I hated college, too

Not as much as grade school, junior high or high school, no.

But, in hindsight, I hated St. John's to some degree.

Not just "had regrets" about the college and career path I was "steered into," which I've had ever since I escaped the fowler's snare.

But hated. More than disliked. Hated.

Just popped into my mind June 5, and I decided to do a journaling-type blog post about it over several days.

What prompted this was looking at Marie's friends lists on Facebook, and the number of St. John's girls who I thought were diffident at best, stuck-up at worst. None of them seemed "relatable" to me because ... I was a runt who had zero relational skills and a life crushed by sexual abuse by brothers, covert sexual abuse by mom, and a few sexual putdowns by dad, along with one instance of sexual competitiveness and other things.

I wasn't bullied by guys as an albino wolf. But, no girls "hit on me." None.

Brenda and Debbie did at Gallup. Cathey in her twisted way at Hobbs. And what's her name, in a sick way, the lesbian manhunter in Mineral Wells.

And that's it.

Maybe, without the outwardly expressed anger — and it wouldn't be at those girls, ladies women — that, in addition to the "be married to the church" idea, or maybe even as a subset of that idea, is why seminary was appealing.

That's not to say that my young adult development might not have been worse yet at a state university of 3,000, let alone 10,000.

On the women, maybe, just as boys saw me as the white wolf to be bullied as a kid, girls, then women, saw me as the white wolf to be rejected. Maybe they recognized that I had some subconscious fears, in part because of mom's covert abuse, plus feeling "dirty" otherwise.

Sidebar: Dad would have been 90 on this date. I totally forgot about it until sis mentioned it to me. It's progress that I didn't even remember it. When he died and I cried, I missed what I wish he could have been. I missed still being afraid enough of him to not make that clearer. And I missed "closure," at least to a degree.

But, I also missed that that past couldn't be undone. I still miss that today. And that's all.

Recovery from religious trauma

The Dallas Observer has an in-depth story about Kathryn Keller, a Metroplex counselor who specializes in recovery from religious trauma.

And, yes, it's real, and as the only one of my siblings to move beyond my fundamentalist Lutheran childhood, it's needed.

As with the sexual, emotional and physical abuse of childhood, I don't think I've totally recovered from this one, either.

Keller rightly notes that religious abuse, like other types, occurs on a continuum. And she's active with her church tradition herself, so she's not an atheist trying to tear down faith.

She says that it can, like other forms of abuse in childhood, if ongoing, cause not just PTSD but complex PTSD. Agreed.

And, if you have a parent who is a religious leader, even if the abusiveness isn't that bad, that increases the ongoing factor.

I rejected my childhood beliefs on both intellectual and emotional-psychological grounds. I probably would have done so anyway, even without seeing the hypocrisy firsthand. But, that did add to the issue.

The year in review

The first big thing was moving to Muenster, and getting out of Sulphur Springs just before Moser bought the paper there. No idea how much he would have held Marlin over my head, but he would have.

It's not been perfect here. Transitions from an old guard team, and mistakes. Add to that Shannon's anxiety and perfectionism levels, and feeling put too much under a microscope by my one column.

At the same time, I overall like it, and overall have less stress than Sulphur Springs. Plus, I make more money, especially with the gamble of not buying Obamacare. That's even more true after a raise.

Off the job, Gainesville's library does ILLs, which puts it ahead of Sulphur Springs for sure.

And Denton? Learning more and more than for most "ritzy" groceries and more, I don't have to go to Dallas. Has an art museum I've not yet been to, an old courthouse museum (ditto), a pretty funky square area, a great quad at TWU and more. And all almost 10 miles closer to Gainesville than Paris was to Sulphur Springs for Kroger, let alone the Metroplex.

Muenster itself is not bad to nice for a small town its size. But, it's cliquish like Rosebud, and even more inbred than most Protestant small towns its size here in Texas.

On the personal growth side? I decided to try a paid membership in a hookup-type website. Never again. Got my credit card hacked via there, and more than ever, the parent company dumps half a dozen chat sites together. Plus, little local selection, and not even decent nibbles beyond the local. And, 98 percent of "nibbles" are clearly fakes.

That said, overall, I've become a bit more detached from such things. A little more often, I feel a bit less like staring at a screen like that.

On the rest of the personal side, I'm becoming more aware of interpersonal dynamics and others' personalities more quickly than in the past. This last year saw definite growth there.

I still dream about work at times. Weirdly, I dream more about things that need to be done that aren't actually part of what I actually do, than I did in Sulphur Springs. I have no idea why. That wasn't the case in Marlin or Center, as best as I can recall.

And that's where we're at on the new year.

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.