A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention (43 page)

Tell the truth.

To yourself, foremost, but also to your friends and family, to the world around you. This is not to say that everyone has the same truth, or that there is a universal truth. There are personal truths, big and small. Do I have an addiction? Am I acting in a way that is consistent with what I preach? Am I abusive? Am I a victim? Where are the disconnects in my life? Where is the deception, or self-deception?

Honesty can be hard, obviously. That’s in part because it can be so hard to even see the points of conflict or dissonance. We have powerful defense mechanisms—personal prejudice, shame, societal messages, and, yes, technology. But all of those, once recognized, can be overcome. And once someone finds the capacity to tell the truth, finding the truth, and expressing it, becomes much easier.

REGGIE COULDN’T STAND THE
idea of letting his family down. He couldn’t miss going on a mission. So he lied about Cammi.

When he got into the wreck, he thought he hydroplaned. Then his mother told him that his brother had instructed him not to say anything else to the police. And then he saw his dad’s terror that he might go to jail. His lawyer said not to say anything. He’d hydroplaned, right? That’s what he’d told them. He didn’t remember texting. He was just driving.

If he pleaded guilty, or admitted something he and others had convinced him he hadn’t done, or couldn’t be proved, he’d again put his mission in jeopardy, he’d risk letting down his family.

WHEN DON LINTON WAS
a boy, a time in one’s life when innocence and truth should go hand in hand, he was a walking, living zombie of a lie. How could it be any other way?

The center of life was the Church, the beacon for all good, but a member in good standing had raped him repeatedly. There was no one to tell. Maybe he couldn’t even see the difference between truth and lies anymore. He even wondered who was at fault: him or the monster?

He couldn’t tell the Church. He had trouble even telling himself; he got straight A’s, he put on a face. And so it stayed trapped inside him, poisoning him.

In school, he says, “I lived a facade.

“I wanted to be liked so I made myself likable. I had the outward appearance of somebody who should be loved. Everybody thought I was smart. I was popular. But when I left school, I left the ability to impress. All of a sudden, the crutch was gone.”

He spiraled and spiraled. He took heavy medications to pave over the dissonance. Anything but the truth.

TERRYL WAS DIFFERENT, PERHAPS
the exception that proves the rule. Somehow, blessed by some spark, she started telling the truth, or trying to, at a very young age, when all the influences were telling her to go a different way. It wasn’t just that she wrote her truth in her diary. She poured out Danny’s booze, and she risked beatings to do it. But it was more complex than that. She often told an outward lie, willing herself to be peppy in church, at school, using positive affirmation, which turns out not to be at all the same thing as telling the truth.

Positive affirmation is a temporary fix, a surface measure. Reggie kept telling himself he could get through it, trying to man up, and endure.

“You have to tell your emotional truth,” says Susan Forward, a therapist and the best-selling author of
Toxic Parents
. This can mean being honest about your own behaviors or emotions, or confronting truths with people who harmed you, as Terryl did, and Linton did, and still struggles to do.

“You have to confront,” she explains. Yourself or others. “You have to say: ‘This is what you did to me, and this is how I felt at the time.’

“You may be damaged, but you can come out of the sewer and you can come out okay,” Forward says. The value isn’t merely for the person who was hurt, or who hurt others. In order to heal a family, the next generation, or society, she argues, “It’s vital to make the connecting thread between the past and the present.”

To Forward, Terryl is a prime example. “Her kids are the next generation, and she had the courage and awareness to change and say: ‘My kids will not go through what I went through.’ ”

Of Terryl, Forward says: “She is a hero.”

That said, Forward believes it is naive to think that all people can survive trauma, as great as those experienced by, say, Terryl and Linton—or, in a different way, Reggie.

They were just lucky to be wired to endure and overcome. “Why is one person who didn’t have such a bad childhood so ill, and why is another person who had such a horrendous childhood able to function at such a relatively high level? My conclusion is: A lot of it has to do with the way we’re wired,” Forward says.

TERRYL GAVE A LOT
of credit to her religion, support from the Church, her abiding belief. Reggie feels the same way. In the end, religion was a great aid to both, but not a substitute for the lessons learned from hard experience. In the end, both recovered a sense of moral authority from the ashes of those experiences, which allowed them to challenge the world in a way that even those with the deepest abiding beliefs might not have been able to do.

As to the role of religion in healing, the experts I talked with feel divided. Forward, who has run fifteen thousand therapy groups, says: “A lot of people turn to religion for the strength they don’t have inside them. They turn to God as the ultimate therapist. For some people, that is comforting. But I don’t know what they do when it lets them down.”

On the other hand, Marc Galanter, who founded the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse at New York University, has done extensive research into the power of Alcholics Anonymous. He says that a crucial aspect of breaking the bonds of addiction and finding inner peace owes to “a commitment to a higher power and spiritual awakening.”

He believes that, over time, neuroscience will be able to validate some of the benefits of such an experience. It’s not the same thing as religion being true—that is a different question—but more speaks to the value of providing something people truly believe, at least in the case of addiction. “These cultic movements and AA can achieve dramatic and rapid transformation,” he says, speaking very broadly of religious movements.

Simplistically put, religion works for some. Not for others.

RELIGION DID NOT HELP
Linton. In a way, it was a hindrance, at least the institution of the Church.

In the end, Linton feels he could only tell himself the truth because he met someone who would help him hear it. When introduced to his eventual wife, he says, she saw something in him, on him—the suffering. He began to allude to what was happening, to that idea that something had happened. And then, he says, as the truth oozed out, she was there to help him own it.

“It takes love,” he says.

“It takes somebody who understands why you’re being so flaky, why you’re worried about leaving your kids with the Boy Scouts, why you’re sobbing over your sister’s death twenty years after the fact. It takes someone who can love you even though you look like a living skeleton,” he says, referring to his distraught state when he first met his wife. He credits her with saving him. “It takes this kind of unconditional love—somebody seeing this value in you, even when they know the truth.”

Linton sees considerable similarities between his own capacity to rebound and Reggie’s ability. “This kid has people who love him unconditionally. They understand what he did was a horrible, stupid, act,” he observes. “But his parents absolutely adore him and realize that Reggie’s not a bad kid.”

Linton goes further in drawing parallels among himself and Terryl and Reggie. “Throughout the world, a lot of what’s needed is to just bring public awareness to what is real—whether sex abuse, or childhood abuse, or texting on the highway. It’s easy for me to compare it,” he says. “Even though with men it’s different—the state of mind is different—the result is not that much different. You destroy a life, and even if you don’t destroy a life, you maim the person.”

Prosecutors, he says, lose cases all the time around childhood abuse, around issues where it is hard for people to acknowledge the reality of the terrible things people can do to one another. “There’s still a lot of denial out there.”

There’s another connection between Reggie and Terryl: addiction. For Danny, it had been booze. In Reggie’s case, it’s impossible to conclusively say he was addicted to technology. But he did find the activity almost irresistible, so much so he did it behind the wheel, maybe to fill a social void, and feel connected. For many others, particularly since technology has gotten more powerful, the signs of compulsion are even stronger. If the electronic gadgets are not used in fair moderation, they can take over a person, maybe not to the extent that drugs overtook Danny, but certainly in ways that can change who they are, the kind of parent or friend they become, how they learn, how they attend to the world.

TELLING THE TRUTH TO
others is often the easier part, the confrontation. The harder part usually is telling the truth to yourself. That owes partly to another of our great survival mechanisms that can be problematic when relied upon in excess. It is our capacity for self-deception.

By way of example, if people really thought about how dangerous it is to drive a car (it’s the most dangerous thing they do on a regular basis, given the likelihood of a crash and a fatality), they might never get on the road, unless they put at bay some of the realities.

Dr. Atchley says that, at any given moment, a person really only sees a tiny fraction of space, but we allow ourselves to believe we see a wider scope than we actually do. “It’s a grand illusion,” he says.

“So much of our brain is built to shield us from knowledge that we are far less in control than we think we are,” he adds. “One of the brain’s most amazing abilities is for self-deception. So when there’s a disconnect between attitudes and behaviors, the brain changes attitude rather than changing behaviors.”

That self-delusion becomes more powerful and perverted in the case of addiction, argues Dr. Greenfield.

“It’s the nature of addiction. It’s self-cauterizing, self-soothing, dopaminergically numbing. There’s no reason to change if it’s working—and it
is
working. People do drugs—and I include the Internet—because they work. They numb you,” he says. And they keep working until some external force causes you to awaken to a problem—a parent, a coworker, a spouse, or something tragic, like a fatal wreck. “When it comes to addictions, whether alcohol or technology or the Internet, it’s almost one hundred percent motivated by an external force.”

“There has to be a walk in front of a mirror, even an accidental walk,” he says. For instance, he explains, you could be gaining weight “and walk past the mirror and get a glimpse of yourself even if you’re not looking at it, and that starts a cascade of self-analysis.”

In the case of technology, phone use or Internet addiction, he says he hears lots of versions of a story in which someone loses the phone for a day, or the power goes out. “They are now juxtaposing their typical day against this new feeling, what it feels like to not have cortisol going through the roof,” he says. “That’s when they hold the mirror up to themselves.”

THERE ARE FAR MORE
differences than similarities between what Reggie experienced and what Terryl endured in her terrible childhood, or what Linton suffered at the hands of an abuser. But they all went on to contribute, to fight for causes, to compensate and grow through a kind of service.

To Forward, this owes to their abilities to have confronted the truth, expressed it, become genuine—in a way that isn’t possible through platitude or mere positive affirmation. “I genuinely believe that people who overcome these things have a special place, a core courage, a spirit of integrity that no one else can get to,” she observes. “I can’t explain it clinically. I just understand it in my gut.

“Wounds are an enormous sense of wisdom, if you use them.”

NOT EVERYONE HAS A
trauma to confront. But many people have half-buried truths, or small lies, or disconnects, little bits of dissonance in how they live their lives. Are we attending to the world—our families and partners, coworkers, friends, jobs, and ourselves—in a way that is consistent with our stated values?

That is how all of this connects to technology, and how we use it in our daily lives. Reggie’s story, in the end, isn’t just warning us not to use technology behind the wheel. It is screaming out to us as a society: pay attention. Know the risk technology poses in your life, and tame it.

Sure, there are lots of little rules, actions that a person might do to limit technology, like turning off the function on a computer or phone that flashes an instant update every time there is a new email or Facebook status update. Or by putting the phone in the trunk of the car when you drive, thereby saving yourself from fending off the impulse that assaults the bottom-up attention, which sends a desperate signal to the frontal lobe and interrupts the driving task.

The journey that travels from Donders to Helmholtz, through Broadbent and Treisman, to Posner and Strayer, tells us a few basic things: That the brain is limited, lacks bottomless capacity, and isn’t particularly fast relative to computer technology. The technological advances defined by laws of Moore and Metcalfe got married and long since overtook what our brains can handle. And we know now that their union also presents the challenge of addiction, or, at least, serious compulsion. Even allowing for the fact that we can know these devices challenge our limitations, sometimes they are so compelling we can’t stop using them.

To ignore this science is to engage in self-deception, to tell ourselves a lie.

And it gets supported by neuroscience.

REMEMBER THE CHOCOLATE CAKE
study, the one that looked at the nutrition choices made by someone asked to remember numbers? It showed that a person’s decision making is impinged by something as simple as a modest memory task.

The choices someone makes—and the clarity of their mind—directly relate to how much information the person is trying to juggle. There are a bunch of studies that support, directly and indirectly, the significance of not being overloaded with information.