Personal Reflections

"Real courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches."
Tom Robbins

I include both of these stories to demonstrate how closely our own issues can overlap with the people that come into therapy. I know that I am effective sometimes because I have stumbled into a lot of the same dark rooms as my clients and fallen down a lot of the same stairs.

This idea in psychology was explored by Carl Jung who said that it “was only the wounded healer who can heal.” Essentially what he was saying was that the therapist has been hurt in a lot of the same ways as the people he sees, but has hopefully learned to recognize and identify these hurts, and draw on memories of how he personally coped with this hurt to assist his clients. This is particularly relevant to me in considering the idea of substitute people, and I wanted to share some personal reflections about this.

My guess is I am not a typical substitute person, and I’m not really sure there is such a thing. The common traits seem to be more about feeling that you are just not quite anyone’s first choice, and personally I know exploring my childhood holds some clues as to how this happens.

As the second oldest in a family of four kids very close in age, the problem was not really with attention. My parents divorced at a very young age, and, although my mother was seriously overworked, she always had enough time for me, maybe even more than my share. The next logical thing you might go to is sibling rivalry. Often a second-born kid becomes rebellious, as the role of the responsible one has been taken by the eldest. Ok, this one was definitely true in my family. My sister was a high achiever and I definitely kind of went the other way. Still, I wouldn’t frame the relationship in terms of jealousy, so this doesn’t really seem to be a great explanation either.

One thing that did affect me personally was growing up kind of poor. Seeing other kids with nicer things was kind of hard, and I think a part of me always thought I was missing out on something. Hard to describe exactly, but really it is a kind of feeling that something is going on just out of your grasp that is a lot more hip than what you’re doing. I’ve felt like that my whole life, and heard similar sentiments from a number of different people I’ve seen in therapy.

It was funny because even when I went on vacation I often thought I might be missing something. I would anticipate and anticipate, and when I got there it wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be.

Over time, when you feel second best for long enough, you begin to make choices that confirm your ideas about yourself, and wake up one day with a second rate life. This is an exceedingly difficult pattern to break out of, and for me it truly took reinventing myself by moving to another place.

So when I was about 21 or so I hit the road, working in a number of our National Parks, I found that for summer at least I was far from a substitute person, and for a time truly felt the beam of a very imaginary spotlight as I met new people from all over the country. Dating was easy in these days, as we were all young, free, and adventurous. I went out with some beautiful women during these years of my life, and seemed to be on my way to a happy and prosperous life with any number of them.

But eventually the summer would end and I would have to return to my life, which was always in disarray. I would return home and all of the old substitute patterns would begin to creep in again. Somehow familiar surrounding always brought back those old feelings of being second best.

So I hit the road over and over again. Somehow a change of place was always a remedy for these feelings, and each time I landed in a new place I found I was able to reinvent myself. In many ways these were the best years of my life, as I met thousand of people, had a number of wonderful relationships, and got to see a big chunk of the world.

Eventually I moved to Chicago to become a comedian, where strangely, I met a number of people who had found a wonderful way to deal with being substitute people, by learning to laugh about it. I became one of these people too. These were hedonistic years for me, and I fell into the very familiar pattern of joking about myself in the evening, while suffering the consequences of feeling second best during the day. Eventually I truly had to hold my life up to a microscope when my comic idol and extreme substitute personality Chris Farley overdosed on drugs just a few short blocks from my house.

So I had my dark night of the soul. I realized that continuing on the path I was on would likely result in an early demise, and I wasn’t quite ready to check out just yet. I started to study Psychology. First I got a Bachelor’s degree, than a Master’s degree and then another Master’s degree. There, I had done it. I had so many degrees I couldn’t possibly feel second best anymore, right?

Wrong…

The crucial moment for me was actually getting into counseling. That is where I first came to realize that changes in your external world have very little to do with the day to day operation of your internal machinery. No, small, internal changes were what occurred as I continued with therapy, and one day I just woke up and realized I felt differently. The best way I can describe it was an ability to laugh with myself rather than at myself. Gradually I learned that virtually everyone, from the hottest celebrity, to the prom queen, to the richest industrialists, feels like a substitute person at one time or another. This was reinforced for me again and again in my work as a therapist. I found that if you looked behind the lives that seemed like they were using a bit too much effort to exude superiority, there was usually a case of crippling self-loathing and insecurity.

So I again try and return to the idea of humor in therapy, because that was my personal path to wellness, although I also recognize there may be others. I constantly see people who struggle with inferiority, and in one way or another it seeps into every aspect of their lives. Shared absurdity, that’s become my mantra. I mean what the hell are we really doing here anyway? I remember watching a video called “The power of ten” a few years back that kept zooming away from the earth by a power of ten. Looking at our tiny speck of dust fade into the distance, I suddenly realized not going to some dance seemed a little less important, and it is a lesson I try and remember. We all have an idea about what it is we are doing here, but all we really know for sure is that we are on this tiny blue speck of stardust together. For better or for worse we’re stuck here together, and personally I think there’s got to be something better than trying to make each other feel bad about what we don’t have. When we can learn to laugh about our shared experience it truly does become a shared experience, and sometimes that makes it pretty bearable.