New year, Maybe a New Beginning, How Things Seem Now

It seems like enough has changed in my feelings, my perception of my status, that perhaps writing a new communique to the outside world makes sense or might even be helpful. I am 354 days into my "new life" of coerced sobriety. My big anniversary is ahead January 18.

I struggle much more realistically now with wondering if perhaps my life is better now than it was before, or at least if my present life is, well just so poignantly "present," so piquant or pungent, that the "ghosts" of the life I loved before, and my identity, have faded enough to become just mists. Maybe it is time to begin to see if there can be meaning in this new life, that is not my choice, but is all that the others in my life will allow me to live.

My work with our therapist surrounding my general life issues, and PTSD in particular, has been increasingly fruitful. As we have moved forward through, Finding Life Beyond Trauma, the PTSD workbook we are working with, I have progressed to the point of working in the realm of values clarification. It is a series of exercises and texts that leads you to explore how, since your "trauma" you have come to live your life Dominated by fear avoidance as opposed to being led by movement toward actualization of values. As I went through exercises to explore how fear driven my life has become and what losses that entails, I realized that I live a life of virtual isolation in terms of much of any meaningful connection with others, even socially. The only person I trust in my life to unequivocably act in my interest is my therapist. Any others may well have me imprisoned again, and while I realize that that is a jaundiced view of life, it is also my very evidence based reality after the last 15 months experience. There is no place that I am ever safe, not in my home, in my bed, in my car, no where that I am immune from the police coming for me because those closest to me have summoned them.

When all this happened I lived a value driven life. My motto which long time friends here will recall was "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined." I wore a bracelet all the time that bore that message's inscription. It was the imperator of our family. Everything emanated from that value. I threw that bracelet away when suddenly, violently, crushingly it was evident that I had no control, that what I wished, decided, enjoyed, believed, cared about was meaningless, and that all there was to my life was to avoid prison, and try to not be crushed further. I now spend my life pretending to worship a god I do not accept, believe in, or know, in a cult that I must adhere to or go to prison, denying myself what has always been my primary celebration of my humanity and my joy in being alive, to participate in rituals that leave me feeling subjugatged, humiliated, and worthless each time I submit yet one more time. This is, or has been my reality over the last year and a quarter. Each day I count a new day's extension of my sobriety, and another day since I last felt I was a man..............wondering if my life will ever have value again and realizing how good my life was until October 2010. That is or has been my life. I may be seeing a change........

I am torn whether to accept something new. My potential new reality feels better for the first time since all this began----not good, but better. It requires me to accept defeat and my ultimate eventual subjugation to this new reality.........where I will then likely be asked to pretend somehow to be Dominant, with loves who demand how I must live and who will crush and destroy me at my deepest levels if I fail to live as they demand. Yet the reality is, I AM overwhelmed. A glorious death gets me nothing. I don't have that courage. If I must live on, why not accept this. If I do, life becomes more comfortable again, and I may come to eventually resolve my cognitive dissonance, by coming to adopt the belief that this life is acceptable, even if not desirable, and perhaps if I live within its prescribed limits, at least those fears that haunt me most horribly, can be held more in abeyance. If I learn to lie to myself enough, I could even pretend that I have some semblance of security even as I know that is a delusion.

It is clear I can never be in control of my life again. It is clear I can never have my own life again. I never feel safe...................there is no security anywhere. There is no one, no matter how deeply I feel bonded to them, who will not wound or horribly smash me if I don't live as they choose. That has been true all my life. I deluded myself that I had achieved a new reality that had belied that truth. I was wrong. It is, and has been, crushingly agonizing to accept but I am reassured that is TRUTH. I will never forget that again. I now know I can trust others to crush me unless I behave as they demand. I was stupid to have believed life could ever be different.

This is not how I had intended for this post to go. There have been major "break-throughs" that began to pick up momentum in my feelings and thought over the past week. They have evolved from my PTSD therapy, as I began to describe earlier on, and from sue's getting me a simple sobriety token (odd how this classic AA symbol has effected me............clearly brain washing in the cult over the last year has potentiated some of their "stuff" to impact me), and a very vivid dream I had night before last that may well have been some sort of healing message from my sub-conscious, or input from a spiritual healer, or something that may allow me to move on.....maybe even to find some sort of value in life again.

I will write more, and in that more positive vein, in future posts. I feel a need to draw a line here now though and end this post,or this post will reach a cumbersome length. It will be better for me, and I imagine for readers, when I am less hopeless sounding. If so, that future message will be more completely understandable when contrasted with this description of my status as a back drop for comparison to these new more hopeful developments I have only, so far, just illuded to.

Thank you those who read here for listening with your eyes. Next I think I will post my dream.

Tom

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after check mate.