June 5, 2004

• My loose ends,
  responses to your comments,
  and sex….

  I left clues for myself the night before last, and then missed
  seeing them as I was uploading pics for yesterday’s blog.  I had
  meant to put in something about the meeting, about the 8th and 9th
  steps and “indirect amends.”

  Since my recovery did not start within the meeting rooms of any
  program, and I never had a human “sponsor” to help me through the
  steps, I still have things to learn about the programs.  “Amends”
  have always been problematic for me.  I have observed that some
  programmed anonymous folk seem to think that saying, “I’m sorry,”
  covers the requirement for making amends and lets them off the
  hook.  Being the dictonary reader that I am, I’ve always thought
  that making amends meant fixing things up, putting things right,
  retrieving or redressing what’s been done wrong.  Being sorry
  doesn’t do that, and saying you are doesn’t even necessarily mean that
  you mean it.  Program literature also speaks of making things
  right, but many people’s interpretations lean toward the apology copout.

  The problem for me has been that those things I most need to “amend”
  are irretrievable.  Three of my kids, the children of my youth,
  were reared by other people.  Both girls were exploited as cheap
  domestic help and were told I’d abandoned them because I didn’t love
  them.  My son’s mind was set against me, too.  My eldest
  daughter had been old enough (three years) when we parted that she
  always believed I loved her.  We had a good reunion when she was
  twenty, and had established a warm and functional relationship before
  she died.

  My second daughter has said several times that by giving her up for
  adoption I gave her “advantages” she’d not have had otherwise. 
  She has also said she never felt like she fit in, she was verbally and
  emotionally abused, and she ran away as a teenager and had a child whom
  she gave up for adoption.  She is in denial about her abandonment
  issues and her addictions.  She will never in this lifetime find
  the comfort and security of Mama’s loving arms that might have made all
  the difference for her when she was young.  I might be able to
  help her come to terms with her issues, but for now anyway she prefers
  denial.

  My firstborn son also seems to be in denial of some sort.  He says
  there’s “no problem” between us.  He simply does not communicate
  with me.  My feeling is that he’s rejecting me more because of
  current religious differences than for old resentments.  He now
  lives with a woman who had been spamming me with tons of forwarded
  simpleminded, aesthetically and metaphysically offensive Christian
  propaganda until I asked her to stop, and his father is living a lie,
  claiming the title of “Reverend” and saying he was a chaplain in the
  Army.  He never was in the Army, and was a jet aircraft mechanic
  in the Air Force.  I wonder how much of the truth my son
  knows.  It’s here in my memoirs, and he has the URLs, but if he
  read them he never responded.

  Thursday night at the meeting the reading from the daily mediation
  spoke of “indirect amends” as making changes to the attitudes that led
  to our wrongful behavior in the first place.  I’ve taken care of
  that.  My fear and insecurity were a great portion of the
  motivating force behind my drug addictions at the start, and were at the
  root of what led me to think that other people could do a better job
  raising my kids than I could.  I was never in a position where I
  could put up any fight to keep my son, but I might have done so for my
  daughters if I had not been afraid.  My ex and his mother
  absconded with my son while I was locked up, moved around, covered
  their tracks and I didn’t find him for over thirty years.  Finally
  the internet led me to him.

  One of the other members at the meeting also expanded on that idea of indirect amends,
  saying that if those we harmed are out of reach or the damage
  irreparable, we can make amends by doing for other people and for
  society in general what we cannot do for them.  In his case he
  spoke of giving to charity to cover things he’d stolen from a
  now-defunct business, and picking up litter along the highway for all
  the empty bottles he’d thrown out his car windows.  I’ve got the
  indirect amends for my kids covered, I think.  My youngest son
  Doug hasn’t wanted for maternal affection, care and protection. 
  Whenever any young woman at an AA or NA meeting shares something
  regarding her kids who are in foster care, I share my story and
  encourage those women to do what they can to be mothers to their
  children.  It’s all I can do.

  
  COMMENTS

  LittleEgypt
  wrote about a niece who had lived in Alaska and had difficulty with the
  darkness of winter.  We all do.  Nearly any Alaskan will tell
  you that the cold is much easier to tolerate than the dark.

  pipsqueak asked:
  “Does
  it feel odd not to have to wear layers and layers of clothing for a
  while and does it ever get warm enough to swim?”
  What feels odd to me is the transition in fall when I have to start
  wearing extra layers again.  The first time I can comfortably go
  barefoot, and getting back into my skinny pants, or wearing a skirt
  without long underwear under it–that just feels good.  The air
  here gets warm, but most of our streams and lakes are
  glacier-fed:  like swimming in icewater.  Around Wasilla Lake
  in the summer you see lots of people sunning themselves, but few in the
  water.  Sailboarding is a popular sport on Cook Inlet near
  Anchorage, but the sailboarders wear insulated dry suits.  There
  is a lake near Talkeetna that is fed by a warm spring.  It is full
  of leeches, but that doesn’t keep some people from swimming in it.

  Sassy wrote:  “I had a tuxedo cat
  named Whiskey for 18 years…he died in my arms when I had cancer…I
  swear he took the illness as bast he could from me and then died…that
  is what I believe…I miss his love…you made me smile seeing your
  Pidney.”
  The healing powers of cats–I renamed the cat that Mark left here with
  us, after she did a therapeutic job on me.  He had called her
  Penny.  I had pain in my hip that I thought was arthritis in the
  joint, but the painswitch wouldn ‘t work on it.  I’d focus my mind
  on the joint and the pain would persist.  Then in bed one night
  Penny got up on me and started kneading on the acupuncture meridian to
  the kidneys.  Her first poke hit a tender point and I realized why
  I hadn’t been able to switch off the pain.  It was referred pain
  from a kidney stone.  I focused on the kidney and the pain
  stopped.  Then I drank a lot of water, did a kidney and liver
  cleanse, and washed out the stones.  She has been my Pidney ever
  since.

  SEX

  Several women here on Xanga whom I love and respect have been
  writing about sex recently.  Some of it has been in protected
  posts and some has been right out there for everyone to see.  A
  common thread in most of those entries relates to pain and shame that I
  feel are completely unnecessary and entirely regrettable.  
  It all makes me want to share my take on the topic.

  I am an orgasm addict.  It is not so extreme that, as we say in
  NA, “one is too many and a thousand never enough.”  But then
  neither is my amphetamine addiction, nor the one to alcohol… and I’m
  not going to try taking one barbiturate to see if I can stop after just
  one.  My point there is that since my therapy thirty years ago I
  have been able to use drugs with moderation.  There is a line over
  which I may not go, a number of drinks or hits of speed beyond which
  the automatism of brain chemistry would take over and I would not be
  able to stop.  What the therapy did for me was (a) made me aware
  that there is that point of no return, and (b) boosted my self-esteem
  enough that I choose not to go beyond it.  With one exception I
  have also been able to moderate the orgasm addiction for those thirty
  years, too.

    As a child and furtive pre-teen I’d masturbate every chance I
  got.    I ran around with the sexual flush on my cheeks
  and chest so much that my mother feared I had rosacea.  When I
  became sexually active with boys and men, it became important to me to
  have one or more of them around to scratch my itch, because having a
  partner added the attention/affection element to the sex mix. 
  That really complicated matters as it does for many of us, male and
  female alike.  Popular culture tends to call affection, lust,
  appetite, neurotic emotional need and the reproductive urge all by the
  same word, “LOVE”.  It can be confusing.

  I grew up on the screwball comedies of the ‘fifties.  There was no
  nudity, no softcore simulated sex, not even open-mouth kissing in those
  movies.  The actors and actresses would gaze into each other’s
  eyes,  hold hands, kiss chastely… and the screen would fade to
  black.  There was not an adult in the audience who didn’t know
  what happened next.  Maybe there were kids who didn’t know, but I
  wasn’t one of them.  For my mother’s generation, “screw” meant
  fuck, and for my generation at that time that’s what “ball”
  meant.  Few people admitted, if they understood, that sex is a
  different entity from love.  The most popular euphemism for sex
  was “making love.”  Jeeez!  Love makes the world go round,
  they say.  Who could resist making it?

  Culture sets us up for neurotic and even psychotic reactions to our
  natural urges by denying them.  Religion has been one of the major
  forces instrumental in creating that culture.  If you believe that
  four-leggeds don’t have souls, you’ve never looked–really looked–into
  the eyes of a dog, and you’ve certainly never lived with a horse or a
  mule… or spent quality time with elephants, raccoons or rats. 
  But religions teach that we are somehow above the “animals” and
  essentially different from them.  Sure, there are differences
  among species, I won’t argue that.  But we are all animals. 
  Our minds may enable us (some of us) to sublimate our instincts and
  suppress our urges, but nothing short of death or severe physical,
  biochemical malfunction makes them go away.  The Big Mother
  Church’s recent inability to keep its priests’ peccadilloes under wraps
  illustrates that fact.

  I mentioned one exception to my transcendence of the sex
  addiction.  When Greyfox came into my life we went on a sex binge
  like there was no tomorrow.   It lasted several months. 
  It would have gone on longer than that if I’d had my way but Greyfox’s
  NPD was what was determining the courses of our lives at that time, and
  he began playing control games.  For the next few years the only
  time he’d make himself sexually available to me was when I didn’t want
  sex.  It was horrible.  I didn’t understand, was ignorant of
  NPD and the sadistic shit that narcissists get their “supply”
  from.  But we’ve worked through that, and it’s not what I’m here
  to write about today, just an illustration of my point.  When he
  cut off my sex supply, he had several drugs and a vinyl vagina to take
  care of his needs.  I didn’t want for orgasms, either.  I’ve
  been quite self-sufficent that way for over half a century.  But I
  did miss the physical contact, the cuddling and kissing… just touch.

  Zoological studies suggest that all mammals need touch.  Human
  infants deprived of touch can fail to thrive physically, and invariably
  develop emotional problems.  We bond with our caregivers not
  through sight and sound but through touch.  That shared mammalian
  need for bonding touch is what ties so many of us to our dogs, cats,
  rats and
  ferrets.  Heather Lende recently wrote a great column
  for the Anchorage Daily News about an interspecies bond between a
  chicken and a rabbit at her house.  In the absence of a companion
  of one’s own species, or in addition to them, many of us bond with
  members of other species.  There is nothing wrong with that.

  Humans condemn and make wrong many things that are only natural. 
  God knows there are enough real horrors of destruction and degradation
  in this world without condemning our healthy natural instincts and
  urges.  I vaguely remember when I first became aware that I was an
  animal like other animals.  When was Desmond Morris’s Naked Ape
  published–the ‘sixties?  Anyhow, now I’m getting to my
  point.  I want to reassure any of you who may be feeling that
  there is something wrong with you because you need affection or sex.

  First, the addictive aspect:  when we go “over the line” with any
  pleasure, when our brains produce so much dopamine that their ability
  to keep up the production is impaired, we start indulging in addictive
  behavior.  It’s a biochemical cycle that expresses itself in
  psychological and behavioral manifestations.  If you are currently
  entrapped by an addictive cycle of any sort, whether to a substance or
  a process, and you want out, look into brain chemistry and find a way
  to balance your neurotransmitters.  Greyfox and I and many other
  people do it with nutritional supplements.

  The reproductive urge:  Both genders experience it each in its own
  way, and culture has taught us a deceptive, euphemistic vocabulary in
  which to express it.  I used to wonder how much of what I was
  feeling was biology and how much was psychology.  Since menopause
  I have discovered, at least, which part of my feelings derived from the
  reproductive urge:  they’re the ones I don’t have any more. 
  I still have not completely sorted out which feelings come from my
  dopamine-cycle pleasure urge, and which are from that mammalian need
  for contact.  The reason for that is experience, learning and
  conditioned responses.  All my life when I sought out contact with
  men they would do their best to steer the touch in a sexual
  direction.  The pleasures of huggling and the pleasures of fucking
  are now linked in my mind.  And, in my mind, there is nothing wrong
  with that.  It’s just something to be aware of.  I’m in no
  danger of inappropriate contact with an inappropriate partner, because
  I don’t ever any longer get out of my mind on drugs.  In my right
  mind, my respect for myself and my fellow human beings, and my
  conscious contact with Spirit, keep me out of trouble.
  

  • 6:43 pm
  • 11 Comments