A Journey from Hellion to Healer
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I am crawling on my hands and knees in the dust. By the fence on my right, a little ahead of me, is my elder brother Joost (pron. yoast). We get to the gap in the chain-link fence we’ve been looking for. Now we get down on our bellies and crawl under the fence. There are some greens on the other side; it is our job to find edible weeds to use as supplements to our meager food supplies. I am eager to help, quickly pick a few leaves, and proudly show these to my brother.
“No” he says gently. “I’ll show you what we want.” He then finds a patch of purslane and says: “That is what is really good, see if you can find more of these.”
I pick a few leaves and taste them. The taste is a little sour but it is the best thing I had ever tasted. With renewed enthusiasm, we continue to harvest this bounty.
I was born in 1942 to Dutch parents living on the island of Java in Indonesia in a city then called Batavia, when the world around us was fraught with tension and war. The Japanese had landed on Java, then a colony of Holland, in March of that year; needing resources such as oil, the Japanese were determined to wrest it from Dutch control. Along with other terrified residents, my parents and my two-year-old brother fled south of what is now Jakarta into the mountains. It must have been a terrifying time. My mother was five months pregnant with me. They had to leave all their earthly goods behind, and their entire social structure was ripped apart. All sense of security, of belonging, of having a ‘home’ was destroyed overnight.
In July, I was born in Pengalengan, a very small hamlet just South of Bandung, on the island of Java. For a brief while my parents and their young son Joost enjoyed the temporary security and beauty of this village, high up in the mountains by a magnificent lake, where the air was refreshingly cool after the sauna-like environment of Jakarta. But their days in paradise were numbered. It was not long after, in September, that we were captured by the Japanese. My parents were forcibly separated, and we were incarcerated in separate POW camps. Women and children were in women’s camps, men and boys over the age of six in men’s camps. Some 170,000 people were incarcerated, and 25,000 of them did not survive the war.
Despite the fact that I was only a few months old when we went into the camps, and three-and-a-half when we finally emerged, I hold many memories of life in the camp. I remember my brother and I finding a way out of the camp by crawling on our bellies, underneath the barbed wire fence — not to escape, but to find nourishment. We snuck out to pick edible plants we could bring back to the camp for our mother to supplement the daily meager ration of a few thin slices of bread and watery soup we were given. My brother somehow knew what we could eat and what we should avoid. I liked the texture of purslane; the small leaves felt like little pillows. My brother’s ability to discern what was edible likely contributed to saving our lives, and I developed a deep connection to him. My very life was in his hands and I trusted him explicitly. That trust has never been broken.
Another camp memory is that of a torture pit. Other little boys and I often crawled up to the edge of the pit. One day I remember looking down and seeing a naked woman being whipped with barbed wire. She was whipped raw and bled heavily. There is no possible way she could have survived this torture. When this memory returned to me in a hypnosis session many years ago, I noticed that there were absolutely no feelings connected to the visual memory. I had already built in a defense mechanism that didn’t allow me to feel the horrors of my daily environment. The one feeling I did experience in that session was overwhelming fear.
Although my own mother was never physically tortured, as far as I know, the camp served up her own version of hell. She was a very formal woman with high standards of cleanliness, and was accustomed to living a colonial life of comfort with servants. The camp was the very antithesis of luxury. The conditions were appallingly filthy; disease was rampant; our nutritional needs were not met. Dysentery, jaundice, malaria, typhoid fever and even cholera were very common in the camps, as were pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. In addition, people had to contend with vermin, fleas and lice. All of this — combined with the horrors associated with war — made up my mother’s world for three and a half years.
When I allow my mind to revisit this scenario from her perspective, I realize that she had been tortured after all — by not knowing if the hell she had been thrust into would ever end, by not knowing if her husband was still alive, by living in filth, by not knowing if her sons would survive, by watching so many of her peers dying or simply giving up. Later I realized that she was so miserable she wanted to die. However, she forced herself to stay alive for the sake of my brother and me — which I unconsciously absorbed into my impressionable young psyche, developing an enormous amount of guilt about it. I believed that I was responsible for her suffering. It would be years before I could recognize and then disassemble this guilt. Among other deeply buried beliefs I held, this guilt covertly sabotaged my ability to be a happy and psychologically healthy adult, to form loving relationship, and to let in love and trust the love of others.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and the Japanese capitulation, three and a half years after our imprisonment, we were due to be released. However, the local Indonesian population had now turned against us, the Dutch oppressors of three hundred years. If we left the camps, our lives would be in danger. Imagine the utterly schizophrenic scenario we then encountered: we had to stay in the camps and to be protected by the very same Japanese camp guards who had been our tormentors.
Eventually we were released and reunited with my father, all of us just clinging to life at that point. When the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was swollen with edema and not expected to live out the week; my father, formerly a strapping man, weighed a mere one hundred pounds, half his normal weight. We were forced to stay in the camps for months after the Japanese surrender, until some semblance of civic order was restored. Upon our release we went to nearby Australia for a short spell to recover, then back to Indonesia, where I lived for the next five years in its war-torn state while it struggled for independence from Holland.
The end of the war brought a new experience: suddenly I had a father who had been a non-entity to me previously, given that I’d been only a couple of months old when we’d entered the camps. My mother once shared that when the first Dutch man entered the camp the kids ran up to him shouting: “A father, a father!”
The beginnings of rage, shame, and abandonment
“...What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of events affect us.” ~Rabih Alameddin
One day, my father, mother, brother and I were walking on a boardwalk crossing a fish pond near Jakarta. I was holding a shiny red metal truck, my first toy. As you can imagine there were not a lot of toys, or birthday or Christmas presents, during the first few years of my life, so I treasured this truck. At one point, however, it slipped out of my hands and fell in the water. The water was clear and I could see the truck on the bottom of it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet deep, but my father would not go in the water to get it for me. The rage I felt on that occasion has recurred many times. In fact, it became a predominant theme in my life and it wasn’t until much later that I discovered the beliefs I had made up at that vulnerable moment. My three-year-old self interpreted my father’s refusal to rescue my truck to mean that I was not supported, not loved, not important.
Other circumstances of my early life subsequently led me to similarly erroneous interpretations. We lived in a state of constant fear; the machine gun nests perched on street corner roofs were an ever-present reminder that we were never safe. Violence, real and implied, was part and parcel of everyday life. On my walk to and from school as a six-year-old I had to cross a park. Every day I was met by a group of Indonesian kids waiting for me who wanted to fight simply because I was white. My father’s response to this was: “This will make a man out of you” — while our man-servant Umang found a different solution. Umang was an artist. He made beautiful little statues out of clay decorated with brightly colored seeds. For the challenge I was facing daily he devised a brilliant solution: he carved a Keris, an Indonesia dagger, out of wood. Thus armed, my traversing the park became much easier.
After my family’s release from the camps, we lived in a house on the outskirts of Jakarta. In the backyard was a water tank, placed high upon a tower. My brother had discovered that when we climbed the tower we could look down on an outdoor shower. This we began to do with some frequency, given the fact that from this perch we could observe our native, female domestic help in their daily bathing routines. I suppose it could be said that we were young peeping toms (we were five and seven years old). I have no idea how other young boys viewed adult women when they were my age, but I do know that a nude female has always been profoundly intriguing to me! It might just be because I had only seen emaciated women for three and a half years in the camps. Thus, a healthy female body was extraordinarily attractive.
My mother’s health had been severely impacted by the years in the camps and when I was about six she developed pleurisy, a life-threatening lung disease. She was hospitalized in Jakarta. My father was not in a position to look after my younger brother and I, given that he worked all day, so we were lodged with friends of my parents. I don’t remember where my brother stayed, but I stayed with a prominent Dutch family. The man of the house was president of a Dutch shipping company that served the Far East.
It was here that I developed one of my most crippling beliefs: the belief that I can be betrayed and a deeply held belief in sexual shame and guilt.
While staying with my hosts I discovered a new way to satisfy my young peeping tom habits. If I crouched outside the closed bathroom door while the lady of the house was having a bath, I could peer through the keyhole into the bathroom to view her. I was quite pleased with this discovery, as the hostess was a very beautiful woman in her mid-thirties. I spent many a thrilling moment watching her bathe.
One day I was at the keyhole, so engaged in visual delight that I didn’t hear footsteps approaching. All of a sudden, I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. My father. “What are you doing?” he asked. There might have been a believable explanation for being on my knees with my right eye pressed to the keyhole, but I couldn’t come up with anything but “I’m fixing the lock.”
What was I thinking? I was busted. My father chose to tell on me, informing the couple what I had been up to. I was kicked out of their house. I never trusted my father again, and I have had many a moment since when an unreasonable fear of betrayal has overwhelmed me. Since that day I’ve had a huge issue with “tattle-telling” and have a restless radar scanning for betrayal. I felt hugely guilty when I was caught, and that feeling of guilt became an addiction that played out in later events in my life, such as when I was married but fooling around. I came to understand that it is not a symptom such as infidelity that is the real problem for most people, but the underlying cause that must be addressed. The underlying cause in my case was an almost irresistible need, a craving actually, for feelings of guilt, especially sexual guilt.
Another significant memory came during my last few months in Indonesia before being sent to Holland. I had raging nightmares every night, and every night I would scream. My mother would come, comfort me, and I’d fall asleep. On one night, I screamed and screamed but she did not come. I crawled out of bed and made my way to the living room where I saw my mother sitting on the couch with a man other than my father, holding hands.
I felt as if I had died.
At that moment, I made up another strong core belief: that love can be lost, that I would not be loved, and that I was not lovable.
When I was eight I was sent to Holland and placed in foster care, where I was subjected to minor sexual abuse. The son of the house had tendencies towards boys, and stole the few art supplies my parents had sent with me to Holland. I had to write my parents once a week and in the first letter to my parents, who had remained in Indonesia, I told them how much I hated the couple I was staying with and how desperately unhappy I was. My foster mother asked to see what I had written; she read it and ripped it up saying: “Let’s try that again, shall we?” For two years I couldn’t communicate with my parents to tell them what was happening to me.
Isolated from my family and increasingly angry, my self-hatred grew, and I became a bully to be reckoned with. My rage was so intense that I was never hurt in any of the daily fights I got myself into, simply because no one could get near me. While in Indonesia I had had to fight Indonesian kids because I was white. In Holland, however, I was called “nigger” because my skin was dark from eight years in the tropics. In this state, that of a ‘monster,’ I had no other identity — there was simply no room for anything else to flourish and grow. At every recess I fought the entire school, which meant some fifty boys formed a circle and ran at me to take shots.
When I was ten I was returned to my biological family. My parents had returned from Indonesia and my brother had come home from boarding school. Although our family was reunited, I remember family dinners were never without tension. My father drank too much and had a terrible temper, which was totally unpredictable. We would be having dinner and out of the blue one of us would be slapped on the back of the head, or receive a blow on our knuckles with a soup spoon. I was beaten two or three times a week.
For many years, I tended to attract people who had anger issues. I replayed my reaction to my father’s anger whenever anyone around me raised his or her voice. Today I know that the purpose of attracting these “angry” people is to heal a belief I have made up: that I am not safe, that it is all my fault, that I am guilty. Today anger does not affect me and I am now very rarely even remotely disturbed when confronted with anger.
From self-loathing to nothingness
“The chains that keep you bound to the past are not the actions of another person. They are your own anger, stubbornness, lack of compassion, jealousy and blaming others for your choices. It is not other people that keep you trapped; it is the entitled role of victim that you enjoy wearing. There is a familiarness to pain that you enjoy because you get a payoff from it. When you figure out what that payoff is then you will finally be on the road to freedom.” ~ Shannon Alder
In Holland when I was twelve, boys played either soccer or field hockey. I took up field hockey, which my brother had played at boarding school. We made a dirt field in the back of our garden where the neighborhood boys would come and play for hours every day. Of the five boys who played there on a regular basis, all eventually played first division and three went on to play for national teams. My brother and I both excelled at the sport and eventually played in the first division in Holland and later on the Canadian National Team.
My father never supported us emotionally, nor did he ever say a kind word. Instead, he would comment after every game he watched on Sundays that it had been “useless again.” It is important to note that I didn’t play competitive field hockey out of any real joy for the game. Rather I was driven to excel by my underlying belief in profound unworthiness. I hid this pretty well, even from myself. If I could diminish or even humiliate an opponent, I briefly “looked good.” Years later I noticed many highly successful clients living out that same kind of story. Many chose to excel at something so no one would see what a failure they believed themselves to be, at a deeply hidden level.
Isolated by self-loathing, I became a seeker. Some small part of me desperately needed to know: Other than this vile creature, what else is in me? What is the point? Why was my world the way that it was? Having no one to turn to, no trusted adult by my side, I devoured a world of books for the answers. By the time I was sixteen or seventeen I’d read everything I could get my hands on: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre — you name it, I read it. I read everything and everyone, and every time I’d open a new book and start reading, I’d think, “Wow, this is incredible!” only to become disillusioned shortly thereafter. There were no real answers for me in the books I read, nothing practical that I could apply to my life to help me figure it out, nothing that led in a consistent fashion towards a reasonable understanding of what this life is all about.
Then one night, in the midst of this internal chaos, I awoke in a state of unspeakable peace, joy, and clarity. I had seen something in this state — something I had been deeply searching for. I had seen the answer to my question.
The answer was that there was no question.
I lay back down in bed, determined to return to the state I had awakened from because I wanted to see what this actually looked like. Lying back down, I went back to that blissful state and saw crystal clear blackness: an unspeakable emptiness full of certainty and beauty and infinite peace. It was also a place where I understood — where I knew by experiencing the interconnectedness of all things, myself included.
Many years later when I related this experience to a Buddhist Rinpoche, he laughed and laughed. Buddhists have a habit of laughing at just about anything, so I was not taken aback. He then said: “You are a Sunyata Buddha.” My ego was quite pleased with that label, but I had no idea what he was talking about, so I asked him what it meant. He said: “It means nothing. It means you have been to Nirvana, but you will never go back there unless you do the work.”
Now I know that state of unspeakable beauty and peace is who I really am, and it’s who you are too. This absolute clear nothingness is the very essence of our being.
I did not share this experience with anyone. If I’d lived in India, I would have informed a guru and no doubt he would simply have chuckled and said, “Congratulations, you’re enlightened,” before meandering, nonplussed, on his way. Instead I was sent to psychiatrists and psychologists in what turned out to be one fruitless appointment after another. These well-meaning professionals suffered through the sessions without me ever saying a word. I was stone cold silent. I would not respond to their thoughtful questions, I would not play with toys that were meant to reveal some deeply held disorder to the therapist, I would not participate in any way.
A number of psychotic episodes subsequently ensued, which I shared with no one. I recognized that I was, indeed, going insane — and decided not to allow my mind to “think” anymore. It was simply too dangerous to walk this path without a guide. I am extremely grateful that those years of my journey didn’t transpire in the 1980s or later, when I would have received so many diagnoses that I would have been medicated into oblivion. PTSD, ADHD, Borderline Personality Disorder, Bi-Polar, Schizophrenia, Autism, Asperger’s... these are just some of the labels I could have been stuck with, and would still wear today. I certainly wouldn’t have escaped a bewildering array of psychotropic medications.
Increasingly isolated, I began to find relief in playing hours of highly competitive sports every day, indulging in alcohol and later, drugs, trying to kill the hateful creature I believed myself to be. Yet I was also trying to rediscover the mysterious experience for which I had no context. Like most addicts, my substance abuse had these two contradictory aspects: self-destruction and misdirected seeking.
But soon the tipping point had been passed and the downward spiral of my journey began. As I descended into a hell of my own making, I fell farther and farther away from that sparkling void of eternal essence that I had known, for a few brief moments, to be my real Self.
Discovering a better way
In 1964, when I was twenty-two, I immigrated to Canada. There I was selected for the Canadian National field hockey team and played internationally for a few years. I attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The initial plan was to study commerce, return to Holland, and join the bank my great-grandfather had founded which, at that time, was still a “family bank.” Instead, I switched to fine arts and then architecture, got married in 1969, had two wonderful daughters and embarked on a career as an entrepreneur. I had a landscaping company and worked as a landscape architect, a restaurant owner, and a developer. In each case my business would initially thrive, then my ‘belief guided’ self-sabotaging tendencies would deliver evidence to prove that I could not and should not succeed. I was married twice and divorced twice. My very strong belief that I was unlovable combined with an enduring conviction that love can, and will, be lost. I would sabotage many relationships before I finally began really healing that belief.
Around the time of my fiftieth birthday, my life was desperately in need of a U-turn if I was to survive. I was drunk every night, and I had determined that unless I could discover a better way, I would drive my car off the road on the Vancouver to Whistler Highway. The drop was several hundred feet, the chances of survival nil.
So I set out, once again, on the path to an awareness of my real Self and, in so doing, arrived back at the place where I had never actually traveled from to begin with. That place is the Truth of who I am, also the Truth of who you are, unchangeably whole and complete. In a pivotal moment of insight, I realized that maybe, just maybe — there might be a way out of my misery. There might be a better way of living after all.
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.” ~ A.A. Milne
Finding that “better way” took me on a year of intensive study and meditation, and very little else. During that time, I focused on the nature of my self-hatred. Where had it come from? How had I constructed a creature so heinous? In the process of figuring out how I had constructed my self-loathing, I was, of course, beginning to deconstruct it. And that’s the process we use today in the profoundly healing work of “Choose Again.” This process will help you to deconstruct the identity you made up about yourself at a very young age because, in the vast majority of cases, that formative identity is the source of chronic unhappiness.
We all make up an identity, of which the cornerstone is typically guilt. I made up a ‘guilty identity’ and you probably did too. Until you realize this and ‘own’ it with unwavering clarity, you will think that the source of your unhappiness is something outside of yourself. You will think “it’s my parents,” or “it’s the economy,” or your boss, partner, or kids. Regardless, it will seem to be someone or something outside of you that needs to change — not you.
Or if you suspect you really are the problem, you’ll be tempted to conclude that the situation is hopeless. A psychiatrist I saw in the ’70s gave me this encouraging diagnosis on my second (and last) visit: “You are hopelessly eccentric; you’ll just have to learn to live with it.” Hopeless: an unchangeable identity and character.
As I began to really examine my life, I realized that in order for me to begin deconstructing the self I loathed, I had to learn to feel. In the beginning that was a huge challenge because I only had two feelings: numbness and rage, with very little in between. What I used early on in my process is a “Feeling Sheet,” on which are listed nearly seventy different feelings (you’ll find it in Appendix A). This feeling sheet allowed me to begin to identify what I was really feeling at any given moment of the day. As a result, I was able to recognize feelings of abandonment, I could isolate feelings of disappointment, and I could identify feelings of rage, fatigue, and hopelessness.
Then I took the next step of accepting the teaching that I was choosing a particular feeling in a particular moment, based on an erroneous core belief that I held about myself. I hope you can hear how important this is:
I choose the feelings I experience. I choose the feelings I experience!
Let that sink in for a minute or so. Let’s put it another way: it’s my beliefs about myself, my self-made identity, which chooses my feelings. There is no one else in here choosing my feelings for me. So, I had to learn to experience feelings. To do this, I would train my mind to focus on the feeling, and then I’d make it really big. And then I’d say, “Okay, what belief am I holding about myself in this moment that is choosing this particular feeling?” Once I’d been able to isolate and articulate a belief, I’d continue by saying, “That belief is not true. The Truth of me is Love.” The Truth does not ‘choose feelings’ but automatically engenders a state of being which can be called bliss. That’s a given. If I were in my True mind, I’d be ‘in love’. There would be no anger, or sadness, or envy. And that is because in Truth, there is only an experience of unconditional Love.
By observing all of my feelings, I was able to uncover the deeply held beliefs about who I thought I was that were driving my behavior. As I learned to recognize the insanity of those beliefs and correct them by replacing them with the knowledge of who I truly am, my behavior changed accordingly. With the help of a group of counselors in Vancouver, I began to put together a practical way of incorporating the lessons I’d learned from spiritual texts (see the Recommended Reading), utilizing the principles of Attitudinal Healing. When I became a professional counselor I formalized this process into the Choose Again Six-Step Process.
The result was the establishment of the Choose Again Attitudinal Healing center in Vancouver, with the opening of a residential center in Costa Rica a few years later. Living at the center near Arenal in Costa Rica provides me with an opportunity to continue to work on myself every day, while at the same time holding up a mirror reflecting the Truth to others to recognize their own true Self.
I’m increasingly less tolerant of a feeling or a state of being other than joy or peace. I’m increasingly losing all fascination with the thoughts that cause upsets. For instance, I don’t find it particularly interesting to be angry anymore. I used to get a perverse sense of false power from anger, and I was good at it. But I don’t find it interesting anymore. I don’t find sadness interesting anymore. I don’t get off on sad stories. They simply don’t touch me.
What moves me now is love.
People come to me with heart-wrenching stories of trauma, of sexual abuse, of emotional abuse. I listen to them but I don’t react. And at the end of the story the bearer of it will ask me, perplexed, “Doesn’t any of that touch you?”
“Well no, it doesn’t touch me,” I respond, “because it doesn’t reflect the truth of who you really are. Your story has nothing to do with who you really are. The truth of who you really are is what moves me. I get teary-eyed when you and I connect at that true level, when we connect with love. Then I cry. But your story won’t make me cry because your story is not you. It is just a story.”
The only reason to tell the story of my early years is to demonstrate unequivocally that whatever happened to you and me when we were young does not have the power to keep us prisoner for life. I have seen too many people recover from unspeakable early life trauma, people who had been told they would never ‘get over’ their past.
My story is not who I am, either. It led me to believe that I was a monster, but that is not who I truly am. I was fortunate enough to experience my true Self when I was a teenager, and that knowledge kept me from completely self-destructing, and it eventually led me back to my Self. I know the truth of who you really are, because that is the Truth for both you and me. In the following chapters, I’ll show you how your current identity came about. Then we’ll begin the work of deconstructing it, which will enable you to connect to profound inner peace and contentment.
“Paths are made by walking,” said Franz Kafka. The paths we are making by inner processing of our feelings and beliefs are new neuropaths. We are actually changing our minds at the deepest levels. Compare this to making a path through a rainforest, a very dense and entangled environment. It takes hard work, but after a lot of sweating and slashing and cursing we have our path.
Now, what do you think happens if you stopped there? What would that path look like in a month? There would be no path anymore; the rainforest would swallow it up, just like the ego can swallow up all effect of a few well-meaning Six-Step Processes. You have to keep the way open; you have to keep processing till that tentative little path has become a six-lane highway, and even then you’ll have to maintain it. Like a rainforest, the ego simply waits for you and I to slack off. Are you worth it? Are you worth the sustained, committed and disciplined approach to changing your mind?