Knuckles

Sixty Minutes News Program ran a story Sunday night about R. A. Dickey, perfecter of the knuckle ball and winner of the Cy Young Award for outstanding pitcher of 2013. 

I was fascinated by two facts which emerged during Lesley Stahl’s interview of Mr. Dickey: 1) He was abused as a child of eight and kept all that history inside for twenty four years, and 2) It was in healing from those events from his childhood that he found a way to believe in himself again. 

He was a good pitcher, but he had some missteps. His career had begun to flounder. During one game, he gave up six home runs in 2.3 innings. He slipped into a depression and began acting out with an affair while his wife was pregnant. He came very close to taking his own life - once intentionally with carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, and once unintentionally - during a stupid “I’ll show the world” attempt to swim across the Missouri River. His muscles gave up. His head went under. He thought about all the people he’d hurt and disappointed. Maybe he thought about the events of his childhood and the shame which prevented him from speaking about it. He gave up. 

When he surrendered, his feet hit bottom - the literal bottom of the river, which gave him enough adrenalin to swim up to the surface. He was rescued by a friend and team mate. Once out of the water, he wanted very much to live. He sought therapy and after about a year and a half, finally told the therapist of his ordeals at the hands of a female baby sitter and, later during his eighth year, with a male stranger who raped him.

Orel Hershiser was the one who counseled Dickey to take up the knuckle ball to offer some surprise pitches and to redeem his career. There was no one to teach him how to do it, so he taught himself how to send this non-spinning, unpredictable ball over the plate. Surprise should be his middle name. No one can hit his knuckle balls.

It is unusual for a baseball player to re-start his career at the ripe age of thirty seven, but that’s just what R. A. Dickey did. He maintains that the knuckle ball is a metaphor for his life: It has ups and downs. Maybe some secrets too. You just can’t tell if it will do what you intend it to do. While he’s pitching, he has to surrender. There’s some amount of magic to the process, or at least suspension of disbelief.

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In the 1980’s a dear friend who knows something of my history with early childhood sexual abuse clipped a newspaper article for me about how kids, who are abused early in life, seem to endure sexual exploitation later in life as well - as if the earlier abuses might implant a magnet to attract similar events later. My belief is that the body is always going toward health. When there’s unresolved trauma, we do attract whatever raw materials may be useful for our healing - even if it looks cr-a-a-a-a-zy from the outside, there’s a wisdom to it. Recapitulations are common among trauma survivors.

Trauma theory suggests that when a boundary is breached - whether it’s through abuse, car accident, fall or surgery - without repair, that gap in our energetic boundary leaves us vulnerable to subsequent repetitions of similar impacts. Perhaps, it’s because we don’t see it coming because we can’t bear to look in that direction whence the trouble arose, or perhaps it’s because we’re attending ceaselessly (hyper-vigilance) to that direction and tune out the other 359 degrees of perception, so we get clobbered. Either way, we’re screwed until we heal the breach in our boundary. Mercifully, we’re hard-wired to heal.

My friend’s kindness in giving me the article touched me deeply. I felt heard and understood. Abuse, incest, and rape generally are not topics for polite conversation. Children who grow up in alcoholic homes learn early the importance of secrecy. Mr. Dickey’s mother was alcoholic. So was my dad. 

For him, healing and spilling the beans about his early years was spurred by the need to get his career back on track. He’s convinced that the knuckle ball would not have been mastered without the progress he was making in the therapeutic container he found for himself. 

My forays into healing were not nearly so dramatic, but rather a gradual building of safety through my marriage, mothering and career. I realized that I HAD to be healthy and sane because I was the hub of several wheels. If I was off center, the cart would fall over. How fortunate I am to have the support to continue the process of healing all these years.

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The last tie-in that’s on my mind this week has to do with the immediacy of tweets, face book updates and smart-phone inter-connectivity and how damaging some news can be to vulnerable populations.

When R.A. Dickey was abused in 1977, there were no instagrams sent by his conquerors/perpetrators. My childhood abuse was acted out in complete privacy in the “safety” of my own home. When I was gang-raped at eighteen, the event was not broadcast on instant media. The shame I felt was severe enough that I didn’t speak of that event for a full decade. I don’t think I could have survived the humiliation had the perpetrators taken photos and put them on billboards around the city. 

Saturday’s L.A. Times’ LATEXTRA Section shows Audrie Pott who committed suicide after photos of her, taken and posted by one of the three boys alleged to have sexually assaulted her, were viewed by her peers. The fifteen year old girl posted on her Face Book account that, “The whole school knows. My life is like ruined now.” A week after that, she killed herself.

Cyberbullying makes very public the humiliation that is barely survivable when it is private. Cyberbullying is becoming epidemic. 

Thank you, R.A. Dickey for your part in bringing to the public conversation the devastation that early assaults wreak on children. Thank you, Audrie Pott for your sacrifice to clarify that assault compounded by public humiliation is too much for any human to survive. Both date rape and cyberbullying must be stopped. Maybe a knuckle sandwiches should be on the menu for would-be sexual predators.