I reached out to Mark Laita who has a YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly, about sharing his experience interviewing and photographing Los Angeles’s Skid Row citizens. I was moved by these people who are struggling with their issues everyday and I was touched by their honesty, courage and pureness of heart despite the tragedies they endured and the pain they still suffer. Without the talents of people like Mark, you would never hear their voices and learn about how one bad decision could change the rest of your life, or somebody else’s.
After speaking to over a thousand addicted and homeless individuals on LA’s Skid Row as well as in San Francisco’s Mission and Tenderloin neighborhoods, my view on addiction and homelessness has changed drastically over the past nine years. While shooting interviews for my YouTube channel, called Soft White Underbelly, I’ve spoken to a few people whose lives were destroyed by what was most likely a genetic propensity to become addicted. I’ve also talked to some individuals who went through such heartbreaking events that they succumbed to whatever would numb their pain. Very few of us could have survived these events and rebuilt our lives after experiencing them. The majority of addicts I’ve spoken to however are victims of something much deeper and more insidious than drug addiction. If I had to point a finger at what causes most addictive behaviors, or self-destructive behaviors, it would be a lack of unconditional love in childhood. This becomes a much more stubborn and difficult problem as these unloved children become adults. A lack of unconditional love in childhood causes that person’s self-worth to plummet, making them seek out situations and people who would support that worthless view of themselves. You can get the addict clean, find them a job and an apartment, but the feelings of low self-worth still exist and they usually relapse, lose their job and housing because their core motivation, which is to fail, still exists. Curing the addiction is like putting a band aid on cancer. The real problem is deeper and more difficult to solve. How do we address the addict’s feelings of worthlessness? Perhaps years of therapy to unlock the pain from their childhood along with some connection with individuals who might help them rebuild self-worth in today’s world. The reason this problem is stubborn is because their low self-worth keeps them stuck, resisting help or therapy that might break them free of their addiction. It’s as if they are brainwashed to believe they deserve to be punished for whatever got them into the situation they’re now in. Ask them and you get answers like, “Why try to fix it? Fix what? It’s just the way I am.” The reason they gravitate to the terrible conditions of Skid Row is because it fits their low self-image. A nicer neighborhood just wouldn’t fit their subconscious view of themselves. A nicer group of people around them, a better life or a job just get rejected because they don’t believe they deserve those better things. They believe they deserve crap. How do you fix that kind of thinking? What’s so frustrating is that the self-destructive personality actually wants to fail. Good luck trying to fix that.
I’ve asked many of the addicts I’ve interviewed what would help them get their lives back on track. Their usual reply is rehab, but even rehab doesn’t solve the core problem and they often relapse once rehab is over. Sometimes becoming a counselor to other addicts can give a recovered addict a purpose in life that is challenging and keeps them on track. The few addicts I’ve met who have gotten themselves clean have all said that a long stint of rehab, a year or more, usually works, but of those five recovered addicts I spoke to, three of them who went out in the real world are back using again. As I said, there’s a deeper problem at work.
I’m not saying it’s not possible. Sometimes I just see that the easier solution is to try to fix the next generation or two. When parents choose to love their children unconditionally, especially if those children were to get poor grades in school, get into trouble, be gay, overweight, use drugs or alcohol, those children subconsciously feel that love and do the things that a person who is loved would do, which is feel enough self-worth to not disappoint their parents and themselves. The self-respect unconditional love instills in a child gives them the capacity to make good decisions, to love themselves and to love others throughout their lives. Put simply, it gives a person the proclivity to do the right thing.
Not that there aren’t other factors at work. We’ll need to change the wealth inequality in our society, along with the education and opportunity inequality and then we would begin to make changes that would stick and would truly effect people and our society in positive ways. As I said, these are stubborn and difficult problems. Racism and greed makes these societal changes very difficult. On the other hand, trying to brainwash a person who is hellbent on self-destructing to change their thinking seems futile, right? The damage done by unloving or absent parents is so deep that kindness and common sense have no effect. These people can’t comprehend self-worth.
I am an eternal optimist who wakes each day with a huge amount of hope and positivity and after spending day after day in the worst part of America I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been to every state except Alaska), even I don’t see a solution to a mind that can’t see that they deserve anything other than abusive interactions with cruel and violent opportunists, horrible health and living conditions and reject any hand offering an escape. It would be easy to blame the drug addiction, but in talking with these individuals about their lives it’s clear that they were trying to self-destruct long before they discovered drugs. Many report suicide attempts, cutting and reckless acts long before drugs ever came into their lives. Perhaps what’s to blame is the misunderstanding about what unconditional love is. What most people call love is just a trade or a transaction saying, “if you’re a good child I will love you. If you don’t act up I will love you. If you get good grades I will love you”. This “trade” plants in their unconscious mind that they are not loved. This eventually manifests as an adult who chooses abusive partners, make poor life decisions, sabotages their career, health, living conditions, finances and relationships.
Some have suggested a religious transformation as a possible solution and perhaps that is the answer. For these poor souls to understand that God loves each of us equally and every single one of us deserves his unconditional love may actually create the self-worth required to change. I find my view of this terrible problem changes as I continue to work on this project and delve deeper each month and perhaps it will end with me realizing that God is indeed the answer. I’ve never been a religious person myself, but given the choices I see out there, God is looking more like the solution every day.
You can watch the interviews on the YouTube channel, Soft White Underbelly. Caution, these interviews are very frank and is an uncensored look into people whose lives are of survival. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCvcd0FYi58LwyTQP9LITpA