On barbs, bravery and belonging
My dad turned 93 last week. He’s been sober for about sixty of those years, with a gap in the middle that started about the time I came along.
The drinking hadn’t always been a problem. It came on in his thirties, the way these things sometimes do. Pressures started piling up that he didn’t have tools to deal with. And he had no community to absorb the blow. “Real men” didn’t need community anyway. Besides, no one in “the community” even bothered to help.
So, he went to the doctor about the panic attacks that started to develop. The doctor checked his vitals, declared him officially healthy, and told him to breathe into a paper bag if it happened again.
Dad just figured out that beer worked too. Tastier than a paper bag and easier to explain at a party.
But all medications have some side effects.
When I was in my 30s, ironically about the same age Dad was when he found his coping mechanism, we did an intervention. It was my brother’s idea; I was a skeptic. For me, dad’s drinking was as old as time itself and as immovable as a mountain.
When the therapist said the intervention would take 30 minutes, I remember saying “lady, I’m sure you’re good at your job, but you don’t know my dad.” I knew there was going to be a fight. There always was.
She smiled in a way that suggested she knew a secret I didn’t.
She did.
The intervention took less than 30 minutes, Dad went into treatment and he’s still sober. He just celebrated his 93rd birthday.
Of course, that’s only part of the story.
The intervention itself only took 30 minutes, but the real work took longer than that.
We were all given an assignment: write a letter that follows a simple format – I love you, I want you to be well, this is how it affects me when you drink, I want you to get help, I’ll still love you either way, but if you don’t get help, here’s what I will do to protect myself.
The heavy lifting happened the day before, when my family sat together without Dad and spent a whole day removing everything from our letters that was really about our own hurt and anger rather than his liberation.
The intervention required a particular kind of witness: I see you. I love you. You’re not alone.
No gotchas. No barbs.
That last part’s the bitch
.
So, the therapist was right. She knew the secret: the intervention worked because the invitation was clean. The invitation was clean, because we did the hard work first.
What my dad encountered in that room wasn’t judgment dressed up as concern. It wasn’t projection disguised as care. It was just people who loved him, telling the truth – sharp as it might be – about what they saw, with the barbs taken out.
He could finally be seen without the fear of embarrassment or erasure. He could be just as he was and still be loved. Still belong.
When we finished reading our letters, Dad had tears in his eyes — only the second time in my life I’d seen them — and he said that he had been trying to stop for so long, and the shame of not being able to do it alone just made it worse.
That’s the heart of addiction right there. The impossibility of “doing it on your own” spurs the very thing you’re trying to stop. Addiction feeds on the isolation that surrounds it. The only way out requires doing the one thing that the addiction keeps telling you to fear most: letting people see you. The real you.
I’ve been thinking about that intervention for thirty years. I didn’t realize until recently, but it’s been shaping everything I’ve done since then. All my work trying to get groups to work well together has really been about creating that clean invitation to be brave enough to let yourself be seen as the terrifying first step to belonging.
I see the same patterns that played out in my family playing out in the dynamics of these struggling groups of well-intentioned, but deeply reactive people.
How do we address the Ur-addiction? The root addiction that feeds all the others – named and unnamed?
The addiction I’m thinking about now is older than my dad. Older than his dad and his dad before him. It’s been building long enough to look like culture, long enough to feel like the only realistic option, long enough that the paper bag solutions got institutionalized and given a marketing budget.
We’ve lived so long in a dysfunctional society that the abnormal is seen as normal and the truth feels dangerous. We’ve created a society of coping mechanisms to paper over all the problems that nobody has the tools to deal with, and we’ve neglected the community that could absorb the impact.
So, just like my family before the intervention, we do-gooder types keep trying to make better arguments. We present the data on the climate crisis, the evidence of rising authoritarianism, the compounding weight of social injustice. We make the case as clearly as we can.
But the people we most want to reach aren’t unconvinced. They’ve done the math. They’re not waiting for a better argument. They’re waiting for a context where acting on what they already know doesn’t cost them belonging.
That’s the permission problem. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
My dad didn’t need better arguments. Neither do you.
So what does a clean invitation look like at scale?
It turns out it looks a lot like a working farm on Pender Island. A refuge for people in recovery from late-stage capitalism — that just happens to look like a timeshare homestead.
If that sounds intriguing, then Welcome to the Farmastery!
And if you’re not ready for that yet — that’s fine too. Sit with the intervention letter until it clicks.
It’ll keep.