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joaquinwhorres · 6 years

Text

Public Knowledge (Sweet Pea x Reader)

Summary: There’s only one rule to your tutoring sessions with Sweet Pea: no one can ever know. Which isn’t a problem. Until suddenly it kind of is?

Pairing: Sweet Pea x Fem!Reader

Word Count: 10,438

Author’s Note: This really grew into a project of it’s own. I’m not even sure what it fully is any more, but I do know that I love the reader character and Sweet Pea and am glad that I got this out into the world.

Warnings: Language. Mentions of emotionally abusive parents. High school bullshit.

"No one can know."

You tore your eyes away from where they had been tracing the Southside Serpents tattoo on his neck, making yourself meet his gaze instead.

"Yeah, of course," you nodded, biting your lip before remembering what your mother said about doing that, and quickly letting go. You settled on a smile. Or rather, the attempt at a smile. You could tell the effort didn't reach your eyes. In your defense, though, he was the one making it hard to seem offhandedly friendly what with his intensely dark stare and the fact that you were certain he was carrying a knife. You stopped smiling, and shifted your weight to the other leg.

"Good," he gave a single nod from where he leaned against the wall, staring at you with arms crossed. "So, Thursday? After school?"

"Yeah. Yeah, ok, that works," you agreed, adjusting your grip on your books. "Where?"

"It's your school," he shot back.

You worried your lip between your teeth, racking your brain for different options."Maybe the student lounge? Or the library?" He raised his eyebrows with a look that was equal parts skeptical and scathing, as if he couldn't believe Mr. Adams had suggested he ask you to help him with his English papers. You couldn't blame him. It took everything in you to avoid looking up at the ceiling and sighing at your own idiocy.

"Right, no one can know and people go to those places," you mumbled, bobbing your head. "Here then? I always see Mr. Adams skipping out of school early, so it should be open."

"Cool," he affirmed. In the awkward silence that followed, your eyes once more slid towards his tattoo, the double headed snake with fangs bared. The same as the one on the back of his leather jacket. "I'm not dumb. And this isn't because I'm in the Serpents," he snapped, and you felt your face grow warm as you refocused back on his face instead of his tattoo. "Southside was a hell hole and my last English teacher was the Sugar Man, not exactly the most conducive environment to getting an education."

"I--I can imagine," you stuttered, once more feeling the weight of your idiocy and wishing it would crush you.

"You really can't," he shook his head, looking out into the hall. "We can figure out the details Thursday." he decided, without even looking back at you. Instead, he just left you behind, wondering why on earth you had just agreed to tutor Sweet Pea, The Southside Serpent, in English.

You were surprised to find Sweet Pea waiting for you in Mr. Adams' room, computer already open in front of him. And apparently that surprise was written all over your face.

"Don't look so shocked," Sweet Pea narrowed his eyes, his hand curling into a fist on the desk.

You shook your head, just continuing to stare at him as he sat, fuming, in the middle of the empty English classroom. "Just–how did you get here so fast?" you breathed out, remaining standing in the doorway and attempting to ignore the twisting feeling in your gut that was reminding you how terrible of an idea this whole arrangement was. Sweet Pea jerked back as if you'd just broken out into song , his mouth hanging open for the briefest of seconds before he snapped it shut and furrowed his eyebrows. He didn't say anything. "You were just with me in Skinner's class, and that's like," you waved an arm in the vague direction of the classroom halfway across the school on the second floor. "And I saw you leave talking to your friends. Didn't you have to finish the conversation you were having or at least answer questions about why you're staying late?"

"Why? You think Serpents are just deadbeats who don't do extracurricular activities after school? We have other interests besides our bikes and Serpent business. Topaz is on the Vixens and Fogarty is with Keller trying to get another show up and going."

You held up your hands. "I just—wish I could make it through these halls as fast as you. That's all I was saying."

Yep. This was quite possibly the worst idea you'd ever had. Being stuck alone in an empty classroom with the human equivalent of a land mine and only the watchful eyes of Shakespeare, Poe, and Hilary Swank from Freedom Writers to chaperone. Not that you needed a chaperone. More like a translator.

He shrugged, letting out an annoyed exhale. "Are you going to continue to interrogate me or can we work on this essay?"

"Oh, yeah, right, ok," you mumbled, walking further in and sinking into the seat next to his. "Did you start already?"

"Of course I started," Sweet Pea said through gritted teeth. "I told you I'm not stupid. I need help not my hand held."

You flushed, staring back at him, keeping your lips pressed shut. His eyes bore into yours, the snarl still on his face as he tried to stare you down. You opened your mouth and then shut it again, rethinking what you were about to say. "What?" he snapped.

"I'm just thinking this is going to be a hell of a long hour if you're going to get angry every time I'm awkward or say the wrong thing because I don't know if you noticed, being the smart person you are, but I'm constantly sticking my foot in my mouth," you retorted.

And then what you just said–or rather how you said it and who you said it to–sunk in and your eyes grew wide.

"I–I–mean–"

He narrowed his eyes staring at you. It would be nice to die right now. You know, before he had the chance to murder you.

"I just mean I'm not nearly smart enough to come up with these clever little slights to insult you just because I'm bored. I'm no Cheryl Blossom. I only–"

You were cut off by Sweet Pea snorting. "You do realize you sort of did one right now."

You opened and shut your mouth. Several times. And then came the stuttering. "I didn't mean to imply that she's always like that. I mean she kind of is, so honestly it was more of an observation than anything clever. And I don't want to insult her. I don't want to insult anyone. I told you I was good at sticking my foot down my mouth. Honestly it's more like I shove my whole leg down there. Ugh that's weird to say. I–Um–I just–"

He let out an amused exhale, his eyes darting to the side as if looking to see if someone else in the empty classroom was getting a load of the train wreck he was witnessing. "Don't worry," he said, rolling his eyes. "I won't tell her you said anything."

"Thank you," you sighed, hiding your head in your arms.

You could feel him looking at you, but it did nothing to draw you out of your self-imposed exile. You were reminded of when you were little and you truly believed–despite your parents' arguments about faulty logic–that if you couldn't see someone, they couldn't see you. You hoped Sweet Pea was staring at the suddenly empty chair where you had been sitting wondering where you went and how you developed super powers.

"Hey."

You should have known you were never that lucky. You felt a nudge against your arm, and you looked up.

"I'm Sweet Pea."

You stared at the hand he had extended, your eyes trailing up his arm to his carefully blank face. Your face wrinkled in confusion as you slowly slid your hand into his. His fingers curled around your hand and shook it a few times, as you fought the blush rising in your cheeks and tried to ignore how his hand was warm and just a little bit rough except for the cool metal from his rings.

"And you are…" he prompted. You stared at him for a second more and he sighed, as if disappointed you were confused about why someone you already knew was introducing himself to you. "If we're gonna restart as…acquaintances, it'd be nice to know your name."

"Y/N," you said, a small smile forming on your face.

"Wanna read this paper and help me with the analysis, Y/N?" Sweet Pea asked, letting go of your hand and gesturing to his open computer with his head.

"Yeah, definitely," you nodded, pulling it in between the two of you to look over. Maybe this arrangement wouldn't be so bad.

Tutoring Sweet Pea got much easier after the first week. Of course there were still outbursts, but the longer you spent together, the more predictable they became. You could expect a rant and/or flipped furniture every time he had to:

Transition between ideas

Write a conclusion

Add a works cited page

Deal with getting a low grade

The rant would begin with how ridiculous English class was and how he'd never need to write an in depth character analysis in real life and then transition into him analyzing whoever was pissing him off the most at the moment: Reggie Mantle, Mr. Weatherbee, Archie Andrews, even you.

But most of the time, most of the time, Sweet Pea was the ideal student. He wanted your feedback and discussed his ideas and setbacks with a surprising amount of eloquence and insight considering how little he spoke in class.

"I like this," you said, finishing the essay and turning the computer back towards him. "Or, I like the idea of it, you know, that Laertes isn't just this raw nerve of a character but instead he's a rational, guardian of honor. I just feel like you could go more into depth."

Sweet Pea nodded, looking down at what he'd written. "Like how?"

"Well," you bit your lip, reading the first body paragraph again and trying to formulate your thoughts. "Like here," you said, pointing to a sentence. "You talk about how if he was truly led by his emotions he would have killed anyone he thought was associated with Polonius' death rather than just the person responsible. But wasn't he manipulated into killing Hamlet? How can you prove that it was a conscious decision or that killing for revenge can ever be reasonable?"

Sweet Pea looked at you as if you had suggested he break down the etymology of the word murder and crossed his arms. "Why? Isn't that obvious?"

"Um no. Because if I was saying what a reasonable character would have done, I'd say that he should not go all vigilante but instead have a public trial which defames Hamlet, embarrasses the crown, punishes the murderer for the crime, and makes you sympathetic and beloved in the eyes of the people."

He scoffed, "Of course you would, Northsider."

"Right, see!" you said, excitedly. "You see him different from me, so you need to explain that argument here. Using the text."

Sweet Pea made a quick note on his paper before stopping. "You don't think I should change it, do you. To argue that he should have let the king and queen handle it?"

You furrowed your brow. "No, why would you?"

"Because it's the right answer? I don't know." He shrugged, looking back down at the paper.

"You mean the Northside answer?" you asked, raising your eyebrows. "Nah, you write better if you actually believe what you're saying."

He looked at you for a brief second, squinting slightly as if trying to make sense of you before he turned back to what he was writing.

"When you're finished with that, I think we're good for the day. Other than that and the little things I mentioned before, there's not much else that I'd change or add. We can give it a final look on Thursday."

He nodded putting his pencil down and starting to pack up his stuff. You stood. The endings of your sessions were always awkward. It was weird that the minute you two walked out the door you didn't know each other. Towards the beginning you had staggered your leaving, but recently the two of you had left around the same time only to walk in the same direction and have to pretend like you hadn't just spent the past forty-five minutes alone in a classroom together. It was weird to have him hold the door for you as you left, unless someone was too close and then he let it close in your face. You kind of wanted to go back to the staggering. You kind of didn't.

"I've been thinking," Sweet Pea said, standing from his seat as the two of you made your way towards the door. "How much do I owe you?"

"Owe me?" you asked, pausing by the doorway, just out of sight from anyone who may be passing by.

"For the help," he clarified.

"Oh," you said, starting to worry your lip, only to catch yourself and stop. "I don't need anything."

"I'm not in the business of owing favors," Sweet Pea said, surprisingly stony. You furrowed your brow at him.

"I don't want any favors. It's fine, really. It helps me work on my own paper."

"That's it?" he asked, skeptically.

"I don't know, maybe you could get me a milkshake or something at Pop's. Not like a date or anything. I mean not that you're not…attractive or datable or whatever. I just like milkshakes, and I don't really want anything else and–"

"And Pop's is basically Riverdale High's after school care, so not really an option," Sweet Pea cut in, and you nodded.

"Right," your arms prickled with embarrassment. "No one can know. Right."

Sweet Pea was silent as he stood there in front of you. "I can do like five dollars a week? That's the price of a milkshake, right?"

"It's fine. Going alone to Pop's is just…sad. I don't need anything."

"You can't just go with your friends?"

"Sarah's a vegan and very anti-Pop's."

"And your other friends?"

"That's pretty much it," you shifted your weight to your other leg. "I know it’s kind of shocking because I’m so calm and socially adept, but people just aren’t really lining up to go out to Pop's with me. Chat in class sure but hang out outside of school...” you shrugged. "It’s fine though. I don’t really have tons of time anyway, with all the studying and homework and everything I have to do. And wow that makes my life sound pathetic and boring. It's not though. In case you were wondering…" you trailed off.

Sweet Pea just stood there, looking at you. Or, if you were honest, it felt like he was looking in to you. Trying to figure out what was going on in your head probably, and hell if you knew. It felt like whenever you opened your mouth and you weren't talking about school things just spilled out and you had no control over what those things were.

"I'll figure something out," he said, nodding at you before ducking out of the classroom and leaving you to wait there until you couldn't hear his footsteps anymore and it was safe to go home.

"This is fucking bullshit," Sweet Pea swore, pushing himself out from the desk so forcefully that his chair toppled over. He didn't even look down at it as he began to pace around the classroom. You stayed seated, having learned that following him around the classroom only seemed to give him more energy and amp him up. One of you needed to stay grounded. "We both know that essay was better than a fucking D." He kicked another chair which skidded into the desk. The resulting crash made you wince.

"He probably didn't even read it. Just saw my name at the top of the page and figured a Serpent like me couldn't do any better than a D." He slammed his fist down on the teacher's desk. And then, in the next second he brought his hand back and swung forward, pushing all of the worksheets off the desk in a flurry of paper

"Hey!" you exclaimed, darting out of your seat and grabbing at his arm as he raised it again. He looked down at you with a glare so menacing you seriously questioned whether or not someone actually could literally stare daggers into someone. "Stop," you said quietly, releasing your grip. He stared for a second longer, maybe trying to melt you this time, but before you could turn into a puddle he dropped his arm.

"Why should I? If all I am is an ignorant thug, I might as well embrace it," he argued through gritted teeth.

"And prove him right? And all of the other assholes?" you challenged. "Besides, I don't think he gave you a D just because you're a Serpent."

"So you think all that work we put into that was just worth worth a D?" Sweet Pea heaved, staring down at you.

"No," you shook your head quickly. "I'm with you, a D is bullshit, but we could at least look at the comments. Ok?"

"What's the point. So I can see all the ways I failed?"

You closed your eyes shaking your head. "You read comments to see where you need to go to improve." You took in a deep breath and then let it go, opening your eyes. Sweet Pea was staring at you, his chest still rising and falling more quickly than normal. "Ok, how about this: I'll read the comments and summarize them while you pick up the papers."

"I–"

"If you're not going to clean it up the custodians are, and I am not getting a zero on my classwork today because you had a temper-tantrum," you said, sharply. Sweet Pea raised his eyebrows at you, and you took a step back but crossed your arms. You could see him set his jaw, but he leaned down and began to stack the papers back up. You let out the breath you had been holding and walked back over to the desk, picking up his chair and the crumpled essay that had fallen beneath the desk. You smoothed the paper out, starting at the beginning, your eyes scanning the comments which were all surprisingly positive for a D paper. Good insight. You could pick a stronger quote. I agree! Your brow furrowed, and you bit you lip, making your way through the second page. Word choice. Need stronger transition. Solid point. ???? Your eyes darted from the question marks to the end of the line.

"funeral, Claudius disrespected him. Laertes also takes on the necessary task of avenging his"

You flipped the page over.

And then returned back to the question marks.

And then you started to laugh.

Sweet Pea looked up from where he was neatly placing the papers on Mr. Adams' desk over to you.

"What's so funny?" he growled, crossing his arms.

You laughed louder.

"What?" You could feel his anger radiating off him, and a small voice in the back of your head that valued your life pushed you to hold out the paper to him.

"How many pages did you write?" you asked, attempting to calm yourself down.

"I don't know like three?" He snatched the essay out of your hand.

"So you're saying your essay doesn't end mid-sentence on page two?"

"What?" It was as if you could see the jolt of panic hit his body. As he flipped the paper to the second page, and then flipped again surprised to see page one in front of him. "Where's the third page?"

"Still in the printer maybe?" you suggested failing miserably to repress the grin on your face.

He looked dumbly at the paper and then back at you. "Never tell anyone about this. Ever."

"I think your already protected under the 'no one can know about this arrangement' rule," you nodded. "But at least you know why you got a D. That's his policy: all incomplete or off prompt papers get a D. You know, just like how all ignorant Serpent thugs automatically get D's."

"Shut up," Sweet Pea grumbled, dropping in the seat next to you. And for the sake of your life, you did.

Sweet Pea was late. Twenty minutes late. And if it wasn't for the fact that you seriously doubted Sweet Pea had ever forgotten anything in his life, you would have left already, sure he wasn't coming.

Sure, you'd moved todays meeting to a Wednesday instead of the usual Tuesday/Thursday pattern. That was weird. It was last minute. The switch up could easily slip someone's mind.

But not Sweet Pea's. He wouldn't have forgotten.

And that thought ate at you. It ate at you more than the thought of what waited for you at home. Because you knew what was waiting for you at home. You didn't know what happened to Sweet Pea. What if one of the Bulldogs had jumped him between your last class and him getting here? Wait, was he even in your last class? Your mind spun as you quick racked your brain trying to remember if you'd seen him in his regular spot today. Usually you were careful to ignore Sweet Pea because you were certain if you looked at him, it'd be obvious to everyone that you knew him. That you two talked. That you were slowly but surely becoming cool with each other. It would be all over your face.

But still, something could have happened.

What if Weatherbee had targeted him for a random search or some other bullshit infraction? What if he was in jail and no one knew because Sheriff Minetta didn't seem the type to give out phone calls.

You grabbed your bag and started towards the door at a sprint, almost smashing into Sweet Pea. "Hey!" he exclaimed, twisting his body away as you skidded to a halt, putting your hands out to catch onto the door frame and stop yourself.

"Sweet Pea!" you gasped. "You're late!"

"Yeah, sorry, there was a wait," he said, turning back to face you, two milkshakes and a to-go bag from Pop's dangling in his hand. He brushed past you into the classroom, heading for your usual spots and ignoring the fact that you still stood at the door, facing where he'd been. You felt like your mind had raced out ahead of you and now you had to wait for it to come back to the classroom so you could process exactly what was happening.

"You got–I thought–You didn't have to—" you started, spinning to face him.

"I meant to bring it last time but then I got caught up with the…you know," he said, pulling out two wrapped burgers and setting one on each desk. "But, I thought if the only thing you wanted for saving my ass was a milkshake, the least I could do was figure out how to get you one."

"I–I can't believe—Is this why—Did you—" You made a helpless sound at the end of the stuttering, and Sweet Pea shot you an amused look.

"Thank you," he supplied.

"Thank you," you echoed.

There was a pause.

"So, are you going to come eat or are you going to stay over there?" Sweet Pea asked, picking up a fry and dropping it into his mouth. "Because I'm not going to save you any fries."

…...........

"Thanks for the Pop's, by the way," you said as the two of you walked down the deserted hallway. "It's probably going to be the best thing that happens to me all day."

"Sounds like there's more to that statement," Sweet Pea said, holding the door open for you.

"Not really," you shook your head. "I just…I don't want to go home," you admitted, looking away from him and out into the almost empty Riverdale High parking lot.

"Having such a blast with me?" he drawled, and you could tell by the way he said it that his eyebrows were raised and he had that small smirk kind of thing going on, the same way he always did whenever he was making fun of you.

"No," you snorted rolling your eyes, or at least you almost rolled your eyes. You stopped midway through, your eyes growing wide, and you turned quickly to face him. "I mean you're fine. Great. I like our arrangement. Ugh that sounds pervy. I don't mean it like a creep, just–"

"Relax," he gave the hint of a genuine smile but whisked it away before anything more could come of it. "What's up with home?"

You glanced up at him before looking back down at your shoes. "It's nothing. I mean, it'll sound stupid when I say it out loud, and I kind of already feel like shit about it so I don't really want to get laughed at."

"I won't laugh." Sweet Pea raised his eyes in a challenging way.

"I think you will."

"Tell me," he said, nudging you with an elbow.

"I got a C on my stat test," you mumbled, looking away from him so you didn't have to see the failed attempts at repressing his amusement and disbelief.

"So that's what makes Northsiders afraid to go home? A bad grade on a test. Shit I wish that was why I didn't want to go home."

You gritted your teeth. "You promised you wouldn't laugh."

"I'm not laughing," he shook his head. "It's just…sad that you think that is a problem."

"I told you it was stupid. I didn't want to even say anything," you said, pushing past him and beginning to walk down the road.

"Hey," Sweet Pea called out, grabbing your arm. You flinched and he let go immediately. "There's more to it, isn't there?"

"You don't want to know about my Northsider problems. It's fine."

"I'm not going to beg you to tell me. If you don't want to you don't have to." He said, standing there still close to you.

"They just…my parents…they just get on me when I come home with any thing lower than an A. And I don't want to deal with it…with the arguments and the things they say."

"What do they say?" His voice was noticeably softer, and your eyes darted from where you'd been staring at the sidewalk to him.

"I don't know, my parents are pretty strict about doing well in school. They just um, they ask if I did my best, and I say yes, and then they'll say something along the lines of if that's my best then it means they failed with me. You know, like how I don't measure up to my sister and they made a mistake with me by giving me some more freedom to come home late from school or not do homework and studying on the weekends and stuff. Then there's the whole part about how can I achieve my plans or amount to anything with grades like that? You know, that if I don't want to end up worthless I need to put more effort in and take school more seriously. With a C it'll probably be a little worse. Just in terms of volume and tone. " You tried to make the last part sound like a joke, but you couldn't bring yourself to keep the smile on your face. Not when you saw Sweet Pea set his jaw.

"They don't hit you, do they?" he asked, tightly.

"What? No. No of course not. They're not abusive. Just…disappointed." You tucked a strand of hair behind your ear. "My sister's at Harvard Law, excelling, and I'm pretty sure they want me there too for pre-med…" you trailed off, looking out at the parking lot again. "I don't know. Like you said, it's just a Northsider problem. I'm sure you've dealt with worse," you mumbled.

Sweet Pea looked you up and down, his brow wrinkling as he seemed to be considering something. "It's not just a Northsider problem," he said finally. "Sounds like shit."

"Thanks," you mumbled, crossing your arms against the breeze. The two of you stood there in silence, alone. Sweet Pea looking down at you, and you standing there holding yourself together, trying to keep the panic and embarrassment down. Deep down.

"You know, if you don't want to go home, we could go back inside and hang out here for a bit or go over to my place."

Your heart began to race. You could almost hear it in your ears as you opened your mouth, but Sweet Pea cut you off, shaking his head with that almost smile. "Don't worry, not like that."

You flushed and shook your head. "I—I have to get home. If I'm later than four it'll just be worse, and I'm already cutting it close."

"Need a ride then?"

You shook your head. "That's ok. Someone would probably see us. I can just walk."

He stood quietly, his eyes once again running up and down your body as if appraising you.

"Yeah ok," he nodded.

"I'll see you tomorrow though? On time?" you asked, your voice lifting a little bit in spite of yourself.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Sweet Pea smiled.

To Be or Not To Be?

You stared at the question at the top of Sweet Pea's screen before looking up at him.

"What?" he asked, his eyebrows furrowing a little bit in the way they always did when he was testing you.

"I thought you would have gone with one of the revenge prompts," you admitted, hesitantly, bracing yourself for the rant coming your way.

"I had more to talk about with this one," he said simply, his eyes darting from the screen and then back at you.

"Oh," you said quietly, turning back to the computer and scanning over the first line. Coming from the Southside and being part of the Serpents everybody here thinks that I'm a deadbeat or a criminal. You stopped yourself, looking up at Sweet Pea.

"If you don't want me to read this one, I don't have to. I can walk you through some self-edit strategies because you've really been getting better. You don't need me to–"

"You can read it," he cut you off, his voice even and measured for once. Your own brow furrowed as you looked at him for a second longer, as if trying to determine whether or not he really meant it. He didn't flinch or move or look away. He met your gaze and held it. Steady.

You broke first, shifting your attention to the essay, your face feeling warm.

I can hear it in their little comments and in the way they whisper when I walk past them in the hall. I can see it in their expressions when I make a good point in class or the way they won't make eye contact. So, yeah, I get angry. I'm angry all of the time because I'm tired. I'm tired of being treated like I'm like a second class citizen because I was born on the wrong side of town. I'm tired of being treated like I'm a criminal because I chose a family who will always look out for me since mine split. I'm tired of being dumped on and blamed for everything when all I do is what it takes to survive. So yeah, sometimes I question whether it's worth coming to school or not just to put up with this. Like Hamlet I have to wonder if it's worth "suffering the slings and arrows" of my classmates and fight to prove that I am smart and belong here or do I give up and become the ignorant thug everyone already sees me as?

It was hard to focus on the parts of the essay that needed work. Clearly his wording could be better and there was room to make this more powerful, but the very fact that he was writing this and sharing it with you gave you pause.

"Do you really feel this way?" you whispered. You didn't mean to whisper. It wasn't like anyone was around to hear you. It just came out that way. As if the question was meant to be asked softly.

He shrugged, looking away from you and towards the wall, crossing his arms.

You nodded shoving anything you would have said back down. Instead, you chose to sit in silence, staring at Sweet Pea. You noticed for the first time, the way he always seemed to be crossing his arms, and if he wasn't doing that he was clenching his fist. Your eyes ran up his arm to his face, which looked distant and closed. And in that moment, Sweet Pea suddenly made a lot more sense. Because you knew that look.

"You thought of me like that when I asked you to help, didn't you?" he mumbled, finally, still refusing to look at you.

You wished you were a good liar. Or that the two of you were friends now. Or that you were braver than you were. But you weren't. You were you, and all you could do was look down and mumble "Yeah, but I was wrong."

His head snapped to you, and he furrowed his brow, his eyes bore into you with that assessing look they sometimes got. You looked up and met his gaze wondering if he was going to charge you with lying or push you on it or say anything else. He didn't. He just continued to stare at you intensely as if calculating something in his head.

"I mean, you're still terrifying. Just um not so randomly? Does that make sense?"

He gave the smallest shake of his head.

"Like," you bit your lip, trying to form the words in your head into sentences. Sentences that made sense and wouldn't cause him to bolt from the room or knock over furniture or scream at you. "You get frustrated when you don't know something so you act all angry and storm away because you'd rather die than have people think you're stupid. That's why we have our arrangement isn't it? Because you don't want people to know you need help?"

He shrugged again.

"And now you're saying you're angry people only see you in one way, which makes sense of why you're always ready to snap on the Bulldogs. Because they are most of the reason people see you like that. I guess I'm just saying your anger makes sense. You're not some raw nerve or ball of senseless rage. You're a real person."

He snorted. "Thanks."

"I don't know, I guess I'm just saying that it's harder to think of you as some thug and weigh all of that Southside and Serpent stuff against you when I like you."

You flushed as Sweet Pea raised his eyebrows. "Not like you like you. Not like that. I mean there's a bunch of girls who do. Even Northsiders. Because you're objectively good looking. Like really good looking, and tall, dark, and mysterious and stuff, but I'm not–I just mean as a friend. Even though we're not friends. Uh, well we could be, but—"

"Breathe, Y/N," Sweet Pea chuckled, his arms falling down to his sides. "I know what you mean."

You flushed and looked back down at the desk.

"And for the record, I like you too."

You nodded, failing to keep the smile from sliding onto your face. "Great. Umm, let's get this paper sorted out then."

"No one can tell me the answer." Ms. Richardson asked, pacing up and down the rows of the history class. "We've been studying Reconstruction for how long and no one can tell me how this affected political parties? This is ridiculous."

Your stomach twisted as you flipped through your notes searching for any kind of hint to the answer.

"Mr. Chisholm? An answer?" your teacher rounded on one of the Bulldogs closest to her who looked up from where he'd been doodling something in his notebook.

"No ma'am," he shook his head, looking back down to avoid her gaze. She shook her head, turning on the next student.

"Mr. Fogarty?"

Fangs Fogarty looked up at the teacher blankly, looking far more like a deer in the headlights than a dangerous Southside Serpent. He shook his head.

"Should have known," Ms. Richardson snapped. Next to him, you watched as Sweet Pea's hands ball into fists and his jaw set.

"We just need a second to think," you blurted.

"Excuse me?" The teacher's attention whipped around on you, and it was if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on your head. You opened and shut your mouth. You were sure your body was shaking. It felt like it was shaking. Like the 24 pairs of eyes that had turned to look at you were crushing you under the weight of their stare. "Oh, no, Ms. Y/L/N, I'd like you to repeat it please."

"I'm sorry, Ms. Richardson, I—I—I just—"

"Repeat. It."

"I said we need time to think. And look in our notes."

"If you need time to look in your notes in order to answer basic questions about material we've been studying for the past few weeks, then you can spend your lunch with me today." Ms. Richardson stated firmly. Your cheeks burned, and you looked away from her as she made her way back to the front of the classroom. You caught Sweet Pea's stare as the corner of his mouth quirked up before he shook his head and turned his attention to Fangs who was whispering something.

…...........

The rest of class went by comparatively smoothly. At least there were no more incidents where you publicly stuck your foot in your mouth. Instead you sat in silent dread, letting the reality of what you'd done sink in.

You were in such deep shit if your parents ever found out.

It was this thought that kept your mind occupied even after the bell rang. It wasn't until Sarah poked you in the back that you shook yourself off and realized everyone was packing up. You started shoving your stuff into your bag as quickly as possible, in the process knocking your textbook down to the ground.

"Shit," you swore, leaning down to pick up the book. Before you could get there a hand already had it and was offering it to you.

You looked up at Sweet Pea who had that small smile on his face.

"Uh, thanks," you said, taking it from him.

"No problem," he said before turning around to walk out the door with his friends. You followed him with your eyes, accidentally catching Toni Topaz's gaze. Your head snapped back around as you finished pulling your books from your locker.

"Ummm, what just happened?" Sarah asked.

You looked up at her, almost forgetting she was there. You shook your head. "I have no idea."

"Did Sweet Pea–Riverdale High's own Wolverine— just pick up your book for you?"

"I…" you shrugged struggling to push down the strange feeling that felt too close to "offended" from bubbling up.

"This is a sign of the end times," Sarah joked.

It was harder to force yourself to laugh than it should have been. And you definitely shouldn't have let your gaze drift back to the retreating Southside Serpent's jacket.

…...........

"Who was that?" Fogarty asked, looking over his shoulder and back at you before following Sweet Pea into the hallway.

"Y/N Y/L/N," Sweet Pea said, staring ahead, ignoring the look that Toni shot him.

"What's her deal?" Fangs continued.

"I don't know what that was in there, but she once got a bad grade in Simpkins' class and cried about it. In class. Poor little neurotic grade grubber couldn't handle it," Cheryl chimed in with her trademark lighthearted bitch tone.

"Shut it Cheryl," Sweet Pea growled.

"What is this?" Cheryl asked, perking up. "Our serpentine prince channeling his anger issues into defending a Northside nerd? Don't tell me you're interested in first movie Hermione Granger."

Sweet Pea curled his fingers up into a fist before flexing them out, focusing on keeping them straight so they wouldn't curl up again and do anything Toni would make him regret.

"Easy Cheryl," Toni stepped in, casting a confused glance at Sweet Pea. "He hasn't had his coffee today, so he's even more of a short fuse than normal."

Cheryl laughed. "Whatever."

The rest of her snark was cut off as Sweet Pea looked over his shoulder and towards you where you laughed with a friend coming out of the classroom door. He pushed the odd feeling that crept up in his chest down and turned back, following the rest of the Serpents.

"You are never going to believe what just happened," you announced, walking into the classroom.

Sweet Pea looked up at you, eyebrows raise. "You just walked in the door six minutes late to tutoring? Yeah, I thought you might have died."

"Very funny," you shot back. "But more unbelievable than me being late."

"You got a second detention today for defending a Southside Serpent," Sweet Pea asked, giving you the tell-tale 'I'm making fun of you' smirk.

You opened your mouth to argue back about how you weren't defending Fangs Fogarty, before realizing that you did not want to start that argument. It was a debate you were destined to lose because the only thing that would convince him that you weren't looking out for Fangs would be the truth.

And you weren't about to tell him that.

Instead, you let out a laugh and shook your head. "No, and I'm going to have to say more unbelievable."

"So we're just going to skip over the whole thing that happened with Richardson."

"Yes, but also no."

"Alright, tell me," he said, opening his hands wide, as if welcoming in the information.

"Adam Chisholm just asked me on a date," you announced, falling into the chair next to Sweet Pea. "And I said yes." To your pleasure, he looked just as surprised as you probably did.

He started to form the beginning of a sentence before he got there. His fingers twitched by his side before finally relaxing. "You're right, that is more unbelievable."

"Hey!"

"I am agreeing with you," he argued back.

"Well, uh, yeah, maybe technically…" you shook your head, feeling your face grow warm. "He found me in the hall on the way here and said he was really impressed with the way I stood up to Richardson and wanted to thank me by taking me out to Pop's. And then I asked him if this was like a date, and he said yes."

"So you asked him on a date," Sweet Pea said slowly.

"No, he invited me out," you scrunched up your face with confusion. It was as if Sweet Pea had just checked out for the past thirty seconds.

"To something that you turned into a date," Sweet Pea continued.

Your face fell. "Oh. Oh no. Did I just ask him out on a date? Is that going to be weird? Does that make me seem desperate? This was supposed to be a friends thing wasn't it? Oh my–I'm so stupid. I can't be trusted with anything. Ugh," you slumped forward, covering your head with your arms. "This is the second stupidest thing I've done today."

You could hear him snort and shift closer to you, nudging your arm with his. "You're fine."

You peeked up from your arms to look over at him. "Really? You're sure I shouldn't cancel? I can cancel still. It's tomorrow, not today–"

"You're fine," Sweet Pea repeated, nudging you again.

"I'm fine?" you asked, bumping your arm back into his.

He grinned. "Just make sure you're safe and pick up some protection before you go."

You gasped, your face in flames, as you stared like him, too stunned to bury your head in your arms again.

"Seriously, Y/N. K9 Advantix or Frontline plus only, last thing you want to do is pick up fleas because you went with some generic bland."

"I…I can't tell if that's a euphemism."

Sweet Pea didn't answer.

Unless you counted bursting out laughing.

In that case, he gave a very long and very loud answer.

"Guess who got an A-," Sweet Pea yelled in triumph kicking in the classroom door.

You whipped your head around to look at him, attempting to plaster on a smile even as your chest constricted and you tried to convince yourself to push down everything you were feeling and just. be. happy. After all, this was far from the meanest thing anyone'd done to you.

His face fell. Obviously your attempt at a cheery smile had failed. Probably miserably.

"What's up?" he asked, moving slower and with significantly less pep.

"Nothing," you rolled your eyes, looking away from him.

"You didn't get a C again did you?" he asked, sitting down backward on the chair in front of yours. You snorted shaking your head.

"Seriously, Sweet Pea, it's nothing. It's dumb." You might have gotten him to let it go if your voice hadn't cracked.

"It was your date, wasn't it?" he asked, his voice tight.

"What date?" you chuckled humorlessly. Sweet Pea furrowed his brow, and you shook your head trying to get control over yourself. "He…he never showed."

"What an asshole–"

You held up a hand stopping him. "I thought maybe–" your voice got away from you, and it took a second for you to bring it back. "Maybe he forgot the time. Or maybe something came up and he couldn't text because it was serious."

Sweet Pea scoffed and rolled his eyes.

"I waited for forty-five minutes, and then I left, and I figured I'd see him in school today and we could sort it out. But then I was scrolling on Instagram, and…"

You held your phone out showing him the picture you had found on Ginger Lopez' Instagram.

It took him a second for the picture of the holding hands and tangled legs and the caption to sink in.

"That son-of-a-bitch," Sweet Pea stood up so quickly, his chair wobbled. "I'll kick his ass," he started for the door.

"Sweet Pea, stop, school's over, he's probably at practice with the rest of the Bulldogs."

"Great, there'll be an audience."

"Hey! Wait!" you called out, grabbing his arm. "Please, don't. It'll make me seem pathetic, and they'll just suspend you for starting it, and then people will know we talk, and I know you don't want that." You stopped, a new jolt of pain running through you. "It's not worth it." A tear escaped and you reached up to wipe it away with the sleeve.

"He's an idiot," Sweet Pea spat, turning back around to face you.

"I'm the idiot," you sniffed, and then more tears were coming. "I really thought he was interested." You took a step forward, moving as if to hug him before you let your hands fall to your sides realizing that just because Sweet Pea was happy to use you as an excuse to fight the Bulldogs didn't mean you were friends. Sure he said he liked you. But that didn't mean anything. You liked plenty of people, but you didn't want to hug all of them. You were pretty sure a good number of kids in this school liked you.

And yet here you were.

Before you could follow this train of thought any further, two arms wrapped around you, pulling you close. You shook, completely letting go of all reserve as you tucked yourself under his chin, your ear resting against his chest and listening to the steady beats of his heart. It was a fast rhythm but easy to follow and comforting in its predictability. You felt yourself melt further into him, breathing a little easier, even as the tears continued. "I didn't even like him that much," you whispered into his shirt. "It was just nice to be liked. To be able to go out to Pop's with someone who didn't mind being seen with me."

Sweet Pea didn't say anything. Instead, he held you a little tighter and rested his head on yours as you continued to cry.

"So," Toni started, dropping into the seat across the table from Sweet Pea. "Are you going to tell me what's going on with you and Y/N Y/L/N or am I going to have to get Betty and Jughead to sleuth it out?"

Sweet Pea looked up at her, finishing chewing on his burger before he placed his food back on his tray to answer. "What are you talking about?"

Toni sighed, rolling her eyes. "I was running late to practice yesterday when I passed by this classroom and I could have sworn I saw you in there hugging her. Maybe it was some other giant in a Serpents jacket though." Toni leaned on her hand, smirking at Sweet Pea. "So, again, what's going on between you and Y/N Y/L/N?"

"Nothing," Sweet Pea answered, tightly, punctuating the lie with a very jerky shrug.

"Ok, so when you picked up her book for her the other day it was just a random act of kindness?"

"Yep," he let the p pop before taking another bite.

"And when you went crazy on Cheryl for making fun of her?"

"I got tired of Cheryl being a bitch." The hamburger muffled his words, but Toni's face still went dark.

"Watch it," she warned lowly. "And don't try to make me mad to change the subject. You like Y/N. How did you two even get to know each other anyway? Is she why you stay after school?"

"We don't know each other." Sweet Pea glared, pushing up from the table. "And even if we did it's none of your damn business." Sweet Pea grabbed his tray, chucking the rest of his lunch in the trash can as he stormed away.

You were thankful that no one knew you were supposed to go out on a date with Adam Chisholm. Well, at least, no one who would whisper about it or bring it up to you and force you to face your embarrassing rejection. There had been a horrible moment of pure terror when you realized Adam may have brought it up and laughed about it with his friends or maybe someone saw you alone at Pop's, but you were so anonymous that it seemed like they didn't even deem you worth gossiping about. And thank goodness really.

You were just glad that the only person who knew what went down and how you reacted couldn't publicly acknowledge that he even knew you.

Because that's what this feeling was. This soft sort of numbness that reminded you of the feeling of snow, blanketing any and all thoughts of Sweet Pea and Adam and school. This was gladness.

You felt relieved when the texts came in.

It was good. It meant you could just let the whole storm pass. You didn't have to address the fact that you drank a milkshake alone. You didn't have to address how comfortable Sweet Pea was or how you liked the feeling of the worn leather jacket. You didn't have to address the fact your chest felt strangely hollow every time Sweet Pea sent you a text cancelling tutoring. You didn't have to address anything.

But, as you lay on your bed staring up at the ceiling, having finished the edits on his paper, you couldn't help but read over his texts for the tenth time and keep repeating one thought over and over again: you shouldn't be this upset.

He was your tutoree. Tutee? Some kid. A serpent. Serpents skipped help.

But then your thumbs were flying across the keyboard.

"You have to tell her." Toni said softly, looking up at Sweet Pea from across the bar.

"And you have to stop reading my texts," Sweet Pea clicked the screen off.

"She's clearly into you and you like her, what's the problem?" Toni snapped, moving backwards to grab a bottle from the bar to refill a glass

"You don't get it."

"Oh yes, I forgot, you are the only one who's ever experienced pining."

"Whatever," Sweet Pea growled, pushing away from the bar and starting towards the pool table where he could be left the hell alone.

"Get back here," Toni barked, and Sweet Pea stopped, turning to her with a glare. "No one cares, Pea. No one cares if you're into a Northsider. No one cares which Northsider you're into. No one cares about Northside vs. Southside anymore except for you. So if you like her, get over yourself and tell her."

"It's not a Northside/Southside thing," Sweet Pea grumbled, taking a hesitant step back to the bar.

"Then what is it?" Toni sighed, deflating a little herself.

Sweet Pea looked over his shoulder before sliding back onto the seat in front of Toni. "She's my English tutor."

"Oh my God."

"So I need help–"

"No, that was because you are so dumb. You're worried that people will find out that you needed help in English? And you're making this poor girl think she's the problem because of your stupid big ego?" Toni was practically screaming at him now, but Sweet Pea sat there, jaw set and body tense waiting for her to finish.

"It's not just that," he finally cut in, running a hand through his hair. "She never…she was supposed to go on a date with this Bulldog…she's not interested."

"Or maybe she thinks you're not interested because you refuse to admit to anyone you even know her." Sweet Pea opened and shut his mouth. "Just sayin' Pea. Stop avoiding her and talk to her. You found a girl willing to hug you of all people," Toni joked. "There's not too many of them out there in the world."

Sweet Pea lifted a finger as Toni let out a laugh and moved to help another customer.

He didn't respond to your text.

Or your email with the comments.

He didn't even look at you in school the next day.

As expected you had made it worse.

It seemed like an uphill battle to hide your disappointment from everyone, but you'd been giving it a particularly valiant effort and had felt rather good about getting away with your mopiness unnoticed until Sarah cornered you at your locker.

"You're coming out with me tonight," Sarah announced as you closed your locker door.

"To where?" you asked.

"Reggie's having a party, and you look like you need some fun and socialization. So, be at my house by 8:30, and I'll figure out which clothes I'm going to dress you up in."

"Sarah," you sighed. "Nobody wants me at their parties."

"Oh come on, like the whole school is invited to this one. It's a blowout for his birthday, and if there's one thing people like Reggie love it's celebrating themselves," Sarah argued, following you as you took off towards the door. She continued to nag you all the way out the door and onto the bus until finally you broke down and agreed that you'd go to this party.

But even though Sarah had said everyone was invited, you hadn't really expected that "everyone" would include the Serpents. You said as much to Sarah when you walked in.

"I'm guessing Cheryl bullied Reggie into it so she could bring Toni," Sarah rolled her eyes. "Don't worry, we don't have to talk to them." She pulled you along, and your eyes fell on Sweet Pea. He met your gaze and you quickly turned away, following her further into the house and straight for the bright red concoction on Reggie's counter.

It only took an hour to lose Sarah to an attractive junior on the track team, which was really just your luck. Being alone. At a party in which you didn't belong. Too straight laced to get drunk enough to deal with this situation. This was the worst.

"Hey! Having a good time?" A voice shouted over the music and you whirled, stumbling on over your feet. Two hands shot out, grabbing a hold of your shoulder and elbow to steady you.

"Thank you," you mumbled, staring up at Adam Chisholm. He had the audacity to smile at you.

"You look great."

"Thanks," you murmured, looking away from him and out to the crowd, desperately wishing you could will Sarah to appear.

"Look, I wanted to talk to you about Pop's. I was on my way when Ginger texted, and I tried telling her I couldn't come over, but you know Ginger; I don't think she's even heard the word no before."

It was hard to keep track of what he was saying. All you could hear was. Pop's. Ginger. No.

"It's fine," you shook your head.

"You're way too nice—"

"She really is," another voice agreed, coming up behind you. You could feel his presence at your back, closer than he normally was. He was here. He was behind you. He was next to you. He was defending you. No one could know.

"I'm sorry, I don't think anyone was talking to you," Adam bit back, his eyes on Sweet Pea. "So why don't you just slither away."

"Sure, as soon as you go back to your kennel and leave Y/N the hell alone," Sweet Pea said, leaning forward so that he pressed against your back.

You bit your lip, trying to keep from looking at him. You couldn't look at him. Couldn't acknowledge him. Couldn't give him away.

"Jealous, Serpent?" Adam asked.

"Look you already screwed with her once. Why don’t you go pee on Mantle's furniture if you want to assert your dominance or whatever fucked up shit the Bulldogs do to initiate the pitiful wannabes like you?"

"What are you talking about?" Ginger asked, sliding up next to Adam, wrapping one arm around his waist and placing the other on his chest.

"The night this asshole 'officially became bae,' he was supposed to be on a date with Y/N." Sweet Pea said, narrowing his eyes at Adam, as if he'd just ripped the carpet out from under him.

Ginger scoffed. "She told you that?"

Sweet Pea didn't say anything.

"Because I don't think she's really ever had a conversation with Adam, and why would she? Adam's a Bulldog who has recruiters coming to his games and she's well…"

"She's what?" Sweet Pea ground out, his hands in fists.

"Nobody?" Ginger said, too lightly. "I'm not surprised she picked a Bulldog to be in a fake relationship with, it's just sort of sad you believed her."

You turned, brushing past Sweet Pea and heading towards the door, trying to keep the mixture of feelings at bay. You pushed past all of the people, ignoring the swearing and the dirty looks until you finally burst outside where you were thankfully alone.

You stood there for a second, just outside the door, taking in the cold and just breathing. It was the first moment of peace you'd felt the entire night.

"Hey, you ok?" You felt his hand on your arm, spinning you to face him. You were positive your eyes were shining.

You shook your head, shrugging. "I expected it coming here. Feeling like the outcast, you know?" you sighed. "I mean it's probably just another Northsider problem, but it sucks. It sucks when people just don't want you and will do whatever it takes to keep you on the outside and cut you out."

He sucked in a breath, looking down at the ground.

"I didn't mean you. I mean, that did suck, but I know why you did it. I get it. I'm unbearably awkward and I shouldn't have broken down on you like that and—"

"You didn't make things awkward, Y/N." Sweet Pea finally stepped in to save you.

"Oh," you flushed. A silence settled between you. "I guess I just read into the texts and thought you were avoiding me. I'm sorr–"

"I was avoiding you."

"Oh." Your voice was the quietest you'd ever heard it.

"It's not because of anything you did. You're…great. Really great. Awesome actually. You don't deserve the shit those people in there give you. I—"

"You stood up for me." The thought hit you like a freight train. Sweet Pea had just stood up for you. In front of Adam. And Ginger. And practically everyone else in the room. "Oh my—you stood up for me!"

"Yeah," Sweet Pea's eyes darted around as if looking for hidden cameras.

"That's gonna mean questions. And people will ask why you did it or how we know each other, and I swear I'll cover for you but I'm a terrible liar, and they'll probably find out. Not that I'm not grateful, I mean it's probably the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me in my high school career. Just how—"

Sweet Pea darted forward and for half a second his lips were on yours and your heart stopped and you couldn’t breathe. He pulled back, enough to look at your face. Enough to bring his hand up to cup your cheek.

"You kissed me." Leave it to you to state the obvious during the most romantic moment of your life.

Sweet Pea's lips quirked up into their almost smile. "Yeah. Is that ok?"

"What if someone sees?" you whispered.

Sweet Pea snorted, leaning down to rest his forehead on yours. Your heart thundered in your chest. Sweet Pea kissed you. He kissed you. At a party. Where he stood up for you.

"Come on," he said, suddenly, stepping back and tugging you by the hand back in door.

You stumbled along after him like an idiot, letting him lead you into the living room where you had just been. Where people still were. Where Toni Topaz' eyes immediately fell on the two of you and she cocked her head, pulling the attention of Cheryl towards you.

And this was your nightmare.

Sweet Pea stopped suddenly, turning to you and grabbing your face in his hands, and pulling you in once more. His lips were warm and soft and they felt like the way he hugged. Which was a weird way of describing a kiss, but you didn't care. Because Sweet Pea was kissing you in front of everyone, pulling you in as close as possible as you grabbed his shirt in your fists and kissed him back, pressing yourself into him. And neither of you cared that everybody saw so everybody knew.

#sweet pea x reader #sweet pea x you #sweet pea imagine #sweet pea #riverdale #riverdale imagine #riverdale fic #sweet pea fic #sweet pea fanfiction #riverdale fanfiction #cw riverdale

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insightexploration · 5 years

Text

Being Myself

Introduction

I am a story teller. As a teacher, a therapist and friend I have always used stories to make a point, illustrate a principle or just to entertain. For the last 49 years people have been encouraging me to write them down. Here are some of them. Make of them what you wish. After writing them I am filled with an overwhelming gratitude for the people who have crossed my path in this life. The most important is Susan Riley, my partner of 59 years to whom I dedicate this effort. None of this would have happened without her.

How I found my calling

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.” e.e. cummings

Doors

One of the most obvious truths I have encountered in my work with students and clients over the last fifty years is that many people are unhappy with who they are and how they are living life. Some have no idea of who they would like to be or they know who they want to be but the road to a meaningful and satisfying life is blocked by anxiety, fear, confusion or crippling depression. Many times their ideas about who they should have become have come from their family and the disparity between this ideal and the reality of their lives is creating great sadness. I would like to posit that many times in life doors appear offering us a way out of this dilemma. We then have a choice to ignore the door and continue on a less than satisfying path or we can walk through it onto the unknown path to a more fulfilling life.

I would like to illustrate this by sharing a bit of my own story with you. Let’s start at the beginning. My parents gave me the name Lawrence because they thought it would look good with “Doctor” before it. It does. After my grandfather died during the depression, my father left premedical studies to support his mother and three siblings by doing physical labor. In the 1930’s he began his own company and for fifty years was a successful, if not affluent, businessman. It was my parents’ intention that I would be the first member of my family to finish college and that I would fulfill my father’s dream by becoming a physician. Even though my “Doctor” looks good, I am not the right kind of doctor. Unfortunately for them, I was a child of the sixties and “do your own thing” was our mantra.

Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” My journey to my bliss was not direct but was determined by several doors that at first were ignored and then recognized as messages from something larger than me.

After the Russians became the first country to send a satellite into space, I was seduced by the national passion and set my sights on becoming a scientist. This was a mistake but it was a mistake sanctioned by my family and the culture. Although it was not as good as becoming a physician, it was good enough for my parents.

In my senior year of high school, with the idea of becoming a key player in the race to the moon, I visited a counselor at Pasadena City College and expressed my desire to become a nuclear physicist. She looked at my transcripts and shook her head. I was not the most motivated student in high school but my dad said if I wanted the car (necessary for dating) and if I wanted to play sports (necessary for impressing potential dates), I had to maintain a B average. Since grades were reported on my transcripts every semester, I knew I had to maintain a B average between two quarters. So if I got an A in one quarter I would allow myself to get a C the next. If I got a C, I would work to get an A the next quarter. Therefore, my high school transcripts show 6 semesters of 5 courses each, all of which are Bs. So, my counselor was looking at 30 Bs.

Her response to me voicing my aspiration was, “You are not bright enough to be a nuclear physicist.” “However,” she added, “you are not bad at anything. Why don’t you become a teacher?” Looking back, this was a door. One I completely ignored and, in fact, felt angry about.

So I gave up on PCC and began college as a physics student at Cal State, L.A. in 1960. In retrospect, I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I had paid attention to her. While science and math did not come easily to me, I did well enough to be able to transfer to the University of California at Berkeley, home of one of the world’s premier physics departments. After two years there I received my degree with a major in physics and a minor in math. When I showed my mother my diploma, her response was, “Take good care of that, it is worth just as much as the ones they gave the students who got good grades.” Alas, I was well on the road to parental disappointment.

Several things happened at Berkeley which were pivotal in guiding me to the path I still follow. In my first semester at Cal, I was required to take a course in which we read several of Shakespeare’s plays. Reading Shakespeare revealed a new world to me in which there was more to human behavior than met the eye. I loved this course but could not afford to spend much time on it while taking advanced courses in physics and calculus as well as two other electives. If I had paid attention to the joy and excitement I felt reading and writing about the human psyche as Shakespeare saw it, I would have known where my life needed to go at that time. However, I was, as James Hollis says, in the midst of my first adulthood, an attempt to live out the life one is expected to live by one’s family and culture. At the end of the Shakespeare course my instructor, a wonderful teacher, said, “You are the smartest C+ student I’ve ever had.” I think it was a compliment. But again, I had ignored an important sign. After I finished my Ph.D. in child psychology I returned to thank him for opening the doors of the human psyche to me. Surprisingly, he remembered me. I have contacted him again recently and he remembered my name and told me he has focused much of his work since then on children’s literature and fairy tales.

In my second semester at Cal, I began volunteering at an elementary school in the West Berkeley ghetto where I tutored some of the worst students in the school. For a middle-class white boy from the suburbs of Southern California this was a real awakening. To my surprise, I found that individual attention could turn some of the worst students into academic successes. Witnessing the wasted potential of children in the sixth grade already consigned to the garbage heap of American life changed me. It was the sixties. I was young and idealistic and it became my personal mission to save as many kids as I could. I wanted to help children that others considered unreachable. A door had appeared.

Although I realized that my life was turning away from hard science, I found employment during the summer between my junior and senior years in the Apollo program at the Research & Development center at Aerojet General in Azusa, California. My assignment was to design a monochromatic light source to simulate the effect of unfiltered sunlight on metal which would simulate the environment on the moon. While this brief experience as an engineer was enjoyable, I realized that I was much more interested in pure theory than I was in the practical application of scientific principles. Also I wasn’t a very good engineer. I blew so many circuits they nicknamed me “Sparky.” I also realized that I was quite a few brain cells short of theoretical physicist material. It occurred to me that I could combine my interests by becoming a teacher of physics, math and English literature in high school.

Being confused, I once again visited a guidance counselor when I returned to Berkeley in the fall. After a battery of tests were scored and interpreted, I returned to find out just what I was supposed to do. I had spent an inordinate amount of energy purging my life of Christian Fundamentalism so imagine my surprise when I discovered that my number one, absolutely no fail, born to be occupation was “Minister.” I was even further incensed when I found out “Psychologist” was a close second. I happened to be taking Psych 1A as an elective in my senior year in order to graduate and had the book with me. I raised it up and said defiantly, “You mean this bullshit?” and walked out of his office. I finished my last year of university somewhat unenthusiastically, married my high school sweetheart (we are still married) and moved to San Francisco where she took a secretarial job and I enrolled in education classes at San Francisco State College.

It is with some humor that I reflect on my professional career and see that I have spent most of it teaching psychology and practicing as a therapist trying to bring spirituality and psychology together. I should have listened to both of those counselors but knowing the expectations my parents and I both had of me, I did not. Doors had appeared and I ignored them.

After four years of rigorous physics and math courses, the education courses at State left me nonplussed. I lasted two weeks. I started looking for work and fell into the most defining moment of my professional life. You can call it grace, coincidence or synchronicity but it has happened so many times in my life, I know it is real. This time I walked through the door.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do so I looked for part time work. I found three jobs: gardening for a psychologist, driving an autistic child to and from his psychiatrist and tutoring a supposedly “minimally brain damaged” eight-year-old boy whose mother was a psychologist. In a matter of days, a whole new world opened up to me. It was less exact and predictable than the world of formulae and numbers, but fascinating in its complexity and ambiguity.

Alan

The most important of these experiences was tutoring a boy I shall call Alan. His mother was desperate. One after another, a series of tutors had failed miserably in their attempts to teach him to read. He was repeating third grade and his psychologist (who was very well known in his field) had told Alan’s mother that her son would be lucky to finish elementary school. From the first moment I met him, I knew Alan was smart; he had a great vocabulary, a wonderful sense of humor and a keen interest in the world of science. He just couldn’t read.

Rather than tackling his reading problems head on as his other tutors had done, I decided to approach them indirectly through a subject which interested him. We began to do chemistry and optical experiments under the suspicious eyes of his mother. Alan really liked the experiments, especially the ones involving explosions or really bad smells. Every so often I would be reading an experiment and I would ask him to read a short word. After a while, he was reading more and more of the experiments and starting to read books with me.

Since Alan was Jewish, I thought it would be important for him to know some of the heroic stories of the holocaust. I learned one of my first lessons on the workings of a child’s mind when we started to read a child’s version of The Diaries of Anne Frank. When we had finished about three pages he said, “I don’t like girl stories.” So we returned to science, where a 21-year-old WASP in an identity crisis and an eight-year old Jewish boy with a learning disability could find true happiness.

My work with Alan encouraged me to start reading about psychology, learning disabilities and children in general. Since I had very little experience in this area, I decided to visit his psychologist for direction. His office was in a very posh area of San Francisco and filled with fine art and beautiful furnishings. It effused monetary success. He said that it was wonderful that Alan had a friend like me, but that I should give up hoping for a normal life for him. I looked around his office at the plush furnishings and thought, “If someone this stupid can be this rich, this is the career for me.” I re-entered San Francisco State where, with the financial and emotional support of my wonderful wife and the enthusiasm engendered by the discovery of my life’s work, I achieved a straight “A” average.

My wife, who had been interested in psychology long before me, also began taking psychology classes and realized it was her life’s passion too (second to her passion for me of course). I was mentored by several members of the psychology department and, in 1966, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota in what may have been the best program in clinical child psychology in the United States.

Alan finished elementary school, junior high, high school and college, and is a happy husband and father who, along with his wife, runs his own very successful communications business. He told me several years ago that he continued to be interested in science after I moved away but gave up chemistry when he realized he would never be able to use it for his true purpose, to blow up his school.

Some important influences in my life

“If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something out of you.” Muhammad Ali

My Last Name

Dettweiler is a fairly unusual name. Things happen to me that wouldn’t happen if my name was Smith or Jones. For example, upon meeting me for the first time, a person often will say, “I knew a Dettweiler (not necessarily spelled like this) in Pocatello. Is that a relative?”. “Probably,” I always answer. My branch of the family settled in Ontario, Canada so when we moved to Victoria, British Columbia I was often asked about my family. The doctor who set up the British Columbia health plan was a Detweiler (different spelling) and people used to say things to me like, “If you are half the man your father was you will be a fine person.” His son was a lawyer in Victoria who did a lot of pro bono work for legal aid. I used to get calls in the middle of the night from guys proclaiming, “I was framed” or “You gotta help me.” Very seldom does anyone spell it correctly and often people mispronounce it. For reservations at restaurants I always use my wife’s name which is Irish and much easier to spell for the person taking the reservation. There is some irony in this as I will explain later.

The Dettweilers, who were Swiss German, came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1700s. About 20 years ago when my son visited Switzerland, he found the Dettweiler homestead which, until recently, had remained in the family. Over the fireplace were tiles inscribed with the words, “Detwiler, 1513.” My dad had recently died and he buried my dad’s favorite pipe behind this building.

It is thought that since they were Mennonites, they were escaping religious persecution in Europe and fled with other Mennonites to the community in Lancaster County. My branch left Pennsylvania for Canada in 1810. After arriving, the patriarch of the family lost his wife and remarried within the church but did not register the marriage with the government. Eventually a huge tract of farm land near Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario was seized by the government since the children who inherited it were not legal heirs.

When I first moved to Canada it was a fairly fractured country. The French wanted out and the West felt like the neglected child in a large family. So when people would refer to the government as “Those bastards in Ontario,” I thought maybe they were talking about my relatives.

My name has caused me to have some interesting interactions. One client came to me because he was Swiss and he knew my village. He said, “I used to drive through it every day on my way to the airport in Zurich.” Once he said to me, “Larry, your ancestors may have come here 250 years ago but you are still very Swiss German.” Curiously, I asked what he meant by that. “Well, the French and Italian Swiss work to live. The Swiss Germans live to work.”

I had another client come to me because he recognized the Mennonite name. He had left the Ontario community and was feeling lost. They shunned him and he felt completely out of touch with mainstream Canadian culture. He was neither here nor there and it was very difficult for him.

I once went to a panel discussion about death and as I listened to Elizabeth Kubler Ross I grasped a whole new understanding of the meaning of life. I was delighted by her statement, “But what do I know? I am just a Swiss hillbilly who has sat with thousands of dying people.” After the talk, I walked up to her and told her what an inspiration she had been to me. She looked at my name tag and said, “Oh look! You are a Swiss hillbilly too. I know your village.”

One of my students, originally from Switzerland, asked me if I knew the difference between European heaven and European hell. I said I did not. She said, “In European heaven, the cooks are all French, the lovers are all Italian, the cops are all British, the mechanics are all German and everything is organized by the Swiss. In European hell, the cooks are all English, the lovers are all Swiss, the cops are all German, the mechanics are all French and everything is organized by the Italians.”

Back to the family history. After losing the land my disenfranchised great grandfather moved the family to Michigan in the late 1800s where, during the First World War, the locals blew up their house because they spoke German. But they persevered and my Grandfather left the Mennonites and became a preacher in the Evangelical United Brethren church, eventually settling in L.A. where I was born and spent my early years. Hollywood to be exact.

I have always taken great pride in being the descendent of Swiss German Mennonites and my wife has felt the same about being Irish. All our lives we have chided each other on the stereotypical traits of these cultures. Recently we did genetic testing and were shocked to find out that my proud European heritage accounts for only 9% of my genetics and her Irish heritage is about the same. Surprisingly my number one heritage is Irish and hers is English/Scottish. No more Irish jokes for me and no more superior race jokes for her. I now refer to her as the Limey oppressor and constantly ask her when she is going to let my people go. I believe most of that Irish heritage comes from my Grandfather Mooney. His family considered themselves Scottish but I think they originally came from Ireland.

My Grandfather

It is a sad truth that many of the men I have seen in my work have had very little contact with positive male role models while growing up. I was fortunate to have two. They were not perfect but they taught me about being a responsible husband and father and gave me the belief that I would be able to traverse this life successfully.

Soon after I was born my dad left to fight in the war in Europe. My mother and I moved in with her parents, Nana and Grandad, who lived next door to our house in Hollywood. My father was gone for three years and during that time my grandfather was really the only father figure in my life. The closeness of this relationship was reflected in an event that occurred three years after my father came home. At age 6 I was selected to be a participant on the Art Linkletter radio show, Kids Say the Darndest Things. When Art asked me if I looked like my father I replied, “NO, I look like my granddad.”

He was a first-generation American son of Scottish grocers who settled in Danville Illinois. He had three obsessions, money, religion and baseball. When my cousin researched the family history she discovered that when his parents arrived at Ellis Island their name was Muney. The immigration officer said, “This is America. You can’t have the name Money.” So at that point their name was changed to Mooney. Apparently, the name went deeper than the spelling. When my grandparents were in their 70s my grandfather would send my elderly grandmother back to the store if he thought she had been shortchanged by even a penny. I remember watching her leave the house in tears having to go back and haggle with the store manager.

The major accomplishment in his life had been to bring Fritos to Los Angeles. He worked for this company his entire life but was always quite happy to remain a salesman driving his truck around Southern California. Although he was obsessed with money and loved to buy and sell property he never made a lot of money. At one point in the 20s he owned a square block of Wilshire Boulevard but sold it shortly after he bought it because he said it would never amount to anything.

Although my grandparents were very kind to me, shaming was definitely the response of choice to what they considered to be bad decisions about money. Once, when I was about ten, we were visiting them on a Saturday afternoon. I had a crisp five dollar bill in my pocket and there was a corner store at the bottom of the hill on which they lived calling to me the whole afternoon. I walked down to the store and bought a dollar toy for me and a little tin bank for my brother that cost four dollars. Looking back, I think, what ten year old spends one dollar on himself and four dollars on his five year old brother? It would seem to me that this act should have been seen as an act of generosity and commented on as such. However, when I returned, my grandfather said, “You bought the bank for the wrong person.”

He never wanted to waste anything. When he and my grandmother were in their mid-nineties they lived in an assisted living/end-of-life care facility for members of the church. My grandmother had been taking hormones and stopped taking them because of problems with bleeding. My grandfather decided that it would be a waste of money to just throw them out and since they were so helpful to her he would take them. Several months later he asked my mother to take him to the doctor because he was suffering pain in his chest. It turned out he was growing breasts. Later, my grandmother decided that she just didn’t want to live any longer and she stopped taking nitroglycerin for angina. Again my grandfather didn’t want to waste the money so he started taking the pills, passed out and suffered a concussion and went into a coma. While he was in the coma my grandmother died.

When he came to my mother played a recording of the funeral for him but he just couldn’t get it into his head that his wife had died. One day when my mother was visiting him he told her that Stella had left him and had run off with another man. My mother, after trying uselessly to convince him that she had died, asked him how he knew she had run off of another man. He told her he had an invisible radio under his pillow and every night it played the Stella and Alan show and on this show Stella had run off with another man. He then told my mother, “I know why she left.” My mother asked, “Why?” He said, “I wasn’t giving her enough sex!” This was too much for my mother, the daughter of these devoutly religious people, and she ran crying from the room.

I’m not sure how his obsession with religion began. I know he was raised in a severe Scottish Presbyterian household. He told me once that his father had beaten him for whistling on Sunday. I do know that as a young man he smoked and drank and was not terribly religious. At some point he found Jesus, stopped smoking and drinking and joined the Evangelical United Brethren church. The minister in this church was my other grandfather, Elden Dettweiler.

He was what we called in those days, a character. Some of the funniest stories about my grandfather concern his poor vision. In his later life he developed cataracts and at that time cataract surgery was very serious. When they removed the cataracts the patient had to stay in bed motionless for an extended period of time so often the surgery was postponed until it was absolutely necessary. I remember that he would take me on his rounds in his Frito truck. We would place a wooden chair in the stairwell on the right-hand side of the truck and I would ride around telling him when the lights turned green when the lights turned red, what lane to be in and generally help him complete his route. When I think back on this it is absolutely terrifying and I would never have allowed my children to do this. But back then nobody thought twice about it. On another occasion we were driving in the mountains and he pulled up behind a parked police car to ask directions. He went up to the car window started asking the officer where we were only to get no response. He soon was yelling at the officer demanding to know why he wouldn’t talk to him. My grandmother got out of the car walked up to calm him down and realized that that the car was parked with a dummy in the front seat in order to slow people down as they traveled down this mountain.

Although he fancied himself somewhat of a handyman, his inability to negotiate the physical world was often a humorous topic of conversation when the family was together and he was out of earshot. Even though we lived in Southern California, he would wear long underwear all winter long. In the summer, when temperatures rose to the 80’s and 90’s, he would cut the sleeves off but still wear the underwear. I remember one year I was staying at their house in Glendale when the annual cutting ritual was being performed. He would fold the underwear in half and cut both sleeves at once. On this occasion, I watched as he carefully folded the garment and proceeded to cut one arm and one leg off. I could tell he was angry but he put it aside, carefully folded the next garment and again, cut off one leg and one sleeve. Under his breath I heard him mutter, “Shit.” It was the only time I ever heard him swear.

He was obsessed with baseball all his life. I remember that we would go to games played by the L. A. Angels minor league team on a regular basis. It was especially fun to go to the games when they played the hated Hollywood Stars, another minor league team. When the Dodgers moved to L. A. he would spend hours next to his radio or in front of the TV transfixed by the slow, deliberate pace of major league baseball. Afterwards, if I was around, he would relate all the funny things Vin Scully had said and give me a summary of the game and the glorious or miserable play of the Dodgers.

All in all, I feel very fortunate to have had a grandfather who was so present in my life and at one time told me, “You are going to be very special and make us all proud.” Certainly in my early life my grandparents were as much my parents as my mother and father and as I grew older we remained close. As different as they were from who I consider myself to be, the feeling of being cared for and nested in matrix of relatives who would be there if needed gave me a sense of security and well-being that has never left me. For that I am grateful. However, he was a character.

My Dad

When she was about 12, my mother was standing on the steps of her church in Los Angeles as a car driven by the new preacher’s son pulled up to the curb. Her brothers always teased and frightened her so when she saw the boy get out and run around to open the car door for his sister (my aunt Irene), she said to herself, “That’s the boy I am going to marry.” She had never seen a boy act so politely with his sister so she figured he must be something special. Later, on their first date, she waited anxiously when they pulled up to their destination. “Don’t open that door,” he said, “It is broken and I have to come around and open it for you.” Well, he wasn’t such a gentleman after all but she married him anyway. She said my dad never opened another door for her, but I know he did because I learned to do that from him.

My dad had a hard life as a young man. He was the son of a preacher during the depression and told tales of working the orchards of the California central valley, driving unsafe trucks and polishing cars at a parking lot. (When he answered the ad he did so even though he wasn’t from Poland. The ad was for a polish boy). They lived off the hand me downs and food supplied by parishioners. There was no money. He got his first pair of new shoes when he was in high school after his father had landed a fairly lucrative position at the church in downtown LA. Just as it seemed they had turned a corner, his dad died suddenly and he and his sister had to quit college and get jobs to support his mother and two younger siblings.

He managed, along with some partners, to start a wholesale florist business which did well, if not spectacularly, for 50 years until he retired. He worked long hours six days a week but I think he loved it. My mother was not so crazy about it. Shortly after I was born he was called up for WW2 and after my brother was born, he was called up to Korea for a year. So between the wars and the long work hours I didn’t have a lot of contact with him.

When my dad knew he was going to be drafted for WW2 he tried to enlist in the Navy. He was told, “Mr. Dettweiler, you are almost legally blind, we can’t take you.” So he tried the Air Force and they said the same. Then the Army drafted him and made him an artillery spotter. A clear example of military intelligence.

After the invasion of Germany he was driving a truck into a town one day and saw a big sign saying, “DITTWEILER” which was the name of the town. He said to his friend beside him, “Hey, this is my town. Too bad they misspelled my name!” They were laughing when around the corner came a German Panzer tank that began to shoot a machine gun at them. They pulled a quick U turn and raced back to base camp, happy to be alive. When they got out of the truck they noticed bullet holes in the back of the cab right above their heads. After a moment of shock and relief my dad said, “I guess they didn’t know who I was.” That’s the way he was. No matter how bad things got in our house or with his business, my dad could always come up with a story or a joke that would get us all laughing.

After he returned from Korea he recognized my mother’s overprotective nature and thought I was becoming a “mommy’s boy.” So he started taking me to work with him on Saturdays when I was 11 and on the rest of the days during the summer when I was 12. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we would get up at 2am and get home about 4pm. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we would get up at 5am and get home about 2pm. Since holidays were the busiest times for him, my friends would be spending their Easter and Christmas vacations at the beach while I was putting in 70 hour weeks with my dad. I loved it. Unlike my friends, I had money to spend and was learning about the world of men, a world I had been shielded from by my mother. I learned the value of hard work and all the guys encouraged me to stay in school so I wouldn’t have to work like this for the rest of my life. It was a valuable lesson.

When I was in Boy Scouts I asked my Dad why we never went camping. He said son, “I camped all the way through France and Germany and up and down the Korean peninsula and I will never spend another night in a tent.” Returning home after one campout I explained enthusiastically how we had eaten this great stuff called Spam and that we should get some for the house. He looked at me disapprovingly and stated, “There will be no Spam in this house.” I think his experience in the army really shaped his attitude toward life in other ways too and has helped me understand some of the reasons he and I differed so much as adults. But he was a good man and a good father.

My dad was pretty tolerant but my grandfather was a confirmed anti-Semite. We lived in Hollywood which was heavily populated by Jewish folks and he would often make denigrating remarks about them. One day, at my dad’s workplace, I went to lunch but did not have enough money for the bill. After a short conversation with the elderly Japanese owner, we settled on a price that equaled the money I had on hand. When I returned to the shop, my dad asked me if I had enough money for lunch. I said, “No, but I Jewed him down.”

This was a phrase I had heard my grandfather use on many occasions and had also heard my friends use. He looked at me the way he always did when he was displeased, tilting his head down and looking over his glasses, and said, “I want to talk to you when we get home.”

When we got home he sat me down and brought out about twenty 8 by 10 glossies of pictures he took on the day his unit liberated Dachau. He had me look through the sickening photos of nude, emaciated bodies stacked in huge piles, bodies hanging on barb wire, bodies in mass graves and then, the ovens.

“This is where talk like that ends up. I never want to hear you talk like that again.”

My dad said that occasionally when he was directing the shelling of German positions he would realize that he was killing men who, had his ancestors not left Germany, might be friends or relatives. After Dachau, he said he didn’t feel so bad about it.

I never did talk like that again and it is fitting that when I have been in really bad places in my life, it has almost always been Jewish men and women who have taken me under their wings. At one point in my life I was so impressed by all the Jews I knew I considered converting which led to my brief flirtation with Judaism. Dettweiler, however, is not a great last name if you want to be Jewish.

My brief flirtation with Judaism

During my second year of grad school I got very interested in working with autistic kids. A visiting expert put a Jewish family in touch with me regarding their 8 year old son who was autistic. The father had been a lawyer in Romania before the war but when the Nazis came his gentile friends smuggled him and his wife into the Ukraine where they hid from the Nazis and their collaborators for the remainder of the war. I never had the courage to ask them about that experience but from films I have seen and books I have read, it must have been horrific.

They were so grateful for the work I was doing with their son Sammy they sort of adopted us. They insisted on paying me and we occasionally were invited to the house for dinner. I was doing behavior modification with Sammy and one of the things behaviorists are known for is keeping excellent records of time and behavior. I would be in the middle of tracking Sammy’s behavior carefully when the door would fly open and Miriam would appear with a tray full of baked goods, coffee and sweets. “Eat, Eat,” she would say. “You are so skinny. Your wife needs to feed you more.” So much for that data collection.

Sammy made such great progress that his parents decided to enroll him in Hebrew school with the ultimate goal of a Bar Mitzvah. I had him on a token economy in which he bought things with the chips he earned for speaking and reading. One of the things he bought with his chips was a TV guide. He would then memorize the whole thing and be able to tell you when and on what station every program was broadcast during the week. I thought, “How hard can it be to memorize a little Hebrew?”

Well the Rabbi at the school thought different. He said Sammy was retarded and couldn’t learn anything. So I asked for the best student in the school to help me and by using M and Ms as rewards I taught Sammy the Hebrew alphabet in about 30 minutes. The Rabbi was ecstatic. He said I had performed a Mitzvah and asked me what my last name was. Oh Lord, all my credibility was about to go out the window as I prepared to tell him my Teutonic title.

Immediately Miriam said, “This is almost Doctor Dettweiler.” “Ahhh,” said the Rabbi with a smile. Next week when I returned all the kids were getting M and Ms. Apparently the Rabbi thought that was why Sammy was learning so quickly.

At one point, a young rabbi came to Victoria to take over the Synagogue and we ended up in the same tai chi class as Danny and his wife Hannah. He took on the job of refurbishing the Synagogue which had fallen into disrepair. As a fundraiser he invited Shlomo Karlbach, a singing Hassidic rabbi and a friend to Hanna’s family, to come and give a concert. I had listened to Schlomo on the radio when I was a student in San Francisco so I was excited to attend. “Bring your guitar,” Danny said, “we are going to get together and sing after the concert.”

I took my guitar and left it behind the coats in the cloak room before we entered the Synagogue proper. Danny and Shlomo were working their way through the audience and when they came to me. Danny said to Shlomo, “This is the guy.”

Shlomo said, “Get your guitar you are going to accompany me.”

A lump formed in my throat and I said, “But I don’t know your songs.”

“No matter,” he said, “God will help you.”

So I got my guitar and accompanied him all night long. When it was over, people approached me and said things like, “I didn’t know you were Jewish” and “So now you are out of the closet.”

“I’m not Jewish,” I would say.

“How did you know the chords to the songs?”

“God helped me and he only plays three chords so it wasn’t that hard.”

One fellow actually asked me if I wanted to join his Jazz band. I demurred saying I only played simple folksongs.

“Nonsense,” he said. “I heard those arpeggios you were playing.”

I thought to myself, “What’s an arpeggio?”

After, a bunch of us went to a house where we sang Yiddish and Hebrew songs for a long time. Then the moment that I was dreading came. He asked us our names. As we went around the circle everyone gave their first and last names. When my turn came, I only gave my first name. He asked me what my last name was. When I told him he asked, “Dettweiler, what kind of name is that?”

“Swiss,” I answered. “But my father fought the Germans and liberated Dachau,” I blurted out. This seemed to please him and we sang a few more songs on that most memorable night.

The next morning my wife and I went out to breakfast at a local restaurant and who should walk out the door as we are walking in? Shlomo. Racing out he said, “Pray for me brother, I am late for the ferry!”

Later, telling Hannah how much I enjoyed the evening, I said I had been entertained and moved by his stories. She replied, “Yes, and some of them may even be true.”

I told this story to a client recently and she told me a quote from Rabbi Akiva Tatz. “All my stories are true. Some happened and some did not, but they are all true.” I love this quote.

Perhaps the thing I love most about Jewish culture, aside from the philosophy of saving the world, is the humor.

I had a colleague who had twin boys that were coming to the point in their lives when they should start studying for their Bar Mitzvahs. He told me that he had no connection to the religion in which he was raised and his wife was not Jewish. I said, “You know Jerry, it is a part of their heritage and they don’t have to do it if they don’t want to. Why not give it a shot?”

“Well,” he said, “I might but I really don’t like the rabbi here in Victoria.”

I took this problem to my friend Louis who was president of the Synagogue. In typical fashion he told me a story.

Once there was a shipwrecked rabbi. His parishioners looked for him long and hard and finally found him. When they went on the island they saw a beautiful little structure made of driftwood and palm leaves. He explained he had built a synagogue in which to worship. They looked up the beach and saw there was an identical building. “Is that a synagogue you built also?” “Yes, and I wouldn’t set foot in it.” I don’t think Jerry’s boys ever did their Bar Mitzvahs.

I don’t know why Judaism has always fascinated and impressed me so but it probably had something to do with all that bible reading I did as a kid and the fact that Jewish people have played such a large and positive role in my life. At one point I felt such an affinity for the culture and religion I considered converting but somehow it just didn’t seem right for me. There was a culture and a history that I did not feel a part of. When I was discussing this with my good friend Bernice who had been a great help in establishing my parenting courses, she said, “Larry you are welcome to become a member of our Synagogue and our religion, but really, you are such a Baptist. Why don’t you just stick with your roots?” I am not sure what she meant but somehow it made complete sense to me. So next I need to talk about my roots.

Jesus is Watching

At the time of my birth my parents were members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church. This was an amalgamation of two churches that had spun off from the Mennonite Church. It was fundamentalist and during my early years our lives pretty much revolved around the church. My dad’s father had been the minister before his untimely death. My other grandfather was a deacon. My grandmother played the organ. My dad was the choir director. My mom taught Sunday school and both she and my uncle were the soloists in the church choir. My cousin and I were the youth duet and we can still do a pretty mean “Old Rugged Cross.”

My first recollection of a reference to Jesus was when I was very young. I was in the back yard and apparently I had my hand down my pants because my mother said, “Don’t touch yourself there, Jesus is watching!” Sage advice, no? A couple of years ago my friend and fellow psychotherapist Ralph got very interested in men’s sexual health. He wanted us to do a workshop on the topic. Ralph is a former Mennonite minister so I said we could do a short workshop entitled, “Don’t touch yourself there, Jesus is watching.” Later he sent me a photo from Farmington, NM of a big porn warehouse and a billboard across the street with a picture of Jesus and the warning, “Jesus is watching.” I didn’t know my mother had ever been to Farmington.

I used to lie in my grandmother’s lap in church staring up and the glass skylight of Jesus carrying a lamb. She would tickle me to keep me quiet and I thought this must me what heaven is like. Those moments are stuck in my memory and the peace I felt is still salient in my mind. Even after all these years and the rejection of fundamentalist Christianity if not Christianity in general, I love to sing along with the old gospel songs while speeding down the highway. Somehow it still touches me at a deep level.

They tore that church down to make a freeway and moved it some distance away. Eventually we moved so my parents started going to a Methodist church, primarily for the choir, I believe. That ended my experience with the EUB church and ironically, they merged with the Methodists at some later date.

Although my mother remained religious all her life, I think my dad had lost his religious beliefs after fighting in Germany and Korea. The battle of the bulge and the liberation of Dachau caused him to seriously doubt the existence of a beneficent and loving God.

One experience that I remember clearly is an interchange between my father and my grandfather after my dad returned from fighting in the Korean War. He was quite bitter about being called back to war after serving in Europe and I think what he saw in both conflicts led him to question all the beliefs that had been instilled in him as a child. We were sitting in my grandparents’ den and granddad asked my dad, “Art, when you were in the foxholes and the Koreans were shooting at you did you pray to God?” My dad answered, “Mr. Mooney, I figured any God that would send me to the hell I experienced in Europe and then send me to Korea to experience it all over again at the ripe old age of 35 wasn’t worth praying to.” All I remember after that was a deadly silence that settled over the room.

As they grew older, my grandparents could not travel to the new church so they started going to a store front mission EUB church nearer their house in Glendale. As a young teenager I loved going to that church. It was fire and brimstone and stand on the third verse. Every week the minister would ask for people to come forward and testify. I remember one ancient old man who stood up on his canes and said, “I used to be a Lutheran but now I am a Christian!”

I started having my doubts in college and attending UC Berkeley in the early 60s put an end to any religious aspirations I might have had. Also, the rigorous scientific training I received while completing my degree in physics caused me to doubt anything one could not see or validate scientifically.

As I said earlier, between my third and fourth year I worked on the Apollo program for NASA at Aerojet General. There was another intern from Cal Tech and we were talking about religion and discussing the fact that in those days they made you fill out a form designating a religious preference when you registered for classes. He was from Idaho and lived in a town with a lot of Mormons. He stated that Mormon girls would go to great lengths to convince you to convert to Mormonism. I doubt this was true but when asked for a religious preference he answered jokingly, “Mormons.” But the joke was on him. For four years he was bombarded by letters, calls and visits from Mormon missionaries trying to convince him to rejoin the flock.

My wife and I married in 1964 in a high episcopal church that her mother attended. Before the wedding with had to meet with the priest and he asked us, “What do you think makes a good marriage?”

Being fresh out of Berkeley and full of myself I answered, “Intellectual compatibility.”

He frowned and said, “I was thinking more of the love of Christ.”

“Oh yeah, that too.” I said.

During the rehearsal, we were told we could not have the wedding march because it was from A Midsummer Night’s dream and celebrated the marriage of Titania to an ass.

Susan said, “If the shoe fits….”

Also, two of my best friends, Iranian Jewish brothers, wanted to throw rice and the priest said no because it was a Pagan ritual. Really? Sometimes religion just seems so silly.

When I was working at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C., the departmental secretary was a born again Christian. I made the mistake of sharing my childhood history with her and she assumed we were cut from the same cloth. One day I could not get the duplicating machine to work and I asked her for help. She came over and laid her hands on the machine, closed her eyes and intoned, “Lord Jesus, help Larry to do his work and repair this machine.”

Somewhat stunned, I pushed the start button and, you guessed it, it worked. She winked at me and said, “You and I know the power of prayer, don’t we?”

My last experience with Jesus came in 1986 when my wife asked me if I remembered the last time we had spent more than a weekend alone without our kids. “Well,” she said, “it was in 1967, before our oldest was born.”

“Ok,” I said, knowing something was coming.

“We are going to take a two week trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico.” Our oldest was to stay at home and the younger was to go to a basketball camp.

“Why Santa Fe?” I asked.

“I don’t know, we just are.”

When we were first married I used to scoff at these decisions based on her intuitions but over the years I have learned that she is almost always right about what we need to do. She has said on the ship of life she is the rudder and I am the motor although I sometimes feel like the bilge pump. So we flew to Albuquerque and landed at night. The next morning I got up and looked out on the west mesa and thought, “My God, this is where I belong.”

As we drove north toward Santa Fe the feeling got stronger. The next day we were downtown when my back started to hurt. I had injured my back seriously playing Rugby in College and every so often it would flare up and I would be incapacitated. As the pain intensified I told my wife, “I am going back to the motel to lie down. Call me when you want to come back.”

On the way to the car I passed the Cathedral of St. Francis. I don’t know what came over me but I said to myself, “You are 43 and you have never sat in a Catholic church.”

Growing up in the Evangelical United Brethren church we were taught that these were havens of evil and not places to enter so deciding to challenge this absurdity, I went in and sat in a pew. As I sat there I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the saints, the architecture and the knowledge that this lineage had been around for almost 2000 years. I sat there and soaked it up for about 30 minutes and when I stood up the pain was gone. And I never even saw the Devil – disappointing.

The next day we went to the Sanctuario in Chimayo and the same thing happened. Afterword we went to a small shop where my wife bought me a small milagro shaped in the form of a human back. I have never had a serious problem with my back since that trip.

We had been trying to buy the house we were renting for years but the landlady kept changing her mind and we had given up. My wife suggested we also buy a house milagro to help us find another house to buy.

When we returned to Canada I immediately went to the local bank and was getting cash out of the machine when I heard a familiar voice call my name. It was the landlady. Nervously I touched the house milagro in my pocket.

“Larry, I want to sell you the house.”

I said, “I don’t think I have enough money for a decent down payment.”

“I don’t care,” she said.

So we bought it.

At that point we decided, “Someday we are going to move to Santa Fe. We are both going to be in private practice in a little adobe office with a portal out front.”

We started going to Seattle for Jungian training and analysis in the early 90s. At some point we decided we wanted to live there and my wife moved to Seattle in 1995. I spent 3 more years at the College where I was teaching until I was ready for early retirement. We tried to get things moving in Seattle but it never really came together. So we said, “Let’s just go to Santa Fe. That is where we belong.”

It was very interesting to watch the responses of our friends and colleagues. Most could not understand why I would leave a secure teaching position with a good salary and great benefits as well as a nice little private practice for a place with no prospects in sight. I would reply, “I don’t know. I just have to.”

I added one caveat. “We have to begin in Albuquerque because that is where the jobs are.” She agreed, sort of. She went down and found us a great place up in the hills outside of Albuquerque. Then, because fate likes to play tricks, I got a job in Santa Fe and had to commute every day. A little over a year later we moved to Santa Fe.

I eventually quit that job and we are both in private practice in a little adobe with a portal out front. I guess Jesus was watching on that first trip.

The last remnant of my Christian heritage sits in my garage covered by a blue tarp. On one of my aunt’s trips to visit relatives in Michigan, a cousin took her to a vacated church where her father had preached. As she looked around, her cousin said, “That is the pulpit from which your father preached his first sermon.” Overcome with emotion she asked if he would ship it to her. When she moved from her home she gave it to me. My wife does not want it inside the house but I told her we’d better not get rid of it because, you guessed it, Jesus is watching.

As I left Christianity behind I longed for some philosophy that would fill the need I had for something bigger than myself. The first was Yoga.

A Hopeless Case

In the early 70’s I was working as the treatment director of a small residential center for preadolescent children on Vancouver Island. I had recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Child Psychology and was a firm believer in the behaviorist school of psychology. As you may know, behaviorism holds that we are shaped by our environment and anything invisible to the human eye is not worth talking about. My wife, Susan Riley, who had a great respect for the mysteries of life, would sometimes recount tales of extraordinary events to me and my favorite response was, “That’s not physically possible.”

In addition to working at the center, I was teaching at the University of Victoria and running around North America giving talks and doing my best to become well known in the behaviorist community. Fueled by copious amounts of caffeine and putting work before my family, my health and the activities that brought me joy, I seemed to be achieving my goal. I felt quite full of myself.

The first warning I received regarding the folly of this adventure came from the nurse at the center who said to me, “If you don’t slow down, you will be dead by the time you are forty.” I was thirty at the time. I remember one of the teachers at the center giving her class the assignment of writing a short book in the form of “Dick and Jane.” One of the kids entitled his, “See Larry Run.” In the book were several pages of stick figures. One was pictured with a coffee cup in his hand and the words at the bottom of the page said, “See Larry Drink Coffee. See Larry Run. Run Larry, Run.”

One morning while I was sitting at home grading papers, drinking coffee and preparing to dash off to work, I was instantly incapacitated by a blinding pain in my chest. I crawled to the phone, contacted my doctor’s office and was told to immediately drive to the hospital which was about a half-mile away. When I got there I was put in a bed and connected to a heart monitor. I, as well as everyone else, thought I was having a heart attack. As I lay there suffering from excruciating pain, I had a thought that I previously would not have believed I was capable of considering. I thought, “If I am going to be in this kind of pain for very long, I want to die.” At the moment I finished this thought, a voice inside my head said, “Stop drinking coffee, spend more time with your family and study Jung, Yoga and mysticism.”

“Of course,” I answered.

After numerous tests, it was discovered that I did not have a heart condition but that I was suffering from gallstones and a jaundiced gall bladder. Rather than a traditionally masculine condition caused by overwork, dedication to achievement and general disregard for my own body in service of some greater calling, I was suffering from a condition, according to my nurse, that usually was associated with the words fat, forty, fertile and female.

Being the rational, masculine achiever that I was, I soon dismissed the voice inside my head as part of a delusional thought process caused by the pain. The next evening I was again visited by the excruciating pain associated with a stone passing through the bile duct. Uncharacteristically, and with great prodding from Susan, I decided this was a sign and that I needed to pay attention. In this experience, as in many other significant changes in my life, she has had the wisdom to know what was best for me when I did not.

So I gave up coffee, stopped traveling and began to study Jung and Yoga. After surgery to remove the gall bladder I also began to experience extraordinary events. I began to practice astral traveling, experienced precognitive dreaming and generally saw myself as a rather extraordinary fellow.

One my favorite things to do was to attend yoga workshops on Saltspring Island led by John Robbins. John was a great hatha yoga teacher and had spent some time at Yashodhara Ashram studying with Swami Radha. I always left these workshops feeling very healthy, happy and centered. This feeling would usually last until I had to face the realities of marriage, children, work or a ride back to Victoria on the B.C. Ferries.

It was at one of these weekends that I had an experience that would change my life. John asked us to sit in a meditative pose and then played a record of a woman chanting. I later learned the woman was Swami Radha. As she chanted, I began to see myself sitting on a large round circle on top of a hill overlooking a lake. Across the lake was a snow covered mountain. Later, I was transported to the other side of the lake and looking back, saw a beach with an A frame and other smaller buildings. When I recounted this vision to Susan she gasped and said, “I had a dream about that same place!”

Wanting to make sense of this, we discussed our respective experiences with Elaine Griff, our hatha yoga teacher in Victoria. We drew a picture for her and as she examined it she began to smile and said, “That’s Yasodhara Ashram. The circle is the foundation for the temple.” Knowing that this was an important sign in our lives we decided to attend an upcoming workshop with Swami Radha, Life Seals. Little did I know what was in store for me.

We arrived at the workshop and at some level I knew that something big was going to happen for me. In a nutshell, Swami Radha cut right to the quick. What was exposed would be called, in psychoanalytic terms, a raging phallic narcissist. I won’t go into the details, but the key words here would be, “It’s all about me.” At the end of the workshop, I approached Swami Radha and asked her, “Would you work with me?” Her response was one of the most painful but truthful pieces of information I have ever received.

In her lovely German accent she said to me, “I think you have been lying for so long, you no longer know the truth. I think perhaps you are a hopeless case.” These words were not music to a narcissistic ear. I was shattered. I lost about ten pounds over the next two weeks and began the process of manufacturing all the rationale necessary to convince myself, and anyone else who would listen, that she was a charlatan. In retrospect, everything I have accomplished in my life since then probably began at that moment. Most importantly, I believe my 60 year relationship with Susan would have never survived me had Swami Radha not uttered those words.

One of my favorite concepts from Jungian psychology is the “wisdom of the psyche.” Over the next year my psyche worked overtime and forced me to see more and more how correct her assessment of me had been. At the end of that year Susan and I went to the ashram for a visit and all I could say to Swami Radha when I met her was, “We’re doing really well.” It was as though I had to make a report to my probation officer before I could even say hello or offer up the customary box of Black Magic Chocolates.

In the following years I had many experiences with Swami Radha but I feel it is only now as I am in my eighth decade on the planet that I grasp their significance. Looking back, I think I wasn’t ready for her teachings the way Susan was. I believe that following a spiritual path requires complete surrender. I was not ready to surrender. I still needed to hold onto the illusion that I was in charge of my life. Even though my experiences with her were limited, I would like to share some of them with you. They were profound for me, have influenced me greatly and, I hope, exemplify her ability to be amazingly insightful, brutally honest, incredibly caring and delightfully funny, sometimes all in the same moment.

I remember being at a Straight Walk workshop listening to Swami Radha when she looked into my eyes. At that moment I felt an incredible stirring in my heart and a wonderful feeling of well-being. I asked her if she had done that to me. She replied, “Ja, I give you a little light. Most times people don’t notice it. You know, the only things that are really important here are the light and the mantra.”

Stunned, I asked, “But what about all the stǖrm und drang, the tears, the confessions and so on?”

“Oh Ja,” she said. “That is the entertainment. If I don’t do that, you don’t come and pay the money for the workshop.”

I never really knew if she meant it or was just having some fun with us.

On another occasion I decided to ask her about the experiences I was having. As I told her about astral traveling, visiting other people’s dreams, precognitions and other paranormal events, she listened attentively and then asked, “Do you ever forget to take out the garbage?”

Taken aback, I responded, “Uh….yes.”

“Are you ever unpleasant with your children?”

“Yes,” I replied sheepishly.

“Do you ever fight with your wife?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “Why don’t you work on those things and let these other things go? Anyone can do those things you talk about but very few can be really good husbands and fathers.”

So I did. I have never missed a garbage day since. As for my relationships with my wife and children, it has taken a lot longer to reach the point where I believe I have successfully integrated Swami Radha’s advice.

From the beginning, I noticed that she treated people differently. In workshops I sometimes felt like she had it in for me. Other people who would whine, complain and generally demonstrate what I, in my wisdom, considered a low level of consciousness were not confronted at all. After one particularly painful encounter I was feeling aggrieved so I decided to ask her about this. “Swami Radha,” I asked, “why are you so tough on me while at the same time you let some people in the group off easy?”

“Ja, I only give you what you can take.”

The incredible gift behind this statement only became clear to me later in my studies of Aikido. My instructor, after being asked why he never praised us but only approached us to correct, replied that in the East, to be corrected by one’s teacher is a great honor. If the teacher does not think you are worthy, you will be ignored. When Swami Radha said she gave me only what I could take, she was paying me a great compliment, offering me a great gift and, I hope, was telling me that I was not such a hopeless case after all.

After fifty years of working in the helping profession, the value of this gift has become clear. As a helper, I must have a high standard of self-awareness or else I will project my own unconscious complexes and insecurities onto those who I am supposed to be helping. I must be willing to take all that is given me by my teachers. In essence, those of us who consider ourselves “helpers” must first clear our own psyches before meddling in the psyches of others. Leo Buscaglia captured this concept perfectly in one of his videos by quoting a Zen monk who said to him, “Don’t walk through my mind with your dirty feet.” Those of us who want to help others walk through this world with joy and purpose must first cleanse our own feet.

Swami Radha loved to point out the symbolic meaning of one’s actions and appearance. Once, when giving a talk with David Bohm at the Victoria YMCA, she was talking about the ways in which we communicate who we are without even knowing. She was talking about clothes and asked, “What is the symbolic meaning, for example, of someone whose clothes are all brown?” Pondering this, I casually looked down and saw brown shoes, brown socks, brown pants, brown belt and a brown shirt. I don’t know if she meant this for me but it certainly had an effect and perhaps explains my annual purchase of at least one Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirt.

On another occasion Susan and I were sitting in the ashram dining room eating with her and a friend of ours. At the end of the meal, our friend casually cupped his hand and collected the crumbs on the table in front of him and brushed them onto the floor.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “Look how you have just created work for someone else with your thoughtlessness.” She never pulled punches if she thought you could take it.

I think it was very hard for her to carry all the projections and expectations that were laid upon her by all of us. She once told me this was the hardest part of her work and actually revealed that she wasn’t sure how long she could continue to do her work since it took such a toll on her. I remember one particularly frustrating moment at a workshop when she sighed and said, “When are you boys going to stop projecting your mother complexes all over me?”

I think this burden weighed heavily upon her and at one point she told Susan, who was planning to go to graduate school in order to become a counselor, “Do you really want to spend your life sitting in a room with someone who is projecting all over you?”

Fortunately, Susan’s answer was yes and she has had a very successful career and has many grateful clients to show for it. This question reveals the difficulty Swami Radha experienced while helping us travel further down the road of awareness and enlightenment.

On another occasion she talked about the ridiculous expectations of many of her followers and students. It was particularly curious to her that many could not reconcile the fact that an enlightened being could have a jones for Black Magic chocolates. It also baffled her that people in workshops would be upset by the fact that this guru would have to take breaks in order to attend to bodily functions. Apparently she should have been above such mundane needs. Fortunately for us, she never stopped her work and, I believe, is working still, even after her passing.

I can give one example of this. Over the 80s and 90s our contact with the Ashram diminished but our appreciation for Swami Radha and the Ashram did not. After Swami Radha passed and in the year of the Ashram’s 40th Anniversary, we returned. I decided to do a weekend program at the Ashram which I translated as “What am I going to do with the rest of my life.” At the time I was working at a job I did not particularly like and wanted a change but was unclear what that change should be.

Although we were in a location where cell phones should not have worked, on the day before I was to begin the workshop I received a hostile, angry message from one of the administrators at my work. So I began my workshop at this peaceful, loving Ashram with hatred and anger in my heart.

We began on Friday night and I hardly slept. In the morning I went to the temple and sat in seiza as we began to chant. About ten minutes into the chanting, with my thoughts churning about the phone call, I started to heat up. Soon I was sweating profusely and feeling light headed. At some point I lost consciousness and my head fell to floor. I awoke suddenly to Swami Radha’s voice saying loudly, “You can’t evolve spiritually and change your life while you are angry at the same time!” Stunned, I moved to a chair and recovered my senses and began chanting again.

When the chanting was finished I approached the leader and recounted my experiences. He advised me to do the workshop but let the focus be finding the meaning of that experience. So I did and the workshop changed from “What am I going to do” to “Who am I going to be” for the rest of my life. Many changes came about as a result of that workshop and, once again, they began on the foundation of the Temple.

When the temple that Swami Radha worked so hard to build burned to the ground a few years ago, I was struck with horror but also realized that nothing is permanent and the experiences I had involving the temple are still with me. All of us who have been blessed by Swami Radha and the Ashram now have to help in our own way to rebuild the temple. Swami Radha always trusted the divine to provide for her in times of need and it never failed her. I trust that the same will be true for the temple rebuild and for all of us who have been touched by her.

Swami Radha is gone now and I regret that I was not more mature when I knew her. I am sorry that in many ways I was a little boy and not the man I am today. Looking back, I believe she was the most enlightened person I have ever met and she may have saved my life both figuratively and actually. In the years I knew her, I heard many of her students referring to her respectfully and endearingly as Mataji. I never used this term because I never really felt I deserved to use it. I had never really surrendered to her.

I don’t know what happens after death. Are we are reborn? Do we move to another plane? Does Saint Peter meet us at the Pearly Gates? All I know is that I want to meet her again. I will be ready this time. Thank you Mataji.

During the time we were involved with Swami Radha, we were so enthralled by the practice of Yoga we began to train as yoga instructors at the local YMCA. I felt somewhat out of place in this endeavor as I was the only man in the training program and I am very inflexible (in so many ways). On one occasion we were doing a posture and the instructor said, “Where do you feel the effect of this posture?” No one answered and she said, “In your ovaries.” I said, “I don’t feel a thing.” She said, “I have a special asana for you. It is called the Steer.” If you know how a bull becomes a steer, you know the meaning of this communication. No more funny comments from me.

But I persevered and one day I was approached by the program director. She said that there was a class, Yoga for Teenage Girls that needed an instructor. Apparently several teachers had tried to lead this class but had become so frustrated by the girls they had left in tears. The director said she had heard I was a child psychologist and would really appreciate it if I would try to teach it. So I did.

The course was taught in the small chapel and the first day I walked in I was greeted by six very attractive young women who probably saw me as their next victim. As I began teaching the class they would talk to each other and generally act out. After the second class I was so frustrated I sat down and said, “I am volunteering to teach this class. I am not getting paid. Do you want to do Yoga or not?”

In Aikido we talk about and practice getting into harmony with your attacker. I had not experienced Aikido yet but I decided to follow this path with the girls. They said they wanted to do Yoga so I told them to bring their favorite music the next week and we would do Yoga to the music. So the next week we did Yoga to heavy metal, Jesus music and crappy pop. They loved it. They started to warm up to me and fortunately whenever I started to feel sexually attracted to one of them I could look up to the picture on the wall and be reminded that Jesus was watching, even in the Yoga class.

Eventually we started having a little discussion group at the end of the class and they would share hopes and fears and problems they were having. All in all it was a wonderful experience and for years after, some of the girls would come to my office at the College just to talk.

Japanese Culture and Aikido

At some point I realized that Yoga was not the path for me. I was drawn to Japanese culture and began to investigate Zen. My first encounter with Japanese culture came when I was 11 years old and I started working for my father. My father was a wholesale florist whose business was located in the middle of two square blocks known as the L.A. Flower market. As I said earlier, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday he would get up at about 2 in the morning, eat breakfast and go to work. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday he would not get up until 5. I would go with him and work at the shop doing menial tasks on Saturdays. Later, during holidays and summer vacation I would work full time at the shop. The main thoroughfare was Wall St so I can say I grew up working on Wall St.!

There were many other wholesale florists on the street as well as two large open markets where wholesalers and growers would bring their flowers to sell to retailers and route runners who would call on retailers who did not come in to the markets. About half of the wholesalers and a lot of growers were Japanese Americans. My dad was very highly respected by them. During the war, when the Japanese were moved off the coast into internment camps, his company took over the running of the Japanese American flower market. Many Japanese Americans were robbed of their businesses and possessions during the war by unscrupulous individuals and companies but when the Japanese Americans returned, my father’s company returned all property and material to them.

After the war there were two Markets, one almost completely peopled by Japanese Americans and one almost completely peopled by European Americans. When they amalgamated, the Japanese would only accept one person as the director, my father. So I had a lot of contact with people of Japanese ancestry and came to love the culture and the food. However, when I went away to University, I lost touch with that culture.

In the early 70s while still involved in Yoga, I realized that I really wanted to learn a martial art. I had been a pretty wimpy kid and relied mostly on my wits to avoid fights with other kids. I also made sure that every year I had a really big, tough kid as a friend. Heaven help the kid that picked on me. So I figured it was time to get a handle on male violence and to be able to fight my own battles. At one point in this search I had a dream that seemed really strange to me. I was in a basement fighting the guys who had picked on me in high school. For some reason I was wearing a black skirt, which seemed very strange.

I visited many martial arts schools and dojos but it seemed to me there was a lot of ego involved and that a lot of the people teaching were pretty nasty guys obsessed with competition and bravado. In 1975 I attended the Transpersonal Psychology conference in Asilomar and saw that there was a morning workshop in Aikido, a martial art I had never heard of. The instructor was Bob Frager, a psychologist and head of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology. I later learned he had studied Aikido in Japan with the founder himself. He has written humorously and informatively about this experience. And, he was wearing a black skirt.

After two mornings of practice, I was hooked. I returned to Victoria and at my first day back at the University of Victoria, I opened the campus newspaper and was surprised to see an article about a young man from Hawaii who was going to begin teaching Aikido on the following Monday. This could be seen as an occurrence of what Carl Jung refers to as “Synchronicity,” two or more seemingly unrelated events that occur simultaneously and are perceived by the observer as carrying a message that would only have meaning in the psyche of that person.

I began studying with Gary Mols Sensei and he did a great job of teaching us physical Aikido as well as presenting Aikido philosophy in an understandable and useful manner. I had been practicing Aikido for about a year when Gary Sensei announced that we were going to Vancouver to participate in a demonstration that the new Japanese sensei there was giving. We arrived at the gym and all went into the change room together. After changing into our dogis we proceeded upstairs and the demonstration began. We all demonstrated but Kawahara sensei’s demonstration was the most amazing and terrifying. I had never seen such power and precision. After the demonstration we went back to the change room, changed into our street clothes and were preparing to leave for lunch together. As Kawahara sensei was getting dressed I noticed he was looking around and saying something in Japanese to one of his students. I realized that he was looking for his socks and I looked down to my feet I realized I had put on his black socks and not my own. Terrified, I left the gym and even after many years together as student and teacher, never told him about this.

Kawahara sensei made many visits to Victoria and I consider him one of my best teachers ever. I wanted so much to learn from him that I even studied Japanese so I would better understand him. On one occasion, he, my friend Gary Anderson and I sat in the wheelhouse of Gary’s fishing boat drinking scotch and carrying on a conversation about life itself. At one point I asked, “Sensei, you drink, you smoke and you like to consort with women. Is this good for you?”

He replied, “Not good for body, but good for spirit!” Gary and I both erupted in raucous laughter.

After our first summer camp with Kawahara sensei he gave a little speech. As we were sitting in seiza completely exhausted but filled with the joy seven days of intense practice had brought us, Kawahara sensei began to speak in Japanese. Ishiyama Sensei translated.

“You Canadians are the worst Aikido students I’ve ever seen in the world. I thought Americans were bad but you are worse.” Imagine the shock we all felt as we were being ruthlessly criticized after a long week of intense practice. What we didn’t realize was that this is a traditional Asian practice used when training students. It keeps one from becoming inflated and in fact is a compliment. If he did not have hope for us as students he would not criticize us. So every year after practice Kawahara sensei would rip us up one side and down the other and we got used to it. In fact, we sort of looked forward to it. So imagine our surprise when after four or five years we sat down at the end of the practice and waited for Kawahara sensei to tell us how terrible we were. On this occasion all he said was, “Your Aikido is getting better.” It was like the heavens had opened up and God himself had blessed our Aikido.

Aikido has given me many gifts. One of these is body awareness. One form is awareness of my own body and a sense of where it is in space and perhaps more importantly, where it is in relation to others and the effect my presence has on others. The lack of this ability in others is painfully obvious every time I am negotiating the aisles at Whole Foods. Another important lesson is that my Ki, or life energy, must flow out ahead of me, even if I am moving backwards. This is true in both a physical and psychological sense.

The most dangerous person in an Aikido dojo is a beginner. There are two reasons this is true. First, a beginner is often so determined to do a technique correctly and with force that they may ignore the limitations of a partner who will be injured if a technique is applied too forcefully or rapidly. One of the major lessons in Aikido is to be aware of partner’s ability. Secondly, beginners are so focused on technique that they lose awareness of their own body and bang into others and also sometimes throw partner into other practitioners. According to Ishiyama sensei, this is not a problem in Japan. Even beginners have the well-being of those around them in mind when practicing. Growing up in close proximity to others and in a culture that stresses awareness of how one’s behavior affects others leads to a sensitivity many of us here in North America lack.

Ishiyama sensei, a practitioner and teacher of Morita therapy, says this also has its disadvantages. While we are focused on self-development and individuation but often fall short in our assessment of our effect on others, according to him, the Japanese are likely to avoid individual achievement and individuation in favor of conformity and group identification. In his mind, the middle path involves development of self and a development of our recognition of our effect on others. This is very similar to the basic tenets of Naikan, a school of Japanese psychology.

One of the most difficult aspects of aging is the limitations that my body is experiencing. I gave up physical Aikido several years ago when my arthritic joints just refused to cooperate. I notice that I sometimes lose balance or bump into doors, something I never would have done in the past. I hope I am still doing mental and spiritual Aikido in spite of my body limitations. What good is a martial practice if it does not transfer to daily life? Really, how many times in a day is someone with a wooden sword going to attack me? And yet I can be sure that every day will bring interpersonal and psychological challenges.

When I was first studying Aikido, I began to look into the martial philosophy of Budo. I realized that for the Samurai, an honorable life meant serving one’s lord faithfully and without question. Dying in the service of the lord in battle was the most honorable act one could perform. As a young professional with a wife and two children in modern Canadian culture, this didn’t seem very practical so I set about trying to translate this philosophy of ancient Japan into a way of life that was applicable to me, now. I realized that if I considered integrity and truth as my “lord” then my ego, not me, would have serve those concepts and, in fact, may have to die in their service. This approach to life turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined but I hope it still guides my behavior today.

One of the greatest gifts I was given in Aikido was the opportunity to confront my own fear and to finish something to which I had committed myself regardless of my fear. On one occasion a Japanese Zen monk stopped by our dojo in Victoria and gave a talk after practice. He asked the question, “What are the three things you must do to become proficient in Aikido?” Some of us answered, “Practice.” He said, “Yes, that is one.” Students then offered numerous other suggestions to which he answered “No” repeatedly. When no more answers were forthcoming he said, “The answers are practice, practice, practice.”

I did not always want to go to practice and sometimes I would have to drag myself to the dojo. Sometimes fear and anxiety would stalk me as I stepped onto the mats and I would want to make an excuse and leave. But I almost always went and I always stayed. Five minutes into practice my spirit would be soaring and often at the end of class, soaking wet with sweat and joints aching I would think, “My God, it is good to be alive!”

I used to be a very anxious person. I think I come by it naturally since my mother, Virginia, was extremely anxious. I think her philosophy was that if you worry about it enough it won’t happen or if does you will be ready. Since most of what she worried about didn’t happen she was reinforced for her worry. See, it works. I worry and it doesn’t happen.

I once asked my supervisor why I was seeing so many clients with anxiety. He answered, "The world is a scary place.” I said, “For this I am paying $170.00/hr?” I remember hearing Chuck Yeager being interviewed about a scene in the movie “The Right Stuff.” He was asked if he was afraid when the plane he was testing went into a death spiral. He answered, “No, fear just gets in the way of the job to be done.”

Once, when I was feeling anxious about a high-school math test I asked my dad the same question about the battles he fought in Germany and Korea. He had a similar response. He said that no anxiety means you are not paying attention, too much anxiety is crippling but some anxiety is good because it forces you to focus on the job to be done. Although, he did say that the one thing that really scared him was seeing the Germans advancing across snow covered fields in their white camouflage outfits. He said on one occasion he thought he was watching ghosts advance against his position.

I knew I finally had a pretty good handle on anxiety and fear after an experience I had a few years ago at the local hospital. I started feeling a pain in my chest one evening and after it became quite intense I drove to the hospital and was admitted to the ER immediately. I was given an EKG, administered nitroglycerine and put through the tests given to heart attack victims. I was informed I had suffered a heart attack and my life was going to change.

Everyone left the room eventually except one male nurse. We began to talk and he said he and his wife, also a nurse, wanted to move to Vancouver, Canada. I proceeded to tell him the best way to do that and we had a long discussion about the Canadian medical system. At some point he asked, “Do you have a spiritual practice?” Surprised, I said, “Sort of. I have studied Aikido for many years and it is the basis of how I live my life. Why do you ask?”

He replied, “this is not how people who have suffered a heart attack usually behave. You are not depressed, not upset, not angry and you don’t even seem worried.” I answered, “What good would that do?”

Eventually, after three days of tests it was discovered that my heart was perfectly healthy but had somewhat of an unusual but not dangerous rhythm. My favorite experience was the treadmill. As we reached the final stages and I was gasping for breath wondering if I would be able to finish it, the tech said, “Keep going Larry. Keep going.” The she exclaimed, “Don’t follow the light, don’t follow the light Larry.” After, she said, “You have the most boring normal heart I have ever seen.”

Pondering what the nurse had said, I tried to understand why anxiety no longer seemed to be a real issue for me. I decided it was Aikido that had helped me lose that burden. A side effect of this experience was that it brought my mortality to the forefront and I had to decide what I needed to complete before I leave the planet. This book is one of those things.

I believe the discipline required for conscientious practice taught me to face my fears, overcome my own laziness and anxiety and complete tasks because I had committed to completing them. Striving to live with integrity was the greatest gift Aikido gave to me. It has become the foundation of how I try to respond to every challenge I face in life. I do not always succeed and fear, laziness and negativity are always lurking.

A funny example of the difficulty of translating ideas across cultures was told to my wife by Dr. Hugh Keenleyside who was a member of the Canadian delegation to Japan before WW2 began. Apparently the Japanese had just begun to celebrate Christmas and as Dr. K. entered a Japanese department store he beheld a large, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. At the top was a large replica of Santa - nailed to a cross.

I studied Japanese for two years at the University of Victoria. The two people I practiced with most often were my sensei and friend, Ishu Ishiyama and my colleague, Michiko. Japanese is very different from English and I remember some humorous experiences.

Michiko told me she was once discussing American politics with a class when she first began teaching in Canada. At some point the class broke into raucous laughter and she asked them why. They told her she had just said she wanted to discuss the difference between Canadian parliamentary elections and the American plesidential erection. I will forever be grateful to her for teaching me a response to, “O genki deska?” a greeting roughly translated as, “How are you?” She told me a good response would be, “O kage sama de.” “Fine, because of you.” How much richer than, “OK”.

On another occasion I climbed the stairs to Ishu’s house and asked politely, “May I come up into your house?” He laughed and said, “You just asked if you could throw up in my house.” He once told me that I could study for years and I would never completely understand Japanese. One reason is that they leave a lot out that you have to fill in with cultural content, much of which is unknown to westerners. Sometimes the subject or object is left out of a sentence. Verbs are sometimes omitted and can be negated at the end of a sentence if the speaker senses discomfort in the listener regarding the content of the sentence. So a sentence might be, “As for Johnny, a good boy he is….not.” The other reason Ishu said it would be difficult to ever understand Japanese completely is that the language, by its very structure, serves the purpose of hiding meaning from foreigners. There is also the problem that there are really two Japanese languages, one for men and one for women.

The importance of syllabic stress and context in the language was demonstrated by one of my teachers who gave this example. Mr. Yamada visits Mr. Tanaka. Ms. Tanaka answers the door and says, “Mr. Tanaka is not home. Would you like to come in and wait for him?” He said this in three ways, all of which sounded exactly the same to me. Apparently the first phrasing meant indeed he would be home soon. The second meant he was away and you shouldn’t really come in but politeness requires me to ask you to come in. The third meant either he was dead or was never coming back. Japanese people interpret these differences with ease. We, of the literal English language, do not.

This teacher also told a story about arriving in San Diego from Japan. He said that in Japan when you are first asked if you want something to eat or drink you refuse it and say something to the effect of, “No I couldn’t possibly eat a bite.” You refuse a second time then grudgingly accept and eat every morsel or you insult your host. So, arriving at his host residence looking haggard and thirsty in the California heat, he was asked, “Would you like a drink?” “No thank you,” he said. His host said “Ok” and began to orient him to his new home. He thought, “What is wrong with this person? Why does he not ask me again? Who are these impolite barbarians?”

This penchant for politeness and indirectness often confuses us westerners and our missing the hidden meaning in the communication makes us seem stupid or rude. Soon after Ishiyama Sensei began teaching Aikido he realized we did not have the same standard of cleanliness that he did. One night after class he asked us, “Would you like to wash the mats now?” We had already opened the fridge in the dojo and started to drink beer so we decided we wanted to do it at another time. He later told me he was astounded at this response as it was not a request but a command. A Japanese person would know that. We did not. When I arrived for the next practice, the fridge was gone and buckets and rags were set out so we could clean the mats before practice. He never had to ask again.

All in all, the influence of Aikido, Japanese culture and Japanese people in my life cannot be overestimated and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to experience the insights and kindness those experiences afforded me. Domo Arigato.

Ishiyama Sensei, Kawawara Sensei and Me

Buddhism

Our annual Aikido summer camp would start on Saturday and by Wednesday we were so exhausted we would only practice for half a day. Full-time practice would resume on Thursday. One year we were told that a Zen monk from Japan was present in the camp and would lead a meditation at noon on Wednesday. Those of us who were interested arrived and lined up in two rows kneeling in seiza while Kongo Sensei began the meditation with a loud cry of “Mokso!” which can be roughly translated as “clear your mind.” He would then walk up and down the lines carrying a large stick (Jo) and if you felt you needed to focus your attention you could bend forward crossing your arms and he would give you a good whack on the shoulders. Kongo sensei, his head shaved and dressed in the flowing robes of the Zen priest was most impressive.

After the meditation we all made our traditional journey to the local pub for lunch, beer and perhaps some pool. When I walked in the door Kongo sensei was bent over the pool table, cigarette hanging from his mouth, pool cue in hand, whiskey glass on the edge of the pool table and a tall blonde hanging from his arm. I thought, “Now this is a religion I can get into.”

When we returned to Victoria Kongo sensei moved into the home of the Tibetan Lama who lived two houses away from our house. Unfortunately, the Tibetans ate almost all meat and he was getting sick because he was a strict vegetarian. Seeing this, we gave him a portion of our garden and in that small portion he raised the most amazing vegetables in precise lines and perfect symmetry that made our gardening attempts look haphazard and amateurish. Our neighbors were a bit upset, however, as he liked to fertilize the garden by urinating on it.

Kongo sensei further demolished my preconceived notions about Buddhist priests by showing up one day at our front door in a white leisure suit and a white hat that made him look like the Japanese version of Roddy McDowell’s character in A Clockwork Orange. Susan said, “Kongo sensei, you like Canada don’t you?” He replied, “I like Canadian women. I have date at disco.”

Kongo sensei gave many lectures in Victoria, usually translated by my friend and Aikido teacher Ishu Ishiyama. On one occasion he gave a lecture on the Buddhist approach to anger at the University of Victoria. At the time, my wife and I were separated and I was very angry so I decided to go to the talk to see if the Buddhist approach to anger management could help me. After the two hour talk I was quite sure my anger was under control and I walked peacefully across the campus to my car. On the way home I started thinking about my situation, conveniently overlooking the fact that I was the person most responsible for being in this place, and started to become angry. Eventually, I became furious, drove home in a rage and spent an hour yelling and pounding my boken (wooden sword) into my mattress. It appeared that I hadn’t quite integrated the Buddhist approach to anger management at that time.

My most interesting conversation with Kongo sensei was regarding reincarnation and the effect it had on one’s life. It was a very interesting conversation conducted in his halting English and my halting Japanese. He maintained that believing in reincarnation very much changed how you lived your life. His main point was that if one believes that the results of one’s behavior in this life will be carried forward into the next life, one will be more careful and more considerate of others. Although I’m not convinced reincarnation exists, this still seems like a pretty good way to live.

My wife and I were quite involved in Jungian studies and analysis in Seattle in the 90s. On one occasion we went to a panel discussion by several practitioners who described how they worked from a Jungian perspective. The panel included a minister, a catholic priest, a counselor, a Jungian analyst and a Buddhist teacher who was also a psychotherapist. Each of the panelists spoke for about ten minutes describing their work. The last teacher was the Buddhist and all he said was, “Yes, all of that is true. But in Buddhism we just call it paying attention.” I was smitten and soon began to explore Buddhist philosophy and practices.

I have always been drawn to Zen Buddhism because of its simplicity and its similarity to the philosophy of Aikido. I think I dabble in Buddhism but do not really practice it. By the end of my life I would like to become a more serious student. It just seems to be so practical and clean. My one concern with Buddhism is that I am not sure it deals with what Jung would call the human shadow, our dark side. Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Perhaps my thought that this is somewhat contradictory to many of the forms of mindfulness is due to my own lack of understanding but I have had experiences with practitioners of Buddhism who seem to not have a very clear view of their own dark side. However, it is a wonderful philosophy and a very useful tool. I wonder why I still cringe when someone tells me their approach to therapy focuses on mindfulness. I need to look at this.

One of my most entertaining experiences with Buddhists took place many years ago. When my wife finished her MA we decided to celebrate by spending a week at Rio Caliente outside of Guadalajara. It was a great place with pools of varying warmth for soaking. The water sprang from underground and at the source was so hot you could burn yourself seriously if you were to step into it. One day a few of the guys decided to hike through the desert and over a hill to a town known as Tala.

We set off early in the morning following the river until, we were told, would see a path that would lead up into the hills and eventually to Tala. As we trekked on, occasionally we would run into a vaquero on a horse and I, being the only person who spoke Spanish, would ask directions. After about three hours we were hopelessly lost and one of the guys, a serious student of Buddhism and somewhat of a proselytizer asked me, “Do you really speak Spanish?” I said that I did but that I had forgotten so much that I could only speak in the present tense. He said, “In Buddhism we call that enlightenment.” Unfortunately, when we moved to New Mexico I took courses in Spanish and now I can use the past tenses. I guess I am no longer enlightened in English or Spanish.

We finally came upon a huge house in the middle of the desert surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by unsavory looking men with automatic weapons. From a great distance I yelled, “Donde esta Tala?” to one of them. He raised his hand and pointed in the very direction from which we had come. "Aya!“ he yelled (There). So we followed the river until we came to a park and I asked a nice young man in Spanish if he would give us a ride in the back of his pickup to Tala. He said, “Sure man. I am from San Francisco. No need to speak Spanish.”

We ate in Tala and then took a taxi back to Rio Caliente. It was a great day but they never let me forget my inability go get us to Tala. At the restaurant the Buddhist kept trying to find out what was in the food because he was worried that there might be lard or some other meat product. Lard in Mexican food? Are you kidding me? I was embarrassed that this rich guy from New York was grilling the waitress from a poor Mexican village about her food. It seemed to me that true mindfulness and loving kindness would require one to eat the food no matter what was in it. Is it going to kill you to eat some lard and treat the Mexicans with respect rather than grilling them on the purity of their food? It seemed very insulting to me.

The food at the spa was good but all vegetarian and a lot of the people there were pretty sanctimonious about what they ate. About 5 days into our stay the Feral Cats were looking pretty tasty so my wife and I jumped into a taxi and rode to Tlaquepaque, an artists’ center not far from Guadalajara. There we feasted on chicken and beer for lunch and steak and wine for dinner before returning late at night and stumbling to our room. The next morning the breakfast room was surprisingly empty and the soaking pools were unusually vacant. We later found out that something had gone wrong with the food and everybody had food poisoning and all were sick in their cabins with the full range of glorious symptoms associated with this disorder.

When people recovered, they asked how we had managed to avoid the plague. I responded, “When you have reached the level of spiritual enlightenment we have, bacteria have no effect on your body.”

Actually it was a wonderful place and the staff were magnificent. One of the visitors who was an English Prof at UBC said he was going to write a novel, “One Hundred Years of Massage.” I suggested he follow it up with a sequel, “One Hundred Years of Diarrhea.”

A lot of the visitors were Texans and their unabashed extroversion and outspoken manner prompted my wife, a true introvert, to say, “In my next life I am going to be a Texan.”

It is a sad fact that Guadalajara has become a major battleground for drug cartels and I believe the Spa has now closed. I hope the wonderful people who worked there are surviving and that perhaps it will open again. We loved it.

Buddhism still interests me and perhaps I will get off my Butt (or onto it) and find the deeper meaning in this wonderful tradition.

My first great therapy experience

When my wife and I reunited after a 4 month separation in the early eighties I was quite confused. I wanted to see a therapist but being really well known in town I didn’t know who I trusted enough to see. She suggested Alice, a woman she had met in a women’s consciousness raising group. Alice was sort of the Grand Dame of the lesbian community in town and practiced psychotherapy even though she had very little formal education. My wife said she was brilliant and that I would like her for that and her keen sense of irreverence. So I went to see Alice. Here is our first conversation:

A: Hello Larry. I must ask you why you came to see me. I don’t see many men in my practice. Actually, none.

L. Well, I know every therapist in town and quite frankly I think I could bullshit them all. My wife doesn’t think I can bullshit you.

A. Ah. Tell me, what is your worst fear?

L. My worst fear is that I might be ordinary.

A. I have bad news for you.

We worked together and she was wonderful. Even though she became a close friend of my wife, she was always objective and helped me realize many insights. After I stopped seeing her we became friends and colleagues and eventually shared an office. We are still good friends and my wife always stays with her when we are in Victoria. I am so grateful to have had her in my life.

Forever Jung

When I was teaching at Camosun College in Victoria, B.C. I was head of the union negotiating committee for one year. I typed up a proposal for the administration concerning Professional Development. Not being a good speller I ran a spell check on it. However, in the early days of computers, spell check would run from your cursor forward to the end of the document and my cursor was sitting in front of the first word in the paper. When we met, the president said he liked the proposal but that for my professional development I would have to go to spelling class. I had not spell checked the title of the paper and had misspelled “Proffessional.”

But all ended well as I myself was eventually awarded a large PD grant in the early 90s which allowed me to travel to Seattle where I studied Jungian psychology and underwent 5 years of Jungian analysis. It changed my life forever and I will always be grateful for that grant that had resulted from a paper with a misspelled title.

My wife, who is a psychotherapist, has always been interested in the ideas of C.G. Jung. In 1990 when I was looking for a new direction in my life she invited me to accompany her to a program at the University of British Columbia built around a series of 20 half-hour filmed interviews with mythologist Joseph Campbell done by Fraser Boa, a Toronto analyst. Campbell discussed the meaning of the great myths within Jung’s theoretical formulation. I was smitten. At the conclusion of the films I told my wife, “I want to spend the rest of my life doing this work.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by this comment but I felt something powerful was stirring within me.

The introduction and end of each film was accompanied by a Bach Concerto. So I must have heard the beginning of this piece about 40 times. After leaving the auditorium, we got into our car, turned on the classical station and lo and behold, the Bach concerto began. I knew this was a sign that my life was to change forever.

I began a search for mentors which ultimately led me to Seattle where I found a wonderful Jungian analyst, Ladson Hinton. My wife and I joined an association of Jungian oriented therapists and traveled to Seattle for therapy, supervision and study groups. All of my work with clients today has its roots in those years in Seattle.

My therapist and my supervisor in Seattle probably taught me more about doing therapy than any other person, book or course I have ever taken. One of the best sessions I ever had with Ladson (I still talk to him once each month) involved my guilt about not committing myself to my full time job at the college in Victoria. I was heading toward early retirement and I was trying to establish myself as a therapist in Seattle. I was in transition.

I told my therapist I was feeling guilty about not putting in my hours at the college and the following conversation occurred.

LD: I am feeling guilty about not spending the whole week at the college during this attempted transition.

T: Do your students mind?

LD: No, they are fine with it and can get me on the phone or by email.

T: Do your colleagues mind?

LD: No, my department operates on a system of seniority and since I am the most senior member, they will all move up when I leave.

T: What about your dean?

LD: She is completely supportive. She is happy that I am following my true calling.

T: So what you are telling me is that no one really cares about the issue about which you feel guilty.

LD: Yes.

T: That is Completely F***ing Nuts!

LD: I have just finished studying the DSM and I had never seen that diagnosis.

T: Well there is a new version coming out and they have included this diagnosis. There is a page just for you.

When I was trying to formulate my future I kept vacillating between moving into adventure and what I considered to be my true calling on the one hand and security and stability on the other. I had a dream that I was in the Safeway store near our house and the hands on the clock on the wall were spinning madly. We worked on the dream and the next week he brought in a quote from Jung in German. I read it and it translated to, “Whoever takes the safe way is as good as dead.” After that I set about changing the direction of my life. I would not be here doing what I do if it were not for him.

My other mentor in Seattle taught me so many things about therapy it would be hard to put them all down here. The most important was the idea of induction. He said that intuitive, empathic people often experience strong feelings when encountering another person. He maintained that a field exists between two people and that the unconscious emotions in one person can induce the same feelings in the other person’s unconscious. Therapists can use this tool to notice what they are feeling and use it as an insight into the unconscious feelings of the client. I find this concept really helpful to clients that are empathic and often have strong feelings they don’t understand when they are around certain people. They are feeling what the other does not or cannot bring up from the unconscious.

On another occasion he drove home the importance of relying on one’s intuition when practicing as a psychotherapist. He described an experience he had had years earlier. As he was sitting listening to a young women talk about her difficulties with her father, he became aware of a presence in the corner of the room. Eventually he realized it was a native American beating on a drum. Out of nowhere he asked her, “Tell me about the drum.”

Shocked at first, she related a story about her favorite toy as a child, a drum. At one point her father became enraged and destroyed her drum. This conversation evolved into a search for the meaning of the drum and eventually led to her becoming an ethnologist who roamed around North America recording the drum songs of different tribes.

All in all, these two men radically altered my life and the wonderful life I live now is in many ways, a testimony to their skill and caring.

My Work

“Life is change, how it differs from the rocks.” The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

My First Real Job

In 1966 I entered graduate school at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota as a student in the Clinical Child Psychology program. This program was primarily test oriented and this did not seem right to me. I was less interested in how a child was performing or acting and more interested in why. One event in particular sealed my fate in this program.

I was asked to go to a school in Minneapolis to administer a Wechsler Intelligence test. I arrived at the school and found most of the students were black and poor. The teacher involved told me the child I was to test had scored below normal on the intelligence tests administered by the school but that she thought the girl was more intelligent than the scores indicated.

I sat down with Felicia and began to ask her the questions on the exam. One of the cardinal rules of this sort of testing is that you don’t ask a child why she answered as she did, you just record the answer. Some questions have general answers that give you full marks. If you offer a specific answer, you lose points. So when I asked “Where do you get groceries?” and she answered, “Albertsons,” she lost a point. I couldn’t help myself. I broke the rule.

“Why Albertson’s?”

“That’s where they take the food stamps.”

Poverty had just lost this girl IQ points.

Then when I showed her a picture of a coat, she identified it as a sweater. More lost IQ points. Again, I broke the rule. We were in the beginning of a Minnesota winter and this little girl was wearing a tattered sweater. So I asked, “Do you have a coat?”

“No,” she replied looking down.

When I tallied up the points she indeed had an IQ below normal. When I told the teacher, she said, “I guess I was wrong.” She put more faith in the test than her own judgement. Discrimination and poverty had consigned this girl to a limited future and I really wanted no part of this.

As much as I wanted to work with children, I did not want to do it this way. I drove back to the Institute and found Harold Stevenson, the chair of the department, and told him I wanted to change programs from Child Clinical to Child Development, a research based program, a program focused on “Why?” Fortunately, there was another student who wanted to move in the other direction so we swapped fellowships and I became a student of developmental psychology and he became a student in the clinical program. We also became good friends.

I am particularly thankful to Harold because without his prodding, I would never have heard many of these stories. At the end of four years of graduate school and after 10 years of university studies I was sick of it all. I told him I would do my research and finish my Ph.D. after I left Minnesota. He reached into his drawer and pulled out a sheet with the names of every one of the students who had left without finishing. Next to those who did finish later was a check. It was a paltry number.

“But I don’t have time,” I said.

He said, “There are two kinds of theses. There is the Magnum Opus, a masterpiece of research and a real contribution to the field. Then there is the kind you are going to do.” I will ever be grateful for that. That degree opened many doors for me and allowed me the privilege of being a part of so many lives and to have had such rich and instructive experiences.

As I recount the stories I am writing here I feel such gratitude to the students, clients, teachers and children who have shared their lives with me in such a rich manner and to all the people who said to me, “You have got to write these stories down.” The first time this happened was in 1970. I had returned to Minneapolis to take my final Ph.D. orals. We never even talked about the thesis. They just asked to hear more stories about the wild kids at the treatment center where I was serving as treatment director. Harold, a prolific writer himself said, “You have got to get these stories recorded." That same year my sister-in-law, Melba Riley told me the same thing on several occasions. If two people from such different backgrounds found my stories interesting and funny, I thought they must be worth writing down. So here I am all these years later finally getting it together.

As my graduate school days came to an end, I began to receive inquiries from a number of prestigious universities in the United States, Canada and Europe. In those heady days of unfettered expansion, graduation from a first class program in child development ensured numerous offers from departments desperate for qualified people. I had over a dozen offers of employment, but I wanted to work with children as well as teach at a university. Unfortunately, by switching from clinical to developmental psychology, I had eliminated my chances of achieving certification in most states.

Through a series of coincidences, word about my search reached a psychiatrist in Victoria, B.C., Canada who invited me to visit him at the Pacific Centre for Human Development, a residential school for "emotionally disturbed” children. He offered me a job as treatment director and put me in contact with the chair of the University of Victoria Psychology Department who was delighted to have someone from the Minnesota Institute of Child Development in his department as a part-time instructor. I took the jobs, flew home to finish my degree, and in the fall of 1970 my wife, my two-year-old son and I emigrated to Canada with plans to stay for two years, gather some experience and then return to California.

What I found when I arrived at the Centre was shocking. The kids were running the place and the staff was barely surviving in an environment of fear and chaos. Bribery and physical force were the two main methods of control. I wanted to establish a very tight program of behavior modification with strong incentives for academic success and reasonable conduct. The staff were very resistant and undermining of this program and something drastic had to happen. So one morning I came in and I told the staff, “I am going to demonstrate that this program will work. I want you to all take the day off and come back at three.”

They were shocked and I could tell they were expecting to find the building burned down and me dead when they did return. But I had a devious plan that had nothing to do with Behavior Modification. After they left I found the two most violent and powerful kids in the school and offered them a deal. I pulled out two twenty dollar bills and said, “If there are no incidents at the school today, each of you will get one of these at three o’clock. The kids can do anything they want but there can be no destruction or violence and you can’t tell anyone about this.”

They agreed and we had a peaceful day. No other child at that facility would dare to challenge these two. When the teachers arrived they were stunned to find a school functioning quite well with no violence or destruction. They bought in and we began a behavior modification program immediately.

It took about six months, but the place began to run smoothly. It also became evident to me that, while we could affect major change in some children, we were sending them back into the same environment which had produced their behavior in the first place. I initiated a parent training program and found that education and some introspection helped many of them to become adequate, if not perfect, parents. I will never forget the gratitude of some of the parents when they were finally able to take their children home. It was working with the staff and parents that led me to the conclusion that I liked teaching adults as much as working with children.

After two years at the Centre I was asked to be the Canadian representative at the First International Conference on Behavior Modification in Minneapolis. In preparation, I distilled all the data we had collected over the previous two years and wrote it up in a report which was eventually published as a chapter in a book summarizing the proceedings. Among the many fascinating aspects of the data was the fact that children who had been considered unteachable had covered two or three years of math and English in the space of one year.

How were we able to do this? As Jean Piaget has said, learning is a fundamental human drive. If you create an environment in which inquisitiveness is nurtured and rewarded, learning is inevitable. We made education a positive experience for these children by allowing them to work at the level at which they were competent and we rewarded progress, no matter how small. We also focused considerable attention on their interests. Every person alive, unless he or she has been completely beaten down in life, has a passion for something. If you can discover that passion, you can unlock the motivation for learning. For Alan it was science. For many of my adult students it has been the desire to raise healthy, happy children, or perhaps to understand their own childhood.

At the end of my three-year tenure at the Pacific Centre, I had the background I needed to become licensed as a Clinical Psychologist and did so. I left the Centre, opened a private practice and eventually was offered a job at Camosun College where I taught for 23 years while continuing to carry a light load of clients in private practice. The two-year commitment became a 28 year commitment until my wife and I moved to Santa Fe, NM in 1998.

I learned so much at the Centre and I realized that a true understanding of developmental psychology can be a powerful clinical tool. I also had a lot of humorous experiences, some of which I would like to share.

Shortly after I arrived one of the teachers told me the five boys she had in her class were paying no attention to her, physically assaulting her and that she was going to quit if things didn’t change. I had not implemented the program yet so I tried something desperate. I hauled the kids out about 15 minutes before lunch one day and took them to the activity room. I said, “We have about 10 minutes before lunch and I am going to challenge you. I am going to take on all five of you and if I am still standing at the end of 10 minutes I want you to promise not to bother your teacher anymore and to be good students.”

Their eyes widened as they relished the thought of pummeling a senior staff member to death and were a little disappointed when I told them there would be no punches, no nasty stuff below the belt and no biting. But they agreed. So I said, “Go!” and they did.

We went at it for ten minutes and at the end I was still standing, barely. They were elated and promised to behave as agreed and they did. I made five good friends that day and we never told anyone.

The nurse at the school was a wonderful Scottish woman who had seen it all. She had learned her nursing skills in the worst neighborhoods of Glasgow and described herself as a spinster. She told me that if she was going to have to take care of someone she wanted to get paid for it and marriage salaries were not that great. She was a prankster of the highest order. I remember showing up to camp and her approaching me with a “special sandwich I made just for you.” Peanut Butter and cotton balls. Yuk.

She used to put pills out on the kitchen counter in the morning and one morning she was going to do a dental inspection so she laid out about 30 pink pills that were intended to highlight dental issues when chewed. There was one incredibly difficult boy at the center at that time, Donny, and as he entered the kitchen he gathered up all the pills and downed them. She went ballistic. She often lectured the kids on the dangers of taking drugs so this was a major affront to her warnings. She grabbed him, hauled him up the stairs, castigating him all the way and then locked him in his room and screamed, “You could die from doing that.”

He took full advantage of this opportunity, yelling, “Helen put me in here to die, Helen put me in here to die!”

She paid no attention and her parting shot was, “Don’t be surprised if your urine is red!”

The next morning she was doing bed checks and when she came to his bed he smiled and proclaimed, “It was pink! And, I am not dead!”

She replied, “How do you know you are not in heaven?”

Stunned, he blurted out, “You’re here!”

She relished talking about one experience she had with Donny who had an undescended testicle. She maintained that was why he was so ornery. She was examining him one morning and asked him to move his penis to a position that would not hinder her from examining the offending testicle.

He said, “It doesn’t move that way.”

“Yes it does,” she replied.

“Helen,” he proclaimed, “You know a lot about pills but you don’t know anything about penises.”

On another occasion we took the children from the treatment center to a beach campground for a summer camp experience. One of the boys in my tent was wetting his sleeping bag every night and we were pretty sure he was doing it on purpose. So I told him, “If you pee in your sleeping bag again, we will take you home to the Centre.”

That night I was awakened by the sensation of warm liquid spreading in my sleeping bag. Startled I awoke to find him urinating into my bag. “What are you doing?”

“You told me you would take me home if I peed in my bag so I decided to pee in yours.”

He had me.

Another child taught me that using power over a child can often lead to resentment and retaliation on the part of the child. This boy had a terrible learning disability which caused him to see written material backwards. He wanted to go home to Yellowknife for Christmas so I told him he had to learn five letters before December if he wanted to go home. When the time came to show me his work he said, “I actually learned six.” He then wrote the following message for me.

U O Y K C U F.

This was a powerful lesson for me about the misuse of power and authority. I sent him home for Christmas, a trip he deserved just for being a child, regardless of his disability.

I got into another bad situation with ultimatums when I was showing a new boy around the school. He was yelling and cursing me, the school and his parents and said he would never stay at this “F…ing S…hole of a school.” Exhausted and fed up, I turned to him and said, “You can stay here or go to jail!”

“I’ll take jail,” he replied.

Once again I had backed myself into a corner. Just then I remembered a story a professor of mine had told me. At the end of the war he was drafted and asked, “Europe or Asia?” Since the war was over in Europe he answered enthusiastically, “Europe.”

“Europe’s full,” the officer replied. And he was off to Asia.

So I said, “Jail’s full.”

Although he was one of the most difficult kids to deal with, he eventually came around and became a model for other boys to emulate. When it was time for him to leave we gave him the choice of returning to his dysfunctional family or a foster home. He chose the foster home.

Bobby was a developmentally disabled boy who had suffered some kind of abuse as a young child and had formed an attachment to Dinky Toy cars and would walk around for hours making car noises as he pushed the cars through the air. At one point a new boy, Alex, arrived. Alex claimed to be a vampire and after a few weeks I was convinced he was right. More than one staff member had bite marks on their necks. He took a fancy to Bobby and manipulated him into a very exploitative homosexual relationship. We decided to use behavior modification to try and convince Bobby to avoid Alex.

My friend Barney and I brought Bobby into Barney’s office and explained a program in which Bobby could earn points by staying away from Alex. When Barney asked him “What do you like that you could earn with these points?”

Bobby replied, “Well, I really like it when Alex sticks his tongue in my mouth and goes lubalubado.”

Barney calmly replied, “That is not on the list.”

Having worked with several autistic children I considered myself somewhat of an expert in behavior modification with this challenging group. So when a young autistic girl showed up at the center I decided to record a teaching video for staff to watch in order to learn how to use such skills as shaping and prompting to teach behavior. One of the things that made Jeanne special was that she had an ileostomy collection bag on her side. It would fill with urine and have to be emptied often. What I didn’t know was that when angry, she would pull the bag off and empty it on the floor.

I sat down with a simple reader and her lunch. I would point to letters and prompt her to repeat them as I was being filmed through a one-way mirror. She began to get agitated as she did not like her lunch to be contingent on completing the tasks I set out for her and when I turned to look at the clock, she whipped off the bag and emptied it on my head. This video became extremely popular and was hauled out every time there was a staff party.

Several years later, after Jeanne was released, I went to visit her in Vancouver. When she came to the door, she gave me a big hug and said, “Remember Larry. You teach me to read. I dump PeePee bag on your head.” Then she laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes.

I had many other memorable experiences but these are some of my favorites.

Some stories about change

I am in the business of change. People generally want their lives to change and are looking to me for help. Ironically, I find change difficult.

My wife likes to ask, how many Dettweilers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer 1: Change? Change? Answer 2: 1 but I liked the old one better. Answer 3: 2. One to change the bulb and one to administer CPR after he accidentally electrocutes himself.

Often change occurs slowly in incremental steps. Sometimes it is rapid. Here are some stories about change.

In the spring of 1968 I was sitting on the lawn in front of the athletic center at the University of Minnesota with my friend Tom after an enthusiastic afternoon of handball. Tom’s dad was head of the Presbyterian Church in the US. He had told Tom that he and other religious leaders in the US were trying to convince Dr. King to cancel his tour of the South as they felt his life was in danger. Between the war in Vietnam, the killing of the Kennedys, the civil rights killings, the assassination of Malcolm X and the specter of Richard Nixon on the horizon, I said, “If he is killed I am going to Canada.” Dr. King went on the tour and was assassinated in April in Memphis. My wife and I, not wanting to raise our children in a country so racked with hate and violence moved to Victoria, B. C. Canada after I finished my Ph.D. in 1970.

Like many Americans I think I assumed Canadians were a lot more like Americans than they really were. Also we were not prepared for the hostility toward Americans that many Canadians felt. I began to get an inkling of this when I was told a joke by a co-worker during my first week as treatment director at the Pacific Centre for Human Development. It went like this.

There were three Canadian surgeons who each went to study in different countries. When they returned they sat down over coffee to compare notes. The first said that in Japan all internal organs are color coded so to do a replacement you just replaced yellow with yellow and so on. The second said that in Germany all organs were numbered so you just replaced a one with a one and so on. The third said surgery in the US was really simple. American bodies only have two moving parts, a mouth and an asshole and they were interchangeable.

I don’t think a day ever went by when I didn’t hear what was wrong with America from a person, the radio or a newspaper. This didn’t bother me too much since I probably agreed with their assessment of American foreign policy. What did bother me was the way in which the anger and hostility was directed not so much at the politics and government but rather at the American people.

And with my loud, extraverted personality and American accent I was often targeted as a typical American. And, like most stereotypes, there is some truth there. Canadians often describe Americans as brash, rude and arrogant. When I first went to Canada in 1970, I think I was living proof of this stereotype. Here is an example.

In the early seventies I was teaching at the University of Victoria and they were putting on Saturday courses at a College up-island. I was asked to teach one and the University thought it would be easier to send the three of us who were doing this up in a limo rather than pay for us to drive up individually.

So the first day the three of us met. Here is the conversation I had with Cary, one of the other teachers.

L: Hi, I am Larry.

C: Hi I am Cary. What department do you teach in?

L: Education this year. But I hate that department. It is terrible. What about you?

C: Education. (Dead Silence)

L: Boy I am tired. My son plays hockey on Saturday at 5 in the morning. What a stupid sport.

C: I coach youth Hockey.

I had dug a deep hole but if there is one way to connect with a Canadian it is to criticize America or Americans. It is the second most enjoyed sport by Canadians after Hockey and it runs all year. Not to mention that there is an endless supply of material for them to work with.

L: I came here from Minnesota but I really was glad to leave. The weather was horrible and I didn’t like the people very much.

C: My mother is from Minnesota.

Sometimes I shudder when I look back at the person I was then, a truly ugly American, but Cary was extremely forgiving and we became close friends on those rides up and down the Island. He and Judy and I, a Canadian, a Brit and an American, were a bit embarrassed by the fact that we were riding in a limo on that first day. The next week it was a little easier and on the third Saturday we asked him to wash it during the time we were teaching because we thought it was dirty. Eventually we began bringing wine and food and we would eat, drink, tell stories and laugh all the way home. And, more importantly, I began to realize that the Canadian character, emphasizing self-effacement, politeness and interpersonal restraint (a lot like Minnesotans actually) might be something I would want to emulate, eh.

I soon took it upon myself to be a little less outgoing and developed a Canadian accent, dropped “huh”, added “eh” and began to try to assimilate. This must have happened somewhat unconsciously because I took my kids to Disneyland in the early 80s and after talking to a woman in line for a few minutes she asked me, “Where in Canada are you from?”

This led to a lot of funny situations, especially in my private practice. I had become Canadian enough that people couldn’t tell I was a Yank. So clients would come in and rant and rave about Americans and at some point I would have to say, “You know, I am an American.” Often they were shocked as I had become so good at passing as a Canadian.

The truth is that Canada did change me. It was there that I learned so much about myself from many wonderful friends, teachers and students. However, as early retirement loomed, we decided to cast our fate to the south. America, with all its faults was our home and we just felt more at ease there among people from our own culture. This is really hard for Canadians to understand. On paper Canada seems such a better place to live. But we are Americans and we feel more at home here.

I spent the first 27 ½ years of my life as an American. I spent the next 27 ½ years as a Canadian. I have spent the last 20 as a New Mexican, in a state that is an entity unto itself. I love it here but when I die I want my ashes spread on the west coast of Canada because that is where I learned how to live life.

My experience with the Victoria Family Violence Project required me to learn quickly on the job. When the director, Alayne Hamilton, first asked me to consider the position of consulting psychologist, I dismissed it out of hand as I had no experience with abusive men or group therapy. She persevered and eventually I went to Ahimsa House, home of the Project to talk to her and Mike, one of the men working there. I demurred but Mike said, well we need a licensed Psychologist working here or they won’t fund our program. You are the only psychologist in town we are willing to let in this building so we are not letting you out of the building until you agree.

In order to learn more about the program, I apprenticed myself to a lay leader in what they called Phase I, the entry level to the program. The idea of a Ph.D. Psychologist apprenticing with a lay group leader who installed cable during the day and had never finished high school raised some eyebrows but we worked well together and I learned the basics of the program during my twelve weeks with this group. At the end of the group I told him I thought he was gifted in this area and I hope I had some influence over his eventual enrollment in and graduation from the Social Work program at the University. Concurrently, I was accepted into the therapeutic group which was being run for the lay leaders, all of whom had been through the program.

The leader of that group was a professional therapist who had never received a degree but was gifted in his work. I learned more about leading groups from him than anyone else I have ever known. After ten weeks I was ready to start my own group. My partner Wendy and I became so good at sharing this role it often seemed as though we were two heads on the same body.

We led groups of 6 to 8 men who were attempting to change their lives for the better and to stop the violence that had so dominated their lives in the past. One of the things we tried to teach them was to change their communication patterns by expressing their feelings to their partners rather than expressing judgments or controlling statements. One night the following conversation took place between two of the guys. I will refer to them as Tom and Jerry.

Tom said, “My wife won’t let me express my feelings.”

Jerry said, “What do you mean?”

“Well I told her I feel she’s a slut and she got mad and told me to shut up.”

“That’s not a feeling.”

“Yes it is,” he said somewhat agitated.”

“No, that’s a judgement and an insulting one as well.”

“No it’s a feeling.”

By this time both guys were getting pretty mad. As the banter continued and tempers begin to flare I found myself splitting into three people. First there was fearful Larry who was looking for the fastest way to the door. Second there was Aikido Larry who was thinking about which technique he would use when one of these guys came after the other. Lastly there was adult psychologist Larry who said, “Let’s examine this interaction.” I managed to put my fear and distracting thoughts aside in order to focus on the job to be done. This is a core concept in the Japanese approach to problems known as Morita Therapy.

I asked Jerry to demonstrate a feeling statement to Tom. With a malicious grin and a gleam in his eye he said to Tom, "I feel you’re an asshole.” I thought, uh oh, here we go.

After a brief pause Tom said, “Okay I get it." That was the closest I ever saw anybody get to coming to blows during my five years working there. But he did get it and became one of the best communicators in the group. An unusual way to facilitate change but it worked.

There was one guy in the group who was particularly difficult to deal with but we all really liked him. In his case, change was slow. He had a pretty good handle on his anger at this time after having been through the program twice but he really got upset when he thought something was happening to his daughters, both of whom often found themselves in dire straits.

On the last night of these groups that ran for six months, we would meet and discuss how we all had changed and improved over the period of the group. When his turn came he told a story about how he had dealt with a man who was harassing his daughters. It had angered him so much that he went up to the man’s third-floor apartment, grabbed him by the feet and hung him over the side of the railing and told him to stop bothering his girls. This was the last night and I didn’t want to open this up, process it and show that, in fact, that it was not completely congruent with the non-violent philosophy of the family violence project. So I just asked a simple question.

"How is this an example of the improvement and change you’ve experienced as a result of this program?”

“Oh hell, before this program I would’ve dropped him.”

I once had a student we will call Julie whose parents had come from Greece. After she had left for college, her grandmother moved from Greece to Canada when her husband died. She stayed with my student’s parents and didn’t do much of anything except wander around the house in her black garb, watch television and cook. After about six months she called Julie and asked her if she would take her out to buy some different clothes. This was quite a surprise to Julie. Also grandma wanted to know if she would help her enroll in English classes at a local college. A bit stunned she did both. Over the next few months she noticed a radical change in her grandmother. In addition to changing her clothes and going to school she began taking driving lessons. When Julie asked her grandmother one day why she had made such a big changes, she replied, “Oprah.”

Years ago I owned a house in Victoria B.C. that had been built in 1910. It constantly needed repairs and I had a fantastic handyman named Burt who would do the work. He always asked me to help, mostly because he liked the company and not for my skills at home repair. One time he and his wife were with me and my wife at a friend’s house. I asked him how much it would cost to repair my front porch. He replied, “400 dollars.” I said, “What if I help?” His wife answered quickly, “600 dollars.”

Anyway, Burt liked to drink. He never drank on the job but his binges were legendary. I called him one day to tell him I was getting new gutters on the house and I just couldn’t get the old ones off. He said they were going out to dinner and he would stop by afterward to look at it. Around nine that night Burt and his wife showed up and he was three sheets to the wind. It was windy, dark and pouring rain but he said, “Bring a flashlight, hammer and ladder.” He climbed up, looked at the gutter and asked for the hammer.

I said, “I have been thinking about all the ways to get this down and I just can’t figure it out.”

He reared back, swung the hammer and the whole gutter flew off into the yard. He said, “That’s the trouble with you f…ing intellectuals, you think too much.” No one has ever confused me with an intellectual before or after that incident but it was definitely an example of the superiority of action over thinking, at least in this case. In Japanese psychology, thoughts and feelings are seen as fleeting and not under your control and the fastest way out of a bad state is to do something. This is very different than western psychology.

Burt taught me a lot about home repair but that night he was definitely my action guru.

On another occasion I was talking to my mentor in Seattle when he told me he had been to the 100th birthday party of a famous Jungian analyst. He asked the birthday boy what he had been up to. After hearing a long list of projects, plans and activities he said, “Joe, how do you do all of that at your age? I get tired just thinking about it.”

Joe answered, “I don’t think about it.”

So now when I really need to do something I try not think a lot about it. If I can just get started, it usually takes care of itself.

A dramatic and fascinating example of change being inspired by a complete stranger was described to me by a former student. This woman, who we shall call Eleanor, was at a major decision point in her life when this event occurred. She told me about it in a career and life development course I was teaching in which she was a student. The students had completed several inventories designed to indicate appropriate career paths they might follow. She had the most interesting test results I’ve ever seen. I said to her somewhat jokingly, “It looks like you could either be a CPA or a counselor.” She told me that, in fact, before coming to graduate school in counseling she had been debating whether to become an accountant or counselor. She clearly had a wide range of abilities.

One day while she was in the process of trying to figure out which path to follow she was leaving the grocery store with her hands full when a stranger opened the door for her. She smiled and said thank you, and he said, "You should become a counselor.” She stood there stunned and when she turned around he was gone.

She went back to school, completed the prerequisites for graduate school and counseling, and enrolled in a graduate program with a specialty in grief counseling. Today she works as a grief counselor and is known in hospice circles as the "angel of death.” She seems to have the ability to walk into a room, sit down next to person who is dying but can’t let go, place her hand on the person and within a half an hour the person has let go and is gone. She has found her calling thanks to a stranger’s comment.

This is a most remarkable woman. She suffers from a serious disease but never talks about it or uses it as an excuse to avoid difficult situations. She has now finished her Ph.D. and will continue with her life’s work, helping the dying and the grieving. She works a lot with immigrant families and told me she always takes her shoes off when she enters a trailer or small home. I assumed this was a sign of respect. She said, "No, I am often the tallest person in the house and I don’t want them to feel small.”

After reading about the importance of action in Japanese Psychology and the importance of starting small I was reminded of a story I heard Bill O’Hanlon tell about Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who was best known for his work in Hypnosis and his somewhat unconventional (at least for his time) approach to clinical problems.

When one of his students heard he would be visiting a large U.S. city where his depressed aunt lived, he asked Erickson if he would stop in on her. He agreed and when the aunt opened the door he found himself in a musty, dark house with all the curtains pulled confronting a woman who appeared to have nothing to live for and who only left the house to attend church on Sundays.

After speaking to her he found there were two things that gave her life meaning, going to church and growing African Violets. In his own inimical way he said, “You know I don’t think you are a very good Christian and I don’t think your flowers serve much of a purpose either.”

Stunned, the woman asked, “What do you mean?”

“Well, a fundamental tenet of Christianity is caring for others. You don’t do anything for anyone else and you are the only person who gets joy from these flowers. I am going to give you a task but I seriously doubt you can do it. I want you to look into the church bulletin and see if there is anyone who is suffering or grieving and send them one of your plants. Again, I doubt you will do this.”

I guess the challenge was too much to resist so she did it. The response from the recipients and the pastor were so positive she did it again. Soon she was sending violets to anyone she heard of who was in need. When she died, hundreds of mourners showed up to honor “The African Violet Lady”, a person they saw as a caring and generous woman.

And it all began with a challenge and one small act of kindness.

Except for one semester, I was a student in University from the fall of 1960 to the fall of 1970. I saw many changes during that period, one of which was the introduction of drugs to student life. By the end of the decade I was a pretty heavy user of Marijuana and dabbled in other drugs. After I moved to Victoria and took my first job I continued to use drugs recreationally.

Shortly after Ishiyama Sensei arrived in the mid-seventies and became our Aikido Sensei, he announced we were going to do a demonstration at the university. We arrived, changed and went onto the mats to warm up. He approached me and told me I was going to do the knife attacks. This was fine with me because we had always used wooden knives in practice. He then went to a small box on the edge of the mats and extracted a long, very pointed metal knife. As he handed it to me I asked, “How do you want me to attack you?”

“Any way you like,” he responded.

I realized at that point that if either of us made a mistake, I could die. So I did my best to attack at full speed and with lethal intent and he countered every attack. It seemed like it went on for hours. That night it was broadcast on the local TV station and I realized it was only about three minutes. But I knew at that time that I wanted to experience every moment of my life with that same awareness and intensity. I never used drugs again.

In 1981 I was approached by my Dean regarding a pilot project in Infant Day Care. In Victoria, B.C. there were no infant day care centers (centres!) and the government was about to initiate a program designed to encourage the establishment of infant day care. The College Day Care Centre was going to be one of the first and he planned to expand our Day Care Worker training program to include infant care. He wanted me to head up the creation of the program.

I said I would do it but I hadn’t read any research on the subject in 10 years since my graduation from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. I asked him if he would send me to Stanford for a month where the author of the textbook I used in my Child Development class was a professor. He agreed.

I contacted the professor and she agreed to mentor me in this endeavor if I would keep a record of my findings and give a copy to her so she could use the information for her next book. This sounded like a good trade to me. Summer came and I was off to Palo Alto while my wife stayed in Victoria with our two sons. Our trade was that she would fly them down at the end of a month and the boys and I would visit relatives and generally enjoy California, Oregon and Washington while she had time alone. So the time came and I drove down to Palo Alto where I would stay with my good friend Carol for a month.

When I got there I was suddenly overwhelmed by the immensity of the commitment I had made. I had not done anything like this in 10 years and I didn’t like doing it back then. Also, it was the hottest summer in Northern California history and the first time I walked into the Stanford library I felt smothered by the oppressive heat as there was no air conditioning. Additionally, I was not in the best emotional state as my wife and I had recently reunited after a separation that had really knocked the wind out of my sails. And, most importantly, being a Cal graduate, I was feeling guilty for consorting with the enemy, Stanford.

My first visit to the library lasted about an hour and I left frustrated and angry that I had put myself into this situation without really assessing how difficult it would be for me. I missed my wife and boys, was not really that excited about the research and remembered that after finishing four years of graduate school, I never wanted to see another journal article as long as I lived.

But I had a job to do so the next day I promised to stay until noon. Reading about infant perception in the morning, I found myself beginning to get interested in the amazing things researchers had discovered about infants over the last 10 years. The next day I stayed all day and soon I was going in at night and on the weekends. I was amassing reams of note cards and when I met with the prof at the halfway point she was delighted to see my work and said I had saved her many hours of work that she could now spend with her three young children.

This is a good example of some of the principles of Kaizen, another form of Japanese psychology. I started small, gradually increased my time on the project, kept with it and the project overcame my emotional state. It really became my life. More importantly, it proved to me that I could do a very good job on a project that had to be its own reward. There was no prize, no money or pat on the head when I was done. Finishing the task with thoroughness and integrity was the only reward.

My clinical supervisor in Seattle once said to me, don’t think of the Psyche as part of you, think of yourself as part of the Psyche. In the same way, this project was not part of my life, I was part of it. I was an employee of the project. It had a life of its own.

There were other benefits as well. I got to know Carol really well and we remained good friends, exchanging letters at Christmas and at our Birthdays. One of the first things she told me, having been born on December 25th, was, “I will not accept one card. You have to send two.” We were on a pretty tight budget but occasionally we would go out to dinner. Her boyfriend had recently left her and she would offer to pay if I promised to walk by his house with my arm around her feigning mad love and affection. Also, I joined the Stanford Aikido Club and practiced every day there was a practice. When I finished the project, the boys came down and we had a great vacation together.

When I returned we set up the program and the Day Care became a fantastic resource for the community. The people who actually made this happen were the wonderful teachers in the training program and the exceptional day care supervisors at the centre. Also, I had a lot of new material for my course in Child Development. I will always be grateful for the experience this project afforded me.

Sometimes life wakes you up and change is immediate. My friend Ron is a great example of this. Ron’s family owned a very profitable furniture store. From an early age Ron showed great ability in art and design and was a genius working with his hands. He once showed me a report card from a prestigious private boy’s school which he attended. All the grades were rather mediocre except art. He excelled at art. He also showed me a picture of a beautiful boat he had built while still in elementary school. It was a work of art. However, Ron’s parents had other plans for him. They wanted him to become an architect and a professional of whom they could be proud. So even though his academic record was not astounding, off he went to study architecture at University. Not surprisingly, he flunked out.

Ron may have been the most introverted and shy person I have ever met in my life. Upon returning home after failing in University, his parents took him into the business and made him the director of personnel. There could not be a job on earth for which Ron was more poorly suited. Fortunately, he married a woman who was very supportive and realized he could not survive in this job. One day, after waking from a terrible nightmare, he resigned his job, sold his stock and begin a business building wooden toys for children. He would isolate himself in his garage while doing his woodwork and his wife would handle all sales from the kitchen of her house. She served as the business manager, doorkeeper and was a welcoming presence who always seemed to have something delicious to offer you while you were picking up toys. At some point they began to build a boat. After years of work it was a beautiful sight to see. Eventually they divorced and Ron moved to a local island where he now builds boats that have been commissioned by people who value his unique ability. What would his life have been like if his parents had seen this gift and nurtured it?

If you were to walk into the office that my wife and I use for our psychotherapy practice, you would see lots of turtles. Turtles on the desks, turtles on the tables, a turtle candle holder, turtles in the windows and turtles on the floor. Not live turtles but every kind of turtle you could imagine. You would even see a turtle painted on a drum on the wall and a turtle night light. There used to be more turtles but my wife said, “Enough is enough. We are taking some of these home.” She has replaced them with shells and stones in the same places. She has her magic and I have mine.

When I taught and worked with the First Nations Salish people of Vancouver Island they told me the turtle clan was the healing clan and that I belonged to that clan. This was an incredible honor so I started collecting turtles. People saw my turtles and starting giving me turtles so I have a lot. People have brought them from all over the world.

I have turtles everywhere to remind me to slow down. My nature is to go fast, to want to finish everything before I need to and come to closure too early. There is also a practical issue here. I do not have the physical abilities I had when I was younger and when I get ahead of myself I tend to break things, harm my person and otherwise cause havoc.

My mother was the same way. She fell many times in her 80s because this previously active and athletic woman just could not slow down. She would stand up from her easy chair, set off at breakneck speed only to trip and fall. On one Super bowl Sunday I got a call from her residence just as the game was going to start. She had fallen and they could not stop her nosebleed due to her use of blood thinners. The woman said that my mother had asked her not to call me because she knew I was watching the game but that they were really worried.

I drove rapidly to the residence where I found my mother covered in blood and rapidly swelling and darkening around the eyes. I did not feel adequate to deal with this so I called 911 for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. When the first responder walked in he looked at the game on the TV, then my mother, then me. "I gather you are rooting for different teams,” he said.

We all went to the hospital and she sent me home and said, “Don’t come get me until the game is over.”

At the beginning of the final quarter, the hospital called and the nurse told me I had to come get her NOW. They needed the bed. I guess Super bowl Sunday is a high volume day in the ER. The next week I bought a TiVo box.

I used to take her to the Coumadin (blood thinner) clinic to get her blood tested. One time she registered very high blood pressure. “I am a nervous Nelly and I always will be,” she said. “And I gave it to him.” Then looking at me pensively she said, “He doesn’t seem to be like that anymore.”

I looked at the nurse and said, “Thousands of dollars in therapy.” She said, “Me too.”

One last story about change. My brother and I were extremely close. I was five years his senior and from the day he was born I felt responsibility for his safety and well-being. In 1965 my wife and I were living in San Francisco taking courses at S.F. State and preparing to move to Minnesota where I was to begin my Ph.D. studies. He was still at home in L.A. with my parents. Shortly before Christmas my father called to tell me that my brother had acute Leukemia and that although he was undergoing new treatment (a variation of which saves children today), he was not expected to live. Over the next six months he was in and out of hospital, suffering intensely through repeated relapses and remissions. My life vacillated between the hubris of entering graduate school and the depression resulting from the impending loss of my best friend. I think I engaged in a lot of denial. Susan says we visited him once in hospital while he was sick but I have no recollection of that. The day finally came when my father called to tell us to come to L.A. to say goodbye.

It was the sixties in San Francisco and compared to my friends at home and my father’s contemporaries, I had long hair. Today it probably would not even qualify as long hair but it did at that time and it identified me as belonging to a certain cohort that was not popular with my parents’ generation. Whenever I would go home my dad would offer me money to get it cut and I always refused. I think that although this was a version of what Erikson calls a negative identity (identity through opposition) it also was symbolic of the emergence of my own identity, separate from my family and the dominant culture.

As my wife and I were getting ready to go to the hospital to say goodbye to Steve my dad said, “I want you to get a haircut before you see him. I want him to remember you as you were.”

I was completely paralyzed. I had to choose between being who I was at the time and pleasing my father, who I knew was in a state of total despair. So I agreed. After the haircut, as I drove up the driveway to pick up my wife on the way to the hospital she came out of the house with tears running down her face. “Steve is dead,” she said. I never got to say goodbye to the second most important person in my life. Tears form in my eyes as I write this fifty years later.

I was psychologically sophisticated enough at the time to know that the real reason I was sent to the barber was so that I would not embarrass my parents. Although not being able to say goodbye to my brother and my best friend was a result of parental narcissism, in some ways it was a powerful experience in the activation of what is called in Psychosynthesis, my own internal unifying center.

I vowed that day that no matter how my future children presented themselves to the world and no matter what choices they made in life, I would support them for themselves and not how they reflected on me. Being my parents’ child, I couldn’t always do that but the two fine men I see today are proof that my wife and I, nutty as we were in those early years, got that part right. I remember when my youngest son was about eight, my wife said to him, “You really like yourself don’t you?” He looked at her like she was the dumbest person on earth.

“Of course,” he replied. She looked at me, smiled and said, “If he only knew what we have had to go through to get to that place that he takes for granted.”

Although I held this against my father for years, when he was dying my mother asked us to come to L.A. to say goodbye to him. She said she didn’t want the experience with Steve to be repeated and that she was the one who wanted me to get a haircut and had regretted it ever since. She knew I blamed my Dad and that she didn’t want him going to his grave with that between us.

I think that my wife and I, coming out of very different but equally dysfunctional families, have been our own best parents. Even during our worst times together we often have been able to sidestep our own narcissism and support what is best for the other. My wife sometimes says that I saved her from her family but I often wonder about it when I see the humane society bumper sticker, “Who rescued who?”

Psychosynthesis

In the early 70s my friend John gave me some information on Psychosynthesis. After reading a few articles, I became fascinated by the approach to psychotherapy and life in general. Let me lay out some of the theory.

Think about how you act in different situations. For example, at work are you one person and at home someone completely different? When you are with your parents or other authority figures do you behave differently again, perhaps like a compliant child or an obstinate rebel? Are you the outgoing leader with some friends and the passive follower with others? Like the famous Dr. Jekyll, on some days are you the perfect mate or parent and on other days the diabolical Mr. Hyde? Do you sometimes wonder, “Why did I do that?” Do you find yourself joyful one moment and in the depths of sadness in the next with no idea of why you experience such intense fluctuations? In Psychosynthesis we call the people you become in these different situations subpersonalities. In other words, you assume a different identity in each situation, often without even being aware of it.

Unfortunately, the beliefs, thoughts, feelings and expectations that motivate our behavior when we are “in” one of these subpersonalities are often unconscious and unexamined and can be completely different for each subpersonality. This leads to splitting and internal conflict between the different parts of ourselves and we seem to be in a state of war with ourselves and others. These subpersonalities have formed as a result of early experience and probably served us well in our attempt to survive and even prosper in our families and culture. However, in adulthood these patterns that reflect our adaptation to what and how others wanted us to be do not reflect our true nature nor are they effective in the world we now inhabit. In fact, they may be quite destructive and counterproductive. For example, someone who complied and was always nice in order to avoid physical abuse from an alcoholic father may find herself constantly bending to the whims of others and not looking after her own welfare. This kind of person often asks, “Why do I keep doing this.”

Although this is not a healthy or happy existence, in our culture it is “normal.” Many of us live in a trance as we follow the dictates of these parts of ourselves that do not reflect our basic nature or our deeper desire to live in harmony within ourselves and with others. While in this trance we can experience addictions, compulsions, poor interpersonal relationships and a general unhappiness that can appear as depression, anxiety or as other psychological symptoms.

Psychosynthesis is a process that carefully opens the doors to the unconscious realms and shines a light on the dark secrets that keep us prisoners of our past. As we examine the genesis of these subpersonalities and discern which aspects of each subpersonality are congruent with our true nature and which are not, it becomes possible to reconstruct ourselves in harmony with our true selves so that we can become whole people who interact in a healthy manner with both the world around us and the world within.

We all come into this world potentially whole. By this I mean that we have the possibility of living out a destiny that is congruent with the gifts that reflect our own unique being. If you are comfortable with a spiritual perspective, you might conceptualize this as following your soul’s journey. If you are not comfortable with this approach, you might look at this way of being as living in harmony with your own intrinsic nature or even your own genetic code.

If you have observed very young children you probably have noticed how unique each child is, even shortly after birth. Some are very wary and observant of the world around them and others are virtually oblivious to their environment. You may have noticed that some are “people oriented” and some are “object oriented.” As a parent, it was a shock to me that this uniqueness surfaced very early in my children and seemed totally independent of and resistant to environmental factors. One would wake if a pin dropped and the other would not be awakened by a train barreling through the front room. One has always been fascinated by ideas and the other by concrete problems to be solved. Effective parents see these unique traits and abilities in their children and engage in mirroring their children. In other words, they see that their children have certain abilities and dispositions and they actively recognize and foster, or at least accept, these aspects. When this happens we say that there is an empathic response from the parent to the child’s authentic self. This does not mean we cannot set limits or teach our children good social skills. It just means that good parents have a basic respect for who the child is as they engage in the difficult process of preparing children for adult life.

Unfortunately, most of us do not experience perfect parenting nor are we perfect parents ourselves. When, as children, our abilities and feelings are not recognized or actually are demeaned or punished and we are dismissed, shamed or otherwise experience an empathic failure, we learn very quickly what is acceptable and what is not. For a child, rejection by a parent is terrifying and, in the child’s mind, can be experienced as life threatening. In Psychosynthesis we call this the fear of nonbeing. As a response to this and other fears we develop subpersonalities that help us cope with the world around us and insure our survival. This is why we call these adaptations survival subpersonalities.

A common example is the subpersonality of “The Pleaser.” If parents only mirror and shine on their child when he or she is compliant and helpful and meets the parents’ expectations, the child may develop a subpersonality that as an adult requires the person to be helpful and giving in order to feel any self-worth. The person may also experience an inability to form boundaries, say “no” or know what he or she actually wants in life. Another child might respond to this expectation by developing “The Rebel,” whose identity and self-esteem is dependent upon constantly being in opposition to authority and others’ expectations. In fact, both of these subpersonalities could exist in one person. The important factor here is that we, as adults, often are not aware of the unconscious motivations and feelings behind the behavior we exhibit when we are “in” these subpersonalities.

Each subpersonality has its own way of interacting consciously with the world but there are two unconscious aspects of each that are very important. The painful, shaming experiences of childhood are pushed out of our conscious awareness and into what we call the lower unconscious. Outside of our awareness, these unconscious memories and experiences often drive the behavior we exhibit when we are acting out of that subpersonality. In fact, at its most extreme, the main goal of the subpersonality is to avoid all feelings and memories that resurface in situations that resemble the original wounding experience and, in the mind of the inner child, activate the threat of nonbeing. On the other hand, those gifts and unique aspects of our being that were not accepted and for which we were shamed are also repressed into what we call the higher unconscious. In this realm such denigrated characteristics as intuition, sensitivity, creativity and artistic ability may reside completely hidden.

The initial work of Psychosynthesis involves examining each of the subpersonalities while delving into the repressed unconscious experiences that led to their creation. The process of uncovering the painful experiences as well as our true gifts can be lengthy and intense but very rewarding as we discover the motivation behind outmoded, destructive and maladaptive behavior, thoughts and feelings contained in the farther reaches of the subpersonalities.

As we examine how the subpersonalities were formed, how they have evolved into adult subpersonalities, how they form alliances between each other and how they experience conflict with each other we see that some aspects of each subpersonality may be helpful to us in our journey to wholeness and happiness. It also becomes clear that other aspects, useful in surviving our youthful fears, are no longer helpful, limit our ability to function and are downright destructive.

Most importantly, we want to integrate the positive aspects of each subpersonality into our everyday life. This process is called synthesis. We want to synthesize the many subpersonalities into one whole personality which, although it may behave differently in different situations, always reflects the true wholeness of the person we really are and helps us to reach our individual destiny. Our behavior becomes a product of conscious thought and feeling rather than being driven by unconscious shame and guilt and the avoidance of nonbeing. We refer to this ultimate state as functioning from the authentic self.

As memories surface and the unconscious material becomes conscious, a sense of “I” begins to evolve. In other words, an observer that is independent of childhood or cultural conditioning begins to surface and we begin to see who we really are, how we actually experienced early life and how we want to live life now, in harmony with but not bound by the expectations of others. As Psychosynthesis progresses, it becomes clear that the “I” is a reflection of a deeper aspect of you, your self. The self is the ultimate expression of who you are and, if you have a spiritual approach to life, a representation of your soul. If you are not comfortable with this concept, think of the self as the totality of all of your potential and experiences which possesses the innate knowledge of exactly how you should lead your life.

In Psychosynthesis we speak of the will, which provides the impetus for our behavior. The will of the survival personality drives you to respond to life in a way that avoids re-experiencing the wounding of your childhood and the fear of nonbeing. As we age, these responses become less and less satisfying and eventually become counterproductive. Their ineffectiveness and the unhappiness that accompanies them is often the reason we end up in psychotherapy. The “I” has its own will and as it becomes stronger during the process of Psychosynthesis, it is able to direct your behavior in a way that is more congruent with your nature than the dictates of survival personalities. Ultimately, you may experience the will of the self which can appear as a calling or a motivation to action that you cannot possibly ignore regardless of how foolish it may seem to others.

As the “I” strengthens and the self becomes clearer, it becomes possible to disidentify from each subpersonality. In other words, we can still inhabit the subpersonality but the behavior we associate with the subpersonality is now serving the healthy needs of the self rather than keeping unconscious fears at bay. For example, one may begin to parent in a way that serves the needs and healthy authentic development of your children rather than serving your own primitive need to feel safe by being in control or serving the need for your children’s culturally sanctioned accomplishments to augment your own self-image. You may begin to do your job in a way that makes the most sense to you and allows you accomplish more than when you were working primarily for the approval and adulation of your coworkers and superiors. On the other hand, you may find that as the need for the approval of others wanes you feel a desperate need to explore a career that reflects your basic nature and not the expectation of parents, spouses or the culture in general. Be warned that such major transformations, although personally healthy, can be very disturbing to the others in your life. This is not a process to be taken lightly.

Although dredging up the past and recovering memories and feelings that are painful can be very unpleasant, the freedom from unconscious control allows one to fully function in the present without the need for validation from others or the need to meet unrealistic expectations of yourself and others contained within the unconscious areas of unexamined subpersonalities. It becomes possible for you to be a happy, satisfied and whole person just being who you really are.

I have been asked, “Isn’t this all about me? Is this not a selfish, self-absorbed and narcissistic process in which I am involved?” My experience has been quite the opposite. When we are operating from the needs of survival subpersonalities, our motivation is unconscious, driven by unrealistic demands and fundamentally designed to keep us safe from our fear of nonbeing. We behave with hidden agendas (often hidden from ourselves), we blame others, project our feelings and motivations onto others and are generally unhappy whenever the world doesn’t live up to our expectations. Living from the self allows us to moderate the need for external validation, relate to others in an authentic, altruistic and empathic manner and to be fundamentally satisfied and happy with life. This is the beauty of Psychosynthesis, a path to self-acceptance and harmony in both the internal and external world.

Some Useful Psychological Concepts

The Guilt-Resentment-Persecution Triangle describes the dynamic of many relationships. The idea here is that if you use guilt to convince someone to do what you want them to do they will do it but feel resentment. Sometimes the resentment is conscious and sometimes unconscious. Resentment then morphs into persecution. This can take many forms. One of the most common is passive aggressive behavior. Forgetting, postponing, or just plain not doing are examples of this behavior. I knew someone once who was a master at this. His wife kept on asking him to put in skylights that they had bought and he kept agreeing but never did it. Finally, she erupted, showed him where to put them in and demanded that he do it, shaming him in the process. He finally did it but he “accidentally” put them in the wrong places. The example of the boy I forced to learn letters earlier was also exhibiting passive aggressive behavior when he learned his letters and them presented them to me in an insulting way.

The Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor drama is also a useful way of seeing some relationships. When one sees oneself as a victim it is often assumed others fall into one of two categories, rescuer or persecutor. And if you are not a rescuer you are definitely a persecutor. Although there are real victims out there, someone who continually takes the victim stance often is not willing to take responsibility for his or her behavior and blames others for the consequences of that behavior. Heaven help the person that points out that this person is often responsible for his or her own predicament. A common pattern seen in narcissistic individuals begins with the narcissist feeling like a victim because others are not giving him the constant validation he needs and feels he deserves. This validation actually serves the purpose of fending off unconscious feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Usually, when validation is not forthcoming the narcissist then feels justified in becoming the persecutor and will attack those who hold him responsible for his attitudes and behaviors. Unfortunately, there is usually someone out there who, for his or her own conscious or unconscious reasons, will step up and rescue the narcissist. This can be called collusion. One need only read the entertainment or political news sections to see this drama replayed over and over.

Unconscious empathy is a skill that some people possess without even knowing it. It involves unconsciously picking up what another person is feeling even though the other person may not be expressing it. The feeling is then perceived as coming from the receiver. Have you noticed that sometimes after speaking with or spending time with a particular person you feel angry or depressed or inadequate? While this feeling may belong to you, sometimes you are unconsciously picking up what the other is not willing to recognize in him- or herself. While this is a great tool, especially if you are a therapist, it is also a curse. People with this skill, often called “sensitives”, need to learn how to discriminate between their own feelings and the feelings of others not being expressed. Psychological boundaries that protect us from unconscious assault are also important to develop.

Much has been written about the concepts “Masculine” and “Feminine” and the differences between them. I do not think these are particularly helpful concepts in the 21st century. They often suffer from overgeneralization or stereotyping and tend to be used in a pejorative manner. I think the concepts of Eros and Logos are more useful. Eros is the domain of feelings, connection, empathy and intuition. Logos is the domain of thought, logic and rational analysis. Both are necessary but in the past the former has been ascribed to women and the latter to men. Traditionally, men who live in the world of Eros are seen as sissies and women who live in the world of Logos are seen as unfeeling and cold. Although everyone usually favors one of these approaches to life over the other, it is a balance that is necessary, both in men and women. Different situations require different solutions.

A third principle that is neither Eros or Logos is the Power principle. The Power principle is neither relational or logical. The fundamental axiom is “might makes right.” I am bigger and more powerful so you will do as I say. History is replete with examples of this principle and it usually doesn’t end well for the powerful, even if it takes generations to overcome the oppressor. It is particularly destructive in relationships between people and especially damaging to children. Also, like guilt, it engenders resentment and eventually retaliation, if possible.

The Inflation Deflation cycle is a useful concept to understand mood swings and such concepts as narcissism, depression and anxiety. A simple analogy my supervisor once used is helpful understanding this cycle. Think of your personality as a balloon. A balloon that is underinflated will not support itself. It just lays there. A balloon that is overinflated is very large but very thin and can be popped easily. The key to a healthy personality is to have a balloon that is just the right size to support itself but not so big that it pops easily when life does not support your self-concept or inflated ideas you have about yourself. Many people oscillate between these two states depending on the feedback the world around them provides.

Good parenting is about helping a child develop a personality that can support itself and be content in the world and at the same time not be so big that it ignores the needs of others and is self-absorbed or narcissistic. Narcissism is the psyche’s way of blowing up a big balloon to cover the unconscious little, flaccid balloon that is the true nature of the narcissist.

How do we encourage and support our children in their quest to be themselves and be effective in the world without creating a narcissistic monster? Here are some ideas.

Parenting

Parenting is a very difficult task. This statement will, of course, surprise no-one who has actually tried it. In the fifty years my wife and I have shared the title of parent, we have, like everyone else, learned gradually through trial and error what it means to be good parents. We are still learning. I sometimes wonder how parents cope with the number of books, courses and "experts” who are willing to tell them how to raise children. It must be very frustrating, especially since many of the experts seem to disagree with each other. My daughter-in-law said than when she expressed her fears about parenting to her grandmother she replied, “There are probably 100 ways to raise children and 99 of them are ok.” I spent a lot of time working with parents both as a teacher and a therapist. Here are some of the ideas I thought were important.

There are two things you can do to begin becoming a better parent. First, find some way to rediscover the memories of your own childhood. When did you feel good about yourself? When did you feel bad? What would you change about your parents and what would you leave untouched if you had your childhood to do over again? Parents who remain naive about this part of their lives are likely to re-enact the negative aspects of their own childhood in some way with their own children. Through reading, reflection, discussion or therapy you can re-parent yourself and break the cycle of abusive or ineffectual parenting that is often passed from generation to generation. Secondly, familiarize yourself with developmental psychology. Find out what needs and behaviors are normal for children in your child’s age group. Often, what may seem strange or unruly to parents is normal for children in a particular age group. In addition to these two fundamental tasks, there are a variety of parenting techniques and ideas that I have found to be very helpful which I will present in the following pages.

It seems to me that the most important thing you can do as a parent is to recognize who your child is. What is his temperament? What are her interests? What are his strengths and what are his challenges? Above all else it is important to recognize that this is her life and not yours. Children should not have to live out their parents unrealized dreams and aspirations. My previous story about Ron is a good example of this. Given this assumption, there are some useful tools for helping children to develop within a family and culture while still maintaining their own identity. Let’s look at the four strokes first.

A stroke is something you experience from the environment around you. A positive stroke such as a smile or praise feels good, while a negative stroke, such as criticism or a spanking, feels bad. A stroke is said to be conditional if something has to be done by the child to receive it. On the other hand, unconditional strokes are not related to the child’s behavior. For example, if the child takes out the garbage and mother says, “Thanks a lot,” this is a conditional positive stroke. Sending a child to her room after she teased her sister is a conditional negative stroke. In both cases, the stroke was a result of some specific act. In one case the consequence, or stroke, was positive and in the other it was negative. "I love you” is an unconditional positive stroke since your love, which feels good, is not connected to anything the child has done. If you are in a lousy mood and you say to a child, “Get lost,” this is an unconditional negative stroke. This remark feels bad and is in no way related to anything she has done. What are the effects of these different strokes?

The receipt of unconditional positive strokes is absolutely essential to the formation of positive self-esteem in a child. The message conveyed is, “you are o.k. for who you are; no matter what you do I will still love you.” Many parents who were abused or neglected as children have never experienced this kind of stroke and, as a result, don’t understand the importance of letting their own child know how much they care for her. For many parents, their own unhappiness may be so great that they cannot express love or appreciation to anyone. For these kinds of parents, repairing their own self-esteem through therapy is the first step towards being able to give positive strokes to their child.

One of the most meaningful ways you can deliver unconditional positive strokes to your child is to spend time doing what she likes to do. This may be swimming, reading a book, going for bike rides, preparing a meal together or just hanging out. Children invest their parents with a lot of power. You are very important to your child. Spending time with a child doing what she likes to do gives the child the message that you consider her needs important and that you like her. This is a message that enhances her self-esteem. Of the four strokes, this is the most important for children to receive from their parents and is, unfortunately, the least common. Unconditional positive strokes by themselves are not enough however. This does not prepare a child for a world in which there are limits and can lead to an inflated sense of self, sometimes termed omnipotence or narcissism.

Conditional positive strokes, while they also enhance self-esteem in the child, act as reinforcement of behavior that is considered acceptable, appropriate or pleasing by the parents. For example, when you say to your child, “You did a good job,” or “I really appreciate you taking your dishes to the sink,” or “Thank you for picking up your clothes,” it not only gives her a feeling of accomplishment and self-worth, but also serves to increase the behavior that earned the stroke. We will talk more about this later.

The conditional negative stroke, or punishment, as it is more commonly known, is, unfortunately, the most common tool parents use to try to influence their children’s behavior. Parents tend to use punishment because it is fast and easy and often puts an immediate end to an unacceptable behavior. However, in the long run, punishment often does not work. While punishment teaches a child what kind of behavior is considered inappropriate, it does not necessarily teach her what is appropriate. For instance, if you punish a child for whining, she doesn’t really learn another more constructive way to ask for things she wants. In the end she probably will whine because it occasionally pays off, making the punishment worth suffering. Punishment also has the effect of arousing a child emotionally and she may get upset, angry, or fearful. Stirring up these intense negative emotions does nothing to help a child learn appropriate behavior and, when the child begins to associate these feelings with the punisher, she may form a negative image of the parent in her mind. The child learns to fear, avoid and lie to her parent. Furthermore, punishment, especially physical punishment (e.g., hitting or spanking), models negative behavior. If a child is hit every time she does something a parent doesn’t like, the message is: “If you don’t like what someone is doing, hit her.” Punishment is also likely to result in revenge. The punished child may see herself at the losing end of a power struggle and try to find a way of getting even, often by repeating the behavior she was punished for in the first place. Prolonged or severe punishment will result in the formation of a negative self-image as the child incorporates the belief that she is bad. Punishment may sometimes be deemed necessary by a parent, but is often overused in our culture. We will discuss some alternatives later.

Because of our own inability to deal with a child or because of problems in our own lives, we may feel compelled to deal out unconditional negative strokes to our children. Sarcasm, critical remarks about a child’s character (“You are a bad child.”) or the use of undeserved negative strokes of any kind is abuse. This is devastating to the self-esteem of the child who receives it. Since the negative stroke is in no way related to the child’s behavior, the message to the child is “you are not worthwhile no matter what you do.” Many parents will recognize this kind of stroke from their own childhood, and should eliminate it from their own parenting. Unlike punishment, which may be unavoidable, abuse is never appropriate.

Knowing that negative strokes are to be avoided, how can we as parents deal with misbehavior? There are essentially three options we have open to us in these situations.

The first option is for a parent to change herself or her attitudes toward her child’s behavior. It is important for parents to realize that their thoughts about how children should behave are based mostly on their own specific experience in a family and in a culture. Sometimes, these expectations are not realistic and behavior that you consider inappropriate may be entirely normal for a child of a given age. This is why it is important to have some knowledge of developmental psychology. Find out what is normal for children the same age as your own. For example, if your two year old daughter is constantly saying “no!” is getting into everything and is generally driving you crazy, you may have to give up trying to control her every move through constant punishment and accept this as normal for a child of her age. This doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for her behavior, but it is extremely important to remember that, in most cases, what you are seeing is not deviant nor aimed at you personally. This is particularly important to keep in mind when dealing with adolescents who have a natural bent toward independence and question all forms of authority. I have found pediatricians, day-care supervisors, parenting courses and other parents to be helpful sources of information about normal, age-appropriate behavior.

Changing yourself or your attitudes will not always be the right choice and may lead the child to an unrealistic belief that the world will change to meet her demands. If this is the case, one of the other two options will be more appropriate. However, examining your own behavior and attitudes is always a good place to start.

The second option involves changing the environment. To return to the example of the two year old, this approach would involve accepting her curiosity as normal and moving everything breakable or dangerous in the house above the child’s reach. Eventually she will lose interest in these objects and also learn what she can and can’t touch. Sometimes children are in classrooms or schools that are not suited to them. This is another situation in which you might like to change the environment. Again, this may not be the best approach. In some cases it may be best for her to learn to cope with less than perfect situations and realize that the world will not always accommodate to her.

The final option, the one which parents most frequently turn to, is to try to change the child, usually in the form of punishment. While this particular response is relatively easy and quick, it is not very effective and has, as we have already seen, many negative side effects. As an alternative to punishment, there are several ways we can modify behavior. Let’s look at them.

As a preventative measure, I would suggest that the most important thing a parent can do is to provide a good role model for the child. Behave as you would like the child to behave. Children learn best by modeling. If they see violent, negative behavior, that is what they will model. All the parenting skills combined cannot undo bad models.

It is also important to state limits clearly. Often children will misbehave just to find out what the limits are, their thinking being, “How far can I go before she will react?” Limits must also be consistent. If, for example, it is o.k. to throw toys on one day, but a punishable offence on the next, the child learns that the world is an unsafe and unpredictable place and will probably act out her anxiety in some way that you will find unpleasant. This is not to say that limits can’t change. When you realize that a limit is unrealistic or unfair, it is time to change it. When dealing with older children, for example, good parents will listen and try to come to some mutual agreement about fair limits.

The most effective way of changing behavior is through conditional positive strokes or positive reinforcement. Many children misbehave in order to get attention. The theory behind positive reinforcement is to grant children the attention they desire when they are behaving appropriately and to deny it when they are misbehaving. In other words, reinforce appropriate behavior, ignore negative behavior. A former student of mine who taught dance to school-age children told me about a child who was a constant source of disruption in her class, He would stand in the back row of the class gyrating and making strange sounds. At first, she would stop the class and admonish him, but this had no effect. This behavior became more frequent and disruptive as the class progressed. Finally, at the end of her wits and having turned into a screaming banshee, she decided he had to go. As a last resort, however, she decided to try positive reinforcement. She completely ignored him when he acted up in class and paid attention to him only when he was acting appropriately. Amazingly, within about two weeks he was one of the best members of her class. The secret to her success was a process called shaping. When we shape a behavior, we begin by reinforcing any small approach to the expected behavior. In this case, she began by reinforcing him when he was standing still and paying attention. When the initial task is learned, the child is reinforced for gradual improvements and failure or negative behavior is ignored until the final goal is reached. Thus the child experiences positive strokes for attempting to change rather than experiencing punishment and failure.

Changing a child’s behavior is seldom as easy as was described in the above example. One of the problems with children who misbehave for attention is that they have learned that the only way they will get attention is to misbehave. Often, a child will decide that a negative stroke is better than no stroke at all. In these cases, the continued negative responses she receives lead to the development of low self-esteem. Furthermore, children with very poor self-esteem sometimes reach the point where negative responses from others take on the role of positive reinforcements. In other words, the child’s attitude is, “I only feel good when someone is treating me badly.” Life for these children becomes one attempt after another to get someone to yell at them, hit them or otherwise respond negatively. Parents, not knowing any other response, deliver negative strokes thinking they are punishing the child when they are, in fact, reinforcing negative behavior and solidifying low self-esteem.

People with poor self-esteem are destructive to themselves and to others. When I worked in a residential treatment center in the early 70’s, we admitted a boy who was the angriest, meanest six-year-old I had ever met. His favorite pastimes were setting cats on fire and smearing dog feces inside little girl’s mouths. He was the product of a violent and alcoholic home and his whole life seemed to be dedicated to enraging adults to the point where they would become abusive with him. I decided to implement a plan which consisted of completely ignoring him until he did something positive. This plan was to be carried out by all staff members at the center. About five minutes into the plan, he broke a window. He was ignored and, to his amazement, no one responded. Realizing something was amiss, he found the smallest, most defenseless girl in the center and began pounding her mercilessly in the face. Obviously we had to immediately stop him and find some consequence for his behavior. I’ll never forget the grin on his face as I marched him away to his room. He had won.

There are two factors which contributed to this boy’s behavior. The first is the need for attention which we have already discussed. Children must feel they can affect the people around them. If they cannot affect you in a way that results in you giving them positive strokes, they will find out how to produce negative strokes. The second is the need for power. Children who feel powerless in their lives will attempt to gain power by acting in ways that are destructive to themselves and to others. How can we as parents ensure that our children have a feeling of power over their lives? With young children, this can be as simple as letting them pick out their own clothes, or which bedtime story to read. As they get older, you might let them set their own bedtime and decide which TV shows they want to watch. Responsible parenting allows you to gradually give a child more and more control over her own life. Children who know you respect and trust them will respond in kind. A child who receives your trust will be trustworthy herself.

Parents sometimes allow children too much power. Children should not be allowed the freedom to decide to stop brushing their teeth, eat unhealthily, verbally or physically abuse others, miss sleep or participate in dangerous activities. This is neglect and can result in omnipotent children who have little regard for others and believe life should meet all of their expectations. The proper balance of autonomy allowed and limits imposed is something we all have struggled with as parents. Children need power over some aspects of their lives, but they also need to feel safe in the hands of a parent who is in control of herself and the welfare of the child.

I would like to make one last comment about power. Beware of power struggles. Try to avoid them by planning ahead and seeing what difficulties will arise in situations you face. Don’t get into battles you can’t win. Decide what rules and limits are really important. Be really clear about them and don’t back down. Everything else should be negotiable or flexible, depending on the situation. Although children understand and respect strength in parents, they also place great value on fairness. It is wise to avoid power struggles but we all eventually find ourselves in these battles which constitute the worst (and sometimes the funniest) memories of our parenting lives. Try to have a sense of humor.

Another alternative to punishment is the use of consequences. Consequences can be natural or logical. A natural consequence is a consequence that occurs directly as a result of a child’s behavior and without the parent’s intervention. If you go out in the rain without rain gear you will get wet and cold. If you do not eat dinner you get hungry. I do not recommend the following technique but it was an interesting example of learning as a result of natural consequences. When my son was about nine or ten months old, I was trying to teach him to stay away from hot things. I would point to the stove and say, “Hot!” He would put his hand on a cold burner and say “Hot!” very pleased with himself. I used lots of different objects to try and teach this, all to no avail, since nothing was ever really hot. One day I was sitting drinking a cup of coffee and he walked up to me. I pointed to the coffee and said “Hot!” Before I could stop him he stuck his finger into the coffee, immediately withdrew it and yelled, “HOT!” From that point on he always avoided anything I told him was hot. Again, I do not recommend this procedure, but it does exemplify the principle of natural consequences.

Often behaviors do not have natural consequences, or the consequences are so awful you cannot let a child experience them. For example, you do not teach children about not going in the street by allowing them to be hit by cars. You can, however, apply logical consequences in these situations. Logical consequences are consequences which make sense to the child and are linked in some logical way to the behavior. Spanking, for example, is not logically related to any behavior, nor is being sent to your room without dinner because you swore. Not getting desert because you did not eat your meal, however, is a logical consequence because the consequence is related to the behavior, eating your meal. When I was trying to teach my one-year-old son not to go in the street I used logical consequences. I would hold his hand, walk with him to the curb and say, “No street.” He would look at me like I was crazy and say “No street.” I would then let go and if he walked into the street I would pick him up, say “No!” firmly and take him into the house. He would protest but we would stay inside for a while just to make the point. Going inside is a logical consequence to not behaving safely outside. I repeated this each day, each time moving farther away as he reached the curb, turned around, smiled and said “No street.” When I felt that he had learned not to go in the street, I let him wander while I sat on the porch and watched. One day he began to walk toward the corner about a half a block away. My wife started after him but I said, “Let’s see what happens.” When he got to the corner he turned his head, smiled, said “No,no,no!” and came back. Needless to say, he got a lot of positive strokes for that decision.

In the end, you may have to resort to punishment, but it should be your last option. If you do resort to punishment, make sure it is being carried out for the child’s good and not yours. In other words, the punishment should teach the child about limits or consequences and not be just the result of your frustration or anger. Avoid physical punishment. This is bad modeling and is not necessary. Lastly, it is important to separate the behavior from the child; make sure the child understands that, though you may not like what she is doing, you still love her. Improving a child’s behavior at the expense of her self-esteem is a hollow victory.

It is important to not confuse reinforcement or positive strokes with bribery or natural and logical consequences with threatening. Reinforcement is spontaneous or part of a contract. For example, we may reinforce a child who has just brought home a great report card or a child may earn a certain amount of money by completing tasks for which she is responsible. We may spontaneously reinforce a child because she has done something that we have decided is appropriate or more mature than we previously accepted. For example, a child may begin to baby-sit her younger sister when you go out. These are all things that are good for the child. On the other hand, bribery is a calculated way to get a child to do something for you, usually after the child has started misbehaving. For example, a child starts to scream in the store and we say, “Be quiet and I’ll get you a chocolate bar.” The child learns, “If I misbehave long enough I will eventually get what I want.” If we are going to reward a child for good behavior, it should be spontaneous or agreed upon before you go in the store. If the child misbehaves, no reward will be forthcoming.

Threats are not very effective because, like bribes, they are usually made after the negative behavior begins. In addition, threats are often seen as a challenge by the child, who may think to herself, “Let’s just see if she means this.” Also, parents often threaten consequences that cannot be carried out, or that hurt the parent more than the child. If I want to go shopping and tell my toddler that she will be taken home if she misbehaves, I am actually giving her a wonderful way to avoid shopping and setting myself up for a disappointing day or an opportunity to go back on my word. Before getting into potentially troublesome situations, be really clear with your children what you expect of them and what will happen if they do or do not meet your expectations. Do not make the child wait too long for positive consequences and if you resort to a negative consequence, it should be clear why this is happening.

This reminds me of an experience I had with my youngest son. Threats are almost always a bad idea with children. Threats you can’t carry out are even worse. It was Halloween and we were going to take the boys to a party at our oldest son’s school after dinner. We were having shrimp salad and my youngest son refused to eat any. So at first I told him we wouldn’t go until he ate two bites. He refused. Now I had really set myself up here in a power struggle I could not win. We were going no matter what. So I backed down to one bite. Still no agreement. So I picked up a shrimp, stuffed it in his mouth, picked him up and loaded him into the car. At the party he ate candy, bobbed for apples, played games and generally had a great time. When we came home we put them to bed and he was so exhausted he was sound asleep before I could even kiss him goodnight. As I leaned over to kiss him, his mouth opened and there on his lower gum was the shrimp.

Parents ask a lot of questions about discipline. Instead of thinking of discipline as punishment, it is helpful to think of it as teaching children how to govern their own behavior. The child who has experienced unconditional love, conditional positive strokes, limits, good models and a minimum of negativity is not going to need to misbehave for attention or to prove her own power. However, all children (and adults) misbehave. What is important is our reaction to that behavior.

We said earlier that there were three ways to respond to misbehavior: Change yourself, change the environment or change the child. All three approaches are appropriate in different situations. It is important to decide which one is best in the particular situation in which you find yourself. Elizabeth Creary, in her book Beyond Spanking and Spoiling, says that the best way to answer the question, “What should I do?” is to ask yourself another question: “How can the needs of the child and my(our) needs get satisfied in this situation?” Considering only your own needs produces a child who feels unloved and unseen, while considering only the child’s produces a spoiled child who does not understand how to get along with others. The goal is to work toward a compromise which will lead to a situation in which both your needs and the child’s needs can be met. To do this you may have to change yourself or your expectations, change the child’s environment, or you may have to change the child.

Children are not machines–you cannot learn how to “fix” them in courses or books. Although these sources of information are helpful, you cannot apply pat, simple solutions to complex problems. Bruno Bettleheim, in his book, The Good Enough Parent, says the key to being a good enough parent is to first understand why the child is doing what she is doing. He maintains that, based on the child’s experience and level of understanding, everything a child does makes sense to her at the time. According to Bettleheim, the first step in dealing with a problem is to understand the child’s perspective. Why is the child doing what she is doing? Is she scared? Is she desperate for attention or power in her life? Is she just acting like a normal four-year-old? This approach requires us to listen to children. Although I have not addressed this topic here, it is extremely important and entire books have been written on the subject. I enthusiastically recommend learning how to listen to your children if you have trouble in this area. Secondly, he advises us to try and remember what it was like to be a child, to try to imagine what our own responses might have to the situations that cause problems for our children.

Closely related to this idea is the concept of mirroring. Mirroring entails recognizing what your child is feeling or thinking and reflecting it back. This process begins with comforting an unhappy baby, returning her smiles and gazes and engaging in loving conversations with the cooing and babbling infant. Later we can show children that we understand why they are unhappy or angry even though we may not alter our limits or environment to satisfy the child’s desires. A friend of mine once told me of an experience with her two-year-old granddaughter who was staying with her while her mother was delivering her second child. At one point during the week the toddler picked up a doll and started banging its head against the table while repeating over and over, “No want baby!” My friend said, “I know you are angry and it is ok to be angry about having to share mommy, but it is not ok to hit the baby. Mommy and Grandma will love you just as much now as we did before the baby came.” This process of mirroring tells the child her feelings and perceptions are valid even if her behavior is not acceptable. It tells the child she matters and is worthy of existence in this world. Mirroring helps to form a sense of self which will help a child to make healthy decisions later in life.

If we are able to do these two things, understand the child’s motives and feel what the child feels, we will most likely make the right decisions. Trust in your own intuition and your ability to become better at this very difficult task of childrearing. Integrate the information you feel is helpful with what you know in your heart is right for you and your child. Remember that, no matter what else happens, if your child leaves childhood knowing you love her and will always love her and has been given the tools necessary to negotiate the perils of life, you have been successful. She will accept herself, will be able to love others and pass this gift to her own children.

White Seal Speaks

On March 12, 1862 the steamship Brother Jonathan arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada from San Francisco. It brought with it a most unwelcome guest, Smallpox. When the disease began to appear in the locals, the government moved to inoculate as many people as possible. As many white people as possible, that is. When native people camping near Victoria became ill, they were forced to leave and return to their villages. There was no attempt to vaccinate them. Between April and December of 1862, half of the indigenous population between Victoria and Alaska perished. Later, more died.

Around the same time, the government started sending boats into the inlets where native villages lay. They would tell the inhabitants that they had one hour to get their children ready to leave for residential schools run by the Catholic and Anglican churches. There the children lost their families, their names, their language, their culture, their religion and in many cases, their innocence and virginity. All of this in the name of “civilizing the Indians” and bringing them to Jesus. After my wife read this she said, “They didn’t lose it. It was stolen.” A moving story was told to me by a man whose grandmother experienced this travesty. When I said, “You should write down her stories,” he replied, “She says you have stolen everything else from us, you can’t steal our stories too.”

This history, and many more injustices, were on my mind when I first arrived at the Red Lion Inn in Victoria on a crisp fall morning to begin teaching a basic counseling skills course to some of the Salish people of Vancouver Island. Never in my life have I met a kinder, more welcoming group of students. After all we had done to them, they still made me feel welcome.

The tribes, or bands, had horrible social issues. Drug and alcohol abuse, family violence, sexual abuse and suicide were rampant. Each band had a social worker who had to deal with these problems. Often the workers had no training and few resources and were overwhelmed and desperate for help. From this need sprang the Camosun College Native Band Social Worker program. I was chosen to teach several of the courses, beginning with Basic Counseling Skills, a week long all day program of instruction.

I remember unloading my station wagon that was packed with boxes of reprints and then carefully reviewing my presentation schedule complete with exercises and role plays before arriving at the classroom promptly at 9:00am. No one was there. Around 9:30 people began to straggle in and at 10 I began. At lunchtime I carried all my boxes back to the car unopened and returned them to the college. It was clear to me this was nothing like any group I had ever taught before. What did I have to offer these people? The problems were horrendous and I was lost as to how to approach the topic in a way that made sense. I should have known then that I would learn much more from them than they would learn from me. In retrospect, teaching in that program was one of the highlights of my life.

The indigenous people of Canada like to be referred to as First Nations people and they do have their own nations. Nothing was more moving than watching some of my former students graduating from University with degrees in social work wearing the beautiful beaded and buttoned capes of their people. While other students were introduced by their name only, the names of First Nation students were followed by phases like, “From the Salish Nation” or “From the Haida Nation.” It seems to me this communicates that, “Yes we are part of Canada but we are our own people.” This, in spite of all we have done to try to destroy that identity.

My first lesson was about the First Nations concept of time. At the end of the day I asked if we could start on time the next day.

“What time?” one student asked.

I said, “How about 9:30?”

He said, “9:30 white man time or Indian time?”

“What is the difference?” I asked curiously.

“White man time, 9:30. Indian time, see you for lunch.”

Everybody laughed and we decided that 10:00 white man time would suffice. One wonderful elderly lady said, “Yeah we got to go to the Bingo tonight so we can’t get up too early.” Everybody laughed again and then let me in on that well known First Nations disorder, Bingo Addiction.

The older lady then said, “Larry, you hear about the two Indian boys lost in the woods?” “Nope,” I replied. One says, “We are lost, do you think we should pray?” The other says, “Sure but I never been to church.” The first one says, “I have lots of times and I know what they say.” “OK then, pray.” The first one screws up his face and in the loudest voice says, “Under the B!”

For my first exercise I chose reflective listening, a style of listening that shows the other person that you hear them, understand them and have empathy. My first attempt went something like this:

Ernie (a chief): “You know about 5 years ago I quit drinkin’. Me and my friend Paul was out on my fishin’ boat one night and we drunk up a storm. Then next day I woke up and Paul was gone. Overboard in the night. I still cry about it.”

Frankie (a wonderful young man who I will talk about later): “Ernie it sounds like you come here with a heavy heart.”

Never in all my years of teaching counseling skills had I seen people so naturally listen and speak from the heart. I had nothing to teach them about this.

After a long discussion about what was troubling them most, I realized they were frustrated by their inability to stand up to the white bureaucrats who controlled their lives. Assertiveness and outspokenness are not valued traits in their culture but are essential when dealing with government agencies and what they would call “European culture.” They found the course useful and I will never forget the stories they shared with me as I learned who they were and what they needed from me. Their kindness to and tolerance of me, a representative of a race of people who had treated them so badly and knew so little of their culture moved me deeply. They invited me back to teach Child Development, the next course.

One of the funniest stories was told by a woman from a village so remote you had to fly in or travel by boat to get there. She said as the plane flew in it would pass over hot springs frequented by “white hippies” bathing nude in the pools. The people of her band called them the white seals and it was a local custom to report on any white seal sightings after landing. Hence the title of this piece.

One of the reasons direct communication and assertive behavior was difficult was that much of the communication between them was indirect or spoken in metaphor. Assertiveness, confrontation and in some cases even eye contact were considered rude. This left them vulnerable to being steamrolled by the white authorities and was often confusing to a culture as direct as ours. One of the best examples of this was the avoidance of eye contact as a sign of respect. Many of my students remembered being beaten because they would not look a nun or a teacher in the eyes for fear of appearing disrespectful.

Once we had to make an important decision. We sat in a circle and I laid out the problem. One of the students started by telling a story about his sister. The next described a fishing trip. This went on as each told a story. I became more and more confused and frustrated and was about to demand that we deal with the issue at hand when Chief Josephine said, “Well, I guess we have arrived at a decision.”

Stunned, I asked, “When did that happen and what was the decision?” They all laughed and one of them said playfully, “Oh, you white people are so stupid.”

Somewhere in all that metaphor was a discussion and decision about the topic but I’ll be damned if I had any idea what it was.

On another occasion I was teaching a course at the College and there was one First Nations student in the course. I assigned a paper that required the students to describe how their parents had disciplined them as children and the effect it had on them. The lone Salish student came to me and told me she couldn’t do the paper because she was not raised like that. She explained that if a child misbehaved some adult or elder would take them aside and tell them a story, most likely with that pesky trickster Raven at the center. It was up to the child to realize the meaning of the story and apply the moral to his or her own behavior. So she wrote a beautiful paper relating stories she was told and how her behavior changed in response to the stories.

At the end of one course I taught, the students asked me when I would have their papers finished and grades submitted. I said, “Well, you know, I have to go fishin’ with my brother up in Uclulet and then I have to go huntin’ with my dad. Also, my cousin wants me to help him clear some pasture….”

Amid howls of laughter, one of them said, “You really understand us don’t you?” I hoped I did.

Those courses and the education I received from those people prepared me for one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. After I had taught the courses, I received a phone call from one of the First Nations employees at the College. She had relatives in the course and said to me, “Larry, my sister’s son is in terrible trouble and I know you understand our people. Could you help him?”

I agreed and soon met with the boy. He was about 17 and what transpired between us is confidential but let me tell you he was in about as much trouble as you could imagine. I can also say that my attempts to help him failed miserably. The rest of the story I can tell because it appeared in the local newspaper.

At some point he got loaded up on drugs and alcohol and robbed a convenience store at a gas station. He beat the attendant so badly he was in hospital for weeks. After his arrest it looked as though he was on his way to adult prison. Soon after this happened I received a call from the chief of his mother’s tribe who asked me if I would write a letter to the judge pleading with him not to send the boy to prison but rather to turn him over the elders of the tribe. The judge agreed.

One of the issues he faced was the fact that his father was white and his mother was First Nations. As a child he was beaten by the white kids for being First Nations and beaten by the First Nations kids for being white. So this action by the elders solidified his identity as a First Nations person. They told him, “You are one of us.”

The boy was taken into the tribe and they began teaching him the old religion and the respect for nature and life in general that were so central to the culture. Then they placed him on a rural trap line for the winter where he had to practice the skills they had taught him and to survive on his own, completely sober. At the end of this experience they held a Potlatch, a ceremony in the long house or big house in which gifts are given by the host to others in the tribe. These were outlawed by the early white government as part of a heathen culture and only recently have been allowed as part of First Nations heritage. Really, what good capitalist gives away what he owns to his neighbors?

In this case, however, the recipient of the gifts was the young man beaten by my client. Each member of the tribe donated money to cover expenses and lost wages. Then each member stood up and expressed the shame they felt after hearing of the treatment he had received from one of their own. Then the young man who had beaten him stood up and expressed his shame and they embraced. The last I heard of this fine young man thirty years ago was that he was helping First Nations youth around the province in a program aimed at preventing drug and alcohol abuse.

We often talk about shame as a bad thing. In this case it served to solidify this boy’s identity as a member of the tribe and emphasized the fact that he belonged and was truly a member of a race and culture with values and expectations. It gave him an identity not as a “half breed,” but as a proud First Nations young man whose behavior reflected on his brothers and sisters in the tribe. That may have been the most important letter I have ever written.

Another moving experience happened during the first course I taught. On Wednesday one of the younger members of the group, Frankie, approached me and said, “I like you Larry. I want to explain to you what it is like to be an Indian.”

He suggested we go over to the shopping center and buy a couple of hot dogs then he would tell me what he wanted to tell me. There, in the midst of middle class white people going about their daily business I had one of the most moving experiences of my life.

He began by saying, “I used to hate myself for being Indian. Then I hated white people. Now I don’t hate anybody.”

He talked about his life as a child and the difficulties of growing up First Nations in white culture. At some point in his adolescence he entered a program that had the purpose of teaching young First Nations boys the old culture and the values that were so central to his people before we showed up. It transformed him and he became the proud young man he was at that time with a purpose in life based on love and respect and not on hate. I will be forever grateful for that experience. Sadly, Frankie died young but his memory lives on as an inspiration to those who want to live a purposeful life.

At the end of that first week, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and aware that somehow these people had changed me. But I was wondering if I had achieved anything of substance when Chief Ernie walked up to me, grabbed my hand and said, “Thank you Larry. I think what you have taught me will really help me help my people.” I only hoped the same was true for me.

One last thought

Anthony Sutich, along with Abraham Maslow, founded the Transpersonal Psychology movement. While in graduate school training to become a psychotherapist, he was diagnosed with an arthritic condition so severe he was given the choice to spend the rest of his life either sitting or lying down as his joints were well into the process of becoming completely immobile. He chose to lie down. I met him at a conference in the early 70s and you would sit behind him and he would talk to you through his frozen jaw while looking at you in a mirror mounted to the side of his gurney. He worked as a therapist and helped many people, probably as much by inspiration as by psychotherapy.

Later in life he decided to return to school and finish his Ph.D. He finished the work but became very sick and was not present when his committee met for the last time and granted him his degree. That night the chair of the committee had a dream in which Anthony came to his bedside walking. “Anthony, you’re walking” he said in the Dream. “Yes,” Anthony replied. “I have died but I want to know if I passed the final review of my thesis.“ "Yes Dr. Sutich,” replied the chair. "Good and goodbye” answered Anthony. The chair was then awakened by the phone. It was Anthony’s wife saying, “Anthony has just died.”

Whenever I am having a bad day or the world is not behaving in the way I want it to (this seems to happen a lot) or I feel frustrated, angry or hard done by I think about Anthony Sutich who gave so much to so many people and will be remembered for his kindness, indomitable spirit and for accomplishing so much in spite of probably having a lot of bad days.

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