Emotion has only recently gotten a foot inside the academy and we still don’t know whether we want to give it a seminar room, a lecture hall, or just a closet we can air out now and then (Behar, 16).
Sometimes you got in the middle, trying to keep the peace. Never knowing what was going to happen, you always felt somewhat desperate. …You learned quickly to keep your father’s drinking to yourself, as your stomach churned, you felt tight inside, you cried into the night – if you could still cry (Woititz, 10,11).
Any subsequent shame experience which even vaguely resembles that past trauma can easily trigger the words and scenes of said trauma. …As the years go by, very little is needed to trigger these collages of shame memories. A word, a similar facial expression or scene, can set it off (Bradshaw, 13).
I have an unwanted associate who is with me most of my waking hours. And he affects who I am and how I behave. Since this is a memoir about race and relationship, it’s important to meet him now. Sometimes he’s standing right in front of me, challenging me eyeball to eyeball, ready to drop down and crush me. Sometimes, his presence is more subtle like when he stands off to the side, whispering an ongoing commentary as everyday life events unfold. At other times, he disappears, becomes invisible, and then emerges in my consciousness the puppeteer of me the puppet. Today he stands nearby. That doesn’t surprise me. I knew he ‘d stick around for this chapter because he knows I’ll be writing about him. I’ve learned he doesn’t like me to talk with others about his influence over me. He doesn’t like to be outed or to have his story shared. He knows his power in helping me interpret my life the way he would have it be lessens with the sharing. I knew he’d be present and accounted for as I dug into writing our narrative. Lately, at odd times, he’s insistently raised what for him must be the question of the hour: “Who will be interested in what you have to say about race? Who will care? And who are you to be writing about this stuff. You’re white after all. What do you know?” My associate is Dr. Shame. The answer he whispers to my ear? “No one will care. You know nothing of what you write.”
Listening to a child of an alcoholic parent bare his soul can seem unbearably self-absorbed and even boringly predictable. Why talk about it? Of what use is it? Dr. Shame tells me that putting the circumstance of an alcoholic life on the table will be heard as a whimper for pity, a request for special consideration, an invocation to have these stories imbued with a kind of unique importance, especially when the intended audience is as much academic as it is popular. He clearly doesn’t want me to put his “stuff” out there for others to think about. And believe me, the doubt he’s created as I’ve thought about including his role in this story of identity formation has been formidable. I’ve vacillated mightily whether or not to include this particular circumstance of my growing up. Ultimately, I decided Dr. Shame had to be a part of this story. He’s here because my adjustment to the alcoholic Dad/husband in our family’s midst was a compounding dynamic in the formation of my identity. I need to be conscious of the behaviors I developed to cope with my familial matrix. Even though I’m now living out of that matrix physically, and have done so for forty years, I am continually triggered by its psychic presence. These coping behaviors formed a communication style in our family, a style typified by secrecy, denial, lying to the outer world, and dis-engagement from the emotions of the daily reality that was our family life. To excise them from this memoir would be to omit critical explanatory dynamics in my identity formation.
I also know there are many of “us” out there whether or not we’ve pursued the peculiar role alcoholism played in our family histories. There is a piece of me that believes this writing might be a useful read for other educators similarly challenged. If you can use this part of my story to help identify the ways you avoid the discomfort and embarrassment of being “found out,” you might see this chapter as an invitation to begin living a healthier existence. Any time we know more about why we do what we do, and then chose to do something about it, life has got to get at least a little better. I’d hope you agree. The events I recall might ring a few useful bells.
Writing about alcoholism conjures up images that all there is to be said about learning to live with a diseased parent is mostly bad. Not at all. At least not for me. In fact, I think the alcoholism in my family helped ready me for the profession with which I am now so thoroughly enamored. But it’s taken me ample portions of counseling over the course of my adult life to figure out some of the reverberations that still play in the behavioral repertoire that originated within my familial constellation. Dr. Shame goes after my self-worth voraciously. I had to understand the dynamics of adjustment that drained my positive regard before I could learn how to better spot and deal with his creative assaults. Once this became part of my weekly workouts, I was then more able to admit that learning to cope with so challenging a parent as my Dad had an up side as well. I’ll try to keep it short, and useful, and relevant to the more central story of an older white guy’s racial identity renovation project.
The Down Side
He wasn’t always Dr. Shame. For a long time, he had no name. He just lived inside me, hidden in form and shape, but very present in the feelings I had about my capacities and capabilities. I’ve come to know him as the author of my text of Self, a text that reads something like this.
Charlie, you’re an okay person. You’ve got a bunch of talents that you’ve used pretty well, especially in your younger life. But fundamentally, you really aren’t very smart. You’re a great doer, and you get bunches of things done, probably too many at any one time. You seem to teach pretty well, but you’ll never hold your own in intellectual combat. Your memory is awful, and if you were ever really honest with yourself, you’d admit you aren’t very knowledgeable about your fields of endeavor. You haven’t had an original thought in your life. You are wise to refuse to challenge authority. Any challenge you brought forward would only result in your considerable shortcomings being revealed to the world. The best way to be is quiet. Appear reflective. In that way others might conclude you are smart. And by all means, focus on being liked.
The most important word in that last paragraph is the verb “to be.” Shame is not so much the result of my doing something stupid. That result would better be called guilt. Guilt can be resolved by acts of recompense or restitution. Shame is a way of being. Shame is my way of being. It isn’t about what I do; it’s about who I am. Ouch! That difference is critical and can be crushing. Even living a life of daily watchfulness, shame doesn’t disappear. At the very best, an aware life, the life that gives me the greatest opportunity to live freely, spontaneously, and full of hope, is a life negotiated with Shame. Shame will sit on the sidelines quietly, but only after I put him in his place. I lessen his base of power by recognizing him, by sharing him, and by listening to his presence in the lives of my friends and sharing with them his power over me. He doesn’t like being outed. He doesn’t like his power made public. He knows that talking about his ways shrinks his power over me. Outing shame reduces his control over being.
Diminished shame, not disappeared shame. Shame never disappears. It is also my experience that unattended, shame regenerates its power. He wants you to keep it all inside. Tell yourself how bad you are. Feel awful because you can’t possibly (fill in the blank). Unshared, shame wreaks havoc with the soul. Having achieved this realization has led to an overall diminution of his power in my life. He requires either a pretty good stimulus now to give me a beating or he can catch me at a time when I am tired and worn down physically. I fully believe our emotional and physical and spiritual lives intertwine as Watson and Crick’s DNA molecule. And the relationship is probably as hard wired. An honest mistake on my part and a shocked reaction by my wife (just for instance) can call him out with sirens blaring. And he’ll take me over. I feel blasted, get quiet, hang my head, suppress my anger while showing in all kinds of ways that I am angry, and call myself at least fifteen different versions of stupid. Sometimes, for days. And sometimes, he is so damn subtle that even the suffering feels good! How bad is that?!?
Since learning to externalize him, these fairly dramatic mood shifts happen much less although situations that evoked his presence in the past can call him forward now whether I want him to come out or not. I’ve learned it isn’t that he’s gone. It’s just that I can outflank him by externalizing his presence and keep him at bay more easily. None of this is easy. It’s hard and emotionally draining having to be aware of his presence so much of the time. But it’s all about the jumpstart — controlling him before he controls me. I have an even to better chance of living joyfully when he’s in his proper place.
One of the things Shame has done to me is to destroy the place in my brain where compliments go to be accepted and honored. When people give me honest positive feedback, it’s almost as if I simply don’t believe it. I can hear the words, but they have no cerebral home. There isn’t a “Charlie, you’re an accomplished (fill in the blank)!” schema in my brain. Positive comments form few synaptic connections and fewer memory structures. David Amen’s[i] SPECT brain scan visually registers cumulative brain activity over time. By looking at comparison photographs of regions of the brain during rest and during stress, he can see changes in activity and functionality. I wish he’d do that with me. I’d predict my brain activity drops significantly when I hear a compliment or my work earns kudos. I simply do not hear it / believe it. This circumstance feels physiological.
Over my life, this inability has had obvious effects. I don’t ever feel very successful or acknowledged. Objectively, the reality of my life is quite the opposite. I’ve had some notable successes, enjoyed some lovely compliments, and earned my fair share of kudos. But none of these have functioned to give me confidence. Quite the opposite, in fact. The cycle of shame worked in such a way as to make me feel more unworthy! That’s the “being” part. If something you do is recognized as being really good or worthwhile, then something must be wrong or will go wrong soon. Something must be wrong because a priori you do not have the capacity to do these neat things. Such a destructive pattern!
Frankly, this twisted appraisal mechanism is another reason I have put off the writing of this text. Dr. Shame ran all kinds of anticipatory thoughts and feelings through my head, most of them flashing neon negative messages: “You??! So what about your identity development! Who cares? Now some people’s critical recall would be interesting to read, people like Oprah or Denzel, or even George! But yours? Who will care about what you have to say? You are just a university professor for God’s sake. Besides, it’s a narrative, soft research, one story among a million. Forget it!”
With a lot of work, I’ve learned to put Shame in his place most of the time when he starts talking to me like this. Just like I did when kids would give me guff in the classroom. What I’d figured out then is, “Hell, I don’t like it when any person talks to me that way, much less thirteen and fourteen year old kids! Why should I take it just because the speakers are seventh and eighth graders? Just because I’m their teacher doesn’t mean they have license to call me out in any way they want.” Forty years later I figured out just because insults come from this weird guy called Dr. Shame doesn’t mean they are any more accurate! Like with the kids, I look him in the eye, face him down, direct him back to his place on the margin of my existence, and go on. He goes. He even goes faster if I tell someone else what I’m doing. By the way, that’s not really what I did with the kids. The only similarity is the realization that I didn’t have to “take it,” either from them (an easily identifiable external presence) or from this Shame Dude (a less identifiable internal presence).
The Origins of My Shame Identity
I remember when I first realized my Mom’s description of Dad “not feeling well” was her euphemism for “he’s been drinking again.” I was seven or eight years old. She and I had driven downtown to attend an evening Colgate basketball game. It was 1949 or 1950. I think the Red Raiders were playing Princeton of the cool orange tiger-striped uniforms. Games were held on the beautiful old wooden court on Huntington Gymnasium’s second floor. My Dad’s University Physician office was in that large stone building, a structure that had been present when he attended Colgate. It was a place I loved to visit. The smell of Rourke’s Liniment, the sounds of basketballs pounding the floor, shouts and grunts coming from the squash courts, the easy conversations among the trainers and equipment specialists, the odor of a freshly lacquered floor, being in the midst of oh so cool athletes (any athlete was cool to the young me), it all seemed like a very comfortable, even heavenly kind of place to be.
That particular night Mom and I had traveled through snow to get there, a journey of two and a half miles. I think we were still driving the gray ’41 Plymouth Coupe, a very, very cool car to own. (I wish I’d kept all those cars. I’d be a millionaire by now…the 1950 maroon Mercury coupe, the 1936 two-tone green Packard coupe, the 1953 Packard Clipper, but I digress.) The routine was that we’d go to our seats courtside and watch the game. We’d see Dad but he would never sit with us. He’d barely acknowledge us, actually. He rarely sat with his wife or family at any athletic events. That’s just the way he was. At basketball games, we’d find him overhead, looking through the arches on the third floor of the gym, arches that defined one side of a hallway. Opposite the arch were squash courts. Earlier that evening, Mom had said Dad wasn’t feeling very well so she didn’t know if we’d see him at all that night. I didn’t know how she knew that but I felt a familiar twinge in my tummy. I knew intuitively that “Not feeling well” signaled Dad was acting strange for some reason other than sickness. Those words were Mom’s code language for Dad not walking quite right, standing funny, speaking louder than usual, and being more on edge than he normally was. To be brutally frank about it, he wasn’t a pleasant man in many situations until the last months of his life but when he “wasn’t feeling well,” he could really be unpleasant. I felt, again intuitively – none of this was ever put into words – his condition seemed to hurt my Mom’s feelings. I felt her tension, the way a seven or eight-year-old kid might take it on. Even then, I wished it could be better for her. That I could make it better for her.
That particular night, some time during the second half of the game, I looked up and over my shoulder and sure enough, there was Dad leaning against the stone of one of the arches just behind and above us. He wasn’t near, but he was close enough to see. I remember just sneaking stares at him when I could. (I didn’t want Mom to know what I was doing. I wanted to protect her feelings and I knew there was a secret here that I wasn’t supposed to be let in on.) But it came to me in one of those prolonged periods of study of the man’s strangeness. It wasn’t as though I was actively figuring it out. It was more like a slow dawning. The concept just simply rose in my mind and I knew what “not feeling well” meant. It meant Dad had been drinking. He was showing the effects of alcohol. Seven or eight years old and in slow motion, it all snapped into place.
Now I had an explanation for the weird things that seemed to happen. How he could be my normal Dad in the morning and then some evenings, be this other Dad. How some evenings he could be his normally quiet, routine self, sitting in the chair when he got home, reading the paper, smoking his classy silver-banded Peterson bent, and then be so argumentative and opinionated and demanding other evenings. I had an explanation for why sometimes I’d feel such worry for my Mom, particularly on dark winter nights when Dad was out. It wasn’t that she was worried about whether he could drive in snow. That was one of my “before I knew” thoughts. It was “could he drive in the snow in the ‘condition’ he was in?” She was always worried about his effect on others, his job. Could he do his job while in his “condition?” I remember there were times he’d get a phone call, he’d be in his chair, and she’d say he wasn’t there. I remember once responding, “Yes he was.” But she waved me off and I never corrected that error again. And I might add, the wave-off was without explanation. That’s what I mean about secrecy, lying, keeping quiet even with each other about what was going on. That’s what families of alcoholics do.[ii]
Mostly, we never talked about it. At least in my younger years. As I hit high school, especially my last two years of high school, Mom and I would talk. I began to use the word “alcoholic” and “alcohol”, but that was hard for her. It was as if she didn’t want to confirm that I was right. I think that silence was probably about her keeping her own self safe from the embarrassing truth. So she and I had an ongoing secret conversation about it all, sort of. The conversations were mostly problem solving in-the-moment conversations. They weren’t about alcohol counseling, or family dynamics, or any of that. We were a classic alcoholic family. We kept our secret to ourselves, we didn’t share our feelings, we didn’t talk about it, we pretended every thing was okay. And as time went on, we were increasingly isolated from friends and other family members. I can count on two hands the number of times family came to call or we visited family. It just wasn’t done. One or two visits with the other Dr. R. were enough to keep people away. My mother was a woman of enormous kindness and dignity and I think family just didn’t want to embarrass her by putting her in a situation where she would have to be party to the obvious fact that yes, sometimes, Doc Rathbone, the man she had married, for better or for worse, was a drunk.
Learning To Cope With Shame
So that’s how Dr. Shame came into my being, the embarrassment of unexplained crazy situations, situations where things happened that I had absolutely no rational control over. I have lots of stories about how I learned that I exercised precious little control over how things in my life would turn out. Here’s one. Mom and I had planned a party for a day Dad was going to be away. It was a skating party. My friends would come, we’d play some games, eat some milk and cookies, have a spaghetti dinner, dig into one of my Mom’s sugar frosted cakes, and hit the skating rink. I must have been about eleven years old. I look back on this now and think my Mom planned this because of the fact that I rarely had friends to the house. It was a time to reciprocate, a Thursday night during school vacation. A time that was safe. Dad went to New York City for a couple of days every two weeks and this was one of his weeks. Well, he never left. He got into a particularly bad bout of “his condition” and showed up in the middle of the party. Mom had me shut the glass doors around the dining room cake cutting as she and my brother ushered Dad through the library room, through the living room, and up the back stairs to their bedroom. I was near to throwing up with the tension of the moment. I heard his awful slurring deep guttural voice that I can still re-call into consciousness. I knew my friends could hear him. I knew it would take very little for them to figure out what was going on. I could hear him shouting at my brother while they played a really stupid game of handshaking. I think Dad was trying to teach John how to shake hands, one of those moments of absolute drunken stupidity. One of those moments that no matter how good a kid you were, you had to deal. We cut the cake and left for the rink much too early in the evening and I never had another party at my home after that.
I did have lots of friends in school growing up but I only talked about the drinking to Bobby, my one good buddy. His Dad owned the downtown Red and White grocery store. We used to go there after Boy Scouts and call for our rides. He and I talked about stuff. Bobby knew, but no one else. Of course that wasn’t the truth, either. It was a small town and a small college. Lots of people knew or suspected. I would hear jokes about by Dad from students during movies in the local movie theater. But at the same time, I knew know one really knew. For a long time, I told no one else.
So I grew up ashamed of a condition I had no control over. Always worried about what people would think of me. My Mom modeled that for me. Her worry became my worry. It was constant, but I avoided the feelings that were connected with the worry and never let myself feel for very long what it was like. I avoided feeling by staying busy, active, always moving on to the next thing to do, or always plotting a way around intransigence before it rose up to challenge me. I avoided discord however I could. All these adjustments became my way of coping with daily life and unchecked; they remain so to this very day. They are my “default” setting. I “monitor and adjust” to these behavioral traits in my present, everyday moments. They seared their way my senses during long agonizing sessions of listening to Dad berate Mom in his late evening harangues. These harangues always seemed to accompany his “condition”. Oddly, it was the only time I ever remember him actually initiating conversations. He’d start in on her about something totally inane and just be so damned abusive and demanding and discourteous. I hated to hear it. Obviously it wasn’t inane to him. He had issues with her doing what I would now call her attempts to liberate herself from under his (and maybe our) shadow.
From time to time, Mom would attempt to establish an independent life for herself in some little way. She worked in the Colgate Library for a while, until he made it so unbearable for her that she quit. She played bridge Thursday afternoons for a while. He made fun of this and after a while, she just stopped going. She joined a Friday morning bowling league and actually won several awards bowling with her older friends (she was younger than I am now as I write this). He made fun of her bowling and though she proudly displayed her prized ceramic green glazed trophy bowl at home, she stopped this as well. It seems all that she was able to persist in doing was volunteering at the hospital and working with the Baptist Church Tea and Sale, a three day Christmas holiday extravaganza for Hamilton that generated several thousands of dollars each year for the Community Hospital.
So when he drank, he’d disparage her activities, all from his chair to the couch where she inevitably sat, his sitting target. A hot air heating vent was located right next to his big stuffed easy chair. That heating vent was a direct line to the heating vent right next to my bed. I could hear it all. Every word. Every sound. Even with my head under the covers, I could hear it. And even if I couldn’t hear the exact words, I imagined them. The sounds of this very one-sided conflict frightened me. I felt it in my physical system. I felt shame and embarrassment for my Mom and I have the same physical reaction today when I encounter an angry voice or loud, disdainful arrogance. I have an automatic and instantaneous dislike of pushy, arrogant people and that recoil comes directly from being the silent participant in these frequent Dad/Mom interactions. I hated hearing him lambaste my Mom. As I got older, I couldn’t figure out why she took it for so long[iii].
At first, I couldn’t figure out why didn’t she leave the room. Later, I couldn’t figure out why didn’t she leave him, although the thought of that really scared me. She mentioned the possibility of leaving only once to me. That was after she’d returned from seeing her sick Mom in NYC. Dad had taken her absence to drink what seemed to me almost constantly. I must have shared that with her because it was in this context that I remember her words, “I should just take you and Johnny and leave here.” At the time, that rattled me almost as much as Dad’s drinking. Later still, as anger began to accompany my feelings of fright, I wondered why she never hauled off and hit him. But that wasn’t my Mom and that wasn’t her way. She only raised feeble responses to his ranting. She tried to explain herself, I remember that. And every time she said something, he’d dismiss it with a garbled and slurred, “Oh that’s absurd.” Absurd. That was his favorite word when he got like that. It would go on for what seemed like hours, and when she could take it no longer, she’d go to bed. He’d follow her up. His snores would rattle off the walls of our home and keep me awake for hours even though my room was at the other end of the house. Neither their room nor mine had doors between us. They slept apart for as long as I knew them as husband and wife.
Shame Settles In
We were oh so powerless in oh so many ways. Of course these sounds of discord affected me in ways I have to consciously apply energy to even today. I work very hard in all kinds of ways to avoid conflict. My emotional reaction to it is the reaction born of those late night harangues. I get sick to my stomach, I sweat, my heartbeat increases. I get silent. When anger mounts and words and word tones turn cynical and angry, like too much higher education discussion I might add, I hear my father’s voice and I look for the nearest exit. It is almost a panic reaction, a reaction that takes me to safety, away from the attack that must surely come my way, away from the situation in which I am powerless, away from the mental anguish of feeling totally unvalued, away from the sick feelings that render my body tense and very much on alert. Even with Dr. Shame in his chair, even with me recognizing my reaction is one of his doing, it is difficult to re-assert personal power in these circumstances. I either flee, or I disengage and ride the waves to get through it. I learned long ago that trying to engage would be ineffective. No matter how bad things were, they would eventually get better. All I had to do was wait. Not try to change the circumstances, just disengage and wait. Of course I also learned that no matter how good things were, they would soon get worse. No matter how good I tried to make everyone feel, I couldn’t keep the times of anger and personal attack at bay.
When it came to my Dad, everything seemed to happen absent my own agency. His “mood” called the shots and we played out our lives in reaction mode. Wait and see and deal with it when it happens. That’s the way growing up was. The only way to get around it was to literally create activity no one knew about so you could have a life of your own disconnected from and absent family life. So in terms of my family life, I learned how to cap my emotions, not feel, ride the waves, expect the unexpected, and avoid direct confrontation at any cost because it would do no good. You never won with my Dad when he was like that. The one time I directly confronted him, I was a sophomore in college. He was determined to leave on a medical emergency and I was determined he wasn’t. Not in his condition. I blocked his way at the front door. I named the truth and said he was drunk. He swung on me, I countered, he collapsed, I threw him over my shoulder and carried him to bed, all 6’1” 230lbs. of him. The next day, nothing had happened. He came downstairs, had breakfast, commented on the weather, and left for work. I did the same. Situation avoided. Life goes on. Another day. That’s the way it was.
Iconic Messages of Shame
You take on certain messages about yourself growing up this way. Two conformational stories come to mind. They confirmed the messages I believed about my capabilities that I later understood came directly courtesy of Dr. Shame. These messages remain very much a part of my unmediated self-definition.
I call the first message the “Big Frog Message”: “The only time you’ll feel good is when you find out how to be a big frog in a little pond. You aren’t smart enough to be a little frog in a big pond.” The second message is the “Avoid Confrontation At All Costs” message: “The only time you’ll feel good is when you avoid all arguments, especially those that challenge your smarts. You can’t win arguments with people who are smart.”
The story of the Big Frog message came from my high school years and occurred when I was applying to colleges. I was an all-state football player and all state French horn player. Interesting combo, eh? I’d earned a NYS regent’s scholarship. My high school academic average if not honors, was above 90 and I was one of the few members of our high school Honor Society. Harvard was interested in me. I knew of Harvard in the most general terms. I was probably more familiar with it as an institution that hosted sports teams than as the elite academic institution that it was. Certainly no one had mentioned my attending that place as I sifted through the college selection process. That is until The Harvard Club of Syracuse had decided I would be one of their choices for admission to Harvard. I was honored. Dad drove me to Cambridge for a visit and for interviews. He got lost in the city; we missed the interview and the tour. And he was normal, not drunk. We left without even so much as visiting the campus. We ended up having a late roast beef sandwich lunch somewhere near the famous Yard and a later lobster dinner at the Kittery Lobster Pound. Why there? I have no idea. Maybe it was Dad’s way of recouping a rather disastrous visit.
I was so embarrassed about what had happened, I didn’t know what to say to any one. I lied to my high school guidance counselor that I wasn’t so impressed with the city (actually, I was fascinated) and I told Mr. Chet Barker of the Harvard Club of Syracuse that I preferred admission to the University of Rochester. He wrote me a letter and in the letter accused me of settling for being a big frog in a little pond. That phrase has stayed with me my whole life. Large frog, small pond. Dr. Shame loved it. He’d toss it to me whenever I got feeling good about something I’d done. Whatever the accomplishment, I feel it as insignificant or of someone else’s doing. The personal label that came along with this message was “Mr. Not Good Enough”. This message pops up whenever I accomplish something worthwhile. Instantaneously. This is another example of Shame as a way of being, not a particular result of a particular event.
The other icon story happened when I was teaching in Syracuse University’s Urban Teacher Preparation Program (UTPP). The UTPP was a Ford Foundation funded experimental program begun in 1964 to prepare badly needed teachers for urban schools. The program was for liberal arts baccalaureate graduates and guaranteed you a Masters of Arts Degree in Education, a NYS Beginning Teaching License, and a teaching job in Syacuse if you successfully completed the work. Getting into the program is a story for another chapter.
I was quite a successful intern. There were perhaps twelve of us. Young men and women, mostly in our twenties, all but one of us white, economically diverse, all gathered together in the summer of ’64 to do something about needy kids, bad schools, and the effects of poverty in these United States.
The interaction of Program and times fired me up as no other confluence of historical moment and personal readiness has ever done. I loved the tough work of teaching in Madison Junior High School and I was quite successful at it. I had tough classes and easy classes and classes in between. The school had a mixed population but mostly, Madison Junior High School was filled with what Frank Reisman called disadvantaged children; black, urban youth who lived in the old brick housing projects and run down houses that surrounded the projects, right at the bottom of University hill. These were tough kids, and there were enough Irish whites in our school to make the entire mix of kids volatile. The black community in Syracuse was growing and as it pushed on the edges of Syracuse’s old Irish community, tensions increased. These geographic borders were dangerous places as were the borders between the black community and Native American communities. Lots of shootings. Lots of beatings. Lots of hard times.
But school was different. Madison Junior High School worked for these kids. We had a well-trained, diverse faculty. Most of the teacher’s eyes focused on the kids first and the curriculum second, and there were enough African American teachers in the school keeping the pedal to the metal. They taught the rest of us not to excuse kids from hard academics because we felt sorry for their so-called plight. We learned quickly enough that we White teachers mere presence wasn’t the answer for helping our young charges gain a better life. We were only conduits. They had important work to take ownership of and our role was to teach it so they were engaged, interested, active, and more confident and empowered because of what we had done with them. Our task was to make them see that they were learners and that that was okay!
So I was feeling pretty good – not cocky, I never felt cocky – the day I went to meet with Gerry, one of our program directors. By far the most confrontational of the three directors, we interns were Gerry’s chief responsibility. Gerry came by my classroom frequently in the beginning days of the semester, then less and less as he got comfortable with the work I was doing. I’d done an interdisciplinary unit (math, social studies, home economics) on “What’s Good Money?” that had its genesis in an argument about how much was “good money” that I’d overheard from a group of my seventh graders. The unit had gone well, we’d taken some field trips (first ever for this particular group of kids), the kids had experienced some applied practice of basic math skills, and they’d ended the unit with an informed sense of how much money it would take if they were on their own just to get by, much less to live comfortably or even at the level of comfort and possessions where most imagined themselves. So I thought we were going to talk about the Good Money Unit as I walked down the squeaky corridor floor to his office at 410 University Avenue.
He got to the point quickly. He said he was disappointed in me. He said I’d done good work in the classroom, but that I seemed to want to be liked by everyone and that I’d only become another traditional teacher (anathema in that program) because I choose to avoid conflict. And then he said, “If in this work, you avoid conflict, you’re part of the problem.” Then he started to probe. How come I was this way? Why did I feel I needed to be friends with everyone? “How come I wanted to be liked so much? Why did I rarely challenge other interns’ thoughts?” I felt my face flush, my neck get hot, my voice crack. My stomach tightened sickeningly. The moment seemed a rush of hot, sweaty, buzzing confusion. I couldn’t talk.
At this point in my life, I wasn’t at all clear about the coping patterns I’d developed in my family. My perspective was twisted. I thought these were just another example of behavior that was my fault. Claudia Black talks about ACOAs being way too hard on ourselves. We take responsibility for everything that doesn’t go right. That way we earn those reactive feelings of low self worth. And Ol’ Dr. Shame was working hard at making me take full and total responsibility for every character trait Jerry noted would not be useful for me if I wanted to remain an urban change agent. Here again was the shame cycle operating full bore. I had no response to Gerry’s question other than to believe he was right because he was such an authority figure. Take what he says, agree, promise to do something about it, and get the hell out of there and do what you want. That was my defense strategy.
I think back now and of course I had several options of response at my disposal. What he said was his perception, not mine. Just because he said it didn’t mean it was true. I should have argued with him then and there but I had no resources to call forth because in actuality, his statement and my feelings of self worth conformed. So there was only one correct response. The one that made me feel crappy. So, I avoided what in fact was very direct, truthful feedback. I avoided what I could have seen as a helpful message for years. I took it as I only could at that point in my life, as a put down, and as an accurate representation of who I was. This was the kid who’d avoided Harvard! Big frog, little pond. The confirming identity was Mr. Nice Guy, funny and pleasant, but ineffective.
It’s peculiar. I knew guys whose parents were real drunks: the fall down, hit your kid, vomit on the rug, beat your wife, let’s break furniture, throw the Christmas tree out the living room window kind of drunks. Dr. Shame even made me feel bad about that! “Christ,” I’d say to myself. “My life isn’t so bad as Jack’s. How come I feel so awful? I must really be screwed up!” But I hid these thoughts, mostly, and kept on keepin’ on.
Thus, the familial involvement with alcohol and the coping strategies that got me through it have had an enormous impact on my life. I took on an aversion to confrontation and powerful, arrogant people. Exposing myself to public scrutiny and comment, or dealing head on with power and authority have never been strong suites of mine, except in athletics. Athletics are where confrontations had the honesty of physical combat. For those I had confidence. They were fair and winning or losing was grounded in physical capacity, not intellectual capacity. In most other circumstances, I’m real good at sniffing out even the potentiality of intellectually confrontational situations and heading in the other direction, pronto.
Back to the Present
So what am I doing writing these stories? After all, this is an intellectual exercise. Why risk all now? All I can say is when I began, I had no intention of publication. But writing has been personally empowering to me and I believe parts of my experience might be helpful to others. It has helped me put and keep Dr. Shame in his place. (“Get thee behind me!”) I am driven to make classroom better places, especially for kids whose skin color places them squarely within those awful pictures from my youth.
I’ve challenged the disadvantaging function of schools in several active ways across my professional life. I’ve not chosen to step out on my own, preferring the more contained venue of working within a research university setting in a small state. But in that place, with my own students, whether I count my kids in Syracuse, or my students at UVM, or even many of the teachers I’ve worked with, I’ve been reasonably effective on behalf of these kids. This book is one more step.
Getting to believe writing might be useful to others similarly inclined, that’s a different tact for me. The “Me” at the beginning of this chapter would never have felt so bold. But now I’m driven by curiosity. I wonder if the stories in this memoir might be a way to achieve a narrative overlap with my readers’ experience. I would hope my stories might embolden you to consider and unpack your own present psychic boundaries of effectiveness. My psychic boundaries were formed by the presence of Shame in my life. If this chapter has shown anything, it has underscored the fact that we are all hemmed in by messages that determine what we believe we can do with our lives. Clearly, I’ve had more than a few. But I believe I’m a better teacher and leader for acting on what I’ve learned about myself. I’m thinking the stories of this chapter and the connections they’ve made with my life might help you use the stories in your own life in a similar way. There are more to come, and as I go on, I’ll keep Dr. Shame in his proper place, looking on, perhaps occasionally commenting, but never directing.
[i] Dr. Amen’s technique is called SPECT, single photon emission computed tomography. His work with types of ADD is brilliant. If interested, see Healing ADD (Berkley Books, 2001.
[ii] Claudia Black’s sequel called Changing Course: healing from loss, abandonment, and fear is really clear about how families adjust to living with alcoholism. She writes “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.” That about describes my family in a nutshell. And we weren’t dealing with physical abuse by any means. Just plain old alcohol abuse.
[iii] My Mom outlived my Dad by twenty years. After he died, she never mentioned his name in my presence. Once, in her mid-nineties, when she still had a portion of her memory, we were looking at a book of photographs, one of which included Dad. She asked who it was and when I told her, remarked, “Oh, he was something, wasn’t he?” It was as if his payback for all those years of verbal degradation was to be mostly absent from her consciousness during the final twenty years of her life.