The Confession (42 page)

As the media began hammering away at my Xanadu work, I threw myself more into my efforts compulsively, causing Ray to grow increasingly concerned about me personally.

“You haven't given up your addiction, Jim. Don't you see it? You're in the office twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours every day. You're working like a crazy man without knowing where you're going. You're still on the gerbil wheel, not the recovery path.”

 

THE SUN HADN'T RISEN YET WHEN RAY CALLED ME EARLY ON THE
morning of February 19, 2005. He was crying. “It's Joe Suliga,” he said.

My first thought was that Joe had done something stupid again; I knew how much Ray cared about him. “Is he drinking again?” I asked.

“Jim,” he said, “he's dead.”

I had trouble taking it in. Joe and I had come up, and come down, together. Now he was dead at forty-seven.

“He was over at that strip joint in Linden,” Ray said. “He shouldn't have been there, Jim. He was in the passenger side of the car, backing out of the parking lot. They were hit by a drunken driver. Jim, he was killed instantly.”

My heart broke wide open. Joe had tried so hard to pull his life together. After his arrest in Atlantic City, he left the Senate. He followed Ray's admonishments about sobriety as best he could, but his struggles continued. Still, his life had been coming back around. He was working in Linden's government again, as chief financial officer, rebuilding his confidence and momentum in small steps, just as I was trying to do. He left behind his heartbroken wife of ten years, who had stayed at his side through thick and thin.

Ray took it all personally. “He was never in recovery,” Ray said. “I told him he had to go to meetings, he had to change his life. He said he didn't have a drinking problem.”

“He lived a life and a half,” I said to Ray. “He lived harder than anybody I know.”

“Being destructive isn't living large,” Ray fired back in anger. “He lived half a life, when he had such great promise.”

That night, I had a terrifying dream. I was alone in a large, dark room which was empty but for an open coffin at one end. I forced myself to look inside and found the body it contained was my own. Something grotesque and hideous had deformed the corpse—not a sudden accident like Joe's, but a force inside me that bubbled its poisons out through the skin, a stinking, acidic, molten substance that ate holes in my heart and twisted my face beyond recognition.

 

WE PAID OUR RESPECTS TO JOE THAT WEDNESDAY AT ST. ELIZABETH'S
Roman Catholic Church in Linden. Throughout my own trauma I had held myself together, almost stoically. But from the first chords of the hymn, “Be Not Afraid,” I broke down and wept. Sitting alone in an out-of-the-way pew, I cried till my collar was soaked. My sadness wasn't for Joe. I believed he had made it to heaven, finally free from his many years of struggle. My heart bled for his wife and family, who had the frightful job of bidding him farewell, and for myself. I cried for the life we both had attained, then squandered, as if it were my funeral as well.

The next day at work, Ray handed me a printout from a website for a trauma and addiction recovery clinic in rural Arizona called The
Meadows—a place frequented by the likes of actor Matthew Perry and singer Whitney Houston.

“I'm no psychiatrist. But I think you need to get away from New Jersey for a little while,” he said. “I asked a friend, and he said this was a good facility.”

God bless Ray; he understood this intuitively. I felt his selfless love for me in a way I'd never experienced it before. He knew I was in deep emotional despair. He'd also deduced that I didn't want to spend the rest of my years at a corporate law firm, making myself and others rich. I'd raced from the statehouse to Ray's firm without noticing how depressed and anxious I'd become. Joe's death made it clear to both of us.

I called the Meadows that afternoon and signed up for a one-week intensive program designed for people who survived a recent trauma. A few days later I sat at a Denny's outside Wickenburg, Arizona, down the street from the clinic. I didn't know it yet, but the Meadows would save my life. As I bit into my chicken salad, I thought: this Denny's is about as far from Drumthwacket as anyone has ever fallen.

 

MY “SURVIVORS” THERAPY GROUP MET FOR THE FIRST TIME IN
the morning. There were six of us. We sat in chairs arranged in a semicircle. Our group leader was Roxy, a no-nonsense and demanding therapist with a disturbing presentation: her spiky hair was a half-dozen different colors, none of them natural.

We'd been instructed to buy stuffed animals from the Meadows gift shop to symbolize our “inner child.” I didn't want to appear closed to the therapeutic value of the program, but I thought this was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Reluctantly I picked up a Kermit; it reminded me of Jacqueline.

Roxy gave us our first exercise. On large sheets of paper, we were to begin an epistolary relationship with our “inner child.” Holding the pen in our left hand, we were to write to our adult selves using the voice of ourselves at about seven years old.

“Talk about things you're scared of,” Roxy said. “Talk about things you need.”

“Dear Mr. McGreevey,” I began. I felt foolish, but I pressed on.

As I wrote in crooked cursive, I was surprised by how the exercise seemed to tap into something. I wrote about the fears—the terrors—my homosexuality had caused me. I'd never admitted this before. I wrote about how I blamed God for making me different, and about all the suffering that caused. My child told my adult about why he'd been an overachiever: to overcome the flawed character in his soul, to hide. “I am ashamed,” my left hand wrote. “I live in a state of shame.”

Layer by layer, the exercise peeled back my artifice. When I moved the pen to my right hand to compose a response, a powerful self-pity overcame me. I cried uncontrollably. Tears splashed on the page. I began to fall apart.

“You are a good little boy, Jimmy. Being gay doesn't change that,” I wrote back—words I'd always craved to hear. “Don't overcompensate. The world won't hate you forever.”

I went on like this for an hour. Long after the others had finished their exercise, I couldn't cut off the dialogue with my child. I kept switching hands with the pen, chatting across the chasm of my life to the adolescent I wished I could have protected.

The discarded terminology for what was happening to me used to be “nervous breakdown.” At the Meadows, it was taken as evidence that the method was working, a “therapeutic response” to treatment.

Later exercises included drawing a timeline across a large piece of paper, left to right. On the top of the line, we listed our professional achievements, our “credentials”; below the line we recounted our personal histories. I was a classic case of divided self. My public narrative was crowded with achievements. Below the line I wrote just twenty-three words: “Dating Laura,” “Married Kari,” “Morag born,” that sort of thing.

I'd lived my life entirely for public consumption behind a wall of words, while my personal life was nearly nonexistent. I started thinking of myself as a robot, a puppet. No longer Spock, but Lieutenant Commander Data, a machine incapable of genuine feelings—a creation whose sole purpose was to please others.

Roxy could tell I was still trying to please others, even in the group. “You keep trying to help other people through their issues,” she told me. “Stay in the
I
. Look at
you.
Come up with your
own
solutions, Jim—not
what your parents wanted you to be, or the Church wanted you to be, or your wife. Who do
you
want to be? Who
are you?
”

For me to answer that, she went on, I'd first have to learn to accommodate my own past. “Who did you injure?” she asked me one day. In front of the other group members, I named everyone from Dina to the citizens of New Jersey. She hit me with more questions, rapid-fire, not stopping to contemplate my answers.
Who is your God? Who do you resent? Who is your master? Who are YOU?
I answered the best I knew how, frustrating her each time.

“Don't play mini-governor,” she snapped. “You have a chance here to self-actualize. Don't let that slip by. You have a rare chance to realign your world with your own values. You'll need to know what those values are in order to become an integrated self. You're not answering honestly, you're answering like a politician. Who do you resent, Jim? Start with Golan.”

“I don't resent Golan,” I told her, truthfully.

“It's latent,” she said in frustration. “He betrayed you. He extorted you. Of course you resent him.”

“It's a blessing, Roxy. What Golan did forced me to confront this deep-seated fear.”

In my overachieving way, I thought I could get over my traumas in one week at the Meadows. I was wrong. When the workshop was over, I still couldn't answer Roxy's questions. My anxiety levels were through the roof. I was crying at every provocation, and sleeping less than ever.

At Roxy's insistence, I signed myself into the center's psychiatric wing, a level-one hospital. For more than a month I was “patient number 05271” at the Meadows. As a traumatic event, coming out and losing your job pales in comparison to what some of my fellow patients had suffered. One had returned from Afghanistan; what he did and saw there was atrocious. Another, a marine named Danny who became my best friend in the program, had served as a viper in the Corps before losing his father to suicide, a trauma that he couldn't work through on his own. In group, I was initially ashamed to discuss my sexuality, especially in front of Danny, a family man whose military bearing was so familiar to me. But he literally told me, “Cut the shit, say who you are.” He never judged me.

I underwent daily intensive group therapy and private sessions with psychiatrists, who diagnosed me with severe adjustment disorder. They treated me for what they called “Dependent Personality Traits, without full disorder,” which in their argot meant that I operated out of my intellect, and was not in touch with my emotions. They called this an “adapted ego state.”

“Patient has a tendency to detach from feelings, advice-give, intellectualize and hold himself to unrealistic standards of perfection,” my charts say. “Upon observation he had depressed mood complicated by anxiety, exacerbated by unsettled trauma and adjustment difficulties adversely affecting his ability to function on a daily basis. He has an inability to abstain from compulsive work, impulse control difficulties, and moderation issues.”

Some of my treatment was silly, and some was extremely difficult. All of it worked.

 

THE TREATMENT PHILOSOPHY AT THE MEADOWS IS BASED ON THE
twelve-step movement as reinterpreted by Pia Mellody, a drug-addiction expert and a colleague of John Bradshaw, the therapist famous for his work reclaiming and championing your wounded “inner child.” Pia believes that trauma scars people in fundamental ways. The cure, she believes, is essentially spiritual—through a deep connection with the Higher Power.

Her model of recovery involves returning to childhood to reexperience your original traumas with the eyes of an adult. Throughout our lives, Mellody believes, we adapt certain unhealthy behaviors and patterns in response to our faulty childhoods. Our attachment to these behaviors and patterns eventually take on addictive forms. Drinking, or being sexually compulsive, or even developing an overattachment to ego like mine, are all ways to mask our childhood injuries.

Her answer is to tear down everything—our adult constructs (which she calls our “adapted self”) and our childhood injuries (our “wounded child”)—and then to rebuild our lives around a spiritual core that allows us to be imperfect. “Human beings are not created as perfect figures. Many of us get the message that we're defective or fear when we're imperfect. We can acknowledge the concept that we are imperfect, and that is the way we are supposed to
be. It's what I call perfectly imperfect,” she has written. True healing, she says, allows us to eliminate our adapted self, and rediscover our authentic self.

“That is what I mean by recovery,” she told me. “It is really about becoming more authentic instead of adapted or living in reaction to others. You learn to actually discover who you really are, you're recovering yourself or your soul.”

This resonated with me profoundly. Pia Mellody's model isn't just a method of treatment; it's a way of living. It encourages a lifestyle of honesty, rigorous self-examination, and spirituality—all the things I'd learned to live without.

I was impressed when I finally got a chance to meet her. She is an unprepossessing woman, excruciatingly honest, and charmingly self-effacing. In my life I have never met a person more in touch with her emotional gauges. She told me she had seen my resignation press conference on television. “I was thinking, What a jam for your wife, and your kids, and you,” she said. “But there was a part of your energy that day that was very right. You stood up for the consequences, you dealt with the crap and the bullshit. I sensed your relief, and your shame.”

Pia's brilliance is in the way she teaches others to recognize shame and disarm it. In group sessions, I was made to present the most unspeakable aspects of my sexual history. I discussed sexual conduct I barely allowed myself to remember—the embarrassing stories that fill this book. I drew wall-sized maps and trees of my moral failures, in politics and love, for all to see. Prying the lid off my shame was terrifying and hideous. But it freed me from my past.

In Pia's model, my shame emanated from my wounded childhood. If I walked away from the shame without resolving it, I was basically abandoning my child, which is the real me.

I had lived my whole life in self-hatred. In therapy, my goal was self-love.