WTWTCH ... when you go to adult crying camp for a week?

I survived the Hoffman Process and you (probably) can too.

This August started with a colonoscopy,¹ ended with COVID,² with a lot of crying in between.

The crying was thanks to the Hoffman Institute in Petaluma California, where me and 38 other willing adults were secluded from the outside world (some might say rudely cut off) for a week: no phones, no computers, no TV. No alcohol, no cannabis, no mushrooms, no horse tranquilizer: nothing stronger than Advil (and not the hospital kind that secretly has cocaine, or so say my sources at the Joe Rogan Experience). No books, no magazines, no music, no social media, no video games, no crossword puzzles. No exercise, no prayers, no work. And they were very clear about this: no sex with one another, and no sex with oneself.³ Basically, anything I use during my day to distract myself from the pain hidden deep inside was gone.

They never exactly outlined how they would find out about some of these, ahem, private activities, but the intention was clear: I was on my own, emotionally speaking. All the small and big ways I numbed myself daily were now officially off-limits. Which meant in my case, there would be no YouTube videos of suburban kangaroos fighting to get in the way of me feeling really, profoundly, bone-shatteringly sad.

The other wrinkle was that me and 38 other strangers were intended for the most part to remain anonymous. (Yes we signed NDA’s which did not stop me from trying to convince everyone I was a famous influencer dentist in real life.)

We were known by the names we were called when we were young kids (“Hi everyone, I’m Jace!”), and we weren’t allowed to talk about our jobs, our fame, our fortune, politics, sports, media, etc. We had to connect to each other like young children do - being funny, being vulnerable, playing, sharing our simple activities together, and not, I repeat, not talking about our internet startups.

Each day was a mix of big group sessions, small group sessions, one-on-one sessions with our teachers, and lots and lots of time in the prison of our own thoughts.

We got angry. We got sad. We got playful. We got introspective. And we (or at least the Royal We) got very hungry.

The food was (seriously) quite good, and the ranch was spectacularly beautiful and relaxing—golden hills and oak trees and a hint of sea breeze at sunset. The hours were definitely long - from 7:15 in the morning often until 10 pm at night. Despite the emotional turmoil it unleashed, I had no trouble sleeping, which felt a little bit like winning. (They didn’t say anything about not keeping score).

Before we even showed up, we had about fifteen hours of homework to prepare ourselves for the transformation. An SAT test from hell where you had to write lots and lots of essays about your addictions, your anxieties, your anger toward your mom, that time you stole gum, that time you drove a stolen car through a CVS, and all the ways that you disappoint yourself in the world. And once I started pulling that thread, it’s amazing how self-critical I could be. How when I lined up all my faults, my fears, my hurtful patterns, it literally numbered in the hundreds. Clearly, I was fucked.⁴

This is the beginning of what they call “Awareness Hell” - basically the place you get to after three years of therapy and you realize that you too have these weird things called “emotions.”

And then after several decades of being hidden in the dark, they suddenly come to the surface? Well, you can fact-check this with my wife, but it’s safe to say that spectacular sunsets aside, it’s not particularly fun living next to a volcano.

And then the process started. I was the last one in (I would like the record to show I had one minute left before it started). My flight from LAX to SFO was 5 hours delayed - yep with the one-hour flight time and it was longer than it would have taken to drive from LA to San Francisco. But it was all worth it.

The next seven days were definitely the hardest week of my life. The most intense. And the most transformative. This is for someone who had several generations of girlfriends dump him with the same message—“95% of our relationship is great Jason, but when things get emotional you completely shut down.”⁵

I made a lot of great friends, several of whom I expect to keep throughout my life. I had fantastic insights, profound realizations, and spiritual experiences of uncovering and healing from lifelong emotional wounds. But the thing I remember most was this - several people complained to me, in a perfectly nice, polite, and generous way, that they had found me to be distracting.

Because I talked over you? (My pattern #18). 

No, they said. 

Because I dominated the conversation? (My pattern #43)

No, they said.

Because I tried to make jokes in order to undercut the seriousness of the moment? (My pattern #79)

No, they said.

Then what new horrible thing did I do that was so distracting? (My potential new pattern #114)

Well, they said. It’s that you cried soooooooo fucking loudly. Which made me feel  my own crying wasn’t up to snuff. But it was also inspiring for me, you know, to keep going. If you were doing it that loudly, then surely no one would even notice my own horrible-sounding crying.

And so there you have it, unnamed-college-girlfriends-for-legal-reasons: proof I had finally got in touch with my (very painful) emotions. And more importantly than showing off to the ghosts of girlfriends past, I had figured out exactly what the source of the infinite well of pain I’d been hiding for so long behind jokes and grins and stoicism.

I can be stoic AF when I need to (pattern #56)

One of the hallmarks of pretty much every Instagram influencer I catch on my wife’s IG account who is not selling face creme made from the very old bones of vegan cows is this: babe, you just gotta love yourself.

Which is, turns out, way easier said than done.

In my case (your mileage will definitely vary), I realized I had been raised with the belief that it was conditional love all the way down.

Meaning: If I was a good boy, if I got good grades, if I was a BIG SHINING SUCCESS, then I would be loved.

I believed if I was a success my dad would love me.

I believed if i was a success my mom would love me.

I believed if I was a success my wife would love me.

I believed if I was a success my friends would love me.

I believed if I was a success my kids would love me.

And I believed if I was a success I would (finally) love me.

This was, in short, a huge breakthrough. Because turns out there was no amount of success out there that could ever consistently earn that love. Maybe I could find enough success (new job! new house! New Cannes Golden Lion!) to be loved for an afternoon, but then the next morning, I was right back at rock bottom, trying desperately to earn a few more scraps of love for the day. And when I failed in my pursuit of success (and as faithful readers of this blog know, boy have I failed a lot), the message was clear: the reason I wasn’t loved was that inherently I wasn’t worth being loved.

There was one moment, where we did a performance and I remember thinking, I’m going to show my classmates what I can do. And so I did a tight five on coyote urine (this is 100% true) and got the surprise laughter and applause I craved. I talked to my teacher the next morning at 7 am (turns out lack of alcohol and drugs makes that a lot more palatable) and she said about my performance the night before:

I thought two things. First I thought you were hilarious. And second I thought, fucking Jace, there you go again, performing for love.

But, I protested, was I not supposed to kill? Was I supposed to bomb?

And she said, No. But I want to think about how you would have felt if you did bomb.

I said, I’d have felt terrible. And I’d have thought that no one would like me.

She raised an eyebrow, nodded, then flew off into the sky like the magical creature of subtle therapy she was.

I realized the basic obvious truth: I had to throw my entire toxic operating system into the garbage, dump super-acid on it, and set it into a spectacular bonfire, fines from the local park service be damned.

And then even better, I learned to replace this yawning, never-filled emptiness within me for the very first time (yes after a half-century on Earth), and love myself completely. For no reason. Whether I did good, did bad, or did nothing at all. Just because I am alive and inherently worthy of love.

So to celebrate, I’m finally starting this blog that has been on my to-do list since I got COVID the first time around⁶. Will there be cringe? For sure. Will there be some meandering moments? You betcha. But it will be real. Honest. And maybe even help someone else out there learn the secret I finally woke up to.⁷

And that, my friends, is worth all the crying in the world to get to.

And so that’s my first post, yall. Subscribe for more. And in the meantime, play me off, Johnny…

Footnotes

1. For my younger readers, a colonoscopy is when they put you to sleep and take pictures of the inside of your body, which is exactly as creepy as it sounds.

2. My third time for those keeping score!

3. Yes. I took my first and likely last “no masturbation” pledge. Basically, it was like Promise Keepers fantasy camp.

4. And for our younger readers, that’s a clinical term meaning “frustrated, uncertain, completed knocked down.”

5. An actual quote I found recently from a letter from my college girlfriend.

6. Mother’s Day weekend 2022 in New Orleans and New York. I still need to make that horrible experience up to my wife. (Oh, did I not mention she was at home with the three kids that Mother’s Day weekend?)

7. Clearly not a secret if I’d been paying attention to my wife’s Instagram instead of watching suburban kangaroos fighting, but it was a huge secret to me.