Angry at God

I was fascinated to hear a Christian say, « I don’t know I’m angry at God. ».

I said « Jesus was angry at God » 

« Jesus can’t be angry at God. »

‘What about Eli Eli Lema Sabachtani. ‘My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?

Jesus taught « Do not be afraid »  Love and fear are opposites but anger is fear in ‘fight versus flight’ mode.  That’s the simplest division. The experience of abandonment is grief.

Jesus was angry at the money lenders. But when Jesus was on the cross, if he was suffering, he was ‘doing God’s will’.  Being obedient to God’s will doesn’t mean I’m ‘happy happy happy’. Jonah was angry.  Grief and suffering go hand in hand.

The ‘stages of grief described by Elizabeth Kuala Ross include ‘anger’.  Anger is a natural state.  Things can cause me to be angry but if I hold onto my anger then I can become resentful. The Bible is clear that we shouldn’t hold onto anger but it doesn’t deny anger is human. Holding onto anger or nurturing anger will turn one bitter.

 Jesus was ‘son of man’.  HE was all human. And all God. If he was just a God then he really wouldn’t have ‘suffered.  To be human is to have the full experience of humanity.  The whole issue of the nature of Jesus resulted in the Athanasian Creed and the Hypostatic Union of Jesus, perfectly divine and perfectly human, not a chimera and not a duality, but one.  One person of the trinity.

So I imagine if I’m a man of human nature on the cross doing the will of God but dying slowly in the most horrid pain, I’d feel ‘anger at God’ knowing that God’s perfect love but at that moment of sever pain feeling abandoned . I may know God will not reject me but I am human. Jesus was human even if there are those who would reduce him to an idol.

Today ‘Why have you forsaken me, “while it might remind us of an earlier psalm, might well be said in the vernacular of today, ‘fuck you God.  Indeed there is a movement by this name and a major controversy. People leave the church and no one question if they are angry. People are afraid of anger in themselves and others. 

In psychiatry, in ‘somatic depression’ or the ‘somatic sympton disorder,’ we think of pain as clothed in grelief and fear and anger. Abraham saw depression as ‘anger turned inward’.  Pain is by extension anger turned inward. Somatization and conversion disorder are pain or other physical symptom like fatigue as well, understood to be a mental disorder, not denying the ‘pain’ any more than one would deny the excruciating pain of ‘phantom limb pain’ but recognizing the materialistic error is in the brain, or the biopsycosocial error is in the ‘mind’.  It’s not simply  a ‘brain’ disease perse but a ‘mind disease’as well.

Anxiety is said to be the measure of one’s distance from God as well as a measure of one’s humanity.

It helps one see ‘suicidal thinking’ as ‘anger turned inward””’  more clearly and understand the ‘seriousiuslness of ‘emotional pain’.  Emotional pain can be deadly.

In ‘communication psychiatry’. Everything is sen as ‘communication’. Cancer is seen as ‘that which can be said in on other way ».

The idea therapeutically in psychosomatic medicine is to look for a new and different approach when conventional therapy fails.  If the door handle turned doesn’t open the door , turn the door handle in the other direction.  

Phillips wrote the sweet little classic, « your God is too small ».  

The God of Love is big enough to take all your anger and all your pain.  God doesn’t reject man.  The devil was said to have turned his back on God because he’d rather watch his shadow than look into God’s light.  

Aliénation and isolation are précurseurs for suicide .  Dehumanization and the feeling of being unloved, alone and rejected.  It’s fundamental to survivalhaving purpose as Man’s Search for Meaning showed.  We die most from ‘neglect’

Jesus was foul  mouthed and ill mannered with friends in low and high places. Inhis day and associated with the improper. Today the contemporary ‘cross’ might well be an ‘electrocution chair’, a ‘guillotine’ or a ‘noose.’ We have a Fondness for the symbolism of the museum Christianity and ‘cobweb Christianity’ as seen in the sentiment some view the ‘cross .’ But it can cause us to overlook the ideas of Jesus today.  Christ’s value is not as a ‘myth’ or ‘teaching story’ alone but as a ‘relationship today’.  If I get angry and my friend leaves me , Do I really have a friend in Jesus.  

All adolescents in their relationships with their parents go through this phase.  Today most Christians are unprepared for this adolescent phase of their spiritual relationship which is no surprise when the church seems unwilling to engage at the point of  ‘anger’, especially anger at God.  Rejection of God.  

Ultimately this is tied to suicide and addiction and pain. 

If it’s not the Cross then what is Glad Gethsemane. And why would Kierkegaard say Life is suffering unto death if was he not referring to pain and the burden of life, expulsion from Eden and loss of innoscence.

60 to 67 yo. Ron’s Death, IDAA Sturgis, Gilbert’s Blindness, Psychopaths and Sociopaths, Waitlists,

Sturges Harley Davidson Annual Motorcycle Festival: It was 2013 that I took my Harley Electroglyde and rode 5000 km Vancouver, Colorado, to Sturgis, South Dakota and back.  I was  the speaker at the International medical conference in Colorado and then rode on to Sturgis, the Annual Motorcycle Ralley.  I heard Kid Rock, ZZ Top and the Dooby Brothers. I loved seeing the antelope, bison and deer that I passed as I drove through the most beautiful country, doing 500 miles a day on average. I’d love starting my day listening to Christian singer song writer, Steve Bell. His song ‘it was on a morning like this’ about the birth of Jesus was so uplifting.  I’d later listen to Steppenwolf, Born to Be Free, remembering seeing the movie with Jack Nicholson as a kid and so longing to be riding a Harley across country. Now here I was.  So many drunks and drug addicts talk of ‘going to Sturgis’ yet their bikes don’t work, or they’ve sold them for drugs. I was just glad to be sober and glad to be riding.I stopped at Custer’s Last Stand and bought an American Saber I carried strapped to the back of my bike.  I brought back Sturgis ‘swag’, the shirts and t shirts.  It was a great adventure.  I tented in Sturgis with some combat vets and later would tent on the side of the road when I couldn’t find a motel on the way back. Rocketed to the fourth dimension.

My brother and sister in law bought a beautiful home in Hay Bay on the lake. It was his dream and they were so happy there. I loved visitting. Then he learned he had pancreatic cancer. I put my life on hold. He came first. He’d cared for my mother and father and me and his family, always there, always solid and loving and funny and brilliant. I shipped my boat down to Loyalist Cove and took him sailing. I had this idea if only he could sail enough maybe he’d have a miraculous cure. I was trying to get a license in Ontario so that I could spend more time there working part time to defray the costs of flights and being away from my practice. The administration and College’s totally screwed up creating barriers and demanding paper work and finally claiming that they’d introduced a ‘new protocol’ so required the ‘whole application to be redone’.  They were evil.  You can’t criticize them either. Like depots they remember and pay back. I’d criticized in an interview saying it was easier to get a license in another country than for a Canadian trained, Canadian citizen to move from province to province. 

It wasn’t long after that the Doctors of Ontario exposed the grossest corruption in the Ontario College beurocracy. The liberal government then fell after losing an untold wealth.  The Charbonneau enquire in Quebec showed the province run by mafia and biker gangs with millions. With the liberal government win the corruption seemed to just spread faster and thicker. 

When pretty boy air head dope smoker commie elite Trudeau was ‘gifted’ with the PM ship, my brother before the election had said, “I couldn’t live another 4 years of Liberal corruption”. He died.  

I blamed the government first. He’d worked for them and when he left they replaced him with three people. He’d been so stressed working in his work.  He had integrity and cared and believed in ‘excellence’ but the government had been so invaded by mediocrity and corruption. He loved his family so and worked always to give them the best he could.  He’d loved to have been an entrepreneur and take risks but instead he cared for family. After retirement he managed stocks and investments of my Dad and his own but always was there for family. He’d wanted to travel but he’d have so many obligations. 

He was the good son.

He was the smart one.

He told me how he’d read about my adventures and watch my course in life with mixed envy and sadness.

He’d been the one that I talked to when I’d been sodomized. He’d understood and let it pass. He didn’t judge me.  He liked when I stopped drinking.  Actually, he did judge me, He thought I didn’t save enough money. My father had been concerned that I worked without a pension. Both he and my brother ‘prepared for old age’.  I never expected to live half this long.  He was so careful with money and admonished me to save and invest. Yet here he was having taken care of everyone else but himself and dead as so many men of our generation, worn down by the work men have had , the unsung heroes, the back bone of society, not the dilettantes or the drama queens, but the ‘steady eddy’. That was him. Always there to be relied on.  The truest pillar. 

Canadian men were dying 10 years younger than women, the most critical factor being the work place. Equal job , truly equal, not the lying misinformation equal statistics manipulating, name changing states of the left but real hard data, men and women died the same. The home was the place of safety. Testosterone was the hormone of war and defence.  Men in the workplace were worn down by the stress ,dying of chronic stress disorder of heart disease and cancers.

My brother was to me like a soldier who gave himself for the home.  He told me that under all conditions he wanted to die at home, he’d seen his mother and father in hospital and seen the sickness and sadness there, and he wanted above all to be at Hay Bay. He asked me to do whatever it took to let him be there as long as he could. His beautiful loving wife Adell equipped the home for home care. I walked him and walked him even when he complained. I’d resurrected the dead by keeping them moving.

 “Don’t stop moving or they’ll throw dirt on you’.  We’d seen new nurses kill old people listening to their complaining.  Forget the pain and fatigue and keep them moving. My patients lived days, weeks and years longer than the textbook answer because « I keept them moving.’  

“Once you stop moving they throw dirt in your face.”

We talked privately. We’d shared a bed room as children and talked late in the night after our parents put us to bed.  Now here again it was like a continuation of that time.  Precious.  It comforted him to talk of the times in childhood when we shared a room, shared our fears and successes and reminisced about silly things that only he and I knew, the Russia Canadian Hockey games, mom’s popcorn and mandarins, dad’s snoring, the dogs farting. We laughed so sadly.  Life is so unkind . I still miss him and but so much of grief is self pity. He’s in a better place. 

I’d know that he’d join my father and mother and aunt and the dogs. Heaven was real to me, a place I’d seen and a world I’d looked into. I’d heard my mother and my grandmother telling me about it. I’d visitted the after life in dreams.  I loved the peninsula and the meetings there with the old ladies. I loved seeing the dogs again.  I have visions meditating.

I had withdrawn from my life here as much as possible to devote my time to my brother. Another office was sold out from under me, so I had to move and there the administration, these deeply evil, greedy dirty little people, rented me an office without the proper zoning. I was told by the city I had to cease and desist in a month.  I was grieving my brothers death and had a lying malingerer complain to the college when I refused to say she could never work again, her other doctors saying she could work again. She had black market jobs and didn’t want to work because she’d make less money. Increasingly patients were coming in wealthy on their ‘non taxable’ incomes while I struggled 12 hour days and paid the outrageous burden of taxes for the stoner government and their Quebec crony criminals. We’d learn that even the Quebec doctors worked half the hours for more pay, than western Doctors’s worked.

I’d hired two assistants and trained them only to have them foul up in a couple of months, one leaving for a boyfriend and one being deceitful and unfrustworthy. I actually had to fire the last one. For months though I was doing full time work and administrative work and training and teaching. It was exhausting. Then I got my last assistant.

My assistants was excellent at times but unreliable. She had another job and her own goals.  Computers and internet allowed staff to work on their own work whenever there wasn’t any immediate work. Even the garbage didn’t get taken out and the dog didn’t get walked. I was amazed at how good she could do a job but had to remind her about any routine like dealing with adolescents. I spoke with my colleagues only to find this was common for ‘millenials’, not at all the ‘steady eddie’s ‘ but rather the hare of the tortoise and hare race. Projects were done well but the day to day got forgotten. 

I was living in fear about what was done and what was left undone because the government was demanding ‘perfection’ from doctors with the typical superiority and judgementalness of dictators while ready to punish everyone for anything.  Meanwhile they were grossly mismanaging resources, corruption reigned and BC had a black market economy of countless billions. The health care system being given away for free to the illegal immigrants and everyone seeming to be getting government ‘free bes’ , while  I and the decreasing frontline workers were  the only one’s  working.  It felt like scabies.

My dog developed hereditary glaucoma and the veterinary and veterinary staff made the grossest errors which wouldn’t have saved his eye indefinitely but hastened his loss and increased his suffering for countless hours. The specialist was uncaring. I changed vets and found a wonderful canine ophthalmologist and excellent vet with wonderful veterinary assistants. It was sad as the vets there had been overall excellent and it was just more ‘staffing’ and ‘administration’ screw ups that caused the problems.  I couldn’t risk my dog.  With the new arrangement he had the best of care though the condition would continue and he’d be blind but that’s a year ahead of where I am in the overall tale.

Because of the dirty landlady, unfortunately Asian and soulessly money grubbing,  I didn’t  have an office anymore.  Again a great lawyer, Mr. Reilly came to my rescue and got me time from the City’s outrageous demands. The College said patients needed 3 months notice of close of practice but the city evicted me in 1 months. Thanks to Mr. Reilly I got the time to move. I had 50 boxes of records which I was told had to be kept till I died and yet they cost $200 a box to digitize and the storage locker for them was costing $700 a month. I couldn’t afford to retire or cut back. I was in an insane merry go round and yet whenever I went to the College of Physicians or walked into a government office I saw the doctors and staff sashaying, fat, purring cats , ‘looking busy’. I’d worked in government 2 years of my life and literally had nothing to do. Little bursts of activities but soul destroying committee meetings where we all sat and listened to some person pontificate.  

I was fortunate because I was working in others clinics for the addiction part of my work so asked and moved my practice into these walk in clinics. My income plummeted and my overhead sky rocketed but it was a joy to be among other doctors, not psychiatrists unfortunately, but other doctors, very good doctors, the best of the best.  I loved seeing the excellence and immediately saw that these people I most admired were working as if through molasses with all the micromanagement of government and the interference that the cancerous waste at the top created.  I wasn’t alone.  They were facing the same stupidity and vulgarity but keeping their heads up trying to make the best of the bad lot of the mismanagement at the top. 

I’d lose another year of sleep and nightmares and suicidal ideation watching this lying psychopath and her proxy warriors in government have their feeding frenzy attacking a good doctor. Meanwhile they were always like police celebrating catching jaywalkers while they let the killers in the profession go not even swarming them; I’d done their jobs on several occasions so knew directly their favouritism and cronyism ,corruption and deplorable behaviour. They’d sold their souls for swagger and pensions.  They had no shame and were barbarians with guns.  Disgusting people. I’d met some good folk there once but now I didn’t see them anymore.  Their insensitivity, arrogance and the poor communication and their lack of professionalism caused me to repeated consider suicide.  Just having to meet with them and watch their Nazi Doctor like displays of ‘tells’ afte ‘tells’ .  So ignorant of psychiatrists.  Their body launguage and vocal tones so loud.. Raucous laughter and serious grandiosity. Stupid people.  Sad.  They must have been selected for this lack of insight and superego lacunae.

I was again grieving and again the College was upstaging the dead.  The psychopaths always attack the weak and the College never gives a doctor a chance but kicks him or her when they’re down. I saw the ‘pattern’.  The government wanted to destroy doctors and had already reduced the ‘profession’ to the communist version. There was no more autonomy.  The merger of the ‘licensing’ body with their education function had taken away the critical ‘division of powers’ They’d secretly and slyly moved to a dictatorship that reduced the university to a functionary. I loved hearing that doctors wanted to join the teamsters because the profession had been destroyed. 

We had the largest beurocracy, least doctors and longest waiting lists and doctors were killing themselves mostly because of the grossest bullying,  incompetence of doctors playing at being lawyers, selected for their need for control and power and lack of integrity and lack of insight.  I’ve  sat and looked into heir eyes and seen that Judas look, the look people have when they’ve sold their soul for cheap. I once was criticized by them when I said ‘it was okay « if doctors  were asked to be escorts, the oldest profession being prostitution,  but I didn’t think I should told to be a street whore for them’. Yet that’s what it had become.

But I didn’t know for sure. Because being a psychiatrist my grief and confusion caused me to see the world through sun glasses. I couldn’t see the light anymore.  I was again questioning « selling life’ and ‘supporting this system’ when the life that was being offered was such a lie.  Also, maybe these people in government weren’t insectoid, I likened them to dung beetles,  but that was my perception. I’d see the lies of Trudeau , outrageously criminal deceitful unethical behaviour and in the new provincial governments it just happened that billions of dollars of money laundering occured and no government leader was shot or hung.  Every criminal I knew was rich beyond their wildest dreams. It was the best place to have two years of college and narcissism and a lack of moral compass. It was the third world. Overnight Canada had become the third world.

But was this me not seeing the flowers in the war. I was so sad with my brother gone and so angry with God and so uncertain as to what I was to do.

I bought a truck and said I’d pay it off. It’s good to do simple things. My mother had said she liked when I had a vehicle debt to pay because she knew I would be working at least till I paid it off. 

I thought I’d have a sex change too.  I was without direction.  I thought I »d adopt a new personality and travel and explore in a variation of the great book ‘black like me’. I’d love to live another life.  I’d liked wearing women’s clothes and had started out in acting. Maybe a new adventure. Travelling as an old cross dresser with a blind dog.  I was so tired of being ‘good ‘ and ‘true’ and studying up the yin yang.

My rich doctor friend laughed, “I don’t know anyone whose read so many books and studied so much psychiatry, you’re interested in it all, the pharmacology, neurology, sociology, psychology, spirituality.  I stopped reading anything to do with my field decades back. I get my 50 hours CME attending hospital rounds each week and the rest of my time is devoted to real estate. I’m rich today on investment. This is a mediocrity. I look over to see you and there’s no reward for going the extra mile, the patients don’t know it. The College doesn’t even care about morbidity or mortality. They’re worse that ‘rate your doctor’.  It’s do the least and look for ways to make money. That’s what the hospital administrators and bureaucrats have done. They made a fortune off the doctors and nurses doing the work and their being the parasites.  You’re killing yourself for others.  Stop caring so much.  Be like the lawyers.  No one cares. The bankers certainly don’t. The accountants certainly don’t.  Be happy. ». He’s always good for a laugh.  I love his hedonism and realism.

I was living in a trailer.  The only people who could afford houses in Vancouver were criminals or foreign criminals . I’d also owned houses and saw that my life was devoted to maintaining these properties which really I had no rights over, the government leased and taxed the land. I just wanted to rent. My friend Dr. George and I talked a lot about ‘ownership’ and ‘renting’.  

“I’m renting. » he said. «   I’m just not going to spend all my time keeping a property and not really owning it.” He loved his Pink apartment with the balcony and view of the harbour. We’d make music together there and talk about women and life. George loved women. He especially loved his children. We both loved medicine. 

All the men I knew had lost a house or two to marriage, the lawyers, the banks and the government.

Canada was a matriarchy. The women all had their homes and the children who worshiped them .There was no other gods but mom in the matriarchy. The guys en mass were off the grid.  A day doesn’t go by I don’t meet another divorced or single male MGTOW.  Men Going Their Own Way.  The country was dying and abortion was all the rage.  Low testosterone epidemic. It was all insane.

I wanted to be sailing again. I dreamed of vacations. A little time away from the insaneity. Patients didn’t come in , themselves insane anymore, but they came in describing insane workplaces or governments or communities.  Everyone was stressed to the max. I’d never had so many people coming throug hthe door , middle class, hardly making ends meet.  Rent evictions and homelessness. 

When I began it was said ‘it’s not a psychiatric problem if a vacation or money could solve it.’ But now half my patients don’t have family physicians and don’t have access or money to pay the rent or stable housing.  It’s insane. I feel like I’m working in India among the poor but these are the middle class and they’re all afraid of losing their jobs and knowing that in a matter of months they’ll be in housing with thieves and drug addicts as neighbours or pedophiles and rapists. The thin line has gone. They’re all afraid. Anxiety.  It’s real.

I go to work. I’m like a little boy with his thumb in the hole in the damn. I do my bit. I hardly get time because the College has all the doctors doing other things than seeing patients. We’re routinely called to the office to give meaning to the lives of people who have sold their souls , the hollow men, the hollow women. They haven’t even read T.S. Elliot and don’t even know Kafka .  I don’t know if paying off my truck will hold me.

I think of a sex change.  I listen to Leonard Cohen’s “I want a new face, one that’s not covered up in grief and shame.”

I started to write this review of my life, the task I give to patients to write their life one page per year.

Gilbert got a glaucoma and his eyes needed to be removed. George the cat almost died but the new vets antibiotics saved him. I had an infection in my mouth when a tooth abscessed,  I was so sick. We were all sick. The stress causes sickness. 

 I drove to San Diego in my new little mini with a back seat for blind Gilbert. I was taking him to the beaches. He was so sad.  He was so depressed blind and banging into things. But I took him to the beaches in Oregon and watched him run free. He’s been alive ever since. I’m looking for my own beaches.  

I go to churches and go to meetings. I see how poorly the elderly are treated here in Canada and I fear aging. I have lost my hearing and different joints are always in pain and I don’t have the strength I had. The criminals are in charge and I fear another young person accosting me on the street. A year of having that man threatening to kill my dog wore me down. Knowing that the College didn’t care for doctors and wanted us dead and the police didn’t protect us and that the great success of this government has been Euthanasia and smoking marijuana.

Well I have to change my attitude. I have to say the serenity prayer. I have to do more gratitude lists. I got another call from a person at the College they want to examine me some more.  Want to look at my files. I’ve now met doctors who have had constant harrassment by their bosses.  It’s never mentioned on the Communist Broadcasting Corporation news. No one in the general public knows the constant abuse of doctors. The Ontario family physicians for a first actually campaigned against their left wing government but now they’re killing doctors in the Middle East jailing them for helping rebels.  No one cares.

The person who called herself a colleague from the college is involved in this further testing of doctor’s ‘competence’.  It’s nothing personal. A group of colleagues are doing it.  More people getting paid not to see patients. More emphasis on the ‘files’. The patient can be dead as long as the ‘file is alive’. I’ve actually had a file say my patient was dead when they were alive and had to argue the facts.  

I’m struggling to carry on.  I don’t want to retire. I ‘d like to do my job wthout this college like a grossly obese fat lady cat sitting on my shoulders shitting and pissing on me as a doctor all day long.  We can’t carry the cancerous burden of this government Venezuela fell. The USSR failed. China is toppling.  The future is supposed to be bright but I’m not.  I’m tired. 

The writing  exercise I gave myself  was to see the good and the bad.  I have a blind dog whose still the joy of my life. The cat and he are entertaining. I have a wealth of friends and have food and shelter. Just for today I’m doing well. I have the sunshine and Vancouver in summer. I got this call from the college and it was like a knife in the back .  I’m sick to my stomach when I see the colour of the paper they send their notices out in. I’ve no complaint but I live in fear. I struggle days to get to the office. It’s gas lighting. It’s getting harder and harder . I‘m afraid of patients. When will the next psychopath with an ulterior agenda come through my office and get the college army to attack me a lone doctor with a practice again.  I wake in sweats sitting across from these Kafkaequely stupid people. They’re always having a party and they’re wearing clown costumes. 

 I’ve had guns pulled on me but I fear most the psychopathic women who use the College as their weapon with their lies and manipulations.  I used to think that the College was just stupid but now I know it’s evil. It works with the criminals.  They search for people to complain to give their hollow worthless lives meaning. They’re so sick but I’m taught to ‘pray for them for they know not what they do’. But I’m tired and failing . I love ‘Save our Heros’ and ‘Diana Davidson’.  

I just want to go to work and save lives. I’ve done that all along. I have known impossibly wonderful success but now I’m too afraid to be creative. I”m too terrified of the demands and threats and anger in the office.  

I have a shower. I love my shower. I”m clean and have clean clothes. These are things to be grateful for. 

I miss my brother. We could talk and he’d make me laugh. He wasn’t Pollyanna. He knew the government and loved finance.  He’d liked to take pictures and he liked to grow plants like my mother.  

I’ve got to get back to defending myself from another attack of the Borg. The Borg have no other purpose than to assimilate. These burearcrats don’t have patients to care for . They just kill.  They have no other obligations.  Like the police. They don’t have to nurture and care . They don’t have to be creative and solve unsolveable problems. I’ve spent 30 years convincing people to live but now whenever I hear of the College and know the depth of their arrogance and corruption I just want to die myself.  I pray to God to carry me. 

Who cares for the caregivers. I’ve taken another cake. I’m soon with my colleagues. Whenever I share there’s someone there who has more entertaining ‘challenges’.  « I’ve got this young social worker in charge in my military unit who thinks they know more psychiatry than I do after 23 years of experience and all the education.  They don’t even know they’ve got low IQ and they just love polished boots. ». She’s a crazy black lady with long term sobriety who goes to church and keeps us in stitches telling stories about there being ‘no military intelligence.’  I see my amazing friends with sick wives and children or husbands and themselves with sickness and they’re carrying on. They have to deal with regular assholes and they’re actually practicing their faith and struggling to be better humans today than they were yesterday.  I always feel better and want to carry on being a doctor after I meet with them.  

They asked me to give a talk on anger so I began ‘Those mother fucker organizers asked me to talk about anger. That’s the shit topic. A loving peaceful guy like me should have been given something more spiritual like forgiveness and love but no the fuckers give me anger. Bastards ».  The place erupted in laughter.  I feel home as a doctor when I’m with these folk. I feel home as a person when I’m camping. Laura and Gilbert and I have more camping planned.  

The writing connected to the time of blogging.  I’ve some digital record and can see that I’ve got a lot of personal growth to go.  

I’m planning a story that begins. 

« They’re all dead. All the people who hurt me. All the people who could hurt me. I’m still here.  I »m still no more happy and no more sure of what the Lord wants of me.  Maybe I’ll eventually go to my grave.  It gives me no satisfaction to have outlived them all.  I’m alive.  They’re dead.  It’s like there’s less smog and it smells better but I’m still searching for God. I’m still seeking joy.  It’s just one day at a time.  «  

Angry People Kick Dogs

Displacement is the term for the expression of an emotion meant for one person but transferred to another person. The classic example was of a person who was chewed out by his boss then walking out the door kicked the dog who was just lying there.

Killing the messenger - this is the strategy of silencing those who tell the truth to delay the retribution or the secret getting out.  The messenger brings bad news.  The classic example was , “Your army was defeated,”. No one wanted to bring the emperor bad news because angry people killed the person who brought the news.

Projection - Denying something about one’s self, the information for instance that your problem is you are angry, a rageaholic, bitter, unloving, unforgiving, alcoholic, addict, slut, wasteful,  whatever behaviour is unbecoming, and angry person will project, throw this back at, the person giving the information. “I”m not that, you are.”  This is like kindergarten fighting. “Your mother wear’s army boots.”  “No she doesn’t your mother wears army boots”.  Often there’s today a subtle or not so subtitle psychopathic twist. “I”m concerned you think I’m - angry, a slut, a liar, a cheat, etc -  I think you must be that to be thinking I am.”  

Generalized anger - commonly a person won’t direct their anger specifically at the target but rather that use a sniper rifle use a shot gun or turn round and round while holding a machine gun to ensure that they take out whatever threat or memory that triggered their fear and anger.

Anger is fear.

Abraham said depression is anger turned inward.  Hence suicide.

However commonly rather than look at ‘one’s part’ in a situation the angry person will blame all those around them.  

Unfortunately today in our society promising instant happiness and instant solution people who have not learned ‘acceptance’ faced with difficulties will become hypersensitive and externalizethe problem.  It’s not that they ‘choose’ this husband or wife and now are in a divorce. It’s not they they voted for this government and now have no money and are facing their dying years paying for his parties and orgies. It’s not that they wasted their inheritance when young and now don’t have money. It’s not they they spent their money on booze and drugs and now can’t afford a bus ticket.

The society of ‘free stuff’ teaches people that they are not accountable and that someone from the government or someone else is the cause of their pain and suffering. Further someone else from the government or elsewhere will fix the problem Unfortunately the people who suffer most and have the least autonomy are most easily duped by promises. They watch TV, a propaganda source if anything and expect that when they go in for help they will encounter the perfect actor who has a whole team helping them appear sweet for that one half hour sit com.

In the complaints department of life everyone is in line.  Self pity masquerades as depression all the time. Unfortunately antidepressants can’t cure self pity, Amber of entitlement.

I resist kicking my dog, hug him instead, because having been kicked all day I have to learn to love. I know they’re afraid. I know that fear produces anger.

I also know that forces have always use angry fearful people to hurt others and act out their political desire.   

There really are people who like kicking dogs and people.

Healing Anger, Whores and Saints

Laura is looking after Gilbert.  Friends are watching my home. Anything worth anything is in my storage locker or here on me. I dazzle with tech.  Apple bling.  I am off work.  I’m off the clock.  20 years ago I chose life.  The woman in my life then had tried to kill us and me.  The woman before her had killed my baby. Drinking and smoking I had fallen in with a desperate lot. When a friend suggested I quit drinking and smoking I thought I’d prove to him I didn’t have a problem.  “I’d show him.” I had returned to the church because it had been there I remembered the good days. It had been there where I’d heard the calling to go into medicine. It was good to be on my knees praying. I’d meditated for so many years. Praying was good. Crying and remembering and knowing that it was highly unlikely anyone was going to get drunk,  smoke dope, shoot guns, or have an orgy. The church was a safe place. I was invited to go with a new friend to a 12 step meeting.  I didn’t want to work then. I felt responsible for the deaths of my wives. I felt that the abortion had been beyond my power but I was blamed for it. I thought that my professor who’d used me for sexual gratification and taken advantage of me. I felt a whole lot of self pity. I felt a lot of anger and resentment too.
Now they asked me to talk on anger at this conference.  I’ve talked here before.  I always hope they’ll forget. I don’t think I talk well.  I once did.  But not anymore.  Mostly I doubt myself.  But then I see how little others know and it seems I’m still okay.  I’m useful. Increasingly an old elephant in a country where the government hires poachers. I keep seeing my colleagues being taken out by the demonic.  Some strongman with the young around him, puppets, with strings attached. I don’t know what happened to my strings. I’m just glad I made it another year. I’m crawling into home plate, tears running down my cheeks.
It’s been tragic year. My brother died. My best friend in so many ways died.  My best doctor friend, my best Christian friend, my best recovery friend.  My other best friend of the same ilk grows yearly more ill.  Then my other young friend dies.  The Landlady was a real greedy ugly clever business woman.  I meet more of them. Women who didn’t play team sports. Feral.  Insectoid.  They use men. On Facebook the silly sorts talk about narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths and they don’t know. I’m there are day. I loved Snakes in Suits.  Looking back at my career I fought them over and over again.  Hitlers and Stalins in clown masks.  Always I knew the problem was me.  My fear is the world I see.
I long to get off this plane at the destination and see a familiar face. My same time next year colleagues.  I find such comfort and solace with dozens of other psychiatrists who share the language of the heart.  I am so tired of being around people who chop off the heads of others to make themselves taller. I’m tired of the competition and the rat race. I turned 65 and stayed. I bought a truck to anchor me in a debt. I’m buying a new home. I’ve the money in the bank but if I spent it the government would take 70% but everyone is glad to bet on my future. I have insurance.  These are things. I just want to move onto the next dimension in time but all my talk with God remains the same with the message to stay, to work, to carry on. I want to be in my sailboat in the Atlantic fighting waves I can see not being stabbed in the back by lying psychopaths who I’ve tried to help and treated as warm blooded creatures hoping and praying they would revive but they’d bit the hand that feeds. The whole loser coward money grubbing arrogant monday morning quarter back set are there to judge. They no longer can do. They’re gloriously incompetent and need to give themselves pats on the back and lots of raises and hang together while they make insane and impossible demands that are the height of silliness.  Insectoid. I pray for them. I pray at their backs.  Their platitudes and superiority and grandiosity are shallow.
The National Post wrote the article what is the difference between the Government of Canada and the the Hell’s Angels.  I like the Jesus stories. It’s the government that errs.
I was asked to talk about anger. Not anger management. The bastards, my friends, I suspect, know something.  I live in a sandwich of slices of homicide and murder with the littlest bit of lettuce between. My mind is a ping pong ball.  I slide into this meeting, slouch into the meeting and somehow rally. Every year for 20 years it’s the same.  I want to give up on my fellow man. I want to go out and killing like Arlo Guthrie kill. I’m a sniper. I’m a chemist. I have countless poisons readily available to me. I have skills and knowledge.  I don’t scare myself. But then the violently insane are more afraid of me than I of them.  I thought Hannibal Lechter was the only psychiatrist portrayal of any validity. The new Sopranos girl is a counsellor. A ego massage therapist. I got in trouble ,the umpteenth time calling my colleague a mental whore, insisting I’d not care if he was an escort but his street slut behaviour was no good for the profession. I was wrong. He’s in leadership today.  Lust surpasses love in the world today. Truth is relative.  The silliest don’t know they’re in the experiment. I’m in God’s brain like Malkovitch.
Today’s music sucks. I’m listening to the music of my teens and twenties again and understanding where my influences came from. Doystoevsky, Allan Watts, Kierkegard, Camus, Kaffka, Paradigm shifts, Story of One, National Geographic, the Bible, Francis Bacon, Science of Fear, Future Shock, HG Wells, Churchill, EE Cummings, Franny and Zooey.  I grew up reading these and now talk to people who quote people magazine.  Or did. They’re now reading O Henry and I’m reading Star Trek. I’ve devolved.  Facebook is an entertainment.  The serious are paid and propagandize.
I like Jordan Peterson. I like freedom of speech. I fear we’ll facing the destruction of the free world by the tyrannies of dead communist doctrine wedded to the other great tyranny dead Islam.
Here in the air port there are some pretty girls.  There are fat old men, like me.  Children and back packs.  Jet set.  There’ no glamor.  It’s work to go through security. I ‘ve come down from the adrenaline rush. They’ve ojected to my guns and taken so many knives and nail scissors off me.  Half dressed and dis oriented I have left my passport or my ticket at the security cheque.  I’m back in school being caned and strapped and screamed at.  I can’t get a lather up when a princess says she was traumatized by a man looking at her.  I see the torture victims in my work and challenge anyone to say these people weren’t emotionally abused and physically and mentally abused.  There’s a oneupmanship in the self pity challenge test.  My emotional abuse needs all the public health care and I can’t be concerned about your cigarette burns and broken bones and missing limbs. I’m emotionally abused.
And the richer the person is the more they can get.  I love the picture that showed a trailer park and said that if the the guy in 50 Shades lived in a trailer on welfare it wouldn’t be a book but an episode of criminal minds.
I relax here. We sit in small groups and talk. The guys and girls tell of their spouses and children with cancer.  The widowed and divorced and diseased share their experience strength and hope.  I feel so utterly self centre and useless. My life is blessed beyond belief but I’ve lived the year with a man threatening my life and the life of my dog and no matter how many ways I block his calls or his emails he finds a way to get in my face and laugh at me….he’s living proof that I have no security. The police did nothing. It wasn’t just me. He threatened lawyers and their dogs and the beurocrats and frankly I rather enjoyed that the beurocrats were threatened.  They likely took years off work and milked it for all it was worth.  So far from reality and yet sickness still get through all the barriers to their space station ivory towers. Even now there’s a new threat and they celebrate it and hate doctors all the while claiming they don’t but there Capos and get good coin to lead us to the gas chambers. Middle management.  But this week the police called concerned because he’s threatening the Prime Minister. I don’t know if the PM has a dog. Muslims don’t like dogs so I doubt it. Maybe his kids will be threatened but they are taking it seriously. The rest of us don’t count.  Yet if I or the lawyer or the eurocrats uttered threats we’d be out of work and in jail but this man and the PM are both above the law. I work with people who tell me of the murders and tortureds they’ve done selling drugs, pushing drugs, in prisons and in gangs.  It’s a slice of reality that doesn’t officially exist.
Some days I’m out in the suburbs.  Its different there.
I miss Hank. I miss Bernie. I miss Doug.  I miss Mom and Dad and my brother Ron, and George and Richard.  I remember my Dad lonely in the end saying, “all my friends have died.” He was old and missed my mother. I love when I dream of them. I love too when I dream of the dogs.
‘I think of sex changes. I think of Leonard Cohen. “I want a new Face.”
I think of turning states evidences, walking into Ottawa RCMP and telling them the good men I know. I know that the good are now the bad, the white is the new black, that 1984 doublespeak is the new Canadian, we live for Taqikya. I need a niqab.  “This face is covered up with age and shame.”  I sing hallelujah.
We stand together our heads bowed and say the Lord’s prayer.  More and more with say the Serenity Prayer of the great christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The people who want to change the outside because they can’t face their own insides haven’t knee jerked objected to Niebuhr yet. They attack Jesus.  Christians are the most persecuted in the world.  You’d think they’d like it.
But we’re slow to anger. That’s the distinction I like about Christians. I turn my cheek 70 times 70 times. Then your life is mine.  I can and will wipe out your genetic signature.  It’s the genius of my scotty dog. The ultimate rodent killer.  I like the celtic blood.  Irish and Scottish.  A lawyer with the help of government stole millions from my grandfather.  He then escaped to a place where lawyers lives outside the law.
Maybe next year they’ll anger management.  When I trained with Elizabeth Kubla Ross I understood the anger. I’m angry at God. I’m still trying to do what I’m supposed to do, questioning meaning and purpose. The great psychiatric text was ‘Denial of Death’.  I loved when we discussed these books and shared them  Now the only question people ask is ‘how much did it cost’.  No one understands there is no price on my dog.
Asked if the woman would have sex for a million dollar, she said maybe, so the man asked ‘what about a dollar’.  What do you take me for she said. That’s been decided, now I’m just dickering for price.  I feel like I’m back in Morocco with camel traders.  I want to withhold my services and remove the gun that says we can’t say we say the price of your life or sanity or medication is what ever we say because your fees and your bills have exponentially escalated with no increase in quality or service while our education and expectations have skyrocketed and all these parasites have latched on like blood suckers ordering us to work for them as they siphon off the fat.
These two sisters , teens are so enthusiastic, travelling. Young. I’m jaded and look for spinning tires to back at. The modern windmill.  My dog and I charge the free way. He’s one eyed.  I’m biker trailer trash.
The bastards asked me speak on anger.
Not enlightenment. Not genius. Not sainthood.
Anger. The pricks.
Now all I want to do is get to a room and sleep and shower and watch tv and order meal service but instead I’ll sit and drink coffee with some old guy and learn or some old girl and learn. And I’ve been blessed to know Tony and Art and Beth and Judy and Dave and Julia and Steve and Carol and the list goes on.  I look forward to seeing a gay man whose missed his death several times and a man who was in a series of accidents but he survived. I met the man with a mechanical heart. Interesting eyes.
Now they’ll be calling .I must go.

Resentment, Forgiveness, and Justin Trudeau

I haven't been personally so disturbed by someone since I was divorced. I remember I couldn't stand the way the ex wife spoke.  She was stoned and would try to appear normal. I knew her so well that I knew when she was being dishonest.
It's the same way with Trudeau.  I just think he's not present.  I want to drug test him every day. I remember Reagan saying, "you can drug test me any day".  Yet here's Trudeau whose admitted to criminal behaviour, breaking the law, with marijuana use, first as a teacher and then as an MP. 

But the issue is my reaction to it.  I'm clean and sober and I did the same as he did. I was every bit as arrogant and megalomaniacal as he. I remember thinking as I smoked a joint that I was 'special'. I was above the law. I was part of the 'insider' group. I was buying dope from physicians and smoking dope with doctors and lawyers. I was 'in'.  I was 'above the law'.  I had arrived.

That's the distinction between alcoholism and addiction.  The alcoholic isn't breaking the law. He may break the law once he's loaded but he's not breaking the law when he gets loaded.  The addict however 'intentionally' sets out to break the law.  Every time he lights up a joint or crack pipe or smokes heroin or shoots heroin he's thumbing his nose at authorities.

I understand it must have been very difficult to have a distant father like Pierre has been described, a rather cold fish with emotional difficulties. His wife and the mother of Justin was absent with her drug addiction so the poor guy grew up loaded with all the red flags that go with mental illness. Stalin's wife killed herself. Paul Johnson's classic book, "The Intellectuals" records the life histories of the highly intelligent men who were equally lacking in emotional intelligence. I get all that. I personally am normally empathic.

But I'm afraid. I'm taught when I have a resentment to question how this is personally affecting me.  First is the person having a negative  effect on my financial security. Well, yes. I think with Trudeau throwing around money like a drug addict does giving away the countries savings and buying votes left and right that I'm not going to have any old age security.  I'm old and fearing I'll never be able to take a break from working.

Unlike Trudeau I've worked since I was 16.  I've worked the equivalent of three jobs for thirty years and lived under the Liberal government for most of those seeing all the wealth of western Canada being stolen by Quebec. That's the legacy of Pierre Trudeau.  I remember liking his carnation and how naïve I was politically when I was caught up in Trudeaumania back before anyone knew how many hundreds of millions of people had been killed by the Communists.  The left wing made the right wing Nazis look like beginners when it came to extermination of it's citizens.  We didn't know this till the fall of the Wall.

Pierre Trudeau's communism was exotic in the 60's and 70's but when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 the lies of the left became available for everyone.  It turned out the USSR economy was built on the slave labour of Gulags.  Today everyone hears about the American prisons but forgets that Communism everywhere depends on slave labour.  China's gangster society with hundred millions deaths and countless slave labour is the latest lesson in left wing politics.   Now we have another Trudeau and communists kill or imprison any one who disagrees with them. Further the fact is that Hitler was a reaction to Stalin.  Communists begat the Nazis.  Read history.

So I fear Trudeau, personally, because I fear and always have feared Police States.  Canada is daily now moving into a worse police state.  Our basic rights are evaporating and the only ones who can afford the courts are the rich.  The Poor and the Middle Class are daily more disenfranchised. Freedom is such a rare and vulnerable luxury which so few in the world have and yet its loss occurs so easily.  Hitler took over Germany within a couple of years. Trudeau wants to change the way we vote.  He threatens every freedom Canadians have won over many many years.  His father's dynasty is the destruction of western Canada and the English.  The only real winners are the courts and Quebec.  Now the Charbeaneau Commission tells us Quebec is ruled by mafia and bike gangs.

So I'm afraid.  I'm afraid of Trudeau and those who are beehind him. 20 years as a Liberal I became disillusioned by the corruption in the Liberal Party and in Quebec.  I left all political association.  

So yes I'm afraid. Fear is the precursor of resentment.

My second question is, after money, what about personal status. My own personal status and my sexual life as well are declining with age.   So yes here' this young punk flaunting his sexuality like a cheap whore showing off his tits and pects.  

I remember Kim Campbell just showed her shoulder .   The women were furious that the PM position would be won by flagrant sexual sales job. Yet now 50 Shades of Grey is the female rage and women are filling the treatment centres for addiction. Myra Cyress and the Kardashians are the new female superstars.  So everyone adulates the bimbo boy PM.

The standards for social behaviour are plummeting and I'm no prude.  But as I've paid the equivalent of a million forfeigt as a consequence of smoking dope, I've paid the equivalent of a million dollars for using the F word. I didn't lie like Pierre did .  Pierre Trudeau said he didn't say 'fuck' but that he said 'fuddle dock' instead. Asked if I said fuck, I was truthful as I've always been saying I said "fuck'.

Now I'm am supposed to forgive my enemies.  I'm supposed to think Trudeau isn't bad but just a sick man.  I'm supposed to pray for my enemies.  Each day I do this.  I'm praying for forgiveness and for Trudeau and for Canada.  I'm praying whenever I'm not working or doing something else.  All I'm doing is praying because it seems a day doesn't go by without him giving a way another billion or throwing another party.

He's taxing the air we breath.  If he taxed O2 even the scientifically illiterate Canadians would figure out that he's taxing the air.  But instead he and Obama with their Climate Change Cult tax 'Carbon'.  And no one without science training figures out that CARBON DIOXIDE is air.  So Canadians are now paying Trudeau to breathe.

And I have to pray for him. I have to forgive him.. I have to learn to focus on the light and not to be distracted by his sickness. I"m taught to 'detach with love'.  Well I'm trying and I'm not doing very well.

So please God help me pray for Trudeau and forgive him.  Help me have hope for the future. Help me to look for the positive.

Now I must look for my part in it.  So God please forgive me for voting for Pierre Trudeau. Forgive me God for not listening to my father and all those other wise older men and women who saw that he was a Marxist Leninist and knew what murderous sociopaths communists worry.  Please forgive me for not listening to my mother who had no respect for Margaret Trudeau.  Please forgive me for my youthful stupidity and superiority and for smoking and thinking I was so hip, slick and cool compared older people despite my ignorance and arrogance.  Forgive me for my inexperience then and I pray now that I am wrong.  Please God fill Trudeau with your light and love.  Help me overcome my resentment as I know that resentments are just taking poison and hoping the other guy will die.  Help me overcome my fear and have faith and trust in you as you have always loved and cared for me.  I am so blessed Lord.

I know in my work I see such poverty and waste and feel so empty with so many good people suffering. I see and hear old men coming back to work as doctors unable to retire because of the rising costs. Everyday I learn of another death.  Sickness surrounds me.  Help me see the humour and find the joy in life Lord.  Don't let me be pulled down by all the suffering in Canada.  So many people I see are homeless.  The elderly are without health care.  The elderly can't defend themselves from the thieves that are everywhere now. The courts have abandoned the old here in Canada.  Every where I turn another old person is being threatened.  Forgive me Lord for my fear and identification with all these good people who worked as I did and now are lost and forgotten.

Please Lord help me forgive.  Tonight I pray for Trudeau.  May they know truth. May they know you.  May I grow in courage and have more faith and know more love.

Self Righteous Anger

I'm interested in the process of my own defensiveness and anger. It's probably best to call this "self righteous anger". I notice that I do good things that I get rewarded for and are expected of me, such as my job. But in addition to do the basic work I do a whole lot more than is necessary or expected of me. Though increasingly the government or employers expectations are impossible and at variance with the clients who pay the government to pay me. I have many masters and trying to please them all is a gargantuan task . So the expectations are a problem.

Similiarly however I will generously contribute my time in a voluntary position or participate in group membership activities rather than just accepting the benefits of being there without contributing. I'm what is known as a 'giver'. I belong to a church and support charities and generally am thought of and think of myself as a good guy albeit irritating, opinionated and unconventional.

What upsets me is not when someone questions work I'm being paid for or asks that I do something in that realm that would serve them more, but rather it's in this other realm, that area where I'm already a 'giver', already 'serving above and beyond the call of duty', doing more than 'chasing the blessed buck."

My immediate reaction in that world is , "Don't they know I'm doing this for free? Don't they know how much I give? How dare they criticize my generosity and my charity." In a way I don't expect pay but am partly looking for thanks and appreciation. I'm hypersensitive to criticism. I'm thin skinned. Yet, I think of myself as tough and chose to work in what I was told and indeed turned out to be the most 'thankless' jobs. I also liked the idea that 'anonymous' giving is the least egotistical so I often played down the giving I did and have not sought accolades for my generosity. I figured God was taking care of that however I 'didn't expect to get criticized.'

So I want to whack the offensive little mealy moused critical person but can't because that would spoil my good guy image. I often think in fleeting thoughts how I could discretely dispose of the critic and not get caught. Anonymous giving back in a different sense. Then fed up, I want to walk away and let the organization, fellowship, project or whatever it is I've been contributing to 'suffer'. I want the imaginary 'group' /'audience" to see that they had a choice, the generous giving, kind, handsome, smart , great me or the little critical shit who usually doesn't do anything but tear down, the prick.

Now I can't see antecedents in my family but I certainly see evidence of this pride in my adolescent behavior. I organized charities like carole singing at Christmas, fund raising, and coffee shops for YMCA and YWCA and various church basements. I also started improvisation theatre groups and in medical school organized 'non profit' contributions by doctors to various activities, volunteered as editor for magazines, contributed much writing for free, sat on committees and generally was very much one of that small percentage of people who participate and do the 'work' of community and society. Interestingly I don't do as much of this anymore. It speaks to the pouting ego, arrogance, self pity, and righteous anger, and thin skin.

I remember as a late teen ager, early youth organizing a very successful coffeehouse that became packed every weekend with the top musicians wanting to play. I liked seeking out new entertainment and getting to know the acts and getting them for the least amount of money. I loved bringing in different almost elegant vaudevillian things with symphony players on the same night as blues bands. A group of us were involved but I'd been asked to participate because of my MC and entertainment connections. But our success was my undoing. We raised a lot of money and the organization hired a psychologist who was to be 'consultant' to the program. He wanted to see the MC position and hiring of groups be democratized and wanted everyone to rotate through the different positions like door greeter, coffeemaker and money taker, things which we'd done as necessary and ad hoc but the formula had put me on the stage and arranging with the entertainers because I was one myself and on my own time went out to the various activities and met all the new people. I also had an eye or ear for what was 'new' and what would bring in the crowds. We were very popular and only those coming early were able to get seats.

Within weeks the psychologist had closed the place down. I left in fact after a few weeks because it wasn't the 'in' place to be and I was commited to the 'excellence' rather than the group in some ways. I remember taking some pleasure in being asked to come back and resurrect the destruction of the coffeehouse. I have this thing for 'vindication'. I've been 'vindicated' so many times in my life that I once thought I'd change my name to "Vinny". At the same time I wished people weren't so stupid as to mess with me, my friends and the things that I and they created.

But the original founders and I talked and none really wanted to do 'that thing' again. Our core group had moved on. Three or four of us kids had been the main thrust and we'd been over run by the 'johnny come latelies' , the 'carpetbaggers' and this 'ideas man' who was getting paid and clearly was the sort of person who didn't understand the 'passion' that we'd brought voluntarily to doing things. We went our separate ways. Mostly putting our extra efforts into our various university and work obligations. I think I was a teen ager at 20 and in retrospect remember a bit of swaggering arrogance too. I'm fairly tolerant of the kids these days who like me looked and acted a bit like assholes because I know they're just insecure, often trying really hard, quite bright, and very creative and just don't have the polish yet.

That "group" process event represents an early example of my inability to express myself or deal with what I felt was a 'bullying' situation well, when something I had worked hard for and cared for was being 'taken' away. I even thought of 'communism' and 'revolution' and how people who couldn't make something themselves always wanted to come in and take what someone else had made but they always seemed to run it into the ground since they really only wanted the end result and didn't want to be there from the beginning or do the leg work of building a thing from the bottom up. A lot of people just want the finished product. It's a throw away instant society of many users and few doers.

Later I'd come across a type of man and woman who could be called "marriage breakers" . They preyed on married people, attracted to the type of good home that they thought they could steal but only destroyed because they lacked the capacity to nurture and care for something once they had it. They were called "cowbirds" because cowbirds sneeked their eggs in Robins nest and left the Robins to raise their eggs for them.

I remember when I was married I'd do 'extra' things around the house, like washing the wives clothing by hand or vacuuming on a day more than we might usually vacuum, or cleaning the washroom, making a special meal, since I was already always cooking, but doing that extra special meal. Then she'd criticize or ask "why didn't you vacuum behind the couch. Why don't you move the couch when you vacuum." "Couldn't you have used cream instead of milk in the sauce, you know how I don't like the sauce thin?" Married people can be very critical of each other. It's always struck me as a Pink Panther /Cato relationship.

Even today I get angry thinking of my ex wife's constant criticism when in my mind's eye (I'm probably cross eyed) I was always trying to do 'extra' nice things. It's like I have this internal "b" grade standard, strive for the A and then say 'screw it' if someone says 'why didn't you get an A".

And it came back to me, thinking of this. In a grade school year I had straight A's with one B and brought home my report card and my mother asked "why didn't you get A" in this class. Looking back I know it was "curiosity" because she was overall very proud and pleased but I took that as criticism and then spent the next semester doing the very difficult task of getting only B's. It's really hard to do straight B's. Years later I'd aim and get straight A's routinely but in retrospect think that year of straight A's was one of my hardest academic challenges.

After that I didn't bother working towards A's in school for some years later.

It was so much more work to get an A and it was even work to get all B's . Later getting all A's was easier that 'straight B's. I never tried 'straight C's but expect it might be an even greater challenge.

So I got mostly b's and c's for a while preferring fishing and extra curricualar activities to school.

That's the source of righteous anger for me and a character defect for sure. I'm praying for God to help me with it. That's all I can do for now. It's interesting to me to know the nature of this 'fault' and hopefully be able to recognize it when I find myself 'angry' so I don't have to feed the 'anger' and "make a case" for being 'wronged'. It's really just the same old same old 'stuff'. Let go and Let God.

Few today are trained in the psychoanalytic traditions. I count myself as one of the lucky ones. It remains in my mind one of the greatest teaching tools but could not compete with some of the modern therapies in consideration of cost and efficiency of behavior change. It still has great merit and the changes that occur are often superior over time to the quicker solutions. What interested me in the process was that understanding myself through therapy I observed "my reaction" to a patient as much as what the patient was doing or saying. With experience, especially now having treated thousands of people, especially the dangerously insane, the personality disorders and sometimes really ghastly disturbed individuals with the roughest edges, I'm fascinated by when and why a person "irritates" me or "triggers" a thought or emotion or memory. Trained in the use of story telling to get around anti authority defences I react to the 'trigger' by sharing a story parallel to the experience. Because of the 'process' factors I'm talking about 'us' rather than me and not surprisingly the person 'gets it' days or weeks later when the 'insight' blossoms, the seed having been planted. But to do this I've had to spend a lot of time in therapy and reflecting on my own humanity. Indeed it's hard to be judgemental when one looks closely benath the layers of the onion skin and realizes 'there but for the grace of God' go I. Empathy is indeed about the common connections through experience and it's so much deeper than the 'sympathy' that so often holds us back.

It was once said of me in a hospital I worked, "the doctor doesn't tolerate fools well unless they are his patients." The truth in my life is that I expected my co workers and my superiors to be less insane or sick than my patients or me and that just doesn't happen to be the truth. My expectations (very unrealistic given the history of destruction by leaders and institutions and countries) has created for me a lot of resentments. Resentments are best described as "taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die."

I find only with age, and that's sad in many ways, do I have the 'empathy' for my superiors and co workers that I lacked when younger. Increasingly I try to rotate the picture and drop the "up down" scale and see things on their 'side' so that I get a more 'planar' rather than 'linear' take on things. It's a real eye opener. Recently I realized that an academic colleague who sits higher in the conventional totem pole paid dearly in his life for the priviledge of that position. I've had a life of adventure and learned many skills while he was completely dominated by living the politics of what Hesse might well have called the "glass bead game". We make choices and when we envy another person their position or wealth or whatever we forget that we may well have taken a 'road less travelled' , starting out on it long ago. I certainly opted for spirituality and learning over amassing wealth, adventure and travel over hoarding and position power. I found the life of a millionaire stifling in so many ways compared to being " free man in paris." What I wonder about now is the 'baggage' of character defects and these traits that served when I was younger, how I'm going to let go of them now that I'm older. I remember as a kid I handled bullies but fighting back and hospitalized several with punches and kicks but that is not going to serve me well if I one day end up in assisted living or a nursing home. I'm not about to roundhouse on the next guy who bullies me but even 'saber rattling' lacks luster now. Living and letting live is it's own kind of skill. My academic friend has certain skills I admire even though I usually think him a pretentious deceitful toady. I pride myself on much more 'practical' and "pragmatic skills" like fixing my diesel heater last night, sailing solo across oceans, that sort of thing.

Righteous anger just doesn't seem to be one of those things that has a lot of 'stock life'. I wouldn't want to let it go but I really have to be careful with how long I hold onto and how much I keep in the cupboards. It does tend to attract a rodents.