I didn’t expect a therapy session when I asked people I know how the Mayor Ford saga was affecting them, but that’s what I got, however extreme those comments might sound. No one said they were indifferent, no one shrugged.
I am not talking about the political angles nor even the fierce mano a mano waged between media and mayor on many fronts. Or the legitimate search on our parts for truth.
I am talking about we the people, the ordinary “taxpayer” if you will, and how toxicity, negativity and name-calling, sneering, cynical put-downs and denial denial denial, all hallmarks of the Fords’ crisis-management style (and also traits of a dysfunctional family), can have a profound effect on even bystanders’ emotional lives.
Lurking just beneath the schadenfreude, just beside the prurience (“crack, crack crack,” how people love to say that word) is frustration and despair that this is what it has come to.
Even a family therapist confessed to being affected: “I think some people might feel strangely relieved that problems happen to the Fords like other people and their families,” said Toronto therapist Diane Moody. “I personally feel embarrassed, and helpless that our city is in the hands of such paralysis, dysfunction and anger.”
This recent saga began of course with allegations published in the Star and on the American website Gawker.com (“Today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news”) of a cellphone video being shopped around by drug dealers showing our mayor purportedly smoking crack cocaine.
Most people were truly shocked, not just by the substance, but if the video is authentic, by the Olympian lack of judgment it reveals.
The story careened into further media investigations into the Ford family’s alleged ties to drugs (Rob Ford himself once said “Our family has been through everything — from murder to drugs to being successful in business.”), the mayor’s senior staff quitting or being fired, and impassioned calls from many quarters for the mayor to get himself to rehab.
Yet most people aren’t like the salivating tweeter who wrote: “I don’t want this to ever end. This reminds me of a good suspense novel where each chapter gets better and better.”
On the contrary, we desperately want this long municipal nightmare to end, because until it does we are all held hostage, citizen codependents in the Mayor Ford saga, enmeshed in what famed family therapist and author John Bradshaw calls a “shame-based identity.”
Bradshaw, in his lectures and classic book about recovery, Healing The Shame That Binds You, maintains that toxic shame is at the heart of every addiction. (And to go meta on this, not only have most of us, in our own families, experienced addiction, aren’t we all, for better or worse, addicted to this story itself?)
People turn to substance abuse and other addictions (work, rage, sex, bullying, to name a few) when, without these self-medicating distractions, it’s too painful to be who they are. The mayor has steadfastly if curtly denied any allegations he has an addiction problem.
Yet as Bradshaw says, “there is no recovery from toxic shame unless you’re willing to come out of hiding.”
So while the citizens of Toronto wait for the mayor to come out of hiding (does anyone really believe he has told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?), we continue to be an unwilling part of a dysfunctional relationship, with feelings of being anguished and trapped on both sides.
I experienced some of this on a beautiful Sunday afternoon when I tuned into the Ford brothers’ radio show, and heard the mayor calling journalists “a bunch of maggots” (he has since apologized,), his brother Doug sneering that his fellow councillors couldn’t get jobs in the private sector (an odd position for a man who makes his money from a family business) and, between the two of them, a sense of an impermeable bubble inside of which they are right and outside of which everyone else is wrong.
It felt dehumanizing and degrading to listen to them. There should be no room for this feeling in the public square.
It felt toxic. And it felt hopeless, as if there’s no clear way out of this mess. “I could see your mood plummet,” said my husband, who listened for a few seconds and then wisely went outside to plant flowers.
But there is always a way out of any dysfunctional mess, whether it’s a family mess, a political mess or both.
The mayor, beneath his false bravado, will either take those steps himself or be forced to change his behaviour.
We will go back to being a city with ordinary problems.
We will sigh with relief when it’s over, glad to feel hopeful and whole again.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Judith Timson
No comments:
Post a Comment