On Fun with Words: a New Year's Poem of Sorts

Stinkin' Thinkin',

Thinkin' Drinkin',

Brinkin',

Drinkin',

Lincoln,

Delinquen',

Blinkin'...

Sinkin'...

Clinkin'.

Drinking and driving is deadly.

Sober wishes for you

this New Year.

-The Traveler

On A Mind-Fuck, and Epiphany - Part III, Conclusion

And now, the epiphany for me, the Holy Grail I never understood in this manner, before.

Those with Attention Deficit Disorder need not apply, today - this is long, and dense.

Part I: ...We must get to our elemental state, broken to pieces, before we can Surrender, because, basically, Surrender is the LAST thing we are willing to do.

Part II: ...And each Surrender is a loss, and each loss must be processed through grief, and then we replace the dysfunctional with the functional. This is the real work of recovery - (both in Stage I and Stage II recovery - read on).

Part III, The Conclusion: Recovery results from, and results in, the Search for Authentic Emotional Intimacy. We screw up our search for intimacy by diversionary means - addictions, compulsions, avoidance, and dysfunctional behaviors that we evolved to use to protect our self. This diversionary pathway results in a bottom that leads us to recovery. Recovery puts us on the correct pathway, to emotional intimacy.

For me, the losses of Surrender have varying degrees of difficulty, as for anyone. And I can give up 85%, or 99%. Or 99.99%. For any Surrender, for me, I give up a big chunk up front, in the initial Surrender of that item. And as I practice life Without, I give up more, but never the entire.

There is always residual, that hair-like thread to which I cling, and that I need to feel. I taper myself off (or, rather, my HP tapers me off as I relinquish more), until the very thread I still hold I cannot feel, but know it's there. And at some point, God performs a miracle, and the thread is gone, and I stop feeling for it. It's a long process for me, each time.

Perhaps there are people out there that can truly Surrender 100% at once, but I rather doubt it. I think the percentage they withhold, but claim they have surrendered, is their denial. I liken it to total belief in God. I just have a hard time believing anyone can be at 100%. I think in both cases people are inherently partially disposed, and cannot be completely disposed. It's the human condition. It's part of the definitions. In Surrender, we give up what we can, and it's never all. In Faith, we believe what we can, and it's never complete. It just is, and it's fluid, and it's another of those areas I don't know, or understand, and have come to stop waiting for that day to happen.

But all these Surrenders seem to funnel, for me. And by that, I mean that they all seem to converge together, that there seems to be a central desire driving my life, that all these things to which I cling touch, even if tangentially. I feel like I'm getting wisps of clarity, that it is just coming clear to me.

When I look back to my catastrophic loss, I dissect it and ask myself what are the elements of that loss, such that it was so incapacitating? Just exactly what WAS the loss, what was it about it that was so central to my existence? To what do I clutch so tightly, such that Surrender is killing me?

And I think I'm beginning to understand, now. The Holy Grail I had always loosely termed as that solution that quells the existential hole we all feel, that hole that makes us need to receive comfort, and feel joy. A 6-month sober speaker put it so well in the Drunk Church Diner, yesterday, "I just felt like I was dying, inside... even though on the outside the trappings looked OK, there was this hole in me..."

I had chased a certain pathway, utterly convinced it was the way to get there. And in a horrifying way, it got me awfully close. It got me to the place where I was completely convinced I was on the way. It all seemed right, and real, but I had no concept at the time that I was staring at the edge of the abyss, not the threshold to the Promised Land.

Until the bottom fell out, and I was left in the dissipating mirage.

I took that last step, thinking I was crossing toward - entering into - the portal to the Promised Land, only to find myself hurling into the abyss. I was ever so fortunate that my HP saw fit to lasso me in a noose, yanking my head and leaving me swinging, over the edge, asphyxiating.

But hanging from God's noose is different than free fall into the abyss. I was able to enter recovery, and get help, and get hauled back up from the edge. I was severely damaged and incapacitated, but alive, and not lost to the abyss.

I had to go there, over that edge, in order to see the right pathway, and let go of my false reality. And I thank God, for that noose, today, the one that nearly snapped my neck, and gave me rope burns, and left me seizing from anoxia to the brain. I would rather have seizures, uncontrolled drooling, tics, and slurred speech - hoping them to heal - than to be in eternal free fall into the abyss.

It turned out it had all been an illusion. And smart ol' me, I had taken it in, built it into my reality, into that most vulnerable core center of myself. I had made room, rearranged, my innermost self to host this "reality" that was in actuality a fantasy, and when it shattered it damn near took me with it. It's taken a year, now, to put the pieces in any kind of order, but they are finally making sense.

The journey for me is the search for authentic emotional intimacy. And, it's the same journey for all you out there, eventually. We humans are hard-wired with this need, the desire to sync up with another person and fall into a comfort net of interdigitating lives and souls. In the end, we seek the comfort of intimacy, to assuage our instinctive alone-ness.

The problem then is, that we are each cripples, in this journey. We're fucked, from the get-go, incarcerated in the thought patterns, behaviors, and fears of the needs of our inner child that were damaged and traumatized and neglected in our formative selves.

But for myself, the desire for authentic emotional intimacy is there, and very real. It's ever so much more powerful than a substance, or compulsion EVER was, and, in the end, it was this very need that drove me to them, anyway. I went to them because I wanted to get away from that existential hole, and I didn't yet know where to go. So I went away. But recovery took those diversions - those escapes - away, and has brought me to the place where I see where I want to go, and has shown me my pathway to get there.

In the time since I started this epiphany series, I have run across literature that finally puts my journey into a framework of words:

Stage II recovery. Earnie Larsen. And he beautifully goes on to investigate my journey, and yours, in his follow-up work, Stage II Relationships.

(I'm sure I'm gonna hear from some of you that the 12 Steps are the Be-All, End-All, All-All, but I'd respond to that that SOME 12-Steppers have the intuitive pathway into Stage II stuff built into their program if they have excellent people around them, but a lot of them get stuck a few years out, wondering if this is all there is, still mired in essentially dysfunctional thinking and behavior patterns and still emotionally stiff and crippled and defended. The 12-Steps are good mechanically, but can lack guidance psychologically and emotionally. 12-Steps can help us fix our behaviors, but in my mind Stage II recovery helps us fix what DRIVES the behaviors. I say don't get stuck in dogma, and keep looking until you find something that works and is functional.)

The rest of this post won't make much sense, until you've read the books and pondered them a while. But this isn't a plug for them; it's only my description of my journey. Do what you want. I'm writing to myself, here, for when I come back and read this in the future, and see where I've managed to get myself, with the help of my HP, down the road.

These are tiny, thin, little books of deceptively profound content. You will either get it, or it will fly right over your head. As with many things, they are only sketches of a message, and the rest is left to you, to work out the details. But I'm excited to have found them, because they put into a word framework my personal journey, and goals. I want rid of the glass wall. And I am willing to work through the paradox. I am willing to do whatever it takes. I am willing to engage in civil war with my Inner Guardian, as Larsen puts it.

The paradox being that in order to achieve intimacy, we first have to develop ourselves by peeling back our defenses, building a foundation of mental health and self-esteem, and offering our undefended core self to those with which we wish to have an emotionally intimate relationship - lay it out on a platter - exposed, and free for the taking. And I'm not talking the usual share-a-bit-of-yourself and give-hugs-all-around and snuggle-up-to-someone-and-whisper-your-thoughts-in-their-ear kind of "intimacy." I'm talking about the get-out-from-behind-all-those-layers, and meld-souls-in-the-danger-zone type of intimacy, putting yourself on the line and going for it, no holds barred, in a thoughtful, loving way. The ultimate risk.

The paradigm of seeking emotional intimacy outside ourselves (by finding our "soul-mate") is all wrong. We don't "find" intimacy; we make it, by our strength and open vulnerability enabling it in others. It's a mind-fuck, to comprehend this. For me, and I suspect most people. Because I just want to go out there and look until I find my perfect soul-mate - who will save me, comfort me, protect me, cherish me, envelop me, and gently offer custodianship of my soul so I don't have to worry about protecting it, anymore. So the fantasy goes.

And then, on top of it, it's rather confusing and counter-intuitive when the methodology in Stage II recovery is the polar opposite of that used in Stage I recovery.

In Stage I recovery, where we incapacitate the bondage of addiction, we must essentially be abandoned by enablers, left to fall apart, until our pieces are too small to function, and we must then get out of ourselves, and lay ourselves out to others, become enmeshed in a network, to reconstruct our daily routines to exclude the addictive behaviors.

In Stage II recovery - the reconstruction of our dysfunctional selves and preparation for intimacy - this must be done deeply within ourselves, by ourselves, from ourselves. And the great paradox here is that in order to achieve that intimacy, WE must become the greatest enabler, of the other person with whom we wish to become intimate. It is our role to enable their pathway to intimacy with us - after we have built ourselves, fashioned our cores, RE-fashioned our cores to be self-sufficient, in early Stage II recovery. (We are enabling their capacity for intimacy by leading by example and providing a comforting zone, by giving them the intimacy we want them to return; I'm not talking about enabling our or their addiction. I'm also not talking about being a Pollyanna doormat, either - this takes two, to work.)

But in both Stage I and Stage II, the ENDPOINT is the same: we must - after rebuilding our own structure to a state of self-sufficient strength (via surrender to our HP) - give away, in order to feed ourselves and maintain ourselves. The only way to have it, is to give it away. And the quality of job that we do in giving determines the quality we are able to have, in our own lives.

I consider this advanced - graduate - level stuff in the path of recovery. Most will not make it this far, but rather will get stalled at some intermediate point, stuck in dysfunction. Many who reach a sober state will then get stuck in limited, defended relationship patterns. Perhaps I will, too. But, I am damned determined, when I finally formulate a goal. I am not timid to do whatever it takes, to get to a place I want to be.

And that place I want, my path of Stage II recovery, is to re-engineer my self to be that person I need to be, in order to get to intimacy. Authentic intimacy, not faux or image intimacy. I have already begun to identify my formative factors and defensive characteristics that will have to be undone, and redone. And risks I will have to take, in exposing myself in order to grow.

Of course, the whole process fascinates a fear-leaning geek-type like myself. It's an amalgam of faith, masochism, psychiatry, 12-stepping, and good ol' fashioned grit to find my courage, to get there. This will be one of those spiritual awakening things, a goal accomplished via HP miracle - something that will not happen in and of myself, alone.

Now, on a side note, lest you think I've lived my adult life an isolated, brooding, withdrawn wallflower, you'd be mistaken. My writing is controlled, and distant. I don't try to make an illusion of real life in written form.

This is a virtual persona, you get, and it's what you get from anyone, in writing, a persona in written form. That you or a writer ever think otherwise is only delusion. If you walked into a room of people, I doubt you'd be able to pick me out. Writing is where I vent my serious persona, the place I take all my tedious thoughts that people don't really have patience for in f2f conversations.

I've had a full and blessed life of relationships - long term, stable, healthy, loving ones. I've had the dysfunctional ones, too, but mostly in those relationships I had no option to choose. Unlike many in recovery, I don't have a trail of failures and disasters in the relationship arena. What I do have is lofty goals. I want the apex, of relationships. I want that deeper level of intimacy, in any relationship in which I could achieve it.

I've always felt there's more out there, and wanted it: that gut-wrenching level of intimacy we almost dare not want because the entry fee is baring our soul in its most vulnerable state. I'm not talking about some romantic fantasy state; I'm talking about a very real, down-to-earth, deeply rooted kind of relationship, one that is the bulwark in the storm, quietly ballasted with depth. Not the whirlwind pseudo-intimacy that is the storm.

It's an instinct within me, that there's a whole other level of connecting, with people, that we could achieve, if only we were enlightened enough, and did the right work, and had the courage. I know it's out there, and I want it, with a fire in my belly.

And it's where I'm headed, in 2008.

-The Traveler

P.S. - I think I'm going to do a post on the intimacy hierarchy as I experience it, sort of a Maslow's Triangle for intimacy. Ran across some good material on what would be mine, and I think that, actually, emotional intimacy isn't the pinnacle, but rather spiritual intimacy is. I'm just not that spiritually evolved, yet, to feel this, I think. But, hey, it's progress not perfection, and I have a lot of re-engineering to do just to work on the emotional intimacy level. I just completely always sucked at that answer, "everything amounts to your relationship with God, and if something's not perfect, just pray more..." I'll try to keep an open mind...

I think the second mind-fuck just might turn out to be that you cannot achieve emotional intimacy with another person until you both sync in spiritually, first, and the focus is on the HP, together, rather than on each other. In other words, to get the closest to another person, you have to channel it spiritually, not person-to-person. That, again, we are operating from the wrong paradigm, laboring to get close to another person, by focusing on them, when the real deal is that we have to focus on our HP, who will somehow put us, connect us, more intimately with them. Counter-intuitive, for me, at least, again. Stay tuned.

HQFT: Highlighted Quote For Thought

"And the truth shall set you free,

but first it will tick you off."

(source unknown)

-The Traveler

Next Up: A Mind-Fuck and Epiphany, the Conclusion

I'm off a few days, to finish my thinking

on the conclusion of this series,

to let it ripen in the vault.

Part I.

Part II.

On This Day

...I'm grateful.

I feel it would be over-the-top to write much,
and claim all sorts of flowery platitudes.
That's everywhere, and overdone.

Less is more.

-The Traveler

On Holiday Visits

I ran into Marlboro Man and Coffee Bar Worker yesterday at the Drunk Church Diner.

Coffee Bar Worker had the joy of discovering Marlboro Man's son in a state of OD, a few days ago, convulsing in his own aspirated vomit, crumpled on the floor. Heroin.

Marlboro Man has been pulling his greyed, thinning hair out, trying to figure out how to evict his own son from the farm. It's a complicated scenario, where Marlboro Man's mother holds deed to the farm, but for all intents and purposes the farm belongs to Marlboro Man. Mother is a supreme enabler, and in her mid-eighties, so she tired of enabling Heroin Dude Grandson (who had been living with her) and dumped him out on the farm, on Marlboro Man. Problem is, Heroin Dude has been wreaking havoc on the farm, ever since.

So Heroin Dude did himself in, nearly. They got him to the hospital alive, but in renal failure and with aspiration pneumonia. While he lay in OD, his position apparently compromised the nerves or circulation in one of his legs, and it sustained severe tissue damage. They are contemplating an amputation, but the word is not final.

Marlboro Man shared this in Drunk Church the other day, and lamented that he was unable to tell the cops his son was a dealer, because then they could have had a handle on charges to get him into jail. As it is, they will try to work the possession angle. Marlboro Man doesn't want Heroin Dude

back, and can't figure how to rid himself, other than incarceration.

If he lives.

Happy Holidays, from THE DISEASE.

I shall put in a cheerier entry, later. But this was on my mind, at the moment.

-The Traveler

A View Inside

This picture... robs me of words. Because I cannot find the words to describe how this image captures the inside of me. (You have to imagine the IMAX, larger-than-life view of it, such that it encompasses your entire field of vision, to see it how I do.)

There's an ambivalence to it. Because I can't decide, what it is. It hits me with many facets, all at once, at the onset. Then, as I slow down and look around it, it gets more complex, even, to me.

Is it gleaming... or gloomy?

Serene... or stormy?

Still... or stirring?

Drawing near... or departing?

Dawn... or dusk?

Yes.

It is all of these, all at once. You can feel them, as you look.

I love the power - the drama - of the colors. Heck, there's even green, in the sky, at the left.

Are the blues washing over me, cooling me, calming me?

Or are the reds arising, to provoke dissension, within me?

Do I fear the shadows on the horizon, or find in them respite?

Those illumined clouds - not exactly the usual. They exhibit pointillism - a staccato - which to me is a visual irony for such as a cloud, made up of boundaryless vapors.

And, how is it, that it can be washed both with white light, and with golden, in the same scene?

I wish I could climb into this place, and just sit there, until what happens, happens. I would so love to smell, and hear, and touch this place.

But only by myself, alone - undisturbed.

In a way, I am there. Because if there were a picture of a view inside me, this would be it.

-The Traveler

On the Spectre of Inner Rage

We all have triggers in our lives - those pop-ups that ignite reflex reactions. When they happen, we are often not prepared, and thrown off balance. We are left wobbling, and groping for our center of gravity.

The journey of recovery is rather an excavation. It brings to the surface, or closer to the surface, things that have been long covered - pressed and encased by dense layers - over eons of time. And, like the unheralded organ of skin, when this encasement is ruptured, and the encased is exposed, it's surprisingly raw, and consuming.

I find that things are never simple, on the surface. They may be simple in the core, but on the surface they tend to be obfuscated, and complex, to unravel. They never exist in isolation, and are invariably related to other things in a sort of chain-reaction or woven tapestry manner. When something pops up, due to a trigger, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

Recovery is the journey to the center of our Self, to find the source, the initiator of the chain-reaction. To find the first iteration, the central issue. The core disturbance.

And at our cores, we are surprising simple. I think there are perhaps only a small handful of elements in our very central-most cores. And I think one, for sure, is fear. This primordial fear branches out in all sorts of flavors, up through our layers to the surface. It drives secondary reactions such as anger, hatred, insecurity, resentment, indignation... a host of derivative emotions.

Shrinks might argue what the core fear is, within us. Some say fear of death. Some say fear of alone-ness. At any rate, it's existential in nature. And never addressed until we acquiesce to the existence of a higher power. We cannot address this existential crisis in the absence of believing in something greater than ourselves.

In the end, to me, it's semantics. I think we all can close our eyes and feel our inner core of fear, whatever it is. It's there, in every single one of us. If you don't feel it, you're just deeper - thicker - in denial, than I am. (This is not to say I go through life quaking in my boots, because I don't. But if I take some time for honest, quiet reflection, I will find it there, deep down.)

So, I'm mumbling on about fear, because I had a rage trigger recently. This is a known trigger to me, but the timing of the occurrences are unknown, as they are elicited by a person, a particular person.

I keep the person at a distance, and do not respond, because I'm in the process of emptying out my poison toward them, in my recovery path. There is simply a toxic chemistry there, and we both know it, and both want to work past it, but we both must stay the course on our respective recovery paths.

Problem is, by necessity, we have to have touch points of contact, in order to do the recovery work, to get past the toxicity. So we touch base, remotely, every so often, and don't directly respond. We just let each other's touch point soak in, sink in, and we take another step toward our detox. It's a very slow process, but we have the same goal, and I think we are equally committed to our respective goals but on vastly different paths to get there.

So as I was thinking out my triggered rage, this last touch point, I came to see it as a reflection of a deeper level: that inner fear. That the rage triggered by this person, and their circumstances in my life, is actually a trigger to a deeper thing, THE deepest thing, that inner core of fear.

And when I back up, or, rather down, into those layers, into the core, into the central fear, then I can again come up through the layers, through the secondary, derivative emotions of that fear, and see that my hatred toward that person is just a spin-off of my central fear.

Now, maybe this all sounds too distant, and calculating, and removed. But, for me, it's a concrete tool to use. To be able to see a hatred reaction to a trigger in a context. That is: the hatred is the re-bubbling of a fear.

This person's contacts with me trigger my central fear, which stirs my core and re-arises in the form of hatred. The energy of that hatred is proportional to the amount of core fear triggered. And, the core fear really isn't their doing, it's my issue. They just happen to be a trigger, and target for the hate that jettisons forth from that trigger. Their actual infringement, which was egregious, is not proportional to the intensity of hatred it triggers, and I know this - when I haul my ass out of denial, and take a good, hard look at it. Which I am wont to do, because I'm one to push into my fears, and explore them.

For me, to be able to see this, what feels like irrational hatred, in a rational context, helps me to get a handle on it, and see a direction to go, to finally defuse the reaction.

I have no idea if this makes any sense to anyone else. But, it sure does, to me.

-The Traveler

On Alter Egos, and Bottoms

People who are around me in real life would likely describe my demeanor as low-key. I'm a back-door type, which makes public blogging somewhat of an unnatural thing for me - the public part, not the writing part. It is the very nature of the venue being in writing that enables me to do it at all, that level of remove.

Some people blog because they love the attention and adulation of feedback; I blog to force myself into a place of discomfort, because this is what I do.

All my life, I've forced myself into positions of discomfort, driven myself into my fears, to see what I'm made of. I don't feel like I go through life fearful, however. I feel like I go through life, and when I find a fear, I have to explore it, and master it. It's a compulsion of mine.

The 24s have passed by, mostly smoothly, until they've added up to quite a few by now. And in those 24s, I've proven a lot of things, to myself. To the point where I don't feel the compulsion to prove things to other people very much, anymore. I actually never felt it much to prove it to other people, anyway; rather it was to myself, and perhaps to my parents. But I rarely felt the need to prove things to my peers. Not sure why. Perhaps because every peer-type benchmark I did undertake I did well enough to satisfy myself. Um, except for the one year I was on swim team. I did not excel in that very well, unfortunately. But I was in buff shape, and looking good.

When I look back, though, I see a pattern of lurid fascination with power objects, a manifestation of an alter-ego within my psyche that belies my outward demeanor. Even in grade school, I broke a neighbor's horse to ride, using such unconventional tools (of an allowance-poor kid) as a paperboy's canvas paper holder, loaded with rocks, upon the horse's back, to simulate a rider's weight. Yes, I trained the horse and rode it around the neighborhood for the following years.

Also in grade school, I bought a protection-trained Doberman that had been neglected. He was starved and full of mange. I nursed him back to health and tuned up his training to the effect that, once when we had cousin house guests and my older brother - who no longer lived in our house - came that night to pick them up and tried to enter our house, the dog did his job so well that my mother was terrified of Mr. Dobie and I had to sell him.

A British couple wanted him, and tried to offer me, a barely double-digit-aged kid, the market price for a pet Dobie. I turned on my heel in a snuff, and refused their offer, sending them home an hour's drive away. They called back the next day and doubled their offer, groveling for the dog. I knew what I had, and had the nerve to hold out for it, even at that age. They were nice folks, and I knew he would have a great home. I always wished I could have kept him, though.

I picked up the power dog interest again, later in life, after a best friend adopted a shepherd from the pound that I fell in love with. I vowed to get one, at my first opportunity. The opportunity came upon my first housing that would allow me to keep a large dog, and it wasn't but the very first weekend after I had moved in that I went looking for my first shepherd.

This launched me into the hobby of Schutzhund, a dog sport where the dogs learn protection, obedience, and tracking in a competitive sport. It's a very complex sport, to get good at, because a dog that is rip-roaring good at protection tends to be tough and hard headed and not well suited toward precision obedience, or the tedious nature of tracking, and vise-versa. So you have to get balanced dogs, and learn how to finesse their various drives, to get good performances in all three aspects. It's a lot more art than it at first would appear.

And believe me, you learn a ton about drives, and behavior, if you want to learn this sport. Both in dogs, and in humans.

Now, hanging around the folks of Schutzhund is not all that unlike hanging around the rooms. It's a colorful and opinionated set, and they are fairly reactive at times when certain dogma are discussed. I would pause here and say I digress, except I do not.

One of the methods one of the Schutzhund trainers used to use was to put a dog into a corner of a fence, on a leash line. These animals are bred for this sport and have certain drives and characteristics that tend to be more pronounced than in the average pet. They generally love the sport, are not traumatized or mis-used, and are well cared for.

But sometimes the methodology people choose to use is... well, not what I would choose.

In this case, this trainer liked to work his dogs in, set them into, high defense drive, to sharpen their performance. Mostly these dogs are working in prey drive, which is the instinct to chase prey and capture it. Defense drive is just that - a drive to protect self. Prey drive is usually a euphoric and fun state for a dog, whereas defense drive is a fear and serious state of mind. But, as you can imagine, the fear state can bring focus to a performance that is sometimes not apparent in the animal when it's in prey drive, and in a fun state. A fear state brings the NOW into focus, sharply.

Anyone relating to this?

So anyway, this guy liked to use dogs in defense drive mode, a lot. And these dogs are tough mothers, bred for nerve and a lot of them take a lot of - um - stimulus to drive them into defense mode, because they are bred to be solid in the nerves. So this guy would take a dog that didn't tend to kick into defense mode, and "teach" the dog how to kick into defense mode.

He did this by putting the dog on a leash line in the inside corner of a fence, then using the "decoy" (i.e., guy with bite suit and bite sleeve on that the dogs are trained to pursue and immobilize, and bite on the sleeve if necessary) to pressure the dog into defense mode. He'd have the decoy guy go into the dog's leash zone (i.e., into the dog's face, in a corner, as it were) until the dog had no choice to avoid and had to get offensive toward the decoy, to relieve the impingement.

Some people in the club had pet-grade dogs, that avoided like an alkie contemplating his first AA meeting. These dogs would back up into the corner until their ass was pressed against the fence and avoid, avoid, avoid, until there was simply no place left to go, and Mister Decoy was in their face, escalating the pressure menacingly. Their only escape, only relief of the pressure, was to go on the defensive, to show barking or teeth or go after the Decoy, after which he immediately gave them a bite on the sleeve, or retreated to back off on the pressure.

How like a bottom that is, that we must be backed into a corner, with no choice of circumvention or avoidance left whatsoever, and escalating pressure in our face that threatens to overtake us, until we kick in and get with a recovery program. We are forced to make that decision, for our life, to do whatever it takes, to get out of the corner. We either find that within us, or end up slumped and dead, back in that corner.

We finally make the choice, to defend our life.

I could illustrate just about everything I've learned in life that is important, using lessons I've learned in Schutzhund training. Perhaps I will write more about them, in coming entries.

For today, it's what crossed my mind, so here they are, my thoughts, my musings on recovery, through my personal filter.

Hope you enjoyed the trip.

-The Traveler

On Shattering at Close Range

(AUTHOR'S NOTE, added 12/31/07 - For all the discussion on the ramifications of how to deal with a bigot, the underlying problem is not apparently clear to some readers. THIS GUY WAS UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF SOME MIND-ALTERING DRUG. ANY ATTEMPT TO USE LOGIC OR EVEN WORDS WITH SUCH PEOPLE IS IN VAIN. They cannot think rationally. As soon as the dinner patrons realized this, they stopped their attempts, which was the right thing to do, because it was in vain, and because he was not directly attacking anyone present, and because it would have created a brawl for the host to have to deal with.)

I had the dubious experience a few nights ago of another of the holiday dinners. Even moreso (dubious, that is), I was seated next to a madman. Addict, I think, actually - on some sort of upper. Rather like having a machine gun going off in your ear, shattering your equanimity as you try to enjoy the filet. It would have been excellent, otherwise, as it was very, very rare, the way I like it....

It was most interesting to see the normies at the table react to him. You see, they haven't the filter of knowing the addict's mind (lack thereof, actually, while they're using), and to them, he's a "normal" person behaving crazy. To others of us, he's behaving perfectly "normally," for being an addict. I smirk, at the irony of that.

They tried to reason with him, calm him, bring him to other points of view in his rantings. I just tried to focus on my filet. I knew it was moot, to do so. Either one.

I guess the good part was that, while they left agitated, I felt much more calmed at the conclusion. I was just glad, when he was out of my range of vision, and on his way. He works for a Washington, D.C. law firm. I had to wonder how many of them are like him. I spent a chunk of my professional life in D.C., swimming in the fast lane, dining with the movers-and-shakers.

Once, I fired a lobbyist my company had hired, and he was pissed off, when I sent him a mere $100 bottle of wine, in condolence.

Been there, done that. The fast lane was an experience, but I feel no need to return, thanks. It is the perfect concoction of circumstances to make crazy people - everyone in that town is chasing an agenda, and thinking they are cleverly hiding it, cloaking it in smooth language under the guise of somebody else's "need."

Hm. Come to think of it, it's a lot like Hollywood.

- The Traveler

On Kleptomania: Toxic Relationships

Early relational trauma sets up dysfunctional adult relational issues.

There are two inter-relating issues:

1. Relationship with self
2. Relationship with others.

The relationship with self presents five primary problems that lead to adult intimacy issues.

1. First the client has trouble having a sense of self, spending much of his or her life living in reaction to the object of their affection rather than in action for the self. This is the reality issue; it causes the client to feel empty inside and causes the client to endlessly blame others for how he/she feels emotionally or for what he/she has done.
   
2. Second, the client does not experience inherent worth. He or she gauges his/her sense of value through a process of endless comparison to others, and is too dependent on others to establish either a sense of value or self. This interferes with his/her ability to maturely love others. She generally can hold another person in warm regard only when the other is "behaving properly," or when he/she has created a comfortable fantasy about the other person and uses denial to avoid looking at the other's disturbing behavior.
   
3. Third, the client has no personal boundary system with which to protect and contain himself/herself during intimate exchange. This leads to abusive behavior on her part and involves control and manipulation, raging, ridiculing, lying and/or high tolerance for this type of behavior in a partner.
   
4. The fourth problem involves poor self-care, leading to dependency and interdependency problems in a relationship.
   
5. The fifth problem deals with living in the extreme. This is usually exhibited by a lack of moderation in attitude and behavior, which leads to a sense of deadness and/or chaos in a relationship.

Childhood Trauma

It is evident that problems with the "self" lead to intimacy issues. The next question concerns where these problems developed. It appears that childhood trauma sets up several core issues. For example:

• If a child is not maturely loved by his parents, he will develop self-esteem issues.
• If he is not protected and taught containment, he will develop boundary problems.
• If he is forced to do so much adapting, he will lose his sense of self and have trouble being real.
• If he is not taught to take care of his basic needs and wants, he will have difficulty doing this as an adult.
• If he is severly shamed into containing himself and not taught containment, he will have trouble establishing moderation in his adult life.

Both trauma and core issues drive addictions---be it addiction to substances, processes, or to other people. Trauma, core issues, and addictions create severe relational problems where sex, love and relational matters all seem to become entwined. Knowing where to start is th efirst step in treatment.

The Starting Point---Love Addiction

Alcohol or drug addictions should be addressed first and foremost. The client must have the ability to think and feel without a mood altering substance.

Subsequently, the primary behavioral addiction to be considered is love addiction. A Love addict has been traumatized in childhood by being neglected or abandoned by either parents.

The child who suffers from neglect or abandonment learns three toxic ideas from this trauma:

1. In a relationship he is worth less than his partner. This kind of trauma is extremely shaming and relationally he will assume a victim posture allowing his partner to be abusive. He will see the partner as a higher power and will literally worship them--giving him a feeling of helplessness---resulting in a lack of self-esteem. The Love Addict does not esteem himself in the relationship, therefore the partner will often assume a position of disrespect and relate out of duty, not love.
2. He needs a partner to take care of him. he believes that he cannot take care of himself and demonstrates poor self-care skills, therefore the partner will feel the Love Addict is a burden.
3. If he does not get close enough to the partner he will not survive. This client believes that he cannot leave a partner because if he did---he would die. Therefore, the client will exercise no personal boundaries resulting in the partner feeling suffocated and victimized.

This toxicity drives the obsessive/compulsive relational cycle of love addiction. The cycle starts with the Love Addict constructing a fantasy that the partner is a god or goddess, although denial is used to protect the fantasy. Eventually, an event occurs that destroys the fantasy and the love addict goes into withdrawal from the fantasy. The withdrawal is experienced as severe depression, rage, panic, and toxic shame. The Love Addict will then try to relieve the emotional withdrawal by self-medicating with food, drugs, sexual encounters, smoking, alcohol, or locating another person to become the object of addiction. If the partner returns expressing seductive qualities, the Love Addict will pass out of withdrawal and return to fantasy. As a result, the love addict cycle will begin all over again.

Love Avoidance

At the other end of the continuum is love avoidance, an obsessive/compulsive relational cycle that begins with the child's enmeshment with parents (meaning one or both of the parents has no boundaries with the child).

The child becomes the support network and provides care for the parents. This concept is best understood by examining the roles a child plays in a dysfunctional family system, such as the family counselor, mediator, mascot, scapegoat, or hero:

• Oftentimes, the child may be a surrogate parent to younger siblings.
• In other situations, "Daddy's little girl" is a situation where the female child is more important to her father than her mother. The child feels superior to her mother and will later serve as her father's surrogate spouse.
• At the other end of the spectrum, "Mom's little man" is when the son is more important than the father. As, a result, the son often feels superior to the father and becomes a surrogate spouse.

In these described roles, the child feels very close to the parent, but is actually too close. He has to adapt too much to the needs of the parent and in the adaptation loses a sense of self and spontaneity. As an adult he will feel easily bored and empty inside, which drives his need to use risk taking to create intensity.

Being enmeshed by a parent creates three toxic ideas in the Love Avoidant:

1. When in a relationship with a needy person the Love Avoidant is superior. He will assume a parental position, have all the power, and look down on his partner. This is a core self-issue of poor self-esteem and in a relationship it will cause him to be controlling and disdainful of the partner.
2. It is the Love Avoidant's job to take care of needy people. This is how he knows to be relational. It becomes part of his value system and if he is not taking care of someone in need, he feels guilty. As a core self-issue it is a dependency or self-care issue. It causes resentment of the partner, as the love avoidant feels oppressed by his perceived responsibility. He too enters relationships out of duty, not love.
3. If the Love Avoidant does not maintain enough distance in a relationship, he will be suffocated. As a result, he uses "walls" to create the distance he needs. As a core issue, this is a boundary problem.

These three toxic thoughts drive a compulsive relational cycle called "the cycle of love avoidance."

The cycle starts with the Love Avoidant entering a relationship because the other person needs assistance. The prospective partner seems needy and the avoidant appears to enter the relationship to avoid guilt and because it makes him feel good about himself.

However, the Love Avoidant doesn't actually enter a true relationship. He is hiding behind a "wall of seduction" that causes the prospective partner to feel special, but in reality the Avoidant is simply role-playing. The Avoidant is contemplating the relationship out of duty, not love.

The result is resentment at having to work so hard to be in a relationship in which he really doesn't want to participate. He then uses the anger to justify his escape from the duty-bound relationship.

As self-medication, he seeks high intensity to relieve his boredom and make him feel wonderful. He starts risk-taking behavior such as sexually acting out, gambling with money or his life, drinking, drugging, or work addiction.

However, following such behavior, he starts to feel guilty because he is not properly caring for his partner, so he returns out of guilt and restarts the entire avoidant cycle.Humans tend to be relationally attracted to what is familiar.

The Love Addict is attracted to people who are distant and relationally irresponsible, similar to his neglrctful parent/s.

The Love Avoidant is compelled to be relational with needy people who put him in a god-like position.

It is not unusual to see these two types of people enter into relationships with one another, whereby they often stimulate each other's cycle.

Nothing To Do With Love........

The Love Addict enters the relationship masked in fantasy that is stimulated by the avoidant's "wall of seduction," He uses the fantasy to mask the Love Avoidant's distancing.

The Love Avoidant uses the "wall of seduction" to make the Love Addict feel good and to keep himself safe from soffocation. Then as the Love Avoidant develops resentments, leaves and acts out to create intensity, the Love Addict uses denial to maintain his fantasy.

The resentment and distancing eventually break the Love Addict's denial and they enter emotional withdrawal from the fantasy. Because he is so unhappy, the Love Avoidant starts to feel guilty and returns to the relationship with a wall of seduction that usually starts the two cycling again.

This is not about love for either partner. It is a combination of addiction, toxic sexual behavior, and deep relational problems.

*******************

The above information I ran across here (that's the klepto part) and tuned up with formatting, etc.

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/relationships-parenting-sobriety/49042-love-sex-relational-matter.html

-The Traveler

On Fantasy, Magic, and Miracles

So today's meeting was to be an "As Bill Sees it" meeting.

But, we had a newcomer.

The metal folding chairs were all set out in rows - small book in each - as people filed in and took seats.

The usual preamble, up to the question, "Is this anybody's first AA meeting, ever?"

Behind me, someone raised their hand, and the machinery set in motion.

Churning. It was just like that! Automated, deliberate, powerful, moderate speed, churning began in the room.

The entire gestalt of the room changed. Several people arose from their seats and silently began collecting the Bill books. Others went to the literature cabinet and took out the 12/12 books, began passing them out.

Not a word was said to initiate the process, and yet the process initiated and ran like a well-oiled machine, switching gears from the usual, to a newcomer's First Step meeting. I had to sit in awe, at the machinations. It was so fluid, so natural, so prepared, and yet didn't feel contrived at all. I just had to appreciate those moments.

Looking back on them, I realize I was fully there, in the moment. It was like watching AA art in dynamic motion. It was potentially a piece of a miracle.

Today, there was a batch of winners there, too. One got his 21 year chip, today. Several of them spoke, to the newcomer. It was so powerful. I wish every meeting had a few of these guys sprinkled in. Once you meet them, and hear them, and see them in life, you KNOW the process of 12-Step living, because you can feel the miracle, coming off them like infrared rays.

I'm not talking about the bullshit artists, or the smooth talkers, or the charmers. I'm talking about those rare folks that GOT it, and emanate it. You can feel it, from them. They never push it on you, because they feel no need to proselytize.

They are living examples. They are visual ironies, because when you first see them, before you have heard their stories, they are so bright, so joyous, so powerful, so relaxed, so serene, so content. It's almost hard to go back in time, into their stories, and imagine what wrecks they were. And yet, they were.

One thing that hit me today was the recurring theme from them, "I was afraid of living. I thought at the time that I loved drinking, the way it made me feel. But years out into sobriety, I had hindsight, and could see what it really was. I had no real idea what living was, and so I ran away, ran into the bottle, to escape my fear..."

"I was slowly dying, but I didn't care. I drank. I used. That didn't scare me. What I was afraid of was not dying, but of living, of waking up another morning just like that, still in that hell, twenty years from now..."

I see the Shawshank Redemption quote bandied about in recovery places, "Get busy living, or get busy dying."

I've always loved that quote. But today, I got a new spin on it.

The fact is that without that trauma - that bottom - most of us would still be running, from life. Some of us wouldn't even know it. Some of us still don't know it, that we were running, from life, afraid of living.

Chasing a euphoria isn't living. It's escaping. It's the fantasy of the too-good-to-be-true, because it isn't true. We cling to the fantasy that a magic exists, a magic that will take us where we think we want to go.

But the irony is that we don't really know where to go, and so we move on, but only to escape our present position, because we know the present position is void, and not giving us what we want, what we instinctively need.

And if it's escape, it's driven by fear. It takes a while, in recovery, to get out of denial to see this, to get to the fear, to see it for what it is - FEAR, and what it drove us to do. To see how fear distorted our perspective, inverted reality, causing the very thing that was destroying us to seem like the right thing to do, the right place to go.

The true long-term winners have the spiritual growth and time in to be able to look back and have this type of perspective. There's a depth to it. A maturity. It must be bought with work and faith, over time, to arrive there.

Fantasy thinking arises from trauma and unmet needs in childhood and beyond. It's a defense of self that keeps us from imploding, but it becomes increasingly distorted over time, the farther from the initiating event it becomes. Over the years, we incorporate the fantasies we built into our realities, and we guard them with our very lives.

This is the power of denial - denial is the protection of our fantasies.

But the process of recovery - of honesty, of maturation, of spiritual awakening - is to correct these fantasies, and gain reality-based living. We must stop the entitlement thinking that the world should fulfill our needs, and grow to cultivate our own selves instead, by turning our lives and our will over, and being willing to do the next right thing.

It's an extremely difficult process; we are highly resistant to let go of our fantasies, because they are our perceived protections, in life. When we drop the fantasies, we are left naked, unprotected. It is this very thing that brings us to our Higher Power. We are too small to endure, naked, alone. To weak.

Ironically, one of the fantasies we tend to harbor is ABOUT the experience of coming to our Higher Power. Many of us harbor the fantasy that we should have some tangible, mystical experience of our Higher Power - proof of God, as it were.

But the spiritual awakening referenced in the 12-steps cites only that the awakening is the actualization of things for us that we could not have achieved, alone. So by default, it was enhanced by a spiritual element.

In our fantasies, we chase a version of miracles that is extraordinary. But the truth is, the real miracle of sober living is in the unremarkable. It's in the unremarkable way of living that we would not have been able to achieve, alone.

I have yet to meet a user that wasn't chasing a fantasy, using. Who wasn't fundamentally driven by fear.

Our work is to put the fantasy living behind us, and see the real magic in everyday miracles.

-The Traveler

On the Grim Walker, and Acceptance

"...practice these principles in all our affairs..."

I woke up in the usual manner, this morning - with a large nose and hot breath in my face, a heavy body sinking the bed, and a nearly imperceptible whine in my ear.

W, one of my shepherds, comes to the side of my bed each morning and lightly rises up, to put his front end up on the side of bed. He sticks his nose in my face, and whines ever so quietly, tail slowly sweeping behind him in gentle arcs.

He's a dog that is utterly tuned into me. Everyone who meets this dog loves him, even people who are deathly afraid of large power dogs. He's just a great guy, and I've often thought if he were a human he'd be my ideal significant other. I just love this guy, from the depths of my heart. He has a special story of coming into my life, that perhaps I will write about another time.

A low-key type, he will lay himself down in sight of me, ever sensitive to my movements. In the middle of the night, if I get up, he smacks his tongue, as if licking peanut butter off the roof of his mouth. This lets me know where he is so I don't step on him - because he's right underfoot, always. If I need him to come in the dark of night, I have only to rub together my thumb and fingertips, making the most whispery of sounds, and he is there, by my side.

He has never had a resentment, that I have known. And so far as I can tell, he lives only in the moment, and is ever optimistic that the best is just about to happen.

We could learn a lot from dogs.

He's getting up there toward ten years, this year. His eyes are getting cloudy, and his muzzle is long since greyed. He is still fit and active, loving his games of tennis ball, where I lob the balls out with a racquet, for him to retrieve.

But I am cautious. Number Three shepherd, JJ, was chasing balls and doing flying leaps the day before she died, no sign of what was to come the next morning.

W is the fourth of five shepherds I've had over the years, and I have yet to have one make it to ten years. So of course this causes anxiety for me, because I am not so good at living in the moment, and I fear for pain - my pain - in the future.

The past months, he's developed tumors. He's got one on a nipple, one on his tail, and a small one on his head.

Two of the three shepherds I have lost over the years I had to euthanize due to cancer. The third died of a brain blood clot or stroke, following surgery to repair a gut torsion.

At this stage in the game, I have come to Acceptance - that these beloved friends of mine live short lives. I have come to Accept that when their bodies start to go, I will not do drastic interventions, anymore.

I don't believe they understand such interventions. I don't believe they desperately want those extra months of life, patched up by chemistry and technology. When it calls for more than moderate pain management, it's time for me to start letting go, and not keep them around for my sake, tired and impinged by illness, buoyed by modern medicine.

I have no poor opinion of people who go to the nth degree to save their pets. But the truth is, they rarely do. They buy a month, or two, or six, and the pet lays around, tired, the extra time, not feeling well.

In the early years, I did the same. I held on with fervor, paid the vet religiously, tried to buy a life back, using money, and technology. In the end, it didn't work. I prolonged what was to come, out a few more weeks. It did not bring me back the past, or lengthen a quality of life.

It prolonged a dying process, and the dogs endured it with patience, but would have been just as content to go earlier, before all the treatment and discomfort came their way, in the end.

And so, my heart seizes, as I think of the tumors, and my W. He's my boy. I fear the knowledge that ten years is coming up - that number where I have met "failure" and separation, and pain, before.

We think that love should be easy, but it's rather the opposite. It is the hardest thing we'll ever do, to love freely.

Because to love freely means to hurt bottomlessly, when it's gone.

And when that day comes - that last morning when the big nose and heavy paws rest on the bed's edge for the last time?

Will I have the ability to turn it over, to God, and give up my W to him?

Will I have Acceptance?

"...practice these principles in all our affairs..." calls for a lot of courage. My life, and my will, turned over. But, God, not my boy. Can I turn him over, too? Not my boy.

I won't have the courage, I already know this. But, I'll ask for it, from the Source. I'm willing to ask.

I just hope I do OK. And Accept life, and death, on life's terms.

-The Traveler

In The Corners of My Mind

Image today is a segment
of doodling I did years ago.
For you, Righty.

I awoke this morning with a particular word echoing in my mind: churning. Actually, it was a visual of churning, and then the word came to mind. I put the word in the back of my mind, and went on with the day, to see what might come of it. And here we are.

My mind has been doing a lot of churning, lately - in explosive growth mode about several aspects of life. I'm not ready to write about it, yet.

I wondered at the word, and it came to me that it's a visual word for me. For some reason, I associate it with commercial production of ice cream.

I once toured an ice cream factory where huge vats churned the ice cream. The tour guide spoke of the percentage of air that was churned into the frozen mixture as one metric for the grade of ice cream, where super-premium ice cream has very little air and is very dense and high in cream content. Cheaper ice creams have a lot of froth mixed in to create more volume, therefore using fewer ounces of expensive cream per unit volume of finished product.

Churning to me denotes a heavy-duty process. The machinery isn't household-grade but rather industrial/commercial grade. The motor behind it is geared low and is powerful. The movement is slow, but powerful. There's a sort of deliberate nature to churning.

And that which it churns is thick, heavy, and resistant.

The action of churning manages to get to all spaces within the confines, pulls the background to the foreground, convects, inverts, folds, evacuates the corners of the mind, doing a roll-call out front-and-center, for examination, and re-mix.

Such is the process within my mind, as I go through growth. I guess, looking at yesterday's post, I'm at the contemplation stage of a lot of changes, for myself. I am beginning to see them; a sort of roadmap is materializing within my mind's eye in a wavy, mirage-like fashion.

I know that after this ripens, the work will begin, the changes. So much is going on, but no action, yet. It's like the calm, before the storm. And yet you can feel it in the air...

-The Traveler

On Lloyd's of London, and BLATANT Plagiarism

In one of my many career iterations, I spent a week in training through Lloyd's of London, in Quality Assurance. (I was the head of my company's quality program, at the time.) It was boot camp for the anal retentive, taught by the most obsessive-compulsive, controlling Sonofa... I ever came across, professionally.

But there was a sort of mad purpose to his temperament, why Lloyd's would have selected him for the trainer. The whole world of quality assessment has to do with picking something apart, and finding out the parts and the process behind it, behind producing it well, and producing it consistently. The phenomenally obsessive-compulsive mind shines in this task.

It can be a tangible process, such as producing widgets from widget parts. Or, it can be an intangible process, such as how to design an experiment. A process is simply a series of steps that must be sequentially undertaken to reach an end goal or product. Sound familiar, anyone? STEPS?

It's not so difficult for the average Joe to understand concrete examples, but what Mister Sonofa... got paid to do was to teach us all how to apply this same methodology to processes that are more abstract. This is the stuff of big money, in business. Suppose you have an entire research staff, and you want them to maximize their process for experimental design. Not so apparent, what to do, is it?

Today, I wanted to think a bit about PROCESSES. I've found that when you can identify something, give it a name, and recognize a process at work, then you can break the process down into more manageable parts, and work on mastery of a part, so the whole doesn't seem so impossible.

Or, maybe sometimes life just seems a bit overwhelming, just too much to handle. I have a rather autistic-like brain that takes in all manner of information and has problems sorting through what's important and what's not, so I get easily overwhelmed. At times like this, I like to be able to take on only a piece of life, something of the size I can comprehend at the moment.

OK, now, I have to confess that I just blatantly plagiarized the bulleted 5 stages of change items below from this blog, today. But, I did it in the spirit of learning, to put it here because I figure something done once is worth doing multiple times, to get all the worth out of it, so I revisit the lessons I write about, later, and re-think them. I wanted this in my blog, to come back to think about, later. So, I plagiarized, I admit it!

These points are about the PROCESS of change, in one's life. Since recovery of any sort is such a process, I thought this was worth a look, and some contemplation.

It seems to me that sometimes the 5 stages of change are undergone within a STEP. And sometimes we have to get through some STEPS, to master one of the 5 stages of change, in our lives. But whichever is the case, this gives us more of a visible road map to look upon, as we change.

1. Pre-contemplation is when a person is not aware of a need to change or does not want to change. He/she often views the problem as belonging to someone else.
2. Contemplation is when a person becomes aware that he/she needs to change but has not made any move to do something about it. A person can be stuck in this stage for years.
3. Preparation is the person who has decided to make a change.
4. Action is when a person is ready to change and has begun to take some action toward the desired outcome although the issue has not yet been successfully resolved.
5. Maintenance is when the person reaches his/her goals through various action plans and now must consolidate the gains received in the actions and prevent a relapse.

Now, getting clean from a substance or making amends and such are pretty concrete examples of change. Therefore, it's rather easy to outline the process of how to get them done, and follow that process.

But where I find the above five points useful is in the changes we need to make where we get lost. For example, how to change really deeply embedded thinking processes, or behaviors, or reactions. Or how to change our relationships, from shallow, to fulfilling and intimate. That's where the money's at, in these 5 stages of change, for me.

So now, when I start to come aware of a not-so-concrete change that I need to undergo, one that is fuzzy in my mind, or not well-defined other than the end point I wish to achieve, I'm going to go to this model, and see where in these 5 stages of change I think I reside. It will give me a point of reference for progress.

And, perhaps most importantly, by defining a process using these 5 stages of change, I will better be able to have patience, and understand what is happening, when I feel stuck. I have a map, now, to see where I'm stuck, which stage. And I can see from the map where I'm at, and where I need to get.

And I can start thinking about how to get there, the next right step.

Just another tool, in my toolbox. Can't have too many of those, you know.

-The Traveler

On Nine Lives, Plus One - GONE, Part II

Part I of this story. (link)

Today Cat Woman showed up. She sat in front of me, after coming in late, again. I wondered if I would get a chance to talk to her, after the meeting.

She ended up across the room from me, during the circle and closing prayer. This meeting has all stand and form a circle, holding hands, then recites the Lord's Prayer for closing.

I returned to my seat to collect my things, and just as I did, she was there, in front of me, not occupied.

So I said to her, "Amy (name has been changed), I wanted to tell you I'm sorry, about your cat."

She stared at me with what I can only describe as shell shock for a few moments, looking me in the eyes.

And then, her arms came out, and went around me, and she pulled up to me, and laid her head on my shoulder and said, "My baby. He was my baby."

I spoke into her ear, "I know. Because I am an animal lover, too. I know how much it hurts."

As we pulled apart from the embrace, she was still shocky, and distant, as though it was surreal. She then said to me, "I think I see him, out of the corner of my eye, at my place. And then I realize he's gone."

She broke off, and wandered away a few steps. I thought she was done, and I was changing mental gears to prepare to leave.

And then she spun around, suddenly engaged, in this reality, as though she had just awakened.

She stopped, and turned squarely toward me, and said slowly, "Thank you. Thank you...for saying that."

And we both went on with our day. But I think our hearts were a little lighter.

Today's meeting was a step study. And as God would have it, we were on Step 12.

- The Traveler

On it Pays to Diversify

I was in a meeting last night and had a newcomer approach me afterward, saying he thought he was in the wrong meeting. Well, he was. Wrong addiction.

He was - as most newcomers - disoriented, and scared, and unsure of himself. He stumbled out the words about how to find the right place for him.

This meeting happened to be at a large rehab facility that has a lot of meetings.

Fortunately, I get around to a wide variety of meetings of different ilks, and attempt to connect with folks in each meeting. So I know a lot of folks.

I told the new guy that I'd fix him up, and walked him over to the correct meeting, telling him that I knew a bunch of homies in there and I'd introduce him around. Both meetings had just ended, so there were lots of people milling about, talking.

It felt good, to take him over to the other meeting, and look into the crowd, and hand pick some winners that are my homies, and drop him off in good hands.

After I made the hand-off, I made the rounds, hugging my homies and some women I know, too, in that meeting. I give a lot of hugs in meetings.

As I wandered out a short while later, I saw Mr. Newcomer in the parking lot. He walked over to a late-model full-sized Mercedes sedan and got in. I was talking to some others in the parking lot, walking, but I have good peripheral vision.

Mr. Newcomer sat and sat in his car, apparently soaking in his experiences.

I felt good, that I was able to get him human-to-human contact, to introduce him to some quality folks. Just that little bridge, that little touch of acknowledgement that he was noticed in a huge room full of strangers, could be the difference between his returning, or not.

At any rate, I was willing, to do what little I could.

I hope he found something to come back to.

-The Traveler

On Heresy: the 4th C

Once a week, I do volunteer work at a local charter school, in their gifted students program. Their gifted students program is cutting edge, because this particular school also recognizes, and integrates, what they call "twice exceptional" students into this program.

These students are students who have demonstrated exceptional test scores or IQs, but who have other issues, typically ADHD, Asperger's, or are otherwise "on the spectrum" of autism. They have sensitive, developing brains.

These kids can be a challenge, and joy, to learn to work with, because you have to throw away your paradigms and learn to sync-in with them, to get performance from them. And the performance you get may not at all be in the form that is conventionally expected. So it forces you to have an open mind, and be creative.

What does this have to do with 12-step heresy, and this as-yet-undefined fourth "C?"

Ahhhhhhh...

These students, the "twice exceptional" students, are prime candidates for our future peers. They work in bubbles of their own worlds, poorly interfacing with the conventional system. Poorly integrated with the normies of their peer age.

Some of them have intellects, and sensitivities, well beyond their years, but social skills well behind. They are pariahs, outsiders, living on the edge of genius. Their vivid minds take in more stimuli, yet their skills are poor in filtering them, and processing them, and working through the resulting issues, socially.

These are the kids that may never feel at home in their own skin. For whom isolation and pain may be constant companions. Who may be painfully aware of their deficits, despite their gifts.

These are potential future addicts, of a type.

DEPENDING ON HOW THEY ARE HANDLED AND DEVELOPED.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, may I present 12-step heresy, what I call the fourth "C":

Contribute.

Yes, it's been pounded into my head that we don't cause, control, or cure another's addiction. This is doctrine that has withstood the decades pretty well, and been very useful and comforting to countless -Anon programmers: Al-Anon, Narc-Anon, etc.

I believe wholeheartedly that the addictive brain has feedback pathways or neurochemical anomolies that are out of the bell curve of normal. And it may be that there is some threshold event that starts the train running, such as a toxic episode, or series of toxic episodes, that get the bad circuitry fired up and screaming for more.

It will be a long time before we know, for sure, but eventually we will. For now, we have brain scans that definitively show that addiction is a different set of brain functions than normal brain functions.

We can see it on the pictures, and see the damage it does afterwards, too.

We can associate some addictions to particular brain structures, using imaging.

There is so much more, to come. So little we really know, about how the brain works.

While seeing may be believing, it still is not etiological. We don't know what exactly is happening, in the imaging - only that something is different, from the "normal" brain scan.

Imaging does tell us that stress can induce brain changes, as well. And permanent function changes. Some postulate that chemicals induced under stress cause brain development to progress differently:

The paradox for the brain comes when there is repeated stress over many days or when glucocortical levels remain high because of adrenal overactivity or poor regulation of the stress response. The result is atrophy of pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus and shutdown of ongoing neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus. After very prolonged and severe stress, pyramidal neurons may actually die. Through these processes, the hippocampus atrophies. This can be seen in the human brain by magnetic resonance imaging.

While I don't wish to write a dissertation, and don't want to drone on until your eyes glaze over, here is my point:

When you listen to where people come from, in the rooms, it's not all that odd to hear of a traumatic past. Especially childhood. There are environments and events that forge abnormal, addictive brains, in part.

The external factors of environment and event may be the last straw to a genetic predisposition, but they can indeed contribute to making such a brain. Some brains are very sensitive, to start with, and easily affected more than others.

My point being, when you wander the earth, remember this. When you interact with others, remember this. If you spend time with children, remember this. You are part of their enviornment.

There are things that we CAN manage, that contribute to the forging of the addictive brain.

HERESY!!!

I stand by my opinion. And, in 20 years, so will the burgeoning reams of research.

Be careful how you treat your fellow human.

And judge them.

And know that your behavior can affect others.

Keep this in mind. You are free of responsibility concerning the three "Cs," but you are responsible for the fourth. Especially with children.

-The Traveler

On "Back to the Future" at the Company Party

So last night was the Company Party. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say I've always hated such things. Primarily, I hate the artificiality of having to socialize with a group of people I don't know personally, talking to folks with whom I may never hold another conversation, about meaningless things. I mean, what's the point. Not my cup of tea.

I did, however, go home with a nice box of Neuchatel chocolates, compliments of The Company.

Fortunately, this was a dinner party. A few hors d'oeuvres, cocktails via extremely slow servers, then a limited menu, but decently good food. In case you were wondering, I had the salmon, with prosciutto/asparagus risotto and haricots verts. I am pleased to report they did not overcook the salmon; it was perfect.

The beef-eaters at the table were a bit disgruntled because it had come on the undercooked side, but I just thought they were whining. I like mine nearly moving.

They had some boss sized coconut shrimp for one of the hors d'oeuvres, but the ones I make blow those away. The shrimp part was good, but the coconut part was... pretty much missing, flavor-wise. Today's graphic is the last batch of coconut shrimp I made. I have certain specialties. And quality standards. (wink)

We were seated around large circular tables with white linens. Among those at my table were two young techie couples. Now, I'm a people watcher, so, I watched, and listened.

Couple One consisted of a late 20's/early 30's Irish (non-practicing) Catholic guy - he would have made a pretty good Apple commercial (cool, hip, young, trendy techie). He was sporting an unruly shock of black hair hanging over his forehead like a horse's forelock, porcelain-white skin, and multiple areas of jewelry such as earrings, lip rings, nose rings, etc. I didn't get the opportunity to assess for tattoos, however.

His date was his fiancee. She was young, sporting cleavage, sweet. Fashionably red hair, in a bob.

They had met in college, a large university with tens of thousands of students. Did the bar scene there and now live in a trendy area here where he proclaimed, "There's nothing to do but the bar scene in __________." Yeah, right.

Couple Two was about the same age, married. She is due to birth a child in a week, and works in payroll. He is another techie. A little bit more standard in flavor, they were, but still young and hip and... young.

The two techie boys spent the evening bemoaning the slowness of the servers, the dearth of quality choices of drinks, and their inability to suck down car bombs here because it was too classy a joint. In between, they made plans for where to go drinking, afterward.

Three of the four of them (the pregnant wife was the exception) discussed how their time was consumed with WOW. Irish Boy had bought his fiancee her own laptop for Christmas, to facilitate her playing, even more. This is their together time, apparently. Married Man brushed off his wife's sarcastic remarks about having no life apart from WOW. Hmmmmmm. I smell the compulsive brain at work, here.

Irish Boy's eyes glittered as he ordered drink after drink, trying the different whiskeys and vodkas. He would be assessing one, thinking out loud what he wished they offered, and what he was gonna order later, when they went to the tavern down the road a stretch. You could already see his thirst, for booze. While he was drinking one, he was already thinking of the next one, fidgety and impatient. When we all got up to leave for the night, his fiancee had half a glass of wine left in her glass, which he couldn't let go to waste, so he grabbed it and sucked it down quickly before rising from the table...

And as I sat there, myself the old fuddy-duddy, watching them, drinking through my three diet Cokes, all I could see were the future faces in the rooms of AA and Al-Anon before me, in a decade or two. The grey haired men, beating themselves for years lost and families disrupted. The haggard women, beat down from years of insanity and abuse. It was a surreal experience, to see the future, to see where the forces starting now would likely lead them.

At one point they teased me, asking why I wasn't drinking. I merely stated I had seen the results, the end of that pathway, with end-stage drinking. I left it at that, and their eyes glazed over even at that short remark, as if I had made an altar call to the heathen. I let it roll off me, their paths don't belong to me. I don't own them.

I was sad for the women, what is coming for them. They were both young and fresh now, cheery with the hope of the future. Rose-colored glasses that life will be one big adventure. Oh, yes it will, but not like you think, gals.

And as I left the party, I realized I had seen both the past, and the future, tonight. Back to the Future, it was.

The question is, will they reach the clock in time, in their respective stories?

I don't know.

-The Traveler