Shame On Me
(Part 1 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
I’m the last person you would ever suspect of experimenting with psychedelic drugs. But this is the story of how at age 64 I completely changed my personality in just a little over a year. It involved talk therapy and a lot of introspection — but the real game-changer was a couple of very successful experiments with psychedelic drugs.
I grew up privileged with two loving parents in an affluent suburb. My friends and neighbors probably think that I have a near-perfect life. I went to Harvard Law School, worked as a partner in a large law firm for many years and saved enough that I could begin the retirement process in my mid-50’s. I’m married to Andrea, a smart, successful and popular woman and have three wonderful kids in their early 30’s, all married or engaged to wonderful partners from families with whom we are friendly. We live in a nice suburb and have lots of friends.
Personally, I have always been a straight arrow when it comes to drinking and drug use. I drink socially but have never used recreational drugs — not even as a teenager or in college. I was in good health, albeit overweight, and living a good life. I’m almost embarrassed as I write this because I know that it must seem terribly ungrateful to complain about anything.
But over the years, my wife and I had grown somewhat distant from each other and had drifted apart. If it weren’t for our children, we’d have had little in common except for our shared history. And the kids had been out of the house for several years. We liked and respected each other but found ourselves living separate and parallel lives — more like roommates than spouses.
It wasn’t that I was unaware of the distance between us, but it never occurred to me to spend much time thinking about it, much less to do anything about it. I can’t say that I felt either happy or unhappy. I was pretty much numb to my feelings and never considered that there might be a preferable way to live.
That path began a few months before Andrea’s 60th birthday, when I asked her if there was anything in particular that she wanted. I would never have anticipated her reply. She said that she wanted us to go to couples counseling. I was taken aback, and all I could think of to say was, “Really? Why?”
She described our relationship as just cohabitating and how she missed the connection that we used to have with each other. As she said these things, I nodded in agreement — she was articulating feelings that I also had but had never given serious thought to. I missed how close we used to be. Her request caused us to talk more honestly than we had in ages, and when she asked if I would consider couples counseling, I enthusiastically agreed.
I’m omitting a lot of detail about our efforts to find a therapist and start counseling. The therapist turned out to be very unstructured in her approach. We had appointments twice a week, and she would randomly see my wife, or me, or the two of us together — whoever happened to show up for the hour. There was no “roadmap” or even goal-setting. We would just show up and talk.
After a couple of months, I realized that I felt uncomfortable with the therapist. I was feeling defensive in front of her, as if she were judging me. I felt that I was advocating for myself, marshalling evidence to defend myself rather than confronting my faults and weaknesses. I didn’t feel safe admitting negative things about myself because I was worried that they would be used against me.
Ironically, when I explained these feelings to the therapist, I had my first important breakthrough. When I told her that she sometimes makes me feel ashamed of myself, she visibly perked up when I used the word “shame” and asked me a series of questions about my prior experiences with shame.
I told her that shame was a familiar feeling for me. It always seemed part of who I am. Shame is what stopped me from getting too “full of myself.” If anyone could see inside my head, they would realize how shameful my inner thoughts are — how shameful I am. As I told the therapist these things and we talked about them, it became apparent to me what an important influence shame had been on my adult and adolescent life, but it still didn’t occur to me that my sense of shame wasn’t well-deserved.
We talked for a while about how the shame had dominated my life. How it had kept me from being very social, always preferring isolation or solo activities. I was obsessively interested in sports and highly focused on academic achievement. I hated parties and dancing and always felt out of place in large social settings. I realized that the shame had played a major role in making me who I am, and yet ironically, I owed much of my academic and financial success to the intensity and competitiveness that it induced in me, just as I regretted its adverse impact on personal and social relationships. I was pretty proud of having figured this out; I didn’t realize that the real breakthrough was just around the corner.
Then the therapist pushed me to remember further back in my life: What was my earliest memory of feeling ashamed? I described to her an incident when I was somewhere between four and five years old and eating dinner at the dining room table (a rare occurrence) with my parents and Gretchen, an old friend of my mother’s, who had showered me with attention before dinner. My memory of the event was very clear. I had felt proud to be allowed to eat with the adults, particularly with Gretchen, who had been so nice to me. I could remember what the table looked like, with the Blue Danube china pattern and big blue crystal-like glasses. My glass was filled with milk, and early in the dinner, I clumsily bumped it with my wrist and spilled the milk all over the table. Gretchen innocently remarked, “He should be using a child’s cup,” and I remember feeling absolutely crushed and deflated, my face flushing with shame.
The reason I think I remembered the event so clearly was that my four or five year-old self was familiar with the emotion of shame and felt that I deserved it. Spilling the milk was just one of many thoughts or actions that confirmed my shame-worthiness even to my very young mind.
As I sat in the therapist’s office explaining how my four or five year-old self had felt, she was wise enough not to say anything and just waited for me to reach the key conclusion myself. As I remembered my young self recognizing my feeling of shame as normal and deserved, already reconciled to the conclusion that I was a shameful boy, a chill traveled down my adult spine. It really felt like an electric current; I stood up in response. In that moment, I had figured out something crucially important about myself, something that changed my entire self-image.
There had been nothing extraordinary or horrible in my early childhood, but my four or five year-old self already accepted without question the “fact” that I was shame-worthy — that I was a shameful person and that the shame was deserved. But there is nothing that my four or five year-old self had thought or done that could possibly justify that assumption! From my 60+ year perspective looking back at how early I had internalized the assumption that I am shame-worthy, I realized not only that I had been wrong to make such an assumption, but I had kept and maintained that assumption as a fundamental axiom of my being until right at that moment.
The therapist later told me that I had been standing there, my face frozen in shock, and she had been asking me what I was thinking and feeling. I don’t remember hearing her. I was totally focused on how the sense of shame that had ruled my life, controlling so many of my thoughts and decisions, was completely unjustified — a fiction created when I was still a toddler. I remember thinking that my entire life was a lie, built on a false assumption that I had never thought to question. I just wanted to be left alone at that moment to be allowed to re-figure out the narrative of my life without the false assumption that I was shame-worthy.
Before I could get my thoughts organized, time had passed and the therapy session was over. I don’t really remember driving home. I spent most of the next couple of days thinking through the chronology of my life, trying to interpret what had actually occurred without the distorting filter of shame. I tried to remember the decisions I had made, the opportunities I had foregone, because I lacked the self-esteem to make better choices. I felt like most of my life had been a lie — and mostly to my detriment.
The next few days I felt imbued with an intense, excited kind of energy, as if I were on the verge of eradicating my sense of shame. I still didn’t know what the original source of my shame had been, and I wondered about that. But I was hopeful that merely by understanding that no child at that young age could possibly be justified in assuming that he is shameful, it would make the shame go away. If that had worked, my journey would likely have ended there. But it didn’t.
