This morning as I write this, I am grateful. I am grateful to Doni for allowing me to join the News Café team and I am grateful that respondents to my first blog were kind.
I am a clinical psychologist. I first became acquainted with this profession in 1973, when I was 17 years old, in the spring of my junior year at Beavercreek High School near Dayton, Ohio.
My world was falling apart. My parents’ marriage was in a furious freefall after my father admitted to my mother he was in love with someone else. He quickly moved out and for a good year or more, I refused to forgive him.
Even then, I knew how to be a stone. At least on the outside. My dad was dead to me. I pushed him out of my mind and heart as far as I could.
My older sister was living with a friend in an apartment in nearby Fairborn, and my big brother was basking in bliss and new-found freedom as a freshman at Ohio University in Athens. It was just my mom and me then in a home that once held five. We felt small, fragile and alone.
When a family breaks apart, you feel the fractures deep inside, in places you never knew about before. My parents’ divide split me as well. To even approach the tender torn parts, a torrent of tears could tear loose. So I learned to leave it alone and tried in vain to drop it like a heavy rock into a bottomless sea.
My mother and I struggled with our private hells and did our best to hold one another up. I didn’t know it then but as she had done all my life, she was training me again.
I learned about grief, loss and emotional pain and what it means to sit with someone else, helpless to “fix” them, but knowing somehow that being there is enough.
And then it got worse. My dad left in April of that year, and that summer, my first serious love, Lynn Othersen, broke up with me as she prepared to leave for college; sinking me into a deep gray world that offered no joy or hope.
My mother told me I was suffering with depression. “Is that what this is?” I wondered. Our brains love to name things. It gives us the illusion of control, like capturing a dark cloud with the clever net of a single word. I didn’t argue.
All I knew was that nothing felt secure or real. I could see no value or purpose. On the surface, the world looked the same. The objects and rhythms remained but I no longer belonged. I drifted from day to day like a dead man, absorbed in myself and the horror of lost love.
It was then my mother scheduled me to see Thelma Donenfeld, a clinical psychologist in downtown Dayton who was tasked with rescuing me from my despair. Through Thelma, I felt my way like a blind man in a dark room, looking for light.
And so I passed the months of my senior year of high school, searching for a way out of the fog. As time and treatment squeezed me back into the world, my wounded mother and I decided to get help by helping. We volunteered at Greene County’s Mental Health Crisis Hot Line and discovered we weren’t the only ones in pain.
Eventually my dad and I reconciled and so did my parents for awhile. The cure didn’t hold, however, and they spun apart for good.
I struggled to trust again and eventually married when I was too young and dumb to know I was too young and dumb. Ten years after my Dad’s affair had come to light, I was completing my final year of grad school while my own marriage spiraled down like a wounded bird and crashed to the ground.
My wife had an affair and I used her betrayal as an excuse to escape. It wasn’t her fault. Not really. I was just as much to blame. I know that now. We run a lot of experiments in our teens and twenties and hopefully learn what not to do if and when we finally grow up.
This year I celebrated 25 years of marriage to my second wife, Nancy, who deserves most of the credit for our long, loving ride. And come October 1, I will finish up my 25th year of private practice. In that time, I have spent somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 hours—in one- hour increments—with strangers and their suffering, navigating our way together, seeking to replace our blame with understanding and our personal pain with empathy and healing.
And I’ve learned a few things along the way, discovered answers to questions, tools that work and lessons that shine a light, illuminating the path ahead.
Let’s see where it takes us, shall we?
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
