Rebound

I suspect that it will turn out for a while, perhaps quite a while, that if and when I do have a brief good time, I will pay for it with a dark time. Yesterday I awakened in tears and was extremely sad and angry throughout the day. The research I read on the Internet indicates that a first time, sudden, violently precipitated, incarceration, initiated by family, generally results in post traumatic stress reaction that takes about a decade to recover from, if ever. Yesterday was exactly one month out from that event having occurred in my life, and I feel unimaginably far from even beginning to recover.

I so wish it wasn't this season of the year. My happiest memories are of early winter and Christmas. Yesterday we had our first snow. That has always been an event that has excited me since my boyhood in the very snowy region of upstate and northern New York where I grew up. I have always marveled at those who grumbled and even became depressed at the advent of snow again each year. Yesterday as I watched the flakes fall there was no feeling. I was just numb. Teresa put up a new Christmas tree we bought for this year and some decorations in early November knowing she would have some disability after her knee replacement. I now wish they were not there. Each Christmas commercial, catalog, and each decoration I see just reminds me this will be my first Christmas in 40 years without liquid "Christmas Cheer," giving and receiving presents, or any sense of joy or excitement. I suppose it shouldn't matter, but the reality is I feel horribly hurt by it all. I wish I could just go to sleep and awaken to find it the middle of January. Who knows perhaps the courts will grant me my wish.

I am now seeing a therapist. She is way into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy usually discussed by the acronym CBT. She has been very effective in her "nailing" me with her logic to obliterate my fallacious, unreasonable thinking. I discussed in my last session my wish that perhaps I could drink very moderately in the future without getting intoxicated and becoming abusive. She asked me, "If I gave you a gun with 1000 chambers and told you there was only one bullet in it, and asked you to spin the chamber and point it at Teresa and pull the trigger would you do it?" I of course responded, "Of course not..............never." She pointed out that for me to drink now would be for me to take the same sort of risk, which might well work out fine....but what about if it didn't. I pointed out that I've lost all my celebratory rituals in my life. She told me no I hadn't. My celebratory ritual(s) now was being with Teresa and Sue. And, if I don't stop drinking I'll lose them. She is very good. I couldn't resist pointing out to her the irony of the BDSM community's use of the Acronym CBT (cock & ball torture) and the mental health treatment community's use of CBT as cognitive behavioral therapy. The therapeutic reference certainly belies the extreme effectiveness in its getting right to the "root" of the issue at hand. It is reminiscent of my favorite Lyndon Baines Johnson quote. When questioned about his amazingly effective leadership style in Congress he quipped,"Grasp them by the nuts and squeeze firmly. Their hearts and minds will follow." It turns out that old LBJ was perhaps the fore father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

I want desperately to continue my life and love with Teresa and Sue. It hurts terribly knowing that the only way I can do that is to not drink. It's not nearly so much the absence of alcohol that makes me sad. I don't have alcohol cravings. I do have huge positive associations with the concept of "aqua vita." Aqua vita is the Latin euphemism (literally translated as the water of life) for wine and all alcoholic spirits. It references a mystical belief that the ritual of drinking alcohol is a communion with life. The Christian communion ceremony was derived from the political necessity to encompass and sublimate classical pagan roman theology in the new Christian state religion adopted in 325 A. D. under the Emperor Constantine as part of the work that came out of the Council of Nicaea.

Our Therapist has very powerfully described, much to the great joy and glee of Sue and Teresa when I told them of it, my "choice." I have to choose to give up drinking or lose Teresa and Sue. They are quite "on board" with that reasoning. She has said it is psychologically implausible to give up drinking forever. She thinks I should just promise them that I will not drink for a year (what the heck...it's already been a month.) And then at the end of a year figure out where we go from there. I have either to lose my "religious ritual by which I believe I celebrate the the joy I take in my life" (likely erroneously....I seem to be wrong about anything I've ever felt or thought). To add to it all, I now wear an alcohol monitor on my ankle that monitors me continuously all day.....everyday. Should I ever have any alcohol at all, I will be immediately apprehended and jailed indeterminately. So there is my "choice." You see my life is really entirely in my control.

What I have is the absence of choice. It is like the "option" given you when a hold up guy says at gun point, "Give me your money or I will kill your child and besides that just for kicks I will kill you too. it is your choice. It is not my responsibility which you choose." My long adherence to the values of self-determination in my persoanl life and my professional advocacy career are now dead. The key choices in my life are taken away from me by my family, the police, the courts, the mental health treatment community. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." has become a fallacy and a sham.

I am so glad to still have my two loves. I don't want to mislead you. They have been horribly hurt and traumatized by my behavior. They are recovering from huge traumatic stress of their own and are trying to hold onto what (if anything) can remain of "us" in all this. They did not suddenly decide to have a palace coups one day and emasculate their Dominant. It was an entirely unintended act. They've pointed out to me repeatedly that no matter how much harm is created, if it results from well intended actions, then harm doesn't matter.

My choice is clear. I may have them or I may have what I have viewd for the last 40 years as the central theme of feeling joyous about my life (even at times when it caused me to not feel, or act, at all joyously.) The concept that there is anything approaching D/s in our lives has clearly become a tragic joke other than that perhaps I am slave to them. There is no one who has any investment in my happpiness. I quipped, sardonically, talking with Sue yesterday that I now wear my collar on my ankle. The only choice I have in my life are between horrible and extremely life damagingly loss and pain or absolutely fatally wounding injurious pain. I have been reminded, as I have supported T through her recent knee replacement, of the incessant medical ritual of "rating your pain from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest." Behind this door you may select pain level 8. And behind this door is pain level 10 and death. There are no other options. That is aside from the parallel track, and independent variable involving what pain and trauma the legal system will eventually inflict on me.

So today I am neither as happy as two days ago when I posted, nor am I as totally dysfuctionally agonized with depression as I felt yesterday. I am not happy and suspect that happiness is not anything that will ever be in my life again. My only options are to try to minimize the acuteness of my unhappiness.

"What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been."

Tom