By the age of 37, I had five stores, a brand-new Porsche 928, three houses, a wife, a son, and two girlfriends. And although I possessed more than ever before, I had nothing. My mind was unmanageable. Obsessive thoughts, intrusive thoughts, and the constant nagging of my fears and insecurities were driving me crazy.
I was in a constant struggle to get more, and more was never enough. And I didn't even realize how insane I was.
One of the girlfriends suffered from alcoholism. I had become obsessed with her, and this obsession began to affect every aspect of my life. In an effort to save her from her addiction, she had been sent to Hazelden, which is a treatment facility in Minnesota.
One day, I had the good fortune of receiving a questionnaire in the mail. It was about the girlfriend; the professionals at Hazelden wanted to find out what I knew about her. But in my "tremendous wisdom" I decided that if I went there myself, I could better tell them how to fix her.
By this time, I was out of control. My emotions had become distorted and unbalanced. One minute I was up, the next I was down. I was irrational and irritable. I had always been able to control my emotions but now found that to be impossible.
On the flight to Minnesota, as I was looking out the window at the clouds, a thought came to me. It was the first sane thought I'd had in quite some time.
The thought was, Richard, the problem is not with her. The problem is with you.
You need help.
It was the first time this realization had occurred to me. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, admitting I had a problem and asking for help was the first step to getting well, and the first step toward developing a saner life.
When I arrived at Hazelden, my first objective was to locate her counselor, but when I found him, I was no longer thinking that I could help with the girlfriend.
What I told him instead was, "I came here to tell you how to fix her, and realized I need help. Would you help me, please?"
It was late in the day, and the office was closing. The counselor gave me directions to a nearby hotel and told me to get some rest, then call him in the morning.
People often say It'll get worse before it gets better, and that night it got worse. I went for dinner but couldn't eat. I decided instead to go back up the hill to the hotel because there was a bar on the lower level. On my way up, I saw a tractor-trailer approaching on the highway and thought seriously of jumping in front of it. I reasoned that if I did this, then she would come to see me.
I made my way to the bar and ordered a scotch. I forced myself to drink the first one but lost interest in the second. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to be anywhere. And by the time I made it back to my room, my mind was on a rampage. I was pacing, I was frantic, and I was miserable.
I went to the window and looked to the mountains. Then I fell to my knees, supplicating, saying, “God, please help me! Whatever is affecting me right now shouldn't be, but it is! God, please help me!”
But I wasn't yet ready for help, and after my prayer, the insanity came back.
By the time the night was over I had decided I was "too well" for help. Hazelden wasn't going to accept me. They were trying to help her, not me.
That morning, as the counselor instructed, I called the office. While waiting on hold, I thought about the situation. I knew they wouldn't take me. But when the counselor picked up the line, he said, "I have a place ready for you. Come on in."
At that moment, between my cries, I began saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
That was all I could do.
As I started for Hazelden, something magical happened, a miracle, unlike anything I had ever experienced. When I got in my car, for the first time in my life, I realized I wasn't alone. I was by myself, indeed, but I could feel a presence in the vehicle.
It was the first time I realized there was a God.
I went to the facility, checked in, and was soon introduced to a discussion group. After that one, I joined a second group. By this time, another level of reality had become clear to me. I realized I had met up with the most ignorant human being in the world, and it was me.
I also witnessed something I had never seen before: people were talking about their emotions. I had been deadened to my emotions for a long time.
I had not been a human being.
I had been a human doer.
And I realized something else. There was a reason I had become what I had become. There was a reason for my unhappiness and discontent. The reason was my secrets — two of them, to be precise. Two terrible secrets I intended to take to the grave with me.
I had never shared these secrets with anyone.
One of the things these groups practiced was the sharing of personal stories. It was amazing to see these brave individuals sharing their struggles, and traumas, and hopes. Telling their stories seemed to help them heal in some way, and so, by the third or fourth day, I decided to tell mine.
That night, while waiting for the group to start, I found myself wanting to share my story with as many people as possible. I began inviting more people to join.
I saw a few young women standing to one side, and so I went to them and said, “I’m about to tell my life story. Would you come and listen to it? I want to punish myself even more.”
The girls joined the group, and I began to speak.
The first secret I swore to never speak of was that I had been raped by a teenager when I was five years old.
The second was that I was raped again, by an uncle, when I was eight.
Shedding light on these two secrets was highly emotional, and as I spoke, I began to cry. But then a weight lifted. The group listened with empathy, and after a short time, I began to experience something I never had before; a weight being lifted from me.
I had always hated the cold, and this was Minnesota in February. It was miserably cold outside, and yet I was full of vitality. Everything felt wonderful, and new, and exciting. I could look at the sky and feel like I was a part of it. I was the first one to get up in the morning and the last one to go to sleep at night, and still, I had energy to burn. It was as if something inside had taken me over, and it was incredible.
But no transition is instantaneous. Because of my connection to the girlfriend, the counselor had placed me on the side for family and friends, and even there my mind played tricks on me.
One of the ongoing battles I had experienced throughout my life was the feeling of unrest and unease. My mind was constantly going, and no matter the problem, when I found a solution, I would immediately find another problem.
Another irritation.
Another frustration.
One of these problems occurred to me on my next to last day at Hazelden. It was the question of my sexual orientation.
Richard, maybe you're gay.
For the next few hours, this thought drove me crazy. I questioned myself and wrestled with the idea, but I was also aware of this new understanding of reality, and of God. I knew He could help me with this difficulty, and so I reached out to Him.
What came to me was, Richard, you have always screwed yourself. Do you have any desire to be with a man?
No.
Have you ever wanted to be with a man?
Well, no.
I considered this and began to reflect on my life. When I was young, twelve or thirteen, and I started to hear about the birds and the bees, it brought back memories of what had happened when I was five and eight. I didn't know how to process this new understanding of those traumas, and so, at twelve or thirteen, I made the decision that my mind was going to be the strongest force on earth. Nothing was ever going to bother or affect me.
And for the most part, I was successful, until the age of 37. But with the trauma of what had happened to me came another problem I didn't expect or understand; sexual insecurity.
Even though I had heard the phrase, "Size doesn't matter," for men it matters, and for me at that young age, it really mattered. I became concerned that my equipment wasn't sufficient. I wondered what was normal, what was average, and what was enough, for several years, until I was able to get a book which explained things in detail.
I looked up the average dimensions and discovered I was above that, so I said, "Wonderful!"
But these dimensions were regarding a man in an aroused state, and so a new concern came to me. What about an unaroused state?
When is small too small?
I began having sex at the age of nineteen, but it was never about making love. It was about proving I was a man. And my insecurity never left me. After sex, I would turn away, or move to the side. Even though I could function normally during the act, the thought would always return afterward.
When is small too small?
I had wrestled with these thoughts my entire life and had even gone to psychiatrists as a result, but that day, my second to last at Hazelden, I found something I never had before.
With my new understanding of God, I found strength, I found comfort, and I found my insecurity lifted from me. My old misunderstanding of God was only that there had to have been a God because someone must have created this crap. In Hazelden, I came to see that I had been protected in the past (even when I didn’t know it or appreciate it), that God continues to protect me in the present, so subsequently I have arrived at the certainty that God will always take care of me.
This realization was the product of looking back at the times God had saved me and performed miracles in my life. When those miracles had occurred, I had disregarded them and either attributed my protection to luck or told myself that I would wait to rea
lly believe in God when the next miracle occurs. I’m grateful I stopped waiting.
One reason for my gratitude is that my last headache was February 17th, 1986. I used to get frequent headaches, but I came to understand that the source of those headaches were my secrets. There is a toll to pay for maintaining secrets, and I had been paying it for a long time.
When I let go of those secrets, there were no more headaches; No headaches, no allergies, no hemorrhoids.
And what's more, this was the very beginning of my journey to peace, tranquility, and happiness. I still had a lot to learn, but it was a pretty good deal for getting well, and letting go of garbage.
and the Thinking Mind
I left Hazelden but continued to attend group meetings, and for the first six weeks or so everything was good, largely because I didn’t know any better. But as it happened, I began to notice that the people in my group weren't very happy.
I wanted to be happy and started thinking to myself, I can do this on my own. I didn't need any help being unhappy.
Many members of the group had trouble with alcohol abuse. After attending this group for a while, I realized I didn't have a problem with alcohol. My problem was self-sabotage; a result of those two secrets, as well as the false and injurious beliefs, inculcated within me since infancy.
I enjoyed the group, though, and I felt comfortable there. And the group would get a kick out of me when I would introduce myself.
"I'm Richard," I would say. "And I'm leaning toward alcoholism."
I was blessed when it came to substance abuse, in part due to the decision I made at twelve or thirteen that nothing would overcome my mind. Alcohol couldn't overcome me, and neither could drug abuse. When I tried pot, all I got from it was a headache. Cocaine resulted in nothing more than an itchy nose. And I thank God for this because I've seen the damage addiction can cause. If I had become addicted, I might still be in that situation. Or dead.
As I continued to read and study, I began to see that most of my thoughts were negative. I knew I needed to rid myself of that, but I didn't know how.
I was still in the dinette business at that time, with five stores, box trucks, vans, around forty employees, and a large inventory to catalog and track. The stores were linked via fax machines, with the merchandise tracked by computer.
There was a woman working for me at the time, a computer operator from China, who helped with this task. When it was time to input inventory in the system, I would call out the information, and she would enter it. One day, an error occurred while she was typing, and a message appeared in the upper-righthand corner of the screen.
Deny Entry.
In my “tremendous wisdom,” I thought, Well, hell. If it works for the computer, maybe it'll work for me.
So after that, anytime a negative thought occurred to me, I would say to myself, "Deny Entry."
But there was a problem with this method, and the problem was this; I hadn't replaced my negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Instead, I had created a vacuum, and anytime one creates a vacuum, something must fill it. So after a few days of saying this, Deny Entry itself had become a negative and obsessive thought.
It was driving me crazy, but I've always been a persistent man, and anytime I've persisted with something good I've succeeded. Eventually, I began to succeed with this, as well.
I was born in Argentina and came to the United States at the age of 17. Thus, prior to my involvement with this group of people, I really didn't know how to read or write English. I could speak the language and was reasonably good at it, but my communication skills were quite limited.
I hated feeling like a foreigner, and I really hated sounding like one. I had no one to teach me, and being that I was my own teacher, I could only work with what I had at my disposal. So, anytime I came across a word I didn't understand, I looked it up.
I was methodical about this, and my understanding of the English language began to grow. After a while I discovered something incredible; the thing I hated most was, in fact, a tremendous asset. Not only had it forced me to build a large vocabulary, but it also taught me to find the true meaning of words most native speakers take for granted. After some time of doing this, I began to realize I knew the language better than many Americans!
One of the words I came across in the course of my studies was the word will.
Will this.
Will that.
What the hell is this? I thought. There are people named Will, so what is this will?
So I looked it up and saw that will is an action in past tense. Suddenly things I couldn't do before, like turn my life over to the care of God, began to make sense. I realized I could turn my actions and my life over to the care of God, as I began to understand those actions. All I needed to do was look at those actions and make sure they were positive. If they weren't positive, then I needed to correct them.
As I reflected on my life and behaviors, I began to realize how self-centered and narcissistic I had been. But I didn't stop with these realizations. I started making changes.
I wanted to become a good human being, and as I scrutinized each action, and made efforts to correct my behavior, I began to develop the positive attributes I sought. And as I grew in trust, I started to grow in my relationships as well.
About a year after I first joined the recovery group, I heard something for the first time that never before had I heard or even considered. The quote has been attributed to many people but has its origins in ancient Eastern philosophy, and when I first heard it, I stopped in my tracks.
"The thinking mind is a wonderful servant or a horrible master."
And I thought, you mean to tell me my mind is supposed to be working for me?
(How is it that I’m just sitting around minding my own business and all of a sudden, I’m in a conversation with somebody that isn’t there, and I don’t even want to talk to them?!)