1.6 Your fight biography

When I look at the lives of those of us who were taught in childhood to despise ourselves, I’m struck by the considerable number of defeats we suffer as kids and then on into adulthood as we try to make love work and fail to make it work.

What fascinates me most, though, is not the defeats, but….

The fight in us.

And once we learn to see that, we get to…

Stop identifying as failures and start identifying as fighters.

And remember…

You don’t have to win to be a fighter.

So let me recommend this…

Turn yourself into a fight-detective.

Shine a light into your childhood. Look behind the scenes. Hunt for clues. Investigate as many early incidents as you can recall. Talk to anyone who knew you as a kid who’s willing to help you with this. Ask them for their memories of you. Get them to tell you stories.

And continue your search into your adult years. Capture the entire biography of your fight in all its incarnations and nuances right up to the present.

Putting together your fight biography might surprise you with just how much…

It will deepen your compassion for yourself.

And how it will give you a solid place to stand within yourself as you take on the challenges of the upgrade journey or life in general.

To give you a feel for what I mean by fight biography, I’m going to tell you seven quick stories of my own, each with a different angle on fight. I’ve chosen these in hopes that they’ll provoke your own memories and discoveries.

Kids are so dependent on their parents that they routinely hide feelings, thoughts, and protests which if revealed might get them in trouble. So when you’re searching through your memories, expect to find incidents that on the surface don’t look like an expression of fight, but deeper down very much are.

For example, here’s my first day of kindergarten…

I was a painfully shy kid and suddenly I was being sent away to spend hours among strangers at a place I’d never been to and I just wasn’t ready for that. It was a simple mismatch.

On that morning, Mom and I stood waiting silently out on our small concrete–slab front porch. Our modest red brick house was still new and it stuck up out of the ground like a cowlick, no bushes growing around it yet to soften the picture. A wood–paneled station wagon rolled down our hill and stopped. Three little faces stared at me through the side window.

Mrs. Johnson got out, came up our walk, smiled, and reached out her hand. I took one obedient step forward, then burst into tears. A terrible thing in a family that didn’t have feelings in private let alone in public. I tried hard to stop my crying but it got away from me. My feet put on their brakes, my body twisted back toward my mom, and in the long tradition of little kids, I begged, “Please let me stay home today. I’ll go tomorrow, I promise.”

I looked up into my mom’s eyes, but she wasn’t looking at me. She stared off down the street, embarrassed. The thought went through my mind, not in words, but like an iceberg: “Won’t look at me…wants me gone.”

So I went. Mrs. Johnson put me next to her on the front seat and talked calmly to comfort me. It was dead quiet in the back. I knew the other kids were studying me earnestly like little scientists. I stopped crying before we were out of sight of my house.

When we got to Mrs. Johnson’s, she took us downstairs to her basement where the kindergarten was. I refused to take my jacket off, found a quiet spot against the wall, stood there at attention, watched the other kids play together in the sandbox, and held tight the paper bag my mom had packed with a banana and two peanut butter cookies for my snack. And that’s how I spent my morning.

On the way home, I made a decision, if an unconscious shift can be called a decision. I did not ever again want to be scared like that. And I did not ever again want to hurt my mom like that. So I became the best good boy I could possibly be, quiet, obedient, and Calvinist. Without thinking it through, I decided that if Mom and Dad were not at ease with kids then I would turn myself into an easy kid. I’d live as lightly as a ghost. I’d sustain myself on holiness instead of love.

Normally you had to wait until you were a teenager and passed the catechism class before you could take your first communion and officially join the church. But this day was my induction. There was no ceremony and no public acknowledgement. I just quietly got with the program. I traded in little–kid me for church me. I would have had to do that sooner or later and this happened to be the day, the day when I decided with generous intent to save my mom, my dad, and my church from the burden of me.

So that’s my story. On the surface a sad defeat. But if you look a little deeper there’s something more. When I got into therapy, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. I came home from kindergarten that day with a plan. It was a hopeless strategy because earning approval will never satisfy the hunger for real love.

I got trapped in this irony: I was hurting myself to take care of myself. But it was a plan and it was proactive. So it was one spit better than drowning in despair.

By the time I got to high school, my anger about having to shut myself down began to leak through my carefully composed facade. My teen years were vanilla boring. I went to school, did my paper route, and struggled with my homework. I never swore or drank or smoked. I went to church every Sunday except when I was in–bed sick.

When it came to God, I gave him my obedience though I never gave him my heart.

But I guess I got tired of being submissive because protest stirred. It wasn’t open and honest, it was sneaky…

In tenth grade, a month before Christmas, I told my family, “Christ does not want us to give presents to each other who have so much, but to the poor who are in need. So this year I won’t be buying presents for you. Instead I’ll be donating to CARE in your names. And if you want to give something to me, you can donate to your favorite charity in my name.”

What could anyone say? I had wrapped myself in the Gospel. I call that episode “out–Christianing the Christians.” I was not allowed to be directly angry but I could get away with this. On Christmas morning, the most important day of the year for our family, as they handed presents around to each other, I sat in their midst, a cold, unimpeachable turd of righteousness.

Nowadays, on the rare occasions when I tell this story, people say, “How admirable for a tenth–grader to care about the poor like that.” I have to correct them, because while I did have some concern for the poor, that was not my point. I was just really, really angry.

That abstinent Christmas was too hard on me so the next year I went back to exchanging presents. But I wasn’t happy with surrender either, so in twelfth grade, I told my family, “I’m not buying any presents and I’m not donating any money either.” And that was the end of Christmas for me.

If I could rewind and go back and tell the truth, I would simply say to my family, “I want better for us. I want us to find a deeper kind of love than what’s in the Bible or in the minister’s sermons. Please, let’s admit how empty we’re feeling and how much we’re hurting so we can really be here for each other and look for answers together.”

That’s what I needed to say, but we weren’t allowed to talk like that, so instead I acted out my distress with a boycott. And none of us had the skills to break that code to get to my real request.

On rare occasions my fight burst out in surprising directness…

One Sunday afternoon when I was in eleventh grade and my grandmother was at our house for dinner, she took me up the half flight of stairs to the living room where we didn’t hang out except when company came. She had never taken me aside like this before. She sat me down on the grey couch, her face set, and without any warm–up, said, “Your friend John is going to hell and if you don’t stop being friends with him you’ll go to hell, too.”

John was indeed a friend, a good friend. Without thinking, I answered her back, “If God is sending John to hell, then he can send me there, too.”

And just for a breath, in that lightning strike of truth, my soul was blazing. Then it went dark again. Neither my grandmother or I ever said a word to each other about this exchange through the rest of her life. I guess I couldn’t tolerate what I had seen, so I went back to being perfectly polite with her.

Why was my grandmother so dead set against John? I have no idea. He was a good and faithful Presbyterian. The only thing I can guess is that he was livelier than me and loved people a bit too much for her taste. Maybe that’s what triggered her alarm system, that his spirit of delight might rub off on me and then my family might not be enough for me anymore and I might leave them behind.

My grandmother shouldn’t have called the question of loyalty. I imagine it froze her marrow to hear me renounce eternal salvation and choose friendship over God.

I wish I could get a signed pass to go up and visit her for an afternoon in her severe heaven, a place which would certainly not be my idea of bliss. I’d sit across from her and say, “Grandmother, thank you for calling that question back then. I was such a lost kid, lost in pretense, but for that one moment of revelation, the two of us got to see down into my soul.

“It could have been a turning point for us if only we could have seized it. We couldn’t and didn’t, but I want you to know that here in my old age, I’ve become the person we saw that night and I’m at peace. And I wish I had known what challenge to give you so you could have opened into a revelation of your own, and then, talk about a miracle, maybe we could have found each other.”

Then there was a protest that went well until it backfired…

During the last month of the summer after I graduated from high school, I got a one–page printed form in the mail from the college I was about to go to. It asked for all the usual information: name, address, date of birth. And there was a box for religion. That stopped me in my tracks. My Christian upbringing had taught me not to lie. I couldn’t honestly count myself as a believer anymore, yet I was still officially on the rolls as a Presbyterian.

So I set down my pen, walked the three miles over to church, climbed the stairs to the minister’s study, and knocked. Reverend Garvey was in and received me with a nod. I sat down in a cool leather chair, and told him, “I have to quit the church.”

“Why?

“Because I don’t believe in God.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I was relieved he didn’t ask more questions because I didn’t have more answers, only that one. I knew that all you had to do to join the church was to say, “I believe.” So I figured if I said, “I don’t believe,” I’d be released.

But Reverend Garvey told me it wasn’t that simple. My request would have to go before the church Session for a vote. Now it so happened that my mother had just been appointed to that body, along with Mrs. Stone my fifth–grade teacher. They were the first two women ever to be appointed Elders in the history of our church—which was founded in 1776. Oh boy, this was not what I wanted.

My request was on the agenda at the next meeting of the Session. Mrs. Stone argued for a six–month grace period, but I heard through the grapevine that my mother said she wanted to honor my request, because while she was unhappy about my decision, she believed I was sincere.

So the vote was taken and I was out. At home we didn’t talk about it, but I was now an ex–Christian. Which meant my relationship with God was over, right? Not so. Not for decades. This legal termination was only a precursor to years of struggle about what might replace God at the center of my life. And about how I could fit into a world of believers if I wasn’t one of them yet longed for their approval and their caring. I did my best to keep up diplomatic relations with Christians while I questioned everything I had grown up on. Sometimes I sidled up to Christianity for a second look, then impulsively stiff–armed it away.

By my mid–20s, I felt like I was down at the end of a dead–end street. Even though my defenses were making a mess of my life, I stuck with them like till death do us part…

Then one day that still, small voice inside that speaks to other people in noble, uplifting epiphanies, finally spoke to me, and said, “Kid, you’re in trouble.”

So I signed up for intensive therapy, the kind of thing that was happening in California in the early 70s. It kicked off with a scary three–week program of isolation and daily sessions that promised to take you where no ordinary talk therapy had ever gone. I told a friend I wanted this to be like surgery. I wanted the therapist to go in and cut out the bad parts. I prayed that after he was done there would be something of me left.

But in my first session, my therapist, David, a soft–spoken guy, said: “I can’t take care of you. You’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to take the journey yourself. Down the road there will be blessings, but first comes the pain.”

Three weeks before I started this therapy, which was going to drag me back into childhood, my parents were coming to visit me. I knew the therapy was going to trigger an earthquake in our relationship, but I didn’t ask them to postpone till a better time.

Instead I handled the stress by getting a fierce migraine, the only full–fledged migraine I’ve ever had. It was so disabling that my doctor put me in the hospital for three days. My friend Linda came in and spent hours with me.

The day after I got home and was back in action she said, “You know, I liked you better when you were sick.” I understood she was saying something profound. I wasn’t shocked or ashamed, I just felt the truth of her statement. But I had no idea what to do with it. I couldn’t put it to work. So I tucked it away in my memory and moved on.

I get it now, though. It takes a whole lot of energy to keep yourself shut down, but the migraine had wiped me out, and that’s why, by default not by decision, I was suddenly vulnerable, and why Linda and I could have sweet, sweet moments at the hospital. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember the surprising feeling of closeness. Something I longed for. Yet the minute I got my energy back I got my defenses back.

David, though, was an expert at breaking down defenses. He was kinder than a migraine, but relentless. Breakdown to breakthrough, that was the name of the game.

There was a discipline you had to agree to. You lived in a motel across the street from the Center for the initial three weeks. Every morning you went in for a two–hour session. But otherwise you had to go cold turkey on ordinary life with its compulsive busyness. You weren’t allowed to read, listen to the radio, talk with anyone, or do anything except sit there and look at your screwed up life. It was the opposite of a meditation retreat where you get to empty your mind and stare contentedly into nothingness.

The discipline was rigorous, but I was a hard case, so it took me ten grueling days to break. On the day before Thanksgiving, at the end of our session that morning, David asked me how I thought I was doing, like what grade I’d give myself on my therapy.

I told him, “I get a B.”

“I think that’s about right. How is it for you to get a B?”

“My friends who have gone through this therapy before me each came back home with an A–plus. But me, just like always, I’m putting in the work, I’m following the rules, I’m diligent, but the heart of it, that part I just don’t get, not with this or with anything.”

After the session, I drove off to a silent, solo lunch at King Henry VIII burgers. When I got back to the motel, I sat in the car for half an hour not wanting to face whatever was waiting for me inside. Once back in my room, I looked at my lonely chair, paced a bit, then made myself sit, and instantly, not wanting to, started crying, then sobbing, then whispering into the sobbing, “I hurt, I hurt.”

Such a little thing, such a big thing. I had never admitted to having feelings. How could I be an emotional virgin at twenty–six? Well, I had been taught from early on how to smother feelings. And I did that with extraordinary dedication and skill. Now, though, I let myself sink into the hurting, deeper and deeper. And finally I understood. It was so simple. The more I could feel for myself, the more I wanted to fight for myself.

This was the turning point, but it was not salvation. It did not fix my life. It woke me up, that’s all. It got me one big step into consciousness. I’ll be forever grateful to the Center and to David for that gift, but there was still a long journey ahead of me.

I started calling my new kind of vulnerability primal, as in primal tenderness. But why that word? Because in my own personal lexicon “primal” means babies, it means our earliest, deepest need for love, a life–and–death need.

And how do babies experience love? If you stand over a baby’s crib and tell her in earnest, flowery poetics how much you care about her, that means nothing. Maybe the sound of your voice will soothe her, but the meaning of your words won’t reach her.

But if you provide milk, cuddling, warmth, wiping, bathing, and attention, lots and lots of attention, then she will feel your love, body and soul. When we meet their need for nurturance, that’s the language babies understand. And, nurturance, it seems to me is still the primal language of human beings no matter how old we get.

Babies are really good at asking for what they need. They may not have sophisticated verbal skills, but they’re tenacious communicators. If they’re hungry, they cry to get our attention. If no one comes, they keep on crying, but now there’s an angry edge. But if still no one comes, the anger subsides into distress. And then if they continue to suffer neglect, the crying stops and they slip into a terrible, defeated silence.

Studies at orphanages where there were too many babies and too few caretakers show that babies can actually die from lack of touch and attention. They can die from despair.

In my mid–20s, before I got myself into therapy, I took a job working with children in a psych hospital. I did okay with the little kids, but I was out of my depth with the teens.

I cared about them but I had no idea how to help them. I was too much of a lost soul myself. The people in charge of the program never should have let me work there. But too many of them had no idea what they were doing either so I guess I didn’t stand out that much.

After I got into my own therapy, though, I noticed I started having a little more to offer. And I began to make a shift. I stopped being impressed when the doctors assigned the kids compound–complex diagnoses. Which were too often judgmental and unfriendly.

As I listened to the kids tell me the stories of their lives, I began to hear a common theme. Most of them were not getting the basic, primal kind of nurturance they needed. And they were hurting behind that, and suffering damage. And lots of them acted out. Which I began to appreciate, because I realized it was better to protest than to shut down and suffer silently. Let me tell you about Daniel…

This story began when I was working on the locked inpatient unit at the hospital. I came to work Christmas morning and found Daniel under the tree. He had been dropped off the night before by his fourth foster mother and would be going home to his fifth. He had just turned six. He was sitting there staring at nothing.

I got him up and got him talking, and right away I could tell he was a kind, sincere child. Over the next days, Kathy, a nurse on the unit, and I became so attached to him that we cooked up a fantasy plan. We’d adopt him together. He’d stay with her for a week then me for a week. That way we could still have our lives but we could take care of this sweet boy.

Six months later, after I had transferred across the street to work in the outpatient day treatment center, in comes our social worker with Daniel in tow. He was being referred to us. I claimed him as my assignment and we fell into a comfortable routine.

But one morning he arrived pissy and pushy, very unlike himself, so I took him over to a corner to talk to him. He descended into a full–blown tantrum, yelling, and threatening to kick. I started feeling pissy and pushy myself, then saw it: “Oh, this is direct transmission. He’s making me feel as bad as he feels.”

And now he was really fighting me, and I thought, “This is how acting out goes wrong. This is how a kid gets himself punished instead of helped.” But I knew Daniel was not asking to be punished, so I scooped him up and hauled him into the classroom next door, which was dark and quiet.

I knelt down, holding him in my arms. His angry tantrum turned into a storm of crying. He squirmed around so he had me cradling him like a baby. I told him, “It’s okay. I’ll hold you till you’re ready to get down.” He cried and sobbed for ten more minutes. Which was a very long time because I wasn’t absolutely sure I was doing the right thing.

Then he slumped and slid to the floor where he lay quietly face down while I rubbed his back. I told him, “When you’re ready, you can get up and go join the other kids. They’re doing art.”

Another long ten minutes with no word from him. Then he lifted himself into a crouch, paused for a minute, and got to his feet, not quite steady, like Rip Van Winkle after his twenty–year sleep. Then he opened the door, walked into the day room, and found his place at the table.

I brought him a piece of giant paper and a double box of crayons and sat next to him. He drew a house. He put the mother downstairs in the kitchen and a little boy with his own exact color of hair upstairs, asleep in bed. Then he drew a man at the front door of the house and was done. Keeping his eyes on the picture, he said, “The burglar breaks into the house, kills the mother, and the little boy is all alone.”

And there we sat, face to face with the core issue of his short life, losing mothers one after the other. And now Daniel, at least for this day, was done with acting out, found the peace he was looking for, and could enjoy being a kid.

It’s so common for an abandoned child to turn against himself and go down the path of self–destruction. But Daniel, only six years old, and without any conscious plan, engineered a journey deep into his pain then back out to a place of peace. I provided support, but he was the one who took the journey. And in the process, he gave himself a bit of the mothering he needed.

And what strikes me as I’m writing this is that Daniel used his fight to open himself up, whereas at his age, I was using my fight to shut myself down.

As time when on, I habituated to my therapy, so it stopped working. I went through the motions but my heart wasn’t in it.

And I got discouraged with hospital work. I began to want to do something to prevent injury so kids wouldn’t have to spend years of their lives struggling to fix the damage done to them.

My dear friend Kate and I found out about a prevention program in Ohio. It taught kids how to get away from kidnappers and molesters. It taught them how to get help for themselves and their families if they were dealing with sexual, physical, or emotional abuse at home. We decided to bring this program to California and replicate it all over the state.

We went into the schools, classroom by classroom, to teach children prevention skills. In short, we were teaching them self–defense. Or you could say it like this…

We were teaching kids to fight for themselves.

Some people told us we shouldn’t do that, because kids are no match for adults who decide to hurt them. But just because you don’t have as much power as someone else does not mean that when you’re in danger you can’t use every bit of the power you do have to fight for yourself.

And we got to meet kids who, from what they learned in our one–hour workshop, were able to get away from very dangerous guys. If you interview child molesters, they’ll tell you almost universally…

“I was looking for a submissive child.”

They looked for a child who was hurting, a child they could count on not to fight them.

The same is true for kidnappers. They usually have a very small window, sometimes just a matter of seconds, to take a child. And if that child does her special safety yell, and she’s able to break his grip, and then run, run, run for help, the kidnapper will usually get out of there and go looking for an easier catch.

Kate and I became evangelists for children’s safety. We went around our state, helping people set up programs in their cities and counties. At our peak, with all of us working together, we were able to get state funding and…

Over the course of five years, four million children got prevention training.

So it was thrilling. But exhausting. I put everything I had into this work. And then more than what I had. I was at it till late in the evening. I worked through weekends. In fact…

I went twelve years without taking a whole week of vacation at once.

I felt noble doing this, but it was so bad for me. I had a meager personal life.

Sometimes people would ask me why I was so driven. Were you abused as a child? I always answered no. And I wasn’t abused, not like the kind of abuse our program targeted…

But I did have this hole in my heart.

So I identified with kids who were getting hurt.

I look back at my years at the hospital and it’s clear to me that I was acting out. I was trying to give kids what I needed myself. My years doing prevention activism was no different. It was another long episode of acting out. I was trying to teach kids how to fight for themselves. But I still hadn’t really learned how to fight for myself, not the way I needed to.

I remember telling a friend…

“I feel like I have to save the world first, then I can make a cozy nest for me.”

I heard myself say that and it gave me pause in the moment. But I didn’t understand how serious a red flag that statement was.

In those days, I could listen for hours to horror stories about kids being abused and I could remain on an even keel. But when I went out into the community to do a presentation about our program and told success stories to my audience, stories of kids getting away from danger or getting help, that’s when I choked up and got tears behind my eyes. I could tell the same story again and again and it would get to me every time.

Finally state politics intervened. The Governor cut us from the budget, and when our funding crashed, I crashed. My identity was so merged with my work, that if I couldn’t keep doing it, who was I?

So I took a hard look at my life and saw that I was still stuck down at the end of a very familiar dead-end street.

This is when I got to the turning point in my life and launched myself on my mission to upgrade love—the next episode of my fight bio—and learned to…

Put fight into the heart of my love.

1.7  The part of you that always loves you enough to fight for you