Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 5:05PM | by Otter
The corbus I surprised in California with my camera
"Love" Addiction, Eros, Love, Mental Illness Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 4:00AM | by Otter EXCERPT:
From the Mailbag (edited with permission to take out identifying details and gratuitous flattery):
Thank you for chronicling your recent struggles [… .] It takes courage to look into the darkness, and after many bouts with drugs and therapies, I like you, decided to say to hell with it and to face it in the strength of my own mind.
My question is, what do you do when you cannot force back your own dark monsters? When you can’t stop the need to hide from the fear and to soothe yourself?
Prefacing this: I’m not a therapist, gods be thanked.
But I’m a pretty good patient….
When I feel circumstances closing around me in certain ways and setting off my addictive behaviors, I manipulate people into positions where they’re under my thumb, and I unconsciously encourage them to feel guilty for trying to get out from under it. That’s my control mechanism…
But the real problem is that way down deep, under the surface of our conscious minds and motivating so many of our decisions, we’re really terrified, and we’re using old tried-and-true techniques for keeping the fear of pain at bay. Which, by the way, is like trying to hold back the tide. Life is not under our control. It’s chaotic, brutal, and hurtful. But inside our minds, a scared little child tries to keep himself or herself safe…
Practically, I think that the real struggle is that we have to wait on those moments you describe, and we have to look at them as squarely as our panic and our wounds will allow, and we have to ask, “What am I most inclined to do to drive this darkness back?”
And then we have to say, “No. I don’t think I’m going to do that this time.”
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 5:37AM | by Otter 
The Manticore: The head of a man, the body of a lion, a scorpion’s tail.
EXCERPT: We develop bizarre defenses against pain. Monsters are killers with unexpected and uncontrolled forms of attack and defense that are ultimately dishonest, no matter how much you tell the truth: you can never make a true marriage of the soul that way with another person, and all your use of sex and “intimate” love-at-first-sight relationships, and all the late night talks that develop the delusion of intimacy, are laughable, pitiable attempts to carry water in a sieve across a dry desert.
You can no more be joined to a person that way than a horse could join with a goat.
Seeing this clearly in myself and in another person whom I loved brings me here.
"Love" Addiction, Addiction, Carl Jung, Mental Illness in Personal Reflection Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 10:14PM | by Otter Since I posted about my struggle with relationship addiction, I’ve gotten some interesting email. Some representative samples, with responses…
Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 2:02PM | by Otter The relationship did not cause the pain.
The relationship covered the pain.
For a time.
It was taking the pain and fear and disappointment and worry and putting it in your basement. If you had faced it, you stood a chance. As it was, you filled your cellars with poisonous things, deadly things, memories you didn’t even know you had but which your flesh and heart and your wondrous brain remember.
All that was coated in the glow of new “love.”
But when it disappoints….?
Have your armor on.
Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 12:34PM | by Otter Even as they renounce destructive patterns, addictive people repeatedly enact them, and this feels to them like a flight toward intimacy when in fact it’s a flight away from it…
Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 4:19AM | by Otter According to the research, the relationship addict’s trouble is that he or she cannot live without “being in a relationship.” And s/he uses the other to meet that need, discarding the other when the need is no longer being met. Obsessive thinking is generally the result of feeling like the supply has been cut off, and it wears down the health and it wears down the heart, mimicking obsessive compulsive disorder in some ways, but really a sign of a very different kind of sickness.
Friday, April 20, 2012 at 5:13PM | by Otter Riparian Church has been offline. I wanted to explain why.
Excerpt: “I had made a rookie mistake: I had believed that good love fixes what’s wrong with us. It doesn’t, because love (like all other forms of government, ritual, and relationship) is only as good as the people who do it.
[… .]
“It’s easy to make people fall in love with you and to imagine that you’re really alright. Hey, it eases the ache: falling-in-love says, ‘You are worthy. You’re better than worthy. You’re beautiful.’ That’s been my modus operandi in the past: to heal the ache of who I am by feeling better rather than being better, to ignore the patterns in my life by sedating the ache with fulfilled desires and the good opinion of some new love. That leaves the patterns unexamined, and when you see patterns emerging, it’s best to stop blaming somebody else, best to pause before drawing in another victim, best to look hard in the mirror.”
"Love" Addiction, Eros, Love, Mental Illness, Religion, Riparian Church, Spirituality in Relationships, Spirituality, Suffering Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 6:35AM | by Otter 
It's six years down the road, and I'm not sure I ever did put this one behind me.
When you see disasters on the news, it's rarely easy to generate sympathy, no more easy than it is to gin up sympathy for a dying character in a video game. "That sucks," about sums it up. But we get on with our lives, and assume that those affected will also.
I've learned not to look at the floods in Vermont or tsunamis in Japan and allow myself to feel anything: you could never feel enough, you could never judge accurately enough. It's like watching combat on your television: it gives you a rush and a thrill of pity and compassion and anger. But you haven't been there, and you have no right to tell a soldier what it's like to live inside his head.
Katrina, Mental Illness, New Orleans in Government, Parenting, Relationships, Suffering Friday, June 24, 2011 at 9:38AM | by Otter Today is one of those days when I get a little weepy.
Comes and goes.
One of those days when the problems with life on planet earth seem too big to shift, but when it seems urgent to shift them. I've been snapping off thoughts at Twitter more often than blogging: it's too hard today to sustain thought in the face of things like this:
That's somebody's little boy who ends up in America's new Devil's Island.
Might be mine.
