Now that he’s Donald Trump’s VP pick, I’ve been thinking about J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and my own similar journey from family dysfunction to becoming a relatively healthy human being.
I’m no hillbilly, but I grew up in the land of the “bogans,” an Aussie term for working- and welfare-class Australians in not so charming locations characterized by high crime rates, substance addiction, and unemployment.
My early childhood and teenage years were spent on the outskirts of Brisbane, Australia, in a suburb called “Goodna,” which is the local indigenous word for “Dung.” I literally grew up in the land of crap. A fitting name for what was a crappy childhood.
But it didn’t begin in Goodna; rather, I was born in a British army hospital in Paderborn, West Germany. My mother was a Welsh barmaid and my father was a tank driver in the British army. But when I was two years old, my mother caught my father in bed with her best friend—and that was the end of that.
My parents quickly divorced, and my mother and I moved to Australia, where the rest of her family had migrated to escape the crippling poverty of ’60s and ’70s Britain. I never heard a word from my father growing up until I went to the U.K. and met him when I was 18. We got along reasonably well with our one encounter. In hindsight, I can say that the man was not naturally gifted with paternal sensibilities and felt no sense of obligation toward me.
After a couple of years, my mother remarried—to a postman from a Yugoslav immigrant family, a guy with a good sense of a humor but the temperament of Serbian crime boss.
My mother had a difficult upbringing herself and experienced various types of abuse, felt abandoned by her family, and then betrayed by her first husband. To her credit, she loved me, protected me, and looked after me as best she could.
But there was a dark side to her, too. She was an angry drunk.
My mum could go from Mary Poppins to Cruella de Vil after two beers. She could transform from life of the party to sadistic queen who delighted in physically and verbally abusing people for the sheer pleasure it gave her. She once grabbed me by the hair, dragged me into a car, and then proceeded to drive me and my brother across town while blind drunk without a driver’s license so I could babysit her friends’ kids so the adults could all party.
My stepdad was not much better: his mother died when he was 13, and his father had survived some seriously messed up stuff in the Balkans during the Second World War. Let’s just say the man was a walking textbook of intergenerational trauma and unresolved grief. So naturally he developed a gambling addiction that plunged our family into financial ruin. The guy once took my half-brother’s lunch money and blurted out, “F*** Dean, he can go without.” The guy literally let his own son go hungry to feed his gambling habit. That’s the effect that gambling had on him.
As a kid, I had a collection of Australian one dollar and two dollar notes, which were out of circulation, part of a coin and currency collection that I carefully hid, or so I thought. When my mum and stepdad found the cache of cash, they immediately took it to the bank, cashed it, and spent it on booze and betting. They told me about it when I got home from a friend’s house and thought it was hilarious. Served me right for not hiding it better, they joked.
Being raised by an angry drunk and a gambling addict meant I was constantly depressed, lonely, malnourished, insecure, afraid of their mood swings, spasmodically assaulted, and began a steady habit of self-harm.
The thing you must remember is that bad parents aren’t bad all the time. I enjoyed birthdays and Christmas. They took me to team sports. They were capable of acts of kindness, love, and generosity. They showed signs of contrition. My parents knew they were bad people, but they didn’t have the ability or resources to self-correct. They had alienated, abused, or ripped off every family member and friend they had. The only friends they could keep were other people with substance-abuse and antisocial-behavior issues. My parents abused each other as much as my brother and me, and eventually that marriage ended as well.
My stepdad taught me a valuable lesson, though: life is hard, and it’s harder if you’re stupid (that’s a John Wayne quote I must confess).
My mother also taught me an important lesson: when you hit rock bottom, when everything seems hopeless, if you try really hard, you can always succeed in making things even worse.
As I finished school, my grades weren’t good enough to get into university, and my dreams of being a musical theater creator with a side gig as a kickboxing champion were admittedly a little far-fetched in hindsight. I had no girlfriend, no prospects, and not much hope.
So at age 17, while weighing 45kg (99 pounds, for you Americans), I joined the army.
It was hard. I had the body of a scrawny chicken and lacked basic adulting skills. Though physically fit, I was not emotionally or mentally prepared for the discipline needed to problem-solve and put up with the deliberate duress of military training. But somehow, mostly thanks to a lot of patience from the training staff, I got through it. Then, eventually, I began to thrive in my military career. I was well-paid, well-fed, learned new skills, developed emotional maturity, and gained confidence. The military was a great ladder out of poverty and, despite a few downsides, like a weird mix of misogyny and chivalry, it had a positive influence on me.
After a few years as a paratrooper, I moved into military intelligence, which was way better. I learned how to soak in vast amounts of information, to analyze, process, and disseminate it in various forms. I had the pleasure of working for some great leaders who would go on to have illustrious careers, including Luke Gosling, now Labour member for Solomon in Darwin, and John Blaxland, one of Australia’s leading strategic security analysts.
Around this time, I also got me religion. I used to think Christians were moralizing geriatrics and hypocrites. Yet when I got invited to a local Baptist church, all my presuppositions about Christianity were broken down and I connected with something that suddenly made sense of the story I had lived. For me, evil and suffering were real, which is why the prospect of redemption and renewal were so appealing. To be honest, a Sunday morning church service was a lot better than recovering from a hangover from hard drinking and chasing girls in Sydney nightclubs.
Eventually I was posted to Townsville in northern Queensland, where I met my wife and soon decided to leave the military to pursue a career in Christian ministry. My love for musical theatre and military-intelligence training prepared me well for a career that depended on oral and written communication skills. I graduated from Malyon College with a bachelor of ministries, then did honours and a Ph.D. at the University of Queensland. I then got a job in a growing university in the Highlands of Scotland until I returned to Australia with our growing family to teach at theological colleges in Brisbane and Melbourne.
I was ordained an Anglican priest and developed a career in academia, allowing me to write award-winning books and deliver lectures in seminaries, universities, colleges, and churches all over the world. I have become a successful Christian academic with expertise in biblical studies, the history of early Christianity, and the interface of faith and culture.
I’m also glad to say that my brother made his own way out as well. Despite difficulties of his own, he has a beautiful family, is a very successful schoolteacher and education administrator, and was recently received into the Catholic Church.
In my mid-40s, I finally had to confront the trauma of my childhood and learn to make peace with my parents and my past, which was very hard, painful even, but allowed me to understand my anxieties and find wholeness.
My advice to young people living among the “precariat”—somewhere between working class and welfare dependence, in dysfunctional or toxic families—is as follows:
Take the First Train Out of Boganville. Poverty is a prison, and abuse is a contagious disease. You can either plunge deeper into the depths of despair or find a way out. You’re going to either rehearse the toxic patterns of your parents and environment or make a conscious choice to get out. Decide if you really want to outdo your family and friends in their capacity to screw up their lives. If not, then dig, crawl, flee, fight, and figure a way to get out. Cut out anyone in your life who is toxic, dragging you down, or a lead weight around your neck. Run far and run fast. You owe them nothing, and survival is the name of the game.
Discipline or Death. The single greatest attribute one needs to escape the cycle of poverty is discipline. When I say “discipline,” I mean the ability to engage in short-term denial for long-term gain. Delayed gratification rather than the habits of selfish indulgence. Do what you have to do before you do what you want to do. Either you learn to use your time wisely or you waste your life on destructive habits. You need financial, moral, lifestyle, and work-ethic discipline. Addictions of any kind, drugs or porn, will keep you a slave to poverty, so discipline your desires to be able to resist bad choices.
There Is No Cavalry. There is no government program to help you. No handsome prince about to sweep you off your feet. You’re not going to win the lottery. There is no calvary or shining white knight about to come over the horizon. In fact, economic pressures and poisonous people are all conspiring to drag you deeper into the pit. The strong prey on the weak, and stupidity spirals into suffering. Decide once and for all that there’s only one mortal who’s going to help you, and he or she is looking at you in the mirror—so get moving.
Get Religion. I found meaning and purpose in a life of faith and in the ministry of the church. Christianity enabled me to make sense of the world, it taught me about the love of God and the love of my neighbor, that hope is currency in a land of despair, that grace is the name for the kindness we all need but don’t deserve. A good church is a refuge shelter for escapees from poverty and pain. The reality is that you are more likely to succeed in life if you find mentors and peers who show you how to be a better you, who encourage you, who call you out for stupidity and selfishness, who provide you with a meaningful community and a moral compass. A healthy church is a good place to start to rehabilitate your ability to function as a human being.
Cultivate a Family. It’s hard to unlearn the habits of a destructive family and to acquire the skills to be part of a healthy and wholesome family, so prepare to work hard at it. You must learn conflict resolution and empathy, neither of which comes easily. Whether you’re married, single, divorced, or whatever, invest time in friends, nurture each other, find a spouse who comprehends the brokenness that created your failings. Along the way, learn to care for yourself, too. They don’t give out medals for not going to a counselor or psychologist if you have baggage. Creating a happy family and network of relationships is the best type of trauma recovery. A family is a safe harbor for souls weary from the storms of life.
Learn Forgiveness. Someone once said that holding a grudge is like swallowing poison and waiting for it to kill the other person. It’s true. I used to fantasize about going back in time so I could literally beat some sense into my parents. Now I look at my parents in their final years with pity, not hatred. They’re victims of the traumas that were inflicted on them. They didn’t know any better. They tried, but failed, just as I’m sure I’ve failed in some ways. But forgiveness is hard; pain is a stain on the heart that does not wash out easily. Forgiveness does not mean we cease to feel the pain of someone’s actions; rather, forgiveness means we no longer let it define us and no longer want to rub it in people’s faces. We need to forgive because, inevitably, all of us need to be forgiven.
I doubt my story’s going to be made into a movie directed by Ron Howard. But I resonate with people like J.D. Vance and, for that matter, Rob Henderson—people who had childhoods characterized by poverty, abuse, and despair but who found a way out and made something of themselves. You don’t have to affirm everything they say, but give some respect to people who had to crawl out of a deep hole to have even a chance at standing on their own two feet.
