Facebook clean-ups and timeouts

Well, I just whacked about 10 friends from my Facebook friends list. Of those that remain, about one-quarter of the non-St. John's friends have been marked as acquaintances.

I had just returned from my second Facebook timeout. This one was four days; I think the first was five, if not a whole week.

It was enough, and I think good enough, for me to think about doing it one week a month. It would help social media detachment. Now, do I do this one week a month with Twitter? If so, the next step after that is to do it some week with both at the same time.

As for the whole issue about whether online friends are really friends or not, to the same degree as meatspace friends?

Outside of Leo Lincourt, I don't think a single non-Lifering friend would be a meatspace friend. That's not to say that all Lifering friends would be that, either.

Cutting and other stress relief — thoughts from the past

Below is a draft post from 2009 that I didn't realize I had saved as a draft. It was three months after moving to Odessa, Texas, to stay employed as something more than a C-store clerk in the middle of the Great Recession.

Free-flating (sic) anxiety still running in my head.

Did some fairly serious "picking" this afternoon.

(I never did "cutting," but, picking at my fingernails down to the quick, then, picking at the skin until it bleeds, or a hangnail bleeds? Yes.)

That's it.

But, I wanted to think about that more.

The fingernail deep picking I had identified as cutting by that time already. Do I have other such behaviors today, though?

Free-floating anxiety I still have, though less than 10 years ago for sure, and I think less than five years ago. Continuing sober life, continuing acceptance of the dailyness of life and continued aging, to be honest, are probably all factors.

My brother, the Lutheran gun nut

Having just read a pretty good (but not quite great) 2017 biography of Martin Luther, as I was finishing a review of it, I went nosing around for other reviews. I then, eventually landed on another, 1980s, Luther bio that I knew I needed to read.

Among the reviewers was a semi-familiar name. I googled it and "Paul McCain" became more familiar as president of Concordia Publishing House. I then, among links that brought up, eventually saw one for a Facebook group called (no, really) "The Armed Lutheran." Shock me that my oldest, political wingnut, Lutheran pastor primary abuser oldest brother is a member.

But he is.

I don't think Walt's probably bought any guns since what he got out of the division of Dad's property. Rather, this is likely virtue signaling first.

It's a "virtue" I could do without.

Children abhor an emotional (and intellectual) vacuum

In progressing through my recovery journey, and looking back at my parents, I have regularly contrasted dad's emotional fire (mainly of anger management issues along with emotional and physical abusiveness) with mom's emotional ice of not being there.

But, in some recent poolside meditation of sorts, or at least pondering, between pages of a re-read of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score," about which I have previously blogged, I had some new insight.

Ice is still something "positive," in the sense of actually being there, and actually having empirical, sensual evidence it's there.

A vacuum? It is nothingness.

What led me to that was, after a bit of my pondering, I started doing something Gestalt-like, which van der Kolk talks about a lot. I started having a dialogue with an image of mom.

After the dialogue was done, as I noted previously in my most recent post before this, I realized that I didn't hate mom. I didn't really even loathe her.

Instead, I abhorred her, or more accurately now, I abhorred her emotional vacuum. From there, I jumped to Harry Harlow's experiments with rhesus monkey babies and maternal or pseudo-maternal bonding.

I know mom bottle-fed me, but that was normal in the 1960s. She didn't have much tactile interaction with me otherwise, nor a lot of emotional interaction either on "positive" or "negative" emotions. I did see her once or twice in fear of dad's anger when directed toward me, but I have no idea if she ever talked to him about it further.

Anyway, this carries on to mom divorcing dad.

She claimed that she was tired of him trying to force us into religious careers. (I have proof of this; my dad apparently destroyed a partially completed application of mine to New Mexico Tech, and I know this because after I was put on academic probation at his religious alma mater after my first semester, he wrote me a letter to "shape up" or I'd never get into it. I found the letter back almost 30 years later, going through a box of old items of mine he had in storage. J'accuse!)

And yet? She never fought in court to have primary physical custody of me and my sister, as far as I know. I do know the court said we could make our own custodial parent decisions as long as we didn't bounce around too much and show detrimental effects.

Unlike dad, who for surface appearances (and maybe some stress relief, but I don't mean to buy his explanation that mom "caused" his temper let alone his acting out on it) did change for generally the better (setting aside "grooming" me to move with him — not sure how much of that he did with sis), mom never did that. It's like, even given the truth of what she claimed about dad, she was still telling a story more than a reality, and that the focus remained solipsistic.

(More on that word below.)

Because of who she worked for, and my SAT results, I got a corporate National Merit Scholarship, which actually pays more than the regular ones, even if a half-cut lower in prestige. Years later, she told me that she had considered writing her corporate headquarters to see if it would revoke the scholarship because I was attending my dad's religious alma mater.

And, no, she'd not contacted me at that time. She wrote me ... half as often, or less ... in college as dad did.

Let's see.

Knocking the props out from under me financially would have done what? Make me even more distant from her, for sure. Angry, even if I didn't realize it at the time. And hence, the "(and intellectual)" I just added to the header.

I mention the word "solipsistic" above. I used to think of mom as "narcissistic," but at that previous blog post, I realized that's not right, either.

I think a true narcissist, whether conscious of it or not, has different internal motivations than mom did.

The "solipsistic"?

By the time I was 12, this abused and emotionally whipped pre-teen, and "old soul" of sorts (no, not in any metaphysical way, New Agers) from that abuse, realized emotionally and psychologically that he did not want children when he grew up. In part, I knew that my mom was mentally ill in some way and I didn't want to pass that on.

It is an "old soul" of sorts that feels that way, and that accepts that stance as necessary, just as it's a similar old soul who can think in his mind of peace-promoting bible passages when his dad thinks he should attack the leader of neighborhood bullies because the rest of them will all cave in.

There's many more ways in which I simply had no connection with mom. Part of that, per van der Kolk, of course may be being "shut down" in some way. But, already when I was 5, I had issues of physical and emotional abandonment from her.

And, the apparent mental illness (neurotic, not psychotic level) behind that is another reason I abhor, but don't loathe.

Dad, on the other hand? Genetic tendencies to anxiety, as well as to anger management, are mental health issues. But, they're not mental illness.

While there are several good things he did for me throughout life, ultimately, while I don't hate him, and I don't think I loathe him as a person, I do overall loathe how he was as a father.

Powerless vs made a decision

Alcoholics Anonymous, and the 12-step movement it launched has been chock full of logical (and arguably, ethical) inconsistencies from the start.

Beyond that, the religious angle (it is, because it mentions a deity and because courts have said it is for First Amendment issues) is off-putting to the non-religious and to many religious people that don't agree with its particular religious take.

Beyond THAT, the "powerless" issue is offputting to women, minorities, abuse victims and others.

Step 1 of AA’s 12 steps says:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

But Step 3 says:

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

See, in religion, Lutheranism recognizes this problem and Martin Luther says that people by their own power cannot come to faith in God. 

But, AA hoists itself in its own petard. A decision is an act. Power, not powerlessness.

Of course, Lutheranism has its own problems. It essentially reduces a human being to an automaton, like Buddhism's claim that there is no individual soul, just a life force. And so, Lutheranism has its own petards.

The way to reject this is to reject an omnipotent deity (and an omnipotent karma), and accept a humanistic world. That world may still have an imperfect deity that some call god, though I don't see that, and that in turn raises philosophical issues about what creature would merit the term "god."

In any case, "powerless" is an absolutist word. Good humanism rejects that. And good sobriety rejects that, too. No need to hope for a "daily reprieve" from the AA version of a Calvinist double predestination tyrant.

Childhood sleep, sickness and wellness and abuse

I am re-reading through parts of Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score" and at one point, he mentioned that child abuse survivors reported much higher rates of sickness than the general childhood public.

I did have some allergy problems in childhood, but nothing serious. I occasionally had some small asthma problems, but that was likely due to dad's smoking as much as anything.

Otherwise, I had no real sickness problems.

But, sleep patterns?

As a pre-teen kid, I regularly stayed up until midnight, and irregularly read under the covers in bed until after that. Once, after previous warnings, my dad caught me and gave me a "spanking" that was more a beating. This was part of his bad parenting, and in her own way, mom's bad parenting, too. Neither one asked WHY I was staying up that late. Neither one talked more to my teachers or principal about gifted classes or anything else that a semi-poor school district in New Mexico might do, either for me individually or me and a few others. (I never even knew others of my level of "geekness" or beyond in elementary school, to be honest. Only in junior high, for a town of more than 15,000, did I start seeing others.)

I also got up at 6 a.m. every weekday to watch the "Today Show" when it was still broadcast live. Again, neither parental unit asked why, let alone talked to me in more detail about this.

Per van der Kolk's talk about feeling unsafe at home, I felt moderately unsafe, or mildly-moderately unsafe, no worse than that, with dad's emotions and anger. Maybe about the same with my two sexually abusive brothers. With mom? Other than worries that she would be so solipsistic — bingo, the word popped into mind at the right time, and it's better than narcissistic — to forget about me (and no, not joking), I felt safe otherwise.

But, safe only in the sense of not being actively threatened. If feelings of abandonment are part of lack of safety, I had that in spades. And I've just realized that.

Beyond a lust for learning, I think both the late sleep start and early sleep end were in part environmental control issues, as my brothers, for the most part, were sexually abusive of me in bed during night time sleep time. Staying up later meant — or was intended to mean — staving that off. Getting up early was meant to keep them from coming in too late. (At the same time, the younger of the two abusers taught me to sneak out of house, including out my bedroom window, to go down to a former Denny's 24-hour restaurant at 2 a.m. On our bikes. Why the restaurant staff wasn't calling police the few times this was done, I don't know. And people think the good old days were better? Not even always for white people.)

At the same time, I surely had sleep anxiety issues. Why this didn't translate into a general somatoform anxiety, with symptoms like, say, a semi-regular spastic colon, I have no idea.

I'm glad, and that may be part of my resilience that led me to survive as well as I did without surrogate parents. (I would have been a mess, and either dead, a druggie, or a male butt-boy prostitute, had I succeeded in running away from home.)

Finally, the degree of abandonment I surely recognized, but also surely didn't actually consciously recognize or feel, is in turn surely related to my ability, as well as my desire, to live alone as an adult.

Yes, I don't have a high degree of "connectedness." And it may prove troublesome down the road. But, it works well enough now, and has for some time.

Wilingness "versus" willpower

AA and the blue-covered paperback book contrast willingness and willpower. And my cogitation, plus some relatively recent sobriety support experiences, say this is wrong.

They're complementary and intertwined.

Sobriety willingness gives the power for willpower that is sometimes all that is to avail when an addictive voice whispers temptations. Sobriety willingness provides the willpower to subsume those addictive voices, those addictive subselves, the "what I don't want to do" portion of Paul and Augustine's lament, the less desirable internal neighbors in Walt Whitman's multitudes or however one expresses that.

And, we do contain multitudes, or at least small neighborhoods; modern philosophy of mind and cognitive science talk about subselves.

So, that's why willingness and willpower intertwine. The willingness to give a sober self or subself more room in the neighborhood is part of what empowers it.

The sobriety support experience that stimulated my thought is that sometimes, what seems to be an abundance of willingness may hide a lack of unity of mind, or even, to get to the willpower issue, may hide a **desired** lack of unity of mind.

And, I've seen somewhat related issues outside the sobriety world.

Years ago, at my group of suburban Dallas weekly newspapers, we hired a person to be the news editor of one of them when we got an opening. Said person was making notes for himself all the time about being organized to do this or that ...

And, amidst all the notes and reminders to himself to get organized, never actually DID get organized.

And, I don't think was even fully conscious or cognizant of that.

I expect to write further on this in the future.

Taking another's inventory not just a 12-step thing

As a recovery blog, this is primarily about my recovery from both alcohol abuse and addiction, and sexual abuse.

But it's also, at times, about general issues in sobriety, including my observations in sobriety support.

I started in AA, before discovering secular sobriety and moving on to it. And, I heard the comments in AA warning about "taking another person's inventory." The old-timers didn't say don't do it, they just warned about it. It's like Jesus saying, "don't judge, lest you are judged in return," but he did not say never do it.

Anyway, it happens in secular sobriety, too. And it's insidious when an inventory is taken in private and another attitude is presented in public.

It's generally bad, outside of that, if the person taking the inventory isn't a sobriety rock themselves.

And, I think that's the main reason the warning arose in the AA version of the sobriety world.

Taking another's inventory is much more than the cheap "when you point at someone, you have three fingers pointing back."

The big issue is that for a person with relatively little sobriety time to take another's inventory, it usually involves not taking a good inventory of their own sobriety standing.

Anger: More displaced or more real?

I went to my city's library this Saturday. Got there at about 3:40 p.m. or so; it closes at 4.

I grabbed one book from the new nonfiction rack, then went into the stacks to browse for more.

I lost track of time a bit.

Then, the lights on the back wall go off. From my experience in a town about the same size where I lived before, I figure I've got 10 minutes.

So, I browse about 2 minutes more. Then more lights go off, as in about all of them.

I stride up to the counter with books in hand. One clock was at 4; the other a minute or two earlier.

All lights were out. Back office doors were being closed. I was told staff computers were already shut down and I couldn't check out the three books I had.

I basically said nothing, but they could see my look of disgust.

And I emailed library staff when I got home.

That said, had I not been engaged in some self-distracting behavior online, I would have gotten there earlier.

So, how much of my anger was displaced?

Some of it ... yes.

No more than 50 percent, though, if that. The poor customer service would have happened even had I gotten to the library when I did for other reasons, "good" reason.

In fact, I don't think more than 20 percent was displaced.

And, I need to make sure that I'm not 12-stepping or something to do an "inventory" that isn't true.

On the flip said, I think my expression was good. No yelling. Minimal comment in general. Setting the books on the counter firmly, even forcefully, without slamming them.

I give myself credit for that.

Nature and the Dao

There's an old, but non-cliched, saying among environmental lovers: "Nature bats last."

I tried recently applying that to Daoism. But ... no, doesn't work.

Makes it sound like the Dao is the other team. And it's not.

"Dao is the quarterback"? That's somewhat better, especially if one thinks of today's NFL, where the whole offense runs through the QB.

Still not quite right.

"The Dao is the dealer in a giant solitaire game"?

That's probably closer.

It's a metaphor I will work with more.

I'm stopping this post here for now.

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