The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, July 11th 2017 (Relationships Scotland Part Two: Love and Sex)



There was a guy on the old Ryver forum, back when it was called WQD and was designed in the very same way as the My Way Out forum, and he's on the new Ryver WQD site still, who we once upon a time were very sensitive towards and supportive of. He was sober for two years at the time and was on the lookout for a partner. Thoughts of being completed and his sobriety perfected seemed to be thrown into ideas of romantic love. If sobriety itself couldn't fix him then it appeared that he felt as though a relationship would. He spent some time on the dating circuit without much luck. He complained about being ugly and needed constant emotional support throughout. He told us all about his experiences which I absolutely loved as it was and is still incredibly rare and difficult to find on forums such as this.

Then one time he seemed to hit it off with a girl and before you knew it he was engaged to be married and then disappeared from the forum only coming back every now and then, once in a blue moon, to let us know that he was married, that she was pregnant, and, just the other day, update us on how his daughter is via pictures and photographs. The whole story is one you might call beautiful, a true success story. One of the reasons we get sober in the first place. It's living life on life's terms. It's what it's all about. The whole thing did for me, however, come across as being a story written by someone very immature and insecure – someone who was ready to just jump into a relationship with the first woman he met that liked him; was, as Bob Dylan said (and this is my first Bob Dylan quote of this new journal even though it's now into the second half of the year) ''Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet.'' He came across as desperate and it was quite embarrassing reading about his experiences. There were times when I wanted to message him and ask him to slow down a bit, not invest so heavily so quickly.

I will say again though that this is what the honest writer risks when he writes as he does on forums – he leaves himself open to judgement as others feel that they know more about him just because he reveals a little (or a lot) more than the average poster.

Lindsay and I have been going out now for a while now. I say it's around ten months; she says it's ''almost a year''. We're sitting in our second relationship counselling session and the counsellor is trying to gather how it is that each of us view our situation. I seem to think of it as still early days. We're still working things out and we're living just for today, as we are taught in AA and suchlike. Lindsay seems to have this projected belief that things are perhaps a day at a time but that this doesn't stop us from thinking ahead. We have a holiday booked together for instance. True. When we booked and paid for that last months there were fifteen weeks before our flight leaves the runway. This is a forward-thinking commitment. The counsellor begins to take things down the route of how we feel about each other. Lindsay comments that she had been thinking this past week while I've been staying at my cave for the usual few days midweek that she was thinking about telling me those three little words that seem to mean so much but that she backed down when the chance didn't really come up.

It makes me think a little about how I view love and the importance of saying it. At the time as I sat in the session my Detached Protector was having a field day (I think I'm actually becoming really good at spotting which mode I'm in and when – something that will please Dr. Bacon when I see him again on the twentieth) but now that I am sitting in the comfortable couch while Lindsay is out working and I am doing housework since the weather is back to being wet meaning that Barry the Bullet and I will live to fight another day I can do a little online research. When is it time to say tell the other person that you love them?

It's no surprise that there are loads of websites dedicated to the question (and that most of them are pretty lame) but what was quite surprising was the amount of people who happily confess that they first said those words early in the relationship. I mean REALLY early. In fact – to not have said it by this time into it (ten months) almost puts Lindsay and me into some kind of record-breaking territory. Some people say the magic words the same day they meet the person; some say within a week; but most seem to have said it by three months. It makes me really wonder.

Could it be a case of my past plaguing my thoughts on this subject. Due to my active drinking and drug taking over the past few years I probably spent more time on my own than most others did outside of prison. I spent two consecutive Christmas days all by myself with the blinds shut and the phone battery removed. It was a dark time admittedly but in a strange way it kind of worked out. It has now left me with this ability to be able to tolerate isolation. I don't mind being on my own for a full day, even two or three. I tend to find something to do when many people resort to television and checking their phones every thirty seconds in the hope that someone feels them important enough to have left them a message, a little slice of love and approval. After a few days I'll admit that I can start pulling my hair out (metaphorically) but for a couple of days I'm good. I've accepted that sometimes I'm gonna be on my own and that's just inevitable. I'm comfortable with it now too.

I don't think that this is the case with a lot of people. I think for many of them their greatest fear is being alone, perhaps second only to being seen as being alone by others. I was thinking about Captain G on Saturday night. He was telling me last week that he's been dating Marie from AA for around seven months but that I'll never see them in the same meeting together. They agreed a long time ago to ''do different meetings!'' I think that a bit of this was probably to do with his guilt (she's a relative newcomer who was only two months sober when they began dating while he his sober date is way back January of 2011 – the whole thing will be very much frowned upon by old timers and sponsors). Marie was there this week and my brain started to do its little time-line thing. Marie got out of that psychiatric ward around the middle of March. She was there for three months which would take her back into last year. I remember Lindsay telling me that she had seen on Facebook that Marie had been committed. They've been going out for around months from last week. This would mean that Captain G had only been going out with her for maybe a couple of weeks, a month at the most, when she went into the hospital.

It's no wonder his sponsor was asking him to reconsider dating someone who had been committed into a psychiatric ward less than a months after they had started dating and who had just joined the fellowship. To be honest I would have told me to stay the hell away from Jenna when I first joined AA, something that Stu and others advised me to do but which I largely ignored up to a point. It is evidence to support my theory that we are terrified of being alone. Captain G seems a little like the guy I mentioned at the top of the post in that he'll do anything not to be alone, or seen as being alone. Maybe they are stronger through it all now but I have to say that if Lindsay was committed within a month of us dating I would hope that I'd be strong enough to realise that the timing wasn't right for either party and that the best thing would be for us both to continue working through our individual problems first and then who knows further down the line.

We mention to our counsellor the influence that AA can have on the relationships that start up between its members. I think that by the way we talk about how ''it takes an alkie to know and alkie'' and all the rest that there's a part of every AA member that wants another AA alkie to be by their side. Our counsellor asks us if we see the fact that we are so similar as a positive or negative feature of our relationship. Again our answers differ with Lindsay saying that she sees it as positive while I argue that while we may be similar in some ways we are completely different in other ways. In this respect I feel us to be the same as any other couple. She likes the television; I can't stand it. I am told that television preference does not change the fact that we are similar but I disagree. Hours spent in front of a television tells a lot about a person. Lindsay likes to ''chill out'' as so many of us do and this will start tonight from the moment she gets back from work. Switch off and relax. Fair enough – it's a twelve hour shift on a hospital ward. Me – I like to stay turned on. When I would come home after working shifts on the window cleaning my way of relaxing was often to post on the forums and then write and record some music. It's a very different way of decompressing. Lindsay and I aren't as similar as some might think.

I can imagine Dr. Bacon smiling to himself. Perhaps he'd accuse me of diverting the conversation away from the subject so that I don't have to emotionally connect with it. This is a tactic that my Detached Protector does. It's that mode I'm in again. It's good that I'm spotting it though.

Regarding the length that this post is turning out to be I think I'll cut it here and post this next section as tomorrow's post. It'll be the first time I've cheated but it'll be nice to have a day off from writing tomorrow.

Who knows? I might even get used to it.

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Stevie

Gets tomorrow off from writing.

1864

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, July 12th 2017 (Relationships Scotland Part Two: Love and Sex Continued....)



So this is a continuation of yesterday's post and will actually be written yesterday. Well – today, but the title and date will suggest yesterday. It means that today (or tomorrow, depending on which way you want to look at it) will be the first day I'll have off from writing in this journal for the whole of 2017 so far. Unless I can't do it and feel compelled to write, possessed to write, in which case I'll be writing a day ahead for the foreseeable. We'll see. I hope that doesn't happen. Sometimes I wonder if all this writing actually helps or hinders me.

But anyway – here we go.....

Regarding when the best time to tell your partner that you love them for the first time I found a couple of interesting little pointers on a couple of interesting little websites. Like I mentioned yesterday (earlier today) – people seem to get so overwhelmed and confused with their emotions, as well as scared to death of being alone or being seen as being alone, that they yearn – and not in a healthy way – to always be in a relationship that they will utter these words so incredibly prematurely. Or what seems to me like prematurely. Then they justify it by saying that they are still with this person today and so it proves that they loved them all along. I think what they really mean is that anyone who is going to jump and run with the idea that someone is willing to tell them that they love them when they don't know even the slightest things about them is probably as desperate as them and so they most likely will end up together forever. It's just a manifestation of this irrational fear that we have of being alone, even for the slightest time, and this irrational fear where we believe that we are unlovable if we aren't with a partner all the time. Someone, anyone.....

Then I notice the age groups that are answering this question and I have to grab a pen and paper. It seems as though (not always but typically) teens and young adults under the age of twenty four or twenty five are much more likely to confess to feeling for someone they have just met feelings that they don't understand and so just assume that it is love. They feel happy so they associate it with love. I know that there have been all sorts of experiments and tests done and teenagers feel pleasure more intensely and so are more likely to get the high from being in a relationship and so confuse it with love. You'd think that twenty-something's would know a little better, be a little more experienced, and the ones that are must not have been involved with these website's data collecting. I won't even go into those who confess to loving people they talk with online but have never met.

When we get a little older, and particularly when we get into our thirties, we seem to take a bit longer. It's not uncommon for people to wait for three to six months to pass when they are on the more mature but less flexible side of thirty to confess how they feel. I can only put it down to a level of maturity that allows us time to wait until the darker parts of a personality reveals itself a little. It's impossible to fake it fully for six months or more and so after this time it is inevitable that some of the other party's more irritating flaws will come out to play. How can one make an assessment of their feelings without knowing all about these little things and they are never going to start coming out and revealing myself in the early weeks and months.

It would also appear that culture plays a part. In Britain we are apparently very guarded with our feelings and expecting emotion from us, male and female, is like expecting it from a stone. In the Caribbean you are more likely to tell someone a little sooner as you are more likely to be open on an emotional level. I guess that I can relate to the British being cold but I don't have much in the way of experience of other places to draw upon. My horizons are not the most broad. I also think that those of Caribbean descent should try not to confuse that feeling of happiness brought on by extra gamma rays producing an increase in brain chemicals be confused with feeling a certain way. Most drunk people will love everyone....even those they have only just met. Maybe us being ''stony'' allows us to reflect a little more on how we feel.

One website says this:

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I ask him, on the off-chance that, you know, he might just love this girl, when would be the appropriate time to tell her? They are going on holiday soon after all. A romantic evening sunset and bottle of rose on the beach? Perfect. But no. He would wait SIX MONTHS before saying 'I love you'. Why? Because he wants to make sure he means it.
I commend this last part. All too often in this Web 2.0 world of saying what you want and being all emotion-full and shouty on Twitter, only to forget about it later, have we lost the art of saying things we actually mean?
We*digitally puke our thoughts out*every day – on Twitter, on Facebook, on comments at the bottom of articles: it's an extension of shouting at the TV screen when something annoys us except we do it online, and want and expect followers in the process.
It follows then, that we are losing a sense of our real selves, of our real opinions, of our real feelings. We have a public-facing opinion where we're happy to share what we had for breakfast, the fact we hate so-and-so but simply love skinny dipping and downing shots – or whatever – but when it comes to our true emotions, we are guarded.
''

I don't know if she's using her blog as a way of criticising social media or if she is really passionate about what she believes but I have learned that just because someone works in a particular position or writes well does not mean that they are emotionally stable.

''
I'm am really, really lucky that in my relationship, my now husband told me he loved me within about a week of us officially dating. Ha! Could he really mean it? But then he had known me already for about a year and so had, I guess, developed these feelings 'behind the scenes'. He didn't expect me to say it back, either. Him saying it so early on, no strings attached, gave me the control, the confidence, of being able to wait a bit until I said it back, safe in the knowledge he meant it and I knew where he stood.
''

Hmmmm.... It looks as though they are all kinds of ways that this could pan out. She makes some interesting points. Could something like this be happening with Lindsay? After all – she had planned on asking me out long before she got around to doing it. There were some in AA and well as her psychiatric nurse who knew all about this before I did. Maybe something had developed in her before I was attuned to it, before I was actually involved, when Lindsay was just someone that attended meetings I went to on occasion and who I shared a common interest in getting sober with.

''
The point is that it seemed a lot simpler when we were younger to fall in love: we didn't have much emotional baggage, but also, we didn't have to keep up with the social habit of baring all online, all of the time. When we said something we meant it; the trivial stuff about breakfast and who you hate most on tele were saved for a few of your friends, if they'd listen – not thousands of followers.*
''

I like this.

Lindsay and I mentioned a little about how we started up and what was going on in AA at the time. I mentioned that I had started to look at Stu (my former AA sponsor) as a mentor and father figure who I had to run everything past before I could make a decision. This was one such thing I had to run past him and he was very averse to it but without really giving me an explanation as to why. In the end it is what cost us our relationship. Lindsay had been through similar scenarios with former sponsors (actually had creepy sexual advances on her by one of them – a guy in his sixties, a darker side of AA that I have not quite shut up about just yet, but that's another post) and at the time she was without a sponsor. Still though – AA opinions, ones not asked for, were coming into play.

The counsellor mentions that it seems as though there is a lot of intensity when starting up a relationship in AA. There is, it's true, but I think now I realise it's only really coming from idiots. Most people don't care; some are supportive; others, usually old men who are years sober but have been single for years and don't have lives outside of the rooms, aren't so supportive.

The counsellor was also interested in how Stu glossed over the Sex Conduct Inventory rather than give it the time and effort that he did the other sections of the Step Five Inventory process during our work on the Twelve Step program and how I had to investigate these things myself, which I did comprehensively on the WQD forum over a few weeks. It's an inventory that is shrouded with much debate in the fellowship, especially when you have younger women coming in every year and it is usually old creepy men who are pushing themselves to sponsor them, knowing full well that sex will have to come up along the road and so they will get their chance.

Relationships Scotland offers a sex therapy service but the waiting list is around two months still. We are now on that waiting list. It's been a huge hurdle for me personally and I wonder if the fact that we've been together for more than ten months now but haven't managed to get there is one of the main reasons for me struggling with my figuring out how I feel. It's more likely than possible.

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Right – I'm closing in on the ten thousand character limit that My Way Out sets for posts and so I'm gonna wrap it up even though I could still ramble on. I think that the best advice I read online regarding the subject of when it is best to tell the other person that you love them was from a website called Elite Daily. It says this:

''
We start out knowing very little, usually allowing our imaginations to run wild and fill in the gaps. As we learn more, one of two things happens: We lose interest or we find that we're even more intrigued than we were initially. The more often we feel the latter, the more likely we are to fall in love.

You don't need to wait until he or she tells you that he or she loves you. If you're in love,*you want to let the other person know.*But you need to wait until it's time.*Here's a few signs that'll let you know when*to say “I love you”:



1. You're sure you love the other person.

The truth is, you always know when you're in love. I understand that when you look back, it may no longer seem like your previous loves*were*full of love.
But they were. A shallower love? Maybe. Definitely a less mature one — for with each failed relationship, we change as individuals. So if you're questioning whether or not you love someone, it's not time to jump the gun and tell that person*that you do.*


3. You believe you're*capable of loving properly.


Maybe time isn't an issue; maybe you're too young. Maybe you're not*physically*young; maybe you're a little emotionally immature.*It's not something to be ashamed of — unless you're 30 or older. Once you hit 30, you don't*need*to get married and start a family, but you should be mature enough to truly appreciate a good thing when you see it. If not, then you must not be learning from your mistakes. If you love someone, say it. And give love only if you can do it fully and passionately.
''


Damn that ten thousand word character limit!!!


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Stevie

Probably overthinking it now.

2176

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, July 13th 2017 (Three Down; Seven To Go)



Scotland's oldest football club Queen's Park Football Club had a birthday on the 09th, last week, last.....Sunday it was. One hundred and fifty years old. Pretty incredible. Nearly twice as old as Alcoholics Anonymous. Hard to believe that football was being played all the way back then. Twenty years before even Jack the Ripper was running around the darkened streets of Whitechapel there was the beautiful game. It was well attended too with some of the biggest recorded attendances being long before the law required us to have full seating in place like we have nowadays. Anyway – belated Happy Birthday, Queen's Park!!

The oldest football club in the world, Sheffield FC, will be one hundred and sixty on October 24.

I find it frustrating at how terrible my search for musicians has been this time around. During previous searches I have had many a session in a recording studio or practice room with many a guitarist, singer, keyboard player, drummer, or other guitar player(s). I've net in interesting people each and every time. This time though....... This time I met with one guy. Just one. The others? Fuck knows! One of them wanted to meet last weekend and then cancelled saying that we should reschedule it for during the week but I've heard nothing at all from him. Then there was that band. They were the ones I was holding out for this time. They were playing all kinds of heavy rock and even some metal but arranging a meeting with them has been nothing short of impossible. I've left the ball in their court but they seem unable to know what to do with it. It's a little annoying as I did put in some time on the instrument learning some of the more difficult passages of the songs they wanted to play.

I would get back onto those sites but there won't be anything happening I don't already know about. It's probably best I leave it until the beginning of the new year. 2018 could be the year it all happens. At this rate I can't see me having a guitar by January. There's no reason to have it sitting there. It could effectively be a little earner. I wouldn't get much for the main guitar itself – the Godin of my Understanding – but when I factor in all of the pedals, amps and accessories then I might do alright. It's possible that all this stuff might find itself on ebay in the coming weeks. If anything would be the ultimate statement that my former life is over it would be in the selling of my musical instruments and accessories. It would before long feel as though I was a different person. We'll see what happens.

There is good news though. I had thought that the new football season started on the weekend of the twelfth and thirteenth of August but that is when the Premier League kicks off in England. The rest of the divisions (English Football League from Championship down to the fourth tier as well as all of the Scottish leagues) all kick off the weekend before this. Saturday the Fifth August. Actually there are a couple of games on the evening of the Fourth to get us started. It's getting closer by the minute at this rate. So there is only this weekend to get through plus another two after that and then we're back on. I've missed the football season. It's another thing that has been sorely missing these last few weeks. Just a handful of weekends to go and all will be back to normal. Next summer there is a world cup and so the pain won't be as severe.

I used to always fear the winter and much preferred the warmth and light of the summer. Now I think things have changed. Another huge sign that a different Stevie is working inside me at the moment. I long for the end of this long and unwelcome summer. I'm not saying that I am looking forward to potential snow and general freezing suckiness......I don't know what I'm saying really. It's maybe just that there isn't much in the way of security for me at the moment. Last winter I was studying and so tended to know what was happening. There was stuff to do all the time, stuff to learn. At the moment I feel the opposite. There's very little happening. All this would feel dramatically different if I could just get out to work for three or maybe four days a week for the rest of this time off.

Barry the Bullet would have found three text messages and twenty eight missed calls from me over the course of the entire day yesterday. At first these calls were aimed at getting out to work. Then, by around midday I noticed that the odds of this ever happening were pretty low and getting lower by the minute, I started phoning more with the intention of simply finding out why he won't answer. Later on it was all about trying to reach him so that I might arrange a meeting with him at some point over the coming days.

Of course he's gonna try the whole, ''We'll get on it big style from Monday'' and all of the rest of it but I'm not interested in hearing any of that. Well that's not strictly true – hearing him keen to get out to work is not something I'll ever ignore, but it's also not something I can altogether rely on either. I have a notepad and pen now which I'll take with me to our meeting and which I'll use to copy all of the work we still have left into. This way I can go out myself if need be or with Ian if he wants to. Barry can have as many days off as he wants to and it won't have any effect on me or the way the company, the ''business'' is run for the rest of the summer.

It feels like three weeks have been wasted. There are only seven left after this week before college starts back up. This means I have seven weeks to gather and put aside a little bit of cash. It's not just that though. I get really fucking bored when I'm not doing anything. I get bored when I'm out cleaning windows as well, of course, but at least I feel connected. It's when I've nothing to do that I feel that emptiness that is synonymous with disconnection from community.

Right then.......that's about all I can be arsed saying.

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Stevie

Seven weeks to go.....

1134

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two


Friday, July 14th 2017 (The Fitness for Work Assessment)


So this afternoon I am going to be assessed for my fitness for work. Am I a raging loony still who is not deemed fit but who is instead to go on the Work Program? Or will I be declared fit and so look forward to an appointment at the job centre next week? I'll find out this afternoon. My attitude towards it this time around is a little different from the last time I had to go on one of these things. Last time my hair was a fair bit longer and Erin gave me something to put in my hair that would grease it up. This, combined with not washing it deliberately so that I looked my worst, made sure that when I went there I went looking pretty pathetic. I had also not shaved for days and was wearing old and dirty clothes when I went. I managed to get the result I was looking for and then headed back to the cave for a wash and a shave and to sort my shit out so that I could go and meet Megs – a member of the other forum I used to post in every day who had volunteered herself to come through to my town from where she lived in Glasgow to help me get out of a little jam I was in. So this was in April last year. Fifteen months ago now.....

This time around, while not exactly looking my best, I am in a much better state than I was back then in time for this interview. Lindsay was visiting her AA friend Rhona the other week and was hearing that she too had one of these health assessments and her preparation for it still seems to be very similar to my way of old. She'll exaggerate everything in a desperate bid to keep her benefit and avoid having to look for work. Her reasons are her fits. She has epilepsy. She hasn't had a fit in years but seems to have adopted this idea whereby she threatens the world with a fit every time she herself feels threatened. This way she can continue to get everything she wants while also avoiding anything which she might be frightened of. This is an attitude I can relate to but can't afford to continue with.

While I don't have the ''luxury'' of being able to threaten the world with an epileptic fit if I have to go and look for work I do find myself hoping that I can find a way to pass this test and keep my benefits for another little while, just the seven weeks I have left until my studies start back up. That would be peachy. The government don't look at it like this though and as long as I'm not seen to be doing anything then I have to sign a contract saying that I am willing to look for full time work on a full time basis. This is something I should just try to deal with if it's the way it's going to go down today.

You see – the difference between Rhona and I, in my humble and judgemental opinion, is her introduction to AA. I was fortunate in that I got involved with my home group one town away in the opposite direction where I located my sponsor. Rhona seems to have been lumbered with much weaker meetings and has never once attempted the sponsorship thing despite having been in the rooms for more than ten years now. She's missing the point of AA and its program of recovery in that this is a program and fellowship designed around the idea that we try and grow during our time in the rooms. We use our freedom from alcohol to try to rebuild our lives and work through our issues. We challenge our fears and we deal with our resentments. This is the idea as far as I can see. By taking the coward's way out each and every time Rhona feels even the slightest threat from the outside world and then running to the rooms of AA to justify it I think she's missing a valuable opportunity to learn about herself and to grow, to grow spiritually, and to work through this obvious crippling fear of hers.

But I think I'm missing a trick here too. If there's one thing that Rhona has it's friendship stability. Every morning she has people visit her and they sit and have coffee. I've met one or two of them (I've met all of them from the fellowship but she does know some non-AAers) and they seem okay. They seem normal. It's not as though hers is a hunting ground for all of the freaks and creeps of Fife. She always seems to have people around her. This is a very different scenario from myself and Lindsay as well.

When I think back to my sponsorship days I can see how my ideas about it, my interpretation of the Twelve Step program, has been manipulated by what Stu was going through in his life at the time. I was going through much change, or attempting to, as I sobered up. He was going through just as much in that since I arrived in the rooms of AA he has completed his counselling training and now has a job; has seen his wife move from England (yep – they were living apart for a long time) to Scotland with him; and she had their child the week after I turned two years' sober. This was his first.

So when I think about it I would have to concede that much of the information I received from Stu, not the stuff that he told me directly so much but the stuff that I picked up on in the same way that as children we learn more from what we see than we are told, was dedicated to getting stuff, to achieving stuff. That our lot can be improved upon by reaching milestones in life, by avoiding mediocrity and perhaps even by treating AA as a real-life Facebook.

Rhona seems not to want to achieve anything in life. Seems determined to stop anything that might want to help her do so. But this doesn't mean she has it wrong. Maybe this idea of achieving stuff means nothing if you have people come in every morning and night for coffee.

When it comes to people and getting along with them Dr. Bacon and I are no further forward than we were when I first arrived. We're still assessing.

So I'm stuck in the limbo of not being able to have people in my life or achieve anything.
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Stuck in a limbo......

1215

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, July 15th 2017 (A Little Torn)


I've been up since six this morning and I'm not too happy about it. Lindsay starts her shift at the hospital at seven and I had hoped to sleep through the alarm. No chance. Fear inside me or whatever makes me sensitive to even the slightest noise throughout the night and early morning and so I am up and at 'em before the day has even started. I've been moaning a great deal in this journal recently about trying to deal with boredom ever since finishing up at the college three weeks ago and today will be another test. I'll have to keep myself busy and try to keep moaning to a minimum. When I start moaning things just get worse but often the moaning starts subtly and before I know it I am stuck in the middle of it.

The Relationships Scotland counsellor says that I appear quite good at spotting my moods in the sessions and noticing quickly when certain defences are active. This is all part of my homework for Dr. Bacon. If I want to get to the part of therapy where we start to look at tools to help me deal with the flaws in my personality then I have to become something of an expert in spotting which parts of me are in control at any given moment. Which schema mode am I in? Only once my awareness is really good can we proceed. Hearing someone point out that I seem to be quite good at this – someone who isn't Dr. Bacon himself – is good to hear. Everyone likes being noticed for their efforts.

I'm a little torn between going to the AA meeting tonight, the one I've forced myself to go to for the last two weeks now after a lengthy (for me anyway) AA hiatus, or to stay in and make Lindsay's dinner for her coming in from her twelve hour shift and perhaps go to the AA meeting at the hospital in another town tomorrow afternoon instead. I've promised myself I'll force myself to a meeting once a week until further notice. I don't know why, possible to work on my attempts to connect, but this is the way things are at present. Sandra from ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) has text me and asked if I would be able to return her book to her (I Got Tired Of Pretending) and so I will do that this afternoon but I have absolutely no wish to take part in the meeting. I'll deliver the book, act all nice and pretend to care how the meeting is going, then leave. I can't see me ever going back to those meetings again. They live in the problem even more than AA meetings do which is sadly quite a lot as it is.

At yesterday's health and fitness for work assessment I just rolled with it. I'll hear back within six weeks. The college starts up again seven weeks on Monday so I'm hoping it takes most of the six weeks for them to get back to me. The worst case is that they make a decision super quick and I fail the assessment. This way they might arrange an appointment at the job centre for as early as the week after next and so I would only have to deal with them for a month at the most. A month. Saying that just rolls off the tongue. It would seem like a lengthy month at the time but it could be a heck of a lot worse.

Most of the assessment was routine and pretty much what I was expecting. I at times thought of Rhona and what a disservice she might do to herself by completely exaggerating her answers to every question throwing any self-respect out of the window. She won't be the only one. I was asked about my general physical health, mental health, and drinking and drug taking history. One of the things AA is absolutely useless for is keeping a log of your recovery history and so I am glad that I went along with government agencies FASS (Fife Alcohol Support Service) and DAPL (Drug, Alcohol and Psychotherapies Limited) as well as my doctor as they keep evidence in the way of a paper trail. Without them there would be no evidence I ever tried to get myself better.

The doctor has made a couple of errors in my file as apparently my alcoholism began in 2013. Also he has said that my symptoms of depression started in 2010. I don't know where these dates are coming from. Maybe the 2013 one was when I first started seeing Margaret at FASS so I guess that one makes sense. My file also has that I broke my arm in 2010 which is completely not true but then I did break my collarbone in 2009 and so it's close enough. Makes me wonder if perhaps my doctor has a drinking problem himself. He'd likely say it was due to him being overworked. He never looks as though he's overworked when I see him. This is just one of the many reasons I changed my GP surgery the other week.

One of the questions was one that Rhona and some others must surely cringe when hearing. When was your last job and what was it doing? My last job officially ended on December 14th 2014 and it was, of course, the window cleaning business. That's more time on record as being unemployed than I've been sober for. It's a long time. Feels that way anyway. That was a time when everything was turning to shit and I was at the very end of my drinking but didn't know it yet. I put on record that I was quitting my business so that I could claim housing benefit and save my home. I've had little option but to keep the business a secret from everyone since.

This is the same business that Barry the Bullet and I discussed yesterday when he finally picked up the phone. We're going out on Monday after a failed week this week that saw me unable to contact him for one reason or another. The weather is shite this morning but a heatwave is forecast for the coming week and so things should be good on the working front from Monday. I've said that before though.

Local football team Raith Rovers kick off their season this afternoon with an away game against Dundee United in the Scottish League Cup. It won't be the easiest little group for us to get out of but the squad should be strong enough to get out of our league division and get back up to the second tier of Scottish football which is about the best a club of two thousand supporters can hope for, I'm afraid. It's cup games this afternoon though. The season will begin properly in just three weeks as league action begins for another year. It's about time too.
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Stevie

Can't stand the thought of tomorrow's meeting so will probably go tonight.

1208

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, July 16th 2017 (Three Meetings in a Row)


Halfway point of the first of two months of uncertainty slap bang in the middle of the year. The summer. What was once so sweet but now so bitter. I start college seven weeks tomorrow. Fifty days. That's fifty times I'll have to take it a day at a time. I think it's four weeks to the day after that when Lindsay and I catch a plane to Spain for a week. Her placement was due to finish a couple of weeks before we left but now, due to absences noted and added on by the hospital (or the university, or whoever the fuck it is that makes these decisions – likely her charge nurse responsible for signing her off once the hours have been done), she now won't qualify and finish her degree until the week before we are due to leave. She finishes up on the Wednesday and then we leave on the Monday.

We were talking about that last night actually. How both of us are stuck in a time we'd rather not be. That we'd both probably take the coming winter over the current summer. Not only do we have our trip to foreign and sunny lands to look forward to but Lindsay will start off her job when we come back and I'll already be studying again at that time. I know all about the saying of the grass always being greener but at the moment I can't see how having some focused study at a level above that I've just done won't do me better than trying to constantly hassle Barry the Bullet in the hope of getting out for another window cleaning shift. I count three. That's three shifts I've been out cleaning windows in the time I've been off college. Actually, come to think of it, one of those shifts was done the penultimate week of the college course so I've only been out working twice in the last three weeks. No wonder I'm feeling the pinch. Hopefully this week I can get the full four days. We will just have to, as always, see.....

So last night I decided to, probably against my better judgement, attend the AA meeting. I suppose that it is the meeting I should feel most comfortable in. It's the meeting I've been to more than any other in the last twelve months. In the months leading up to the end of last year I was there almost every week. I was there on Christmas Eve and at the gathering held there on Hogmanay (that's what we Scots call New Year's Eve). I brought the year in with the group. I then continued going for another four or five weeks before I went on my, what has proved to be completely game-changing, ninety days without a meeting experiment. After ninety full days away I chose that meeting as my return but didn't stay for the whole thing. I then managed to get myself there two weeks ago and again last week. Now this marks three weeks in a row.

The whole time I'm thinking of what Dr. Bacon says. All human action is a result of psychological needs either being met or not being met. I bet that some of the people in this meeting, all across the AA board actually, don't care to realise that they are stuck in a pattern of behaviour that doesn't work by attending these meetings every night of the week. Psychological needs are not being met at this meeting, or others, AA as a whole can stop working after a while, yet they continue to come here. Every night some of them. There are needs being met for them at this meeting. That's the bottom line. They are coming here because they are getting something from it, week in; week out.

I'm not here to take the inventories of others though – only by taking my own will I have any chance in getting better. What's my reason then? Are any psychological needs being met by me coming here tonight? Or is it just boredom? I spent most of the day by myself so was it just a case of me seeking company in the evening only I know so few people in the real world that I am resigned to a meeting with others who suffer from loneliness and who lack the ability to make it in the outside world with other people? What the fuck is going on here?

Whatever it is thinking about it doesn't seem to be getting me off to the best of starts. I am quite frightened for some reason. Although I sometimes think it's fine to judge others so that I might make sense of what best to do with my involvement in the fellowship I do get quite petrified by the thought that everyone in these rooms might right now be judging me. I have to try to recall many of the things that these rooms taught me to begin with, those things I think I remember but have really forgotten long ago. I have to remember that I am just a little cog in AA's wheel and so am not important enough for people to want to spend time thinking about me, but, even if they are, then it saves them from thinking negatively about anyone else.

This meeting for me starts off bad but gets gradually better. The end is the best. The sharer is from another part of Fife and so I haven't seen him in months (first time in 2017) due to me not really caring enough about my involvement in AA enough to travel around anymore and it's good to meet up with people again after a while. This guy speaks and I pick up on many similarities. People always talk about getting identification but rarely do I ever get any meaningful identification from a top table. This guy talks about how he noticed everyone who came into the rooms at the same time as him talk about how great they felt after just a few weeks and how no one else seemed to have any problems in getting sober. He says that he had headaches for months, loads of debt that took five years to pay off, lots of problems really.

I can relate. My debts are still huge and I had many physical problems in early sobriety. I didn't sleep for literally months. I also had problems with hunger in that I never felt it. For almost two years after sobering up I never once noticed myself feeling hungry. It didn't matter how much, little or often I ate I couldn't get my stomach to respond. Now my problems are related to relationships and sex. Two and a half years sober and unable to perform sexually and having nightmares at even the thought of it. Lindsay's an attractive woman. It's something in my head, some sort of fear of exposure, fear of judgement....or something. This is not something that the sharer talked about though. When this is all behind me though it is something I would hope not to be afraid talking about in a meeting setting if I felt it fit in with my experience of overcoming things in the first years of sobriety.

As we go round the room in the second half of the meeting there are a few people say the same thing in response: they say that their drinking was completely different from his but then try to justify their presence in the rooms by saying that this doesn't matter because it brought them to the same place. They don't need to do this as AA will accept them with open arms anyway. You don't have to be an alcoholic to join AA. What these women are saying, really, is that they can still identify with some of the thinking and behaviour that the sharer talks about even though their drinking was severely tame in comparison. They also talk about how they like to hear how bad it can get so as to deter them from ever going ''back out there'' just in case. I've still only met one other person who has slept rough for more than just a night here and a night there. I've still yet to meet someone who seems as hurt as I feel I am in the rooms in that it comes out in my actions and theirs. I know that the majority of people in these rooms haven't had it all that bad and I'm growing more tolerant and accepting of that as time goes by......I hope.

At the end I realise that most of this negative thinking I had when I arrived in terms of the negative things that they were all thinking about me is bullshit. It's in my head and it created through fears and insecurities I have that I have no other ways of dealing with. It's important to be reminded that I can't trust my own thoughts and opinions at times.

Three weeks in a row I've been to AA now. I'm starting to feel some of the benefits.

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Stevie

Will be back next week for number four......

1558

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, July 17th 2017 (Long Term Goals)


I quite like writing in this journal still, I have to say. I still notice that when I think about not doing it I get a kind of withdrawal that is most uncomfortable and so I'm not sure how healthy it has become but all of the professionals I have spoken to about it seem to love the idea and suggest I keep it up. I also notice that I am much more drawn to the My Way Out forum than I am the old WQD (which at the moment plays a bit-part role on Ryver). All of my old friends didn't make the crossover from the old site to this one and I do feel that there is next to no community about it anymore. I feel that My Way Out is a little more genuine in the way its members interact with one and other and in the way the whole site is run. It's quiet, yes, but I don't care too much for that if the people are decent and actually have something to say. I think I'll stop posting this onto Ryver WQD probably at the end of the year and just continue here instead.

When I got back from the meeting on Saturday night (carrying the leftover sandwiches and cakes – don't know why we used to get lumbered with them and am even less sure why we still do) Lindsay wasn't in the best of moods. It had been a pretty bad day at her placement. She's got her job to walk into once this degree has finally been achieved and it's in a nice and cosy little ward where challenges will be in existence but over eight hour shifts rather than twelve. It's becoming a struggle. With this being her final placement it is quite a long one too. The others have all been around five to eight weeks but this one doesn't finish until the end of September and has already been going for a couple of months. She's in it for the long haul. All I can do is be supportive when I can, offer a coffee and an AA cake.

We talk a little about what happens after all of this, what the plans are a little more long term. This could be a little scary if I let it but we're not talking about long term commitments regarding our relationship – merely individual goals. What was all this sobering up for in the first place? For me it seems to be going down the road of college study. I started out doing sound production but somewhere along the line switched to radio broadcasting. One of the reasons for this was employability. The odds of finding work in radio seems much higher than in sound production but jobs in sound production don't often tend to look at qualifications much anyway and so that might be a direction I head in one day based on just the skills I have just now.

Another reason I chose radio rather than sound production was the transferable skills. I like the scripting aspects of the radio course, the journalistic aspect. Anything that will see me having to think about and research something and then – the best part – to write about it afterwards should I treat like my best friend. At my interview it was explained to me all the projects, the kinds of things that students this year had done, and these ranged from one side of fucking everything to the other. There was one student who did her graded unit on homelessness in Scotland and took a trip to Edinburgh to interview homeless people on the streets. There's a cafe in the city that provides soup and warm food to homeless people and this student interviewed the volunteers who work there. What a really decent project. I could really see myself enjoying something like that.

I also heard about the two students who travel the local area watching football matches as part of their broadcasting experience as they report back on the college radio station: Boom Radio. Watching live football and then scripting and producing a show for the local college's radio station? What the fuck!? Who WOULN'T want to be doing that shit???? There is also the pull of Sunderland. Completing the degree in England rather than here in Scotland. The grass might be greener indeed.

Lindsay, by comparison, seems to have made a choice based on something other than what will be the most fun. I had to go with the fun option as it is something that has been sorely lacking in my life for so long. I've done the window cleaning thing for too long. Nursing seems to be such a bitchy and ego-driven profession and with such a toxic environment. I'm not just thinking about Lindsay's experience here – my mum worked in nursing all her life and I remember the times when she's mentioned about how uncaring the new starts would be from one generation to the next. When I think about the nurses in AA as well...... Most of the most unstable and selfish women in the fellowship work as nurses or have recently been struck of the nursing register. There's obviously a certain type of person who will go into that kind of profession and it's not always the type of person you'd assume. There's a lot of people overcompensating it would seem and they're using the HNS to do it.

Lindsay does have a plan though. Ultimately she wants to get through her driving test at some point after she qualifies and pick herself up a wee car. Then she could do community nursing. This is the new way of the NHS. Rather than wait for people to become so bad that they need to take a trip to hospital we are to start their care at home so as to save hospital beds. Lindsay would like to eventually do this. She'd drive around the local area and visit people in their own homes. I could see her and this being a really good match actually. We'll have to start working on this but I think she needs a year, maybe two years, of experience in the wards before she is eligible to apply for this kind of community nursing.

It's good to hear us speaking about plans like this. For so long, so many years, life seemed to have no purpose at all. It did for other people, they were better, but never me. Now all this talk of plans is exciting. It's sober stuff. When I first sobered up there was this tendency to perhaps think that I would have some kine of idea as to how my sobriety would progress from one year to the next – like I could roughly predict what might happen and how this journey might go down. I'm not even three years in and already there are little curve-balls being thrown. It's all good stuff though. Good and unpredictable stuff.

Barry the Bullet answered his phone last night and agreed we need to get out to work today. He's now answered it this morning as well so I've no doubt he'll be at the races today. It's lovely weather out there too and so I am much looking forward to getting out there and kicking some window cleaning ass. This is the week that gets the ball rolling with work.

I should get going if I want to make that bus.

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Stevie

Off to work on a Monday morning.

1280

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Tuesday, July 18th 2017 (Relationships Scotland Part Three: The Genogram)


In a bid to space out her twelve hour shifts at the hospital Lindsay has rescheduled a couple of things over the next two weeks and one of them involves our Relationships Scotland session for next week. The counsellor had said that it might sometimes be best to see us one-to-one on occasion. As a couple is fine most of the time but it is always necessary during this kind of therapy to take parts of it individually. This week both Lindsay and I are in attendance but next week it will just be myself. This is okay though, good even.

Right then – so what the fuck's a Genogram when it's at home? It depend on its use as they can be used in social work or educational contexts but what we're looking at is a kind of family therapy and relationships so it goes like this:

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Genograms are widely used by family therapists as a tool to map family relations, giving both therapists and clients an overview of family relationships and patterns. The genogram may help the therapist get to know the family and help them deal with their current issues. Genograms may help a husband and wife understand each other's learned patterns for responding to stressful situations, handling intimacy or conflict, or managing gender and cultural issues. Genograms are used by medical professionals to better understand their patients' medical, genetic and psychosocial history. Genograms are also useful for anyone who is interested in better understanding the patterns and issues in a family.
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It's all about looking at what both Lindsay and I have learned from our families and how we put that into practice in relationship situations in the present day. That last part there about understanding better the patterns and issues in family – I am hoping that by doing this I might get a better idea of why my family is so distant and why we barely communicate. Why does my family find it so undesirable to be with one and other? Or is it just me? Still the black sheep despite two and a half years of continuous sobriety? Why does my family completely confuse personal development with financial gain? There are many things I am hoping to learn about while working through the Genogram model.

Rather predictably it's Lindsay's turn to go first. Her family tree takes up the whole of this session. Next week it'll just be myself but the counsellor says that it's a good thing is Lindsay sits in while we go over my own Genogram and so that will be done the following week. Actually – she's on training that following week, our counsellor, and so it'll be the week after that we get around to all things Stevie-Genogram related. Only the God of my Understanding knows then what we'll be talking about next week in Lindsay's absence.

She does well, Lindsay, in talking over her family history to our counsellor in front of me. Lindsay comes from a family where there is a long history of alcohol abuse and dependence and so I guess she was all but doomed to ending up a problem drinker herself before she was old enough to even know about the devil drink. She's also had a tough time in terms of taking on the role of the carer in her household. She was essentially her parent's parents.

Lindsay says herself that talking about this has taken some of the guilt out of her past. Lindsay's own son has suffered as a result of this pattern of parenting continuing for another generation. Even though she told herself when she fell pregnant that she would not put her son through anything like what she herself had been through she nevertheless did exactly that. I used to ask my AA sponsor why so many people in AA didn't want to seem to try the program of the Twelve Steps. He would say that it was fear. I would often question this but he would always ask me what else it could be. I guess. What else could it be? Lindsay admits that he own parents were too frightened to look at themselves. Our counsellor says that although things have been tough for Lindsay she has done a great job in now breaking this cycle. The cycle of drinking but also the cycle of fears at looking at herself.

Who would want to look at themselves like we have to when we are trying to recover? It's much easier to put personal development to one side and concentrate on making ourselves better by making more money. That'll fool them. Actually it's just what we all seem to do and so continues the not looking at ourselves. It must be terribly difficult for some people to accept that while they thought they were in charge of their lives the whole time they have merely been playing the roles laid down by their parents. All this time and they have had no control of their destinies after all. Just products of their experiences. It's another form of powerlessness.

I can't help but admire Lindsay as she talks about her family and how it impacts her life now. She seems remarkably articulate and composed. She has good insights into herself and the effects of trauma. I can see her becoming a really good nurse. The counsellor seems to connect her nursing to looking after her mother all those years while she was a drunk and while her dad was too busy drinking himself to bother contributing emotionally to his family. Lindsay seems to have been blamed for brining her parents together. If she hadn't been born then they wouldn't have had to live together. They would have had their fling and moved on. Her being born meant that they were destined to remain in a toxic relationship.

I feel closer to Lindsay now even though nothing has really happened. I feel closer to her than I did when we woke up this morning.....well.......yesterday morning.

This morning I am off to work again (yep – again) and Barry the Bullet will be meeting me in the next town for another day of window cleaning. Yesterday we were out all day and it was roasting. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it made up for all the fucking around that has happened in the last couple of weeks since I finished up at college but it will certainly be good to get out for my first consecutive shifts at work since I went out that week in December.

My genogram will be next and I have to say I am looking forward to it. Bring it on.

In three weeks' time.

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Stevie

In therapy.

1151

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Wednesday, July 19th 2017 (Letting Rip)


This morning I am up early enough to be posting for the third consecutive day. Good morning everyone!!

It's going to be an interesting one today. The weather is okay at the moment but it isn't to last. It's supposed to get pretty bad later on but Barry the Bullet and I will be giving it a go until it does. At least I hope we will. He left his phone with me during work yesterday (I carry a backpack on my back all day and so it was just for somewhere safe to keep it since he usually switches it off when we are working – something I actually love) and I accidentally brought it back to Lindsay's with me. It's sitting right beside me as I type. I haven't been able to contact him at all since leaving him at the bus station after work fourteen hours ago. If he makes it to the meeting point tomorrow morning then it would be great but I won't run to the bookie's and throw a tenner on it. Fingers crossed.

The sun was beating down on us all day yesterday and despite three times applying factor fifteen sun cream I am badly burned on the arms and shoulders. I say ''badly burned'' but some of you guys live in really hot places and so I guess perspective comes into it. Badly burned to you might be blistered and in need of hospital treatment. I am in no need of immediate treatment – my arms and shoulders are just really red and sore. Usually on hot days at work I wear sleeveless tops but today I have a t-shirt with me. I might actually take my jacket as well, just in case. It looks and feels like it might get a little colder pretty quickly and at any time, but that's enough of talking about the weather – it's boring!

Barry the Bullet and I were walking through the town centre yesterday morning – kind of the same way I hope that we will be in around ninety minutes – and he is in agreement with me in that it is a much nicer walk in the mornings when only a few of the shops are open for business and hardly anyone is around. He mentions that he probably shouldn't say it but there are times when he thinks about coming down here during the busier times when everyone is ignorant as they go about their capitalist-serving consumerism with an Uzi 9mm and just letting rip – blowing everyone away. Fuck you too!!

I don't know why he feels that he ''probably shouldn't be saying'' that because he's not likely to be able to ever get his hands on The Terminator's favourite instrument of death (especially since he only seems to want to bloody work once in a blue moon) and so the likelihood of him ever being able to fulfil this particular murderous desire is extremely low. I find things like this quite interesting though. I think it's because you can never know. I'm not about to ask Barry how serious he is about his statement but I do wonder. How many times do those left behind by suicide victims mention that they felt they should have known and that they now realise that some of the things the deceased would say prior to their passing now take on a more personal meaning? Now that they know the context to which it was said and implied!?

I'm not going to worry about getting there this morning to find that Barry has shot up the place – I'm just hoping that he'll be there.

Lindsay came back from her placement yesterday morning not long after getting there. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is but this has been happening more and more with this placement – the final placement of the degree. Her attendance has actually been so poor now that the university has sent her an email saying that they have taken these absences into consideration and she now will not complete her placement hours until the week before we are scheduled to fly out to Spain. At the rate she's going there will be more absences and so her placement will continue on after we come back. She's stopped doing her part in helping herself get better. She's due in again tomorrow and Friday before a big one next week with four twelve hour shifts Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.

It's annoying but I find it difficult to know what to do. How to best support her while also put forward the idea that I don't think the late nights are a good idea (she comes to bed later than me some nights even though she has to get up earlier) and that I don't really agree with her just coming home unless there is a good reason. I think that this is sometimes why therapy can be a little dangerous. Just like my old counsellor (FASS's Margaret, very long term readers will remember, if there are any of you left) advised I keep a drinking diary thus enabling me to drink I feel that our Relationships Scotland counsellor might yesterday have enabled Lindsay.

As we were working our way through Lindsay's genogram we looked at her sleeping history. She would apparently suffer from night terrors as a child and drunken dad would come through, angry that she had woken him up, and whack her. Our counsellor believes that Lindsay now has a fear of going to sleep. I don't want to be a dick or anything but last night was one of those nights when I go to bed earlier than she and could hear her coming to bed later. I don't know what time it was but I was sleeping having read some of my book. It was probably around an hour later. I went to bed at eleven so she went around midnight. Midnight isn't all that late but when you start a twelve hour shift at seven and have the alarm set for twenty to six then you are talking about some seriously fucked up shit and not enough sleep.

I can remember the days of not sleeping when I was in early sobriety (or should I say ''nights''?) and it sucked. I haven't had a long term pattern of night terrors as a kid and so don't really know how to try to be there in the best way for Lindsay. All I can do is be responsible in keeping my end. Go to bed at my regular time (whenever I want to between ten and eleven) on school nights and then wake up in as good a mood as possible and get on with my day.

If I manage to get out to work today and it's anything like yesterday and Monday then I'll be doing okay this week. Barry and I have already agreed that we'll go out on Friday evening on a debt collecting mission. We'll attempt to gather as much of the cash as we can from people who are not present to pay us during the day. This'll leave us with quite a profitable little first full week back. We'll be splitting pretty much everything we get as we have been doing so far but we'll be sticking a little aside for the business. This way I can, over the weekend, make an online order for anything we might need for the rest of the year or at least the next few months.

Tomorrow I'll have to finish up a little earlier as I have my next appointment with my clinical psychologist Dr. Bacon at half past three in the afternoon. It's been three weeks and I'm keen to get back to it and on with it.

Here we go then – off to meet Barry the Bullet for another day of window cleaning and not wanting to blow the faces off of others who share the town centre with us with an Uzi.

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Stevie

Sunburned.

1369

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Thursday, July 20th 2017 (Aurora)


That performance by the Scottish women's football (soccer) team last night was shocking, and against the Auld Enemy too. Six goals England put past us in what turned out to be their best ever recorded result in a major tournament and our first ever involvement in one. At least it wasn't seven. At least they made it to the tournament. The actual Scotland team hasn't competed in a major finals since the world cup in France all the way back in 1998.

Barry's not at the meeting point yesterday morning as I might have hoped for him to be but I do manage to get his phone onto a charger and look around it, have a little nosy into his private life, but not to the extent where I might be deemed intrusive. His mum has been ill recently and so he's likely to be quite close with her. Sure enough – he's been in touch through phone calls right up until June 30th when the calls seem to stop. This would have been around the time he ran out of credit and would not keep contact with me. Explains a lot.

I decide to call her and we have a little chat. I now know where he stays. His exact address, and his mum's too. The plan is that she phones around and tries to find out what he's been up to and she gets back to me. When she returns the call she says she's spoken to everyone who might know where he is and no one has seen him. In the end I jump on the bus and take a trip through to see if I cannot find him myself.

Barry's block of flats is like something you might see in the next Trainspotting film or something. Most flats have a security door and you have to press the number and the occupier will let you in but here the door is wide open – door off the hinges open! Inside there is a faint whiff of piss – either cat's or human, I'm no expert. There are four floors to these buildings but I'm surprised to find Barry's on the ground floor. I don't know why. I guess that it's because I have known so many people over the years who have lived in buildings such as this, have been in one or two myself, and they've always been at least one floor off the bottom. The ground floor just seems strange.

Barry's not in though. He's not at his mum's either. They reckon that it's best I leave the phone with them than it is me popping it through his letterbox. I'm not so sure myself but concede with no fuss. They (Barry's mother and I'm guessing sister) don't seem to have anything good to say about him. He appears to be in their bad books for some reason. I make my excuses and leave for the bus shelter but pop back into his block on the way. Still he is not answering and shouting through the letterbox that it is me and that I have his phone seems to make no odds. I write a note for him explaining that I'll call him in the morning to see if he's game for working and that I hope everything is okay. I can but pray.

I spend a lot of time on buses these days. I stay at Lindsay's more and more and so make the trips between her town and my own almost daily. Before I caught the bus to Barry's town I popped into the local book store as they always have their mix and match ''Three for £5'' deal on and so I spend a while browsing for a book or three to keep me occupied on this coming bus trip and the next few dozen after that. I've not long since finished reading a book I found quite interesting. Aurora, it was called, but Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't normally indulge in science fiction but this came at Lindsay's recommendation and so I gave it some time and really got into it.

It's the far future (2545) and a starship is off to a distant planet to colonise it and the story starts off six generations into the journey, only when they get to this planet, Aurora, they discover it to be poisonous and so a debate ensues over what to do next. Half of the crew choose to stay and try to find a way around the problems while the other half turn around and set back for earth.

I like some of the ideas in here. It brings into question the whole plausibility of space travel and argues that we aren't just going to be able to take this capitalist view whereby we can afford to destroy this planet of ours all the while hoping that one day we might be able to find another place to live and then charge people fortunes to live there. This planet is, in all probability, the only one capable of providing a home for human beings. The book throws up a huge number of thought-provoking ideas as to why space travel of this magnitude itself is pretty ridiculous and, most importantly for me, that suggest humans are essentially evil, bad.

Almost all of the world's greatest thinkers have come to this conclusion, that humans are evil, and it's something I've always believed. Robinson is not the only fiction author to suggest it as well. In this book it's the idea that so many people would volunteer to take on such a mission where they are completely aware that they will die onboard and that their children will too. With the book starting off with characters from the sixth generation we have a bunch of people who's life started on the ship and they have never known anything other than life on the ship. It's not as if they can ask their parents about it either because they know nothing of life outside the ship either. When we make decisions like this we are making decisions for all of our generations to come.

The idea of it being necessary to conquer things like space travel as part of human evolution is also challenged. We must do these kind of things and we will eventually. It's all about reaching that goal. It doesn't matter that ninety nine per cent of these missions might end in disaster we will have the audacity to call it a success when the first ship makes it. It's like saying that Mother Theresa's efforts make our efforts to help the starving is a success.

I like how it talks about how people live with little more than their ideas. We are pretty much just our ideas, and we'll act on and live in these ideas either until the day we die or until these ideas are realised.

Shit – I'd better get going or I'm gonna miss my bus.

Looks like I'm working by myself this morning.

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Stevie

Working by himself.

1200

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Friday, July 21st 2017 (A Note For Elsa)



I noticed a comment from paul-mh in my Ryver journal from the other day but couldn't make sense of it. I went back and read the post I'd written, Mondays it was, but found that I didn't mention social work at all. Maybe he read it wrong? I've had problems with people skim-reading my journal before and to be fair it is awfully long. Have I skimmed it when I've read over it and missed the point he's referring to? Is the comment a dig at Lindsay who is doing nursing rather than social work? Was it something I mentioned in another post? Or was it just a random opinion about social workers in general? I've no idea, but hi anyway Paul.

So that's Elsa – the project manager of the Charity Shop and Community Cafe for the last fourteen years – moving on to greener pastures. The rest of us all seem stuck on the bridge and the new chair is the nasty ogre who keeps jumping up and threatening to eat us all up if we don't change our acts and conform to her new capitalist ways. I feel like kicking her off that bridge at any moment. Someone's going to have to be the big Billy Goats Gruff. Elsa was aksing if I am coming back to my volunteering duties and explains that she has left a note for her replacement saying that I was struggling with time coming to the end of my college course and with going back to work but that I would likely come back at some point once I'd worked things out.

This isn't strictly true. That's making up little stories, Elsa. I was at the end of a college course, yes, and I have returned to work, yes, but the reason I don't work at the charity shop any longer has nothing to do with any of this. When the committee had one of their little meetings recently where they all get together and try to make each other important and stroke each other's egos for a couple of hours (sounds remarkably like an AA Intergroup gathering) one of the things they did discuss was Elsa and what they'd be looking for in a new project manager. She's too soft, is Elsa. Okay, I get it – I can see what they mean. It doesn't take a genius to work that out. I hope that they realise that they are not the only people who have seen this. Elsa making excuses for me and sugar-coating my reasons for leaving is evidence of her incredible people-pleasing but what do we want!? Do we want to replace her with someone who has only money-making in mind? Who's only thought upon waking each and every morning is ''How can I make as much money as possible today?''? It's a slippery slope indeed. I can only pray.

Since I've been out and about this week much more than I normally am since I've been working with Barry the Bullet – and especially since it's been in my own town – I've bumped into a few people. One of them I hadn't seen for a while was English Sara. She and Dennis are off to England next week so I said I'd pop in the following week. Gillon got an A for his graded unit at college and so he is off to university next year. We are discussing in the town centre as I wait on Barry (he's an hour late this morning) how we used to think that people with degrees were smart but now it seems like all of us are going out and getting them and that they aren't all that tough to achieve at all. Gary got an A for his graded unit on his diploma as well. He was also not what we would ever have considered an academic. Lindsay will complete her degree in a little over two months. All of a sudden the other half don't seem all that impressive and intelligent after all.

Last night Elsa had her send-off party but my Detached Protector asked me not to go. I'd had a hard shift with Dr. Bacon and so just stayed in. I've just been to the cafe to find out how it went and to hopefully catch Elsa on her last shift but she finished yesterday and so I'm stumped. Now I have her address though and so I think I'll write her a little note and send it off. I should be able to find her post code online no bother and so I'll send it off this week. I was told that the only thing to spoil last night was the new chairperson thinking that this would be a good time for her to offer up a speech of her own. This was Elsa's night but this new bitch thinks that she can steal her thunder. We've got to get rid of this woman. Show the committee responsible for giving her this position that we will not be bullied like this. Unfortunately people never stick to their guns with things they believe in. Remember the end of the film ''Gone Baby Gone.''? In order for change to happen we need on board people with that kind of belief in their beliefs although I have to admit that even I was struggling at the end of that movie.

Now I'm sitting in a little cafe at the comfy seats. This was actually where Lindsay and I had our first date although at the time I thought that it was just two friends meeting up. It was a couple of weeks after that we started seeing each other. Dr. Bacon had wanted to talk about her yestersay and I was all up for that but the session went onto my brother and so we just followed the natural course of things. I'll write about all that tomorrow.

It's not long after half past one and so I'm going to go to Restoration. It's been a few weeks again since I was there. Not much will have changed. I can't see it anyway. Like AA though I think it's important I show face every now and then to support the cause that was there when I needed it. I've been a member of Restoration actually longer than I have been Alcoholics Anonymous. In AA I am just one of the new guys who managed to get to the two year mark and stick it out. I suppose I am, whether I accept it or not, one of the recent success stories within the rooms. Very, very few have come in since me as newcomers and are still sober and attending meetings.

In Restoration things are a little different though. I am perhaps the ONLY member to get anywhere near the length of time I am sitting at sober (nearly two and a half years) and clean from all substance (nearly one and a half years). Most of the people who attend are stuck in the cycle of addiction and are nowhere close to starting off their lives in recovery. It makes relationships difficult for me because I judge them for not being able to do what I did and they judge me for being able to do it while they can't. It's an awkward group dynamic and there is little I can do to help them other than turn up every now and again and tell them that I'm still sober.

I'll write that little note for Elsa tonight and then I'll see you again tomorrow for a write up on yesterday's session with Dr. Bacon.

Adios.....

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Stevie

Missed Elsa's send off.

1303

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Saturday, July 22nd 2017 (Little Stevie's Healthy Adult)


Glimpses anyway, that's what Dr. Bacon was putting across at least. I'm not so sure though. Maybe tiny little glimpses. For the most part I feel the Detached Protector part of me to be the most active in any given moment on any given day. So active that it managed to keep me from going to Elsa's going-away party the other night and made it difficult for me to stay in the Restoration hall for more than forty five minutes yesterday. It's a lot to answer for, so it does, but Dr. Bacon reckons that we're starting to see parts of my Healthy Adult mode coming to the fore more often than in previous sessions.

I had a shocking night last night. A return to the sleeping patterns of old? Nah, it was only one night. Sleeping was one of two huge problems facing me in the first two years of sobering up (the other being my appetite) and I seemed to sort it out, defeat it somehow, in the last twelve months or so. Every now and then though, it will return and I'll have a sleepless night. Just one I can handle. Maybe there's a lot going on in the head at the moment and it's making me think more than usual. I am not on Facebook but Lindsay is and every now and then she'll point out something she thinks I might be interested in from someone I know. One of my old friends Andy is to become a father for the first time at thirty four. Everyone seems to be becoming a dad these days. It's like we've got nothing else to do. It does make me think about the past though. Enough to keep me awake at night? Maybe just one night.

I could have called this post ''Hard to Love'' (and I may actually go back and change it to that depending on how I feel when the post is written) as this was a common theme in the session. I think that mum found me a little more challenging of the two sons and so it seemed, to me at the time at least, that her efforts were better spent on my brother Gary. This magnified my sense of being unlovable and so thus also my rebellion. I never spent much time with mum or my brother when I was younger. It always seemed to be those two doing one thing while I did another. That's not fair actually – Gary and I did more things together than he did with mum, but he definitely spent more time with her than I ever did.

Dr. Bacon thinks that this is important. We're talking about how this fits in with the feelings of being an outsider that I have at the moment. If I don't see my nieces again until Youngest Niece's birthday on the sixth of next month then it'll have been one hundred twelve days since last contact. It's a long time for me to not have seen them. It's the longest time since they've been born actually. It's been longer than this since Lindsay was at an AA meeting though. One hundred fifteen days she is currently sitting on. I though that I was impressive when I did my ''ninety days without a meeting'' thing from mid February through to the beginning of May but this is a whole lot better. She's not even trying to stay away either. I've had to persuade her a little but we are both going tonight. This'll be my fourth Saturday night in a row at a meeting.

So there's a reason I'm not just walking up to my brother's front door, knocking on it and walking in. This is the way it used to be after all. Now it's different though. Could it be something to do with my being left behind? I used to babysit or go and play with them while Gary would study and Scottish Sarah could work and this has stopped suddenly. It's rather annoying how little this seems to have effected them. Contact is broken. End of story. Perhaps they are married now and Gary is going for his degree next year and they've decided that they don't want any dead weight. I am surplus to requirements and not for the first time. I'm left behind.

Perhaps this was what was going on last night when I couldn't sleep after reading all about people I used to know and their new lives on Facebook. Perhaps I'm being abandoned again. If this is so then it seems as though my life patterns follow two distinct routes. I can either go down the route of detaching altogether from them and so just plodding along, or, in fitting with another of my coping modes, my Bully and Attack can come out to play, despite being most unwelcome, and it can tell me to defend myself by saying something along the lines of: ''Well if you don't care about me then fuck you – I won't care about you!!'' This is happening as well I know.

The difference between these two approaches is internal. I remember Captain G talking with me in the car the other weekend when he gave me a lift from the AA meeting and how he was telling me about how stressful he finds resentment to be and how he'll do almost anything to become rid of one when it pops into his head – anything other than drink, I should think. With regards to resentment I feel very similarly but sometimes a resentment will linger and it will be more difficult to remove than the others, more difficult to hand over to the God of my Understanding, or is it that He will not take it from me until I learn exactly why the resentment matters so much to me? Gary may not know anything about my resentment towards him for his apparent indifference to my absence in recent days (like – one hundred of them!!) but I do. Captain G is correct when he says that resentments are difficult things to tolerate when they are burning from within. If I could just go back to blocking this off – to detaching – then I would be doing all the better.

Dr. Bacon asks a little about the types of people my brother and his new wife actually are. They are carrying their own baggage. I started off a little journey seven years ago when I saw a ''self help guru'' for six sessions. This then continued with alcohol counselling and onto forums and eventually AA and clinical psychology. Plus all of the stuff in between. Neither Gary and Scottish Sarah have had the luxury. Change within them is most definitely not imminent. They believe that a change of career and greater income is the change that they need. I try to imagine taking away the last seven years of learning and look at things through their eyes. Sarah's mum was not the best influence possible in her life and as a result Sarah has grown up to have a belief system that means she has to be perfect or she's worthless. If she isn't perfect at something then she'll be very vocal in telling you why and it will not be because of any fault on her part. She's living in her own little princess's castle. My brother had the same tragedy in his young life I did and as a result has learned to block off emotion even more perhaps than I. Sometimes I think he struggles greatly to ''let it out''......whatever ''it'' might be, but whatever it is I think it sometimes needs to come out.

I think that the bottom line is that....well.....what am I really expecting!? Are Gary and Sarah really the type of people who can have a serious and emotional talk? Is ''we miss you'' really in their vocabulary? Do they even really talk to each other in more sophisticated ways than small-talk and idle chit-chat? Who knows, but I should stop pinning my hopes on something that they might not be able to provide me with. We will be meeting again on the first and third Mondays in August and then he's (Bacon) on another period of annual leave. I only had one session in July and it looks like there will only be one in September. He says that at the moment this is fine and we can get by with a session every now and then but when we start to work more intensively we will need to schedule fortnightly appointments on a regular basis.

Intensively? This is both exciting and daunting. I know that there will be tough times ahead. I also know that I am, as things stand, not ready yet to face the tough times coming. I still have growing to do. There's still moulding to be done. I'm not sure exactly at which points during this session he was referring to when he said that we were beginning to see some of my Healthy Adult coming out but it was good to hear. I think it's because he knows as well as I do that doors swing both ways and that the only thing stopping me from halting the rising day count between my last visit with my nieces and the next is me. Or rather a certain part of me. A certain part of me we devote much of our session time together each time.

I started writing this post thinking that I would write a couple hundred words and then continue it when I woke up in the morning but I haven't been back to bed yet and so ignore what I said earlier about the sleepless night. It's quarter past two in the morning her in Scotland and I'm heading back to my bed to see if I can turn this sleepless night into just a late night......a very late night.

I'll be in bed in less than five minutes.

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Stevie

Heading back to bed but enjoyed writing this post so kinda glad he got up.

1715

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Sunday, July 23rd 2017 (The Day Of Rest)



Another week comes grinding to a halt. Or do you consider a Sunday to be the start of the weeks? I prefer the day of rest to bring them to a close personally. Monday morning seems like the best way to kick a week off. Start it off shit and end it with a relaxing day. Lindsay's cat (Noelle) seems to think that every day is a day of rest. Lazy git. Lying in the exact same place she was two hours ago. The same place she always is. Recently though she's been out and about a bit more. She doesn't get out much since this is a first floor flat but there has been scaffolding built up all around the building as work begins tomorrow for the next six weeks and so from the balcony she can gain access to the scaffolding and then the world's her oyster. Or so it should be. After ten seconds of experimentation she is back in and in that spot again. Lazy kitty!!

I'd love to get back out to work again this week. Barry the Bullet has been challenging, what with his latenesses and how difficult he can be to reach on the phone most times, but we've made some good progress this week and got out to work for almost full days on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. That's almost as much as we worked in all the other weeks combined since I finished up at the college. I am hoping it has started a trend that will see us getting out to work at least three or four days a week for the next six weeks until the college starts back up again on September 4th. After that I will try to keep working but it will obviously be much more difficult.

Tomorrow I won't be working either. I have a Triage appointment in the morning that I have decided it best to go to. Then I am booked in with Relationships Scotland at five. There's not enough time in between these to make it worthwhile taking the bus trip to my town and trying to find Barry the Bullet. We'll go for it on Tuesday morning instead. Make a good go of it again this coming week. Triage seemed to make a big mistake last year and for some reason have marked me as being absent to every appointment I had with them since the college course started at the end of August right up until this last month when for some reason my absence has not been just ignored. I have been asked to come into this one. If I've been wrongfully paid sickness benefit this whole time then I wonder what has been happening with my college bursary this whole time. I know that I was awarded it for the first few months which is why I have over a thousand pounds sitting in the Credit Union for the first time in my life but since January until the end of June it remains unexplained.

Last night I went to the AA meeting. I tried to get Lindsay to accompany me but she wasn't up for it. It would have been her first meeting for one hundred and fifteen days. That's sixteen and a half weeks. It was my first meeting for one week.

It was okay, I guess. I like how I feel a part of something when I'm in the rooms but the actual content of the meeting is of the lowest standard possible within the fellowship. That's me been to every Saturday night meeting in July though, which was the plan, so that's all good. It was Captain G sharing at the first meeting which was okay; an old-timer woman the following week which was pretty dreadful; an old-timer guy last week which was pretty good; now it was AA Gangster's wife's turn. She just waffled on and on and there were many times I couldn't tell what the hell she was trying to say. Bless her.

What I did manage to get from her was that she is resentful of people in the fellowship who are in positions of power and who are not doing what she believes God's will for us. They are doing what people on the outside do – running from ego and little else. I get what she's saying. The Fife Convention is run by such people. I think that I know only a little part of it since I've never been involved in service of this kind since being a member. AA Gangster and his wife have done just about everything there is to do in AA service at some point along the line and so have a better understanding of how things were originally set up to run when these positions first started up all those years ago.

She also mentions that sometimes she prefers a night in front of the telly to a meeting and was going to come to this meeting two weeks ago but decided against it at the last minute. She says that nowadays she finds that sometimes going to meetings all the time can work against her. I decide to use this to my advantage. I haven't talked in the rooms about my ninety days without a meeting experiment and what I learned from it but decided to share a little on it this evening when it was my turn to speak. I mentioned that I found AA to be working against me for a while and that I found it healthy to step back for a while. I learned many things about my life and recovery that I wouldn't have been able to if I was always within the safety and security of the fellowship's rooms.

Sometimes I think I might have higher hopes for myself than many others in the rooms. The whole idea of going out to study in the hope of changing my job is just one area I feel this way. Most of the old-timers seem to be doing the same thing they always did (or at least did right the way up until retirement) and the younger people are not much better. Hardly anyone seems to make any profound external transformation. I want to be an exception to this. One of the reasons I am starting to believe that this will happen is exactly that part of me who is willing to do things like try out a ninety day away from the rooms experiment in the first place. The fact that I know it's a healthy thing to do. I'm not in denial. If it's being used as self-seeking – whatever it is – then it has to go.

Hamish shares a little afterwards. He says that I might be right in saying that if I find myself depending on meetings for my emotional and mental health then I would be right not to take it to addictive level but that he would rather be in meetings every night (and he is too) than go back to what he used to be like.

This is worrying. For him, at six years sober, there are only two options. I can tell that many feel the same way as they nod in agreement with his comment. The options are: go to meetings all the time or go back to how it was. They seem to be missing the whole point of why we're here. We're here to recover from our fears and insecurities, to improve our lives and move away from old habits. We're trying to be reborn. We're here to change our stinking thinking.

Or at least I am.

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Stevie

Still trying to change.

1311

[Lunarer]

Re: The Sobriety Experiment: Chapter Two

Monday, July 24th 2017 (Relationships Scotland Part Four: Solo Session)



Lindsay felt it best she split up her shifts this weeks and so it's just me at the weekly session with the couple's therapy agency Relationships Scotland. So just me and the counsellor. Last week was pretty much a Lindsay solo session as we completed her Genogram – a look into her family history as a way of trying to figure out how she approaches relationships – but it was important that I sit in on this, just like it will be important that she sits in on mine when we go over it in a couple of weeks. Next week she's on holiday, this counsellor, and so there won't be much happening until the following week. It's then that we'll look over my family history, my Genogram, before Lindsay has a one-to-one in the same way I did this evening the following week. They do it this way to keep things fair. I get a one-to-one and so Lindsay gets one too. It's the way it is.

I leave thinking much the same as I do when I walk away from Dr. Bacon after a session and how I often do when I leave AA meetings. I feel bad about myself. I know that this isn't how it's supposed to feel (not that I believe there is any ''right'' way to feel about things like this when they are still fresh in the mind) but it's how it is in that I wonder if I'll ever be at the stage where I don't think that I've still got it all to do I have faith that there will come a time during my sessions with Dr. Bacon where I am not stuck in the limbo that is the assessment phase and when we do actually move on to recovery tools that help me to live with my defensive modes but that time is not now. I will be seeing him twice in August but likely only once in September. Over three months we will have had only four sessions. It's difficult.

The Relationships Scotland counsellor mentions that she feels the same way about me that most people in this earth do: defensive, guarded, you know the drill!? She says that in the sessions we've had so far (in which Lindsay has been present at them all apart from this one) that she sees clearly that I am guarded in the meetings, that I'm guarded in the relationship......just guarded, and that it's obvious that it's hard for me to offer up much of myself, to put my defences to one side and connect, to allow people into my world. The problem now is that Lindsay is pressing things a little more than people normally do. People don't normally try too hard to get to know me. Andy had once said that I was hard to get to know but worth it when you did get to know me. I don't know if that could be described as being a backhanded compliment or what. But yeah – Lindsay is pressing hard on the whole get to know Stevie thing and this confuses him and his defences.

Another thing she points out is how isolated I appear within the relationship, both of us actually. I guess this is to do with being hurt or at least the fear of being hurt. It's a scary thing to think about though – that both of us seem isolated within the relationship. There are times when this counsellor is asking me questions that I can feel my guard really go up. Are these really questions she's asking me? Or are they statements and judgements but she's asking to make sure I am aware of them? It makes me start to question everything I know about myself and Lindsay. I'm not panicking but I really don't like these times when I second-guess myself and my life. Sometimes it feels like I am going in exactly the right direction but there are always those little moments when I doubt everything.

Next she asks me what I believe my role in the relationship to be. I ask her what she means – what are the choices available!? She rattles off a few potential roles for someone to adopt in a relationship: lover, brother, father, friend, sexual partner. Again I find myself unable to answer straight away and so can feel my defences rise again. Damn it! Now I'm second-guessing everything again!! What is my role?

She points out how difficult it is for me to give up sexually, emotionally, mentally – every way that it is possible to offer up and bring to a relationship. It'd be really easy for me to start getting super down on myself at this point but I rather like it when the cat is fully out of the bag. Just a little bit is never enough. Fully out – that's what I'm talking about! The thing is she's right about all of this. I do struggle to offer up myself to anyone and everyone. I'd likely be fine by myself on a desert island – it'd be when you started adding other people that I'd begin to struggle the most. Yet without people I wouldn't get very far at all. The alkie paradox.

We talk a little about my coping tools. What do I do when the 'racing heed' starts to get in the way of my judgements? One of the tools I use the most is from AA's Twelve Step program – the Sixth and Seventh Steps (Step 6 – Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character; and 7 – Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings) but the counsellor advises against me handing things over to the God of my understanding while I am in these sessions. She would rather I let things out so that we could talk about them. The whole idea of getting better is by talking about and working through things. Whether or not I feel some things to be defective within my character do not hand them over while in these sessions. It's not really a case of my choosing though – it's kind of up to my Detached Protector which parts of me are allowed out during these sessions and which parts will remain hidden and forgotten about – passed off as being handed over to the God of my Understanding.

When Lindsay comes back from work this evening I find that I can relax. Everything seems fine. The counsellor did make me sound like a bit of a useless freak at times (or my head made it seem that way, which is most probably right) but at the end she summed up by saying those things that everyone says – how smart I am, only she adds ''wise'' into this as well. Hmmm... I've been called smart before, am actually usually called smart or intelligent or suchlike by pretty much everyone I meet these days but I've never been described as being wise before. This really is a first for that.

When it comes to relationships though......

Scotland had another bad night in the women's football again last night getting beat by two goals to one by Portugal despite us being the favourites. Nice one girls. We're not out completely but the odds of qualifying for the next round are now incredibly slim.

I wonder what my odds are now of qualifying for the next round of this game we call life.

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Stevie

Hoping to qualify.

1278