Luke Ford

He sat with his arms folded across his chest, his hands gripping his triceps. And then when he stood, he quickly returned to that same posture.

To walk across the room, however, he had to unclench, and when he got to the other side, he stood next to a friend he hadn’t spoken to in a decade, and then his arms flung open for the hug, and for the next thirty minutes, he no longer felt the need to tighten.

When he walked home, he wanted more of that freedom from clenching, from pulling down, from walling himself off. He wondered how far away was that land where he no longer felt the need to defend himself.

I had this great therapist. I respected him so much. After about 18 months of work together and after my blogging kept tripping me up and stopping me from getting along with my various communities, he said to me, “I don’t think you want to change.”

I was up for making incremental change, but my therapist encouraged me to go for deep change, the kind of change that would require me to stop doing things I love doing, such as infuriating people. I typically do this in one of my periodic bouts of grandiosity when I’m sure I’m just so much smarter than everybody else, and not just smart, but damn courageous too, and now I’m going to tell the truth, no matter what the cost to me.

My therapist wanted me to have what I said I wanted — at least a normal level of human connection. I wanted to be able to walk into a room, into a shul, and to feel welcome. I wanted to have friends. I wanted to be able to walk around my community and to run into people who were glad to see me. I said that’s what I wanted. I said I didn’t want any tension with my Alexander Technique community. I wanted to be a good teacher. I wanted less unnecessary tension in my most important relationships.

What’s the name for the syndrome where you restlessly pursue reconnection with people from your past who live nowhere near you while living solitaire in your present place? This has afflicted me since 1977 when I moved to California from Australia at age 11.

A great thing about having some measure of fame is that it reconnects you to old friends. And Facebook is great for that.

There are large swathes of my life where I’ve been unable to reconnect with anyone.

I’m not in touch with anyone I worked with at KAHI/KHYL radio from 1982-1987.

I’m not in touch with anyone I went to Sierra Community College with from 1985-1988.

I’m not in touch with anyone from my one year at UCLA 1988-1989 (except for Arnold Strong). I’d particularly like to reconnect with people from my quiet floor, the second floor, of Rieber Hall.

I’m not in touch with anyone from Forest Lake Christian School (ninth grade, 1980-1981).

I’m not in touch with enough people from Pacific Union College Elementary School 1977-1980 (sixth through eighth grade).

I fear I’m going to be rusty when I get back in the dating game. What am I going to say about my blank resume the past 30 months? That I’ve been working on myself?

I knew this couple. They were taking a break. He said he needed time to work on himself. A few weeks later, she found out he was working on himself by having sex with other women.

The kind of men who sleep around rarely strikes me as impressive. They have this power over women, but their drive to achieve gets sucked out of them so that they become hedonists and addicts to the game of seduction. By contrast, the most impressive men I know are committed to their wives and family.

I didn’t want life to be like this. I thought when I was younger that there would be nothing more glorious than sleeping with a lot of women. Think of how much you’d learn. Your horizons would expand. Every time you merge with another person, you experience a little bit of their world. Surely that makes you wise and deeper and more empathic?

I was at this Jewish event one Friday night in Pico-Robertson circa 1995 and I thought I was being terribly amusing because people were laughing.

The organizer pulled me aside and said I was being inappropriate. “But they were laughing,” I said.

“They were laughing out of embarrassment,” he said.

That took me aback. I hadn’t thought of that.

I was reading one of my brilliant stories the other night and my teacher suggested that when my therapist pealed off into a fit of uncontrollable giggles, she might’ve been laughing out of embarrassment, not amusement.

I think I’m terribly amusing, but much of the time I’m just embarrassing. I see my behavior as grand when really it is beneath contempt. I think I’m contributing when I’m really just horrifying.

I notice that many psycho-therapists give their patients assignments of writing out their feelings and frustrations in long letters to their parents. Did your dad wound you when you were eight with a withering comment at the dinner table? Write him a letter about it. Did your mom emasculate you at age six when she took away your toy gun? Write her a letter about it.

One Gentile couple I know were absolutely devastated when they received such a letter from their son. This was not the way we generally did things in my WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) upbringing. We learned not to complain and we kept a stiff upper lip. Therapy was for troubled souls. And you definitely did not write long letters to your parents describing your frustrations with them.

I’ve never written such a letter to my parents and I can’t conceive of doing so. My parents did the best they could and I had far better parents than they did.

The price of not dealing with your own stuff with your parents is that you will take it out on others. Your relationship with your father will shape your work and financial life and your relationship with your mother will shape your relationships.