The Core of Who We Are

         Following is a very bold assertion. As with everything written here, I don’t want you to believe it. Rather, I would ask you to look in your experience, no one else’s, yours, and see if it is true. The core of who you are, who I am and who all people are is that we want to experience love and the ability to love and be loved. We want to know that what we did here on earth counted for something and we want to know that we are powerful enough to take charge of our own lives. Isn’t that the essence of who you are at the core of your being?

         The place I discovered this “core” was the Maximum-Security Prison in Somers, Connecticut in 1979. A few weeks before my visit there, I had been watching television and saw a small portion of the Phil Donahue Show. Donahue did some great work before trash and reality TV took over most of “talk” television. Nick Groth, PhD., was the guest along with three convicted murderers and rapists, silhouetted behind a scrim. You could hear their voices, see their silhouettes and actions, and not their faces. It was what their conversation lacked that caught my attention. There was not one word of blame assignment or rationale given for their behavior.

         Anything that had to do with where violence, especially what seemed random violence, interested me in the second half of 1979. Unfortunately, my research into the root causes of violence in our society was dramatically escalated forty-one years ago when one of my children was raped at the age of eight. We needed a quart of milk and a can of Comet. This was a middle class suburb of Akron, Ohio, on a bright sunny afternoon. The grocery store was across a large field, easy walking without crossing any streets. I could see no reason not to let her go.

         A man in his late teens or early twenties stopped Joy on her way back from the store to ask her to help him find a dog he claimed was lost. As it turned out, there was no dog. He covered her mouth, dragged her behind a hedge and raped her. Bloodied and scared to death, she made it home. The emergency room and the police added to the trauma she dealt with physically, emotionally and mentally. Years later she would tell me that when I would acknowledge her courage, the truth was she was putting on a good act. She is well, a great person, whose life was affected beyond words. Today she runs a small dog kennel and trains service dogs. Of course, I am wildly prejudiced on her behalf; she is an incredibly loving, bright and caring human being.

         On that day in 1979, I discovered that I have the capacity to kill and would have, I am sure, if I had caught the man then or soon after. Notice I did not put the capacity to kill in the past tense. Capacity is capacity. Once you know you have it, you have it. Ask your friends who have served in the military, if they will talk about it, what the experience of knowing you have the capacity to kill is like. It did not take long for me to realize that made me no different than any other killer, no different than the man who raped my daughter. I probably thought I had a better “reason” in those days, I know better now. The behavior we fear most is within us.

         I knew then that all the things I thought most important in my past meant nothing if we lived in a world where children were raped. Helping found one of the pilots for Upward Bound, teaching, being the youngest YMCA Director, the Director of Development of a great K-12 day school, the assistant to Helen and Leland Schubert in giving away a piece of the 3M fortune, nor being Community Affairs Officer of what is now Key Bank, nationally, made not one bit of difference. I had to come to some understanding, to be at peace about what I needed to do, to determine a path.

         Be clear that this work is selfish. It is my intention to see violence end in my lifetime. All violence! I now realize that will never happen unless we create A World That Works for Everyone! This is not utopian idealism. It is about a pragmatic, conscious choice to create workability or continued violence and chaos.

         I needed to understand those inmates and their mentor, Nick Groth, as well as myself. When I spoke to Nick on the phone, he said I would have to come to Somers in order to understand what had happened in the lives of these inmates and why they were willing to help me (and others) understand the root causes of violence in our society.

         Having not a clue as to what I was getting into, I agreed. As I drove the roughly four hours from Phippsburg, Maine to Somers, Connecticut, my emotions were all over the place. I wanted to do this. Why did I want to do this? I was going to meet and talk with people “just like” the person who had raped my daughter less than six months earlier. Was I crazy? Should I turn back? How would I react? Could I keep a civil tongue? Would any of this make any difference?

         When you enter a maximum-security prison, it is clear by what you can see and what you are asked to do that this is serious business. Razor wire is everywhere. Once identified and checked in, you surrender your wallet (identification, credit cards and money were coins of the realm), your keys, your glasses (because the metal arms make a great weapon) and your belt. After you pass through the third or fourth steel gate or observation area, you know you are inside. At that point, feeling absolutely no more confident than on the drive down, I meet Nick for the first time. The first group of inmates we spoke with was on break in an open area. Engaging them in conversation, Nick asked how they got there, who was responsible for them being in prison. The stories varied and there was a long list of those responsible: Mother, Father, judge, cop, lawyer, a gang, teachers, bad breaks and finally the victim. “If only the bitch hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have killed her.” I was greatly relieved when Nick said it was time to move on. It crossed my mind that I would probably say something that might upset this group and I could be the next reason for violence. Nick had worked with this group for only a few short weeks.

         Nick took me to an area in the prison where we met with a number of inmates, all of whom he had worked with for at least a year. They, too, had awful stories about their childhood. One man in particular told of being locked in a closet for ten days at a time. He explained that was where he ate, slept, urinated and defecated and that it was easier to be in the closet than deal with the repeated beatings and sexual attacks by his Father and his Father’s friends when they were on a drunken rampage.

         We spent hours in that same room, talking about violence, its causes, my anger, their crimes and their lives now. All of these inmates were “lifers” with no possibility of parole. This conversation was not being recorded. To a person, these men knew that they had been the cause of their own criminal lives. Were there mitigating factors of childhood abuse, violence and criminal neglect? Absolutely. They now knew that they had absorbed this violence and made it their own. One man (we’ll call him Robbie), who had committed three combination rape/murders, the same man who had been locked in a closet for days on end, came to me at the end of the day, at a time when no one else was in earshot. He told me that he was deeply sorry that my daughter had been raped. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he meant it from the bottom of his heart. That was the beginning of two very powerful learnings. The vast majority of people who commit violent acts (over 95% of all convicted violent criminals) were themselves the victims of physical, sexual or verbal abuse.  Terrorists invariably see themselves righting a wrong, either real or imagined, triggered by a climate of or direct experience with violence. What I learned in this unusual laboratory is that it is possible, given two critical factors, for even the most violent people to develop meaningful, productive, contributory, joyous lives, even within the confines of a maximum-security prison. The fact that this is so speaks volumes in terms of what we can do about creating A World That Works for Everyone!

         Nick Groth led me to vast amounts of information. The most important piece he gave me was about why he had been able to get through to these men at Somers. I assumed it was his training, degrees, and his scholarship. Nick assured me they were not it. The critical factor from Nick’s point of view was getting these individuals to know that they are loved (i.e. cared about, valued) and that they are able to make choices. Nick had been successful in supporting these men in separating who they really are from their behavior, powerfully enough for them to realize they were worth something. Why else would a group of men spend an extended day talking with the father of a child that was raped? It must have been like being with the fathers of their own victims.

IF IT IS POSSIBLE IN THIS ENVIRONMENT, WITH THESE MEN, IT IS POSSIBLE AT EVERY MOMENT IN EVERY ENVIRONMENT WITH ANYONE.

INCLUDING YOU!

         Robbie, through Nick’s love and guidance had come to know the core of who he was. What I discovered from him, inside the Maximum-Security Prison in Somers, CT, is that all people, underneath all behavior, are people who want to experience and be able to give love, know that they count and that they are powerful enough to take charge of their own lives. No exceptions, no exclusions.

         What is required is a conscious commitment on the part of all of us to acknowledge the core of who we are and operate out of it at all times. Not simply when it is convenient, always. It is not complicated and it is going to require merciless discipline on everyone’s part.

It is because we have at the present moment everybody claiming the right of conscience without going through any discipline whatsoever that there is so much untruth being delivered to a bewildered world.

– Mahatma Gandhi

         People who are Grounded, know that they have the capacity to love, are powerful enough to make good choices and don’t damage other people. All of the damage in our society comes from ungrounded people who do not feel well about themselves. The young men who did the shooting in Littleton, Colorado’s Columbine High School were part of a group everyone treated as outcasts, isolated from the rest of the student body. Grounded people don’t shoot their classmates. Grounded people don’t rape children or anyone else. Grounded people don’t beat their spouses. Grounded people don’t engage in road rage. Grounded people do not mock or verbally assault their peers. Grounded people don’t create puppet governments with tyrants as leaders and ignore or worse abuse the rest of the country’s population. Grounded people do not allow tens of thousands of people to die needlessly each week of hunger, starvation and persistent hunger. Grounded people don’t kill anyone. Grounded people don’t damage others. Period.