BP 37
The First Day
I’m in the psych ward at the local hospital. Yes, the looney bin. It’s my third time so now I qualify as a frequent flier. I even graduated up to the quiet room this time. I guess the ligature marks around my neck got me the penthouse suite.
What makes it worse is that I come from a church-going family and gave my life to Jesus when I was six. What an embarrassment I’ve been to God and my parents.
Since I tried to off my pathetic self, I now have someone watching me so I don’t try it again. I’m lying here thinking if a person wants to die, why don’t they let them die? Why do some people care so much if you live or die, especially when there’s no legitimate reason to stay above the ground?
When I got here in the ambulance, I didn’t want to talk. Not quite correct. The truth is that I couldn’t talk. I was a zombie. I was so tired I couldn’t even open my mouth. I could only lie on my bed and exist in some hazy-crazy world inside my head. It was a familiar world where I was not fully real. Who is Nick, anyway? Sometimes I think he’s not even real. I’m a twenty-five-year-old wraith.
After half a day, I attempted to speak to the psych nurse and the psychiatrist, but they couldn’t comprehend me. I hated them for it. (That was me projecting. It was me who I really hated. I couldn’t even speak words that someone else could understand. How mental is that?)
No one has ever understood the private language of my mind. I am alone in my head. So bloody alone!
I didn’t blame the hospital staff because I had no idea what I was trying to say, either. I just hoped that maybe this time if I opened my mouth someone might hear what I wasn’t saying because what I said never made sense to anyone. Something was terribly wrong in my world and it had to be me. I was the bad one and everyone knew it—even me.
It was only logical for me to kill myself. I was simply removing a blight from the earth. I was an alien–an ET on a planet of humans.
The psychiatrist whipped up a new medication cocktail for me since the old one obviously wasn’t working.
Go me.
The Second Day
I spoke with one of the resident psychologists after morning group. It almost seemed like she understood a few words of the foreign language I was speaking. Miracle of miracles! (Sarcasm intended.) No one had ever heard me before—at least not related to this crazy topic of my fatal flaw. Could it be that I’m only 99% alien and 1% human after all? (More sarcasm.)
She said that she had read my file and noticed that I identified as a Christian. She said she was a follower of Jesus as well. She told me that because I had been created by a loving, intelligent Deity, my problems and my symptoms would all make sense in the end. Created beings don’t malfunction randomly but only because they’re not living life according to God’s innate design.
When the shrink seemed to get me at least a little, I didn’t feel totally alone (for the first time ever) in the world inside my head. But I still didn’t believe I was lovable, that I should live. No way. I still felt like a grievous mistake. God had gotten everyone else right but somehow I messed up His design in me.
No doubt about it—there was something fundamentally wrong with me. None of my peers liked me. They saw me as an obnoxious freak. My principal despised me for acting out at school. No wonder he expelled me.
Like I said, a big reason no one understands me is because I don’t even know how to communicate what is wrong inside of me. It’s like you’re sick but you can’t explain where the pain is coming from and not even the experts can diagnose you so you must be really messed up in some unhuman, twisted way if no one can figure you out. Now, that realization is not hopeful at all. It’s rather depressing, actually.
Later that same day after attending a process group (I hated everyone in the room and did not want to be there), I had a startling epiphany. A heavy curtain was pulled back an inch and I peered out the window. I saw that it wasn’t all me. I wasn’t the only one who wanted me dead.
They did, too. My parents.
I rarely questioned them because they were Christians. Surely, they must know what is right and wrong. God was on their side, after all.
No, they didn’t want to kill me physically, but I began to see that they didn’t want me to be alive emotionally. They couldn’t tolerate me, their one and only offspring. They wanted their version of me. The Nick who popped out of the birth canal wasn’t their type. They were round holes, and I was a square peg.
I had to die so the familial-correct Nick could exist—the FC Nick. The PC Nick.
Parents are gods. The reality they communicate to a child is simply true. It’s binding. The child must always defer to the perceptions of the gods and goddesses of the world and ignore his own gut feelings about what is true in the world. If my parents tell me I’m too much or that I’m selfish, they must be right.
The psychiatrist told me I was so depressed I would probably need electro-convulsive therapy to reset my brain.
I’m a psycho.
The Third Day
I learned a universal truth in group this morning: If there’s a deficit in parental love, the child usually believes it’s because he’s unlovable. In a child’s eyes (especially if aided and abetted by a parent who is unaware or refuses to look inside), the lack of parental love is because he is not good enough—there’s something wrong with him.
It can never be that the parents don’t have the capacity to love or that they don’t know how to love.
Likewise, if the parent communicates to the child that he’s too needy, most people don’t consider the possibility that the parent may be lacking the supplies the child needs. When some parents have an empty pantry, they tell the child it’s his fault—he wants too much, or he’s being a big baby.
You’re too sensitive, they say. You’re too angry. The problem is you and your extraordinary needs. So, stop being you around us (and starve alone on the inside).
The psychiatrist used an interactive psychotherapy technique called EMDR with me today. He tells me it’s an effective intervention for my trauma-related symptoms.
I got dizzy.
The Fourth Day
The fog that had shrouded my mind for twelve years is beginning to lift. The clarity I experienced (or maybe simply the increased space in my brain) allowed me to conceive of a new metaphor.
As a child, I was born with a broad bandwidth—nothing unusual there. Most children have broad bandwidths, partly because they’re so needy and dependent early in life.
Yes, my bandwidth (my inherent personality) was broad because I was a person, a living boy. I wasn’t wooden, like Pinocchio. A wooden boy would have a narrow bandwidth. No, I was flesh and blood. I came into the world created in God’s image. (I remembered that from youth group.)
I wasn’t an animal to be locked in a kennel or muzzled. I was a human being replete with emotions, needs, anger, the capacity to be hurt—to even be in a bad mood.
My parents both had narrow bandwidth. (If only it had just been one of them.) Neither of them could tolerate tension, anger, neediness, irritability, conflict, or anything that might trigger their anxiety. They could never feel out of control.
They required that everything, including me, be regulated. Predictable. Safe. Orderly. Emotionally controlled. Convenient. Neat. Dead. They weren’t very good at entering my world. I always had to enter theirs and accommodate to their capacity.
If I went above and beyond their capacity, they reminded me that I was outside the acceptable lines. Mom might explode at me in anger or give me the silent treatment for anywhere from two hours to two weeks depending on how egregious my sin was to her personhood.
My father’s manner of communicating the impropriety of my aliveness was a bit more indirect. He would often give me a look that was stone cold with anger and despising. I felt annihilated at those times.
He might also commend one of my friends in my presence for how proud he was of him for some attribute that was nice and accommodating toward him. Indirectly, he was telling me I was bad for not being the same way.
Truth be told, my parents’ bandwidth was so narrow it could only handle a rock or maybe a plant. Even a pet would put too much stress on them. The dog would bark and need to be fed, watered and walked. No, they needed something nonorganic. Organic was way too overstimulating for them. In other words, they did better with dead things instead of living things. Ergo, I had to try my best to be dead.
In the black and white coloring book of their lives, I was a splash of color that was way too bright and usually violated their lines. So, they taught me to mute my colors and to stay in between the lines.
The space between their lines was very narrow.
Later in the fourth day, my parents came to the hospital for family group. I thought they would never show up because the psych ward is too honest for fragile people—too much of a microscope for those who wish to hide from themselves. But there they were, sitting next to me in the conference room with seven other parents and their children. Chalk one up for old mom and dad. They were very nervous.
Maybe they could handle some mess after all. I was certainly the epitome of messiness.
Long story short, the two leaders of the group cajoled my parents into talking about things I had never heard them say before.
Mom had grown up with nice parents—at least nice to the outside world. But behind closed doors, they changed. Her father was a raging alcoholic with hair-trigger anger and her mother was cold and indifferent to her. On top of that, my mom was raped as a preteen in the barn by the hired man.
She never told her parents because she was too afraid of being in trouble. She grew up scanning her world for landmines at all times.
My father’s mother died when he was seven. He spent the rest of his pre-college days growing up with a dad who had come back from Viet Nam a very different person than when he had left Fort Bragg. Since he suffered from shell shock, he reacted violently to any noise above 30 decibels by smacking my dad with any object within reach–even a wrench or a tire iron.
My dad learned at a very young age to fly way under the radar of dad the sniper or the dad who would emerge suddenly from his underground tunnel and attack him. To be seen or heard was to risk bodily injury. Therefore, be unheard, unseen and—you guessed it—dead.
I walked away from that family group with new and critical information: my parents were survivors of trauma. Because they grew up in an uncontrollable environment, when they finally had power over their outside world, they became extreme controllers, even over me. Especially over me since we didn’t have any dogs. Only plants and rocks.
Even with that awareness, my parents couldn’t quite grasp how they had taught me to play dead. So the results of that first family group were mixed.
I also learned that my parents did not want me dead in their conscious minds. But in their subconscious, they demanded that I function within a narrow range that was tantamount to killing me emotionally–asking me to die. Another mixed result.
Overall, the meeting did help me to understand that my parents were not intentional murderers. Their homicidal behavior was not premeditated but on the level of manslaughter only. They were killing me in self-defense—to defend their fragile selves that could barely tolerate another human breathing in their presence.
PTSD sucks–for the adult victim and for their children (especially if the parents refuse to face their fears and instead allow their emotional dysfunction to leak out of their hearts like Agent Orange.)
Like someone said, if you don’t transform your fears, you will transmit them to the next generation. In the end, it’s not what happened to you that’s potentially the most damaging factor. It’s how you respond to what happened to you that is the most significant predictor of health or dysfunction.
If you bury trauma or emotion of any kind, they will come back to haunt you and your kids.
I observed that a few of the parents in the group were murderers—evil people. They seemed willing to sacrifice their children at any cost if it meant that they would remain comfortable and be exonerated from any guilt. They refused to look inside.
My parents weren’t evil; they simply didn’t know how to look inside since they had grown up always looking for the danger in the world outside of them.
Overall, I walked away from that family meeting believing that there are three types of parents: Those who get it; those who don’t get it but are willing to do the painful work of growth to get it; and those who don’t get it and refuse to grow even if that refusal will damage or kill their children.
Later that same night, after my parents had left, I experienced strong suicidal ideation and engaged in SIBs (self-injurious behaviors). Even though my parents were not premeditated murderers, their mere presence was still an ancient and powerful trigger for me.
Sometimes I think my grandparents live inside of them.
I slept torturously in the quiet room that night.
The Fifth Day
I’m increasingly realizing that I am a separate self in the universe, not an extension of my parents. God created me to be alive in the world—to run, skip, laugh, scream, refuse to eat my peas, come up with seventeen reasons to not go to bed at night, make angry expressions with my facial muscles, slam a door or two, and occasionally even tell my parents that I hate them.
I’m not talking about intentional rebellion—just spontaneously being me. I’m beginning to see that I’ve lived by the motto that it’s safer to ask permission than to apologize—or to never do anything at all that might elicit the ire of others. At least that was philosophy as a child.
When I became a teenager, I also could act out magnificently at times. I had two poles inside me, and the pendulum occasionally swung back and forth between them in radical fashion.
In art therapy today, I painted a picture of a bowling alley. The pins were all Faberge eggs. You know, the jeweled and ornate ones made by that Russian dude. There were also four bowling balls in my picture sitting on the ball rack. Three were small nerf balls and one was a regular ball that was literally on fire. It would never make it down the lane without scorching the wood and burning the pins.
The art therapist nailed her interpretation of my painting. (Not that it was that difficult—it didn’t require a rocket scientist to figure it out.) She said that the eggs represented my emotionally fragile parents and that the three nerf bowling balls were me. I had to be small and soft so I would never damage the pins or knock them over.
The only thing she could not interpret was the fourth bowling ball. All I surmised about the fiery ball is that it was the key to my Generalized Anxiety Disorder (including panic attacks) that had held me hostage for years.
During individual counseling with my hospital shrink later that evening, she took the gloves off. She told me to stop being a tin soldier—a robot. She said I was the consummate people pleaser—a classic codependent—and that I orbited around my parents and everyone else like a small moon that never generated my own light but only reflected the light of others.
I did okay until she said that I was nothing but a nice boy. I tried my best to color inside the lines, but I lost it. I literally screamed at the shrink.
She handled it.
I couldn’t stop being irritable after that.
She didn’t start crying or go ballistic on me.
I was disagreeable, cynical, and negative the whole session.
She didn’t walk away.
After I realized that I could color outside the lines with her and be real, I showed her my painting. I told her that the fourth bowling ball—the one that was on fire—was also me. I told her that the three nerf balls never got my parents’ attention. Yes, they kept mom and dad comfortable and prevented them from getting anxious, but I was then left alone, hungry for them to see and hear me.
A hungry baby will cry. A starving boy will ask for a snack. A famished teenager who gets no attention will act out. That was me. I spoke through my behaviors. I couldn’t use words because I was never heard. So, I engaged in graffiti, vandalism, truancy, theft and general mayhem at school.
Unfortunately, my attempts to get attention were all negative. The positive ones never got my parents’ attention because if I was good, they left me alone. They had no supplies to give me attention. But the negative behaviors made me unlikable to my peers, the authorities, and my parents.
No, it went beyond that for my parents. Since they could tolerate no stimulation from the outside world, they either attempted to erase me or they turned their backs and walked away from me.
I began to feel worse about myself. As the good boy, I was invisible and hungry. As the bad boy, I finally got the attention I hungered for but was then disliked and even hated by everyone. Damned if I did. Damned if I didn’t. What was I to do? What other options were there?
Hate myself and die.
Of course, I didn’t have the benefit of all those insights until this third trip to the hospital after I had almost succeeded at hanging myself. (Did I make the knot too loose because deep inside I wanted to live?)
Lying on my bed that night, I entertained the idea that I could be negative or angry and I wouldn’t kill anyone. Growing up in my house, someone had to die. Either my parents or me. If I showed up as my true self, they would die. If I became who they needed me to be, I would die. Someone had to be sacrificed.
That would be me.
After I had been acting out for over a year, my parents exiled me.
They sent me to a Christian boot camp in Arizona to fix me. The message that I heard in my twisted brain was that they didn’t want me. (In some ways, they didn’t.) I was unlovable. Bad. The problem. Too much for them. Evil. To be me was to be abandoned. So, I felt even worse. The solution was to die.
The staff at the camp seemed very controlling in my opinion and simply reinforced my parents’ message that I couldn’t be me. I stopped acting out and conformed. I could do that in my sleep. I was reinforced once again for being good, nice. I was accepted and rewarded for not being me.
When I came home after a year, I was a good boy, not bad. I had been reminded that my role in life was to be muted at best or dead at worst. I had become Pinocchio once again–the wooden boy.
I was so confused. Be the good boy or act out. Both of those left me alone. I didn’t know there was a middle ground. No one ever told me that, and I certainly didn’t see it. A third option existed. Really? There was another way besides compliance and rebellion?
The Sixth Day
Groups were helpful today and so was my individual session with the psychologist who could increasingly translate my private language.
Then my parents came for family group and the world as I knew it was totally wrecked.
I got angry with my parents for the first time since I was exiled to Arizona. Not out of control angry. Just normal angry.
I got torqued at my mother for telling the group I had been born angry. I raised my voice at her.
Mom began to tremble. Was it an act by the victim or a genuine response? I didn’t care. I lost it. I screamed at her. How could she be that fragile? She began to sob.
Dad tried to defend her with a stern glance in my direction, the familiar look that said, How can you treat your poor mother so badly after everything she’s done for you?
I screamed at dad and told him to stand up like a man and use words when he communicated with me instead of his cowardly faces. He stared at me. His face turned pale. I thought he was going to have a panic attack. I knew I had become his abusive father in that moment. I half expected him to shrink away from me as if I had a baseball bat in my hands.
I stood up and yelled at everyone in the room—especially at the parents I had previously discerned were the evil ones. The fiery bowling ball rumbled down the lane and scorched everyone in its path.
I vented for ten minutes. The two group leaders didn’t stop me. I don’t remember everything I said, but afterward I was told that I spent the first five minutes cursing at everyone in the room and the last five minutes apologizing for being bad and beyond their forgiveness.
When I finally concluded my unprecedented monologue, my eyes that had only seen red for ten minutes now focused on my surroundings.
Nobody had died.
Nobody had tried to kill me.
My mother and father had not fled the room. (Although if things went as they usually did, they would show me their backs and give me cold silence for a year after this eruption.)
I was so spent that I collapsed into my chair. I felt ashamed. I deserved to die for my hatred and anger and for murdering my parents–for obliterating the Faberge eggs. But I was soon to realize that it was not the eggs that broke. It was me.
I crumbled like a dam that had been holding back an ocean of pain and aloneness for twenty-three years.
I did something I could never remember doing before. I began to weep. Then I sobbed. I cried so hard I could hardly breathe. Eventually, I totally lost control of my body and fell forward onto the floor. (Drama queen.) I began shaking violently. (Don’t be your weak mother.)
While I was lying there, I remember someone actually touched me—the murderous pathetic leper–and repeated my name in a consoling tone. The ET was comforted. I was seen. Someone actually spoke to me as if they cared about me instead of wanting to send me away because my emotions and needs were too threatening.
It proved to be the turning point in my life. Maybe I didn’t have to emotionally and physically die after all.
The Seventh Day
Today I was released from the hospital. I returned to my apartment where I lived alone—but not for long. My heart had finally opened, and I began to believe I was lovable and that I could be alive. I never attempted suicide again or did any further self-harm.
The Aftermath
One thing I learned in the eighteen months since my suicide attempt is that for twenty-plus-years I had believed that to be good was to not be me but a false self who was convenient for others. To be bad was to be my true self with my needs, emotions and separate will. Who wants to be seen as bad? So, I tried over the years to be good but in doing so distanced further from my God-given self every day.
Probably the best news today is that I no longer equate God with my parents’ personalities. (Kudos to them–they have grown some in the last year or so.) Before the veil was removed from my psychological mind, I thought God wanted me to be good. Good in the sense of how my parents communicated it and how I interpreted it: be emotionless, self-sufficient and don’t bother anybody. Be the nerf ball and not the real bowling ball.
Do you see how what my parents wanted me to be and what God seemed to ask from me overlapped and made it so confusing for me? Didn’t God—like my parents—command me to be good, self-controlled, peace-loving, thinking of the interests of others, obedient and dead to self? Weren’t God and my parents demanding the same thing from me?
Today, I’m increasingly realizing that I’m not supposed to be dead to my true self—the me that God created—but to be dead to sin and disobedience and rebellion. Could Satan be in the middle of all this—trying to confuse me by planting in my mind a counterfeit belief that God wanted me dead in both ways?
Without a doubt.
I have come to see that psychological territory is good hunting land for Satan. Unless believers are willing to go into that territory and oppose the accusations and lies and distortions that the enemy sows in human soil, many who are clinging to a relationship with God will deconstruct their faith. They will reject their families and God.
I must say that I thank God for the story when David brought the ark of God’s presence into the city of Jerusalem. He leaped and danced for joy before the Lord, coloring way outside the lines of what was proper for a king who should be self-controlled and manly.
His wife, Michal, witnessed David’s dance and despised him for his display of emotion. My parents witnessed my true self and maybe didn’t totally despise me, but they clearly communicated daily that they could not and would not tolerate my version of David’s dance.
After Michal despised him, David said, “I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in your eyes. But by the female servants . . . I shall be held in honor.” ~ 2 Samuel 6
If I have to exist in narrow places so I don’t overstimulate the Faberge eggs, how can I ever dance for Jesus?
Every day now I pray that Jesus will help me not to live in the camp of the nice compliant people who color inside human lines and exist in this world with false selves and are actually quite dead. I also pray that in my repressed anger I will not suddenly run to the rebellious camp that represents a pendulum swing from the conforming false self to the stubborn and disobedient false self.
No, let me neither be the conformist or the rebel. Neither extreme represents my true self. Both will lead to death.
Instead, Jesus, teach me how to seek the middle place where truth lives. Show me who I am in you—a beautiful light that shines in the universe. Make me obedient, not compliant. Honest in my emotion, not destructive. Loving others, not being nice. Daily seeking to be who you want me to be instead of what the world tells me to be.
Without you, Jesus, as the plumb line and the mirror and the counselor within, who could ever know her true self? You alone know how to direct us toward genuine identity and Christlikeness. Here, then, is yet another reason to practice the presence of God.
I thank you, Jesus, that your love is unconditional and that you are strong—never fragile. You will welcome me into your presence with all my sin and impurities and refine me like silver. You will remove the dross within me but never burn away the person you made me to be.
I thank you that you want me to be fully alive now that I’ve died with you. You want me to live the most abundant life as I abide in your presence.
Yes, in you Jesus, I am most alive!
Refine them as silver is refined, and test them as gold is tested. They will call on my name, and I will answer them; I will say, ‘They are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God’” ~ Zechariah 13:9
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing ~ Zephaniah 3:17