PROJECT DREAM AGAIN

MY SOUL SPEAKING

by Ed Cooper July 5, 2009

I am mad at God right now so I immediately started building a case against Him. We do the same thing with friends or families who we think have wronged us, or we have some other reason to need to dislike or dismiss them. Therefore, I was delighted to find this gem in a novel I am presently reading. It goes like this.

“Well, sometimes when I see a guy like that, I say to myself, “There but for the grace of God go I,’”

Gail commented, “If God’s grace existed, there wouldn’t be people like that for you to say, “There but for the grace of God.’” (from Spencerville a novel by Nelson Demille)

However, my delight quickly passed and reality once again hit me in the face. God was not responsible for my anger. He was not the one who had committed the actions that were causing my anger. True enough He had not stopped them, but if He had, I would have been angry at that because that would mean He had decided to take our freedom away and turn us into robots.

The truth is I am responsible for my anger. Yes, something was done to me that should not have been done, but I am 60 years old and I know that I am not perfect and expecting perfection from others is simply insane.

Tolerance and acceptance of one’s self and those around them will lower the anger quotient. Tolerance and acceptance does not mean agreement or status quo. It means you may work to change what you can, but with a spirit not consumed by anger.

Anger is not only destructive to the person feeling it and the person or persons on the receiving end, but it prevents you from being heard either by the source of your anger or the larger community.

Anger produces violence in one’s deepest core and at times erupts into acts of violence. Every time I get mad, I at some point think about Jesus in the Temple and Him cursing the fig tree for not having any fruit on it. I say to myself even Jesus got mad. Whatever He was feeling we know He went to the Cross sinless. Can we claim our anger never causes us to sin? If we can’t make that claim then we need to claim responsibility for our anger. We need to stop demanding perfection before perfection is possible.

It will only be possible when we join Him in the place He is preparing for us. Till then we own our own anger. I guess I have to stop being mad at God. What a shame? It was easier than taking the responsibility myself, but if I am going to be honest and work on a healthy soul I must. The case I must build now is one of tolerance and acceptance without ever becoming resigned to reality as it is.

Working to improve my heart and the hearts of those around me. Working for the day that anger will pass away.

Project Dream Again

1) We respect the reality of others and believe that is the starting point for any relationship if one intends to be helpful in the facilitation of healing and recovery even when the other person's reality appears not to be based on one's own understanding of reality or in the larger community's collective understanding of reality.

2) We believe that all human beings are of equal value even while recognizing the apparent inequity in the distribution of abilities and resources found within the human race.

3) We consider the recovery journey to be a path that can be supported by others, but that only the individual can determine the direction, pace, and destination of the recovery journey.

4) We know that authentic recovery is possible and that it should be the goal rather than reform or rehabilitation.

Natural

Recovery

July 1, 2009

We will never begin to heal our shattered souls until we can see a self when we look into a mirror. A person who has suffered abuse has a hard time doing that. An individual who has been subjected to incest and physical abuse over a number of years may never see a self. Self to them may remain for their entire lives a community of people sharing a single body. For such a person the concept of a single self is only an abstract concept to be read about and talked about with the rest of the world.

The idea behind most therapy for those of us with more than one person sharing our body is to integrate us back into one. Sounds right, but there is just one little problem. To integrate is in reality is to murder my other folks.

Now I know it is not explained that way in the textbooks or by the therapists, but if you take 9 people and end up with only 1 where did the other eight go?

I know. I know. I am looking at it too simplistic. If I only understood.

Well I understand this. Most of us that the psychiatric world labels with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are either hidden from the world in mental hospitals or in our homes if we are lucky enough to have one. We do not do well in the world of integrated folks and we sure learn early on that we are not understood very well.

Mostly we hope we never are found out and exposed as a DID because we know that what created us folks think may turn us into criminals. That seems especially true for males with DID.

No matter what you have read or been told or think, severe and prolonged sexually and physical abuse as a young boy over several years does not produce a criminal. It may give birth to several people to cope with the pain, but those people may never do anything more criminal than let a car pick up too much speed going down a long hill on the interstate.

I am not saying abuse does not create abusive people, but I am saying it is not automatic. I am also saying that all abusive people have not been abused in their past. There are no straight lines to any of this and the faster people working trying to prevent child abuse and to help those who have been abused stop using stereotypes and develop a more real paradigm the quicker real progress can be made.

For all the efforts being made I say thank you, but keep on trying to learn. Question every assumption you have made and make sure it is solid. Ask yourself where the information has come from and why did the person give it. Most people have a reason for explaining an action. Make sure you know the reason.

The data on child sexual abuse is some of the worse data we have. It comes from people with all kinds of reasons for saying what they say or do not say. Why am I saying what I am? Even if I gave a reason, you would not know if it was the truth.

by ed cooper 

We are all unpaid staff here at Project  Dream Again so we are a very small operation, but we have big dreams.  We dream someday we will not be needed.

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WEDNESDAY

July 1, 2009

TODAY'S QUOTE

July 5, 2009

"But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money."

Acts 8:20