'Carrie' and the monster who raised me



The devil and his minions have haunted me all my life.

As far back as I can remember, I've been visited by the unquiet dead, the hungry ghosts, and even Old Scratch himself in my dreams. Perhaps these nighttime visitations were spiritual attacks, perhaps they were the predictable manifestation of the violence and instability of my upbringing.

Like Piper Laurie in 'Carrie,' my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. 'Humble yourself before me!' she shrieked. 'GodDAMN you, humble yourself!'

Maybe they were both; maybe the kind of moral derangement that afflicted my parents was a kind of demonic possession.

The devil I know

I'm not sure I believe in God, but I'm getting closer to believing in the devil. That's a confused position, admittedly, but that's what you get from a guy who believed as a child until it was punished out of him and then spent too many years as an obnoxious "new atheist" adult.

Whatever the answer may be, I've been terrified and fascinated by the supernatural, the uncanny, and the grotesque all my life. The kinds of spooky stories that gripped me were the type you find in Victorian English ghost story anthologies. Authors like E.F. Benson, M.R. James, and Elizabeth Gaskell.

If you like these too, no one reads them better than English podcaster Tony Walker. His "Classic Ghost Stories Podcast" is one of the few I find so good that I voluntarily pay for it. This is no amateur sideshow; Walker's narration is professional grade. Why he's not rich reading books for Audible, I'll never know.

Weeping and wailing women in veils who glide down hallways. Rain-bedraggled brides hitchhiking on the side of the road who disappear from their ride's passenger seat as he drives past Resurrection Cemetery. Fingerprints that appear on the windows of automobiles that cross the railroad tracks where a locomotive hit a school bus long ago killing the children on board. Their spirit fingers gently push your car along to make sure you don't meet their sad and untimely fate.

In search of ... belief

Like many kids of the 1970s and 1980s, I grew up watching shows like the cryptid/aliens/spook-filled "In Search Of," narrated by Leonard Nimoy. My library card was full many times over with every book on Bigfoot, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeists, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Have you heard about the moving coffins of Barbados? That's top-quality spine tingles. As the story goes, a wealthy family living on the Caribbean island built a family vault in the cemetery. Every time a member died, the crypt was opened to accept a new coffin. And every time the crypt was opened, the coffins that were already there were tossed about helter-skelter.

Maybe it was flood waters. Except that there was no evidence of water incursion. Maybe pranksters did it. But the family sealed the stone door and sprinkled sand on the floor, and there was never a footprint betraying a (living) human presence.

For a proper classic haunting, you can't beat the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall. Nearly everyone with a passing familiarity with the spirit world of 20th-century popular culture has seen the photograph of this long dead woman, a translucent, begowned figure descending the grand staircase of the palatial home in Norfolk, England, built during the reign of James I in 1620.

According to two photographers who were documenting the inside of the estate in 1936, as they were setting up a shot, they looked up at the stairs in astonishment. A veiled specter was float-walking silently down the stair treads, and they had just enough time to open the shutter on their plate camera and capture the most famous ghost photograph of all time.

Was she the shade of Lady Dorothy Walpole? Lady Walpole was said to have been immured in a room in Raynham Hall for the rest of her life at the hands of her husband, Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend, who was angered by her unfaithful dalliances.

Or was this just the first and best example of trick-ghost photography, a double-exposed photographic plate? In the early days of photography, the public was not wise to the trickery available to a skilled image-maker. Long before Photoshop and AI, the public believed the camera never lies.

I want to believe. There's something magnetic, romantic, and almost erotic about the possibility that a curtain separates us from the realm of the dead and that it thins at certain times, like now. As a child, I delighted in being scared so badly I didn't dare turn off the flashlight under the covers I used for my clandestine and very-much-not-allowed post-bedtime reading.

Joy interrupted

Yet the possibility of an ethereal realm where the dead who refuse to acknowledge their condition "live," a plane where real devil cavorts are not merely fun and games. If that plane exists, and if it's populated by any of the henchmen attributed to Satan, then the other side is very serious business indeed. I'm not so sure I want to believe, in that case, but I'm also not so sure that I don't.

When I was 8 years old, my family took a rare trip to a sit-down restaurant on Christmas Eve. We were poor, and a night out at Demicelli's Italian Restaurant was so special that Christmas would have been joyful even if we didn't get a single present. As we walked toward Placentia Boulevard in Fullerton, California, I looked at the night sky and saw the brightest star I'd ever seen.

"Mommy, look!" I said, tugging at my mother's sleeve. I pulled on her cigarette hand, which annoyed her. "It's the star of Jesus, Mommy. It's the star that guided the Wise Men to the baby Jesus!"

It was wondrous. It made me feel light-headed with a joy I'd never felt.

My mother made a derisive sniggering noise as she blew out smoke. "Oh, no it isn't, Josh," she mocked. "It's just a star. Probably Venus."

My face went red with embarrassment, and I stayed quiet the rest of the night. I felt stupid. Unsophisticated. Dumb. Childlike. Naive. And substandard. This was a problem that repeated itself over the years. My mother was the resentful "victim" type, and she was at war with God.

I convinced her to take us to the Presbyterian church where I'd been (to her reluctance, as she recalled it) baptized as an infant for Christmas Eve services in 1986. Mother spent the walk home railing about those "Goddamned hypocritical Christians! Where were they for this single mother when I needed a little help to put food on the table?"

I can't repeat the rest of what she said in a respectable publication.

Maternal monster

It wasn't until my 40s that I realized why I had been captivated to the point of obsession with certain dark characters in disturbing films like 1976's "Carrie." This was an adaptation of Stephen King's debut novel of the same name, a book that still ranks among his finest work. It's only nominally about a teen girl with telekinesis, the psychic ability to move objects with her mind. The story is really about a frightened girl who grew up with a maternal monster.

If you've seen the movie, you remember Piper Laurie's almost kabuki performance as Margaret White, a religious fanatic tormented by her own sense of failure and sin. Seeing herself as a fallen woman who fornicated with a man, she uses extreme interpretations of scripture to berate and subjugate the result of that union, her daughter, Carrie. Just as Margaret believes she can never be forgiven, she can never forgive her daughter for being born, for embodying her mother's sin in too-real flesh.

So she screams at Carrie, beats her, forces her to confess sins the girl has never committed (they were Margaret's sins), and worst of all, locks her in a "prayer closet." The scene that terrified me the most was the vignette in the dining room when Margaret forces Carrie to her knees as she intones about how God had loosed the raven on the world, and the raven was called sin.

"Say it, woman! Say it!" Margaret screams. "Eve was weak. Eve was weak!"

She drags Carrie to the prayer closet, a black cloak whirling about her like the wings of the raven, and babbles insanely while her daughter screams for mercy. Lighting a candle in the dark, Carrie looks up to a figure of St. Sebastian on the wall, a grotesque effigy with agonized eyes reflecting the pain of his arrow wounds.

Fascinated by fear

Margaret White obviously had a severe condition called Borderline Personality Disorder, which also afflicted my mother. While my mother was not a religious fanatic, she treated me the way Margaret White treats Carrie. Just as in the movie's dining room scene, my mother forced me to kneel while she stood above me bellowing. "Humble yourself before me!" she shrieked. "GodDAMN you, humble yourself!"

My mother did not want what she claimed she wanted: respect and filial piety. She wanted to be worshiped. My mother created herself God in her own image.

So I prayed to God to be delivered from my mother's prison, but I never got an answer, or one I recognized. I was more certain that the world was full of angry entities, though, and to say I felt haunted wouldn't go far enough.

That which terrorizes also fascinates. Over my life, I've tasted and re-tasted the fear through movies like "Carrie" and "Mommie Dearest." Fictional versions of my real-life horror were a poison candy; they hurt so good, like the compulsion to thrust the tongue repeatedly into a canker sore that won't heal.

I still don't know what I believe about God, the soul, heaven, or hell.

I knew what I saw

No Halloween story would be complete without a personal anecdote of an encounter with the unexplained. This is the first time I've told this story to anyone, let alone in print. Like I do myself, you may doubt me. I admit that I was halfway to drunk when it happened. But in the moment, I knew what I saw and heard, I knew I was only buzzed on three beers, not falling-down drunk. I wasn't hallucinating pink elephants or anything else.

It was 1992. I was 18 years old and sharing an apartment with my best friend, Lisa. It was movie night in the living room, and it was my turn to fetch fresh Molson Goldens from the refrigerator. I put the sweating bottles on a round cocktail tray with a rubber no-slip bottom I'd brought home from the restaurant I worked at.

I was a skilled waiter who could hold a tray with four entrees and several cocktails without spilling. And though I'd had a few beers, I was not drunk. In the hallway as I was about to enter the living room, one of the standing beer bottles on the tray violently flipped over to the horizontal with a thud. It wasn't the kind of soft thud that happens when something tips over. It was a THUD, as if someone had thrown the bottle into the tray.

Remember, it was a rubberized tray. It was actually difficult for a glass on such a tray to slide, let alone tip over. I had not tilted the tray; I was not weaving drunkenly as I walked. The other beer bottle didn't tip over. The two mugs on the same tray didn't move. More, the same thing happened a few minutes later in the living room. My (replaced) beer bottle on the side table, three feet from reach, loudly tipped over on a perfectly level table and made a loud rap.

I remember so clearly stopping still as the blood drained from my head. Did I really just see what I thought I saw? I did. And I felt it, too.

In that moment in the hall, I said this in my head: "What you just saw and heard really happened. You're not drunk, and you're not hallucinating. But no one will believe you, and over time, you will not believe you either. Your memory will soften, and you will convince yourself that you were drunk and that you somehow caused these bottles to tip over in apparent defiance of the laws of physics and friction."

That's exactly what happened. As I tell you this story, I doubt myself. At the same time, I remember the warning I spoke to myself in my head about doubt there, in the moment, and I know I wasn't crazy.

Happy Halloween.

How to find effective, no-nonsense therapy for men



If you told me even 10 years ago that I would be writing for a conservative publication like Align, I would have chuckled. Had you told me that I would be writing about issues of concern to men, about what men are and what they need, I would have guffawed.

Until about eight years ago, I was a typical liberal gay guy. Democrat, leftist, feminist. Wait — don’t close your browser tab!

If you had a good mother, you will likely pick good women. If you had a wicked mother, the women you pick will be disasters.

I understand the urge; people like me helped lay waste to American culture for a long time. But as Irving Kristol said of himself, I was mugged by reality over these last eight years. I came out on the other side as a conservative and a traditionalist.

For decades, our culture has been trying to turn men into women and women into men. Because of that, some of you may not be well-disposed to hear an argument in favor of psychotherapy for men.

Deliberate handicapping

But what we call “therapy” in 2024 is actively anti-therapeutic. Instead of challenging and helping patients become more whole and self-reliant, what’s called “therapy” today is closer to brainwashing and deliberate handicapping.

Instead of teaching clarity and self-reliance, too many practitioners foist leftist social justice ideology onto patients. At absolute best, most of this is merely an expensive hour with someone to complain to — someone who will respond by cooing over you and telling you you’re perfect as you are.

At worst, especially if you’re a man, you’ll be told it’s your “male privilege” making you miserable, and wouldn’t you be a better person if you were more feminine?

But there is real therapy that can help people who need it, and some genuinely do. I’d like to help give you the best chance of finding it if it would be helpful to you.

Mom or 'Mommie Dearest'?

Who needs therapy? People like me and maybe people like you. I was raised in a home headed by a mother with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. If you are tempted to write these terms off as “psychobabble,” I ask you to take them seriously.

They are very real, and people with them are some of the most deranged and often abusive types you will ever come across. Though it is not a perfect analogy to my childhood, if you’ve read the book or seen the movie "Mommie Dearest," you grasp the gist of what my life was like as a child (minus the money and fame).

Those of us raised this way come out extremely damaged. We have trouble having normal emotions, we hate ourselves even if we don’t know it consciously, and we’re prone to making terrible life choices. I became an alcoholic in my teens and did not quit drinking until my mid-40s (I’m 50 now). Many have walked a similar road, and many have had it much worse.

If you are a man who had an abusive mother, the effects are profound. The mother is the most important figure in a child’s life; her care and affection cannot be replaced by a substitute.

When she is deranged or abusive, your entire view of yourself, of other men, of women, is distorted. It does not matter if you’re straight or gay — all men “marry” their mothers eventually. Gay men do it through intensely close platonic female friendships while straight men romance or marry a version of their mothers.

If you had a good mother, you will likely pick good women. If you had a wicked mother, the women you pick will be disasters.

Learning what 'normal' is

This is what genuine psychotherapy is for. Most addictions and patterns of self-destructive behavior are rooted in a lack of stable, sane childhood homes. We are all responsible for the choices we make in adulthood, and only we can steer our lives. But those of us from profoundly abusive or neglectful homes have to do extra work later in life to learn what “normal” is.

It is true that therapy is not the answer to everything, and what we call therapy today is, let’s say, “overprescribed.” But the fallout from that is that there are many people, including men, who really can benefit from proper psychotherapy who have been scared off from the concept because the whole field has gone femi-woke.

How do you find a “real” therapist? I can’t give you a formula that promises success. Pickings are slim. But I’ve been in real psychotherapy for six years with an old school, no-nonsense guy, and it’s been a genuine help. My appointments are also less frequent than they used to be; I’m not advocating being on the couch for decades.

While I am not a degreed mental health practitioner, I do offer consulting/coaching (“counseling,” if you prefer) to clients who have personality disordered people affecting their lives. I’m a well-read and knowledgeable layman with experience, and that’s what I offer to those who book time with me.

How to find a good therapist

One of the most common questions from my clients is how to find a good therapist and avoid woke practitioners. Here is what I suggest:

  • Go for the oldest therapist possible. They were in school before the woke collapse of the field. My therapist is 70.
  • Men, seek a male therapist, especially if you have “mother wounds.” Part of overcoming them is connecting to other sane, healthy men. Female therapists can be very good, but there is a risk to men with mother wounds of meshing with a female therapist in unhelpful ways.
  • Avoid any therapist who advertises or even mentions LGBTQ+. That is too often an indicator of a leftist ideologue. Besides, any truly competent therapist can help clients of any demographic category.
  • Treat your first session as an interview. Explicitly bring up any concerns in plain language. Example: “I do not believe in gender ideology, and I need to make sure we’re a good fit. What is your position on LBGTQ+?” If you don’t like the answer, move on.

Therapy is not a fix for everything. There’s a lot of wisdom in the notion that getting engaged in activities in the real world with other men can do wonders for a man with a broken spirit.

I just bought my first shotgun and had my first of many trips to the shooting range; this is my way of bringing some masculine balance into my life that has been missing. Besides, I live in the country, we have bears, and I’m not relying on cops to save my own hide.

Maybe balance for you, the man reading this, is giving real therapy a shot.