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