Archive for Adult Children

More on unilateral contracts

By Drew | Published September 25, 2012

I am terrified to have children because the thought broils through my head that I may pass on the cycle of violence that was inflicted on me. I have severe violent impulses when I get fragmented and inundated by things around me. Many times I have wanted to beat the crap out of my cat for crying at the wrong time.

I learned violence from being abused. When abused my mind would fragment and I would rush off, mentally, to a safe place. This fragmentation was there to keep me safe but all it does now, as a learned habit, is avoid the problem and expose me to what I learned as a child through direct interaction – violence.

Fragmentation is the art of escaping the moment and sadly, the moment, is the only true place one can live happily. I strive to be in the now, in the moment but, I fragment very often and the moment is lost until I refocus.

I really am a healthier zombie but, a zombie nonetheless and with that these ancient habits sit waiting to spring to life. Fragmentation is the root of all evil. The innocuous psychiatric phenomena of personality fragmentation was there to protect me and is now only here out of habit. And it does not help me as an adult.

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Love – then versus now

By Drew | Published August 24, 2012

Now that I am in my 40ies, one thing that seem so odd about the fact that I had to go back and grow up again in my 30ies is that while it was a horrific process – much akin to going through high school again – it has allowed me to leave the morass of an immature mind set and start moving forward into areas I never thought possible.

Love used to be a desperate and painful feeling. When I felt love, it meant I was obsessive and scared, a leaf in the wind of emotions and gut wrenching sadness, a place where fear dominated and self doubt was the rule. Growing up meant leaving this immature mindset behind and looking to the unknown world of mature adult feelings and emotions.

And I am there. I am in a place where love isn’t so scary anymore and it sits in a different place in my heart. Instead of pain and doubt, it inhabits a state of strength and hope. Instead of a desperate need it feels like something I deserve and can expect as a result of hard work and being a good person. It’s no longer something that overwhelms but something that feels like satisfaction and contentment.

Now, I have no idea where this current iteration of love is going or where it will end up but, for the first time in my life, I’m not afraid of the outcome and not afraid of what bad things might happen and instead am just happy to have this person in my life and be able to feel these nice warm feelings and emotions in my body and soul. I am not afraid of the future, I look forward to the adventure it will bring.

So thank you to my inner self for embracing this change and working so hard to grow and expand into a mature and true self. You trusted me and together we have made fantastic progress.

And thank you to the person who has reawakened those feelings in me. You know who you are.

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Climb out of that hole

By Drew | Published March 2, 2012

I forget sometimes exactly who I have become after years of work, after staring into the abyss and not blinking, I lose sight of the truth of my strongest aspects and fall victim to the weakest. As I have created my own healthy reality and pushed my life towards its own good goals and truths, I can still be blind sided by someone else’s dream, by someone else’s reality.

And this is an essential lesson and proof of old causes that I have not yet cleared from my overall karma. There are still a few aspects to my personality I have not yet ironed out. Those aspects need the light shone on them for me to be able to clear them out and learn to react a different way. And there are far fewer of these blindsides than when I started this process so long ago but, there they are nonetheless.

And nobody is at fault; I am not blaming the other for their dream and how it infected me. They no more intended to hit me with their mess than I did in allowing myself to fall under the spell. There is no blame just change and learning and responding to things in a different way. There is only the time when faced with the way you do things, to break free and try another tact. I am actually utterly grateful that I have these close and dear friends to show me the areas that still need work.

But we can never be done as there is always much work to do to fulfill the goals you set for yourself and break free from the patterns we all repeat, over and over, from our childhoods. Sometimes these are good patterns but mostly, they fall in the category of bad habits and most of the time we can’t even see these patterns because they feel so normal and are much easier to just ride out.

But what fun would that be?

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All this fixing and still broken

By Drew | Published February 9, 2012

Years of hard work, changing habits, examining motives, understand tendencies and using the tools I have found to make myself more whole; to help myself be an adult on the inside…all of that and more yet, I get this far only to realize there’s an enormous part of me that’s still a fucking child.

Oh how frustrating this discovery is, that I, when motivated by the right external forces, revert back to the depressive, challenged and brokenhearted kid that has dominated my life for its entire existence.

Feeling my thoughts go back to that awful rumination, that inability to see the truth and going into that place where nobody likes me, everyone hates me and all I am left with is eating worms is harrowing. Seriously though, how disheartening to realize all of this recovery has to happen on several concurrent platforms of my identity, some of which I didn’t realize were lacking. I’ve made great strides in professionalism, self-interests, socialization, friend making, appearance, expectations, planning, my money…but then to get blindsided by another plank of my person that I forgot to experience and grow is as frustrating as all hell.

Ugh! This is love? I forgot about love! How could I forget that emotion?

So here we go again, back to the slow slog of change, back to the road to recovery and once again to feeling things long dormant that must be felt and experienced while making subtle changes to get to a place where I can feel and be whole again. Thank you Universe for reminding me that my job is nowhere near finished.

And thank you to an old friend for reminding me about this part of me that I have been avoiding. You woke me up and now I can’t go back again. You brought me joy which I turned into pain, that has always been my way. Without you I’d just be in denial. Mad mad props.

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Missed your window

By Drew | Published December 7, 2011

Yeah, what if you missed your window, woke up too late? You could start over. You could push through and yes, start again but a forty year old man isn’t suppose to be waiting on his peers, he’s suppose to be blazing his own trail and blah blah.

My generation is full of nihilists and definitely not capitalists and stuck behind the cushion of life’s couch. I managed to squeeze out but I’m still picking crumbs and lint from my hair.

When I meet someone and they seem uncomfortably hard to be around, they are probably a lot like me. I’ve also noticed there aren’t that many general personality types, behavior-wise and it is possible to predict people’s reaction more readily than I thought it would have been.

Growing up is putting aside childish things and that is true when I consider my growth, at this late stage, and how immature certain aspects of my behavior were as an adult.

I have a chronological age: 42. I also have an inner child/emotional age that I can always check by just asking myself and listening to what that inner voice tells me (the first number that pops into your head). Everyone has this ability and the ‘inner child’ knows this and will give you that number. When I was 32 and started redoing my personality, my inner voice would answer ’13′ years old. I was an emotional 13 year old.

After 10 years of good therapy and rebuilding I have hit about 28.

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Back door to mediatating: Chanting

By Drew | Published September 15, 2011

We’ve pretty much started realizing that meditation, like exercise and eating right, is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle in that it reduces stress and helps things like PTSD recovery and any number of mind related stresses.

But I always had a horrible time meditating as I couldn’t get the perfect time, a quiet moment, a settled moment or even the mindset to consider creating the space. My mind was always racing and I’d be 10 steps in front of where I was when I thought I should be meditating and would just shrug it off and move on.

Then i got introduced to a form of Nichiren Buddhism (Japanese) that chants “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” (which is also the title of the ‘Lotus Sutra’ (without the ‘Nam’)) and away i went chanting a little here and a little there…

Once I got the phrase down and felt comfortable repeating it over and over I found I could launch into meditation a lot faster. I also noticed the repetition of the words, the speaking, the chanting, gave my brain something to do and allowed me to train myself to sit still and take some time. i didn’t need bells or music. i didn’t need silence or to settle down, I could just launch into the chant and in a few moments be literally meditating.

Now after 3 years I have actually chanted (with heavy meditation) for over 3 hours straight! (a huge victory for my ADHD, short attention span self.)

And after years of going through alcohol recovery and personality recovery I truly believe this form of chanting might just be a killer back door for people who find traditional quiet meditation untenable. These links below are slow and fast version of someone chanting ‘Nam Myoho Renge Kyo’ in a meditative state:

Slow version: http://www.sgi-usa.org/newmembers/resources/slowgongyo/daimoku_slow.mp3

Fast Version: http://www.sgi-usa.org/newmembers/resources/slowgongyo/daimoku_fast.mp3

- *Nam* – Naam (Like VietNAM)

- *Myoho* – Mee-Yo-ho

- *Renge kyo* (pronounced together:) Wren Geck Ee-yo

You are suppose to put the emphasis on ‘Myoho’ because it is the ‘mystic power’ that kicks the stuff into gear

Naam Mee-yo-ho Wren-geck-ee-yo

And here’s more explanation from Wikipedia – Diamoku (chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimoku

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These are days

By Drew | Published June 7, 2011

How do you ask for help from the world around you? Do you yell at the top of your lungs? Do you whisper? Do you beg?

I’m crying on and off, choked up like I’m watching an Old Yeller retrospective. No rhyme, no reason just crying and sadness and a direct connection to the part of me that is very sad.

These days I miss my anti-depressants, my SSRI – the beautiful little bubble I used to live in that protected me from myself.

I’ve started yelling at people to defend the little boy inside from their shitty behavior. He loves it but, them? Not so much. He thinks its cool because I never used to defend him and would let people walk all over me. But I think I need to find a middle ground where I don’t sound so much like a crazy person that just got visited by aliens.

I’m a 16 year old boy in the body of a 41 year old man. My feelings are racing between highs and lows and my mind and my body don’t know what to do. I’d blame the alcohol I recently started imbibing again after a 9 year hiatus but that just seems like a cop out. Truth be told, this is what I should have been doing when I was young – to learn how to be stable, strong, confident, happy and content. So here I am in my 40ies when I should be going through a mid-life crisis and am instead having a teenage dream of growing up.

I will power through these issues, this maturity, the coldness of a world that just doesn’t seem to give a shit. And I will try my best to make these growths with grace and subtlety and avoid the wild mood swings becoming bludgeons with which I beat the people around me.

Forgive me world. growing up is hard.

Posted in Adult Children, Rant, Zombie Philosophy | 1 Comment

How come he doesn’t want me

By Drew | Published January 20, 2011

Everything I could ever say about my father is said in this clip:

I don’t necessarily blame him because his father did the same to him but, without the ability to express it to him, this clip is all I have. Feelings of abandonment are the hardest to face. They reside in the darkest holes and deepest pits of our psyche. Thanks to the Fresh Prince, I can cry about it now.

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smeared

By Drew | Published December 14, 2010

…across my face.

I send props to my creativity, while awesome it is hidden behind a defense system almost not worth fighting.

Maybe I’m not going to ever be a worthwhile writer, a worthwhile member of society. Might be that I am just a regular bloke that does his job, keeps his head down and muddles through life.

But Americans are taught they can be anything, do anything and shoot all the way to the top. They soaked my addled mind with such tripe when I was a little boy. My grandmother took me aside once and told me:

I see you becoming famous one day. Not sure why or how but I think you’ll be an actor.

Now, I’ve been waiting ever since, frozen and unable to act upon this bit of information. One thing to tell some kid that to help him along but to say that and then do nothing support wise, school wise, college wise – hell, how about require me to do my homework?

I lived a childhood where the most important thing was keeping things smoothed over to avoid the inevitable drunken fight between my parents. I didn’t care about books, just peace. And here I am decades later and I’m still that little boy – frozen, scared and motivated by a desire to be left alone and do nothing.

Maybe I will never reach escape velocity to leave my childhood behind.

Science has found that 75% of our adult behaviors were developed before the age of 10 and never change. And what if those behaviors were learned poorly or not at all? Nothing worse than an adult walking around with a childish mindset; making childish mistakes, using childish emotions, being an adult child.

Will I ever escape this…

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Go to tell your 16 yr. old self something

By Drew | Published September 17, 2010

Oh fuck dude, where do I begin? Lemme see….

You’re not at all fat! Actually as it turns out, you are very handsome but just got lied to by people that should have been protecting you but instead destroyed you. Keep repeating over and over until you believe it the truth: you are aren’t fat. You’re very handsome and a really good guy. I am so fucking proud of you. Do you know that?

And what do you want to be? What do you want to do? And I don’t mean smoke pot all the time and get drunk. What else? You’re a great writer but your still illiterate technically at 16. You’re writing is like a really creative mess. Ask for help. I want you to apply yourself and if you do you will be so happy, I promise. Apply yourself, please? If you do? You can still smoke pot. Okay?

And pretty soon you’re gonna need therapy and I want you to start whenever you feel up to it, okay? You’re depressive, buddy. A big cute depressive guy. I want you to get help, okay? Check out ACOA and IBP therapy…get a head start cause your 30ies will be a fucking ride and a half :-/

But I’m so proud of you. I’m so proud of how you end up fighting through your depression and changed your life. I’m so proud of how good you are at heart and how you removed those defense mechanisms and let people love you. You can do anything buddy, so don’t ever sell yourself short and start writing more and you’ll be so happy.

I love you

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