Into the Shadows

The last place we left off before I went on hiatus from this blog was how my brother Mike struggled in his earliest years, and how the people and systems around him were already failing to meet his needs from the very start, how his community was failing to support and properly love him at home, at school, and at church, and how he was told to just be better, then left largely alone to his pains and struggles. If you didn’t see any of that in what I’ve already written, go back and read again. I may have initially written the first two posts with more subtlety.

If you think I am fully off the hook myself you’d be wrong. Let’s talk about the me in all of this. Let’s get real. Let’s dive into the shadows. At the same time, we will enter more of the teenage years.

As we grew into our awkward preteen years Mike and I remained close. We went from collecting Pokémon cards together and plotting to run away like Tom Sawyer, to setting out to ride all the craziest and fastest rides at theme parks together once we had made the move to Florida. We stayed up late talking about navigating social life in middle school, telling secrets, or just laughing about stupid things. Some of my favorite nights involved staying up way too late in the kitchen with Mike, sometimes others like our mom and our other brothers, just laughing and laughing. Mike was jovial. He was comfortable being the entertainer: doing an impression, a little dance, or telling jokes to keep everyone laughing. He was incredibly perceptive and intelligent. He read people, the room he was in, situations, everything around him, as if it was as easy as reading a book. He missed very little, especially when it came to people, which was the thing he was always most consistently interested in and focused on.

One thing we did not talk about during the earliest preteen years, was Mike’s drug use. By this time, unbeknownst to me, he was already getting deeper and deeper into the world of experimentation with various drugs. When I was in 6th grade and he was in 8th, he was expelled from our middle school for being caught with weed at school (on Drug Free day no less, when the whole school was lined up to make the word “D.A.R.E.” in the field with our bodies for someone in a helicopter to fly over and take a picture of). I knew something had happened that day because the air was thick with silent anger when I got home from school. I was told Mike had been expelled but no one would tell me why because it was none of my business. Mike wouldn’t even tell me. He was reluctant to allow me into this side of himself because he liked the untainted innocent perception I had of him until this point. He was not ready to show me a side of himself he knew I would be shocked to see and may severely affect the way I see him moving forward, especially when adding on the filters of our rigid and unrelenting Mormon belief system. This belief system added whole new layers to the shame and guilt each one of us kids felt as we grew, much of which I didn’t come to realize until adulthood was not how much shame and guilt other kids not growing up in a high demand religion were experiencing.

When we made “bad choices” we weren’t just a kid who made a mistake because we were still feeling out the boundaries and limits of the authority around us, trying to ease overstimulation, trying to demand the attention we each needed, or just plain making mistakes due to imperfection. When we made bad choices we were bad. We were following Satan, listening to him instead of listening to Jesus. We were sinners who needed to repent, and everyone was disappointed, especially Jesus. We were making Jesus cry when we sinned. We were taking his sacrifice for granted. If we didn’t live righteously we would be letting down our ancestors and we would be forfeiting our family because if we don’t live our lives the prescribed way we can’t be together with our families in the Celestial Kingdom for the rest of eternity (this is where you want to go when you die if you’re Mormon). The weight of our eternal family pressed heavy on all of our shoulders. The list of transgressions we must avoid in order to escape being shamed for our actions by authority figures was long. The consequences were not just mental, or physical, but spiritual. Every act was a declaration of allegiance to either God or Satan. Everything we did was judged at a spiritual level, determining our entire sense of worth as spiritual beings.

So as you can imagine, looking through the added lens of an unyielding belief system that demanded obedience and added the weight of eternity to every decision we made, it was hard for Mike to allow me in to knowing about the side of himself that would likely cause me to recoil and confirm what he was already fearing at his very depth: that he was unworthy of love.

And he was not wrong to try and protect himself from my judgements and the shift of my perspective towards him. I did judge and reject him. I did add my disappointment of him to the pile. I had learned a specific set of beliefs since I was born that made it clear that what he was doing was wrong. It was bad. He was making bad choices and following Satan. He was sinning in a major way, not just a little way. Breaking the Word of Wisdom was inconsistently a huge deal. I say inconsistently because if you ate too much sugar and meat and didn’t exercise enough you were fine and you could still attend the Temple. If you drank coffee, did any illegal drugs, or drank any alcohol, you were no longer worthy of attending the Temple. So some offenses have always been much heavier than others. Doing any illegal drugs was probably the worst one on that list to most people. It didn’t matter that addiction is actually just a symptom of mental health problems and an indication that a person is in deep and complicated pain. It didn’t matter that it was a choice made in childhood and then by adulthood less of an active choice and more a form of survival. If you were doing it, you were the bad one and you were the only one to blame for your actions.

I told him many times that he needed to stop the drugs and repent. I thought I was helping, that I was inspiring him. I even once wrote him a letter that expressed all the anger and disappointment I felt towards him due to his drug use. I told him he was selfish and harming everyone who loved him. That letter is one of the biggest regrets of my life. When he needed love and acceptance most, I responded with fear and shame and blame. I responded selfishly, focused on how he was hurting me and how his addiction negatively affected me. Now that is something to truly be ashamed of. The drug use was not. The drug use that started as a form of rebellion against the authority and systems that had let him down and couldn’t be trusted, had turned into a way to cope with the deep rooted feelings of worthlessness and abandonment that kept burrowing itself deeper and deeper into his psyche. I thought by making him realize how his actions harm others it might wake him up, not realizing all I was truly doing was confirming to him what he already believed about himself: that he needed to earn his love from others, that he deserved everything bad in his life, and that he was unworthy.

And yet, no one was saving him. Our oldest brother was lost in the same world of misery and shame and escapism. At the very least, in all this Mike was not completely and totally alone. Our oldest brother was there with him suffering just as hard. No one saved them. Everyone felt the best way to help was by reminding them of how drugs were bad and a sin and how sad my brothers’ choices were making them and making Jesus. As if piling on more shame to two kids already swimming in it was the answer. As if that was going to pull them from the depths of their pain and out of their growing addictions.

I don’t believe in blame, I believe in looking at the flaws in whole systems and communities. When it comes to people, issues are not usually ever as simple as just within the individual or even within the one factor of their existence. There was a whole storm of madness that created Mike’s situation. But the fact of the matter is that no one saved him. No one saved our oldest brother either. Or if anyone has, to be honest, it’s his wife. But certainly no one in his life before her. No one extended the right help to either of them or ever stopped to consider if their approaches kept harming more than helping.

On the other hand, much of the shaming approach came from a belief system that had people desperately trying to avoid losing their family for all eternity by telling their kids they needed to take accountability for all their poor choices rather than ever taking a look at their own accountability as the adults, nor the accountability of the system that benefits from people feeling unworthy of attaining higher spirituality all on their own. This feeling of unworthiness keeps people beholden to the leaders of this system to tell them how to live their lives. These systems need people to question their worthiness while placing absolute faith in the worthiness of those that lead the organization/institution. The parents in this situation are less to blame than the system is. The parents are just conduits of the messages of the system, used by the system as the most effective way to create a devoted servant: feed the sense of duty to obedience and unworthiness into each member from the earliest moments of childhood, in the home. It’s mostly foolproof. The parents think they are doing the best thing for the child, all while feeding them poison daily. It is not completely their fault, they didn’t know any better.

To face the reality of the ways in which you as a parent may have spent every day feeding your child emotional and spiritual poison, is an unbearably painful hell I don’t even want to imagine. Yet, I am not completely unfamiliar either, as I started out the first several years of my kids’ lives using some of the same shame-induced phrasing as “when you make a choice like that, you are choosing to follow Satan” and “Your choice makes Jesus sad.” The biggest parenting regret I have so far, is not breaking free from the cycle of this harm sooner. I don’t think I could have broken free with only the resources, knowledge, and upbringing my parents had. Myself having multiple degrees in psychology , including lots of study on the psychology of healthy childhood psychological development, plus the advantage of watching what happened to Mike as someone who understood the emotions of it all from his side… It takes strength and courage to face and accept the truth of what kind of pains we inflict on our kids without meaning to, without letting that realization and admission destroy yourself. It has never been difficult for me to not only freely forgive my parents for the role they may have played, but also hold immense depth of sorrow and compassion for them in what role they were assigned to play in regards to Mike’s existence in this life. Me being honest about what occurred is a part of facing the pain in order to alchemize it. Pretending anyone’s contribution did not occur does no one any good and does not allow anyone to acknowledge the pain so they can allow it to transform them. I hope someday we all forgive ourselves.

When it comes to me, I reacted with the same mentality as my parents did, what I was taught. In my mind Mike was the problem, not the community in which he was existing. In my mind he was simply making bad choices and he wasn’t wanting sobriety bad enough. He wasn’t trying hard enough. He wasn’t being good enough. He was continuing to choose badly and it was completely his own fault. In this system, the fault and blame are always squarely on the shoulders of the sinner, the individual. So everyone just tells them to be better, to act better, and to repent. No one asks “What’s going on with this person that’s making them act out? Are we as a community failing to meet the needs of this individual? How can we work together to support them? How can we be a safe space for them to be fully themselves without feeling the need to hide bits of themselves to avoid the shame and fear they expect from us? How do we better address their emotional needs? How do we learn to love them in better ways that will build their confidence and resilience? How are we not showing up in the right ways to love this individual?”

I did try to help in my own ways. My parents and others in the community tried to help in their own ways too. Unfortunately, we failed to connect and help him in his way, in the way he needed us all to show up, which was to just love and accept him for who he already was, to make the space around him safe enough for him to put his shields down and just be. As I came to better understand his life purpose as well as my own, it became much easier to let the pain of what happened to him transform me for the better. But before I tell more about the positive transformation into the light, we need to fully explore the depths of the shadow.

To wrap up for today, below are the lyrics to Galapagos by The Smashing Pumpkins, as well as a YouTube video of the same song so you can read the lyrics while listening to the song. This is a nostalgic song, one Mike knew well by a band he listened to often, and it felt fitting for today’s descent into the shadows.

“Ain't it funny how we pretend we're still a child?
Softly stolen under blanket skies

And rescue me from me
And all that I believe

I won't deny the pain
I won't deny the change
And should I fall from grace
Here with you
Will you leave me too?

Carve out your heart for keeps in an old oak tree
And hold me for goodbyes and whispered lullabies

And tell me I am still the man I'm supposed to be

I won't deny the pain
I won't deny the change
And should I fall from grace
Here with you
Will you leave me too?
Will you leave me too?

Too late to turn back now
I'm running out of sound
And I am changing, changing
And if we died right now
This fool you love somehow, is here with you

I won't deny the pain
I won't deny the change
And should I fall from grace
Here with you
Would you leave me too?
Would you leave me too?”

-The Smashing Pumpkins, Galapagos