Buffalo News, February 20, 1992

Douglas Gilbert is currently a doctor practicing in the South Towns of Buffalo. He is also a Presbyterian minister. Doug and the author sat down and discussed Doug’s life experiences and his motivations for going public in 1992 in order to show his support for the rehabilitation center in Angola. The following was written after a conversation between the two which also discusses the ignorance behind the NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome.

Doug responds with his story. He grew up in Middleport, up in Niagara County, graduating from high school in 1962. Hobart College. Princeton Theological Seminary. A year at St. Andrew’s in Scotland studying the New Testament in Greek. A parish pastor near Corning. Then on to medical school in Philadelphia, a general surgery residency in Cleveland and neurosurgery residency in Detroit. Increasing amounts of alcohol and other drugs and always more degrees and achievements to accompany them. He picked up tobacco smoking from the thoracic surgeon who mentored him in Cleveland. They would remove a cancerous lung, then break for a cigarette together before moving onto the next patient. He still smokes.

The drinking and drugging would stop in 1985 after a marriage and three children and a divorce. After years of telling himself that he was too smart and too accomplished to be so sick. And after being told by another woman he loved that he was a drunk and she wanted nothing to do with him.

In September 1985, Doug signed up for the 28-day detoxification program at the Chit Chat Rehabilitation Center in Pennsylvania. He came out clean and stayed that way. In late 1990, on the shores of Lake Erie, after five years of misery and meetings, he met a Catholic priest who talked to him and tried to understand him. Doug was close to suicide.

Doug told him of the boyhood beatings, and the emotional and sexual mistreatment. The cleric helped him to understand that he had been treating his childhood wounds with alcohol and other drugs and recommended a five and one-half day family counseling program at Chit Chat. He knew it had helped others to learn how to uncover these mysterious early afflictions. People who are paralyzed with fear don’t want to drag out these injuries just because they are so affecting, so consuming, so shaming. But the program would help him to identify his particular curses and give him some tools to moderate and move forward from their adverse effects.

Desperate, Doug got right on the phone and discovered that the sessions were booked for months. By confessing to the woman on the phone that he might not "be around" for the next opening, he convinced her to admit him to the one starting the next week.

That five and one-half days taught Doug that his parents were sick, not bad. The experience made it easier for him to forgive and harder for him to be so angry. He began to understand that in adulthood he had been replicating his experiences in childhood- hiding and covering up and avoiding these memories that hurt him so much. He cemented these realizations with three more years of Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings; with three years of struggling with a painful past he had not wanted to dig up. Counseling really did save his life.

He now teaches addiction medicine at the University of Buffalo Medical School "when it occurs to them to offer such a basic course." He studies and interprets the Sermon on the Mount and visits prisons to treat the inmates. He continues to see and treat more conventional patients. He refuses to do business with HMOs.

Doug muses on what might have possessed him that freezing night in Evans to bare his intemperate soul before so many so mercilessly. He reveals that he had already "lost his anonymity" back in 1985 when he first sought help and counseling for his addictions. In a fit of irony, the CEO of the hospital where he was then Chief of Staff "blew him in" to the State Health Department only after Doug had acknowledged his problem and stopped drugging and drinking. He went bankrupt defending the charges but managed to keep his license and his patients.

Therefore, speaking out in 1992 at a huge public gathering studded with news gatherers risked little more than the gamble he had taken when he first admitted he was a drunk and a junkie. Then he chanced his reputation to save his life. Seven years later, getting up to speak out openly for the recovery center energized him and made him feel invincible just as first acknowledging his addiction and sickness gave him a chance to stay physically alive. Both times he needed public affirmation to "fix the brokenness." First his. Then his and the town of Evans. Why did he need the audiences?

Doug revealed that with the healing he had to acknowledge the disorder: he hadn’t been able to love himself; he had not been good enough, so he had always sought recognition from others. His addictions cloaked childhood trauma, reenacting the childhood cover-up each day of his adult life. The nature of the hurt required secrecy and seclusion. The hiddenness was part of the disability. In coming to accept and care for himself he still needed the attention of others; hiding these secrets had gnawed away at his sense of being part of the world.

Even more, Doug related, this speaking out in Evans was for a facility which was feared and opposed because "... if the bums get too close, I might have to face those demons in me, also, and confront those forces and problems in my own life which I’m trying to hide." As Doug saw it, the opposition that night was submerged in an epidemic of hopelessness which it did not have the tools to resist. Every one of them supposed that this organization, its bureaucratic creators, its powerful supporters and its unseemly following, were all out to subvert their individual choices to live in peace and isolation in a town bordering Eden. For them, that battle, then, represented a specific outcropping of the smothering malaise of hopelessness which surrounds them and convinces them that everyone is trying to take away something from everyone else. Then there was Doug stating, "No, it doesn’t have to be this way. It isn’t this way. I am one of you and a place like this gave me my life. This one will give you yours, not take it away." Doug states that he fought for the life of the rehabilitation center and his community because counseling and then his community had given life to him.

Doug Gilbert’s experience shows that to join the block club or to speak out at such a gathering is, then, to stage a redeeming drama. You must acknowledge a problem to begin to work it out. This is about accepting: accepting the history and the body that combined to bring you to this point. Accepting who you have become represents an end to covering up those influences; an end to pretending that all those causes had no effects. If you haven’t accepted your past influences, you haven’t accepted the need to abstain because you still want to obliterate them with drugs and alcohol. Maybe you haven’t accepted your need to take medicine to lighten those delusional escapes from your situation, or perhaps you haven’t accepted the need to get some help to balance your checkbook. If you have accepted yourself, it is impossible to hide that history from the others. Being open and accepting are part of the same process. If you can’t disclose, you haven’t accepted who you are because you are still saying to yourself that what "they" think about you is more important to you than who you have become.

The writer sees this as basic Howard W. Campbell stuff, Vonnegut 101. You become what you pretend to others to be; A prisoner. Think about your pretensions. If you continue to pretend that you’ve never suffered these curses, you’ve gone ahead and denied to others that there is anything you or anyone can do to alter this aftermath you are living through. You have erected a jail. Predestination rears its debilitating silhouette: to forget and avoid pain, we drink or escape into delusions and that’s just the way it is. To be able, rather, to engineer change, to deconstruct the penitentiary, to, in Doug’s words, experience true resurrection, you must accept and study the calculus of the past. And you must be willing to move beyond that past.

One can see that it is also about energy and time. Pretending borrows all this space that you would otherwise be using, naturally and unconsciously, openly and easily, for making the changes and for understanding your past trauma to make those changes possible. You don’t open up to that new acquaintance who seems so ready to understand because your energies are directed into your mask. Doug’s experience and ordeal bring several questions to mind. Is it possible the crowd at Evans doesn’t want to even see the addicts because the individuals of the group have not accepted themselves and each and every person who has admitted a problem and sought treatment threatens to uncover their disguises? Is the psychological basis of xenophobia, that "hardwired" distrust of the strange, related to another hardwired process which conspires to obliterate the memory of pain? Have we done mischief if we bring that specter home?

Doug says there were no ill effects of the outing in Evans. It was all positive for him. He doesn’t think any of his patients abandoned him. He has earned a deference reserved for the forthright. What about the crowd? It’s as if Doug has circled with his correspondent’s thoughts: "Each and every one of them will be less likely to think the stranger they meet is trying to take something away from them." That is because they know Doug has faced his demons and Doug is familiar to them.

The rehabilitation center never happened and no others were built. Doug is not aware of the fate of any of the others who stood up for the rehabilitation center that midnight in 1992. Not one of the opponents has ever come to him hat in hand. Any gauge to measure the sum total of Evans’ distrust is not so finely calibrated that we will be able to determine the Doug Gilbert variation the next time such a clinic comes up for debate. But because Doug unmasked his own struggle in the presence of his neighbors and because the sum total of that fear of strangers mirrors or maybe even duplicates the aggregate fear of all their own masked and unaccepted selves, the gauge will certainly read lower next time.