My Brother Lew Has Cancer, Part II

My brother, Lew, had cancer.  He died on the evening of July 8^th.  He was sixty-eight.

It still feels unreal.   He was only diagnosed in April of 2011.  I know, many others go much faster.  Our oldest brother, Larry, was gone suddenly in a matter of weeks back in 2004, at sixty-four.  If this were a hundred years ago, both of them would have been considered old.  But it isn’t and they weren’t.

Untimely death.  Maybe we call it that because when someone is taken too soon, it scrambles our sense of time. 

Today is 1955.  The latest national event is Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett on TV.  Our father, a New York City journalist, manages to arrange for us to meet him.  I am eight.  Lew is ten.  We walk into a hotel room in New York and there he is, all six foot five of him, in buckskin and a coonskin cap.  We sit on his knees.  He shows us the enormous bowie knife.  He tells us that the Georgie Russell character played by Buddy Epsen wasn’t a real person, but represents a number of sidekicks that Crockett had.  We feel as if we’ve been initiated into special information from a larger-than-life figure.  He gives us each a coonskin cap.  We have our pictures taken, sitting there on his knees, in our caps.  We are going to wear them for the next several months, go to sleep with them on our pillows.  We are going to be celebrities in our neighborhood because we got them directly from “Davy Crockett himself.”  We will spend the summer running around the little town of Highlands, New Jersey, where our grandfather lives, with coon tails flying—flags of boyhood.

This is today.  It walks with me.  If I take a quick step in the right direction, I can be running up Bay Avenue in Highlands, a mile from the ocean with Lew beside me.

                                                   ****

It’s also today that he is asking me again about our mother’s final days.  He wants to know the mechanics of going to sleep until the end comes.  She had morphine pills placed under her tongue.  She slept for five days and died.  He is going to ask Nancy, his oncologist about methodology.  He continues to have breakthrough pain at night and he and Nancy continue to adjust the medication to combat it.  Cancer not only consumes the body.  It consumes the mind.  Beyond a certain point there is nothing else to think, feel, talk or learn about but this treatment, that theory, this drug combination, the quality or personality of this doctor, nurse, lab tech, survival rates, the fate of others with similar afflictions and, above all, pain and managing pain.  The joys and interests of a lifetime are utterly upstaged. Lew has thought hard about the courage it took our mother to say, “I’m there.  No more.  This is it.  I want to sleep now until the end.”  He tells me, “This isn’t it, yet, but it’s getting close.  I want to be prepared.” There are discussions of “the sublingual approach” being “a general part of the hospice comfort pack” and “fentanyl lollipops for immediate control of pain.”  Fentanyl lollipops.  Could the inventor of lollipops ever imagine that phrase?  All at once, things are moving faster than any of us have foreseen.  I’m booked for a return visit.  I’ve been convinced he’ll still be alive and awake when I get there.  Now I’m not so sure.

Then, suddenly, this email from him:  “This IS it Bob.  The combination of pain, fluids, and this and that over the past 2+ days has reached the point where Anne and I have this very evening to stop the dance…this has happened very quickly.  Where does this leave you?  Staying home?  Trying to have one last visit when I don’t know what the situation will be?  It leaves you and me forever in one another’s arms in ways that I’m sure neither of us would ever have imagined.  I want you to have as much time as possible to think about what you might want to do (to come or not to).  No matter what happens, what events unfold, know this:  I love you tremendously and thank you once again for your blog and so much more.  I will give Mom, Dad and Larry a big hug from you and confirm that we hope it will be many, many years indeed before we are all together again.”

I call as soon as I read this.  He is sleeping.  I ask Anne to try to read a final email to him if he awakens: “Lew, I love you. I love you.  I love you.  That is all I can give you to take with you.  I am so grateful for the love we have shared over a lifetime and over these last few years but especially these last few months.  You did not run.  You did not hide from what was coming.  You opened your eyes and your heart to all around you so they could receive the last and fullest measure of your soul’s gifts.  Thank you, my precious brother, thank you! I am walking with you to the threshold and waving you across.  Bob”.  

I am planning on going anyway, even if he is in his final sleep.  I can support my sister-in-law and Lew’s grandson, Ben.  And maybe Lew will sense my presence.  But this is not to be.  The day before my scheduled departure, Anne asks that I not come.  “The last 2 days on Lew’s downward spiral have been a free fall…  So, Bob, since spirit energy knows no time and space, you are as much with Lew now and he with you, as you could be here.  Save yourself and take a walk to Montana de Oro (the state park with miles of rustic beaches that are special to us) and visit with Lew there. Coming at this time would be futile...”  She wants to devote all her energy to his final moments.  It makes sense to me.  I stay home.  The next evening, before I would have arrived, he is gone.

                                                 ****

This is today, too, perhaps a year after coonskin caps.  My mother gets a phone call and goes gray in the face.  Lew has had a bad spill from his bike going down one of our town’s steeper hills.  Apparently a dog ran out and startled him.  He is at Overlook Hospital.  We rush there.  My heart hammers.  How hurt is he?  I feel my mother’s fear.  I see my father grit his teeth.  This is the first time in my life that I have been faced with the possibility one of us could be badly hurt in a life-changing way, or even killed.  I am shaking inside.  I grip my mother’s hand as we enter the hospital room.  At the same instant, we all connect with Lew’s eyes.  He is sitting up, alert, bruised all over his face and arms but fine.  When he comes home the next day, he gets to sit out in the side yard on the chaise lounge.  His bruises are all dabbed with some kind of jelly.  He looks funny and knows it.  Mom and Dad buy him a huge quantity of comic books.  He burns through them.

This is today.  I think about that moment when we walked into Overlook Hospital.  I think how wholly unpredictable and unforeseeable most of life is.  I think about how little time has passed though the calendar says it is nearly sixty years.  I think about how the beaches of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, were playgrounds and holy places in our childhood.  There was one beach where our parents paid a quarter for us to get on.  Then we were given a small yarn—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, gray, purple—that indicated we had paid that day.  We tied it on our bathing suits so the lifeguards knew we had paid.  I think about how the beaches of California’s Central Coast have become my holy places in adulthood, and certain beaches in the Rhode Island and Massachusetts area his…and where his ashes will be scattered.  I think that calendars and clocks are tricks, illusions.  They have nothing to do with time as the heart knows it.  Time is liquid, not linear.  I need to get some yarn in different colors.

                                                 ****

Another today.  He is retiring from 36 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  I ask, “Do you think you’ll do some part-time teaching?”  He answers rapidly, “No.  I’m done.  I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my career.  But I’m done.”  I ask, “So what do you want to do?”  Again, he answers without hesitation, “Spend time with Anne, read, lay on the beach.”  For the past few years he has been sending me reading recommendations which we refer to as “Lew’s Book Club.”  He has done enough reading in his academic field.  These are wonderful novels, all the best contemporary stuff. He and Anne buy a little place to spend their winters in St. Augustine, Florida.  Anne, reading, beach (no yarn necessary).  All set up. Perfect.  What could go wrong?

                                                 ****

And this is today.  Our father has just died.  We take his ashes to a special beach at Montana de Oro state park here in San Luis Obispo County, Larry, Lew and myself.  We each pour some in the sea.  When Lew pours, a little wind tosses the ashes in a swirl around him, almost a caress.  Later, at a memorial service, we all speak some words about our father, the journalist, the lover of words.  Lew’s testament: “He was a man in full.”  Yes, not a perfect man, not a perfect father, but a man in full.  This day I can say the same of my brother.  He was a man in full.  A rare phenomenon in an angry time of half-beings.  A man in full whose bravery was met by the brute pain that cancer visits on its victims…and yet, a man in full to the end.

                                                 ****

Another today.  Some kind of sibling rivalry.  He is five years younger than Larry and only two older than I.  I guess I am an unwitting usurper, by dint of my position.  So, yes there are occasional struggles, a rare fist fight when I am six or seven (he wins with a fist on the top of my head that sends me crying), and some residual resentment riding into adulthood.  But this is generally not Shakespearean.  It’s run-of-the-mill jealousy, a peevishness that surfaces from time to time.  When our father dies, and I begin writing poetry in earnest for the first time in many years, he is avidly supportive.  He asks, “When are you going to start doing the thing you were born to do full time?”  Meaning, writing.  Meaning, specifically, writing poetry.  Meaning, life is short.  Who cares if you make money at it?  Just write.  I am touched by his enthusiasm and it continues and even grows as the last sheath of sibling rivalry is shucked away by the death of our brother early in 2004 and our mother in September of the same year.  “Write, Bob.  Just write.”

                                                ****

And this is today, toward the end of my visit in April of 2013, I am thinking what a good person Lew is.  He has never done any serious hurt to another human being.  He is a good man who has shared his joy of teaching and the French language and its literature with hundreds of students.  He has loved his wife, has been more a father to his adopted sons than their own, more a father to his grandson than his own.  There is no rhyme or reason to why this person gets cancer, or that person dies of a sudden heart attack or another person lives to 95 after being a royal prick most of his life. 

                                                   ****

This is a thought today.  It may be true that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but that is not the case with memory.  All these moments, thoughts and feelings exist simultaneously within me.  As I said, time is liquid, not linear. It has depth and breadth, current and cross-current. Conflicting truths flow together, forming something unforeseen in a new kind of present tense.  We are a family of five and yet now we are one.  “We thought we’d be boys forever…”  So I wrote in a poem after Larry’s death and it is still true.  We are boys forever.  The sandbox will always contain us, the pine limbs bear our weight.  Yet, we are also reduced to one now…one person to hold the elixir of memory for an entire family.  One person to carry the love and the loss.

                                                   ****

Another today.  I am in my late twenties.  I write Lew and ask him to share his sweetest memories of our childhood together.  The first thing he offers is the two of us on all fours as little boys, probably three and five, playing animals under the dining room table.  I am so grateful for this, for it has left my own ready-recall file, but the moment I read it, the memories come back in detail. 

More than sixty years later, in this today, I realize he has always been there, for I was the youngest.  They were all there, always—Mom, Dad, Larry and Lew, each pouring their own rich memories into the chalice, many of which I could never have reclaimed on my own.  I have never known life without at least one of them being at the end of a phone call or email.   But Lew is gone and I now know life alone, life void of contribution.

 As I try to understand why the bond is so strong, the grief so deep, I return to that space between the four legs of our dining room table, a table that protected us like a mother elephant, and those moments when we crawled around making animal sounds, so close to each other that his particular five-year old boy smell wrote its verse in me, and the feeling when our bodies would bump against each other, and the sound of his breathing and his voice as it manifested growls, purrs, howls, barks and trumpeting—verse after verse.  We knew each other only as little brothers can in the dawn light of life. 

It was a unique bond.  We were animals together, slept in the same room, knew that we came from the same people, looked up to the same faces, loved the same voices, rode the same hips and shoulders and were looked after by the same oldest brother.  We ran through the same storm door into the winter snows where snowmen, snow angels and sleds were the kings, queens and royal carriages of our little land, a land where together we discovered the neighborhood and friends, games and rituals, hiding places, magical trees, swinging vines and outcroppings of ancient faces.  We also ran through the same screen door into the bright summer air to dash through backyards and front, ride bikes, throw and kick balls, climb fences and trees, explore brooks and catch lightning bugs. And on trips to our grandpa’s, we tanned nut-brown like twins under the same sun on the same sand and in the same Atlantic waves.  There was only one person on earth right beside me from the beginning, each of us making our own marks on our lives’ first pages of poetry--my brother, Lew.

No words or deeds can fully honor my love for him.  But I am heading to the beach today…and I have yarn.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

The Myth of the Pelican & the Truth About Humans

 

There is an interesting bit of information about pelicans circulating among bird lovers. It holds that because of their diving into the water from heights up to 60 feet and at high velocity,

they eventually go blind from the accumulated damage done to their eyes when they

hit the water. In other words, some of the very things that serve their survival—their keen eyesight and diving ability—lead to their demise. Now I have discovered this is not true. It is a myth. First of all, not all pelicans dive for prey. Some of them paddle along the surface and do quite well catching dinner

from a sitting position, thank you very much. Those that do dive have protective sacs that cushion the

impact on their eyes. Pelicans have been around for roughly 40 million years without significant change in their anatomy, from what we can tell. So the design seems to work. Individual pelicans also live up to

forty years, which puts their diving scores far beyond those of any human Olympian.

So this is a myth, but we have many myths in human culture. They are not true on the surface, but they are true at the depth. An obvious example is the myth of Superman, which I have written about extensively (my first book, The Superman Syndrome, 2000, Authorhouse). When is the last time you saw a man flying around your city in blue tights with red boots? No, there is no superman, no superheroes, no X-men, no Prometheus giving fire to man (if you want to go all the way back to the Greeks). Nonetheless, a careful examination of these myths teaches us some valuable lessons. The preeminent one for me is that all these superheroes have some kind of terrible wound visited upon them. In the case of Superman, his entire planet exploded with his family on it when he was merely a baby. He had to endure a long solitary journey to his new home on earth. He grows up to be the Man of Steel. But there is something very interesting about this man. He doesn’t feel very much. He’s not the sensitive type. If he has any feelings, they seem to be a kind of detached amusement or righteous anger. But the deep truth is conveyed to us when we discover that in order for him to be in love with Lois Lane, he must give up his super powers. In other words, steel and feel don’t compute.

The myth is repeating to us a basic human truth. That when we undergo trauma in childhood, we tend to shut down. The capacity to feel, to yearn for connection is there under the surface but we are not fully in touch with it. We become grandiose. We become world-shakers, masters of the universe in business and politics, figuratively or literally insane artists who create magnificent paintings, sculptures, poetry, film roles, or athletic stars--all to feed the public hunger for someone to instill hope that we can triumph in the end.

But, like the teaching within the myth of the pelican, what we discover is that while being able to disconnect from feeling has allowed us to survive through the traumas of the childhood of our species and our individual childhoods, in the long run, this dampening of feeling puts us at risk of vanishing.

We seem to need crises to awaken our deeper sensibilities—like global warming today, or the suffering of our fellow man paraded before our eyes on evening TV such as happened during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights Movement or more recently, the devastation of Katrina on the people of New Orleans or the brutal suppression of human rights in so many countries around the world. But reacting to crises is a risky strategy at best. We are always trying to catch up. We don’t seem capable of grasping and acting on the essential truth by asking the core questions: why would humans treat each other this way? Why would humans treat the planet that has given them life this way? How could we be so insensitive to the evidence that surrounds us?

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neurologist who suffered and recovered from a left hemisphere stroke has written: “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” (Her italics). Yes, we are birthed and experience are first most vulnerable years of life with our sensing and feeling brains (brainstem, right hemisphere, right limbic system), and have to wait for more than two decades for the left hemisphere “thinking brain” to completely come online. But it would probably be more accurate to say that we are feeling creatures that disconnect from our feelings under certain levels of trauma and stress, but that the feelings from which we disconnect to not vanish from our biological system, only from our conscious awareness. Then they exert tremendous influence on the further development of our entire physiological system, including how and what we think about later as the left hemisphere does develop. We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves—a heightened feeling capacity being “told” by other parts of the brain that it does not or should not feel so deeply. As long as we obey those messages which are delivered by life in general and often our quite specifically by our original caregivers and instructors as agents of a disconnected society, we will increasingly be at risk. As individuals, a lack of feeling will lead us toward less than best-case decisions, at the least. As a nation and a species, we will not feel danger until it is upon us—until we are nearly blind from the impact of so many dives in our frenzied pursuit of what we have come to believe is the real sustenance—material possessions, status, money, power. Even political freedom, while a necessary precondition, does not guarantee psychological freedom from this cycle of reinforced suppression of feeling.

So, do we ultimately perish from using the same strategy over and over again as the myth ascribes to the pelican? Is this a fatal glitch in our design—that in order to survive we must disconnect from our deep feeling nature, and that disconnection will render us incapable of responding to the very crises it impels us to create?

The jury is still out, out on the question of whether or not enough of us can see this and change

However, the jury is not out on how we make it through. Nowhere is it more exquisitely stated than by Martin Prechtel in his luminous book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: “For me, true initiations would be impossible until the modern world surrenders to the grief of its origins and seeks a true comprehension of the sacred.” He goes on to discuss the perverse hunger that is the result of being disconnected from the simple feeling truths of everyday life: “…hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars. That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead of blocked and filled up” (my italics). What an irony. The teaching here is that, like the pelican, we have protective "sacs" near our eyes--tear ducts! The pelican has been here 40 million years. Homo sapiens has only been here 150,000. Our survival repertoire is still largely untested. Still, it is a sad measure of the breadth of repression that there are still large numbers of people in the psychological community that not only fail to give grieving its due importance as a healing process, but actively denigrate it.

As is so often the case, artists and soul-adventurers like Prechtel know better than so many of the people who purport to be experts on healing the human heart.. There will be no true transformation into the centuries-old longing for peace and collaboration among humans without our first feeling the brutal and sorrow-filled episodes of our origins—as a species and as individuals. No feeling, no tears; no tears, no truth; no truth, no vision; no vision, no potency to manifest what lives beyond political freedom—psychological and social freedom that cherish, respect and mobilize our essential nature as brilliant feelers.

C 2012 Bob

Fierce Attachment III, Couplehood, the Final Frontier

 

I have an old friend who is passionate about our founding father, Thomas Jefferson. He speaks of him with the adoration and devotion of a young boy for his dad. As I write this on the morning of October 6, 2011, many people across the world, myself among them, are mourning the loss of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. He might well be seen as the founding father of a new age. Never in the history of human business and culture have so many people been so enamored of a corporate CEO and the brand he birthed. I use the word "enamored" with intention. In its core, you see "amor"...meaning love. Between Jefferson and Jobs, we could identify a very long list of public figures who have been the objects of enormous affection on the part of huge numbers of individuals. This is just more evidence of the centrality of fierce attachment in human existence.

I have been very fortunate in my life to learn at the feet of some very smart, wise and talented people. I will readily admit to you that I am fiercely attached to these beloved mentors. Given that I am sixty-four years old, you might think I am done seeking mentors and am busy being one. Maybe there are a lot of people smarter than I am. I am aware of still having a lot to learn and I cherish people who can bring something new, potent and truthful to me. Most recent in that category are Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the husband and wife team behind Imago Relationship Therapy, as well as Bruce Crapuchettes and Francine Beauvoir, the senior faculty members of Imago Relationships International, under whom I have done most of my training over the last three years. What have these four people brought to me in my sixties that is so valuable? Since this is a blog post, not a book, I'll be brief, at the risk of understating their gifts to me.

I went through a lot of individual therapy when I was younger...a key moment of which I shared in my last post. The process of regaining my capacity to grieve over childhood hurts literally helped me save my life and grow into adulthood.

Harville and Helen brought a major new insight to the therapeutic process. I don't think it's a stretch to call them the true founding father and mother of transformational couplehood. They have shown us that no matter how much work we do one-on-one with a therapist, there will be wounds that will never be addressed, can never be addressed until and unless we are in a love relationship in which both of us are committed to help each other heal. As intimate as is the one-on-one patient-therapist relationship, as capable as it is through the process of transference of stirring up old feelings for healing, there is no relationship that more closely resonates with the vulnerability of our first connections in life with our primary caregivers--usually mom and dad. In the womb, in infancy, in early childhood and all the way into adulthood, we are at our most dependent and sensitive. Templates of the basic dynamics of relationships are being imprinted in us. As adults, with our lover, we are as open as children once again, hopeful, joyful, ecstatic and dependent. So old early hurts that have managed to lie dormant for decades can be suddenly triggered when our partner seems to ignore us, or talk to us with edge in their voice, or give us a cold shoulder or forget to do something for us. There are just some layers of feelings that only a lover can trigger and make available for processing--not a boss, not a friend, not a therapist, not even a child.

Not only have they shone a bright light on a key truth about human existence. They have presided over the training of thousands of therapists in specific practices that couples can actually learn in workshops and in therapy sessions. Those practices constitute a comprehensive toolkit that has been tested and honed. It is very user-friendly. It is the iPhone of couplehood.

You might be thinking that Harville and Helen's insight naturally raises a question about the limitations of a solitary wisdom path such as meditation. That would be right. Notwithstanding that there is genuine value in the practice of meditation, the iconic journey away from civilization is not, for me, the optimal or even most heroic.

The final frontier of human development is not on a mountaintop in Tibet or in an ashram in Massachusetts. Couplehood is the final frontier. But it is not "out there." It is "in here" or "down there." It is the ultimate site for personal and relational archaeology. Couplehood unearths what has remained hidden in spite of serious efforts through many other methods and moments. Without couplehood, we cannot fully become whole, and unless we become whole, we cannot fully experience couplehood--a challenging, yet sweet and virtuous loop.

Through the application of Imago practices I have repeatedly seen people discover things about their own life journey that were utter epiphanies for them and brought transformational energy. In my own practice with my darling wife, I have processed and learned things that shaped my consciousness from my first breath, things that were still hidden from me as I entered my seventh decade of life, in spite of a great deal of inner work. I have been called to new levels of consciousness, honesty, courage and understanding. The power of these revelations is self-affirming. I'm convinced that it literally reorganizes brain synapses...making us into a qualitatively different human being, more feeling, more compassionate, more curious about our partner, more honoring of their otherness and, above all, more capable of being attached appropriately as adults, rather than caught in the co-dependence that results from being over-burdened with unconscious injuries from our earliest years.

For the insight of couplehood as the final frontier, for the practices to help us navigate that realm and for the sweet, steadfast and patient teaching I have received, I celebrate my fierce attachment to my Imago mentors. Above all, I whole-heartedly celebrate my fierce attachment to the woman who brought me to the Imago well to drink, my true partner, the amor of my life, my Andrea.

C2011 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment, Part II

Before my son, Ben, was born, I had tried hard to imagine him as a particular individual with particular features...not just "the baby." But when I saw his face for the first time as the doctor held him up, I realized this was no baby. This was a person, of me, of my family. He was completely recognizable. He looked an awful lot like my Grandpa Sam, my mom's father...except for his creamy blue color. After more than thirty hours of labor, it felt as if the room were tilting and spinning when he finally emerged. My eyes were fixed on Ben but I was falling away in a strange kind of slow motion. I was on the verge of passing out when I felt his tiny spirit lasso and haul me back. I tumbled forward off the cliff of my own breath as he took his first. In an instant, I knew him and he knew me. Our souls collided.

Fatherhood comes upon men in different ways. During the six weeks that followed Ben's birth, I experienced a high beyond anything I'd ever felt. This was not just a new page or new chapter in my life. I had been transported to a new planet. Everyone and everything was different, as if the world itself had just been born. And I had a mission unlike any I'd ever imagined--to protect, nurture and love this person into full flowering. There was no questioning this. It had an irresistible primordial potency. I'm sure millions, perhaps billions of fathers before me had felt this same flooding of the heart...but it was my turn now.

That high felt as if it would never end. I would be the best possible me for the rest of my life, victoriously dueling with the demons of the world to make a sanctuary for my boy. But it did end, almost as if scheduled, right at six weeks. It ended with a bang, not a whimper. Like a lightning strike. I fell into a massive depression. I'm sure I'm not the only man who has experienced "post-partum depression." It isn't talked or written about much, but it happens. We could talk about the crashing of the happy hormone-neurotransmitter pump...but let's not.

The high was followed by a low that matched it. My confidence had flown. I was in the world without any refined skills to make my way and provide the safe-haven Ben deserved. I had just turned twenty-eight. Much of my twenties were spent traveling in Europe, the Middle-East, writing songs and performing. I dreamt of a career as a folk-singer, though I was a few critical years late. That train had left the station. Music was changing. Besides, even when everything is in sync, how many people actually get to live that dream? I went to the local city college and started learning carpentry. I'd have something to fall back on, I thought. But when Ben arrived, I was still in contractor kindergarten. Everywhere I looked, I saw closed doors. Unlimited optimism had turned into unlimited despair and utter paralysis. I contemplated suicide.

Fortunately, there was help available and I grabbed it as fast as I could. Within a few days,

I was on the floor of my therapist's office sobbing my guts out. Initially, all I could feel was that I loved Ben so much more than I had ever loved anyone or anything--yet, I couldn't be the father he needed. I didn't have the skills or the smarts. I had spent most of the last ten years in self-centered pursuits. How could I possibly be a father? What preparation did I have?

After about ten minutes of "woe is me" in the present, things shifted. An image of my father showed up in my mind's eye...not my father as he was in this day, at the age of 58, but as he was when I was about four years old. The image was so clear, it was as if he were in the room with me...and I was that four year-old little boy. "Dad!" I cried, reaching up for him as that little boy. I was inundated with memories from that time...most of them about his absence and my longing to be close to him, to climb in his lap, nuzzle into his body, ride on his shoulders or just be in the same room with him so I could see and hear him. They didn't present themselves as memories, though...but as the present, as immediate reality and need.

Like most men of his generation, my father was a career man. We lived in northern New Jersey. He commuted by train into New York five days a week. Most of the time, when he was around, he was engaged, energetic, warm, playful and funny. Clearly, this was a far better situation than if he had been cold, distant and cruel. Still, it had its own odd curse. Since my father was such a magnetic person, my little boy soul could not help but yearn fiercely to be with him. But being the third of three boys, there just wasn't a lot of time left for me. So that was my deepest hurt with my father--needing to be close to a dynamic man who certainly loved me but just wasn't available enough. I was left gasping for the oxygen only he could provide.

I had known this intellectually for years. I wasn't a novice at psychology or therapy. But for the first time in my life, I was feeling it from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. I was that little boy.

I needed my dad desperately. There was no other reality.

After nearly two hours of crying, I was exhausted. The therapist hugged me and told me to go rest. The next morning, I was back. More tears. More images from the past as clear as if they were happening for the first time. I stayed with the little boy. I surrendered to his need. I was him and as him, felt helpless within this need that could not be met no matter how hard I reached for my dad or called for him.

After another two hours, it ended, cleanly. There were no more tears. I sat up, blew my nose and said, "That's it."

"What's it?" the therapist asked.

"I couldn't be a man because I wasn't done being a little boy. I needed my dad to come home and be with me."

"Well, that's very clear!"

I stood up. "I've gotta go," I said.

"Where to?" the therapist asked.

"Home. I've gotta go home. I've gotta go get a job and take care of my kid."

"Alright!"

We hugged and I was out the door.

Two days later, I got a job selling cars. This was not even on my list of "things I'd like to do". But I had a friend who had done it and told me I had the requisite people skills and there was good money in it. But I needed to make a living and right now. He turned out to be right. Within a month, I was making more than I ever had, and learning the art of selling. Some of it was repugnant to me. That just spurred my creativity so I could find other ways of relating to people without manipulating them. Some of it was quite satisfying. All in all, it was a legitimate way to make a living. Over a couple of decades, I mastered selling, moved into management and ultimately, beyond into consulting and the deep work of leadership development. I never looked back. I never had that feeling of needing my father as a four year-old again. I never again felt paralyzed in the face of life challenges. I had a firm grip on my manhood and did a decent job of raising my son, who is now a grown man and a father.

So, think about attachment. It was fierce attachment to Ben that both triggered the unmet need of my father and gave me the courage to face its force. That need is an intense dynamic which I would argue is common to all children. By fully processing the sorrow of not getting enough of my dad, I was liberated from it...detached, so that it no longer ran my life from its subterranean realm. I was also able to detach sufficiently from my unrealistic dream of fame and fortune so I could be a real and present dad. I would have to do some more work on that dream later, work that had to do with my mother, but the key factor at this moment was that my feet were planted firmly on the ground. I had been the victim of what we might call "the artist's conceit"...meaning that artists so often believe there is an intrinsic beauty and value in their work that the world should and will beat a path to their door eventually to embrace them. That conceit, in my view, is a projection of unfulfilled early needs.

I said in Part I that the fierceness of our attachment to our caregivers is beyond what most of us allow ourselves to feel most of the time. This was true of this situation following Ben's birth. If you had told me that I was going to have to cry for my dad as a four year-old for nearly four hours in order to stand up and be the father I wanted to be, I'd have been pretty skeptical. Having actually done it, there is no way anyone can talk me out of the value of those tears, and the truth that as children, our need to be close to our parents is the dominant force in our lives. There is also no way anyone could talk me out of my appreciation of how our extraordinary brains are capable of holding onto enormous old hurts in the hope that one day they will be healed. Frustration of early need sends the resulting pain underground, from which place it will run our adult lives until we are able to connect with it and grieve it in its original context. No amount of thinking or talking about it will yield the same result.

I am also convinced, from my own experiences and from what I see all around me, that the need for attachment is life-long in humans, though its nature changes with development and aging. Look at human history, at both our cruelty and our finest accomplishments. Look at it through the lens of attachment and all comes clear, from Caesar to Hitler, from communism to capitalism. None of it happens without the fierce need for attachment being unmet, distorted and driven into other areas where it writhes and dominates our lives with sub-optimal adaptations, including cataclysmic brutality. You will also see, laid plainly before you, what we need to do to end the cruelty and create cultures of compassion and connection.

C 2011 Bob Kamm (For more on my fatherhood experience, see my second book, Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, available at amazon.com and other book outlets).

How to Express a Feeling

 By the time we reach adulthood, we have heard a lot of "don't" messages from our culture. This begins with our primary caregivers but quickly fans out to include other adults in our lives...and other kids who have already become agents of the culture. These are powerful shaping experiences. One of the many results is that as adults trying to actively be in a love relationship, we have lost or hidden away the capacity to express a feeling in a straightforward manner.
In our work, we frequently hear people go down the wrong road by using this phrase: "I felt that..."
What usually follows is the word "you" and a criticism or indictment of their partner. In other words,
criticism comes through masquerading as a feeling. "I felt that you disappointed me" is not a feeling.
"I feel that you are never really going to understand me" not a feeling. "I feel that you'll never do the things I need you to do so I can feel respected" not a feeling. All of these are criticisms. When you point your finger at your partner, they put their fingers in their ears.
So how do we express a feeling? Ask yourself how young children do it. They say, "I feel really hurt," "I feel sad," "I'm mad," "I'm really scared," "I feel bad," "I'm so happy!" They just say the feeling. There is no "that".
They say the feeling and feel the feeling at the same time. As adults, if we really want our partners to hear us and be empathetic and possibly change some aspect of how they interact with us, we have to unlearn the Language of Hurt which is "you, you, you," shame, blame, criticize in a variety of disguises...and sometimes undisguised contempt! We have to relearn our natural language, the Language of the Heart, the Language of Healing by owning what lives in us and is so painful. It is painful for a lot of men to say, "I'm so sad, I could cry for a week," or "I'm really afraid...I'm afraid I'm going to be alone." It's very painful for a lot of women to say, "I'm angry. I'm just so angry!" We could go down the gender difference trail further but for our purposes here, not necessary. Because, frankly, it is painful for most adult human beings to just say their deepest feeling out loud at any moment, unless they are happy...but a lot of people even have trouble saying that, as if there is an inner voice telling them it's not good to be too happy, an unwelcome residue of our Puritan founders.
Some people joke and tease about the phrase "inner child" or the phrase "how does that make you feel?"
The truth is, we make fun of them because they make us feel uncomfortable...because nearly every last one of us is carrying around an emotional heritage that includes some very painful memories. Yet, until we get fully real with ourselves and our partners, until we claim our right to express our hurt, to tell the story of what we experienced as vulnerable children, we can not experience true intimacy as adults. It is a great and sad irony that vulnerability set us up for hurt as children...but without vulnerability as adults, we cannot be intimate. We must risk telling our story in its true form, or face the greater risk of living a life under cover.
C 2011 Bob Kamm