The Soul, The Role, and Ketamine Whiplash

His arm was cocked; his fist was locked.

My father had me by the collar of my faded concert t-shirt. I stood defiant in the summer sun. He had delivered uncounted blows upon me since 1st grade. But this time? This time was different. I was going to take what he gave, but then I was going to give it right back to this asshole. In fact, I planned to kill him or be killed. And as we stood in the front yard for all the neighbors to see the forthcoming violence, I thought the plan was going quite well.

OK, let’s do one of those Hollywood things and mess with the timeline so you have some context. I can’t remember a time during my grade school through high school years when my father wasn’t ready to either kill me or abandon me. My offense was typically forgetting to do the assigned chores or not getting the proper grade. And the proper grade was whatever he would have gotten back in the day. My natural talents were music and mimicry. Dad’s talent was multiplying two 3-digit numbers in his head and beating the person with the calculator when he did it. To this day, when multiplying by seven, I still hear him screaming in my face and slamming his fist into the kitchen table.

“God damn it, John. You just need to KNOW this.”

So, his parenting style was a bit more than Gradgrindesque. When I got into high school and discovered psychology, I wanted to know why people did the things they did. More specifically, I wanted to know why my father was trying to kill me. He had two modes of being — silence and violence. He was either raging against me, anyone who played Green Bay, or traffic. I could only assume that his sullen moments were dedicated to inventing new tortures when the old ones no longer served.

Having a son who played sports year-round allowed for bruises to be explained away. Once I learned this, I tried to quit sports but was not permitted to do so. My solution? While on the basketball court, I managed to get myself fouled out of the game within three minutes. This concerned my coach. However, that brought the spotlight too close to home, so Dad surrendered. Years later I would learn that he had surrendered much in his life.

Time froze in the front yard. Would he finally kill me and be free of the burden I brought upon him? Mom was somewhere else — nursing school, minding her dementia-stricken mother, or lurking through some neighborhood garage sale. And like a turkey thermometer, my father had a superficial artery on his forehead that would pop out when he was hot. He also had a physical condition — nystagmus — where one’s eyes involuntarily twitch back and forth rapidly. With his pulsating forehead and vibrating eyes, he truly looked like a man possessed.

That look would inspire so many nightmares for me as a child. At nine, there was nothing for me to do but weather the storm. But at twenty-seven, I was built like an NFL lineman standing 6’5”, weighing about 300 pounds, with a 20” neck, and could pick up the front end of a garden tractor. So, I was ready. He was going to kill me, or he was going to wear himself out and then I would kill him. Either way, he would no longer torment me. Either way, I would be free.

In a twist of irony, I ended up doing my student teaching at the same high school that my father had been kicked out of. My focus was teaching English to at-risk students. And if time wasn’t linear, he would have been in my class. The family legend was that my father was walking through the halls, smoking a wooden-tipped cigar as a high school sophomore, and was suspended. During the suspension, he rode a motorcycle across the grounds as though he was auditioning for The Outsiders. That stunt resulted in expulsion rather than the intervention he was begging for in his adolescent way. I’m not sure if this was before or after he caught his father screwing the neighbor’s wife in the back of the family station wagon.

Yup, my father was a sophomore when he and a friend snuck into the local drive-in. He saw the station wagon, thought his parents were at the movies, and snuck up to the back to startle them. Instead, he saw his own abusive father committing adultery. They locked eyes. After the initial shock, it was a race to get home and set the spin of the story for my grandmother.

Cars are faster than bikes and my grandfather was waiting. My father was livid and was dead set on telling his truth. I’m not sure if it was more important to hurt his father as I was about to do to mine or if it was out of righteousness and the desire to convince my grandmother that her husband was a liar and philanderer. (Yes, my grandfather was a traveling salesman and he fit the stereotype perfectly.)

My father made several attempts to get into the house and each time he was met with physical blows. Not able to get past him, my father grabbed his bat from the garage and proceeded to break off a mirror and bust the headlights out. I’m sure there was more but, in the end, he was kicked out of the house with the clothes on his back and would not return home for seven years.

It would take years to get information about this dark time in his life. Rumor has it he worked as a day laborer and made his way from Indiana to Texas, then to Alaska before coming home. Once home, he had a job as a bouncer that was frequented by the military. He also was good friends with men who worked for a trash company owned by a traditional Italian family. The fact is my dad had no parental love. He had no positive male role model. He had been abandoned by those who were supposed to provide unconditional love. He was an Outsider.

The frozen moment began to thaw. Generational abuse was about to culminate in someone’s homicide — as it often does. After years of being terrorized, I actually WANTED him to hit me. His forty years of torment would meet my decade of abuse… multiple generations of violence transcended into this very moment.

I pushed back with my sternum and stuck out my chin to give him a good target… to dare him to take the swing. Then, a moment of grace descended.

“If you need to take a pop at me so you can reconcile the anger you still carry about your own father, then swing away. As we stand here, father and son in their own front yard, if you need me to fix that pain, then do it. But I’m fucking done being a victim.”

Thunderstruck.

When I play this episode back in my mind, this is the look that my dad had. Without premeditation, I smashed through his façade and found the abused child within. Perhaps for the first time since childhood, he was truly, honestly seen. Two broken children hiding inside the bodies of grown-ass men were locked together physically and emotionally.

There was a muscle memory triggered somewhere inside him. He responded by shoving back — a reflex to my leaning in and sticking out my chin. It was the male posturing equivalent of me double-dog daring him to hit me. I responded by closing my eyes.

I could not have predicted the next event. I heard the screen door open. I looked over in time to see him disappear into the house. The most telling thing was not that he didn’t hit me. It was the fact that the door closed softly and wasn’t slammed.

The dynamic had forever been changed that day and it would have been an exceptional time for all of us to enter family therapy. But that was not how the roles had been written.

Cognitively, I knew that abuse is passed on from generation to generation. I knew that he had never had any parenting skills nor had a positive male role model from which to learn. What I didn’t know was that he carried a tiny bit of animosity towards me because I had it better than he did. Again, the child with him was jealous of the child I was. I learned this thanks to ketamine.

Ketamine has saved my life and there’s no hyperbole in that statement. I am unable to process nearly all antidepressants due to my genes which is kind of amusing considering all the generational depression that comes with me — genetically and energetically. In the video game of life, I think I mistook “difficulty” as “cowbell” and opted for more than necessary. So, after about thirty years of trying different strategies like meditation, tai chi, boxing, journaling, drinking, and whoring — some more successful than others — I finally discovered ketamine. It was life-changing. I felt like one of those research beagles that discovered sunshine and grass for the first time.

Not only did I feel like I had dropped the millstone from around my neck, but all of my senses were also unrestricted. I perceived colors as brighter. Music stirred my soul again. I listened to birds and watched insects with wonder. Although I had heard that ketamine is as close as you can get to a near-death experience, I had not believed it. I do now. I once heard that Terrance McKenna said there are two kinds of people in the world — those who have taken ketamine and those who haven’t yet. I agree.

Now, I need to circle back on the unrestricted senses aspect because, by this time in my life, I had come up with some unusual compensatory strategies for my abuse and depression. I would remotely view my previous lifetimes and see what they were learning. Seeing “myself” work through problems showed me that I had done things like this before. I also felt empowered because it was in this current lifetime that I learned how to access the previous ones. For the first time, I had retrospective data to draw upon and I used it to speculate on trends and trajectories. Or, to put it woo-woo parlance, I had accessed my Akashic Records and saw the lessons my soul was learning and refining. However you choose to look at it, I was finally able to get my shit together — from a soul’s perspective. And that’s when I learned the difference between the “role” versus the “soul”. It would take another ketamine series and meeting someone in my hypnogogic state who self-identified as The Architect to discover the nuance. My perspective changed from speculative assumption to emotional connection as it was made clear to me that Dad and I had been doing this for generations.

I will be the first to admit that this may be a recapitulation of the work of Dr. Brian Weiss shining through the lens of my experience. That said, it was still helpful. While Dad and I shared a birthday in this lifetime, we had been twins in another life. Thankfully, before he died, we had surrendered the past as a learning experience from both sides. What developed was a spirit of fraternity between us that family members were both surprised and pleased to see. We even changed our monikers with “Dad” becoming “Pop” and “Damn it, John” becoming “JB”.

The lesson I want to share is this — let the feelings happen when you encounter a challenge. But realize that you are both the soul and the role. The role you play is reactionary based on your experiences. You may want to fight it figuratively or literally. But the soul is like a director of a community theater and they have contrived a circumstance/challenge where your character’s role has the opportunity to learn and grow. And once you have mastered the scene, you can move on to greater challenges and victories.

And thanks, Pop, for playing your role. You made me a better person and I love you for it.