Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
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Good Morning Friends!
Perhaps I mentioned that I do not watch television. I have not watched television for most of my life. For years now, I listen to Public Radio during the day, which gives me factual news of the world, albeit on the liberal side, (I am a liberal myself, so that's fine) and facinating programs, interviews, and wonderful music.
In particular, I listen to a Program on Sunday mornings at 7, "On Being." Last Sunday there was an interview with famous Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr. He said that he was influenced by the saying: "Pray for one humiliation a day." Most of us in contemporary America have been raised to be narcissists. #ME FIRST. The last concept we want to entertain is humility. Yet, this is the key to living a joyful life.
My first lesson in humility came in Spring 2004. I was living with a violent lover, and I was financially dependent upon him. He was a "trust fund baby" so he was a cowboy who was used to getting away with anything. He beat me and kicked me mercilessly. He degraded me. He began drinking hard liquor early in the morning, and drank throughout the day and night, and I began to drink with him, trying to cope with the nightmare my life had become.
One morning he gave me $20 and left me on the beach. He said he would pick me up "later." I was dressed in a short black dress and high heels. I was so sick in alcohol withdrawal, (which can actually kill you) I was lying on the beach, surrounded by happy, joyous famiies and children playing and yelling, and I kept throwing up and covering it up with sand. I hadn't eaten in a long time, so it was only that awful bile. A kind Black man came by and asked me if I needed help. I said I needed water. For hours he kept bringing me water. I would drink it and throw up. The sky was blue and clear, except for one black cloud in the distance. Can you believe it? That single storm cloud made its way over to me and rained on me! Now I was wet and cold and sick.
I asked the man who was helping me to call an ambulance. The EMTs had to carry me to the ambulance, I couldn't walk. I was admitted to the psyche ward and kept there for 12 days. It was such a relief to be away from my abusive lover! The staff helped me with a referral to a local homeless shelter. I had always had substantial money and success- so appealing to a shelter for help was true humity for me! But it was a turning- point in my life, one that has continued to create an opening for greater inner development.
The surrender of our tyrannical ego-mind opens the Portal to Divine Guidance and Grace, and to a belongingness to our humanity.
***
I blame it all on my daughter. She gave up soda and slowly her brother and I did too. She quit TV, and the two of us followed suit. I google my news from multiple liberal, conservative, domestic and international sources. I also get it from different computers (cookies have a stronger influence than you'd think on what ALL of the news stations show us...I really HATE when I accidentally click on the royal news. Ugg. I didn't care about Fergie or Diana, and I don't care about Kate and Megan.)
Anyway, perhaps read Good Without God? It's totally possible to be a good, humble, caring, person without extra beliefs.
I tell my kids that both possitive and negative exist in the world. That each day that it's our choice what we LOOK for. "Life" will happen and throw both good and bad our way...that we can't stop. But the direction we LOOK, has a lot to do with the direction that we end up traveling. Look for good...and you'll find good.
If you've got time...this lecture series is interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949691B199
...thanks for sharing your story in a very real way. I know of humility as well. I am impressed and touched by your own humility.
Actually, what you bring to memory is a relational challenge I dealt with many years ago. Many of my relatives have issues such as you describe with drug addiction and hard liquor. And I don't feel that you want that others should do an examination of the details of your story; your struggle is so obvious and you are certainly past proving to yourself that you know how to respond to personal disaster. I see you as attempting to stay on the strait line with personal courage, strength and conviction. I support that, and the "Divine" influence you speak of is very common language to those of us who are familiar with those progressing and daily crises at hand.
I'll leave you with a few wise and understanding words of thought: We can cleanse our "inner vessels" by replacing unrighteous pride with humility. Pride chains us to self; pride thrives only in poverty of spirit.
Best to you today! I admire your self-respect! :-)
I listen to Rohr on podcasts through iTunes. Thanks so much for mentioning him, because I'm listening to one of those podcasts this very minute. Serendipity, huh? :-)
I was deeply faithful as a child, but "lost my religion" when I called a priest in desperation when my Daddy died, and he told me my father was going "straight to Hell" because he was a Jew. I closed my heart to my faith, and remained estranged for the next 50 years.
But addiction brought me to my knees, and it was there my spirit was reawakened- not to my Catholic indoctrination, but to a spiritual awareness of a loving, and merciful Divine Presence that permeates all. It encomasses evil and death, has no contradiction. For me, it is a Creative Power that spawns the beauty I perceive in nature and in loving-kindness and forgiveness.
For Simpson, I say the "St. Francis Prayer" daily, though I know I can never live up to such moral integrity, I aspire to do so.
For Muji, I intend to read RIchard Rohr, as I was not familiar with him. Thank you for the others you suggested, Will check them out!
Remiah, thank you for your loving support!
Do you have aversions to Flying Pink Unicorns? Probably not. But you probably don't believe in them either. Just saying....
And while at one time I considered myself a humanist, I don't anymore. It's a bit complicated to explain, but humanism is a subcategory of atheism. Somewhat similar to calling oneself a Baptist. Not all Christians are Baptists... Not all atheists are humanists.
I too used to be Christian. Loved church. Loved it. I left it only after years of being torn between my beliefs/morals and my love of the church.
My morals won out, and I embraced the peace that atheism brought me. (That's my story, and only mine... I am 100% behind anyone finding their own path that leads them to peace and morality in this sometimes turbulent world.)
I know that may offend some folks who aren't willing to extend their interpretations of bible stories beyond their memories of Sunday School years back, and I apologize, that's not my intention, it's really not.
It's just that having grown up a third generation pastor's kid, I'm loaded up with those stories, so whenever a new outlook on them is suggested to me, I'm grateful they can be put to new use.
It happened in my Spanish literature studies in grad school for my PhD, too. We had to read the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, who famously stood up to Hitler's Spanish ally Franco back in the day. He was fearless about faith, too. His book Saint Emmanuel the Good Martyr was about how after a great pastor died in Spain it was discovered that he served his people even after he lost his own faith and pastored in secret as an atheist. Wow. That redefined what a saint is to me.
I think my takeaway from all of this for my own PTSD recovery is that the uncertainty PTSD symptoms embedded into me are OK. Faith isn't certainty, after all. It's facing doubt, right? Whatever we doubt, God or even more especially, ourselves. I'm grateful for the permission, to, as the Beatles put it as they broke up and watched the 60s idealism wind down, to "let it be." Thanks for that, y'all.
NO
You don't cry out to something you don't believe in.
A crisis of faith for a believer...perhaps.
But that's NOT atheist.
Atheist isn't "falling away". Atheist isn't a rejection of faith.
Atheist is to Not Believe.
For one, I am eternally grateful for the New Atheists (really a hate term to describe people who won't sit down in the back of the church and be silent over their beliefs.)