This Friday I got off to a mentally slow start and never really felt like I got going.  Then I tried to study but had to attend to my youngest daughter repeatedly.  She just wanted someone to play with her.  I set her up to play several times but each time she would come sit in front of me and plead for me to play with her.  I finally gave in when she started falling asleep in her chair.

I never did feel right all day and I told myself that it was the moon cycle.

My wife was gone all day working into the evening so I had kid duty all day.  In the afternoon I took my middle son to therapy and took the other kids to the park.  I ran into my friend's wife and two sons and the oldest joined my oldest and i in throwing the football.

In the evening my serenity ran low and I was disappointed that I didn't get to go to a meeting.  But I enjoyed my time with the kids and we watched some cool cartoons.  At the end of the day I had a nostalgic feeling and the Flock of Seagulls song "Space Age Love Song" running through my head.

Thanks be to God for this day.

This Thursday in personal adjustment class a student gave a report on a book about a guy who lived in Apartheid South Africa.  He talked about how the book gave a good description of the step by step process in which that system evolved.  I asked him if the book gave a better understanding of how these sorts of atrocious policies evolve and how good people think they are doing good things.  A classmate asked for explanation and I used the example of how the Germans were lured into Nazism little by little, justified by the perceived injustice and suffering of their people.  It didn't seem to be understood and my had to interject and try to explain.  It seemed to validate the reason that I brought this up.  Because I think that people do not try hard enough to understand why people do bad things, they prefer to just think these people are bad.  It is because of this that people and social groups continue to commit injustices.

After the book report our professor then talked about forgiveness.  She first talked about the premise that knowing how to forgive is essential.  That holding on to resentment is like taking a drink of poison and expecting the other person to die.  She went on to say that forgiving is not just to forget.  That one cannot forgive by the will to do so alone.  This resonated strongly with me.   Then she talked about a book called Toxic Parents by Susan Forward.  In it the author discusses the struggles of children with highly abusive parents.  The author expressed some attitudes about forgiveness that I found questionable.  They are as follows from my notes:
People who have been severely hurt by there parents don't have to accept what their parents did to them.
They don't have to understand what they did.
They don't have to be okay with it.
They don't have to forgive like God.
They have to turn loose of the power that person has on them.  <---I agree with this
They shouldn't let them off the hook.

It's possible that I misunderstood part of this.  But in further discussion I realized that I was understanding the dimensions of forgiveness that she was describing.  It seemed very difficult to sustain.  She went on to tell the story of the book the Sun Flower in which Simon Wiesenthal tells the story of the Nazi that admitted his misdeeds to him on his death bed and asked for forgiveness, which he did not give.  She asked the class for their thoughts and the whys.

I had to say that I would have forgiven him, but this was given my understanding of forgiveness now.  I said that I would have thought of all the times in the past that people of my culture have committed atrocities to other peoples.  However, I certainly understood Mr. Wiesenthal's point of view since I would have treated it similar to him in the past.

Here are my thoughts on forgiveness:
I must forgive in order to be free of resentment, if not it will rot my soul.
I can forgive the person if I separate them from the offense.
In order to do this I must treat the offender as a sick person, a good person who went wrong somewhere.
It is imperative that I understand my nature, human nature, that I am just as capable of having gone this astray but for good fortune.
This in no way diminishes the gravity of the offense.
I don't have to like the person, or validate the behavior, just stop hating and blaming.
I must recognize that wrong paradigms, bad environment, wrong attitudes are the source of evil.
I must forgive in order to stop the cycle of justifiable resentment.
This sort of radical forgiveness might not be possible without faith in a Higher Power (at least its not for me).

I looked up the book after class and found it disturbing.  The coauthor's bio showed his picture and which he was between two candles and had prosthetic horns.  I found this eerie.

In the evening I attended initiation into a fraternal order of men at my church.  I am excited to become more involved for my family but I was troubled by the spooky rituals.

Thanks be to God for this day.

This morning I got off to slow start.  I took the kids to school and then went to class.  I finished the book for my end of semester report while waiting for class to start.  In class we talked about behavioral approaches to therapy.  I had some stimulating thoughts about sensitization, stimulus, reinforcement, and cause and effect in relation to relationship between the biological mechanisms and the reaction logic involved in conditioned responses.

After lunch I passed out for an hour and never really felt productive again.  I tried to get started on some school work but I never could get it together.

After I brought the kids home I got into a pretty serious confrontation with my son over following my directions.  He didn't want to do his baseball hitting practice.  I had to be steadfast while trying to be flexible and reasonable with him.  He ended up doing sentences for showing a ad attitude.  But eventually he did do his assigned tasks and actually had fun.  I joined him for the latter half.

I got to talk on the phone to a friend who is new in recovery.

I also did some practice with the two younger ones.  They are showing some good progress.  A friend of my son came to visit from 3 blocks away and when it was time for him to go home we rode bikes to escort him there.

Thanks be to God for this day.

This morning I had some thoughts about humility again. This might have been something I thought about some a little while back. It is the precise nature of humility. What is the greater dimension of the virtue? Perhaps rather than just being a feeling of modesty it is the true and more accurate awareness of the limits of one's abilities and the recognition that the seemingly less virtuous or less proficient person is actually just a less fortunate person. The person is not lesser in natural aptitude, rather that they are a product of less fortunate circumstances or environment than me.  There, but for the grace of God, go I.  Perhaps the significance of this is that one can never really see the truth if they are not in a state humble awareness, and one can never truly forgive another without this.

In Personal Adjustment class today our professor had us read stories about people who overcame great adversity and tragedy in life and went on to great success and self actualization by using their experience to inspire and help others.

At noon I met my wife at my son's school and we ate lunch with him for his birthday.

This evening I got to go to a 12 step meeting.  A guy from our group brought his brother who has double digit sobriety.  He brought our topic, "have you a sufficient substitute?", a line from page from page 152 in the Big Book.

This got me thinking about the parallels between my new life and the old.  Both involved going to a place to share an experience of conviviality, companionship, and colorful imagination.  Both also involved a critical element on which this experience centered, in the bar it was the drinking experience, in the AA club it is the spiritual experience.

I also thought about what it was like to hang out at the bar without the booze.  Sometimes I would go there perhaps sick, or perhaps needing a sober day, with the idea that I would just drink coffee or a coke and play pool or something.  Or, I would run out of money, or get cut off, and still hang out.  It was stupid, boring, and glum.  It was a whole lot of boring people hanging out at the same place for hours on end, playing the same old games and the same old music and talking about nothing.

Likewise when I was in AA without a spiritual experience.  Before I committed to the spiritual life or when my spiritual vitality ran dry due to lack of action.   It would be interesting for a while but it would start to grate on me.  The same people would say the same things every week, they were always grateful and everything was a freakin' miracle.  It was stupid boring and glum, it was like the bar without the booze.

I guess you could say that the booze put the spirit in the bar.  The spirits, the booze, was the power that made it all wonderful.  It fired the imagination, livened the mood, and brought together people who normally would not mix.  But it came with a price, It was an addicted power that robbed me of the most sacred value of all, that of free will, of the power of choice.  In the end, as I became more and more isolated, it robbed me of the very experience that drew me in.

In the 12 Step fellowships the experience is spirited by a Higher Power.  But the experience is counter to the former.  It is a progressively greater, it increases one's imagination, joys and rewards, and relations to others.  It begins by willingly giving oneself and progresses into increasingly greater freedom.  Most of all the spiritual experience gives one back the ability to function, succeed, and gives meaning and purpose to life.

I had another slow start this morning but not as bad as yesterday.  I never really got a chance to pray effectively until I was in mass.

Our readings today were about justice in eternity for evildoers.  On the surface these seemed liked difficult beliefs to deal with but with a little thought there were two simple lessons that could be ascertained from them:  1. Everything on this earth is impermanent, so don't place your faith there, and 2. One can transcend the injustice on this earth through faith in eternal justice from God.  

This afternoon my son and I invented 2 fun baseball games in the backyard to make practicing fun.

I had feelings of aimlessness today but trudged through them just doing the next right thing.

This evening I got to go to a meeting. We read pages that had a couple of major ideas that I found to be great sources of inspiration.  I thought about commenting in the meeting but chose to remain silent to practice humility. Several group members commented on the same thoughts that I had.  They brought up some excellent perspectives that I agreed and disagreed with: 

"Burn the idea into the consciousness of every man that he can get well regardless of anyone."  I thought about how this was a revolutionary idea to me for it's emphasis on change from within, despite one's circumstances and domestic difficulties.

"Both you and the new man must walk day by day in the path of spiritual progress."  Someone pointed out that this is an imperative that we must be willing to do intense sponsorship work to stay sober.  They pointed out that it is in the chapter "Working with Others" therefore it is so.  But in looking at the context, I took it as an imperative to uphold the standards of spiritual progress and  guard against become entangled in the new man's domestic affairs.  

"In our belief any scheme of combating alcoholism which proposes to shield the sick man from temptation is doomed to failure. "  This was the one that really caught my attention. I remembered how this really struck me when I was trying to find my belief.  It occurred to me that it was an incredibly bold statement for a fledgling organization trying to build credibility.  The idea that they would not use techniques of aversion but rather conversion was either proof of a miracle or based on experience.  Given that they all had under 5 years of sobriety, clearly it was the former.

Thanks be to God.

I felt out of it all morning.  I guess my body is still fighting off this virus.  I wondered if my joy/reward system is still screwed up.  I wondered if motivational fatigue is a form of depression.  Not the sort of depression where one feels sorry for themselves, but rather the sort of depression where one's motivational drive is low.  I thought about how I would probably do better at getting going if it were not for the immediate clamor of children in the house.  There were two kids here that spent the night in addition to my four.  Then two more came over and the party from last night continued.

I tried my best to recover at mid day.  I wanted to study but never was able to find the solitude.  My wife went to work at 3 so my service load doubled at that point.

At some point in the evening I was cooking dinner and I suddenly smelled something that made me think of cocaine.  I felt a moment of desire in my mind.  It passed immediately and I just found it remarkable that this could still happen, and so randomly.  I wasn't fantasizing about any part of the old life, I wasn't stewing in anger, I haven't had any conscious desire for anything remotely close to partying in years now.  Other than the occasional dream in deep sleep, the old life is like an ancient myth that doesn't even seem relevant anymore.

I was too busy to stop and think about it at the time but later I wondered again about this.  I also thought about how much time I still spend thinking about my addiction.  I thought back to the class about grieving and loss.  I thought about how drinking and using and my sex attitudes were part of my identity.  I was really attached to the part of me that savored imported beers, high quality blow, and lustful pursuits.

It is easy to understand how this left a void within me when I was in early sobriety.  When my sense of identity was still edgy, just without the intoxicants.  But what I find astonishing is how it still exists now after all these years, now that my concerns are so different.  Now my thoughts and identity are dominated my family, my studies, and religion.  You would think that there would be nothing in my thought life that were attached to the old passions.

Thanks be to God for this day.

This morning I recalled looking for an easy reference to the Erikson's stages yesterday in class and decided to find one for a single page. I had to draft it myself and fell into a flow with it and couldn't stop until I was done.

This and a review of the stages of grief lead me to the stages of change model.

Stages of Change
1. Precontemplation - Has no intention to take action within the next 6 months
2. Contemplation - Intends to take action within the next 6 months.
3. Preparation - Intends to take action within the next 30 days and has taken some behavioral steps in this direction.
4. Action - Has changed overt behavior for less than 6 months
5. Maintenance - Has changed overt behavior for more than 6 months.
6. Termination - Overt behavior will never return, and there is complete confidence that you can cope without tear of relapse.

Today I learned of the condition of sensitization which is the opposite of tolerance. I realized that I experienced this.

I also came across the I-Change model of change:
1. Awareness - the result of accurate knowledge and risk perceptions of the person about his own behavior
2. Motivation - a person's attitude (the results of perceived advantages and disadvantages of the behavior), social influence beliefs (norms of others, behavior of others, and support of others) and self-efficacy expectations (the perceived ability to perform a particular health behavior).
Action - Self-efficacy, action planning and goal setting. Performing the new behavior, Coping or maintenance Development of skills required for the new health behavior.