How to Change Someone You Love: Four Steps to Help You Help Them - Hardcover

PART I

At the End of Your Rope Is Hope

ONE

You’ve Got the Power!

If anyone needed to change, it was me.

From the time I was a teenager, I had a preoccupation with catching a buzz. The son of a preacher, I grew up in a drug-and alcohol-free home in Eugene, Oregon. Our house, situated on an acre of land, was a neat, modest wood-frame home on Kirkwood Street, a road away from my father’s church. Our house was surrounded by azaleas, rosebushes, towering oak trees, and a large lawn that I and my three brothers mowed regularly. There was a garden in our backyard where we grew a lot of our own food, and we were able to can a season’s worth of fruit and vegetables. Folks from the church, many of them farmers and fishermen, would stop by with beef, lamb, salmon, and crab to fill our two large freezers. There were sidewalks, neighbors waving from their porches, and schools within walking distance of my house. Life in Eugene was largely predictable and tranquil.

But mine was not. I was born with a birth defect: abnormal breast tissue. In other words, I had boobs. I looked like I needed a bra. I refused to take a shower at school, and my secret was something I tried to keep. But in fifth grade, I was exposed by a coach who took delight in making sure I was always a "skin"—that is, assigned to the team that had to take their shirts off to play ball. "Look at Lamm’s tits!" the coach would yell. It was cruel.

To be laughed at. To be different. To be in fear of discovery. It just hurt way too much. I decided one day that I should kill myself—and confessed my intention to my parents. They were shocked: "We never brought it up because we didn’t want you to be even more self-conscious," they said.

My emotional crisis forced a decision on their part—to correct my deformity as soon as possible. At age fifteen, I had surgery, and voila, the outside had changed. Yes, the physical was improved, fixed. But the birth deformity, although corrected, left me feeling damaged emotionally; the psychological scars of being laughed at and mocked as a kid still remained. For most of my life, I felt like I didn’t belong, like I could never belong, like every room I walked into was an unwelcome one.

The same year I had the surgery, I attended a Christmas party at a retirement home where I played the piano on Sunday mornings for the old folks’ church service. When no one was looking, I snuck a bottle of champagne, locked myself in a bathroom, and chugged it down. My first experience with alcohol equalized all the unease with which I lived. Gradually, alcohol became something I felt I needed desperately, in order to remove my insecurities, make me feel like I fit in, and provide relief from my feelings. The more alcohol something had, the better, and I conscientiously read the bottle labels to make sure I was getting the highest proof available.

My drinking escalated. At the beginning of my freshman year in college, I’d get drunk before classes, then snort cocaine to boot myself out the door. As time went on, drugs of all types became a fixation, especially cocaine. It was an obsession, lord and master over my life, all I ever thought about.

I decided to leave college at age nineteen. My life at that point had become an endless series of flirtations with recovery from drugs and alcohol, yet I always ended up right back where I started: in the drugs, the alcohol, and the nicotine. I was self-medicating with everything that could release me from the pain I felt. My grandma Lamm called my pain "a bag of dead chickens." "Why do you insist on carrying it around everywhere you go?" she’d say.

Of course, she was right. I needed to drop the bag to get better. But I couldn’t. To do so would mean I would have to do something about my addiction; I would have to face the dreaded c word: change. I was not ready for that. The thought of living without my crutch was too frightening.

I decided to "find myself" and settled in Kamakura, Japan, an ancient seaside city, where I lived in a picturesque hillside home near the beach. I taught piano and English, studied Japanese and Buddhism, and wrote music. I bought fresh fish from the local fishermen. I cooked healthy foods, tried to live a healthy lifestyle, and worked to fix the pain I felt through spiritual exploration and dedicated self-discovery.

I wasn’t doing hard drugs, but I was doing alcohol, mainly beer and wine, and sometimes to the point of blacking out. The beer was making me fat. I smoked to control my appetite and keep the weight off. I binged and even purged when I had eaten too much. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another! I hated my lack of self-control. I prayed daily for strength. "Please God, relieve me from this!" But I felt my prayers went unheard and unanswered, or maybe I just wasn’t worth being listened to. Maybe I was too damaged by my past—that sack of dead, rotting chickens I kept lugging around. I wondered, too, if maybe God had turned his back on me.

One Saturday afternoon, while browsing in a little office supply shop, I slipped a book of Shinto prayers in my pocket. I rationalized that it was okay to reward myself by stealing something, since I hadn’t drunk anything for five days. I deserved to get something for nothing. Not for nothing, as it turned out. A security guard pulled me aside, and within minutes I was surrounded by guards, speaking a hundred miles an hour in a language I barely understood. They threatened to call the police, but in the end I cried my way out of it and charmed my way back to my moped. I went straight home and drank until I passed out.

After I awoke, I read a prayer in I Corinthians 10:13 and claimed it: No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

But to no avail.

My way out always led back to another unanswered prayer. Was I not praying hard enough? Or was I maybe a hopeless case, as I feared? I always ended up back where I’d begun, which was nowhere—fast.

Then one day a solution came to mind—the notion that if I moved to New York City (the center of the universe in my mind), I could make the connection, find the answers I lacked, and moderate what I had been unable to control. Within a week, I was packed up, ready to go. I would make a fresh new start of it! I took boxes of a life that I’d cobbled together to the post office and mailed them to New York. I kissed my friends good-bye, and closed the latest broken chapter of my life, promising myself that the future would be better.

This was a fantasy, and the reality was far from it. Within a short time of arriving stateside, I landed a job as doorman at the world-renowned Limelight nightclub. I was in heaven or hell, depending on your view. Drug dealers slipped me drugs each night if I would let them in. Alcohol and cocaine were always a handshake away.

A chance meeting, while I was working the Limelight door, led to a job hosting an entertainment show that aired in six cities. Turned out I was pretty good in front of a TV camera. A man named Conrad Shadlin, the top agent for weather anchors on television at the time, took notice. He wrote me a letter and wanted to take me on as a client. He promised he’d train me on how to be an on-air personality and teach me how to do the weather. I signed on. Maybe he would lead to my prayers being answered.

My first gig as a weather guy was in Boise, Idaho. The year was 1996. My parents and brother Scott lived there too, and I was happy to be reunited with them. Life in Boise would be a fresh start. I promised myself (again) that I was done with...