Trust

A bit of an epiphany last night. 

Epiphanito? 

I have had a concept of trust that is fundamentally flawed. It's more accurately been a series of positions I've taken that are more related to control, self-protection, safety and emotional distance. When I have set things up so that I feel safe, then I have said "I trust you." 

To a degree, we want to trust people who are trustworthy. That is a valuable way to navigate the world. It's one of the promises of Codependents Anonymous:

"I am capable of developing and maintaining healthy and loving relationships. The need to control and manipulate others will disappear as I learn to trust those who are trustworthy."

But it seems obvious to me now that feeling invulnerable to being hurt, being in control of a relationship, holding most of the cards or at least thinking I do— none of those constitute a foundation on which I could legit say I am building trust. 

Trust now looks like 

1. Allowing myself to be in an important relationship where it is clear that I could get eviscerated

2. Staying open to the other person anyway

In other words, now it seems like trust can only live and breathe in an exchange where there is risk, where I am vulnerable. Where I am not in control and neither is the other person. Where I could get hurt but I'm staying in the game anyway. 

This is probably obvious to a lot of you, but not obvious to me at all. I have thought that I trusted someone if I felt safe being in relationship with them. There's an element of that, for sure. It would be unwise to leave oneself open to someone who is untrustworthy. A liar, a cheat, an unreliable person. But even in relationship with someone with integrity, trust isn't about safety. 

It's about staying open to risk. 

Liver season, baby

Is this liver season already? I guess since spring comes early in Arizona, so might liver season. 

In "Chinese medicine," which is probably not even a valid descriptor, spring is liver season. Putting all the NEWAGE bullshit aside about detoxifying and this and that, it's interesting to look at emotional dimensions of the change of seasons:

Now, right away, I get back to some of my own anger and belligerence around this empty-headed foolishness of categorizing emotions as positive or negative. I suffered with a lot of shame as a result of that bullshit and I think in general our culture does too. Emotions move like wind and water and fire and earth, however they want to fucking move, and classifying them as positive or negative is like saying "well, that ocean is negative, but this one is positive." The confusion results from the speech and action that arise from emotional states, not from the entirely innocent and probably indispensable emotions themselves. 

Anyway, it is beginning for me. The spring wildness of wanting to get out into the world, of feeling trapped in the straitjacket of routines, of buying into this or that bullshit that I myself have created, etc. I do seem to push through a cycle of sloughing, burning off, moving on from all sorts of shackling realities in spring, every year, somewhat to the degree of the heaviness of all of it. I guess this is just natural, even in my incredibly mild climate. I still have the seasonal cycles deep in my cells. 

In general, I wake up to a feeling of urgency. A feeling of just not having time. No time for shit. For stupid fucking arrangements I have made (usually unilaterally) that repeatedly rip me off. A light starts to move over those moldy and passive, codependent and lazy ways I have been treating myself. This tendency has gotten even more fierce as I have gotten older. The sense of the foreshortening of time and just not wanting to languish has gotten more urgent the past 6 years or so since I crossed 50. Peter Garland, the great minimalist composer, has his 66th birthday today, and his piece The Days Run Away is absolutely right. The days do fucking run away. In a blink. You turn around and say what the fuck. How did I get to be 56? And then you look forward and realize all the coming years are by no means guaranteed and are tumbling forward in an avalanche. 




You get this deeply unsettling existential feeling that you might as well already be dead, so hurry up with whatever is the most important thing. Now, obviously, you can't really live your life in that state of impending doom, but it does arise. And a natural reaction in its midst is to find the more grey, lazier, passively waiting and expecting parts in one's soul and get fucking pissed. Because NO. No time. 

I guess for me this is probably connected to being seasonally depressed, even living in a warmer and sunnier clime. If I do move somewhere with a lot more winter, I guess I'll have to buy a light box or schedule all of my desert field work for January and February, which would be excellent anyway. 

I'm connected now to a person with whom I would spend the rest of my life, in a heartbeat. First person I've ever wanted to marry, in spite of how amazing the women of my past have been. Hell, if I had a time machine, I'd go back 30 years and start there with this person. But as mentioned before, she's not available. Within not being available, she is also...not available. Like, not available in the long term, not available in the short term, not available on a daily basis, and often, not available when we are actually attempting to interact, due to entirely understandable realities. Additionally, I suspect this person to sometimes have an avoidant attachment style (maybe innately, maybe also just because that's what it takes to mother a two year old and a five year old), that is, a tendency to withdraw in the face of emotional situations. Or in the face of impending conflict, to seek to just dodge or hide. I am the same way, a lot of the time. 

I also have this tendency to just grit my teeth and claim I am okay, when I really am just not okay. Somewhere along the way in my life, I learned that having difficulty of any kind and expressing it amounted to me being a fucking pain in the ass. A problem. Being difficult and unreasonable. I mean, seriously, I once had a broken finger and it set improperly because I didn't want to cause any trouble. 

But then liver season kicks in and I go too far the OTHER way. NONE OF THIS IS FUCKING FINE. NONE OF IT. This tends to surprise people, since I've been claiming that all is well for weeks. I suddenly go from being the Denial Dog to being the fire. 

I do eventually find equanimity. That's good. It also helps to do some strenuous cardio. Go camping. Get away from the fucking computer. So-- see ya!

Pulled toward waking

Started to feel a vaguely creeping emotional crud passing over like a fucked up cloud, at first every now and then, but more recently, mostly cloudy and darkening daily. Depression worming its way back into my daily emotional landscape. I responded at first by thinking huh, maybe it's just this or that. 

Maybe it's just being 56. Maybe it's just being in the more dull phase of the PhD. Maybe it's the financial pressures of getting the sequencing done for my samples. Maybe it's winter. (That could be, actually). Maybe it's just.

I woke up yesterday and it was grey and cool outside. I started to fantasize about getting out of town almost immediately. At first I was thinking of a southern trip and some camping. But then I started to think about snow. And I found out it was snowing in Flagstaff. So I quickly made reservations at a cheap motel and packed and was on the road. 

The drive up was not too bad, except for the last 15 miles or so, icy and very slow on Interstate 17, taking about 90 minutes. The town was swathed in fresh powder, the air crisp and cold, the motel peaceful and warm and 500 feet from one of my favorite greasy spoons (and a Vitamin Cottage on the other side, a message from the equanimous universe). 

Landmines lurking though. I ate a big lunch and then went back to the motel and fell asleep for 2.5 hours. I woke feeling dark and sad. It took me about an hour and half to get ready to walk into town. Walking in the cold night, I felt better, but still oddly bereft. 

I sort of automatically walked to a great restaurant here, Criollo. Went in. Sat and ordered. And it hit me that this is the first time I've visited Flagstaff since before the breakup with A. And then I realized that this stretch of time is the anniversary of the process of my entire life falling apart. The dates, the weather, the Facebook memories coming around and the general atmosphere were all conspiring to subtly but undeniably dredge up that wounds from that time. 

It's weird how the soul (or whatever you want to call it) wants what it wants and creates situations where it can be heard. I want to tell you something, it says, and we either pay attention or refuse to listen, or only half listen, until WHAM— no choice but to look right at whatever it is. 

Tumbling through the air along with the further processing of the slow motion dissolution of my personal life from last year, a great many other tangled memories of snow, visits to Flagstaff. I have been visiting here for nearly 30 years, and for a long time it was a major drinking town for me. I would stop here on the pretense of being too tired to drive on the LA or Santa Fe, but what I really wanted was to go to the Irish pub and drink Guinness and whiskey. A and I visited here frequently, also, either with her kid or not. 

So it feels like the wake up to a run of grieving and letting go was slow boiling in me, and my unconscious self or whatever the fuck drew me toward an outer circumstance that would make it explicit and no longer something I could deny or even make guesses about. 

Simple realizing what has been going on has helped tremendously. But I am still going to see Doc O when I get back to the Valley. 

What we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now

I have long suspected Bill W was up to some kind of funny language game, as he often is, when he phrased it in this way:

"Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now." (by the way, if Bill hadn't used the Oxford Comma, I'd be drunk this minute, or dead. How could I have possibly wanted what he had if he hadn't used it?).

In particular it seems a strange construction: "What were you like? What are you like now?" 

To be "like" something. Weird. 

I think it would be informative to trace Bill's concept of personhood, persona, personality and self throughout the Big Book. His total rejection of self will and his unrelenting characterization of self will as the thing (?) that blocks us from God. The spiritual awakening that Bill talks about could be traced fairly easily as a loss of self, of course not a new idea at all. His later embrace of the so called St. Francis Prayer is along those lines, especially in its very odd conclusion: "It is by self-forgetting that one finds, by forgiving that we are forgiven, and by dying that we awaken to eternal life."

In the simplest outline, we used to be like selfish people, we hit bottom and found a higher power, and now we are like unselfish (or less selfish) people. I mean, that seems to be one way to trace it out. 

I resist the usual narrative of a lot of alcoholics that is so harsh and self-hating. A great many tell their story in this way: "I was a loser, a dirtbag, evil and an awful person. I got sober. I am now essentially the same as I used to be— a liar, a cheat and a thief— except that now I have AA to keep me honest." I don't find that narrative helpful, inspiring, conducive to sustained sobriety or even true. 

Anyway, the general formula is on my mind becaue I was asked to share at tonight's CoDA meeting, and I have never told my CoDA story. I have told my AA story many times. I guess I'll just use the general framework but from a CoDA point of view. 

In other news, I stumbled on some new music a couple days ago. I was curious if there was a song with lyrics related to "shithole," intending to post it on FB as a funny commentary on the Cheeto in Chief's comments. I found a song actually called Shithole by a band I had never heard of before, Weaves. I ended up going down the old YoutTube rabbit hole and loving all of their stuff. I have a real weakness for weird pop made by people who are unafraid to take it somewhere surreal and who also have big ears and obviously have very deep musical backgrounds. 

Omphaloskeptical

One of the themes that runs throughout some of the more spiritually oriented works available in contemporary culture is that we must discover and create love and compassion for ourselves "before" we are able to practice love and compassion for others. 

I'll perform loving actions in the world as soon as I am exactly like Green Tara

There's deep wisdom in that, of course. If I don't carry the seed of self-acceptance, gentleness and non-aggression toward my own humanity, it makes sense that I would be more prone to rejecting the humanity of others, consciously or unconsciously. Bill W's maddening spiritual axiom from Step 10 in Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions comes to mind:

"It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the wrong also. But are there no exceptions to this rule? What about 'justifiable' anger? If somebody cheats us, aren't we entitled to be mad? Can't we properly be angry with self-righteous folk? For us of A.A. these are dangerous exceptions. We have found that justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it." (pg. 90)

However, my experience of the path is that there is not enough time to get that self-acceptance and compassion "right enough" in order to start being of service to others. And that ends up being a blessing, because I have also found this weird alchemy— when I take the risk of performing loving actions and bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world even from my place of abject discomfort and rejection of myself, I experience relief, but not only relief; also growth, healing and increased self-acceptance. 

And through service from my place of imperfection or even self loathing, compassion for myself and love and acceptance for myself naturally begins to arise. In fact, it effortlessly arises, since my efforts are directed elsewhere. 

Pema Chödrön often mentions sitting meditation as the main way toward cultivating self-acceptance and compassion. But I think what is missing in a lot of her work and in the work of many spiritual teachers is the simple power of becoming socially engaged. The work is as much outside in as it is inside out. When I step out into the risky interaction with someone who is asking for help, in fact, my self hatred becomes powerfully useful. A sponsee might say to me, "I want to stay sober but I hate myself and it's so uncomfortable to not have any relief," and instead of going to a strategy and saying "have you tried sitting meditation?", I can simply say, "Yes indeed. I really struggle with that too."

I value the ways that therapy, meditation and "working on myself" begin to heal the wounds that give rise to despair, a feeling of uselessness and self pity and flat out self loathing. However, I also value the ways that service, getting out there and doing things and bearing witness, performs the same kind of healing. 

whoa dude, fancy chair setup

Far more the reality. If you hang around recovery long enough, you will discover the ancient healing benefits of folding chairs and church basements

I think the inside work and the outside work truly work together naturally for me. It is both/and, not either/or. But I will say that, for me, the outside work sometimes gets the job done much more simply and quickly. I can therapize some ugly looking snag in myself for a long time. Suddenly, however, if I just get off my ass and go to a meeting and help set up chairs and make coffee, the sense of the importance and knotty persistence of my suffering evaporates. 

An apothegm in recovery is that self esteem comes from esteemable acts. I have directly and powerfully experienced the undeniable truth of this statement, when all the cultivation of warm feelings for myself and an open self-acceptance repeatedly fails. This of course may not be the case for all, but for me, action truly works in many cases when no therapy, meditation or self-directed practice works at all. And that is incredibly good news, because it means I don't have to wait in order to begin to live a purposeful life. I don't have to venture out into the weird and wild world only after I have somehow gotten my self-compassion license. In fact, for me, I can find healing right now, moving out into a broken world, with my broken self. 

Lovesick

Have you ever been so in love with someone that, when you think about them, sometimes you can't breathe? You feel dizzy and groundless? You feel every cell in your body go flying in their direction? Something like divine music plays in your soundtrack? 

From the William Blake Tarot by Ed Buryn

Lots of other wild responses, too. The world lights up. Everything reminds you of that person. "They would love this! They would be angry about this! They need to see this!" 

And, in spite of the free falling unconditional admiration and reverence for the Beloved, there's also intermittent crushing jealousy and possessiveness. Hatred for all of their exes. A hostage-taking level of grabby attachment. 

That describes my state of mind, in part, regarding a certain person. It's been unwieldy and confusing in a lot of ways, since I lack skills (either chronically or specifically at this time) to "handle" such intensity. It has been unbidden. When I have tried to contain the adoration and love, it just boils over, repeatedly, without me even turning up the heat. I can see why all of the myths of falling in love include that aspect of "Cupid's arrow," a vector force that arrives as if shot from the outside, through the heart. 

A few people have hurled little bits of "sanity" my way— why not give it some time? Why not be single for a while? Why not get involved with someone who is available? If what the two of you have is real, it will still be there! Why, thank you. Very sound! But irrelevant. 

Fortunately, my counselor is more along the wild, archetypal, roller coaster/learning experience side of things. He seems to distance himself so he can size me up, and he keeps discovering that I am surfing these tsunamis fairly skillfully or at least usefully, and we talk more about how rather than whether or not. He also knows that whether or not is moot. 

There's something Olympian and absolutely amoral about the experience. Not immoral, mind you. Amoral in that totally indifferent sense. Outside of the categories, not to sound too Nietzschean or whatever. 

So where does the "sick" part come in? According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the phrase dates from 1520, and has always meant "languishing in amorous desire." So in a couple years, it'll be the 500th anniversary of the phrase in English. Of course, the concept has been around a long, long time. But it is that "languishing" aspect that probably infuses the "sick" part of the phrase the most. So distracting! There are times when I just can't get anything at all done, thinking about the Beloved. Languishing indeed.

There are some other troublesome parts of this kind of immolating love. What a growth experience, to face and have to find a way to deal with my tendency toward codependent patterns in general. Enmeshment, obsession, terror of abandonment, suffering in comparison, feeling unloved and unlovable, experiencing a lack of contact with sharp pain and distracting ache. All of the wildness. All of the precarious, contingent elements. 

I keep expecting my inner gyroscope to kick in. I keep expecting to feel confident, on solid ground and with an ordinary amount of hope for the future. So far, Aphrodite is kicking my ass. It's getting a little better. As my relationship with myself grows, the sense that I will be all right no matter what the Beloved decides or does is definitely growing. This is growth for me. I have been in controlled, safer partnerships for decades, where I always felt like I would be okay if the partnership ended. With A, even in the darkest passage of not having a home anymore, I still knew that, essentially, I was all right. 

This falling in love has knocked me totally off center. It is truly precarious. The etymology of that word is worth copying and pasting from the Online Etymological Dictionary:

1640s, a legal word, "held through the favor of another," from Latin precarius "obtained by asking or praying," from prex (genitive precis) "entreaty, prayer" (see pray). Notion of "dependent on the will of another" led to extended sense "risky, dangerous, uncertain" (1680s). "No word is more unskillfully used than this with its derivatives. It is used for uncertain in all its senses; but it only means uncertain, as dependent on others ..." [Johnson]. Related: Precariously; precariousness.

The weird thing about what I am working through these days is that the Beloved offers strong verbal and behavioral evidence of meeting me in the wildness of this kind of love. It is not one-sided. I am not in a position of being abandoned, ignored or ghosted. Yet, no matter what reassurances the Beloved offers, and no matter how much evidence I try to gather and how much rational self talk I try to engage in, I still feel this searing doubt and pain of loss. 

Obviously, this is a reflection of how I have not "allowed" myself to be in love like this since I was 17 and had my heart stomped flat. A reflection of the unhealed gashes of other primal experiences of a lack of reliability, of bitter betrayal. A lesson in working through attachment dysfunction, which, in a wide variety of ways, has largely poisoned my relationship style— not simply in romantic or sexual relationships, but across the board. A reality of mine, not even related to the Beloved. 

Although grossly oversimplified, Hazen and Shaver's classic 1987 paper that translated childhood attachment styles to adult situations of romantic love offers some structural categories that are "fun" to think about. 

The three basic attachment styles, learned in the family of origin, are:

Secure attachment

Anxious or ambivalent attachment

Avoidant attachment

This New Age-ish site offers very clear summaries of the three styles.

Secure Attachment

– Securely attached adults support and respect one another. They form a relationship built on mutual care and trust. A securely attached relationship involves compromise. Each partner establishes and maintains boundaries. A securely attached person is able to give generously of themselves, while maintaining their self-esteem and sense of identity. Children learn to form secure attachments when they experience them at home. They practice them throughout childhood by forming and maintaining friendships. Securely attached people are able to trust their partner’s affection and maintain realistic expectations of the relationship. This kind of attachment is found in healthy partnerships. (Editor's note: may we soon see a day where the word "healthy" is never used metaphorically again).

Anxious Attachment

– Anxious attachment occurs when one partner is desperate to engage in a fantasy relationship. They fear it will not happen due to abandonment issues or a lack of healthy connections throughout their childhood. A person who experiences anxious attachment is unlikely to trust their partner on a deep level. Instead, they live in constant fear of betrayal and abandonment. They are afraid to be alone. This fear causes them to attach to their partner very quickly. They put emotional expectations on their significant other that are unrealistic and unlikely to be met. People who experience this type of attachment expect to be completed or rescued by their partner. They seek safety and security. This type of attachment is not conducive to an emotionally healthy relationship.

Avoidant Attachment

– People who have been hurt repeatedly, or who never learned to attach in a healthy way as children, may form an avoidant attachment. In these relationships, one partner has a fear of intimacy that prevents them from connecting to the other. They withdraw emotionally. Although they may have deeply affectionate feelings for their partner, they are unable to express them clearly and respectfully. They might withdraw in a dismissive way, which involves distancing themselves from the relationship. They may throw themselves into work, ignore their partner, cheat, or disappear entirely. Their avoidance could also manifest in a fearful way. They may deny their feelings, refuse to commit, or avoid emotionally heavy situations. 

I am capable of all three styles, sometimes even within a single day. I bet usually someone whose predominant style is avoidant hooks up with someone whose predominant style is anxious, or two people trade those styles endlessly. My general mode in many romantic and sexual relationships for the past 40 years has been avoidant, although I have slipped into the anxious attachment style a few times and gotten very badly hurt. I have sometimes thought I was engaging in secure attachment, when it has actually been avoidant. Avoidant attachment can feel secure for me particularly because I am sufficiently protected from getting hurt. I also am in a position of power and control when I am avoidant, and that can seem secure. It's interesting to think about where power resides in the three styles— equally shared, surrendered or rigidly held. 

Obviously, if you are given to analytical and structural thinking, such categories and intersections can provide hours of fun. 

Essentially, since I am intensely in love with someone who is often unavailable, all of the out of balance (sick) dynamics that come up for me can be traced back to attachment versus letting go. Codependency itself can accurately be described as an attachment disorder. "We admitted we were powerless over others— that our lives had become unmanageable." To hit bottom by having to concede to my innermost self that I am powerless over others must mean that I have been addicted to trying to have power over others. Definitely disordered attachment. 

In this way, "lovesick" gains a lot more dimensions than simply "languishing in amorous desire." Languishing in a set of interconnected attachment disorders as well. Truly precarious, in the sense that Ben Johnson would approve, since the "dysfunctional" attachment styles are *entirely dependent on the other person*. 

So the work I am doing, whether I like it or not, is to let go. In particular, I want to heal so that my alternating anxious and avoidant strategies do not poison the well. 

Burning

Here are the things I burned last night in the fire can (by doing an abstract drawing quickly with a single pen on regular notebook paper, and writing the name at the top and then lighting the paper on fire, watching it blaze and saying "fare thee the fuck well"):

Enmeshment

Seeking outside validation 

Acting out of self-centered fear

Letting self pity run my life

Controlling and manipulating

Feeling less than

Indulging in pessimism and lack of trust

Wallowing in gloomy nostalgia

Acting out of greed and possessive jealousy

Of course such ritual doesn't instantly remove the spiritual illness, but I feel more free today. A process like this that is almost entirely non-verbal definitely sets strong intention and reshapes the fundamental ground. And I have the list of the words.

Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove these defects of character. Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. 

You know I don't even believe in "God" per se, but this is step 6 and 7 work for sure. Because the great myth of our times is that we can do this work ourselves. That I can fix me. 

I have a mountain of evidence that I can't fix me. 

But these toxic patterns do become ameliorated when, instead, I just turn them over. I am powerless over my defects. They are unmanageable by me. Here, Universe, here they are. Help me let go of them and find new ways of being. 

A good way to say adios to the old year.