Hate Alcohol Quotes

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.

Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth. 
 You still feel warmth.
Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you.  Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less. Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.
Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you. Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that. Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. 
You’re doing just fine.
You’re doing fine. I’m doing just fine.

Good,” said Gideon. “It means the effect of the alcohol is wearing off. One question, by the way: what did you want a hairbrush for?” “I wanted it as a substitute for a mike,” I murmured through my fingers. “Oh, my God! I’m so horrible.” “But you have a pretty voice,” said Gideon. “Even I liked it, and I told you I hate musicals.” “Then how come you can play songs from them so well?” I put my hands in my lap and looked at him. “You were amazing! Is there anything you can’t do?” Good heavens, I heard myself sounding like a groupie. “No. Go ahead, you’re welcome to think me some kind of god!” He was grinning now. “It’s rather sweet of you!

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.

The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors--psychology, sociology, women's studies--to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favor abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.

THE MYTHS ABOUT ABUSERS 1. He was abused as a child. 2. His previous partner hurt him. 3. He abuses those he loves the most. 4. He holds in his feelings too much. 5. He has an aggressive personality. 6. He loses control. 7. He is too angry. 8. He is mentally ill. 9. He hates women. 10. He is afraid of intimacy and abandonment. 11. He has low self-esteem. 12. His boss mistreats him. 13. He has poor skills in communication and conflict resolution. 14. There are as many abusive women as abusive men. 15. His abusiveness is as bad for him as for his partner. 16. He is a victim of racism. 17. He abuses alcohol or drugs.

Tickle me, stroke me, feed me, fuck me, Overload my senses-- hug me, drug me. It's hard, you see, to consider what's more, When we hate to think and love the gin. But until this pleasure dies, I will never live-- There has to be more to life than this.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

The drugs and alcohol, they don’t make us feel better. When you’re high you hate yourself freely, and it’s okay, because you’re not accountable in that moment. You’re free to be your own worst enemy–free to be the person hiding inside you. The person that is less than. Less than you’d planned to be.

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change.

Amy hated--hated--the way the grown-ups her parents had surrounded themselves with were so quick to offer prayers and so low to actually do anything. Old women who barely left the house for anything but bingo and congratulated themselves on never drinking alcohol or saying dirty words, thinking God created humans to stay home and watch televangelists and just run out the clock until the day they die. Well, Amy figured you don't need more than five minutes on this planet to figure out that one thing we know about God--maybe the only thing--is that he favors those who act. David also believed that, through he didn't realize it.

When we hate ourselves we destroy our bodies with alcohol, drugs, casual sex, and a bunch of stuff. Then we look at ourselves and hate ourselves even more.

Hemingway is overrated, Twain is even more lost at sea, And all truths point to the mouth of a woman, Where both her whispers and her screams, Are born. Pour another glass, Beer, wine, whiskey, I don't care, So long as its wisdom is sharp, And it tells lies instead of promises.

I'm an old man now. Old on the inside. I'm a drunk, and I hate to tell you, but I'm not prepared to change. So you have to figure out if you want to forgive me and love me like I am, or run away again. Or hell, stay here and hate me. Just...know that I love you the best way I know how. I always have. I do the best I can.

SIMONE: I was getting a lot of phone calls from Daisy at all hours of the day. I’d say, “Let me come get you.” And she’d refuse. I thought about trying to force her into rehab. But you can’t do that. You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind. I used to rehearse speeches and interventions and consider flying to where she was and dragging her off that stage—as if, if I could just get the words right, I could convince her to get sober. You drive yourself crazy, trying to put words in some magical order that will unlock their sanity. And when it doesn’t work, you think, I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t talk to her clearly enough. But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.

but was this funny? was this funny? was this funny? why was this funny? why was Sugar Kane funny? why were men dressed as women funny? why were men made up as women funny? why were men staggering in high heels funny? why was Sugar Kane funny, was Sugar Kane the supreme female impersonator? was this funny? why was this funny? why is female funny? why were people going to laugh at Sugar Kane & fall in love with Sugar Kane? why, another time? why would Sugar Kane Kovalchick girl ukulelist be such a box office success in America? why dazzling-blond girl ukulelist alcoholic Sugar Kane Kovalchick a success? why Some Like It Hot a masterpiece? why Monroe's masterpiece? why Monroe's most commercial movie? why did they love her? why when her life was in shreds like clawed silk? why when her life was in pieces like smashed glass? why when her insides had bled out? why when her insides had been scooped out? why when she carried poison in her womb? why when her head was ringing with pain? her mouth stinging with red ants? why when everybody on the set of the film hated her? resented her? feared her? why when she was drowning before their eyes? I wanna be loved by you boop boopie do! why was Sugar Kane Kovalchick of Sweet Sue's Society Syncopaters so seductive? I wanna be kissed by nobody else but you I wanna! I wanna! I wanna be loved by you alone but why? why was Marilyn so funny? why did the world adore Marilyn? who despised herself? was that why? why did the world love Marilyn? why when Marilyn had killed her baby? why when Marilyn had killed her babies? why did the world want to fuck Marilyn? why did the world want to fuck fuck fuck Marilyn? why did the world want to jam itself to the bloody hilt like a great tumescent sword in Marilyn? was it a riddle? was it a warning? was it just another joke? I wanna be loved by you boop boopie do nobody else but you nobody else but you nobody else

I had never been a dresser. My shirts were all faded and shrunken, 5 or 6 years old, threadbare. My pants the same. I hated department stores, I hated the clerks, they acted so superior, they seemed to know the secret of life, they had a confidence I didn't possess. My shoes were always broken down and old, I disliked shoe stores too. I never purchased anything until it was completely unusable, and that included automobiles. It wasn't a matter of thrift, I just couldn't bear to be a buyer needing a seller, seller being so handsome and aloof and superior. Besides, it all took time, time when you could just be laying around and drinking.

On the surface a borderline personality can be very difficult to identify, despite the underlying volcanic turbulence. Unlike many people afflicted with other mental disorders—such as schizophrenia, bipolar (manic-depressive) disease, alcoholism, or eating disorders—the borderline can usually function extremely well in work and social situations without appearing overtly pathological. Indeed, some of the hallmarks of borderline behavior are the sudden, unpredictable eruptions of anger, extreme suspiciousness, or suicidal depression from someone who has appeared so “normal.” The

And when he got home he started on Mumma. He hated her then, because in her fatness and untidiness and drabness she reminded him of what he himself was when he was sober.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.

I didn't exactly hate my father...I felt contempt for him.

He had to hate them, to move the smothering shroud of hatred from himself to them. He closed the door of his room behind him, and almost snatched the drink from under the bed.

Alcoholics hate two things: the way things are and change. I knew something had to change—I wasn’t suicidal, but I was dying—but I was too scared to do anything about

Hey, I’m going to go inside this place and blow my brains out on alcohol, thereby killing my brain cells and liver while also doing damage to other vital organs. I might even do some blow in the bathroom. But those other fuckers better go outside to SMOKE!” Fuckin’ savages …

For all the alcoholics and addicts out there, you are loved, stopped being so stubborn and come in from the cold. Wherever you are, there is a brighter light in your sight. Move towards it every day, and keep moving towards it. Even the worst and strongest addiction is a choice—a choice not to fight, to give up, to indulge the impulse, or instead to accept the hands offered you to help, even from strangers, even from the state. Don’t hate those who gave up on you, it wasn’t their fault, you just wore them down. Show them they were wrong about you. Your troubles are meant to mold you into something better, not destroy you, so FIGHT! Another day comes for the better if you’re standing in the right spot for it to hit you. Find the right spot and stay there until it does.

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame.

Is alcohol getting in the way of my happiness, my life, my self-esteem? Is it getting in the way of my dreams, or maybe just not working for me? Does it cost more than it gives, does it shrink more than it expands, does it cut pieces out of me I can’t reclaim? Does it make me hate myself, even just a little bit?

Alcoholic parents are so confusing, they're your parents, so you love them. But they're drunks, so you hate them. But you love them, but you hate them. They have moments when they're still the people you grew up idolizing. They have moments when you can't imagine they were anything but monsters. And then, after a while they're monsters full time. The people they used to be has enormous power over you. But the people they've turned into has no power over you at all.

An alcoholic hates and curses drink because it ruins his life. But at the same time it is his life. – Harry Hole

Bulls**t,' I say. 'You chose to relapse. You didn't have to.' I hate it when alcoholics relapse and then act like somebody cut the brake lines on their cars.

On my way home, an everlasting tiredness dissipates me and the alcohol has caused my mind to project images, most of which are harsh and relentless: Passing by a derelict building and hearing a child sigh along with an older man, an elderly lady sitting by her window, tapping a long, skeletal finger against the glass, endlessly, every day, a girl I once had sex with whose back was so scarred from her boyfriend at the time that it looked like darkness was pouring out of the wounds, which crept like breathing mouths all over her naked body, people who were tethering on the brink of insanity, a by-product of living in the city, so empty and famished they drugged themselves daily to numb their ceaseless pain, and teens, most of them around my age, walking aimlessly in circles and, above all, beaming with its own empty light, the deprived husk of a message: I have never cared for anyone and I hate people.

Since it’s not really avoidable, I think the question is how to—if you like—turn [hatred] to advantage.... It’s a bit like alcohol, if you like. It’s a good servant, but it’s a bad master.

Meet your partner. You think you’ve never seen them before, but you knew them. They were in your first breakup, your worst heartbreak, your old marriage, the honeymoon sex, in the alcohol swishes of finding out your spouse cheated, and in the times she leaned over the grass to kiss your cheek at picnics. Love was dancing in the same candidate who kissed you, the same nominee who hated you, and the plenty of people who tricked you. Love was dancing to the tango of your agreement to try. Love grows bigger and bigger, shaping itself more correctly to your happy heart.

I was not too crazy about sleeping with girls I didn't know. It was an easy way to take care of my sex drive of course, and I did enjoy all the holding and touching, but I hated the morning after. I'd wake up and find this strange girl sleeping next to me, and the room would reek of alcohol, and the bed and the lighting and the curtains had that special "love hotel" garishness, and my head would be in a hungover fog.

Society gives the image of sexual violators as weird, ugly, anti-social, alcoholics. Society gives the impression that violators kidnap children are out of their homes and take them to some wooded area and abandon them after the violation. Society gives the impression that everyone hates people who violate children. If all of these myths were true, healing would not be as challenging as it is. Half of our healing is about the actual abuse. The other half is about how survivors fit into society in the face of the myths that people hold in order to make themselves feel safe. The truth is that 80% of childhood sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members. Yet we rarely hear the word “incest”. The word is too ugly and the truth is too scary. Think about what would happen if we ran a campaign to end incest instead of childhood sexual abuse. The number one place that children should know they are safe is in their homes. As it stands, as long as violators keep sexual abuse within the family, the chances of repercussion by anyone is pretty low. Wives won’t leave violating husbands, mothers won’t kick their violating children out of the home, and violating grandparents still get invited to holiday dinners. It is time to start cleaning house. If we stop incest first, then we will strengthen our cause against all sexual abuse.

His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it.

What happens when you hit your daughter. First, she will bond to you out of fear, mistakenly thinking she has done something wrong, and if she can just manage to not do it again or somehow please you, you might not hit her or anyone else anymore. She will even think you will love her properly if she can earn your approval. She won't realize this is impossible. Then she will either do that with every man she comes within 100 feet of for the rest of her life or until she learns not to - this will take much doing - or she will despise them with such vehemence that she can barely stomach one around. Sometimes she will do a combination of both of those things, working herself into a pattern of push and pull - I love you, I hate you, I need you, I don't need anyone - that will drive her a little crazy. She won't understand at first, if ever, why she only attracts other masochists. Whatever numbing agent she's picked for herself - she will probably try drugs, drink too much alcohol, starve herself or binge and purge, maybe cut herself, act out sexually - in fact, she may do all of those things - that continues to help kill her spirit and dulls her enough to keep her participating in living like a maniac will be consumed to varying degrees depending on need. She will be more likely to commit suicide than if you hadn't abused her. She will give herself away and will mistake admiration and infatuation and sometimes even abuse for love.

Meg spends her days at a shit job she hates and spends most of the rest of her time working out and starving herself, so she’s usually in a bitchy mood because she pretty much hates her life, but definitely needs a sandwich. Contradicting that shit, she doesn’t have a problem pouring alcohol down her throat and smoking a shitload of grass, which gives her the munchies she refuses to give into, thus the vicious cycle with her bein’ a bitch and makin’ the mellowing qualities of pot lost on her.

We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves: Vague, impersonal forces—“I cleaned my room because I had to.” Our condition, diagnosis, or personal or psychological history—“I drink because I am an alcoholic.” The actions of others—“I hit my child because he ran into the street.” The dictates of authority—“I lied to the client because the boss told me to.” Group pressure—“I started smoking because all my friends did.” Institutional policies, rules, and regulations—“I have to suspend you for this infraction because it’s the school policy.” Gender roles, social roles, or age roles—”I hate going to work, but I do it because I am a husband and a father.” Uncontrollable impulses—“I was overcome by my urge to eat the candy bar.

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they hated him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death. The devil-devils they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since McAllister did not believe in devil-devils, they were without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He must have been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.

editor in New York and my mom and dad on the phone. My body is weak and bloated. I’m slowly poisoning myself to death. And it’s not like I haven’t seen what this shit does to people. The most fucked-up detoxes I’ve ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It’s worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain—leaving you helpless, like a child—infantilized—shitting in your pants—ranting madness—disoriented—angry—terrified. But that’s not gonna be me, I mean, it can’t be. I may hate myself. I may fantasize about suicide. But I’m way too vain to let myself die an alcoholic death. There’s nothing glamorous about alcoholism. You don’t go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops. Alcoholism takes you down slow, robbing you of every last bit of dignity on your way

Healing means breaking this cycle of thought, and we don’t change how we think about ourselves by wishing it different; we change by actively engaging with different words, phrases, and beliefs, and repeating these mantras to ourselves until they interrupt the old hateful story and make a new loving one.

Something her father always used to say popped into her head. God hates a coward, Ruby. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and met his stare head-on. “Since you bought me an alcoholic beverage and I’m planning on kissing you, then yes. I’d say this qualifies as a date.” His gaze dropped to her mouth, and she couldn’t stop herself from biting her bottom lip. If the music wasn’t so loud, she knew she would have heard him groan. “Sorry. I can’t kiss you.” Heat suffusing her face, Ruby pushed her chair back and stood. “No kissing, no fun, no gambling. I’m starting to forget why I found you interesting.” Before she could blink, he moved to stand behind her. On either side of her, he laid his hands on the table, effectively blocking her escape. When he spoke, she felt his every word against her neck. “I just watched you bend over a pool table in those ridiculously tight jeans. Over. And over. You think I could stop at kissing?

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Dribking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged diety. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.

I hate the stuff. Just a glass of sweet sherry at Christmas, so as not to be accused of being a spoilsport. But it changes people. And not for the better.” I agree. I have no interest in alcohol, or in people getting “merry,” or “whistled,” or “half seas over” and all the other words and phrases which make them feel better about themselves.

The term “act like a log” comes from the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra, or The Way of the Bodhisattva, an eighth-century Mahayana Buddhist text, written by the Buddhist monk Shantideva. The verse: “When the urge arises in your mind / To feelings of desire or angry hate / Do not act! Be silent, do not speak! / And like a log of wood be sure to stay.

When Marino's needs us, we chip in.I just hate when chipping involves waiting tables. I have to write down orders so I don't forget them, am scarily clumsy with hot plates, and, humiliatingly, have to get someone else to bring the wine or beer when customers order it, because I'm not eighteen, and it's illegal for underage me to seve alcohol.

I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously. I hated relying on anyone for anything. I'd have sooner cleaned floors than be given pocket money or walked three miles in the rain at night than be given a lift home by a parent. I was looking up the price of one-bedroom flats in Camden when I was fifteen, so I could get a head start on saving up with my babysitting money. I was using my mum's recipes and dining table to host 'dinner parties' at the same age, forcing my friends round for rosemary roast chicken tagliatelle and raspberry pavlova with a Frank Sinatra soundtrack, when all they wanted to was eat burgers and go bowling. I wanted my own friends, my own schedule, my own home, my own money and my own life. I found being a teenager one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, co-dependent embarrassment that couldn't end fast enough. Alcohol, I think, was my small act of independence. It was the one way I could feel like an adult.

Man knows himself as body, and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Man has no control over his inspiration. If a piece of music or a poem has moved him once, he can never be certain that it will happen again. But man hates to think that he has no control over the spirit. It would discourage him too much. He likes to believe that he can summon the spirit by some ordinary act. Instead of striving to prepare himself for it through discipline and prayer, he tries to summon it arbitrarily through some physical act—drinking Düsseldorf beer, for instance. . . Stein said, chuckling: Which is the way all good Düsseldorfers summon the spirit, since our Dunkelbier is the best in Germany. The priest laughed with him, and for a moment Sorme had a curious impression that he was listening to an argument between two undergraduates instead of two men in their late sixties. He shrank deeper into his armchair, wanting them to forget his presence. The priest stopped laughing first, and Sorme had a glimpse of the tiredness that always lay behind his eyes. Stein also became grave again. He said: Very well. But what has this to do with the murderer? It has to do with sex. For sex is the favourite human device for summoning the spirit. And since it is also God's gift of procreation, it nearly always works. . . unlike music and poetry. Or beer, Stein said. Quite. But even sex is not infallible. And man hates to think that he has no power over the spirit. The more his physical methods fail him, the more voraciously he pursues them. His attempts to summon the spirit become more and more frenzied. If he is a drinker, he drinks more, until he has more alcohol than blood in his veins. If he is a sensualist, he invents sexual perversions. Ah, Stein said. There are many other ways, of course—the lust for money and power, for instance. All depend upon man's refusal to face the fact that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, that no physical act can be guaranteed to summon it. . .

She asks A.J. about his lifestyle. He answers the question truthfully. “I’m not what you’d call an alcoholic, but I do like to drink until I pass out at least once a week. I smoke occasionally and I subsist on a diet of frozen entrees. I rarely floss. I used to be a long-distance runner, but now I don’t exercise at all. I live alone and I lack meaningful personal relationships. Since my wife died, I hate my work, too.

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

Poem for My Father You closed the door. I was on the other side, screaming. It was black in your mind. Blacker than burned-out fire. Blacker than poison. Outside everything looked the same. You looked the same. You walked in your body like a living man. But you were not. would you not speak to me for weeks would you hang your coat in the closet without saying hello would you find a shoe out of place and beat me would you come home late would i lose the key would you find my glasses in the garbage would you put me on your knee would you read the bible to me in your smoking jacket after your mother died would you come home drunk and snore would you beat me on the legs would you carry me up the stairs by my hair so that my feet never touch the bottom would you make everything worse to make everything better i believe in god, the father almighty, the maker of heaven, the maker of my heaven and my hell. would you beat my mother would you beat her till she cries like a rabbit would you beat her in a corner of the kitchen while i am in the bathroom trying to bury my head underwater would you carry her to the bed would you put cotton and alcohol on her swollen head would you make love to her hair would you caress her hair would you rub her breasts with ben gay until she stinks would you sleep in the other room in the bed next to me while she sleeps on the pull-out cot would you come on the sheet while i am sleeping. later i look for the spot would you go to embalming school with the last of my mother's money would i see your picture in the book with all the other black boys you were the handsomest would you make the dead look beautiful would the men at the elks club would the rich ladies at funerals would the ugly drunk winos on the street know ben pretty ben regular ben would your father leave you when you were three with a mother who threw butcher knives at you would he leave you with her screaming red hair would he leave you to be smothered by a pillow she put over your head would he send for you during the summer like a rich uncle would you come in pretty corduroys until you were nine and never heard from him again would you hate him would you hate him every time you dragged hundred pound cartons of soap down the stairs into white ladies' basements would you hate him for fucking the woman who gave birth to you hate him flying by her house in the red truck so that other father threw down his hat in the street and stomped on it angry like we never saw him (bye bye to the will of grandpa bye bye to the family fortune bye bye when he stompled that hat, to the gold watch, embalmer's palace, grandbaby's college) mother crying silently, making floating island sending it up to the old man's ulcer would grandmother's diamonds close their heartsparks in the corner of the closet yellow like the eyes of cockroaches? Old man whose sperm swims in my veins, come back in love, come back in pain.

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

I’ve lived on both sides of the abuse. I wear bruises on both sides of my fist. I have wept “what am I doing” and I have cried “why did they do that”. The child of an alcoholic and the alcoholic of a child. It’s strange how broken spirits, broken hearts, and broken homes walk hand-in-hand. How they leave a clear trail of shattered to follow. We are all picking out sins of the father like shrapnel left over from the day we were born. Bang. Welcome to life. Try not to step on a landmine before you get to twenty. Here are your parents. They hate you. Sorry that you won the race. Me? I’ve got a piece of broken mirror lodged dangerously close to my heart. I never know which twist in the story will be the one to open up my insides and help me drown in my own soul. People asked me where I picked up the wisdom. I don’t know that any of this actually is made of wisdom. There’s just too much fluff and well-meaning for my taste. For me, the path was always made of pain. I haven’t found feel better or act right yet... not for myself. I’m not the best one to help anybody else find it... that’s for certain... but I know every road that leads to resentment. I’ve walked them more times than I can count. I can’t tell you how to get where you’re going, but I can give you a roadmap that highlights the places I wish I never went. The first place on the list sits pretty damn close to home. There’s a town called Grief & Regret just north of Salvation, USA. I’m putting do not enter signs on every road that goes there.

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity... When LIza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and her doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.

Originally, the word power meant able to be. In time, it was contracted to mean to be able. We suffer the difference. Iwas waiting for a plane when I overheard two businessmen. One was sharing the good news that he had been promoted, and the other, in congratulation, said, “More power to you.” I've heard this expression before, but for some reason, I heard it differently this time and thought, what a curious sentiment. As a good wish, the assumption is that power is the goal. Of course, it makes a huge difference if we are wishing others worldly power or inner power. By worldly power, I mean power over things, people, and situations—controlling power. By inner power, I mean power that comes from being a part of something larger—connective power. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure the wish here was for worldly power, for more control. This is commonplace and disturbing, as the wish for more always issues from a sense of lack. So the wish for more power really issues from a sense of powerlessness. It is painfully ironic that in the land of the free, we so often walk about with an unspoken and enervating lack of personal freedom. Yet the wish for more controlling power will not set us free, anymore than another drink will quench the emptiness of an alcoholic in the grip of his disease. It makes me think of a game we played when I was nine called King of the Hill, in which seven or eight of us found a mound of dirt, the higher the better, and the goal was to stand alone on top of the hill. Once there, everyone else tried to throw you off, installing themselves as King of the Hill. It strikes me now as a training ground for worldly power. Clearly, the worst position of all is being King of the Hill. You are completely alone and paranoid, never able to trust anyone, constantly forced to spin and guard every direction. The hills may change from a job to a woman to a prized piece of real estate, but those on top can be so enslaved by guarding their position that they rarely enjoy the view. I always hated King of the Hill—always felt tense in my gut when king, sad when not, and ostracized if I didn't want to play. That pattern has followed me through life. But now, as a tired adult, when I feel alone and powerless atop whatever small hill I've managed to climb, I secretly long for anyone to join me. Now, I'm ready to believe there's more power here together.

Harry had felt the gnawing ache for alcohol from the moment he woke up that morning. First as an instinctive physical craving, then as a panic-stricken fear because he had put a distance between himself and his medicine by not taking his hip flask or any money with him to work. Now the ache was entering a new phase in which it was both a wholly physical pain and a feeling of blank terror that he would be torn to pieces. The enemy below was pulling and tugging at the chains, the dogs were snarling up at him from the pit, somewhere in his stomach beneath his heart. God, how he hated them. He hated them as much as they hated him.

chess is deeper and more mysterious than all of us put together; it’ll exist until somebody manages to master it completely, and that’ll never happen, Ferenck, it’s impossible for that to happen. Oslovski looked at him in surprise, and said, at the end of the day it’s a question of statistics: we’ll keep getting better, more intelligent, more gifted, we’ll keep going farther. Soon the great men of the 21st century will be born, or rather, they’ll turn into adults, because many may already have been born, and then we’ll know about them. The Freuds and Marxes and Einsteins and Nietzsches of the 21st century must be going to school right now, or still playing with toy cars, or watching the fall of a leaf in a park, who knows? And apart from them, there’ll also be a young Kafka suffering then turning to literature as therapy, and there’ll be an aristocratic Proust, who’ll portray the decadent bourgeoisie of the early 21st century from within, and of course the new Rimbaud must already be walking the streets, a young man with his fists clenched with hate, struggling against the social forms, and the Bukowski of the 21st century receiving a thrashing from his father and discovering that alcohol dulls the pain, and of course some boy of seven or eight must be on the verge of checkmating an adult on a chessboard,

What do we have here?” Grant slurs at me. He seems different and it raises flags in my mind. His fingers wrap around a section of my hair and it scares me. His face is flushed red and his eyes are glassy and bright. I can smell the smoky scent of whiskey or scotch rolling off his tongue as he speaks and breathes heavily. “I’m lost and I need a ride home.” My voice wavers as I speak and I hate it. I fist my hands in the hem of my blazer. “I’ll get Albert for you, but first spend some time with me,” he slurs again, sounding like his tongue is too large for his mouth. As if sensing my attention, the tip of his tongue sneaks out and slides along his supple bottom lip. He smiles as he tastes the alcohol that’s staining his mouth. His eyes are bright and shiny and glazed over. He has a smirk on his face that shows off his dimple. It no longer reminds me of Whitt. It seems sinister and dangerous- promising something I’m not ready to experience. The feel of his fingers playing with my hair gives me goosebumps and I shiver as my scalp tightens, sucking up the pleasant attention. I do my first stupid-girl moment of my life. I shameless crush on a guy and let it turn my thoughts to mush. “Okay, if you promise to call Albert first.” I try to negotiate with him and he gives me a naughty smirk for agreeing. He backs me up with his physical presence. His front touches mine- chest-to-chest. His lips part and breathes the smoky, whiskey scent onto my chin. My back hits the door behind me with an audible thump. He reaches around me and I don’t wince. I anticipate him touching me and crave it. Instead, his hand twists the doorknob by my hip and I fall backwards. I’m pushed into a dark room until my legs connect with the edge of a bed. I can’t see anything, and the only sound is our combined breathing. I feel alive with caution. I’m aware of every hair, every nerve on my flesh. My senses are so in-tuned that I can feel my system pumping the blood through my veins nourishing my whole body.

I hate the Fourth of July. The early middle age of summer. Everything is alive and kicking for now, but the eventual decline into fall has already set itself in motion. Some of the lesser shrubs and bushes, seared by the heat, are starting to resemble a bad peroxide job. The heat reaches a blazing peak, but summer is lying to itself, burning out like some alcoholic genius. And you start to wonder - what have I done with June? The poorest of the lot - the Vladeck House project dwellers who live beneath my co-op - seem to take summer in stride; they groan and sweat, drink the wrong kind of lager, make love, the squat children completing mad circles around them by foot or mountain bike. But for the more competitive of New Yorkers, even for me, the summer is there to be slurped up. We know summer is the height of being alive. We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime, and each one has to be better than the last, has to encompass a trip to that arts center up at Bard, a seemingly mellow game of badminton over at some yahoo’s Vermont cottage, and a cool, wet, slightly dangerous kayak trip down an unforgiving river. Otherwise, how would you know that you have lived summertime best? What if you missed out on some morsel of shaded nirvana?

becomes more powerful. It believes alcohol is necessary for survival (again, more than food, more than sex), and it’s on a mission to get it. If you’ve ever woken up hungover and resolved to never drink again, and at five p.m. found yourself standing in line with a bottle of red in your hand, this is the flip. Your top-down controls—which made promises to not drink, which are horrified by your perceived weakness, which know that alcohol does you no favors, which want a social life and a future and a sober night with your kids—are weakened, and the part of you that thinks in terms of the next fifteen seconds, which is concerned only with your survival, is running the show and telling you to fuck it, the wine is what matters. This is the cycle of addiction. It doesn’t matter how much we want to quit or hate that we haven’t; we feel compelled to ingest a substance or engage in a behavior we think will provide relief, or make us feel good, and whatever relief or goodness we get in the

You’re really nice,” I slur. We’re waiting for the valet to bring Gavin’s truck around, and it feels like the fresh Colorado air has increased my alcohol level from drunk to trashed . . . and I still haven’t cracked open my wine.   “You’re pretty nice too.” He’s watching me closely, and I’m trying to watch him closely. His eyes are crinkled with amusement; mine are struggling to focus.   “I really wish you were an investment banker.”   Oh no. The loose lips part of the night has arrived.   “Besides my mom, you’re probably the only person in the world who does.”   “Because everyone else would miss their superstar quarterback in his super-hot pants throwing the ball every Sunday?” Sober me hates drunk me so hard right now.   “Because I’m terrible with numbers. I had three different tutors trying to get me to pass my math courses in college. And I’m not sure most of the fans focus on my pants, but I’m glad you do.” His body is shaking with laughter as he nudges me with his shoulder.

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result, naturally, was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink. Once when he was very ill Samuel asked, "Liza, couldn't I have a glass of whisky to ease me?" She set her little hard chin. "Would you go to the throne of God with liquor on your breath? You would not!" she said. Samuel rolled over on his side and went about his illness without ease. When Liza was about seventy her elimination slowed up and the doctor told her to take a tablespoon of port wine for medicine. She forced down the first spoonful, making a crooked face, but it was not so bad. And from that moment she never drew a completely sober breath. She always took the wine in a tablespoon, it was always medicine, but after a time she was doing over a quart a day and she was a much more relaxed and happy woman.

These believers, like all fascists, condemn the reality-based world as contaminated, decayed, and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation, and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful, and happy. The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and reason, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem.

He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that's garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he's come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he's gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares.

Guilt isn’t an emotion. It’s a living, breathing organism. It’s another man living deep inside you, screaming so loud sometimes that you wish you could tear off your skin and let him escape. But you can’t. And there’s nothing you can do to silence him. Nothing at all. There are things that you think will help you. Wicked, beautiful things. Sex. Narcotics. Alcohol. They all sing their sweet siren songs to you, hoping you don’t recognize the evil underneath. They are a temptress, promising to alleviate your pain, promising you a soft, warm hug. They promise you the world. And they deliver. They always keep their promise. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a few hours, they let you be taken by the undertow. That’s why you keep going back. Because they don’t lie. And because the next day the guilt has multiplied. You’re an even worse person than you were before, as if that was even possible. As if the hate inside you for yourself could ever deepen. But it does. Again and again. Day in and day out. And there’s only one way to get through it. To dull the pain. Mask the sorrow. Numb the hate. You do it to yourself again. Until it’s the rest of your life. But I don’t want it to be the rest of my life. Because

How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow) 1. Appreciate happiness when it is there 2. Sip, don’t gulp. 3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more. 4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics. 5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers. 6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.” 7. Listen more than you talk. 8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful. 9. Be aware that you are breathing. 10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind. 11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you. 12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga. 13. Shower before noon. 14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself. 15. Be kind. 16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim. 17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction. 18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen. 19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen. 20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.) 21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”. 22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls. 23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication. 24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through. 25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end. 26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people. 27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” 28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point. 29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful. 30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive. 31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life. 32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects. 33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.

He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price.

We have a crisis in this nation, and it has nothing to do with regulatory reform or marginal tax rates. This book is not going to be about politics. (Sorry to disappoint.) It’s about something deeper and more meaningful. Something a little harder to quantify but a lot more personal. Despite the astonishing medical advances and technological leaps of recent years, average life span is in decline in America for the third year in a row. This is the first time our nation has had even a two-year drop in life expectancy since 1962—when the cause was an influenza epidemic. Normally, declines in life expectancy are due to something big like that—a war, or the return of a dormant disease. But what’s the “big thing” going on in America now? What’s killing all these people? The 2016 data point to three culprits: Alzheimer’s, suicides, and unintentional injuries—a category that includes drug and alcohol–related deaths. Two years ago, 63,632 people died of overdoses. That’s 11,000 more than the previous year, and it’s more than the number of Americans killed during the entire twenty-year Vietnam War. It’s almost twice the number killed in automobile accidents annually, which had been the leading American killer for decades. In 2016, there were 45,000 suicides, a thirty-year high—and the sobering climb shows no signs of abating: the percentage of young people hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and actions has doubled over the past decade.1 We’re killing ourselves, both on purpose and accidentally. These aren’t deaths from famine, or poverty, or war. We’re literally dying of despair.

The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were being shown through the campus. The Regents were the supreme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manufacturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the president was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bankers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson's dissecting-table, with his derby hat reverently held behind him, and into that hat Clif dropped a pancreas. Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker's hat. Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Winnemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker's hat, and he demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and confess. Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He growled, "This is outrageous! I'm going to expose Clawson, even if he is a frat-brother of mine." Martin protested, "Cut it out. You don't want to get him fired?" "He ought to be!" Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested, "Will you kindly shut up?" and, as Ira subsided, Angus became to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.

Why Does He Do That? That's the number one question, isn't it? Maybe it's his drinking, you say. Maybe it's his learning disabilities. It's his job; he hates it. He's stressed. I think he's bipolar. It's his mother's fault; she spoiled him rotten. It's the drugs. If only he didn't use. It's his temper. He's selfish. It's the pornography; he's obsessed. The list could go on and on. You could spend many years trying to pinpoint it and never get a definite answer. The fact is, many people have these problems and they aren't abusive. Just because someone is an alcoholic doesn't mean he is abusive. Men hate their jobs all the time and aren't abusive. Bipolar? Okay. Stressed? Who isn't! Do you see where I am going with this? Off the subject a bit, when someone commits a violent crime, they always report in the news about his possible motive. As human beings, we need to somehow make sense of things. If someone murders someone, do you think it makes the family of the victim feel better to know the murderer's motive? No. Except for self-defense, there really is no excuse for murder. Motive, if there is any, is irrelevant. The same is true of abuse. You could spend your whole life going round and round trying to figure out why. The truth is, the why doesn't matter. There are only two reasons why men commit abuse—because they want to do so and because they can. You want to know why. In many ways, you might feel like you need to know. But, if you could come up with a reason or a motive, it wouldn't help you. Maybe you believe that if you did this or that differently, he wouldn't have abused you. That is faulty thinking and won't help you get better. You didn't do anything to cause the abuse. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you didn't deserve to be abused. You are the victim and it won't help you to know why he supposedly abused you. No matter what his reason, there is no excuse for abuse. You are not to blame. —Beth Praed

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon. Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.

1) The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3) He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4) He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7) He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14) He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17) He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship.

When he was braced alcoholically for his classes, there was never a passable female student that he had not considered hungrily and, properly loaded, approached. Even complaisant girls, however, either froze or fled at their professor's greedy but classical advances. An unexpected goose or pinch on the bottom as they were mounting the stairs ahead of him, a sudden nip at the earlobe as they bent over the book he offered, a wild clutch at thigh, or a Marxian (Harpo) dive at bottom, a trousered male leg thrust between theirs as they passed his seat to make them fall in his lap, where he tickled their ribs - all these abrupt overtures sent them flying in terror. Brought to his senses by their screams, Kellsey retreated hastily. Some of the more experienced girls, after adjusting their skirts, blouses, coiffures, and maidenly nerves, realized that this was only a hungry man's form of courtship. They reminded themselves that old, famous, and rich men played very funny games, and they prepared themselves for the next move. But Kellsey, repulsed, became at once the haughty, sardonic, woman-hating pedant, leaving the poor dears a confused impression that they were the ones who had behaved badly, and sometimes, baffled by his subsequent hostility and bad grades, they even apologized.

The principle thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic. In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that, for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse.

Realistically speaking, every teenaged girl spends a lot of time convinced that something is deeply, profoundly wrong with her, and I was no exception. All the world hates a girl, in special and vicious ways that goes way beyond even the mountain of shit we shovel onto young dudes. They get toxic masculinity and we get “you throw like a girl” and “scream like a girl” and “you’re such a pretty girl.” Mansplaining and creepers on BART and whistling out of car windows. I internalized the full measure of girl-hating, hating the sound of my recorded voice, the sight of my photographed face, my own body in the mirror. I hated my handwriting, the loopy letters I’d taught myself to draw when we first moved to America and I’d had to unlearn Russian and figure out the strange English glyphs all the perfect girls could write perfectly. I hated my hair and the way I walked. I hated my tits and I hated my bras. I hated my mother and I hated all the girls in the world, more than anything. Even more than boys. I don’t believe I was special in this regard. There’s a lot of self-hating girls out there in the world. We’re the secret, seething, silent majority. Some starve. Some cut. Some try to screw their way to happiness. Me, I idolized strong, powerful women who seemed to have risen above it all. Never mind that they were drunks or sadists or war criminals. They were leaning in, doin’ it for themselves, and that was what counted. Compared to being trapped in girlhood, alcoholism and war crimes were small potatoes. (less)

I set a fast pace back towards the House and their footsteps followed close behind me, punctuated with hissed fragments of conversation as they tried to figure out what to do. As we closed in on the glass building, the boy declared that he was going to seek out Darcy and left us, his feet hitting the path at a thumping pace as he ran. I ignored them both and kept going all the way back to the House, taking the stairs two at a time before striding through the common room. I received several curious glances as we passed but most people had headed to their rooms already and the look I threw the others was enough to stop them from taking photographs or asking questions. I made it to my bedroom door before Sofia caught up to me again and she was even brave enough to grab my arm to halt me. “What?” I asked, lacing my voice with a bit of threat. Sofia blanched at my tone but didn’t back down and I found myself equally surprised and impressed by the devotion of this nothing little Fae to the girl in my arms. “Why are you taking her to your room?” she demanded. “I’ve got her bag right here with her key and-” “And while she’s in this state she could lose control again and burn the whole House down,” I replied. “I’ll have to stay with her tonight until she sleeps off the alcohol you watched her consume.” There was more than a hint of accusation in my tone but the girl didn’t even flinch this time. “And that’s all you’re going to do?” Sofia demanded. “You’re not going to play some trick on her or hurt her or...” She didn’t finish that accusation but her gaze flickered to the point where my hand was gripping Roxy’s bare thigh as I held her. “I’m not a fucking rapist,” I snapped. “I can have any girl I want in my bed any night of the week, why would I want to molest an unconscious one who hates me?” Sofia backed off instantly, seeming satisfied by whatever she’d seen in my eyes as her shoulders sagged a little. “Okay, I didn’t mean to imply...just...look after her,” she said, frowning at Roxy again with concern as she passed me her bag and backed up. I made to turn away from her then an idea occurred to me. “Wait…Sofia, right?” I asked, trying to sound vaguely friendly. It wasn’t something I attempted often and the frown she gave me said I was terrible at it. “Yes…” “I er, have this… cousin. Third cousin actually, who just emerged as a Pegasus…” “Good for her. Why are you telling me this?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s a him. He’s called…Phillip.” “Phillip?” She looked at me like no one in the world was actually called Phillip and I had to admit I’d never met one. Dammit. Why did I pick that fucking name? “Yeah. Well, as you can imagine in a family of pure blooded Dragons, Phillip isn’t coping so well with the shame of-” “Shame of what?” she asked, a clear challenge in her eyes for me to dare to finish that sentence. And in hindsight implying her Order was shameful probably wasn’t the best way to get her to help me. I shifted Roxy in my arms and sighed, wondering if I should just abandon this idea. But this girl had impressed me tonight despite her weakness and I didn’t really have anyone else to ask so I barrelled on. “I’ll level with you. Me calling your Order shameful is about the closest to a compliment he’d get from a member of my family on the subject. He’s been locked in his house, hidden away from the world, his father has actually considered killing him to conceal his true nature. He’s…alone. And he could really use someone of his Order to talk to…” My throat felt tight, I didn’t know if this was a terrible idea but Xavier had sounded so broken on the phone earlier, so desperate, I just wanted to try and help him. And maybe having another Pegasus to talk to would help him see some good in what he was. (Darius POV)

So I think to myself I guess if the choice is my intolerable condition requiring a spiritual solution for living in this world, I'll take being hateful because it has me having to reach for that solution the way I once reached for a drink.

Before we get started, I need to warn you that this book is going to talk about suicide, including detailing suicidal methods. It’s going to detail experience of sexual assault. It’s also going to talk about addiction, including references to cocaine and alcohol abuse. It’s going to examine self-harm and depression. It’s going to be honest about some of the darkest things it’s possible to feel. It’s also going to (try to) be funny. I

If you find the 20% who make you 80% happier, you’ll laugh like a giggle and answer future’s riddle by letting your soul soar to defeat satan’s storm. So move mountains with enthusiasm and do not live life wrong. Don’t focus on the extrinsic — beauty, power, fame, and wealth — but focus on the intrinsic love and excitement in your heart. Don’t let drugs and alcohol slap you full of hate.

I went to the bathroom and put each hand forcefully down on opposite sides of the sink. I looked straight into the mirror before me and stared at the person I’d been ignoring for some time now. I didn’t have to say much. I already knew all this person’s demons. I shook my head in disapproval. The alcohol and hate were killing me. What they missed, the depression whittled at unrelentingly. My whole life I had been told that I didn’t look like a fisherman. All the while the only thing I wished to be was a fisherman. I screamed at the mirror in pure rage. “Do I look like a fisherman now?” “Dooooo IIIIIIIIII looook like a fucking fisherman now!!!” “Do I?

Popular products from the tech boom— including violent and sexist video games that a generation of children has become addicted to—are designed with little to no input from women. Apple’s first version of its highly touted health application could track your blood-alcohol level but not menstruation. Everything from plus-sized smartphones to artificial hearts have been built at a size better suited to male anatomy. Facial recognition technology works far more accurately for white men than darker-skinned women. Social media platforms are hotbeds of online hate disproportionately targeted at girls and women, not simply because some humans are downright mean, but because of how men have designed the very systems that allow this hate to propagate. The exclusion of women matters—not just to job seekers, but to all of us.

When you are an empty vessel. People will fill you up with their own things. You will be full of nonsense. They will fill you with hate, rumors, fear, drugs, alcohol, negative thoughts, delusion, doubts, self-hate, bad thoughts, bad behavior, bad thinking, ill-discipline, disrespect, depression, stress, confusion, rage, misinformation and lies. You will take and believe everything they say because you are empty. You will be easy manipulated, mislead or misguided. Fill yourself first with knowledge, understanding , information, education, skills, care, awareness, and love. So that they won't have space to fill you with their nonsense. Not knowing is dangerous because you always make wrong decisions and say the wrong things. Don’t stop, reject, or refuse to learn.

family background of someone with BPD is often marked by alcoholism, depression, and emotional disturbances. A borderline childhood is frequently a desolate battlefield, scarred with the debris of indifferent, rejecting, or absent parents, emotional deprivation, and chronic abuse.

I don’t hate you as much tonight,” I whisper. “It’s the alcohol. Don’t worry, you’ll despise me again tomorrow.

Liza hated alcoholic liquors with an iron zeal. Drinking alcohol in any form she regarded as a crime against a properly outraged deity. Not only would she not touch it herself, but she resisted its enjoyment by anyone else. The result naturally was that her husband Samuel and all her children had a good lusty love for a drink.

...for drink makes me miserable, and I hate drinking, and there's nothing left for me to do except get drunk.

...for drink makes me miserable, and I hate drinking, and there's nothing left for me to do except get drunk.

Thank God for alcohol since I kind of hate flying. Except for the part where it takes you someplace entirely new. That part I love.

Not a secure ward; I was free to leave whenever I wanted, and that was important. Because anyone can avoid drugs and alcohol if there’s a lock on the door stopping you getting to them. That’s not recovery, that’s escapology.

Learning to like something new takes longer than you’d think, however. Your brain doesn’t see it as important information if it doesn’t trigger your happy chemicals. And new things are hard to focus on because the neurons don’t fire easily. Here’s a simple example. Fred wants to drink less alcohol. He decides to substitute a new pleasure with fewer side effects. He looks around for something that can grow on him and remembers how he enjoyed sketching when he was young. He resolves to take out his sketch pad every time he feels like drinking. Fred doesn’t actually feel like sketching when he longs for a drink. And once he starts sketching, he doesn’t feel fabulous. So he accepts that he will live with bad feelings for a while. He plans to do this for two months because he has a big event on the calendar then. At first, he finds it hard. He hates his sketches and he hates the feeling he gets when he doesn’t drink. But he sticks to his goal of repeating the strategy whether it feels good immediately or not. After a while, Fred learns to see the sketching time as a gift he’s given himself rather than an extra burden on his already hard life. He learns that his unhappy feelings pass without killing him, and once they’ve passed, he discovers the pleasure of being alert and responsible. Before the two months is over, he stops looking at the calendar. His sketching circuit has grown as big as his alcohol circuit.Now, he’s a healthy person with a fun hobby and a cool skill, not a person at war with himself

ridding the body of the demon does not completely sever the ties between the host and the demon. Once the demon has consumed you, it is easier to return to that dark place. It is likened to being a recovering alcoholic. Every day you must resist the temptation toward anger, rage, bitterness, hate…all these things can actually feel good. Every day is another victory.

People came in search of alcohol and food and the illusion that if you combined alcohol and food, they added up to meaning.

How I ran my home, I don’t know. I went on, realizing what I was becoming, hating myself for it, bitter, blaming life, blaming everything but the fact that I should turn about and do something about my drinking. Finally

Someone nudged her elbow, interrupting her reverie. “Hello? Anyone there?” The question came from Rylann’s roommate, Rae Mendoza, who was seated at her right. “I’m here. Just…picturing myself at the pool.” Rylann tried to hold on to the mirage for a few moments longer. “It’s sunny and seventy-five degrees. I’ve got some kind of tropical drink with one of those little umbrellas in it, and I’m reading a book—one I don’t have to highlight or outline in the margins.” “They make those kinds of books?” “If memory serves..." “I hate to burst the bubble on your daydream, but I’m pretty sure they don’t allow alcoholic drinks at IMPE,” Rae said, referring to the university’s Intramural Physical Education building, which housed said pool. Rylann waved off such pesky details. “I’ll throw a mai tai in my College of Law thermos and tell people that it’s iced tea. If campus security gives me any trouble, I’ll scare them off with my quasi-legal credentials and remind them of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures.” “Wow. Do you know how big of a law school geek you just sounded like?” Unfortunately, she did. “Do you think any of us will ever be normal again?” Rae considered this. “I’m told that somewhere around third year, we lose the urge to cite the Constitution in everyday conversation.” “That’s promising,” Rylann said. “But seeing how you’re more of a law geek than most, it might take you longer.” “Remember that conversation last night when I said I was going to miss you this summer? I take it back

Although I hate to read publicly, I began to get addicted to speaking publicly. For a grandiose opportunist like myself, AA can become a nifty little public speaking venue. As a professional comedian, I would often go for the laugh rather than honesty and growth. I began to chase the laughs with the same vigor and enthusiasm that I used to chase drugs and alcohol.

knew that alcohol and I had to part. I couldn’t live with it anymore. And yet, how was I going to live without it? I didn’t know. I was bitter, living in hate.

But that, I am afraid, was my mistake from the very beginning, the fatal flaw in my design. I thought that I could suffocate the Old Man with shovelfuls of dirt and mud. But with his body in the soil, in the specific silt of this family's land, everything on it was bound to die. Rancor seeped from his eyelids, his mouth, his ears, his ass, where his head had been all the days of his life. I should have never made him one with the land. I should have thrown his body into the sea, expelled it and not me. My anger keeps me digging into the earth, pulling at its protective mantle, eager to see his body decaying deep inside. The Old Man has refused to cooperate. His body is wholly intact. Years of alcohol can do that to a person, make him dead but not departed, make him indelible to those who have had the misfortune of sharing his name. Pickled and preserved is another way of thinking about it. All the water that is normally found inside a body had been in his displaced by alcohol, of a proof strong enough to kill anything that comes in contact with it. The tiny animals, the grubs, the worms that help to bring about the decomposition of the body before it can be returned to the earth, had with him no hope of doing their work. So they left him alone, left his hate to poison the land, a process so gradual, so obedient to this still functioning will, that it would take my lifetime to complete. If I had a son, it might take his lifetime as well. This is as close to being immortal as the Old Man ever had the right to be, and I am the one, the only one who keeps him that way.