summarize: I began using these tools and strategies on a daily basis, forming an emotional
health routine of sorts. I focused on eulogy virtues, not résumé virtues. I
worked on being more relational, more present with my family. I tried to
practice reframing. But something still felt off. Even as I worked on my
relationships with those closest to me, I still had a major blind spot: my
relationship with myself. I had become a much better husband and father, but
inside, I was just as hard on myself as ever. My deep self-hatred and loathing
still contaminated most of my thoughts and emotions, and I didn’t even
realize it—nor did I understand why it was happening.
I know I was not alone in this feeling. I was speaking with a patient of
mine once, an incredibly successful and well-known person, and he said
something that stunned me. “I need to be great,” he said, “in order to feel like
I’m not worthless.”
That stunned me. Even he feels this way?
Yet my own insecurity and self-hatred still gnawed at me. While I was
getting better at dealing with other people—that constituted some progress—
I was as hard on myself as ever. Anger still ruled me, even when I was
supposedly having fun. Simply missing a shot at archery or spinning out of a
turn in my driving simulator would send me into a seething, self-loathing
rage. I would constantly lose my temper with myself and throw tantrums,
yelling out loud and even snapping an arrow across my thigh if I missed a
shot. That hurt a lot, but I kept doing it.
It was as if I had my own personal Bobby Knight, the Indiana University
basketball coach who was famed for his red-faced sideline meltdowns (and
who ultimately lost his job because of them), living inside my head.
Whenever I made a mistake or felt I performed poorly, even in tiny ways, my
own personal Coach Knight jumped up from the bench to scream at me.
Make a mistake cooking dinner? How do you not know how to grill a fucking
steak? Flub the intro recording to a podcast? You are a worthless sack of shit
who has no business being alive, let alone having a podcast!
The crazy part is that I actually believed that voice served me well. This
rage and self-doubt had fueled much of my personal drive and whatever
success I had enjoyed, I told myself. It was simply the price I had to pay. But
in reality, all it had produced was more résumé virtues. And I wasn’t even all
that proud of my résumé. It would never be good enough.
For the first time in my life, I had a radical thought: Who cares how well
you perform if you’re so utterly miserable?
During this time, Paul Conti, who continued to keep tabs on my declining
emotional health as a friend, sensed another rising storm. He began
suggesting that I go into another residential treatment facility. The Bridge had
helped me greatly, and without it I would have lost my family. But Paul felt I
had left the Bridge too soon, staying for only two weeks, and thus had not yet
scratched the surface when it came to examining and healing my relationship
with myself. But I stubbornly refused. I’ll be fine.
Something had to give, and soon enough, it did.
—
I imagine that if 2020 had been like any other year, I could have kicked the
can down the road for a few more years and just gotten by somehow. But
there is nothing like a crisis to bring every other simmering issue right to a
full boil.
When COVID hit, our practice was already maxed out. We bring on most
of our new patients in the first two quarters of each year, so I had already
committed my ancillary bandwidth to learning the ins and outs of the new
patients. COVID instantly doubled or tripled our workload. There were daily
calls with the research team to discuss everything we could find out about the
disease, starting very early in the morning, as well as a new and daunting slate
of COVID-related podcasts. I gave up my morning meditation practice in
order to field the countless calls from patients, who were understandably
panicked and looking for reassurance.
As March bled into April it became clear there was no end in sight. One
day in late April 2020, I was on a routine morning call with my practice
manager when I couldn’t take it anymore and started venting. I’ve lost control,
I told her. I can’t keep my patients’ stories straight anymore. Was it patient X
or patient Y who just last week told me about his daughter’s struggle at
school? Was it patient A or patient B whom I needed to reach out to that
evening about an issue she was having? She tried to soothe me, saying I was
doing the best I could under the circumstances and that our patients were
grateful. But the more she talked, the angrier I got.
And just like that, I spun into a radical, self-destructive episode, one like
I’ve never experienced before or since. Even remembering it now is terrifying.
I threw a table across our living room. I tore my T-shirt to pieces. I screamed,
in rage and pain. My wife begged me to leave the house for fear I would harm
her or the kids. I thought about driving myself into a bridge abutment or other
structure fast enough that I’d be killed. I was convinced that I was broken,
defective; when they autopsied my brain, they would discover just how
screwed up I was. I was beyond fixing. Nothing could make it right.
I ended up holed up in a motel, on the phone with Paul, Esther, and Terry.
They insisted that I needed to go back to a place like the Bridge. Now. True
to form, I stubbornly disagreed, claiming that I could fix this with just a little
more time and support, if only I could go home and get some rest. After
pleading with them for forty-eight hours, I finally relented. In the middle of
the night, I drove myself to Phoenix, Arizona, to be admitted to a place called
Psychological Counseling Services, or PCS.
Terry had been telling me about PCS for nearly a year. He said it was a
place that worked miracles, healing wounds that seemed beyond permanent. I
asked how he could be so sure. He said I just needed to trust him.
—
Just as with my visit to the Bridge two and a half years earlier, it took a few
days to get settled in. Because it was the beginning of the pandemic, I was
alone, dealing with therapists remotely on Zoom for twelve hours each day
while I sat in a tiny Airbnb a few miles from the facility.
It was not until the second week that I began to make progress. Slowly, I
came to accept that I had built a structure of perfectionism and workaholism
on the pillars of performance-based esteem. This structure rested on a
foundation of my shame, some of which was brought on by trauma and some
of which was inherited, as children take on the shame of those around them.
But all of it was exacerbated by my own vicious cycle of self-loathing and
guilt for my actions. It’s not a coincidence that I have gravitated toward sports
that demand perfection, like archery and driving race cars.
I ended up spending three weeks at PCS—twenty-one agonizing,
uninterrupted days—finishing the work I had begun at the Bridge and going
far beyond what I had imagined was possible. We covered an enormous
amount of ground, but one task absolutely stymied me. On my second day, I
was assigned to write out a list of forty-seven affirmations, representing one
positive statement about myself for each year of my life. I made it to about
five or six before I got completely stuck. For days and days, I couldn’t come
up with anything good to say about myself. My perfectionism and my shame
did not permit me to believe anything nice about myself. I just couldn’t do it.
Finally, on the nineteenth day—a blistering hot Wednesday morning—it
happened. One of my therapists, Marcus, was pushing deeper and deeper into
a story I had told him earlier about how I had stopped wanting to celebrate
my birthdays when I was about seven; in fact, I revealed, I would keep my
birthday a “secret” until well into my twenties. His questions made it clear
that this was not something a healthy child would do, and it likely masked
something more deeply wrong. He just kept digging and would not let it go.
That recognition pushed me into an emotional freefall. It had been two
and a half years in the making, but I finally was able to let go and accept the
truth about my past and how it had shaped me, without any excuses or
rationalizations. All that I had become—good and bad—was in response to
what I had experienced. It wasn’t simply the big-T traumas, either; we
uncovered many, many more little-t traumas, hidden in the cracks, that had
affected me even more profoundly. I hadn’t been protected. I hadn’t felt safe.
My trust had been broken by people who were close to me. I felt abandoned.
All of that had manifested itself as my own self-loathing as an adult; I had
become my own worst enemy. And I hadn’t deserved any of it. This was the
key insight. That little, sweet boy did not deserve any of it. And he was still
with me.
Once I had accepted all this, it was easy to write out the forty-seven
affirmations.
I am flawed, but not defective.
I am a good husband and father.
I am a good cook.
I am not my shame.
I will find a way to love myself.
They just poured out of me. It reminded me of this observation by Jacob
Riis, the great Danish American journalist and social reformer: “When
nothing seems to help, I go back and look at a stonecutter hammering away at
his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the
last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
