I grew up with relatives who were just like Lucy in The Peanuts comic strip. They would
insult people, shirk responsibility, chew people out, and in the end, they
always found ways to justify their behavior. Eventually, I realized there was
only way out, and that way was to avoid them. You can never win an argument
with a narcissist, because they believe their own lies. In this book, Dr.
Abraham Twersky uses Lucy, and other Peanuts characters, to illustrate the
mentality of addiction.
Dr. Twersky (MD/PhD) is an interesting character; a Rabbi
and Psychiatrist, specializing in addictions, he’s worked with every class of
addiction you can think of, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, food, rage, or just
plain procrastination. He mentioned in The
Jews of America that he sees the traits of an addict in himself, describing
it as “I’m a procrastinator, I crave instant relief.” One of the points of this
book is that the need for relief is not a cause or symptom of addiction, but part
of a spectrum of problems you see in addiction.
One of his examples is the dynamic between Lucy and
Schroeder. We’ve all read the strips, where Lucy leans on the piano, crooning
to the boy while he ignores her. Nothing he says or does, no matter how
dismissive or just downright hostile, can make her go away. He looks right
through her, and she can’t see that he’s ignoring her. Then there are Lucy’s
victims, the people that good-naturedly listen to her while she raves, rants,
vents, and lies. She’ll miss a fly ball because she’s drawing in the dirt, and
when Charlie Brown gets mad, she’ll say, calmly, “A good coach doesn’t yell at
the players.” She goads people into getting angry so she can criticize them,
and it’s a way for her to feel superior. We wonder when Charlie Brown will get
it into his head that Lucy can never be trusted, wishing he’d give Lucy her
comeuppance.
The book begins with the mantras for Alcoholics Anonymous
and 12-Step, and one of the most well-known is that you have to admit you’ve
lost control. You have to come out and say “I’m an alcoholic, and I have no
control over myself anymore.” From there, you build back up, and you look into
how your addiction started and how it altered your life. In the Peanuts comic, Charlie
lets people drive him crazy, but won’t face the fact that he needs to avoid
them.
On the subject of addiction, I recall the movie The Lost
Weekend, where the alcoholic writer drags everyone down with him. I asked an
addiction counselor how much of it was realistic, and he said “everything,” and
how he could relate to the guy being desperate for another drink, waiting
desperately for the pawn shops to open, lying constantly to his loved ones. But
there was one highly unrealistic part, and that was the end. There are no
epiphanies in addiction; the only way an addict gets clean is when he hits rock
bottom, and rock bottom is when your friends and family cut you off.
Unlike another Rabbi/therapist name Shmuley Boteach, Dr. Twersky
doesn’t get as much attention. He’s not a media hound, but he is well-known to
people who really want to recover. If you watch him on youtube, you’ll see that
he doesn’t go for instant relief, and you’ll have to have patience to watch and
listen to him. If you want instant relief (whether it works or not) then you
can watch Dr. Phil. One of the aspects of the Peanuts comic that kind of
mirrors Dr. Phil is the way Snoopy decides to eat to forget. Instead of facing
his problem, he decides to eat until he no longer thinks about horrible things,
and ends up obese. Saying “hooray, I’ve forgotten her,” does not mean anything.
There’s no magic pill.
I recall a Mad Magazine
parody of Peanuts, where Charlie
Brown finally deals with his frustration. In that parody, Lucy says she’ll hold
the football down, while Charlie runs up to kick it, and we all know how this
always ends, right? Well in the next panel, Lucy is on the ground, nursing a
big bruise, and says “I know I deserve something for always pulling the ball
away, but why did you have to kick me in the head?” Charlie responds “because
the way you were facing, I couldn’t reach your butt!” Though the reader wishes
this would happen, it wouldn’t work. Lucy would never learn from something like
this. She’d go around telling everyone that Charlie was the aggressor. Unless,
that it, Charlie cut all ties with his social circle, because then it would
make no difference what they thought of him.
Perhaps one of the first things about recovery is leaving
the people with whom you are addicted.
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