Between the Cracks: A blog by Albert Clayton Gaulden

Lleyton Hewitt was down two sets to love a couple of days ago to Ivo Karlovic at the French Open-who had served a record-breaking 55 aces during the match-yet the Australian Hewitt pulled out the win in five sets. After losing the first two sets, Lleyton Hewitt seemed to turn the match around when momentum swung in his favor. Something within him, some surge of determination allowed him to win the spellbinding five-setter.

In many ways recovery from addictions and compulsions is like that tennis match. After having been beaten down by all the resentments and rage and mistrusts that drive alcoholism and drug addiction-and a myriad forms of other destructive behaviors-some addicts and alcoholics find that courage to change within themselves to hit a bottom and recover from their disease, against the greatest odds.

But as with sports where the unknowable and almost mysterious character that athletes find within themselves to win against oftentimes a better opponent, the addict draws from the grace of the God within himself to win against the disease that has ruined his life and driven him into despair.

I know about tennis because I used to play the game, and I know about addictions because I am a recovering alcoholic. There is no one-neither a sage nor a psychic-who can predict when or if the addict will find the courage to change the things she can-herself-to win when she has been beaten day after day by this rapacious killer. Whether alcohol or drugs or sexual addiction, over-spending or over-eating, momentum does swing in the favor of victory over one’s compulsion to act out and stay sick.

If you or a loved one needs to find the courage to change, there are many places where that capacity to find that momentum can be aided and abetted. Open your phone book and look under Addictions, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous or Treatment Centers and make a call that can save your life. After more than 29 years clean and sober I can assure you that all things are possible in the game to win against any debilitating compulsion or addiction; momentum will swing to help you overcome the allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind.

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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Seth walked into my hotel room in Atlanta for an hour private astro-intuitive counseling session as a straight man in a 30-year marriage with two grown kids and walked out having been exposed as a closeted homosexual who had a lover in Boston. In case you’re wondering, Seth had no overt mannerisms that would have signaled he was gay (and I confess to not understanding or having “gaydar”, which in gay parlance means that you are able to spot someone who is homosexual or lesbian). In my language I am wont to say that ‘it’s in your chart or it’s not,’ or I pick up on closeted affairs, among other things, through my carefully-honed intuition.

Suzanne sought me out because she was married with a new baby but also had had a two-year, on again, off again, affair with a woman twice her age. What is so interesting about women who have lesbian affairs or lovers or, beginning recently, have married another women, there is none of the emotional wrangling that men go through with their gay side. Suzanne decided to stay with her husband because she found out through honest inventory that she had used her lesbian lover as a mother substitute. When I told her that all of us substitute someone or some thing for what we missed as we were growing up, she opened up to that part of her life that had been a deep dark secret: she had been sexually abused by a half-brother and her step-father, all the while, knowing that her mother knew and did not stop it or expose it.

Sexuality is scary for most of us because few of us know who we are and how the shadow, the male nature within a woman and the feminine spirit within a man, can cause a lot of misunderstanding about who and what we want sexually. Through excessive alcohol or in a drug state, we can act out in all sorts of dark and dangerous ways when heretofore the sober us handled this “other self” by repressing it, i.e., the latent homosexual or lesbian.

Seth is now divorced, has had a number of spiritual revelations about his identity, and is good friends with his ex-wife and has a better relationship with his children because he is not hiding who he is-or a major part of who he is-and the three of them talk openly and can travel together with authenticity. Suzanne is doing just fine and counsels women who are going through what strangled her for so many years.

Through more than 45 years of working with men, women and young people-oftentimes regarding their sexual preference-I have come to the conclusion that gay and straight are the same thing-illusions that hide true feelings.

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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The challenge of letting go of the past and all the cast of characters who live rent-free in your head is to find space for forgiveness. When I grew up the expression was ‘forgive and forget’, but I have found through experience that forgiveness involves remembering and not regretting those who have been touchstones to our spiritual growth. Thus I refer to all these teachers as flowers; they have become forget-me-nots.

Ned was determined to hate his dead mother for eternity. “When she found out that I was living with an older woman with two kids, she cut me out of her will. After she died she kept her promise and left a considerable fortune to charity. I got nada. I will never forgive her for judging me and denying me what I deserved financially,” he said to me in session one day. Thank God, for most of us, we come to agree, that we should never say, “Never”.

The underpinning of Ned’s healing was his capacity to see his mother’s side of why she did what she did. He reviewed her past and discovered the same thing happened to her: his grandmother cut his mother off and out of her will when his mother married his father, someone his grandmother felt was beneath his mother’s social standing. Ned discovered some letters in an old trunk of his mother’s in which she discussed the hurt and pain of her mother’s decision with a sorority sister of hers. Reading the words of his mother, plus his capacity to stop the bile of anger and resentment, Ned found room to not only forgive his mother but to love her.

The Rubicon of his dilemma and frustration with his mother was crossed when I asked Ned if he would rather be right or rather be happy. He looked at me and said, “Albert, this mental anguish and hatred of mother has got to stop. I choose to be happy.”

If there is someone in your life who has become an emotional albatross around your neck, let it loose-drop the rock-forgive that person so you can be free to live your life and not stay stuck in theirs. Find peace within yourself to forgive someone who has been torturing you and causing you unnecessary pain.

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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Within the last two weeks I met two young people each of whom could be described as a ‘motherless child’, even though both of them have mothers. What makes me tag them as such is that none of them had a mother who gave a damn about them and when they were not being ignored by their mothers they were being judged, criticized, castigated and made to feel like they didn’t count. Their mothers told them they would have been better off if their kid had never been born.

You think I’m talking trailer trash here-deep- South hillbillies or snuff-dippers-women who married their cousins? Not on your life. These youngsters came from more affluent homes-bluebloods, big mansions, fancy cars, over-educated-you know, the country club upper crust- but where privilege-nurturing, loving, kindness and gentility-passed each of my clients by.

Thank God my brand of therapy is to have clients write their life story, so I am not misleading them by implying anything other than what they tell me-I advise them, “Gimme the facts (ma’am or sir), just the facts,” as Sgt. Joe Friday of Dragnet used to say when he was interviewing a witness or a suspect. They write it and I give meaning to what they put on paper. When I found out that a mother wrapped her eight-year old daughter, whom I’ll call Emily, in a blanket when she was sick, gave her medicine and then locked her in the bathroom all night so the mother would not be disturbed, I named it what it was: child abuse. 

Ben came from Miami with a tale of “I’d have been better off without a Mom” when he wrote that his mother called him fat, ugly and stupid since he was a tot. She favored Ben’s younger brother whom she lavished with praise and great expectations. Ben was no cry baby but he wept crocodile tears when he told me that he was convinced that his mother did not love him. I pinned the ‘child abuser’ tail on the donkey, aka momma. If you want to know how we processed his 22-year dilemma it was when we did a bit of creative dialoging-I showed him how to have a proactive and affirmative conversation with his mother without disrespecting her. It must have worked because his mother emailed me to say that she wanted a dose of the therapy he got.

Scott Peck (author of People of the Lie and The Road Less Traveled) used to say that you should name something, like narcissism or sociopathy or down-right meanness like these kids survived and also to confront the person, the mothers in these cases, and let them know how much pain they endured by their mothers’ behavior. If you keep these kinds of negative and damaging emotions damned up they can lead one to commit suicide or to harm the mother or other family member or friend who is culpable.

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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For years I had been saying that America’s youth were going to hell in a hand basket. Then along came The Kid.

When I first met The Kid, I am wont to say, he was knee-high to a grasshopper (in essence, at 12 he was as tall as I was, which ain’t saying much) and as curious as my new puppy, Mr. Darby, a wire fox terrier. The Kid was smart enough to make the grades in school but he was and still is more interested in what makes all of us tick, what drives folks to ignore the millions upon millions of men, women and children who don’t have enough food or water to survive when most of us in this country have too much, and which politicians are statesmen and which are merely blowhards. He knew at the ripe old age of 14 that he wanted to go to a more culturally-mixed school than the school he was in-The Kid is no fancy pants nor is there an elitist bone in his body-so when he asked me what I thought, I told him to get on the bus and time the difference between a prep school in Brooklyn and the more prestigious one down the street from where he lived. He graduated a couple of years ago from the prep school in Brooklyn.

What I love about the Kid is that he is already around the corner gathering data about the greed on Wall Street or some other corporate malfeasance before CNN can take credit for the scoop. But you can also catch him in church every Sunday-he is a devout Catholic-and on the tennis courts a few days a week where he takes no prisoners. For a class project lat year he went to Mexico to study border control and how it works or doesn’t work. When he wanted to study Spanish he took it in school and then went to Guatamala and lived with a family to learn the language. Did I tell you that at almost 21 he is 6′5″ and the only thing bigger about him is his heart?

I no longer have a morning cup of Joe or walk three miles before the heat rises in the desert but I do get a call from The Kid every day or I phone him. He is a tennis fan-his family has gotten tickets and we’ve all gone to the US TENNIS OPEN many times-but his all-time favorite is Rafa Nadal. When the Spaniard GOAT beats his opponent in two sets or five, The Kid is on top of the world and that is all we can talk about.

More than a year ago Scott my business partner and I got the bright idea to have The Kid write a column for our monthly newsletter called Kid’s Corner. It is so successful that we had the first year bound for his Christmas present last year for posterity and his review of what he wrote. Speaking of Scott, he and The Kid are like big brother/little brother and they bonded from hello; but there’s little doubt that The Kid cleans up the court when they play tennis.

I share this relationship with you because I think nothing keeps you young at heart and on your toes more than having someone like The Kid in your life. He can act out and act up from time to time, but he’s just getting jacked up for the game-the Knicks or the Yankees-or most importantly, the game of life-which he will win in spades.

The Kid ain’t perfect, but don’t let me catch you telling me that. In my eyes, there’s nobody anywhere like The Kid. Ya oughta meet The Kid.

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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The late and great black comedian Flip Wilson used to dress up like a character named Geraldine who would always retort when asked why she did something either stupid or illegal, “The devil made me do it.” As a friend of mine, famous for his Louis B. Meyer-like malapropisms, would say, “I heared (sic) that.”

For decades I liked to blame my momma for my air of self-righteousness and for wearing a lot of different hats and at least two faces. And daddy-o, poppa, who was not only a ladies’ man but a 24-carat gold drunk and floor-flusher, I pointed the finger at him for my 20-year run with active alcoholism. When Fats Domino used to wail, “Ain’t that a Shame,” I would copycat my friend and mumble, “I heared (sic) that.”

I took wise counsel from a rabbi a few years ago who gave me a piece of advice as solid as a rock and as true as a good friend: Get out of the blame game. You have choices. I know that we hear when we hear and see when we see, however, I was thunder-struck when he spoke those words.

In examining my life I have run across a few revelations that I feel are touchstones for living with choices rather than playing the blame game: 1) What addictions and compulsions are feeding your bad/boy/bad/girl behavior? Something has to keep the insane finger pointing going; 2) Do you give your power away to other people-does what others think of you matter more than what you think of yourself? 3) Turn your will and your life over to a Higher Power-let Him be the judge and jury of what you can do or not do to be happy. After all, being happy is the only pay-out for living on this earth.

“That’s all folks.”

Albert Clayton Gaulden is the founding director of the Sedona Intensive and author of You’re Not Who You Think You Are: A Breakthrough Guide to Discovering the Authentic You. For more information about Albert and Sedona Intensive visit http://www.sedonaintensive.com/.

Purchase You’re Not Who You Think You Are at http://www.yourenotwhoyouthinkyouare.com/

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