Few Places

One of the few places I have ever been truly happy has been at work. This is not because my life has been miserable. No, there have been many moments of joy, some moments were such exquisite joy that I've not managed well! Hence my diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder—although I’ve thought many times that a substance-induced Bipolar Disorder was more accurate.

There have been many deliberations (mine and others) about the true nature of what happens in my nervous system and, as with most, I think the DSM has touched the surface, but left much to be found out by the personal experience of it as well as much to be found about the true nature of what is happening along those little synaptic firings that can rock or break a world.

I’ve struggled a Herculean (or would Atlasean be more of what it is?) struggle to function at times. No time as significant, profound, possibly a losing battle as that I fought in 1989. I was ‘prescribed’ make-up to give myself some affect. Alcohol poisoning had drained all affect from me and along with it even the ability to fake it. A little red on the eyelids and a little taupe.

It seemed to work but that did nothing for my inability to speak fluently or worse, for my inability to have enough thoughts to want to speak fluently.

I remember a moment at the pharmacy when I went to pick up my mood stabilizer, my antidepressant and my anti-psychotic. I wrote a check, just barely, my handwriting was constricted, the whole process seemed foreign. I broke a diaphoretic sweat just doing it and another sweet moment some months later at the same window when the person on the other side of the counter said “You’re getting better, aren’t you?” I suppose I was. Inch by inch I could speak, inch by inch I could write a check. Inch by inch I no longer needed to sleep from Friday 6pm till Monday 7am.

It was a crash that had been coming all my life. I remember it sometimes for a stretch of time everyday now 22 years later. This morning it is sparked by a silly movie with a young Bruce Willis. 1989 was his heyday. 1989 almost killed me.

I went out on the deck for my usual coffee and cigarette this morning and studied my mood and affect for a bit. “I am rarely happy” I thought “mostly I am okay and things are alright”. Not bad. I am not suffering. I am not manic and out of control. I am alright. And then: “One of the few places I have ever been truly happy has been at work.” That’s when I came to the keyboard (the “typewriter” I still call it sometimes when I am in the flow and not so premeditated in my speech).

It’s true. Work has sustained me: money, friends, mission, happiness. It has been the center hallway around which everything else has come and gone. A double helix of life, wrapping itself around some invisible central corridor through which I walked, sometimes crawled and sometimes barreled like the “freight train” that took a handful of meds to slow it down.

But that has been my happiness. My one sustaining purpose and the place I’ve entertained, become intimate and suffered some of my greatest sorrows. Despite my illness I became a ‘master therapist’ Diane Topping, the most masterful therapist I’ve ever known, said more than once.

I can’t tell you how that happened or how a young therapist would set out to do it. It is more a mystery of how life goes. Becoming a good therapist is more about living your life wherever it takes you and suffering along the way until you find the way out.

For me it has been a spiritual path, my own crucifixions, my own agape love and salvation, my own seemingly endless need to find the exit strategies of debilitating despair. You gain some skills.

This life began for me in precarious circumstances. A child would not have been planned in that perfect storm of demographic craziness. Let’s leave it at that, but let’s also see the perfection of a blueprint for suffering—a blueprint that left me no choice but to live my life from that homebase storm.

Children are helpless to control their circumstances. They have to go internally to exert their power. That was 101 of finding my skills as a therapist: that going within because there were so few choices and because the outer circumstances were so aversive and out of control.

There was violence. Violence of iconic proportions. A shotgun. The intent to kill me. The intent to make me one of the victims of an execution to right a ‘wrong’ my father had done. I was 4 and I have only 2 nonviolent memories of the event. I am grateful for that.

It was my father’s fault, the fault of his profession and one of the events that his choices would unfold to hold me hostage awaiting his death and my mother’s and my own. Somehow, in the man’s mind that sat with us waiting for his moment to rectify my father’s betrayal, this was what had to be done.

My dad chose what he felt was a noble cause. I suppose it was, but it was one that ate its participants for lunch. Pursuing bad guys meant the bad guys would sometimes pursue you.

In the end he saved me and my mother and himself—at least in that moment. In the long run, who knows? Is that what left him unable to be sober? Is that what drove my mother mad? Is that what launched me into this profession?

So there it is I thought when the event surfaced in my own psychotherapy--the iconic psychic event that I did not ‘integrate’ until I had my 40s in my sights. Somewhere after sobriety, about 22 years ago, I began to consider this event as important.

Prior to that I’d flip through family photo albums and say things like:

There is my first bike with its training wheels.
There is my grandmother.
There is dad’s car with the bullet holes.

Ah, the missed opportunities of NOT having your patients bring in their family albums! My therapist, perhaps my 3rd?, caught it.

Wait, wait, let’s go back. There is dad’s car with the bullet holes?

A smattering of paint hit the canvas. Gallons of coins fell out of this jackpot.

And so my double helix uncoiled and, in an instant, rewound itself. I was someone else. He was someone else.