the mysteries of this one. By the way, taking LSD while at school is a really bad idea—that’s why I did it twice.
My way of identifying where the limits—both internal and external—were, was to exceed them, leaving them in the dust . . . repeatedly. As my father put it during one of my blood-shot mornings after another night of debauchery, “Moderation Dan, look it up!” I stole hundreds of pills from my mother. I took so many that I knew that she knew, but nothing was said. We engaged in an unacknowledged dance: she kept finding new hiding places for her meds, and I kept finding them. When we finally talked about it in shared sadness, I said, “I kept waiting for you to say something,” to which she replied, “I kept waiting for you to stop.”
Adding the self-centeredness of active addiction to the developmentally based narcissism of adolescence makes for a noxious combination. The relationship between my parents and me deteriorated, becoming more overtly conflicted as I increasingly disrespected them and their authority and ignored any limits they attempted to set. It got to the point where my father and I couldn’t be in the same room together for more than a few minutes before an argument would ignite and escalate until he would come after me physically, chasing me out of the room and out of the house. I would return hours later.
As this pattern continued, I began to stay away from home overnight, and then for several days at a time. The mounting tension finally exploded altogether when my father and I got in the one and only physical fight we’ve ever had. I had a furious argument with my mother and threw a football hard in her direction, hitting her in the foot. I didn’t think that I wanted to hit her, but I could have made sure to avoid it. When my father came home and learned what happened, he understandably flew into a rage and came after me. This time I didn’t run. It only lasted a few minutes, no punches were thrown, and there were no physical injuries, but for me it was terrifying and traumatic. I left the house fighting back tears and totally freaked out, knowing that it would be a long time before I could return.
I was able to stay with a family I knew well, whose two daughters were among my close friends. To my relief and my parents’ surprise, they generously allowed me to live with them from August through December of 1976. During that time I was introduced to two new areas that would open my eyes in unexpected ways. Faye, the mother in the family with whom I stayed, was the first person to teach me about consciousness—how our mind determines to a great extent our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world; and how so much of our subjective experience is a function of our perception. For the first time, I began to get a sense of the spiritual as distinct from the religious, as well as understand drug-induced states of consciousness as part of a much larger continuum.
The physical separation from my parents gave us all room to breathe. The distance allowed us the space for a gradual rapprochement, and after about a month I started to have dinner with my family once a week. At my parents’ urging, we also began family therapy. I didn’t want to participate in family therapy and I was convinced that it would be a waste of time, but I also didn’t want to bear the weight of responsibility for not being willing to try since so many of the family’s problems seemed to track back to me. Moreover, I really did want to have a relationship with my family and had no idea how to get there from where we were.
Family therapy was both challenging and fascinating. Our therapist was an experienced and savvy MSW who used an explicitly family systems approach. Even though—as is so often the case with the Scapegoat—it was my acting out that brought the family into therapy, to my amazement I was not blamed. As much focus was placed on my parents and on my siblings as on me. As uncomfortable as I know it was for my parents, particularly for my father, to not be in charge, they were open and receptive. Family therapy changed how we related to one another, and for a time, communication within our family, and between my parents and me, improved dramatically.
All through this period, I continued to develop my capacity to live a double life, negotiating very different worlds—precariously balancing a “B”+ average with the roles of druggie, varsity athlete, pot dealer, and student council vice president. My group of close friends dubbed me “Citizen Dan” for my ability to shift gears and strap on a diplomatic persona whenever it served my purposes.
I moved back home in early January 1977, and having accumulated enough credits to graduate early, completed high school later that month. I graduated somewhere toward the bottom of the top 15 percent of my class. Some family context: my brother would become valedictorian, graduating first in his high school class; one of my sisters was salutatorian, graduating second in her class; and my other sister graduated somewhere between the top 5 and 10 percent of her class. When I said good-bye to high school, I was well versed in the three “R”s (well, not so much ’rithmetic—math and I never got along well) and intimately familiar with the four “S”s—smoking, swallowing, snorting, and shooting.
Two weeks later, at the age of seventeen, I left New York and most everything that was familiar to me 3,000 miles behind. I had spent a month during the previous summer hitchhiking around California with a friend, and decided then to attend college there. With a one-way plane ticket and $200.00 in my pocket, I moved to Los Angeles by myself, forsaking the glory days of my senior year of high school to work full-time and get a head start on establishing state residency prior to beginning school at the University of California at Santa Cruz that fall.
At the time, I knew one person in LA, an uncle who had had a nasty divorce from my aunt ten years earlier, whom I had visited briefly during the previous summer. I lived at his home in Downey for the first month, which also coincided with my first job as an independent adult—selling encyclopedias door-to-door. As bad as that gig was, from it came an unexpected benefit. I became friends with a coworker who had a friend with a small house in Temple City who needed a roommate. For the following eight months I shacked up with Perry, who despite being legally blind rode a motorcycle and somehow had a legitimate California state motorcycle license. I got a job at a glass manufacturing company in East LA, which required taking two different buses, over an hour each way, to get to and from work. Although I used daily, my LA experience gave me important opportunities to grow up and provided a less-than-appetizing taste of what the adult world of work can mean, reinforcing my appreciation for higher education.
The University of California at Santa Cruz is a singular place—2,000 acres of redwood-covered forest, interspersed with wide meadows overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the city of Santa Cruz with its stunning beaches, stretches of sand extending between cliffs perched on the northern tip of Monterey Bay. Established by the University of California as an “alternative” campus in 1965, it was unique in combining the resources and prestige of a major university with the intimate feel of a small, liberal arts college and a rigorous academic environment. After exerting so little effort in school, I was finally ready to invest myself academically.
Even still, throughout my tenure at UC Santa Cruz, I walked a tightrope between working hard and performing well academically and pursuing pleasure pharmacologically. I lived on campus my freshman year and my dorm was located next to some administrative offices. On one occasion, an office assistant followed the pungent aroma of pot to my room and politely requested that I find a way to keep the smoke from infiltrating their building. It was as matter-of-fact as if she were asking me to turn down the live Grateful Dead that I routinely played at loud volume.
Wacky names for college intramural sports teams are not unusual, but during my sophomore year our intramural flag football team likely broke new ground. “The U-40s” was the brainchild of a small group of like-minded friends who shared an affinity for both sports and intravenous drug use, and may be the only intramural team ever named after a specific model of syringe.
I graduated in the spring of 1981 with a double major in Psychology and Environmental Studies/Planning and Public Policy, and an asterisk. The asterisk was that while I received my BA in Psychology with Honors, I had completed all of the requirements for my degree in Planning and Public Policy except one—an extensive senior thesis. Environmental Studies, and the degree I didn’t quite yet have, was my real interest. The program at Santa Cruz was state-of-the-art; the coursework was challenging and thought-provoking, and the professors were awe-inspiring yet approachable. My psychology major was also excellent and growth-enhancing, but I added it basically as a throw-in to achieve the distinction of a double major. I had fully planned to finish my senior thesis the year following my graduation.
