The Demoralization of Beachcomber Mike

The last time I posted here was on May 12, 2024, an essay called “The Incident of the Pacifier in the Crib.” I did not get the feeling that many people were reading my posts, and I was focusing a lot of attention on Indolent Books, the boutique literary press I founded in 2015. The press never quite came to a standstill, but it went into low gear as my demoralization deepened in the last years of my marriage.

That’s what I want to write about in this post: demoralization. It’s sort of in line with the pacifier post and the one before that, about absolving myself of happiness. And the line it is in is the line of childhood attachment trauma and its adult aftermath.

Over the past ten years or so I was aware of becoming increasingly demoralized. What I meant by demoralized was what dictionaries define as discouraged, dispirited, disheartened—having lost hope. It’s the meaning of demoralization that has to do with morale.

Then, in the spring of 2023, I started listening to a lot of YouTube videos by Anna Runkle, aka The Crappy Childhood Fairy, whose focus is on complex post traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), which basically means the traumatic effects of having a chronically crappy childhood in which you were abused, neglected, or both, whether physically, sexually, emotionally, or some combination of these.

What Anna Runkle meant by demoralization had to do not with morale but rather with what we might call morality, with descending into risky and self-destructive behavior including, but not limited to, our old friends sex, drugs, and alcohol.

When I first heard Runkle use the term demoralization this way, I thought, Oh, she’s talking about something different than what happened to me. But oh, silly Beachcomber Mike. Soon enough did it dawn on you that, while you may have started from a place of impaired morale, you soon enough landed in a place of impaired morality as well.

And when I use the word morality here, I do not mean to be, well, moralistic. The Latin word mos, whence we get the words moral, morale, and morality, means custom, or customary way of life. It’s essentially synonymous with the Ancient Greek work ethos, from which we get ethic, ethics, and ethical—like the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible, or the five precepts of Buddhism: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t harm yourself or others through sex, don’t harm people with words, and don’t mess with substances that mess with your mind.

So as not to bury the lede too much longer, let me be blunt: Not long after I started feeling chronically discouraged, dispirited, and disheartened, I also started engaging in risky sex with strangers, dangerous drug use, and excessive alcohol consumption. That is, I progressed from what I might call emotional demoralization to what I would like to call behavioral demoralization. And if I’m making an argument here, it’s that complex trauma—that is, childhood trauma and chronic relationship trauma in childhood or adulthood—seems to me to lead quite reliably first to emotional demoralization and then to behavioral demoralization.

I like to write these Substack posts in one sitting with minimal editing—more about that in a future post about adult ADHD and its connection to childhood trauma. So I’m going to start winding this down. But long term, I have a lot more to say about this topic. I feel that I may have introduced some mystery above in my rather cursory allusion to my own sex, drug, and alcohol abuse. Again, too much to go into in detail here. Suffice it to say that I am currently sober from some things and not from others. If you are inclined to worry about me, you are not out of bounds, but I also want to assure you that I have lots of appropriate medical and psychosocial care. I mean, I am a writer after all—some amount of irresponsible sex, drugs, and alcohol is practically a prerequisite for our MFAs.

Finally, if it sounds like I am making light of these issues—Well, to a degree, I am. It’s a laugh or cry kind of thing. Those of you who read this essay through the lens of your own experience I’m sure will know what I mean. And those of you who do not have such a reservoir of personal experience upon which to draw as a source of empathy—I mean, to be honest, I don’t think that is going to be true of anyone reading this.

Until next time.