Creating More Support

Wednesday, February 11, 2015


I have elected to participate in an outpatient program that I hope will provide me some extensive tools to further my healing process.  I expect to begin next Monday, February 16th.  The program meets for a few hours four days a week for eight weeks.  I believe it could make a tremendous difference in the quality of my life and the pace of my journey in the direction of my biggest life goals.

I am excited about this new opportunity.  But I also feel quite weary.  I feel a bit psychologically 'beaten up' still.  I suppose this is not at all unusual considering how long I have been consciously focusing on my own healing process.  I have been doing therapy for approximately twenty months now.  By engaging in this outpatient program I hope to accelerate the process of my own healing.  I want my life back.

My grief and sadness still weigh heavily on me.  Lately I am aware of the disappointment I felt during my adolescence.  I did not feel very much witnessed by my father as I was becoming a man.  I wanted someone to support me in the development of my sexuality.

I nonetheless find myself able to enjoy the small and inexpensive pleasures of daily life that can sometimes be difficult to savor.  I still marvel at how well my eyesight brings the world beyond my skin within me.  Clear vision is a wonderful gift to enjoy.  It is no small gift.

I am hoping to gain insight into how to be a better man in the coming weeks.

My Grief Is Improving. My Feet Seem To Be A Different Story

Tuesday, February 10, 2015


I had a session with my handsome chiropractor this morning.  My visits to Parkside Alternative Medicine Clinic always leave me feeling better.  This is true even when I growl in pain as a result of the treatment I am receiving.  That happened this morning.

The light is returning to the outside world.  One day in the not too distant future the snow and ice will melt and spring will arrive.  Despite the apparent recent regression in the quality of my health I believe I might actually be holding my own.  I'll be visiting with my podiatrist tomorrow to check on the status of my feet.  I hope he will have encouraging news for me.

I have had issues with my feet for three months now.  It is not clear to me if my feet are improving or not.  It seemed as if there was a trend of improvement until this past Sunday.  The demands of that day seemed to cause my feet a renewed bout of irritation.

I have been an active person throughout my life.  I have relied on my feet to carry me through the beautiful scenery of places as diverse as Norway and Hawaii.  Perhaps I was demanding too much of them recently.  Perhaps I have even taken them for granted.  What I do clearly know now is that I want to be able to rely on my body to be healthy for many, many more years to come.

My grief and sadness is still with me.  But I feel the grief is a bit lighter lately.  It appears I am continuing to move forward in my healing journey.

Capitalism, Equal Opportunity...and Trauma

Monday, February 9, 2015


I read an interesting piece in the New York Times yesterday regarding the state of the American economy.  Plenty of real and virtual ink has been spilled in the last several years as the American economy has struggled to emerge from what is often called 'The Great Recession'.  Some would say we actually endured an economic depression.  I wouldn't necessarily disagree with such an assessment.

Discontent with the American economy has always existed.  But the amount of discontent appears to be growing.  The above referenced article cites a Gallup poll from January, 2015 in which 67 percent of Americans are noted to be "dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed in the United States."  I do not know what the demographic of those polled was but I have to say I am impressed by the proportion who cited dissatisfaction.  Basically two of every three Americans are unhappy with the income and wealth distribution in this country!  That is a significant majority.

The New York Times piece introduced a term I had never previously heard.  That term is "inclusive capitalism".  Upon reading the article my first visceral feeling was one of dubiousness.  Is inclusive capitalism an oxymoron?  It seems it very well could be.

An article in The Guardian defines inclusive capitalism as "the idea that those with the power and the means have a responsibility to help make society stronger and more inclusive for those who don't".  This type of capitalism might operate through the implementation of principles including improved access to education, prioritizing "livability" in the design of towns and cities and a greater emphasis on thoughtful long term investment (as opposed to an obsessive fixation on maximizing short term returns for the pleasure of shareholders).  I personally believe the implementation of such principles could make for a kinder, gentler form of capitalism.  But would it make capitalism inclusive?  That depends on how you define inclusivity.

In my own thinking inclusivity and justice are inextricably intertwined.  A just society values inclusivity and an unjust one will sneer at it.  To be a society defined by this idea of inclusive capitalism we would need to do a better job of offering equal opportunity to all.  When your socioeconomic status automatically excludes you from access to certain opportunities enjoyed by others you have a recipe for eventual economic and social dysfunction.

I don't really foresee the United States becoming a more just society until we begin to more seriously address a number of issues.  And one of those issues is how wealth can and is used to distort access to economic and social opportunities.  I personally feel alienated due in part to the fact that so many Americans are falling behind while a very small few possess a greater and greater percentage of the total wealth of this nation.  But even this reality would not necessarily concern me if it weren't for the fact that this uneven distribution of wealth is being subsequently used to distort access to the political and other processes by which we can steer the course of our own individual destinies.  All you need to do to appreciate how dysfunctional the United States has become is to research the topic of campaign finance reform.  As long as money is equated with speech we will continue to have serious problems that defy poorly conceived policy responses.


So what does inclusive capitalism have to do with trauma?  I will speak from my own experience.  I am still cleaning up the mess done to my own psyche and sense of self due to the dysfunctional behavior of my family of origin as well as certain institutions that failed to fulfill their declared missions in my early life.  These early life experiences I could not really escape were unjust and caused me demonstrable harm.  I became cynical, angry, mistrusting and fearful.  I am finally learning how to let go of the anger and resentment I once held.  Sadness is now the affect I am most aware of carrying.

Trauma can and does decisively impact how we think of ourselves and what we think is possible in our own lives.  When a life history marked by past trauma is further burdened with society scale factors (in other words issues beyond the control of any one person) such as unemployment, corruption and deeply systemic apathy you have a perfect recipe for people to get lost and simply give up on themselves and the world around them.

I know I have wanted to give up on my own life more times than I can count.  I all too often feel weary of the challenge of trusting both individual people as well as entire institutions.  For example, I fail to be easily moved to trust our current Congress when I hear so many stories about legislative inertia in the face of truly pressing issues.  As I wrote in a separate blog piece found here Congress has lately been as popular as pornography and the BP oil spill!

If people such as myself are going to continue to walk the paths of our own individual healing we need resources and support to make these journeys.  We need friends, families, communities, states and a nation that care enough about us and our challenges such that they will make us a priority.

I am grateful to have a good network of social support here where I now live.  Minnesota is a state filled with many progressive and caring people.  I feel immensely grateful to benefit from the health insurance I currently enjoy.

As cliched as it might sound we are all truly in this together.

Male Intimacy

Sunday, February 8, 2015


I am currently pondering the potential value of participating in a program that would provide me some additional resources, skills and support to further enhance my journey of healing.  I have a follow up appointment scheduled for this coming Wednesday in which I hope to complete the intake process and make a decision.  I feel some fear about jumping into this program.  I also feel some fear about not jumping into this program.  I believe the program could prove worthwhile.

Lately it seems as if I spontaneously do some sort of cost-benefit analysis in my mind whenever I contemplate making a significant decision.  The program in question would require an eight week commitment from me.  That doesn't strike me as an immense commitment to make.  I believe I am finding commitments of all sorts easier to undertake because I no longer engage in black and white thinking as much as I once did.

One of my primary life goals I want to consciously focus upon is enhancing my ability to cultivate meaningful, joyful, long-term friendships and other relationships.  And I specifically want to improve the quality of the relationships I have with other men.  This is partly due to the fact that I am a gay man.  I also want to improve my relationships because I simply want to become a healthier human being.

Put quite concisely my current intentional therapeutic journey began due to issues I have with my biological father.  As I have recounted elsewhere in this blog I became quite ill in 2013 shortly after my return from a trip to Germany I made in May, 2013.  At first it was very difficult to understand what I was experiencing.  I was experiencing a variety of symptoms.  I ultimately needed a number of weeks for my body to heal from what was most likely a respiratory infection.  Other symptoms led me to reenter psychotherapy.  And now here I am some twenty months later.  I am thankful that I have no terminal illness.  I still have a chance at a brighter future.

I needed my father to be present to me in my time of grief back in 2013.  At the time I felt sick with grief due to the fact that I was mourning the reality that my birthmother now has a degree of dementia.  My visit to my mother triggered a reawakening of the old grief I had never properly processed from the time I lost her as a very small boy.  I needed my father to bear witness to my pain and comfort me.  But he could not and did not.  And when he failed to be present to me in a time of deep personal pain and sadness I felt disappointed, frustrated and very angry.  I felt that he had failed me yet again.

Looking back on the life I have lived so far it is not at all surprising that I have issues with men.  My paternal family of origin consists of what I believe to be some deeply wounded men.  I see this as being true of my father.  And I also believe this is true of my father's younger brother.  I believe they both would present with criteria associated with PTSD if they were to submit to an appropriately designed mental health screening and actually be honest about how they feel.  But I doubt they would ever do that.  They seem to believe that hiding, burying and avoiding pain is the best way to deal with pain.  My decision to live what some might call 'a life of radical honesty' runs deeply counter to the conditioning I received as a child.

I find it so very sad that distorted conceptions of manhood run amok in American society.  The reasons for this are likely quite numerous and not necessarily easily disentangled and made sense of in one sitting, one day or one blog posting.  Even professional social workers, sociologists, psychologists, historians and cultural critics can regularly find themselves perplexed by aspects of the world they dedicate their lives to exploring.  I know I certainly have my own current of confusion within my psyche.  I sometimes look around the world outside my skin and bones and ask myself some very probing questions.  Some of my questions include:

• Where do some men get these ideas of manhood that they use to define who they are?
• Why is being a man so often associated with acquisitive behavior, domination, the subjugation of minorities, entitlement and violence?
• Why do men think that showing vulnerability and fear is a sign of weakness?
• Why are some men absolutely terrified to cry?
• Why won't men treat themselves and women better?
• Why won't men take a more active role in the protection and stewardship of the planet for the sake of future generations?
• Why do men find fighting, violence and the complete annihilation of other people to be so sexy?

I do not entertain the unrealistic hope that I am going to find the answers to these and other questions on one February Sunday.  And yet I nonetheless am willing to keep trying to be a better man for my own sake and for the sake of those who are a part of my world.

The consequences of unaddressed men's issues can be quite ghastly.  For example, in my own personal experience, I have decided I never again want to see my father unless we somehow resolve the longstanding issues of my earlier life history such that we both are satisfied with the outcome of an effort to resolve them.  Do I believe this is possible?  Yes.  Do I believe it will happen?  I don't believe it is likely.  I believe it's quite likely that my father will remain resolute in his stubbornness until the day he dies.  I cannot change him any more easily than he can change me.

I feel immense sorrow that I am estranged from my father.  It doesn't have to be this way.  But I believe in the possibility of something better.  I am stubborn that way.  I will not accept deceit, avoidance and scapegoating as acceptable adult behavior.  I feel very disappointed that my father has become the man he is.  But I can choose to be a different and better man.

I want to be a better man.  I just need to find other men who are committed to the very same journey of self empowerment.  I know they exist.  I have met them before.  And I believe I can find them again.

Acknowledging My Truncated Adolescence

Saturday, February 7, 2015


The days are growing longer now.  We are in the depths of winter's silence but at least the world is growing a bit brighter each day.  I myself feel quite aware of the dark sadness I carried around for so long.  Though it might not seem like it I do feel the nature of my grief and sadness is changing and also improving.

The particular traumatic moments of my early life history no longer haunt me in the way they once did. I can no longer connect my grief and sadness to particular events as I once could easily do.  My grief has morphed into something a little less ponderous.  I now am aware of how sad I feel about how what I experienced distorted how I thought about myself.  I specifically am aware of the less than ideal adolescence I had.

Lately I have been involuntarily recalling the period of time in my adolescence in which I made my bedroom into something more like a cave.  One of the neighbors in our neighborhood had a bright lamp behind their house that illuminated the area where their swimming pool was.  It was so bright that it also would illuminate the ceiling of my bedroom!  I didn't much care for this.  So I coped with this excessive light by covering the primary window of my bedroom with blankets and other items to blot out the light.  Unfortunately my coping strategy had some unintended consequences.  Between this issue and my stepmother's proclivity for ensuring my younger brother's bedroom was the right temperature I often found my own bedroom to be uncomfortable.

I recall the discomfort I felt as an adolescent and feel sad and aggrieved that I was often so uncomfortable.  It didn't have to be that way.  I didn't protest my discomfort with my father and stepmother more than I did because I didn't want to waste my energy.  Their behavior was often inappropriate.  I rarely felt heard.  I rarely felt as if my most basic needs were respected.  It was a horrible way to live.  And now I am finally mourning how I felt all those years ago.  At least I am finally working through my grief and pain.

It has been nearly twenty months since I decided to reenter psychotherapy.  I never would have imagined it would make such a difference.  EMDR therapy in particular changed my life in a way I could not have foreseen.  I find myself still adjusting to the changes that have come about due to the treatment I have undergone.

When will my grief end?  I honestly do not know.  But I do feel it is improving over time.  I sense that this coming spring will mark a decisive leap forward for me.  At least I hope it will.  It is one of my many hopes.

Walking Away From The Martyr Archetype

Thursday, February 5, 2015

It's another sunny and cold winter day here in Minnesota.  I continue to feel quite unmotivated to seek out a new paying job.  I have been looking for four years.  Despite my feelings of disenchantment (with my job search), sadness and confusion I am going to do my very best to find the good in my day and not descend into the abyss of complaining. Complaining won't do anything to change my life anyhow.

Some aspects of what I am doing in my life now are quite clear.  I am walking away from the martyr archetype.  My paternal family of origin includes a number of people who, in my opinion, bought deeply into the supposed glory of the martyr archetype.  This is not surprising considering how my father and his siblings were raised Catholic.  Though my own upbringing did not include what I would call rigorous instruction in Catholic teachings I nonetheless soaked up plenty of the ideology of the martyr archetype.  It has taken me some time to unlearn the shadow side of this way of living in the world.

Quite simply I spent too much of my life putting the needs of others ahead of my own needs. I spent four years of my life in my twenties serving and, yes, even ministering to others. Caring for others came quite naturally to me.  I first learned about how to care for others when I was a kid. Just being required to be present to the drama and chaos of my father's first two (dysfunctional) marriages gave me excellent firsthand experience in how to live like a hostage.

When followed over a long period of time a way of life in which you always put others ahead of yourself seems to be a perfect recipe for eventual burnout.  Some might call such burnout compassion fatigue.  Others might append the term trauma to describe a person's experience.  Whether you describe what I previously presented with as Stockholm Syndrome, compassion fatigue, PTSD or something else does not, in one important sense, really matter. I felt awful and I was not recognizing the very unsuitable life I had created as being a significant cause of my distress.

I don't feel anything near the degree of burnout I did in 2013.  But I still feel quite weary on occasion.  This is not at all surprising to me now considering how long I was living a life in which I was not taking very good care of myself.  Some of the grief and sadness I have been working through is very much a product of the sobering and gradually deepening realization I have been coming to that I really did not take good care of myself for a very long time. Considering the family I came from this is not at all surprising.  I didn't have good examples of how to live a healthy, productive and rewarding life.

My grief and sadness ebbs and flows like the tide along a coastline.  I feel an ultimate end to the grieving process will arrive one day.  I feel it drawing closer.  I feel the necessity of moving on and opening myself to the grand possibilities that can still come to be in my own life.

The good news is that I survived.  The good news is that I am learning more and more how to honor my own needs.  The good news is that each and every day I am drawing closer to discovering and authentically expressing my true self.

Today I finally did something important.  I removed my original commentary which appears whenever I post a link to my blog online.  This is what previously would appear:

When making a comment please keep all comments respectful.  I ask that you offer only constructive criticism.  However, any comments containing inappropriate, abusive or obviously false information will be removed and the account of the person so posting blocked from future access.

Any person with any significant awareness and sensitivity could easily surmise something was really off about my life at the time I wrote that.  I was in a very defensive, frightened, furious, sad state of being.  I still feel sad now.  But I am thankful to see that my defensiveness, fear and angst have substantially lessened.  I am probably the healthiest person I have ever been.

And this is enough writing for today.

Don't Ever Give Up

Wednesday, February 4, 2015


I experienced a serious setback to my motivation to keep trying to improve my life last month. Lately it feels like a Herculean task to do anything above the basic daily activities of sleeping, eating, bathing and breathing.  I just want to give up on my efforts to move forward in my life.

As with many days recently I am choosing not to give up.  I will keep the promise I made to myself to show up for the appointments I have today.  I feel little enthusiasm to do so.  But sometimes life feels like a drudgery and we still need to show up for life anyway.

......

I had a productive session with my therapist this evening.  I spoke about my current priorities and needs.  I recently wrote them down.  I need:

• More healthy men in my life…for friendship as well as deeper intimacy
• An opportunity to apply my skills in a context I will find meaningful
• A real financial future
• Opportunities to have fun
• Health insurance that will provide me some measure of peace of mind

How I will fulfill these and other needs remains to be seen.

As for today I am pleased with the progress I have made thus far.

What I Need Now

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

As I continue my healing journey I have noticed that my prominent needs are changing.  This is not surprising.  As we change our needs will naturally change.  I feel encouraged by the fact that I feel less in need of intensive support compared to how I once felt.  In other words, my life is improving.

This evening, as I rode the bus home, I made a list of my needs I am most aware of now.  They are listed below in no particular order of primacy.  I need:

An opportunity to apply my skills in a context I will find meaningful

I have been working on this goal for several years.  My enthusiasm for continuing to strive to achieve this goal waxes and wanes.  Right now my enthusiasm for continuing to show up and try is quite low.  I have a network of supportive people.  I also continue to be as creative as I can be in my search process.  But I feel deeply frustrated.  I feel as if my life is passing me by.  If something doesn’t change for me in the near future I feel I might be involuntarily consigned to a future of inescapable poverty.

More healthy men in my life…for friendship as well as deeper intimacy

I have dreamed of having this be true of my life.  I do have some male friends who are healthy.  And I am grateful for them.  But I would like to have more men in my life who are my age peers.  I have experienced a dearth of this for so long that I sometimes feel the lack of such healthy male peers is going to ultimately leave me feeling a bit psychologically warped.

What complicates this aspect of my life even more is the fact that I do not feel I am the chronological age I am.  And I also do not want to act my age anyhow.  I want to recapture the adolescence I never fully lived or appreciated.  Some people might categorize such a yearning as clear evidence of a mid-life crisis.  Perhaps it could be correctly described with such a term.  In one sense it’s purely a matter of semantics.  Regardless of whatever label I append to what I am experiencing the journey itself is very real.  I feel my yearning in a very visceral way.

A real financial future

When I ventured into graduate school (again) in 2009 it was my sincere hope that my willingness to enhance my existing education would eventually garner me a handsome return on my investment.  I essentially completed my most recent degree four years ago.  It has been a period of immense disappointment.

I don’t know that I will ever have a true financial future.  I would like to believe I will.  But I do not want to nurture unhealthy illusions.  I still have big dreams for myself but I don’t know if they are even realistic any more.  This is another good reason for me to be in therapy.  I need someone to offer me a consistent reality check.

Opportunities to have fun

My desire to relive my virtually unlived adolescence often manifests as a desire to have a lot more fun in my life.  I find myself attempting to rediscover that part of myself that knows how to have fun.  My childhood was altogether too serious; I lived in a state of heightened anxiety so much of the time.

If I decide to pursue a doctorate at the University of Hawaii one of my biggest fears is the very real possibility that my need for lightness, joy and fun could be so immense that it could undermine my willingness to dedicate myself to the demands of such an endeavor.

Health insurance that will provide me some measure of peace of mind

I want to minimize the possibility that I ever go through something like what I have in the last twenty months.  As a means of providing myself some significant protection I am intent on researching any means by which I might be able to secure better health insurance in the future by virtue of the fact that I was a victim of the unfortunate negligent, careless and even corrupt behavior of others.  In my most resentful moments a common thought that has gone through my mind has been this one: ‘Why should I pay the costs for other people’s mistakes?’  In a sense I am railing against the injustice of the world.  I want a real chance to grow, thrive and be happy.  I want to transcend the harm caused to me by people who didn’t treat me with the consistent care and concern I needed.

Whether I will realize this particular goal or the other ones I have enumerated remains to be seen.  By I am determined to keep trying.  I do not want to give up on my life.  I have worked too hard for too long to give up on myself.  But I am really tired of trying.  Those closest to me know the truth of this.

Like last year at this time I find myself looking forward to the beauty of the turning of the seasons from winter to spring.  I am grateful to feel much less weary of winter than I did last year.  This winter has been much milder compared to last year.  And I am a much healthier person than I was a year ago.

I have only just recently begun Year Two of being sub-clinical for PTSD.  What a journey it has already been!

To Be Able To Walk Without Pain

Tuesday, February 3, 2015


About eleven weeks ago something started happening which really blindsided me.  My feet started hurting.  The pain came on so suddenly that I felt very perplexed by what was going on.

In the last eleven weeks I have tried to take good care of my feet.  I have tried to take good care of my physical and mental health in general.  I am not sure how much progress I am making.  In other words, I feel confused.

I went to see my podiatrist shortly after my feet became inflamed with pain.  He put me on a medication to treat the inflammation.  Shortly after the pain started I found myself working two different jobs.  I was working for the University of Minnesota in a role that lasted a mere month.  I also worked as a seasonal employee at Macys.  My position at Macys required me to stand for protracted periods of time that could total up to eight hours in a single day.  Sometimes I would walk about the floor I worked on or go to other floors in search of merchandise or for some other reason.  My foot inflammation started before I began working for Macys.  I tried to care for my feet as best as I could.  I think it was the eight days in a row I worked around the time of Christmas that really aggravated the condition of my feet.

I recently was switched back onto the medication my podiatrist originally put me on.  My primary care doctor briefly tried to put me on a different medication.  That one did not work out so well.  I feel as if I am back at square one now.

I am struggling to maintain a positive attitude right now because my life appears to be no more stable and secure than it was two years ago.  I use the word 'appear' because appearances can sometimes be deceiving.  What has changed is that I am no longer carrying around an incredible amount of psychic pain.  I am clearing the old pain out of my psyche.  It has been quite a process.

It is a rather humbling experience to be me lately.  My podiatrist recently gave me new guidelines to follow to help my feet heal.  I am to bear weight on my feet for no more than five to ten minutes per hour of the day.  This guideline significantly restricts my ability to do basic activities such as shopping, food preparation and simply moving about the world.  It could be a full month before the inflammation in my feet sufficiently subsides such that I can live the kind of life I was living before last November.

As has often been the case it seems like my life is a story of two steps forward and one step back.

I feel as if I am being invited to continue to be patient.

Staying Focused

Monday, February 2, 2015


I am doing my best to remain focused.  It isn't easy right now.  I just want to give up.  I am so tired of trying.

The good and bad news is that I have partially moved out of my apartment.  Four months ago I moved into my own apartment.  I did so with an immense feeling of hopefulness that my move was yet another indicator of my progress forward.  I was sorely disappointed.  Due to the dysfunctional and illegal conduct of other tenants I eventually came to conclude it was in my best interests to move out.  I am now in the process of dealing with the full consequences of my decision.

It all too often happens that I feel a bit fearful of making major decisions.  I feel this way in part due to the fact that I did not develop very good decision making skills when I was growing up.  My father certainly did not teach me how to make good decisions.  He was busy working and avoiding the pain in his own life.  He wasn't a good model of manhood for me.  I have the power to choose how I will live my own life.  But I feel a bit bereft at the moment.  I need more resources to support my own healing process.

I spent time this past weekend working on a number of important 'issue areas' in my own life.  I read a document focused on something called a 'cultural landscape approach'.  I sent out emails to potential professional contacts as I continue to explore the possibility of pursuing a doctorate.  I went to the YMCA and got in some exercise time.  I took my medication in a timely way and got enough sleep.  It was supposedly a productive weekend.  But I am nonetheless struggling with dark thoughts.  One of the most prominent of my dark thoughts is 'It's too late for me'.  Sometimes I feel the best years of my life are behind me.  Throughout the last four years I have tried to find the next step forward in my professional life.  These last four years have often felt excruciating.

I don't want to give up on my own life.  I have fought too hard, invested too much in myself and given too generously of my time to give up now.  But the weariness and sadness are upon me.  If I cannot make any significant strides forward in the short term then I at least want to protect what progress I have made.

I think the sadness fast idea I wrote of recently is a good notion to keep playing with.  I have carried a lot of sadness in my own life.  I want to start healing myself of my sadness.  I have been working on it for a while now.

Some Forms Of Distorted Thinking

Sunday, February 1, 2015


Throughout the duration of my intentional healing journey I have been fortunate to encounter other people committed to their own personal health and wellness.  I have also done my own personal research.  I enjoy being a researcher.

Below appear some forms of distorted thinking I recognize I have engaged in.  I still struggle with some of these ways of thinking.  Below each type of thinking appears my own brief commentary of my own experience.

Polarized Thinking. Things are black or white, good or bad.  You have to be perfect or you're a failure. There is no middle ground.

I often would refer to this as black and white thinking.  This form of thinking is one that I once struggled with quite a bit.  I think it's true that people prone to perfectionism may engage in such thinking.  Some particular expressions that could reflect a polarized way of thinking might include these:

"If something isn't perfect then it isn't worth anything."
 "If I don't get all A's I might as well not show up to school."
"My hair looks dreadful.  I won't leave the house today because I feel too self-conscious."
"If I don't overcome the obstacles and challenges of my earlier life by a certain age then I should not have bothered to begin with."

I was fortunate to recognize my own pattern of black and white thinking early in my return to the process of conscious healing.  I still have my moments when I feel myself getting caught up in it again. But unlike earlier in my life I find I am able to stop myself from continuing to think (and then subsequently behave) in such a self-defeating way.


Catastrophizing.  You expect disaster.  You notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's".  What if tragedy strikes?  What if it happens to you?

I don't feel that I exactly expect disaster.  But I do sometimes feel doomed to be consistently disappointed with the behavior of others.  I have experienced enough hardship in my life that misfortune is not something that really blindsides me when I experience it.

It is my impression that people who experience trauma may manifest behaviors associated with catastrophizing if they feel hypervigilant.  A person caught in a hypervigilant state of being may be prone to looking over his shoulder or isolating in ways that reduce the risk of exposure to unpleasant stimulation.  Such avoidance may come from an immense fear of being harmed again.  In some way engaging in catastrophic thinking might feel protective to the person doing it.  By expecting the worst you can somehow perhaps better prepare yourself for it and thereby increase your chance of survival.


Fallacy of Fairness.  You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair but other people won't agree with you.

This is a big one to watch out for.  Given my experience of institutional corruption and severe family dysfunction I often felt very aggrieved and victimized.  I felt resentment because I was treated very badly.  And yet despite all my suffering it would be quite a leap to assert that I and I alone know what is generally fair.

A fair and just world is something we can co-create with intention and dedication.  People ultimately have very different ideas about what fairness is.  The same would hold true for justice.


Shoulds.  You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act.  People who break the rules anger you and you feel guilty if you violate the rules.

I have been struggling with this one lately.  My worst should statement is "I should not need this much help."  Unfortunately there can be times in our own lives when we need a lot of help.  There is nothing necessarily wrong with this.

Following the rules is another important sore point for me.  I see clearly that I was carrying a lot of resentment due to the fact that I have followed the rules of society while others have broken them with relative impunity.  I would rather not live in such an unjust world.  But then again we all have things we dream of experiencing that are quite unlike what our lives our actually like on a day to day basis.


Heaven's Reward Fallacy.  You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score.  You feel bitter when the reward doesn't come.

This form of distorted thinking has been a problem for me in the years since I most recently completed graduate school.  I thought my life would be quite different by now.  I spent a lot of time going to school and preparing myself for a glorious career that has yet to materialize.  I am not sure if it ever will. The disappointments of the last few years have been truly sobering.

......

I am a much healthier man than I was nineteen months ago.  This much is clear.  I have had sufficient input from a number of friends to know that my progress is genuine.  But I still feel sad.  I feel sad for the little boy and teenager I once was who developed such a distorted sense of self.  I feel sad due to the very lengthy period of time I spent perceiving the world in a distorted way.  I want to choose to not be that wounded person any more.  I wish to be a new man.

A Sadness Fast

Saturday, January 31, 2015


Have you ever done something called a sadness fast?  I recently came up with the concept a few days ago.  I have never heard someone use such a phrase.  I have been thinking of tangible ways I can support my ongoing healing process.  Doing a sadness fast seems to be one good idea.

I would define a sadness fast as living in a way that avoids undue and excessive exposure to stimuli (violent television programming, news of man's inhumanity to his fellow man, dilapidated parts of your community) that will provoke feelings of sadness and despair.  I don't believe I have ever really thought so consciously about what prompts me to feel sad as I am doing right now.

I have been reflecting on my own sadness quite a bit lately.  I found myself sometimes feeling almost super-aware of my sadness in the last few weeks.  I attribute this heightened awareness to the intensive work I undertook in the outpatient program I just finished.

Underneath all the anger I once carried around was a heaping quantity of sadness.  I have difficulty recalling a time when I did not feel some significant burden of sadness when I was a kid.  I had my happy moments.  But long, stable stretches of happiness in which I did not concurrently feel some unpleasant level of anxiety are not something I can easily recall from my early life history.  Anxiety has been a companion I had for much of my life.  Changing this reality has been no small task.  Indeed, it seems to be the task of my healing journey.  And I feel sad that I had a heightened level of anxiety for so long.  My anxiety was preventable.

Last night I began making a pros and cons list for a major choice I am contemplating.  I found the process quite demanding.  Shortly before I finished working on my list I felt a growing awareness of how mentally drained I was feeling.  I believe there is a certain truth in the idea that you cannot always think your way to an answer.

I feel fortunate that my motivation to keep trying and showing up for my life each and every day is much greater than it was earlier this month.  I believe my progress can continue.  I simply need to keep being mindful of my needs.

The Issue of Compassion Fatigue

Friday, January 30, 2015


"Caring too much can hurt" - Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project homepage

While recently attending an outpatient treatment program at Abbott Northwestern Hospital I decided to look up the issue of compassion fatigue.  I think it's very true that caring too much can indeed hurt.  When we get enmeshed in the pain of other people's lives we can end up emerging from the enmeshment feeling drained and demoralized.

I discovered the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project while briefly delving into this topic. According to the project's website compassion fatigue symptoms can be seen as "normal displays of chronic stress resulting from the care giving work we choose to do."  Perhaps even more interesting is the contention of traumatologist Eric Gentry that "people who are attracted to care giving often enter the field already compassion fatigued."  Some people may take an interest in "other-directed care giving" because "these are people who were taught at an early age to care for the needs of others before caring for their own needs."  I can certainly see myself in this population of people.  I experienced such early conditioning.  I grew up in a family of people who are good at being martyrs.  They take care of other people at the expense of their own needs.

Unlearning an obsessive adherence to the martyr archetype can require some real discipline. A brief summary of potential indicators of a martyr can be found here.  Of the indicators listed I can most easily see within myself the first one, namely "invoking the shadow in order to control".  I once strongly believed that my commitment to graduate school would bring me rewards worthy of the time and energy I put into the endeavor.  When this didn't happen within the timeline I had originally imagined was reasonable to expect it to happen within resentment grew within me.

I see clearly that my own 'case' of compassion fatigue began early in my development.  It began in the summer of 1982 when I was returned to the custody of my father after he was nearly murdered by his own spouse.  I lost my trust in my father after this horrific conclusion to his second marriage.  And then I was expected to pretend that my capacity to trust was not deeply undermined by my father's immense mistake and subsequent deceit.  My wounding became a source of my feelings of alienation and betrayal.  In essence I was expected to lie about how I felt about being abused.  I was expected to tolerate abuse and deceit as somehow not being immensely unhealthy.  I was asked to pretend.  I was asked to pretend I was not deeply hurt.  And I felt immense resentment due to the dysfunction I was expected to tolerate.

I became very good at ignoring how I truly felt.  My adolescence and early adulthood were marked by an unconscious pattern of frequently putting the needs of others ahead of my own needs.  It is no wonder I eventually found myself at the end of a long road whose terminus was alienation, sadness and a feeling of immense emptiness which outwardly also manifested as a loss of motivation to keep participating in the world.

I want to participate in the world in some way.  But I need to participate on terms that are healthy and in alignment with my current and future needs.  I will no longer participate in ways that only enhance my previously strong feelings of alienation, sadness and frustration.

It's clear I need to continue to redesign my life.

I began thoroughly redesigning my life some nineteen months ago. I made a number of significant changes at that time.  I have remained dedicated to continuing new healthy behaviors.  I intend to continue to pay close attention to how I am feeling each and every day.  By attending to my needs I feel confident that I will become healthier over time.

This blog has served me well as a creative and therapeutic outlet.  I intend to continue writing.  What form my blog will assume as time passes is not something I can clearly see at the moment.  But somehow my journey of writing is enabling me to knit my deep wounds together.

Today I will be reminding myself of what I am grateful for.


What are you grateful for?

Showing Up For Yourself Over and Over and Over Again

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Eighteen months of individual psychotherapy as well as two forays into a partial hospitalization program at a local hospital have helped me to reach a number of conclusions about myself and my life.

The horror of my early life history

I experienced genuine pain due to the ignorance and negligence of other human beings.  My trauma was compounded by institutional corruption.  The group therapist I had in the program I just completed today acknowledged that I was ‘treated very, very badly.’

A lot of people have suffered immensely in their lives

And yet my life journey has exposed me to the reality that many, many people have endured plenty of horror of their own.  In other words, I am not alone in my experience.  Stated another way, I am not unique.  Stated still another way, there are plenty of people who can have empathy for my experience.

Hardship is not always a function of having been or being a ‘bad’ person

You can do everything ‘right’ and ‘proper’ in your life and still suffer from hardship.  I realized in my most recent plunge into intensive treatment that one persistent form of my own distorted thinking is known as something called heaven’s reward fallacy.  In this form of distorted thinking you imagine that your life should be better than it is due to all the sacrifices and efforts you have made.  Put more succinctly you believe being good means you should experience good.  I have learned this isn’t always the case.  You can do everything that is required and expected of you and people will still find reason to complain and whine.

Perception does not always equal reality (even when we think it does)

Just because you feel something to be true doesn’t mean it is actually really happening outside your own skin.  For a very long time I have struggled with feeling that I am fighting this immense battle and that I am very much alone in my battle.  But this feeling isn’t based in any objective truth.  The truth of the matter is that I have a large number of people who care about me and are supportive of me and my dreams.  That is the truth.

Sometimes I feel that all I can do is keep showing up for myself again and again and again and again.  And sometimes I feel like I am doomed to keep living a life in which I show up and nobody responds to my showing up in the world in the way I need or want them to.  I attribute this feeling to the number of resumes I have sent out, the number of phone calls I have made and the general amount of energy I have spent in seeking out a meaningful job.  But just because not a single person validates my skill, my kindness, my compassion, my tenacity and so on does not mean I am not skilled, kind, compassionate and tenacious.  When people experience really poor parenting it can take a while to stop looking for validation outside of yourself.  I know that has been true for me.

Asking for help is not equivalent to being weak

I see this as a fallacy that men in particular are especially prone to.  I sense my father has this distorted manner of thinking embedded in his own mind.  If you don’t know how to do something you can simply ask someone to help you.  That is so shocking, right?  Can you imagine what we would become if we never received and accepted help?  We would never leave our cribs!

Failure is just something in our minds

I can still vividly recall how one of my past mentors reframed failure in words that I found so compelling and evocative.  He described failure as ‘not producing a desired result’.  It is the meaning we lay on our perceived failures that gets us into trouble.  When we make our failures mean something about who we fundamentally are as human beings we can find ourselves firmly on the path to self-deprecation.

I don’t have to be anything…and neither do you

My dignity and value have nothing to do with what I am, what I do for my work and what my talents are.  We are all worthwhile simply because we are.

A Reason To Celebrate

Wednesday, January 28, 2015


Today is what I would call a special day.  It is my one year anniversary of being deemed sub-clinical for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  It's been a full year!  Even though it is a gray January day outside I feel quite sunny on the inside.  I still have some additional work I wish to do in support of my own mental health.  But I feel very excited and happy to have achieved this milestone!

Here is a look back at a portion of what I wrote a year ago:

As I made my way home today the world around me looked much as it would shortly after those first sessions I underwent using EMDR therapy: vivid, engaging, exciting.  Though today is one of the coldest days of a winter that has felt plenty long already my excitement about my recovery suffused my body and mind.  Were it not so brisk outside I could imagine going out and shouting "I'm sub-clinical, I'm sub-clinical!"  But then some people might think I am clinical in another way...such as being manic!  The coming of spring and a new cycle of life is still many weeks away but this encouraging news today gives me such a needed boost at a time when I have been feeling a bit weary.  The bitter cold of this winter has been a lot to manage.  I cannot imagine how I would have put up with such enduring cold if it had happened last winter when I had first moved to Minnesota.  Thankfully the remaining days of this winter will be even easier for me to manage now that I have confirmation that all the work I have been doing on myself is paying off...and paying off well!

As a simple means of celebrating the life I have today I am going to enumerate what I am grateful for:

• My health insurance
• My loyal friends I have all over the world
• My health
• My desire to work
• My professional interests
• My love of doing fun and zany things
• My motivation that inspires me to keep trying
• My willingness to open my heart and be open to love

Acknowledging My Sadness

Tuesday, January 27, 2015


Today was my eleventh day attending an outpatient program at Abbott Northwestern Hospital.  I feel much better than I did when I began two calendar weeks ago.  Today, as I have on other recent days, I acknowledged the deep sadness I feel.  I have plenty of 'good' reasons to feel sad.  And I recognize it's about time I finally really opened up and acknowledged the depth of my sadness.

I have felt some amount of sadness for much of my life.  The trauma of my early life history served as the rotten seeds that would later bloom into my longstanding sadness.  And yet being filled with immense sadness is not a death sentence.  I do not have a terminal health condition.  I can improve and I believe I will continue to improve.  The veneer of my anger is finally falling away.  And there underneath my anger was my long semi-dormant sadness.  How long does it take to heal such sadness?  This is another good question.  And I have absolutely no good answer to that question.  The process of healing will take whatever time it requires.  I have no magic crystal ball that will allow me to accurately foretell my future in regards to my health.

A year ago my mental health was quite different.  I was still busy with the process of doing some demanding and extensive physical therapy.  I was also still quite angry as a result of my most recent interactions with my biological father.  I sometimes had the physical sensation of spinning much like the tasmanian devil cartoon character would do on the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood.  It didn't seem that I could break out of the cycle of my pain and hurt.

Walking away from my paternal family of origin has helped immensely.  It was a painful choice.  But it was a valid and necessary choice.  Choices can be very easy when no manner of real loss is truly involved.  It's another matter entirely when making a choice results in people vanishing from your life...perhaps to never return.

Now I have an immense awareness of the sadness I feel.  I suppose I should learn to be a more entertaining and convivial host.  I have a feeling this sadness will be hanging around for a while.  My sadness is another teacher.

It Just Doesn't Seem Possible

Monday, January 26, 2015


Sometimes it just does not seem possible that I am still working through the sadness I feel regarding aspects of my life from thirty years ago.  I am relieved that I no longer feel saturated with anger.  The anger covered up my sadness and grief for a very long time.  With my anger dissipating I can now better attend to what I can more clearly discern was underneath the anger all along.  My sadness is immense.  It is not debilitating.  But it is so large that the very prospect of successfully attending to it seems to be yet another task for Hercules.

I would feel more encouraged if my physical health did not seem so tenuous lately.  The inflammation and tenderness I have experienced in my feet has been going on for about ten weeks now.  The new medication I am currently taking for my foot discomfort does not seem to be working too well.  So I might soon be switching back to the medication my podiatrist originally prescribed for me last November.

I feel this immense space inside me now.  It is a space made possible by my decision to no longer maintain active ties with certain members of my paternal family of origin.  This space sometimes feels like a gaping black hole or open wound that will heal only very slowly.

There are moments when I attempt to distract myself from the pain I feel by marveling at the beauty of the world.  I actually feel as if this works quite well.

It seems I am finally truly alive.

My Ponderous Sadness

Saturday, January 24, 2015

As I awoke this morning I found myself recalling one of the insights I have come to while going to therapy.  I found myself feeling really sad as I remember how throughout the summer of 1982 I felt convinced I would not live to see my ninth birthday.  Such pessimistic dark thinking is a very horrible burden for a child of eight years of age to carry around.

My sadness and grief are still inside me.  They have been my unintended companions for many years.  But by paying some genuine attention to them I feel the onerous quality of their weight lessening with time.  It’s obvious I need to make time in my life to attend to these companions.  I believe they will eventually leave once I make enough space in my life to give them what they need.  My sadness needs attention.  My grief needs attention.  I am giving them attention now.  They will eventually not feel so weighty and demanding.

I have one important task on my weekend docket I am determined to accomplish.  I am going to go visit a friend who has two cats he wishes to give away.  They originally belonged to his former roommate.  I wish to have at least one companion animal.  I believe having a living creature waiting to see me when I arrive home each day would be very good for me.

I have other activities I can participate in this weekend.  Depending on how my energy level is I might attend some events.  One of my primary goals is to listen to how my body feels as I move about and live my life today.  I still feel a degree of weariness.  But the weariness is thankfully also lessening.

This Winter Has Been Easier

Friday, January 23, 2015

It is obvious that the days are starting to lengthen now.  We are now a full month of time past the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere.  The sun has entered the sign of Aquarius.  I do not feel anywhere near as weary of winter as I did this time last year.  All the Vitamin D, exercise, psychotherapy and other healthy practices have made a real dent in the burden of unhealed pain I was carrying around.

I can now somehow sense the metaphorical light at the end of my journey of healing.  I don’t feel it would be a good idea to stop going to therapy this calendar year but I do feel that one day in the not too distant future I will be able to start more concretely imagining when that date might actually fall in a real calendar.  As for now I am working to do better at befriending my grief and sadness.  It hasn’t been easy.  But it is necessary for my own deeper healing.

Next week will feature an important milestone in my journey.  I’ll finally have been undiagnosable (ergo subclinical) for PTSD for a full year of time.  So I will be entering my second year of walking around the planet in a fairly healthy state of being.  I believe it’s going to be much easier than the first year was.

I have been toying with the idea of another commitment I could make for myself that would be supportive of my healing process.  Considering how much sadness and grief I had been carrying around for so long I feel it could be wise to cut out sad and heavy media (movies, news and so on) for a period of time.  I was overloaded with sadness for such a long while.  I deserve to have a real break from all of that heaviness.

Oh Hey It's 1977 Again!

Thursday, January 22, 2015

Today was another day in which I surfed through a variety of many feelings.  I felt amusement, confusion, encouragement, sadness, frustration and more.  And I probably went through this cycle of many feelings several times.

The day began in an amusing way.  I took my razor to the YMCA so I could shave and make myself look a bit more presentable than I have been feeling.  To take the last bus of the bus line I prefer I had to abort my shaving before I could finish it.  So I left myself with hair under my nose.  Yes, I left myself with a mustache.  I found myself laughing as I made my way to the bus stop.  I felt as if I looked like Michael Mouse Tolliver from the movie based on Armistead Maupin's book Tales of the City.  I felt as if I was wearing an outdated facial hair look more typical of the 1970s.

My outpatient treatment program proved helpful today.  I feel better than I did this morning.  I feel a bit more able to sit with and feel the sadness I had been carrying for such a long time.  Memories of being a 'latch-key kid' have been floating through my conscious awareness over the last several days.  The sadness I carried around for so many years was so ponderous and so heavy.  I feel it was genuinely unjust that I be expected to carry around what I did.  But there are many people who have experienced immense injustice in the world.  And some of those people have not survived the injustice that they experienced.  At least I survived my early life history.  I am blessed in many ways.  There are some days when it is difficult for me to really appreciate all that I have.

As I recount what I experienced throughout the day I still feel a lot of sadness as I write now.  And it's perfectly fine for me to feel sad.  Sadness and grief are a part of every human life.  We all experience loss at some point in our lives.

The journey of writing my blog has felt a bit more arduous as of late.  It hasn't been as much of a joy as I would like it to be.  But I want to continue to write nonetheless.  Even the activities that we really enjoy doing might not feel so enjoyable each and every day we honor our commitment to do them.  I feel that part of the challenge of daily living is showing up for what we have agreed to do even when doing so holds little excitement for us.  I think I once heard a saying that "90% of life is showing up".

Cheers.

I Need An After-School Program

Wednesday, January 21, 2015


The therapist who runs the group therapy portion of the outpatient program I have been attending this past week made a comment to me today in regards to something I said to her yesterday.  Sometimes I like to hang out in places for some time after my business in that place is done.  I suppose I sometimes do this as a coping mechanism if I am feeling especially lonely or needy.  I have felt a bit low lately so my inclination to engage in this means of coping has been a bit elevated.

As I departed yesterday I commented that "I need an after-school program".  I was actually referencing that time period in my life when I was still living at home.  My after-school program on many, many days was to go home, watch television and do my homework...alone.  Even after my younger brother was born I still felt a certain gross measure of loneliness.  This was partly due to the fact that my younger brother was never old enough to play with in a way that was age appropriate for either of us while I was still living at home.

Watching television wasn't exactly a healthy after-school program.  Engaging in this activity didn't really enhance certain skills that would prove vital to me later in my life.  Watching television isn't really an active activity.  Yes, there are programs that still exist that are truly educational in nature.  But much of television thirty years ago as well as now does little to really enhance the skills and quality of life of many people.  I probably would have been better served if I had engaged in more social activities.  But I lacked a good measure of self-esteem by the time I entered high school.  This lack of confidence led me to frequently isolate.  It wasn't healthy for me to be as alone as I often was.

Here I am thirty years later and I am continuing to disassemble aspects of the person I have become.  I have more anger and sadness than I want to have.  I need more love and kindness in my life.  I became burned out some time ago because I was not giving enough love and care to myself.  And this was partly due to the fact that I didn't have good role models for the development and practice of self-care skills.  So now I get to do it.  I could choose to hide and mourn and feel pity for myself for what I never experienced.  Or I can choose to go out into the world each day, reach out, meet new people, take risks, dream and keep trying.  I would prefer to apply the latter approach.

All the instability of my childhood profoundly affected my sense of self and my sense of what was possible in my future life.  I still wrestle with how the chaos impacted me.  But I do believe that I am gradually transmuting my personal darkness into something else.  It will take some additional time for this process to unfold.  But I feel I am gradually moving in the direction of an enjoyable and love filled future.

I feel immense gratitude for how far I have come.  I look forward to the flowering of the coming spring.  I believe it will be a spring unlike any other I have experienced.

Sitting With Sadness

Tuesday, January 20, 2015


On this chilly and gray late afternoon I made the commitment to sit with myself and reflect on the element of sadness in my life.  As the anger I carried for too long continues to fade I am finding myself more able to access the layers of other 'material' underneath it.  And I recognize that underneath my anger is a ponderous amount of sadness.  I still sometimes find myself becoming confused as to what the real distinction between sadness and grief is.  According to some brief surfing around sadness may be seen as a synonym for unhappiness as well as grief.

In my opinion sadness is not identical to grief.  I have long understood sadness to be something more transient in nature.  Grief seems to be something that can persist for a much longer period of time.  Lately I feel more and more aware of both my sadness and my grief.  Sadness may be something you feel when a close friend moves far away or when you lose a job you deeply loved doing.  I associate grief with changes that might be irreversible.  Whereas you might feel sad when a good friend moves away you might instead feel grief if that person actually dies.  It seems sadness and grief are related but are not identical.

I have been contemplating sadness a lot lately.  It seems to be what I predominantly feel right now.  I feel sad due to the many elements of my life that once were a part of my life but no longer are.  My sadness feels persistent.  To experience persistent sadness can be construed as indicative of having 'Complex PTSD'.  I first wrote about Complex PTSD last summer after learning about the concept from a mental health practitioner (whom I sought out to obtain a second opinion regarding my mental health).
It was a rather sobering experience when I first read about Complex PTSD.  I could see within myself elements of all six of the criteria described on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website found here.  I won't elaborate upon all six of these criteria here.  I have done so in other postings.  I want to focus on my sadness alone.

I suppose it would be a correct assertion to state I have felt some amount of sadness throughout much of my life.  I know I felt sad throughout the summer immediately after my father was nearly murdered.  Such a response would, according to the opinion I now have as an increasingly healthy adult, be a healthy and predictable response to a trauma as horrible as nearly losing a parent to murder.  But then something still worse began to happen.  My sadness went 'underground'.  I buried my sadness because I felt compelled to as a way of coping with the family I was growing up in.  I didn't feel comfortable fully  expressing how I felt.  I felt being so fully expressive could make me a target for more unjust, unkind treatment.  So my sadness festered in my psyche.  And this went on for a long time.

Very early in the evolution of this blog I wrote an entry entitled Parents of Murdered Children.  As I think back on this entry I wrote nearly eighteen months ago I see a lot of meaning loaded into these four  words.  When my father was nearly murdered a piece of my own child self did actually seem to die.  I became a 'child of a nearly murdered parent'.

I don't know if completely eliminating the sadness I feel is a realistic goal or not.  Perhaps I will find that time, therapy and living well eventually leads to the healing of so much of my pain that the sadness no longer feels so ponderous.  But I find myself often asking how long that will take.  And I cannot provide myself a clear or accurate answer.  And the professionals I work with cannot provide a clear answer either.  Why?  Because they can't possibly know either.

Sometimes we can feel pained by the simple fact that life is filled with countless unknowns and unknowable things.  And yet somehow, if we want to live, we must continue to breathe through the difficulties of life.  Such is life.

I wish I felt better than I do now.  But I am grateful to feel so much better than I once did.

Where Was The Boundary?

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Leo Tolstoy

As I continue to do my grieving regarding my family of origin that often did not give me the proper attention and care I needed I find myself more and more able to retrospectively define what the seminal issues were.  And one of them was the issue of boundaries.

Unhealthy families are distinct from healthy ones according to a number of indicators.  And one of those is boundaries.  In an unhealthy family boundaries are either too rigid and dense or weak and diffuse.  A family with rigid boundaries may express a form of authoritarianism in which the children of this family are given limited access to the world beyond the home.  Friends might not be able to come visit the children of the household with any ease.  Privileges may be restricted.  Access to opportunities for fun and play may be limited.

Meanwhile, families with poor or loose boundaries may exhibit quite opposite issues.  Parents may fail to monitor children's activities and progress in school.  They may fail to provide proper guidance, not be proactive regarding their children's health and even disclose their own struggles with their children in cases where their primary relationships do not offer the support they need.  Parents in such families may also have trouble pursuing healthy relationships of their own.  These issues may adversely affect their own children.  My father's family fits easily into this category.

When I have attempted to confront some of my father's siblings regarding the abuse and chaos I experienced I have rather consistently experienced avoidance or silence.  Self-righteous indignation has been another response.  The responses I have received have led me to make my own conclusions regarding where the boundaries actually are and were within my family of origin.  It seems to me that the abuse I experienced would have continued (in the event my father had not actually been nearly murdered...which led to the end of his relationship with my stepmother and the end of the abuse) up to the point of my own tragic and preventable death.  The issues in my father's second marriage were that bad.  Tolerance of such severe abuse to the point of physical harm, permanent injury and even death is a great example of a very poor boundary.  Is it any wonder I fantasized about running away?

It's my impression that children who grow up in families with poor boundaries will become adults who often face the challenge of learning what healthy boundaries actually are.  When parents do poorly in parenting their children those children will ultimately have to find good role models in other people.  This has been my experience.  I am still learning how to create healthy boundaries for myself.  It has  certainly been a process.

Given what I experienced and what I know of my father's childhood I can only surmise that there is a lot more to the story of my paternal family of origin than I have ever had access to.  And I suspect this will always be so.  I feel immense sadness when I contemplate the boundary issues and seeming 'unspoken agreement to be silent' of my father and his siblings.  Such silence can ultimately prove deeply alienating.  It certainly was for me.

......

And now it is time for a hopeful counterpoint to what I have already written.  I may be effectively and permanently estranged from my father's family but that doesn't mean I cannot go out into the world and create my own family and abiding friendships.  This is what I want to be about.  But as I do this I need to continue to attend to my grief.  Each day is often just a bit better than the last.  I have my difficult and demoralizing days but I am happy to say the trajectory continues to be upward.