Little children and animals have always loved me. Horses no one else could handle were quiet for me. Dogs and cats that never like anyone get cozy with me. And children who won’t go to anyone except Mom or Grandma fall asleep on my shoulder. It’s a strange way to start a bio, but these are important things to remember as you read about me.
I was born the third child in a family with two children, and my parents made sure I knew my place. There is something in all of us that is supposed to be nurtured by the love of Mom and Dad. I have been accidentally blinded twice in my life. My experience is it’s easier to deal with blindness than it is to grow without the essential emotional nutrition of parental love.
Trapped With Pretended Love
When I asked to live with Aunt Geri and Uncle Harold on their horse farm, the answer was telling. After I had the audacity to catch her in repeated lies, my mother rather hotly explained saying “She raised Fran’s kids and Anne’s kids. I’ll be damned if she’s going to raise one of mine.”
When I was ten, I once asked for help sorting money to pay for my four paper routes. My mother’s answer was “We told you not to take those paper routes. So now you can deal with them on your own.”
Growing up rejected by my parents made me believe everyone would feel the same way. After all, who is going to love you when your parents don’t, right? My first inkling that my father’s dislike for me was intense came during a ride home in the family station wagon.
My birthday comes in December so I was able to start school at age four. The ride home came the following summer, and my now five-year-old-mind latched onto reading road signs for entertainment. I’m pretty sure I wanted to show off how well I could read, too. I have no idea how quickly, but my mother and brother joined the fun.
Everything was fine until my brother hit a couple signs he was unable to read. He is three years older than me, so him failing where I succeeded proved troubling. I think it was more troubling to my father than anyone else.
After I read a couple signs my brother missed, my father got angry. I remember being accused of showing up my brother. Now, I have no memory of what I did when I was able to read signs my brother missed, but what five year old would be anything other than gleeful at being able to outperform his eight year old brother?
My mother defended me at first. Unfortunately, she was a teacher. It made complete sense to her that she should explain how younger children often make rapid progress in learning to read. That enflamed my father and incited him to lash out at me.
I spent the rest of the ride home reading road signs quietly to myself.
Aging Sometimes Makes Vinegar
That emotional battering progressed as I aged. It gradually led to me transforming from a cheerful, friendly boy to an angry teen. For a big part of my life, I lived by the motto “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest S.O.B. in the valley.”
I have lived on both sides of the law with considerable skills as a thief and faltering skills as a drug dealer. I’ve also served honorably in the military, ran a carpentry business, been married, worked in high-rise construction, and am a father.
Yet, no matter what I was doing, I was never inclined to tolerate willful stupidity.
It was routine for people to be surprised, even shocked, when their courteous co-worker, polite contractor, or considerate drug dealer was suddenly calling them out for their stupidity.
Of course, my stupidity was combining the expectation of rejection with every subsequent rejection and thinking it all proved my parents were right; I’m not worth loving.
No one should be surprised when unloved children grow into adults who behave in ways that prove their parents right. Everyone loves the result when we get a professional athlete, successful entrepreneur, or effective activist. But we blame the person who is anti-social, cruel, or rude.
What is it about us as people that we praise the parents when things go well, and blame the child when things go bad? We all know children learn what they live. Then they proceed to live what they have learned. Yet we avoid blaming the people (parents) who do the teaching.
To my credit, I started breaking free of parental expectations around age 19. I had always been rebellious, but childhood and teenage rebellion are different from consciously assessing what you’re doing, and your reasons for doing it.
My reasons have led to great choices that resulted in employment success, achieving wealth as a business owner, a wide base of learning through continuing education and reading, and some wonderfully, temporarily, happy relationships.
My choices have also managed to lead to bankruptcy three times (once instigated by my father), being homeless five times (twice by deliberate choice), spending time in jail, and living through more than fifty years without forming a single long-lasting relationship. Even the children to whom I was a father are no longer part of my life.
The Jerk – More Than A Steve Martin Movie
At this point, you might be thinking I am quite the jerk. You’re right to think so. I have been a consummate jerk in my lifetime, and I have no fear of offending people by speaking the truth. Even my good, positive choices ended up marred by self-sabotage. (How else do you describe telling someone the truth while doing it in a way that cuts them down?)
It took a lot of learning, and a long time, to realise two things:
- All we have is the reality in front of us; and,
- A lot of people are desperate to avoid reality.
You can see the truth of it in everyday life by watching people who accept wage-slavery (their reality) and then complain about having no control (avoiding responsibility for their reality).
I have invested an incredible amount of time listening to business owners, parents, and young adults as they defend their stupid choices, and, more importantly, as they change course for better choices. And the intellectual spectrum covers everyone from doctors and tradesmen, to teachers, PhD students, and labourers. It is stunning to see how deeply the desire to be accepted as right, in the face of all opposition and contradiction, permeates our society. Even more amazing is seeing the relief that washes through someone when they succeed in fixing a mistake. Bill is a great example.
When his employees asked for a raise, Bill had the habit of crying poverty by telling them it had been years since he had a paycheque from the business. While this was true, it was far from the truth. I managed to bring Bill back to reality by telling him precisely that. Yes, it had been years since his last paycheque, but he had arranged it to his benefit. In a perfectly legal accounting move, Bill arranged it so his investment into the business over the years was a loan. So yes, he was getting paid, and the payments were tax free because the business was repaying the loan.
Things got a lot smoother between Bill and his employees when he finally confessed this truth and started passing along some of the business’ success in the form of raises.
When you add up all the hours of listening and coaching, it turns out to be decades of experience. Parents concerned about their children. Children angry with their parents. Business owners confused about leadership and customer relations. The experiences of listening, accepting, being honest and consistent, caring and encouraging, smoothed the rougher edges left from an angry, abused, and rebellious young man.
Those experiences, and a life-altering divorce in my forties, led me to pull back, look honestly at myself, and strip away my private lies and pretentions.
From Riches to Rags
I was running a successful business when the divorce hit. Six books were written – including two international bestsellers and another a case study in every mistake you can make when putting a book together. Two others were moderate successes and the sixth was a lead generation tool. They made for a great education in what works and what flops.
Business owners were lined up to pay premium fees for my advice and guidance to make their businesses stronger and their customers happier. So much so, I came home in November 2012 with six clients lined up and $265,000 in first year billings, plus commission on sales copy.
This is in addition to having gone from being a single copywriter living in Toronto, Ontario (3rd largest city in North America) to being married with three children living in a small town of 12,000 in Illinois, U.S.A.
What could have been a culture shock was significantly softened by finally having come into being part of a family. I remember my wife once asking why I would be interested in a woman in her forties, a widow with three kids, and no ability to have more children. I told her that ready-made family and her maturity were exactly what I wanted. I had lived my life without a family and finally found one with her and her children.
My wife filed for divorce a week later.
During the divorce, I slept in churches around town in the Out Of The Cold program and spent my days in the library. That’s also when I started writing Getting Happy …when you wish you were dead.
I made my way home to Canada after the divorce. The kid who grew up in a family that never loved him was now a man. A man whose dream of finally having a family had been shattered and torn from him.
The resulting emotional turmoil took four pages for a psychiatrist to type up a diagnosis. I have been receiving disability benefits since 2013 because of that emotional turmoil.
Cranium Ex Rectum
My life motto today is simply Cranium Ex Rectum™.
Yes, pull your head out of your arse and face the reality in front of you instead of what you wish were in front of you. You can tell when people get it because they laugh
The whole point of the phrase Cranium Ex Rectum™ is to play on the pretentions of erudition. It’s a phrase that sounds lofty in Latin and turns out to be simple, even crass, advice. Stop kidding yourself. Stop lying to yourself and others. Pull your head out of your arse.
But the meaning is a little deeper, too. We often think of the cranium and the head being the same, but they’re different. The cranium is really just the part of the skull enclosing the brain. Cranium Ex Rectum is about getting your brain unstuck from bad thought habits.
Rectum, on the other end, is the final section of the large intestine. Your arse is the big fleshy muscles of your bum. Your anus is the strong muscle that holds everything closed. And the rectum is the last place poop gathers before being pushed out of your body.
And If you know anything about me, you know I’m big on PEP (Personal Empowerment Practices) versus POOP (Personally Obstructive Offensive Practices). So it really strikes me as appropriate – Cranium Ex Rectum – get your brain free of the POOP in your life.
Discovering My Cranium Was Buried
You can bet I’ve put a lot of effort into getting my brain free of the POOP that came into my life.
I learned a lot of POOP as a kid. Then I heaped more into my life as a teenager and young adult. And yes, there were lots of people throwing in their two bits’ worth along the way. It ended up creating a real gulf between who people thought I was and who a few people discovered me to be. Now, let’s be clear, I put on a real show of lying, being changeable, threatening, punishing, and criticizing. Anyone who thought I was a massive jerk had good reason to think so.
Being that person taught me a lot. Does that sound trite? Ooo, the big bully learned a thing or two, did he? But I mean something rather different.
There was me, Conrad, a very caring, honest, accepting, encouraging, and supportive person. I hid myself away inside a shell of punishing, threatening, lying, and blaming because people terrify me. In my life, people have been incredibly, often violently, poopy toward me. You know how it is . . . You get hassled or kicked or tormented enough and you grow a shell as a last ditch effort at self-protection.
But in travelling from church basement to church basement I learned something surprising. That shell never provides protection. It only serves as your custom made prison.
I met a lot of kind and generous people in the Out Of The Cold program. Talking with them helped me come to terms with two very important parts of reality:
- The internal conversation we all have every day is the most important conversation of our life; and,
- Adults get to choose who participates in, or influences, that conversation.
My internal conversation included me telling myself that pushing others away was effective protection. Yet, that course of action had just played a major role in the destruction of my marriage.
Getting My Cranium Ex Rectum
My first step toward pulling my head out of my arse was returning to Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics along with Dan Kennedy’s The New Psycho-Cybernetics. Dan’s updated version included getting his audio program. I’ve read both books twice and listened to the audio program four times. I also found a PDF version of Dan’s book and printed it as a personal study guide.
From the time I arrived home in Canada in August 2013 to the end of 2020, I read more than three hundred books (yes, about a book a week) from Jack Canfield, John Maxwell, Dan Kennedy, Dr. Terry Lynch, Thomas Joiner, Dr. William Glasser, C.S. Lewis, Dale Carnegie, Sarah Millican, Robert Plank, Gary Chapman, and dozens more authors. They all write about choices, self-image, and the power of personal responsibility. It was eight years of intense, PhD level education, in addition to a half century of lived experience. I worked my way back to loving little children and animals as much as they have always loved me.
My adult life – all the good and all the bad – is the direct result of choices I’ve made. I have learned a lot about myself, making and fixing mistakes, and how other people behave as a result of the choices I’ve made. The best way to share that learning is writing it down, yes?
The Power of Self-Image
Have you ever heard the phrase “When you find yourself in a hole, put down the shovel?” Well, it’s fair to say I started life in a hole of negative self-image. I made that hole wider, longer, and deeper by holding onto rage and being cruel to people around me. Even worse is I was often utterly thoughtless toward people around me. They meant nothing to me because I meant nothing to myself.
Eventually, I put down the shovel, fashioned stairs to leave that hole, and built a strong, positive self-image. Was it all roses and honey? No. And I make no claim to having a perfect life now- nor am I anywhere near being a perfect man. There are still lots of people who think I’m a jerk. Only now I’m a jerk for telling an uncomfortable truth instead of being a jerk because I was mean, vicious, or cruel.
And make no mistake, the hole is still there. There is nothing that can replace love and support that was never present. However, real effort can transform a crappy, dingy crawl space into a warm, light-filled, friendly, finished basement.
I’m just a man who has learned to stand on his own two feet, makes the best choices he can, and accepts responsibility for those choices. And even at my worst, I have always been a man loved by little children and animals.
