Cur alii, non alii?

The old question, "why some, not others?" first raised in medieval Latin Christianity about why are some saved and others not, whether looking on the human side at acts of repentance and belief, or later in Calvinism, at the divine choices in predestination, has long been a question in sobriety, for myself and many others.

Why do some "get it," and others don't? Even when things like child or adult traumas are controlled for, so that people of similar circumstances are being compared, it's clear that ... some get it, others don't.

In my secular sobriety, I was recently reminded of that, strongly.

A lady in an area where there is not face-to-face support had drifted away from activity in online support years ago. In fact, had had ebbs and flows of participation within her long-ago involvement.

Recently, she jumped back in. And, in her meatspace world, started looking at some personal and medical issues, and also signed up for some brief inpatient help plus intensive outpatient.

Less than three weeks later, at an old running buddy's ... she drank, and not just one beer/wine/mixed drink.

Can't tell you some of the other details to honor privacy, but I can talk about the general style I've seen in such cases.

After the relapse (too big to call it a "slip") the person then beats themself up. And invites others to do the same. The subconscious — maybe in some cases fully conscious — idea seems to be "I'll make myself look undeserving of sobriety."

Not only is the person letting an "out" form, subconsciously — or again, maybe fully consciously — they're actively helping create this out.

I don't condemn such people in public for several reasons, and I don't want to sound sanctimonious myself in saying that.

First, if I suspect this is what a person is doing? I'm playing their game in that case. And, in a public forum, rather than one-on-one, I'm playing their game in a way that others can hear and see me play, and thus might be tempted themselves.

Second, if this is not an active attempt to create an out, my jumping in might tempt that person.

Third, definitely, if it's not an active attempt on their part, my jumping in is not productive.

Fourth — to riff on Calvinism and double predestination? What if I am "back out" in the future? It leaves me in a place where I am thus less deserving of compassion myself.

At the same time, I could be — not so much tempted, but conscientiously challenged — to, without saying "Bullshit," say, "Hey, I think this is at least in your subconscious, something deliberate."

I haven't and I won't.

In my opinion, doing so at the time is almost certain to create nothing but a reactive, defensive response. Doing so later is likely to be unproductive if the incident is forgotten, or ... producing a reactive, defensive response if it's not.

To go further than AA, sobriety is about more than so-called "cash-register honesty," but in a specific way.

It's about self-honesty, and about the subconscious as well as conscious parts of ourselves.

Without practicing Buddhist mindfulness, let alone mindful meditation, we do need to work on sober self-awareness.

Fuck you, Jim Moser

Offering me a publishing job on arguably unethical terms as far as budget even if you don't know that Dennis and Teresa have been overcharging people on ads, which I bet you do, assuming they were doing that in Hearne even before taking over Marlin, and somebody, sometime, contacted you?

I'll put more here later, but before everything dissipated, wanted to get the original emotion out, at least.

More specifically, eff you for getting me to raise my hopes of escape from Sulphur Springs, for screwing up vacation eligibility that already sux here and other things.

The real world versus aching desires

Well, it's back to Sulphur Springs after the Marlin newspaper job turned out to be a shit sandwich carefully wrapped to appeal to my emotional heartstrings.

I have no idea if Jim Moser asked other people besides me before offering me this job. I do believe, based on stuff that i couldn't have known about before I got to Marlin, that the offer was borderline unethical at a minimum. And, the "borderline" part is being polite.

So, despite my yearnings to move, despite me liking people in Marlin, despite me liking being near Waco, and despite me trying to use the I Ching and an old baseball cap to convince myself any lingering misgivings pre-move weren't real, it's back to Sulphur Springs. Fortunately, my old job was available and there's no company rules against rehires, even in those particular cases.

That's the real world. I'm back to a place I wanted to get out of rather than keeping myself in a dry heaves situation over a job whose future worried me. More in weeks and months ahead.

The good side is that I'm not eating much money, and that I now have a new cushion from Geico.

That then said, when I do hit 62 or beyond, even if I don't need to have financial worries, will I still actually have them?

Looks like it's moving time

And, back to an old position, at an old paper, but under new ownership.

Back to the town where I found this hat on the road.

The working out of the kinks on this has led me to some free association type thinking about previous cities I've lived in or at least visited regularly.

One-word/phrase word associations with various cities:

Flint — GM. Specifically, the town GM built and GM let die.

Bonham — Transitioning. Did it ever finish that? What’s the town like today? Why couldn’t things have been different when I was there? Before CNHI bought?

Honey Grove — silently dying. Like we all are. Sad.

Hobbs — Why? Why didn’t I see Mary Bearden’s manipulations better? Hah! Remembered her name. Why do other people advance and I don’t?

Jacksboro — Sorry. Sorry I screwed up with Roy. Sorry I didn’t look at good side. Sorry I didn’t do more with sports. Sorry it wasn’t 5 years later in terms of Internet. Sorry for all sorts of stuff. Town sorry too. Struggling. Oil not helping it. Only further east in county, with workers in Wise County.

Mineral Wells — Hypergritty. What will turn it around?

Lancaster — Bypassed. Bypassed by most white and much of the better black migration out of city of Dallas. Kicked? Failed city-state, with Chamber implosion?

Navasota — Depressing. Literally, for me, and thank doorknobs I got past that. Ugh. Sweaty. Missing its chances?

Cedar Hill — Boomtown-bust. The desert mall. Hypocrisy alert on Franke et al.

Odessa — Trying. Oil. Climate change looming as it gets hoist by its oil petard. Denialism.

This is from Dripping Springs, near
Marble Falls, where it eventually
was the perfect time to move.

Marble Falls — Gaslighting. That’s the way I felt with Schock. Really? That’s the way I felt with Roy’s wife. As Chuck said: “Marble Falls is not Fredericksburg, it never has been Fredericksburg and it never will be Fredricksburg.”

Marlin — Gritty. And, I guess, about to become home again.

Center — Clusterfuck. Brandi bought the Light and Champion out of nostalgia. Didn’t do due diligence with the presence and strength of the other folks and didn’t have a real plan. Clusterfucks on publishers, there and Mount Pleasant alike.

Sulphur Springs — Pretentious. In several different ways. More details later. Kind of like a bigger Marble Falls but with less reason.

==

I"m going to write more about these cities.

I lived in Flint two summers home from college in the mid-80s, half a year, again with dad while working in the late 80s, a couple of summers home during seminary time, then 18 months moved in after that.

"GM"? If you've seen Roger and Me, you get it. I saw a fair chunk. AC-Delco started there. Half its manufacturing now gone. Fisher Body of old GM cars, closed. GM Truck and Bus plant, closed. Other GM plants closed or cut back. That was before Rick Snyder's lead-laden pile-on. It's a shell of what it was 30 years ago, and pretty much a shell of 20 years ago, though changes were starting already then.

Bonham? My first newspaper job. I think my dad was right — I moved down with him, nothing keeping me in Michigan, to the nearby town of Honey Grove. To some degree, the town was living off old largess of Sam Rayburn, though Mr. Sam really wasn't that big a pork-barreler. It's gotten new life since I left, primarily being an exurb commuter town for the northeastern sprawl of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Neighboring Honey Grove, aka "the sweetest town in Texas"? Dying town, as I could tell in person recently. The 2010 Census declined almost one-third from 2000. Members of dad's church dying; saw one's grave at an old country cemetery.

These sentiments are still true, even though in my return, I found out the previous publisher, and still publisher of the next paper down the road, had been committing seemingly unethical and possibly illegal predatory sales actions on advertising customers, along with other issues. So, I'm back to pretentious Sulphur Springs, and still wanting the fuck out of a dying newspaper industry

Expressing a bit more, at least in Gestalt self-talk

Per my previous post, my review of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score," and related items, I've started doing a bit of self therapy based off group therapy family role playing he mentions in the book.

It's doing something, that I know.

I told images of my mom and dad, from childhood, that I was not just angry in some way, but that I was disgusted, ultimately, with how both of them were not only, or just, self-centered, but either unaware of their being self-centered, or something like that, during my growing up, as far as failure to psychologically nurture me.

Indeed, I then thought for things that aren't specifically emotional abuse, but maybe a constellation of religious abuse, intellectual abuse and similar, that we ought to call this "psychological abuse."

I also told a Gestalt image of my sister, of today, not childhood, that I was kind of angry with her response to me a few weeks ago when I had a PTSD anxiety incident at work that had ripples inside me for a few days.

I'm paraphrasing somewhat, but it came off as being something like "Put your big boy pants on," or "you made your bed." She knows I took this job because I had to, rather than risk staying unemployed after being downsized and over the age of 50.

That said, as I have written here before, I see less and less available at that well. That's just honest.

The Body Knows the Score

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel A. van der Kolk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The latest in trauma treatment

Van Der Kolk, a leading researcher, and treater, of PTSD and other mental traumas, summarizes the latest findings on what works to help treat trauma, whether from the clinical lab with examination of the brain, treatment protocols with groups of patients, or actual individual and group therapy sessions.

If you're still struggling, you may have some new ideas here to either bring to a counselor or to try on your self at home if you're in the right conditions. (I see some things that could be adapted for journaling, more conscious self-talk, etc.)


View all my reviews

One idea he talks about is Internal Family Systems Therapy, something I'd never heard of before. Here's a website that's the home for IFS counseling training.

IFS, like Family Systems Therapy, talks about family structures, but in terms of we trauma victims having a "family" inside. This family is made up of one or more of:
Exiles — the hurt ones;
Managers — the ones that present smiley faces not just to the public but to the Exiles to quietly keep them in place; and
Firefighters — the ones that do ANYTHING to shut down an Exile when it's threatening to blow up.

Mix of depression, anxiety, and frustration / anger

Hello, follower friend and any others who read this.

This is updating my "mini-depression" previous post.

It's more than that.

It's the PTSD anxiety about being trapped.

And, more than that, it is frustration that is becoming outright anger.

First? Just one Facebook friend or friend of friends has looked at my LinkedIn profile since I posted it a week ago. And that was my brother-in-law.

My sis has long offered to help, and a decade ago, when I felt more depressed than this and less inured to this level of depression, even came to visit me a few days. But, she has enough on her hands now, among other things, and I've learned to otherwise lower expectations.

This also confirms the limits of networking, IMO.

Since I've gotten into the newspaper biz, every job I've gotten has been primarily, if not entirely, my own effort. Two cases where I had some assistance, that assistance was in the form of pointing out an ad for the opening. The third? It was a friend of a friend, but that also includes a bait-and-switch from the allegedly available job to the actually offered one.

So, from what I see, networking is pretty much bullshit.

If you want to try to prove me wrong, don't "talk." Help me get a job better than what I have now.

Second, the person hired to be managing editor at my current newspaper is less skilled than me and less experienced than me. The only two reasons she likely was hired was being native to this city and, with freelance work running slim, she could be lowballed, if that happened.

Third? A good non-newspaper job for which I am skilled, a university position back where I lived before and missed its previous opening? Hasn't called back in eight days to talk about interview appointments. I assume, whether for ageism, non-locality, or whatever, it's going to screw me.

Fourth, and originally forgotten? The last couple of times I've dropped hints in Lifering's email lists ... nobody's picked up on them.

so

FUCK YOU WORLD!!!!!!!!

oh, and

BITE ME, WORLD

oh, and an hour later, another

FUCK YOU.

Mini-depression coming on?

I don't feel the same degree of anxiety as I did in 2007, but otherwise, feel kind of close to the point I was the last time I went on anti-depressants. And, I don't want to do that. I asked for an older one, a tricyclic, as well as an SSRI, having heard of brain zaps. Turned out that, in part probably due to not tapering enough, had more brain zaps from the old Elavil than from the Lexapro. (I was on a bigger dose of Lexapro, too.)

I've had a lot of work-related stressors in the last six months, even more than a decade ago. I've adjusted better so far, though not perfectly.
1. Laid off
2. Get new job but have to move for it
3. Company gets sold (good for getting health ins., not so good overall in other ways)
4. New editor as a result of that.

More later ... I want to hit the hay.

Good-bye to another sobriety friend

This is five seven sobriety friends or acquaintances I've had die in the last half-dozen years, now, with the passing of Dale Phelps.

And, no, AAer types, this isn't about the disease doing push-ups outside your door. That's a metaphor I reject, and besides ...

This is about sober friends and acquaintances who died that way.

Interestingly, I met none in real life.

Chani was more acquaintance than friend. Still never did hear definitely what killed her. She was about my age. Had some mental health issues, but seemed to be getting beyond them. But she passed in the middle of 2010.

Then came Kishi. I was likely her second-closest friend in Lifering. Though we never met in person, we talked a lot on the phone. A recurrence of her feminine cancer, combined with low reserves from a lifetime battling Crohn's, did it. She was my age, and died in the fall of 2012.

Ray? Ray Smith? Wow. A shining light in secular sobriety of many groups, as well as secular humanism in general. He died, also from cancer, just a little over a year after Kishi, early in 2014.

Then Manya, who surely was Kishi's closet Lifering friend, about a year after that.

And now, Dale.

And, I'd forgotten about two others.

Scott Larsen, with his diabetes catching up to him.

And, Mog — Michael O'Grady — to whom I was more intellectually attuned than any of the others.

Going full circle

I spent extended time at a university town yesterday — and not the first time I'd been to this particular place.

It's about 30-40 miles from where I lived 20 or more years ago, when I first moved to this part of the world, then started my first job in the newspaper business after moving in with my dad.

I'd been here before, when I'd lived up there.

I actually halfway remembered where the town square was. I'd gotten a university library card, while thinking the unversity library looked far different than it did decades ago.

Then, just off the square a block, I saw the city library.

And, THAT was it. Closed by this time on Saturday — a change from decades ago. But, otherwise unchanged, from what I could tell looking through the front door glass.

I still remember how interesting I found it back then that a small town in Texas, in its public library, had a copy of "The Humanist." Yes, being a university town helped, but still. (Since then, I've been in a university town where the town was still a town, not a city, but four times bigger, and the university 20 percent bigger, and the city library didn't have "The Humanist." That said, library funding cutbacks may be an issue in the Internet era.)

A bit of poignancy was in the air. Walking around the university grounds before that probably added to that. At the same time, the present day had me thinking beyond poignancy and deja vu. Something I looked up about my newly-current employer when I got home has me thinking more and more that my current position isn't the right one. One of those intuitive feelings. The question, of course, is how do I change that.

I actually got to thinking that, because there's not "that much" to the university town without the university, it wouldn't be a bad place to retire. Or, get a university PR job before that.

Stay tuned.

The emotions are enough that I think they contributed to a dream during my Sunday afternoon nap.

==

I may be checking in here more in weeks ahead. The stresses of moving, a new job, declining to move a second time to a second new job, while seeing this new job acquired (I think for the good, that's why I stayed) by another company is a fricking boatload of stress. And I face it in a small Religious Right-driven Texas Town.