The Little Shop of Horrors
I don't know about you, but for me, nighttime can be a hellish time when times are hellish. You wake up in the middle of the night, it's dark, and most of your senses are offline, so it is just you and your mind together (crazy notion, right? You and your mind, like two independent things).
It is as if your mind shows a movie of all of your problems up on the big screen inside your mind while you lie there in the dark watching the horror show with your mind. Shit gets seriously magnified by our minds in the dark.
Well, shortly after the withdrawal nightmare ended, I found myself lying in bed wide awake in the middle of the night watching the Little Shop of Horrors movie of my future playing on the big screen of my mind, when it hit me like a sledgehammer upside the head. I am right back where I started out as a teenager.
As I lay there, I reviewed some old film footage from my tender teenage years from 13 to 17 years old. During those four years, I was arrested 24 times and "sent up" (the vernacular of the time, indicating being sent to reform school) five times.
The parallel was uncanny. Hazelden and reform schools are both institutions. They are both trying to fix broken, messed-up people. They both are deeply associated with being "less than" and being a loser. They are both associated with shame and despair.
Of all those arrests and reform school visits, the moment that hit me with the same sledgehammer force was when I was 17 and sitting in the front passenger seat of my probation officer's Chevy after my 24th arrest for breaking into a grocery store in the middle of the night. At that point, I had been in an institution (juvenile detention center or reform school) a total of 29 times over 4 years. That's an average of 7.3 times per year, or roughly once every six weeks.
My probation officer (he knew me well for obvious reasons) showed up at my school, extracted me from class in front of everyone, escorted me to the passenger side of his Chevy parked on the street, opened the door, and ordered me to "get in."
He walked around the front of his Chevy, gets in, takes a long drag from his Marlboro, and, while shaking his head slowly back and forth, purses his lips as he exhales his exasperation with me out alongside the cigarette smoke just loud enough for me to get the message: I'm fucked.
A period of silence ensued while I shifted my gaze back and forth between the ashtray jam packed with cigarette butts and looking out the front windshield at the wipers squeaking away at the grey drizzle of cold Minnesota fall rain while I waited for the verdict.
Finally, he turns his head, puts his right arm on the back of the seat, and looks at me. Me? I'm keeping my eyes locked on the butts and windshield. Another big sigh and some more silence until he finally says, kinda like he was sorta maybe kinda sorry: "Mike - I talked to the judge - you have two choices: drop out of high school and join the military, or be tried as an adult and end up in prison."
So there I am, 17 years old, my home life is a disaster, I have no other family (my only real family is my street friends), and I am not (drum roll for the following major understatement) showing any academic promise. Talk about feeling lonely and lost....
I was in debt to a universe of cause and effect that finally demanded payment.
The same crushing sense of loneliness and being lost washed over me again as I lay in my bed in Hazelden at 2 am, watching my mind's Little Shop of Horrors movie while my 21-year-old alcoholic roommate (on his 5th tour of the place) was splayed out on his bed blissfully snooring 10 feet away from me.
In that moment, I realized that I was, in essence, right back where I started that day in my probation officer's car, and that I was, once again, in debt to a universe of cause and effect that finally demanded payment.
But this time was different. Yes, the similarities are (to me anyway) profound: emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually bankrupt and embedded in a thick miasma of uncertainty and fear.
But as a lost young man pinned down in my probation officer's car, I was only in survival mode to avoid going to prison and having to deal with all of the nightmarish hell that could have entailed. It was a difficult yet straightforward binary decision. Join the military, or else become some guy's prison chia pet.
"Acceptance Will Set You Free"
Not long after breaking free of the withdrawal nightmare, I found myself in a mandatory orientation meeting with Bruce, my assigned counselor, in his office. Bruce's office was right off the kitchenette in our Cromwell housing unit, and it reminded me of when I was 16 and in St Croix Forestry camp reform school in northern Minnesota, where the guards' offices were right next to the large dorm rooms filled with rows of metal bunkbeds.
Bruce was a large man with a paunch the size of a 9-month pregnant woman's belly who was (is) an alcoholic. He's a straightforward, regular sort of blue-collar guy, and a fully robed High Priest of the 12-step program. He was sitting on his couch across from me, slouched down, his demeanor infused with a sense of bored resignation as he gave me the lowdown on the 12-step program. It felt like getting a job orientation from someone in corporate who had gone through the job description binder hundreds of times.
(A brief context reminder: Bruce was dealing with a highly programmed surgeon who was voted least likely to succeed soon after his arrival by his fellow inmates, which may have contributed to his apparent "here we go again" attitude toward me.)
When he finished disgorging the verbal materials from his mental orientation binder, a prolonged period of silence ensued between us while Bruce sat and stared at the floor. He broke the trance when he looked up, locked his eyes on mine, and said, "Acceptance will set you free."
It was one of those times when someone says something that you know is true, but it is also a direct stab into the heart of what your core issue is, so much so that you are in an apparent mental Catch-22: muster up the courage to acknowledge the truth of their observation, or let your ego run the show and blame the messenger and say or think "fuck you and fuck that shit."
At the same time, simultaneously, I felt the deepest irritation with (truthfully, more like a searing hatred) of Bruce, his massive paunch, the 12-step program, the alcoholics, Cromwell dorm, Hazelden, all of it, and a weird sense of profound relief that maybe, just maybe, I found a nugget of gold in this river of sewage.
When I walked out of Bruce's office and into the Cromwell dorm kitchenette, I realized that the trance of my resistance had been cracked. The smell of my resistance was stinking up my mind and my life, and by default, the lives of others in my orbit. It was time to detach. For the first time in a long time, I felt awake, at least a little bit.
As the Navy SEAL Jocko Willink says, "the solution to your problem is not going to be found in the problem," meaning you must mentally and emotionally step outside the problem by detaching, which means not allowing your ego, emotions, or old perspectives to continue dictating your actions. This kind of detachment is a bona fide superpower.
Only by stepping back and detaching your ego, emotions, and old perspectives from the problem will you be able to get a wider field of vision and hopefully clearer thinking about The Problem, no matter how small or large The Problem is.
To me, detachment is snapping out of the trance of the mental and emotional gravitational pull of The Problem. Once you're out of the trance you can see reality, instead of reality being obscured by the layers of mental bullshit conjured up by ones ego, emotions, and skewed perspectives.
Easier said than done for a chap like me in this situation, especially for someone voted least likely to succeed in rehab.
Standing there in the kitchenette, looking down at my fellow inmates in the TV room, I felt a second-order change come over me (a shift that results in a new worldview or perspective that is transformative). My mental car was finally detaching from the locomotive of resistance and attachment (to the way my life was and how I wanted it to be) that was pulling me down the tracks to further misery. I finally
Or, to paraphrase Martin Luther King: "Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last." Of myself.
Well, now that I am somewhat awake and have, to the best of my ability, detached from me - from my ego, emotions, and skewed perspectives (skewed is another robust understatement) - my mental pump was primed to move on to my man Bruce's admonishment: "Acceptance will set you free."
Acceptance
The word used to conjure up in me thoughts of weakness, caving in, resignation, and lack of agency. I never had any room in my mental house for such attitudes. But now I realized I was facing a new reality, a Brave New World, and if I wanted to move forward in a productive way, I better get on board the train of my new reality.
As the psychologist William James said, “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
Acceptance means accepting reality. But there are two realities we all have to face in the process of acceptance: Our External Reality and our Internal Reality, because it is only through seeing and accepting both of these realities that one can clearly discern what is needed to change either of them.
Michael's External Reality: I was addicted to narcotics, it was a complete disaster that affected everyone in my orbit, it led me to this institution, and now, if I want to rebuild my life, I can either begrudgingly go along with the process and just get through it with the goblins of mental resistance holding me back like a dog in a harness, or I can accept my new reality without resistance or attachment to any outcome, and from that mental platform, get on the train and embrace the trip to mental and emotional healing so I could get back home to take care of and help heal my family.
Michael's Internal Reality: Our internal realities are housed inside our 3 lb football-sized wad of 100 billion brain cells. This is a weird notion, but here goes. Each of us has an internal world in our heads, which is our Internal Reality. We take the zillions of bits of information in from the external world coming at us every day and cook them up in the mental crock pot inside our skulls, and voila, we have our Internal Reality, the "Reality" cooked up with the ingredients put into the pot. It is the interpretation or conceptualization of all of those inputs that our lovely crock pots cook up for us.
Now here is the interesting part: emotions vs feelings. Turns out they are different beasts (I wish someone had taught me this stuff years ago). Emotions are physical reactions to external stimuli or triggers that are activated by neurotransmitters and hormones, which can be objectively measured through indicators such as blood flow, brain activity, and nonverbal reactions. Emotions are there for rapid decision making and immediate action for survival - think of the emotion disgust upon smelling rotten milk or decaying food.
Feelings, on the other hand, are the conscious experience of our emotional reactions. Feelings are the responses to the thoughts and interpretations of our emotions based on our past experiences, memories, expectations, attachments, and our personality.
Very cool. Because just like Viktor Frankl said - "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
In other words, detach your ego, emotions, and perspective from the stimulus and you gain the power to choose your response, instead of staying in the trance.
Applying this same paradigm to feelings - "Between emotion and feeling there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our perspective (or frame). In our feelings lies our growth and freedom."
An example: you're driving to work and you come around the bend on the highway. As far as you can see, there is a line of cars choking the road ahead. Immediately, your hands tighten on the wheel, you lean forward a bit, you start glancing at the next lane, looking in the rear view mirror, and then start swearing under your breath. Traffic congestion is the trigger for the emotion of fear, specifically the fear of being late.
Now here is where it gets interesting. One can stay in the trance of the emotional tunnel triggered by the traffic congestion and start complaining about traffic, how the city should expand the number of lanes and how you hate living in this city and the damn drivers who don't know how to drive their fucking cars and they're all on their phones.....now you are feeling anger and resentment.
The deal is that those feelings were created by how you interpreted or framed the emotion of fear (of being late) in this circumstance.
You could Choose, yes Choose, to detach from the situation by becoming aware of the trigger and your internal reaction, then taking a deep breath or a few of them, and now, having snapped the chains of the trance of the emotional tunnel that could have led to you switching lanes back and forth with a form of insane urgency that accomplishes nothing except to further escalate your tension and anger, you can fully accept the external reality of heavy traffic, you will be late, and drop the useless battle, and then change your internal reality by reframing the situation as an opportunity - to just relax, to think about your day or week ahead, to give someone a call you have not spoken to for a while, or to listen to that podcast you've been meaning to listen to. Now, instead of feeling anger and resentment, you can feel calm and, if you like, productive!
I used to think bullshit to the notion that we get to choose how we feel, that things or people don't make us feel things. It seemed counterintuitive, given my direct experience, which was one of stimulus → emotional response → trance-like state, which leads to responding to the emotion on autopilot.
I was wrong. We can decide how we want to feel about things, and the way to do that is to reframe the situation or problem to our advantage. Not easy, especially with big-ticket emotional items like I was dealing with in Hazelden, but like all skills, it gets easier with practice.
Returning to the beginning of this piece when Bruce looked me in the eye and said acceptance will set you free where I wrote: "At the same time, simultaneously, I felt the deepest irritation with (truthfully, more like a searing hatred) of Bruce, his massive paunch, the 12-step program, the alcoholics, Cromwell dorm, Hazelden, all of it, and a weird sense of profound relief that maybe, just maybe, I found a nugget of gold in this river of sewage."
As I surveyed the TV room and my fellow inmates after meeting with Bruce, I managed to detach (to a sufficient degree) from my ego, perspectives, and the emotions of anger and resentment the triggering stimulus (Bruce and the whole situation) generated just long enough to get outside of the emotional tunnel so I could actually see and accept my external reality, and simultaneously or nearly simultaneously, I managed to tweak my internal reality just enough to think that just "maybe, just maybe, I found a nugget of gold in this river of sewage."
It was, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen's lyrics from the song Anthem: the crack that lets the light in.
I love the way Jocko Willink frames dealing with problems: "Problem? Good!" and since, as Sam Harris says, life is nothing but a series of problems, we can learn to adopt this mindset of Problem? Good! with confidence when you understand and use the three tools for dealing with problems:
- Detach from the stimulus and its resultant emotion.
- Accept the external realities of the situation in your bones.
- Decide what frame you want to put around the problem and start constructing a vision of an internal reality that moves you in a positive direction.
This stuff is not easy, and the best way to learn is to practice in everyday situations (like navigating traffic) to get the feel and rhythm of the process. However, it is worth the effort, because these steps are the keys to real resilience when faced with the bigger problems in life, which we are all guaranteed to encounter eventually.
Standing there looking out at my fellow inmates, I realized that I did not like the situation I was in (God, the staggering level of understatement) but, for the first time in a long time I felt a bit of freedom from myself and finally, a bit of optimism about myself and my future, and it gave me the ability to write a letter to our son Sam, who was also, at the same time, locked down as a plebe in his first year at the Naval Academy. In it, I wrote the following:
"Sammy, all I can offer you is to have faith. Faith in me, faith in the belief that I will do everything in my power to fix this situation, and faith that I will bring our family back to order, and faith that maybe we will all be even better off than before." Not much to hang one's hat on. But I really meant it.
During those trying days, the crushing uncertainty of everything in my life threatened to choke the life out of me, but the ability to detach, accept, and reframe in even a small way allowed me to breathe just enough to move forward in baby steps. And it wasn't like ok, I did the three steps, and now I have my shit together and everything is rosy.
Every morning, as my eyes opened to my new reality, when I woke up from the hell of the nighttime hellishness, and the crushing anxiety and uncertainty would nearly flood my soul and threaten to overwhelm me, I just kept going through the three steps, again and again, stimulus after stimulus, until I gained enough footing to start to feel in more in control, of myself, and of my life, again.
It's a bitch to do when lifes a bitch, but it works.
Feedback with a thumbs up or down is greatly appreciated, or drop an email to me michael@michaelmaddaus.com.
