The 7R's of Life

The 7R's of life: Rules, Roles, Relationships, Responsibilities, Respect, Resources and Returning Cycles.

1) Rules

Rules are a specific body(s) of information … sometimes described as guidelines … that we as a group choose to live by.  These guidelines serve as the foundation for governing our living together. These rules can outline very complex international issues … these issues can differ dramatically between various societies … everything from traffic laws, criminal laws and the comings and goings of the social services safety net … to educational systems and a myriad number of variations on a theme … falling under categories such as social custom or common law … codes of conduct etc. 

History and simple necessity are often the originators of most social and interpersonal rules. Community or social rules are the vehicles through which we can begin the task of fulfilling our needs … for food, shelter and clothing, … Maslow and his triangle … as well as set into motion a safety element or environment within the social structure where an individual may from the sanctity from within the construct of the created social zone begin to search out love and acceptance and move up the socialization triangle to higher orders of completion. 

These Chosen Rules can set our direction and define our responsibilities to ourselves and with those that we share the system with…

2) Roles

o   Roles relate to the many “jobs or masks” we wear within the family and our community. 

o   Roles are often determined according to our community or family needs. 

o   Please Note: just because it is what the family needs does not make it healthy.

o   The healthy roles we play provide us with our opportunities for learning and growth. 

o   Roles can be channels for expressing the truth about our needs and ourselves.  BUT…

o   The problem in the system seems to be that we were trained to be who we think we are. All this learning happened at a very early age. This training, often as not, contributes to the predetermination of the Roles we will adopt in our life and display in our community as we advance toward our adulthood.  It has a circular theme … what was learned in childhood is how we will be in Adulthood.

o   Our childhood training often demands that we give up true self. It is basically a defense strategy. We do this for the sake of the system and its survival … not ours necessarily.  We adapt a grab and run technique for our needs fulfillment.  This is referred to as narcissistic depravation

Thus we cannot nurture our lost self unless we leave home at least figuratively.  Some of us have to break ties altogether … literally. 

We leave home by giving up the role that our system demanded we be … for the good of the system …  the scripts and rigid unhealthy roles. 

These scripts defined us by what the system needed and not as us as an individual. 

This process of giving ourselves up for the greater need of the system denied us our authenticity, our sense of self and our sense of self-esteem.  Each of us adhered to these rigid roles out of our misplaced loyalty to the system we were born into.  The odd thing is that we got a sense of power and of being in control from doing this, but this entire process cost us dearly. To adhere to the rigid role(s) we had to give over our sense of uniqueness, our sense of self, and the essence of being … just to maintain membership in the system.

We were born to be ourselves.  Truer words were never spoken.

3) Relationships

Relationships deal with the nature and quality of our interactions … us with us and us with others … but first us with ourselves.

To form a relationship we must first be able to relate and understand how to set the relating process in motion. 

Our comprehension of how relationships work (or don’t) lay at the feet of our parents ... those persons who parented us, Mom’s relationship with herself and dad’s relationship with himself and their relationship with each other lays the ground work for our understanding of how relationships work or don’t work.  Once this is appreciated or imprinted or impressed on us it then plays like a message on a tape recorder … over and over again.  There are variances that are explained by personality and other outside influences but basically the parents and their interactions set us in motion on how we will conduct ourselves during our adult relationships. 

To get to the root of the problem it is essential to plumb the depths of our own psyche and our own past … to release those lost and buried hurts and pains … then to grieve the losses we experienced.

4) Responsibilities

Responsibilities in one sense refers to the level of maturity we have reached, or how we handle ourselves both privately and publicly, and more importantly how we handle getting our needs met … especially our dependency needs. 

Our inter play with other people, and the roles we choose to fill in the interacting process with them are simply expressions of our sense of our ability to fill our own needs through inter play with them. 

Often as not, responsibility appears to have something to do with providing inspiration or leadership to all who come into our spheres of influence.

M Scott Peck pointed out: Life is what happens to you while you are busy doing something else.   Assuming the working definition of responsibility is a commitment to being involved … you with your life … in a complete, full and healthy fashion … thus being able to fulfill the ways of satisfying your own needs … it helps to understand the difference between Wants and Needs.

This is an essential aspect.

5) Respect

This starts with an individual’s Sense of Self. That Sense of Self is a by-product of early child developmental experiences. 

Sense of Self/Self Assurance has its clearest defining qualities rooted directly in the time spent and how it was spent with the early care givers … those people who reflected how the child was viewed during the child’s first 30 to 60 months of life. 

It Is True That:

It is a necessity that we must first have respect for ourselves … it then follows naturally … that we will have respect for the rules we chose to live by … those we agree to … and conduct our living accordingly and build our social order around. 

On the other hand if we do not have this Sense of Self Respect instilled at a very early age then ... it is with great effort and difficulty that we will move through our lives (seemingly) constantly at odds with our surroundings. 

Respect is something that is purely experiential (subjective) … it can be obtained anytime … First we must know what we are looking for …  then … where to look for it.  12 Step programs are one of those places to look. Another is a properly laid out therapy program. The book Iron John asks the question “Where is the Key hidden”.

One of life’s conundrums: Sooner or later we get ourselves involved in attempting to make something happen in our lives that we view as very necessary. The problem with the attempt is that a necessary ingredient for making things happen is missing. We need to respect ourselves. If that is missing then our attempts are doomed to fail.  The necessary tools are missing. The business of recovery is the acquisition of those missing tools for life. Life is difficult; that much is true, but with tools of self respect and self esteem on hand, the job at hand will not be “an impossibility” any longer. 

The Basics of the concept is: 

People cannot respect themselves unless they know the truth about what happened to them.

For most of us, the truth of who we are is lost back in the early beginnings of our life. There were times and circumstances where we simply had to pretend to be someone else just to maintain our membership in our families of origin ... It is also very true that our every effort to maintain the family lie is a painful thing to do. The problem is, every time we build a (neurotic) defense strategy to protect us from a world that seems to want to destroy us, our defense strategy becomes more painful than the pain we were masking. Thus, if this is our only defense against our pain then we will build another neurotic structure … mask … false self … to protect us from the next level of our pain and that becomes a repeating pattern until we have no idea who we really are. Finding our lost self-respect is a prerequisite to healing.  Something a kin to Peter Pan recovering his lost shadow from Wendy’s drawer.  Now we have a place to look … and a direction to go in.

6) Resources

They are available to us on many levels.  Help will only help if you reach out for it.  It is necessary that you participate and utilize them … put them to work for you … it is your entitlement … they won’t work unless you work them.  I quote John Bradshaw from Healing the Shame that Binds You:

...methods have been adapted from the major schools of therapy.  Most all therapies attempt to make that which is covert and unconscious, overt and conscious. These techniques can only be mastered by practice.  You must do them, and reinforce them by doing them again.  They will work only if you work them.

Appreciating Compliance & Surrender

Compliance is motivated by guilt.  That is, I will make every effort to appear to be doing what I need to do while I resist doing the doing. Compliance is in fact an attempt to surrender without giving up control.  It is the attempt to appear to be doing the necessary without actually doing it.

An interesting fact that I had to learn the hard way was: denial and delusion can continue in spite of the acknowledgment of guilt.  Guilt can actually be a way to distract one from the real problem(s); feeling guilty about what I didn’t do ... is actually mood altering and we can be just as hooked on the guilt as we can on any other substance or actions.  Many of us need a fix of guilt periodically and will screw up in some major fashion just so that we can have a reason in the here & now that explains our feelings rather than the real reason that lay lost in our history.

Please Note: Compliance and guilt are ways that a codependent has hoodwinked many an unwary partner, spouse, parent, sibling, therapist or friend.

Some shame-based people tend to seek out and even embrace punishment.  Admitting guilt and paying for it enhances the denial of what they fear most deeply - quitting doing ...  fill in the blank. To have quit whatever it was ... fill in the blank ... then the individual would have to admit that his or her life was out of control ... thus by admitting that, they are exposed as a flawed and defective human being.  No one willingly wants to have their face ground down into their shame or pain … the conundrum of the whole thing is that the only way out of the compulsive/addictive shame cycle is to embrace the shame ... not ignore it or pretend it does not exist.

Surrender: is motivated by the acceptance of shame.  For a codependent, surrender is the first true act of freedom since beginning their recovery attempt.  It is best embodied in the following:

Talking about our problems, mapping out our family’s dysfunction is not the same as taking action.  Action means that I've let go of control and I'm willing to listen to someone else and do it his way, rather than my own way.

7) Returning Cycle

It is actually ... I suspect ... a universal law that helps maintain the balance of the universe. The truth of the matter is; most of us have never really noticed this phenomenon before.  We were all just too busy just trying to get from A to B. The process of returning cycles involves the process of giving and receiving. 

o   We get from life what we freely give.  But first we must give. The key word there is freely. Many of us have had to give and give and give ... but it was done under duress ... and chaos and duress becomes our way of things.

o   Or we reap what we sow; it is not always apparent ... but sooner or later it comes around. Sometimes it bites us ... and sometimes it seems to reward us ... but its’ necessity will always come around.

o   But then we have to give it back to life. We don’t own it ... its’ not ours ... it is something we got from life and it has its own place in The Greater Way of Things but it is not ours to own. We may think it is ours but ... we only get to use it for an undetermined period of time then we must give it back. There is no real choice in the matter ... that is simply how it works. But we are working within a time frame that is defined by eternity.

o   We must give back what we received ... that is a primary part of the law ... again but, this is where we do have a choice ... for the grace of being ourselves, we add just a little of our potential to it as it passes through our hands. It has our character and our talents now attached, then it passes back to the universe. Now it has just the tiniest bit more energy in it, it has our energy. Why do we do this? So we can find our sense of pride and self respect. So we can become a Co Creator with the Creator. 

Thus, a returning cycle is not a punishment, even though there are many times when it may seem so. In reality it is the restoration of creative energy within our own environment ... This can be at home ... in the office ... at a tea party ... at church ... anywhere where we notice that we actually have the ability to give, because it is always there ... the opportunity to give ... we just don’t notice. Where we don’t have to hide behind our false selves and masks; when we can just be who we were intended to be, that defines life’s purpose. The energy we give back is now enhanced by our effort rather than diluted by our resentment. We Now Have A Choice.  

Effort or Dilution

It was observed many years ago that if mankind lived according to the Principal of Returning Cycles many of the rules and laws of man’s world today would be unnecessary.

Wisdom Is Not A Natural Born Thing

Wisdom Is Not A Natural Born Thing

Wisdom is not a natural born thing. It is the result of experience(s) ... but ... wisdom does not necessarily result from all or every experience and it definitely does not appear instantly.  Sometimes experience has to be repeated many times until the deeper aspects can be appreciated in proper light (understatement). But for wisdom to develop as it should it needs to be taken in combination with both properly appreciated experience and serious introspection.

We began to notice that we have never fully met ourselves, or for that matter really understood who we are. Why? Most of us have spent a life time pretending to be somebody other than whom and what we are and we are lost in that process. Again why? Because we have always been encouraged to withdraw away from what was predetermined to be un­pleasant or painful; to label the unpleasant and painful as bad or wrong, then avoid it at all cost; hence Addiction, Compulsion and Obsession. Each of the big three has serious negative consequences and anyone who acts out in them will pay. 

If one is paying close attention they might discover that they are their own Keeper of the Keys. The very attempt to avoid legitimate suffering causes all who attempt avoidance as a defense strategy to step into the loop of becoming their own worst enemy while they are trying to save their ass ends from the worst pain in their life ... they become Keeper Of Their Own Keys and Jailer all at the same time.

I have been told by many, if not by most, who have sorted through all this that opening to their deeper and supposedly darker feelings has allowed them to begin to see what has made life difficult for them. This process of simply having their feelings and seeing their origins allows the individual to begin to come to understand why the pain, why the difficulty. It gives them a path to follow, If Only They Choose. It is possible to begin to comprehend what anger is, what fear is, and more importantly what they are not and most importantly how they actually fit into their lives.

As this all begins to fall into place those old lost feelings will process, and as they do, they will go to their rightful place in memory. That is as good as it gets.

As This Happens  

We Get Our Lives Back 

More Importantly ... We Get Our Souls Back

A Fact Of Life That Few People Really Understand

The only way to transform, to make the changes you say you want to make is to come to terms with what you believe about yourself. Then once you come to terms with what you believe the next step is to unlearn what you have learned. Understanding your experience in life may not have been aligned with The Truth of Life initially but appreciating, It Was What Happened is a necessary first step.

The concept is very simple. But at the same time very hard to do. After all, you depend on what you have learned about yourself from the world around you. That much is true, the problem with this whole thing is: not a lot of all this experience that happened was based in truth.

As you go through the process of unlearning ... things begin to happen ... things change. Your faith returns to you, that is, you have the ability to put it to use in the rituals of your dailyness ... this is not about Church and God, it is solely about perception ... actually about how I am looking and not necessarily what I am seeing.

Faith is a tool not an occupation nor vocation.

The same is true for your sense of self. As this grows your sense power increases. You are able to meet your own needs more readily... The Dependency On False Beliefs Diminishes Over Time.

As you recover the energy you have invested in false beliefs and their related systems and in defense strategies that once were a Godsend but now are debilitating ... you can invest that energy forward in your life and into your creativity ... you can become a co creator with the Creator.      

So perfect in its pain

utter all absorbing soulful pain

unimaginable sadness

effusive gut wrenching sorrow

So perfect in its pain

that I cannot help but see it as a strange and unlikely part of heaven itself.

Christine Simcoe

June 5th 2012

A Study Out A Window

This Came In This Mornings Email ... Pass It On

Concentrate on this Sentence 


'To get something you never had, you have to do something you never did.' When God takes something from your grasp, He's not punishing you, but merely opening your hands to receive something better. 


Concentrate on this Sentence... 
'The will of God will never take you where the Grace of God will not protect you.' 

There comes a point in your life when you realize: 

Who matters, 

Who never did, 

Who won't any more... 

And who always will. 

So, don't worry about people from your past, 

there's a reason why they didn't make it to your future. 

At The First Awakening of My Soul

When we first awaken into spirit, one eye opens and then it sees.  It sees pain, it sees happiness, it sees injustice and fairness, it sees good fortune and bad, and for a period of time what it sees is overwhelming. Each of us comes with a built in remedy; this onboard system is designed to cushion the load of First Sight.  It’s called the Ego. 

The Ego:

o       has a job.

o       defines everything for us.

o       fits things into slots.

o       claims to understand things, that if you really think about it, aren't really so understandable. Note, we feel safer when we think we understand something. 

o       sets up our belief and disbelief systems.  They are separate systems and the latter is probably more powerful then the first.

o       sets out how we can get those childhood dependency needs met—the needs that in a perfect world would have been met in childhood—  away back when we were supposed to be properly dependent upon properly dependable people. 

o       becomes our sword and shield.

Over time as the Ego evolves it generally sets into motion a series of events or a set of circumstances that bring us back to our unfinished spiritual business.  It does this because it believes it Knows, and this appearing to Know seems to be accidental. This is referred to as the coincidence of Karma. 

Hierarchy of Needs

Food Shelter and Clothing  Love and Acceptance:  Sense of Self--- Power 

Sense of Self Awareness and ability: Freedom      

Sense of Play:/Fun/Growth/ /Enlightenment

On Even Days --- On ODD DAYS

On Even Days consider the following using the guidelines that are suggested.

·                    So why do I do what I do?

·                    Now as I consider why it is that I do what I do ...

 Know This!

·                    Every step toward understanding why I do what I do loosens the grip of my conditioned experience(s) and its resultant fear, has on my consciousness. 

·                    With each new insight, I will gain a glimpse of what creation really is. 

·                    Each glimpse increases my creative power until the balance between my mind and my ego is tipped in favour of my mind. 

·                    When that happens, progress is rapid indeed.

On ODD DAYS take your consideration to Three Axioms ... Two Observations With Actions ... And a Hint ...

Three Axioms ...

·                    Before you can be willing to allow the forgiveness of yourself or of others, you must identify the purpose their guilt or anger serves for you and the reasons why you believe it is in your best interest to maintain this vision. 

·                    Before you can be willing to forgive the world, you must become aware of the reasons you believe it is to your advantage to think of it as a dangerous place to be. 

·                    And, before you can enjoy unlimited abundance, you must see why you believe it serves you to think of creation as limited.

Two Observations With Actions ...

·                    When you notice the Ego’s demands ... refuse to act on them ...

·                    Know this, those demands will become louder and more specific ...  still refuse to act on them. 

And a Hint ...

·                    When you begin to see the beliefs behind the ego’s demands, you may be willing to give them over to the Spirit for healing.

The most important thing I have learned thus far is on this journey called life is

When I come to the end of My Known Universe. 

When I come to the end where the light stops shining for me.  

It is from this point on that I have to be a risk taker.  

I have to go blindly off into something or some place I have never been or seen before.   

Of course the alternative is also possible.  I can shrink away from moving forward - I can shrink away from exploring God's Gift ...

What I have discovered is: when I step off into the darkness, it is the darkness of my unknown; it is here and only her that I grow ... it is then that I come to know ... it is then that I notice the light ... I am in it.

God will either 

Provide something solid for me to stand on 

When I step out into My Unknown

or

I will be both taught how to build the wings

And fly on the way down

The Mythical Full-Length Mirror of Self

Each of us, in turn, must go to a place and stand in front of The Mythical Full-Length Mirror of Self, if we are in fact to heal. It is a place where we come to know and see probably for the first time just how much “stuff” we really carry and how it drags us down and holds us from our future. The one we were intended to have.

To Heal we must own it! And become ready to consider casting it off.

The Process of Recovery is described as Uncover, Discover and Discard.

People have to know what they are up against. Where and how we carried it, and how our sense of evil spiritedness, of not being good enough, sometimes called incubus (from the Latin: evil spirited, devil or demon.)  Things, metaphorically mostly, that most of us believe are locked down inside us and run our lives...

It locks us into our guilt, hurt, pain and shame. How this burden of guilt, hurt, pain and shame serves as the drive engine for the behaviours that we hate about ourselves.

Those behaviours we can’t seem to stop doing and the ones that are killing us, the ones, oddly enough that we are trying to give up.

Ashamed and isolated and in the middle of a world,

That is full of people who are ashamed and isolated too,

Just like me and too terrified to admit it.

So now the opportunity sits here before me,

An opportunity both figuratively and literally,

To do something for the first time,

That is constructive,

About the state of my being. 

A WorkShop on Intimacy

Things I Have Learned While I Sat & Listened

Things I Have Learned While I Sat & Listened

When the trauma in life has been hidden away from our conscious mind for prolonged periods of time, what I have found is that the integration of new information about the past is a deeply disorganizing and disorienting exercise to attempt.  Basically it plays hell with my self esteem, that much I know is true.

Mother Nature "knows" when to shut people down who are caught between the rock and the hard place ... Festinger’s theory on Cognitive Dissonance. She also knows when it is time to open people up again, to begin the process of reintegration, to open up those things to the light of day that have been compartmentalized at great cost over the years.  It is important to understand that the reopening and shining the light of day into the darker and deeper reaches of the past can be a painful thing to do.

One of my greatest eureka’s came when I noticed that as people recovered their own feelings, their sense of their humanity, they also came to a place of realization about the gravity and the grief from their past that has not been dealt with, and just how inhumane it was to have been them for prolonged periods of time.  This was big for me. It is during this period of recovery that people often come to a greater sense of unhappiness and of sadness. This can be very painful and is referred to in the recovery material as the Original Pain work. The end product of recovery is that the individual ends up with more of themselves available to have a life with, with more of their truth(s) at their finger tips, and with more opportunities for an authentic and satisfying life style.

What Scott M Peck Calls “Cheap Forgiveness”

I, like Peck, have noticed that many people come into the therapeutic process and announce as quickly as they can ... that ... yes ... they had difficult childhoods, and ... yes ... their parents did the best they could and that they have forgiven them for all of it. 

But if the individual gives the therapeutic process enough room and time they always discover they have not forgiven anyone at all ... they are using their prespective as a diversion away from their legitimate pain.

This is what is sometimes called the Egyptian River Syndrome ... DE-NIAL.

There is a period of time where the individual will feel like they are putting their loved ones on trial. For them it really does seem that way.  In actual fact, what they are doing is coming to terms with what really happened.

This is not about whom the parents or the family members are or were, or even who the individual is ... it is about what really happened ... it is about a system that really did not work ... it simply is the truth of it all ...

Most often as not ... it's the system that did not work.

We naturally want to assess blame ... blame helps us defend us from our legitimate suffering.

But once one gets past that blaming thing, and just face the way it was ... It Is In This Space of No Active Defence Strategy ... Where Healing Happens ...

Blame Is An Old School Dysfunction ...

When Control Breaks Down ...

Use Blame ...

So When You Stop And Think About It,

Cheap Forgiveness Is Not So Cheap.

It Can Cost Us Our Life ...

Intro to the Metaphor

My name is Neil Douglas-Tubb. The sir-name is doubled barreled, the Douglas’s go back to The Black Douglas of Scotland (Sir James) and he begat children all over hell’s half acres and he ran around with Robert Bruce and the like ... and in all probability drank too much. On the Tubb’s side of things the history gets lost in antiquity somewhere around Newcastle the UK in the mid 1800’s. 

I am a Registered Clinical Counselor in British Columbia, prior to this I had a number of callings that I identify with as being my vocation for various periods of time. One of the more predominate endeavors I had a go at was member of the RCMPolice.  I honed my drinking skills there and continued in the family tradition that traced its roots back to the 13^th century. I continued honing my skills for some time after I ended my employee with the Force. 

I no longer drink. Have not done so since Feb 22^nd 1996.

I have struggled with the issues of codependency since my earliest memory.

I have written this book in a semi poetic fashion.  It seems to parallel my journey from RR#2 Hell back into The Real World.  

I have only recently arrived back in the real world, although I thought I had made it many times many years before; my best thinking not necessarily being my best friend. This thing called my journey is a lengthy and circuitous journey that really goes back in time to the early 1950’s, and as I recall when I was about 5 years of age.

I hale from small town Ontario, the politics there are slightly right of center; St Thomas Ontario has one or two interesting facts.  First: there are a lot of people from St Thomas and two: Jumbo the elephant met his Waterloo there, hit by the Wabash Cannon Ball trying to save his friend Tom Thumb.  That happened on September the 15^th 1885. 

St Thomas has always been a sleepy backwater sort of a place, and when I was a youth the Railways determined who was who and where they were in the social pecking order of the town. It was my high school chemistry teacher who told me to “get the hell out of Dodge” because this place did not hold much of a future for anyone. Thanks Mr. Norm Lancaster that advice opened up a world for me that was unimaginable in its dimension both in beauty and oddly enough, in despair.

I have traveled the world literally; got to do things that most only dream about.  I have to experienced things that most would like to avoid “like the plague” ... but from all that, from all those things that I experienced, I learned and I gleaned experience and it would seem I have been blessed with a small amount of wisdom.

There was a time in my life in the mid 1970’s where the front door of Hell kicked open literally.

It was then that I had my first real experience with a “Power Greater than Me”, one that I could relate to, truly in a Step Two Tradition and I had no idea at the time that it had anything to do with a Second Step.  It was a profound experience for me.  The nature of the experience and the depth of the experience were over shadowed by the person who actually went to the time and trouble to create the experience for us ... Not just me but for both of us.  I now know that neither really knew what we were doing outside of I was in deep trouble and about to fall of the end of the earth and he stepped up to the plate and held out a hand and allowed me to swing back into life. His name was Marty Bremner; we were both living in Ottawa Ontario at the time. He has since passed from this life but he did save my life.

I supposed my first experience with “A Power Greater than Me” happened when I was a child but nothing in my memory was as profound as what happened to me in early 1977. 

It was then that I experienced both the opening of the front door of Hell and at the same time seeing the path to my own growth and recovery.

It took damned near 30 years to put it all together. In fact this year is the 35^th anniversary.

I have met several others on the path.  One I would like to mention is Larry B ... my sponsor in the program ... he walked with me and still does at a distance to this very day ... Larry I thank you old buddy.

I hope this work expresses what it was that I experienced on my journey, but in a soft and gentle way. For anyone who has done the journey you know that it is difficult to put into words, this is my best effort for the moment.

I have worked with 12 Steps and A Course In Miracles extensively. I have worked with the outline for recovery that Julie Cameron expresses in her work books. I have sat in therapist offices, attended workshops, read books, did group work, sought out people who were supposed to know and during all this, I have craved understanding of who I am by both me and others and finally I craved salvation from this Hell that I was trapped in. Craved is a good word to describe the intensity of my need.

It took too recently for me to come to terms with I was in the middle of my salvation all of this time that I had been here on the face of this planet. That one took a long time to settle in.

My problem was: I just had no idea what to do with it. 

One of the things this whole experience of having my “life and recovery” has taught me is that we all have souls, and more importantly that each and everyone one of us has a particular curriculum for their particular soul to grow too.

Most of us fight this concept of the curriculum hammer and tong.  When in actual fact it is the initiation point onto the path.

For me, I had felt since my earliest memory that I did not belong, I was always an outsider wondering why I did not belong, and I knew that everyone else knew that I did not belong and could see that in how I felt and thought they treated me.

That whole sense of me goes back to my earliest memories. I felt from my earliest memory that I was inferior. I was raised in and around alcohol and alcoholics some of whom have been immortalized by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Scotch[1]. Mr. Galbraith was writing about his home town and most of our respective relatives in that book.

As I remember it my Grandfather purchased a house on Shackleton Street from one of Mr. Galbraith’s relatives and I got to play with some the Galbraith family’s electric trains, all that happened when I was about 10,  apparently they had been left or stored it in my now Grandfather’s basement. The house has traded hands several times since my grandparents passing but I still wonder if the electric trains from the 1930’s were still in the basement.

In particular Galbraith wrote about what happened in the quadrangle behind the McIntyre House Hotel in Dutton on any Friday or Saturday Night after the beverage room closed.  I can remember sitting up nights watching from my room in my grandfather’s hotel.  It was better than watching TV ... in those days TV was a little iffy ... the antenna had to be just so, and or the rabbit ears needed to be strung with foil.  Iffy was the word, but the action in the quad behind the hotel was very visible and very real. My Grandfather owned that hotel for quite a space in time, all through the late 1940’s and the 1950’s and up to the mid 1960’s. It was there that some of my fondest memories from childhood hail.  It burnt to the ground several years ago. The main street of Dutton now has a missing tooth in its main street smile where the old hotel used to stand.

I chased down recovery for a number of good reasons. I mean I chased it down.  I wanted it, I was lost and I wanted out and as I have come to understand it, it, the recovery process is primarily made up of spirit in action and it rose to the occasion and walked with me gently. 

For a very long time actually but I never released it until I was deeply immersed in my recovery process. Spirit, I have discovered, has no time table.  In fact if I understand it properly time simply does not matter to spirit. It is always waiting, waiting for each and everyone one of us to awaken and to begin the task of birthing our soul. Waiting for me to turn and see what was next that needed to be done, and then get on with doing it.  Never demanding anything other than the truth; oh yes, I have discovered that the hard way of life is demanding; is the ego but never the spirit. If I was not ready for this or that, it would simply wait me out.

So I wrote The Metaphor after being inspired by a fellow 12 stepper. I have expanded on it to include some of My Experience, Strength and Hope.

I hope that you can find in these pages something that speaks to you about what it is that you need to do for you so you can find your way out.

Neil Douglas-Tubb   

Victoria 2012

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[1] P   Published by Macmillan of Canada...