Writing with understanding

In 1991 Dr. Bob Colonna’s 29-year-old daughter died suddenly, a victim of a brain aneurysm. For Colonna, the loss of one of his four children became a life-changing experience.

“It was a turning point,” he says. “I realized how short and fragile life is and how suddenly everything can change. I came to appreciate each day.”

At the time of his daughter’s death, Colonna, a California native, had already earned his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkley, and he and his wife lived in the San Francisco Bay area, where, in 1984, he had opened his own counseling practice.

“The marriage ended in divorce,” he says. “My wife and I grieved for our daughter in different ways. Relationships often fail because people cannot communicate.”

From his experiences as a counselor have come three books, “The Addiction Process,” published in 2000, “Invisible Wars,” 2005, and “Discover the Real You,” 2006. The first and last books deal with what Colonna terms, “a process of addiction” and treatment. Both grew out of his own experiences as a recovering alcoholic and counseling others. Both books are based on a series of lectures given to participants in a chemical dependency treatment program who were responding to written copies of the lectures.

Many might find Colonna’s belief disconcerting – that the inception and progress of addiction lies in the establishments of society. Traditionally, we have placed total responsibility on the addicted person. The reader comes to understand that the author’s message is that societies and cultures themselves suffer from a kind of generic addiction that begins at birth and is reinforced by the superficial values of our institutions – family, schools, church, government, and so on.

“People live in a state of what I call ‘dis-ease,’ that results from our separation from our innermost selves – our souls. This separation is the mother and father of all addiction, the ‘addiction process’ itself that gives birth to all forms of recognized addiction – drugs, alcoholism, gambling.”

Why?

Colonna believes that separation brings with it a feeling of emptiness – that the glass is half full. He says, “We are always wanting, needy, looking for fulfillment in things – alcohol, drugs, cars, money, power, relationships. This is the message that society’s institutions, often unconsciously, have given us from the beginning of life – that more is better.

“We need to be able replace wanting with a feeling of gratitude,” Colonna says.

He offers solutions, one of which is that parents impress on their children that they themselves are valuable – unique. You don’t have to be rich or have the biggest house in town to have worth as a human being.

“If you see yourself this way, how can you not see others in the same light?” he asks. “Parents are responsible for giving their children love, guidance, protection – safety.”

He does not overlook the biological and chemical components of addiction. “It is there,” he says even in the gambling addict who gets a buzz from the adrenaline rush that comes with taking chances.”

The books explain that to treat the addict he or she must be separated from the addiction of choice, and only then can what is really a spiritual problem be treated with a spiritual solution. Colonna does not promote any specific religious ideology. Among the aids is a version of the Alcoholic Anonymous 12-step program plus a conscious decision to seek one’s own, spiritual core. In the two books, Colonna suggests ways in which to do this.

The middle book, “Invisible Wars,” is painful to read because of the protagonist’s graphic descriptions of his participation in gang warfare while growing up in Cleveland and accounts of his role in covert violence in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Yet, it is a story of fall and redemption. The book is based on the journals of David Bell, and Colonna dedicated the book to his memory.

Colonna was program director in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco at a residential recovery house for those recovering from alcohol and drug addiction when he met David Bell, a Vietnam veteran who had been a covert intelligence operative in the Air Force’s Special Operations group.

Bell also was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder at the Veterans Administration hospital and was experiencing nightmares and sleep deprivation.

Colonna feared that psychological problems might jeopardize his patient’s sobriety and, based on his 20 year’s counseling experience, recommended hypnosis. As Bell remembers his past, he began to keep the journal that became the body of this book.

The journal reveals that Bell, at age 10, was a runner for his parents’ numbers racket in Cleveland. There are contradictions in his story. His mother was a teacher, a church member who seemed naïve and unaware of her son’s gang activities and the explosive and bloody level of violence in which he participated. Amazingly, Bell was intelligent, articulate in speech and writing, a good student, nice looking and a sharp dresser, not yet addicted to drugs. The mayhem in which he participated was always directed at other gangs.

Probably, for this reason he escaped arrest until 1970 when, at the age of 17, he was told to choose between prison and military service. He chose the latter where, because of his aptitude and intelligence, he was selected for Special Operations.

From the invisible wars of the streets, Bell came to this job as a trained warrior. Over the ensuing years in the invisible wars of Southeast Asia and elsewhere he was involved in the assassination of political leaders, and participated in the slaying of civilians.

Colonna says that some of his sessions with Bell challenged his sense of reality to the extent that he would have to call a timeout. By the end of the last journal entry in 2001, Bell speaks of finding peace, of being free of the bottle.

Colonna says he lost touch with Bell after leaving the Bay area but learned that Bell died in 2003 after being struck by a car.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is its relationship to the premise of the other two books, that the true self is the soul, the spiritual side of being human.

In all the horror in which Bell participated as a teenager and as a covert agent, his entries indicate he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Colonna says that Bell was an example of a man waging a war between the world in which he grew up and spent his early adult years and his own, spiritual self that always knew that what he was doing was terribly wrong. This was Bell’s invisible war just as much as were the hidden wars in South East Asia and the streets of Cleveland.