Radford Noone Research Service

climbing your family tree

Mighty Drofdar

Processing Information: Finding Order in the Chaos

 

 

 

             John’s son had just committed suicide. It didn’t take long for me to hear the whispers at the family history center. The family history center was full of sadness as these rough and rugged men were dealing with the ultimate of tragedies. John was having a hard time holding himself together and would cry at the drop of a hat. His son was twenty years old. What made John’s plight so universal was that he was raked with the guilt of not being there. He played over and over in his mind that if he had not screwed up that he could have somehow saved his little buddy. John’s anguish and tears was a reminder to all the men that they too are helpless to intervene on the behalf of their loved ones in trouble.

             What made matters more pointed was that John is not a wimpy man. He’s in his early forties, tall, muscular, and has an authoritative voice that can intimidate the meek. He isn’t going to put up with anybody’s foolishness if he’s not in the mood. Yet there he was falling apart and looping the “what if’s” of his life as though somehow that would bring him some answers. What his son did throughout his own shattering was to keep diaries of his thoughts and feelings. His last entry was the day before his suicide. For good or bad, John now had copies of those diaries and he was forced to go into emotional places that he never had a reason to before.

             What his son did by keeping his journals was to provide John with a gift and an example. John decided to follow in his sons footsteps and to process his thoughts and feelings by writing chapters. His main topics that he needed to process was his relationship to his family and to spirituality. These twinned topics would be threaded throughout every one of his chapters. He was learning to process his feelings in the most brutal and honest way anybody could imagine.

             I couldn’t know what was best for John, but his essay writings were his attempt to come to terms with his loss. He was not only trying to rebuild his faith and his knowledge in a prison environment, but in the middle of his own personal nightmare. Within a couple of months of losing his son, he was asked to give a talk in the LDS church service on Sunday about caring, setting the example, and tying that into his son’s suicide. He wanted to know if I wanted to hear his talk. Of course I said I’d love to hear it. In the LDS Church, there is no professional clergy so people in the congregation are assigned to give talks. He knows I’m not a Mormon but he like the rest of the guys just don’t seem to care one bit.

             He sat down across from me with the bat cave desk in between us. He likes to lean on the desk as he’s talking to me. It was just him, Brad and myself. He started reading his church talk that he had written. A little way through it a female volunteer walked in to ask a question. She was invited to stay and hear the church talk. As I certainly expected, about half way through it, John started crying. I felt for him. However, what was most interesting and reflective about the whole incident was how the other two people in the room reacted. They were obviously touched. After it was finished they said the right things from the heart and went on their way. I on the other hand wondered why I couldn’t just say the right thing and be on my way. I thought about that for days. Then the revelation hit me square between the eyes.

             My epiphany was that I don’t process information on the spot. I just don’t develop my conclusions in the moment. I’m not sure I knew that about myself before. It wasn’t that I wasn’t touched by John’s written talk. I was, but not immediately. Where the other two people in the room processed their feeling on the spot, I had to wait until I got in my car that evening and started the drive home and begun unraveling my prison shift experiences. My conclusions were that yes, I felt really bad that John’s son killed himself. Yes, I felt bad that John was helpless to do anything about it, and yes, I thought his talk ranked up there with the top ten talks I’ve ever heard in my life. His talk was raw, real, and from the heart. Still I couldn’t process that in the moment as the peer pressure in the room was requiring me too.

             When I came back the next week I was able to sit down with him and tell him how much I respected and appreciated his talk. He shared with me how it had gone that Sunday in the chapel when he gave the talk. We were able to meet in a common emotional place where we both understood the profoundness of the message he was giving at church.  However, it took me days to get there. That’s how I process information. I break it down into bit size pieces and process each at a time, savoring each bite. I see the pattern threading through the storyline, and I have a thought out conclusion at the end of my explorations. Even if the conclusion is that there isn’t a conclusion -- at least that is a conclusion. That way I get to savor the experience I just had and mine it for the depths that I need.

             My prison encounters have taught me that whether or not we find the patterns in the chaos depends a lot on how we process information. This has been played out before my eyes in my relationship with Adrian. He’s a short, stocky and plump man in his mid-forties, with dark hair and a few missing teeth. The volunteers who know him always describe him as “sweet” and that’s not meant as an insult by any means. He’s just a kind person. Now whether he was “sweet” when he was a meth addict on the streets, I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that the person now emerging is a good and humble person that I enjoy being around. I’m sure this personality was locked inside him somewhere, but as with all drug abusers the real them is submerged and replaced by the addiction. Meth is a particularly nasty drug. Maybe what makes Adrian so symbolic to me is that with the help of the prison literacy program, he is reprogramming his brain and he is learning all over again how to process information.

             Once Adrian decided he could trust me, each week he would tell me his story little-by-little. He said that he didn’t want to hide anything from me because he respects me. Naturally he doesn’t owe me, and he doesn’t have to tell me anything. Yet this was important to him, so I listened. He started with, “If I don’t tell you something it’s not because I’m hiding anything. I’m just not able to vocalize it from inside my mind.” What does one say to that other than, “OK when you’re ready.” He didn’t realize how insightful this self-realization was. Yet I did. He consciously understood what was happening to him and he was actively engaged in the healing process. This is much more self-aware than most people I know on the outside are.

The prison had told him that it could take up to a year of being clean for his brain to start reprogramming itself. I could literally tell the week that started to happened, and it was about a year as they said. I was talking with one of the guys in the bat cave and all of a sudden Adrian’s head popped through the door (not his body just his head), and he made a joke and popped back out. He was happy and appeared very clear. That happened a few other times that day. He was just checking in on me. That was all. I told him later that I recognized what had happened and that I liked the new Adrian. He smiled with this huge grin and said, “So do I.” So through Adrian’s eyes I’ve been able to see how he’s learning to process information and how he’s finding order in the chaos that is life. It’s been a very spiritual experience for me to be a part of this.

Each week in between our discussions of his Welsh family history, he will bring up a situation that he encountered during the week and will ask my perspective on it. Then I get the privilege of watching him process the information. Sometimes it takes a week (sounds like me), but he does process it well. One particularly insightful conversation was when he said, “I think I’m mad at my mother but I don’t know if I should be. Something really weird happened when I was talking to her over the phone.” I enquired as to what had transpired. “My mother said the reason I’m slow is because she didn’t want me when she was pregnant with me and she tried to lose me and it caused brain damage in me. That really hurt. She has never said anything like that before. It’s just so unlike her. She’s a church going woman who would never, ever, say anything like that.”

He then went on to recount how when it happened he was so upset that he discussed it with a few inmates and all they could do was ask him if he was suicidal over the whole thing. It certainly didn’t take him long to realize that he was asking the wrong people for a perspective. I asked him how old his mother was. “She’s in her early seventies,” he replied. My simple observation, that I shared with him, was that maybe she’s suffering from mild dementia.  I introduced him to what dementia was and how my father in his eighties developed it in the nursing home. I gave him some war stories about the really strange things that he did. My mother still talks about some of these odd behaviors not knowing whether to burst out laughing or break down crying. Adrian stopped and processed all that and said that could be true because when he called her on it, she didn’t remember saying it. I suggested that maybe he should clue his brother, who looks after her, in on the situation, and that his brother really needs to know if this is the case. He has since done that.

             The miracle of this conversation is that as Adrian is learning to process information, he’s remembering how to weigh information as he hears it. He would tell me over the weeks how much my suggestion meant to him and that it has wiped out any anger he may have felt towards her. He has since noticed that she has done other little things that just aren’t quite right. In processing what he sees, Adrian’s now able to find a common thread from which he can identify the patterns in the chaos. The miracle is unfolding right before my eyes.

             As Adrian unfolds, I reflect on how I’ve learned to process information. It’s a tough one because most of us never take the time to just be still long enough to think about it. With the guys, I’m learning very quickly to look for the silence between when my thoughts occur. There I find the answers for myself and the method to deliver them with compassion either to myself or to the men when needed.

             Maybe the core revelation I learned about how we process information is symbolized in the faces of the guys themselves. Whether John or Adrian, they are on a journey of self-discovery. In this aspect they are no different than I am. The inmates somewhere along their life attached to thoughts and put them into action, which is why they are in prison. They didn’t process their thinking to the point of letting go of a thought. They simply acted. Whether a sex offender, murderer, addict, corporate criminal, gang banger, or Neo-Nazi -- none of them listened for the silence between when the thought occurs and the mouth opens or when the thought is born and the action occurs. Many are no doubt learning this hard lesson and very effectively. Others will never get it.

             My task is to understand if I get it or not. Do I process information in a healthy manner? Are my conclusions at the end of my explorations compassionate or self-serving? Certainly I can be as bad as anyone in prison even if only in my mind. I think if we were to all be honest with ourselves we would understand that we all can at times. Not all the time, but at least here and there. Honesty in how I process information can sometimes be brutal, but it at least helps to keep me clean in my thinking and in my actions at the end of the day.