Conscious Choice Seattle: Damage Control

January 2006 | The EM Column

Damage Control

Minimizing self-destructive behaviors is the best—and hardest—resolution for 2006

By Silja J.A. Talvi

“I couldn’t escape the darkness.” Richard Pryor, 1940-2005.

“All my humor is based on destruction and despair.” Lenny Bruce, 1925-1966.

There’s a strange way that the emotional anguish and illness of artistic-types gets exoticized, even romanticized. Painters, writers, comedians, musicians: there’s almost an expectation, it seems, that to be good at what you do you have to be a bit twisted, strange, eccentric, maybe even outright self-destructive.

Some of the license to think this way comes from the fact that artistic types will be among the first to communicate something about—even make fun of—their own “madness,” including their wild leaps into excessive alcohol and drug use.

There’s a way of joking about even the darkest of realities that will still make people laugh. Yet getting real about the extent of that “darkness” can push those same people away. Self-destruction almost seems like something that could rub off, if you get too close.

Many of the greatest talents, those men and women who truly dared to push the envelope in their particular genres and social contexts, arguably did more damage to themselves than anyone else could have. To name but a few of the people who immediately come to mind: Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Kurt Cobain, Spaulding Gray, John Belushi, Janis Joplin and Richard Pryor.

Some of them died by their own hand, intentionally, others did so unintentionally while reaching for altered states of consciousness from which they never returned—at least not to this particular physical existence. Still others, like Pryor, lived out their lives paying a steep price for the self-inflicted abuse of earlier years.

But high-profile people are not the only ones engaged in self-destructive behavior. In fact, from what I see in my daily life, most of us seem to engage in it, to one degree or another.

There are myriad ways that we are capable of doing so. Examples include overeating and choosing not to exercise, running up credit card debt, self-sabotaging career or personal relationships, smoking, drinking or using drugs heavily, gambling excessively, “talking” to ourselves negatively and hypercritically and being unwilling to forgive ourselves for past transgressions. These are all ways that we keep ourselves in pain, keep ourselves downpressed—to use the apropos Rastafarian term for both internal and external oppression.

In harm’s way

Why so many of us act in ways that only harm ourselves is what interests me. I want to understand more about why perfectly good and decent people—people with so much to give and share, people from all walks of life with tremendous promise and potential—will do so many little and big things to make sure they never quite reach that potential. Some of these things we do are entirely subconscious, true, but other actions are taken with full knowledge of their self-damaging effects.

One of my very good friends, a woman in her mid-20s who has become something akin to another younger sister to me, is both bright and beautiful. On her best days, she has boundless energy and a truly loving personality that makes people of all ages gravitate to her.

But Rose, as I’ll call her, has been on a year-long binge of self-destructive behavior that ebbs and flows. She chooses men who end up hurting or deserting her; she turns to the bottle to soothe her pain; she’s also in a dangerous line of work (without health insurance) that has left her body battered and fractured.

It’s heartbreaking to hear this amazing and kind woman at the other end of the line, breaking and cracking as she recounts some of the things she’s going through. She tells me she has no energy left, that she’s not sleeping and that her thinking has been so clouded that she can barely make even the most basic of decisions about what to do next.

She sounds like she’s very depressed, I tell her, knowing that she’s been there before—that I’ve been there, too. The worse her depression gets, the worse her decision-making skills get. She knows it, but is afraid to reach out for help. Why? Because to do so, she admits, would be to display her own weakness.

“I’m stronger than that,” she says in a hushed tone. “I’ve always been strong, and I just have to be strong now.”

Slowing our progress

It all snaps into place for me; I know this feeling. We all suffer through personal struggles and tragedies. It’s the human condition. But the difference is knowing when to reach out for help, to recognize that some things really may not be within our own internal repertoire to be able to fix. While it may feel familiar to hurt ourselves in the process—comforting, even, in its own, peculiar way—acts of self-destruction only hinder the speed of our own progress toward something better and, yes, emotionally and physically healthier.

As this new year gets off to a start, I’ve made it a personal resolution to try to minimize my own self-destructive habits. It may seem like a well-worn cliché, but the world would truly be a better and more beautiful place not just for more acts of loving-kindness toward our fellow human beings, but toward (and for) ourselves too.

Silja J. A. Talvi is an award-winning journalist and columnist for Conscious Choice.

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