The Shame That Drove Me Off Track

Why do we let other people decide what’s right for us?

I’ve never understood why Sally had such an impact on me. Maybe it was the timing — her presence in both my worlds, standing on the cusp between when everything made sense and when it all fell apart.

Sally was in the picture when my son had his first psychotic break, standing strong at the center of the maelstrom, certain she had the answers, that she knew how to help my boy. But why did I believe her? She was just a teenager!

She’d been to prom with him, the two of them looking healthy and handsome in their fancy clothes, all dressed up. I still have the pictures to prove it, those beautiful pictures. She was almost his girlfriend, until things fell apart, until the complete and ongoing destruction began.

That was 17 years ago.

Yet here she is again with me today, knocking loudly on the thick and firmly-closed door of my subconscious, demanding that I pay attention to her and the things she said back then.

What I Want from My Program

Just last week I joined a program for mothers of people who are addicts or have mental health problems. One of the first exercises was to freewrite about what we want out of the program. The rules of freewriting are simple. You start writing and you don’t stop. You don’t worry about the words landing on the page — if what you’re writing is good or coherent or even what you believe. You just keep writing and writing for the designated time period, letting whatever bubbles up, bubble up.

What do I want from the program? “I want to be a good mother,” I wrote. “I want to trust my instincts.” And then it all came tumbling out. The night Sally called me to say my son was in trouble, using drugs at his apartment across the Bay.

“You need to go get him,” she told me. “You can’t let him do this.”

“I don’t know if it’s my place. He’s an adult. He’s making his own choices. I don’t know if it’s right for me to show up and try to drag him out of there. I don’t know if he’ll come.”

“Of course it’s right for you to drag him out of danger! You’re his mother!” she almost shouted into the phone.

So I went. And Sally came with me. We dragged him out of the unfamiliar apartment. His skin was hot. His eyes were shining. He was so stupified he couldn’t figure out how to put his bike in the trunk.

He admitted in the back seat of the car that he was high on crystal meth — not mentally ill, as the doctors inside and outside the hospital had told us. He agreed to go to rehab. He entered the next day. Then he exited hours later.

We drove around frantically looking for him. Sally. Me. His best friend Jason. The chaos hasn’t really stopped since.

Spreading the Shame Like a Cancer

Just as Sally had shamed me, told me I wouldn’t be a good mother if I didn’t rescue my son, I turned around and shamed his friend Jason who took his hand off the oven of my son’s dysfunction when it got too god-damned hot.

Jason had driven around for hours that day looking for my son, his friend. Another day, he drove him to the beach, where my son walked away and never came back. Jason called and asked me what he should do. He’d already waited for hours. He needed to go home. I asked him to let the local police know my son went missing, in case they found him confused and wandering. To give them my number, so they’d know whom to call. It was a lot to ask, but Jason did it anyway, for me, for my son. But as it turned out, it was a bad idea.

Police showed up at my house to show me the flyers they were posting saying my son was missing. A helicopter was called in — a whole search team. I tried to tell them to call it off. To just keep an eye out for my son and call me if he showed up. But that wasn’t the protocol in this small town on the Pacific coast. They worried my son would be swept away by the surf. The next day, after a night of upset and worry, they found him. But after all that effort and expense on his behalf, he wouldn’t get into their car. He didn’t want to leave the beach. And he wasn’t breaking any laws, so they couldn’t force him.

The policeman sounded defeated when he called to tell me what was going on. And I felt a familiar and overwhelming feeling: shame. How could my son be so heartless? How could he be so unconcerned about the trouble he was causing? All the worry and the work?

We didn’t see much of Jason after that. And whenever I ran into mutual friends, I bad-mouthed him, spreading the shame I was feeling all over him. He abandoned us! He used to come for dinner once a week! He’d been like a son for over a year! But now that his friend was in trouble, he disappeared!

Shame. I wanted to heap on the shame — to take some of it off my own heart and shovel it onto his. I wanted to shame Jason even though his response was entirely appropriate. Why should he stick by a friend who abused and ignored him? Why should Sally? Why should anyone? They weren’t his mom.

Shame is Basic. But is it a Good Metric?

As my son’s experience with the Search and Rescue team demonstrates, it’s a bad thing to feel no shame. Shame is useful in compelling socially responsible behavior. And shame is a basic human emotion, common to healthy human beings.

“In his 1872 survey of the emotional lives of humans, Darwin found that expressions of shame were universal: In every one of the cultures and civilizations he surveyed worldwide, he found that people displayed shame in exactly the same way — eyes downcast, gaze averted, slack posture, head lowered, and confusion of mind,” according to this story in Psychology Today.

The same story tells us that according to modern Affect Theory, shame is a basic biological emotion, one of nine “that spontaneously appear without experience-based learning. Shame doesn’t need to be taught; it is in our genes.”

But like any powerful tool or emotion, shame can be misused and misunderstood. Another story in Psychology Today puts it this way:

Shame has been called the “master emotion” because so much of our experience is filtered through this lens. In addition, it warps and confounds our understanding of ourselves and others in a way that makes sustainable resolutions extremely difficult if not impossible.

Shame was at work in that early rescue of my son from the drug den he had burrowed into, and it continued to influence my actions for the next 17 years, when I rescued him again and again and again, shielding him as best I could from the direst consequences of his actions.

“Of course it’s right for you to drag him out of danger! You’re his mother!” she almost shouted into the phone.

For much of that time, his father opposed me, advocating for the “tough love” espoused by many recovery programs. But how could I abandon our son? How could I let him go hungry? Or homeless? Or lost and disconnected? Wouldn’t that make me a terrible mother? Wouldn’t that be neglecting my most basic responsibility? My most important job?

Wouldn’t that make me unendurably ashamed?

Are There Limits to Motherly Love?

It wasn’t only shame that motivated me to keep trying, to keep throwing that life preserver out to my drowning son. I love him. I don’t want to lose him to mental illness or drug addiction. I want to keep him close.

But at what cost?

The conundrum of how best to help my son has been the central theme of my life for almost two decades. And after spending all that energy worrying and reacting to and trying to manage his kaleidoscopic circumstances, what kind of energy did I have left to offer my other son, his younger brother, who was deeply impacted by the chaos swirling through our home? What could I give his older sister? His father — my husband? Myself?

My preoccupation with our troubled child was the topic of my very first story on this platform:

And it was the topic of one written last month:

So what has all this preoccupation yielded? Has my son improved or recovered? Has anything really changed?

Nope.

Family, friends, society, the media — everyone thinks that a mother’s love is sacred and healing. That mothers are magical. That mothers are saints. And believe me, I’d love to be a magical healing saint!

But the truth is, I’m not magic. My love isn’t going to save my son. And throwing myself on the funeral pyre of his illness isn’t going to do anything but waste another life.

The Paradox of Doing by Not Doing

So now, after 17 years, I’m trying another tactic. I’m stepping back. I don’t blame myself for waiting so long to do this. There were reasons I couldn’t disengage before. But now my son has a subsidized apartment. He has a treatment team who is supposed to be looking out for him. He has a disability check that comes every month. He’s not homeless, or in jail, or in a locked psychiatric facility — or living in a drug den across the Bay. He’s turning 35 years old tomorrow, and he has everything he needs to build a better life for himself, if he wants to. And if he doesn’t want to, that’s his choice to make.

The program I’ve started teaches moms to protect themselves by setting appropriate yet loving boundaries, refusing to allow themselves to be abused or manipulated, and putting themselves before their adult children with addiction problems or mental illness. And paradoxically, once they stop taking responsibility for their adult children, sometimes those “children” take responsibility for themselves.

That’s the magic of doing by not doing.

It reminds me of the AA slogan: Let Go and Let God. My own perception of god is something like the “Way”or the “Tao” in the Tao te Ching, one of the greatest wisdom books ever written. Composed 2600 years ago by someone known as Lao Tzu, it’s comprised of 81 poems on how to live, many of which extol the virtues of yielding and acceptance. Here’s #10, as translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child’s? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from your own mind and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing, acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue.

The Tao te Ching talks a lot about not trying to control things, about recognizing the fact that you have no control over events, about having faith that the way things are is the way they are meant to be. Applying that wisdom to my troubled son, I ask myself: how do I know that he isn’t meant to live the life he is living? How do I know that the life I want for him is better than the one he has? The truth is, I don’t know. I’m not god, and I’m not my son, who has demonstrated over and over again that the world he lives in is quite different than my own.

What right do I have to force him to live in my world?

If he were harming others, yes, I would have a right and a duty to intervene. But what if the harm he’s doing is mostly in my perception? Isn’t that something that I, then, control?

• If he asks me for money, but I don’t give it to him, where’s the harm in that?
• If he becomes rude, and I hang up on him, haven’t I prevented the harm?
• If he knocks on my sister’s door, and she doesn’t answer, is that a terrible problem? Not really.

His behavior might be upsetting or embarrassing to me, but I have it in my power to reject the shame, because as a grown man, he’s responsible for his actions — not me. Because as a grown woman, I have a right to decide my best action (or non-action). I have a right and a duty to choose my own path

Learning How to Accept What Is

Paging through the Tao te Ching, I find many verses that apply to my situation with my adult child. If I could, I’d reproduce the whole book here. I thought I remembered a verse about how water, flowing gently over a rock in a stream, yields to the rock yet also smooths and shapes it. But I can’t seem to find it. No matter. Perhaps it doesn’t exist, or exists only in my imagination. Perhaps a better one to close with is #78:

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard; the gentle overcomes the rigid. Everyone knows this is true, but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains serene in the midst of sorrow. Evil cannot enter his years. Because he has given up helping, he is the people’s greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical.

I also want to tell Sally, wherever she may be, that I am going to try helping by not helping. For my son, for my husband, for my other children, and for myself, I’m bound and finally ready to try to understand those words.

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