“Now tell me another good remembrance, and don’t you forget it! That is the PRICELESS part!”
“I remember Dorie once hitting me on the head with the telephone and me running over her new Easter hat with my bicycle and Mom having to come out and make us apologize to each other and kiss and make up. But even stuff like that was kind of a goodness and light thing. We wouldn’t have really hurt each other for anything in the world.”
“Was it after…Lance…you started feeding all the negs in your life, actually encouraging them?”
“Yeah! And I know I did, not just with him, but I started looking for all the faults in everybody else, too.”
“Could we say you stopped altogether trying to make ‘sunshine cake’ and started putting together only ingredients which make ‘cow pies’?”
“You could not only say that, you could say that after the ‘Lance thing’ I put into my life only things that made it just one big pile of cow crap.”
“Let’s go over that concept one more time. What made the change between the happy times and the miserable times in your life?”
“The ingredients I put into it, or allowed others to put into it.”
“Pretend you were making peanut butter cookies and someone dumped in some rat poison by mistake, or on purpose. What would you do?”
“I’d throw out the batter and start over, of course.”
“I wonder why we don’t do that with mental poisoning?”
“Maybe because the physical stuff is so much more obvious.”
“Granted. But isn’t one poison as potentially dangerous as the other?”
“Yeah, could be mental poisoning is even more dangerous than physical poisoning and maybe self-forgiveness is the equivalent of a second chance.”
“You’ve put that thought into your mental computer disk permanently, right?”
“Right.”
“Now I know this sounds ‘elementary, my dear Watson,’ but just for the fun of it, let’s take turns naming some of the ingredients that instead of making cow pies make one of life’s sunshine cakes.”
“Looking for the good and having a pos ’tude.”
“Doing the good.”
“Looking for the kind things.”
“Caring how others feel.”
“Being in harmony with people and things.”
“Wanting to help not hurt.”
“Knowing that to be happy we have to work at making others happy.”
“Loving and allowing yourself to be loved.”
“Mostly that! Man, I feel so dumb letting one jerk asshole make me think and act like a complete jerk asshole, too.”
“What might have happened if you hadn’t let him?”
“There’s no way I could have stopped him.”
“You probably couldn’t have kept him from messing up his own life, but might it have been possible for you to have kept your own intact?”
“Well…maybe if I’d come to see you then.”
“Or maybe talked to your mom, or Mo, or someone else you care about and trust like you said.”
“Maybe? Possibly…”
“If you ever have to live through another traumatic incident, what might you do?”
“For sure, I wouldn’t allow it to grow until it consumed my life! I’d dump it on somebody! Anybody!”
“Would that be easy?”
“Probably not.”
“No one ever said it would be easy.”
“Actually, once I got started, dumping the ‘Lance thing’ was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I’d held that ever-expanding, unspeakable, killer pain and hate for him inside my guts for so long that finally puking it up, even with its nauseating stench and its creeping tissue-disintegrating vileness, was a relief. I feel fifty pounds lighter in weight and a million times lighter in spirit.” Sammy hesitated and quietly sobbed for a long time.
“But I’m still soooo hurting! I’m punctured and bruised and broken and bleeding in every single part of my body and soul. Not only that, but it’s like he rubbed salt and broken glass and acid into each of my gaping wounds, rubbed them in while he was laughing and tearing me down in every way known to man. Now the bastard sees I’m beginning to heal, and he won’t let me! He doesn’t want me to heal! He enjoys seeing me crying and moaning and groaning and suffering. He viciously intrudes into my dreams to watch me.
“Sometimes when I’m just sitting in school or maybe having fun, beginning to think I’m maybe getting back into a normal life, his gloating face pops up before me, sneering at me, telling me I’m a failure, a misfit nobody that won’t…can’t ever make it…asking me why I don’t just give up and go back to the world of failure where I belong. I see him everywhere. He’s always, all the time…goading me to…you know…do it.”
“Whoa, Sammy, slow down. Now could be the time to detach from all your fetid past. Are you ready?”
Sammy shuddered. “I’m ready. At least I think I’m ready.”
“Good. Close your eyes and restfully and slowly take in three big, cleansing, oxygen-filled breaths through your nose, then let go of all the negative toxins in your body as you breathe out through your mouth—cleansing air coming in…negative toxins going out!
“Allow your subconscious to say to your material body, ‘I see a large, sturdy, white plastic sheet on the floor. I feel quite quiet…I feel comfortably relaxed as I start placing all the past negatives of my life in the center of the plastic sheet. IT IS AS THOUGH SOMEONE ELSE, NOT ME, IS DOING THE FOLLOWING THINGS.’ The detached person hears Lance saying shockingly terrible things about subjects we had always been taught to respect and good things about subjects we had always been taught to disrespect. Don’t open your eyes; just see Lance’s words and actions as though they were tangible colored blobs being placed in the center of the sheet. What color are they?”
“Red, as red as mixed flames and blood.”
“Next the detached person sees the feelings you had when you watched Lance use cocaine. Those tangible blobs are taken and placed on the sheet. What color are they?”
“They’re red mixed with black lightning-bolt streaks of shattering electricity.”
“Can the detached person see Lance beating up on his son and screaming at him?”
“Yes. It’s unreal though.”
“What color are those sounds and actions?”
“Black…hard…jagged…some have blood dripping from them and orange-and-green slime.”
“What color are the blobs the young innocent boy Sammy sees as he tries to get away?”
“Heavy, heavy, heavy, scared black wiggly lines. Some with scary monster shapes.”
“What color are the blobs at the bus station and on the bus, and transferring from one bus to another?”
“Black as the blackest night and piercing like arrows and bullets and axes and knives.”
“Have they all been dumped on the pile?”
“Yes.”
“What about when the boy Sammy gets home, what colors are there?”
“At first they’re almost normal, then blackness begins to filter in from all directions and take over.”
“Can those colors be placed on the pile?”
“Yes.”
“What color are the hostilities at school?”
“They grow from regular to roadkill pizza colors, to black, deep, sucking-down black.”
“Are they dumped?”
“Yes.”
“What about the colors during the school gang period?”
“It got to the point where he”—Sammy had begun to say the word he for himself—“could only see colors other than black when he was being physically hurt, or road screeching or tagging.”
“Can he dump those colors?”
“Yes…dumped.”
“What about in Las Vegas when Blunt held up the man?”
“Shades of gray and black. Dumped.”
“We’re in East Los Angeles.”
“All black with occas
ional stabs of red or orange.”
“The drive-bys, the hurting young girl who reminded you of Dorie, the dying pregnant girl who had been stabbed?”
“All black with splashes of blood.”
“The kitten?”
“The kitten was the only real experience there.”
“What about being shot and in the Los Angeles General Hospital, the hall, the operating room, being treated disrespectfully, being released?”
“All different shades of black except the long multicolored lines in the halls that even the workers had to use as road maps, the place is so big.” Sammy was quiet for a few minutes. “It’s all dumped.”
“The ‘Chicken Hawk’ truck driver?”
Sammy took two big, slow, sighing breaths, then the barest smile on his face showed he was thinking of the kind couple in the motor home who had found him at the rest stop. After a minute or two he sighed. “Dumped.”
“We forgot to dump the time you hit Mo.”
“That was a hurtful black, bleeding black blood from every pore of my body time that I’ll never be able to dump.”
“You mean you want to carry it around like a sack of bricks for the rest of time?”
“I’m not sure I can do anything else.”
“That’s up to you.”
“Do you think I can dump it?”
“I know you can if you really want to and you honestly think you should.”
“But Mo’s the only one I truly love that I actually physically hurt.” Sammy had come out of his self-induced trance and opened his eyes wide.
“That’s true. But you’ve got to dump the incident before you can be well enough to repair the damage both to yourself and to her. What good is it going to do to keep on picking and opening up an old wound that needs to be healed? Dump the old, unclean, toxic, infection-inviting crud and go on to encourage healthy healing for both her and yourself.”
Sammy looked like an innocent five-year-old. “Is it really possible?”
“Yes, It’s possible! If you wipe the slate clean and start over on building yourself a rewarding, mentally and physically healthy lifestyle.”
“I want to! I do want to, more than anything else in the world!”
“Okay, let’s do it! Take three big, deep, slow breaths, taking in positives, releasing toxic negatives. Put yourself back into the control state where your actions are subconscious. Feel your thumbs being totally relaxed…your toes totally relaxed…the muscles in your shoulders and your neck…totally relaxed, like warm wet noodles. Dump all the rest of your pain and guilt and shame and blame, along with the Mo incident. Can you do that?”
“I guess I can. It’s all red and black and green and oozie, and I can smell it. The stench is so bad it’s almost strangling me.”
“Then relax into an even deeper state and let’s pour disinfectant bleach around the edges of the pile. How big is the pile?”
“Big as your La-Z-Boy lounge chair and so ugly it almost has a life of its own. It’s moving, almost fighting.”
“Of course it’s moving and fighting. All those combined negative patternings don’t want to leave you in control of all your emotions and actions. Let’s pour more disinfectant bleach around the whole circle.
“Can you see the bleach begin to disintegrate the negative colors around the edges and in toward the middle of the pile?”
“Yes.”
“Is the blob the size of the chair beginning to soften and become smaller as the disinfectant bleach gets to it?”
“Yes. It is. It really is.”
We took another fifteen minutes or so to completely disinfect and bleach and disintegrate Sammy’s past pain into a white vapor, then into oblivion. “Do you now feel some relief?”
He opened his eyes and smiled. “Only like the world’s weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Am I going to feel this good and this light from now on?”
“Only if you fill the vacuum which was left within you when you took out the dark, hurtful, poisonous negatives, with pleasant, light, healing positives! Don’t leave one contagious, toxic thought or concept to multiply and try to take you over again! And be patient with yourself. If at first you don’t succeed…YOU’RE NORMAL!”
“I can do all that stuff if you’ll help me do it!”
“Sorry! I can tell you how—the doing you must do yourself. But it won’t be that hard if you make a commitment TO YOURSELF to be ever positive, optimistic, compassionate, and long-suffering. Every time you are tempted to say or do or think a negative thing, either bite your tongue or give yourself a good twisting monkey bite on your arm. Some people wear a loose rubber band on their arm and give themselves a good flip.”
“That part sounds doable. And just because Lance is the repulsive, revolting, white trash degenerate jackass of all time doesn’t mean that I have to be one too, does it?”
“Absolutely not. In fact, you can be the exact opposite if that’s what you want to be.”
“You know, I think the hardest thing was…to accept what is, as what is.”
“That’s often the case.”
“And to know that a person can be a knight in shining armor on the outside and the evilest of demons on the inside. When I was growing up Lance was always Sir Lancelot to me, from the first time I read about King Arthur and the Round table. He was everything good and mighty and bold and honest and honorable. I truly thought that he could save the world, do no wrong, and somewhere in my guts I always felt until it happened, that Mom must have done every bit of the stuff that caused the divorce. What a fool I was, an empty-headed blame-the-wrong-person fool.”
“Relax, Sammy. Don’t blame yourself or anyone else. Blame, guilt, criticism, condemnation, culpability are all useless, time- and energy-wasting thoughts, verbalizations, or actions. They do nothing to mend, cure, or restore. Teach yourself to fall back on something constructive to yourself and others, instead of destructive. Many of the people I work with feel comfortable working with some form of the Alcoholics Anonymous’ Serenity Creed:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
“You told me about that before. It makes complete sense, and honest, I’m trying real hard to keep those thoughts in a place in my brain where I can always pull them out when I need them. I’ve failed so far, but I am going to keep trying! You were hoping I would say that, weren’t you?”
“You are scary. You’re reading my mind so often these days.”
Then I guess you know I’m thinking maybe I should know some other ways to get rid of the big bad wolves when, like in the fairy story about the three little pigs, one wolf or another is huffing and puffing and trying to blow my house down.”
“Well…you could learn to detach yourself.”
“Like how?”
“Like doctors in medical school have to learn how to ‘detach themselves’ so that when they’re performing a cesarean section, or doing brain surgery or an amputation—”
Sammy interrupted. “They won’t gag or faint when the bloody little baby or the guts pop out, or the little saw buzzes through the skull and the brains hang loose, or the big saw buzzes through the leg, and it drops on the floor—”
I interrupted. “You’re a little overly graphic, but I’m sure we’re both getting your picture. Who else can you think of that might have to learn to detach themselves?”
“Firemen. I don’t see how they can handle carrying out a little kid who is half on fire, or anyone else for that matter, even a dog or a cat. I’m sure they must have some skill in detaching themselves.”
“What about policemen?”
“Yeah them too. They must see lots of people shot and stabbed and stuff. And the scary part of it…man, I don’t know how they do it. Even if they can detach themselves some, I’ll bet they can’t detach completely.”
“What about people who work with little babies who are born drug-addicted or grossly de
formed, or ambulance drivers, or those of us who work in the mental health field?”
Sammy thought for a few seconds. “I can see by your body language as well as hear from your voice, that you’re pained when I’m pained.”
“Right, but I can still detach myself enough so that if you’re going down for the third time, there is no way you can pull me under with you.”
“I guess I let Lance do that to me, didn’t I?”
“If you think you did.”
“Man, life is complicated.”
“Not once one makes the choice to be a Positive Magnet.”
“Bull! That wouldn’t, couldn’t keep bad things from happening in someone’s life.”
“You’re right. But it isn’t what happens in our lives that makes us or breaks us…”
“I know. I know. It’s what we do about what happens.”
“Why do you suppose some abused children turn out to be abusers themselves while others don’t, or why one generation after another in some families turn out to be on welfare while in others they don’t?”
“And some kids whose parents are alcoholics or drug users fall into the same trap and some don’t?”
“And some kids brought up in illiterate homes become brilliant educators in numerous fields while others remain illiterate.”
“I guess I’ve tried, even to this very moment, to shift the responsibility for my totally unacceptable actions onto Lance, haven’t I? And it doesn’t work that way, does it?”
“Never has, never will.”
“Life is geared so that every individual has to own and take responsibility for every single thing they do, isn’t it?”
“With some little leeway for environment, including parenting, etcetera.”
“Okay. I think I’ve got the Detachment Concept and the Responsibility Concept and the Positive Magnetic Power Principle stabilized in my brain. What do I do now?”
“Go home, kid.”
“Trying to get rid of me, huh?”
“No. Hold on a minute, I’ve got some visual aids you should put around in your house, where you can’t ever miss them!” I brought out three little black bottles with skulls and crossbones on them. Under the crossbones were the words:
Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets Page 14