The OCD Diaries

April 13, 2012

The JetBlue Captain Went Crazy

I held off on writing about the JetBlue captain who suffered an emotional breakdown in flight because the case seemed too cut and dry for my added perspective.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/JRlkTNlLy3w

That’s because I was thinking about this from the perspective of a frequent flyer. I prefer that the guys running the cockpit of my plane are sober and of sound mind. If someone is on the mental edge, they shouldn’t be flying a plane. And if a captain unexpectedly loses it, he should be removed from the cockpit.

There’s nothing remarkable here. I think any airline passenger would echo my sentiments.

The justice system appears to have reached the same conclusions. According to a Reuters story posted this morning, a grand jury indicted the pilot and charged him with interference with a flight crew. From the article:

Pilot Clayton Osbon “moved through the aircraft and was disruptive and had to be subdued and forcibly restrained from re-entering the cockpit” during the flight from New York to Las Vegas, the federal indictment said.

The unusual indictment of an airline pilot was filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Amarillo, Texas. The JetBlue flight made an emergency landing in Amarillo on March 27 and Osbon, 49, was taken into custody at the airport.

Osbon is undergoing a court-ordered psychiatric examination to determine whether he can stand trial and his “sanity or lack thereof” at the time of the incident, according to court documents.

The FBI said Osbon began saying “things just don’t matter” while he was at the controls of the Airbus A320 about halfway into the five-hour flight, and that he told the flight’s first officer, “We’re not going to Vegas.”

After the pilot suddenly left the cockpit and started running up and down in the aisle, banging on a restroom door, and attempted to force his way back into the locked cockpit, several passengers retrained him until the plane landed, court documents say.

The FBI said that while he was being restrained, Osbon yelled “pray now for Jesus Christ,” started yelling about Iraq, Iran, and terrorists, and at one point shouted toward the cockpit, “guys, push it to full throttle!”

A detention hearing that had been set for earlier this week to determine whether Osbon should be released on bond was postponed while his psychiatric exam continued.

As dangerous as this guy was, I can’t help but feel for him. As someone who has suffered from panic attacks and emotional breakdowns, I can certainly place myself in his shoes. The inside of an airplane is THE WORST place on Earth to have an emotional breakdown. You’re trapped in a tube with nowhere to go. Anything can happen in that situation.

Some have called for heads to roll at the airline, but I think that’s pointless. We can yell until we’re blue in the face about how there should be tougher screening for pilots to ensure no one gets on a plane emotionally unhinged. But you can’t always catch these things in a screening.

I’ve had days where I woke up energized, confident and ready to take on the world. Then, somewhere in the day, without warning, my emotional equilibrium would take a dive. It has happened on the job, and at home. It has happened with me behind the wheel of a car and in the kitchen with sharp objects in my hand.

Screening beforehand might have revealed some latent depression, but that’s not enough to predict that the person is a ticking time bomb.

There are no good guys or bad guys in this tale. What happened happened and I doubt anything could have been done to avoid it.

If the pilot had been acting out before takeoff, the plane never would have left the ground with him on board. Not in this post-9-11 world.

That’s the problem with time bombs. You can never predict when they’ll go off. You can’t catch this type of explosive in a TSA line, especially when the TSA is preoccupied with patting down toddlers in wheelchairs.

I just hope the pilot gets the help he needs.

JetBlue Flight 191 on the ground in Amarillo, Texas. It made an emergency landing after its captain had to be restrained. Roberto Rodriguez/AP

April 12, 2012

Godspeed, Barney Gallagher

Update: Barney Gallagher passed away this morning. He was a wonderful man who lived his life in a way we should all learn from. Godspeed, Barney.

Like everyone else who has worked at The Eagle-Tribune, my life has been touched by Barney Gallagher, an old-time journalist who reminded us young ones what the profession was about.

Mood music:

I’ve been informed that Barney is gravely ill. This post is to honor the man and ask that you all say a prayer for him.

I first met Barney when I interviewed for the night editor job at The Eagle-Tribune in 1999. Then-managing editor Steve Billingham was asking me questions when he stopped, looked up, and said, “Hey, Barn!”

I looked up to see an old timer perusing items on a cork board at the back of the newsroom, next to where Billingham worked at the time. Barney walked around smiling, stopping every few feet to say hello to someone.

He was ALWAYS smiling.

As night editor, I got to know Barney well. It seemed as though he could magically appear at the scene whenever a fire, car crash or other incident happened on the streets of his beloved Haverhill — camera in hand.

As I’d sit there frantically working my way through a pile of stories I had to edit for the next morning’s papers, he’d breezily walk in with that smile of his, looking as relaxed and fresh as if he’d just had a 10-hour nap, roll of film in hand for the dark room to process.

Haverhill Editor Bill Cantwell once said, only half-joking, that Barney slept with a police scanner under his pillow.

Barney’s insight became immensely important to me when I moved to Haverhill to start my family in early 2001. I knew little about the city other than that my wife grew up there. I turned to Barney’s “My Haverhill” columns for an education on my new home.

Through his work, I learned the history of the city, names of the most noteworthy characters (the late harbormaster, Red Slavit, comes to mind), and, with his columns in hand, I set out to explore the neighborhoods, the river and the open spaces. He taught me where the seediest parts of town were located, as well as the most beautiful.

Above all, his columns always captured a theme we imperfect beings tend to overlook in the hustle and bustle of daily life — that a community is only as good as the people living there, and that anyone could make a difference for their neighbors.

When I’m having a bad day, cranky from all the petty fires fate likes to light in our path, I often think of Barney and his smile. By the time I got to know him he was already well into his senior years. He had been through it all and carried on secure in what few could understand — that life’s storms always passed into oblivion, and that if we kept our cool, we’d be left standing.

His life is a case study in how we should conduct ourselves. I thank God that I was lucky enough to know him.

I’ll end with this picture of a young Barney Gallagher, drink in hand, cigarette in mouth, symbolizing the old-school journalist. Thanks to The Eagle-Tribune’s managing editor, Gretchen Putnam, for posting it this morning on her Facebook page.

You’re in our prayers, Barney.

April 10, 2012

I Pity The Fool — Especially When The Fool Is Me

“I don’t know how much more I can take.”

I’ve told myself that a million times, as I’m sure you have. We say it in times of desperation, pain and blueness.

But here’s an uncomfortable truth — Sometimes we like feeling this way.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/JRlkTNlLy3w

There’s something about feeling bad for oneself that’s so satisfying. Maybe it’s that on some level you’ve made peace with your seemingly miserable existence.

It helps us get through a bad fight with a loved one, because instead of thinking of what we did to cause the strife it feels better to stew over how unfairly you’re always treated.

If we despise our job it feels so much better to focus the hate on whichever bosses keep criticizing us than it does to take an honest look at where we keep slipping up.

If you hate the results of an election, it’s so much easier to trash the “stupid” voters who picked the other guy than it is to think about how the candidate and supporters like you failed to make a convincing case.

If you don’t like the drivel that comes from the mouth of a misguided minister, it feels so much better to steam over the entire religion than it does to think of better ways to practice your own faith.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Sometimes, we love to feel bad. Pure and simple.

I’m trying to enjoy it less as I get older, because I find that self-pity and misplaced blame is like any other narcotic: You feel good for a few minutes, but then an awful hangover takes hold.

You start to wake up every morning with a cold rock in your belly and an ax swinging inside your skull, chopping brain.

Then you go looking for other shallow comforts to hold it together: A few cigarettes, a few glasses of something intoxicating and as much grease-drenched food as you can swallow.

The hole gets bigger, no matter how hard we try to fill it.

Nothing gets better. it all just gets worse.

That’s my experience, anyway.

I’d rather go the other way.

April 9, 2012

Working-Class Hero Syndrome

I’m a sufferer of working-class hero syndrome, a condition that makes me look down on everyone who doesn’t work as hard as me, all while wasting hours on work that proves fruitless.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/KLe2pA5KTIE

My favorite cinematic version of a working-class hero is Quint from the movie JAWS, who relentlessly needles boat mate Hooper for being rich and having a bunch of excess gadgetry to do his job. Of course, Hooper survives while Quint gets eaten by the shark.

The disease takes different forms.

There’s the white-collar working-class hero who thinks he-she is so much better than the person bagging groceries. I probably fall closer into that category, because I’ve often labored under the delusion that working 80 hours a week in journalism made me better than everyone else.

There’s the blue-collar variety who will look down at the guy in the desk job because that person isn’t out there getting dirty and operating big, dangerous machinery.

The common symptoms:

–Moments of extreme irritability from too much work and too little sleep.

–A tendency to dive into a self-righteous rage at the drop of a hat, blaming all the problems of the world on everyone but yourself. This usually leads to many hours spent complaining about people at work, in your family and in your town.

–An addictive personality that grows more ravenous with each of those rage moments. You do more drugs, drinking and binge eating to comfort yourself and hold it together, all while carrying on with the belief that you’re somehow better than the people who look at you with worried eyes.

–A tendency to lie about how exciting your job is and how well-payed you are upon learning that the person you’re talking to is better payed and has a more exciting job than you.

I’m pretty sure I got this disease from my father, who allowed the family business to become the center of his universe. He didn’t have a choice. My father was the middle child of his generation, but he was the only son. My grandfather, who came off a boat from the former Soviet Union with all the typical old-school values, expected the world of my father. As my grandfather descended deep into old age and illness in the mid-1960s, my father became increasingly responsible for the family business.

My father always had the attitude that you were useless unless you were working 24-7. He once joked that he was indeed prejudiced. “I hate lazy people,” he’d say.

I started my life as the youngest of three kids, the proverbial baby of the family. My late brother Michael was the oldest and, as such, was the kid my father expected the most from.

Michael was encouraged to chart his own course and was studying to be a plumber. But he was expected to help out with the family business and do a lot of the grunt work at home.

I was the baby, and a sick and spoiled one at that. I came along almost three years after my sister Wendi, and by age eight I was in and out of the hospital with dangerous flare ups of Crohn’s Disease. I got a lot of attention but nothing hard was expected of me. I was coddled and I got any toy I wanted.

The result was a lower-than-average maturity level for my age. At age 10 I acted like I was 5 sometimes. I would crawl into bed with my father for snuggles, just like a toddler might do.

My maturity level hadn’t changed much by the time I hit 13. I probably regressed even further right after my brother died. But as 1984 dragged on, I was slowly pulled into the role of oldest son.

All the stuff that was expected of my brother became expected of me, and I wasn’t mentally equipped to deal with it. My brother had a lot of street smarts that I lacked.

As I descended into my confusing and angry teen years, I would be sent on deliveries for the family business. I’d get flustered and lose my sense of direction. One time my father sent me to Chelsea for a package. It was 4:30 and the place I was going to was closing at 5. I got there at 5:10 and had to drive back to Saugus without a package. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

As I reached my 20s all that immaturity and feeling of inadequacy hardened into an angry rebellious streak. I started getting drunk and stoned a lot and would hide behind boxes in my father’s warehouse, chain-smoking cigarettes and binge eating while everyone else did the dirty work.

And yet working-class hero syndrome took hold anyway.

Because I was going to college, I developed the idea that I was better than the guys I worked with. Learning how to write and crash-study for days at a time made me feel like I was the hard worker who deserved life’s biggest prizes.

After college I dove head-first into a journalism career and put in 80 hours a week. I worked so many hours that I began to lose my health. I binged regularly and ballooned to 280 pounds. I lost track of family and friends.

By the time I began my big turnaround, I didn’t have many friends left.

I manage the disease better than I used to. I’ve forced more personal time into my schedule and I stopped working 80 hours a week once I realized I’m better at my job when I cut those hours in half.

But it still surfaces on a regular basis.

When I’m running my kids to appointments all over the place and cleaning the house from top to bottom, I tend to see it all as part of the working-class hero’s life.

When someone tells me about their job and it isn’t something I would choose to do, I sometimes catch myself thinking I’m better.

The remedy is a daily look in the mirror and a lot of prayer.

Work-life balance has become the Holy Grail. But I’m still digging around for it.

When I find it, I’ll let you know.

April 4, 2012

Don’t Let Anger Blind You To What Really Matters

The front office at my kids’ school is mad at me and another parent for complaining about something on the school’s Facebook page. I don’t think they saw yesterday’s post in this blog. That would make them angrier still.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/RVFgxkL_vuk

I’ll admit I was angry when my wife told me the principal and office administrator got after her about my behavior. It’s not like I jumped up and down on Facebook yelling obscenities and calling people names. I simply agreed with the other parent’s dismay over a specific matter of the school not following up with parents on a school closing next week. I think I was more ticked off that they gave Erin trouble, because she did nothing wrong.

I make no apologies, because, as I said yesterday, we practically break the bank every month paying the tuition to send our kids there. In essence, we parents are the customer. The customer is not always right, contrary to popular belief. But school administrators should respond to them as if they were, unless the parent is way out of line, which we weren’t.

On to the main point of this post.

There’s a lesson here for everyone, whether you’re dealing with difficult people at your kids’ school, in your workplace or on your street. Anger should never blind us to what’s truly important.

Some are probably asking why we would continue to go to a church and send our kids to a parochial school where there’s dysfunction. My answer is simple:

–For me, going to church is about getting closer to God. Everything else is second fiddle.

–Our children’s education is far more important than squabbles with parents and administrators, though it obviously becomes a problem if the latter has a negative effect on the former.

–This is our home, and I don’t believe in pulling up stakes and leaving because of dysfunction in the institution. I’d rather stick around and try to be part of the solution. That’s not always possible and sometimes it’s best to leave. But I don’t see this as an example of that.

–If you leave and go to another community, you’ll find dysfunction there, too. Where there are humans, there is dysfunction. That’s life. It may not be fair, but no one ever promised life would be fair.

Since this is an issue within our parish family, I can’t help but bring my faith into the remainder of the post. If religion isn’t your bag, leave now.

This is Holy Week, where we remember the sacrifice Jesus made to give us all a shot at redemption. It’s incredibly easy to forget the core message when we get busy arguing with each other over matters that are more political than spiritual.

I officially became a Catholic at Easter of 2006. I was in a pretty dark place at the time, struggling with a binge eating habit that had me shot-gunning $40 worth of fast food on the drive from the office to the house every day. I was crazy with fear and anxiety, the result of OCD out of control. I was a depressed, disgusting mess inside, and it was slowly working its way to my outward appearance.

Finding my faith was a major step in bringing those demons to heel.

But it remains a struggle sometimes, especially when you have disagreements with people in the community. So I wrote up the following manifesto to help bring me back to the center. I’ve used it several times in this blog, but it bears frequent repeating.

These are the bullet points. Click on any of them to see the full explanation.

1. Don’t Succumb to “Happily-Ever-After” Syndrome.

2. Peace IS NOT The Absence of Chaos. It’s a State of Mind (or, if you really want to get technical, a state of being in God’s Grace).

3. What You Get is Only As Good As What You Put In

4. Don’t Let Politics Get in the Way

5. Plan to Fight the Good Fight to Your Dying Breath

Keeping my head and heart on those personal items is much more important than besting church and school officials in an argument.

And so I move on.

April 3, 2012

MomDay Monday – School Daze

Please indulge me while I contribute to this pile-on.
Personally, I love the school my kids go to. The teachers and support staff are wonderful. I’ve made some of the best friends ever among the parents. I adore the fact that my children are in the same school their mom and aunts attended. And, most importantly, the kids are being infused with a faith that will carry them through all the difficulties that await them in adulthood.
But there’s a lot of truth to what Linda writes about. There is a lot of dysfunction.
I wrote about the parental gossip awhile back in a post called “Schoolyard gossip and the damage done.” http://www.theocddiaries.com/2011/11/21/schoolyard-gossip-and-the-damage-done/
I wrote about the school administrative culture and it’s frequent cluelessness on how to deal with the more challenged students among them in a post called “Taking the different kids out with the trash.” http://www.theocddiaries.com/2011/12/21/taking-the-different-kids-out-with-the-trash/
When parents pay a hefty tuition every month to send their children there, the administration has a responsibility to listen to parental concerns instead of dismissing them as rabble rousers.

They have a responsibility to communicate clearly and often, but they have slipped on that one regularly this year.
With families so over-scheduled these days, you have to be from another planet to expect every parent to remember a note from last year and in September about school closing for three days BEFORE April vacation so teachers can attend a conference. To get defensive when parents take you to task for not putting reminders in the weekly school updates is maddening.
If the Archdiocese of Boston thinks this event is so important that every teacher needs to be there, they should consider holding it on a weekend, during school vacations or in the summer, to minimize disruptions in the school schedule.
What does this have to do with the subject matter of this blog? Two things: I know parents who, like me, have dealt with illnesses of the mind, body and spirit in the past.

The better the school communicated with them and works with them, the better they can parent and, in turn, the better their kids will do in school. More importantly, this is about the children. When the school doesn’t properly communicate with parents, the students suffer.
And when it comes to children with special needs, it is the school administration’s responsibility to make sure ALL of the student’s teachers are on the same page. When the ancillary teachers mark a kid down because of deficiencies caused by something like ADHD and you, the parent, learn later that those teachers were not told of the child’s issues, it’s inexcusable.
All that said, I don’t think there’s a single problem here that can’t be fixed. We can all learn from the problems, help in solving them and emerge as a school community that’s stronger than before.
But if parents like us keep our mouths shut or sugar-coat things because we fear retribution against ourselves and our kids, nothing will ever improve. Pure and simple.
Personally, I don’t fear retribution from school administrators. They are good people at the end of the day, and they want to do their best. Sometimes, public pressure is necessary to help them reach that full potential.
I’m not worried about being blackballed by other parents, either. Frankly, the folks who would be angry with me are already the ones who aren’t inclined to like me anyway.
And who knows? Maybe this public display of concern will lead to some new, unlikely friendships. Those are often the best kind.

April 2, 2012

‘Break On Through’ Is Precisely The Idea

When my cousin Faith saw the new OCD Diaries banner I unveiled yesterday, she said she immediately had The Door’s “Break On Through” running through her head.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/cJQwnAhXnBk

My reaction was a satisfied smile, because that was exactly what I was going for when I enlisted another cousin, Andy Robinson — creator of the original banner — to make a new one.

When I started this blog, the idea was to come clean about my own battles with OCD, addiction and my past. It was a two-pronged attack: one against my own insecurities, because writing about them always helps clear my head, and the other against all the stupid ideas society has about mental illness and addiction.

By coming clean about my issues, I figured someone with their own demons would read it and realize they’re not alone, and that they always have the option to re-do their lives. The formula worked, based on the thousands of comments, emails, Facebook and Twitter messages I’ve received in the last 30 months.

But I started getting stuck behind a wall made out of my diseases. It was hurting loved ones at home and it was boxing me in as a writer. The more you focus on this stuff, the more it defines the person you are, and that was never part of the mission. So I decided to expand the themes of the blog and punch through that wall.

Break on through? Hell yes.

Expanding the theme is not nearly enough. I have to crush the bricks every day outside of the blog. I’m working hard on that, though I admittedly have a long road ahead.

My life didn’t begin when I was diagnosed and started fighting back, though my quality of life is light years ahead of what it was. I don’t want my life to be about this stuff and nothing else.

That said, my demons will be a recurring theme, as will messages to others fighting their personal battles. Coming clean and breaking stigmas is still at the heart of the blog. But beyond that, it’s a blog about learning to find the joy in life despite the darkness we often have to live with.

The darkness takes many forms — the poisonous nature of today’s political discourse, the way the media portrays our everyday challenges, the way we talk to each other.

With the wall breaking open a brick at a time, all those subjects become fair game.

Things are going to get more interesting around here. You’ve been warned.

March 29, 2012

Operation Global Blackout Would Save Me A Lot Of Trouble

In my work blog, Salted Hash, I predict that a threatened “Operation Global Blackout” attack on the Internet by hacking group Anonymous won’t happen for a variety of reasons. But truthfully, such a thing might do me some good.

In my vicious battle to live in the moment and be present for those around me, the Internet has become my arch-enemy.

On one hand, I need the Internet and require it’s presence to do my job, which is almost exclusively based online. I like being able to reconnect with friends there and keep tabs on distant family members. I like being able to access my music there.

But I have three problems that has made this a poisonous relationship:

–I have an addictive personality. With my cigarettes, cigars, booze and junk food gone, the Internet has become a crutch that is stitched to my hip. A normal amount of usage is not even close to enough. Ever.

–I have clinical OCD, which means that it’s hard to take my eyes off something online, whether it’s a favorite website, a work project that has my full obsessive attention or a Facebook chat message that won’t stop flashing at me.

–I have a touch of clinical ADD, which means that when I can’t focus on what’s happening in front of me, I stare blankly at the laptop screen, captivated by its warm glow.

Like any powerful nemesis, the Internet always seems to come close to destroying my life. I’m really starting to hate this sucker and fantasize about wanting it dead.

That’s one of the reasons this Operation Global Blackout thing appeals to me. If I can’t escape from the Internet, maybe killing the fucker is an acceptable option.

Consider the cumulative effect on me: I get so sucked into Facebook and Twitter that it’s easy for the observer to think I’ve built a secret second life there. Maybe I have, though not intentionally. Meanwhile, as a writer, I’m increasingly paranoid that in an act of copy-and-paste sloppiness, I’ll inadvertently commit plagiarism someday.

It’s turning me into an angry man. I don’t like being owned my anger.

But I’m also a realist.

As I said in the Salted Hash post, Operation Global Blackout ain’t gonna happen. Even if it did, it would be short lived.

And in the final analysis, I can’t remove the internet from my life. I don’t think anyone can at this point.

And so this is like everything else in my journey to wellness and being a better human being: I have to work at knowing when to look away and shut the machine, especially when someone is talking to me.

Truth be told, the thought of it makes my head hurt. But that’s life.

An addiction to crack or heroin would still be a lot worse, so I’ll go count my Blessings again.

March 28, 2012

‘Shattered Hopes’ Director On My ‘Learned Helplessness’ Post

Ryan Katzenbach, director of “Shattered Hopes: The True Story of the Amityville Murders,” sent me a note on Facebook yesterday regarding the post I wrote on one of the themes of the film: Louise DeFeo’s “learned helplessness.”

Ryan always responds to his fans when they have questions or comments on the documentary. Given his high profile and workload, it amazes me how accessible he is. Anyway, I wanted to share what he wrote to me, because it really captures the purpose of this piece of work:

Bill, this was truly great reading. When we finished with Part I, and in watching the subsequent installments through the editing process, I had wondered if our film would actually help anyone out there who finds themselves caught in a similar situation of domestic, be it verbal or physical, abuse. Originally, this started as a means of understanding the family dynamic of 112 Ocean after hearing stories, like those of Peg Giambra, the juror from the case, when she told of the horrifying stories that she encountered while sitting through the trial.

For me, growing up in a home that was never dysfunctional or abusive, there was a huge gulf between understanding WHY people stay and WHY they don’t leave. When you grow up absent any such environ, you simply don’t understand. I would ask myself “given the means of the Brigante family, why didn’t Louise do something?” Part of that answer, I would learn, was due to the era. We didn’t recognize domestic abuse as we do today; it was hushed, it was quieted, and essentially, it was a man’s right as the king of his castle. But then, when Drs. Hickey and Puckett began to apply clinical psychology to the situation, it really came into focus. Part of what they did was help us understand the tumultuous cocktail of dysfunction and WHY and HOW it happened. The next part of what they’re going to do is help us understand the psychology behind murder itself, and reviewing the elements of our forensic study encapsulated in Part III, it is, in many cases chilling. There are passages that cause the hair on the back of my neck to stand up, still. Far, far more haunting and disturbing than Jodie The Demonic Pig. Because this stuff is REAL.

I hope that maybe as a residual, perhaps….MAYBE….somehow…some person who sees our film and finds themselves in this type of domestic abuse situation will be able to summon strength from the story of the DeFeos to do something in a proactive approach to escape their personal insanity. If just ONE person were to learn from what has been presented and get out of their situation, then perhaps the DeFeo family did not die in vain…..maybe their lessons will impact others and from this, we can draw a positive from a story that is otherwise dark and negative.

Just my thoughts.

Thanks for the feedback, Ryan.

March 27, 2012

Don’t Fall For ‘Learned Helplessness’

I’ve been watching Ryan Katzenbach’s documentary “Shattered Hopes: The True Story of the Amityville Murders.” Forget the haunted house bullshit. The scariest thing about this case is how mental illness can destroy a family.

Mood music:

I’m not talking about divorced parents and kids going off into the world without a moral rudder. This story ends with six members of a family dead and the seventh in prison for life. Well, OK — the story goes on with a hoax about the next family fleeing the house after 28 days because of “hostile demonic forces.” But the real story ends with the death of the DeFeo family.

One of the most striking things to me is the notion that Louise DeFeo — wife of Ronald DeFeo Sr. and mother of his five children — had developed “learned helplessness.”

Fearful of what might happen if she left her abusive husband — He smacked her and the kids around constantly and once punched her in the face as she carried a basket of laundry up from the basement, sending her and the laundry tumbling back down the stairs — Louise settled into a pattern of learned helplessness. The Wikipedia definition of learned helplessness is full of sadness:

Learned helplessness, as a technical term in animal psychology and related human psychology, means a condition of a human person or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. Learned helplessness theory is the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.

In other words, Louise learned to take the beatings from her husband and accept it as the only life for her. Her oldest son, Ronald Jr. — who was beaten up as often and badly as Louise — eventually shot everyone to death on Nov. 13, 1974, though there’s some evidence that his oldest sister Dawn killed the three younger siblings before he shot her in a rage, concluding the massacre.

It’s easy to consider how things could have been different if not for Lousie’s learned helplessness. Maybe she and the kids would have left Big Ronnie and snapped the cycle of violence, and everyone would still be alive. Maybe not, but who knows?

The point of writing this post is to raise awareness of learned helplessness. No one should ever assume they have no choices; that they can’t change their lives because they’ve been beaten down so much that it’s been proven to them that sorrow is the only option.

Maybe your learned helplessness comes from the kind of abuse the DeFeos lived with.

Maybe it comes from falling off the wagon so much you’ve learned to accept that your addictions will always rule you; that you can never quit.

Maybe it comes from being depressed for so long despite all the medication you’ve tried that you think there’s no escape short of suicide.

If you hate your life and you’re convinced it can never change because the bad outcomes have been proven for so long, this is a wake-up call.

Some people lose to their demons. Many more learn to control their demons and have lives worth living.

There’s always a choice.

If there were no choices, I’d still be lying on the couch every day incapacitated from OCD-fueled depression and shamed into paralysis from another day of binge eating. I could have taken my imperfect upbringing and held it up as proof that I have no choice but to carry on a tradition of abuse and self destruction. I could have looked at childhood illness as proof that I could only have a limited life.

It seems ridiculous to compare what I’ve been through to what happened in Amityville. OK, it IS ridiculous. But my experiences are what I have to go on, and I think there were periods where I practiced learned helplessness in my own way. But I got over it. Watching this documentary really drives home how lucky I am. Sometimes the grass is greener on your side of the street.

I still have a long way to go in being the man I want to be. But I’m still here, fighting for what’s better.

Because one day I realized I wasn’t helpless after all.