Earlier I wrote,
In my individual circumstance, I was unconsciously recreating the group atmosphere that I experienced in DAYTOP through my involvement in various religious communities, communes, and and cults. It was my form of isolating and removing myself from "the world."
Specifically, I became addicted to living and moving among groups, particularly religious groups, and thought that I could not function as a fully psychologically autonomous individual; I have been involved in everything from Rainbow Gatherings to the Army, from Pentacostal Holiness churches to Hare Krsnas and everything in between. Believe me, I have made the rounds of various communal groups. I learned a lot along the way and these experiences were not without their edifying elements too, though a lot of it was to my detriment as well.
Such are the consequences of my religious addiction. That's why I am here at MeadowHaven.
Now I’d like to take the opportunity to expand on these statements a bit.
What I am trying to say is that for many years post-program, I was trapped in a sort of depressive fugue state and would, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, put myself into various group situations in order to re-create the therapeutic group context that I have been immersed in as a part of DAYTOP. To help you understand how this came to be, I shall now give some background, the “back story” as it were, to put things in context and help explain how it came to be that I was put into DAYTOP in the first place.
For me to say that I never felt like I fit in as a part of this world would be an understatement. I always felt like an alien being among the earthlings, as if I looked like a human, and understood the language, but was totally ignorant of the culture and customs of the society in which I lived and was born into.
All of my teachers would always remark about what a bright child I was, genius level in fact according to the standardized tests, but how I was a chronic underachiever, never got on well with my peers, was a kind of loner, and wasn’t living up to my potential in general.
In all honesty, I as a kid was always the nerdy one in school, had few friends, was not at all popular, nor was I much of a participant in the social scene. Not a hit with the ladies. I was terribly insecure and got beat up at home by my father and in school by my classmates, and felt utterly alienated from others, both intellectually and socially. I was always fundamentally different from everybody else, heard my own drummer, marched to it, and was never one to “color between the lines” so to speak. Way outside of the box.
Now I know it was Asperger’s all along, but in my youth all I knew was that I was “different.” I was often depressed and uncomfortable in my own skin.
So as a means of escape from the pain of feeling so out of place among others, and not finding acceptance anywhere I went, I in elementary and middle school lost myself in fantasy stories, comic books, and certain role-playing games. I immersed myself in an imaginary world in which I felt like I did fit in, a world I could create and control, and in which I could take on some heroic persona, an imaginary alter-ego.
Spider-man was my favorite as a kid. Peter Parker was a sort of hero of mine, the nerdy, bookish guy with special powers that he had to keep secret from everybody, who believed that with his great power came great responsibility. I wanted to be Spider-Man, with his super-hero alter ego. I was always as a kid fantasizing about transcending myself; I wanted to be somebody else and take on another persona, hence the D&D and the comic books.
Later on in high school, when I outgrew the comics and fantasy wargaming, I got into psychedelic drugs, particularly grass and LSD. This was my new means of escape, my new means of seeking transcendence, of introspecting and trying to discover myself.
I rebelled, tried to destroy the nerd image, sought acceptance among a more rebellious crowd, started wearing combat boots and Army-surplus jackets and hanging out with the misfit kids who would hang out across the street from the school and smoke cigarettes before class. I was desperate for acceptance from somebody and tried to find a group of people in which to fit in. So I hung out with the other misfits my junior and senior years in High School.
We’d sometimes skip school and drop some acid, then walk around in the Dallas Museum of Art all afternoon, or go up onto the rooftop of Moon Manor and sit under the big Geodesic Dome up there.
Long story short, I got busted tripping at school and wound up in DAYTOP in March of ’92. I was eighteen years old. This would have been in the last six weeks of my senior year and I would not have graduated anyway, so I decided to get my GED, and I do not know how I made it that far in High School anyway, as little as I studied and as much as I skipped class. I really was a pothead underachiever and was on a one-way road to Fuckupville.
DAYTOP was the place in which I was forced for the first time in my life to take a close look at myself and try and make some real changes. This is where I learned to identify and articulate my emotions and practice my interpersonal skills and means of relating to others of my peer group. This is where I came to realize that the direction in which I was going in life, with the constant potsmoking and weekly psychedelic adventures, was not in the long run going to take me to a place where I wanted to be in life. I split for a couple of months in the summer of ’92 but that’s a whole other story.
I’ve already, through the medium of this forum, related my account of what my experience in DAYTOP was like at length. First the positives:
I was popular in DAYTOP. People liked me and sought out my counsel. I was part of a team, part of a whole, with my share in its purpose and all that. I got along well with my peers, for the first time in a social situation up to that point. I was the only coordinator in the house for a while. The family in general liked me. The counselors thought of my as an oddball and a space cadet and would tell me not to use big words or show off my smarts that much because they called it ostentatious and phony and over time I developed into a true-believing DAYTOPian.
So it wasn’t all bad and there were certain elements of the experience that proved edifying toward the development of my self-awareness and social skills. I made friends for life through DAYTOP and learned how to identify and in a more constructive fashion deal with my feelings.
In DAYTOP, I experienced a cohesive peer group in which I was accepted and valued for the first time in my life. Two of my best friends are guys who I graduated with. We formed and maintained a close bond for years and were roommates off and on for three years or so after graduating.
After we left, we all fell off the wagon together too and I’ll tell more of that stuff someday maybe. We went to Rainbow Gatherings, sold weed, hung out with Hare Krsnas, engaged in weird late-night acid-fueled Encounter Group type sessions. Imagine something along the lines of a Synanon Game on LSD. That’s what we’d do sometimes. We lived in a bus way out in the desert outside of Taos for about a year and grew our own. It was a big blue bus with no engine, and a wood-burning stove, on top of a hill. We called it The Great Space Coaster. Those were high times in ’95-’96, in every sense of the term. We had lots of adventures. It was a long, strange trip. The NM Gathering in ’95 was one of the best times I ever had in my life. This would have been a little more than a year after graduating DAYTOP.
But as I’ve also written in the past, there were definite negative and destructive elements at work through all of this as well. We’d all become very emotionally dependent on one another, as if DAYTOP sewed up apart as individuals and sewed us back together as a group. We’d learned to reproduce the group, outside of the group. We never learned to be individuals in the larger sense. It became a kind of DAYTOP graduate roommate cult of sorts. Instead of lifting each other up to get and stay sober, we all started getting high together and encouraged and fed one another’s baser proclivities. We had no boundaries between ourselves, or with anybody else. We were very judgmental of anybody outside of our little clique.
Now back to me and why I am here.
To summarize, (and again, a lot of this I already wrote of in my earlier posts, in terms of how the DAYTOP mentality became systematized into my consciousness) in the subsequent years following my time in DAYTOP and as a part of the DAYTOP grad roommate cult, I went to college part time, had various part-time jobs, was in the Army, and wasn’t so successful in any of these things. I got fired from more than one job, quit several as well, never finished my degree, still smoked a lot of pot, got hooked on GHB, had an emotional breakdown in 2000 following an incident involving a betrayal by my sister and family and my resulting deep resentment that led to depondency, then I joined the Army in ’03 for purely mercenary motives, went to Iraq, came home more depressed, resentful, and isolated than ever, and began my time as a serious suicidal-ideation having religious addict and compulsive seeker of religious communities in which to deliberately place myself.
This is the scarier stuff for me to face, the naked truth, and I want to make myself very clear.
A quote:
"If nothing has satisfied your deepest longings in this world, perhaps you were created for a different world".(C.S.Lewis)And I never have, as I said before, I have never felt like I belonged in this world, like I am an alien who is on a planet other than the planet of my origin. So after the Army, I set about trying to find the Mothership. I wanted to “beam up”, having found no intelligent life down here.
For a time up until about a year ago, I was quite consciously seeking to lose/escape from my individuality into a collective identity as a form of soul suicide without having to “pull the trigger." In other words, I was seeking to lose myself in a group as a means of killing myself without having to leave my body.
I was trying to "kill" my old self and somehow find and cultivate my New Self, to become in some contrived sense fully Self-Realized.
I engaged in attempt after attempt to attain Transcendence, but in the religious realm. Higher than the comics and RPGs, higher than the LSD sessions, higher than the DAYTOP group therapy, higher than them all, seeking God is the Ultimate Trip, and mingling with various cults is the ultimate role-playing exercise.
It for me was like what those people in the movie
The Village, where they were all so overcome with grief that they all moved out into the woods together and created a world of their own. I was overcome with grief and was out to find a pre-arranged world of my own.
Perhaps a better reference would be to that movie
Fight Club, in which the guy goes as a “tourist” from support group to support group as a means of release, becomes dependant on the groups, then moves on to a more radical form of group therapy (the Fight Club), which for him becomes the ultimate in catharsis, and in the end (basically) comes to realize that he’s been fighting himself all along, that’s he’s been fighting with a suppressed alter ego of sorts.
I got started in DAYTOP, AA, NA, and the Roommate Cult Support Group.
Then I graduated to the hard stuff. I have experimented with Hare Krsnas, the Twelve Tribes, a small group in Dallas you never heard of, JPUSA, various Pentecostal communities, Hutterites and Anabaptists, and others. I even dabbled in groups that I never really intended to join just to try them on, so to say. I have tried on different religions and communities in the way that somebody might go to the department store and try on clothes.
For a couple of years, I travelled the country for a couple of years seeking out and living among various communities until my savings was depleted and then came to Dallas again.
Yes, I was trying to find a cult to join so that I would no longer have to be myself, so that I could deliberately move into a world of suspended reality, and have that reality dictated to me. To try and assume a different persona and obliterate my old one, with which I was not satisfied and which I wanted to escape and leave behind.
This was my way of seeking to kill myself without having to leave my body, you see.
God is the Ultimate goal in the pursuit of transcendence, and cults are the ultimate in committing cognitive, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual suicide.
It was all, as I see it now, illusory in nature. There are no Utopias. Like August Nicholson said in
The Village, “We cannot run from heartache…Heartache is a part of life, we know that now.”
One way to understand this desire of mine is for me to explain my conviction that in our modern secular world, such communities provide sanctuaries and safe "habitats" where serious and devout disciples can earnestly strive to put the radical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount into practice without being crushed by a heartless and godless world.
Just as endangered species in nature find refuge in wildlife sanctuaries and natural habitats, where they are protected, so do committed Christians, who strive to put the radical precepts of the Gospel into practice, enter in by the "narrow gate" into the spiritual sanctuaries found within the walled cloisters of monastic habitations and spiritual communities, in order to escape from the selfishness that rules this world and to give themselves entirely to God.
It was all my way of isolating, while still being around others but only those of a like mind and a common path.
The whole of my experience with the groups can be summed up as one long repeating cycle of going from group to group in an effort to improve and fix myself somehow, and as the ultimate in escapism, a form of suicide, actually, but
cognitive suicide.
I learned the hard way that looking outside of oneself for some group or other to externally impose a vision of reality and transcendence on an individual is bound in the long run for futility. It’s just not real.
Jesus said (Luke 17:20-21) "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."Please understand that I do not quote from the Bible in order to be preachy, for that is not my style; you have to understand that my spiritual/religious consciousness is the overarching framework in wich I was operating, the context in which all the motivation for my previous behavior must be explained. This, and the fact that I was trying to reproduce the therapeutic community environment, but in a different context. The ultimate context, in fact, for I set about injecting God into the equation. This takes the quest for the perfect TC to the highest degree. It also takes the damage done to a deeper level of evisceration too, because this all ulitimately damaged me at the deepest possible level, that is, the level of my soul, in the very essence of my being.
And then last August, I came to start to understand that even all of that community-hopping wasn’t going to help. I’d been seeking out new highs and spiritual peak experiences for years and had reached terminal burnout.
At that point, I was ready to bow down at the altar of Mr. Mossberg and step into eternity once and for all. I became acutely suicidal and smoked pot like a madman, day and night. I was at the end of my rope. It was time to initiate my own personal Project Mayhem.
That’s when I called Meadow Haven and begged for some help. I arrived here last September 7 and have been in treatment ever since. I am three hours of therapy a week, am using certain brain-training computer programs designed to improve my cognitive function and minimize the symptoms of my psychological trauma, so that underlying issue can be dealt with more readily. I work out and eat well. Still I have no job, but that will come in time. I am looking forward to going back to college in Boston this fall and getting on with my life.
What does this have to do with DAYTOP, you may ask? In short, DAYTOP set me up for my compulsive religious addiction later on in life. DAYTOP was the gateway it all. I was unconsciously trying to recreate the therapeutic community atmosphere. My being hooked on groups in order to maintain my sense of safety and security I can trace back to my formative years, in which the groundwork was laid and my identity and individuality were undermined through what happened to us there. And I can trace it all back to DAYTOP.
Pardon me if this all rambled a bit. It all just spilled out of my mind and thorugh my fingertips onto the keyboard and into the screen, and I didn't rwork from an outline or create any rough draft. It was just type and post, with very litte minor editing and proofing.
Does all of this make sense to anybody? Has anybody any questions?
