On Therapy… Part 1
This is the first in what will be a series of posts on this exciting topic. Buckle up.
Iwas born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1969. I lived in 11 cities before I turned 16, which may actually be more than the typical Army brat. This translates to three elementary schools, two middle schools and three high schools. My parents were barely 22 years old when I was born after having been conceived out of wedlock while they were in college. Their fathers were both WWII veterans who spent their entire careers as carpenters. My maternal grandfather was a Marine who saw hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese in the South Pacific. He was home in Wisconsin on leave after jumping off the boat in an overcrowded San Francisco harbor when the United States dropped the atomic bombs and the war ended. He proposed to his girlfriend, they got married and he rarely spoke of the war for the next fifty plus years.
My mother was raised a very strict Lutheran and my father attended Catholic school through 8th grade. My parents were high school sweethearts. My father was essentially kicked out of the church for having the temerity to get a Lutheran girl pregnant and marry her.
After the rain | June 2018
We lived the typical life of the 70’s & 80’s corporate ladder-climbing family. It is likely that my late mother had an undiagnosed mental illness. Her brother suffered from bi-polar disorder his whole life and she had many of the symptoms. She self-medicated with cigarettes, caffeine, shopping, wine and, eventually benzos. She was an extraordinarily gifted seamstress who began sewing at the age of eight. My father is a workaholic and used to drink heavily. He also has an anger management problem. Those two things together were a lot of fun as a kid.
There was little to no physical affection in our house. The words “I love you” were never uttered in our home. Praise was rarely given, while criticism flowed freely. There was corporal punishment. I have a sister and brother, three and five years my junior, respectively. To the world, it appeared as though we were the picture-perfect family with the three towheads and the nine passenger station wagon with faux wood siding.
At the tender age of 12, I smoked weed about a half dozen times with a buddy who nicked it from his older brothers. My mother found out because, of course, I told another friend, who promptly told his mother. In either late seventh or early eighth grade, I began drinking alcohol at parties. Somehow we got flasks of blackberry brandy and ferreted them on the ski club trips to Vernon Valley / Great Gorge. By the time I landed in my third high school at the beginning of sophomore year, we lived in Clearwater, Florida. After about a year, I managed to work my way in with the “popular” aka “party” crowd. I worked at a country club with waiters who were older and would buy us beer. I hated the taste and drank only to be cool and get drunk.
Again, from the outside, everything always looked great. This was crucial. To say my mother was image conscious would severely understate the situation. I was obsessed with what I wore. It had to be Ralph Lauren. I wasn’t afraid to sport a popped pink collar. I think I not only owned but wore a pair of green pants. Yeah, I was that guy. When I was a freshman, my father, when asked, once told me he didn’t like my outfit because it was a blue shirt and blue jeans and he didn’t like blue and blue together. I was devastated.
Of course, I selected that bastion of Midwestern beer consumption, UW-Madison for college after being soundly rejected by Penn and Cornell. Did the fraternity thing, where I served as Social Chairman during a semester I was out of school due to the fact that I wasn’t lighting the academic world on fire. After that semester, during which the fraternity hit a new record for half-barrel consumption, I moved into an apartment. In retrospect this was out of a deep sense of self-preservation that I wasn’t even conscious of at the time. Occasionally, over the course of about a year, I experimented with cocaine. Fortunately, I had a really bad experience and I swore I would never touch that stuff again. My first wise move.
When informing me I had to take a year off, which he did by lying to me about his financial condition, my father gave me the idea to start a consulting business using the computer skills I had been developing since age 11. This was a prophetic recommendation. I worked three jobs (bank, law firm, country club) and dug into the manuals for a relational database program, which proved a better use of my time than playing drinking games in the bar room of the fraternity. I launched “Kosterman Enterprises” which became “Solutions Marketing”. By the time I graduated, I was billing more than 90% of the starting salaries available to college graduates. I was often seen outside lecture halls on a pay phone talking clients through computer troubles.
Yes, I did a testimonial for Apple. No, they didn’t pay me. Yes, I had hair. | Winter 1989
Graduating from UW-Madison in May of 1992, I took a job as a Merchandising something-or-other with Mirror Wearever (cookware & bakeware) in late summer which took me to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. For those keeping track, this was my 13th city in 22 years. It wouldn’t be polite to write what I thought of that entire situation. So, after my father sending the classified ads from the Tribune every Monday, and me furiously firing resumes at any job in any city that wasn’t Manitowoc, I landed the Kodak gig (side note: my resume only got a second look because the District Manager noticed “Manitowoc” — his father’s home — on the header. Life is weird that way.). Upon giving notice and offering to work the next two weeks, my boss not-so-kindly suggested I could leave immediately, if not sooner. I was kind of a little prick in those days.
I started with Kodak that December, spent three months in training and was sent to Indianapolis to sell big, expensive copiers. While doing that, I commuted to Racine, Wisconsin on weekends, four to five hours each way, where I was finishing up a custom billing database for a law firm, a project I began the prior summer. I also got a private pilot’s license, met a girl, was named Rookie of the Year for the Midwest Region. All this wasn’t enough, of course. As living embodiment of the sentiment “the grass is always greener” I accepted a job as a Development Engineer with the Commercial and Government Systems (C&GS) group of Kodak after about 18 months in the sales position.
After spending two months working with Homocide, Sex Crimes and Robbery at the Indianapolis Police Department (fun times!), the test site of the software project which would come to consume my life for two years, I moved to Rochester with my wife-to-be, Amy. She was awarded a position as a corporate sales trainer at Kodak’s Marketing Education Center, a job for which she was eminently qualified.
The utter horror of what I had gotten myself into fell on me like a pallet of HD TVs from Costco. More than 25 years later I can still recall the existential dread in the pit of my stomach as I walked through the rows and rows of cubicles that comprised our offices at “Hawkeye Plant”, which was where the cameras of the same name had been built for years. “What in the fuck have I done?” raced through my mind.
I went from being a single, fancy-free college kid computer consultant and make-your-own-schedule sales rep to engaged to be married, living in an 80 year old fixer upper. I was now working a job I detested that rotated between endless meetings, hours in my cubicle with my, er, asshole of a boss popping his head in regularly to bother me and travel, lots of travel. On top of that, after absolutely busting my ass the first year, I think I got a 2% raise.
We tied the knot in June 1995. Shortly thereafter, Amy suggested insisted I go to a therapy session with her in late 1995, early 1996. Things were not great with the new marriage. I can’t imagine why. I hated my job. I traveled all the time and my free time was consumed by my mission to rehab our 100 year old house from top to bottom. Everything had to look good, after all! After maybe 30 minutes of listening to my story, the therapist told me I was depressed and needed to be put on Prozac. I recoiled in disgust. These were the fairly early days of antidepressants. I viewed them as a crutch; something only weak people would use. What on earth would people say if they knew I was on ANTIDEPRESSANTS? Qu’elle horror? Silly me, if only I knew I was ahead of the crowd. It wasn’t long before being on Prozac was a badge of honor among the suburban set.
We left and made it clear I wasn’t going back there any time soon. In retrospect I think it was the combination of the perceived shame of both being in therapy and on an anti-depressant that really shut me off to the whole thing. There was also the little matter of my profound inability to express any kind of emotion for fear that it would reveal a crack in my armor. These things, coupled with the fact I didn’t remotely feel heard by the therapist made it a nonstarter. Hindsight being 2020, it’s a shame I didn’t at least give the therapy part a shot because I really was clinically depressed.
That was my less-than-successful introduction to psychotherapy. I’m not surprised I would end up at a fundraiser 25 years later and hear the head of the Bronx VA Hospital tell the crowd that “psychotherapy is broken”.
Thanks for sticking with me through that whirlwind history. There’s a lot there. It’s foundational for posts to follow.
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