The Journey to the Healing Place

By M. Hilliard Patterson

Someone suffering from addiction lives in a fantasy world – one where the world seems hostile, judgmental, and unforgiving.

Those with the disease cannot see their true role in the universe, and they rationalize, justify, and deny their anti-social and criminal behaviors. M. Hilliard Patterson knows because that is what he did as an addict.

In this testimony, he recalls the pain of addiction and what it felt like being trapped in a world of self-doubt. More importantly, he shares how he escaped a prison of his own making so that others can:

overcome unpleasant thoughts and feelings; appreciate how family trauma and loss can lead to addiction; find freedom through faith in the Lord.

While the author does not pretend to have the answer to the problem of addiction, he does know what worked for him and how God has helped him overcome his problems. Through hard work and faith, he has found a renewed sense of meaning and hope.

Take control of your life, stop making excuses, and help others walk with you to a better place by joining the author on his journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480883338

M. Hilliard Patterson

M. Hilliard Patterson was born with everything necessary to live a productive and successful life but drifted into a world addiction as a way to escape the world around him. Once he discovered that God lives inside us all, he faced his inner demons and was rescued from his own prison. He has found that depending on God results in freedom.

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Copyright © 2019 M. Hilliard Patterson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

We Have This Ministry–Samuel Proctor, Gardner C. Taylor with Gary Simpson. 1996 Johnson Press, Valley Pa.

African American Pastoral Care–Edward P. Wimberly. Abingdon Press 1991

Celebration and Experience in Preaching–Abingdon Press 1990

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4808-8334-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-8333-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019914575

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/16/2019

Contents

Introduction

The Beginning

The New Jersey Years

A Descent into Madness

College

The Twelve Steps and The Beginning of My Faith

Finding the God of My Understanding

My Recovery Years

My Church Years

My Conversion to Organized Religion—but Not to God

The Healing Place

God Is Blamed for Our Unbelief

The Meaning of Healing

Introduction

This is the story of the life of one person, but elements of this story apply to all too many people. The idea that addiction is the result of using drugs is a dangerous misconception. The character of an addict is developed by reactions to events in everyday life, and in a great many instances, there is a search for spiritual belonging. This addict was searching for a way to be a part of God’s universe. He is sometimes troubled even today by feelings of being an outsider who is either vastly superior to others or vastly inferior to what he thinks he should be. A confused self-image that is oblivious to reality can manifest itself in many forms.

The word junkie encompasses a whole range of behaviors that are attempts to totally escape the realities of the self and the demands of life. There is no question in my mind that addiction is a deadly disease. Someone with the disease of addiction lives in a fantasy world that affects their perceptions of themselves and the world around them. They perceive the world as being hostile, judgmental, and unforgiving. The world does not comprehend their entitlement. This life of fantasy is one of manipulation of circumstances, unrealistic demands of those around them, and unrealistic expectations of other people. Other people are only there for the addict’s convenience. They have faulty perceptions of their own roles in the universe. They rationalize, justify, and deny their antisocial and criminal behaviors.

I am searching for a way to tell the story of a distorted life of underachievement, dishonesty, and fear. A collection of thoughts, emotions, and longings is pieced together like the disconnected notes of an out of tune symphony. The orchestra is totally oblivious to its conductor’s instructions. The addict is choosing to live an existence of obsession, compulsion, and flights of fancy.

I longed for freedom from myself and the courage to be myself. I wanted to become who I thought I could become. Instead, I was trapped inside a wall of self-doubt. I was standing on the outside and was too afraid to participate in the real world. I spent many years looking for some missing ingredient or magic formula for happiness. I searched my soul and rejected God. I was living only for myself and had no regard for even my own well-being. This mind-set drove me deeper into negative thought patterns, which led to behaviors that went against the morals I had learned. Confused and misguided, I looked for total spiritual affirmation by shifting my conscious mind into a constant state of euphoria.

This spiritual transformation was coupled with attempts to gain the emotional maturity that would ground me in the realities of life. I discovered that there is no way to avoid the uncertainties of life and the deceptiveness of feelings. For someone with an addictive personality, life can only be faced with the help of God. A diseased spirit, emotional instability, low self-esteem, and a fear of life itself took hold of me very early and crippled my attempts to grow spiritually and attain living skills.

The Beginning

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THE PASSING OF years has made memories blur or become distorted. They have been shaped into a collection of the thoughts, suppositions, and even the remembrances of others. I have recollections of being a very young child. My life began almost as one of privilege, relatively speaking. I was born in Pennsylvania, but I only know what I have been told about those years. My father became ill when I was two years old, and we moved to South Carolina. My first recollections are of living in a small town in the 1950s.

The sleepy southern town had an antebellum courthouse in the middle of the town square. The courthouse had been rebuilt with twentieth-century architecture, but the downtown stores still formed a town square around the courthouse. Someone painted murals to commemorate the past on the sides of some of the downtown buildings. Everything about the town screamed old South; the town was steeped in Southern tradition.

We moved south when I was two. My father was a lot older than my mother, and when he became ill, my mother could not find a teaching job in Pennsylvania. She found one in the segregated south. I have no idea how this arrangement affected my father. He had earned a high income for a black in the early fifties, and from all accounts, he was a vigorous and energetic person. My father had a great head for business, and my mother was great at managing things. They made a strong team. He had plans to do a lot of things, but his health prevented him from doing them. Had he lived, our economic condition would have been a greatly different—if Mama had handled the purse strings, that is.

We had the necessities for life after my father’s death. We lived in a house that my father bought; he was very astute at purchasing real estate. We also had a car (a Kaiser, a status symbol in those days). Mother provided us with enough of everything we needed, and I guess she had a prominent position in the black community at the time. Teachers were considered upper crust because many people of color could barely read or write.

Since schoolbooks in the black schools had to be rented, large families missed out on a chance to learn the basics. The classes were overcrowded. One year, my mother had seventy-five kids, and most of them lacked books. There was a class system among blacks. The ones who were fortunate enough to be educated looked down on the less fortunate. The ones with little or no chance to succeed harbored great resentment toward those they considered a step above them. That light skin, dark skin thing further divided the black community.

Segregation was, for the most part, accepted as a way of life by both blacks and whites. It shocked everyone when a black man sat down inside a restaurant that only served blacks through a window on the side of the building. This was not a demonstration; he just wanted to sit down to eat. As I recall, he was from out of town, but it was still quite shocking and made the weekly newspaper.

I believe that traditions and lack of leadership, rather than fear, caused the black community not to react and resist segregation. The feeling was things were the way they were, and nothing could be done about it. Those were the days before Martin Luther King Jr. led the fight to raise the consciousness of black people in the south and eventually, all over the country.

Many of the streets, even within the city limits, were unpaved. There were as many unpainted houses as painted ones, and indoor bathrooms were almost a status symbol. Our house was painted. We had an indoor bathroom, thus the feeling of privilege. It had been added onto the house. The neighbor to the left of us had an outhouse. The one to the right had indoor facilities, but I don’t know if it was added after the house was built. All three of the houses are still there.

All three were a cut above many of the houses in the black neighborhood of that day. Most were unpainted and in ill repair. They might be called millhouses—because many were rented to workers at the local sawmill—or shotgun houses. A shotgun house is one you can see or shoot straight through. If you shot a gun through the front door, the bullet would go out the back door without hitting anything. There were no building codes in those days.

Many of those houses are still there. Like most small towns, the community has changed very little in that respect. Things might have been different if more ambitious and energetic people had remained, but most migrated to large cities in the North or South mostly to Atlanta to the South or New York City (up the road referring to moving north).

Since there were no leash laws, packs of dogs often roamed the streets at night and in the early morning. It was unclear as to which ones were strays and which had homes. Most of the dogs didn’t have collars or any evidence of receiving rabies shots. Lots of folks, even in the town limits, had chickens in their yards. The woman next door cleaned chitterlings in her front yard. The sight of women making soap was not unusual. They built a fire under a big cast-iron pot and cooked the lye, lard, and other ingredients until it made soap.

Smokehouses, where salt-cured meat was processed and stored, dotted the yards of the more fortunate residents. Pork was a staple in the diets of most of us. I often heard people say you could use every part of the hog except the squeal. I still don’t exactly know what a hog jowl is, but I guess I have eaten some. Have you ever dined on chicken feet? We had a few chickens for a short time. My mother canned vegetables from my grandfather’s farm. We were never hungry. She sewed and repaired garments for herself and my sister. She did hair in our kitchen sometime to make ends meet. My brother, and I had to grow into many of the things she bought us—some we are still growing into—but we were always dressed well. Above all, we were loved—and we knew it.

The old woman on the left side was born a slave. She must have been in her nineties in nineteen fifty. I loved going to her house and talking with her. She showed me love and gave me a nickel every now and then. In a lot of ways, I think of her as my first good friend. It seemed that I didn’t have to fear her and say all that yes, ma’am and, no, ma’am stuff. But, boy, was she nosy. She even peeped in our windows. The upside to that was that the house was under constant surveillance when we were away.

The neighbors on the right, on the other hand, were for lack of a better way of putting it—prototypical, absolute authority figures. The grown-ups expected total and immediate obedience from their daughter and all children they encountered. They had a farm, and he worked at the cup factory, the best factory job in town. The other industrial employer was the local sawmill, but it paid a lot less.

A few blacks worked for the railroad. My grandfather did for a time, and his brother worked there for fifty years. My grandfather drove a truck, and he and others were employed as seasonal workers in various jobs at the tobacco warehouses, which lined the main street for a couple of blocks. There were two black policemen and one postal worker. There were several black businesses, including a motel restaurant that we were quite impressed with at the time. By today’s standards, it would be inferior. After the owner’s death, the property was sold, and fittingly enough, a place that sells headstones replaced it. One might conclude that it was symbolic of the death of black business in Darlington. There was a fairly large grocery store, but again, it was not much by today’s standards.

There were at least one black plumber, two black filling stations, a black tire shop, a black shoe repair shop, several black beauty shops and barbershops, and lots of black churches and preachers. Most of the rest of the black population was separated into groups like the whites or any other population, but with a real ceiling. Teaching and administrative positions were the only professional jobs for blacks, except for one black doctor and one black nurse. I don’t recall a black lawyer, architect, or engineer. I almost forgot the two black funeral homes and one man who could be described as being in real estate. The rest of the black population got by as best they could. I was too young to understand the true dynamics of the racist and oppressive system that engulfed this typical town in the South.

A few were engaged in illegal activities, such as gambling and bootlegging, but crime was not much of a problem; you could leave your doors unlocked. However, the local chain gangs were never empty of black inmates. They did a lot of work around the town and were quite visible. Most of the inmates were charged with crimes: such non support (though few jobs were available) disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, or driving without a license. Except for the ones there for drunk driving or violent acts against other black people, whites were quite safe, and for the most part, unaffected by anything one black did to another. Whites were only impacted if an employee was hurt in a fight or put in jail.

There is a stock car race nearby. It used to be the biggest race of the year. One year, the star of Gunsmoke came down to be in the parade. That was the first time I saw a celebrity in person, and it was a big deal for the whole town. Most people commented that he looked a lot better on television.

Back then, we could hear the cars’ engines all over town as they raced around the track. The town’s claim to its limited fame revolved around that race. The entire atmosphere changed when Labor Day approached. In the years to come, the powers that be became more and more opposed to the race for some reason. I don’t understand why they discouraged race fans from coming to town, thus missing out on the economic boost to the local merchants. The race has declined in its importance to the stock car racing world. It wasn’t even on Labor Day for a few years.

The great debate in my mind is if it really matters whether memories were created or if actual events are remembered. The past is no longer reality. It is as unreal as fairy tales and as elusive as an attempt to capture something blowing in the wind, but its specter still haunts us when we get caught up in it. Many things affect our lives—even before we are born. Things happen before we are old enough to remember them, or maybe we just wanted things to have been that way. We control much of our outlook on life with how we choose to remember things that happened or that were planted in our consciousness by others.

The early years of my life, the times spent with my mother brother and sister, I recall with a great deal of happiness. However, those times were punctuated with sadness, including the death of my father when I was four years old and my grandmother five years later.

What did I feel if anything when my father died? I was four years old at the time. That is still an open question. There is no way to prepare for it or discuss such things with children without robbing them of their right to be innocent. They must learn to accept the uncomfortable realities of life as they grow old enough to understand. I am perplexed about what I could feel or understand at that age without a reference to my life experiences. The only things I knew of grief or any other feeling was what others told me to feel or what they allowed me to see of how they felt. I