15

Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation.

—MOTHER TERESA

Dan was less interested in my words than in the spaces between my words. What I chose not to say captivated him more than what I said.

Several months into our work together, I arrived for our weekly appointment and Dan was already in his chair. Though my depression and anxiety continued, there were periods when the darkness thinned and shafts of light broke through the cloud. No matter how brief, the appearance of those beams kept me going.

Dan gestured to the couch and held his finger to his lips to remind me we were beginning our session with silence. There was a grandfather clock in the corner behind my couch. The steady thrum of its pendulum was soothing. Three minutes later, Dan took a deep, cleansing breath and exhaled loudly enough to signal that our time of quiet was over.

“Ian, I want to speak to you about your drinking,” he said.

My throat tightened. “Why?” I asked.

“Dr. Ashwood told me that during your physical he noticed that your liver was enlarged.”

I shifted positions to try to get more comfortable. It didn’t work. “So?”

“He thinks you drink too much,” he said.

“When did he tell you this?”

“He called me before your first visit.”

I opened my palms toward Dan. “So why didn’t you ask me about it the first time we met?”

He looked deep into me. “Would you have come back?” he said.

I couldn’t argue the point.

“So let’s begin again,” he said. “Tell me about your drinking.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “I don’t drink as much as my father did,” I said.

“He’s our benchmark?” he asked. Dan was never sarcastic. It cut.

“I don’t drink much,” I said. Then there was silence, followed by more silence until I couldn’t endure it. “I’ve had times when drinking was a problem and times when it wasn’t,” I said.

I’d never used the words problem and drinking in the same sentence before. “When was it a problem?” Dan asked.

I pressed my eyes with my fingers. “The first time I tried it was a problem,” I said. I gave him the blow-by-blow of that story. “I was afraid of drinking after that, so I smoked pot instead.”

Dan laughed. “Healthy alternative,” he said. The humor was a welcome relief.

“And then I stopped both for a few years,” I said.

“Why?”

“Dan, I love getting high. I actually looked forward to getting my wisdom teeth out because I knew they would give me Vicodin after the surgery. But partying was also about me looking for attention from my father. It didn’t work, so I decided to become a star student.”

“When did you start drinking again?”

“I don’t know—end of my sophomore year, maybe the beginning of my junior year in high school. Somewhere around then.” I fingered one of the buttons on the arm of the couch.

“What prompted your picking up again?” he asked. I’d heard the phrase “picking up” a week earlier, when I’d seen my former drinking pals Terrence and Landon. It had been over a year since we’d hung out. They were both in recovery. Terrence had joined AA around the time Landon’s parents checked him into a rehab in Minnesota. He’d been sober for six months.

I stood up and walked behind the couch, placing my hands on the back of it. “I made friends with a bunch of guys who were really popular. If you wanted to hang with them, you had to party. I already told you that drinking made it easier to face my father when I came home at night. What else do you want me to say?” I asked.

Dan ignored my question. There was little hope I could wrest control of this conversation from him.

“And why are you drinking so much now?” Dan asked.

In the years between college and starting my full-time work in youth ministry, I worked to contain my drinking, with the occasional slip. I hadn’t touched drugs since college. It’s hard to make a case for social drugging.

I never drank and got behind the wheel. My ministry would be finished if I got caught. If I was lit or worse, I’d be sure Anne drove. But if the police could bust you for DUI in your house, I’d be screwed. The anxiety and depression had made keeping a lid on drinking more difficult. I told myself that I needed several more drinks to sleep through the night. Now drinking was both recreational and medicinal.

I came to bed one night with a glass of white wine.

Anne’s face darkened. “What are you doing?” she asked. “You said you hated that wine the other night.”

“It tastes better with ice,” I said.

“Ian, that glass is huge,” she said. “And I’ve never seen you bring a drink to bed.”

“It’s mostly ice,” I said. I’d purposely put ice in the glass, hoping it would disguise how much wine was in it.

“We need to talk about this,” she said.

Our premarital counselor had advised us not to tackle heavy issues in bed, but rather to wait till morning.

God bless him.

Dan put his legal pad and pencil on the antique side table next to his chair. “I won’t see you again until you stop drinking,” he said.

I sat back down on the couch. “Why?”

“Three reasons,” he said. He held up a finger to enumerate each. “First, you’re an alcoholic. Second, you’re an alcoholic. Third, you’re an alcoholic.”

The first time he said it was the knife going into my abdomen. The next time twisted the knife. The last time was the upward thrust to ensure that my survival was impossible.

I leaned forward. “That’s crap,” I said. “Do you have any idea what a real alcoholic looks like?”

He didn’t blink. “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” he said. “I’ll have thirty years of sobriety next year.”

“You go to AA? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The second word in AA is Anonymous, Ian. I don’t tell people I’m in recovery unless I feel it will help them get sober as well.”

I fell against the back of the couch and looked up at the ceiling. I was pinned. There was only one way out. I sat forward again. “Maybe we could use a break,” I said.

I had expected Dan to back down or ask me to reconsider. Instead, he stood and extended his hand before I had time to get up. “Call when you’re ready to see me again,” he said.

As I walked down the hall, I heard him close the door to his office behind me. The sound reverberated down the hallway. Taking a break is a good idea, I thought. I rolled my shoulders like a defiant boxer readying himself to get back into the ring.

My heart skipped a beat as I realized I was now fighting alone.

It was New Year’s Eve. My sister invited Anne and me to join her and a group of friends to celebrate. The night started on the wrong foot and ended with no footing at all. I didn’t realize what an anchor Dan had been. After a month of not seeing him, I’d stretched further from my mooring than I realized. My depression and anxiety had crawled back into my life, and my emotions were brittle. I’d begun hiding bottles in the garage to make sure there would always be alcohol on hand. As usual, Caroline had brought together a group of smart, interesting, and fun people. One of them had brought two magnums of expensive champagne as a gift. I enjoyed drinking most of one, and my sister and the remaining guests the other.

One of her friends raised his glass to me. “Your brother loves champagne,” he said.

My sister arched one eyebrow at me. “Apparently,” she said.

Anne glowered. She had been watching the speed and quantity of my consumption and was running a flag up the pole to say, Slow down or else.

Too late. We’d boarded an express train, not a local. It wasn’t making stops.

It was a classic blackout. The next morning I couldn’t remember anything that happened after arriving at Caroline’s apartment. But Anne and Caroline were only too happy to fill in the details. It had been only 10 p.m. when my livid sister called a limousine service to drive her incoherent brother and his humiliated wife from Manhattan to Connecticut.

“Stopping isn’t one of Ian’s gifts,” she’d told her friends as she helped Anne pour me into the back of the car.

She called the next day to tell me I was “socially indigestible.”

Anne said the ninety-minute drive brought fresh meaning to the expression “hell on wheels.” I threw up several times out the car window, and I wouldn’t stop apologizing to her and the scowling driver. He told Anne that if she weren’t in the car, he would’ve left me on the side of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

“You call Dan and make an appointment, or I will,” Anne said.

I went to the bedroom and called him. He sounded neither surprised nor unsurprised when I called; he was simply gracious.

“You’ll stop drinking, at least while we’re continuing to meet?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Excellent. I keep an office at my church. Can we meet at five thirty? I have an appointment there at seven,” he said.

I was hesitant. It was an Episcopal church several towns away, and I knew people there, including the rector. I didn’t want anyone knowing the Young Life guy was seeing a psychologist, but I didn’t feel like I was in a position to push back.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

When Dan opened the door to his office and hugged me, I was so surprised and warmed by his kindness that I forgot to raise my arms to embrace him in return.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.

As I’d expected, Dan had us begin with a time of silence. I missed the soothing sound of the grandfather clock at Dan’s other office, but the quiet alone was calming.

Dan crossed his legs. “Let’s begin where we left off,” he said. “I asked you the question, ‘Why are you drinking so much now?’”

I’d spent a month thinking about that question.

“I have all these feelings, Dan,” I said. An upsurge of despair rose suddenly from the depths of me unlike any despair I’d experienced—and that’s saying something. My sobs came from my core. By the time I could speak again, my stomach muscles were cramped and sore.

“I failed,” I said. “I never got him to love me, and now he’s dead. All my life, I felt that it was my fault he was an alcoholic. It was up to me to get him to stop. If only I’d been a better son, a smarter student, a more talented musician, maybe he’d have found the will to turn his life around so he could show up for mine. Is there something so rotten and hateful about me that he couldn’t bring himself to see me, to love me, to even touch me? My head knows it wasn’t my fault he was an alcoholic and that it wasn’t up to me to fix him, but my heart doesn’t believe it. He’s gone. Now there’s no hope of making him love me. Ever.”

I buried my face in my hands. Soon I felt someone take a seat next to me. Dan placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Ian, look at me,” he said.

I raised my head and turned. I expected to find Dan’s eyes spilling over with empathy. Instead, I found something more: the sort of eyes God gives only to seventy-year-old men who have faced their own demons and survived.

“I see you,” he said, “and you’re beautiful.”

Any carnival worth its salt has a Whac-A-Mole game. The Whac-A-Mole machine is a waist-high cabinet with five holes, inside of which there are plastic moles that randomly pop up with increasing speed. The object of the game is to force the moles back down their holes by whacking them on the head with a soft mallet handed to you earlier by the carnival employee, who is also the last remaining person on earth who smokes Kools. In order to win, you need to reach 150 points in the allotted time.

As a kid I learned to manage my feelings according to the rules of Whac-A-Mole. When an emotion like anger, sadness, disappointment, grief, or even happiness popped up, I whacked it back down its hole as fast as I could before I could feel it or, worse, express it. If I wanted to survive the unpredictability of my father’s craziness, I had to push my feelings underground. I had to numb them, deny them, bury them, or minimize them. How could I endure the barrage of disappointments and trauma if I let myself feel them?

After a while, I clobbered my feelings so many times that some stopped coming up altogether. Now and again one would try to claw its way up, but it would be so slow and woozy that I could hardly bring myself to whack it again. But rules are rules, so I had to let him have it.

After my father died, and Anne and I were settling into a stable home, my emotions decided it was safe to wake up and start the game over. To make up for lost time, they started popping up faster than I could whack them. I was flooded with emotions I couldn’t contain anymore, and the result was overpowering anxiety and depression.

Of all the feelings that awakened in me, grief was the hardest. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to face the backlog of my losses: the father I wanted but didn’t have, the wrecked holidays, the loss of a reasonably normal childhood, and the loss of trust in myself and other people, to name a few. Dan and I did the hard work of unearthing memories and giving them the tears they deserved. I can’t get a refund for the Christmas Eve when Dad fell through the decorated tree, but I can honor the story by telling it, and that is its own reward.

It’s been twenty-four years since my last drink. My children have never gone to bed wondering if I love them. They have never heard my approaching footsteps and felt afraid.

My greatest sin now is how infrequently I say, “Thank you.”

Years ago I met a retired psychiatrist named Dr. Carlton who told me he’d treated my father in the 1970s. He told me my father had suffered from a serious illness called narcissistic personality disorder. There are competing opinions of how someone develops NPD. One is that narcissists experienced profound emotional deprivation as young children, destroying their self-esteem. They compensate for the absence of self-worth they feel by acting as if they have an overabundance of it. They are grandiose, they expect to be treated as superior to other people, they act entitled, they can’t admit wrongdoing, they never apologize because they’re never to blame, and their hunger for admiration and attention is insatiable. The one trait all narcissists possess is the inability to recognize or give importance to other people’s emotions and feelings. They are incapable of feeling empathy, so they can’t love, not even their own children.

I asked this psychiatrist how my father could hold down important jobs or work for the CIA if he was so ill.

“At first blush, full-blown narcissists are charming; they come off as competent and confident. They are natural entertainers, outgoing and flattering,” he said. “Half the entertainers you love, and even some of the people who run our government, have more narcissistic traits than the average person. More than a few are pathologically narcissistic.”

“What about my dad’s work in the intelligence services? How did he fool them?”

“I know a number of men who worked for the CIA in its early years. I’m told it was loaded with alcoholics. No one can compartmentalize his life or live secretively as well as a good alcoholic. And I imagine people who can’t feel empathy must come in handy when certain tasks have to be performed.” He paused for a moment. “Ian, your dad was miserable. He was empty, self-loathing, and more fragile than you can imagine. It wasn’t about you.”

It wasn’t about you. Shame, the belief that God regrets creating you, is like a weather pattern that descends upon a mountain. I once believed I was the weather. Turns out, I’m the mountain.