Vincent

¡Hola! Everybody...
Caution: you may not want to read the following story. Seriously.

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-=[ Letting Go of Guilt ]=-

I have written about guilt before. In a way, I believe guilt (along with ignorance) should be considered one of the deadly sins because it’s responsible for so much suffering.

I usually make a big stink about my birthday -- celebrating it and letting as many people as I can know about it, but it wasn’t always that way. Many years ago, my stepfather, Vincent, a man I loved and saw as a surrogate father, committed suicide in the early morning hours of my birthday. He put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Just like that...

I’m asleep in a drunken stupor. I’m vaguely aware of someone trying to shake me awake. I think it’s Vincent, but I’m not even sure if it’s him or a dream. Annoyed I shrug him away and tell him to leave me alone, and I crawl back under his car. He tells me he really needs to talk to me and I tell him, or the dream, that it can wait. To leave me the fuck alone.

It was the day before my birthday and we were living in Houston. It was Friday and my stepfather had picked me up from work and I asked him to stop by the liquor store to stock up for our usual Friday family get-togethers. In retrospect Vincent seemed a little different that day, more pensive, and we spoke on the way home. He told me a lot of things: how he was feeling pressure to maintain the quality of life; he spoke of disappointments -- he spoke about a lot things.

I was surprised because Vincent was the type of man who never complained. He was cut from old school: never let them know how you feel. He was a rock. He was a worker. Vincent was made of the stuff that made this country. He got up in the morning worked very hard, and he provided. That’s what he was taught a man was supposed to do. But he would never really talk about what was going on in his mind. He was a stoic in that sense. He did what he had to do without complaint.

On the way home that day we talked and we explored how maybe we can do things differently. I was working and I could help him financially (he wouldn’t accept money from me) and that he should let my mother know about the financial problems and stop trying to put up a façade that everything was fine.

When we got home that day, there was no one there -- everyone had left to go fishing. My mother’s an avid fisher and it wasn’t unusual for her to round everyone up and go crabbing or fishing. At the time, my sister and brother, as well as myself, were all staying in the house. My sister, had a live-in lover, as did my younger brother. Actually, my sister had only recently moved out, but she was there all the time. My other sister, lived nearby and was always around. We were a tight-knit extended family that spent a lot of time together.

That day, when I got home and went to wash up, I found a bloody pair of panties that had been left in the wash basin by my brother’s live-in girlfriend, whom I couldn’t stand. I showed this to my stepfather, who was outraged and it just fueled the whole conversation about letting people know there things were going to change, blah, blah, blah.

And we drank…

Towards the end of my drinking, I became what’s called an “ugly drunk.” I could get confrontational and say and do and say spiteful, hurtful things, and start shit, and that day was no different. By the time the rest of the family showed up, both Vincent and I were well into a quart of Bacardi and I was in rare form. Before the night was over, my brother and I almost came to blows (he took exception to me calling his girlfriend a pig), and Vincent argued with moms. Finally, my mother threw me out of the house because, “ I was acting like a garbage can.” Actually, she tried drop-kicking me but I was too fast for her. I don’t know where she found the strength, but she picked up this huge potted plant and threw it at me, barely missing my head.

I went to my sister’s house which was nearby in the same sub-division and started talkin’ shit there until, mercifully, I went to sleep under my brother-in-law’s car in the garage. No one knew I was there.

I am awakened by a cousin. “We’ve been looking for you, Eddie! Something terrible has happened! It’s Vincent! Hurry!”

I wake up thinking there’s been a fight or major argument but I’m completely unprepared when I see my mother’s eyes -- I see it all in her eyes and I’m wrenched into sobriety. My mother only manages to say, “Oh Eddie… ” or something like that. Nothing prepares me for the next time I see my dear Vincent, an incongruously neat bullet hole in his temple. I scream out in denial because I can’t accept this -- this can’t be... And I hold his head in my hands and beg him to wake up.

Outside the hospital, my brother challenges me yelling out, “It’s your fault! If you wouldn’t have been startin’ your shit this would’ve never happened… ” And he goes on a harangue for what seems to me too long and all I can do is stay quiet. And every word is like a knife into the very heart of me. When I try to form the words, nothing comes out, I have nothing, I’m empty inside, as if the very life force of me has been sucked out.

The details are hazy, but I remember someone trying to wake me up. I thought it was Vincent. He kept calling for me to wake up and he tried to take my arm, but I shook it off, telling him to leave me alone. I’ll never be sure if this really happened because I was so drunk. Was I dreaming? Was it really Vincent trying to wake me up and telling me he wanted to talk to me, or did I make the whole thing up? I don’t know…

All I know is that sometime in the night one of my cousins found me and told me to get up quick because something terrible had happened. I looked at my cousin and she saw my anger and said, “Get up, Eddie, Vincent shot himself.” I’ll never forget those words.

They rushed me to the hospital and the last time I saw Vincent he was already dead. A part of my mind couldn’t wrap itself around that. There was my mother crying and everybody else and there was Vincent dead, having shot himself in the head in a drunken stupor/ rage. What’s worse, he did it in front of my youngest brother, his son Vinnie, who was maybe 5-6-years-old. He locked himself and my little brother in his car and blew his brains away.

At the hospital, it got ugly. My brother confronted me and told me that it was my fault because I had gotten drunk and instigated a series of events that ended tragically. Vincent wouldn’t have shot himself if it weren’t for me, he said. And I looked around and while the rest of my family didn’t say it outright, no one disputed it either. I jumped at my brother, the rage welling up in me was uncontainable.

Looking back, I can’t blame my brother. Our lives were irrevocably, senselessly changed that day, and it was something unfathomable, it was impossible to make any sense of it. I know that in my own heart I also felt Vincent’s death -- it was my fault.

They say that all suicides are accompanied by a psychological phenomenon known as psychache. Psychache refers to the pain, anguish, and psychological hurt in the psyche, the mind. Truth is, Vincent had attempted suicide before, but was unsuccessful. Sometimes when he drank, he would lose it completely. There were demons inside of Vincent -- who knows what lurked in his mind? What traumas he harbored? And while things weren’t all that smooth, he was experiencing the most success ever.

But I took my brother’s words to heart and I couldn’t forgive myself for Vincent’s death. From where I stood, I killed him. I created the circumstances leading to his suicide by fighting and inciting Vincent. Vincent’s actions that night almost destroyed my family; the repercussions would be felt for years. It was my fault as surely as if I had put that gun to his head.

Tragically, suicide is not as uncommon as we think. Within the United States, suicide ranks as the eleventh leading cause of death among the general population, the second leading cause of death among 25-34 year olds, and is the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year olds. Of the 240,000 annual suicide attempts, most do not end in death and despite the frequency of suicide, there is a huge social stigma attached to it.

I left Houston as soon as I could, returning to New York and distancing myself as much as I could from my family. I was unable to face the hurt, the destruction, but no matter how much I ran, I lived with that guilt in my heart for so many years. I can honestly say that Vincent’s suicide marked the beginning of my personal descent into hell. For many years after, I became more and more self-destructive, gradually surrendering to my dark side, throwing myself into an addiction that knew no satisfaction. And whenever I thought about changing, or doing something to save myself, my guilt was there, something I could flagellate myself with, ensuring that I would never feel worthy of some measure of sanity, some peace of mind.

I like to say that feeling fucked up is habit-forming, and it is -- you can rewire your brain for misery if you feel fucked up long enough. I couldn’t change in part because I didn’t feel worthy. I was unworthy in all areas of my life. I was a failure as a father, as a son, a lover, a brother, I was someone who never fulfilled his potential -- all these things drove me and my addiction. Most of all, I felt so guilty for my mother, who suffered so much.

Guilt is a completely different thing than remorse. In our culture, “guilty” is a verdict hammered out by a judge in court. And if no one else punishes us, we look to punish ourselves, in some way or another. Guilt for me meant punishment deep inside my psyche. It created in me my own psychache.

Today I know that Vincent’s suicide wasn’t my fault, but it took me a long time to get here. I also had a lot of support and did a lot of “inner” work therapeutically and otherwise. And still I almost didn’t make it. I too attempted suicide once and when that failed, I tried to get others to do it for me. But I’m here today, and I can celebrate my birthday and not be angry with Vincent for taking what I thought was the easy way out. For so long, I was so angry with Vincent. How could he do such a thing? How could he leave us? I still miss Vincent, and today I still love him…

Today, I know I can never really know why Vincent did what he did. Today, I try to honor Vincent’s memory by remembering all the good he did while he was here: his selflessness, his compassion, his commitment to providing for us -- five children, four of whom weren’t even his own.

Vincent always encouraged me to use my intelligence. He would take me to his co-workers when I was a child and announce, “This is my son and he’s real smart. Ask him any question -- go ahead.” LOL! It was a lot of pressure and I hated it when he did that, but nine times out of ten, I would get the answer right and Vincent would beam with pride. He paid for my cherished encyclopedia Britannica because, although he never had a formal education himself, he understood my intellectual curiosity needed to be nurtured. My greatest hope is that he really understood what he meant to me -- to all of us.

I guess the most difficult part of my journey was convincing myself that I deserved forgiveness and absolution. For so many years I lived with this crippling guilt. Then one day, I realized that if I wanted live, I would have to let go of the guilt -- forever. That was the day I broke out of my inner prison.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Guilt Trip]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today is the Gay Pride Parade here in the Center of the Known Universe. Let me reiterate here once again and express my support to my GLBT brothers and sisters. To my inbred, repressed brethren who are against gay marriage? Well… I would submit that if you’re against gay marriage, the simple thing to do is not marry one…

SMDH

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-=[ Guilt ]=-
Love and guilt cannot coexist,
and to accept one is to deny the other.
-- A Course in Miracles

Feeling guilty is just another way to rationalize behavior that defeats your happiness. Feeling guilty is an indulgence – a selfish and twisted way for you to continue beating yourself into the insanity of committing the same actions and expecting different results.

I once offered forgiveness to an individual who had wronged me and her initial response was to tell me how it cut her to the heart. She went on how nice I was (I’m not), blah blah blah. Her eventual response was silence. Years later, I ran into her by chance on the street and she began to cry. She told me that she had just come from her therapist and that she had been talking about me – about how she squandered what could’ve been something special and beautiful. How she always pushed what was good and decent away. She was so beside herself, all I could do was give her a hug and assure her everything would be all right.

I have a funny feeling I’ve become the subject of too many therapeutic sessions. For the record, I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist. All I want is for you to wrap your legs around my waist in lustful entanglement. *grin*

The sacred offering of forgiveness is not about allowing someone to take advantage of you. Few people know that forgiveness -- true forgiveness -- must be first cultivated internally before it could be given away. Once you forgive yourself, you come to the full realization that there is no “other” to forgive. Ironically, forgiveness is probably one of the most selfish of acts.

If you commit a wrong against me, my interest is in helping you grow out of that mode of living. Most people would rather continue to feel guilty than to actually grow. True growth is the process of becoming willing to have defects of character removed. It’s not even about having them removed! It’s about becoming willing to have defects of character removed. When you become willing, you shed the guilt and start doing the work. Lying, cheating, dishonesty, the whole cast of character defects -- become fodder for your growth:

Yes, I lied to you, this was why, and I want to stop. And I because I love you, I want to work with you so that we can become truly intimate and loving.

When you feel guilt, you’re in the grips of your ego. Guilt isn’t about someone else, it is about you because only your ego can experience guilt. Guilt will always disrupt your growth, will always sabotage you, and will always compel you to make the same mistakes.

You will be treated like shit, because guilt demands that you should be treated like shit. You will meet assholes who will defile you because your guilt demands it.

The end of your guilt will never come as long as you buy into the notion that there is a reason for it. For you to be released from guilt you must first learn that guilt is insanity; it always is and always has been and will always be. Guilt has neither reason nor rhyme.

And here’s why:

Guilt asks only for punishment and punish you will be – always. You will be punished and be lost in the world of illusions and shadows. The Ex wants to be punished. She doesn’t understand kindness. She’s not too different from many women and men I know. Be nice to them and they will run away. But if you want them to call you, or to fuck them, treat them like shit and they will be clamoring for more punishment.

I can’t do that – I’ve never been able to do that – to manipulate fear and guilt for sexual gratification. It isn’t worth my peace of mind. Like other women I know, the Ex replays the scene: she disappears for a little while, suffers some more, and then somewhere in her mind, she remembers the light and calls me. She suffers a lot. As do many of us... Maybe one day she will come to the realization that she does not have to suffer needlessly. I do not know. All I can do is keep an open heart.

A mind without guilt cannot suffer. Your freedom -- indeed, your very salvation -- depends on your escape from the self-made prison of guilt.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog [The Best Little Whorehouse in DC]

¡Hola! Everybody...
You know, I’m so sick and tired of hearing white lawmakers saying that if they said something similar to Doña Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment, their political careers would be over.

Huh?!!

We have, like over 200 years of crackers like Pat Buchanan, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and many, many others saying fucked up shit about people of color! LOL! Shit! Current Sen. “Crackhead” Sessions is a US senator though he called a black man a “boy” and likened civil rights organizations to the KKK. Buchanan is a Holocaust denier and self-professed Hitler admirer! LOL A black muthafucka can’t even admit to knowing, let alone admire, a Farrakhan, for example, without having to pay dire political consequences...

And when are we going to put to rest the myth that whiteness is neutral?

I may not be able to finish this today...

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-=[The C Street Boys: Guilt, Shame & Sex ]=-

Or: The Best Little Whorehouse in DC

It’s not widely reported in the MSM, but apparently there is a Christian-run neocon whorehouse in DC on C St. Almost all the neocon bad boys such as Ensign and Sanders -- both of whom called for Clinton’s resignation during the Lewinsky affair, by the way-- stay there. They fuck their mistresses there, sit down and “fellowship,” sharing the sordid details of the extra-marital affairs there. Who knows what those repressed freaks do there!

The question, I guess, is why do so many who set themselves up as morally superior, often act in a depraved manner when they think no one is looking.

While the answer to such a question cannot be distilled into a snazzy republican soundbite, I do feel that shame and guilt, combined with sex and power often makes for strange bedfellows (pun intended!).

Let’s start with guilt, or the feeling of being found out. Everyone has experienced guilt at one time or another. In fact, literally millions of people are burdened by feelings of guilt of all kinds, especially sexual guilt. But what is guilt, where does it come from, and more specifically, what is sexual guilt?

Guilt comes from an Old English term gylt which refers to a fine for an offense. In modern usage, guilt signifies the state of having committed a transgression, of being in violation of the law. Subjectively, guilt stands for the sense of having done wrong, of being blameworthy. It is a concern over the rightness or wrongness of one’s action. This concern implies a worry that one might be found out or caught, suffering consequences. This form of worry can be manifested even without a person having done anything wrong; the mere thought or intention to do so is sometimes enough to evoke extreme feelings of guilt.

Oftentimes, our feelings of guilt are disproportionate to their causes. It is as if we’re conditioned to have a guilt button that goes off at the slightest provocation.

Let me say that not all guilt is unhealthy. Guilt, like anger or jealousy, is a normal emotion. Psychologists like to distinguish between what they call situational guilt and modal guilt. Situational guilt comes from actually having a committed a wrong (as in causing a woman’s anus to be sore *grin*); modal guilt is the vague feeling of having sinned, which clings to a person like an unpleasant odor. Situational guilt is healthy, but modal guilt is neurotic. Modal guilt is a frozen feeling that creates a habitual pattern, which is dysfunctional because it blocks the free flow of your thoughts and actions.

Still with me?!! LOL there’s much more to guilt, it has deeper roots that reach down into the human condition itself, but it’s getting late.

Let’s move on to shame, or the feeling of being unworthy. While guilt and shame are closely related, there is a significant difference. Guilt is the bad feeling we get from having known we have done something wrong or bad. Shame, on the other hand, is the painful feeling that we are bad or unworthy. This distinction between doing something unworthy and being unworthy has come to play in the field of addiction and recovery. Shamed people believe that something is basically wrong with them as human beings, while guilty people believe that they have done something wrong that can be corrected. Another major difference is that shamed people are usually bothered by their shortcomings, whereas guilty people notice their wrongful acts. Finally, a shamed person lives in fear of being abandoned because they feel unworthy (and you thought it was your parent’s fault, huh? LOL)

Looked at in this way, one can see how shame may follow guilt or how it may feed guilt. The only way a shamed person can heal is by changing their self-concept so that she gains self-confidence or ego-strength. The two emotions combine to create a revolving door that keeps a person trapped in a perpetual spin. Therefore, we must deal directly with guilt and shame if we want to evolve and overcome sexual dysfunction. Whew! LOL

If you’re wondering what this has to do with neocons, well, just note that shame and guilt are the two most widely used measures of control in religious orthodoxy...

Still with me?

Guilt and shame are especially prominent in the area of sexuality. Many men and women feel guilty about sex itself; they think sex dirty or base. (Please note that many practitioners know that even those clients who deny having guilt feelings soon discover, when confronted with their unconscious that they are in fact sitting on a boatload of guilt.)

Many avoid having sex, or if they do have sex, it is in the form of a fast encounter in the dark. Such people almost never talk about sex, or have difficulty in discussing sexual matters openly. Their sexual frustration spills over into their marital and professional lives. Oftentimes, they act out their repressed sexual desires in highly dysfunctional ways; or become obsessed with sexual acts they consider taboo. This sex-negative attitude is most clearly evident in religious fundamentalist circles.

As those in the helping professions can attest, the forms of sexual guilt and shame and their permutations are almost infinite. Sex is most troubling to those who know least about sex, and sexual ignorance dogs the lives of religious puritans. As one of my professors phrased it, “Those who are religiously rigid tend to be sexually frigid.”

It’s no wonder the politicians who claim to hold the higher moral ground often fall short of their own standards. In having made sex a “problem,” Christianity has paid a huge disservice to civilization. Driving human sexuality into the dark recesses of their psyches, religious fundamentalists become a slave to it, rather than its master.

Love,

Eddie

Shame and Violence

¡Hola! Everybody... Imagine having me as a student in your classroom. LOL! I went to university at a later age and I got my money’s worth. I challenged, and was often challenged in return, all my professors. If you didn’t have your shit together, I was mos’ def going to ream you a new asshole. Most

professors enjoyed my participation. Most professors were dedicated individuals deeply invested in intellectual development. Most...

::arches eyebrow::

In fact, I remember one professor catching me in conversation with one of her colleagues and she stopped and asked him, pointing to me, “Is this guy in your class?” When the professor affirmed that I was, she added, in these exact words, “Well, you better have your shit together because Eddie doesn’t play around!”

LMAO!

I loved that woman and she helped me tremendously.

I’ll be in prison all day, running my women’s prison workshop and running my men’s group at night. Make it a great day, it may be your last...

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-=[ Shame, Guilt and Violence ]=-

“’How do you know so much about everything?’ was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was ‘By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.’”

-- John Abbott (1821–1893) Prime minister of Canada

Some of you know that I work in the area of criminal justice. More specifically, for the last eight years, I’ve participated in the creation of a community-based model for supporting the men and women returning from incarceration. One of areas of interest is whether pure punishment, without regard to rehabilitation -- or in many cases, habilitation -- is an effective means of social justice. Of course, it isn’t. In fact, there’s an empirically strong case for shame as a major factor in violence and violent crime. I tend to agree with this, generally speaking. I actually see it all the time. Psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has worked in prisons for 35 years, describes an interesting experience. He was called in to resolve a running battle with a prisoner in which he would assault corrections officers and they would punish him. The more they punished him the more violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they punished him. Nothing they did (at least legally) could stop this man from assaulting the officers.

When Gilligan went to see this man he asked him what he thought was an obvious question, “What do you want so badly that you are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?” His answer astonished the doctor. Usually inarticulate to the point that it was difficult to get a clear answer to any question, he stood up, and with perfect clarity he stated: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem.” And then he added, “And I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.” He went on to describe how the officers were attempting to strip away his last shred of dignity and self-esteem by disrespecting him, and said, “I still have my pride and I won’t let them take that away from me. If you ain’t got pride, you got nothin'.” He made it clear that he would die before he would humble himself to the officers by submitting to their demands.

According to Gilligan, this wasn’t true of just this man. In fact, several hundred violent criminals in this country provoke their own deaths at the hands of the police in exactly that way every year. Indeed, this phenomenon is so common that police forces (and this is not counting the clear cases of police misconduct) around the country have given it a nickname: “suicide by cop.” In World War II, Japan’s kamikaze pilots behaved in a way that had much the same result, as do contemporary suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere. In the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and disrespected by their perceived enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their lives to replace those intolerable feelings with the opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired by their friends and families and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of artificial form of respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.

Articulating a powerful insight, Gilligan adds, “In the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and disrespected by their enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their physical existence to replace those intolerable feelings with the opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired by their allies and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of ersatz form of respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.”

Here’s the travesty: we recreate environments, at an enormous social and economic expense, that exacerbate these feelings of impotent rage. Our prisons are filled with people whop have become part of a human experiment in how to further destroy destroyed lives. In other words, we take individuals who probably weren’t functioning well to begin with (addiction, abuse, illiteracy, etc.) and make them worse. The icing on the cake is that we do this at an enormous economic expense and that money gets taken out of, yes, you guessed it, luxuries such as education.

There has to be a better way. In fact, there are better ways. Gilligan has run an extremely successful prison restorative justice program utilizing his insights, for example. It is also known that education and supportive services (vocational training, employment assistance, family reunification, etc.) cost a fraction of what prisons cost and are extremely more effective. I believe social justice needs to be brought back to the community, but that’s a fuckin’ crazy idea, huh?

Not too long ago, while reviewing some literature, a colleague sent me the following snippet:

In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed at the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and everyone in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, recalling the good things the person has done in his life. Every experience that can be recalled with detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully. This ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.”

* * *

Love,

Eddie

Happy New Years Everybody!

¡Hola! Everybody...
Well, this is it -- the last blog of the year. Last year, I resolved to post at least one blog a day. I did it... LOL! It’s been an “interesting year -- historical, even.

I know many of you are resolving to make changes and sometimes I wonder about that...

I’m not sure about what I’ll do tonight. I like going to Times Square -- and no you fuckin hicks don’t know jack shit about New York, so stop it with the “Omigosh!” statements. Or, I might meet up with some friends and go out to some nightclub. It’s going to be really cold tonight and that makes me think twice about going anywhere. LOL!

Here’s hoping that whatever you do, you do it joyously. Felicidades

* * *

-=[ The Perfection of Guilt ]=-

I quit high school and was hanging out, being a table pimp and shit, until my mother put a damper on all that one cold February morning. She came into my room and requested I wake up. When I didn’t listen, she came back and poured icy cold water all over me.

“Here’s carfare money, get out of my house, and don’t come back until after 5pm, like people who work do,” she informed me.

For the first couple of days, I hung out at friends’ homes until their mothers (who were just as sick of their lazy table pimp sons) let me know I couldn’t be hanging out in their homes doing nothing.

It was winter and it was cold, so it was hard to find a place to hang out. I really thought my mother was being an unreasonable bitch at the time.

Well, I came home one early day, and she gave me two options: I would either finish school and enroll in college, in which case, she’d be willing to sell her ass if need be to support me (my mother has a colorful way with language), or I went to work with my stepfather as a construction laborer. Just to show you where my head was at the time, I chose the latter.

My stepfather did not want me working with his crew. He fought, yelled, and stomped, but in the end, he had to take me to work. I knew jack shit about physical labor -- he even had to tell me to take my hands out of my pockets at the construction site. LOL!

At first, my stepfather would find menial things for me to do just so I would be out of the way. I hated the work. It was hard and it was fuckin cold outside! My stepfather was a patient man, and he took me to the side one day and told me that he was going to teach me some skills that I will always have some use for later in life.

He wasn’t lying.

I learned how to put up sheetrock and then how to lay tiles. I was smart, so my stepfather’s confidence in me grew. One day, he left me alone to do a bathroom from scratch. Now, laying tile is not as simple as it looks. But if you follow the basic rules, you can get the knack of it pretty quick. I mean, set your level, draw the line, add the gook, and start tiling, right? Well, the thing here was that at the time I loved smoking weed. Smoking weed and doing anything that takes some measure of precision is not a good thing -- not very smart. But that’s what I did and when I tiled my first bathroom, I got the leveling wrong and the tiles didn’t match when I made my way around the bathroom -- it was off by a lot, like an inch or so.

My stepfather was pissed off, but he was a patient man, and we were able to fix it up a little. The next day, he looked at me and asked if I could do the deed, and I did. This time the level was fine. The tiles looked quite good in fact, except for two tiles that were at wrong angles. Those two tiles were pissing me off and I thought I had done a miserable job. My stepfather came to inspect my work, and said it was a good job. I looked at him and asked if he was high. I showed him the two errant tiles and he turned to me and said something that I never forgot, “I see the two bad tiles, but I see the other 99% percent of the tiles that are well done.”

In this way, my stepfather taught me good craftsmanship, but he taught me a more valuable lesson. The lesson being that perhaps striving for success is better than going for perfection.

Perfection and guilt go hand in hand. When I looked at the wall, all I saw were the two bad tiles. My inner critic immediately went to work and it filtered my perception of reality. My stepfather taught to build on my successes rather than to focus on my failures. Eventually, I developed into a good tile-setter and I learned other basic carpentry skills that have stayed with me all these years. Skills that helped me get a job wherever I went.

In my work as a healer, I see this perfection/ guilt trap all the time. People end relationships because all they can see in their partner are the “two bad tiles.” Many become depressed because all we can see in ourselves are “two bad tiles.” The reality is that there is more that is good about us than we care to admit, we just can’t see those qualities. We focus too much on our mistakes. The mistakes are all we see, they’re all we think are there and so we go into an internal war to destroy all that. And sometimes, unfortunately, we destroy a good piece of work.

I hope that whatever you “resolve” to do this coming year that you focus on what’s good rather than the negative. I hope you drop the internal war and the guilt trips. Those are all traps -- prisons that keep you locked up. I actually hope that you develop a mission rather than a resolution. A mission is about being about something, standing up for something. As the saying goes, if you don’t stand for anything, you’ll fall for anything.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Guilt]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today is the Gay Pride Parade here in the Center of the Known Universe. I’ll state it here and offer my support to my Gay and Lesbian brothers and sisters. To my inbred, repressed brethren who are against gay marriage? Well… I would submit that if you’re against gay marriage, the simple thing to do is not marry one…

SMDH

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-=[ Guilt ]=-
“Love and guilt cannot coexist,
and to accept one is to deny the other.”
-- A Course in Miracles

Feeling guilty is just another way to rationalize behavior that defeats your happiness. Feeling guilty is an indulgence – a selfish and twisted way for you to continue beating yourself into the insanity of committing the same actions and expecting different results.

I once offered forgiveness to an individual who had wronged me and her initial response was to tell me how it cut her to the heart. She went on how nice I was (I’m not), blah blah blah. Her eventual response was silence. Years later, I ran into her by chance on the street and she began to cry. She told me that she had just come from her therapist and that she had been talking about me – about how she squandered what could’ve been something special and beautiful. How she always pushed what was good and decent away. She was so beside herself, all I could do was give her a hug and assure her everything would be all right.

I have a funny feeling I’ve become the subject of too many therapeutic sessions. For the record, I don’t want to be anyone’s therapist. All I want is for you to wrap your legs around my waist in lustful entanglement.

The sacred offering of forgiveness is about allowing someone to take advantage of you. Few people know that forgiveness – true forgiveness – must be first offered to one’s self before it could be given away. Once you forgive yourself, you come to the full realization that there is no “other” to forgive. In a twisted way, forgiveness is probably one of the most selfish of acts.

If you commit a wrong against me, my interest is in helping you grow out of that mode of living. Most people would rather continue to feel guilty than to actually grow. True growth is the process of becoming willing to have defects of character removed. It’s not even about having them removed! It’s about becoming willing to have defects of character removed! When you become willing, you shed the guilt and start doing the work. Lying, cheating, dishonesty, the whole cast of character defects – become fodder for your growth.

Yes, I lied to you, this was why, and I want to stop. And I because I love you, I want to work with you so that we can become truly intimate and loving.

When you feel guilt, you’re in the grips of your ego. Guilt isn’t about anyone else but you because only your ego can experience guilt. Guilt will always disrupt your growth, will always sabotage you, and will always cause you to repeatedly make the same mistakes.

You will be treated like shit, because guilt demands that you’re treated like shit. You will meet assholes who will defile you because your guilt demands it.

The end of your guilt will never come as long as you buy into the notion that there is a reason for it. For you to be released from guilt you must first learn that guilt is insanity; it always is and always has been and will always be. Guilt has neither reason nor rhyme.

And here’s why:

Guilt asks only for punishment and punish you will be – always. You will be punished and be lost in the world of illusions and shadows. The Ex from Boston wants to be punished. She doesn’t understand kindness. She’s not too different from many women (and men) I know. Be nice to them and they will run away. But if you want them to call you, or to fuck them, treat them like shit and they will be blowing up my phone begging to be punished. Of course, my idea of punishment is fucking her in the ass.

I’m kidding!

I can’t do that – I’ve never been able to do that – to manipulate fear and guilt for sexual gratification. It isn’t worth my peace of mind. Like other women I know, the Ex from Boston replays the scene: she disappears for a little while, suffers some more, and then somewhere in her mind, she remembers the light and calls me.

She suffers a lot. As do many of us... Maybe one day she will come to the realization that she does not have to suffer needlessly. I do not know. All I can do is keep an open heart.

A mind without guilt cannot suffer. Your freedom -- indeed, your very salvation -- depends on your escape from the prison of guilt.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness (Shame)

¡Hola! Everybody...

I’m at work, but I would’ve loved to have had another day in bed. I’m still not anywhere near 100% and I might go home early. I’ve got a couple of items on a deadline that I need to clear up...

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Shame

I kid around that I like catholic girls because their ingrained shame and guilt equates to deviant, hot sex. LOL But in reality, the Catholics don’t have a monopoly on shame and guilt. I believe we live in a shame-based culture. Our major religions rule by it and our political structures are grounded in it. In addition, shame is a major component of addictive/ dysfunctional behavior.

Most of us have some experience of shame in our past and most of us don’t like to talk about it. That’s what shame is all about. Essentially, shame is a response to violating someone else’s standards. When we feel shame, we are usually afraid of rejection or abandonment due to trespassing of real or imagined boundaries. For some people something seemingly trivial like farting in public (or even writing about it) might cause shame. Some mental health specialists consider shame to be the root of many personal difficulties, especially the codependent behavior observed in the families of addicts.

Ideally, shame should serve as an alarm system letting us know when we have offended other people, and that if we want to continue being friends with them, we may need to change our behavior. So maybe fluffing the sheets after farting is not a good way to keep a lover. Worse, broadcasting intimacies on 360 or the internet might not be a good way to garner friends and influence people. Some of us have no shame, which is not a good thing. However, many people are haunted by feelings of shame, which make them feel unworthy.

Almost all experiences of shame seeing ourselves as “small” and others as “big.” This is typical of people when they feel ashamed. If you temporarily try this out, you can probably experience shame too.

Shame has been described as “the secret emotion” or “the hidden emotion.” For most of us, it’s a minor inconvenience, but for others it is devastating. When people feel shame, they also feel ashamed about feeling shame, so they’re not inclined to talk about it. This is why I give people who try to do something about it major props.

Shame is the result of someone repeatedly giving us the message, “You’re bad,” often without telling us exactly what they didn’t like, and usually without giving us a clear idea of what we could do instead, or how to do it. Parents, teachers, and other authorities do this, often because they don’t know any better.

In a way, someone who feels shame does so because he was a capable and quick learner in an environment where shame was being taught. The good news is that that same ability can be used in learning to have a different sense of self.

In severe shame, it’s as if the person has only one standard for themselves. “I should please others,” is the ruling thought pattern. Putting too much emphasis on pleasing others can result in submitting to abuses without complaint. I see this behavior on 360 (and the internet in general) in abundance!

In transforming shame, it is important to recognize the difference between someone else’s standards and our own, and to be careful to our thinking caps when deciding which standards to use for ourselves. As we do this, we are also building a healthy sense of self, or what is often called self-esteem or integrity. This is who I am; this is what is important to me. In reality, we only begin to exist as individuals when we can stand on our own in this way. Until then, we’re just mirror images of someone else -- any one else -- and dependent on them for a sense of identity.

I know two people very close to me who have not been alone -- ever. A friend goes from woman to woman, looking for validation. I have yet to see him be single in all the years I know him. Of course, each woman becomes his focus until they fall from grace. Another person close to me has never been outside a relationship since her teens. A part of that, I believe, is this inner shame and the need to live up to external standards. Somehow, we have to find better strategies for living more effectively.

Love,

Eddie