Martin’s southern Maine family has been dealing in antiques for decades. Not to mention pent-up rage and mental illness. The podcaster/painter/antique-appraiser who lent Paul a helping hand when he was getting this podcast off the ground opens up about what it took to stop the cycle of fathers unleashing their anger on their sons.
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Episode notes:
Check out Martin's artwork website or his podcast the Antique Auction Forum.
Episode Transcript:
The Mental Illness Happy Hour
Episode #40 Martin Willis
Paul: Welcome to episode 40 with my guest Martin Willis. I’m Paul Gilmartin, this is the Mental Illness Happy Hour—an hour of honesty about all of the battles in our heads, from medically diagnosed conditions to everyday compulsive negative thinking, feelings of dissatisfaction, disconnection, inadequacy, and that vague sinking feeling that the world is passing us by. You give us an hour, we’ll give you a hot ladle of awkward and icky. This show is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice; I’m a jackass that tells dick jokes and I just happen to do a show that some people find a little bit helpful in dealing with those battles in their heads. I want to thank the listener Sean who emailed me that. He said “Stop referring to yourself as just a jackass that tells dick jokes.” And so he suggested that I say that, and I thought ‘You know what, OK, I will. I will.’
I feel like I should be happier around the holidays, and I feel kind of like something’s wrong with me because everybody else seems to be doing all these celebratory things—hanging lights and doing this and doing that, and I always feel kind of left out because I never feel that spirit, the closest I can feel to that spirit is seeing how much my wife enjoys it, and then I just kind of draft off her excitement, and I eventually come around on Christmas Eve because I know she’s gotten me some great presents. Isn’t that what the holidays are all about?? Bullshit your way through not being happy until presents are there and then you are actually happy…Oh fuck, that’s my fucking truth. That is my truth. And I know I’m not alone in that, because when I share this with people a lot of them laugh and say “Yeah, man, I feel the exact same fucking way.” So if you’re out there and you’re feeling like you’ve missed the Christmas train and something’s wrong with you, I don’t think you are. I think that’s just how a lot of us feel.
I’ve mentioned before, the website for this show is mentalpod.com, and there’s a couple of different surveys you can take on there, and I wanted to read a survey respondent…they took our Shame and Secrets survey, and I like to go through and see what people have written sometimes, and I want to read this woman’s survey and just send her some love. Just let her know that she is not alone. Her name is Kat, she’s in her ‘30s, she’s a bisexual. She writes that she is almost completely in the closet. Her environment she was raised in, she writes “Some parts were very normal and healthy and a few specific aspects were very abusive.” She was the victim of sexual abuse and never reported it. Her deepest, darkest thoughts: “I think about how I wish my family was dead. Sometimes I wish someone would kill me.” Um…What are your deepest, darkest secrets? Thing that you’ve done or things that have happened to you. She writes “I was raped by my best friend while he was blacked out. He kept saying how much he loved me during it. He has no memory of this. Many times I have gone out to bars, gotten drunk with the purpose to take a complete stranger home for sex. Frequently we wouldn’t use protection. I’ve driven drunk. I broke into a neighbor’s house with a friend when I was 15. One of my ex-boyfriends broke up with me three days after I had a miscarriage. I have bi-polar disorder, which some people know about. I’ve attempted suicide twice, which no one knows about. I’ve gone in-patient in psych units without telling anyone in my family because of the shame I feel about my illness.” And then to the question “Do these secrets and thoughts generate any particular feelings toward yourself?” she writes “When I think about what I’ve done, I think about how much of a disgusting person I am, that I am a waste of humanity and a slut.” Kat, you’re not a disgusting person. You are not a waste of humanity and you are not a slut. You sound to me like a person who has experienced a lot of pain in her life, and is coping the best way that she knows how. And I just want to send some love your way and say that you are not alone and if you were here I’d give you a big fat hug and welcome you to the Mental Illness Happy Hour family.
[Intro music/theme]
Paul: I am talking with Martin Willis, who, I met Martin about…I guess it would have been about a year ago, you heard my character on the Adam Carolla show and you had interviewed me for your podcast, Comical Cast…You also have another podcast which is an auction podcast—what’s the name of the auction one?
Martin: Yeah, hi Paul, it’s the Antique Auction Forum.
Paul: The Antique Auction Forum. So you and I met and I had told you that I had an idea for this podcast and I didn’t know…I knew how to record the audio but I didn’t know how to put up a website, I didn’t know how to get it up on iTunes, and you were generous enough to do it for a very, very reasonable price and I really appreciate that. And anybody who’s out there listening to this podcast, you should thank Martin also. I had no idea that you considered yourself to be qualified, I guess, to be a guest on this. I don’t know how to say it without…I don’t know what the right verbiage is, I’m still finding it, but I noticed a post that you had put up on the forum for this site—the web site for this show is mentalpod.com, and there’s a forum and people post stuff--- and you had posted some kind of painful-sounding stuff from your childhood. So you and I talked some more and decided that maybe you would be a good guest to come on and talk about this. I guess the place to start would be your relationship with your dad. Now your family has a history of being in the auction business, can you talk about that?
Martin: Yeah. Well, I grew up in a small town in Maine, right on the border of New Hampshire, and it’s kind of like antique territory back in this area. And my father was messing around a little bit with the antiques, and he was more or less the mayor of the town, which he was the chairman of the board of the Selectmen, which is considered a mayor in small towns. And he showed up at a benefit auction, the auctioneer came in drunk, and couldn’t do the auction, so they said “Hey, you’re the mayor, get up there”. So they put him on the spot, he got up there and did a wonderful job and he got real busy right after that and actually, you know, it became a second generation business because I went right into it myself.
Paul: The auction business, is that antiques? I should say, is that something that you were interested in or you just fell into it because your dad was interested in it?
Martin: A little bit of both. I was…yeah, it’s kind of funny, when you’re in Maine, there’s…it’s sort of primitive when you’re young back in the ‘70s and I dug bottles out of 200-year-old dumps in the area. I collected bottles and I loved that, I loved the old stuff, so I sort of had that to begin with.
Paul: What kind of bottles? Like liquor bottles, or…?
Martin: Everything you could think of. You know, when you’re a little kid, anything that’s really colorful, you know, that’s what I collected. So I always had sort of a bug for collecting, and you know, antiques and things like that. And then the business grew really big from my father and then also from myself later. So that’s kind of how we sort of stumbled in, from a drunk guy actually.
Paul: Isn’t that funny? The beauty of alcoholism. Sometimes beautiful things happen from seemingly painful disasters. So can you talk about your relationship with your dad growing up?
Martin: Sure. Well, my dad was a big man. When I say big, I’m 5’9” and my dad was 6’2” and just, you know, real tall so when you’re a little kid, you know…He was very loud and he liked to yell a lot and stuff like that. And he worked all the time but he took every Sunday off, and every Sunday morning as a little kid, we’re talking you know 5 years old or so, I would start crying because he would be around and there would be a lot of chaos.
Paul: Can you be specific about what kind of chaos?
Martin: Well, there would always be like yelling and there was a lot of belting, and you know, things. And it got a lot worse than that as the years went by. But he would find me…I used to try to hide from him because I knew he would not…The worst thing I could ever do was cry in front of my father because he would scream at me to stop crying, and the more he screamed at me the more it was difficult to stop. But he used to put me up on top of the bathroom sink and push my face into the mirror and say that I was a little girl and that he was going to put me in a dress…
Paul: Because you cried?
Martin: Because I cried. And you know, the thing about that, I talked to my father in later years about that, and he said that he ended up going to a psychiatrist—I don’t remember any of this—but he went to a psychiatrist because it was bugging the shit out of him, and the psychiatrist said--
Paul: What he had done to you was bugging the shit out of him?
Martin: No, that I was crying.
Paul: Oh my God. That that’s the behavior that needs looking at, is your crying, not the fact that he…Well, I’m sure he didn’t tell the psychiatrist what he was doing to you.
Martin: Well, listen to what the psychiatrist told him to do. He said “OK, this is what you do. You totally ignore him like he’s not even there, alive, day and night no matter what. Just do that and it’ll stop.” So my father told me it was really painful to do this, but for three months I would run up to him to say goodnight or whatever and he would just hold the newspaper and never look down or anything.
Paul: Are you kidding me? Are you sure your dad didn’t pay to see a lumberjack, and that’s who gave him the advice? That’s unbelievable.
Martin: The lumberjacks wear two hats here, you know.
Paul: Oh my God. What did that feel like, to say goodnight to your dad and he wouldn’t even put the paper down?
Martin: I don’t really recall that, as a matter of fact I was kind of surprised but I know that eventually I stopped crying so in a roundabout way I guess it worked. But you know, to talk a little bit more, my father was a very important figure in my life…
Paul: Hold on one second, Martin. It worked in the fact that you didn’t cry outwardly, but I would imagine it was a disaster and that those feeling gotta go somewhere, so you probably directed them at yourself.
Well, you know Paul, I gotta really tell you, I think if I was really to put myself in that place again I would be relieved because he was a scary man to be around, and he became very physically violent after that. But I think what hurt more than the physical was the words, so one of his favorite things to say to me over and over again, throughout all the way into my teens was—and it was not proper English—“You’re never gonna be nothing”. He used to say that all the time.
Paul: What do you remember thinking or feeling when he would say that?
Martin: Oh, it was crushing. And when I had some failures in business and things like that, for some reason I would think ‘Well, yeah, he’s right.’ I used to think I was stupid and because, what would happen is, if he came around me when I was doing homework or whatever, I could not write what two and two was—I would just be so nervous. And so he said “What are you, stupid?” or something like that. Anyway, going back to the words…There was a lot of physical abuse, the belting happened a lot, but the worst part of it was the taunting. He used to stand in front of me and snap the belt, you know fold it in half and snap it together, and just look at me. And I’d start crying because I knew I was going to get the belt. And recently there was a belting on Judge Williams, where the clip got played two million times or something, and that’s what I dealt with all the time. It was like “Okay, put your hands, you’re gonna get it on the hands”…
Paul: What clip? Judge Williams—what are you talking about?
Martin: Judge Williams was a Texas child abuse judge that his daughter released a film on YouTube of her getting whipped or belted and it went viral.
Paul: Right, yes, I’m sorry.
Martin: But that’s what it was. The worst part in any of the whippings or when I used to get into the bathtub and my mother would see the scars on my back because my father used to carve switches out of sticks and hit me with that. The worst part was seeing my mother cry. I couldn’t stand to see my mother cry.
Paul: Did she say anything to him, do you know? Did she try to stop him from doing that?
Martin: Well, he rarely did anything in front of her besides yelling. He did a lot of yelling, but he would rarely hit us kids in front of her. But when it was out in a barn, my mother would defend us for whatever she knew and it would just be by crying, basically, in front of my father, and…
Paul: And that would work on him. So he had sympathy for her tears but not his children’s tears??
Martin: Yeah. So you know the worst it ever got with my father and I as far as physical was he went up in the woods with a chainsaw, and it was my job to go up and stack the wood after school and I stacked some of it but not all of it . So when I told him that he flipped out, and a friend of mine witnessed this whole thing, he started strangling me up against a wall. My friend was on a path looking down and saw the whole thing—until I passed out and I woke up on the ground and no one was around. So that was the worst. I thought I was dying. I saw his hands around my neck and the look in his eye and I thought that was it.
Paul: Wow.
Martin: So that was probably the worst thing that ever happened. And like I said earlier, it’s funny how the most painful things wree the words. And there were three times in my life that I actually thought of killing myself and one of them was in total revenge toward him. I had written this real elaborate note saying how much he’d hurt me, and I want to hurt you back, and it really went into detail about I wanted him to hurt, I wanted him to feel the pain I was feeling. So I wrote this long letter, I took a rifle we had, put a single bullet in the chamber, I took the safety off, and I found a stik and I put it across the trigger…And this whole thing was done, it was like I was a robot, it was all like really mechanical. Like I’m so surprised I didn’t go through with it cause my feet were right by the stick ready to push down on it and the barrel was in my mouth, and something stopped me. And then it just seemed like it was many years before that thought came up again but that was definitely…
Paul: And you had written him a note that you were going to leave behind?
Martin: Yes.
Paul: And what did he say after he read the note?
Martin: Oh no, he never saw the note.
Paul: Oh, he didn’t. Oh, because you didn’t go through with it.
Martin: Yeah, right.
Paul: Yeah, that makes sense.
Martin: Yeah..
Paul: You have to understand, by the way, that the comedian in me—because I know you, and we have joked darkly with each other—it took every power my being to not ask you if that was an antique rifle that you were using.
Martin: It was Custer’s actually.
Paul: I thought ‘You know, somebody listening to this podcast for the first time would probably immediately switch it off if I went through with that’. But part of me really wanted to but…Why is it do you think that that is—for those of us that have been on the brink of suicide or attempted suicide—why is it that that feels so good to laugh about it? Because we got through it, do you think? Or because somebody else knows that feeling?
Martin: Yeah, yeah, I suppose you’re right. You know there was a couple of times that…I would like to say that’s the closest I’ve been but I’ve been closer.
Paul: What were the other ones?
Martin: Well I had a noose around my neck and was on the stool…
Paul: How long ago was this?
Martin: You know I would love to say that was like 20 years ago but it was…Well, actually it was almost 20 years ago. I was going through a very, very difficult financial time and that was mostly about money and a very dark depression.
Paul: How long have you lived with depression? Is it clinical depression? Any particular type of depression?
Martin: You know, I have a very strange type of depression. I don’t know if anyone else out there has this, but it happens to me like once every ten years or something like that. I’ll have little mild sessions but I’ll go into a deep depression like once every 10 years and it’s bad when it happens and I feel like there’s no way it’s ever going to leave. So I had help from a friend that was trying to get me out of my isolation because I wasn’t returning phone calls or anything and he had a gun in his mouth before and he really helped me—he was someone I could talk to but I didn’t want to talk to anybody, really. But he told me “I’m going to try to help you and give you some advice. He said “When you get up in the morning, you write down 10 things that you’re grateful for.” And I looked at him and said ‘I’m not grateful for anything.’ He said “What about your son?” and I said ‘Well, yeah, I’m grateful for my son.’ And he said “What about you have a roof over your head?” Yeah, so I…There was two things he had me do is call him once a day and write that damn list. And that damn list and calling him both were monumental in that particular depression. But I’ll tell you what, it pulled me out, you know. It worked for me. I don’t know if it’ll work for someone else, but it certainly worked for me.
Paul: Yeah, it makes sense to me because sometimes we don’t’ know what we need to pull us out of the depression because we don’t know if it’s of the spiritual nature and it’s our attitude that’s got us depressed or if it’s of the physical nature and we need some type of medication to do it. But you never know unless you try.
Martin: That’s right.
Paul: And you know that’s one of the things to me that is so draining about being somebody that lives with depression is you never know which front it’s attacking you from, you just know that you don’t feel like getting out of bed, you know that you feel that all hope is lost, you’ve blown it, you’ve made mistakes that can never be changed, and you’re not really worth the effort of even trying to get out of the depression. And so death seems the easiest, most natural choice.
Martin: There’s a time where it seems like it’s the only option out of the pain. You know, it seems like it’s the only escape from it.
Paul: Yeah.
Martin: And I really think that you know when the pain gets higher and higher, you know…I almost have compassion for people that have done this, but I’ve known a number of people that have killed themselves that I’m actually angry at because of what I’ve seen happen to their families, such a terrible, terrible thing. You know, when someone actually goes through with it. But, yeah, we’re on a pretty dark subject right now.
Paul: That’s OK, man. This is the place to talk about it because I know that if I don’t talk about this—and I’m not in this suicidal place—I’ll be honest, I’ve thought about it a couple times in the last couple of days as fleeting thoughts, just because I’m so tired of being in this place where I’m not feeling passion for anything. It’s nowhere near that depression of where I was thinking about suicide every 15 minutes for a couple of years. It’s nowhere near that. But there is something oddly comforting…Marc Maron and I have talked about this before and I had him on as a guest. I forget exactly how he puts it but he talks about having that little ace in the hole of ‘Well, I could always kill myself’, yet it’s never really the right option because, as somebody said, it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Martin: Right. I have a friend that’s really savvy in business but he has kind of a crazy life, and I remember sitting with him one time and he said to me “You know what, some day some of this will all be over and thank God”. He was talking about our natural course, but…
Paul: Yeah. It’s like some days we’re not even grasping for happiness, we just want relief, you know? And to people that don’t understand depression, they think that it’s just you feeling sorry for yourself, but it’s truly a lack of any of the good feelings that make you get out of bed in the morning or at least give you the skills to cope with what life throws at you. And to me one of the worst aspects of living with depression is that feeling of being overwhelmed, because you feel like you don’t have the energy to accomplish anything and you just visualize this mountain of shit piling up around you that you’re never going to be able to dig yourself out of because you’re just not capable of it, and it’s all coming at you too fast.
Martin: And another thing that you mentioned just a minute ago is the loss of passion. I can remember, in New England I always love spring. Everything’s turning green, the birds are chirping and everything but I just remember having depression in the spring and just like ‘Eh’. Didn’t even care, you know, it meant nothing. And you just kind of numb walking through life.
Paul: So, getting back to the childhood stuff that you were talking about…
Martin: Yeah. Well, for one thing my father used to tease me and call me a mama’s boy all that time. And I was, I adored my mother, and she had a lot of health issues and she was a beautiful woman and men were often after her. My father was jealous. Of course when you’re a little kid you don’t really understand but you know something’s going on and something’s a little weird or whatever. But we were friends with the neighbor couple, our families would do things together, and basically what happened was my mother and the neighbor’s husband left one day when I was 10 years old. There was just a note saying “I’m leaving” or something like that. So for nine months my mother was gone and we had absolutely no idea where she was…
Paul: Oh my God…That must have been horrible, if the only person that you feel safe around and loves you completely violates your trust and now you had nobody that you felt like…
Martin: My sister. I have a sister that I was very, very close to and still am, and she helped. She was there. It’s a funny thing about my sister, everything bounced off her, it’s like she was fine. She was fine with everything. She did not get in any way any type of abuse. She was a goody-two-shoes sort of, and she didn’t get any type of abuse. I remember some yelling, maybe, but that was basically it.
Paul: Now do you know that it didn’t affect her, or she just didn’t show the effects?
Martin: She’s a little bit older than me and she just started therapy. I’m a strong advocate for therapy and I like to get into that a little bit here and there on how that helps me because the important message that I wanted to get across is I ended up having a wonderful relationship with my parents. And I know that sounds odd but for me to go ahead and forgive was the best gift that I’ve ever done for myself.
Paul: How do you get to that place where you forgive the guy that strangles you? How do you forgive the guy that pushes your face in the mirror? Its easy to say ‘Forgiveness is great’, but were you seething with hate at him? Did that…?
Martin: It’s funny you mention that. I mentioned earlier that the barn was where all the bad things happened. I was getting my ass kicked one day by him in the barn and I remember I was on the floor and he was saying to me, he came right up to me and he started shaking me and he goes “You hate me, don’t you”. And I said ‘No’. He says “You hate me!” and he kept screaming at me “You hate me, don’t you?” and I kept saying ‘No, I don’t, no I don’t’…And I’ve never hated my father. But he ended the sentence with “You hate me because I hated my father and I turned out okay.”
Paul: Oh my God, that breaks my heart, Martin. To think of such a sweet little boy that couldn’t even hate this guy that did all this awful stuff to him.
Martin: I was fearful for anyone to even…My father almost got into a fistfight in a store and I was ready to jump in front of the guy. I never wanted anything to happen to him and it’s a weird thing I don’t really understand, but there was never a minute through all the times that I didn’t deeply love him and I don’t really…And I hear a lot of people have strange fetishes and stuff from this but that never happened to me, you know, like the spanking.
Paul: ‘I got a barn fetish, I can’t come unless there’s a stack of hay next to me.’
Martin: Yeah, you know, I thought of that…
Paul: ‘Can’t hit my trigger unless I’m petting a chicken.’
Martin: But anyway, you know, so forgiving my dad was tough because I mentioned earlier that there was a time when I had a business failure and I was thinking of him saying those words “You’re never gonna be nothing”, so I called him up on the phone and I started talking—this was about 20 years ago—I started talking to him about the abuse and things. And he said “No, no, I didn’t do any of that. That never happened.” And I got so pissed at this point that I didn’t talk to him for two years and I was gonna stay that way. And then I went into a grocery store, I ran into an old friend, and he asked how my father was doing and I said ‘I don’t know, I don’t talk to him.’ And he said “Well, let me just tell you something, I didn’t talk to my father, my father died and I can’t do anything about that. I have a lot of regrets. I can’t change any of that and I can’t settle anything.” So at the time I was going to therapy--and by the way I’ve had over 13 years of therapy--I was going to therapy and I went to my therapist and I said that this situation really impressed me a lot. So with the guidance of the therapist I contacted my father—this was after two years of not speaking with him—and I said to him ‘I would like to have a session with you with my therapist’ and my father agreed and I said ‘Oh and by the way you’re paying for it’, so…
Paul: Good for you!
Martin: Well, I had to get him to pay one of them because I could have bought a few cars for the amount of therapy I had. So anyway he showed up and…I want to backtrack a little bit about this…
Paul: And hold on one second, I wanted to apologize. Occasionally the sound gets a little squirrely on this conversation. I’m interviewing martin via Skype, and I’m shocked at how good the quality is, the fact that you’re in Maine and I’m in Los Angeles and we’re just both talking into microphones plugged into our computers. But occasionally it does get a little bit squirrelly. But go ahead, you were going to say…
Martin: I wanted to back up and just say that one of the things in therapy…I heard one of your guests say recently about free-flowing writing, or something along those lines.
Paul: Putting your pen to paper and just writing and writing, and not even lifting the pen up.
Martin: Yeah. Well, I was given an assignment, and I did a lot of that which really helped me a lot, and then I’d read it afterwards and I’d say ‘What the heck was I thinking?’.
Paul: And it’s just writing what is flowing through your brain. You’re not constructing anything, you’re just letting all the thoughts out and it doesn’t have to make sense and you’re not gonna read it back. It’s just a way of purging the poison in your brain.
Martin: Yeah. Well one thing the therapist told me to do, he says “I want you to write a letter to your father. He will never read it. No one will ever read it. But you write that letter to your father about what happened and the feelings that you had.” And so I brought the letter in and I read it and I couldn’t even get through it. So…
Paul: Because you were crying? Or you stopped because it was too painful?
Martin: It was painful and frankly, I was a little embarrassed about some of the stuff.
Paul: How awful would it have been if the therapist had pushed your faced in the mirror and called you a little girl?
Martin: Didn’t I tell you? He did. [Laughs] So anyway, my father agreed to come to this therapy session and we sat there and I started talking about it, and…
Paul: Did you write the letter before or after your dad came to the therapy session?
Martin: This was before, I had written the letter before and the letter was destroyed. So I started talking to my father, and I said ‘Do you remember when this happened, and this happened…?’ and I would talk about it and he would shake his head in disbelief that he did it but it was painful for him and he got real emotional.
Paul: So he was accepting that he had done it?
Martin: He was accepting, but he was shaking his head in disbelief at the same time. And it was just at that moment that I realized that I had—whether he remembered in the ’70s or not, or late ‘60s-‘70s—the forgiveness had to be for me. I didn’t have to worry about whether or not he was truly or sorry or not. I had to forgive him if I wanted to move on. And it was such a freeing experience and I’m hoping that if someone’s out there and they have a similar situation, that they can believe that there actually can be a better place to be and not feel these feelings, not carry them around like a chain around your neck. And with my mother it was the same situation.
Paul: How do you get to that place where you can forgive somebody that’s caused you so much pain? Do you get there intellectually? Do you just jump into it and hope that it’ll feel okay and you’ll feel something? Or is there a thought that you have to think before you forgive them, like ‘Their parents probably fucked them up and he was doing the best job he could.’ How do you get there?
Martin: It’s funny you just said that last phrase, because I talked to my aunt a number of years ago and she said that my father’s collarbone was broken when he didn’t stack the wood. He had a very abusive father and I realized that that’s one thing I have to say is I never laid a hand on my son, you know, I never, never did and never talked to him in a cruel way. And I feel very, very fortunate to have broken the pattern.
Paul: That to me is the biggest miracle and the greatest thing about therapy and opening up, that we have a chance to break the cycle because it’s the most natural thing in the world to do what has been done to us.
Martin: Absolutely.
Paul: Because it becomes our impulse.
Martin: You know, it’s funny, I never had the impulse to raise a hand to my son. I don’t understand why.
Paul: But you had the impulse to kill yourself because you turned that rage inward.
Martin: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: I mean, that’s my dime store opinion.
Martin: Yeah. No, I’ve had a lot of issues in my life because of turning things inward, absolutely. Also I’ve had situations where all of a sudden rage will absolutely pop out of me unexpectedly and triggered by unusual or…I want to tell a quick childhood story because it’s kind of funny, about how much of a people pleaser I was. I was about 12 years old or so, or maybe a little bit younger, and I had a paper route. And I heard from one of the paper route guys that if you take steel wool—you gotta remember this is southern Maine and we don’t have much to do there—you take steel wool and you wrap a wire around it and you light it with matches and you twirl it around and it’s like sparklers but 10 times better. So I wanted to show all my friends that I could do this so I bought the steel wool and had a wire in the barn and all this…So I was gonna do it outside but it started raining so I went into the barn and I’m twirling it around and it’s sparkling everywhere and everyone’s like “Yay, wow, that’s cool” and all this stuff…So I’m riding on my paper route and it’s about a 5-mile route, and about a mile and a half away all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off at the fire station and scared the heck out of me. I was with a friend that day and he rode over to the fire station and he came back and he says “Is your father’s name Morgan Willis?” and I said ‘Yes’, and he says “Your house is on fire” and I said ‘Oh my God’. This is how much of a people pleaser I was, Paul. I decided to finish the paper route. So I see my father drive by at least a hundred miles an hour, he doesn’t see me or anything, and so I get about another mile into it and there was this little gossipy guy that owned a meat market and I delivered the paper in there. So I go in there, bring the paper, and he says “Oh, did you hear about the fire up on River Road?” and I said ‘Yeah’. He said “Oh yeah, there’s people burned alive and everything.” And you know what? I still finished the paper route.
Paul: And you knew it was your house?
Martin: And I knew it was my house. I can’t describe what makes a kid do something like that.
Paul: I interpret that as you had a great reverence for the news. That’s how I take that. I’m shocked that you didn’t become a journalist
Martin: I actually do a lot of writing. So anyway at the end of this paper route you can go back the long way or you can go the short way but there was this big bees’ nest hanging right in the path where I could take my bicycle through, and so I pushed through it and I had like nine bee stings on my back or my head and I went racing home and I got there and the barn was half burned but still there and everybody was okay, and I walked in to my father, and he said “Wow, that’s something about the barn, huh?” and all of the sudden I just started bawling and I says ‘I did it’ and he walks up to me and he hugs me and says “Thank you for being honest.” And that’s the same guy that would flip out if you left the cover off the peanut butter jar.
Paul: What is that about? What is that about?
Martin: I have no idea. But I was always walking on eggshells. You wouldn’t know what was gonna make him snap, you know? There was one time where I knew I was gonna get belted and there was a cedar chest, you know, one of those little small things you put blankets in? I crawled into that and locked myself in and I couldn’t get out. I was hiding from him. And he opened it up and he saw me and how pathetic it was and he started crying, and that was just the weirdest…it was really weird. And one thing I have to say too is my father went away. He had several nervous breakdowns, and still to this day I don’t really know what a nervous breakdown is, but I remember him packing the car and going off to the hospital for a couple weeks and they say “He’s resting”. But also in New York City there was some tall building—he was there with my sister—he told me later in life that he grabbed her in his arms and he was gonna jump out the window with her.
Paul: What??
Martin: Yeah.
Paul: How old was your sister when this happened?
Martin: I don’t even remember but I’m gonna say just a young kid. But there was some definite mental illness going on there for sure.
Paul: Yeah, I think when we don’t talk about what’s going on with us it’s gonna come out one way or another so it’s like, do you wanna go the healthy route that has the minimum amount of damage to other people by going to therapy or just talking to a friend, or just doing something? Or are you gonna try to keep it inside and have it come out in strangling your child, or wanting to jump off a building? I don’t know anybody that can successfully internalize pain and damage from childhood and not have it come out in some fucked-up way. Well I suppose there are people out there that don’t show it and you just never know it, but I suspect those people are few and far between if they exist at all.
Martin: You know I’d like to say that therapy gave me a lot of tools and helped me a lot, but I still have to catch myself sometimes from going into a rage. And people that know me, everyone thinks, you know, he’s an easy-going nice guy, but if someone pushes the wrong button at a wrong time I can still kind of lose it. And that’s the thing, growing up with my father, I remember everyone saying “Oh you were so lucky to have such a nice man for your father. He was known as the nicest guy.” And I used to go ‘Uh-huh, mm-hmm.’ That was a tough one to swallow. But you know I can see every once in a while if something ticks me off I go off the deep end.
Paul: Those are the scariest people to me, are the ones that take it and take it and take it…It is, because when they do finally snap it’s scary because it’s been built up.
Martin: Yep. You know I had a situation…I would say the angriest I’ve been in life two times was road rage, and unfortunately my son witnessed both of those times when he was little. One time someone turned left on me and they gave me the finger…It was a young girl, she turned left at a light and almost hit me and gave me the finger and I absolutely lost it. I mean I chased her down and called her the “c” word and was screaming and yelling and was trying to push into her car, and my son was just flipping out. And there was another time…
Paul: How old was he?
Martin: I think he was about nine or ten. And there was another time we were in upstate New York and there was a cop sitting right at a 40-mile an hour speed limit where it went to 30. And so I was doing 40 and it changed to 30 and I didn’t have time to slow down so I let him have it.
Paul: A cop!
Martin: A cop.
Paul: Good choice, good choice.
Martin: Well, this is really sad and it’s not even funny, my son was shaking when I looked over at him, I saw him shaking because he thought I was going to go to jail. And I really…I was calling the guy names. I said you are the biggest asshole…I was going on and on and on, because he just pushed that button somehow.
Paul: And he didn’t arrest you?
Martin: Didn’t arrest me, no. but he still gave me the ticket. [Laughs] So I would say I’m lucky. But there’s never been any violence, as far as physical violence, I’ve never had any physical violence. There’s one other thing that happened that was really freaky, and I think I’ve heard you mention something similar with something that happened to you. When I was 14 or 15 years old, my father’s best friend was visiting from Ohio and they went out for drinks or something that night, and we had two twin beds in the room and he was to share the other bed.
Paul: I don’t like where this is going.
Martin: Yeah, it’s not pretty. So I woke up with him giving me oral sex and calling me his wife’s name. So it was the only time I did anything violent toward an adult, you know adults ruled everything in my world. So I took my two feet and kicked him and ran off to what was my grandfather’s little in-law apartment. The next day I told my father and he didn’t believe me. And I started thinking as I started maturing, ‘You know, that felt good…that was a man giving me oral sex and it felt good. Am I gay?’ You know, I had to really sort out…There was a time where I thought ‘I think I’m gay’, you know, and then there was a situation where I almost had something go on with a guy. I remember walking away after that saying ‘Thank God I’m not gay’.
Paul: Yeah.
Martin: And I was really confused about that whole thing.
Paul: You know, I think all people at some point think about sex with the same sex and think that that makes them gay. I don’t think it does. I think there’s a continuum from completely gay to completely heterosexual and a bazillion points in between there. But I don’t know, I think that’s one of the most normal things in the world. In fact, I remember when I was like maybe 11 years old, I thought—because I would maybe picture a guy without his clothes on—that that made me gay. And I remember seeing something in National Lampoon magazine that just said “No, you’re not gay”. And I just remember thinking ‘Oh, other people experience that, you know, wondering whether or not they’re gay.’ So yeah, I think that’s totally, totally normal. But that’s gotta fuck you up.
Martin: Yeah, you know it did a bit. The thing about it was about 10 years ago, my father mentioned his name and looked at me and said “I’d like to kill him”. In other words he finally came around and believed me. He realized I wasn’t lying. And I looked at him in disbelief and I said ‘So you believe me?’ and he says “Yeah.” And my father and I, when I say we had a great relationship—
Paul: Did he pass away?
Martin: Yeah, and I’d like to talk about that in just a minute too, because that was a real important situation. But he and I shared the antique and auction business, and right up until the day he died he was talking about it. He loved the business, loved antiques and art and all that. So we always had that in common, even in, you know…the times of course when we weren’t talking but we always had plenty to talk about. He always wanted to know what was going on because he retired quite a while ago. But in 2007 my father had kidney cancer and he was pushing 80, and he always said he was gonna live until 80, and his 80th birthday party was pretty big, lots of people there, and about a month later I got a call from my sister and says “You better come on out, things are not good.” So I came out and we met with the oncologist. He was in the hospital and was considering an operation, and the oncologist said “He’s got about six months to live. Somewhere around there, maybe more, maybe less, but at least if you don’t do this operation.” And so he made the decision, he did not want to go through the operation, so we supported him in that. So that night we were leaving the hospital and something in me made me stop and tell everybody to go ahead, that I wanted to talk to Dad. So I went back in, and he was laying there, and I grabbed his hand and we had the most wonderful conversation I think that two people could have. He told me that…He acknowledged the things that had happened, and he told me he had a lot of regrets. And I was able to tell him, and mean this, that the slate was clean. And it was the most wonderful conversation that I think I ever had with my father and we were both crying, and that was the last time I saw him conscious. We had no idea he was gonna die and we were there…He never woke up, we were there, my two sisters and I, and we all had our hands on him, holding his hand while he died and it was a really beautiful experience. Sounds weird, but…
Paul: Sounds scary, too, in a lot of ways. Not scary when you were there, I’m sure it was beautiful, but for somebody listening—I’ll speak for myself—part of that scares me because it’s so emotionally intense. And I don’t know… why would that be scary?
Martin: One of the first questions I asked when we had that conversation was ‘Are you scared to die?’ and he said “Absolutely not.” And he looked at me and he meant it. He wasn’t. He was ready. And I think that had a lot to do with it being in place. Even though we expected him to live six months longer, it just…Everything just seemed to fit.
Paul: I would imagine that the stuff that you guys went through in therapy in a lot of ways was cleansing for him and probably made it easy for him to get to that place, where he felt like “Okay, I’m ready to go”.
Martin: Yep.
Paul: Wow, that’s beautiful, Martin.
Martin: I think that the beautiful part is getting to a place in my life where I can say that the best thing that I ever did for myself was to learn how to forgive and learn how to…I always had the love, but learn how to share the love with my parents and be there for them, and it’s…You know, you don’t have a lot in life, really, but connections like this.
Paul: Yeah, you know, I think in a lot of ways the most profound love is the love you express towards somebody that you don’t want to love, or that it’s difficult to love. You know, the person that annoys you, to have compassion, or the person that has really damaged you, to have any kind of compassion…That to me is the most potent powerful love, and can be so transformative. But it’s funny ‘cause our instinct is to hold on to the hate.
Martin: Absolutely. And it’s a power, holding on to that hate makes you feel very powerful and in control.
Paul: Yeah. You know, somebody said that resentment is where you take the poison and wait for the other person to die.
Martin: To die. Yeah, so true. Yeah. So, you know, those type of things have really helped me move into a better place in my life and have, you know, a compassion for people and, you know, understand that, you know, that when I see someone that’s totally messed up, and they do a really messed up thing, my first reaction is to either say something, comment, or whatever it is. But then I always have to stop and think ‘Oh yeah, you know, this person came from that.’ You know what I mean?
Paul: Uh huh.
Martin: But if someone chooses not to get therapy and it’s so hard to…You know, you can read a ton of self-help books, and some of them are really good, but unless you’re working one on one with someone and you have some issues, it’s really difficult to get on the other side.
Paul: Yeah.
Martin: I remember I used to say to my therapist all the time, ‘When am I gonna get on the other side??’ and I remember the day she said “You know, I think you’re just about there.”
Paul: Do you feel like doing a fear-off?
Martin: I can, I don’t have anything written down but I certainly have enough fears.
Paul: That’s alright, man, you’re gonna Miles Davis it. You’re gonna turn your back to the audience and just let those fears come out of you in the key of F#. Is there F sharp? I know there’s two…Yeah, there’s no B sharp because that would be C and there’s no E sharp…
Martin: By the way, I want to mention this, you are a musician, you’re great, and that theme song is yours. The theme song intro and the outro, and I think it’s great.
Paul: Well, thank you and I appreciate that and my ego will struggle to…Actually, my ego has accepted that already, but the rest of me will struggle to accept that compliment but I’ll manage to get it down at some point. So, would you like to start the fear-off?
Martin: Uh, sure. Um…
Paul: Before we start the fear-off, I’m going to be finishing with some fears that a listener TJ had sent in to me. He’s got about, I don’t know, maybe about eight or ten more. So you’ll be competing first against him, and then should you still be standing you’ll be competing against Ellen.
Martin: Oh God. Well, no one could beat Teresa Strasser…
Paul: No. She’s a ninja. She is a ninja.
Martin: She’s a ninja.
Paul: But we have had other people that are up there, that are definitely up there. So I’ll start off with a fear from listener TJ. “I’m afraid that I will put back on all the weight I’ve lost because the person that got fat in the first place is still me.”
Martin: Wow. I’m afraid that I will continue to go not making a whole lot of money the way I am right now.
Paul: OK. TJ says “I’m afraid my friends and family secretly despise me behind my back.”
Martin: I think my dog despises me. I understand that. I’m afraid something’s gonna happen to my dog, to be honest with you.
Paul: Yeah, I have that fear too. TJ says, “I’m afraid I’ve picked the wrong religion to follow and will go to hell.”
Martin: I’m afraid my son will somehow be disappointed in me and stop talking to me at some point.
Paul: Uh, “I am afraid I will put myself in dangerous situations so if I’m severely injured it will show me who really cares about me.”
Martin: Well, I’m afraid of drowning. I’m very afraid of heights. As a matter of fact, I think I heard someone say “What is this thing that people have where they have this feeling they wanna jump?” I get that sometimes.
Paul: I do too.
Martin: What the hell is that?
Paul: There’s the fear like my legs are going to put me up on the ledge and I’m not going to be able to control it. Especially when a train is coming, I feel like ‘Oh my God, there’s part of me that is going to jump in front of the train even though I don’t want to.’ Like I’m just gonna have some crazy muscular reflex that’s gonna do it beyond my control.
Martin: Wow. So I’m not fucked up?
Paul: No. No, you’re fucked up, just not about that. We’re both fucked up but I think we’re a lot more normal than we think we are. Uh, TJ says “I’m afraid I will max out my credit cards buying unnecessary items, thinking they will make me happy.”
Martin: Wow. When I was leaving my last wife—repeat offender, I guess—she said to me “You are going to die a fat, bald, lonely man”, and I have a fear that she might be right.
Paul: Oh man, that is so fantastic. That is so fantastic.
Martin: Nice words.
Paul: Yeah. Uh, TJ—“I’m afraid I will get addicted to online video games and will no longer be able to identify reality versus fantasy.”
Martin: Wow. Wow. Uh, he’s good, by the way.
Paul: Yeah, he’s good. And by the way, he had from a previous episode probably 30 or 40 more. Yeah, this kid’s good. This kid could turn pro.
Martin: Wow. Wow. Um, I have a fear that it didn’t really matter that I was ever here.
Paul: Wow, that’s deep. That’s a really deep one. That to me is one of the most profound fears that I have, is that my life will be forgettable. Uh, and TJ’s last fear is that “This is as good as it gets.”
Martin: You know, maybe we ought to end on that. We tie it.
Paul: We tie it? OK.
Martin: Wait a minute, I still owe one, don’t I?
Paul: Yeah.
Martin: He started.
Paul: Yeah, if you want to defeat what’s left of his fears you’ve gotta come up with one more.
Martin: I fear that I’m going to die and nobody’s going to be there. I’m gonna be alone.
Paul: Even your son?
Martin: Yeah, I just have a fear of being alone. Dying alone. I have a fear also that I wont be able to tell the people, like my son, how much they meant to me and how much I love them before that last one more time.
Paul: I see, so you’re afraid that you’re gonna die and it will have been too long since you told your son or other people that you love them. And so there will be that feeling that you had things left to say when you died.
Martin: Do you want me to re-do that…?
Paul: No, no. That’s perfect. You know, we welcome clunky and…
Martin: You got it!
Paul: Mission accomplished! You know, that’s one of the things I love about having your own podcast, is the mistakes to me are what gives things flavor sometimes. Like I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about this before on this show before or not, but the Rolling Stones song ‘Gimme Shelter’ where the woman’s voice cracks…You wouldn’t hear that in music today because everything is so combed over and perfected and everything’s adjusted and there’s a thousand takes. I think there’s a place for mistakes and awkwardness and clunkyness and humanity. You know, that feel that a human being, an imperfect person, is kind of behind something. I’m finding myself more and more drawn to that, I guess is what I’m saying.
Martin: Well I’m gonna say something really boring to most of your audience out there. I was in a really nice museum yesterday and I was with a scholar and I was learning and I had a wonderful time. And she showed me this Korean pot, she said “This vase is worth about right around a million dollars.” And I’m looking at it and it’s, like, lopsided and it’s, like, imperfect. And she said “That’s how you can tell it’s rare and the people love it like that.” So yeah, there’s a place for things that aren’t perfect.
Paul: Wow, that makes…
Martin: To the tune of a million bucks!
Paul: Yeah, so how can I take my broken shit and get a million dollars for it? Cause Martin, that’ll make me happy. That’ll make all the bad thoughts and feelings go away. I tell you this much—it would for a day or a month, maybe even a year. And I’d be willing to try that.
Martin: I gotta tell you, you know you can edit this out if you want or whatever, but—
Paul: I’d like you to say that one more time. I’d like you to offer me to edit…
Martin: You know Paul, it has to do with me being a podcaster.
Paul: Yeah…
Martin: So, you know…yeah. I know I’m probably a pain in the ass to you.
Paul: You’re not a pain in the ass but you put yourself down too much, and I know because I do the same thing to myself. But it’s beautiful the two of us can be competing to see who’s gonna put themselves down more.
Martin: Okay, you’re talking about a million dollars…I had talked about my three times where I almost committed suicide, well, I had bought a painting that I had a contract on for over a million dollars if it could get authenticated. Long story short, it ended up it did not get the green flag but I was thinking that the total time, that money was gonna cure me and make me happy. And when it didn’t happen I was so angry at myself for the greed. I can’t tell you…The depression came on, very severe depression, probably the worst I ever had, mostly because not the fact that I wasn’t getting the million dollars, but the fact and how I reacted and what I did in the process to try to get that money. I just felt it was an ugly, ugly thing.
Paul: It made you feel like you were kind of desperate and pathetic?
Martin: Absolutely. Very pathetic and I just didn’t like where I was going and where I was.
Paul: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. When we’re pursuing things that our soul wants, we never look desperate or pathetic. When we’re pursuing things that our ego wants, we often times wind up looking desperate and pathetic.
Martin: Absolutely, yeah.
Paul: All right. Well, Martin, thank you so much for opening up and being my friend, helping me get this podcast off the ground, and just being you, man. Just being you.
Martin: Yeah. Hey, thank you Paul, so much.
Paul: All right, buddy, I’ll talk to you. Many thanks to Martin Willis, and be sure to check out his podcast Comical Cast, and the Antique Auction Forum.
I have a letter that I want to go out with from a listener. It’s a heartwarming letter and before I read that, just a couple of quick announcements. If you would be so kind as to support the show, there are various options that you can do. You can give a donation via PayPal, we have a little link on our website—the website is mentalpod.com. You can also buy stuff through our Amazon search box. Amazon gives us a couple nickels, and a lot of you have been doing that and I appreciate that. And you can support the show non-financially by going to iTunes and giving us a good rating, and you guys have been doing that as well and I really appreciate that, that helps boost the visibility of the show and brings more people to it and it makes me happy.
Oh, and the winner of our Christmas memory was Jane. I read her email, I believe it was one episode or two episodes ago. She talked about how she couldn’t think of any Christmas memory and then she was decorating the tree with her kids and she flashed back to all the Christmases with her alcoholic dad. But she was able to find this beautiful insight into it and invited her kids kind of more deeply into her life at that point to join in the festivities, and it doesn’t get any more beautiful than that. So, Jane, I will be contacting you and sending you a Mental Illness Happy Hour t-shirt. And those are available at the website as well.
Keep your emails coming. I never get tired of those, and here’s an example of one that just absolutely warmed my heart. It comes from Herbert in Australia, and he had written me a couple of months ago and this was a follow-up. He had been experiencing a lot of anxiety so he had written me a couple of months ago and said that he was gonna start therapy. So he writes “Hey Paul, it’s been two and a half months since I last emailed and wanted to touch base. The last time I emailed I mentioned that listening to you had inspired me to begin therapy. Well, I did more than be inspired, I’m doing it, and already I’m seeing the benefits. I’m more positive, I understand my fear far more, I can see when my anxiousness is based on things that I have thought up, and can also now acknowledge that I am unreasonably nervous and have irrational anxiety. It’s funny, I now have more energy, my IBS is not as bad, and my drive in life is far greater. I know there is more work to do and bumps on the way, but I do feel like getting the ball rolling was the biggest step, one I had avoided for years. I really want to thank you again so much for the courage of your podcast. I know you too get a lot out of it and it can only be a good thing when people are communicating honestly. Thank you.” And you know, I’m gonna read this last sentence. I was gonna not read it because I was like ‘Oh, it’s gonna sound like I’m full of myself’ but fuck it. He writes “There is a kindness in your voice and a genuine feeling that you care, understand, and relate to those that you speak to. It comes through loud and clear, all the way to Australia. You’re a good man, Paul, and I wish you and your family a very happy and loving holiday season.” Thank you, Herbert, that really means a lot to me. There’s just no other feeling in the world like knowing that I’m not alone and thanks, Herbert. And Kat, whose survey I read at the beginning of the podcast, I just wanna send some love your way because you sound like you’re hurting and you know, I don’t know what the answers are. I’m a jackass that tells dick jokes and does a show that some people find helpful. But I just want to send some love your way and say “You’re not alone.” And thanks to all you guys for your support. Happy holidays and thanks for listening.
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