In last months column (Quantum Physics - expanding my Spiritual paradigm) I discussed the importance of Quantum Physics in my quest to find a Higher Power of my own understanding - and mentioned that I didn't know what led me to start reading books on the subject. I realized as I was working on this month's column, that my interest in the subject was sparked - at least in part - in the summer of 1988. That Spring I had gone through a 30 Day treatment program for codependency - and had then moved from Los Angeles to Arizona where I had gone through treatment. In the summer of that year, I was led to do some study with a group in Sedona Arizona. In the course of that study, I remembered seeing a chart that showed the vibrational frequencies of different emotions.

That was a new combination for me - emotions and vibrational frequency. The most important thing I had learned in the treatment program I had gone through earlier that year was about the grief process. Doing my emotional healing had led me into doing deep grief work which I discovered involved releasing energy. The more I became clear that emotions were actual energy that needed to flow instead of being blocked, the easier it became for me to get in touch with my emotions and open up to healing them through energy release.

The combination of what I learned about grieving - and this new concept of emotions having a vibrational frequency caused a shift in perspective for me. Emotions are energy. Energy has a vibrational frequency. Anger has a higher vibrational frequency than pain or fear - thus the human defense mechanism which allows us to turn pain or fear into anger because it is has more energy mass and therefore feels empowering instead of vulnerable and weak. Much of world history becomes clearer just by understanding how humans - as part of trying to survive - have reacted to fear and pain by getting angry and acting out that anger.

The Universe is one giant dance of energy. This realization led in part to the title of my book: The Dance of Wounded Souls. We are all dancing energy made up of dancing energy. I realized that the reason the dance was painful and dysfunctional is that humans have been dancing to the wrong music (wrong as in not aligned with the Truth of a Loving Force.) The dance of life for humans has been grounded in shame and fear, empowered by belief in separation, lack, and scarcity. These are lower vibrational emotions and beliefs based on the three dimensional illusion that humans experience as reality. As long as the dance of humans harmonizes to music - vibrational emanations - that are rooted in shame, fear, and separation the only way to do the dance is destructively.

As I did my deep grief work and started to clear up my internal process so that I could more clearly differentiate between Truth that was a vibrational communication from my Soul and the emotional truth that was coming from my wounded soul, I was able to start trusting myself to be able to discern Truth.

I was able to have a more trusting and Loving relationship with myself through getting more in touch with my Spiritual Self, my Higher Self, and through that Higher Self with God as I was coming to understand God. I was able to start having a personal, intimate relationship with my own concept of a Higher Power / God / Goddess / Great Spirit. I learned to trust the vibrational communications, the feeling of something resonating within. I was studying Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, religion, theology, philosophy, mythology, esoteric metaphysics, science fiction - whatever was brought into my path to study. In those studies I was sorting out the wheat from the chaff - I was picking out the nuggets of Truth from the twisted, distorted beliefs they were embedded within. From this quest the Truth that I resonate with emerged - from this search I found a Higher Power of my own understanding.

Next in series: Love as a vibrational frequency

I mentioned in second column of this series that Richard Bach's book Illusions was a major factor in my quest to understand how there could possibly be a Higher Power, a God-Force, that was Loving. In fourth column I talked about Dr. Paul's chapter of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the impact it had on my Spiritual Belief system. This month I am going to focus on another major influence in enlarging my perspective of how the Universe works, in expanding the intellectual paradigm that was dictating my relationship with life - Quantum Physics.

(I am using a quote about quantum physics from my book at the end of this column - as well as several short ones within it - instead of the beginning, because it works better that way.)

The groundwork was laid for paradigm expanding concepts of quantum physics by a mystical messenger named Albert Einstein. There are several quotes that I use on the page facing the copyright page in the beginning of my book that come from individuals whom I consider to be mystical messengers.

This quote from Mark Twain speaks to the reality of human internal dynamics that I keep repeating throughout my writing. Our intellectual paradigm - mental attitudes, definitions, and beliefs - determine our perspectives and expectations, which in turn dictate our relationships and emotional reactions. If our intellectual paradigm is limited - if we cannot imagine a larger perspective of life - than what we perceive is limited, is out of focus. If we cannot use our imagination to open up to different interpretations of what we are seeing, then we are wearing blinders and can only see a limited view.

As an example: A traditional therapist / psychologist / psychiatrist has a limited perspective that restricts them to labeling behaviors - that are symptomatic manifestations of codependency in my belief - in such a way that they fit into the boxes their intellectual paradigm dictates. A Freudian will twist everything to fit into the second chakra perspective that Freud was viewing life from. A Jungian will come from more of a heart chakra centered point of view because Carl Jung reached that level of consciousness - but even then emotions are usually discounted.

Someone who believes that brain chemistry is the higher power in determining emotional health, will look for chemical solutions. (For more on this topic, see the addendum to my article Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1- which is on the woundedsouls.com site)

 Einstein was not saying that knowledge was unimportant - what he was talking about is how the growth process works. Here is a paraphrase of a paragraph in which I describe this paradigm / perspective expansion in another work of mine.

What I found, is that every time I let go of how I viewed some aspect of self, other people, and/or life, and surrendered to my intuitive guidance - I was led to a larger intellectual paradigm in which to view life. By trusting my emotional, intuitive side, I was led to a larger perspective of life, a higher level of consciousness. And I found - when the dust of my old shattered definitions had settled, and I started looking around and exploring the new perspective of reality / or some aspect of my reality - that everything eventually made perfect sense in a logical rational way. I could not get to the new level through logic, but once I had trusted my intuition to guide me to it - it was perfectly rational. The pieces of the puzzle fell into place because I was looking at the puzzle of life from a larger perspective.

(Intellectual growth in relationship to some concept / topic / area - physics for example, or a new invention of any kind - works dynamically through these intuitive, imaginative leaps of perspective. The same dynamics apply to the emotional and spiritual growth process - and can cause emotional turmoil because what we need to let go of to grow emotionally are ego definitions that are limiting our relationship with self and life. There is an inherent conflict between the human ego and the nature of the life experience for humans that I wrote about in this article: Loving and Nurturing self on your Spiritual Path.)   Einstein was able to make huge leaps in knowledge because he was willing to surrender to expanding his intellectual paradigm by trusting his intuition to guide his imagination into seeing the puzzle of life from a larger perspective. He was able to think outside of the box - and make huge breakthroughs in understanding - because he learned to follow his intuitive, mystical guidance to higher levels of consciousness that afforded him expanded perspectives of whatever aspect of the puzzle he was looking at. Albert Einstein stated that there were dimensions beyond the concrete three-dimensional one that humans experience.

Einstein's pioneering work paved the way for the revolutionary, mind expanding concepts of quantum physics.

I was so desperate to find some meaning and purpose to life that I was willing to go wherever I was led in my quest to find a concept of a Higher Power that could possibly Love me. I was open to the messages that were coming my way - and willing to buy Illusions when I discovered it in a grocery store at only 3 months of sobriety. I was later willing to start reading and trying to understand quantum physics when I was led to books like The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukov. And, let me tell you, I hated science in school. In college I took geology to fulfill my science requirement - even though it involved twice as many course hours - because I hated physics and chemistry and such. (I ended up really getting into geology by the way - fascinating stuff.) So, we are talking a major surrender here. I don't remember now how I was led to studying quantum physics - or when exactly on my Spiritual growth path it happened - but it was a major influence for me in a multitude of ways. I will be sharing some of the ways this impacted my Spiritual beliefs in some future columns. The following quote from my book however, is kind of a bottom line as I see it.

Next in series: Vibrational Dance

We buried my father this last weekend. He had gone into the hospital almost two months ago as an emergency admission. A gall stone led to several surgeries and uncovered other problems. He was in the hospital suffering from numerous complications - in a situation that contained no dignity and much pain. It was a blessing last week when congenital heart failure cropped up and took him within a couple of days. The things he was suffering from previously could have caused him to linger for weeks and weeks.

He was 80 years old and had lived a full life. All of his family members got a chance to see him while he was still lucid and able to communicate. I went to visit him in the hospital in Phoenix several weeks ago after doing a workshop in the Bay area. I was able to get some closure of a sort - to tell him I loved him. He couldn't say it back to me. He has never been able to say he loved me.

My father was an emotional cripple. A man who had learned that real men don't get scared or hurt or sad - real men only get angry. I wrote a column about how as a little boy I was terrified of him - and how sad I was about my relationship with my father - for Father's Day in 1997. (Emotionally Crippled Fathers - a sad tragedy of the masculine)

I had actually done much grieving about my relationship with my father - and his inability to treat me in a way that felt loving - years ago. I didn't actually have a lot of grief at his passing last week - some, but not a great deal because of that previous grieving. There was actually more grief for me in seeing my family members who have no recovery, who have no understanding of how wounded they were by his behavior, in pain over the myth of fatherhood they were still empowering.

The most damaging thing about our relationships with our parents growing up, is that we incorporate the messages we received from them directly - and indirectly through their behavior and role modeling - into our relationship with our self. It is not possible to develop healthy relationships with our parents if they do not change and get into recovery themselves. We can certainly get healthier in our interactions with them - but we cannot develop healthy relationships with anyone who is not getting healthier themselves. We can however heal our relationship with ourselves by taking power away from the old tapes and emotional wounds their behavior caused us to incorporate into our relationship with self.

This is what I am focusing on as I write this. A dysfunctional level in my relationship with myself that still needs some healing. This is a level of wounding that came not just from my relationship with my father - but also with the concept of God the Father I had imposed upon me as a child.

The Old Testament concept of a punishing, judgmental God the Father - a god with a human ego who created humans to adore him - is an abusive, ridiculous concept in my opinion. (I share some of my beliefs in this regard - along with links to articles focused on different aspects of my beliefs - in my December 2004 Update Newsletter.)  That masculine image of a God is - as I say in the quote from my book above - an image of a male with no feminine side.

That image of an angry patriarch has been a fundamental component of the template for the way men were trained to express their masculinity and deny their feminine side in Western Civilization. The similarities between the way our fathers treated us and the image of the judgmental, abusive God the Father has been devastatingly wounding to not only many men in society - but also the many women who have tried over and over again to win the love of the emotionally unavailable, abusive males that were recreating the ways they were wounded in relationships with fathers who were emotional cripples like my father.

The combination of the reality that my father did not ever treat me in a way that made me feel that I was lovable and worthy, but rather the very opposite - along with the concept of a Father God who would send me to burn in hell forever because I was inherently sinful and shameful - are at the core of the toxic shame that is the foundation of my codependency. I have been working on healing - and have made great progress in eliminating - that shame about my being in the years of my recovery. I count my codependency recovery as beginning on June 3rd, 1986 - so I am coming up on my 19th CoDA anniversary.

There has been however, a dark corner deep within me where the feeling that I am not lovable or worthy - that I am somehow defective - has still been causing me to sometimes engage in self sabotaging behavior. I still have some terror at the core of my relationship with myself at fully opening up to believe that I deserve Love and Joy and abundance, some resistance to fully embracing being alive - and because of that terror I have periodically found myself justifying some behavior that is hurting me.

I deserved to be treated better than my father treated me. I certainly didn't deserve the emotional and spiritual abuse heaped upon me by a shame based religion. And I need to stop indulging myself in this self destructive behavior - so that I can more fully honor and respect my self by treating myself in a way I deserve to be treated. Today I am leaving that behavior behind. Today, May 31st 2005 - to honor that I deserve to be treated better than my father was capable of treating me - I am going to commit myself to stopping the self abusive behavior that directly relates back to how his behavior wounded a little boy many years ago. Today I am going to defy that stupid ridiculous concept of an angry male god the father by stopping the self sabotaging behavior that I have until now been powerless to stop completely. Today I make this commitment to myself - to treat my self with Love and respect in all my behaviors. I commit my self to accessing the power available to me from my Higher Power to be more Loving to my self - because I deserve that Love.

Next in series: Quantum Physics - expanding my Spiritual paradigm

In the quote from my book just above, I mention that some of the 12 steps contain shaming and abusive wording. I was speaking specifically of step 5 and 6 - which are part of the 4th step inventory process. Here are those steps in an excerpt from an articles on my site in a series on the 12 steps.

"4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

Even though this page is about step 4, I included step 5 and 6 above because I want to first address the shaming language in which the twelve steps - as used in AA and adapted by CoDA - are written. Step 6 actually refers to the negative side of the inventory done in step 4, so is a part of the fourth step process. . . . .

I hate the term "defects of character." There could be no better term to describe toxic shame. That is what I felt most of my life - that I was somehow defective, that something was wrong with who I am.

I prefer to refer to these "defects" as codependent behavior patterns and dysfunctional attitudes. They are part of the emotional defense system which we adapted to protect ourselves as children. They are not signs that we are defective, nor are they "wrongs" as step 5 states - they are dysfunctional because they do not work to help us have a Loving, fulfilling relationship with ourselves. They are a part of the disease of codependence that we were powerless over as long as we were unconscious to them. By starting to get conscious of these behavior patterns and attitudes we start to access the power to change them. That is what step 4 is Truly about - becoming conscious."

- The Miracle of The Twelve Step Recovery Process - Step 4 inventory

The underlining dynamic of codependency is black and white thinking. Drinking or not drinking is a black and white issue. Thus many recovering alcoholics can stop drinking while still empowering the black and white thinking of codependency. Many recovering alcoholics are rigid in their perspective and don't ever do the emotional healing of their childhood wounds because they tell themselves it is not necessary to sobriety - and they are scared to death of their own emotions on a subconscious level. Some of the most wounded codependents I know have 30 or 40 years sober and have never addressed their emotional issues - while justifying their rigidity as doing AA the "right" way.

According to this "old time" AA perspective, "outside issues" should not be discussed in AA meetings. There are many suffering codependents in AA who are not open minded enough to realize that Bill Wilson - one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous - would have loved to have had the tools we have available to us today. He would have run to an Adult Children of Alcoholics or Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting where he could have found the roots of the depression which tormented him. The suffering codependents in AA are terrified that if they don't follow a rigid formula - the "right" way - in their recovery, they will end up drinking again.

That "right" way, according to the rigid members of AA, includes not discussing drugs in an AA meeting. Alcohol is of course a drug - so this is nonsense in my view. But some old timers are very adamant about AA being only for alcoholics and not for drug addicts.

That rigid black and white thinking led in recent years to something which I personally find ridiculously petty. In the newest revision of the AA Big Book, the story that was most important to me in the book had it's title change to remove the word addict.

This chapter - which used to be called "Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict" - was written by a man named Dr. Paul. It was from his chapter that I got a lot of the basic foundation for my codependency recovery. His chapter was instrumental in my search for a Higher Power of my own understanding.

There is a multitude of good stuff in this chapter but I will touch on three that were very important to me here.

1. He talks about being part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. Seeing the half of the glass that is full instead of focusing on the half that is empty. Out of this I came up with a little saying for myself: "I don't have any problems, I have opportunities for growth."

This was a little saying that had a huge impact on my recovery. It started shifting me out of the victim role I had been programmed to react out of in childhood. This saying was a paradigm buster for me. It caused me to change my perspective of how I viewed life and led to me changing my relationship with life. I stopped automatically seeing myself as the victim of life and other people and started looking for the silver lining, the opportunity for growth, attached to the events in my life.

Little sayings can have a huge impact on our healing paths.

2. He says something in his chapter that I interpreted to be "If God Loves me unconditionally, whom am I to not Love myself." It was a shocking concept to me. That God could actually love me - the shameful, sinful, weak creature of the flesh who was certainly going to be condemned to burn in hell forever - was shocking enough when I first started in the program. What was more shocking was to realize that if I put myself down I was saying that God made junk. I realized it was actually arrogance to believe God could love everyone else but I wasn't lovable. It was my dysfunctionally programmed ego that was giving me that message - it was negative grandiosity. It was another paradigm buster for me and a real catalyst in me changing my perspective on, and relationship with, both my self and a Higher Power of my understanding.

3. The other vitally important thing that I got out of this chapter was a new perspective on how I gave away power over my emotions. Dr. Paul talks about how his serenity was directly proportional to his level of acceptance - and inversely proportional to his expectations. Looking at how my expectations were setting me up to have emotional reactions to life - and learning to be honest with myself about those expectations - was one of the most important pieces of the puzzle for me. It was vital in the process of learning to be emotionally honest with my self - and in learning to take responsibility for my emotional reactions. I have an article on my web site in which I talk about how pivotal focusing on my expectations was for me in learning to stop buying into the belief that I was a victim. Serenity and Expectations - intimately interrelated I mention Dr. Paul's chapter in the Big Book in that article.

So, I am very grateful for Dr. Paul's chapter of the Big Book - it was inspirational for me, and provided a great deal of fundamental insight into my relationship with myself and life. I am also very grateful to Alcoholics Anonymous because it saved my life. I find myself alternately sad and angry about the rigidity in AA caused by codependency - and the shaming messages that rigid members often give to anyone who is looking at other issues or doing emotional healing. Something that has been true in a lot of religions in world history is also true in AA to a certain extent. When human beings - reacting out of fear - place rigid interpretations on the words that carry the message, they often lose the spirit of the message.

Next in series :God the Father, and my father