The Road Most Traveled - My Journey With 'People of the Lie'

Chapter One

Pacts with the Devil

“There is no rest for a messenger ‘til the message is delivered.”
Joseph Conrad – The Rescue

I told my father before he died that I wanted to die with my integrity and belief in God. Writing this book is honoring that commitment. I told my therapist when he asked how I emerged as who I am that I married Christ when I was seven. But this book is not really going to be focused on my childhood but instead on my adult journey. I worked at Union Station, a homeless shelter, for eight years where I taught anger management. Never in my life have I learned so much or witnessed such acts of heroism and humanity. I told the people each week did you improve the quality of life for one person today? If you did not, go back tomorrow and try again.

I am writing this book in hopes of improving the quality of least one person’s life and perhaps many lives. Evil does indeed win when good men do nothing. In some small way I hope this book lights the path a little for some fellow travelers. I am dedicating this book to the three heroes I have had in my life. The first one was Gary Cooper, who played in ‘High Noon’. At ten years old I kept sneaking in to see the movie again and again. What impacted me was this characters’ courage, his vision and most of all his commitment to his moral obligation to protect the town. All of my life I have wanted to meet a man with that kind of courage. I finally found him and married him and have been touched by the magnitude of his courage to face evil head on.

My second hero was Erich Fromm. When I was nineteen he came to San Francisco State to speak and after his talk twenty students were picked for their high records to sit personally with him. I was honored to be one of the twenty selected. I sat spellbound while he told us he thought man was basically good and had a choice about whether he wanted to indulge his evil. He said “love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to human existence.” He asked us all what we wanted to do with our lives. I told him his books had touched me deeply and I wanted to be a therapist and walk with people into the darkest parts of their pain. I left that day feeling deeply committed to following my dream.

The third hero was Scott Peck, M.D. His books spoke to me and lit my path over many dark crossings. The book that touched me the deepest was “People of the Lie”. It touched me so deeply that I have decided to write this book to illuminate his message as many years have passed since he shared his visions about evil in that work.

I grew to see that anger and evil are joined at the hip. All people feel anger. If they have been severely damaged they often are not in touch with the anger directly. Often what we see in our patients and the public is depression which I believe is anger turned in on the self. This can grow to such a proportion that suicide can occur. It is the things that people do with the anger that is what I believe to be true evil. Their unwillingness to own the deeds, actions, and life choices is what severely impacts others and destroys them. To me that is what Scott Peck is speaking about in his book. It is really about what people choose to do with their anger that is the critical issue. I was disappointed when they took ‘Passive Aggressive Personality’ out of the DSM because this is the main vehicle people use to express homicidal rage and get away with it. It truly is the perfect murder where the person is never tried or convicted or even recognized as a killer.

The most powerful examples of this was one of my first patients. Shirley was referred to me by my boss and he was on the verge of hospitalizing her. She was 210 pounds, had severe anxiety attacks, depression and agoraphobia. She was a religious woman who attended the Lutheran church every Sunday and touted what a good Christian she was.

I realized how angry she was but when I asked her if she was in touch with anger or anything in her life she said “I don’t like the house I live in”. And slowly she admitted she resented her husband for not providing enough for her and being away at work all the time. She had two small children and I sensed she resented caring for them. She was a very infantile narcissistic woman that was obsessed with surface and looks. She touted being a very good Christian women dedicated to Christ and the principles of the bible. She and her husband came in together for couple’s therapy and I also saw her alone for individual sessions. She wanted me to help her lose weight and gain more confidence and perhaps get a job. We slowly worked on her goals and she said she would like to teach school. I encouraged her to finish her education and see about getting a teaching credential which she eventually did.

I struggled with her obsession around wanting to be noticed by men and seen as attractive. She was a very plain woman with a matronly look. I helped her with her agoraphobia and her anxiety. Finally after she got the weight off and received her teaching credential she looked for work.

I felt deeply sorry for her husband and children because I felt they struggled with feeling abandoned by their mother. Her narcissism was so extreme that I felt she had a narcissistic personality disorder. The following description of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder is from DSM III as I felt it is more descriptive than the diagnosis listed in DSM-IV. The difference highlights the muting and antiseptic approach that has occurred in this profession and the discussion of that is a big part of this book.

“A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy of behavior), lack of empathy, and hypersensitivity to the evaluation of others, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts as indicated by at least five of the following:

1. Reacts to criticism with feelings of rage, shame, or humiliation (even if not expressed)
2. Is interpersonally exploitative, takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
3. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be noticed as “special” without appropriate achievement
4. Believes that his or her problems are unique and can be understood only by other special people.
5. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
6. Has a sense of entitlement: unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment, e.g. assumes that he or she does not have to wait in line when others must do so.
7. Requires constant attention and admiration, e.g. keeps fishing for compliments.
8. Lack of empathy; inability to recognize and experience how others feel, e.g. annoyance or surprise when a friend who is seriously ill cancels a date.
9. Is preoccupied with feelings of envy.”

The horror came for me when this patient started having an affair with the neighbor, who was also married. She stopped being home when the little ones would come home from school. I told her I felt it would be very damaging to her children and to her marriage and the neighbor’s marriage. I felt a wanton destructiveness from her when she said “well he told me I was attractive”. I said is that the god you kneel in front of at this point, that anyone who tells you that you are attractive you then ignore all your Christian ethics. She said with a taunting manner in her voice that I could not reveal this to her husband as it was stated to me in our individual session.

I was shocked at her lack of care for other people. She said now that I had helped her lose the weight she craved any attention she could get. I sensed her shadow was slowly enveloping her. The children began to do poorly in school and act out because they sensed that their mother had abandoned them. I spent many hours trying to reason with her I asked her why not get a divorce if she wanted to have affairs. She said she wanted the money and security marriage brought to her. Soon the pool man was being seduced and the house painter was also being seduced. She became an addict to getting any attention from any man. She was like the heroin addicts I have treated; she had to keep upping the dosage to get the high. I worked at Patton State Hospital and treated people who killed their relatives. I found them to be often more honest with their evil deeds. What they did they openly admitted to and there was a strange honesty to them.

Here this woman Shirley was always talking about what a devout Christian she was. I consulted with many colleagues about the situation and they felt I was in a difficult situation. The husband John was completely unaware of what was going on when he was gone on business trips. He could not understand why the children were struggling. This is definitely a case of what my hero Erich Fromm called ‘Malignant Narcissism’ as discussed by Scott Peck.

“Malignant Narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will. All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They do what God wants them to do rather than what they would desire. “Thy will, not mine, be done,” the God-submitted person says. They believe in what is true rather than what they would like to be true. Unlike Bobby’s parents, what their beloved needs becomes more important to them than their own gratification.

In summary, to a greater...