PoM 181
Boundaries:
I was talking to a sponcee about keeping boundaries with men.
First you have to practice in safe, non-sexual relationships with men. You need to learn to say “No”, and make it stick.
If you don’t learn that first, once sex and love start entering the picture, there’s no way you’re gonna be able to say “No”… And you’re stuck with someone who is gonna drag you down.
As I was doing my daily run today, by San Francisco Bay, I heard a man practicing a flugelhorn beside the road.
Being naturally grandiose, as a character defect, I thought about adding him to my band.
I stopped and asked him to play for me.
He played a simple high school march for me, and was not very good.
The music I write, while unpleasant to listen to, it’s very, very difficult to play. He would not be a good fit.
When I start to date I need to ask myself a number of questions about a potential partner:
Are they in touch with their feelings?
Can they set boundaries and have boundaries set with them?
Can they announce their limits?
Are they capable, as adults, meeting their needs fully, without me?
This is real basic stuff before I get to the seemingly pressing questions like:
Is this person as ugly as a mud fence, as big as a house, as old as Methuselah or crazy as a loon?
Otherwise…you end up with a bad fluegelhornist.
PoM 182
The most painful part about recovery is not stopping heroin or alcohol.
It’s not stopping smoking or losing weight and keeping it off.
It’s not doing family of origin work and discovering what level you have been harmed as a child.
The hardest part about recovery is that you get closer to people, emotionally and spiritually, than you ever will at a church, or in therapy or, often, even in a marriage, and then one of you stops working as hard as the other, or becomes unwilling…and you have to leave.
It tears the flesh, breaks the heart and sears the soul.
It will bring you to your knees…
But that is exactly where I need to be…on my knees asking for God’s help.
PoM 183
“All members of the family should meet on the common ground of tolerance, understanding and love.”
Big Book
My wife tolerates a lot with me:
I write and play the most hateful music, run a fan every night, and eat food that she herself grows in our kitchen.
She likes to bake (I can’t eat flour and sugar). She loves Facebook and YouTube. She loves the Philippines.
Gummy wants to play his electronic keyboard and listen the Stravinsky’s Firebird all day.
But, we love to serve others, pray, laugh and joke and we both love God, deeply.
We love each other endlessly and are both just entranced with Gummy.
There is just enough difference to be honestly ourselves but enough in common to enjoy our family.
PoM 184
To my brother David,
Step Nine “Made direct amends to those we had harmed, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
After 55 years, you finally talked about your resentment at me for not protecting you when we were raped by the Vint Hill Teen Center Director in 1967.
I regret and deeply grieve that experience.
I also feel compassionate towards two kids who were viciously attacked and, instead of fleeing into the arms of their parents for protection and safety, the main thing that we tried to do was hide it from them.
I was 12 years old and you were 10, but already by then I was what your best friend in AA, Bernard, and I, call “powerless”.
I had been raped by our father on the night he returned from his tour of duty in Korea in 1961.
Our mother pulled out a pistol and threatened to kill him if he didn’t stop. But, he didn’t stop and she didn’t shoot.
I was also orally raped later that year by our mother in her bedroom, and twice more in failed penal/vaginal attempts by her, when she was drunk, when we lived in Fort Knox, Kentucky in 1963.
By the time we were raped by the Teen Director, four years later, I couldn’t protect myself, or you.
I am a sex addict and have been since I was five years old, and I have spent the last 40 years of my life undoing my past.
I am sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me most.
Your brother,
Steve D.