This Thursday I got off to a good start, I woke up early enough to get my head on straight in prayer and meditation before feeding the kids and getting them off to school. This morning I did breakfast and prep and my wife took them.

Today I had my second Psych of Personal Adjustment class.  As I was preparing to leave the house, I realized that I had a homework assignment that I hadn't been able to complete.  I had to rush through it but fortunately it was question and answer and I had some good coffee and my thoughts came together successfully.

In the class we did  an interesting exercise of drawing a map of our life story with crayons.  I drew mine based on Jellinek's diagram of the downward progression of addiction and the upward progression of recovery.  I applied this on a lifelong scope by starting with an upward path of development when I was a child.  I placed important relationships and milestones on it, loving mother, guiding father, religious devotion, academic excellence, team sports, etc.  Then the path changes direction in the teenage years, it starts into a downward slip when I started partying, drinking, and taking drugs.  This progresses into the abyss until I hit bottom in my early twenties.

My adult life is marked with a substantial period of dry abstinence but no upward trend.  This is followed by a return to a party lifestyle with period descents into small spirals and bottoms and living as a quasi-functional addict/alcoholic.  During this time I acquired a wife, a career, and some hobbies which I used at intervals to keep my addiction at bay.  Eventually however, they all stopped working and my addiction asserted itself and overwhelmed everything good in life.

I went to my first treatment and had an epiphany about the nature of my condition.   I learned about the disease concept and the need to prioritize recovery.  It didn't stick however and I descended  once again into an even worse death spiral of addiction and the hardest bottom of my life.  Here I found the willingness to take direction and completely give myself to a recovery process.

I represent the point that my life changed with another flash of epiphany like the first treatment except bigger.  this was like the launching of a rocket that gave me enough altitude to escape the gravitational pull of the black hole I was in.  This was a spiritual awakening in which I discovered an aspect of life that had always been obscured from me by my own fixed perceptions.  Here was where I found a concept of a Higher Power that could command and restrain the psychic demons that had hijacked my will.  From here I show the path on an uphill track that surpasses my childhood development.

The reason I show it higher than the first 12 years of my life is because I have a life today that is better than good.  My state of being is no longer limited by the state of my circumstances in the material world, but all my needs are met.  I don't have financial security or material prosperity but I have a loving family and a host of friends with whom I share a common philosophy of living, something that I never had before save for a destructive one. I show milestones in life such as emotional stability, motivational recovery, discovery of purpose, children, in short, self-actualization as concentric ripples on the upward path.

I had a moment in the parking garage where I was ascending the west stairwell overlooking the part of town around Shoal creek from an angle that I had never seen before.  I stopped for a second and just took it in.

In the afternoon I went to my human growth and development class.  There was a woman in there that caught my attention.  She was constantly in motion and made bizarre expressions and gestures.  She did a sort of dance that I am very familiar with, it is the tweaker twitch.  It is the dance of death that I have often seen in women with the disease of severe addiction and late stage alcoholism.  I probably wouldn't mention it except that I wondered a lot about her circumstances.  I wondered what her life is like, she has that homeless person tan and skin texture.  Then in the evening I met a person at Dairy Queen near the campus to buy a text book for the class.  While I was there the woman from the class emerged from a hole in the fence behind the building.  She was carrying several large dairy queen cups and a water jug which she filled with water.  On top of that, the person drove up with the book and she was a student from the class that had to drop.  She recognized the woman also.

My wife didn't have to work this evening and I got to watch a little league world series game with the kids.  I was grateful that all my needs are provided for.

Thanks be to God for this life.