Some Practical Advice on Living With Monsters

Ever since becoming a dad, I’ve been grumpier than usual.  Some of my negative mood could be attributed to life as a new parent and adjusting to the new responsibilities which come with this new reality.  Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the insomnia which, like some Twilight Zone, Monkey's Paw plot twist, comes hand-in-hand with the new workload and stakes of parenting.  All your decisions have new weight to them, there’s a human being you have to keep alive and the twist is you get to do it all without sleep. Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the fact we bought a house and had to deal with realtors and lawyers and banks and movers and contractors and the rest of the people whose job it seemed to be to screw us over as we tried to make a home.  Some of my negative mood could be attributed to the junk food I ate as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned stresses, which paradoxically made me more anxious then groggier, neither of which I thought was possible.  After coping this way I’d feel sick for days as my body processed all the poison I ate to make myself feel better.  But something else was happening, something sinister.  Beyond the understandable frustrations which accompanied these life events, something hideous was lurking inside of me. 

I was on edge all the time. I found myself getting angry when I put my daughter to bed, suppressing while hot rage as I soothingly read The Giving Tree.  She’d wake up in the middle of the night and call for me.  I’d get her back to sleep, then lie awake for hours myself, anxious, longing for wet wipe style single-use chloroform towelettes I could use to knock myself out cold.  The weekdays my daughter and I spent together were magical – we’d go to the library, get donuts, play at the park and have a blast.  Picture perfect parental bliss.  But, something about them was also excruciating.  After spending the morning crushing it as a dad, I’d put her down for a nap and feel worthless.  “I’m doing so good, why don’t I feel good?” It felt like there was a monster inside of me making me angry, anxious and ashamed. 

I went to see my doctor, sure she’d see a monster on one of her screens or gauges. She told me to ease up on the junk food and ‘lose some of the weight around the middle,” like there aren’t mirrors in my house.  “Otherwise, you’re remarkably healthy,” she said. We had to call in the big guns. 

My psychiatrist has experience in both filmmaking and academia, so he buys exactly zero of my bullshit, which makes him a maddeningly good therapist: he sometimes drives me crazy but it keeps me from going insane. The monster may not show up on measurable devices, but with this man’s help, I knew we could find it.  Through talking about my feelings, we discovered something about parenting I had never heard before or read anywhere. The last time I spent this much time around a child is when I was one.  During my childhood, I experienced some of the ugliest traumas to which I’ve been subjected, traumas I’ve spent my life since childhood trying to reconcile, one way or another. Talk therapy works better than junk food, but to each their own.  By spending all my time with a child who looks a lot like me, I, like all parents, recreated and perpetuate a physical and emotional environment similar to that of my childhood.  In this familiar context, though my role is as parent, I am subconsciously experiencing being a child all over again. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!  It's beyond vicarious, transcends empathy even, the intensity of these emotions. Aerosmith lied to us when Steven Tyler sang, “The past is gone.” Dream on, buddy!  William Faulkner had it right when he wrote, “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”    

The monster wreaking havoc on my life is the unreconciled emotions of my traumatic childhood. Taking care of my kid reminds me of being a kid and all the dysfunction, anxiety and violence which was in my life at that time. In this toxicity, the monster was born. As a kid, I had no capacity to reconcile the emotions these experiences filled me with, name them or really express them.  Amidst this confusion, the monster got stronger as these emotions embedded themselves in my subconscious.  As I got older (and could legally drink) the monster retired to the shadows, but its powers never waned.  Now, in a situation of similar circumstances to those of my childhood, the monster is roused.    

It’s a tremendous relief to know what I’m up against but naming the monster doesn’t kill it.  It’s not like saying “Rumpelstiltskin” and the villain disappears.  That type of simple thinking has a place in the stories I tell my daughter but here in the real world, defeating a monster like unreconciled childhood trauma is a bit more complex.  I’m fortunate to have an army at my disposal.  I have a great wife, great therapist, there’s a drum set in my office and a punching bag at my gym, there’s good stuff on vinyl these days, weed will be legal in my state soon – I can slay this monster any time it rears its ugly head.  And I do.  I slay.  I slay all day.  But it comes back.  Again, and again and again.  It doesn’t matter how many punches I throw, I’m still angry.  It doesn’t matter how much yoga I do, I’m still anxious.  It doesn’t matter how many accomplishments I achieve, I’m still prone to feel ashamed of myself.  Sometimes I do all the things I’m supposed to do to defeat the monster, check all the boxes of self-care; still, the monster disembowels me and leaves me for dead.  That’s when I feel most worthless, when I do everything I’m supposed to do to destroy the monster and I still get crushed.    

It’s like the monster can’t be beaten. 

This realization is where my metaphor falls apart and the truth reveals itself. 

The monster can’t be beaten because it isn’t a monster.  The monster is me, it’s the personification of emotions I’d rather not feel, sometimes present emotions, sometimes really old ones.  My emotions can’t be defeated, choked out or beaten into submission, they can only be expressed. Sometimes in healthy ways, sometimes by eating cookies like some kind of monster.  When I’m angry and I go box, I may feel better, but I’m not defeating the monster, I’m appropriately expressing its rage in that moment.  If I’m anxious, I can do yoga or meditate, but sometimes deep breathing and stretching make me angrier, more anxious or ashamed. That’s because I’m not breathing the anxiety or shame out of my system as I like to tell myself; rather, I’m giving the monster the air it needs by giving myself space to feel my true feelings. When I pay attention to and express my true feelings appropriately and without judgment, I see that sometimes I feel monstrous and that’s okay.  It doesn’t get scary unless I try to fight these feelings or beat myself up for being upset about events which happened 10, 20, or 30 years ago when my life wasn’t calm enough for me to feel the pain the traumas I was experiencing caused me.  And that’s okay too.  In fact, it’s actually beautiful.  It’s a sign the home I’ve made my daughter transcends the home in which I was raised: the only reason I’m able to truly access these unpleasant feelings from the past now is because my life these days is so relatively safe, calm and wonderful. Like some Twilight Zone, Monkey's Paw plot twist it’s precisely because I’m so safe I’m free to feel so vulnerable.