And I had not realized either that drinking and drug abuse both facilitate delayed socialization. One author I was reading said that many drunks are ten years or more behind people their same age in their ability to manage their own emotions, and accurately read those of others. Drinking, of course, is often an alternative to socializing, and not an adjunct to.
I have not had a drink in three weeks. I’ve been using a GNC ZMA supplement to sleep, along with 5-HTP, both of which I recommend.
And I am just letting things flow. I am getting in touch with much of the inner nastiness in my family. It is a really hard thing to do, to separate actual malice, from pretended helpfulness. It is hard to understand how much anger and hate can lurk in smiling faces, and the habit of appearing nice.
We all of us are capable of nastiness. There are no exceptions, and I think those who most think they are the exception are the ones most likely to latch onto some grand project to save humanity which will bring terror, death and pain in its wake, and which can on some level be predicted to do such.
The Christian and Islamic fondness for painting vivid pictures of Hell is a type of aggression in my view. It is an attack they can launch on children that feeds their capacity and need for cruelty, while being rationalizable as “for their own good”. I think it was Richard Dawkins who spoke of religion as a form of child abuse. He is a clumsy thinker, and tends not just to conflate all theisms together, but all iterations of each, in one formless lump (practically; in his polemics, of course, he attempts to use the Bible against believers); but in this respect, I think child abuse is a correct term.
Me, I think I am beginning to connect with some energies that I should have connected to as a child. They were withheld from me, denied me.
But I don’t quit.