“That thought is frightening. I won’t let anything happen to me. I can’t!”
“Would you like to listen to an explanation of our SOMETIMES ME FIRST PROGRAM? You’ll be surprised to find out that it’s anything but a selfish, ‘I want mine first-bigger-better-more costly and luxurious than anyone else’s type program. It’s really a humble, ‘I must take good care of myself mentally and physically and spiritually to help other people make the most of themselves in those areas’ program. A Mental Health Sometimes Me First concept is the exact opposite of a selfish, self-centered one. You’ll like it.”
“I like everything you’ve taught me, and it makes sense that first I have to learn how to swim before I can keep my kids and the other people I love afloat. But you’ve presented so many get-me-out-of-my-black-hole, exciting things in this first session, I’m not sure I can remember them all.”
“That’s the reason we’re making a tape. You can take it home and listen as many times as you want and make notes if you’d like or, if there is anything too personal or that might be painful to yourself or others, feel free to come back here to check out your tape and go over it in our little private Listening Room. It used to be a storage area, but now it’s a cozy place for you to listen again to yourself as well as to me.”
“Be sure I will use it! On my lunch hours if that’s okay.”
“You might want to call before you come to see if the Listening Room is in use, or to make a reservation. I’m sure you’ll find rehearing and contemplating what we’ve said on your tape will be an added support system—and at no extra cost.”
“When I came here I had no idea I was going to go home trying to work on myself and my new positive attitude.”
“That is an important concept! Most people don’t realize how contagious attitudes are; negative ones can flit through a home, an office, a school, a community, faster than measles, the flu, or even the common cold, often with very serious and possibly permanent repercussions.”
“I can’t wait to get home and start using positive therapy on Dana and Dorie. And soon, oh, I do hope soon, on Sammy. I know he will come home, and I can wait a while. When I came in here I thought I couldn’t, but I can and I will.”
SUMMARY OF SESSION
Paula Gordon’s pain has been somewhat relieved. She has been given three concepts to work on: 1. Set 1-Relaxation; 2. Discomfort Rating; 3. Sometimes Me-First.
Three months and nineteen days later
Tuesday, July 26
As I was leaving my office, a dirty, unkempt teenager arose from the bottom step and started toward me. I felt my muscles tense and took a tighter grip on my purse and briefcase. When I was just one step above the boy, he spoke softly.
“Remember me? I’m Sammy Gordon.”
He was so thin and sickly-looking I hardly recognized him.
“I guess you don’t have any time…and I don’t have any money and…” He turned to leave.
I put my arm around his shoulder and guided him back into the building. “I’m happier than you’ll ever know just to see you’re still—around!”
His embarrassed almost-smile told me we had connected.
Samuel Gordon Chart
Tuesday, July, 26, 5:45 P.M.
Freebie Session
Second Visit
SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old
“Sammy, I’m really, truly glad you’re home.”
“I haven’t gone…home. I…I don’t know if Mom would let me in.”
“I think she would.”
“But you don’t know where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing for the past…who knows how long.”
“I’m positive your mom knows to the day and the hour.”
Sammy took such a deep breath it was like he was trying to inhale the universe. “Do you think sometimes people can get a second chance?”
“Do I think birds can fly?”
“But I’ve done things I’m really ashamed of…things I’d never want Mom to know about, and especially never, ever, ever my two little sisters.”
“So? What’s wrong with wiping the slate clean and starting over?”
“With me it would be more like starting UP, and…I mean from the very, very, bottom!”
“Everyone has to start someplace.”
“But I’ve done everything…everything!”
“Not EVERYTHING, dear Sammy. You didn’t ‘blow out your candle.’ I’m so happy for you and so proud of you, for that.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really!”
“Do you think my mom could forgive me, too…and…” A stricken, heartbroken look crept over his tense face.
“And who?”
“God?” (He more mouthed the word than said it.)
“Have you ever heard the story of the prodigal son from the Bible?”
“Yeah, I learned it when I was little and went to Sunday school.”
“Would you like to repeat the story as you recall it?”
“Well, this rich man had two sons and one took his inheritance money early, and went to another country and spent it partying and stuff. And when the money was gone, he couldn’t get a job, so he tended pigs, and there was a famine, and he got so hungry, he ate the pig food. Finally, he got so down on his luck that he went home to his father and said he wasn’t worthy to be his son anymore, but could he please be his servant…”
“And did his father allow him to be his servant?”
“No, he put fancy clothes and robes and stuff on him, and they killed the fatted calf, and they had a big feast…”
“And…”
“I don’t remember what else.”
“I’ll tell you what else. The father happily said, ‘My son…was lost, and is found,’ and he took him back into his home and heart.”
“I wish it could be that easy for me.”
“Well, were you lost?”
“Yeah, I guess. In a way…from both my family and myself…”
“Do you think your mom loves you?”
“I know she did before I got so screwed up.”
“If you had gotten physically disconnected some way, would she have ceased loving you?”
“NO!”
“I’ll bet she’ll welcome you back with joy and tears, and even pull out the fancy clothes and the fatted lasagna.”
We laughed gently, and it was like lovely, bright springtime returning after a long, cold, dangerously dark, hard winter.
“What would I ever say to Mom? I can’t just walk in like I dropped out yesterday and that nothing in between happened. I’m a different, second-rate, defective person now.”
“Wrong! You’re still the same fantastic person you always were. You just got your priorities mixed up for a little while.”
“Will I ever, ever, ever be able to forget where I’ve been and what I’ve done?
“You won’t forget everything in its entirety, but as you replace the negatives in your life, no matter what they were, with brilliant-wattage positives, the monsters of your past will slowly become distant grey shadows.”
“I can’t believe that’s possible, not with what I’ve done.”
“It is! Honestly it is! I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count! If any person really wants to replace badness with goodness, helplessness with helpfulness, failure with success, unhappiness with happiness, he or she can! People just need to be taught how, and then do the work required. The first and right-now question is, can you forgive yourself?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Were you taught in Sunday school that God could forgive you?”
“Yes.”
“I think much more often than not, God forgives people but people refuse to forgive themselves! Does that make sense?”
“Maybe.”
“Will you ponder a little on that till the next time I see you?”
“Yes…but…”
“But what?”
“I’m still a little…no, a lot…scared and l
ost. I feel like I’m filled up to my eyebrows with…” (He didn’t seem to be able to find the words to describe his load.)
“Garbage?”
“Yes, rotten, stinking, dead horse, maggot-infested…”
“I get the picture.”
“There’s absolutely no room left for anything good.”
“Then why don’t you dump the garbage?”
“I’d like to. It’s like rotting me from the inside out.”
“Well put, smart person! I think you know more about how your ‘YOU’ works than you ever imagined!”
“Can’t you just hypnotize me and wipe out everything in my memory for the past year or so, sort of like amnesia or something?”
“Sorry, but we’ve got to take it a little slower than that.”
“How long?”
“Not very long, now that you’ve decided to recharge, rechannel, and upgrade your life. Actually, no one else can do that for you no matter how hard they try! However, any good, friend, teacher, parent, sibling, counselor, priest, etc., can help you make a positive alteration in both your present and your future if you choose to allow them to do so.”
“I’m allowing, I’m allowing. Let’s get on with my, from-repulsive-maggot-to-beautiful-butterfly-type metamorphosis—I hope.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“But I feel so unglued. How can I ever find the broken, lost pieces of myself and put them back together?”
“Do you think maybe we should go back and find out why you made the decisions to do what you’ve done?”
“No. No way! I want to forget all that crapola. I’ve got to get on with my life like you said I could.” (Sammy began to look frightened, dejected, and beaten.) I want to start over new. I want to go on and up, not back and down! Maybe you can’t or don’t want to help me. Maybe nobody wants to or can!”
“You’re wrong, dear, dear Sammy. I can and want to help you, but there’s no way I can do it if you close me out. It’s okay for you to disagree with what I propose, and I may not always be right in my assessment of a situation at first glance, but we’ve got to start somewhere. And I have a lot of training and experience in putting people back together who have felt fragmented.”
“I know I’m just a wuss being paranoid, afraid of letting someone else get inside my head.”
My hand reached out and patted his knee. “You’re a good kid, Sammy.”
He smiled. “You sound like my mom.”
“I take that as a great compliment.”
“It is.” He gave me two high fives.
“Let’s try again to find a beginning place. That’s often the hardest thing to do in a therapy session.”
“Okay.”
“Are you sure? Completely sure you can trust me with the hurtful, destructive things that are inside your heart and head?”
He hugged himself tightly, took a deep, deep breath and relaxed. “Ummmm…I guess I have to, don’t I?”
“Some people I see can start from where they are at the moment in their rediscovery and recovery program. They don’t have to go back and regurgitate the past. With you, it’s different. You have the equivalent of some deep, inner, abscessed wounds that need to be cleaned out before they can begin to heal. You’ve got to get them cured before you can proceed with the rest of your healthy, happy life.”
“Are you sure?”
“This session is going to be like taking out slivers. Remember when you were little, you probably had some big ones and some little ones. Some you fought having taken out, even though you knew they might get infected if they weren’t removed.”
“I remember. Once I even had to go to the doctor to have him cut out a piece of glass in my foot.”
“So? Where do you want to start? With the worst slivers or the barely-there ones?”
Sammy bowed his head and shriveled into himself. He seemed half as big as he had a few minutes before and about ten years younger. “I guess we’d better start with the big one. Everything bad and horrible started there.”
“I’m sad that it’s going to hurt, Sammy. But again, I want you to know I deeply care about you, and anything you share with me will be considered absolutely secret and sacred.”
Sammy’s eyes and nose started running in torrents. He didn’t bother to wipe the stuff away as he began blurting out his story.”
“I was a happy, sunshiny, self-confident, king-of-the-mountain type little kid. Even after we got the divorce, which hurt a whole lot, I felt I was special, and that I could lick the world at anything I cared about. I was on the tennis team, the soccer team, a partly A student, I played a little on a lot of musical instruments, I had two cool little sisters, and then…”
After about fifteen seconds I asked quietly, “And then?”
“And then that dirty, bastard-shithead…”
Almost instantly Sammy became another person, writhing and cursing loudly, incoherently, uncontrollably.
I put my arms around him in a firm, fiercely protective manner. “Shhh…Shhh, Sammy. Let go of the pain, the hate, the anger. Shhh…relax…relax…relax.” I began gently, slowly, kneading nerve points in his shoulders, neck, and head. “Shhh, let the pressure, the rage, the tension, wilt and dissipate. Take some slooow deep breaths…”
After a few minutes the rigid tautness in his body softened into exhaustion. He looked up with embarrassment.
“I guess I’m not ready yet to face the hard-ass stuff. I had no idea it would be so tough to upchuck. One part of me wants to, but another part of me wants to bury all the crappy crap deep inside and never, never let it come to the surface till hell freezes over and beyond. The last part of me wants to snuff and get it over with. Does that make me paranoid and schizophrenic and other crazy types of stuff?”
“No, no, no, no. You’re okay, Sammy. And you’re certainly not alone in your feelings. Many, many people live all their uncomfortable lives trying not to face their pasts, or trying to pretend that the bad things that happened, didn’t happen, or thinking about suicide.”
“That’s me.”
“No! It’s not you! You are willing to dump your past garbage. Together, we just made the mistake of trying to have you dump the biggest, baddest batch first, instead of starting with the smaller emotional bangs and bruises. You still want to go through with it?”
“Yeah, I do. I really do. I know I’ll never feel clean and good until I get rid of all the rot-gut I’ve got packed away inside me.”
“Would you like to pick a minor trauma to talk about and let the major one or ones sit for a while?”
“Like, just sit and rot and rust and disgust the guts of me till my whole me collapses into one thickness like a cardboard person or someone run over by a steamroller.”
“Sweet, neat Sammy, it’s not that bad!”
“Yes, it is. I’m a Humpty Dumpty you can never put back together again.”
“Remember the little blue train that you read about when you were just a child? The one that said, ‘I THINK I CAN! I THINK I CAN! I THINK I CAN!’ AND HE COULD! AND HE DID!”
Sammy sighed deeply. “Well, okay. I was many, many miles from home when it happened, and all I wanted was just to put space between me and…the UGH. It seemed Mom was light-distances away on another planet, but I had to—I just had to get home to her and…it was like I was all the time swimming upstream—upstream with the salmon, upstream forever.
“By the time I got home, after three bus changes, and I don’t know how many days, I was not only tired to death, I was hungry and dirty and stinky. I’d run out of money and energy and patience. I screamed at a guy in one station who sat next to me and dropped his head on my shoulder, and I cursed at the man at the ticket counter who said I was short twenty-three cents on my final ticket. I finally scrounged it up by going through every one of my pockets. I called him something I’d heard at school but had never before said myself. It was vile, but in some perverted way it made me feel good. Sick, huh?”
“Not sick, just acting o
ut hurtfulness and sadness.”
“I kept thinking that when I got home everything would be better. The nightmarish things would go away, and I’d go on with my nice life as it used to be.” (Long pause.)
“What did happen when you got home?”
“It seemed like Mom was always ragging at me, and the kids were nonstop screaming and quarreling and bugging me in every way possible. Even Dread Red Fred, who had become a wimpy dog, hated me and spent more time romping with my creepy sisters than staying in my room listening to the new Metallica tape I’d bought. I couldn’t figure out what had changed everybody. I didn’t know them anymore. They were like hateful, distrustful strangers.”
“What happened when you went back to school?”
“My so-called friends had all become snots, snobs, self-centered, conceited, uncaring, unconcerned ignoramuses, jack asses all! I couldn’t stand their guts. They seemed like protected little babies, only interested in their own sissy cotton-cushioned lives. They had no idea about what was going on out there in the real world. The thoughts made anger flame up inside me, hot and red as an out-of-control forest fire, wasting everything in its path, with me on the sidelines enjoying every minute of the disaster. My anger seemed like the only thing I could relate to and actually, in a way, enjoy. The rest of life was colorless, tasteless, odorless, drab and blah and not worth living, completely meaningless.
“After a few days I started wondering about the ‘home boys’ who sauntered up and down the halls. They seemed so secure and self-confident and protective of each other that in a way I envied them. They were not just single kids fighting their way through life alone; they were a solid, unified force. I wanted that kind of a support system. I needed it!” Sammy sat silent for a while.
“Before all the crap I had liked, really, really liked Harmony Harmon. We were close. Now she seemed like a holier-than-thou bratty bitch, always telling me to stop being so moody and so sarcastic and everything else. I didn’t need her to swipe at me. I got enough of that at home.