54
Treatment
Our second son had been conceived in the spring of 1990. Gloria’s Bitterwater Clan had already named him Nataanii Nez, Dineh for “tall, statesmanlike leader.” I was pleased to have another child on the way, but relations with my wife, strained since when we had separated in 1988, continued to deteriorate. We bickered constantly throughout her pregnancy, and I found reasons to leave home for days at a time. For that reason and others, I didn’t fulfill as many of the responsibilities of fatherhood as I should have during that important time. However, when I was home I sang and talked to him, as I had with Tatanka. Gloria had vowed to have this baby by the natural method, but after twenty-six hours in labor, she was exhausted but hadn’t dilated. When the baby’s heartbeat became erratic, she agreed to have a Caesarean. Our son was born on January 8, 1991.
To the consternation of the Navajo nurses at that Catholic hospital, I carried my newborn son for two hours, singing and talking and praying. When he began to turn yellow, often a sign of liver trouble, the doctor insisted that I relinquish him to nurses who would stick him with needles to reverse the jaundice. They even enlisted Gloria to get me to do so, but I refused. Instead, my son Tatanka joined me in a tobacco ceremony. Holding Nataanii Nez high in the air, we sent our prayers to the Great Mystery. Later, I gave him to the doctor and he found no jaundice!
As I had done with Tatanka, for the next three months I fulfilled my parental obligations. I stayed home and got to know my new son. I played with him and spoke to him until he knew my voice and smell and we had “bonded,” as they say in the white magazines.
Gloria and I, however, continued to drift apart. While I was in North Carolina making Mohicans, I had written her a letter in which I shared many thoughts about our relationship. I meant to say how much I loved and admired her, how good we were together when our lives were in sync, but somehow she understood my words to mean exactly the opposite of what I had intended. Because of that and our past troubles, she refused to visit me on location. Our marriage seemed headed for disaster. I stayed married mostly because I wanted to raise my sons. I had cheated all my other children, and I felt this was my last chance to be a real father.
Looking for help, Gloria began to see a marriage counselor. When I returned to Chinle after Mohicans, she persuaded me to join her. After two sessions, Sister Adelaide, a Catholic nun, convinced me to enter a thirty-day residence program for treatment of my anger. She was very emphatic that I couldn’t go merely to save my marriage. I must go to save myself. Suddenly, that made a lot of sense to me.
I wanted to start the new year off right and Christmas has never been a good time for me—I like nothing about it—so I decided to go in December 1991. I wouldn’t commit myself until I went home to Pine Ridge and spoke to my Oglala people, including a spiritual leader and several others whose opinions I respected. Everyone said, “Don’t go,” suggesting instead that I enter the inipi purification lodge, go unblecayapi, cry for a vision, or wait for summer and wiwongwaci, the sun dance. I had performed all those ceremonies, but they hadn’t made me less angry. I reasoned that since I had a white man’s kind of problem, maybe I should try a white man’s kind of solution. I headed down to Cottonwood de Tucson, then considered one of America’s finest treatment centers.
The Cottonwood people sent a guy with a van to pick me up at the airport. One of the things shown in its brochure was a gym with free weights. Before checking in, I asked about them and was told that the weights had been given away. It was as good an excuse as any, so I said, “I ain’t going. One of the main reasons I came down was because you had free weights.”
“That’s up to you,” said the intake counselor. I put my suitcases back in the van. Then I thought, maybe I’d better try this. I returned to the reception area, but in a few minutes, I found something else I didn’t like and blew my stack, shouting that I wasn’t coming in. I marched outside again.
It was very hard, committing myself—about the hardest thing I had ever had to do. But finally, I signed myself in. Fortunately, Gloria’s employer, the Arizona school system, provided insurance that covered the fee of thirteen thousand dollars. No visitors were allowed for the first two weeks. After that, I was allowed one visit weekly until “graduation.” Gloria brought our sons down to see me.
The place was filled with wealthy patients—millionaires and top executives from major corporations, even a lawyer who owned his own mental-health hospital. Everyone, including me, was anonymous. I was assigned a bed in a room shared with three other guys, two of them alcoholics. A sponsor, another patient who served as a big-brother type, took me around and introduced me to everybody. I was pissed off because, except for two Chicanos and a Navajo woman, I had seen only white people. I became even more angry at learning that what the Cottonwood staff called “family of origin” psychotherapy seemed like nothing more than a twelve-step program like Alcoholics Anonymous. Although they claim otherwise, it is based on Christian precepts. They might refer to their god as a “Higher Power,” but they use the word “Him” and act as if there were only one. How can a supreme being, acting as giver of life, be masculine? I was steaming.
The first morning one of my roommates, an oil-company vice president, rose early to shower. The light and noise woke me. I took that as thoughtless and rude. Very loudly, I let him know I was displeased that he had to wake up everybody in the goddamn compound. The next day he and the other alcoholic moved into another room. I thought sure I scared them away, but the real reason, I learned, was because Cottonwood’s management wanted to separate chemical dependents from those with other problems.
Because of the need to handle administrative details and meet my doctors, on my first day of treatment I left some group sessions early or arrived after they had started. Thus I was a few minutes late to the “large group,” where about fifteen or twenty people were taking therapy. After everyone said hello, I was asked to give my name, why I was there, and three feelings describing how I felt. I told them I was in for my anger and I could think of only two feelings—anger and sadness. Try as I could, I couldn’t come up with any more feelings. I was so out of touch with myself that I had become a prisoner of my rage.
Later, I went to an anger workshop. Late again, I missed the orientation and entered the room to find a guy holding a baseball bat and eyeing a huge cube of sponge rubber.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to the guy next to me. He said, “He’s about to beat his mother.” I thought to myself, give me a break. Sure enough, the man began to beat the rubber cube with a plastic bat. He really got into it, cussing his mom, really whipping her. I thought, this guy’s nuts! What did I get myself into here? I told myself I could walk out any time—but I resolved to give it two more days.
The next morning, I attended “small group”—two other guys, a shrink, and me. An hour passed before I learned the shrink was a sex therapist. One patient, a blond guy I’ll call Gabe, began by telling about being fucked in the ass by his father, beginning at age four and continuing throughout his boyhood. For nearly two hours, I listened to him describe how that had affected him as a teenager and an adult. Gabe told about the perverted things he had done in sleazy porno joints. He described depraved sex acts he had performed. He had grown up to become an enforcer for the Mob, and he recounted in detail some things he had done on the job. I told myself that my life and problems were nothing compared to Gabe’s. If he could tell the truth about himself, so could I. He became my role model for honesty. I made up my mind to stay in the program and to be completely truthful about myself and my feelings.
During my first few days, I noticed a certain white woman in my large group. She was very conscientious about completing the written assignments we were expected to work on each evening. I chose her as a role model also, deciding that even though I hate to write, I would be just as thorough with my own homework.
I noticed several guys crying in group therapy sessions. At first I thought, what a bunch of fucking wimps! I was raised in Western society and brought up with the Eurocentric male worldview that said, “Tough guys don’t cry. Men are always in control.” I rarely allowed myself to cry.
As I began to meet more people, I learned that my AIM look, a perpetual scowl, made everyone scared of me. As the week unrolled, I began to realize I was in a safe, completely sincere environment. A few people might have been faking, but everyone seemed as honest as possible. I began to feel my own honesty coming out. Then I noticed a guy with a cross on his back. He carried it while walking around the grounds, when he came to therapy, even when he ate. It made me think, here’s a guy who believes he’s Jesus Christ. What kind of loony bin is this? Eventually, I made friends with him and learned that he was a car salesman, a great guy, so accommodating to others that that was a cross he had chosen to bear. Carrying an actual wooden cross was a way of getting that point across to him. The therapists assigned certain people to do things like that. A woman who tried to mother everyone had to carry around a bunch of dolls. A guy who talked a lot had to remain silent for seventy-two hours. Because I was always throwing tantrums, I was told to act like an eight-year-old throughout the three-day Christmas holiday.
After a few days, much of my skepticism boiled away and I started to see that there was a rationale to treatment. It’s a formulized approach, a way of teaching us about ourselves. Once you catch on to how it works, you can make great inner changes. Besides group therapy, there were different exercises and experiential workshops in which mood music was used to help us take inner trips. With eyes shut, I imagined what it was like to fly or jump off cliffs. I learned how to relax. To allow the therapy to work, I had to make many spiritual compromises. I had to resurrect my parents’ spirits, which Indians traditionally avoid. Once we’ve gone through grieving for loved ones and let them go on to the next world, it’s disrespectful to bring them back, especially for negative reasons. But I had to do it. The therapists also put a lot of emphasis on eye contact, which Indians find discourteous, but I decided to go along with that, too.
Through it all, I maintained my Indian spirituality. Just before dawn, when the crickets, owls, coyotes, and other night people have gone to rest and the birds and day people haven’t gotten up yet, everything is quiet. Even the wind dies down. That is the time when the entire world waits for our prayers, the time when the Indian male must say thank-you prayers. Then the east wind brings the morning star, which gives us the dawn of a new day and a chance to avoid repeating the mistakes of yesterday. So each morning, I rose in darkness, went outside, and greeted the morning star. I recited my thanks as I watched for the thin band of light that appears along the horizon to announce dawn’s arrival.
After a couple of days, I was joined by another patient, who stood behind me and watched me pray. The next dawn, he was accompanied by a woman, and on the following morning four people were observing me. That grew to seven or eight and then about a dozen. Then my therapist called me in and told me that Cottonwood didn’t need or want a guru. He told me to tell the others that they couldn’t pray with me anymore.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What about the First Amendment? Don’t we have the right to pray in our own way?” The doctor convinced me that there were good reasons for each patient to find their own path to spirituality. I suddenly realized the immensity of white Americans’ spiritual void. It made me sad but prideful that those people, without understanding a word that came from my mouth in prayer, were drawn to my ancestors’ ways and could feel the blessed connection with all that is sacred and holy and good.
Spirituality alone, however, would not cool the rage simmering within me. That required therapy. My turn to spill my guts came during the third week in the small group. First the therapist asked me to recall all my mother’s bad behaviors. He wrote them on one side of a chalkboard—a litany that included anger, abusiveness, impatience, perfectionism, and disciplinarianism.
“Now list the good ones,” he said. That inventory, which included strength, dependability, conscientiousness, ambition, energy, and generosity, was about half the length of the first list. I thought, wow, what a bad mom I had! The doctor said, “Now do the same for your dad.” I recalled his alcoholism, that he never stood up for me, that he was irresponsible, untrustworthy, and undependable. On his better side were wit and a sense of humor, likability, an easygoing attitude, wisdom, patience, and the graceful way he moved. Even so, Pop’s good list was only half as long as his bad. I thought, what lousy parents! No wonder I’m having problems—it’s all their fault. As if he had just read my mind, the therapist said, “Now give us the bad behaviors you have from both parents.” When I had finished, he said, “Now all your good behaviors from them.” I saw that my ratio of good to bad was about one to eight. I had all my parents’ bad qualities, but few of their good ones. With more therapy I came to understand that I had many other good behaviors—but in that moment of confronting reality, I was stunned. I was ill-tempered, impatient, filled with rage, a demanding perfectionist who always sought control. I was a liar, a fake. I was undependable. Looking at my behavior through my own children’s eyes, I couldn’t feel sorry for myself.
In many workshops, therapists spoke about discovering one’s “inner child.” Most people are forced to become premature adults. Their parents, or whoever raised them, put adult responsibilities on them at an early age. I realized that my grown-up duties had begun soon after my brother Dace was born. Even when I was only three years old, if he did something wrong, I was punished, as my mother often said, “Because you’re the oldest—you should know better.” I hated that phrase. I grew up knowing that whenever I heard it, I was going to get a beating. Once I got a diary for my birthday, and after a week of making entries, I read it. On six of those seven days, I had gotten a strapping. Who wants to keep track of that? I threw the diary away. Sometimes I wanted to scream at Mom that I was only a child. That would have brought on another beating, so instead I asked my dog, Sox, “How come it’s always me that has to know better? Why can’t I just be a kid?”
In large group, we explored our genealogies, going back generations to examine the behaviors of our parents and how they got them. We did the same with grandparents and great-grandparents. I was surprised to see that some of those rich people and executives could remember meeting their grandparents only once or twice. Others didn’t know their great-grandparents’ names.
Seeking the source of all those behaviors, I recalled that my mom and dad had gone to boarding school but my grandparents hadn’t—at least, not for long. So I knew where most of my parents’ behaviors had come from—a BIA whip, the club and the hose and the stick, and the bag of beans or marbles they were forced to kneel on. My dad’s alcoholism came from his low self-esteem. He didn’t think he was much of a man, and he spent his whole life trying to prove it. Only his wit and quiet grace allowed him to survive. To avoid being crushed, my mother got by on strength and an iron will. Those were revelations to me.
Life at Cottonwood wasn’t all workshops and exercises. As my inhibitions diminished, I felt free to hug white men and women and to sit down with anyone and talk about my feelings. I spoke often with a lawyer who had had several heart attacks and almost worked himself to death. He was from a well-to-do home; his dad had owned a business. I thought of him as having grown up rich. To me, anybody who didn’t have to mow his lawn, anyone who could hire people to clean his home, was rich. I listened to the problems of the wealthy and thought that compared with what I had faced, they were as insignificant as my difficulties were to Gabe’s, the mob enforcer.
In the second week, I joined a large-group experiential workshop for anger, in which we took turns role-playing. The therapist, a woman, asked me to select individuals from the group to represent everyone who was important in my life, including Sox. Sox was an unresolved issue with me. I had left him behind when I went to live in Winnebago at fifteen. For eight months, my mother’s letters told me that his spirit had gone—he moped around, acting as though I had died. When I returned, he was deliriously happy, wagging his tail in a circle and jumping on me. For an hour, we ran and hugged and had fun. When I moved to Los Angeles, I left him with Mom. She took care of him until he became deaf; then she had him put to sleep. In the role-playing, I apologized to my best and most faithful friend for the way I had ignored him at the end of his life. I acknowledged the shame I felt for having abandoned him in his old age.
Other people stood in for my sisters Madonna and Mabel Ann, and for Marilyn, who had died recently. I thanked them for their contributions to a beautiful part of my life, and I shared many wonderful memories. Then I spoke to each of my brothers—Dace, Bill, and Ted. I apologized to them. Not only did they have to grow up with the same parents I had had, they also had to grow up with me. I said I was sorry for not having known what I was doing when I hurt them. I had thought I was doing right and, just as our mother had, I had beaten them into obedience. I said I would visit each brother in real life and try to make things right between us. That day hasn’t come yet, but I’m still working on it.
To represent my dad, I picked a big, burly Chicano I had become friendly with. My previous surrogates had taken a couple of steps forward when I chose them. When my friend started forward, I said, “No, stay there, you fucking wimp!” It was the first time I had ever talked to my dad that way. I don’t know where it came from—it just popped out of my mouth. I went over and stood in front of him. “Hang down your head,” I said. “You’re nothing.” Suddenly I realized that while I was growing up, I had built a false image of a father of strength and athletic prowess. Despite all his boyhood sports trophies, he had never displayed any of those qualities to me or my brothers. He had never stood up for us. He had failed to support us emotionally and financially.
I knew those were among my own behaviors and I would have to deal with that, but the biggest issue was my mother. I told the therapist, “I don’t know if I can do this—and I ain’t touching that baseball bat.” She said, “Picture your mother when she was a little girl.” Mom was the oldest child in her family. She had told me that her parents often compared her looks with her sisters’ and taunted her. They called her ugly. I recalled a picture taken when she was three or four. She wore a white dress and white shoes and she smiled. She had never looked ugly to me. The therapist said, “Remember, she didn’t grow up thinking, I can hardly wait to become a mother so I can fuck up my oldest son’s life.” That hit me hard. I thought, that’s right, she didn’t grow up thinking that. But she was beaten regularly in the BIA boarding schools. She was taught that that was the way to raise children. So when she beat me, it was really those sadistic school matrons beating me. It was the U.S. government beating me. Then the therapist said, “It’s okay to hate your mother’s behaviors and still love her.” As I realized what those beatings were really about, all the details of my childhood of pain and humiliation came cascading out. I shared my innermost secrets, even the fact that as a toddler I had been beaten into being toilet trained, and these emotional scars remain to this very day.
Next, the therapist got me to share some positive aspects of my mother. I spoke about her strength and courage, and her determination to raise four sons with little help from my father. As she had given me freedom to roam our neighborhood, she had taught me responsibility. When it came time for the role-playing exercise, I chose to represent my mother, a very skeptical lady who had expressed great doubts about the whole treatment program and kept insisting that it was phony. The therapist asked me to share with her some of the names Mom had called me when she was angry. Standing next to the foam cube, “Mom” started yelling at me: “Greaser! You’re irresponsible! You’re no good! You liar! I wish you were never born! You’re dirty! You dirty, no-good, irresponsible liar!” I took the plastic bat and started to hit the cushion—and lost all control. I went crazy. I whacked that cushion to punish my mother for all the times she had strapped me. I hit as hard as I could, striking back at last for all the pain and humiliation and shame she had beaten into me. I beat her and beat her and beat her until I could hardly raise my arms—and then I broke down and bawled like a baby in front of all those people, and I didn’t care. They understood, and suddenly I felt great. All at once, I understood—anger was my way of covering up a lack of self esteem. My mother had told me I was no good—and because children worship their mothers, I had believed her.
After I understood where my anger came from and what I used it for, I was able to participate more fully in the workshops and therapy sessions. Letting all my secrets go felt great. I was free to acknowledge and identify and enjoy dozens and dozens of different feelings. It was so wonderful and liberating that I can’t fully explain it to anyone who hasn’t been through treatment.
With the ability to open myself up, I developed close friendships with several people at Cottonwood, men and women. As treatment continued, I discovered tools that would enhance my good behaviors and allow me to get control over negative ones. I learned that because anger is an honest emotion, it’s okay to be angry in appropriate ways. Since then, I’ve never again experienced that sick feeling of seething rage. My anger has been the healthy kind that I can recognize and put in proper perspective. Treatment has allowed me to finally free myself. I have no more pain inside. I now accept life. I can deal with my impatience and my imperfections. I’m no longer afraid to cry.
In thirty days of intensive work, I had completed the first five steps of the twelve required. As this is being written, I’m working on step eight, recognizing the people I’ve hurt in my life. My next step is making amends. Of all the people for whom I’ve caused pain, my children have suffered the most. The oldest four have now gone through treatment themselves. I’ve been there for each of them during their family week.
At Cottonwood, I came to understand that life is not about race or culture or pigmentation or bone structure—it’s about feelings. That’s what makes us human beings. We all feel joy and happiness and laughter. We all feel sadness and ugliness and shame and hurt. Life is not an “ouch!” contest. Nobody cares who has the best reason to suffer. If you’re rich and hurting, you feel no different than someone who is poor and hurting. Then I realized that if the human family has all the same feelings, all any of us should worry about is how to deal with them. Forget about “saving the environment.” Never mind “race relations.” Don’t worry about “justice.” Deal with feelings and relationships. The cultures of every indigenous society in the world are based on improving relationships—the individual’s connection with a dolphin, a wolf, an eagle, a tree, a rock, a spider or snake or lizard, with other human beings, with the clouds and with the wind.
I had often wondered how best to decolonize my people. Treatment made me realize that there is no need for all of them to get into the whys and wherefores of colonization that have led them down the path to self-destruction. It must be done one human being at a time. Without that kind of help, Western society does not allow people to come to terms with their feelings. With honesty and with therapy, my people can be made whole again.