Digger - The Doctor Will See You Now by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 2

As a young man, Ryan Archer’s life was filled with stress. His father lived in the shadow of a darkness he was unable to understand and often found himself on the receiving end of it. Feeling as though he’d become a target of his father’s rage, he vowed to escape — dead or alive. At some point in his young life, Ryan began to express this rage as well and when he learned that frogs hibernate into a seemingly frozen block of tissue, the temptation to put it to the test proved beyond his ability to resist. But as he became caught up in his unconscious hatred towards his father, the innocent experiments took a grim turn. He began disemboweling them. And with nothing to ‘put them under’ with, watched as they squirmed beneath the edge of a razor blade. But they would usually die of shock before he could see their beating hearts.

One day, the experiments went too far, and the act he had committed left him disturbed by its gruesome nature. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the neighborhood was quiet. Again, he sat crouched in the far corner of the backyard, the tall grass and weeds making for an ample supply of frogs. He’d been exposed to Christianity for most of his early life, but when he got older, he concluded that someone had come up with the brilliant idea that his soul needed saving. Year after year, the stories etched themselves in his psyche, becoming part of who he was, in spite of being a nonbeliever. But on that day, he acted out Christ’s passion as he constructed a small crucifix out of two sticks and a piece of string. Without the smallest inkling of remorse or sympathy, he tied the frog to the makeshift cross, planted the unholy object into the ground, stood up and urinated on it. Freud would have been left speechless. Almost every day, he returned to the scene of the crime, absorbing the image he created in the name of unfulfilled hate. Then, one day, it stopped. All of it. Ryan managed to somehow push his rage deep into his mind as he began to look for his life’s purpose, believing that a life of anger was no life at all. Not that he had consciously considered that idea, but he’d developed a need to help others. A psychologist would call this codependency -- the need to be needed. On a deep level, there was the unrealized knowledge that if his father could not be fixed, there must be others who could be. After all, someone who had never learned to be human would likely never rise to sainthood.

In his search, Ryan came to believe that helping those less fortunate would somehow cleanse his soul and burn away the hate and rage that had accumulated throughout his childhood. His assumption that he would purify himself through good deeds would eventually prove incorrect. But he did not act out of insincerity, and it was out of the act of helping that he learned patience and compassion -- two things he never would have learned otherwise. Yet, he was still without direction. His father was too busy drowning his demons with alcohol, and his mother always seemed to be protecting him and his siblings from whatever threats her mind imagined. It was certainly easier than trying to keep their father out of arm's reach.