SV GIRI, MD, Aging and awards

Seeing President Biden drop out of the presidential race was positive and negative for me. Yes he was dramatically neurocognitively declining over the last years and it was difficulty to hear this explained as studdering.  Bruce Willis has declined to.  So did Joni Mitchel but she’s made a come back.  I’m of an age when so many of my cohort are retiring, declining or even dying. I’ve lost too many family and close friends in the last few years. It’s cause for grief and for anxiety for my self. I’m a great one for denial of death having worked in the midst of death and being as prone to the next for magical thinking.  

My father was an engineer and in charge of the Matthew Conveyor installation at the Winnipeg Airport and Winnipeg Post Office. It was the reason my family moved to Winnipeg. Dad had 150 men working under him in those years.  Yet post retirement, downsized front house to apartment with Mom, having survived an MI and near death experience after prostate surgery, he was no longer robust and the powerful as the man I’d known him.  There was a coffee room and activity room where he stayed.  A man my father had fired for drunkenness and theft on the job was given an apartment in the same building my father was in. Mom and he had paid significantly for him to be there and always paid more than their share.  I never knew either to not work. Yet now this former street person was harassing my father whenever he went to the cafe.  My father stopped going to the cafe and my mother told me of this.  What he was most upset with she said, “He keeps calling him a liar and says he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t work on the PO or Airport.  He bullies your  dad and calls him names and your father just returns to the apartment”  

I made a trip to the cafe and spoke to the dozen or so elderly people there and confronted this man telling them all what a great father my dad had been, how he was an engineer and was in charge of the installation of the conveyor systems for the Airport and Post office , how I’d worked for him as a Millwright’s helper and how I was a doctor and specialists and taught at the university thanks to what a great father I’ d had.  I also said my parents raised me to tell the truth and I’d never heard either of them lie.”  I concluded by saying that I’d heard my father’s good name and reputation had been questioned and my father is a humble man who doesn’t care to be in the company of liars and near do wells.  

My mom told me after that this man who’d been the charm of the old ladies was thereafter ostracized and dad eventually returned to having their morning coffee there visiting with their friends. The old sociopath and liar apparently more often than not left when my father came but never again disparaged my father or called him a liar. 

I felt I did the right things, restoring order and protecting my father in his old age God knows he protected me endless times when I was young and indeed more often than not my worst enemy.  That he didn’t kill me when I was a teen ager was the coin that no doubt contributed to his going straight to heaven when he died.  There was no doubt that Mom was headed there but Dad, having been an Air Force Veteran through WWii expressed doubts about his own final destination.

Now I’m selling my sail boat. It was my life and identity for many years, learning all the navigation skills, sailing skills and boat maintenance and engine repairs, communication involved in off shore blue water sailing, my passion after and parallel to my medical training and speciality and sub speciality training.  I am selling the sailboat now.  Soon I’ll be without it and like my friend who lost his license after a stroke so can’t drive his truck, I’m feeling the future closing in on me.  

Younger I’ve heard people who are couch coaches and athletes and dr. Google specialists tell me “I don’t know anything”.  It’s that kind of world today.  People are being given awards and titles without having earned them. Indeed the new DEI , diversity, equity and inclusion designativions are being called ‘Did not earn it’.  Working with the military I had to address the growing issue of ‘stolen glory’, men and women claiming they had served and were wounded in wars that took place far from their couches and little minds.  The professors I know are having increasing problems with fraud.  I imagine Joe Biden telling people in the nursing home that he was once the President of the United States of America and no one believing that.

It’s ego dropping away.  My back aches and I’m no longer a gymnast and dancer and though I hiked to tops of mountains and carried 60 lb packs on week long hike I could sneeze today and be contorted by a spasm,  So yes it’s challenging.

I mostly fear being told by a liar the likes of our lying near do well Prime minister and so many of the political and media sorts and the paid lying Goebels sort that I wasn’t a sailor and wasn’t a doctor and wasn’t who I was.   I imagine being ny father walking away from a favourite cafe where I’d once been accepte and laughed with friends because a bullies and criminal and thief moved in and I just didn’t want to leave my room. Indeed it’s sometimes hard to get out of my bed.  And who’s going to be there to say I was a good man who lived life and loved and served.  Service is not a part of communism the religion of aetheism.  The godless are only interested in what they can get for themself and project their greed onto all those others who believe in something more.  

I had a nightmare of being stripped of my degrees and accomplishment and body and memories and was standing alone and being accused of being a liar and I had no evidence to prove my past. None of the babies I’d delivered. None of those I’d helped get off drugs and alcohol, none of those I’d brought back to life rescuing them from disease and death for another day were there. I was there in that empty room disembodied and naked being a cussed .  Ex wife and old enemies.  There were the murderers I refused to sign out of jail and the pedophiles I put in jail and the malingers and liars I’d exposed.  All of these were accusing me of the voices like those who said I never did n’t do enough. Like the lovers who were never satisfied and the patients who felt I wasb’t perfect and yet I’d done all I could. And the storms at sea which I’d tried to avoid and the storms I’d past through only barely surviving and thinking how poor a sailor I was with broken equipment and exhaustion and the thought that someone from the Navy or Coast Guard would know better or an old offshore fisherman. I’ve never felt I knew enough or was enough and seemed constantly facing challenges at the limit of ny learning.  

I supposed that Jesus or a friend night be in that room I was an advocate for my father.  I suppose and hope and even pray that there is an advocate on that day of reckoning to save me from despair and sorrow.  It’s hard to let go of my sailboat and hard to see my friends retiring and muddling on barely.  

Thank you God for what I had, Thank you God for what I lost, Thank you God for what I have left 

55 yo Mom’s death,psychiatry, Chinatown, Gilbert

55 years old.  I think it was a particularly terrible year though of course that’s only because the negatives stand out in my mind rather than the positives.  There’s a rare and beautiful person who will remember the flowers blooming in the springtime of the war.  I”m working on this.

When I think of 55 yo I think of my Mom dying.  I’ve returned to Vancouver and opened up a practice on Broadway.  Opening a practice is the most difficult time with countless new patients and so many borderlines sent to you by doctors fed up and overwhelmed and hoping the ‘new kid’ will have a solution when all else have failed.  It’s the greatest strain on the nervous system too. Each of these new patients vying for attention and obviously desperate. I open myself to people when I see them. I drop the barriers and defences and let them in. I ‘lend them my ego’ as we say in the trade and I ‘walk a mile in their moccasins.”  I join their insaniety. I ‘feel their pain’.  There’s always some psychopaths and sociopaths early days.  It’s a matter of seeing and sorting out those people who one can work with, who needs simply medication, or a letter, or only a consult and those who are right for in depth psychotherapy and in the ‘action’ phase of change.  

People come to see the new psychiatrists for the following reasons 

1. To get relief from emotional pain

2. To prove to him and themselves and their families that they are untreatable

3. To get a new diagnosis because they don’t like the diagnosis their previous psychiatrists gave them, some people I’ve know have disagreed with 30 plus psychiatrists. 

4.  To spar. 

5. To have an ‘episode’ of television in their boring narcissistic self loathing lives.  Entertainment.

6.  To complain to, to have yet another person hear how horribly wrong they’ve been done by and that it’s not their fault.

7. To have someone more to blame 

8. To stop the thoughts of suicide and homicide.

9 To stop having sex with their sister, cow, dog or mother in law

10.  To ‘show’ their spouse that they’re doing something about their problem when they aren’t doing something about their problem

11. To lie

12. To threaten an educated upper class person when they want to kill another educated upper class person, like Justin Trudeau but he has body guards and psychiatrists are soft targets

13. To get drugs.

14. To get off work.

15. To get disability forms completed. They don’t want to get well, they want money. Money is the solution to their problems and the insurance or government have coopted the psychiatrist to ‘rubberstamp’ the bullshit

16. To be able to get a complaint for human rights or the college to show everyone how they are offended

17. To stop the voices telling them to kill

18. To get a pill that will make their horribly unimaginative lives seem less desperate and bleak

19. To avoid getting a partner or a life or a job.

20. To talk about why they are an aetheist, vegan, and communist and (fill in the blanks) and how everyone should be like them but they’re clearly miserable and none of the antidepressants are working

21. They don’t want to change or do any work at all but they want the psychiatrist to work and change and even take the pills for them or read the literature they bring for him.

22.  They want to steal from him and are there to case the place and access his building or his other patients

23. They want to have sex with him because they’ve always wanted a doctor and they stalk doctors and if they had Sex with a psychiatrist that would prove they weren’t batshit crazy

24. To have sex with a psychiatrist because they’ve already had sex with a lawyer, a priest, a teacher, a football player, a psychologists and their mother in law and they’ve never had sex with a psychiatrist but it would up their score.

25. They want to change.

26. Others say they should change and have said this for 20 years and they don’t want to change but maybe they should consider it.

27.  God told them to go to the psychiatrist and tell him he is an abomination

28. They were sent to the psychiatrist as part of a government ‘sting’  or are being paid by someone else to evaluate the psychiatrist for some nefarious scheme..

29.  Their husband wife or father or mother or boss or the police sent them and they don’t want to be there.

30. Other people complain about their having sex with children and they like having sex with children

31. The police don’t like them

32. They can’t afford the heroin anymore so they want the cheap government drugs

33. They need housing

34. They want a million dollars

35.  They want the psychiatrist to kill their ex husband

36. They want to be on television.

37. They want drugs they can sell for the drugs they want but are tired of doing blow jobs for them

38. They hate everyone

39. They can’t feel

40. They have tried to kill themselves a dozen times in different ways and can’t seem to do it right

41. Women don’t love them.

42. They can’t find a millionaire husband, Men just use them.

43........

I have opened a half dozen psychiatric practices over the years. I have some colleagues who have opened one practice (business) and the trauma of that experience has kept them there terrified of opening another.

It takes months to sort through the patients. Mostly this is a time of rejection and hate.

“You won’t give me opiates or speed or benzodiazepines! You’re no good as a doctor. I’m going to complain to the College of Physicians and Surgeons and say you sexually harrassed me.!”

“You wont say I can never work again. I’m going to complain to the College of Physicians and Surgeons and say you sexually harrassed me.”

“You won’t have sex with me. I’m going to complain to the College of Physicians and Surgeons and say you sexually harrassed me.”

“I”m going to tell my husband you say he should hit me. He’s the best friend of the Mayor and he’s going to ruin you. I just wanted pain killers not some sermon on my marriage and life. We like S&M. It’s what we do. I just need opiates and you’re supposed to give them to me.”

I have had hundred of threats that people will complain to the College when I have made the following diagnosis

1. Alcoholism

2. Substance Use Disorder

3 Malingering

4. Anger issues

That year I was 55 I hired a minister who was a lazy cow and didn’t do an ounce of work in the office, talked on the phone to friends, family, sponsees and never did any ‘billing’, or ‘correspondence’ or ‘book keeping’ or filing. She’d told me she’d worked for her ex husband who’d been a counsellor and that she knew all about billing, book keeping and filing. She answered phone calls and booked appointments.  She double and triple booked me and I saw hundreds of patients which I never got paid for. The government has a convenient system which is that they only pay for a half of their bills with a variety of ways of delaying paying doctors. We get paid in one to 3 months ,however if we bill after 3 months they will deny the bill and after 6 months they totally deny the bill but if your secretary isn’t putting in bills you don’t know that she’s not doing this till months later.

I’d opened the practice on Broadway investing all my income into the new business paying all the staff and overhead costs. If I’m a labourer I can get paid at the end of the day. If I’m blue collar I can get paid every two weeks. If I’m a professional I have to pay tens of thousands of dollars upfront in education and licensing costs and commitment to the system and when I open a practice I will start getting paid in 1. - 3 months. I will likely get all my billing paid in 6 months if I constantly write and demand and beg to be paid,   because of all the ‘dickering’ the government does to ‘steal’ money from doctors for ‘short term’ investment.

I then had the accountant who we assume was a drunk and went into treatment but his throwing his records in the dumpster and on the street cost me tens of thousands of dollars and being garnisheed by the government because of him and my secretary not doing billing cost me tens of thousands of dollars in fines and losses.. 

There is some thought that the woman the minister brought in to help her, who she insisted she vetted and said was clean and sober over 5 years  and had worked in offices before and was good at billing and filing and typing was actually ‘targeting my practice.’ Her biker boyfriend and her were said by those who knew them that they did ‘shakedowns’.  They both within months would steal from me and threaten me.  My new accountants book keeper would ‘teach’ her how she could make ‘false claims’.  She put hundreds of hours of ‘overtime’ in the books which she’d never done and the office had been closed. 

My mother was dying. My patients were sick. My staff were stabbing me in the back and stealing from me. I was working night and day and weekends and I didn’t know that my staff was stealing and stabbing me in the back or that my accountant was lying , psychotic and not doing my books.  

I paid a lawyer tens of thousands of dollars and got a new staff to go over all the government claims this skank brought against me. I only learned after this that the new staff I had, this horrid hateful person who’d been so two faced, had actually ‘shook down’ all her previous employers.  She’d gone to human rights and all the mass of agencies that exist to ‘serve the public’ but all this meant was that I was paying these two people who hated doctors and felt doctors were rich people and entitled.  I made ‘zero’ money that year, faced with theft and shake downs and all along the government agencies were publicly paid institutions that served to destroy entrepreneurs and private enterprises and hated doctors. They loved ‘salaried people’.  It’s been shown since that they prefer communism. 

I was grieving my mother’s death and all I was doing was fighting these agencies who were the worst bullies. Government employees today are dominated by these communist minded entitled people who see their job as destroying others.  There’s also this ‘first come first served’ industry. The skank had complained so they were all on her ‘side’.  I was male and she was female so they were all on her side.  I was older and she was younger so they were all on her side. I was educated and she was not so they were all on her side. I was conservative and traditional in appearance whereas she was tattooed and edgy (the crystal meth addiction certainly helped) and I was staid and pedantic.  It’s all about the victim card and old white guys who are professions don’t get one. 

I spent a year of meeting the lowest humans I have ever encountered in my life. So many highly paid government workers who would ally themselves with a lying active drug addict theif who’d apparently worked as a prostitute and her references were previous Johns. Meanwhile her biker boyfriend was barging into my offic and threatening me but was a terrible coward who I’d simply throw out of my office.  I was building and maintaining my practice despite these evil sick people and their evil sick government allies. She actually went to the college and made a false allegation that I ‘sexually harrassed’ her. The CMPA made it clear that the College was right out of bounds. “It’s a disgruntled employee complaint. It’s none of their business. She was never your patient. They have no boundaries. Their behaviour is so unprofessional.”  But he college is above the law and even their own lawyer  would leave saying they were appalling. 

It was during this time the CMPA told me I was the ‘most persecuted doctor in Canada.”  I’d already learned that there was this person in the college who absolutely personally hated me and abused their position of grotesque powers to act out their evil.   

My mother had died. I felt it was a year before I was out of the war zone and could cry. I still cry. 

It’s a measure of the civilization of people and society how they deal with their poor and old and sick. I was not allowed to grieve. There is an epidemic of doctor suicides in Canada and burn out running 60 to 70%. I have never met more cruel people than those who worked in government with their pettiness and pomposity and their lack of care for other human beings. My mother had worked in offices and my aunt had been the assistant to the Ambassador.  I had worked in a dozen offices in England. I was never cruel and uncaring like these absolutely heartless bureaucrats. Barbarians.  There are no words to describe their insensitivity and the horror they do to good people. I’d be vindicated time and again but though proven innoscent I’d go through this gauntlet of party boys and girls with no dog in the game getting rich and slick on tax payer money serving their own self centred needs and destroying the health care system and country with their arrogant stupidity. 

 I am still working on forgiving them.  My mother’s death was defiled by these subhuman sociopaths and psychopaths.  I would have killed myself a dozen times over if I wasn’t a Christian and knew that my mother and father raised me better than these callous Cretans. I am appalled today at the number of people killed by these bureaurcrats and how they deny accountability no better than the government who maintained the murdering nurse I’d reported years before.  The negligence and sins of omission and corruption are the problem in the system. After that year of being exposed to the hallow men and hollow women in the burearocracy I concluded that only God made sense. There was only hope in Jesus. My Christian faith grew and my appreciation of sobriety was immensely rewarded by seeing the ego addicted narcissism of the truly satanic. I loved reading C.S. Lewis’ Screw tape letters again. I loved when the grief lifted I could have at least black humor.  I loved carrying on. My father needed me.

During my mother’s sickness and dying a woman neighbour had thrown herself at Dad. My mom hated her. She was always asking him about his money and pension and when mom died she was there telling us that he could move in with her and she’d take care of him and could we help her to transfer his pension to her to help her with the costs and what was his bank so she could do all this. Dad was crying at mom’s loss and this lady was flaunting about half naked and just a pig. I was so thankful for my sister in law at this time.  She and my brother and I knew that Dad couldn’t remain here. He was blind and old and weeping with sorrow and this predator was circling.  Her daughter was a nurse drug addict and we actually figured that the mother was just trying to get money for her daughter but she would have killed Dad for his pension.  It was an ugly thing to see. My sister in law Adell was the strong one and a saint and she saw through all these machinations and insisted on taking Dad home with her. My brother and she would arrange for him to be in assisted living nearby them and Ron with his incredible capacity for business and finance would take over all the family affairs. I’d go back to work glad to be part of the rescue of my father and now able to focus on defending myself from the female psychopaths.

Women don’t fight one on one but work their wars and evils through proxies, institutions and men.  They also gang up and tag team.   The fact that I’m alive and things worked out eventually though they’ve cost me thousands,  is that there’s a whole group of good people mostly behind the scenes supporting good.  They don’t like the skanks and psychopaths and they limit their violence.  I was also supported by the Canadian Medical Protective Association and the good men and women who worked there and saw that the system was flawed and these pseudo legal institutions were increasingly out of control. 

Dr. John White the Christian Psychiatrist I’d trained with had written metaphorically about the spiritual war and seeing the evil in the institutions I fully appreciated the spiritual war fare on a larger basis. I actually met Vorgons in government and saw all the characters that are the bad in Lord of the Rings. At the same time my sister in law was a fairy queen during this time and there were others like Laura and Aim and Joanne and Elizabeth. All these beautiful people that counteracted the darkness that seemed to be growing.  My brother was a regular Gandalf while my nephews were definitely Hobbits. It was the metaphors I had to deal with. Sometimes it’s was Luke Skywalker and Obi wan but I just kept telling myself that God prevails and in time these bottom feeders would let go.  

It was so easy to see the darkness but there was always light. Coming back in the sailboat with the broken mast and the lousy battery bank I’d listen over and over again to that great Christian Rock BandThird Day’s song “ There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

I’d become ill one week, I’d had acquired tubuculosis working in the northern Indian reserves , been treated, but my lungs were never the same.  I thought as I was going to die from this horrible pneumonia so I’d might as well buy a motorcycle so I had something to live for. I’d taken all my lessons and loved my Ruckus but now I almost bought a Honda Shadow but a Buell Blast went on sale at Trev Deely. Laura loved motorcycles and had had a dirt bike she adored as a teen ager so was 100% behind my return to motorcyling. After I’d crashed a Norton on the back roads drunk and stoned getting rocks in my finger joints I had to pick out I’d decided against motorcycling for fear of losing my fingers. Now sober and having all the fun we’d had with the Aprillia and Ruckus motor scooters I graduated to the Buell Blast 600 cc. Laura had her motorcycle license and I’d do my training with her driving my car and me riding behind her on the country roads. Eventually I’d have my full motorcycle license, after only one crash in the exam where the fleet footed examiner escape alive.  I’d  drive that Buell all over the province before I graduated to the Harley 1200 cc Roaster which Laura and I would take motorcycle camping all over the province. I wanted to go to as many round up camp outs as I could and did.  We’d fall in love with Salt Spring. I’d loved it as a sailor and now loved it all over motorcycle camping. 

Every weekend and every evening of that year I was ‘defending’ myself and my practice and my patients from disgusting low life in low and high places.

I’d eventually have this lovely young lady who was pure and honest and Christian join as staff. In addition I had this very savy young man who’d worked in accounting and banking sort out the mess for me 

He was also ‘mr BC’ in this hilarious society in which the men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Each year there’d be a ‘drag queen’ ball and that’s when I spent the evening with the mayor in a magnificent gown with my hair done up , my make up perfect and even my friend Barbara didn’t recognize me. Laura laughed at all the shenanigans.  95% of cross dressers were heterosexual so our group was husbands and wives and rather hilarious. We’d have these dinners with challenges as to who could dress best from Value Village  with only $20 .  I was living on Beach in this fabulous apartment with balcony and loving going to the great pool every other day and eating out on Davis. I rarely drove and lived downtown. I even got roller blades and almost killed my self because my friend Dr. Anna said it was fun. I had more padding than the Michelin man but still couldn’t stop. Stanley park was a marvellous extension of my experience with great walks and cycling tours at this time.  I’d take a little ferry to Granville Island to shop and really loved the city. The problem was camping and hunting. I had everything in storage and would bring everything back only to find the elevator broken and me faced with climbing 20 plus stories.  It was a truly ‘city’ time though and I loved going out to clubs and dances and having a whole network of eccentric and wild friends from my elite club and downtown church.  

As it was with me the office buildings where I worked had cataclysmic events.  They got sold and the new owners took over the floor I was located on. The whole floors got evicted twice in my experience.  I was a very little guy and watched a Dentist and Opthalmologist get the same shaft as I experienced. The next time the lawyers on the floor couldn’t resist so I just went with the flow. Everyone just doing ‘business’.  I couldn’t complain.  I had a year to year lease and had to vacate.  It was the best thing that happened to me

I moved to China Town. The secretary that I’d had who was this horrible angry person who abused my patients who all complained about her, lasted with me less than 6 months because ‘I don’t like seeing people that aren’t from West Vancouver. I don’t want to work with people with drug and alcohol problems.”  I suspected she had a major alcohol problem after a while but who knows.  She was perfect in the ‘honeymoon’ and then her ‘true colours’ showed. I was glad when she said ‘I don’t want to work with people with drug and alcohol problems or crazy people. I thought you saw people who were a little depressed. Half your patients are lovely people but some of your patients are just disgusting. They don’t respect and appreciate me or treat me as they should. I certainly am not going to work in China Town.  That’s so beneath me.  You can’t move there.”

Well I could and I did. I was tired mostly of the parking gouging on Broadway. I ‘d had a horrible experience at this location with the evil minister and her evil friend and the evil government agencies.  I wanted to go to China town and have different places to go to lunch at noon. I worked from 8 am to 8 pm and would only get out if I had a cancellation or a lunch. I loved Chinatown and wanted to be able to explore at these times. I’d been on the Broadway corridor for years and eaten in all the restaurants. There was nothing wrong with it but I wanted a change. 

Because I moved I’d hire new staff. I’d keep more than half my patients. Some from the university area didn’t want to make the trip down to the city but I really didn’t have to ‘start over’ with the practice but had had more and more ‘medical legal’ requests.  I’d taken an interest in neurology and head injury just bccause I’d been seeing so much of this in my alcohol and drug addicted patietns. The best part of all was having Aim,  Joanne and Hannah come to work with me. After a year of theft and attitude and downright evil I had these extraordinary women come into my practice as a gift of God. They did the work and they did it well and they always ‘cared’ for the patients. I’d had the skank and her boyfriend and this horrible old lady who simply lacked empathy and didn’t seem to ‘care’ for the patients.  

Now I had these amazing ladies who really were mature and emotionally so highly developed and cared for the patients.

In the summer before I’d move and meet Aim and Joanne and enter 5 golden years of practice reminiscent of the days of Lil, and Laura and Suzanne, I’d decide to sail my boat back with my friend Tom. I”d pay for Tom to fly over to Kona and spend a couple of weeks checking out the systems and replacing what was needed. This was all good but he refused to replace the batteries which I’d paid for him to do. He insisted they were fine when indeed they weren’t. He did however ensure all the other systems were working and when I arrived we were able with only another week or so and massive outfitting with my credit card get on our way.  

We were a hundred miles off Kona when the rudder connection broke. I contacted the Hawai Coast Guard and sailed back. Homeland Security had become involved since 9/11 and ‘permits’ to sail the islands were highly restricted. We were a boat in distress and I only motor sailed daily from island to island during the day rather enjoying this  ‘sailing’ of these tropical islands. I’d enjoy it more but I was paying for a secretary and an office and had a whole lot of patients waiting for my return. I’d planned 4-6 weeks off and it would actually take another 4 weeks.  I’d sailed solo to Hawaii in the worse conditions in 24 days but now sailing back in the best conditions with crew took 34 days.  30 days was a reasonable plan except for the equipment breakdowns.  

We arrived in Hawaii main island harbour. That’s where we saved the pacific fleet by finding they had a ‘hole’ in their defence at low tide.  This impressed the Navy and the Coast Guard but nothing impressed Homeland Security who treated me like a “terrorist to be”, the whole time I was there. She did not like ‘yachties’ and thought everyone should be in uniform.  I was thankful that the Navy and Coast Guard countermanded her order to leave insisting I couldn’t because my boat’s rudder needed repair. We had to order the part. I rented a lovely white convertible and Tom and I had an idyllic week going for coffee, lying on the beach and reading.   When the part got in, thanks to Tom’s engineering skill, we replaced the rudder coupling and restored the autopilot function to the rudder.  

We were off again.

It was perfect sailing conditions. Wonderful tradewinds. Great sunny days. We’d met a couple of other boats going back and kept in touch with my Hamm radio. Then my crew got his crazy impulse to race at night. A gale had come up and he’d put up all the sails. Sleeping below I’d felt the boat lean too far and woken in fear, ran up on deck to start screaming and pulling down sails. That’s when the mast cracked. I’d had to repeatedly tell him that the maximum ‘cruising’ boat ‘angle’ had been x when he wanted to have the ‘gunwale’ in the water. “We’re not in a fucking race. I’ve told you time and again  I reduce sail at night. If anything goes wrong we’re alone at sea at night.”  I was really quite furious and my crew would joke about his having only 40 feet to stay away from me that night.  I just was angry that he’d take risks with my equipment and pull that whole anti authoritarian , adolescent ‘acting out’ with the full sails at night routine and now I was paying big time for his inability to simply follow orders and respect my equipment and my desires on my boat. The old mutiny and why I understand the ‘lashes’ that lasted so long in the British navy and weren’t such an issue on land.  I certainly wasn’t Captain Bligh who really got a bad name because his crew mutinied. 

Spanish Turnbuckle.  We were going again.  70 miles a day rather than the 100 to  150 miles a day and more weeks at sea but really a good time was had by all though my costs and losses for this all would be $150,000 but I’d have my boat back and we would be alive. My crew would oversee the repair of the mast having created weeks of work for himself and I’d eventually have the boat back as a home and a true joy.  My tugboat captain friend arranged space for me on the commercial dock and I had a shower in the China Town office. It was a rough existence in some ways but I truly loved the SV Giri. 

But on the boat coming home we’d had this wind generator problem. I had the wind generator from hell. It was huge. Tom in a fate of redemption stood on the precarious strut and lifted this beast off. He tried to fix it and for days we had this killer monster taking up our cabin and then in another feat of despair it was lifted back onto the pole when I was arguing we just chuck it overboard.  He deserved a Victoria Cross for his bravery and contribution to the boat even if it didn’t work any better after that.  My solar panels had all the input they could get but the problem remained the batteries. I had a water maker and for the water maker to work we needed batteries. The batteries ran the autopilot as well though we were able to get the wind pilot working a lot.  2 guys at sea.  Lots of challenges. 

 I have a friend who brings yachts home and now appreciate his amazing skills. I’d sailed solo starting with a fully tested ready to go ship but now this boat had been on land for three years and things corrode and gum up and such. The rudder had broke and the mast had broke  and the batteries wouldn’t hold a charge. But I had a Honda 1000 generator though it was problematic with intermittent air flow issues.  Nonetheless we made it. The tuna we caught was delicious. Tom baked fabulous bread.  

Coming into the Strait of Juan de Fuca my cell phone rang and I realized that now we had cell phone coverage in the coastal passage where I planned to be sailing now that I was home. I immediately thought this means I can do a methadone clinic. To be a methadone doctor you have to be on 24 hour call but VHS radio is not private so until this moment I couldn’t be because I didn’t want to give up sailing. Now I could.

I’d phone Gary and begin working a day a week at his methadone clinic a few blocks from the new China Town office I’d arranged after the Broadway building was sold.  All my money was going into the boat or the practice.  I was functionally ‘poor’ but rich in so many ways.

Now in my China Town practice I’d become so rich in heart.  I’d decided I could have another dog. I was over the murder of Stuart as much as one gets over the murder of a friend.

I made the decision to meet Gilbert. It all happens first in a spiritual realm. My prayers were answered. 

My cousin Wayne, logger and rancher, who bred Appalachian horses,  hunted and fished, and lived in a beautiful log cabin he’d made himself in the north had a Cockapoo. I decided that a cockapoo was what I wanted and found a retired  American Navy Commander who bred them on Whitby Island.  I contacted her.  Laura was keen on helping. 

I’d go off to meet Gilbert in my truck and  return with wonderful bundle of love that Laura and I continue to be blessed to know.    

Compulsive Liars

I once worked with a compulsive liar. A female sociopath who was brought into my life by a female minister who promoted the compulsive liar, knowingly or unknowingly The damage she did eventually cost me more than $50,000 and left me feeling utterly violated. It turned out that the references she provided were from men who had previously had business with her but not the business she claimed. Given their claims on her behalf, regarding her character, not her physical skill, in retrospect I concluded that she must have threatened them as she threatened me, extortion being part of her repertoire, or being the business minded type of older men who liked adolescent women and had no character themselves. She stole but what was more extensive was the dishonesty, compulsive lying which verged on pathological lying.
In retrospect I couldn't sort out what she was other than mean, deceitful and despicable in the foulest of ways. Sadly her lies incorporated a dozen women of stirling character whose character was then doubted by a truly dubious female doctor whose capacity for gullibility bordered on the insane. She ignored the truth of a dozen upstanding women preferring the repeated lies of a crack and apparent sex addict who'd used a female minister for her nefarious ends.
The 'enabling' doctor was brought into the 'con' which all the while was devastating the community, hurting me and hundreds of others. The girl and her pimp like boyfriend were white and particularly racist and well as loathing of the rainbow community, The doctor was a conservative white lady known for her inferiority complex coupled with a superiority complex known for her fawning way or belittling of male specialists depending on how much the male doctors deferred to her outdated ideas. As one female specialist said she was a cow who found her calf and to this brilliant and beautiful psychiatrist that explained everything though it didn't particularly help me. She lived in an ivory tower protected by male and female doctors who themselves would have had the street smarts to smell a rat long before she could if she ever did.
In the end I swore I'd have nothing more to do with sociopaths and compulsive liars. My mother had died that year. Rather than focussing on mourning and remembering her for her great achievements, I was distracted by the sordid indecent drama of the pervert lying lady and her old lady doctor promoter. The female minister was by no means an Oswald Chambers, had beat a quick retreat from the disaster she had sewed preferring only the lush robes of office. She was no longer needed as the dubious doctor was the latest host for the parasite who lied for money and lied for lying. In contrast, my mother, a Baptist Christian lady of high character, had lived a life devoted to the truth.
Yet here once again a rat has got in my chicken coup. Jesus said sweep the house of demons and don't let one back in or they'll bring more with them. I can actually chart the part I played letting them scurry that first day into the bag of feed. When I had a chicken coup, that one rat I saw that day eating the chicken's grain didn't seem like much. Yet within days I was carrying two bags more of feed each week to the chicken coup, all profit lost as a result of the infiltration of rats, all joy gone, and my back aching from the effort to feed the chickens whose food was being stolen en mass by the rats. Rat poison, 12 guage shot gun shells galore, drowning and a number of cats never did get rid of the rats. In the end I moved. Life is too short for good people to live among rats if there are alternatives. I sometimes think Vancouver with it's bike lanes and multibillion dollar marijuana industry, housing prices inflated by heroin trade and crack industry, is particularly ratty. Yet others argue it's a product of the times and the decline in morality and rise in relative ethics. "It could be worse, Goldman Sacs could be your neighbour," my Vancouver loving friend argues.
Compulsive liars are often called rats. They and their lies proliferate. I'm dealing with a male one now. Despite all my experience and training and after that female Eva Brawn experience I thought I was over having them sneak under my radar. Yet they're superficially charming. Their lives are compartmentalized with no one knowing the full extent of their deception or how many people they hurt or are hurting until later. They commonly borrow money or steal from everyone and only later do people who know them meet up and go 'aha'.
Dr. Robert Hare has written extensively about sociopaths and psychopaths and documents how many people have rats in their lives, how the rats live, how they breed and where they like to leave their droppings and what lives they devour. When I beat myself up for letting this latest one in, I was reminded by a friend that even Jesus, had his Judas. I gather from that maybe 1 in 12 people isn't all human but more a rat like, Gollum, character who CS Lewis would say looks for the architect in the wall of the building. As I heard chanted in Indian, 'they love things more than people'. They like shiny things, like pieces of silver.
I haven't raised chickens since the rats came. I moved away from that town and took up other pursuits. The rats were real but also a metaphor. I'd had to deal with a liar whose eyebrows grew together and was glad I got out before the good people we knew there were destroyed by drug dealers and other sociopaths. Rats are parasites so if you remove the host the rats die or go elsewhere. Rats don't live long and aren't welcomed anywhere but in dumps.
All recommendations about Compulsive Liars start with the recognition that whatever they say is not true. Personally once I note that a person who I'm not being paid to work with, treating pathological liars is part of my business, I know that everything that follows is a lie. In terms of transactional analysis the compulsive liar 'wins', 'gets a reward' by gambling on you 'buying' their latest lie. Commonly the 'lie' is 'seeded' in a group of half truths and even an occasional truth. This person in my life right now owes me thousands of dollars and has caused me to drive hundreds of miles to be 'paid' and adjust my schedule on several occasions to 'meet' with them to be 'paid' only every time they "lie". They 'conveniently 'forget' and 'miss' appointments. Even now they want me to again accomodate my schedule and life to their chaos and deceit. The cost and pain of being 'played' by a sociopath amounts to far more than thousands of dollars of initial 'help'.
Books are written about them with titles like 'soul suckers' and 'emotional vampires'. That's part of the pattern of 'compulsive liars'. They play on the good nature of their hosts. They feed on food meant for others. They're takers and players. The pleasure for the liar is to 'manipulate' others around them and to 'control' others. They get everyone playing their game and are called 'king baby' because their games are so juvenile. Their behaviour, were it not for their age and wearing long pants, would be perfectly appropriate in a toddler, a terrible 2, or even tolerable in 13 year old. It's just painful when these compulsive liars are masquerading as adults hiding diapers under their stolen big people clothing.
Commonly these sociopaths are drug addicts as well and one doesn't know if the drug addiction has begat the compulsive lying or the compulsive lying is just a component of the immature character of the person. Pathological lying is commonly associated with alcohol and marijuana. Drug users commonly lie partly because of the brain damage (reversible or irreversible) and partly because of the grandiosity and arrogance that goes with addiction. Addicts live in a false reality where they preen before a magic mirror of their own making excluding any truth since truth might topple their fantasy world.
At work we get the 'cheques in the mail' lie too but we refuse to do business with such folk after the first lie. Countless businesses have died because of liars and many an idealist has become a cynic, thanks to one too many liars or sociopaths.
Compulsive liars want you to play their game of 'believe me' and 'trust me' so the can get close or stay close. Then they can throw a rock through your window. They say "trust me" and "I promise" but this is never a 'reliable' response because they lack the character to be able to be as good as their word. They and their word are wholly foul. The consequence then is that all who deal with compulsive liars must consider everything they say as untrue until they 'prove' by demonstration and action and repeated demonstration and action over at least a year that they have given up the addiction of compulsive lying. Prisoners in jails want out because they don't like being around compulsive liars and sociopaths. They're like a collection of virus who need hosts to infect. Rats aren't happy just to be among rats. They infest homes, towns and cities. If they'd stay in the dumps no one would care.
In addiction circles where compulsive liars are common the sayings which apply are 'don't tell me, show me,' and 'if you talk the talk, walk the walk.'
Personally I am feeling again so violated that I want to just leave and go anywhere that compulsive liars aren't enabled and supported. I am so tired of being hurt by these children, sick as they are.
Psychodynamics tells us that they are usually a product of equally sick parents where one at least of the parents, either themselves were a compulsive liar or addict or one that rewarded compulsive lying. The organizations Adult Children of Alcoholics shares their experience of being victimized by addicts who compulsively lied and routinely broke promises to their family while maintaining a fake personna in the community. Those in 12 step programs are in recovery and seeking treatment for the damage done often so they don't pass along the damage done to them to their children. Not uncommonly I treated three and sometimes 4 generations of compulsive liars and sociopaths, usually on welfare, sometimes running corrupt businesses, often criminal, and simply not knowing a life better than 'lying' and happy as bottom feeders living in the dark and afraid to walk in the light regardless of the lies they tell themselves.
Al anon, the sister organization of alcoholics anonymous, teaches their members to 'detach with love' when dealing with the alcoholic and their compulsive lying.
Still, while it's true they are sick individuals, like pedophiles are sick individuals, it remains that when one has slithered into your life or been brought in by well meaning people ,it's hard to think of them compassionately as they wreck so much damage and waste such valuable time that could be used elsewhere. Their 'king baby' 'drama queen' antics, thoroughly delighted with the smell of their own poopoo, they smear it all over their hand and reach out to shake yours again and again, laughing each time they catch you in another of their countless shitty little lies. It's then you relish the old language of seeing them as evil and demon possessed and want to stake them on the lawn to discourage their likes from coming around. I encouraged a patient to forgive a relative who is a pedophile and hurt his family, but know that it's incredibly hard to forgive when what one really wants to do is revenge.
I listened to the new Tenth Avenue North album, Struggle yesterday and enjoyed the young song writer talking about long ago using up his 70 times 70 minutes of his 'forgiveness plan' but then remembering Jesus on the cross saying 'Forgive them for they know not what they do."
As psychiatrists I raised this topic at my recent convention, sharing about my own openess and generosity making me prey to sociopaths, how "boundaries' were such a static pre global arty luddite term for a post internet, facebook, spy camera everywhere world, when as medical scientists we did need 'membranes' instead and we talked together of this mutually sharing our experiences.
I shared how the beaurocrats reminded me of the drunken irish lawyer who'd picked bar fights always winning because he was the lawyer for the Hell's Angels and the Angels stood behind him and his adversary always 'stayed down'. Boundaries was good for them because they lived in medieval ivory towers and ruled but it lost relevance in the real world where real doctors negotiated their influence and lived among people and didn't 'dictate' to them as 'administratives' types preferred. We shared how the police, judges and lawyers who so often work alot with these unwashed heathens make a strong point of having highly selective personal circles. My detective friends don't want just anyone around their families because frankly they need a 'break' from compulsive liars and sociopaths. There might well be described as a group who use 'moats' more than anything else.
As psychiatrists we weighed the pros and cons of very tight 'boundaries'. When I graduated we were told not to share any personal information with patients, women and men couldn't wear wedding rings, all of us had private phone numbers we didn't share and our addresses were sacrosanct. I spent years working like that, treating patients like they were somehow 'infectious' and wearing my doctor persona like a Hazmat Suit. The lawyer at the College wears just such a Hazmat suit and I always think she is afraid of being infected by 'doctors'. As psychiatrists we learned that the 'stigma' of mental illness extends to the caregivers as well. It's equally why so many people think of lawyers as 'liars' because they are 'stigmatised' with their so often criminal clientele.
Having been stalked, had my windows shot out, had my dog killed, and my life repeatedly threatened all related to work I fully appreciated the women psychiatrist who today wouldn't have anything but a very restricted artificial relationship with her patients . She admitted she was afraid of many of them and was glad to have a place where she could share her fear. Alot of my colleagues 'cherry pick' the 'worried well' or work in 'student mental health' or leave clinical medicine all together to become administrative doctors or doctors who police doctors because they are afraid too. I loved an old College Registrar who shared he was always delighted when I'd chat with him and share my trials and travails because he told me it made him thank his lucky stars he wasn't back in front lines faced with such awful decisions with so few resources. He said he'd got burnt out and looked for an escape and eventually ended where he was, an amazingly wife and compassionate gentleman whose contribution to medicine was truly admirable.
The psychiatrist working in the jail told us as well he couldn't even share that he had cancer because an inmate 'gloated' and used that as 'ammunition'. Sociopaths love to learn something about people and then use 'name calling', saying things like 'faggot' to put down those around them. They even use words like "Christian" or "doctor" or "worker" in a twisted way making a "positive" appear negative because that's really a reflection of their internal 'bizzaro' psyche. The jail psychiatrist would say that a sociopath could tone the word 'mother' or 'father' in such a way as to make those beautiful words sound like smegma. Sociopaths live to 'chop the heads off others to make themselves look taller'. None of the jail psychiatrists told their patients the names of their wives or children partly to protect them from physical harm but also to protect themselves.
Hearing them share this I reflected that I'd done a similiar thing when I worked in jails and asylums. I was reminded of this when a patient recently stole my personal laptop and I wondered if I wasn't too old for this work. All my life doctors have been pilloried in the media and by the government whereas drug dealers seem to be celebrated and rewarded in this part of the world. When I told Dr. Hildes years ago I wanted to be a missionary doctor he told me I didn't have to leave Canada. He got me working with the Northern Medical Unit at the time but I know now that as one of the wisest men I had the priviledge to train with his insights regarding health care weren't just limited to Circumpolar Health.
The private psychiatrists like myself however especially the older men who worked in addiction psychiatry, often had long standing relationships with patients where their personal lives were an open book. A number of the psychiatrists had written books with extensive autobiographical material which made it rather moot what they shared but they too could talk as I did about the days when we had our walls bare and answered every question with a question. I shared too that the woman doctor I'd mentioned who'd been thoroughly conned by the female sociopath had still been doing that when she retired.
When I was a small town country psychiatrist everyone knew everything about me and the country psychiatrists described the same experience of being on display today. I loved Scott Peck's book, "People of the Lie" better than "The Road Less Travelled". Over the years I've treated cleaning ladies of the rich and famous and learned all manner of details which I'm sure were 'priviledged'. My colleague said he liked the 'privacy' of his life in Burnaby compared to when he'd worked in Asia where every household had so many 'servants'. "So much of what I've read about 'boundaries" is wholly ethnocentric and western because it doesn't take into account servants or families or multi culturalism", he said. They found the big city psychiatrists talk of 'boundaries' priviledged and irrelevant , not at all realistic when their kids were all in the same school as their patients and they were coaching soccer teams and attending Bible studies with patients. "These guys must live on the moon and see patients from another planet," the way they write. The addiction psychiatrists described their experiences of being open about their lives in 12 step meetings where their patients were and then learning that one patient befriended another patient in the waiting rooom. That was why my psychoanalyst mentor had separate exit on his office so no patients passed each other.
While everyone had had similiar experiences which had helped them in being 'human' and clearly did a tremendous service for their patients and 'fellow humans' each had had a 'bad experience'. That's what we shared too. This conference is one I attend because it encourages doctors to share. Then we discuss options and reflect on solutions without doing that typical administrative and beaurocratic 'blame and shame' game. These are real physicians, healers, and not just paper pushers and rubber stampers.
I was reminded of when I played guitar on stage and sang Paul Simon's brilliant song, "I am a Rock I am an Island." The line I loved most was "I touch no one and no one touches me."
We reminisced how easy it must have been for the psychiatrists doing lobotomies and certainly surgeons can stay aloof like the administrative doctors try to be but in the end humanity seems to prevail. Only Ralf Nader could withstand having his garbage gone through daily by security firms hired for millions of dollars to find dirt on him. No one ever did but in the end he was thought a 'boring' man. In the end I thought he'd make a change as a politician and president but the hoi polloi didn't want saints ,preferring dope smoking womanizer Clinton and former alcoholic Texas bad boy Bush to Nader, the man with the cleanest garbage in history. Ralf Nader, himself, a man of truth, didn't accept politics probably because he knew politicians daily had to deal with lobbyists some of who were by nature compulsive liars.
Like the other older psychiatrists at that meeting of sharing about 'boundaries' and 'ethics' I remembered my psychoanalytic teacher saying that he wouldn't share an elevator with a patient under any condition. Yet Freud had his patients come to his house where they smelt what his wife was cooking along with every other household nuance of that canny old master, now quite unfairly criticized by 'johnny come lately's who have all benefitted from his pioneering genius.
Given the lies told about me by the sociopath and the public domain of a particularly deceitful divorce, I chose "transparency" as a measure of safety. In a particularly fascist community which thrived on dark rooms and 'secret discussions' and knew it's own share of 'lies' ,I was even 'declared dead' by a colleague who I'd named for killing patients, Unfortunately for him and his patients, I was very much alive and he was found wholly negligent and given the mandatory wrist slap.
The professionalism of the day was protect the leader at all costs and sacrifice the young for the sake of the old. It was a particularly toxic environment with some of the most heinous of acts making front page news. What was so often overlooked was that the vetting bodies were complicit in the crimes. Compulsive liars and sociopaths are most blatant in their 'cover ups' which are clearly not just 'mistakes' but declare best of all that 'evil intent' and 'false motive' were definitely present.
The recent financial crisis where the Fanny Mae and Freddie Macs compulsively lied before Congress showed that despite the lessons the world had learned from Hitler , yet again sociopaths and compulsive liars could get under the radar of countries and do all manner of damage to the world. This wasn't Stalin or the bad Chinese or really bad North Koreans but Canada's neighbour, America with Americans doing it to their fellow Americans. They're like a disease that can't even recognise their own. They behave like children whose parents just never could get them to understand that basic rule 'don't shit where you eat'.
We should all know today, only the rich or irrelevant can truly have secrets. Transparency has such merit that Beverley McLaughlan, the head of the Supreme Court of Canada has made it her central theme. Instead of "judge Judy' on tv, we can look forward to a return to real judges on television like the days of Solomon when court was an open forum and the judge didn't cut deals in his or her chambers.
Given the experience of dealing with the female doctor who rejected the truth of a dozen women of stirling character preferring her own skewed view reinforced by a crack addicted pervert whose failure to report relapses were part of her history of compulsive lying, I learned that people will often 'believe' what they want to believe and refuse to let the 'facts' get in the way of their 'opinions'.
I depend as much today on prayer and Grace as I do on 'boundaries' or 'locks'. As an old saying goes about a servant who didn't tie up the camels and they were gone in the morning, when he said to the master, "But you always say trust Allah", the master replied, "Tether the camels and then trust Allah." As Christians say, you are the hands of God. So a spiritual life isn't one of work without faith but rather work and faith. In the beginning and the end, all is God.
I have also learned that it doesn't help to confront compulsive liars , just as it doesn't help to confront a sociopath. It's like telling a cannibal that they are a cannibal. Cannibals don't care about this information. What is important is to get your hand back before they get your arm. The only hope for a compulsive liar or a sociopath is if they are an addict as well. Addiction is a treatable medical condition.
But addiction, compulsive lying, and sociopathy all share in common that for treatment the person must have reached a bottom, be coerced to accept treatment through intervention or have a moment of clarity or age. Prochaska has written very clearly about Stages of Changes starting with Precontemplation, Contemplation, Determination, and finally Action. Modern day motivation therapy encourages us to no longer waste valuable resources on patients who are not themselves further along in the process. Compulsive liars and sociopaths love an audience. Transactional analysis and other therapies showed that they 'score' not by changing for the positive but by 'defeating' your helping them.
Usually toyboys and party girls grow up in their 50's and though they do immense damage to their children along the way they might themselves find truth within their life time some being simply developmentally delayed. Others learn 'toilet training' early while this group sociologically are 'challenged' as the pc language would say. They think their shit doesn't smell even but eventually may 'get it' though frankly the evidence does suggest that as often die young.
The most important point though is that those around compulsive liars and sociopaths do best to keep them out, recognise the rat when it gets in and as quickly as possible get out before they bring more rats or tell more lies.


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