Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  A sense of isolation was another symptom, and it should be obvious by now that I felt for years like I was in this alone, really up until Sophie came into my life. My father isolated me physically and socially. I could never say that I had a best friend or a circle of friends growing up. By the time I landed with the under-18 program in Ann Arbor or with the IceDogs in Mississauga, I might have been able to spend more time with my teammates or with people I met in school, but I also felt separate from them, like we had so little in common in our lives that they could never really know me. I don’t want to say that I felt lonely, because that only sounds like self-pity or pleading for sympathy. Still, when my father would try to frame our lives as Us against the World, I felt like he was going into the battle on his own and I was doing the same.

  The psychologist also told me that people with PTSD struggle to feel for other people in any sort of empathetic or sympathetic way. That again rang true for me. I didn’t understand what people went through, going right back to grade school when I’d see kids crying over failing a test or some other disappointment. It was still a problem with Sophie—as much as she knew what I had gone through growing up, she would become frustrated when I didn’t feel other people’s pain. There’s no easy way to say what is at the root of the lack of empathy on the part of people with PTSD—it might be that everyone else’s pain seems so small by comparison to theirs, or that so much energy and attention is spent on their own traumas that they have nothing left to give to another’s. For me, my attitude might have been “You’re on your own.” That by itself is cold and not going to win you friends, but it’s a lot more dangerous in a partner, a spouse or a parent.

  Looking at it on those terms, I understood even better the stakes of healing: as much as I was in this for my own emotional and psychological well-being, I was also doing it for Sophie’s and for our sons’.

  * * *

  Although writing everything down was hard, there was more to the treatment. The psychologist had me go through a bunch of different exercises. In one I had to talk through traumatic incidents blow by blow and we’d work through them in reverse order—like slowly rewinding scenes in a film, back to the first frame. Talking to me in an almost hypnotic cadence, he had me doing relaxation exercises. In doing that, I had to think through my father’s abuse in painful detail. I realized after doing it awhile that this backward history was a way of simulating the undoing of the trauma—starting out as the wounded and working your way back to the person you were before, the person you would have been if you had managed to avoid the abuse and violation. And when I did this I found a different Patrick O’Sullivan. In a way, I was able to reclaim a childhood I had been denied by my parents.

  I don’t take much away from talk-therapy sessions, which might be part of the reason that I’d resisted the attempts at counseling before and which was definitely a major reason why I liked the work in Santa Monica. Talk feels empty to me. It feels weightless. I know that some people like it and even swear by it. I felt that it was a question of personal preference for me. I don’t like to talk about the incidents from my youth with anyone, even Sophie, because I don’t see how anything in words really helps a relationship—I don’t see how anyone can really understand that way. It might be that over the years I used words to cover up the abuse I suffered and my father was able to talk his way past any suspicions. Words had failed to help before. Words are easy to miss. And in the end, talk therapy is based on the idea that the person you are talking can help you. That wasn’t what I needed. I needed to be able to help myself—to arm myself with an awareness and a method for helping myself when there wasn’t someone there to talk to.

  I knew that talk therapy worked for some people who have psychological issues, and I assumed that it didn’t work for me because of personal preference. I didn’t like the process and didn’t feel I was going to make any progress out of it. As it turns out, it wasn’t necessarily personal at all: the numbers show that talk therapy doesn’t work for a lot of people with PTSD, maybe most. It’s not considered one of the more effective treatments. That makes a lot of sense when you step back and look at it—especially when you know research findings about traumatic memory. Experts say that traumatic memories are stored in different areas of the brain than other personal memories, a part of the brain that isn’t connected to speech. There’s no sure reason why it happens that way, but experts have some theories that make sense: traumatic memories take shape when fear for your safety has kicked in, when adrenaline is rushing, when you’re focused on surviving, so they take a different shape. For whatever reason, traumatic memories aren’t there to be reached and to be pulled out—they’re not consciously recallable, not controllable. They’re spontaneous, bubbling up involuntarily, falling out when you don’t expect them to—flashbacks triggered by something experienced in the moment. In my case, my flashbacks didn’t go to a moment but to hundreds or even thousands of them.

  I knew that there was going to be no way that I was going to be able to work my way through a checklist of everything that I had been through, a checklist of every issue that came out of my youth, a checklist of every situation that I was going to find myself in. That might work for some people who have some other sort of specific traumatic event, but not in my case. It had just been too many things over too much time to narrow it down like that—it wasn’t like a bull seeing a cape in the ring or the bell ringing for Pavlov’s dog. It was going to be a lot of things, and many of them weren’t obvious in any way. I’d have to be able to recognize when I was reacting and work backward to a cause. Recognizing when I was upset and irritated was the easiest part—for me, it had always actually been a physical feeling, something that might only start with a knot in the gut and an anxious state. Identifying the root causes, though, was like trying to sort out a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of your life complicated by the fact that some of the pieces are missing. Just the ability to identify them, however, neutralizes their effect—you can see each piece for what it is and nothing more.

  Some specific things set people with PTSD on edge—the psychologist called them “triggers.” I had to be able to identify them or, more importantly, I had to learn how to identify them. If I laid out all my triggers here, this book would run more than a thousand pages. But a couple of them are enough to give you an idea of the process.

  One example is the smell of grass. In keeping notes of what looks like dull, everyday routine, I could see that I often had a bad day after doing some chores around the house. I dug down deeper and saw that it didn’t happen on rainy days. I dug deeper still and picked out a very specific trend: things went bad for me every time I smelled freshly cut grass. It was no big jump to make a connection with my past. My father had been particular about keeping up appearances of the places we had rented, and he had made me cut the grass to his specific demands. If my lawn cutting didn’t satisfy him—and it rarely did—he would beat me. He had effectively conditioned me to be prepared for a physical beating every time I mowed the lawn. Knowing this, the next time I was able to neutralize the reaction. It still takes a bit of a conscious effort, and it might for a long time. It might never be automatic. But awareness of history is the closest thing that I can have to erasing it.

  Another example is interrupted sleep. In keeping notes, I noticed that I was really irritable whenever I woke up during the night. I also noticed that it didn’t matter what the cause was—it could be the sound of thunder or anything else outside the house, it could be getting up to change a diaper or to go to the bathroom. Any sort of interruption would leave me too agitated to fall back asleep easily. This would have been easy to write off as a sleep disorder. But again, with some work, going back to see the patterns in my life, I was able to get at the root cause: those times when I was in grade school and my father would come home from work or the bar at three in the morning, wake me up for a workout and lock me out of the house in my pajamas. Again, when I wasn’t able to sleep through the night, I had been subcon
sciously and even physically conditioned by abuse. Just knowing what was behind the feeling made getting back to sleep easier or at least possible.

  To say that there are dozens more triggers like this is no exaggeration. It would be on the low side. Of course, some things were more obvious than these. It was no big jump to figure out the source of nausea and anger when I’d be around someone heating up baked beans. And I’m sure that over the rest of my life, I’ll be identifying still more triggers. The key is to recognize the feeling triggered and then put the pieces of the puzzle together as much as I can.

  I know that I’m going to have good days and bad days. I have to enjoy the good days as much as I can and blunt the impact of the bad ones, dial them back. Sometimes I’ll have that feeling of being triggered but not be able to make a connection—still, just knowing that it was something can help. I try to remember everything from that day so if the feeling and the situation come up again, I’m halfway to the point of piecing together another trigger.

  * * *

  Fact is, given my history, I have to count myself as one of the lucky ones. The odds are long against a survivor of abuse having a happy and productive life as an adult. Abuse in youth raises the incidence of a slew of problems in adult life. You are more likely to have alcohol and drug issues. You are more likely to suffer from depression and other mental issues. You are more likely to land in jail. You are more likely to end your own life. That I even have the prospect of a happy life means that I’m beating those odds. I’m lucky to be able to afford the help that I found in Santa Monica. I’m also lucky that I’m able to afford maintenance help from a psychologist I see every few months near my home in Florida. I’m lucky that I have been able to cut the night terrors down to one or two a month since I’ve been in therapy. I’m lucky that the work in therapy has helped me so far, because some do all the work and see no benefit—in the worst cases, revisiting their traumas in therapy hurts them, deepening their despair. I’m lucky that I found something that works for me—it might not work for all others with PTSD, but they might find other effective treatments. I only hope that everyone who suffers from PTSD seeks out help and finds something that works.

  part three

  38

  HOW IT HAPPENED

  When I tell my story, people come away thinking, How could his father do such things to him? At some level you might presume that his motives are clear and uncomplicated. Clearly, he wanted me to play in the NHL and thought that, left to my own devices, my own desire to make it wasn’t enough. Clearly, he thought the ends justified any means. Clearly, he was fueled by desperation and lacked the skills to build any sort of life for himself, never mind provide for a family.

  You might make a few jumps when you get below the pragmatic and into his psyche. You can make his motives as complicated as you want. That he wanted payback. That he wanted to win in a game that had chewed him up and spit him out. That he wanted to be in the spotlight in a game that had exiled him to its deep, dark minors.

  For years, questions from people exhausted me and angered me. These weren’t questions that I asked myself. To be polite, I offered the bare minimum of answers. I’m inured to it. For one thing, it happened, and thankfully, it’s over. For another, I think that my father is mentally ill. That he was in some sort of denial or delusion was clear in his interviews in ESPN The Magazine and on The Fifth Estate, in the letters he wrote to me, in the accounts of people who have talked to him in the years since and in his attitude when I saw him in Peoria or when Jed Ortmeyer spoke to him on the phone in Binghamton.

  These, though, explain why my father did these things. Not how. That’s the question I’ve spent more time thinking about, and it’s a question that’s easy to answer, at least on its face. How could he do all those things to me, getting away with it for years? He could abuse me because no one stopped him.

  It had always been a puzzle to me: even when I was young, as young as eight or nine years old, I understood that my father was unstable. Looking back on it as an adult, I have to presume that his instability had to be plain to others. Crazy was the word that people who knew him threw around, whether it was those who played with him in the minors or at University of Toronto, where he was called Crazy John by his teammates. My father could be a stealthy operator—he could work a con like the birth certificate deal at the U.S. Under-15 Festival. He might be able to fool people on first impression, but they were able to figure out who he was before too long. Eventually, they could get a better read of him.

  And they could get a clear read of his son.

  I was his hostage. That’s how it is with a lot of abuse victims. But unlike others, I was a hostage who was out in public. I wasn’t locked away and unseen. I played with hundreds of kids and for dozens of coaches. Over the years, hundreds of parents and officials were on the other side of the glass. A lot of people watched me, and watched me more closely than the average kid. That’s just the case for any exceptional athlete. My father moved me from one team to the next, from one city or town to another every season. Still, I was around a group of kids and adults three or four times a week, often more. I was around them over the course of months. I was around them for hours at a time. If I had an acne breakout, they would have noticed. If I had a haircut, they’d have noticed. If I came to the arena with new equipment, they’d notice. How could they not have known something was wrong? Even if my abuse wasn’t in plain sight, what signs could they have picked up on? And why didn’t they follow up?

  That my father abused me couldn’t have gone unsuspected. It isn’t if people knew, but rather how much they knew. And knowing what they did, it’s also why these people did not act.

  For years, I thought that breaking away from my father freed me for a journey in hockey. That was how I saw myself, as a hockey player. There’s not a lot of introspection on retrospection in the game, not for a player. You play a game and when it’s over you look ahead to the next game; one season over goes on to the next one. After hockey, though, I realized that I had to dedicate myself to being a husband and then a father. At that point I started to think of my life experiences in a bigger context. I still had one question that stood in the way of a greater peace of mind: How did nothing stop my father’s abuse from happening to me?

  I set out to answer that question.

  39

  SCHNURR

  I tracked down Mike Schnurr, our coach with the Falcons back when I was ten playing with twelve-year-old kids. Schnurr wasn’t hard to find. He had worked for a food company back when he coached us and was still there all these years later, now as the chief executive. I cold-called him, and when he picked up he seemed distracted, blindsided for sure. I told him that I was working on a memoir, doing some research, calling up teammates and coaches from my time in youth programs. He told me his day was full of meetings and scheduled calls and he didn’t have fifteen minutes to spare. He asked if any questions could wait until the next day, so we set up a time in the afternoon. He said that it would give him time to think through his “reservoir of memories.” It seemed like he was opting for executive caution, figuring out in advance where he would tread and where he wouldn’t.

  When I called back the next day, Schnurr had not only considered what he was comfortable saying but also tried to game out my motives for calling him. He had thought through what had happened all those years before and what he wanted to say. He didn’t have a prepared list but seemed to work from notes that he had set down. He started out by preparing me for disappointment. “I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say,” he told me. “I know the story that came out after, but to me, your father was a good guy.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” I said.

  True. Schnurr and my father got along, maybe as well as my father got along with anyone at any arena. Schnurr seemed to like the character my father presented, the rough diamond, the hard-ass who looked at everything as Us against the World and wouldn’t back down. Schnurr also seemed to like m
y father because he wasn’t like the other players’ parents, parents who came to him only when they had problems with his coaching. “I got to know John better than most parents,” Schnurr said. “He would hang around the dressing room and talk to me. He had ideas about what we could do on the ice, good ideas. He had a background in hockey, and that set him apart from 99 percent of the parents who never played the game.”

  Schnurr vividly recalled the first time he talked to my father. “John called up when we were having tryouts late that summer. He said he recently moved into the area from Toronto and he had a son he wanted to bring [to the tryouts]. I said that was okay. Then he said that his son was ten years old and I told him, ‘Sure, you can bring him out, but we don’t really have kids that young making the team.’ Two years up. We didn’t have players like that, but John seemed confident that his son could make the team. Very confident.”

  Schnurr stopped to laugh, his way of acknowledging that my father never lacked for confidence. He seemed to like that in my father.

  “I didn’t think that there was anything unusual about John . . . just how he’d take it to the next level,” Schnurr said. “I remember there was a rink over in Mount Clemens under construction, about 80 percent along the way, but before the lights and fixtures were installed. I went there one day at lunchtime to meet the arena manager, about arranging some ice time when the building was finished, and I saw John and you. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ And he said, ‘I brought Patrick up here during his lunch hour from school to shoot some pucks.’ I was just laughing inside. That’s really taking it to the next level. After a while [we realized] he had an obsession with you making the NHL. That was his motivation. I didn’t see anything out of line. He was going to do whatever it took, legally or illegally, to give you the best chance to get to that level. And you know what? He did. He did a good job of making you a player, didn’t he?”