The Boy in the Back Row

I was eleven years old the day I learned to fake it.

We went to a megachurch in downtown Detroit—the kind with a minister who was bigger than life — a personality, almost a celebrity. You didn’t get close to a man like that. So when the end of catechism came, and word went out that the head ministers themselves would be coming into our room to lay hands on us, it was supposed to be the holiest day of our young lives.

I should tell you where I was sitting. A couple of rows behind everyone else. That’s where I always sat. I never felt like I fit in that place — I could never understand why everyone seemed to be crying every week, so sorry, so sad. It didn’t move through me the way it seemed to move through them. And I always thought it was strange that none of the leaders ever came back to where I was and tried to pull me in. They just let me sit there, off on my own, at the edge of the room that was supposed to be the warmest room in the world.

And there was a quiet pressure underneath all of it that I didn’t understand until much later. My mother had built a Christian counseling practice. Which meant that my sister and I being good, faithful, well-turned-out kids wasn’t only a family matter — it was, in a sense, the evidence. If you wanted help becoming a better parent, you’d go to the counselor whose own children were shining proof it worked. So we were dressed to look the part. We were expected to play the part. We were, without anyone ever saying it out loud, a kind of advertisement.

I want to be careful and clear here, because this is the most important thing in the whole chapter: my parents were good people who loved me. They were not cynical. They were not staging anything on purpose. They were running a program they couldn’t see — the same one running underneath almost everyone — that says your worth is tied to how your children reflect on you. They inherited that program. They never chose it. And you cannot hold someone responsible for a blind spot they don’t know they have.

I’m telling you about it because I think you know this pressure intimately, even if you’ve never said it out loud. If you’re raising a child with special needs, somewhere in you, there is a fear about what your child makes you look like as a parent. The meltdown in the grocery store. The stares at the party. The milestone that the other kids hit that yours hasn’t. Some quiet voice asking what people must think of you. Almost no parent admits to that fear, because it feels shameful to even have it. But it’s there, and it’s heavy, and it’s the same program — my worth is on trial through my child — handed down one more generation.

It is a pressure no one should put on a child. And it’s a pressure no one should put on themselves. But here’s the turn, and it’s the gift hidden in this whole chapter: your parents couldn’t see it, so they couldn’t choose. You can see it. And the moment you can see it, you’re holding something they were never given — a choice. You get to set the weight down. You get to stop needing your child to be different so that you can feel okay. That’s not just freedom for you. It’s the chain not getting passed to them.

There were maybe a hundred of us that day. And the ceremony involved receiving what they called the gift of the holy ghost and speaking in tongues — the thing I’d watched adults do on Sundays, where someone would suddenly lift their hands and pour out a stream of words in no language I knew, filled, they said, with a presence that spoke through them.

So the ministers moved through the room, laying hands on each kid’s head and praying. And one by one, the kids began to speak it. Hands rising. Voices filling the room.

They prayed over me, and I sat with my head down. And nothing happened.

After a while, I cracked my eyes open and looked around. More hands in the air. More kids pouring out their own private languages. And slowly it landed on me, cold: I was the only one left. The only one in the entire room not doing the thing everyone else was doing.

And then every minister in that room — all of them — came over to me. They circled and put their hands on my head and began to pray.

I’m forty years past that moment, and I just got chills writing it.

There I was, a kid, with the weight of every authority in my world pressing down on my head, waiting for me to produce something I did not have. And I want you to understand — I wasn’t refusing out of rebellion. I wanted it to come. It just wouldn’t. There was nothing there.

So I made a decision. I took a breath, threw my hands in the air, and I started to babble. Sounds. Nonsense. Whatever I thought they wanted to hear.

And the room erupted. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord.

They were overjoyed. They had their miracle. And in the middle of their celebration, an eleven-year-old boy stood there having just learned the most important lesson of his childhood — and it was exactly the wrong one.

The real me — the honest one, the one who sat with his head down because nothing was happening — that kid got silence. Got circled like a problem to be fixed.

The fake me — the one who performed the thing he didn’t feel — got the hallelujahs.

It’s still stored in my body 40 years later. My nose remembers my ancestors 100’s of years ago. My body remembers programming installed before I knew the word “programming.”

A week later, they baptized us. Same enormous room, the font raised up high so the whole congregation could see. And by then, I already knew exactly what to do. I went under, came up, turned to all those people, threw my hands in the air, and shouted hallelujah as loud as I could. And I watched them clap.

I had learned the formula. Perform the feeling you don’t have, and they will love you for it. Show them the real thing, and you’ll be sitting alone in the back.

Here’s why I’m telling you this, and why it matters for you and your child.

That day, a program was installed in me. I didn’t choose it. I wasn’t even aware it was happening. But a rule got written into me somewhere below thinking — the real you is not safe; the performed you is the one that gets loved — and that rule went on to quietly run enormous parts of my life for the next thirty years.

It’s why I became a chaser. Why I needed to be the best at everything, why I went all in on every single thing, why I kept achieving and achieving, trying to feel like enough. I thought that was just my personality. I’m driven. I’m intense. I’m an extremist my friends would say. For many years, I wore that title as a medal of honor. No. No. No. I was an eleven-year-old who hardly knew how to make a sandwhich. Yet, still throwing his hands in the air, still performing for the hallelujah, decades after he left that room.

That’s what programming is. It isn’t a metaphor. From the time we’re very young — long before we can consent — we absorb rules about what’s safe, what gets us loved, and who we have to be. A painful moment happens. We adapt to survive it. And then that adaptation keeps running, automatically, in the background, for years and years after the original danger is gone, shaping our reactions and our choices while we experience it as simply who we are.

You have these, too. Everyone does.

It’s the reason you snap in a particular way that you swore you never would — the exact way, maybe, that someone once snapped at you. It’s the reason a certain look from your child can launch you into a reaction that’s three sizes too big for the moment. It’s the reason you keep doing the thing you’ve promised yourself a hundred times you’ll stop doing. That’s not weakness, and it’s not a lack of love. It’s a program written long ago, running on its own, in a situation it was never designed for.

Here is the single most important thing I can tell you, and it’s the whole reason this work is possible:

You are not your programming. You are the one who can see it.

The fact that you can read this and feel something flicker — oh, I think I do that — means there is a you that is watching the program. And anything you can step back and watch, you are not. You’re the awareness behind it. And what awareness can see, awareness can begin to change.

That eleven-year-old boy didn’t know he had a choice. He thought the only options were silence or performance. He couldn’t see the program because he was the program — he was looking out through it, not at it.

If you are hearing this (or better to say “seeing” haha) for the first time, let it land wherever it wants. This concept is profound and life-altering for those who come in contact with it. Let it steep and watch life as you know it change.

The work we’re going to do together is the slow, gentle business of turning around and looking at it. Of catching the moment you throw your hands in the air for the hallelujah and realizing — for the first time — that you don’t have to. That the real you, the one you exiled to the back of the room all those years ago, was never the problem.

He was never the problem. Neither were you.

I’ll see you next week.

If this landed, follow along — I write every Monday, for the parent carrying more than anyone sees. I want you to know that I see you. I’m here for you, your programs, your good attitude, your bad attitude, and everything in between. Together we push ourselves and our community towards personal mastery. Sure, 6-pack abs, millions of followers, a big house, and owning an island in Fiji has its place and in itself isn’t bad (maybe quite the opposite), but it’s not the game in my opinion. On this journey, our kids experience new levels of calm. Their nervous system settles. In those new pockets of space, our kids hear things for the first time. They retain something previously taught, but now there is space for retention. With that retention, a new milestone is discovered, development is seen, and the only thing that exists is love. So here’s to love and your courage to walk another day on your path.