his shipping industry job. The employer fired back with legal documents arguing that the elder Grisham’s stress was due entirely to his son Jack, whose outrageous troublemaking had constantly weighed on Grisham.
There could be no doubt that Jack had caused his parents considerable grief. Jack’s mother affirmed that when she confessed to him years later, “Not a night went by that I wasn’t praying you wouldn’t get killed.”
Alone among the family’s five children, Jack had been arrested—taken into custody at least two dozen times, in fact—on charges ranging from vandalism and assault, to throwing a brick through a cop car window and incitement to riot. As the lead singer for a notorious West Coast punk rock band, Jack defiantly called himself an anarchist. He considered violence, drug use, and debauchery badges of honor. He painted his face pasty white, wore cowboy boots with sharpened spurs, and generally acted like a maniac during his band’s punk rock performances. He intentionally cultivated an aura of glowering menace.
Through all of the years of senseless mayhem, including having their home shot at and his car firebombed, Jack’s parents had stood by him, if only passively. They never kicked him out of the house. To this day, Jack marvels at that, though part of the reason may have been his father’s paralyzing alcoholism, which rendered the family dysfunctional on many different levels.
Within a year of his father’s death, Jack began trying to get sober from his drug and alcohol dependencies. He had simply grown tired of being out of control, and he had a girlfriend nursing a serious drug problem of her own. He wanted to get sober with her. Given the rampant drug abuse within the music circles he traveled, getting sober was a radical thing to do. Instead of thumbing his nose at government and other institutions of society, as his song lyrics so frequently did, he was now rejecting a central lifestyle tenet of the subculture within which he had become a role model. His friends thought he had either gone crazy or was pulling yet another prank on everyone.
His sobriety came in fits and starts. His wife, the girl he had gotten sober with, relapsed and left him, but he continued going to 12-Step meetings. Jack finally broke free of drugs and alcohol for good on January 8, 1989. He has been sober ever since.
“For me, when I got sober, it was like a tidal wave had come and I was swept along with it,” he explained to me several decades into his recovery.
I’m not really seeing what’s happening, and the tidal wave dropped me off, and as the water recedes, I start to see things. Like, I’m in my twenties and living with my mother. The water sucks back some more. I’ve got a daughter I haven’t been seeing. It sucks back some more. I am being blamed for my father’s death. It keeps receding, more and more, and I am able to see all of the damage my behavior has caused. It was like a coroner’s blanket being pulled back slowly from over a frightening mess. I had started to wake up, and my head began to clear.
Though some people tried to convince Jack it wasn’t his fault his father had died at age fifty-five, Jack wasn’t buying it. He said:
I got the full realization of what I had done to my father. I saw my role in his death. I had to accept my role, take responsibility, and stop playing the victim. My sobriety demanded it. Justice demanded it. I couldn’t blame anything anymore, not my anger, not my behavior, not my father’s alcoholism, not on our screwed-up society, not on police brutality, not on an untrustworthy government—not on any of the other targets I used to sing about on stage with my band. I realized how I had created all of the negativity I was wallowing in, and my own selfishness had created my own demons.
Not long into recovery Jack visited his father’s grave for the first time since the burial. He stood there alone, a stream of painful memories washing over him, and had the longest conversation of his life with his father. “I told him how sorry I was. I told him how I had hurt him and added to his stress and pain. I told him how I had changed. I was in recovery. I had a bright future ahead of me. I told him I hoped he could be proud of me now.”
With recovery, Jack was reborn into another way of thinking. He took responsibility for all parts of his life. He became a new kind of role model. He still plays music, but without any of the other lifestyle toxins and attachments from his previous life. He has become a clinical hypnotherapist and an inspirational speaker performing on a new stage—before hundreds of people at a time—extolling the life-changing miracles of recovery from addiction.
WHAT MAKING AMENDS DOES
When someone goes into recovery from an addiction, that person should take an inventory of who they really are. Everyone on the planet could benefit from doing this periodically, regardless of whether they are in recovery from an addiction or not, because that examination prepares you for a journey down the road of self-transformation toward becoming a more contented person.
This self-examination involves compiling a detailed checklist, much like what retail stores do in their annual inventory of merchandise, so you know what resources are available to you and what is missing. First, you must identify and understand the primary problem in your life, which could be just about anything, not just an addiction. Second, you need to develop an understanding of your responsibility in having created that problem. Third, accept that you’re responsible for changing the mind-set and behaviors that initiated or accompany the problems you experience.
Part of that process, the accepting personal responsibility piece, involves a realization that you’re responsible for virtually everything that happens in your life. You can’t legitimately claim victimhood. And you are the one who must fix the problems in your life—you can’t pawn off that responsibility. You must hold yourself accountable for your words and deeds.
Beginning in the 1970s, this theme struck a responsive chord with the more than one million people who participated in awareness training programs and workshops pioneered by groups such as est (Erhard Seminars Training), Landmark Forum, Lifespring, Temenos, and Pathways. These programs were designed to expand conscious awareness—bringing darkness into light—and improve the way people experience themselves and one another.
During these workshops, ground rules—stringently enforced—emphasized personal accountability, including something as simple as promising to be on time for each session. That might seem trivial, but punctuality (or lack of it) reveals a lot about people’s reliability. In many of these programs, if you were late to sessions or back from breaks, you were given the opportunity to stand up in front of everyone and confess that you had no one to blame but yourself. Excuses sound extremely lame when someone has to publicly confront an audience of faces staring back, like a giant mirror of self-reflection.
Early in my recovery, I blamed my upbringing for my having developed a drug dependency. I actually believed I was victimized on a variety of levels, and I felt totally justified in feeling and voicing that victimization. It’s true that I grew up in a family plagued by codependency, and I wasn’t taught very good interpersonal skills from my parents. They were both alcoholics, and my mother was devastated by the tragic events in her life, including losing two of her brothers to assassins. She became withdrawn and emotionally unavailable. People around me would get mad, and they couldn’t talk about it because they were afraid of their own anger. So they hid away all of this resentment and anger and plastered a smiley face on top of it. In our family, we would hide our feelings of victimization behind a mask of stoicism, which meant we couldn’t talk about any of it or deal with it on any level.
As with many people in recovery, I’ve struggled with an inability to get along with other people, whether it’s my kids, my family, or in my love life. I could be in a loving relationship, but then get suspicious, thinking the person was only in my life to get something. She didn’t really love me for me. She just loved where I had come from, the family I grew up with, or the possessions I had. She’s using me—that was my greatest fear.
Where did this message come from, and was it true? What was my responsibility insofar as dealing with it? I came to realize it wasn’t something being done to me. It was something I had created, and I had to take responsibility for it. Why did I create it? One reason has to do with self-worth. I did get a lot of attention for who I was in my life—the famous family I came from—and I became somewhat wedded to that image. In some ways, it was my