The Continuing Saga of Traumatic Body Memories

I realized, recently, that I hadn't written an article for the MMWI Blog since my return from a one month visit to New Mexico over Christmas, 2017-18. When I was in New Mexico, visiting a wealth of friends and colleagues that I hadn't had a chance to connect with in a very long time (some not for 30+ years), I found out, much to both my surprise and joy, that many of them had been keeping track of me via the MMWI Blog [which they knew about from my posts on Facebook about the blog]. Since almost no one (except a few very close supportive friends) ever posts a 'comment' on the blog, I'm never clear who, if anyone, is actually reading the articles I write. What keeps me going, even in the face of that non-clarity of readership, is both a resonant love of writing and an opportunity to talk about my 'life experience', as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and physical torture, in the hope that it may be of benefit to someone else, either who experienced a similar trauma or who knows someone who has and wants to be an 'enlightened witness' for them. Additionally, as it turns out, many people I've known over the years are 'keeping up with me' via the blog. And that is, frankly, quite satisfying.

I have been wanting, over the past year, to write a blog about 'my Vietnam War years', and have, indeed, begun such an article, but decided that, right now, a more 'immediate' pressing need was to write an article about the continuing 'blowback' from the horrific trauma I experienced as a child due to the abuse of my parents, and the way in which my body memories are continuing to cause very real ongoing trauma in the present.

The Lingering Effects of Trauma

Recently, I finally had access to an updated version of my media databases (after a consultant friend, who specializes in FileMaker databases, returned them to me). And I've been engaging in adding several hundred books, movies and documentaries, and music CDs to those databases.

In the process of adding books (which had been piled in boxes, awaiting cataloguing, and therefore I wasn't quite aware of what was in them) to the database, I came across a book by Alice Miller, who is a favorite author of mine (The Drama of the Gifted Child had been one of my early forays into the study of childhood abuse). The book is entitled The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. It is a great read, though given the subject matter and my direct personal experience with the trauma she is describing, it is also disturbing.

I have been aware, for several years, that 'memories' are of at least two varieties: mental and somatic. There are memories that we remember in our brain, or that are locked away in our subconscious mind, only slowly revealing their secrets over time (if ever). Those are memories which arise in dreams, or in mental health therapy, or are evoked by a specific further trauma or even by a piece of music. But the other locale of memories is in the body. Deepak Chopra talked about these in a video I saw, and he referred to them as neuropeptides, which are essentially 'brain cells' that live in locations throughout the body and communicate with the brain in our heads. They manifest as 'body memories', as compared to 'mind memories', yet they are all, interestingly, in the same genus of memory. Last year, I had read The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In The Healing Of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk. That book both displayed the ways in which the body 'remembers' trauma, and gave suggestions on how to access those memories.

I've been reading these books, and ones with similar subjects, because I have, for the past 53 years, been having periodic panic attacks, which are often so thoroughly devastating that my nerves feel like they have been 'fried' afterward. And in the midst of the panic attacks, I feel like I'm dying, quite literally. When I first started experiencing them, at the age of 14, when I was living in Tokyo, Japan (my father, who was an U.S. Air Force communications maintenance officer, was stationed there), the 'cause' was quite obvious: I was being quite openly beaten by my father on a regular basis. It wasn't that I was 'misbehaving', nor that I was some kind of delinquent, but rather because my father was psychotic. He beat us (myself and my two brothers) just because he felt anxious about his own life and took out his discomfort on his children. I had episodic panic attacks until I entered college, at which time I turned to substance abuse to 'numb' my consciousness and dull the traumatic pain.

During those years of extensive substance abuse (largely from the age of 17 to 32), I had instances when I took too many psychedelics or narcotics, and my heart raced so fast that it was slamming against my chest. I very nearly died a number of times, but I suspect (looking back) that my large frame allowed the drugs to be somewhat diluted, and so I didn't die. Now, understand, I often thought that I wanted to die. And I had attempted to commit suicide in the freshman year in college, by taking an overdose of the tranquilizers my neurologist had prescribed. I had 'failed' in that attempt (I slept for 36 hours and woke up with an absolutely torturous headache), and was so intensely depressed that I berated myself for many years afterward, with a self-talk that I was "such a profound failure that I couldn't even successfully kill myself". In fact, I continued to often be suicidally depressed until I was in my early 50s. I realized a couple of days ago, after reading more of Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies that it wasn't that I wanted to die -- it was that the pain of living was so profound that I wanted that pain to end. Death is the great unknown and quite frankly we all arrive there eventually, whether with effort or old age; hence, it wasn't that I wanted to fall into the unknown, as that I desperately wanted to depart from the far too well-known, which was the traumatic PTSD outcomes of the childhood incest and torture that I had experienced.

The second period of my life when I experienced a large number of panic attacks was when, at the age of 34, I had a profound nervous breakdown (or 'breakthrough, as my late much beloved therapist, Shoshona Blankman, reframed it for me after I had recovered from the initial bodily devastation). For three months, I had a non-stop panic attack (literally, all day long, with disturbed sleep cycles). The only way I survived at all was due to having access to daily acupuncture treatments, which calmed me enough to minimally function. I continued to have panic attacks two or three times a week for the next two years [until around 1989].

Then, they started up again, in earnest, about 6 years ago. My mental health therapist here in St. Louis has speculated that the 'parts' of my Self [based on Internal Family Systems theory] that represent the 'exiles', that I had for damned good reason not previously accessed in my therapy finally felt 'safe' enough to reemerge and become accessible to my mind and body. As he stated it "they were, all those years, locked away in the salt minds of the lowest depths of your psyche", hidden away because, until I was healthy enough for them to reemerge, they were the most traumatic elements of my childhood rape and torture [which had, I now know, begun when I was an infant]. As an example of those subsumed parts, I have almost no conscious memory of my childhood between the age of 6 and 12. My therapist refers to that period as 'traumatic amnesia'. In other words, the level of abuse was so intense that my mind blanked out the vast majority of those memories. The traumatic incidences that I do remember, quite clearly, from the age of 12 onward, I often feel I would just as well wish to forget. But since they are accessible to me, I can work with and on them, for better or worse.

The Manifestation of Those Traumatic Body Memories

Six years ago [2012], I began having 'burning scalp' [neuropathy] sensations. No matter what shampoo I used, my scalp literally felt like it was 'on fire'. I ended up, for several years, only washing my hair about once a week, since each time I washed my head, it burned intensely. Eventually, this past year, I found a shampoo at Trader Joe's [the only one they sell] that allows me to wash my head every two days without significant discomfort.

Then, starting around 2014, I began to have problems with mattresses. The mattress that I had had for many years wore out and, not realizing that mattress materials had profoundly changed since my 1999 purchase of the previous model, I bought a memory foam mattress [pretty much the only material available by then]. I had a severe allergic reaction to the material. I tried 'cool gel' mattresses, and others as well [I've addressed this issue in previous blogs]. The long and short was that one of the mattresses evoked neuropathy in my ankles, which I've had ever since [my ankles 'burn' almost all the time]. Eventually I found a mattress at IKEA with minimal foam in it. That mattress sort of solved the dilemma, but frankly I don't really obtain much of a solid sleep on it. It doesn't make me sick, but I can't sleep for more than 5 1/2 hours each night on it. Last year, Linda [my intimate partner for the past decade] and I stayed at a B&B in Taylorville, Illinois, and slept on a mattress which was 'tolerable'. We removed the sheets to see the manufacturing label. They are made in Springfield, IL, so I hope, in the next couple of months, to drive to their factory and see if I can purchase one and have it delivered to St. Louis [or find out if a local supplier has them in stock].

Around the same time I began having difficulties with mattresses, I began having even more intense reactions to a host of other materials, namely shoes, clothing, belts, etc. that I had worn for many years. Over a period of about a year those materials became allergic to me. And when I would put them on, I was having an intense allergic reaction -- major headaches, intense GI tract distress, and rapidly increasing feelings of overt TERROR. What I now realize, when I was reading Alice Miller's book last week, was that what I've been experiencing for the past six years is a 'version' of the panic attacks that I had in the past.

When I was younger, given the intense nature of the mental health work that I was engaging in, I often said that "I ate risk for breakfast". It was a quite conscious challenge to the trauma, knowing that I had to 'move though the pain in order to get beyond it'. For the past four years, as I have worked to overcome the pernicious effects of the 'materials hypersensitivity' reactions, I have periodically, in a clearly planned approach, 'challenged' my potential reactions to materials, knowing that I would potentially have a negative reaction [often I would meditate either before wearing the material or after first putting it on], but being willing to 'try to challenge the reaction'. It has never been 'easy' and I often end up having a more or less controlled panic attack. In those situations, I know exactly what to do if the reaction becomes too intense: take off the offending clothing or shoes, quite quickly, and often wash that area of my body with soap to remove, as best I can, any chemicals that are causing the body memory to be evoked.

Part of the 'problem' is that there are few 'mental images' associated with the body memory reactions. Occasionally I've had, the first time I tried a material, images of being raped as an infant, or beaten severely as a youth, but more often than not, the only sensation [I say 'only' not to minimize the pain but to note the singular 'known' reaction] that I feel is SHEAR TERROR. My throat feels like it is closing off, my lungs feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest, my intercostal muscles, on either side of my chest, feel like I'm having heart attack [which I learned, years ago, was not a heart attack, but a muscle spasm], my GI tract goes into a hyper-spasmodic cramp, my legs freeze up and I know I need to, as quickly as possible, remove the offending garment and do whatever I can to calm my nerves. Those are all the bodily sensations of an overt panic attack. 

But what is even worse is that, periodically, as best I know I've done all the things I need to do to make a material 'safe' for me to wear it [including, as I've learned, to wash new clothing at least 6 times before wearing them, to minimize any chemicals that will evoke this terror] and 'out of the blue' I have a major panic attack. In this situation, I'm not consciously trying to challenge the material or the reactions I suspect it will provoke; quite to the contrary, as best I know I've taken care of removing offending allergic chemicals and yet I am SLAMMED, full force, with a panic attack of formidable proportions.

The trouble is that this happens at least several times each month, and has been occurring with that frequency for four years now. The other issue that evokes a panic attack is food. Sometimes I'll eat a food which either contains some sort of preservative or ingredient that I'm sensitive to, that I'm unaware it contains, and 'out of the blue' I'm hit with a profoundly intense panic attack. The 'totally random nature' of such an attack reminds me [maybe subconsciously it's the trigger] of the manner in which my father would 'out of the blue' turn and beat me with his fists for no apparent reason. Or torture me in some other manner just because his psychosis evoked such a reaction at that particular moment.

Yet, Progress HAS Been Accomplished

As I say, I have finally found a shampoo that only 'burns' my scalp at an acceptable level (a complete lack of pain is no longer a probable outcome when neuropathy is present). I have a mattress that doesn't make me sick, but also doesn't allow a good night's sleep (luckily, though, I sleep most evenings at Linda's house, and her mattress is tolerable to me). And I know where I can purchase a mattress that I can likely tolerate and get a solid night's sleep again at my own house.

Since the overt crisis of the autumn of 2016, when I reached a point of total depression, believing that I had almost no clothes to wear that didn't make me intensely ill [compounded shortly thereafter with a 4th blood clot in my left leg], I have had the benefits of yoga therapy, offered by a close female friend who is quite knowledgeable in that modality, and have slowly dragged myself out of what seemed at the time to be a bottomless pit of anguish and hopelessness. I now know I can wear jeans without a significant negative reaction, and I can wear shirts and socks which I can tolerate after I've washed them for 6 - 10 times to remove offensive chemicals.

I am still having MAJOR problems with shoes, though. The white New Balance cross-trainer shoes that I've worn for the past 4 years, which are by this point almost dilapidated [I joke that they look like 3rd-world retreads] have been continuously glued together and I've had them resoled several times. It's not that I can't 'afford' other shoes [I have probably 20 pairs of shoes I used to be able to wear in my closet], but foam material has become something to which I have a serious allergy and which, upon trying to wear, I have an overt panic attack after wearing for more than an hour. I'm researching other materials [some newer shoes are now made with a cloth-like materials other than leather or foam which might be tolerable] -- Xero or Nike Epic React or Skechers are a possibility which I plan to try soon.

I'm still having bad reactions to leather belts. A couple of years ago I found a Nautilus brand belt that was made with man-made materials that wasn't allergic to my body, but it wore out and I've found no other one since. I've searched online for another one, but thus far haven't found what I was looking for. So I wear jeans which are tight around the waist and need no belt to be held up.

Each time I accidentally wear an offending material or eat an offending food and have a significant panic attack, I feel as though my nerve endings have been fried. And my emotional reaction is to not attempt to challenge any materials for several more weeks, so thoroughly devastating are the attacks. Last week, for instance, I wore a pair of cargo pants that I hadn't tried to wear for the past four years and, apparently, the pants had last been washed when I was going through my 'compression socks chemical pollution' period [I had to discard a large number of clothes after that, since the chemical in the compression socks is intensely sickening to me -- washing them with my other clothes had been a major inadvertent mistake]. After about two hours of wearing them, I clearly determined I was having a panic attack not as a result of anxiety, but due to a chemical allergy. I took off the pants, washed my skin, and put on a pair of jeans, but it still took 6 - 8 hours to fully recover from the panic attack. I have to 'schedule' times when I'm going to 'challenge' a material, to make sure that for at least several hours afterward [in case I have a negative outcome] I can recover from the allergic reaction without having to be anywhere for a meeting or scheduled appointment.

Everytime I wash any of my clothing, I always run them through an additional rinse cycle, to clear out the maximum soap residual. I use Seventh Generation 'free and clear' laundry detergent, to minimize allergic reactions in the first place. Though I bought a used dryer last year, I've not made use of it since because of an overt fear of being 'polluted' with fabric softener chemicals, since I had such a crisis with a previous used dryer. I know it's paranoia, but since I have the option of drying my clothes are an indoor clothesline, I've been able to avoid my fear without a major alternate problem.

When I was in New Mexico over Christmas, my schizophrenic nephew, unbeknownst to me until I had returned from a visit to Santa Fe, had discarded four white compression socks that I had left behind at the casita that I was staying in at my brother and sister-in-law's property. That provoked a major crisis for me, since getting used to new compression socks is its own significant physically traumatic problem. I have to wash new compression socks 15-20 times [at a commercial laundromat, so as not to pollute my own washing machine with chemicals I can't tolerate] to make them 'tolerable' to me, and even after that, I wear them over ankle-high socks, so that the compression sock material doesn't come in direct contact with my skin. For six months after returning to St. Louis, I had only two tattered compression socks to alternate on a daily basis, which felt both emotionally and traumatically constricting. Finally, about 3 months ago, I finally gathered enough courage to try to wear some older black compression socks, that I hadn't used in several years, to see if they were 'tolerable' to my body. Lo and behold, to my joyous surprise, they did not cause an allergic reaction! Hence, I now have access to 20 compression socks that are in generally good condition, which with proper care should last for several more years [before I have to face the fear getting used to the chemical reactions of new compression socks].

In Summation

I guess I'd say, in concluding this article, that it's particularly depressing to continue, at the age of 67, to be subjected to intense body memory reactions to the rape and torture that I experienced as a child. I was terrified of my father right up until his death in 2011, so on a chronological level, it hasn't been that long since the 'terror provoking perpetrator' was in my world [even though I hadn't been around my father much at all since 1990]. As my therapist often says "you come by it honestly", which while reassuring that I'm not insane, is still quite bothersome.

Anyone who thinks that a person who experienced significant PTSD can 'just get over it' quickly is living in a fog of denial. Trauma of the kind and duration that I experienced simply does not 'clear out' quickly. I've been engaged in the most difficult work of mental health therapy for 40 years, with quite excellent mental health and bodywork/yoga therapists, and yet I continue to be plagued by profound emotionally and physically traumatic memories of that abuse.

It is important to remember that "you don't have to do it all alone". I have had the intimate love and respect of Linda, my significant partner of 10 years, who has been a wonderful support in my healing, the friendship and great working relationships I've developed in my Unitarian Universalist congregation, the emotional support of my New Mexico men's wellness community [even at a distance, here in St. Louis], and my own intense devotion to my personal recovery.

I know that I have to 'go through it to get beyond it' and I know that may continue until my dying day, but it doesn't make it any easier to know that. Recovery is no easy or simple journey.

Healthy Enough To Travel

I just finished reading my most recent blog, "Paradoxical Success", that I wrote in May of 2017. That makes it quite a while since my last post, and not surprisingly, a lot of 'water under the bridge' has flowed since then.

Downward Spiral

From October 2015 to November 2017, I experienced a rash of quite serious and what at least 'felt like' life-threatening health crises. First, there was the death of my much beloved and greatly respected former therapist, Shoshona Blankman, in New Mexico, in April 2015 -- which I didn't hear about until shortly before being scheduled to attend the 2015 New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference [6 months after her passing]. Between that and some accumulating health challenges, I had to cancel my trip to the Conference, literally on the way to the airport, and ended up in the ER for 24 hours, due to a major anxiety attack. [I have suffered from such emotional challenges quite a number of times in my life, and each time they result in significant setbacks, at least for a period of time.]

That was followed by greatly increased 'toxic' reactions to clothing, shoes, belts, and pants, many of which I'd worn for many years, but which now produced deeply uncomfortable heart palpitations and feelings of overt terror [a condition I term "materials hypersensitivity", though I'm now clear that the cause has a far more to do with emotional trauma than with any toxins organic to the materials, though I don't, in the least, rule out environmental toxins as complicating factors]. I had already been suffering, for 4 years previous to October 2015, with 'burning scalp' and 'burning leg' neuropathy [both of which continue to plague me].

By the summer of 2016, the "materials hypersensitivity" had become so pronounced that I was reading every article I could find on the Internet and talking to multiple medical personnel about how to resolve the issue, but unfortunately to no avail. No one seemed to have any answers which 'worked' for me. I couldn't take nutritional or herbal supplements -- I was far too hypersensitive to those as well -- and my mental health therapy, though quite effective for a wide range of my traumatic challenges, was not 'working' for becoming more tolerant of the clothing I used to be able to wear. Then, I made the horrendous mistake of inadvertently washing several different loads of clothes, with the compression socks that I was required to wear to minimize the chronic edema that I suffered from due to multiple embolisms over the years. The problem was that the compression socks had, embedded within them, chemicals that made me intensely nauseous if they made direct contact with my skin [I have had to wear thick over-the-calf gym socks underneath them to keep the chemicals from touching my exposed skin]. In doing so, I 'polluted' several loads of clothing, including almost all the underwear that I had been 'tolerant' of up to that point.

I reached the point, by September 2016, where I had NO clothing that didn't make me extraordinarily ill. I literally ran out of clothing to wear! On top of that, the last avenues of potential solution to my hypersensitivity had run out. No physician knew how to resolve my condition, not even allergists. I was down to wearing only a pair of long legged gym pants, and some old shirts. I felt at my wits' end and was extraordinarily anxious and depressed about life.

I had wanted to attend the 2016 New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference, having had to cancel the previous year's attendance, but in the midst of that clothing crisis, I additionally learned that I had melanoma cancer on my left arm. At that point, I had to cancel my desire to attend the Conference for a 2nd year in a row. The recovery from the cancer surgery was long and painful. And then, two weeks after the surgery, I had another blood clot in my left leg [the 3rd or 4th -- it's not entirely clear how many -- since 1997]. After spending several days in the hospital, I was given anticoagulant medication, but quickly ran into the problem of being able to adequately tolerate the dosage level prescribed by my physician. That crisis went on for almost 3 months, even while I was recovering from the cancer surgery, before I finally had an nerve-wracking appointment with the physician who was treating me for the blood clot. The result of that appointment, though -- thankfully -- was mutually deciding upon a dosage level I could tolerate without becoming profoundly sick.

In October 2016, I had the good fortune of finding out that a female friend, Pamela Todd, whom Linda [my intimate partner] and I usher with at The Sheldon Concert Hall, was skilled in 'yoga therapy', and Pamela noted that she was working with a couple of war trauma survivors of the Bosnian genocide. Slowly, with great effort and care, her yoga therapy began to have a positive effect upon my 'emotional trauma' reactions to my clothing, and I figured out some clothing [through trial and error] that I could tolerate without becoming frightfully sick. Her yoga therapy positions, which I continue to engage in on a daily basis, quite literally have saved my life. 

By the spring of 2017, I felt like I was 'on the mend'. But I kept ending up in the ER with various aliments, including a very nasty flu, and in the summer of 2017, with a kidney stone. When I have, in the past, had dental root canals, I have never taken pain medication, not due to any 'macho' desire to 'tough it out', but because the pain medication made me intensely sick, worse than the pain of the dental work. But when I was hit with the kidney stone, I quite willingly ingested the 'narco' that was prescribed [hydrocodon-acetaminophen combination] and often took a second tablet within an hour of the first -- because the pain was stunningly and profoundly intense! Luckily, although I was unable to 'pass' the stone on my own, within 4 days of being hit with the kidney stone I was put in the hospital and given surgery, which broke up the stone with a laser beam. Another week with a catheter followed [which was no less painful than the kidney stone and far more disruptive of my physical comfort and functionality], but finally, upon the removal of the catheter, I was 'cured' [though I continue to have some periodic residual pain].

On My Feet Again After Two Years of Continual Crisis

By November 2017, I felt 'healthy enough to travel' again. That was the first time in over two years that I felt I had reached an adequate point of physical and mental health that would allow me to travel without excessive pain or anxiety. Having attempted to travel to my home state of New Mexico in 2015 and then again in 2016, and having had to cancel the excursions each time, I wanted to visit family and friends, for an extended time, so I decided to spend a month in New Mexico [from late December through mid-January]. I wanted Linda, my intimate partner, to travel with me, but she has a part-time position at the Missouri Botanical Gardens [a customer services role she has enjoyed for almost a decade] and could not be away during the Christmas season. She encouraged me, though, to take the trip, feeling that such a trip would engender greater self-confidence, given that I'd be traveling alone. And it would give me the opportunity to engage in extended visits with my family and long-term friends.

I had hoped to take the train to Albuquerque, but the planning for such was foreshortened by the recovery from the kidney stone. Hence, I chose instead to drive to New Mexico. I was concerned about such a method of travel, in that, with multiple blood clots, driving long distances was a potential problem. But I decided to more leisurely drive to New Mexico over 3 days, with multiple stops to get out and stretch my legs, keeping the blood flowing adequately. Plus, with cruise control, it would be tolerable.

I spent Christmas with my brother and sister-in-law in Albuquerque [they own an adobe apartment complex and willingly had lodgings for me], and had the chance to visit friends for a week and a half there. Then I drove up to Santa Fe, for a week, staying in a casita that my brother owns, to visit the museums there and have the opportunity to visit with friends in northern New Mexico. I spoke nightly with Linda [we have a mutually loving, decade-long intimacy, and we enjoy sharing our daily activities with each other], and by early January, she was able to join me in New Mexico, for the balance of my trip there. We spent another week back in Albuquerque and three more days in Santa Fe, visiting more of my friends and seeing parts of New Mexico that we both enjoy greatly.

A Different and More Refreshing Perspective Upon New Mexico

As I have enunciated in many previous posts, I've always had mixed feelings about my years in New Mexico. I often write about Albuquerque and St. Louis [between which I've spent 49 of my 66 years] as the 'tale of two cities'. My years in New Mexico were often quite frustrating to me, in that the economy there is 'challenging' even in good years, and 'devastating' in 'bust' years. And, on top of all of the financial and employment challenges, I have been, throughout my life, engaged in a long-term, very emotionally painful, recovery from profound childhood sexual abuse incest/rape and physical & mental torture. Those subjects have been covered, extensively, in many of my past posts.

For this trip, though, I wanted to approach my visit to New Mexico in a very different -- and more refreshing -- light, with 'recovery' and 'connection' as the watchwords and 'minimal frustration' as the focus. And, by and large, I was successful in that effort.

In addition to visiting with my brother & sister-in-law and their families, and spending quality time with friends whom I often see when I visit New Mexico, I made a special point of contacting people who I hadn't met with in a very long time. I had, in all cases, been communicating with them via social media for the past 5 or more years [and made use of Facebook Messenger to arrange times to get together while I was in town], but in finally sitting down for extensive conversations, often for the first time in over a quarter of a century (!), I afforded myself the opportunity to 'get to know them' in a far deeper way that I'd known them when I was younger. I noted to many of the people I met with that "we've now lived long enough on this planet that a distinct 'arc' of our lives has manifested itself, and we can now view our lives -- and the value of our friendship -- with greater clarity". I learned things about people I'd known well, most often from political and social advocacy activities, that I found quite intriguing and intensely educational. On some levels, we discovered that, while we had worked together and had shared many endeavors over the years, we didn't REALLY 'know' one another very well at all. The depth of those conversations was both powerful and mutually empowering. It was, as though, now that we are 'retired' and in our advanced years, we can drop many of the 'cultural facades' that are constructed in our society, that block true emotional intimacy, and 'know one other for the first time'.

There were, no doubt, several points during the trip, when setting up appointments was sketchy or I had periods when I couldn't quite figure out what next to do with my time, that the 'overarching frustration' that I had felt when living in New Mexico began to take hold. But, being well aware that I did not desire to "go there" on this trip, I 'talked myself through' those moments and decided to not allow myself to become captured by those old and emotionally vacant feelings. It took a 'force of will' to continually maintain a positive and vibrant perspective, but once I had another appointment with an old friend, the energy and connection between us quickly and effectively dissipated such frustrating feelings.

One of the 'old feelings' I had, that cropped up even in the midst of my meetings, was "Why had friends, who were successful in their own employment opportunities, not assisted me, all the years when I lived in New Mexico and was 'hitting the wall' due to minimal decent employment, with some suggestions on where to look for jobs or people to connect with?" But, frankly, I had to step back from that frustration and see how many of my missed opportunities had to do with my own mental health challenges [due to the intense PTSD evoked by the incest & terror I had experienced in my childhood] and that others around me were either unaware of the challenges I had faced, or not at all clear on how to assist me, even if they had been willing to do so. It surely didn't help that I was deeply constricted by serious substance abuse until I was in my early 30s [due to the profound depression and suicidal feelings I wallowed in for years after the childhood torture], nor that I was effectively 'out of the picture' for 7 years between the ages of 35-43, due to recovery from a major nervous breakdown in 1985. [Shoshona, to her wonderful credit, reinterpreted the 'breakdown' as a  'breakthrough', stressing the recovery from the PTSD and encouraging me to rise above the often horrific feelings of self-victimization.]

Additionally, we were all 'victims' of a relentlessly crummy economy in New Mexico. Finding decent employment, for anyone, no matter how many graduate degrees they had acquired or professional connections they could muster, was difficult, and while people 'cared', the competition for good jobs was often brutal. (Many highly skilled and well-educated people in New Mexico, at least in the larger cities, are willing to compromise on employment just to live in an area that is topography stunning and which has pleasant, temperate weather most of the year.) And I knew many of the people I met with on this visit via politics, which is its own cutthroat business. While many of my visits were with very good and greatly respected political allies, many of whom I had worked with on multiple campaigns, all of us knew candidates who treated you like 'the best thing since sliced bread' while a campaign was being waged, and then often acted like they couldn't remember your name after winning [or losing]. If you were 'of value' to their own future, you were still welcome in their camp; otherwise, you quickly become so much flotsam. Given the Public Administration graduate degree I had acquired in 1978, politics was one of the few avenues of social and economic advancement in an economy that heavily depended on government funding [being a poor border state], but if your candidate had lost or was no longer in power, your 'value' in the overall economic standing was questionable at best. Even if the Democratic Party [of which I was a well-known activist and for which I was a seasoned campaigner] had won a subsequent election, if the candidate was not your man or woman, then you were subject to the same kind of [figuratively speaking] 'political bloodbath' as someone from the 'other' party.

 Feeling Greater Comfort With The Choices I Made - Or Which Were Made For Me

But I tried to not 'go there', not go to the 'what if's', not wallow in the 'if only this had been true', when in fact something quite different had been the actual reality, on this trip and in my visits with old political allies. As one of many examples, after the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992, during which I was the Statewide Volunteer Coordinator for the general election and had, by the conclusion of the campaign, over 1700 volunteers throughout the state under my auspices, almost all of the campaign staff had been given patronage employment in Washington, D.C. or with the Arkansas Democratic Party. Except for me, that is. I had been caught in the unenviable position of being paid by the New Mexico Democratic Party, but working for the national staff. The Clinton-Gore staff felt no obligation to me [since I was not on their payroll], and the state party felt no obligation either [since I worked for the national staff]. I was cut out on both sides. No one felt any obligation to assist me with employment. But as a colleague later darkly joked, at least I didn't get indicted and have to obtain legal counsel, unlike many of the Clinton staffers who got caught up in the 'Travel-gate' and 'Whitewater' witch hunts.

After having worked on 50 Democratic Party campaigns by that point, I finally learned that it was not in my best interests to be a 'political whore', offering my services to almost any candidate just because I thought they were going to adequately serve the public, but whom I didn't know at all well. From that point forward, I only offered my campaign services to people who I personally knew and trusted, and even then had no expectation that any kind of post-election employment would be manifested due to such assistance.

As I noted in my previous "Paradoxical Success" post, as it turned out, having finally 'hit the wall of total frustration' with the employment and educational climate of New Mexico, I was motivated to actively seek admission to graduate programs beyond NM, and to seek employment in states where such possibilities were greater. That such employment was ultimately unsuccessful even in Missouri was surely depressing, but somehow life has worked itself out, and I'm in far better shape now than I'd been in my younger years.

My mental health is now more flexible, my emotional trauma more recovered, and though I still have many challenges to overcome in relation to the 'materials hypersensitivity' -- it is an ongoing challenge and one not easily scaled -- this most recent trip to New Mexico let me know, in a deep and comforting way, that the choices I have made in my life have managed to be fairly healthy and emotionally productive, and have allowed me to continue to 'fight the demons of my childhood' from a competent perspective. The very nature of life assures us that 'it ain't an easy journey', but I've managed to live far longer than I ever expected when I was younger and with a greater ability to bounce back from health challenges.

And finally, as both Shoshona said back in 1998, when I moved to St. Louis, and a very close friend reiterated on this visit, "Albuquerque works well enough for many people, it just didn't work for you. You needed a bigger playground, to spread your wings, and you've found it." I still very much enjoy visiting my former home, and will hopefully always enjoy the company of my many good friends and allies [as well as the love of my family and relatives], but St. Louis is now 'home', in a very clear and distinct way. I've been here almost 20 years and, other than from an employment standpoint, it has 'worked well for me'. I have a most enjoyable and loving decade-long intimacy with my partner and a wonderful religious community where I feel respected and appreciated. Life is good.

Paradoxical Success

As of August of 2017, I will have lived in St. Louis, Missouri for 19 years, having arrived here in 1998 to complete the second year of my Master of Social Work at Washington University. I note this with a combination of professional angst and personal pleasure.

Prequel to Moving to St. Louis

I had begun to work on the Master of Social Work in 1995 at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico [the 'other Las Vegas', as we always emphasized - very different from the one in Nevada - much smaller and far more economically challenged]. Since I was living in Albuquerque, NM at the time, Highlands represented a 'commuter school'. A fellow student and I would drive the 120 miles to Las Vegas on Monday morning, attend classes all day, stay overnight in a motel, attend classes all day on Tuesday, then drive back to Albuquerque on Tuesday evening. Then each student would earn gradate credit at a practicum, Wednesday - Friday, in our home city (most of the students were from cities other than Las Vegas). Personally, I worked at the New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families [NMACF].

After that first year of the graduate program, due to a number of difficulties with the program's other students [most of them were only there to get a degree, with minimal effort, whereas I, being an older student, was very invested in getting a quality education, and that difference caused some major clashes between the most of them and myself], I decided not to return to Highlands University for the second year of graduate studies. My supervisor at NMACF, Jerry Ortiz y Pino, willingly arranged for me to obtain a full-time contractual position in the agency (working on the Shaken Baby Syndrome Project, which I totally revamped, with a focus on men's emotional wellness), at which I continued for the next two years. Jerry encouraged me, though, to continue the MSW program somewhere (though clearly not at Highlands). Hence, after the first year of full-time employment, I began to apply to social work graduate programs around the nation where I could feel sufficient academic challenge. After applying to 12 different programs, New Mexico State University, University of Denver, University of Minnesota and Washington University offered me admission, and I was waiting to hear from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (they finally, belatedly, offered me admission, though unfortunately six weeks after I had already accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis).

I traveled to the 4 graduate programs that had offered admission by February of 1998, interviewing with each of them, and finally decided upon Washington University (in large part because they offered an Academic Scholarship that paid half of my tuition, plus a further small Minority Scholarship, with the combination paying 2/3 of the tuition cost). They were also fairly assertive about encouraging me to apply for their doctoral program, given that I was a straight-A student. The graduate program somewhat ran into problems, though, due to some issues with the practicum that I started with, and by the end of that second year of graduate studies, I was only too happy to be finished with the school. I successfully earned the MSW in May of 1998. By then, the desire to continue on, in the doctoral program, no longer motivated me.

Then I hit the 'lack of employment' wall, hard. I ran smack into several major roadblocks: (1) as a male graduate, in a field that was primarily female staffed, I was often given interviews, I suspect, solely so that the agency could check off the 'diversity' requirement on their EEOC forms, with the intention, all along, to hire only female graduates; (2) the overall American economy was going through a significant recession at the time, which made gaining employment, for any graduate, difficult; and (3) I had just turned 50 and, though it was technically illegal, I was negatively impacted by the 'over 50' age discrimination. On top of that, I had two graduate degrees (having earned a Masters of Public Administration from the University of New Mexico in 1978), and therefore ran into the 'overqualified' paradox.

Finally, though, after significant job hunting, I secured a position as the Project Director for a Missouri statewide smoking cessation program. However, I learned later (after being hired) that the Board had wanted to hire a female candidate, but that she had received some inside information on the answers to the interview questions, and I was hired, even though I was the 2nd choice candidate, to avoid a potential lawsuit. The dynamics behind that became obvious when my supervisor kept demanding favoritism for a female colleague of hers, who later, after I had resigned from the program (under a cloud of dissension on my part and disagreement with the Board about the job requirements of the position) was hired into the position. Hence, once again, the agency really wanted a female candidate, and I only got the position by default. I left the job in April 2002.

During my time at the agency, I had additionally earned a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I greatly enjoyed that graduate certificate program, at least in part because I had the chance to develop a close collegial friendship with John McClusky, the NP Management Program Director, and to meet and become friends with Kathryn Nelson, who had a wonderful reputation in St. Louis for her work on early childhood education.

At first I was quite overjoyed to be out of that toxic environment. But it quickly became obvious that obtaining employment, of any sort, anywhere in the nation (I was applying for positions as far away as New York and Hawaii) was going to be difficult. Between 2002-2008, I sent off over 2000 resumes and had something like 300 interviews. In many cases, I was interviewed for positions where the agencies were looking for an Executive Director, for which my experience and education made me qualified, but in every case, either I didn't have 'enough' experience or I was 'overqualified', and in almost every instance a female candidate was hired instead. I finally 'hit the wall' in 2008 when I applied for a position in St. Louis where the female candidate who was hired had less education, less experience, and fewer skills, and yet was hired at a salary which was $10,000 a year more than I had ever made in my life. (So much for the 'lie' about "we can't hire you because with your excessive qualifications we'd have to pay you too much"). At that point, I 'threw up my hands in total frustration', realizing that I had no idea how to gain employment, at any level.

In the two years that I had worked after gaining the MSW, I had earned approximately as much in salary as the MSW had cost me in tuition and living expenses, though no more. Here I had gained a vaunted social work degree from Washington University in St. Louis, which turned out to be basically damned worthless to me. 

Paradoxical Success

I used the title "paradoxical success" for this blog because although I had come to St. Louis to finish the MSW (and had graduated with a 3.95 GPA, which I was quite proud about, having just barely scrapped by with a 3.08 GPA during my first graduate degree in 1978, when I was a younger and considerably less serious student), the value of the MSW, in combination with the previously earned MPA, and the NP Graduate Certificate, turned out to be a myopic fantasy.

I had managed to survive, albeit with a major struggle, the boom/bust economy of New Mexico, largely because I had entered politics in 1978, knowing full well that the Masters of Public Administration was likely only going to have value in that kind of government environment (and because I came from a family legacy, on my maternal Hispanic side, of many decades of government service and political involvement). By the early 1990s, the Democrats were no longer in the governor's office, and my employment prospects were dim at best. Many people had encouraged me to believe that the MSW, along with the MPA, would make me a "highly qualified job applicant". As it turned out, the reality was quite the opposite: all that education, combined with the poor state of the national economy, made me toxically 'overqualified'.

In many ways, I had used the application for a 2nd year of graduate school (along with the scholarships and loans) as a means to 'escape from New Mexico'. That's not to say that New Mexico isn't a great place to live, for some people, but for me, it was a frustrating experience. I had grown up in a military family and moved around the U.S. and had lived in a couple of foreign countries, so while New Mexico was a state where many of my Hispanic relatives lived, I wasn't 'from' there 'originally'. In fact, most military kids of my generation weren't 'from' anywhere in particular. And New Mexico, as beautiful and culturally vibrant a culture as it is, has had a historically miserable economy. 76% of the graduates of the University of New Mexico leave the state upon graduation, given that few professional jobs are available, and the ones that are around pay poorly compared to almost every other state in the nation. I felt a sufficient sense of frustration that in 1982, after being laid off from an employment position in the New Mexico state government, I tried to obtain employment in either Texas or Louisiana, but to no avail. Again, while New Mexico has worked out well for many of my friends there, I personally needed a bigger playground, which St. Louis has provided me.

Whenever I say to friends that the MSW was a disaster, they point out -- quite reasonably -- that although professionally coming to St. Louis was a bust, there have been a wealth of other ways in which my residence here has been an unmitigated success.

In the 19 years that I've lived here, I have:
- Founded a nonprofit focused on men's emotional wellness (though, albeit, I've never obtained funding for it, so it has been more a 'labor of love' rather than a successful nonprofit organization).
- Matured by living in a city where my family-of-origin wasn't around me, and I had to learn how to survive on my own.
- Worked with and found great pleasure in the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, where my efforts and leadership have been and continue to be valued and respected.
- Bought my second house, which I've now owned for 13 years.
- Mutually manifested a loving, equitable and respectful intimacy with a female partner for 9 years.
- Had a very vibrant -- and inexpensive -- cultural life, as a result of ushering, at first, at 6 different venues in the city (though, at this point, I'm down to only two, having largely 'burned out' on the overzealous effort). In addition to the ushering, Linda (my intimate partner) and I have had season tickets, for the past 6 years, to the Opera Theater of St. Louis (though, albeit, they are the least expensive seats in the house).
- Greatly added to my philatelic stamp collection, because I'm in a city that has stamp shows and where I can obtain stamps without resorting, as in a small city like Albuquerque, to gaining them primarily through the mail.
- Had the services of several very qualified mental health and yoga therapists, which has greatly assisted  my PTSD recovery/healing from childhood sexual trauma and physical torture.
- Traveled to many more places around the country and internationally than I ever did when I lived in New Mexico (at least in part because I now have a pleasurable traveling companion in Linda, who is more than willing to equitably share expenses).
- Had access, for 12 years, to a 'welfare' medical system that provided me with good, no-cost healthcare, and have lived in a city which has one of the finest medical delivery systems in the nation.

At this point, I haven't had a full-time professional employment situation in 15 years. I survive, adequately though, with the financial assistance of my brother and some saved funds. I joke that I retired at 52, though the larger reality was that I was 'made redundant' by the state of the American economy. But, I continue to foster my unfunded men's emotional wellness nonprofit [Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute], which has had federal 501c(3) status since 2003, mostly via this MMWI Blog and the maintenance of the MMWI website. And, last year, I became a Credentialed Minister at the First Unitarian of St. Louis, and promote (as my health permits) a Men's Wellness Ministry within the congregation.

The years have flown by! Though Albuquerque was my 'first home', having lived there for 32 years (between stays as a child, and 29 years as an adult) -- and I still call myself a 'transplanted New Mexican' -- St. Louis is my 'second home' and likely the place I will spend the balance of my years. Friends in New Mexico ask if I will ever return to live there, in my old age (older than I am now!), and I note that, since St. Louis has provided me with a culturally rich and inexpensive home, and my intimate partner is from here, remaining here is the greater likelihood.

One of the frustrating things about living here, though, is that my New Mexican friends rarely ever visit me, and I can only make contact with them if I return for visits to New Mexico. (It isn't that they never travel; rather that when they do, if they come to the Midwest, they'd rather visit Chicago -- even though, as I point out, I live here and it's a great city to visit!) I truly miss the tall mountains, the rich Hispanic and Native American culture, the arid climate, and the rich topography of New Mexico. If I had enough funds [it's unlikely that this will ever be more than a fantasy] to have a home in both cities, I'd spend a couple of months of each year in Albuquerque, with the majority of my time in St. Louis. But I can still do that anyway, to some degree, because my brother and his wife live in New Mexico, and they have a place for me to stay when I visit.

Hence, while the original, primary rationale for coming to St. Louis -- to complete an MSW at Washington University and, with that degree and my other education, gain more lucrative employment in this part of the country -- was largely a bust, coming here, quite paradoxically, has in fact been wildly successful, for very different reasons. It has been one of the larger paradoxes of my life, yet one that I greatly appreciate, for the reasons I enunciated above. It sort of addresses the "be careful what you wish for" cliché, in that the target shifted the longer I lived here. Paradoxical success, indeed!

The Darkness Before The Dawn

I haven't written a blog for a while because my medical situation went from tenuous to quite bad, and I have only, in recent weeks, been slowly 'coming back up for air'. It has been frightening, to say the least, and there have been points along the journey when I, frankly, did know whether I'd was going to 'be around' for much longer.

First Surgery, Then A Blood Clot

As I noted in my previous blog, I had surgery for a melanoma cancer, on my arm. The surgery took out a chunk of my left forearm, but thankfully the dermatology doctor called the following week to let me know that 'all the edges were clean', meaning that they had successfully removed all the cancer. He stressed, though, that given that melanoma is a serious cancer, he wanted to 'keep track of this situation' with regular visits.

The surgery resulted in a major wound, which took 3 months to fully heal, and my arm still is very sore and has not recovered fully. Within two weeks, though, I had another major setback. I woke up early one morning in mid-October, and upon trying to stand up, nearly collapsed on the floor in excruciating pain. There was severe anguish in my left leg [almost all my medical issues have occurred on the left side of my body] and I could not walk, at all, without the assistance of a cane. My left thigh was swollen. Two days later, with the condition not having resolved itself, Linda [my partner of 8 1/2 years] took me to the ER on a Sunday evening. After a 7 hour wait (and they call these 'emergency' rooms?), we were admitted and the doctors determined that I had a blood clot. After another 5 hour wait, I was given an observation room. A couple of hours later (it was now mid-morning of Monday), they were going to give me some anticoagulant medicine and send me home. But I was having some major fears about the medicine [both because I have significant problems with almost all medications, and because I had major anxiety about ever having another blood clot], my internist recommended that I be admitted to the hospital; it took another 6 hours until I was finally given a patient room in the hospital.

I was in the hospital for 3 days, with the doctors running various tests and interviewing me about those anxieties. Eventually, I was given, to start with, an anticoagulant drug [Xeralto] and sent home, but by then I felt much more 'at ease' with the medication and the seriousness with which the healthcare system took my fears. I was on the initial 15 mg. dose twice a day for 3 weeks, but then they wanted to transition me over to a 20 mg. dose once a day 'for the rest of my life'. However, upon taking the 20 mg. dose, it felt like someone had slammed my head with a sledge hammer and my intestines went into peristaltic cramps for two days. Clearly that was not going to work. I called the doctor's office, asking if I could take 15 mg. once a day instead, but their concern was that I would be in a 'less than optimal' medication situation, so over a couple of weeks they suggested two other anti-coagulant meds, neither of which were satisfactory (the side effects were too severe and debilitating, even after one dose). I even tried to take 10 mg. tablets of Xeralto twice a day, but the accumulated effect was just as debilitating as taking a 20 mg. tablets once a day.

Hence, I ended up with a situation where I was not taking any anticoagulant medication, therefore not having a method of counteracting the blood clot. That was quite simply unnerving, because I knew that having a blood clot without a safety net was foolhardy and extremely dangerous, and could result, potentially, in a stroke or pulmonary embolism. This went on for 2 months; I had to wait until I had a scheduled appointment with the doctor in the Hematology Department before I could move forward.

I sank into a very fatalistic mood, and became intensely concerned about my morality. I started reading a lot of books on 'end of life issues', fully expecting to either end up medically incapacitated or dead. In my attempt to gather further information, I searched the Internet and asked several medical colleagues from my congregation about what was possible. One person suggested an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter and I engaged in some major research on that. While I was afraid of having a device in my veins, I also didn't want to die (not just now, anyway, knowing that we all die eventually, from something!).

Finally, I attended the appointment with the hematology doctor in late December. After a most tortured conversation (I had high anxiety about the whole of the situation), the doctor said, first, that a vena cava filter was not a good option, due to the many complications with the device, and that he was agreeable to my initial request that I take the 15 mg. dose of Xeralto once a day, agreeing that the 20 mg. dose, while therapeutically advisable, was not something that was tolerable. Plus he emphasized that the real danger to not taking any anticoagulation was either the threat not of a stroke but a pulmonary embolism, or the very real possibility of chronic veinous embolisms that would make walking quite painful. After an initial period on that dose, wherein I experienced a couple of hours of intense nausea each day, within about a week I began to 'acclimate' to the medication. It has now been 3 weeks, of what the doctor said would probably be a 3 - 6 months period of having to take it. He also agreed that taking it 'the rest of my life' was not advisable, in my case, given my hypersensitivity to medication -- and that taking it long enough to assist my body in dissolving and encasing the blood clot would be sufficient. I'm now feeling far more 'confident' about 'having a future' and a more or less 'regular life' for another decade or more.

The downside of this positive news, at least temporarily, was that just as my cancer surgical site had fully healed (it was somewhat delayed due to the anticoagulant medication) and I was looking forward to the opportunity to get back into swimming exercises, I was hit with a significant bronchial virus, which has kept my activities limited for the past two weeks. People who've had it say it lasts, including aftereffects, for about a month or more. Coughing, wheezing and a chronically runny nose are not pleasant. Yuck!

A Positive Corresponding Development

After having polluted all of my underwear and getting down to the point of having only two pairs of shoes and three pairs of jeans to wear (plus one dilapidated belt that was tolerable), I was in a heightened state of anxiety related to my hypersensitivity to materials. My initial reaction was to ask the assistance of a medical allergist. After running through a number of possibilities, she suggested that I might be suffering from Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, and ordered some tests to determine the efficacy of such a diagnosis. At first that felt like a 'valid answer', though I was quite anxious when she described the medically required method of counteracting it -- mainly, ingest some fairly toxic medications, which even at pediatric doses were going to be difficult to tolerate. Two weeks later, her office called and informed me that MCAS was not a viable possibility.

By this point, though, I had, in my desire to find some modality which would be effective on the materials hypersensitivities, asked a female friend, who teaches yoga, if she had any suggestions. To my surprise and delight, it turned out that she specialized in 'yoga therapy', with some recent experience with a client who was suffering from Bosnian War-related trauma. She suggested that the yoga therapy could be helpful in dealing with my PTSD issues, which my MH therapist believes are quite likely the cause of my materials anxiety.

Hence, when I had the followup appointment with my allergist, and she gave me the news that MCAS was not the cause of my symptoms [which, she said, was good, because the treatment was admittedly quite harsh], I noted that in the meantime I had started engaging in yoga therapy. Her face brightened considerably, and she exclaimed "better health through natural medicine!" She was quite enthusiastic about that approach and wished me well.

Both Linda and I have been engaged in the yoga therapy since late October, after I had returned home from the hospital [Linda wanted to actively  participate in my healing, and felt the yoga would also be helpful for her]. On a daily basis, we engage in various breathing exercises, poses, mudras, and yoga. My yoga therapist, Pamela, suggested that we start with upper body stretches, to get the body into a shape that 'let it know that help was on the way' [fully being aware of the way in which the body retains its own memories and that the most effective way to assist it in releasing those memories is through movement and meditation]. We have slowly moved from the head to the upper body, and, starting tomorrow morning, we are going to begin moving into the stomach/pelvis/genital region, which constitutes the body's 'core' and is likely the place where my body has retained the memory of most of the sexual trauma experiences I was subjected to as a result of my parents' dissociative behavior. She has warned me, though, that when we start working on that region "plenty of emotional pain may arise", which is why we are going to go very slowly.

The Most Effective Way To Go Beyond The Pain Is By Going Through It

What I have learned, after 30+ years of mental health therapy related to PTSD issues, as a result of being a survivor of sexual rape and physical torture in childhood, is that the best way to get beyond emotional pain is by going through it. It can be [and often is] intensely painful, but there isn't much of any other way to heal from the pain except to release it. This is especially true for someone, like myself, who experienced much of this trauma in infancy, before I either had verbal communication skills or suffered from a quite normal development limitation of 'infant amnesia'. Because much of this occurred before my limbic system had fully developed an ability to construct clear cognitive memory retention, the 'memory' of the abuse was retained in my body tissues. And it is those body memories which I have, for good reason, avoided most of my life [due to their horrific nature and the fears that they evoke], that I am now having to confront in order to move beyond these materials allergies and a lifetime of terrified reactions to what most people might consider to be 'normal' experiences.

And it is all part of the 'dark night of the soul' that I have been confronting for the past two years. The very nature of that journey is that using ones cognition to predict the eventual outcome is the last method that is helpful; it is far better to allow meditative practices which set aside the ego and allow the 'body to speak' though a 'witnessing' process. It requires one to 'listen' in an intuitive manner, because the body, not having an audible 'voice' of its own, speaks to us in a quite different manner. It requires, a priori, that one 'set aside' a cognitive analysis, at least long enough to allow the body/mind to generate the information we need to assist our moving forward on a healing pathway. I still allow myself to write down the information that arises through meditation, so that I can 'document' my enlightenment for later review. But I've learned, though trial and error, to set aside that 'ego awareness' long enough (sometimes for a couple of days of more or less continuous mediation, but at the least 20 minutes of mediation twice a day) to allow the 'witnessing part of Self' to listen to the messages my body is generating about what occurred, so long ago, in my infancy.

It has required -- as a former girlfriend, with whom I still have a warm and positive friendship, often said to me -- "to allow the Universe to have an opinion". The very nature of a 'dark night of the soul' is that one must step back from ones intellectual urge to use cognition to answer most of the questions of life, either through extensive thinking and/or research, and intuitively 'listen' to the ways in which the body speaks to all of us. It's about 'emotional language', not 'verbal language'. And while it is not easy to achieve, its achievement is critically necessary in order to heal from traumas that occurred before the cognition had a chance to 'remember' anything, in the way we normally use the term 'memory'.

Along with the deep meditation daily, the yoga movements assist the body to release its memories. In addition to other positive and healing messages, I have been motivated to finally confront the lifelong discomfort with my male gender, which was generated by the combination of mixed messages resulting from the sexual trauma long before I had any 'mature' notions of 'what love meant', and the dysfunctional messages my parents generated due to their own confused concepts of love and gender acceptance. It has been difficult overcoming the 54 years of internalized gender confusion that was the outcome of that trauma, but I've finally been able to start re-conceptualizing my self-acceptance and, in the process, apologizing to my body for the ways in which I discounted it and often hated it for the confusion that had resulted. That alone has been most enlightening, and has already generated some serious gender enlightenment, which will, no doubt, assist the process of releasing many of the 'core' body memories.

Hence, that's a recapitulation of the events of the last several months, since the most recent MMWI blog. Where it will all go from here is anyone's guess. I know some intense memories are going to start arising from the yoga therapy; while I'm a bit anxious about that, I know from past experience that that is the only way to move beyond them, so I'm fully prepared to face them (or at least am willing to face them, knowing full well beforehand that while the experience may be enlightening, it may not be pleasant). And in many ways, as I have emphasized, it is anyone's guess and has to be so, because to 'know the answer beforehand' will limit what needs to be fully known for healing to take place. The 'dark night of the soul' has its own internal logic and pathway, and one has to allow it to unfold organically.

An Even Darker Night Of The Soul

The previous time I wrote about 'The Dark Night of The Soul', on May 19 of this year, I was generally discussing psychic distresses. This time, I need to delve even deeper into the morass of my childhood PTSD and talk about what has occurred this summer that has sent me into the 'sulfuric acid' pool in the basement of my PTSD, the deepest, darkest recesses of pain that I have ever engaged -- and a 'part of Self' that has terrified me all of my life.

Confronting The Anger About My Abuse

In February of 2016, after a lifetime of being far too terrified to confront it, I finally summoned the courage to challenge the anger that was corrosively eating away at my soul. In my family-of-origin, only my father was 'allowed' to express anger -- and in his case, what he most often expressed was RAGE: violent, brutal, and destructive rage toward his children and spouse. If any of us got angry about being beaten or brutalized by his rage, he beat us even worse. He simply could not tolerate any challenge to his sole position of 'master of the house'. As a result of that brutally instilled learning, as an adult I found it difficult, in fact terrifyingly difficult, to express my anger openly toward anyone. At most, I engaged in destructive sarcasm, which was it's own quite negative expression of anger, and it effectively destroyed many a relationship over the years. Most of the time, when I would feel anger, it was 'inwardly directed', in intensely self-destructive substance abuse or suicidal feelings, as I unconsciously attempted to soothe the awful pain in my heart.

But in February of this year, I finally reached a point (after years of encouragement by my mental health therapist) to SHOUT OUT my anger during 'Anger Workouts'. Anger toward my abusers, anger toward my parents for having unremittingly raped and brutally terrorized me as a child, anger toward the employers who had blown me off for being 'overqualified', anger toward my eldest brother who had legally brutalized me in a nasty inheritance battle, anger toward people I had worked with in politics who promised me patronage employment if they won, and then betrayed that promise after the election, anger toward 'parts of my Self' that had wanted an alternate manifestation of my somatic being [because it felt so thoroughly unsafe to 'be me'] and I couldn't ever help them with that fulfillment. Mainly, I got ANGRY openly about being TERRORIZED the whole of my life. That was the positive side of the outflowing of that anger.

The 'Terrorizing Part of Self' Fights Back

But the 'part of Self' that had terrorized me all my life, the 'part' that had learned how to interact with the world only from the standpoint of terror, who's only reality was to be terrorized and to terrorize in return, fought back, quite in an unconscious way. For the first time in my life, I started periodically washing my underwear with my compression socks. Now, why this is a major problem is that while the compression socks are beneficial in that they control the edema in my left leg (the one that has had two embolisms), they contain a chemical which is incredibly toxic to my system. Interestingly enough, these socks are advertised as being able to be worn AS socks, and many people, apparently, have no problem with that approach. But, for whatever reason, due to my hypersensitivity to materials, which I've been suffering from for at least 6 years (I wore latex compression hose, to control the edema, until I became allergic to the latex), I can only wear the compression socks if I have knee-length athletic socks on underneath. And everytime I handle the socks, I have to immediately wash my hands, as the chemical gets into my skin and makes me quite ill, quite quickly.

Each time I would wash a compression sock with the underwear, thinking that I was NOT doing this (believing that I had properly separated the clothing so this would not occur), the underwear became horribly 'polluted' with the chemical, and the result (sorry to be so intimate, but this is the nature of my present 'dark night') was that my genitals 'burned' from the chemical. A horrible, stinging, burning, incredibly painful sensation. I would talk about it in my therapy, crying with anguish about being 'so stupid and unaware', and then did it again. I was down to 5 pairs of underwear pants and 5 t-shirts that were not 'polluted' in this manner, as I prepared for my trip to New Mexico. Then, equally unconsciously, I managed to wash a black compression sock with my regular black socks and the remaining underwear. When I realized I had done this, it truly felt like it had occurred in an alternate universe, one which I had no control over. Having done so, 'I' effectively torpedoed my planned trip to New Mexico. This was truly devastating. 

A Devastating Crisis Becomes Even More So

I was already facing a situation where I could 'tolerate' only two pairs of shoes that I owned (and kept having to repair those two to make them wearable) and only two pairs of black jeans. It's not as though I couldn't afford more clothing or shoes, nor that I didn't have multiple pairs of both that I had worn comfortably in the past. But the hypersensitivity to materials had become so thoroughly overt in the past two years that I was 'running out of clothing to wear' that didn't make me incredibly ill. To add insult to injury, this summer I began to become hypersensitive to belts. I tried to wear belts I had owned for years and got really sick, almost immediately upon putting them on -- intense nausea, heart racing, head feeling like it was going to explode. Really deeply terrifying! I thought at first it was only the fact that they were leather belts, so I saw a cloth belt advertised at Eddie Bauer and tried that. I put it on and three minutes later as I was leaving my house I literally ran into the wall from my equilibrium being messed up. I thought "this can't be because of the belt!", so I left it on and got into my car. But within 5 minutes, I was becoming so horribly nauseous that I grabbed the belt and pulled it off. Some of the nausea diminished, but only slightly. I continued to be deeply nauseous for somewhere between 24 - 36 hours after! This was an even a worse reaction than to the clothing or shoes -- with them, the nausea diminished after about 18 hours. 

So now I'm in this really weird, really bizarre world where my underwear (at least the pants that I could 'tolerate' without becoming ill) are 'polluted' in a way that is frightfully painful to me (burning genitals are not something to be rationally tolerated), I only have two pairs of jeans that I can wear without sickness, and only two pairs of shoes that don't make me intensely sick. [And even with them, I have to wear three pairs of socks to create a barrier between my feet and the glue that was used to repair them -- which is a distinct problem, in that I've already been suffering for the past 3 years with burning, searing neuropathy in my lower legs, 24 hours a day.] Luckily one of the jeans is 'tight' enough that I don't need a belt; the other one I need a belt, but have one that is almost totally shredded out, but barely functional and tolerable. On Wednesday of two weeks ago I tried a pair of underwear that I thought were not 'polluted', but which turned out to be. By the end of the day, Linda (my female partner of many years) and I were at an event at Washington University and I became intensely sick to my guts and had to go home. I laid down, sans underwear, for about an hour, when the insanity and total frightful pain of my circumstance finally, utterly and completely overwhelmed me.

For about a half hour I went into total emotional breakdown, laying on a bed screaming in anguish, holding my hands over my face, crying out in the most terrifying psychological pain I have felt in many years, with Linda holding me as best she could, trying to calm me. She had had the experience of being a 'witness' to my 'Anger Workouts' and therefore knew this wasn't 'about her', but it must have been, nonetheless, quite unnerving to her. [As she later said, "this wasn't an Anger Workout, this was the real thing".] I hadn't been that deeply pained with anguish since the nervous breakdown/breakthrough I had experienced in 1985, when as a result of an acupuncture treatment which had gone horribly awry, I experienced non-stop trembling terror for 3 months, and then intense panic attacks thereafter for another two years. [That I made it through those years was rather incredible, and a testament to the excellent guidance and work with my dearly beloved, recently passed away, therapist in Albuquerque.]

I was screaming out that I had utterly and completely sabotaged my world, that what little 'flexibility' I had left in my materials hypersensitivity had been destroyed, and I had no where to turn for relief. The bizarre and wholly weird nature of this hypersensitivity to materials over the past several years simply has had me completely flummoxed and I felt at the end of my rope. I was fully willing, at that point, to die. I saw no way out of this dilemma.

Luckily, with Linda there, she suggested we call my mental health therapist. Equally luckily, he was back in town from a conference. We talked for about 45 minutes, going over what had occurred this past summer, and what he emphasized -- and I feel this is quite accurate -- is that a 'part' of my personality which is totally focused on terrorizing me had indeed sabotaged my world, very probably as a result of my finally challenging the anger that I had been too fearful to challenge my whole life. And it was 'unconscious', in that my 'conscious' part of Self was unaware of this other part of my personality -- making the nature of my abuse even more bizarre and the degree of my PTSD even more insidious. Linda suggested taking two pairs of pajama bottoms I still had and making them underwear until we could come up with some other solution to this bizarre hypersensitivity to materials. Not much of an option, but at least a minimal option.

The Complete Landscape Of My Present Crisis

Since then, I have had surgery for a malignant melanoma. That is unnerving me, the whole cancer issue. And I strained a muscle in my groin, from bicycle riding, and that hurts mightily (my doctor gave me some exercises to slowly heal the situation). And now, as of today, I have realized that only one of the pajama bottoms is 'tolerable', since apparently I managed at some point over the summer to 'pollute' the other one. So, I'm down to one underwear pants that I can tolerate without getting sick or having my genitals burn. I have taken all the other pairs of underwear (from an older batch and new ones that I bought this year) and washed them MULTIPLE times (up to 15 - 20 times at this point), hoping that eventually they will be tolerable to me. (I tried one brand after 15 washings and got horribly ill almost immediately). Don't know if this will 'work', but I have no other options available that I'm aware of.

So, THAT is why I feel so intensely depressed and 'with my back to the wall' right now. And feeling like I'm in this really bizarre, intensely weird world where my best efforts to keep myself SAFE failed disastrously. And I'm running out of clothes to wear that don't make me sick. I've got appointments next week with a couple of allergists (one Western medical and one acupuncture-related) to find some sort of solution to all of this before I completely feel that my life is finished.

I still have a very loving intimate partner [who says she isn't going 'anywhere', that she is devoted to my healing "because we have a lot of years of joy left in our lives"], a superb and devoted mental health therapist, an excellent Medicare insurance plan, a decent and adequate income, many loving friends and family, a house I own, a religious community that respects and cares about me, etc. It's not as though I don't have 'options'; I'm not poverty-stricken, I'm not facing the likely possibility of being killed by police or other assailants (because I have white privilege and live in a relatively safe neighborhood), I have access to decent drinking water and food. Hence, I'm not unaware of the advantages I have in spite of the truly bizarre nature of this condition in which I find myself. 

My mental health therapist strongly believes much of my hypersensitivity is due to the PTSD, of being from a family where I was raped and brutally terrorized, almost without relief, for 18 years, and that my mind is still effected by that terror and my body is 'strained almost to the breaking point' due to the overtaxing of my adrenal glands and other organs from non-stop fight-or-flight syndrome.

What Is Next? Is There A Next? Is There Reason For Hope?

Will I make it through this? I don't know. I really and truly don't know. I want to say yes. I want to live and heal and live into a ripe old age, at least beyond my 65th birthday. But I'm in a state of intense fear right now. Really, really intense fear. [And it isn't solely because of the Presidential election, which is unnerving all by itself -- in my opinion, if Trump is elected, what hope is left for our democracy?] I'm NOT feeling suicidal, in the conventional sense of the term. I want it 'all to work out', but 'hope' feels like it is slipping away.

I know my female partner, who deeply loves me [and whom I feel has been an incredible gift in my later years, whom I deeply love and feel safe around], wants me to survive. I know one of my brothers, who has been a wonderful and loving support in recent years, wants to keep his brother in this world. My mental health therapist (who has been my therapist for 16 years) believes I can survive this and maybe even thrive again someday; he is working very closely with me to keep me from 'pulling the plug' on my life out of shear fright and pain. And, of course, I have many, many loving and caring friends, who would be deeply pained if I exited before a natural end of life.

Hence, while many well-meaning friends believe my only major healing crisis is recovering from the cancer surgery, actually it is all far, far more of a crisis than that alone. Which is why I am deeply and painfully struggling, day by day, sometimes hour by hour, through this 'even darker night of the soul'.

On Aging: A Personal Perspective

The following is the full text of a sermon, entitled On Aging: A Personal Perspective that I composed and presented at the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis on August 14, 2016. It includes all the elements of the church service, other than the hymns and special music.

Chalice Lighting

#502, from Singing The Living Tradition, the Unitarian Universalist hymnal:

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.

It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year.

It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow.

Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.

(W.E.B. Du Bois)


Prayer and Meditation

Baba Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now, which was very influential on my early years of healing, wrote an essay entitled "How To Keep Your Perspective Along The Path". He wrote "Doing sadhana [spiritual practice] can be as much a trap as any other melodrama. It is useful to have some perspective upon the path in order to keep yourself from getting too caught up in the stage in which you are working." While there are 11 helpful pointers that he lists, for the sake of brevity I will emphasize three of them:

• At first you will think of your sadhana as a limited part of your life. In time, you will come to realize that everything you do is part of your sadhana.
• The initial euphoria that comes through the first awakening into even a little consciousness, except in a very few cases, will pass away... leaving a sense of loss, or feeling of falling-out of grace, or despair. The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, deals with that state.
• Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW... so you stop asking.

Let us mediate on these words as we engage in a time of silence.

1st supplemental reading

From Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey by Letty Cottin Pogrebin:

Because it is so full of paradoxes and prone to distraction, nostalgia is best defined by what it is not: It is not homesickness, although it can derive from similar feelings of yearning. It is not a substitute for fulfillment, but rather an experience recalled for itself, and it is not pathological unless we overidealize the past or repress truthful memories. Rather than "a longing for something far away or long ago" (as one dictionary defines it), nostalgia is an acknowledgement of what that long ago something once meant to us, an exercise in appreciation, and an energizing, nourishing reconnection with who we were then.

Yet, some people fight it. "I'm always looking for antidotes to my in-born nostalgia," writes Daphne Merkin about being plagued by a string of losses of objects and people -- an erring, a scarf, a friend -- and annoyed that she misses them. Though moved by her account, I take a different view, having realized long ago that my losses are as much a part of me as anything I possess. All of us are the sum of our losses and our gains, but nostalgia lessens the losses by reminding us that nothing is all gone as long as it is remembered.

Many intellectuals assume that all nostalgia is mired in the swamps of middlebrow mushiness, or that being impervious to the past is a badge of sophistication. They put down personal nostalgia in the same breath as they disdain the latest theme park, suggesting that drawing pleasure from one's private memories is as morally corrupt as the mass marketing of a distorted American past. Underlying many of the nostalgia put-downs is the implication that we reminisce when memories are all that we have. In fact, what most of us do is use the past as a cache of clues to the times that made us what we are.

Surely there is nothing silly about cleaving to the mood and manners of another decade if we find strength or comfort there, or if drawing upon those memories helps to keep us whole.

2nd supplemental reading

From The End of Innocence: Facing Life Without Illusions by Sheldon Kopp:

In the face of repeated experiences of overwhelming helplessness and bewilderment, the child must find a way to make sense of a confused and confusing world. There may be little option but to escape into the reassuring world of personal fantasies made up of variations on the disconcertingly discredited family fairy tales.

The raw sense of total vulnerability must be shielded. To survive emotionally, there may be little else such a child can do at the time. But out of such a configuration, the child gradually develops a neurotic way of life that continues into adulthood. Pseudo-innocence requires wearing the blinders of denial. By making powerlessness into a seeming virtue, such a person acts as though God watches over the weak and the naïve. Preoccupation with the past involves pretending that, if childhood is never outgrown, one will always be watched over.

Residual weakness, helplessness, and dependence prevent people from ever feeling grown up. They remain embedded in nostalgic longing. It is not a matter of retaining childlike spontaneity, but rather of holding onto the childish insistence that someone else must take care of one so frail.

For others of us the dream of righteous vengeance maintains the image of heroic virtue as we await the time when we will be able to conquer all evil, to be recognized and appreciated at last. But it matters little whether the expectation of living happily ever after is sought through needless self-sorry suffering or hazardously reckless romantic adventures. Feigned humility and pretended bravado bring the same results. The real dangers of life are obscured, the opportunities for growth overlooked, and the rewards of taking care of oneself missed.

An older child may lean that what was first believed does not always turn out to be true. Still sometimes thing work out in a way that partially validates these early expectations. In growing up, such a child can retain a realistic measure of hope and trust. Modified by outside-the-family experiences of adolescence and early adulthood, the original innocent attitude can be developed into a more complex world-view without the person being stuck with a sense of having been tricked and misled.

Sermon

"On Aging: A Personal Perspective", by Donald B. Jeffries, Credentialed Minister, Men's Wellness Ministry, First Unitarian Church of St. Louis

Several weeks ago, John Knoll asked me to consider giving a sermon for the Summer Series. I had been planning to write an article for the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute Blog on 'aging', so I decided to accept his request, modify my ideas and give this sermon on that subject.

There are four parts to this sermon this morning which express four different 'themes' about the aging process. They are only loosely connected to one another, in the sense that they are all about how aging has affected my own perspective on life.

• The first portion is about my personal perception of aging, based on how my own life has unfolded.
• In the second portion are various observations about how our perception of the meaning of aging is dependent on the chronological point that we occupy on the path of life.
• The third portion will address some of the ways in which aging is affecting the leadership development and continuity in our congregation.
• And then I will conclude with some further personal perspectives on what it might mean to 'live a life with purpose' for the remaining years of my life on this planet.

Part 1: Personal Perception of Aging

Next month, I turn 65 years of age.

In a cultural sense, that age represents a significant 'turning point' in our lives, in that we become eligible for Medicare. Since we can start accepting Social Security at 62, some of us, including myself, started those payments earlier this year. Given the profound increase in the cost of medical services in America over the past couple of decades, and the minimal reimbursement provided by the insurance companies under the so-called Affordable Care Act, having access to Medicare, which pays a minimum of 80% of medical costs, is a great advantage. In fact, given the problems that arise for many Baby Boomers who have insufficient retirement savings, many of us have looked forward to becoming 65, so that we would have access to Medicare.

Ever since I was 25 years of age, I have looked forward to growing older. I was never a great fan of 'youth' -- my own childhood and young adulthood had largely been obliterated by coming from a dysfunctionally violent and sexually abusive family-of-origin -- and so I wanted to find a way to actually enjoy adulthood by escaping from the profound depression that that brutal upbringing had bestowed upon my emotional life. I had, additionally, by my mid-20s, decided conclusively that I had no desire, whatsoever, to have children, primarily because I did not want a continuation of the kind of painful childhood I had experienced. And I was fearful that, given the terrifying modeling of my own parents, there was the potential that I would replicate that behavior with any progeny that I co-produced.

On top of that, I had no significant desire to be married, again due to coming from a family where marriage had been seen as a 'rock around one's neck'. And, since I had no desire for marriage or a family of my own, by 25 I started, in a very focused way, to date women who were 5 to 15 years my senior, in the hope that they were less likely to either want or be able to have children, due to their relatively advanced age.

Added to that perception was the concurrent painful experience I had with women my own age: that being that 90% of them were -- in a quite rational strategy that is amply supported by American culture -- looking for a partner who made a greater income than they did, and many of whom were seeking, as well, partners who will willing to assist in producing and supporting a family. I personally had a very difficult time finding decent employment in the boom/bust economy of New Mexico, where I lived from the ages of 17-48, and too many of the women I dated, even before they had taken the time to get to know me, were already stating quite openly that they wanted to have a family. Between the two demands, economic and familial, I found myself quite lacking in the eyes of women of my own age cohort.

Hence, since my focus was on older women, I wanted to 'appear' to be older, so they would 'take me seriously'.

I'm not at all sure I succeeded, in that my emotional maturity had been profoundly stunted by the overt brutality that I experienced at the hands of my father during my teenage years, and the sexual abuse that I was subjected to by both of my parents, but it was, nonetheless, my desire. At the very least, though, many of the older women whom I dated seemed to enjoy their cougar status, by having a younger man in their lives, because I had specific energetic qualities that men their own age had begun to lose.

The older I became, the greater the age of the women I dated, so that difference in 'energy levels' was maintained. Hence, my focus upon older women further encouraged my own desire to appear and 'act' older. As I aged and grew first gray, then white, hair, I liked that very much.

On top of an often forlorn attempt to manifest a long-term emotionally and sexually stable intimate relationship (which, for all my efforts, I didn't actually attain until I was 56 -- after a lifetime of serial monogamy), I had become a hippie and, in a misguided effort to soothe the emotional pain, sank into extensive substance abuse during my years of attending college, graduate school, and early attempts at professional employment. The overt depression and disorientation that I experienced as an outcome of my terrifyingly dysfunctional childhood produced, in me, periodic bouts of suicidal thoughts, and a desperate struggle to feel a stable 'sense of self'. By the age of 32, I finally had successfully achieved sobriety, but continued to be wracked by intense feelings of disorientation and dissociation.

Hence, just staying alive with a minimal degree of happiness became quite a struggle. At each chronological juncture of decades, I was AMAZED to still be alive. Upon turning 50, after having earned a second graduate degree, this time in social work, from Washington University, I was simply STUNNED that I WAS still alive!

Here I am, now, at 64, turning 65 next month, and it turns out, to my delight, that I'm in amazingly good health for a guy my age (my doctor continually assures me he is equally impressed by my positive health outcomes). Hence, heretofore, 'aging', at least as a physical manifestation, has been generally good to me, or at least it became a positive experience after I had managed to heal from my overt depression and pervasive substance abuse. That's not to say that I don't, like most people as they grow older, have very real health challenges -- in my case, I suffer from continuous burning neuropathy in my legs, multiple chemical sensitivities to a wide range of materials and foods, serious edema from having had two embolisms in my left leg, and the continuing aftereffects of my childhood PTSD -- but it is also to note that I still 'look forward to' aging, in the sense that I enjoy 'getting older and still being alive' within the mutual loving intimacy with my female partner of 8 years.

Part 2: Various perceptions of 'aging' depending on where one is in their life journey

> 'Aging' has different meanings for people living in different time periods:

• For young children, aging is a somewhat amorphous event, in that they may not have lived long enough to feel themselves 'aging': they might see it as 'growing older', but 'age' isn't 'oldness'.
• For people in the early 20s, age might mean becoming mature and having the opportunity to establish their own households, separate from their parents, as well as the opportunity to create some kind of career path.
• For people in their 40s, 'aging' starts to make some degree of 'longevity sense', in that they have now lived long enough to notice some sort of pattern and experience their existence as a 'journey' and/or if they have had children, they notice their own 'aging' in comparison to their offspring.
• For people in their 60s, 'aging' starts to have a very real and perceptive quality, since their bodies are beginning to feel the aches and pains of 'growing older', and some of their friends and colleagues around them begin to get cancer or other diseases and die.
• For people in their 70s and 80s, they notice 'aging' because by now they have outlived many of their contemporaries, their bodies are experiencing major health issues, and if they had children, their children may likely have had children of their own, making the older adults grandmothers or grandfathers.

> Then there is the old observation, from the days when people read the newspaper more often than most do presently, that:

• When people are in their teens, they read the newspaper to find out places to go to experience fun activities with their friends.
• When people are in their 20s, they begin to read about their contemporaries having marriages, starting jobs, establishing careers, and, for some, forming families.
• When people are in their 30s, they are reading the newspaper concentrating on where they fit in the 'pecking order', and how others of their age are moving forward (or stagnating, or becoming unemployed) in their careers, and what kinds of schools are a good fit for their children.
• By their 40s, people read newspapers to check out stories about how families are faring in the economy, how younger adults are forming families or fighting wars, etc.
• By their 50s, people tend to start looking at stories about their contemporaries retiring from careers, and by their 60s, they start reading the obituaries to see who has begun to die 'relatively early'.
• By their 70s and 80s and later, reading the obituaries has become a sort of force of habit, since they are outliving many of the people they grew up with.

> There is also the 'perception' of age: people in America often want to 'be older' until they are around 25, at which point they start saying they 'want to be younger'. And when they turn 30, they consider it some sort of stunning upset, like they are already 'over the hill'.

> There have been a number of studies that looked at when 'happiness' reached its highest point in people's lives. We often assume that people are happiest when they are younger and become less so as they age. In contrast, many studies have shown that 'life satisfaction' follows a U-shaped pattern. People are indeed generally happy when they are younger, then happiness falls to its lowest point among those aged 45-54, before increasing again among those in older age groups.

> We have a society which is, hence, profoundly concerned about 'midlife crisis', and it is often assumed that occurs somewhere in the 45-54 age range. But, in fact, 'midlife' all depends on actuarial outcomes for any one individual. If you finally live to be 90 or 100, then 45-54 indeed was your 'midlife'. But if you die at 22, then midlife actually occurred at 10, or if you die at 45, then midlife really occurred, for that person, at 25. In fact, you might die in the midst of your 'midlife crisis', trying to 'act younger', thereby ensuring that while you thought you were going to live into an actuarial 'old age', you in fact expired far younger and your REAL midlife occurred in what most of the populace considers 'youth'.

> As a member of the Baby Boomer generation, I, like many of my contemporaries, have always had this 'sense of youth culture' from the days of our youth continuing into our retirement years. We still think of ourselves as being 'kids' who can still 'conquer the world' and transform culture with progressive ideas. We largely got away with that illusion due simply to there being a large number of us, given how many were born post-WWII. 'Aging' has, therefore, been something we could delude ourselves into believing was only for 'those older than ourselves', that we could 'live forever'. Of course, that IS truly a delusion, and we, as a generation, are finally coming to terms with our aging processes and the health-related issues associated with growing older.

Part 3: The effects of aging on leadership continuity in our congregation

'Aging' has a particular meaning for this congregation, in that, like many religious institutions throughout the nation, we have a large preponderance of WWII-era children and Baby Boomers who are growing older, but who are not being replaced, in equal numbers, by as many younger members, especially younger members with families.

For this congregation it particularly shows up in the leadership of the committees. Many of the older, more seasoned members are retiring, moving away, burning-out, becoming infirm, or dying, and are not being replaced in those leadership roles, at a sufficient rate, by younger members, resulting in there being both an increasing number of open committee chair positions and fewer members on each committee. This is, in part, a problem caused by the shrinking size of our congregation: we have 53 committees and only about 260 members.

On the other hand, there ARE definitely some younger members who are 'stepping up to the plate', and this is a positive development. It is important that we develop methods to educate new leaders with the assistance of the more veteran leaders -- in the manner of an apprenticeship program. One of the issues that often crops up in organizations is that the older, somewhat burned-out leaders, ask for younger members to come forward and actively participate, but those leaders fail to provide a system that allows for accessibility to those leadership roles.

It would, for instance, be enormously helpful if we were to develop the Policy Manual that has been in the planning stages for the past 4 years, wherein we can have written instructions and job descriptions, so that when a member joins the Church Council, Policy Board, or a church committee, the institutional wisdom developed by previous holders of the role can be 'passed forward' to the next candidate. By being focused on that manifestation of continuity, we will be in a better position to proactively handle the problems that arise, instead of resorting to the old -- and ineffective -- fallback of having to 'reinvent the wheel' each year.

Part 4: Living the balance of my life 'with purpose'

In conclusion, I want to address the issue about living a life with purpose.

For most of my adult life, I have gone through periods where I had a sense of purpose that motivated my actions as I struggled through my life journey. First it was schooling and student activism, then it was political campaigning -- at this point in my life, I have, since 1978, worked on 68 Democratic Party campaigns.

Then there was work on earning two graduate degrees; involvement with and devotion to Unitarian Universalism since 1987; serving on over 30 community boards of directors; active involvement in community organizing, activism and advocacy; and, since 1990, the men's wellness movement, which set the stage for the formation, in 2003, of my own fledgling nonprofit, the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute. And overall, since 1982, the primary focus of my life has been healing from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that I have experienced since I was a child.

In 2002, I resigned from a professional position as the Statewide Program Director for the Missouri Partnership on Smoking or Health, and to my surprise and frustration, found myself in an economic quandary that resulted in my being perennially redundant thereafter. (I really love that British term 'redundant', meaning unemployed, because it means that there are too many job applicants, who have now become 'redundant' in the economy!) While I've been able to cobble together an adequate life due to a small inheritance, I haven't been able to acquire any professional employment since 2004, and therefore consider myself to have become inadvertently retired at that point in my life.

Then, last year, shortly before I was planning to travel back to New Mexico to visit friends and family, and attend the annual New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference, I found out that Shoshona Blankman, my very beloved former female therapist and friend, had died of cancer the previous spring. That simply sent me for a loop and I was thrown into an emotional state of profound grief. She had been my mental health therapist in Albuquerque for 15 of the most difficult years of my healing, and then had readily offered to continue being my 'cheerleader' when I had moved to St. Louis in 1998. I had had the expectation that we would be great friends for many, many years to come, into the advanced age of both of us.

Between her death and increasing allergies to multiple chemical sensitivities [MCS], my 'sense of purpose' has, for the past year, been thrown off balance in a significant way, and other than an overwhelming focus on healing from the fear generated by the MCS, I have often felt like I've largely run out of energy and willingness to continue the struggle for social justice and other political//advocacy issues that had motivated my life for 43 years.

The other thing that happened as a result of Shoshona's death was that the mortality of life suddenly came to me full force and in profound contrast. For a very long time, far longer than most of my chronological contemporaries, I had continued to believe that 'someday I was going to manifest a career', in contrast to the larger reality that 'manifesting a career' was rapidly becoming a forlorn potentiality, since I was moving into my late 50s and early 60s.

In other words, AGING in the sense of 'having actually grown older' suddenly caught up to me. And my 'sense of purpose', which has periodically been lost and then found again, is, for now, for the present, a bit off-kilter and 'lost'. That has been both disorienting and distressing, as well as opening the intuitive, meditative spaces in my life for new potentialities of which I've not yet become aware.

I continue to foster the Men's Wellness Ministry that I founded in our congregation last year. I have barely kept my nonprofit alive, over the past 13 years, primarily by the force of my own love for men's wellness -- since I've never found funding for it -- and continue to write periodic articles for the MMWI Blog. And, of late, I have been writing long commentaries, attached to my Facebook posing, about the current presidential race.

Hence, at this point in my own aging process I am once again struggling to contemplate how 'living a life with purpose' will manifest itself for the balance of my life on this planet and on this temporal plane of existence. It is unlikely to 'look like' the expansive world that was available to me when I was younger, and it will not likely, ever again, include professional employment.

Therefore, I conclude my sermon with a bit of existential frustration and angst. Having had a distinct sense, at many points, of what I needed to do next, I am presently 'at loose ends' trying to figure out 'what to do next in my life journey', other than the continuing work on healing from the profound abuse that I experienced as a child and learning how to cope with the severe setbacks to my current health, caused by the MCS, that continue to disrupt my daily existence.

I've always laughed that as we age, our bodies fall apart, but we also gain wisdom about how to cope with those infirmities. Maybe that simply means I've matured and come to full awareness about being an older human being.

Finally, in closing, I will mention that 13th 'helpful pointer' that Ram Dass noted in "How To Keep Your Perspective Along The Path":

What is happening to you is nothing less than death and rebirth. What is dying is the entire way in which you understood "who you are" and "how it all is". What is being reborn is the child of the Spirit for whom all things are new. This process of attending an ego that is dying at the same time as you are going through a birth process is awesome.

Absolutely awesome!

Benediction

From Getting Over Getting Older

Gabriel, the main character in James Joyce's The Dead, realizes that "we're all in the act of becoming the past." Clearly, human beings have a great capacity for self-delusion in the face of this truth. The attempt to banish the past from the present is, to coin a phrase, as waste of time, since today becomes yesterday tomorrow. Each day moves into the past as soon as we've lived it. The future is only a prayer.