Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  People ask me all the time if I know where he is or what he is doing.

  I don’t know, and I don’t care to find out.

  36

  WHEN IT WAS GONE

  Gothenburg, Sweden, October 22, 2012

  I had made my decision to walk away from the game a few days before, but I didn’t tell anybody. Not management, not my teammates, not even Sophie.

  I love the game—the playing of the game on the ice, the game in its purest form. The business of the game had worn me out. The way things had gone down in Edmonton, Carolina and Minnesota was bad, and the 2011–12 season with Phoenix was tougher—the Coyotes told me to move Sophie and Henry to Phoenix because I was going to spend the season there, but as soon as they arrived with the dogs in tow I was assigned to their minor-league team in Portland, Maine. I’d see them when I was called up to Phoenix for a few days every month. It was a mess. If the team had been straight with me and told me that I was going to spend the season in the minors, I could have planned around it. I wanted certainty for Sophie, Henry and my second son, who was on his way the next winter.

  I thought Europe would give us some certainty. I could make a decent living over there like a lot of other players had. I could play the game. It would be an adventure.

  I had switched agents the season before, and my new agent looked for a deal for me in Europe. Big-money was out there, something like NHL dollars, in Russia and Switzerland. That was out because it meant training camp in August. He came back to me in the fall with a deal that HIFK, in Helsinki, was offering, and I jumped at it.

  About three weeks in I realized that I had made a mistake.

  I liked the game in North America, whether it was the NHL or the minors. I liked getting out on the ice and competing. In Europe you play fewer games and the emphasis is on practices—long practices, a grind that leaves you with long waits until the next game. It was all the work of hockey with none of the play. I thought Helsinki was great—it brought back memories of the World Juniors in ’04, and it’s a world-class city. I was at the wrong time of my life for it, though. Not with a wife, a young son and another on the way. We needed to be in a stable situation. I wanted to spend more time with my son and help Sophie out with the newborn.

  To me the choice was clear.

  I was going to tell management about wanting to walk away after a game against Frölunda, a Swedish Elite League team that HIFK was meeting in a European club-team tournament. HIFK had been good to me, and I felt like I couldn’t leave the organization or my teammates hung out to dry, a man short with an important game coming up and without enough time to find a replacement as an import player.

  When I stepped out on the ice in Gothenburg, I felt a sensation that I had never felt before and won’t ever again: emptiness. I never had trouble motivating myself to play. I had never stepped on the ice when I felt I had nothing on the line—even though the NHL teams I played for never made the playoffs, I always felt that I had to prove myself, earn my salary and hold on to my job. I tried to do more than go through the motions. I have no idea if it looked that way. We wound up shelling Frölunda that night, 8–0, but the score meant nothing to me. The feeling that I had that night—the lack of feeling, really—confirmed to me that I was making the right choice.

  * * *

  When I came back from Gothenburg, I phoned Sophie in Florida and told her I was going home. It was time to get on with the rest of our lives. She didn’t really see it coming. She had been thinking about coming to Helsinki in December once I was settled, and she’d thought that I was going to play another five seasons or more. She was prepared to stand by me no matter where the game would take me. She didn’t try to talk me out of it—she just didn’t want me to make a spur-of-the-moment decision that I’d regret later. She also knew that the average professional doesn’t walk away from the game healthy at twenty-seven, especially when only three years before he was earning almost $3 million a season.

  But even at twenty-seven, I had been dominated by the game for two decades. There were more important things that I had to do. And now I had the time to focus on them.

  37

  HELP

  Santa Monica, California, November 2012

  I sat down, picked up a pen and wrote for more than two hours, almost three, the first day. I would do it every day I was out in California. That first day, in those first two hours, I wrote down stuff that I had gone through that had taken me years to talk to Sophie about. Even in the first two or three days, I wrote out in awful detail stories about growing up that I had never told anyone but my wife. In days after that, I wrote about times that I couldn’t even tell her, memories I’d tried to bury, memories that I would have found impossible to talk about at all. It wasn’t just all pouring out, though. I wrote about the recent past, what happened to me as a player, as a boyfriend and then a husband and then a father. I wrote about the here and now, what happened in my average day as an adult, what made me happy and what made me sad. I put it all down on paper. I was in Santa Monica for thirty days, and every day I sat down and poured it all out—not just every incident, but everything that I remembered about every incident. And I have a memory that’s pretty much photographic and not selective. My life was laid out on stacks of paper—pounds of paper. I wrote up to thirty pages a day for those thirty days. I wrote right through writer’s cramp.

  I didn’t try to make it a journal or diary that I was trying reconstruct after the fact, not year by year and blow by blow. Each day I tried to write about an event or time that was important to me. These were the stories that I told myself. Not secrets—it’s not a case that I try to conceal. Just the stories that I’d think of first if you were to ask me what made me the person that I am.

  It’s a strange thing, something that I didn’t know going in: I thought it was going to be so much harder to write it all down. I can sit across from you and for a couple of hours I can tell you about awful things that my father put me through and about my mother’s neglect. I can do that, and even if it makes you uncomfortable, I’ll feel nothing, or at least nothing that doesn’t pass after a few minutes. It’s like I’m just rewinding and playing back the tape. I’m reciting fact from memory, like the multiplication tables. I thought writing it down was going to be so much tougher, just the physical act of it. I was wrong, though.

  It turned out that I could write about things that I could never talk about, not with my best friends, not with Sophie, not with an analyst who’s expert in getting people to open up. I thought it was just because I was doing this alone, but that turned out to be only a part of the story.

  Writing it down was different. Just the act of writing takes more time, and the effort forces you to think harder about each and every word. And the way that I was writing it out—not just what happened but everything that was around me, everything I was thinking and feeling at the time—made my past come alive again like it never did when I told anyone stories about my past, not even when I told Sophie.

  For thirty days I wrote without stop, probably because if I stopped, I might have trouble starting again. I wanted to avoid any temptation to put this off until later or until tomorrow. I had to do it, I thought, and I had to do it now, otherwise I might never do it. I needed to take stock of my life so I could have a life worth living. I needed to understand trauma to understand how trauma affected me and how to move past it.

  * * *

  I had been looking at seeking out psychological help for a couple of years. Early on in my NHL career, I had come around to understanding that I had never addressed the damage done when I was growing up. And I knew I was going to have to do that at some point if I wanted to have a shot at a happy, productive life.

  I’d had brushes with it before, but nothing had worked out before Santa Monica.

  When I was sixteen, just weeks after my father’s arrest, my agents had set me up to talk to a sports psychologist who did some work with them and for NHL clubs—Dr. Scot McFadden. We met just once. Ma
ybe it was an impulsive reaction, but I didn’t get a good feeling about the session. That was completely predictable, when I look back at it. At sixteen I didn’t feel the need: I had been through hell, and with my father’s arrest and the restraining order, I had made it past the worst. I had survived all the abuse and was still making it on inner strength and toughness—at least that’s what I thought, and nobody was going to tell me different. I was too stubborn, and everyone was walking on eggshells around me. My mother was too busy sorting out her life to spend any time and energy on mine. My agents had set up the meeting with McFadden but weren’t going to push me to seek help I didn’t want, not if that was going to piss me off and lead me to fire them as my reps. I hadn’t hit the age of majority, but I felt I was ready to make the big decisions for myself. I was old for my age—that was my image of myself. In grade school I couldn’t understand how kids would get so upset or even burst into tears if things went wrong, if they failed a test or something like that. I thought they were weak and I wasn’t. The same at sixteen: I didn’t want to be treated like a child, not after what I had been through, and not as far I had made it in the game.

  I had looked at getting psychological help while I was still in the game, but that hadn’t worked out either. Again, I met with a couple of specialists but never moved past a single session. One psychiatrist wanted to prescribe me drugs right off the top, but I didn’t want any part of that. Sophie and I had met with a psychologist in Edmonton—we understood then that I needed help, that we needed help if we were going to be a successful couple, if we were going to make it. She shouldn’t have to live with someone who is inconsolable for six hours after loss. The psychologist lost me in the first five minutes when he started talking to me about the Oilers and asking me if I could get him tickets. I wanted to be treated like someone other than an NHL player. I wanted to be able to separate the game and my life away from the arena. He wasn’t going to help. He’d only make it worse, like being treated for claustrophobia by a psychologist who wants to hold sessions in his hall closet.

  Those were learning experiences, though. I learned that you need to have complete trust in the specialist you’re working with, which is a problem when you’re like me and you have trust issues with a lot of people. I learned that you have to go into any work in the right frame of mind, feeling good about the process and the person you’re working with. And I learned that your mindset and circumstances have to be exactly right or you have no chance of success—when I was living the life of a pro athlete in L.A. and making $2.9 million a year in my early twenties, exactly what was I supposed to think I needed help with? I wasn’t a victim, I thought. I was a success story.

  I went to Santa Monica with low expectations based on my past experiences, but still I was committed. I was told upfront that it was a thirty-day program and that the days were long. Twelve hours sometimes, sometimes more. I had talked it over with Sophie and she’d told me to go and take all the time I needed. It wasn’t anything close to a holiday. I didn’t tell any of my friends that I was going to L.A. It wasn’t a matter of stigma or embarrassment—I just didn’t want to have any distractions. I wanted to be able to focus on the treatment, and I thought having to talk about it or even acknowledge it to friends wouldn’t help and could hurt.

  And really, I was only ever going to be able to focus on treatment like this when my hockey career was over. I knew that treatment was going to require reliving a lot of awful moments and that all of those things would leave me in no state to play the game professionally, or even to train. All of them were going to leave me in a bad place and make it tough to be around other people. I needed isolation, for however long. To jump out of a session and into a crowded dressing room, to go back over all those years of my life and then land right back in the pressure cooker of pro hockey, just wasn’t going to work.

  But even on day one I had a good feeling about Santa Monica. Based on what I had heard about the program, I was sort of surprised by the location. The psychologist’s offices weren’t in a clinic. He worked out of an office building that he shared with law firms and investment outfits in a high-end business district. It was not the place where you expect the wounded to show up—and his patients were the wounded.

  To be clear, I was the only pro athlete that the psychologist was seeing. I was going to be the only one he’d ever treated up to that point. I knew going in who his patients were: veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A lot of them had Purple Hearts for wounds that they suffered on the front lines. A lot of them had lost limbs. They had all been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. And on the first day at the office, so was I.

  * * *

  Looking back now, it’s not a surprise that I wound up being treated by a psychologist who worked with military veterans. One hundred years ago people talked about vets coming back from the front lines with shell shock. What they had was PTSD; it’s just that no one had given the condition a name or thought of it as a clinical, psychological condition. That didn’t happen really until the seventies, when thousands of American soldiers were coming back from Vietnam and having difficulty or finding it impossible to get by. For many, it seemed like they couldn’t return at all to the life that they used to lead. The U.S. Veterans Administration poured millions into clinical studies of the vets. Forty years and millions of soldiers later, the VA still drives research into and treatment of PTSD—its budget for mental health is $7 billion a year. The work the VA has done on PTSD helps more than the veterans and their families, though: 28 million people in the U.S. suffer from PTSD, most of them never having been in the service.

  My psychologist focused almost exclusively on veterans. I never saw one of his other patients in the waiting room, but he told me about them and he made it clear that my trauma was different from theirs. Not that one is worse than another—though it’s impossible for me to even imagine what it’s like to go through life missing an arm or a leg or with a body that’s covered in scar tissue from severe burns. I’m not about to minimize that. But the fact that so many veterans were working on their PTSD motivated me and inspired me. From where I was sitting, their sacrifice and courage made it impossible to feel the least bit sorry for myself. But my case was different from theirs down at the basics.

  For many of the veterans, the traumas were isolated, one-off incidents: a single something that happened to them during the service. For me, my father traumatized me daily.

  For those veterans whose traumas were suffered over the course of time, it would have been over the course of a tour of service or two. For me, those traumas came over the course of ten years.

  For most of the veterans on my psychologist’s patient list, their first treatments for trauma came within a year or two of their return from action. For me, my traumas dated as far back as twenty years.

  And finally, and most importantly, the veterans were enlisted men and women, all adults when they suffered their traumas. I had been a kid and then an adolescent when my father had been beating me. My emotions were still being shaped. My brain wasn’t physically matured.

  On a lot of counts I wasn’t an average patient in his practice, but my psychologist made it clear—I had what they had, and I needed treatment just like they did. He also made it clear that this wasn’t something that he could fix in thirty days or over the course of months or even years of treatment. This was work that I’d have to commit to for the rest of my life. This wasn’t anything that I’d ever move past and leave behind. PTSD wasn’t like that.

  * * *

  When the psychologist went through the symptoms of PTSD with me, I realized that I fit the profile. One symptom really hit home: sleep. My problems with sleep were a red flag so obvious that other specialists I’d seen should have picked up on it.

  As far back as I could remember I had been a bad sleeper. My sleep was disrupted when my father was waking me up at three or four in the morning to work out. Even when he didn’t wake me up like that, it was on my mind when I w
ent to bed. Growing up, I would try to grab sleep wherever and whenever I could. As I’ve mentioned before, I regularly fell asleep in class in grade school and middle school. I’d drift off on the late-night drives back from Alvinston or Strathroy, at least until my father shook me or pushed me because he thought it was unfair that I could sleep and he couldn’t. I basically grew up sleep deprived.

  Yet after I moved to Mississauga, and later when my father was out of my life, my nights were just as bad. Three times a week, when I was in my early teens or even as an adult, I would have awful nightmares—what psychologists treating PTSD patients categorize as “night terrors.” For me they were recurring flashbacks. There wasn’t a story, just a flood of images that would shock me awake and leave me trembling. It was something that my roommates on the road were used to and something that Sophie knew about better than anyone.

  When the psychologist listed other symptoms associated with PTSD, I checked off just about every one of them. I recognized myself. I recognized how every symptom played out in my life.

  Near the top was a numbing of emotions. I had always been a flat line in that way—most of the time I didn’t react emotionally to things like the majority of people. On what should have been a good day, I would be stuck, not allowing myself to be happy. I could turn irritable almost instantly and for no good reason. But sometimes when I was in a shitty situation, like my worst times with Marc Crawford in Los Angeles, I’d surprise people by my ability to shrug it off—with Crawford, I did that right up until he kicked me on the bench. When I told my teammates that “my standards for bad” were different from theirs, it was just another way of saying that I didn’t feel things like them. My standard reactions for bad were what really differed.