9th Renewal Convention on
Adult Children, Recovery, & Trauma
Las Vegas, NV � February 23-26, 2005
Healing the Deep Hurt: Childhood Onset of PTSD
Earnie Larsen, MRE (ACOA25-028-Larsen)
LARSEN: We are not alone here. I truly believe in prayer, not so much as in necessarily saying prayers, but like love and action�showing up, being there, got your back kind of stuff. I want to tell you, the largest treatment center in Minnesota is in a prison called Lino Lakes . It's a 500-bed treatment center. But because of church-state kind of stuff, you're not allowed to talk about God; you're not allowed to talk about even higher power and stuff.
When I go out there, I get to work with the transition guys, which isn't in the big house. But a week or so ago, the lady was wonderful; she said, �I'm just a tough, old AA broad,� and boy she's something else. She said, �Next week, why don't you come in and talk in the big house; they want you to come in there.�
So I said, �Great.� So we're in this huge room like an airplane hanger, and there was me and 400 felons and about 100 guards�and it was wonderful!� It was wonderful. You know how when you're doing group and you're talking to people and their faces are talking back to you and they're open and they're hungry, and I mean, it's just God on earth.
I sad, �I can't lie to you. If you have the privilege of carrying a message, you've got to tell the truth.� I said, �You've got to have a connection with a higher power. Call him whatever you want, but you've got to have that.� And I said, �You've got to give it away. If you don't give it away, it's going to rot inside you.� So I told them we were going to be here this afternoon. I said I don't know if there's going to be three or five or who the heck knows, and I said, �You guys know what I got your back means.� Everybody kind of knows that phrase, but in prison, it has a little different meaning; if somebody doesn't, you're dead or thrown off the rail or somebody's house pet, you know.
So I said, �Show up for us. They're great people. We're going to be talking to great people who are doing life's most important work.� There's nobody on the face of this earth that's doing more important work than you are. I mean, it'll knock your socks off. This isn't about this, this is about this. And this isn't about what's going on; this is what's going on.
So I'll tell you, there are guys with notebooks, you know, and there's this whole sea of guys, and they said, �We'll be there.� It took a little while for a lot of them to leave because the cell blocks left, and five or six guys came up, and they said, �What's the time difference between Minneapolis and Nevada because I want to be there at the right time,� because they know what I got your back means. So somebody's leaning on you; somebody's behind you. And if you get a little spiritual boost or a little insight here, maybe it's because these guys are there with you.
I want to ask you, in the same vein, Monday, I'm going to be in Atlanta talking to the National Association of School Counselors, and I don't know any one of them, but I know all of them�right?�just like you do because they're in the same field we're talking about; it's bringing human beings back to life. So I'd really like to ask you Monday afternoon, if you think about it, show up and be there because they've got the same problems we got, the same struggles and the same joys, incredible joys.
So the second thing, then, I want to talk about is, I always kind of like the thought, Tell them what you're going to tell them, and tell them what you told them �that kind of makes sense to me. What I want to share with you now is, I'll bet a hundred times in the last couple days, I kicked it out and it won't stay kicked out; it keeps coming back. I'm sure many of you know how that voice works inside of you and you think, �Well, I'm not going to do this,� and that voice says, �Yeah, you do it.� Or you know, that little voice says, �Now, make this phone call. Call this person.� �Yeah, as soon as I get back.� � Make the phone call.�
How many times have you found, for no logical reason, that person was on their way to kill themselves or on their way to kill somebody else or on their way to get drunk, and you know how that voice works and you learn to pay attention to that voice and you learn to honor that voice. So there's some reason why I'm going to do this because like I say, I kicking it out, but...
I want to do four points�a summary�not only of what we're going to talk about today, but I think what everything that we're doing is about. Ordinarily, you put a nice little flip chart up there or something, here's your nice little title and here's A, B, C, D, but it isn't going to be like that.
One of my teachers who I truly honor is a wonderful lady named Shirley who lives at Turtle Mountain Reservation up in Bellport , South Dakota . Wonderful, wonderful lady, and traditional and is an absolute warrior; I mean, she's got the most beautiful heart, and I go up there often and learn from her; give what you can, but mostly go up there to learn.
After about the fifth or sixth time, she said to me, very polite, very quiet, you know, she comes up, she says, �Uncle Earnie��we're Uncle Earnie and Sister Shirley�she said, �I've heard you about four or five times. I don't know what the hell you're talking about. And neither does anybody else.� <Laughter> I said, �Well, how come I keep coming back,� and she said, �Well, we're polite people.� <Laughter> I said, �Well, that's pretty nice.�
What she said was, �When you talk, you think and you talk and you write like a white man,� and had that look of pity on her face, you know. <Laughter> She said, �Everything you do, and white people do, it's right to left, very nice, orderly, bink, point two, point three, point four. That isn't real. That isn't the way it works. If you don't put it in the hoop, nobody understands what you're talking about.�
I said, �Well, I appreciate that.� So I did my best to put it kind of in the hoop, and when we were all done, she came up and said, �Oh!� So that's what you meant!� I said, �Yeah, that's what I meant.� I think that's true; I think that's absolutely right. When you put stuff A, B, C, D, it gets compartmentalized; it's like it's not related. Everything's related. Everything's related.
Again, you jump in this, as I know you are, but you jump in what we're doing with your hearts�you know, you don't stand out there like looking at a lake; you jump in that freaking lake and you start sharing molecules and you get involved in that. I mean, it's thrilling. I mean, to think that there's kids going to be born a hundred years from now who will never know that you were alive, and you're going to reach right through time and touch them.
You're going to go right through whomever you're working with, who was their granddaddy or their dad or their whoever it is, and you are changing the course of people who aren't going to be born for a hundred years.
Great saying: Those people who don't hear the music think the dancers are crazy. <Laughter> Boy, and isn't that true? If you don't hear the music, you think the dancers are nuts. The other side of that, though, if you hear the music, you see that dance and it's so freaking thrilling, it's beyond words. It's beyond words.
So what I'm going to put up here and on your papers, if you want to do this, is a hoop, and put an X in the middle of it. I also want to say, as we start this, that this isn't about something that you write down, think about, and say, well, this is what he said.
You are great people, you really are. Every magic, everything that you will ever hear at this conference or any other conference or any book you ever read, it's in your life. When we learn to honor our story and honor our life enough to reflect back on it and see it in our own story, then it's our truth. It isn't our truth if we're writing down somebody else's notes. It doesn't become our truth until we internalize that and it becomes ours.
It's there in your life! Our stories are so rich! They are so incredible, if we take the time to stop and reflect back and learn our story. What we're going to talk about, obviously, in just a bit is the effects of early childhood trauma on recovery. Part of that is, you've got to know your story; that stuff is dancing around back there in that fog machine. You can't touch it if you don't blow the smoke out of there. You have got to be willing to know your story, and most people don't. Most people don't. We haven't spent enough time; we haven't looked at it with our heart. We looked at it with our head; we haven't seen the richness.
If I was going to say, turn to the person next to you and share with them the last time you saw the miracle�you saw that lightning hit; you saw somebody, that look of openness in that eye, and you saw that face start to open up�and by God, you know their heart was touched. They got it. I mean, you tingle because you feel that power. When was the last time you saw that, and how did it happen? What was your part in that, and what went on?
There probably isn't anything more important that any of us could do, then to do that kind of work and reflect on it and know what we're looking for and know what we're trying to do. Certified isn't necessarily qualified. I'm talking about being qualified . Certified's in your head; qualified's in your heart. Qualified means you hear that music. Qualified means that you see the beauty and you see the wonder; you're out there doing it.
Not that there's nothing wrong with learning. But the most important evidence-based stuff you're ever going to get is out of your life. Study your life!
We don't have time to do that, but I'll tell you, if you have a group�I presume everybody here is in group; we sure don't have any right to tell anybody else to go to group if we're not in group�but get with your team. Who's your spiritual team? I don't mean, oh, you know, Ph.D., father, whoever the hell it is. I'm talking about your partners, that you walk with, the people that you get honest with, where that love and that support is there.
You start sharing this kind of stuff because the real stuff�isn't that true�the real stuff, mostly, we don't share with anybody. We don't talk about that because we don't want to sound nuts. You know, we want to kind of quasi fit in, but if you fit in, in the insane asylum, you've got problems. <Laughter>
I mean, that isn't a big virtue to fit in, in an insane asylum. What we have to say, if we look at our life, is powerful, and it's what people need. It's absolutely what people need.
So anyway, what I'm going to share with you, it's four points, it all fits together, it blends together; they're four different colors that keep coming together and separating and coming together. But what I'm saying, and what I'm going to continue to say through here: Is this what your life has taught you? Maybe it's not. So I'll come back tomorrow; I want to hear what you said then. How has God led you down your path? What have you learned? What are the truths that have jumped up in your life? That's what counts; not what I say.
I want to suggest, it seems to me, the more I reflect on my life over these last 39 years�August will be 39 years I've called the 12-step fellowship home, and it's the greatest gift a human being can have is to be with people walking down a spiritual walk.
But as I reflect, as I often do and I'm sure you do, after you've done two or three groups in a day and you've heard a couple fifth steps, and then you stop and say, �What did I learn? What did I learn? I had wonderful teachers; now what did they teach? What was going on?�
Here's, for me, is what it seems like it's all about. The first victim of abuse is always self-compassion. The first victim of whatever way we get damaged and we get hurt, what it does is it limits and it damages our capacity for self-compassion. Now, the labels of how that gets done is called addiction, it's called co-dependency, it's called shame, it's called adult child syndrome�they're different labels for exactly the same thing.
What all of it does, what happens is, we lose the capacity to truly deal with self-compassion. You look at that and you think, well, the obvious thing is, if you can't love yourself, you can't love anybody else. But that's wrong, isn't it? Isn't that wrong, when you reflect back on your life? When you were on the dark side of the moon, did you not love anybody? Or was part of the reason that you stayed in an addictive state is because you loved somebody so much and you knew you were hurting them and you couldn't stand the pain of knowing how bad you were hurting them.
It isn't that you can't love. The fact is, the degree that this self-compassion�it limits our capacity to function in a relationship. Two totally different things�loving and being able to function in a relationship are two completely different things and part, it seems to me, of what we have to know if we're going to take responsibility for our spiritual life.
How did this happen for you? Where did it come from? How did it happen? How does it express itself? How does it get in the way of your relationships? How does it damage the way you try to make connections with other people? What the noun to all the adjectives is, is the first victim of being hurt is self-compassion.
You look at that and you think, okay, then if that's true, then what has my life taught me that this is about? It seems to me indisputable. When you're talking about human wellbeing�and that's what recovery, especially in a [wise sense]�you're talking about human wellbeing. All there is, is love and love denied. To the degree that love is denied and we have those basic needs in terms of our spirituality because isn't it true? We aren't human beings trying to be spiritual; we're spiritual beings trying to be human. The spirituality is always there; what happens is, the humanity gets hurt. How did that happen�for you? How does it express itself for you?
So love is all there is. I don't think there is anything else. That's a hard word to use because it gets all mixed up with sloppy sentimentality and what's in it for me and sex and all the�that isn't what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the guy that learns to care enough about himself that his car breaks down, he'd come on his hands and knees to meetings. I'm talking about them people that show up when it isn't convenient�you call them 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, they're going to be there.
That's the kind of love I'm talking about because what is does is it creates in this person the divine question: �Why would they do that?� And they're forced to look for that answer: �By God, maybe I am worth it; maybe I am worth something.�
So this is very low-tech, but it's infinitely deep spirituality. Either come with your A-game or stay the hell home before you hurt somebody. The degree that we have not dealt with this�and we're going to kind of do a little test later on and stuff, to see if this relates to anybody in here�but to the degree that this has happened, if we don't do the work to change it, we limit ourself in the ability to do what the heck we're trying to do, what our mission is.
Now here's where the fun part, I think the exciting part, comes again, if you stay in your head. How then does this happen? If love is what heals and programs do not heal people�people heal people. God, through people, heals people. Love coming through the cracks is what heals people. If that's true, then what's our role in it? I want to suggest to me, what we are, at our best, we are mirrors; we are God's mirrors.
Somebody, in a sense�it's just the way it makes sense to me�that knows what they're doing, they know that you stand in front of hurt, wounded, damaged people, and you know what they're seeing or the image that they put out is they're an old bum that deserves to be cut out in the snow, and you're saying, �That isn't what I see.�
We reflect back to them a truth that they are not able to grasp, for very real reasons. I don't think there's a calling in the universe higher than to be one of God's mirrors. Who do you know who really does that? When do you see that happening? I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1965.
One of my first heroes, who really, really showed me�at least, again, in my understanding�what this was all about and what my job was, Msgr. Clem Kern up in Detroit�talked to him all the time. But Clem was a tall, dignified monsignor, and I was, again, a young priest, and it wasn't working out. It wasn't exactly what was advertised, at least in my experience. <Laughter>
We'd sit at dinner and they'd have a little bell and you'd ring the bell and somebody would come running out, the cooks, you know, and put the dinner�it was just something that I thought, it wasn't my thing. You go down to old Msgr. Kern's place, down in the Inner City, and honest to God, around that table, there was the hurt and the wounded and the people that couldn't walk and the people that couldn't see, and by God, they were there on that table�it was the most beautiful thing.
He said to me one night�I guess he must have liked me�he says, �Let's go over to Putnam House.� Putnam House was one of the first I think halfway houses in Detroit . It was an old, beat-up, rickety place that their parish ran. So we went over there, and ratty old furniture, and guys with galoshes, you know, those old type galoshes and winter coats because it was colder than hell in there.
I'll never forget, old George was sitting on this beat-up old couch, and he had passed out in the snow and lost all his fingers and he had his fingers cut off. He still had these dirty old bandages because they did�I don't know how often they changed them. Talk about beat up self-compassion.
This dignified, proper, prim, thin monsignor goes and sits down next to him, puts his arm around him and they're chatting. He says, �You want a smoke, George?� George says, �Yeah. Yeah.� He takes out a cigarette and lights it. See, and here's the magic: He takes a couple puffs, then he takes a breath, he takes a couple puffs. He probably gave out communion a hundred million times, but he never did it better than what he was doing with old George, and you could just see.
We were leaving and I said, �Geez, I didn't know you smoke, Monsignor.� He said, �I don't smoke. I hate it.� <Laughter> �Filthy habit. Filthy habit.�
But see, if you're paying attention and you're looking at that�and you do that all the time. You see�look, here's what it is; here's what it is�there's people at your treatment centers or wherever you're working and they're sitting there, having a cup of coffee, and that little voice says, �Hey, let's make some magic.�
So you go sit down there and have a cup of coffee because you know what you're doing; you remember their name, and you remember what they said. You look them in the face�because almost nobody looks them in the face, looks them down in their soul��Annie,� or �Pete, how's it going?� �Well, de-de-de-de-de.� Here, the counselor is spending time to talk to me.
I was thinking the other night out here in this room, you know, with Sierra Tucson, they had the board of the superstars, pitchers�you know, Claudia and John Bradshaw�and they're wonderful, they're great people; they're wonderful people.
I was talking to a guy and I said, �Now, what do you do?� He said, �Well, I've just got a little place.� I said, �Well, what do you think of this?� He said, �God, I'd drive a thousand miles to come here.� I said, �They do more important stuff than you do?� He said, �Oh, yeah. You know, we just got a little...�
There isn't nothing in the world more important than what you're doing. These people aren't better than what you're doing. They're dancing on a different stage. But that isn't what makes into the difference. And you know, it's easy to get it here, and it doesn't get down here. But by God, when you own that, that this person that I'm talking to here, maybe everybody in the world gave up on him, and I'm sitting here and I'm giving him respect and I'm giving dignity and I'm giving him love. That's it! That's it! There isn't anything else.
The more you start to feed on that, the more exciting that it gets. Let me tell you a poem that�John Bradshaw is a wonderful guy; I was reading his poems the other day. This isn't a written poem because the guy's illiterate; it's a word poem. He's down a the Salvation Army, a guy named Cash, and he's a little street guy, a little tough guy, and he's a meth addict, you know, coming off meth, and he's got race horses up in his nervous system. Boy, he can hardly stand still.
We were talking about this and saying, �Steve, you're a great man.� He's a big, big dope dealer. He got his nickname Cash because he always used to say, �I wouldn't leave the house with less than $10,000; I wouldn't walk down the street with less than $10,000,� and all that stuff.
We were talking and I said, �Yeah, but you're $10,000 don't mean a damn thing.� I said, �You've got a mission. You've got a mission, Cash. There's young guys out there that are going to listen to you that you can touch. They aren't going to listen to some old foolish white guy like me. Boy, you can do it.�
Here's the picture that he said. He said, �You know? I think we're like, I see a stained glass window, and it's got a thousand different pieces in it, and it's all different colors and it's all different pieces, and it's the light coming through the window that makes the difference. But the window changes the light.�
He said, �The little blue piece is just as important as the big red piece. It's when it comes together that it makes the difference.�
�You're the poet, man. That's exactly right,� I said.
He said, �As long as you stay in the window and don't fall out, that's exactly what it's about.�
Isn't that beautiful? We are pieces of glass that God shines through, that makes a difference of what's going on inside somebody else's soul. You cannot have access to anybody else's soul any more than you have access to your own soul.
What I think that necessitates, which is this fourth point up here, is we are healed to the extent that we are willing to give love into the world. There's some wonderful reverse osmosis that as you are doing your best to send love into this world and send healing into the world, that's how you get healed. It's reciprocal. It's reverse osmosis. You are touched in places that you have never touched, as you reach out and try to touch somebody else.
Now, I'd like to come back tomorrow and have you run this through your life. I want you to tell me how this works in your life�how you see it, where you see it, where's it happened. To me, I think this absolutely is it.
So now we're going to move on to other pieces. I want to take this whole thing again about abuse and about the effects and the onset of childhood PTSD in the adult people�that kind of trauma work.
What I first want to do is to put that into context. It seems to me, if you don't have a context, it's just another piece floating around out there, like a million other pieces. You can take your car apart and have a thousand pieces on your front yard and they're all good pieces, but it isn't a car�you can't drive a thousand pieces down the street.
It seems to me, in the field, it's absolutely critical that we move towards a spiritual kind of dimension where we stop defining ourself by our addiction. That does not mean that you can ever forget that you're an addict; it does not mean that you can ever start playing with it because addiction is patient and 20 years later, it'll come out and eat your soul if you aren't paying attention.
But, that isn't the same thing as saying, I'm first of all a human being who happens to be an addict. I'm not first of all an addict who happens to be a human being. What does it mean, then, to first of all, to be a human being and to start�quoting Mary Oliver's poem� living into the world , living into your humanity?
Here's what it means to me. I'm saying, as you reflect on your life, what has your life taught you? That the two deepest needs of every living human being�and this is where, again, where I said I think first of all, we're spiritual beings [who are half-human], so our humanity gets hurt.
But the two deepest needs are the need to love and to be loved; the need for acceptance and belonging. To the degree that these needs are met�and the problem is, we're born with the needs; we are not born with the skill to meet those needs�and to the ability and to the extent those needs are not met, that's what results in this closing down of our capacity for self-compassion.
We can work like dogs and we can kill ourselves in a thousand different ways for a good cause, but you don't love yourself, you don't honor yourself, and it becomes a stumbling block. Now, again, we're born with the need; we aren't born with the skill to meet those needs. How we learn to meet those needs, to a large extent, depends upon the family system we're born into.
Now, lots of other things�luck, culture, birth order, lots of gender, lots of different things come into that. But everybody in this room and every one of our clients and every human being on the face of this planet learned what are the rules to get the good stuff. To the extent that love and acceptance and belonging and safety, to the extent that that was available, we developed into people who are capable of having a foundation�we know what safe is, we know what vulnerable is, and we can tolerate vulnerability�to the extent, though, that that does not happen, trauma happens.
What trauma does is it blocks our ability to get the good stuff. This is where humanity weeps. Blocked here is where the hurt and the pain and where the generational evil comes in. Put a name to that. What is that for you? Looking and knowing your story, to the degree and whatever place�again, there was trauma there. Of course, the problem is that we don't recognize it as trauma�it just becomes normal. Doesn't everybody have their old man break their ribs? No! Doesn't everybody get thrown down the steps two or three times a month and get ignored and all this rest of this kind of stuff and not counted? No! But it becomes so normal, we no longer recognize it as anything but the way it ought to be.
But here's the test. Here is the ultimate test. Think of a child that you love. Is it okay that what happened to you happens to them? I don't know how much of your damage translated into rage and anger; I guess to different degrees, it always does. But you start talking�at least with the guys that I work with�you start talking about this and say, �What if the same thing happened to you?� You see that red mist start closing in.
The difference and the distance between if it's okay for them and if it's okay for you, the distance between that is the degree to which your self-compassion has been hurt, if you look at the kind of stuff that we put ourself through and never think twice about it. Work until you're sick�you know, I mean, a thousand different ways we do that. But there is trauma, and there is hurt.
Now, everybody does not get hurt to the same degree; everybody doesn't get hurt in the same way. I have found it helpful to look at this trauma, there's stage one, there's stage two, and there's stage three.
Stage one is if this translates for all the different factors and becomes an addiction, then you've got to do stage one work; you've got to get sober. Basically, that's what treatment is�it gives you a foundation; it points you in the right direction; it gives you a taste of what fellowship is; it gives you a taste of what spirituality is.
This is the job of stage one recovery. But, sooner or later, you've got to learn how to deal with your life in a different way. That's what we call stage two work, and it's called co-dependency, it's called a lot of different stuff. We have a life management program that has to do with that.
But stage three is about people who exhibit the symptomology of that post-traumatic stress, and childhood onset of post-traumatic stress is different than adult onset. Guys that go off to war, have terrible things happen to them, or kidnapping or torture, they have a foundation to come back to. What I think most people in the field�and I don't necessarily mean us because, you know, C.C. Nuckols does a wonderful job talking about a lot of this, and there's lots of info�but the people out in the street don't know it.
I didn't know it! God, I'd have given anything in the world if I had known what this was. After 20 years of recovery, you hit this wall. I thought I was freaking nuts! The anxiety and the hurt and the kind of stuff that starts surfacing�I didn't know what it was. The more that you finally come to understand that�and again, that's part of our job is being the mirror. We can lead people to this�they don't have to go through�I don't know how many of you that this is part of your profile.
It isn't for everybody, but if this is part of your profile, you've done that work, you know how lost and how scared and how hurt that that can be. I don't know about you, and maybe you were fortunate enough to have somebody who knew what they were doing and had been there before who could lead you through this. I didn't�it was hunt and peck, I'll tell you. We got three or four other guys who were kind of going through the same thing and says, �Man, let's hold hands and stumble down the road and see what we can find out,� and it flourished. But long!
But understand this�I think, and this research has never been done�I'll be that there's 50, 60, 70 percent of people in our groups that have one degree or another of the symptomology of post-traumatic stress and don't know it. They aren't going to talk about it because if you've been there, you know how crazy you think; you've got rats running around your head.
Now, everybody in recovery's got a sad story. Everybody, though, does not have the kind of symptomology that rises to the level of what we're going to talk about in a minute of that symptomology. Everybody doesn't have that�it's different. Everybody has been hurt. Everybody, though, does not have a brain that has been rewired and reorganized, which is what trauma does. Everybody doesn't have what John Bradshaw calls that amygdala imprint, but it's a whole neural network.
When that gets triggered and it's in the limbic system of the mind, you know, and you get that input, and most things, it goes through the neocortex, so you've got time to make the ethical judgment, which allowed civilization to happen�all that stuff is wonderful. But when you are in danger, that input totally passes�skates around�it doesn't go through the neocortex; it goes right to that limbic system in your brain. It's evolutionary biology, which is the way it ought to be. If you're standing there in front of a cave, and a saber-toothed tiger jumps in front of you, you'd better not stop and think, �Geez, what a pretty thing.� You're going to wind up lunch!
I mean, the whole thing, the main neurotransmitter that comes out of the amygdala, which is Latin for almond , the two little glands in the back of the brain, is glutamate; it's supercharged adrenaline. They can neuromap that and they talk about the glutamate superhighway. It's the kind of thing that you don't recall; you don't remember the trauma�you relive it. Everybody doesn't relive the trauma! You can remember it, but you don't relive it.
That's why 20 years after Vietnam , a plane goes by and guys are diving in the bushes. They aren't remembering--it's physiology . The whole mind, the whole nervous system, is organized as if it exactly was the same thing happening there. When that starts going on, you truly, honestly, think that you're absolutely crazy.
One of the reasons why I wrote, Destination: Joy , which I wanted to call, Beyond Stage Two: A Map of Recovery to Abundance because I said, joy isn't a destination, for crying out loud. It's part of the freaking journey; it isn't a destination.
But at any rate, chapter eight is trying to raise the flag and say, �Hey, take a look at this!� Is this part of your profile?� Now, again, I didn't know what was happening to me. The symptomology of that psychic numbing and that horrible, terrible rage all of a sudden started to surface and there was a reason for that. The reason was, my first grandson was born.
Kids are God's secret weapon. There's a whole bunch of us in here, you know, that put up with normal and it wasn't too bad, and you got down the road. But see, then, some little kid came into your face, boy, and I'll tell you, you're holding them and that little hand comes out to you, and this starts to crack. When that cracks, I'll tell you, your spirit wants out�it wants out. Only, you don't know how to do it.
You've got 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years of practice, you know, and the dog that wins the fight is the dog that's fed, and you've been feeding this old, crazy dog over here for the last�and you didn't know you were doing it. But I went to this wonderful counselor, Ph.D., psychologist, you know, $150 an hour or something, Dr. Renee. She was a neat kind of�I got a couple of good things from her.
I was talking to her about the symptomology and stuff and what was going on with my life and just the agitation, and she said, �It's classic PTSD.� I said, �Oh, you're so full of shit, Renee.� <Laughter> I said, �I've never been to war. That's war stuff.� She said, �That's your problem�you've been to war every day of your life and you don't know it.�
She said, �You don't believe me?� I said, �No.� She went and got the DSM-IV�and try this; I've done this a zillion times�opened the DSM-IV to PTSD and said, �Read the symptomology. You fit every freaking one of them.� She said, �If the symptoms are there, the cause is there.� So that was good.
Another wonderful�hard�but wonderful truth that she gave me, she said, �You've done such good work over family of origin, but you've never looked at your life through the eyes of an abused child.� I don't know how that was with you. I don't know if any of you have ever had to do this work. Everybody does it. But if you have to do this work, at least for me, an abused child, boy, I resisted that, and I fought that, and it just did not seem right.
I loved my parents, and I still do, and they did the best they could, but they were damaged people. We've got more damned suicides and incarcerations and jails and commitments to�well, I filled that one; I did 30 days in a locked psyche unit, you know, before I knew what in the hell was going on.
But they did the best they could, but we started debriefing. Again, we're going to talk again about knowing your story. I divided my life up into three 20-year segments; it took me a year and a half. When you in-depth starting doing your life story, relative to what perhaps is abuse�I was acting one of those out. Renee invited me into her group one day and we were acting out and I was telling her about them and she kicked me out of the group. She said, �You're causing relapse�traumatizing these people again.� <Laughter>
But I wasn't trying to do that. We used to fight, me and my dad, and he'd knock the living hell out of you. I was telling them about the time he made me bust his rib, and I was a little kid, and we were fighting him and he said, �I want you to hook in and by God, you hook in,� and he'd pull your punch and he'd knock you down so damned hard, I still can't hardly hear out of my left ear. I mean, your ears would ring, and you'd get up, and I hated that and I remember that and how pink and red and green the side was getting.
God, I didn't want to hit him, but he wanted to drive you into an animal rage. He had fighting dogs, loved his fighting dogs. You know, he'd throw them in a pit and they'd go till one of them's dead. Loved it. Loved blood sport. That's what he wanted. That was his task.
Again, my story's not different than anybody else's. It's different scenarios, it's different kinds of things, but see, what I'm saying is the exact same stuff kind of happened. You lose the capacity for any kind of self-compassion.
Finally, I heard his rib pop, and Jesus, I hated that, you know. He was gasping. He said, �Well, okay, we can stop. Thank God, you can hit a little bit.� I was kind of doing that and hoping�they were saying, �Well, what's kind of your story?� I go, <makes smacking sound>, and they'd say, �Get out of here.�
Well, see, what is your story? How did that trauma happen? When love comes calling, guide that little hand or whatever it may be, and you want to get through here so bad, and you don't know the name of it. You don't know what's stopping you. You don't know what the problem is. All you know, that your spirit has come so much to life, it's going to kill you if you don't do something.
That was one of the neat lines from Mary Oliver's poems that Bradshaw was reading, and James White, who's an Irish poet, he lives in Seattle , he says, �You follow the voice because it's the only thing you can do.�
Now, let me just ask by a show of hands, so I know if we're at least on the same planet. How many people know that experience, of your spirit is trying to get out so hard, and it doesn't know how to get out and you're getting depressed and you're always in stress and you absolutely thinking you're crazy, and you don't know what to do, you don't know what the problem is? Anybody ever been there? Yeah, well, okay, great. [...] <Laughter>
See, and you think, what a glorious mission, to be able to go to the guests that we are called to offer hospitality to and say, �You aren't going to die. You aren't crazy. You feel crazy, but you'll get through this. You and me, we'll get through because I'll be your mirror. You tell me whatever you have to tell me, and you cry as much as you have to cry, and you bleed if you have to bleed. I will continue to give you back that reflection. I see a beautiful human being.� God, what an honor! Isn't it? What an honor.
One of my dear guys down at the mission, Big Mike, he was a loan shark in Chicago and a body guard for the biggest drug dealer in Detroit. Big, big man; looks like Mike Tyson, only he's a hundred pounds heavier�huge, huge guy. All he's ever known is violence; he doesn't know anything different. But God came calling. I don't know exactly how that happened to him, and he came off bum row and he got into the mission and we were talking and one night he comes to me, and tears are coming down his eyes.
He did a lot of hard time. And you don't cry. He's like, �I got to talk to you. I got to talk to you.� I said, �Well, great.� So we were sitting there talking in the chapel, and I said, �What's the problem?� He said, �You know Gina? She's my counselor. You know, I've got a woman counselor.� I said, �Yeah?� He said, �She's giving me trouble.� I said, �Well, maybe you deserve it.� �No, no. I want to kill her. I can make her disappear; I've done that a lot of times.� But he says, �But I can't do that and be a good man, can I?�
Oh, struggling so hard! See, now, you take him out to the prison, you sit him down with some of them guys; he's a genius. He's a genius because he's been there and he knows what that's all about.
But again, see, if you've got people and their profile is down here in stage three, they've got to know that. We have to know enough to be able to recognize the signs and to lead them to someplace, so there's an out. I mean, if you've been there�and again, maybe a lot of you have had guys�but if you haven't, holy cow, to find somebody who can walk through there with you is like truly finding God Himself, and I think that's what we're truly called to be.
Now, let me share with you�and you guys probably all know this�but the symptomology. I want to share with you five symptoms. I've found it really helpful and important to understand, you do not start in this journey talking about your story because what people say is, �Well, is my story enough?� I don't know if your story is enough. Are the symptoms there? If the symptoms are there, the cause is there.
What we, of course, tend to do is to start comparing is my story as bad as this other guy's. That isn't the point. It's a very, very bad place to�are the symptoms there? This is part of the handout on�I got the symptoms on page 99. Then again, I think by far the best way to understand these is you draw this kind of circle because they come and go.
Now, I'm going to go through these fairly quickly because you know what they are, but I'll bet a lot of your people don't know what they are.
Dissociation. You're not there. You're body's there; you aren't there. You're a watcher, and you can spend the vast majority of your life watching yourself live your life, but you aren't doing it. Now, again, if the whole goal, the whole point is about relationship, how in the hell are you going to be in a relationship if you aren't there? There isn't nobody to have a relationship with.
That can sound so insane, unless you've been there. Most of your life is lived behind a bulletproof glass wall, and you can see through it and you can look out and you can kind of reach around and interact enough, and they don't know that you're not there.
Or you get into that kind of�you leave your body and you're watching yourself from the outside. I don't know how many of you do fifth steps. I'm not saying this necessarily should be part of the first fifth step, but whoever said you only ought to do one fifth step. You're second, third, fourth, fifth step, a lot of times, if the person keeps their head in the game, is going to be around this kind of stuff.
There was a dear lady, I put her in this chapter eight�Kathy was her name�nice, nice lady and having such a difficult time. She had got the Hazelden pamphlet on doing a fourth step and she had all of her little stuff�you know, �I get impatient and I do this and de-de-de-de-de,� and you could just�something isn't right here; we aren't on track here.
I said, �Well, okay. God bless you. Let's hold it for a minute, though; let's take a step back. Tell me a little bit about your life. Were you ever sexually abused?� Because, what, 30 percent of the in people in this room have been; another 30, 40 percent physically, emotionally abused. If you've been there, you recognize it, you see it. She said, �No.� I said, �Well, are you sure, Kathy?� She said, �Well, no. My dad and my brothers used to make me get naked and they would kind of play with me. Then my brother used to bring his friends over, and they would laugh and pinch me and stuff.� I said, �Jesus, what did you do?� She said, �Oh, I left. It didn't happen to me; I was over here, watching. It didn't bother me.� She said she's totally incapable of a loving relationship because she's not there.
You think about your experiences, that again, about knowing her story. As I really started to do this, I remember lots of times as a little kid, carrying them damned cement buckets, and they were too heavy; I couldn't do it. But I was standing out here, watching that little boy because I didn't know if he was going to make it through the day alive. But I wouldn't going to die. He might die, but I wouldn't die.
You stand out and you see that�that dissociation. Again, it's an amazing, amazing kind of thing. But how do you make the relationship work, which, again, is kind of the whole point. If you have a high number�I do ask the guys, �Now, I want you to rate yourself on a score of 1 to 10 on these.�
Exaggerated response�boy, is that a big one. The literature talks about an unreasonable response. Well, it's only unreasonable depending on if you know what you're responding from. What happens is, of course, with all this, our gauges lie, and we have tremendously exaggerated responses, inappropriate responses to stimuli that don't require�not the ones here and now, but that isn't what you're responding to!
That's the whole point. When some guy cuts in front of you and all you can think about is, �I want to get my machine gun and kill that son of a gun.� You aren't the 30-, 40-, 50-year-old-guy that's now an executive or something driving down the road; you open that trap door in your forehead, and you're still that little five-year-old kid, hiding under the bed, hoping to God somebody that's so much bigger than you doesn't come in and kill you.
If you don't know the difference, you don't have a choice. That's what I'm saying. How ever good or poor, all of this makes sense. If you don't know the difference�and the vast majority, at least in my experience of my people, don't know it. Don't know it. A guy was telling me the other day�a long, long time in recovery�he was sitting in the movie with his wife, watching�and it was a scary movie; you know, stressful. Somebody stole an atomic bomb and was going to blow the world up.
He hadn't worked his program well enough, and of course, what all this leads to, once you understand it well enough, what do you do about it? How do you desensitize that raw, angry, beat-up thumb that you hit with the hammer that's getting all the attention? How do you do that? Well, you can't do it if you don't understand it.
His wife, he said, was holding his hand and was tapping. He hadn't worked his program well enough�you know, to pay attention�and you have to pay attention. The price of freedom is you have to pay attention to paying attention. I hate having to pay attention, but I don't hate it as bad as I hate the consequence if I don't.
But he said he was just in this kind of state, and he said an old lady who must have been 80 or 90 years old was stumbling back by his chair in the movie and had a bag of popcorn, and that voice said, �She's got a gun; she's got a gun in that popcorn sack. You better get up and pop her in the face and throw her right over that or goddammit, she's going to kill you.�
See, now, of course, nobody ever talks about it, but you know what I'm talking about. See, if there's nobody showing you what that's all about, you just think you're nuts, and you hope you don't kill anybody. Lots of people do; you see them in the pen, see them doing time, or whatever it may be.
But see, that exaggerated response, whenever the response is inappropriate to the stimuli, what you're responding to is not what' going on�it's what went on. That neuromap is firing, boy, and you are not remembering; you are reliving.
How does that happen for you? How does that happen for you? You lose $20 out in the street and you know you're going to be a bag lady. �I'm going to lose my house; they're going to kick me out of the house and I won't be able to care out of...de-de-de-de-de,� and it seems so real.
See, what's your story? What's your story? How does this translate into your life, this trauma that totally kills that self-compassion?
Here's the third one: psychic numbing. Nothing matters. It don't matter. You got blood coming out both ears; �Ah, shit, it don't matter.� No matter what happens, it doesn't matter.
One of my team, that when we started going through this, oh, but dearly love him, 42 years sober, a guy named Willard, just love him; he's a wonderful guy. He called one night and he'd broken his leg and he was in the hospital. I said, �How did you break your leg?� He was 65 years old at the time. He said, �You know, I was building houses, I was down in the valley, down there about 200 feet down in the valley and it was all full of trees and brush and stuff, and I had this great big power saw, you know, chainsaw.� I said, �Who were you down there with?� �No one.�
He cut a tree and it hit him top of the head. If it had been another inch this way, of course, it would have killed him, but it bounced off, broke his right shoulder, broke his right leg. The leg was so broken, it was at a 90-degree angle and it was just dragging his foot behind him.
I said, �How did you get out of there?� He said, �I would either die or I had to climb up...I had to drive myself up 200 feet up the valley.�
I said, �Well, I thought there was brush.� �Well, there's all kinds of brush. It hurt like hell. I'd get over that tree and my busted leg would fall off the log.� I said, �Geez, Willard.� �Well, that ain't nothing.� Psychic numbing�it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's what happens when all this self-compassion is totally shut down.
How much psychic numbing is there going on in your life�or was there going on in your life? You're with somebody you absolutely totally love; you can't feel a freaking thing. You might kill to protect them, but you don't feel nothing because you're not there. You're all kind of dead.
Hypervigilance. Unless you've been there, it's hard to imagine that there are people who never have a clue what safe means. Hypervigilance. You always know them�you come in a room like this and they're going to be sitting against the wall. They'll say, �I want to see what the hell's going on. I don't want nobody getting behind me.�
You're sitting at a basketball game, again, you're 30 years clean, and you've got a nice front-row seat type thing, and there's a space behind the chairs, and people are walking behind, they're going to get beer, going to get whatever, and you're absolutely going crazy because somebody's behind me and I don't know who they are. Hypervigilance�you never feel safe. Never feel safe.
How many relationships have you or the people you work with ruined for no other reason that it required vulnerability? �I'm not going to do that. I don't know how to do that. Nobody's getting close to me. People I'll get in a relationship with are crazy people because it's not going to work, and they don't want nothing from me.� So that exaggerated response, that hypervigilance�incapable of trust.
The last one I want to talk about is easily overwhelmed, and that really is a mark I think of self-compassion, especially the older you get. You've got to go to the store and get four things�it seems like 800. Simple little tasks, and you do, you get overwhelmed��I can't handle it. I can't do it.�
If part of that crazy voice says, �You lazy S.O.B. Move it! Do it!� You'll push yourself and push yourself and push yourself and push yourself and you're hurting other people and getting them out of the way, and all you're doing is continuing that intergenerational evil because you don't know that the voice is from yesterday. The only place it exists is in your head; it doesn't exist anyplace else but in your head.
One of the most profound truths that a human being can truly internalize is: Reality is optional . Reality is what you say it is . That voice is saying that you're in danger; somebody's going to kill you, do all this kind of stuff. You have a choice if you understand well enough whether you're going to follow that path or whether you're going to go a different path, but not if you don't recognize it; not if you don't understand it.
So now, if I was going to say, as I do with our guys, pick one of those that you really relate to, which one of those would you pick?
There's three questions. Here's the second question: Give me an example of how that trait expresses itself in your life that you would never tell anybody. How is it there?
See, and number three: How has it gotten in the way of your relationships�your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your kids, your relationship with your family, your relationship with the people that you love? How has it done that? I have experienced that when you invite people with these questions to get down to their core, the kind of liberation and the kind of freedom, you give them permission to talk about these things, healing starts. It desensitizes that horrible pain that they come to the show with.
So, I mean, those are some questions. Now, here's another circle of five: Then what the heck do you do about it?
I think�at least my experience has been�five steps, again, of what it takes to deal with this stage three damage. Number one, again, I think it's terribly important that we know our story, that we take the time in-depth family history. The more you can focus that on the damage, the hurt, the wounding that has happened there, the more powerful, the more effective it becomes. But what is your story?
The second step is how important it is to understand our story. Here, I'm talking about connecting the dots. Just to know a lot of horror stuff that's all gone on in your life doesn't necessarily connect the dots to how it's continuing to affect your life today. How does it still happen? One of the techniques that we use, the examples, that seem very, very effective, again, building out what we did before�here is the symptom or the issue that I want to pick at least for now that has really caused me some difficulty; when you talk about the symptoms, that I can relate to them.
Secondly, here is a concrete situation, which was the third question, of how this symptom gets acted out in my life. This situation is now. In this situation, we have them think about and reflect on, in this situation, here's the way I think, here's the self-talk. In this situation, here is the feeling. From this thought and feeling, number three is here's the action that I take. Then, of course, here is the consequence.
The fascinating thing is, all right, now, let's do the same thing about them. Give me an example of a situation not now but then where this issue was there�the hypervigilance, the inability to trust, the body shame, the whatever it may be. Give me an example of then. What was the thought, feeling, and action then? You look at those, and they're the same thing.
So when you're acting out this way�and now, how old are you? My experience, people start to develop the skill to put a space between the impulse and the action. That's so much of what that healing is. Because the impulse is there doesn't mean that I have to act on it because that's just one reality.
There's another reality possible if you practice it, but a powerful, powerful exercise. Understand. Be able to connect the dots. How does it all work?
Now, a real hard one, number three is to embrace your story. Twenty years I made my living telling these kinds of story, and it's like a water bug going across the water�never got wet at all. When you embrace that story is when you start to engage it emotionally�when you start to feel the feeling.
Oftentimes, it seems to me, it takes�I didn't know any other way to call it�when the egg starts to break, when, after 50, 60 years, this stuff starts to purge, you're going to feel crazy. To have somebody that knows enough and cares enough about you to walk through and say, �Don't make any big decisions when you're in this stage. You're going to feel every feeling that you have repressed, and it's going to be absolutely crazy making.�
God, I wish I would have known that. I was still out there, doing seminars on intimacy and all kinds of crazy stuff�you know, just absolutely going through agony. You are so incredibly vulnerable, and you are so hurt and you are so wounded. And to know enough about this now, when you find somebody who's going through this, show up for them; go with them.
Oftentimes, that conversion experience, when this egg breaks, will come from a child�the child will be the angel at the door. You've got to embrace it; you've got to feel it.
The fourth is, it has to be shared. Of course, there's lots and lots and lots of ways to share this. Do your art class. Illustrate how you feel. Illustrate what this feels like. Share it with somebody else. Any of you use art therapy in this process? Very, very powerful.
You've got to embrace it. The fourth step is, you need to share what you have learned. That's one way. There's zillions of ways to share your story with somebody else. You put it out there in some kind of a drawing, and then you tell the people what it is. You tell the people how it feels.
Jerry�God bless Jerry Moe the other day�was talking about doing this with the kids program out of Betty Ford; tremendously powerful. What I ask the people to do that I work with is pick out ten events from having done your life story, and then we're going to process those�but specifically get ten events.
In each one of those events, find the wounded part, that wounded child, and give it a name; make it as personal as you can. Old Willard was the brooder boy; he grew up on a farm, no electricity, no water. The only way he kept warm, he said, during the winter up in Minnesota, they had a brooder house where they kept the chickens alive, and he said, �I'd go in there and sneak in there and hide in there, to try to keep warm.�
He said, �We had thousands of rats in our house, running across there. When harvest came, the grain was out. I'd lay there all night and hear these rats running through my bed.� Give me the events, and give it a name.
Then let's sit down�and this is the part about being in this mirror�tell me that story. Tell me that event. Let's talk about that event. Let's process that event. Again, that blockage comes in there. You just keep inviting them to open up and to have it come out. Incredibly powerful.
Psychodrama is, again, another tremendously helpful process in there. Have them act it out, in a safe environment because you're going to make it safe; you're going to be their mirror. Let's do this again; let's talk about it again. Put words to it. If you could go back in exactly that same situation, what would you want to tell this person?
Boy, that's powerful. A person's dead; you sit there right there in the chair�you know because they aren't dead; they're fully alive here�and you have a conversation. Yes?
AUDIENCE: <Inaudible comment.>
LARSEN: Read it in group? That's absolutely right, and write more than one letter. Every time you write to that person, it's going to be different, to different people. Then, after a while, when you practice this, let them write back to you because they've got stuff that they want to tell you too. Yes?
AUDIENCE: Non-dominant hand.
LARSEN: Non-dominant hand, that's another technique. Would you say that again?
AUDIENCE: Non-dominant hand.
LARSEN: There's lots of different ways to do that. But what I'm saying is, it needs to be shared. Again, lots of people don't even know there is anything to share. Being able to offer them the opportunity and offer them a place to do it is just, I think, tremendously helpful.
Some people write. Write it out and share it; talk about it. Write a poem. Get a picture. Debrief it.
Then the last part here�and again, it keeps going around�the fifth step is, you need, then, to start to rewrite your story. I think what that has a lot to do with is you start to practice. The more you understand what you're doing�again, you really start to practice�and you strengthen that whole positive side of what you're trying to do, and the more you practice it, you're able to stretch out the impulse and the action, and you get more and more proficient of how to do that.
Let me give one example of that, and I'm really kind of proud of this. As soon as this is over, somebody's scheduled my plane to leave at 2:20�I don't think there's a way in hell I'm going to make it. Yeah, out in front of the hotel, it could be 20 minutes before you get a cab, then you've got to take a shuttle ...
I can't tell you the kind of stress and trauma that that could put me under because once you're out of control, see, then every tragic, horrible thing that ever happened to you, you're vulnerable to it and it can come crashing down.
But you don't have to be there. And the more you get that impulse�and I was thinking about that and I was kind of going into a panic attack last night, thinking about this, and because you practice and because you're with people that you love and people you're sharing with and that kind of stuff, you think, �Shit, reality is an option; so what.� <Laughter> So, if I miss the plane, so freaking what.
You know, a hard time is if you were in the tsunami and lost your family. This isn't a problem. <Laughter> What are you going to choose? It absolutely really is a choice. Every kind of damage and every kind of wound and every kind of hurt that we get into, it will try to shoot us off into that whole neural map over here that is traumatic, that is tragic, that is out of control, it's dangerous, you're going to�but choose the other one.
Now, here's part of what we do. After you've done this number four, however you're going to do it, I think this is really the ongoing work. Three steps. You have the guys track and log at least three times a day when you caught yourself in this negative reality, this lack of self compassion. You do these three steps.
You intercept it, so you catch yourself in the craziness and say, �No, I don't believe that. That ain't what's going to happen.� I'm there, you know. Everybody's dead. They aren't going to do this to me. The house is now a parking lot, but except here. So you intercept it.
Then the second you reframe it you move from the old lie to the new truth. What is your new truth? What is the new reality that you choose?
Then, of course, the third step, you act it. But it's not just behavior modification. You are internalizing the new truth that you have chosen is going to be part of your life. I don't want to go out to that freaking airport and be crazy and pushing old ladies out of the way and screaming and hollering, �By God, <mumbles>!� <Laughter> I mean, I've seen too much of that; I'm not going to do it.
But it's a choice. But it's only a choice if you see if you have an option. If you don't have an option, it is not a choice.
Then we get together�and again, you have to log this three times a day, every day. Well, you don't have to, but if you want to be free, if you want to find some freedom, you have to do it. This is not easy stuff. You, obviously, as you well know, you've got to go back to where you were hurt the most. You've got to go back to the scene of the crime, or you're not going to be able to desensitize it.
Again, it's just like you smack your thumb with a hammer, the whole world is in your thumb; it gets all the attention. That whole process, again, of practicing and spreading it out and making the different choices, what happens is that hurt part gets integrated back into the whole personality; it isn't sticking out there all by itself again.
But man, you get the love and the support in those groups. I'll give you an example of your Monday. Intercept; reframe; act. You find that you have a choice. Just very, very exciting, I think.
So the whole upshot, there's a lot of people suffering, it seems to me, that I have met, and they don't know what they're suffering from; they don't know what the pain's coming from, they don't know what the hurt is. If we can, by any stretch of the imagination, offer them some guidance, offer them some love, offer them some help, you can't be bored. I mean, it's the most exciting thing that you can imagine.
I want to read you a part from one little letter. This is a new friend of mine; I've never met him except through the mail. I knew his mom. I met his mom down in Mississippi. This guy's name is James. James is doing life in a prison down in Tennessee. He's the head vice lord in the prison; he has 56 different chapters report to him, and he apparently is the guy that decides who gets shanked and who doesn't get shanked and who's let go and who's not.
The first four, six, seven letters, you know, it was all tough guy stuff and gang stuff and all this kind of stuff. But see, oh, God, he has kind of a stepsister; I don't exactly know what the relationship is. She's 13; her name is Casey, and James loves her. James loves her. He said, �I'd do anything in the world for her; I'd do anything to protect her,� and, �God's right and right through that love for that little girl.�
He's been in the system since he was 13 years old, and this is the paragraph from the last letter. Now, if you hear the music, boy, the dance is something else. I think it's so beautiful; he's starting to crack open.
�The demons that I must face are the hatred that I feel toward myself and others. At the core of my addiction is this deep, deep feeling of hate��total loss of self-compassion. �For years, I was able to make it through with enough drugs, but after a while, nothing could tame the urge to destruction. In February 5th, 1984, this hatred manifested itself in action��didn't have a choice.
�Fresh off a drug binge, I could focus on nothing but destruction. I laid restless in bed, fighting the urge, to no avail. After a short thought process, I was compelled to act upon this hatred��the voice. He said, �A short time later, an innocent life was lost. I had allowed the demon to do as it wished. Today, I still struggle with the containment of this hatred. I fear that it will rear its ugly head again. I've yet to find a safe and sufficient way to release this hatred, in order to rebuild with love.�
I think that's tremendous insight. Again, we're a mirror. Last Christmas, I went to our recovery church, and I passed out his address. I said, �You know, now, we're here about recovery and it's time to do something and not just sing songs.� I said, �You send him a letter.� Oh, God, you ought to [hear James]� �Why would they do this?��the divine question. �Why would they do this? Why would these people take the time to send...mail this?�
�Why do you think, James? What are they telling you?� See, and it just starts to flower, and you're thinking... God, I'd love to get down and see him. I don't know if I can. It's not exactly death row, but it's segregated. I said, well, when am I going to get down to Tennessee? See, in about two days later, we got a call, �Hey, we're coming down. We're doing a statewide thing in Tennessee and de-de-de-de.� I want to go look in his face. I want him to be able to read just what a cool guy he is. That's where it happens. That's where it is.
I'd like to close, and again, part of another choice about this is my bag is heavy�for me, anymore, it's heavy; you know, I'm 65 years old. It's a long way out to the front of this casino, which is where you can catch a cab. So, of course, this old crazy thinking, �You need help? That bag don't weigh no more than 80 pounds; man, I could take ten of them.� Yeah, and then for a week, you're paralyzed.
So I met a real nice young guy that works... <Laughter> He has one of the booths there across the hall; his name is Jesse. I said, �Jesse, what are you going to be doing about 12:30?� He said, �I don't know.� I said, �Would you carry my bag for me?� It's too heavy. It's a choice, but it isn't a choice if you don't know that you have an option. If you haven't found a way to desensitize that �Ugh! Hurt him!� it's the most fascinating thing, and it isn't nuclear science.
The grandson, the first one is now 13 years old and he plays hockey, and they check. Montgomery's a tall kid, but he's lanky, he's not very heavy, and he just gets his socks knocked off when he gets checked. So I said, �Now, let me tell you a couple things.� I said, �In a collision, the guy that's lowest is the one that's going to win.� Of course, what we were trained, you've got a helmet, so hit them low and then try to bring your head up under their chin so you can break their jaw. I mean, that's what you want to do. <Laughter>
I didn't want to tell him that. <Laughter> Well, I didn't; I didn't tell him that. And of course, he said, �Oh, shit, you know nothing, Grandpa. You can't do that.�
So, honest to God, I hadn't thought of this for like 50 or 60 years, but one of the things in our fighting that we used to do, and we had magic markers and my dad would mark�where do you hit a guy to hurt him the worst?
One was in solar plexus and two was under the heart and three was the chin and four was the tip of the nose and five was in the kidneys. If you ever really got pounded in the kidneys, it paralyzes the hell out of you. You'd practice shooting out of jabs and they'd turn sideways so you could make them pee blood for a month.
So when I went to group with my team, with the guys that we went down on this journey, I was saying, �You know, funniest thing, I hadn't thought of this,� and talking about Montgomery didn't want to do the check and stuff. I told them about this fight with markup, and he said, �Jesus.� I said, �What?� He said, �That's terrible.� It didn't seem terrible. It didn't seem terrible. Big damn deal.
See, but then the ultimate test. Okay, so you take Josh. Josh is about the same age that I was then�eight, maybe. Are you going to paint him up and pound on him? No, wouldn't tolerate it.
See, and it takes you right back to, again, what everything is about. It's about this whole self-compassion and learning that you count and learning that you care. Lovely.
I would like to, if I could, I want to close, and really, one of the ways that this kind of helps me to desensitize this is, I like poetry�I like to write poetry; I like to write stories. Write a story, so it comes out the way you want it because again, reality is optional.
I want to share this with you. It seems true for me, and especially for those of you who have fought the good fight and are fighting the good fight and you've got rats in your head, but by God, you're getting down the road the best you can. Even more so, you're willing to turn around and to help somebody else through this terrible, terrible time. This is the way it kind of seemed true for me.
The light is fearsome, for those too long in the dark.
Isn't that amazing? I mean, ordinarily, you think, �God, the light's wonderful.� It isn't wonderful if you've been in the dark too long.
Even when lost and knowing how lost,
The road leading beyond the demons
always appears blocked
By other demons more fearsome yet.
But somehow, the monsters I know seem tamer,
and less dangerous, than those ahead,
Unknown and hidden in shadows.
Even though beyond them flickers a light leading to a home I've never known, yet oddly somehow remember.
I remember it with at least the same hunger and passion and fury, to the fiery blood lust of angels turned to demons
through the evil alchemy of betrayed innocence.
The light is fearsome beyond all telling,
And yet, Lord, I come down the road,
Pursuing the light the best I can,
Seeking peace as best I can,
Seeking release as best I can,
Seeking connection as best I can.
Though it seems the tools that I need to make these connection
are somehow missing,
I send my life as prayer into the unending dark void around me,
and in me and before me,
And I will keep coming until death ends my journey.
I am hurt; I am not evil.
I am doing the best I can to pursue the light
of a never-known or forgotten home.
If I am not ready, help me be open, Lord.
If fear binds me, melt the knots.
I carry so much brokennes,
But I try, and I am trying the best I can.
I don't see or feel you at times,
But I reach into the darkness with all of my power,
Asking you to find me, who seems unable to find you.
I am coming, Lord, as best I can.
Then here's what God says back:
Little brother, I hear your call, and I am here.
Put down your failed defenses.
You have been at war too long.
I am here.
Rest.
Let me stand guard.
I am bigger than all of your enemies.
I am here for you.
And I will stand here until we are one.
You do not have to be strong.
You do not have to be right.
You do not have to be tough.
You do not have to be brave.
You do not even have to be good.
All you have to be is here,
And I will do the rest.
<Applause.>
Thank you. See, I want to hear yours. I want to hear yours. Mine isn't any different than yours. Yours is not different than mine. And God is looking for you and you're looking for God just as much as anybody else is, and we need to own that greatness, I think.
Okay, let's close with a meditation. I've got just a couple of minutes before I'm out of here. This will be a guided meditation, so I want to ask you to close your eyes, if you would. Yeah, turn off your cell phones. Wiggle around in your chair and try to get as comfortable as you can. I'd like to ask you to take two or three deep breaths. Take some deep breaths.
I'd like you to picture that you are in a place that is safe. If you don't know what that is, make it up. It's warm; it's where you want to be. Just be there and feel the warmth and feel the light and feel the goodness.
Into that space in your spirit, I'd like you to pull up the face of the person or persons that you love the most in all this world. I want you to look at him and see that face and see how precious it is, and let them touch you, let yourself feel that beauty beyond compare.
I want you to say to them, in the wordless way that we can in meditations, tell them how much you love them. Maybe it's prelude to be able to put in actual words, but tell them. Let your heart reach out. Tell them how beautiful they are and what they mean to you and how you are there for them.
I want you to share with them that your love is faithful, that you'll always be there, that they can't go anywhere that you won't go. That there's nothing they can do�ever�that will cause you to throw them away.
Tell them they can count on you. I'm here for you. I'm your mirror. And I will reflect back to you the beauty that I see until you can see it yourself. Say that.
I'd like you to slowly become aware of a pair of hands larger than you holding you, and God, as you understand, looks into your face and says, �You cannot love greater than I. As you have loved those whom you love, so I love you. Through all of the guilt, through all of the shame, through all of the hurts, or whatever you have been, I love you. I honor you.�
Feel that. And listen to God say to you, �I am faithful. Whatever your wrongs, whatever your mistakes, whatever damage has caused you to hurt yourself and to hurt others, I will not leave you. Oh, I have your back. As you come unto me, I will go into you.�
Hear that. Hear that. �Through the incest, through the shame, through the violence, through the red mist, I am here for you.�
I want to ask you to slowly, quietly, if you would, just reach out and take the hand of the person next to you. Very quietly. And through the language of touch�because touch is a language�I want you to tell that person that you know what it means to be lost and hurt and alone and so out of control with sadness or rage or panic or hurt. Tell them that you've been there; you know what it is.
I want you to tell them, with all of your might because you don't know the condition of that person whose hand you hold, I want you to share with them that there is hope, there is an answer, there is a way out. Tell them with all of your heart, �I think you're neat. I think you're neat. I see your beauty. I see it.�
Make the pledge that, together, that all of us will go out and change the world, that we will be the mirror that reflects back beauty. Where the person can only see ugliness and brokenness and shame and hurt, �I will be your mirror, Rise up. Rise up.�
Thank you very, very much. God bless you. <Applause.>
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