My God! I Feel Like Writing

I have been locked inside myself, lost, confused, anguished, grief ridden and "crisisy" for a long time now. I have longed to write about what is raging inside me, my head, my feelings, my soul, and "locked up" whenever I attempted to even approach the prospect of writing, let alone doing so. It seems being "locked up" is my life's primary learning the last year.

This morning suddenly I WANT to write....................I need to. I feel like Forrest Gump when he said he felt like running one day and so ran. There was no antecedent. There was just action...........being as a verb not a noun.

It has been almost a year now since last October 28, the day that was my personal 9/11. It kicked off a series of real injuries for me. It culminated a string of losses over the last two and a half years. Little has been good since and nothing is the same.

Over the last two and a half years I lost my parents, lost my thirty-five year long professional career and concomitantly what I stood for publicly as a man, lost 60% of my body through gastric bypass surgery that was medically very difficult, had a crisis bowel resection from a life threatening bowel obstruction that became medically complicated, and lost the majority of my personal income. These losses occurred in the run up to last October 28.

Then October 28 occurred. Sue phoned 911 when she became concerned a comment I made in an IM chat with her reflected suicidal intent. Police hunted me in our condominium complex with rifles, flak jackets, and a shoot on sight order. I had fled to a local WalMart when she told me she had called 911. They found me there and about a dozen of them harassed and interrogated me in handcuffs in the parking lot for a half hour or so, before, having no police record at all, they felt they had nothing on which to base arresting me and so I was released. I was enraged . I lost my trust in the integrity of our D/s. In my drunken raging about that a few days later, I lost my sense of safety in my home, as I was carried screaming and struggling in hand cuffs from my home. I've not felt safe a moment since. I know at any moment anyone, likely those closest to me , can call the police and they will do whatever they want to me for whatever reason. I was released with my first criminal conviction..................suicidality treated as a crime, with no services offered or provided. A month later even after seeking services on our own, I was worse. This time I was psychotic and murderously self-injurious and intent on harming sue and t as well as myself. Again I was in jail in chains. My second conviction......................two years probation...............pending a year in prison if I fail to complete that, or if for any reason at all they decide to violate my probation. Again no services were offered or provided, but they were mandated. I did 8 weeks of alcohol rehabilitation. It was a 6 week program, but my family felt I shouldn't graduate at the end of six weeks, so they took it on themselves without talking to me, to have it extended.

I have no trust or sense of security ever. I am depressed. I am in constant fear. I have lost my trust in the those whom I love. I have no faith in our government. I melt down if I see a cop. I have murderous fantasies of retaliation against police, and rejoice every time I hear of police injury or death.

I attend two mandated AA meetings a week and submit reports about them to the weekly continuing care meeting that I must attend to stay out of prison. AA has helped me at times. More often it makes me feel worse. It is a religious cult that focuses on replacing substance addiction with addiction to magical thinking. One must, to fulfill their program, develop a vision of a higher power, be that Christianity's vision of God, or coming to believe in a "door knob." (I am not exaggerating. That is one of the examples of what AA says you might do if you are an atheist or agnostic). Whatever that vision is, every gathering ends with a remarkably non-secular recitation of the Lord's Prayer, as they sanctimoniously purport they are not a Christian cult. I have jokingly wondered if they ended each meeting with readings from the Koran, they would be able to get away with claiming to not be an Islamic religious cult. I am keeping up my compliance act. I behave as though I have thrown myself into AA and aftercare. My aftercare coordinator called me last week to tell me she enjoys reading the insights in my AA meeting reaction reports as much as any she has seen. I must or I will serve a year in prison.

I've lost a life long love with alcohol, a lover that I traveled every road and experience with for 47 years since I was 15. It was time for that to end, and a very harmful love affair. My feelings towards alcohol are like my feelings for my ex-wife. My life is better for not having her. There is no aspect of my life that is not better without having my ex-wife or my not having alcohol in it.

The loss of my first marriage benefited me hugely. It was a terrible loss after 31 years of marriage and involved huge grief and loss. The loss of alcohol benefits me hugely. It is a source of huge grief and loss.

So on top of the losses leading up to 10/28/10, I have lost alcohol. I have lost the privilege of ever working as a professional again because of my now permanent criminal record. I might well have not chosen to return to my profession. But there is a huge difference between choosing to never work at your chosen profession, and knowing that your society has said you are too criminal to ever do that again. We have lost about $10,000 in the process of this. I am 233 days sober today and 225 days into probation. We will continue for the next 505 days paying probation to handle my supervision. Probation entails nothing, but a meeting with me every two months to collect my probation fees. They do consider whether to approve a pass for me if I want to travel outside of my community. I am not allowed to travel without their permission. In the midst of this we lost t's Mom. My loss in this compared to t's is minuscule. Her Mom took me in and treated me as a valued and loved son when I was divorced and my own parents shunned me, and accepted our family completely as we came to include sue. Her loss is a painful void.

I've lost self-esteem. I don't correspond with or relate to any of the people I knew before this. I feel such shame and humiliation I don't want to face them.

I've felt a loss of my BDSM orientation and, it has, as sue has written, effected our relationship. I don't know how to have a trust based relationship with loves who clearly had so little trust in me they wanted me locked up, and who even though they thought that the way the police and courts treated me was wrong and harmful, support what was done to me anyway. They do not trust me, and I want desperately to trust them, but often when I try to, my mind flashes to being naked in solitary confinement, freezing, in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, or why.

I am in therapy now for about 10 months with a private psycho-therapist. As we have wound our way through this, it has turned out, that I am a child abuse victim. I certainly knew my childhood was not happy. I've certainly seen other people whose childhoods were far worse than mine. I was an only child and it was the only childhood I knew. I assumed my childhood was as childhood is. My therapist asks me questions about if I had an experience like this or that. I recount experiences that I don't usually think about, but that occurred, usually between my mother and me, some with my father. She then reacts vehemently, and tells me it is no wonder that I have issues I have, and react and feel as I do.

It is her hypothesis that it is this history of child abuse trauma that is the root cause of the intensity of my post traumatic stress reaction, paranoia, grief at the events of the last year. Not that those feelings would not be normal, but that the overwhelming debilitating extent of my feelings is likely me, harkening back to feeling as I did as an abused helpless child when I was four, five, or six. She says I feel as I did then, when now I am in the hands of an abusive system at the hands of the women I love. Friday she is intent on our working together, the therapist and I, through an inner child healing exercise with hypnotic suggestion. I am a Masters prepared counseling psychologist. Psycho-analytical early childhood trauma based theoretical approaches to people's issues, have never had much credence for me, feeling it better to focus behaviorally and affectively on present life on life's terms (the 12-steppers in the crowd will be pleased to see that bit of "Big Book" jargon.) On the other hand, I am being treated for traumatic stress, I am coming to see that my childhood was pathologically abusive, and certainly what I am experiencing now is debilitating. If my childhood abuse is catalytically ratcheting up my trauma exponentially, why not try this? If nothing else, it should be an interesting experience. I don't see it making anything worse. She is very good, this woman I'm seeing and she feels it may well help. I guess it's a classic "in for a penny in for a pound" situation.

She is adamant that I am one of the more intelligent men she has known. She tells me that it is rare for people who have my childhood history (abuse, dyslexia, chronic acute illness, etc.) to have had the fairly highly functional life I've had.

Over the last two days I have had a re-emergence in my consciousness of my BDSM orientation, and a realization too that is it not only a sensual erotic orientation, but a spiritual one. Likely this spiritual twist is a function of my time with the Alcoholism cult folks. I am being reminded that I am who I am. The fact that I have lived through this last two years, and have relationship issues in the aftermath does not change who I am.

I am a Dominant man who is a BDSM practitioner. I am polyamorous. I will recover my strength. My current life is (in the words of my therapist) all scorched earth, but green is beginning to sprout again. I will heal someday.

I realize as I read back over this, how somber this all is. I suppose it is. It could be read or heard as accusatorial or blaming of sue and t. They were overwhelmed and fearful in the throws of dealing with a very distraught, angry, violent, depressed, grief ridden, drunk, paranoid man. They did the best they knew to do for themselves and me. Mistakes were made. None more than by me. Our loves are, I believe, preordained somewhere and sometime before any of us even knew to be. We will heal together. We will be back, not as we were, but better. Our family will be stronger. I feel that as a fact, even more than I desire it.

I need to write more. I need to write here. Sue and t and my therapist and my inner self tell me that I have books to write. I may in fact begin that process.

It is good that, despite the absence of our input here, this Blog still exists for me to be able to do this. That is because sue, in this awful interim has (at times quite laboriously), stirred the ashes here to keep this option alive, and to keep us connected to the love of the many friends here who have so supported us as we have struggled through so many challenges over the past two and a half years.

This period has been/is more traumatic than any evolution I have gone through before....whether adolescence, or any other of my life passages. I have made it traumatic for those around me.

Finding my voice here again is, I suspect, a milestone on the way through it.

Tom