My parents had the very best of intentions, I am sure, and I hold them guileless and blameless. It was a time of much confusion as our social institutions tried in vain to keep up with the rapidly accelerating pace of changes within the socioeconomic structure. Modern manuals of parenting were not available in the late 1950's, so people clung to the traditions of their parents including such bizarre notions as "spare the rod and spoil the child," to the detriment of at least one entire generation. Gone were the days when people could ponder problems at length and have many hours of quality time available to them within the great extended family clans that worked, ate, and slept a common dream. The industrial revolution had changed all of that forever. Fear and paranoia were the signs of the times. As Victor Frankl notes: "since Auschwitz, we new what man was capable of and, since Hiroshima, we knew what was at stake."⁽¹⁾ Communism and the cold war had this nation holding its collective breath.

     I was born into a troubled time and a troubled home. The words that come to mind when I think of my earliest memories of my father are busy, distant, and angry. His personality, at that time, seems to have been dominated by a maddened and confused Child ego state a great deal of the time. I can only speculate as to the reasons. The youngest of six children, his father died, I believe, when Dad was around 15-16 years old; so he had only sketchy and incomplete information on fathering, probably the feeling that his father had abandoned him by dying, and the responsibility of fathering himself. Although his mother was very nurturing and kind, due to sex-role programming in those days, this probably didn't help much in the development of his nurturing Parent ego state (P₂) toward being a father himself.

     When I was around six years old, my mother showed me two large photo albums containing mostly pictures of me, as an infant, and my father showing me off to friends and family. I remember thinking that must have been some other child in those pictures. The father I knew would never have spent that much time with me and would never have smiled that much. I remember him, in those days, as a grim and unapproachable man. He seemed always to have something to do that kept him from sharing time with me. I was told that these were "important" things that occupied my father's time. I will note that this must have changed somewhat over the intervening years. My one brother and three sisters that were born during the decade following my own entrance into this world each, in descending order, seem to have fared a little better than those senior to them.

     I was given the same name as my father and I, quite naturally, looked to him for some idea of how I was supposed to be when I grew up. Father sold life insurance and I was told many times by many people that he was an exceptionally intelligent man. He always made sure that we had the essentials of food, clothing, and medical care but it seemed that this required all of his waking hours to do so, leaving no time for us. The other essentials of eye contact, physical contact, focused attention, emotional teaching, relationship modeling, and unconditional love were left wanting. It appeared to me that my father should have been able to be almost anything he desired yet he had this minimally rewarding job. He certainly should have, at least, been running his own agency, I thought. When I questioned these seeming inconsistencies, he would usually tell me something to the effect that truly smart people would not want the top positions because of the hassle of responsibility such positions carried, indicating that only self-important fools did such things. I believe, in retrospect, that I may have somehow interpreted from this that it was not really necessary to go all the way in a person's endeavors as long as that person was smart and tried hard (i.e., the injunction - don't succeed).

     Since Dad's "pig-parent" (P₁) was probably scared, angry, and confused and, since a lot of his programming (such as two years in the marine corps) colluded to prevent easy expression of his feelings, his nurturing Parent (P₂) was weak and stunted at the time I came along. This left him easily dominated by the raging pig-parent within. The result was that Dad was emotionally distant with me and prone to hand down severe injunctions and attributions followed up with brutally abusive fits of anger and terrifyingly violent beatings. Some of the programming that I believe that I received from my father is as follows:

     My mother was also born last or next-last of six children into a poor household. Her father was sick a lot and died when she was around six or seven years old. Her mother, I believe, was a severe and strict pious catholic widow that hammered into her mind the harsh and guilty reality of that mutated monster called the Catholic Church from early on. Mother's guilt load must have been far in excess of what a young girl could reasonably be expected to bear. Her feelings and thoughts must have been brutally and callously discounted by authority figures to the point of utter confusion regarding her ability to understand her world and reconcile the contradiction between her feelings and her programming. This eventually resulted in her adoption of the "no mind" script of schizophrenia with her two nervous breakdowns occurring when I was two and twelve years old respectively. They must have been quite frightening to me, filling me with anger, resentment, and fear over what appeared to be an act of abandonment to the daunting possibility of having to live alone with my father.

     I have no conscious memory of her first breakdown; my younger brother had just been born and it was a runaway post-partum depression that caused my mother to be hospitalized. I'm sure I must have some that I have repressed, however, since I have other vivid waking memories of being two years old. One very conspicuous example is when, in the middle of the night, I performed a major engineering feat (for a 2-yr.-old) by using a chair to get on top of the kitchen counter to open a high cabinet from which I took and consumed an entire bottle of baby aspirin. I remember the policeman looking down into the car at me when he stopped mom for speeding on the way to the hospital and the bitter acid taste and burn of my stomach contents as the nasogastric tube was withdrawn. It is uncertain whether I did this for the taste of the orange-flavored pills or whether I knew that aspirin was for when you hurt and that the anxiety and discomfort over not knowing if my needs were going to be met was painful to me.

     Some things are quite clear to me though. The ability of my primary caregiver, my mother, to perceive and respond to the totality of my infant need must have been severely diminished as she began to succumb to her own overwhelming distress, powerfully affecting my sense of security. Neither can there be much doubt that my father was decidedly ill equipped to assume the responsibility for the complete health and well being of two tiny children, one an infant and the other a newborn baby. I could not have helped but be affected by the intensity of his frustration, fear, and confusion, though I would have had no way to interpret its meaning. The reason that I have suppressed my recollection of these events may very well be that I witnessed some terrifying displays of the fury he must have felt over the magnitude of his predicament (for which he may even have irrationally blamed us in the extremity of his despair). In retrospect, it seems probable that this led to a decision that something not-OK about myself was behind this frightening change in the behavior of those upon whom I was totally dependent, thus damaging my emerging self-concept.

     Thereafter and for most of the first twelve years of my life I gravitated toward my mother, since my father was unavailable to me emotionally. During much of this time, I remember her as being warm, very much alive, understanding, loving, and nurturing. I believe that I developed the majority of my positive character traits during this period, mostly by modeling on her behavior and from her teachings. I have felt thankful, many times, for her and those first twelve years. I may not have a clear conscious recall of her first battle for her sanity, but the second time is burned indelibly upon my memory -- the richness of my horror at the specter of madness, unforgettable.

     My seventh grade year was already plenty traumatic bringing, as it did, my introduction to brutal competitive sports, locker room fights, girls, puberty, etc. One quiet summer afternoon at home, I found my mother locked naked and lying on the floor in the bathroom talking about chariots from heaven and admonishing me to "guard the door and get your father" (he was at work). Mother was confined for barbaric psychiatric treatment including electroconvulsive "therapy" which took away her memory. I was forced to live with relatives and, that fall, sent to the home of my father's brother which was considerably more affluent than ours. I was continually badgered and made to feel shabby by my cousin, three years senior, who was a sadistic, insensitive, brute. When she finally returned home and they came to get me, Mom hardly recognized who I was. She never seemed quite the same after that and I felt great impotent rage because the person I knew as my mother had been taken away from me.

     The additional programming that I received from my mother certainly includes the following:

Because I was close to my mother and believed that she knew me, I probably internalized the above very strongly indeed. According to the principles of Transactional Analysis, I made an existential decision at this point. I vowed to myself that such a horror as happened to my mother, I would never allow to happen to me. By honing my intellect to a razor edge and suppressing confusing emotions, I believed that I would be able to avoid that fearful fate. Skinny and awkward, I saw myself as a klutz and these thoughts became the seeds of the mind/body split that would figure prominently in the future. The script sequence which resulted is classic and has been called the Intellectual by Steiner.⁽²⁾. . .

     . . . At around two years of age, my parents took me to a movie theater. I can remember little except nonspecific visual imagery and pleasure. The name associated with it in my memory is Darby O'Gill. Whether this meant anything or not has been uncertain, since I had only rudimentary language skills at the time (I have recently discovered that the film Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959) does, in fact exist -- amazing!). . . .

     . . . In the fourth grade, I bent over one day in class to pick something up and felt an intense pain in my leg. I did not know how to explain this and feared I would not be believed. The pain persisted for a couple of days making it difficult to walk. When my parents asked, I told them that a desk had fallen over on my leg, thinking that would make more sense and that would be the end of it. To my chagrin, they insisted on calling the school which led to an embarrassing interrogation, proving that I had lied. Mom and Dad made a big fuss over how their "always truthful" son had fallen from grace to become instead a liar. They humiliated me for some time over this saying that they could no longer trust me which resulted in a great deal of anger and frustration for me.

     Later on that year I began to hang out with older kids in the park trying to gain the recognition from them that I wasn't getting at home from my dad. I tried to impress these kids by smoking and, one day, I went to a local drug store and stole a bunch of smoking materials at the behest of these older children. My father caught me with these items and, in addition to being beaten severely for this, I was forced to confess my theft to the store manager and to my mother. The castigations went on interminably, though I'd felt badly enough about it on my own. Since this then got me labeled a thief, further alienating me from my father, I gave up completely trying to be a "good kid" and began to try to find all of my happiness outside the home after this. I got into trouble several more times over the next five or six years ending up in juvenile court on multiple occasions for theft, curfew violation, drinking, and driving without a license (wrecked the car).

     Life in our home seemed somewhat sterile, lacking an essential closeness necessary for proper parent-child and sibling-sibling bonding. In fact, it was more like seven separate individuals living under the same roof than a family. Our parents just didn't model deep affectionate relating and unselfish, unconditional love. There was continuous bickering, back biting, and infighting among the children with intense competition within our family stroke economy. . . .

     . . . My early experimentation with drugs occurred during mid-adolescence, mostly from curiosity, but also probably due to the vague but nagging sense of needing but not knowing what it was that I needed. It may seem odd but I had no idea that my home and family was anything but ideal, having heard so many times what a good home and parents I had. If this was true, then I needed something more. I began junior high school in 1968. Radio, television, films, and news were full-to-overflowing with the message of drugs and I was immediately intrigued with the idea of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. I took the occasional drink from the liquor supply and poked around in the household prescription pills cache from time to time. The Percodan and Quaalude tablets, along with Methadone cough syrup that I found gave me powerful first lessons in the effects drugs could produce.

     My mother's sister . . . always carried a huge satchel of medications with her and . . . I browsed and sampled my aunt's pill supply. Along with potent narcotics and barbiturates, I happened upon a bottle of Didrex tablets. Didrex was a particularly nasty and potent preparation containing 50 mg. of benzphetamine which produced and intense erotic euphoria and sense of well-being. . . I took so much of this drug that, by the time we were heading home, I went into a frightening psychosis that included vivid visual and auditory hallucinations. I imagined that the pores of my skin were filled with some awful waxy substance and proceeded to pick large inflamed sores on my arms. My parents were alarmed but the symptoms subsided shortly after we arrived home and the incident was forgotten.

     Our parents never fought in the sense of open hostile exchanges. In hindsight, I can see that they were not close but, at the time, I had no idea that theirs was anything but a model man/woman relationship. In many ways my father treated my mother as if she were an incompetent child, though she was quite intelligent. . . One of the most disorienting blows I ever sustained was when I was calmly informed, during my twenty-first year, that my folks had never really loved each other, that they had only stayed together for our benefit, and were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. I could find no way to come to grips with the reality of this, with its implications of years of deceitful behavior and violation of trust. . . .

     The poison was black, insidious, and exquisitely potent -- much more so than if there had been an overt, gross, and tangible dysfunction such as a criminal or alcoholic father or a single-parent home that a resourceful and intelligent child could recognize and work around. Whatever problems existed had been whitewashed, denied, and submerged beneath a layer of chenille gentility. Suddenly I felt adrift in a world that I could not understand, having absolutely no idea which or how much of my programming was false or unreliable. Being a fairly bright kid, I suppose I had begun to sense inconsistencies and a certain falseness in the values and patterns of behavior I had learned but, with no one who could be trusted for answers and guidance, I assumed that I was my one and only resource.

     Rebellion against my parents and virtually all other forms of authority became the dominant theme in my behavior until, on the night of my high school graduation, I drank and used drugs until I was grossly impaired. Though arrangements had been made to leave our cars at a friend's house where we would spend the night, our friend, unfortunately, became drunk and belligerent and threw us out. Having left the windows down so that the seats were soaked from the rain, I had to abandon my backup plan to sleep it off in the car. With my reasoning compromised to the point that I could see no alternative other than attempting to drive home, I drove the wrong way down and interstate exit ramp and hit another car, causing minor injuries. This resulted in my arrest, the loss of my drivers license, and my father threw me out of the house. After leasing a $65/month tenement apartment downtown, he deposited me and my things there, leaving me to figure out where to get the next month's rent.

     

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