The Effects
Of A
Dysfunctional ChildhoodOut of respect of those I love I can not go into a lot of detail in describing my adult years. I wish I could write another book describing those years in detail as to how I perceived them to have been but I can't, not in any great detail for I don't believe reliving all of those years again my emotional system would be able to take it.
I had met my wife some six months after my return from New Orleans. At a time in my life I needed someone, more than I had ever needed anyone before in my life. As I had said in the last pages of my book, "I was but a thought from suicide." When I was with her all of the unhappiness, loneliness, all of the terrible feelings I was experiencing were gone. I never thought of the past, only the future I wanted to have with her. Even though I had asked her within a week after we had been "going together" to marry me and most every week after that, she had always replied we would have to wait and see. When I wasn't with her but home alone in my apartment all of the terrible feelings would return. I would walk from room to room crying. I would lay on my bed and cry until late at night. Never understanding why I was crying. Through my mind and from my lips would always come the constant, repeating question, "What am I going to do now?" Not knowing why I had asked it nor what it meant.
This had gone on for seven terribly long months before my wife finally agreed to marry me. I was to asked her years later why she had waited so long, her reply, "I wanted you to be sure that is what you wanted." She had never known what I had gone through. The terrible feelings and the constant fear that she may reject me and I would lose her. Though I loved her very much I couldn't see how anyone could possibly love me. Not the type of person I felt I was.
I was twenty-two years old when we were married a month later. I might add even though she had accepted my proposal of marriage I went through one terribly emotionally long month. Feeling that something could happen and I could still lose her. Yes and the nightly crying went on for I was alone then.
Once we were married then I was never alone and the crying and all of the bad feelings left me. Now I had a wife and I had to take care of her and I did that. I didn't want her to do anything. No cooking. No dishes. No housework. I wanted to do it all for her. This had gone on for the next three years as our children were born. I would get up in the night and feed them and change their diapers for I wanted her to rest.
I think it had been about the second year of our marriage something was happening, something was changing inside of me. I had changed jobs and at the new job I was more isolated so I was alone a lot more. It seemed when I was alone, for no apparent reason, the terrible feelings and fears started to come back and I would breakdown and cry.
When I was with others all of these terrible things would go away. When I was home with my family I was very happy, the memory of the terrible crying spell I might of had that day would be gone as though it had never happened. But again, when I was back at work and I was alone it would all come back and it had progressively gotten worse.
I was beginning to think things like, "What if I go home and find my family gone?" "What will I do if for some reason I should lose them all?" "What will I do if someone thinks I am not taking proper care of them and they take my children and put them in institutions to grow up like I did?" Those thoughts and many others. I was tearing myself apart and I couldn't understand or stop it, not realizing then that it would automatically end if I would only get with others. I had lost so much in life I was fearful of losing again.
For those first four years, to all apparent appearance our marriage was made in heaven. Though we didn't have much everyone noticed how happy we were, how close we were. It was even noted that we never argued about anything. Yes, I guess everyone, including my wife and I, thought our marriage was a happy one and would last a life time. But then no one except I knew of the terrible things that were happening inside of me and I didn't understand and chose to ignore them when I was with others.
Today I can look back and see what was one of the most basic problems I had then and through most of my life. I could not feel love from others. I could not understand nor see how anyone one could possibly love me and I had to love them much more than what was normal. I had to love them so much more, to make up for the love that was impossible for me to feel radiating from them. My love became obsessive for my family. My fear of losing them even more.
When I had discovered that, only about a year ago, I looked back through the years, for a time I had felt true love from another person or just a feeling that they liked me real well. My first thoughts had gone to New Orleans but I had to quickly reject that. I never cried there, I was very happy there and the man had liked me very well but for the wrong reasons. That had been an unnatural experience. I had gone back through the years, stopping here and there, thinking about someone then rejecting that person and go on a little further back, until I came to what should have been very obvious to me in the beginning. Mr. Parker, Iowa Training School for Boys, October, 1949. When I was fifteen years old. From that day on and unknown to me it had been impossible for me to feel the love from others. I had no love for myself. I hated what I thought was the type of person I was so how could I possible feel that anyone could love me.
If I had known this back then in the first years of our marriage would it had helped any? I doubt it for I needed a lot of outside help and I didn't know anything about psychiatric help then, even though when I was thirteen I had a session with a psychiatrist and had like it. But as it was, I didn't realize I needed any help.
No I didn't realize I needed help, not consciously but I had unknowingly tried to seek help. Looking back on that day, it is a wonder the way I was acting they hadn't put me in some sort of restraints but they did nothing.
It had happen somewhere in the forth year of our marriage. It is a long story and I don't want to go into it in detail but my wife was sent to a mental health center for evaluation, to me I seen it as a death sentence to our marriage and that I had lost her. It was a case of my wife and I being very ignorant, very naive and taking the advice of several different people.
My wife was seeing two medical doctors and one psychiatrist and each of them were subscribing medication to her for headaches and back pains. None of the doctors knew of the existence of the others or that my wife was taking other drugs. What happened was, my wife and I didn't realize it but she was overdosing herself with drugs. After about a week in the center they had found out what the situation was and had found out she was suffering from sever migraine headaches, the original problem. They had wanted to keep her for thirty days for more evaluation but in my confused state of mind I hadn't understood any of it and wanted my wife back. I had even gone as far as to try and kidnap her but my wife wouldn't go along with it. She had a little more sense than I did.
I had asked at the hospital to see her doctor and I was told I had to have an appointment. I had asked how I could get an appointment and I was told I had to write a letter to the doctor and if he wanted to give me an appointment he would write back and tell me. If I wrote to the doctor it would take two days to get to him and if he gave me an appointment it would take another two days for his letter to get to me. I didn't have time for all of that, I wanted my wife back and I wanted her now. I exploded. I said things and acted in such a way, a way no one should act in a mental hospital and expect to walk out of there. I had called them names, I had accused them of terrible things and I had been crying through the whole thing. It is a wonder the way I had been acting they had let me walk out of there but they did. I had gone straight to a lawyer who said he couldn't help me.
That day I had thought I had lost everything. That was the day I had decided to end my own life and I had come within a hair's breath of doing it when I had thought of what would happen to my children. I went home to them and the days passed until my wife came home to me. Through all of those days, all of those thoughts, those feelings, the visions and dreams returned. Only my children had kept me alive for the eventual return of my wife.
Someone should have noticed then that there was something terribly wrong with me for I hadn't acted in a rational way but they didn't. In that period of time I had been hit so hard it was to make an irreversible shift in my personality. No one noticed it then, not even I.
I think one of the hardest things to describe is what a person feels like when they are considering suicide. Imagine being in a very dense fog, so dense you can't see your hand in front of your face. What you see is your future. Nothing. What you feel is hopelessness, utter despair, loss of everyone and meaning to your life. At that point it is impossible to feel physical pain which makes it all that much easier to end one's own life. It is the most terrible feeling I have ever had and I don't ever want to be there again. Because of this, a defense mechanism, maybe you could call it a shield or a wall, went up around me so I wouldn't be hurt if something should happen again. No I didn't do it on purpose, I didn't even know that it had happen until years later.
What was this mechanism doing, how was it working? It was tempering my emotions but not my love for my wife, that has never changed. It should have been a good thing for it was giving me more control over my emotions but that wasn't all that it was doing to me, I was shutting my wife out and shifting my attention to my two sons and especially to my daughter who was named after my sister. If you remember from my book, I stood by the side of my sister's casket and promised my sister I would some day have a daughter and I would name my daughter after her and I kept that promise.
About the time my wife had been released from the hospital I had changed jobs. I became an apprentice electrician for John Deere the farm implement company. I was no longer alone at work and as the next few years rolled by I started having better feelings about myself. I had studied hard night and day working my way up to a journeyman electrician. I was respected at work for my knowledge and the things I could do. At work I had a joke I would tell. "I can touch anything and it will turn to gold." Maybe it wasn't such a joke for I sort of felt that way. Life at home was going very well. All of my past negative thoughts and feelings were completely forgotten. I was noted in telling people, "I'm on top of the world and nothing can bring me down." Yes everything was going well in my life. I was soon at top pay for an electrician and I had gone into industrial electronics schooling. Yes everything was going real well. I was on top of the world.
About three years before my wife and I were married, my mother had remarried. To a man by the name of Leo Young. I had first met him when I had come home from the federal reform school. I had liked him but at first there had been no special bond between us. He was my mother's husband, my new stepfather. He looked a lot better than the last one. By the time I had gotten married though a bond between Leo and I started to form. In years to come I was to describe him, "He was the greatest man in my life." I came to love that man . . I was going to say like I would my own father but it was much more than that. By the time I had been married for ten years my love for him, even though I had taken it for granted, had become an obsession. He was fifty-three years old then. To me he would hit a hundred easy.
I was thirty-two years old and in the tenth year of our marriage when I had gotten a call from my mother shortly after coming home from work telling me that Leo was in the hospital, had some stomach pains, doctor wanted to keep him in the hospital for a few days to run some tests. I had told her I thought I would go up and visit the old boy and see what he had to say for himself.
I had eaten supper and went up to visit Leo. I was kidding him about him trying to get out of work, fooling around with all of the pretty nurses. At one point he had laughed so hard he had to tell me to stop making him laugh for it was hurting his stomach. I had sat there and visited with him for a couple of hours before going home. Feeling we had a real nice visit and all was well. The next morning my mother had called me, we had to get to the hospital as soon as possible for Leo was dying. By the time we had gotten there he was dead. As I stood there by his bed something seemed to come down around me and close in on me tightly.
I hadn't showed any emotions as I had walked out of the hospital room and drove home. As I fell across our bed I told my wife, "Leo is dead." And I cried.
The visitation periods prior to the funeral was a time of denial for me. I was talking too much and too loudly about everything but Leo. I was moving about much too quickly but never near the casket. At the funeral when they had sung, "Beyond the Sunset." I had broke, I could no longer hide what I was feeling. On that day, for the first time, everyone saw a part of my inner being.
For three months I lived in a trance like state, until I could block my grief from my mind. Like my sister's death, I was never to accept Leo's death but only to block it from my mind. I had lost him and I couldn't deal with it.
For the next eight years in my professional life I excelled, I became an electrical project engineer and was well respected for my abilities but in my personal life, unknown to most, my mental and emotional control was deteriorating. As is usual in this condition I was able to cover up what was going on in my mind.
I started going back to the orphanage across the river in Davenport, usually alone sometimes my family was with me but not very often. I would sit in my car behind Cottage Eight and think of a long ago time when a boy I once knew lived there.
It was on one of these trips with my family when I had parked the car directly behind Cottage Eight. I was looking out the driver's side window, thinking of a long ago time when a boy had been pinned in a window there in Cottage Eight and had received a terrific beating, when my wife who was sitting to my right said, "Larry, I notice every time we come to Davenport, you always come here, stop and stare at that building." Then she asked, "Why do you do that?"
Without turning my head and with tears in my eyes I had replied, "To cry for a little boy who once lived there."
I couldn't get my mind off of those years I had spent in the institutions. I was hurting and there seemed to be no one I could talk to, not even my wife for fear she would see how unhappy I really was and not understand. It had been something like, I didn't want her to be unhappy too.
By the time I had become forty there were many things in my life that were happening I couldn't understand logically, only emotionally. All of my decisions in my personal life became emotional decisions. None were logical nor rational. Even then I was able to cover up what had been going on inside of my mind. Until January 6, 1975.
January has been sort of a bad month in my life, that was the month my father had died. The Sixth of January has been an especially bad day for me, that was the day they had taken me from my foster home and returned me to the orphanage, among other things I haven't mentioned that had happened to me on that day. This January 6, in 1975 was an especially bad day for me. It was the first day I was to see my psychiatric doctor as a patient. It had been the day he had said something to me that stunned me, to the point I had almost fainted. It was the day I had walked from his office, crossed the street and had walked in the snow, deep into the woods until I had come to a log and sat down to contemplate suicide.
For a year I fought, I had fought to prove to everyone what they thought of me was not true. And no one seemed to understand. Looking back neither did I. I had found the only way I could have any peace of mind was to ride off into the woods on my enduro motorcycle and ride as hard as I could. I would do this for hours on end. But even then matters had only gotten worse. Events beyond my control were happening and I couldn't do anything about them.
I was forty-one years old in the spring of '76 when my doctor finally had me admitted to the hospital, diagnosed "recurring depression." I think that it was a little more than that.
From there on, for the next three and a half years it had been an up and down hill battle. I had cut my wrists a couple of times. I took a massive overdose of Valium, my youngest son and his new wife had rushed me to the hospital. I had passed out along the way not regaining consciousness until I was in the emergency room at the hospital and that had only been for a few moments as they were pumping my stomach. After that the next time I had regained consciousness was in the Intensive Care Unit only to quickly pass out again, after removing the tube that had been run through my nose, down into my stomach that the nurse had refused to remove. That hadn't been very pleasant at all.
Sometime during those years I had asked the doctor to give me "Sodium Amatal," (truth serum) for I had gotten so bad I couldn't talk about much of anything to anyone. I was shutting down, so much it was like I was in a box and looking through a little peephole. All of my senses were essentially shutting down. I couldn't hear what was being said, those times I did hear I couldn't understand. My emotional feelings were numb.
After many repeated requests the doctor had finally given me the "Sodium Amatal." The first question he asked as I passed out was the date of my father's death. To my surprise (which I verified later) I had given him the exact date. At that time I had not consciously known the date.
A few days later, after I had recovered from the "Sodium Amatal" we had talked but he wouldn't tell me what I had disclosed to him, all he would say in regards to it was, "Larry, I had always felt you were snowing me but now I can see you have had more than your share of problems." Then as I was about to leave he had come around his desk and put his arm about my shoulders and said. "Larry, you are quite a man." The feeling that flowed through me is hard to describe, I felt elated and thought, "He understands." This had only been a temporary reprieve for within in a week or two I was slowly slipping back into my box, my own private world.
At the age of forty-five, four and a half years of being under a psychiatrist's care I left a well paying job as an electrical project engineer with John Deere, I left my wife and everything that was important to me and roamed the country for the next several months, until I finally wound up in a state mental hospital with nothing on my mind but to end my own life.
After three months in the hospital I was released. Upon my release I went to New Orleans. My wife divorced me. My 20 year old daughter lived with me for two and a half years and during that time I had given her absolute control over my life and I was happy. I was happy until January 6, 1983 when the world fell in on me. My daughter unexpectedly left me. Five months later I was again in a hospital with both wrist badly sliced, after driving eighteen-hundred miles not stopping for anything but coffee and fuel. I had roamed from New Orleans to Iowa, back to New Orleans and then back to Illinois.
A year later I had moved to Denver, Colorado thinking I could make a new life for myself there. The first six months I had been doing well and I was for the first time in my life doing it on my own. In my mind I had given up everything and I was going to make a fresh start in life, then my daughter came to live with me again. I took the easy way out and again gave her complete control of my life. Then again for almost five years I felt I was happy. But on January 15, 1990 my daughter again, un-expectantly left me.
For the next year I was lost without her, and I had been in a hospital briefly, but during that period of time I slowly became determined that no one was to have control of my life again and that I would make it on my own.
My wife had remarried soon after divorcing me. My daughter, who then was thirty, met a man older than I and was soon married after leaving me. I had been married for twenty-three years. I have now been divorced eighteen years, the last eight of that completely on my own. I have never considered remarriage. All of those I have hurt so terribly much in this life are now happy and that is all that matters to me.
During these last eight years that I have been on my own I have researched and wrote this book and learned to live alone. I have found it is the only way I can survive and survive is all I can do. For I will walk alone.
I realize that this commentary on my adult life has left some questions unanswered but due to those I love and were closest to me those questions will have to go unanswered. As to what the doctor said to me on January 6, 1975, that had stunned me so much. I can only say it was of a seed that had been planted in my mind, sometime when I twelve years old, when I had been alone in Isolation at the juvenile home. A seed that was to germinate in my mid-teens and blossomed in my adult years. A seed that was to eventually grow into an overpowering factor in my life, to overshadow all other problems. To eventually cause me to give up everything and to destroy any chance to ever having a happy life. Today I pay the price for it as I will for the rest of my life. For I will walk alone.
Surprisingly, I never became a career criminal, abuser of children, homosexual (though my sexuality is understandably in grave question) among a multitude of other things I could have become. But then I have often wondered, if I had been left with my mother maybe there would have been a lot of good things I could have become but didn't.
In a recent E-mail message I received from a reader, it had been asked, "If you could go back and live your childhood over, what would you do differently?" I simply replied, "Make them kill me." And I don't say that lightly. These pages are now my life and that is all I live for.