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...

Life's Conundrum

Life’s Conundrum: How Do I Help Those Who Have Something That Repulses?

What I have found is that if I encourage those who seem to carry that which repulses to explore that very thing, the remedy is always held someplace deep in the exploration of their own pain, hurt and rejection.  It really is in there someplace.  They just have to find it.  Another oddity is that, as they find the resolution, become comfortable with it, and are no longer overpowered by it, the issue seems to lose the quality of repulsion and they are no longer projecting that out onto the world.

No Longer At Odds With Everything

It is a truth that those who have little room for their own pain and cannot accept pain as a normal and natural part of their life, seldom, if ever, encourage others to enter directly into an experience with their feelings (which could promote a more intimate understanding of this feeling and thus soften the resist­ance to pain that the feeling engendered in the first place). 

Resistance to pain only serves, in the long run, to enhance the pain.  Thus, examining it in some depth can serve to relieve the pain. 

"It isn't just the pain in my body that really hurts.  It's all the pains of my life that I have to pull away from; that which has imprisoned me in my impression of how I think life should be. Beginning to see my feelings just as they are brings me to a point of recognizing just how little time I have given to having real feelings in my life, including my pain, both physical and psychological."

As they began to notice that they had never fully met themselves in life or dealt with these feelings or, for that matter, their own immortality (because they had always been encouraged to withdraw from what was predetermined to be un­pleasant or painful and then labeled as bad or wrong) what they discovered was that the very thought of unpleasant acted as keeper of the keys.  They were, in effect, their own jailer.

"The Greater the Artist

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidenceis granted to the less talanted as a consolation prize." ~ Robert Hughes, Art Critic

A Prayer to Start Your Day

Put before me what You would have me do today and with Your strength, wisdom and aid I'll give it a whirl ... Amen