Trauma Don't Play Volleyball: A Bestseller
Karate, orcs, Albany, mentors, barnyard fashion, waterfalls, and no socialism
In Lord of the Rings, they have this weird mud that Orcs are born from, bubbling up until they’re fully formed.
That’s how I think of trauma. The mud is your life and experiences, all mixing together. The trauma orc emerges from that, ugly and unformed, and before you know it, the trauma is fully armed and armored, ready to do battle. (And then meets a donkey). I used to believe that depression was probably fifty percent random occurrence but the more I talk to people, the more I’ve come to believe that there is a memory of something that is difficult enough that the brain can’t process it. So at that point, the memory is locked away where it doesn’t disappear but continues to make dissonance and difficulty until the brain falls into a state of screwed-upness.
My wife and I have been watching The Vow, which explores the NXIVM (pronouced “Nexium”) self-help and sex-with-a-creep cult that roped in a lot of Hollywood actresses.
I’m going somewhere with this.
There are several mysteries to this show, chief among them is how this guy,
a former multi-level marketing scammer, was able to pull this whole thing off. He started this movement that was ostensibly about being a productive person but ultimately involved taking over people’s lives, draining them of money, and in many cases branding women with his initials and sleeping with them. Also, a lot of late night volleyball games in Albany.
It’s an interesting documentary series to watch, especially if you want to spend more time watching Catherine Oxenberg check her messages than you ever thought feasible.
Besides the volleyball, one thing that makes NXIVM different from other cults is that at first glance there’s nothing at the center of it. It’s not really religious. Doesn’t present Rainiere as divine, has no doomsday prophecy, nothing about outer space or even spirituality, really. It’s mostly just a lot of incredibly vague conversation about being a better you. It sounds like a bunch of people assigned to form a codified belief system and a cosmology who just didn’t do the homework and are now forced to vamp in an oral report. There’s no Xenu here. Just volleyball and half-formed phrases from a seventies self-help manual.
But what finally caught my attention was the frequency with which trauma, usually referred to in other terms, kept coming up. Rainiere and his conspirator-believers offered the idea that your worst traumas and psychological issues could be made to disappear through (comically) intense conversation sessions. You could be cured of the damage of a childhood trauma through remembering it (and paying money) and then they’ll make it go away.
The believers, who seem to have loads of money since no one really has a job and their homes are amazing, are being offered a shortcut: pay money and we’ll get rid of your problems. It’s like the idea that therapy is something done *to* you and not something you have to do yourself. Here’s this organization and this volleyball guy who will teach you how to make the bad stuff disappear. The scam, of course, is that you then need to spend MORE time, take MORE classes, move to Albany, play volleyball, sleep with evil Kenny Loggins in order to advance and become a better you. But the core idea is the erasing of all the bad mental gunk. I wonder if this is part of the appeal to wealthy people. Don’t go to Home Depot and spend the weekend doing it yourself, just have your assistant hire a guy.
Me, I keep yelling, “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!” at the tv, frightening the dogs and annoying my wife. I have yet to hear of any approach that promises to erase the bad stuff that isn’t a cult. What works, as far as I can tell, is learning to deal with the trauma, to own the trauma, to recognize that it’s part of your life and managing that reality.
Maybe not quite a “scars make you beautiful” approach but I find that knowing what happened, consciously addressing it, and moving forward from there is a way of being in touch with the reality of yourself and the reality of the world. Then you can move forward, moored in the truth. If you deal with something like a depressive disorder, firm footing can be a wonderful thing because then you’re in a more stable - not always pleasant but at least stable - place.
It’s like you have a heavy rock that you’re forced to carry around all the time. The Keith Rainieres of the world offer to take that rock away from you and then tell you they did while secretly hiding it elsewhere on your person. Then they convince you that you’re carrying many other rocks and to get rid of those you have to stay with them. In Albany.
Reality, as far as I can tell, is more about using research and assistance to build a series of pulleys and levers to carry that rock in a way that controls the impact so you can free up your arms to do other things.
I would make a terrible cult leader. Too grossed out to brand anyone. No good at volleyball or staying up late. And mostly because the idea of one single approach being the true and only path to mental health is just stupid to me. Especially if increasingly large payments are part of it. Especially if there’s a leader who calls himself Vanguard after the mediocre arcade game.
Every day since early April, I have checked the update page for COVID-19 in Minnesota. Gets posted each day at 11am. In that time, I’ve seen the number of new cases rise and fall and rise and now we are in the middle of the biggest rise of all. Deaths have followed along, going way down to two or three per day up to around 40. I think we were at 19 today.
I know a lot of people who don’t bother to check that often and I know no one else who does it every day. My instinct is to say that this makes me bad or obsessive or morbid. But I’m trying to not go to that part of town as a default in every situation. I think I do it in my quest for hope, maybe. But I think the routine of it all provides some very strange comfort.
We are in a situation where this things lives and grows seemingly on its own and aside from protecting ourselves as best we can and wearing masks, we must observe. And we must live among people who simply won’t wear masks as they sneer and potentially kill the rest of us. It reminds me of when I was a kid and my dad smoked all over the house. “Am I dying because of someone else’s lack of consideration?” I thought. “Yeah. Possibly. I wish he would change.”
There is no zippy joke at the end of this item like I thought there would be. Here’s a pig in a nice sweater.
Television is the best! It’s full of shows! Because of COVID, I can’t go out to my regular slate of debutante balls and cotillions. And so TV yay.
I like Cobra Kai. I’ve never seen The Karate Kid because it looked stupid when it came out and I’ve held that opinion since. I absorbed its meaning, though. This is some of the same characters in present day and focuses on Johnny, the bad guy karate guy of the original. Now he’s a burnout middle-aged guy trying to tie a life together through karate. I like him because it reminds of 10,000 guys I knew in high school. Plus karate. They didn’t know karate. They were just stoned.
I’m like four episodes in. Well written and well acted and funny and meaningful. And depressing! And you know how daddy loves that!
Tomorrow (Saturday), I’ll be virtually appearing at the virtual conference for NAMI Washington. I’ve grown a little bit fond of these appearances where I don’t travel at all, just sit in my office and then suddenly appear in virtual Albuquerque or some place.
This one makes me sad, though, because it was to happen in Olympia, a city I enjoy. When I think about Olympia, I see a wet yet sort of warm place and lots of thick sweaters. I think of my friend Sean who went to Evergreen and we used to hang out down there, being in our early twenties, mostly broke, punk rock hippies.
For this conference, I’m being interviewed by Bill Radke, who hired me to work in public radio in 2001, as a writer for his show Rewind. That public radio stint lasted until June of this year and I’m pretty sure I’ll never go back. I like Bill Radke.
We’ll talk about mental health, maybe radio, probably our shared experience of losing a brother to suicide, and very possibly Dire Straits.
This week, I went to High Falls, the biggest waterfalls in Minnesota. It’s right on the Canadian border. We saw some Canadians across the river and I waved and thought about The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen that asks the question, “Why is there a waterfalls?”
I finally got around to trying Cobra Kai as well (although I had seen the movies - yes, all of them). I had to take a break around episode 4 because it was bringing up some pretty bad reminders of why I'm glad I'm no longer in high school. ;-)
Love it! Thanks, John, I needed this today.