1. It was to be a journal. I’ve kept journals since I was a teen. I have cardboard boxes of years of life, all the woes and Suffering of Poor Werther, the jobs and work and enlightenment, the friends and wives and family Even I find it boring and repetitive. Yet I didn’t like it when my ex wife at a moment of evil spite stole these very personal accounts. She by contrast didn’t care for history and destroyed history of various kinds. She didn’t like the truth and preferred a marketed image reality. I never knew how deeply disturbed some folk were until I saw how she could twist the truth and thoroughly believe her lies and reject the evidence directly in front of her. She was called a borderline personality disorder what was once called a female sociopath. I was gaslighted. Her narcissism learned in the drama and trauma of her childhood long before I encountered the fall out was a defence terribly constructed. I actually had the arrogance to believe I could ‘rescue’ her from her self loathing and conniving and her perspective of rank paranoia. I truly believed and still do that I am a child of God and a channel of that love when I am not myself afraid or twisted. The experiment failed and I was quite thankful to get out alive . The women in the family had a history of attempted murder and mayhem. I am thankful that I come from similar stock and we both found ourselves channelling our ancestors who lived by tooth and nail. I left when her physical violence and drug addiction became too much. She was right , I didn’t love her enough. I was afraid. I fell back to my first life saving course where I learned that to be of any use I must not die in the process of rescuing another. I’ve probably never forgiven myself that weakness. What kind of male praying mantis am I not to offer my head Saint John like to the queen’s whim. So the journal is a personal account of skewed reality seen through the eyes of subjectivity and self pity.
2. I wanted to keep a record of my writing of my profession and the ideas and observations I had in psychiatry and addiction. I’m a specialist in medicine and I have always planned to write some books about the good in my fields of endeavour, hopefully sharing insights and experiences. I put together a books based on these writing and musings using a cut and paste and edit method which was partly successful. When I published my first book of poetry I was interested in learning the ‘art form publishing’ but wasn’t that interested in it. I live everything to do with writing and once had a total fascination with fountain pens, inks and paper. . Now I love my word processor and keyboard. I’m presently working on a cut and paste book about the life of my dog taking the pictures and writing of our journeys together from my blog. I have the outline for a book on psychiatry and a book on recovery and will incorporate cut and paste items from the blog when I get down to actually producing this greater work, the book
3. I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences of God and spirituality. I’ve been on about God since I was a child and praying by my bedside with my mother, going to church, becoming the president of the amalgamated baptist youth groups, teaching sunday school, studying theological at University of Winnipeg, becoming a yogi disciple in the 70’s, studying comparative religions, doing courses in Christian Spirituality at St. Mark’s Catholic College, Regent College, Vancouver School of Theology, and taking on line courses in Hebrew as well as attending Bible Study with the Baptist, United Church of Canada, Anglicans and Pentecostal all the while learning more about Buddhism and Taoism and Suffism, meditating for decades formally, with monks and religious leaders, attending ashram and eventually getting a master degree in theological studies of spiritulaity on line from the University of California. I thought it marvellous that the original school I’d done ‘experience diploma’ with got bought by Pakistan and was eventually shamed by the mainstream. What irony. Shocking. I continue to play hide and seek with God, am a Christian and pray all the time, meditating daily and enjoy best talking about God in the presence of others, considering that Jesus said, where two or more are gathered in my name there too am I. So at least Gilbert and I are gathering in Jesus’s name daily. Jesus means ‘god within’ and Christ means ‘god will come again’.
4. I was once a ‘yuppie’ very upper middle class, in the midst of the leaders and shakers of the world and hob nabbed with the greats. I loved the phrase ‘lives of quiet desperation’. I had trained as a psychiatric psychotherapist and loved Jung’s terms “persona and shadow’. I was interested in the ‘self’ and the finding of the ‘core self’ and the freeing of patients ‘creativity’. I was trained to confront and challenge and very much enjoyed releasing people from their demons. My first interest was personality disorder especially borderlines. I came to see how borderline personality disorder was untreated post traumatic stress disorder until proven otherwise. I was able to watch patient after patient in therapy with me become free and move along on their developmental course. Mental health is the ability to love, work and play. So I used the external qualifiers as evidence of successful therapy. Men and women alone went on to marry. Women had children. Workers were promoted. Students went from failing to getting A’s. Loners connected with their communities. Suicidals stopped trying to kill themselveds. Paranoids learned to trust again. Phobics overcame their phobias. It was clearly ‘evident’ subjectively and objectively that I was doing excellent work. At one point I had a 2 years waitlist and mostly had word of mouth referral for therapy from successful patients. I was always praying and felt touched by grace.
Psychotherapy was a process very akin to the surgery I’d begun doing. It wasn’t ‘counselling’. It wasn’t massage. If you didn’t encounter or address the negative transference you were merely flashing your tit and feeding the infant and keeping the infant dependent. The difficulty was in the developmental adolescent phrase and leaving home phrase of therapy. If the patient continued to ‘need’ you then you were like a surgical patient who never was discharged from hospital. Meanwhile I have seen people off and on over decades much like any other medical condition where the persons’ condition waxes and wanes and further brief therapy is needed. My work with trauma got me into emergency departments and jails and asylums and working with military, police and refugees.
During this time I was still associated with the university and the hospitals and institutions and the dominant authoritative structures. I was increasingly aware that Owen Barfield was right about ‘saving the appearances’ and that Scott Peck was right on with his book “People of the Lie’. I became increasingly aware of what is best called evil but has a variety of politically correct equivilants like sociopaths and toxic work places and psychopaths and takers and soul suckers. The list goes on.
I began to see that patients who did not get better were often limited by others who were invested in their misery and poverty. I found myself increasingly in the realm of the social aspects of patient care fighting the good fight and seeing that husbands wives parents, bosses and elected officials and judges and beurocrats were often corrupt greedy and dangerous emotionally physically and morally. I began to see that they lived for the darkness. I met the shadow people and in my personal journal, a little bout with alcohol and marijuania and the illegal industries associated with the production, I was surprised that I became addicted to tobacco and that I couldn’t quit smoking until I quit marijuana and alcohol and a year later I didn’t start them up again but concluded that the alcohol was the personal gateway drug. Certainly trauma was the gateway drug and I was diagnosed with PTSD after repeated betrayal, sexual abuse, and countless near death experiences.
It’s hard to say because I really was addicted to smoke. It was only much later that I regularly drank but I saw how I was impaired though not ‘that impaired’ and that my ‘culture’ was commonly people just like me though most further along the rabbit hole. They all ‘looked good on the outside.’ I remember offending a leading government power broker who subsequently tried to ‘ruin’ me in every way possible for ‘my sake’. I’d told her that the acronym for FINE was ‘fucked in side and nice exterior’. This was the street version of Jung’s Persona and Shadow. I didn’t know at the time that people who were most upset at the word ‘fucked’ were themselves usually perverted. I was seeing these very insane personality disorders in suits in my office their sexual proclivities were bizarre but they presented as ‘good people’ by ‘the lady protests too much’.
I saw that transparency and openess were positives but dangerous. I wanted to share in recovery which began 20 plus years ago that the ‘inner experience’ was diverse. The critical matter was the behaviour. I was seeing more and more invasion of the individual on behalf of the State just like the Catholic church and Islam invaded the ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ of their servants. It was one thing to ‘confess’ and ‘share’ in private but it was another to be interrogated and threatened such that people lived lives of quiet desperation behind self inflicted walls. We have two forms of coercion which are clearly good and bad depending. They’re called asylums and jails. I worked on both.
I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings, as crazy as they are as evidence that ‘courage ‘ is not ‘absence of fear’ but rather doing good despite fear. I had seen so many people, especially in the halls of recovery,, who were ashamed of their thoughts and feelings and literally frozen. I wanted to show that I as a leader and a relative success by so many societal standards wasn’t ‘particularly sane in my thinking.’ I wanted people to consider their thoughts as we do the free for all in the meeting before we edit the group and go on to decide behaviour . This is indeed the creative process. In my office I’d seen leaders of the country, world champions, multi millionaires and leading military brass, priests, chiefs, scientists, bishops, and whatever world acclaimed individual one could think of. Their inner lives were mostly more mixed up and confused and troubled but they did what I did, they sought help and shared. Their behaviour was mostly admirable and superior to those who isolated. I’d spent years in ;psychotherapy training to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist only to said to be insane based on the ‘proof that I’d seen a psychiatrist’ by one of the local sociopaths psyhiatrists who had never seen anyone since he graduated psychiatry and saw his success in dollar signs. He was so poor that all he had was money. All he sought was power. An inferiority complex with egomania. So common in addiction.
I saw that the personality disorders I was treating which didn’t get better principally had drug and alcohol problems. The course in therapy then was as dramatic as it is today. Drugs and alcohol really interfered with learning and coping. As I moved through my own recovery seeing that it was as much a matter of association and what the bible calls ‘principalities’ I really did have to consider tribal association and effect of tribe. This is a better word than ‘culture’ which has been skewed from it’s origins to describe ‘cultures of addiction’ and ‘cultures of pedophiles’. I prefer to say ’tribes of addicts’. The tribe is our history Culture once referred to the highest and we spoke of ‘cultured people’ but today we are faced with ‘reductionism’ and various forces which affect individuals mightily.
So I wanted to share my journal, something that for years sat in brown card board boxes . I have as a result had wonderful discussions and made great friends and found like minded people through this process. It was an experiment. A stream of consciousness experiment which was useful in a time when the world was safer.
The attack on freedom of speech in Canada and the outright war on the west and especially the war on Christianity which held truth and love highest is making this idea of Canadianism a bit more treacherous. I consider this trend to openess a peculiar Canadian trait and all the friends I know from other countries are astonished at my openness because in their ‘country , culture and religion’ they could not do what I do. They sometimes call me demonic because it is so alien for them to encounter a psychiatrist who speaks openly. This is just what Canada was a bout.
Most people live lives of fear and die of internalized tension and stress. My interest in ’psychosomatic illness’ began with a wish to see the effects of psychotherapy in the physical world. Over the years I’ve ‘cured’ but mostly prolonged the lives of individuals by addressing their shame, anger, and fear, and helping them work through this ‘anger turned inward’ which presents as pain, physical disability, fatigue. I am limitted in what I can do because of the industry which exists to perpetuate this but it’s tied to my work with addiction. I don’t take credit for anything I do When I did surgery I had pride but only because of the illusions of action. Philosophically and spiritually I’ve known that I’m just part of a vast process but I have done the right thing. I’ve been a member of a team and directed the team. The team humility is to give credit to a pill or what I’ve called the ‘jelly bean’ but the pill is the magic of years of silence and countless doctors and caregivers .
I’m just the kazoo in that symphony and yet I know the kazoo is critical. The kettle drums are out of control these days and often the string section is whining on and on when the brass are constantly contained. I’ve never had a solo kazoo performance in my life except in my mind , that place of mental masturation and folly. In the world we are as the natives say ‘all my relations’ . We’re all interconnected.
I was taught by Dr. Carl Ridd that we were made in the image of God and that’s god’s imagination and I’ve always been part of God. I am star stuff. As my sponsor Scotty used to say “God doesn’t make junk’.
So those are reasons for this blog.
I”ve also loved photography combined with words, those coffee table books. The blog lets me do that. A combined platform.
So far God is happy with me. Not that I am but I know that God is. I worry I’m not ready for death and am more addicted to life the older I get. I am struggling with concepts of ‘letting go’ and ’surrender’. Thy will be done not my will.
Thank you Jesus.
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