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.