This morning during prayer my thoughts drifted into the idea of critical thinking. I thought of it as a filter. There have been times when this concept has come up in conversation and the terms critical thinking have not seemed precisely right, it seems too aggressive. Maybe critical filter, or rational filter, or filter of reason is more appropriate.

In Personal Adjustment class our professor talked more about death and dying. It was very helpful in understanding how to be attentive to the needs of those coping with death or life crisis. I thought of my friend with a serious illness, and of my sister with cancer.

This got me thinking about Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of death. I thought about how this could be helpful for both those near, and the person themselves, in understanding the psychological states in the process of dying. I thought about how this could facilitate the state of acceptance and help improve the time that the person has and perhaps in their legacy.

My biggest interest in these stages however, is in relation to all the other losses and changes in life. We talked about the losses in our lives and drew pictures of them. I remembered how i went to the Kubler-Ross website and looked into her books and found out that she and others apply the stages in this way.

I think this will be extremely helpful in helping those struggling to admit their addiction to understand where they are and move towards action.

During Human Growth and Development class a discussion ensued about the condition of learned helplessness. There was a guy in class who couldn't get how people could fall into this behavior. I thought of all the book reports in Personal Adjustment class that covered the deeply traumatic lives of people that explain this problem. I realized how much I have befitted from these accounts, however difficult they were to sit through.

This morning I remembered that a friend called last night and asked to borrow a few bucks. I didn't meet his request last night, partly out of caution with people in recovery, but mainly because I was putting my kids to bed. I felt a little guilty for not being more willing to be helpful but looking back it was probably the right choice.

This morning the guy followed up with me and met me at school. I wished that I could help him more as he is genuinely trying to get on his feet. Interestingly enough, the topic in my Social Services class was on the good and bad of being a SS worker. Our professor talked at length about detaching and not trying to help too much or getting personally involved or too invested in outcomes.

Today I thought some more about existential psychotherapy, I read on a website of the givens of existence that listed them in additional terms and included a fifth:
1. Freedom, Responsibility, and Agency
2. Death, Human Limitation, and Finiteness
3. Isolation and Connectedness
4. Meaning vs. Meaninglessness
5. Emotions, Experience, and Embodiment
I also thought about my own theory of the structures of the psyche. To the idea of the being as composed of 3 parts:
1. Intellect: the mind, thinking, logic, reason
2. Emotion: the heart, instinct, motivational force,
3. Intuition: the soul, gut feeling, choice, judgement
I thought of how they have distinct but not separate functions. How they overlap in a sort of Venn diagram.

This afternoon I had to write up my mom's life story. I felt a great deal of honor and gratitude to have her as my mother.

Once again I have a cold. This morning 10 minutes before rising I felt so bad that I didn't think I was going anywhere today. I had to abbreviate my prayers today. I am grateful to have this worked out and that I did get to make take my youngest daughter to school and make it to my first class.

We got to talk about isolation, loneliness, and solitude today. The professor introduced us to the existential approach to psychotherapy. This approach resonated greatly with me. I was immediately taken with the idea of a common set of givens of existence: Freedom, Death, Isolation and Meaning.

After class I fell into a great deal of discomfort and felt distressed. I stopped at the bookstore but was in so much physical discomfort that I had to leave. When I got home I thought that there was no way that I was going anywhere else the rest of the day. I ate some chicken soup and drank a 7 up, took some medicine and went to bed.

Amazingly I felt better later and made it to my afternoon class.

I got to go to a meeting tonight. I got to connect with some friends that I have been missing lately. Our topic was about spiritual fitness and the psychic change that comes with this work. I thought about when it happened for me. About how I had gotten sober many times and struggled through months of fighting off the obsession to drink and/or use every day like clockwork. This was a monkey on my back that I took as a given. But when I began the 12 step process and had begun the personal inventory, at about 35 days clean, I noticed that the obsession had not come that day. Then a little while later I couldn’t remember the last day that this happened. I also had begun to experience an entire paradigm shift in my life struggles. This was astonishing to me because I had never experienced this type of sobriety.

Thanks be to God.

This Monday all my kids were home due to a school holiday. After my morning class I packed a lunch loaded the girls in the bicycle stroller and the boys rode on their bikes to the park. We had a great time, the weather was nice, the boys and i threw the football.

In the evening my mom came over and she helped me with my end of semester project by telling me her life story. I felt like I got to know her better through the perceptions and feelings that she shared with me about the events in her life. We went on for a long time and she had much more to share but I had to cut it short. I would like to do this again and hear more.

Thanks be to God.

This morning in meditation I thought of the idea of "Physician Heal Thyself" as the focus of my end of semester report. I started out my prayers in a state of worry and fear about school but found a good sense of focus and received a few more increments of clarification.

I also thought about the idea that my prayers (and those of the newly sober) should include a petition for removal of craving and obsession.

Today I was grateful for the extra hour of sleep.

Before mass I got to listen to watch the litany of the Sacred Heart (on TV) and listen to the scripture readings and to a sermon online. I am grateful for this also because we had no choir at mass and we had a fundraising presentation in lieu of the homily. The priest presented a great concept in regard to the afterlife, that of the subrational the suprarational argument. I thought the subject of belief in the afterlife was very synchronous with the book I am reading about the man dealing with his impending death.

also: Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to the absurd") is a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence.

I had to exercise a good deal of patience with my kids before church. My wife and I made a mistake by taking my youngest daughter who had a fever last night. She didn't feel well and cried a lot in the children's liturgy with my wife. When the kids were released I took my daughter out of the sanctuary and we sat in the van until mass was over. When my wife came out I asked her how things went and she said terrible. She went on to characterize the children as behaving badly every mass, I had to correct her in their defense and point out that the kids had been pretty good especially when they go with me alone. She went on to vilify the children's behavior and I found myself pointing out her short temper and inconsistent conduct with them as the cause of her problems.

As I sat in the van before she and the older kids came out, I listened to a talk by Fr. Corapi in which he quoted the parable: "Physician heal thyself", that is that one should attend at their own defects not those of others.

I am still not sure if this was self centered, or inconsiderate, or unjustifiably aroused bitterness. Or if perhaps it was appropriate for me to assert this in an effort to help our family.

My parents came to visit today. We had a great time together, my wife ran errands with my mom and I got to spend time practicing baseball with my dad and the boys in the back yard. I also got to line up my psychology assignment with my mom.

In the evening I got to go to an admissions function with the Knights of Columbus.

This Saturday morning I find myself really having to resist the injunctions that I have decreed for myself this week:
I have not been productive enough,
Our money is going too run out,
I am going to be dropped from math,
I am going to fail,
I can't do this,
My sobriety programming is lapsing,
It's all her fault.
None of these are true, they are all based on my fear instinct and I can walk through them by trusting and relying on infinite God rather than finite self.

This morning I was beginning to get resentful when my wife didn't wake up early and I had to attend to the kids. But she did get up at a fairly reasonable time and I was able to get started on an essay for the end of the semester assignment. My real problem here (again) was my own feelings not her actions. It was the "B" in the A-B-C's of resentment that was missing, it was my B-lief about the cause, not the true cause. I also got to spend some time catching up on journaling.

I have a simmering anxiety over not being able to do my review journaling again. This is the greatest gap that I have experienced in the past 7 years. I must again look to the ends, not the means, to keep my head up, while at the same time allowing the motivation to drive me to get back on track.

After lunch my wife started yelling at me for giving the kids leftover Halloween candy. She griped at me as she was passing through the living room and I was in the kitchen. I answered her in a regular voice that I was just giving them this for dessert. She went off on a rant yelling at me that they don't need dessert after every meal, it's not a candy free-for-all, they don't just get whatever they want, and several other things. She yelled at me long on hyperbole and short on communication. As I realized that she was not open to reason or calm, I simply backed away from the argument. The last thing I heard her say was that I am always concerned about them not getting fat, the implication being that I am contradicting myself. I thought about how it is reasonable to have dessert, how I never let them overeat or encourage large proportions, how she has always had problems with serving sizes, how my concern is that they get exercise (something she knows nothing about).

Here is one of those examples of how these days she has s very short fuse and a strong resolve for her demands to be met.

Last night I woke up and my wife was holding my hand. I thought today about how we don't share affection right now. I thought about the reasons why. She has always expressed to me that the initiative lies with me, that when i don't express affection to her she feels rejected and inhibited. Sometimes she holds back because she is angry but this rarely lasts and she typically recovers from anger in a way that is completely foreign to me. I on the other hand, do not recover from angry emotions quickly and even when I forgive, I still do not feel enthusiastically affectionate for a while.

In looking at the reasons for my reservation of affection, I think it is because I am shielding myself from coercion. I feel like that she has a mountain of ambitious, intricate and high demands for every aspect of all of our lives and the minute we become affectionate then she employs this to gain what she wants. This can't be good and it wasn't always this way. It seems that she regressed about the time that she started school.

There, now that I wrote about it, I have to resist it and let it go. I mustn't carry this resentment into every new day. I need to approach the moment without the baggage of the past.

Later in the day while updating my journal for Thursday I came across the following teaching about/from the encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI:
"To the Pope as to all his predecessors, marital relations are much more than a union of two people. They constitute a union of the loving couple with a loving God, in which the two persons create a new person materially, while God completes the creation by adding the soul. For this reason, Paul VI teaches in the first sentence of Humanae Vitae that the transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator."

I no longer felt inadequate for having to work at marriage, not just be happy.
I no longer felt guilty that the main love I feel for my wife is when I see my children in her.

The past few days I've got extremely tired in the afternoon and passed out really hard. I have to admit that this is troubling me. I want to be highly disciplined and energetic. Maybe my body is fighting off a virus, the kids are all sick with one staying home for the past two days. The past 3 days I have been the one to get the kids going in the morning. Come to think of it leading up to that my wife was sick and I had to carry much more of the load than usual.