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Bisexuality – Passion or Addiction

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2016-03-26_0931Now that our relationship hurts and pains are under control, we can get back to gender and sexual orientation issues. In the past, those hurts and pains may have led to compulsive or even addictive sexual behaviors. All forms of compulsion and addiction are destructive and filled with negative energy. We have to turn that energy to the positive side; we have to go from destructive compulsions and behaviors to instructive mental and heart-based patterns.  That means turning addiction into passion.

To do this we first have to understand or become conscious of compulsion and addiction. The best source of information that I have found on this topic is a book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate[1]. Even though his main focus is drug addiction, he also applies his theories to behavioral patterns, including some sections on sexual addiction. If you have similar experiences as I have had, you will feel these words hitting home:

“People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit — not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of a mate, of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying.”

“I (Alvin) get a high of some sort. Which lasts about three to five minutes (in our case, an hour or two), and then…you say to yourself, ‘Why did I do that?’ But then it’s too late. Something makes you keep doing it, and that’s what’s called addition.” [2]

“Cocaine (or in our case, sexual addiction), as we shall see, exerts its euphoric effect by increasing the availability of the reward chemical dopamine in key brain circuits, and this is necessary for motivation and for mental and physical energy.

“He (Aubrey) feels incomplete and incompetent as a person without the drug (or in our case, gay or lesbian sex) a self-concept that has nothing to do with his real abilities and everything to do with his formative experiences  as a child…and the sense that he was a failed human being were a part and parcel of his personality before he ever touched drugs (or as in our case, engaged in gay sex).[3]

“Dr. Sigmund Freud used cocaine (or as in our case, gay or lesbian sex) ‘to control his intermittent depressed moods, improve his general sense of well-being, help him to relax in intense social encounters, and just make him feel more like a man’.”[4]

Let’s put these quotes together and apply them directly to compulsive or addictive sex.

First of all, for bisexual men and women, this usually means a heterosexual primary relationship with a desire to engage in same-sex encounters and relationships.  Usually these sexual adventures have some degree of guilt and shame, or at the least, a sense that we are doing something that is not quite right. However, we are driven by our own desires to seek a deeper sexual experience that can give us a rush (dopamine drive) and to fill a kind of emptiness inside that seems to always be there just below the surface.  At times, when we feel down or trapped, these desires rise to the surface demanding a stimulus that can break us out of the blah mood.  When we engage in gay or lesbian sex, we feel the dopamine rush that leads to an opiate response (intense pleasure) and a hormonal drive (a mix of testosterone or estrogen and oxytocin). Throw in an Adrenalin rush because we feel we are walking into forbidden territory, and we have a powerful rush equivalent to a combined shot of ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. After a few encounters we are hooked on the rush provided by our own body chemicals. We become addicted.

At this point, we are caught in a dilemma: we need the rush to survive, but we feel obligated to our partner to stay in a monogamous relationship. Enter guilt and shame.  We now create a cycle of drive and withdrawal.  Our depressed desires become a major part of the feelings that trigger a compulsion for another same-sex encounter.  We now are aware of the possible consequences of our sexual behavior but we feel powerless to stop. The power of the relationship with our spouse or partner begins to fade, and we become more and more addicted. Eventually, we realize we can no longer control the behavior, but we feel we have to get out of the relationship because we cannot deal with the dishonesty and shame. If we are brave enough, we come out to our partner with a willingness to live with the consequences.  If we are not brave enough, we get careless hoping the spouse will discover our behavior and make the decision for us.

At the bottom of all this, there is usually a root cause that goes back to a traumatic event or wound suffered during early childhood. In other words, we were an addiction just waiting to happen.  This brings us back to the inner healing which we have discussed in the previous blogs.  If the wounds of the past have now been healed, the key now is to become conscious of the addictive behavior, detach the thought and behavior patterns from the root cause, and consciously reattach them to positive circuitry.  In other words,we take control of our own behavior. We are honest with ourselves and our partners, and we make the decisions that will be best for both of us. We are now free to change addiction to passion and begin to enjoy our sexual bodies without shame, guilt, and compulsion. More on that in the next blog.

[1] Mate, Gabor. In the Realm of Hingry Ghosts. Knopf Canada, 2010.

[2] Mate, page 31.

[3] Mate, page 40.

[4] Gay, Peter. Freud a Life for our Time. W.W. Norton, 1998. (page 444).

Fathers’s Day and Bisexuality

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cc01c6b7-a6fb-44c2-90ac-256d0b2874e8 (2)When I burned the contract with my ex-wife, I realized that our family life as I knew it was also over forever. My ex-wife and I had created a family, loving two beautiful babies into existence, and adopting two beautiful, equally-loved children. They had all been a part of the contract. By burning the contract with her, I was also burning my contract with them. It meant that I could never go back to things the way they were.

Contracts with spouses involve contracts with children, making it very painful to burn the family contract, especially for men who are usually the ones that have to walk away from the home where our children live and breathe. This involves huge amounts of grief and guilt.  We have to realize that in a situation where love has been replaced by mere duty and loss of passion and drive, we no longer have anything to offer within that relationship; in fact, we may be doing more harm than good. Children absorb emotion like sponges; it affects their neural pathways.  If there is anger or resentment, they will absorb it and not be able to process it consciously, so it will get buried in their subconscious and come out as negative feelings and behaviors. Even if we continue to live together, but without love, they will also absorb the broken bond and harbor their own feelings of brokenness.

The key is to make a clean break while reassuring the children that they are still loved by each parent, and that the parents have made a conscious decision to live apart, but to still cooperate and be true to the bond each of them has made to the children. It will hurt for a while but they will adjust. It is also important for them to see the parents together from time to time as friends with no animosity or bitterness.

If you are a bisexual, and that is the main reason for the break-up, do not burden the children with this information until they are ready to accept what you have to say. This is the domain of the bisexual parent. The straight parent should never expose the children to this information; however if he/she does, simply explain your situation with information as needed, free of the bitterness of the unwanted exposure. Obey the golden rule, you never blame the other parent. Remember you are the adult and you give them just the amount of information needed so that they can understand that you still love them and they are not responsible for your choices. If you are in a new same-sex relationship, the same thing applies. Do not flaunt your sexual freedom; do not expose the children to situations they may not be able to handle. If they ask questions, just give them the information they seem to be asking for.  Be brief and to the point and compassionate.

My situation was different; I had adult children. As a parent I had set up contracts with them that I insisted they observe. Now that they were adults, they had developed contracts with me that they insisted I observe. My ex-wife had broken the golden rule, disclosing my bisexuality to my children.  At first, they were shocked and critical, even advising their mother to leave. This family conference without me was the most painful experience in my entire life. I could no longer bear the sense of shame, betrayal, and guilt; I had to burn those contracts. I wrote them up and placed them in the fireplace. It hurt like hell to watch them burn. As I watched the contracts disintegrate into red sparks, I visualized the comforting power of my spirit flooding my soul with a pure white light. The last obstacle had been removed. I set about to restore relationships with my family. My children were gracious and welcomed me back immediately.

This concludes my section on inner healing. I still have issues related to my wounded ego, but I have abolished the contracts that my ego had used to give me a sense of purpose and being. There are no more contracts to control me; I am free to be myself.  The energy released by burning the contracts of hurt and pain has become the white light that has helped me see life more clearly. I now can see the “I” that was always present and can simply let it  take over by an act of my will. Recognizing, accepting, and loving the “I” was the moment of the healing of my personality disorder. This allowed me to be compassionate, honest, and understanding with my Self.  As I continue to experience the truths of life, it helps me understand and feel compassion for people who are going through similar experiences. My understanding and the subsequent acts of compassion have become an energy source that can bring healing to others, especially my children, and a joy to my own soul.

Bisexuality, the Heart, and Ex’s

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2016-03-26_0931This is the third in a series of blogs dealing with deep inner healing. I know this may sound like my idea of the quick fix, and I apologise for that.  There is no quick fix.  Our memories are scattered bits of words, images and feelings that can be and will be triggered for the rest of our lives.  The key is to disconnect them from the pathways that lead to pain and rewire them to positive feelings – to go from worthlessness to worthiness, self-hate to self-love, and yes, even from pain to joy. This is an on-going process that sometimes takes a lifetime

In the last two blogs, we looked at relationships with parents; today we will look at ex-spouses. When I started burning my contracts, I kept the most difficult for last, my ex-wife. I believe the relationship with an ex-spouse, especially the first spouse, the other parent of our children, is held together by strong oxytocin bonds connected by that first innocent passionate love and reinforced through the birthing of children. When the raw passion recedes, we have to move on to heart to heart love or the bond begins to die and be replaced by a set of self-centered and self-serving expectations that are suffocating and eventually may prove fatal. This is the contract.  Once the bond is broken, it is broken, yet we persist. But it is not love that holds us together at the end, it is the contract.

In my own story, I had sacrificed all my own wants and desires believing that it would please her and force her to keep on loving me. I had become a shell of a man who hated himself and had embarked on a course of self-destruction. By being untrue to my Self, I had built up a massive body of unconscious resentment. I resented the contract with my ex-wife that led me to sacrifice my Self, my sexual orientation, my career choices, and even my family, on the altar of our marriage. These resentments had burst forth in gay sexual encounters as a way of escaping the pain and emptiness, placing the blame on her, and striking out against her. But in my unconscious state, the only person I was destroying was my Self.

When the man she had fallen in love with disappeared, she too had held on to the contract.  When I had failed to keep my end of the bargain, it was the end of the marriage. She burned her half of the contract. When the marriage ended, I felt I was a hopeless failure. I kept this feeling of failure buried deep within my soul. Even after two years, I was still holding on to my half of the contract, believing it was the one thing that could save me from myself. I finally came to the point of accepting that the reconciliation was not going to happen; in fact, I finally understood that I could not even let it happen, because it would destroy what was left of me. I also understood why I had let the gay encounters happen; I had subconsciously forced myself out of my poisoned contractual relationship before it literally killed me. I had to burn the contract. But I realized that there was still some good there – good times, good memories, and that she was still the wonderful girl I had fallen in love with. I had to do it as an act of love for myself and for her. It took one whole sixteen hour day to write the contract. It was necessary for me to lovingly go through each positive and negative item of this contract so that I could see, remember and weep for the things I had enjoyed and lost while burning the guilt and failure.

I lit the fire and watched the written contract burn in the real fireplace as I visualized it being consumed by spiritual flames in the spiritual fireplace I had built inside my inner room. As I watched the last disintegrating pieces float up the chimney and out into the open sky, I felt the weight and guilt of having failed her lift off my shoulders. Then it all became clear. There was no failure. A marriage that dissolves is not a failure; it is merely an accepting that the bond has broken and that both need to move on in order to survive and thrive. There was no more shame; my sexual orientation was a powerful part of my body and the basic foundations of my mind.  It simply demanded to be expressed; it was okay to accept these urges and enjoy the sensations of my body. There was no more guilt; I had done the best I could under the circumstances. I had held on for thirty-three years and kept my family together free of the knowledge of the struggles I was experiencing until all my children were well established adults. I did not have to apologize to anyone or forgive anyone, particularly myself and my ex-wife. It was just a matter of being conscious of the truth of the situation and then moving on to a more wholesome life.

As the last black fragments of the contract disintegrated into the final spark that floated up the chimney, the old me departed. It left a hollow feeling behind, but I was ready to begin again. I was ready to love again, perhaps really love for the first time. I was now free to be me, to enjoy wholesome relationships with men and/or women, and to reconnect with all the people I had loved, with all the people who had tried to love me   But his time it would be as an honest man, free of guilt and shame, I would be true to my Self.  I would just be ME.

The Heart and Abuse

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2016-03-26_0931I would like to address a comment I received regarding the ending of my last blog. What do we do if we do not have a parent who truly loves us, and in some cases may have inflicted physical or sexual abuse? For healing to take place, we have to somehow find some aspect of love from our parents or at least a reason to love them even though we cannot feel being loved. Remember love is the only emotion powerful enough to overcome deep inner pain. I believe that if we dig down deep enough we will find some aspect of love from our mother even if it was just a weak and painful connection buried beneath neglect and abandonment. With parents who do not love or who inflict severe damage through abuse, this becomes a very difficult but not impossible journey. In this case we have to find a reason to forgive.

 

The best visualization for this process I believe comes from modern views on reincarnation. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter. It is the visualization that is important. According to spiritual teachers we are eternal souls who keep coming back to Earth to seek opportunities to grow. Part of that process is the planning session where we plot out our lives so that we can experience certain trials and hurts that do not exist in the eternal world. As part of the plan, we call on souls who are part of our circle of eternal souls that we associate with through various lives. We ask them to take on certain roles so that we can achieve our goals. We count on souls who are mature and close for the difficult roles like abusive fathers and mothers because these roles are very difficult for loving souls to play. These roles are acts of love.

 

When we enter our present life, all memories of our eternal souls are erased and we have to struggle on through our preplanned trials until we come to a sense of awareness of who we really are, powerful beings filled with beauty and light. During this stage of awareness, we begin to sense the other souls in our life as spiritual beings, not at the physical level, or even conscious level, but as a vibration between our souls. At this point we can forgive and receive the love they have sent us by playing their roles for us. Now, if you have no other reason to love and forgive, I highly recommend this process as a healing of the inner soul, as a healing of the heart.

 

Of course there is therapy, which I highly recommend. But the therapy cannot just be used to dig into the past; this will accomplish nothing but reinforce the negative neural pathways. It has to somehow connect to love for self and to a reaching out to the abusive parent to reshape the bond so that we can feel some form of love. We will never understand their behavior but we can simply acknowledge it as a painful flaw in their personality, probably as a result of a deep wound they have themselves received physically, psychologically, and neurologically as young children. They may have made really bad choices, but they were probably responding to powerful destructive pathways within their own mind and brain. We have to acknowledge their pain and try to empathize with them, which is the first step to love.

 

We then forgive and turn to find the love we need within ourselves. We can begin to praise the inner spirit which has survived the abuse, and the courage of our own heart which keeps on caring and searching for love. We have to fill that need for love from our own heart.

Unfortunately, because of the abuse, the heart is wounded and may not be able to do this. This is where the second visualization takes place. It is the higher power that works so well in AA. Whether you believe or not in a god based on traditional religions does not matter; in fact, it may be detrimental as most tend to be male dominated and may be linked to feelings of abuse. You simply have to believe in a power, which spiritual teachers refer to as a universal spirit of life. You have to see the divine design in things and the beauty of life which we can sense when we are quiet and open up our own souls through the powers of awareness and mindfulness. We then join ourselves to this divine presence believing it to be the source of good which we can experience in our pleasure systems, thereby releasing our own opiate, the endorphins. This is the emotional feeling that we refer to as love. We can sense our Self becoming a part of this flow of universal love. We do not have to believe in any god, just open our hearts to sense a presence of peace and beauty.

 

After we begin to experience this presence we can begin to use the love power within to heal. When the old feelings return and the old images try to occupy our mind we simply take these five steps:

 

  1. Acknowledge the feeling, and replace it with your memory pathways of universal love.
  2. Acknowledge the abuser, but gently inform the image that it no longer has any power of over you.
  3. Forgive the abuser and thank the abuser for playing the role that has helped set you on the path to becoming a powerful spiritual human being.
  4. Close the door (you can visualize an actual door) to these memories and open the door to universal love. Walk through it and feel the power of universal love.
  5. Give yourself a hug.

 

We have to love ourselves. I could write books on how to go about this process and of course hundreds have already been written. But it is your own book, your own story that matters. Deep within yourself you have the power to do this, and deep within yourself you have the knowledge. Be patient with yourself. Acknowledge your pain but connect it with the positive from within and without. Seek a friend who really cares and share your feelings, and end each session with a hug. Acknowledge, accept, and embrace the truth: you are no longer a victim; you are a powerful, beautiful human being.

 

Bisexuality and Contracts with Parents

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2016-03-26_0931

In the last blog, we looked at gift giving as a heart-based visualization process for changing negative feelings to positive. With the people closest to my heart, gift giving did not work; the pain and sorrow kept coming back over and over again regardless of how many gifts I gave them. My heart was broken. When it came to these relationships, I had to seek another way of healing my ego so that my heart would be free to command and heal the core of my wounded inner soul.
Pain from powerful bonded relationships involve huge neural constructs containing intense emotions and feelings. They form a complex safety net of rules and regulations agreed upon and imposed on each other by our fragile egos. These constructs can become unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. We can become hooked into expectations and roles that we play for each other rather than being true to our inner self. When we allow our egos to control our relationships and our sexual orientation, we create impediments for the heart. Our relationships can become twisted and destructive. This often leads to thought and behavior patterns involving deception, evasiveness, mistrust and disappointment. The ego then becomes desperate in trying to resolve these issues and maintain these relationships that have become part of our wounded identity. We have to burn the contracts that we have made with people we love through our egos, so that we can be free to love each other unconditionally from the heart.
In a healthy person with healthy relationships, the heart is in control and can allow the ones it loves to enter and leave according to its own wants and needs. We do not want to remove our parents, spouses, and children from our inner souls but we do not want them to stay there all the time as part of our identity. We want them to come and go in positive interactions so that both our souls can be enriched by each other’s presence. If we can remove the pain-filled patterns, we can continue to experience them and their precious gifts inside our inner soul, not as part of our identity, but as part of our network of love. We need to be free to live our own lives, to come and go out of each other’s inner room by mutual consent, so that we enrich each other’s lives.
Contracts with parents evolve naturally with the development of family roles and responsibilities. They seem to become a part of our identity and sense of self. Any attempt to alter these contracts will be met with fierce resistance. One of my prime contracts had been with my mother. I had never experienced my mother’s unconditional love. According to the contract I had written, if I was the perfect son she would have to love me. However, she, too, had a badly wounded soul. She was a single-parent mother with nine children and a husband who had abandoned her before I was born. She could not fulfill the expectations of my contract.
During my year in Costa Rica, sitting on my patio on my volcanic mountain, I went over all the aspects of my relationship with her. I wrote up all the benefits that I had enjoyed from our contract and thanked her for each one. I then looked at all the negative aspects, including her twisted view of sex as “the real apple” (poor Eve), and her attempt to push me towards becoming a priest. I tried to see the reasons for each clause, acknowledged that she had done the best she could, then thanked her for trying to do her best for me as she saw fit as a mother.
I then examined the role my mother had played genetically and socially in shaping my bisexual orientation and then thanked her for that gift. In the process, I realized that I had tried to hide my orientation from her and that a large part of my shame was feeling that I had disappointed of even betrayed her. I then forgave myself and acknowledged the heroic struggle I had gone through to be true to her while being true to myself. I then dealt with my role in the contract and realized that I too had done the best I could under the circumstances. After bringing the contract to the conscious level, I realized that I had outgrown it; I no longer needed the security it had provided. I was even able to thank my ego for the contract realizing that it had been necessary for me to survive.Then I burned the written contract in a real fireplace as well as the visualized contract in the fireplace I had created in my inner room. As I watched the last sparks fade out, I felt a quiet peace flood my soul.
But there was still something missing; my heart was still not involved. Now that the contract was gone, I had no platform on which to rebuild my love for my mother. Now that the false self with its false identity was gone, my heart seemed lost and confused. During the summer in Canada after my first year in Costa Rica, I consulted a spiritual therapist. She put me in a state of relaxed consciousness through hypnosis. She took me back to that moment just after my birth when I lay nestled in my mother’s arms. It was not until that moment that I felt just how much my mother had loved me. My mother had died four years ago, before my mental crash. I had not shed a tear. I visited her grave. I sat there until I finally felt that bond that I had never known, but had always existed. And then the tears finally began to flow. I stayed there all afternoon, just receiving my mother’s love and loving her back with powerful sobs of grief mixed with joy. I wept for all the moments we had had and yet did not have.
I let this love for her and from her flow into my inner sanctuary and heal the broken heart of the child within. While I allowed myself to grieve, my heart led me to the truth which had always been there. I suddenly realized that my mother and I had always been connected through the power of love, but our damaged egos had prevented us from immersing ourselves in that love. I realized that our love bond was real, had always been real, and was still real. I now know that my mother and I have always been, and always will be, connected through the power of love. My connection with her is different now, but it is still very much alive. The love between a mother and her son knows no boundaries, not even death.

 

 

Bisexuality, the Heart, and Gift Giving

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2016-03-26_0931It is very difficult to live a thriving spiritual and emotional bisexual life with a wounded soul.  Yes, we can try to stay in the moment, but our ego-minds keep dragging us back to past wounds and fears. To live a victorious life we have to come to terms with the ego part of our soul. This means trusting the heart and using its love power to heal the bisexual mind.

I searched my soul and began to trust the feelings from my heart. I knew these feeling would lead me to the true path where I could find peace and understanding. But to get to that place, I would have to retrace my steps one more time, but this time with the creative powers of self-love in stead of the destructive powers of self-hate. This meant going back into my core relationships and into the heart of my wounded inner child. It also meant going right back to my biological make-up, my sense of identity, and my bisexual orientation, and reconnecting these thoughts and feelings through unconditional positive regard for my Self..

 

During my two years in Costa Rica, surrounded by peace and beauty, I stopped hating myself and began the healing process which immediately focused on my past relationships. I came across this image of gift giving. I did not want to destroy the thoughts, images, and feelings connected to the people I had loved; I just wanted the pain part to go away. I still wanted to give them the gift of my love and receive the gift of their love. I needed to separate the good parts from the bad; I had to destroy the connections to pain.

 

One of the most powerful tools of healing is imagery. Imagery bypasses the thought processing part of the brain and gets us directly in touch with our feelings. One of the best strategies of imagery that I have found is gift giving. Most of our struggles are related to past and present relationships.  I believe we can best rewire negative social patterns to positive ones by accepting the contributions people have made to life as it is and by thanking them for their gifts and by giving them gifts in return.

In my opinion, there seems to be two sides to each relationship, the negative and the positive. I feel we have to recognize that both are gifts, even the negative. When we allow our feelings of love to mingle with the emotions of rejection and abandonment, we can reroute the fears and hurts of the ego into the positive feelings of acceptance and gratitude from the heart. We simply acknowledge the people involved and thank them for the good gifts they have brought into our lives. Then we examine the negative influences they still have on us, wrap them up into a second gift, and place it on an altar we have prepared just outside the spiritual room we can visualize and create in our soul. We then call on the fire of passion from the heart to burn it up and blow it away. We can visualize the negative vapors dispersing into the gentle summer wind that blows continuously in the spiritual garden just outside the inner room. We need to visualize the burning of negative constructs as an act of kindness, a gift to the people involved, because it frees their souls from the negative bonds we have created.

As we do this a miracle takes place. We begin to become conscious of the fact that we had done our best under the circumstances.  We begin to see patterns of behavior that we had established to survive.  Then we begin to understand that these patterns involved others who may have unintentionally wounded us, especially during the early childhood developmental years when we were innocent and vulnerable. We become more understanding, patient, and even loving with our Self.  We give ourselves credit for having done a remarkable job just to survive.

After giving gifts to some people with whom I had had more intense, intimate relationships, I could almost sense a release of their pain and confusion. I realized that I too had given them gifts, some good gifts from my heart and some bad gifts from my wounded ego. As my ex-wife said to me ten years later, the break-up and dealing with the truths of my secrecy and deception had made her a stronger person.  At that moment, I stopped feeling guilt and shame.  I realized that we were just two souls trying to thrive and grow and that for thirty-three years we had helped each other become powerful human beings. I also realized that our parting, painful as it was, was also a necessary part in that path to self-awareness and Self -actualization, which for me meant accepting and cherishing the gay part of my bisexual orientation. We are now friends once again and we have  rededicated ourselves to working together to make the lives of our adult children and our grandchildren just a little bit easier and a little bit better.

 

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2016-03-26_0931The key to living from “the heart” is to love your Self, the real you.  To do this you have to put aside the self-hate and recognize and embrace the perfect and beautiful soul that you really are. The heart longs to do that; it is the natural state of the heart to love the Self.  When the heart is functioning as it is meant to be, it engages in true love, first for the Self and then for others. John Steinbeck in his collection of thoughts from A Life in Letters, captured this love beautifully:

 “There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had…..Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it”[1].

But this is easier said than done. After years of practicing self- hate, we have built up huge neural pathways focused on our perceived failures to live up to some impossible standards. When we apply these standards to our bisexuality, self-hate gets tangled up with sex and takes on the added power of our hormonal sexual energy which is aimed at disgust for our sexual behavior. We have to refire and rewire those self-hate pathways into self -love ones.  We have to separate ego based behaviour from the longings of the heart.  The heart has no hate for the Self.  It is not concerned with our sexual behavior, at least not in a moralistic sense, but it does seek to turn sexual behavior into love. Love of self and love for others is something that needs to be developed over time, until it becomes an art. Again, from John Steinbeck:

“The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering….I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.” 

In other words you have to focus all the energy you use in hating yourself into loving yourself.  You must balance every self-hate statement and feeling with an abundance of positive self-love statements and feelings.

Let’s start off with an easy exercise in the art of self-love. For years I could not make eye-contact with myself in the mirror.  When I engaged in cross-dressing,  and saw myself from my feminine side, it was different.  I could make eye contact, saw that I was okay and  told myself that I was beautiful. But I hated my masculine side. I was ashamed because I felt I was not the man I wanted to be.  I finally overcame that by starting off each morning with a good stare into the mirror until I could feel positive about myself.  Sometimes this took awhile and with a lot of head talk to convince myself that I really did like the person I was. I would end this session by telling myself that I loved myself just the way I was and I was proud of myself for fighting the good fight and then whatever else it was that I could find to say to myself to convince myself that I loved ME.  Try this for the next week.  It really works.  We will go on into the art of love in the next blog.

[1] Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library). Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter, A Life in Letters. www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/12/john-steinbeck-on-love-1958/

 

 

The Bisexual Heart

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual EducationLeave a comment

2016-03-26_0931(Before we start this blog, a brief explanation: self refers to the ego self, whereas Self with a “capital S” refers to the soul Self.)

With this knowledge of the ego and the mental issues we face as bisexuals behind us, we can now look at the solutions and beyond to how we can not only survive but actually thrive as bisexuals. That means we leave the ego and all its issues behind and enter into the realm of the heart. I believe that the soul is more than just a function of the body, the brain, and the ego. The functions of the ego can be explained by brain structure and neural pathways, but our desires, feelings, and behaviors related to those feelings, seem to go beyond the basic foundations of the mind. That takes us to the heart. The heart is that part of the soul that lets us sense and create a higher view of life, reality, and truth. The heart appears to be the inner sense of being which operates by feelings rather than thoughts. Feelings are different than thoughts and emotions. Emotions arise from our thoughts, basic drives, and the anxieties of the ego, but feelings are the unspoken words of the soul.

The ego and the gut direct the self towards self-actualization with the emphasis on the self. The gut seeks pleasure, and the ego seeks harmony, peace and self-centered happiness.  Normally, these are great things and lead to purpose and contentment.  However, as bisexuals, we often live double lives that make it very difficult to find peace and harmony thereby throwing the ego into a state of anxiety. On the other hand, the heart seeks mutual unconditional joy and love with others. Through the guiding power of love, the heart creates heart-values which are the unconditional worth we place on living things, ideas, and people. The bisexual heart needs to function in connection with others and the seeking of a greater good. Guided by the heart, the bisexual soul creates dreams and goals that it hopes will lead to good feelings and the path of love.  By experiencing love from life and others, it is able to increase its love for Self, leading to ever greater levels of Self-fulfillment. It is these acts of love that are the ultimate expression of the bisexual soul which keeps us rooted as whole human beings rather than just seekers of sex from our bodies and anxieties from our ego.  As bisexuals, we must let our heart guide our thoughts, emotions, feelings, and actions, and leave behind the struggles with sexuality.  That is the only way we will and learn to accept ourselves just the way we are.

But to do that we have to first heal the heart. The mental issues we face are more than a disease of the mind; they are diseases of the heart. They are based on the failure of the heart to love itself. As the soul struggles to understand and repair itself, it does not have this resource to endure the hurts of the present because of its brokenness from the past. The healing has to occur in the heart. The heart has to learn how to love itself.

 

In the next blog we will look at the nature of the broken heart and why it is necessary to be broken before we can enter into mindfulness, consciousness and Self-love.

 

Ego Disorder

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2016-03-26_0931

To help you understand the role of the ego in a bisexual man with a personality disorder with confusions in gender identification, we will turn to a case study.  Me.  Most of us bisexuals have some of these issues but experience them in different degrees.

My body was working against me. It wanted to avoid the pain; it wanted to explore all the pleasures of my senses, especially gay, erotic pleasures. It was working overtime trying to prevent me from gaining access to my mind and inner soul. Because of all the abuse and pain of my religious background, it was trying to deny the existence of the soul. It was saying, ‘”Baby, this is it. That is all there is! This is all we have to work with!” It was trying to say that everything erotic was “Okay!” It was saying, “Enjoy or die!”

I tried to justify my body-driven behaviour, but another part of my soul would not let me accept that this was the best I could do. It wanted me to move on from eroticism and find love again. Unfortunately, my ego had a personality disorder; it could not feel or give real love. My fragile inner child was lost, and alone, and tortured by feelings of detachment, rejection, and abandonment. I had to somehow dismantle these constructs, but I had nothing to replace them. I had no true foundation of my own. I lacked the one component that would allow my ego to thrive: unconditional love of the self, by the self, for the self.

My faulty beliefs were the foundation of my insecure ego. I had no self-concept; I never believed in my abilities. Anything I had accomplished, short of perfection, I viewed as failure. I did not believe I had any right to respect, because I could not respect myself. I did not believe that happiness was attainable, because every moment of happiness was linked to a foundation of pain. I ignored the feelings and desperation of my soul. I allowed my ego to be the only expression of who I was and who I thought I wanted to be. I focused on other things to believe in like family, career, and church rather than on my own wants and needs. When I crashed and these crutches were taken away, I could no longer stand up and face the world.

After my crash, I could no longer hide behind the beliefs I had borrowed; I had to build my own personal, true set of beliefs. Of course, this rebuilding process was a ludicrous proposition, because all the tools I had, by their very nature, were borrowed and conditional. I had no guiding compass of my own to guide my ship of fate through the mother of all storms.

I had never had a true social picture of myself that would allow me to relate confidently with others. I was vulnerable to their words and opinions. When I crashed, I turned to my ex-wife, friends, and church members for emotional support. I found out that I was alone. In my communication with them, and in the things I heard being said about me, it seemed that some people that I had tried to love were downright mean and nasty. They felt they had to take sides and support my ex-wife by hating me. They actually seemed to be enjoying the pain I was in.  It was the turning point, isolating me from everyone else, leaving me with the most intense pain I have ever felt. I am thankful for their cruelty, because I was able to use it to turn self-hate into righteous anger. I was able to use this anger to separate myself from my relationships. It was really my first opportunity to actually get to know and be true to my inner self.

 

What I Used to Believe

 

And what do I believe,

Now that the closet door has been smashed down,

And the tiny room has been inspected and purified,

And the ghosts that used to dwell there

Have been set loose to wander the halls of time,

Alone,

Moaning and groaning,

And bearing the cold iron chains of shame.

 

Those secret confining walls are gone,

The self-dignity built brick on brick in achievement,

That never allowed itself to hear the praises of others,

The security of a religion of rules and earned mercy

Given stingily by a god I had created,

The comfort of conditional love evaporated

With the careless madness of a moment of honesty.

These walls have all crashed around me

Leaving me exposed and naked.

The secret room is gone.

There is no comfort of darkness,

No support for what was not,

Just me and my sadness,

And a terrifying endless string

Of moments,

Upon moments,

Upon moments,

Without love.

 

The Ego and Mental Health and Wellness

Published on by Bi-Ed: Bisexual EducationLeave a comment

2016-03-26_0931Looking back at that day when I danced around my big living room in agony, the day my wife decided to leave, I recognized that there had then been something deep inside me that had said it was still not ready to give up and die. In an aha moment, I realized that I had an inner voice, a source of self still yet untapped. I decided to take another look at my forgotten soul. As I examined my knowledge of neurology, psychology, and my religious beliefs, I found it difficult to know where the tortured mind (ego) ended and the soul began. I decided to look into my soul, not with the closed dogmatic eyes of religion, or the strictly rational side of the human mind, but with an open-minded view, a carte blanche.

To heal and understand the ego, we have to first understand the soul. I believe the soul is like a mystical trinity; there is one soul, but there are three sides to it: the part of the body and brain that is sometimes referred to as the gut, the ego or the mind that is sometimes referred to as the self, and the inner soul which is often referred to as the heart. The gut appears to contain genetic memories, body memories, gender identities, and the basic functions of the brain including drives and emotions. In a healthy bisexual soul, these drives are based on surviving, thriving, and the pursuit of pleasure. In a healthy bisexual soul, the gut is safe and comfortable and at peace with its sexuality; however, in an unhealthy bisexual soul, the issues begin with the ego which interferes with the desires of the gut. In an unhealthy bisexual soul the ego fights with the gut because it believes its sexuality is a source of pain that has to be avoided at all costs.

To heal a wounded ego, we have to realize that it is not our enemy; it is actually a part of our persona and therefore a part of the soul. It is the part most vulnerable to the stresses of life.  Its role is to filter out harmful events and issues and help us remain in a state of homeostasis.  It is like a soldier on the front line that has to be monitored and supported for us to be healthy human beings. That is the role of the inner Self or what we can refer to as the heart (more on this in a future blog).

There are varying views on the ego. In some spiritual circles, it appears to be the “bad boy” of the family that works in opposition to the soul. I prefer to take a broader view; I view the ego as an essential part of the soul itself. The ego is our sense of identity, our sense of self, the rational decision-making center or our being. It is there to keep the soul grounded in the day to day realities of life.  A healthy ego uses the brain to solve problems as they arise.The ego constantly seeks that point of homeostasis where security is assured and it can pursue a path which leads to knowledge and a greater degree of purpose, contentment, and happiness.  In the process, it develops complex sets of neural pathways made up of memories and emotions that become sets of beliefs. The ego then combines these beliefs to form schema which we can refer to as attitudes and ego-based values. Beliefs, attitudes, and values manifest themselves as thought and behavior patterns which the ego then uses to deal with present situations similar to past experiences. It uses all this information to set goals to take us to self-actualization where we can function and thrive in the real world as independent human beings.  In this process, we become powerful adults who can make decisions that lead to more success and pleasure and less failure and pain.

These beliefs, attitudes, and values shape all our cognitive-social patterns. We are social creatures; we need the support of the group, and in the case of our sexuality we need to form positive, loving relationships. The ego seeks out relationships that bring positive feelings of pleasure and connection. Negative encounters, however, build a powerful body of painful memories and constructs that we can refer to as the pain body. When the decision making process of the ego is based on the pain body, it can become a vicious circle that can lead to destructive thought and behavior patterns in relationships. The key to mental health then is to assist the ego in dissolving the negative neural relationship connections in the pain body and reconnect them to positive feelings and emotions from the heart.  The ego cannot do that alone because it gets stuck in its cycle of negative thought patterns and uses the same old schema to solve the same old problems.  That’s where the heart has to step in and help build new thought patterns connected to feelings of love and appreciation instead of the old ones of hopelessness and worthlessness (to be covered in the next series of blogs).