Archive for the 'Addiction and mental illness' Category

Ten years

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 25, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness and Faith
. 21 Comments

It is June 25, 2008. Ten years ago this Friday, on June 27, 1998, I took my last drink of alcohol and my last illicit drug. Ten years ago this Friday, I tried to take my life by turning on the gas in my apartment building and blowing out the pilot lights; I very nearly took quite a few people with me. Ten years ago this Friday, I came to what we in recovery call a “bottom.”

The gas did not kill me; sheriff’s deputies kicked in the door and pulled me to safety before any serious harm could be done. After a few hours in ICU getting my stomach pumped (for the umpteenth time), I was dispatched to a locked psychiatric ward. I date my sobriety from the day I was released from the hospital: July 1, 1998. The drugs I took on the night of the 27th took several days to leave my system, and so I wasn’t clear-headed until the 1st.

It scarcely seems possible that I have been clean and sober for a decade. I have written often on this blog about what I was like “before” and “after”. And of course, my story is a common one. There are plenty of “once was lost, now am found” narratives out there; the very root of autobiography in the Western world is the trope of conversion and transformation. The familiarity of the story doesn’t make it any less interesting to those caught up in it, of course, and it doesn’t mean that the story isn’t worth telling over and over again. After all, the primary purpose of relating these stories is not to gratify the ego but instead to remind others that recovery is possible, miracles do happen, change is real.

When people ask me what helped me get and stay sober, what helped me in my recovery from diagnosed mental illness, what helped me give up the “deathstyle” I lived for so long, I cite three things. The three-legged stool of my recovery: intense psychotherapy; rigorous participation in a Twelve-Step program, and a rediscovered faith in Christ. That doesn’t mean that everyone who seeks recovery must have each of these components, but they were, each in their own way, indispensable to the transformation that happened in my life in the summer of 1998 and beyond. I am not sure I would be where I am today had I not had each of those tools at my disposal, had I not had my nightly meetings, my thrice-weekly sessions with Dr. Levine, and a growing sense of God’s plan for my life.

And of course, I had something else: a fierce desire to live. I’ve lost friends and lovers to the “disease” of addiction, to mental illness, who didn’t have that same willingness to do absolutely anything to get better. And this morning, that’s what I’m contemplating: why it is that some of us are blessed with that will, that hunger, that longing to survive while others are not. Ten years after my last drink, ten years after my last illicit drug, I still have no idea why some “get it” and others don’t. Was it luck? Was it “divine election”, as my Calvinist friends might say? Was it sheer stubborness on my part? Was it privilege, the sort that pays for psychiatric care three times a week? Was it a constellation of all of these?

I don’t know. What I do know is that June 1998 saw me very close to ending my life and taking others with me. What I do know is that something happened, something marvelous and soul-stirring and, so far, apparently permanent. And I am grateful beyond words that it did happen as it did. Let me embrace the cliche: every day is indeed a gift, because I willingly forfeited my life a decade ago and received it back, undeserved and unexpected. And Christ almighty, I try to remember to be worthy of that gift I was given.

“Becoming available for the miracle”: in defense of psychotropics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 15, 2008
in Addiction and mental illness and Memories
. 28 Comments

The discussion of medication, specifically anti-depressants, has made its way back into the blogosphere. Kactus posted on December 20 at Feministe about her relief at finding a good anti-anxiety medication. More than 120 comments followed, many critical of the pharmaceutical industry — and others questioning the usefulness of medication for depression or anxiety.

Responding to Kactus, my fellow vegan feminist Elaine Vigneault takes a fairly strong anti-medication tack, largely rooted in her own experience.

Yesterday, Daisy summed up the whole kerfuffle at her place.

I was on one form or another of psychotropic drugs (all prescribed, though at times abused) from 1987 to 1998. After my first hospitalization at age 19, I was put on Elavil, an old-fashioned anti-depressant that left me teary and sleeping 12 hours a day. I was a first-generation Prozac kid (from 1989-1992). As micro-psychotic episodes began to appear, I was put on lithium as well — and spent eighteen months on that drug. Others followed, from Anafranil to Wellbutrin to Klonopin. I became seriously addicted to the last of these; of all the substances I ever put in my body, none was as compelling and intoxicating as Klonopin. Continue reading ‘“Becoming available for the miracle”: in defense of psychotropics’

A very long post on how to rebuild trust

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 28, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Family, Memories and Relationships
. 17 Comments

I insisted on inflicting my Top Ten posts of 2007 on my readers. Not everyone is so unkind; many bloggers have managed to provide only their single best post of the year for public consideration. Jon Swift has compiled an excellent list, having invited his entire blogroll to send him a link to what each writer considered his or her finest offering from these past twelve months. Warning: it’s a time-suck, as the kids say these days.

A regular reader asks:

I do have a question for you that you may be able to answer. I am wondering if it is possible to reconcile with a person where trust has been broken and be able to rebuild the trust back again. Have you any personal experience in this area that you can shed wisdom on?

I’m not a relationship expert: three divorces by age 35 are proof of that. That doesn’t stop me from offering advice and reflections, and it doesn’t stop people from asking. So with the standard caveat that my opinion is only that, an opinion, here goes.

I’m going to assume my reader is writing about reconciling with a romantic partner. When trust is shattered in a sexual relationship, it’s usually qualitatively different than it is in other friendships or among family members. But I’d like to touch on the loss — and the restoration — of trust in a variety of relationships, because I’ve got a considerable amount of hard-earned experience in this area.

I had my first major mental breakdown in April 1987, shortly before I turned 20. I had my last (God willing) in the summer of 1998, shortly after turning 31. Over that eleven-year period, I was hospitalized more than half a dozen times. I also struggled very publicly with a host of addictions. And I know full well that addicts break the hearts of those who love them, over and over again. My mother, father, brother, and sisters suffered more than anyone. None of my friends, lovers, or wives were part of my life for that entire period; I very successfully chased everyone who wasn’t bound to me by blood out of my life.

My lies were the standard ones: “I’m sober”, I would say — when I wasn’t. “I’m seeing a great therapist” — when I cancelled all my appointments. “The meds are helping” — when they weren’t. Above all, my most consistent lie was “I’m fine.” Anglo-Saxon reticence, and the concomitant dissembling it requires, were part of my family culture. I spent many years on the stage as a child, and my acting skills came in handy when it came time to cover up the pain, the despair, and the appalling acting-out behavior that characterized my life in my late teens and twenties. Continue reading ‘A very long post on how to rebuild trust’

Now I must go buy garbage bags: a note on “doing the NEXT right thing”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 12, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Memories
. 10 Comments

In my post on Monday about teachers who had touched my life, I left out — quite accidentally — the two “sponsors” who guided me through the Twelve-Step program over many years. “Jenia B.” and “Jack K.” loved me, nurtured me, and talked sense to me. it was through them that I learned some basic tools for how to live.

I was thinking about Jenia and Jack this morning as I read through John Spragge’s comments beneath this post. John writes:

Seriously, I don’t object to the notion of changing our thinking and behaviour; I only object to the notion that you or anyone else can tell us how to think and feel. Tell us what works for you, if you like, but don’t indulge the illusion that it will work for everyone else.

I have several problems with what John says here, but I’ve already addressed some of them in this post.

What John reminded me of is something my old sponsor Jack K. was fond of saying to me: “Hugo, just do the next right thing.” Not just the “right thing”, but the “next right thing.” Early on in my recovery, this was a vital tool. During the summer of 1998, for example, when I was just days and weeks removed from a serious suicide attempt and on the cusp of a dramatic conversion, I told myself to “do the next right thing” at least a dozen times a day.

During that strange, marvelous summer — the summer where I once and for all made the decision to live rather than to die — I had to think through the smallest actions. When the alarm went off in the morning, and I had to decide whether to get up and go to an early Twelve Step meeting or stay in bed, I would ask myself “Hugo, what is the next right thing to do?” And the answer usually was: “Get out of bed, put on some clothes, make some coffee, go to the meeting.” Once or twice it was: “Today, you’re exhausted. Stay in bed.”

When I found myself in a “slippery situation”, I asked myself the same question. During that summer and fall of ‘98, I took the first vow of voluntary celibacy of my adult life. A few weeks into that period, I ran into an old “friend with benefits” on the street. Every corpuscle in my system longed to “connect” with her in the familiar way. And I asked myself, almost frantically, what the “next right thing” to do was — and found, to my amazement, that I was able to excuse myself from our flirtatious conversation and complete my errands. The next right thing that day had been to go and buy garbage bags, and the thought “Now I must go buy garbage bags” was what enabled me to walk away from a very tempting situation.

It’s been nearly a decade since I first relied on this tool to survive. These days, my inner compass is much more reliable, and my susceptability to stupid, self-destructive decisions is much lower. But I still use the “next right thing” tool to get me through. Now, it’s less about avoiding drugs, alcohol, and unethical sex than it is about making justice-based choices. When I go to the market, I ask myself: “what is the next right thing to buy?” I know, for example, that I really want coffee. I like certain kinds of coffee, so my own wants are part of the “right” decision. I also know that I want to spend my money as “rightly” as possible, and that means buying coffee that has been certified free-trade, shade-grown, and so forth. Thus the “next right thing” is to find the place where my wants and the world’s needs intersect.

I look for this intersection in every aspect of my life: how I eat, how I teach, how I interact with others in personal relationships. Sometimes, what I want and what the right thing to do is have no easy intersection. When I’m tired and a student asks me a really appallingly dumb question, I want to wring his or her neck — or at least make a witty and cruel remark. But most of the time, I swallow that anger and exasperation and find something supportive to say instead. The “next right thing” is often about redirecting certain of my impulses; it’s usually about being slightly less selfish and a bit more generous.

The “next right thing” is thus not about self-denial. It’s about finding that sweet spot between my deepest desires and the needs of the other creatures with whom I interact. It does require a certain amount of self-awareness, as well as a willingness to ask others to point out “blind spots”. But I can’t help but feel that the world would be a good deal better off if we all applied the “next right thing” model to our lives.

Every dollar I spend is a vote for the kind of world I want to see. Every word I speak, every action I take, has an impact — however slight — on others. Constant mindfulness is a tool for change. And I’m comfortable exhorting others to be equally mindful, even if they end up seeing the “next right thing” as something very different. This isn’t Puritanical self-absorbtion; rather’s it’s a tool for living justly and kindly. And it’s a tool that honors individual perspectives about what the “next right thing” is.

Humility and humiliation, self-loathing and hubris: a long and personal post about addiction and self-awareness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 18, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Faith
. 11 Comments

I mentor a wide variety of students in an equally wide variety of ways. I’m fond of all of them, but I will admit I have a keen sense of responsibility to those students whom I know are my fellow addicts. In the various Twelve Step programs with which I have been affiliated, there is a key maxim: if you want to keep something good (like sobriety), you’ve got to give it away. Call it mentoring or sponsoring or advising, it’s vital to my continued recovery that I work with other addicts. And as luck would have it, I’ve struggled with a colorful palate of compulsions, so I can usually identify with what it is that the young man or woman with whom I am working is going through. And even when I can’t always relate to the actions they’re engaged in (though I almost always can), I can connect to their feelings. That spinning cycle that carries them compulsively from ecstasy to despair is very, very familiar.

Though I often tell anecdotes about my students, when it comes to issues of addiction I shy away from blogging about what they tell me in confidence, even if I go to great lengths to disguise their identity. Their pain is not fodder for my writing. But of course, I do get inspired to blog about things that come up in these mentoring sessions, and something came up this week with one young person that brought me instantly back to a younger, not-yet forgotten Hugo.

One characteristic I see in many addicts is one that was a key part of me for many years. From the time I was a child until I was well into my thirties, I had what most addicts have: a strange mix of brutally low self-esteem and extraordinary grandiosity. For years and years my head told me that I was fat, ugly, shallow, selfish, and unloveable. At the same time, my head told me that I was incredibly strong. My strength lay in my capacity to endure what I imagined no one else could endure, because — my ego told me — if anyone else was suffering what I was suffering they would go stark raving mad. Admittedly, I did go temporarily mad on more than one occasion, but also managed to get through college, earn graduate degrees, and hold down a tenure-track job while dealing with both addiction and periodic psychotic episodes. In my grandiosity, I chalked up that success in the midst of my despair to this great strength I had. Continue reading ‘Humility and humiliation, self-loathing and hubris: a long and personal post about addiction and self-awareness’

Thursday Short Poem and a note about madness: Sexton’s “Live”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 8, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Memories and Poetry
. 1 Comment

Because Anne Sexton ended up taking her own life, this poem — with its brief, defiant rejection of suicide - is all the more poignant. Like most people who love poetry, I’ve connected with different poets at different times over the years, but there are only a handful whose complete body of work has always moved me. Robinson Jeffers is one, and Sexton another. I’ve never put this poem up for TSP before, largely because it’s so viscerally connected to a very dark time in my life. (It’s also a bit longer than what normally goes up, so it’s beneath the fold.)

I remember reading the collected works of Anne Sexton over and over again during a fourteen-day involuntary stay on the locked psych ward at what was then CPC Alhambra, a private facility a few miles from Pasadena. It was the summer of 1996, and I was near bottom, having only just survived yet another suicide attempt, this time by massive overdose of prescription drugs. In the hospital, I was heavily medicated, but I still found comfort in books: Robertson Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy” and an anthology of Sexton. If the staff had been more literarily inclined, they might have confiscated the latter text. I’m glad they didn’t, because I found much comfort in this difficult, breathtaking poem.

And often, that chaotic June and July, I said to myself “Even crazy, I’m nice as a chocolate bar.” I still say it sometimes now. But what really resonated for me in that summer were the last eight lines. And as it happened, in no small way thanks to Sexton, I made it through that dark time by discovering “I am not what I expected.” And in the end, I said “Live”. It still hurts me that Sexton, whose own madness so closely paralleled my own, didn’t end up saying the same in the end. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem and a note about madness: Sexton’s “Live”’

Hugo is a Martha too: on addiction moving laterally, and struggling to be still

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 17, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Faith and Vanity
. 12 Comments

My alarm went off at 5:30 this morning; I had a relatively easy seven-mile run scheduled. Though I had had gone to bed before 11:00 last night, and slept well, I woke up drained. I lay there for a few minutes, trying to decide whether to get up and force myself through the work-out, or turn off the alarm and catch another hour next to my wife. I’m glad to say I did the latter.

It’s very, very easy for me to neglect my self-care. Like a great many people, I make lists in my head of the various things I want to accomplish in any given day. Time for sleep and time for spiritual reflection usually get bumped to the bottom of the list in favor of both fulfilling vital obligations (teaching, grading, writing letters of rec, taking care of chinchillas, doing laundry) and not-so-vital ones (reading blogs and exercising several hours per day.)

I’ve got to keep a close eye on my addictive nature. When I first got sober many years ago, my sponsor said to me “Watch out, Hugo, the disease moves laterally.” I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, but quickly found out. I gave up the alcohol, and turned (in no particular order) to compulsive sex, disordered eating, and — briefly — fundamentalist religiosity. It was in sobriety that my weight dropped to 145 pounds on my frame (I’m a lean 175 now, for comparison). It was in sobriety that I experimented with intolerant zealotry. It was while sober that I began to struggle both with pornography and reckless promiscuity; I traded physical intoxication for the high of seduction. The disease moved laterally indeed. Continue reading ‘Hugo is a Martha too: on addiction moving laterally, and struggling to be still’

Al Rantel, Oliver North and Jack McClellan: a long post about pedophilia and macho posturing

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 1, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Sexual ethics and transformation, Sexuality and Youth
. 90 Comments

Yesterday, it seemed as if the saga of Jack McClellan was the only story on the local AM airwaves. McClellan, for those of you who never watch Fox News or listen to right-wing AM radio, is a self-identified pedophile who has managed to stay scrupulously within the bounds of the law while advocating for man-girl love.

McClellan is a rather pathetic character, and not the subject of this blog post. How men talk about him is.

Yesterday evening, while driving to Pilates, I caught the beginning of the “Al Rantel show” on KABC 790. I don’t listen to conservative talk radio often, but I check in every once in a while. (I’m not trying to work myself up into a lather of lefty indignation; I just think it worthwhile to “keep tabs” on what the right is thinking and saying.) Rantel led off his show with a discussion of Jack McClellan, and spent nearly ten minutes describing what he (Rantel) would do to McClellan if he had a chance. “I’d break his camera over his nasty head and take my chances with a jury. No jury with parents on it would convict me.” (Interesting how some on the right, so theoretically in love with the American system of jurisprudence, are quite happy to call for jury nullification when it suits their interests.)

When I got home last night, I took the chinchillas out in their play room. We have a small TV in the chin room, and I read the New York Review of Books with half an eye and watched the tube with another half. (One full eye carefully monitors the babies during their out time.) I paused briefly on Fox News, and listened to old Oliver North introduce his segment about McClellan. The former Marine officer reminded all of us that before he was a sanctimonious talking head, he had been “trained to kill for a living”. He declared that if he saw McClellan anywhere near his “two lovely grand-daughters”, he’d murder him on the spot. North’s two guests did not challenge him.

I’m struck by the way in which both Rantel and North felt compelled to threaten McClellan with physical violence. Indeed, neither was capable of raising the real issue (which is McClellan’s first amendment right to be open about his attraction to young girls) without first declaring that if given the chance, he would take the law into his own hands. It’s cheap vigilantilism, of course, but it’s something more: it’s a specific kind of macho posturing. Both North and Rantel reaffirm their own masculinity by detailing their willingness to use violence. It’s stunningly puerile.

In American adolescent “boy culture”, a great deal of conversation traditionally revolves around the question of “who can kick who’s ass.” Threats of physical violence, detailed discussions of what one intends to do to one’s perceived rivals, are far more common among many middle-class boys in their teens than actual scraps. Among the young, a “beat-down” or an “ass-kicking” (or, more often, the threat thereof) is used to mark the boundaries of what is acceptable male behavior. When a boy “crosses the line” in the eyes of his peers, he will be threatened with physical violence. Most adult men who survived junior high school remember how the language of beatings was often more pervasive than the beatings themselves. As boys age, they are less likely to judge themselves by their ability to kick each other’s asses — and more likely to use sexual prowess with women as the yardstick with which to measure their own anxious masculinity.

North and Rantel would no doubt dismiss me as an effete urban intellectual, the very embodiment of a member of the coastal blue state elite whom they despise. (Gender studies? Chinchillas? Dual citizen? Pilates? The New York Review of Books? Veganism? I wouldn’t dare tell them I learned to drive on Ford pickups, dipped Skoal, listened to “Alabama” and am still pretty damn comfortable in a Western saddle.) North and Rantel would surely insist that they aren’t posturing, but rather expressing their willingness to “protect little girls from predators.” But of course, “protecting vulnerable women” is the excuse non pareil for issuing physical threats.

When I listen to men like Oliver North and Al Rantel, I don’t hear genuine worry about little girls as their primary concern. Both North and Rantel mentioned their desire to protect girls only briefly, and went on at much greater length about their own fantasies of doing physical violence to Jack McClellan. Their real focus was less on the threat to young women, and more on rhapsodizing about what they’d do and how they’d do it (and in Rantel’s case, how he’d get away with it.) In a world where the pedophile is (perhaps rightly) the most maligned figure of all, he is the perfect tool for pundits like these talk show hosts. The horridness of a pedophile’s identity, the particular details of his sexuality, make him a rare thing in contemporary public life: a figure against whom threats of murder can be made openly and fearlessly. McClellan is the ideal punching bag through whom these microphone jockeys can prove to all just how manly, brave, and virtuous they are. It’s seventh grade all over again.

What amuses me about some on the right is how self-righteously protective they are of little girls — and how willing they are to tolerate the abuse of young women just a few years older than McClellan’s targets. The Norths and Rantels of the world are the ones who decry the “feminist sex police” who “scream date rape” on college campuses. The Norths and the Rantels of the world were vociferous defenders of the Duke lacrosse team, who while apparently not guilty of rape, were certainly guilty of the sexual exploitation of a working-class African American stripper. (And guess what, folks? Any comments about the Duke case will be deleted. Not the topic here.)

Let’s be blunt here: the only difference between McClellan and a hell of a lot of men is that the former wants to have sex with girls who are pre-pubescent, while the latter are often attracted to girls still well below voting age. But the arrival of puberty is not the same as the arrival of emotional maturity. A fully-developed fifteen year-old girl is likely to be ogled by a great many older men (ask her about the wolf whistles sometime.) The eight year-olds on whom McClellan is fixated are children, deserving of protection. We are right to be appalled by the content of the fantasies he shares publicly, though we are not right to threaten him with harm. But the arrival of menarche and the development of secondary sex characteristics do not mark as rigid a line between the “pedophile” and the “normal red-blooded American male” as some imagine.

We live in a culture that fetishizes the bodies of teen girls. The most popular niche in pornography, we’re told, focuses on “barely legal” teen girls. The implication is that the men who frantically masturbate to the images of those who’ve just turned eighteen would love to be looking at much younger girls, but are held back by fear of legal repercussions and lack of easy access. How many adult men — say in their thirties or forties — are enraged that McClellan is drawn to ten year-olds, while these same men stare at high-school cheerleaders just a handful of years older than the pedophile’s targets? A ten year-old is a child; a fifteen year-old is a child. The fact that the latter may have gone through puberty in no way makes an adult man’s sexual attraction to her any more legitimate. The end of childhood is determined more by emotional maturity than by the arrival of breasts and menses, after all.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am disgusted by Jack McClellan, though I wish him no harm. But I am also disgusted by the legions of men (of whom Ollie North and Al Rantel are only two famous examples) who brag about their desire to beat the pulp out of McClellan while sanctioning the sexualization of girls just a few brief years older than McClellan’s targets. One wonders if there isn’t an element of self-loathing and guilt in the hate that’s directed towards a pedophile like Mr. McClellan.

If we’re going to protect our children, folks, let’s protect all of them. That includes those who’ve gone through puberty. And if we’re going to call a man “sick” for being attracted to a child who is, say, eight years below the age of consent, let’s apply the same term to the men who are drawn to those eight days below that same demarcation line.

Addendum: To continue my point, read this old post of mine about National Review columnist John Derbyshire. Derbyshire, who is considerably older than I am, opined in 2005:

It is, in fact, a sad truth about human life that beyond our salad days, very few of us are interesting to look at in the buff. Added to that sadness is the very unfair truth that a woman’s salad days are shorter than a man’s — really, in this precise context, only from about 15 to 20.

Bold emphasis mine. So what’s the moral distinction between McClellan, who likes ten year-olds, and Derbyshire, who likes ‘em at fifteen?

The Twelve Step guide to learning Los Angeles: some recollections

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 10, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Memories
. 1 Comment

I’ve been living in Los Angeles (or the immediately surrounding area) for eighteen years now. I moved down here from the Bay Area right after graduating college in the spring of 1989, and have called this place home ever since.

Please forgive the huge amount of privilege that the following anecdote conveys. Many people I knew got lovely graduation presents from their parents. Most of my friends from Cal went on long trips the summer after they finished college; one backpacked New Zealand, another went to Czechoslovakia (remember, this was the summer before the Velvet Revolution), others went off to France or Ireland. Me? I moved down to Los Angeles at the end of May 1989, and within a week got my graduation present: admission to a 28-day residential treatment program for alcoholism.

The hospital program I was in has long since closed. It was in a dingy and depressing mid-century building in Van Nuys; the program was called ASAP: “Adult Substance Abuse Program”. We were kept on locked wards in a hospital setting, allowed outside only for “smoke breaks” (which were blessedly frequent) and for closely supervised trips to Twelve Step meetings. It was these outings to AA and NA and CA that I remember best.

We were packed into fifteen-passenger vans, and driven, as my mother would say “all over the hell and gone.” While in ASAP, we went to meetings from Chatsworth to Century City; from Studio City to Saugus, Pacoima to Palms. A newly arrived transplant from the Bay Area, readying myself for grad school at UCLA, I was almost completely ignorant of the sprawling geography of greater L.A. But I got a marvelous crash course in navigating the city as a result of traveling in our little white van, going from meeting to meeting to meeting.

Being a rebellious and troubled sort, I dropped out of the program, going out AMA (against medical advice) after a couple of weeks.

The day after leaving ASAP, I took what little graduation money I had left and made a down payment on a used 1983 Honda Accord. It was a stick shift, and I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. But the flirtatious young saleswoman made me a deal: if she could teach me to drive it in less than thirty minutes, I’d buy the car. I bought the car at Keyes, the huge conglomerate in the Valley. The saleswoman took the car onto a side street, and in twenty minutes, had me shifting without stalling. I bought the car, and drove it to my little apartment in Westwood that very day.

One of my first purchases after the Honda was a Thomas Bros. map to greater Los Angeles. I had a little AA meeting directory, and I was determined to continue to pursue recovery even after having bailed out of the treatment program. And over the next couple of years, as I moved in and out of sobriety, in and out of my first marriage, and through my first phase of grad school at UCLA, I learned my way around Los Angeles as I went to Twelve Step meetings. Indeed, I wouldn’t know L.A. half as well today as I do if I hadn’t gone to as many meetings as I did.

Traffic was lighter in the late 1980s and early 1990s than it is today, and so it was easy for me to leave Westwood and hit an evening meeting in, say, mid-Wilshire or Reseda or Torrance. Armed with my Thomas guide (no cell phone or GPS for me in those days), I made my way around this vast basin. Most meetings were in churches or synagogues or hospitals. Even now, my wife and I will find ourselves driving down a little street in, say, Culver City (somewhere I hardly ever have occasion to go) and I’ll cry “Look, honey, see that church on the corner? I went to a couple of great meetings there in 1990!” My wife is a patient soul, but she’s only mildly amused that most of my knowledge of how to get around this town came from the steps I took to treat my addictions.

It was traveling to Twelve Step meetings that made me love Los Angeles. Like most Northern Californians, I came down to L.A. with a host of vicious half-truths and prejudices. Had I stayed in one small enclave around the UCLA campus, I might well have continued to harbor those prejudices for years. As it was, going out to Twelve Step meetings across the city, usually traveling on surface streets, taught me to love this unwieldy metropolis. I learned where all the 7-11s were, where I could buy my diet Cokes and my Parliaments. I learned where I could get my junk food fixes. And I learned that Los Angeles was a lousy place to visit, but could be — at least for the young and childless addict with a car and a map — a great place to live.

Virtue, desire, self-control: a long response to curiousgyrl

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 15, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Aggression and violence, Faith, Favorite posts 2007, Sexual ethics and transformation and Veganism
. 19 Comments

Blogging about feminism and veganism doesn’t seem to be winning me any friends. My feminist allies seem concerned that the way in which I write about veganism is likely to promote or trigger disordered eating. My vegan allies worry that I make veganism sound too much like a difficult challenge, and less of a celebration of diverse and exciting food choices. And those who are neither vegan nor feminist seem irked by the strong strain of self-righteous evangelism that seems to characterize most of my writing.

So I’ll admit I’m frustrated. I spend too much time, perhaps, trying to explain myself. I assume that folks don’t understand what it is that I believe and why, when the truth seems to be that they understand perfectly well what it is that I believe and why I believe it, and they think it’s wrong-headed and judgmental. At some point, does it stop being worth it to try and make the case for feminist/vegan/Christian living? Judging from most of the comments here and elsewhere, what I advocate sounds too joyless, too difficult, too Puritanical for most folks to stomach. (Even if I am, as I wrote in December, a Happy Puritan!) Priggishness is not seductive, and I’ll be clear — I am trying to be seductive on this blog. I want other folks to consider what I have considered, and to join me in making certain commitments. I clearly need to do some deep reflecting on how to make the case for this way of life in a way that is more light-hearted, more winsome, more attractive!

In the comments below last night’s post, curiousgyrl (who regularly participates at Alas) writes:

I’m a feminist and former vegan the main thing I dont get is why self-control is the central component, rather than conscious eating or ‘giving my self the gift of tasty, healthy, fair food.’

I also have to say that I hope your compassion for young women and feminism in general is not predicated on a similar foundation of self-denial and control–i haven;t read enough of your blog to know.

Oh, to be someone for whom justice came naturally! Oh, to never feel the pangs of longing for an older, more self-indulgent way of life!

Eating vegan is often a joy. I do eat a more diverse diet than I did before, and most of what I eat tastes yummy. I like it, and it makes me happy. (I’ve got the most amazing lentil soup for lunch today.) But sometimes, I still crave meat. Some vegans I’ve talked to never crave meat, some do all the time. For some, vegan living seems “natural”, while for others, it seems easy some days and hard on others.

This fits with my experience with other things. I loved alcohol. I loved pornography. I loved womanizing and taking drugs. I gave them all up in order to save my life and in order to live justly. None of these were easy surrenders. In my early days of sobriety, in my period of chosen celibacy and then later in my first truly monogamous relationships, I found the whole process of living “by the rules” to be absolutely exhausting. The cravings for alcohol, for illicit and exploitative sex, for drugs — all of these slowly, gradually abated. (Monogamy is not in the least bit difficult for me any longer.) But every once in a while, nine years sober, I look at a bottle of beer on a hot day and I feel the longing rise in me.

It is the same thing with meat and dairy. Most of the time, I am very happy with my vegan lifestyle. But every once in a while, I have a sudden overpowering urge to eat meat. Driving by the little taco stand on the corner of Fair Oaks and Villa this weekend, I smelled the grilled carne asada. Was I nauseated? No, I was turned on. I suddenly felt famished. I went home, had a vegan shake, and felt better very quickly. But for a few moments, the urge to eat meat was palpable and intense. It was pure self-discipline that held me back. For a few minutes, there was no joy in being vegan, only sacrifice.

When I went through my last divorce in 2002, I was devastated. My wife at the time — a fellow Christian — had decided she “wasn’t in love” with me, and wanted out. I had left my first two wives, but my third left me. We had done “everything right” (right down to waiting ’till the wedding night) according to my newfound evangelical faith, and wouldn’t you know it, the third marriage was even shorter than the first two. I was deeply and profoundly depressed, and one night in September ‘02, drove to the parking lot of a strip club in the San Fernando Valley. What I wanted, with every fiber of my being, was to go in, get hammered, and drool over naked women. I felt betrayed, because I had imagined that if I did everything “right”, and didn’t drink and didn’t use and didn’t cheat, then my marriage would naturally prosper. It didn’t turn out that way, and I was tempted, God was I tempted, to throw away what was at that time four hard years of therapy, sobriety, and self-control.

By the grace of God, I didn’t darken the doors of the club. I didn’t pick up a drink. I didn’t have a one-night stand. But God’s grace was manifest in my ability to squelch my own deep and driving desires to act out, to be selfish and self-indulgent and destructive. Self-control saved my sorry rear that night on Sepulveda Boulevard.

Curiousgyrl wants to know if my compassion for young women and my commitment to feminism is predicated on my own self-control. Well, my compassion is genuine. My spirit is committed, and has been committed most of my life, to living justly and kindly, to treating other human beings with respect and dignity. But where my spirit was willing, for years and years my flesh was very weak, as Paul so famously says. I did what I didn’t want to do over and over again, and I didn’t do what I wanted to do over and over again. There was a huge amount of wreckage created even as I longed to be a kind and gentle man.

But while my compassion isn’t rooted in my self-control, my ability to act compassionately is. That’s a vital distinction. My spiritual life, my relationship with God, gives me the strength to not do what I still periodically am tempted to do. I am happy to say that with the passage of time and my own spiritual growth (and perhaps my own ageing), the desire to do selfish, irresponsible, destructive things abates a little more each year. But I know in my heart that at my core, I am not inherently a kind and loving person. I am a narcissistic, self-involved person trying to become a gentle, devoted, empathetic husband, teacher, mentor, brother, son, family member (and someday, father.) I am not by nature a pacifist; I have a lot of violent rage within me, rage that with time and grace and prayer and self-discipline is being slowly dissipated.

I make no apologies for not being “naturally” good. Virtue is not the absence of temptation; indeed, if we were never ever tempted, how would we know what virtue is? Virtue is restriction and self-control in the face of temptation. Virtue lies in the conscious choice to practice what the Buddhists call lovingkindness with everyone (including the animals, including oneself) when one would rather hit them, steal from them, seduce them, use them, eat them.

Not everyone is like me. I am obviously an addictive personality. But there are a lot of folks out there who share this compulsive, driven character make-up. Shaming them for their desires won’t work. Neither, of course, will giving up on them and telling them that they can’t help themselves. I write for as wide an audience as possible, but my heart is with the addict, with the narcissist, with the violent, with the myopically self-absorbed. My real interest is in reaching those with the greatest capacity to do damage to women, to children, to men, to animals, to our planet — and in giving them a message, a message backed up by how I and others like me live — that change is possible. Saul the persecutor became Paul the apostle; had he not been so wickedly good at the former he might not have been so grace-filled as the latter. I am no St. Paul. But I am a man who knows what it is like to live ruled by impulse, and I know what it is like to live ruled by self-restraint and grace. And I know which man I like better, and I know which man my wife, family, students, friends, and chinchillas like better.

The system worked for me: more thoughts on Cho Seung-Hui and the response to serious mental illness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Memories
. 23 Comments

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings and the revelation that the culprit had been hospitalized in the past for profound depression, the conversation has turned to the various ways we treat mental illness. Some have called for draconian measures. Jill at Feministe provides this quote from someone named Beth:

If you ask me, if we are going to let these crazies run free, not forcing them to be institutionalized, then we need to goddamn well do a better job of protecting the public from them. There’s a reason why they used to be locked up, and it was to protect society. Virginia Tech totally dropped the goddamn ball with this guy; there’s no reason why they should have to educate dangerous people. I know, it’s all about wishy-washy liberal ideals–can’t deny someone with mental illness their “right” to a college education…

I have only occasionally touched on my own battles with mental illness. (See here, here, here, here).

I was first diagnosed with mental illness in college, back in the spring of 1987. After a very violent episode of “cutting”, I was placed on the first of what would be many “5150s”. A 5150 takes its name from the California code that allows 72-hour involuntary “holds” in locked psychiatric facilities for those who are considered a danger to themselves or others. I was 5150ed in April 1987, April 1990, June 1996 (two separate occasions) and June 1998. I was a voluntary admit in June 1989. It totals half-a-dozen stays in locked facilities. (My worst time of the year has always been spring; I tend to be at my lowest between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. I have many theories why, but this ain’t the time.)

I was lucky, so lucky: all the hospitals I was locked up in (both in Berkeley and Los Angeles) were private. They were good places, for the most part. In most I stayed only a few days, but in June 1996 (after two suicide attempts three weeks apart, the second nearly successful) I was placed on an “extended” fourteen-day hold. I talked about my various diagnoses in this post; as I said then I was usually described as having a heavy-duty case of “cluster B’ disorders: Narcissistic, Antisocial, and above all, Borderline Personality Disorder… Doctors frequently added phrases I remember vividly, like “with psychotic features or “prone to micro-psychotic episodes.”

At Feministe, a reader named Psyche wrote:

The real problem is that there aren’t really intermediate states between involuntary commitment (the experience of which, at least the way our mental health systems works now) is comparable to being arrested in terms of humiliation and unpleasantness. Perhaps worse in terms of the dehumanization and total loss of agency. And locked wards in mental hospitals, even the best ones that money can give you access to, are pretty much the last places you want to spend any time, especially if you’re a borderline functional person, you’re surrounded by people who are by and large incapable of sustained social interaction, in an environment with very few distractions, and with no privacy and no control over how you spend your time.

Well, yes and no. Mostly “no.” The locked wards I’ve been on (for, as I said, as long as a few weeks at a time) weren’t Club Med. But they weren’t prisons, either. I’ve spent time in five different locked facilities (I was only hospitalized in one place twice), and I was always thrilled to leave. But while I was there I generally felt safe, cared for. Each time I was locked up, it was after an episode where I had done something so self-destructive that it was obvious to me (and to everyone else) I couldn’t care for myself. Yes, these “psychotic episodes” were brief in my case; I was able to return to functioning (including working on a dissertation and teaching) within a short period of time after release. (I even wrote a paper in one psych ward.) Though I was fortunate in the sense that my illness was more episodic than chronic, I am also clear that all five of the locked wards on which I found myself were places where I got good, competent, even loving care.

I can still remember the faces of the various psych nurses who took care of me. I often ended up in the wards with physical injuries that needed attention (usually cuts or burns); once it seemed likely I had damaged my heart and my kidneys and my liver with one particularly nasty overdose that led to an extensive stay in the ICU before being “released” onto a 5150. (A whole lot of Ritalin and Anafranil and Klonipin, if you’re keeping tabs — quite a cocktail of about 100 pills. I’ve had my stomach pumped three times, and vomited up that charcoal stuff they give you another time or four.) The nurses who took care of me were sometimes loving, sometimes brisk, but always, always, they made me feel safe.

I ate a lot of fruit cocktail (always served in locked wards, it’s a staple.) I made moccasins in occupational therapy. I sat in community meetings with the paranoid schizophrenics and the bipolars in the full bloom of their manic episodes. I read back issues of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. Two years apart, I watched England lose two heartbreaking matches (to Germany in Euro ‘96 and Argentina in the ‘98 World Cup); I was hospitalized for both. I was in a locked ward for Tiananmen Square in 1989, and watched the coverage of Khomeini’s funeral. (I was lucky — most of the wards had cable.) I read all of Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy”; even now, rereading it as I have a couple of times, it brings back those days. And oh my, did I smoke. I had my visitors load me up with packs of Parliaments and Marlboro Reds (and once, a few Djarums.) I haven’t smoked in years, but I puffed away with the best of them every time I went behind the locked doors.

I know I was lucky in many ways. I was a young white, not unattractive male with insurance. I was well-spoken and articulate, and tried always to be polite. (Once, when I was in restraints, I apologized profusely to the nurses who catheterized me, saying that I felt “dreadful” that they had to do this for me.) I was also obviously no danger to anyone other than myself. When I was in Northridge Hospital in 1998, I wandered the halls in Tigger slippers which the staff seemed to find cute and endearing. My illness often made me pathetic, but it rarely made me nasty when I was in the acute stages. (Outside the hospital, I could be very antisocial.)

I was lucky too, in a sense, that when I was “in an episode” my behavior was so bizarre and dangerous that I was instantly 5150ed. Had my illness been less obviously destructive, I might have resisted voluntary hospitalization (something I only consented to once). I know many people struggle with family members who refuse to seek help; I am so fortunate that my disease left me with no illusion that I could function or survive without treatment!

I am grateful that privacy laws kept my condition from Cal when I was an undergrad, UCLA when I was a grad student, and PCC when I was a professor. I can disclose my medical history now because I have been healthy for nigh on nine years, with little fear of the darkness returning. I am very concerned that the reaction to the Cho Seung-Hui situation may lead to calls to deprive those who seek treatment for mental illness of these basic and essential rights. What good would it have done to have me removed from school, fired from my teaching position, held longer than minimally necessary? Am I more of service here where I am or rotting in an institution? After eleven years and six hospitalizations, I might well have been considered a prime candidate for long-term commitment to a mental facility. Blessedly, the system allowed me to return to my life, to my family, to my duties as soon as I was able to do so. In my case, folks, the system really worked.

Medication, intensive therapy (including a couple years of analysis on a couch), growing older, and a Twelve Step program (or three): all of these played vital roles in my recovery. God’s grace allowed me to get still enough to make use of these tools. My story turned out very differently than that of Cho Seung-Hui. But if he is the face of where the system failed, let mine — for those who know me — be the face of where it worked.

“Architects of our own adversity”: a long post about men’s complicity in their own oppression, and the difference between self-acceptance and self-love

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 21, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 21 Comments

Sorry folks, this is gonna be another very long post.

Over at Alas, A Blog, Amp has a good discussion up on the old question: Are Men Oppressed as Men? Amp cites a very interesting article by Caroline New, but warning, the article is tediously jargon-laden.

One strand of feminist thinking about male oppression is that men are rarely oppressed as men. Those who advocate this stance argue that black men are oppressed for their blackness, not their maleness; Muslim men for their faith, not their sex; inmates for ther status as prisoners, not their biological equipment. They also argue that authentic oppression requires a dominant oppressing caste whose identity is distinct from those whom they are oppressing: in other words, whites can oppress blacks, but blacks can’t oppress whites because of an unequal power differential. And blacks can’t oppress blacks because the dynamics of oppression are always the dynamics of oppressing what is Different, what is Other.

New, happily enough, is smarter than that simplistic reading. Most importantly, she notes that in certain instances, the oppressed can be complicit with their own oppression. A valuable and interesting discussion follows in the comments at Alas.

I am not a theorist. I’m not an intellectual at all, really, though I’ve played the part of one for a couple of decades. (I sometimes describe myself, self-deprecatingly, as the least intellectually curious Ph.D I know.) But I do think that feminists and male feminist allies need to have these sorts of thoughtful discussions, and I’m glad that folks like Amp host and provoke them.

On a less theoretical level, I am intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I spend a lot of time reading the literature of many “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. I spend a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce (I am, if nothing else, an expert on starting over.) And I mentor a lot of young male students and boys from my youth group at church. And in conversations with many of these boys and men, I hear “narratives of helplessness” emerging.

From the older, angrier voices of the so-called MRAs, the narrative describes a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack”, which is why many — not all — men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.

There’s not much point in telling these men, “you know, you’re an oppressor more than you are oppressed”. The “you’ve sinned more than you’ve been sinned against” trope doesn’t go over well!. These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel – often — impotent. And too often, our feelings become facts. Too often, we conveniently ignore the ways in which we played the part of volunteers, not victims. Too often, we deny our own complicity in our own misery.

Many men make the mistake of equating the role of the oppressor with a sense of personal fulfillment. If they really were oppressing women, they assume, if they really were part of a dominant class, they’d experience a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction. After all, if there really was a patriarchy, isn’t it supposed to benefit men? If men really did systematically take part in the dehumanization and degradation of women, wouldn’t more men feel the tangible benefits of that oppression for themselves? In other words, they ask the plaintive question over and over again: “How can I be an oppressor when I feel unhappy and powerless?” If most men are leading lives of “quiet desperation”, then surely those same men cannot also be agents of injustice. Right? So goes this line of thinking, or more accurately, this line of emotional reactivity.

Ten years ago, I began three interrelated journeys: I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I drank my last drop of alcohol, and turned to a Twelve Step program for recovery from my various forms of acting out. And I began to work to do more than espouse a superficial egalitarian philosophy — I began to make the effort to match my language and my life, to live a life of radical justice. Now it’s true that alcohol hasn’t passed my lips in nearly a decade, but I’ve had plenty of slips and falls on my walk with Christ. I’ve had quite a few struggles as I’ve sought to live in to an authentic pro-feminism. Growing up and taking responsibility isn’t easy.

One thing my faith, my feminism, and my recovery program all taught me: I was the architect of my own adversity. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t blame my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t blame my genetic inheritance for my predisposition to become an addict, and I couldn’t blame my hormones for my chronic infidelities. I certainly couldn’t blame the women I’d married. My misery was a result of a series of choices I made. Hormones and family history helped shape those choices, but the final decisions were always mine. I came to realize that my sense of my own helplessness was an illusion, one I used to justify my bad behavior and one I used to justify a chronic refusal to change.

It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression. The older lads who torment a younger were themselves tormented when they were his age. The “be a sturdy oak” rule, a rule that teaches men to be alienated from their own inner emotional terrain, is one that is almost entirely enforced by other males. The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.

The first task of authentic men’s work is helping boys and men get in touch with their own ancient wounds. Men need to re-feel the old injuries inflicted upon them. They need to rediscover the tears they suppressed. They need to go beneath the anger (most men have a considerable amount of anger not too far from the surface) to the root cause of their pain. And once they’ve dragged all that garbage out, then they need to be encouraged to understand themselves as active agents with a choice:

“So your father never showed you how to be there for his family? That’s terribly painful. But your father’s script isn’t yours. If you follow his example, it is not because it is your ‘destiny’: it’s because you are consciously ignoring alternatives. If you do to others what was done to you, you have become not only an oppressor, but a victimizer who has made a decision to be one.”

This is true in the big things and in the little things. The fact that we don’t raise men to be as in tune with their own emotions, to be as perceptive and intuitive as their sisters, doesn’t mean that men are destined to be shallow and obtuse. It’s appropriate for a grown man to express frustration when his own vocabulary for his feelings isn’t as deep and broad as his female partner’s; it’s not acceptable for him to shrug and say “Well, it’s the way I was raised” or “Well, that’s just the way my brain is wired.” To say those things is to be complicit; to insist on one’s own inability to transform because of one’s biology or one’s childhood is to buy into the seductive lie of our own helplessness.

I’m not big on self-acceptance. Really, I’m not. What I’m big on is self-love. Too much self-acceptance leaves me believing the idea that I’m okay as I am, even when I’m not particularly happy and I’m not making the world a better place. Self-love reminds me I’m a precious child of God. Heck, I’m God’s favorite! (And so are you, you, you, and you.) Self-love reminds me I’m worthy of joy, but that the world doesn’t owe me happiness. Self-love reminds me I am called to share with others, to live in community with others, to work to change and transform and heal the world and myself. My Jewish friends call this mandate tikkun olam. The Christians I worship with call it building the Kingdom.

But we can only heal the world and build the Kingdom when we know we have been given the power to do it. And if we buy into the lie of our helplessness, our oppression, our victim status, the world doesn’t change. We stay miserable, or maybe just vaguely dissatisfied. Our relationships are, at best, just okay. And we settle for so much less than we could have.

Thomas Eagleton and a note on mental illness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 4, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness and Politics
. 6 Comments

Former Senator Thomas Eagleton has died.

Eagleton was the first vice-presidential choice of 1972 Democratic nominee George McGovern; Eagleton was forced off the ticket after revelations that he had been hospitalized several times for depression and treated with electro-shock therapy. As cruel as his ouster was (an ouster McGovern later said he regretted), Eagleton played a not-unimportant role in the dramatic change in American attitudes towards mental illness and psychotherapy. It is inconceivable that we will not soon have a major presidential candidate admit he or she has been treated for depression; the number of Americans who have sought help for minor or severe mental illness is just too great.

I’m a white Christian heterosexual male. That makes me as privileged as can be. But if there’s one thing that’s a sure disqualification for higher office in my background, it’s my own past struggles with mental illness. I’ve posted about them before: here and here, for example. Let me repeat something I wrote back then:

I know we live in a confessional age. We’re cynical about “once was lost, now I’m found” narratives, and rightly so! We’ve heard them too often, and we’ve been burned by the likes of the lamentable James Frey. But if the alternative to conversion/transformation narratives is a sense of helplessness about the possibility of real change, I’d rather the marketplace continue to be flooded with stories of hard-won miracles. In some ways, my story is fairly mundane; in other ways, it’s fairly dramatic. And if nothing else, my story makes clear to me (and perhaps to others) that addictions, personality disorders, and mental illnesses can — through a combination of grace and exhaustive, long-term effort, be overcome. Especially with mental illness, a clinical diagnosis only describes the past and the present, not the future. Where there is even a tiny spark of willingness to change (and inside some pretty rotten, crazy people, that spark can be found), there is reason to hope. I don’t write to give false hope to those who love the mentally ill and the chronically addicted. But as one who has worn the handcuffs, felt the restraints, been locked away and medicated to the point of incontinence again and again, been divorced multiple times, and spent tens of thousands on therapists, I know that change can happen.

My freedom to write this, knowing that my job and my volunteer position are both safe — that’s part of a legacy of comfort and confidence that Thomas Eagleton’s very public revelation helped bring about. And I’m grateful for that.

Just how nice the Nice Guys are…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 16, 2006
in Addiction and mental illness, Blogging, Circumcision, Feminism, GLBTQ, Men and Masculinity and Vanity
. 84 Comments

The boys at the Nice Guys Forum (registration required, a pity) have been their usual sweet selves lately.  They linked to my post about circumcision last week, and were predictably aroused.  One keyboard therapist named Patr writes:

This is beyond feminism, gender studies, whatever; this is mental illness. It is not so much what he did but his attitudes toward these things and the ways he chooses to describe himself. I think he has serious mental issues. I don’t just say that because I am looking to put down Hugo, I really believe he has serious problems that require treatment.

I suppose my second wife might agree with Skeptos, who wrote:

Hugo Schwyzer is living proof that narcissism and self-loathing are not mutually incompatible. Creepy.

These are among the nicer comments from the "Nice Guys."

There’s also a thread about my post yesterday on chest hair.  Steve writes:

I’m pretty easygoing for the most part (though not in the moral sense of that term) and pretty damned tolerant, too, but this is some seriously weird shit. The dude is posting like a high school girl and claims to be having conversations with high school girls that make it seem like he is trying to be one of their girlfriends. Is that f-ed up or what?

And Burton:

It is a bit disturbing that Hugo, who is the big mangina (man-vagina, the awfully clever term of opprobium for male feminists) on campus, would be talking to teenage girls about this stuff. Perhaps he and Mark Fole (sic) double date?

A while back he ran a blog on older men-younger women relations. Perhaps he was testing the waters? But that is what we suspect is his real agenda in ratting out other men, eh? Get the feminists to flop on their backs for him?

And Nigel:

This person should truly be on the sex-offenders’ register and be denied association with those over which he has authority without appropriate supervision.

And khankrumthebulgar:

Does his wife know he’s a closet Homo? This is such a cliche. I really think Hugo hates himself.

So, there you have it, boys and girls.  The MRAs suggest I’m

a.  insane
b.  a pedophile
c.  self-loathing
d. gay
e.  just using a guise of pro-feminism to get laid

These are the "Big Five" insults traditionally thrown at men who do pro-feminist work; I got ‘em all in less than one week.  I am flattered indeed.

Some of the lads who post here at my blog also post at Nice Guys.  They vary their language, mind you, but I’m afraid that the relatively tame discourse I’ve put up here is fairly typical of what goes on "behind the registration-required doors."  And though at times it’s tempting to retaliate in kind, I think it’s nice to let the boys hang themselves with their own ugly, hate-filled words.

Another school shooting, girls targeted again: a preliminary reflection

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on October 2, 2006
in Addiction and mental illness, Aggression and violence, Sexuality, Teaching and Youth
. 47 Comments

Third post of the day.

For the second time in a week, a gunman has walked into an American school, forced all of the males out, and then assaulted and killed female students.  It happened today in Pennsylvania, and last week in Colorado.   The Times reports on today’s tragedy:

“There was some issue in the past” that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students, Commissioner Miller said. He said that the murders were premeditated and that the gunman had called his wife — without telling her he was holding hostages in a school — that he would not be coming home.

It’s not clear whether or not this shooting was inspired by the events last Wednesday in Colorado, where a male drifter in his fifties molested several girls before murdering one.   School shootings have often happened in clusters in the past, so it seems possible that the two events are related.  While the killers at Columbine High School famously targeted "Christians and jocks", these two shootings have targeted young females.  (It doesn’t appear yet that there was a sexual element to today’s event, unlike in the Colorado murder last week.)

I’m thinking this afternoon about Commissioner Miller’s words about today’s killer:

“There was some issue in the past” that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students. 

As a pro-feminist gender studies prof, if there’s one topic that depresses me more than almost any other, it’s just how widespread male rage at women seems to be in our culture.   I have no idea what the "issue" was that the Commissioner refers to that would lead the shooter to target elementary-age girls.  I’m not sure what particular perversity led the guy in Colorado last week to sexually molest his victims before killing one of them.  But you don’t need a degree in abnormal psych to see that these men were deeply, profoundly, angry at women.  Their victims were kids, but only female kids were selected.  They became the victims of twisted fantasies of disturbed men, men filled with some sick and horrific sense of revenge and "justice."

Do I think there’s a legion of men out there whose fantasy lives are similar to those of the murderers in Colorado and Pennsylvania?  Lord God, I hope not.  I know that the misogynistic hatred that many men feel towards all women can be tremendously powerful.  Until this week, I hadn’t imagined that adult men would target vulnerable girls in such terrible ways.  And while these men are obviously anomalies, they are not entirely alone.  We live in a culture where rape remains ubiquitous; where sexual harassment is a nearly-universal experience for many women in the workplace; where pornography that features the narrative of teenage girls being raped or overpowered is ever more available and popular.  I don’t know what specific factors inspired these two shootings, but I do know that they are, in some as of yet inexplicable way, emblematic of a larger cultural problem.

I suspect a lot more feminist commentary is coming.  We just need more time to mourn and reflect.

I was talking to my wife about the Colorado school shooting the other day.  Without intending bravado, I told her that if a gunman came into my classroom and ordered me out, I wouldn’t leave until all my students could go with me.   I asked her if she would want me to leave if we had kids of our own; after all, heroism is easier for the childless!  My wife told me, "No, you should stay, regardless.  There are some things even more important than living for your own children, and if you’re a teacher, protecting your classroom is one of them."    She’s right on, my wife.

As a teacher and a youth leader, I take protecting young people very seriously.  No one can really know what they would do in such a horrible situation, and it is my sincere hope that none of us ever face it.  But for those of us who teach and give our lives to young people, there is a sense that the classroom is a sacred space.  If someone is coming to hurt one of my kids, they will have to do it quite literally over my dead body.  That is not false bravado; it’s the quiet but firm acceptance of the responsibility that my career and my avocation convey.