Six and a Half Years With Pain, Opioids, and the Question of Desire

The Fall

I fell fourteen feet onto concrete. Broke more than thirty bones. Fractured my skull and three vertebrae. Bruises and contusions on top of all of it.

When I came to in the hospital, the first thing the doctor said to me was, “I don’t know why you’re alive.”

“I do, Doc,” I said. “It wasn’t my time yet.”

He looked at me with a little surprise, nodded, and said he’d get back to me later. They’d just run a series of needles down my spine — an epidural, a spinal block, trying to stop the pain receptors from firing. That’s what brought me back to consciousness. I was already on a morphine drip.

I was a recovering addict. Thirty-four years clean and sober.

They kept me in the ICU for ten days, until they discharged me because I had no insurance. The pain was insufferable. One of my sponsees picked me up and watched a grown old man cry in agony, reaching for his pills. I could see the apprehension in his eyes. Neither of us said it out loud.

It was six years later before he finally said it: “Maybe that’s the best you’ll be able to do.”

— — —

Spinal Tap

The Long Taper

Hearing those words — six years later — let me stop punishing myself. Let me actually look at the thought that I might be on some form of pain relief for the rest of my life. It was a dark and bleak prospect. Not one I relished.

I’d already been struggling for months by then. Tapering off, stepping back up. Tapering off, stepping back up. Trying different things — kratom, more Tylenol than I care to admit, even smoked weed once just to see if it would help. None of it held. There’d be progress, then relapse. Progress, relapse, progress, relapse.

I’d picked up a tag in the 12-step program a few months before that, hoping it might help turn the tide.

I’d also been working with Dr. Ryce for years by this point, and his process was invaluable in helping me clear my mind — without a doubt the most powerful set of tools I’ve come across, and the only ones that consistently worked for me.

The doctors didn’t know what to say. Some of my recovery friends recommended detox or rehab. There always seemed to be some reason I couldn’t — I was barely surviving, not making any money, at my wits’ end. I tried Suboxone. It was horrible — a whole other set of psychological disturbances to deal with, which honestly I’d suspected going in.

— — —

What I Want You to Know

My purpose in telling this is to let people know: you can get off opioids. You can do it on your own, the way I did. I’m not a doctor, so you’ll need to make your own decisions with whoever your team is — whoever you trust, whoever actually knows what’s going on with you. But having someone you can tell everything to is extremely helpful. Maybe essential. It was for me.

The number one thing you need is desire. You have to have the desire to stop, and that desire has to come from whatever you want to call it — God, higher power, universal consciousness, the grand master of all, whatever language fits you.

Desire that isn’t a true, innate, spontaneous, deeply held conviction is worthless. I can say I desire something and still be lying to myself the whole time. Figuring out what you truly desire is most of the battle. Brutal self honesty, that requires a lot of work. Once you’ve located a desire that’s coming from something greater than you — whatever that might be — you have a chance.

Within the desire comes awareness, with awareness the possibility of choice. With the possibility of choice comes the possibility of change. And change was what I wanted.

— — —

If You’re in This Right Now

If you’re battling opioid addiction — whether it started with a pill bottle after a surgery, an injury, or something else entirely — I want you to hear this directly: you are not alone, and what worked for me might work for you, or at least give you a place to start.

I’m not offering a program here. I’m offering myself. If you want to talk — about tapering, about desire, about what it actually takes, or just to have one person on the other end who’s been where you are — reply to this post, or reply directly to this email. I read every message myself, and I’ll get back to you.

You don’t have to have the right words. You just have to reach out.

Once my mind was cleaned up, a return to a connection I had lost, one that I thought was gone forever, happened.

It’s real, it’s powerful and it’s beautiful.

— — —

If this reached you, or someone you love, share it with them.

He teaches and shares a Quantum Stillpoint Breathe process that has consistently lifted me to higher levels of truth, expansion and consciousness expanding experiences.

It would take years for most to begin to deeply assimilate the teachings. And I’m here to testify it is worth it.

I’m going through a new and deeper level of healing and transcendence of my limiting beliefs.

The technique is based on his work, www.whyagain.org and his years spent teaching the forgiveness process, he has found in only two teachings on earth to date.

I spent over 5 hours going in and out of the Stillpoint process today, it was something I had to do, an inner drive. In this session I experienced many levels of expanded beingness, healing and release from pain and trauma in my body.

This teaching is based on physics, as taught by Yeshua, (known as Jesus) but gleaned from his native tongue, the Aramaic Language, a language of phonetics, energy and vibrations, mostly lost or unknown.

I have died, literally, more than once, physically. Yet here I am . The last Doctor, upon seeing me come back into conscience awareness of my body and surroundings said, “Mr.Bowling I don’t know why you are alive.”

I said, “Doc, I do. It wasn’t my time yet.”

This teaching is made free to all who want it.

☮️

❤️

Week 14 of 52

AA’s Gifts and Limitations

The Program That Saved My Life — And the Parts It Was Never Built to Reach

I remember exactly when it first happened. I was sitting in a meeting at the Unity Club, discussing the third step, and when it came around to my turn I offered that I finally got it — that if I could describe God, or thought I understood God, that wasn’t God. It was only my own limited belief about what God might be.

Dead air. Silence. And in that silence I realized something that should have been obvious years earlier: other people don’t understand things the way I think they do.

I was feeling a moment of clarity. What I didn’t understand yet was that the room wasn’t sharing it with me.

Thirteen weeks into this series, I’ve told you what happened to me. This week is different. This week is about what worked, what didn’t, and what I had to build myself once the program had taken me as far as it could.

— — —

What AA Gave Me

The first time someone suggested I might want to check out AA, I was insulted. The suggestion came from my father — Big Fat Don, the wannabe mobster — a man I’d watched destroy family relationships, serve multiple prison sentences, beat people, do all kinds of horrific things. And he was telling me I had a problem.

I got sober later, and not by willpower. I had a mystical experience in the hospital — a presence — and from that moment forward the desire to drink, drug, and smoke was simply removed. Gone. That’s the structure that held me up when nothing else could have: not a schedule or a slogan, but something that happened to me that I didn’t manufacture.

The program promised that we’d be happy, joyous, and free if we thoroughly worked it — and that no one capable of being honest with themselves has ever been known to fail. For a long time I struggled with the happy-joyous-free part of that promise without connecting it to the fact that I hadn’t actually done the direct work in the steps yet. The consequences of half-measures weren’t dramatic. They were just quiet non-arrival.

The rigorous honesty landed on me in pieces, from different men, at different points. My sponsor Roy H., during a fifth step, when I told him I had a fear of failure. He looked at me and said, “Look at your life. You are a failure. Everything you’ve ever done has been a failure up until now.” Before that, another sponsor, Tom S., had told me plainly that up until then I had been totally incapable of forming a meaningful relationship with another human being. Neither man was being cruel. They were just the first people willing to tell me the truth without flinching.

— — —

Where AA Asked Me to Go

I threw myself into the step work early, vigorously, earnestly. I’d experienced a transformation at the level of addiction — I was free from active use and abuse of substances — and it felt like anything was now possible.

Within the first thirty days, my first sponsor, Richard O., launched me into a rigorous fourth step inventory. It was arduous — lots of writing, lots of back-and-forth conversation, rigorous detail. There was one instance in particular where I felt completely justified, where I believed I’d been wronged by a specific person, and I was planning to kill him. I would fantasize about exactly how I was going to do it. And then I finally got to the bottom of the resentment and realized I was the one who’d set the ball rolling — exactly like the literature describes, and exactly the kind of moment the steps assume will produce remorse on contact. For me it produced clarity first. The remorse, when it came, came later and had to be built.

Making amends without natural remorse is its own kind of labor. It’s an exercise in generating emotions I wouldn’t necessarily expect from the very people I was approaching. What I noticed was that the exact situations — the people, places, and things that needed to be addressed — kept appearing in my life on their own schedule. And each time, I got to choose in that moment whether to move forward or to turn and regress into a cowardly kind of avoidance, fueled by denial and rationalization.

The higher power question required its own kind of proof. I had to have that moment where something — some presence, some energy — actually penetrated me. I was in the hospital after five days in and out of a coma, on what I believed was my deathbed, sitting in a wheelchair after a meeting, praying that I just couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t live and I couldn’t die. That’s when the opening occurred. I felt something — a warm presence, almost a glow — and the room itself seemed to brighten a little in the middle of the night. And I just felt okay.

For years in the rooms, I assumed everyone else was lying about their own experience — claiming it was the booze and drugs that corrupted them, that they’d been good people before that — that everyone was simply choosing to turn off their conscience the way I did, and that’s how they’d committed their own wrongs. I thought they were all liars. It took me years to understand that my thought structure had been damaged and rewired at the age of five, long before I ever took a first drink or a first hit. My conscience never operated the way the room assumed it did. It took the room a long time to teach me that, and it took me longer to admit it.

— — —

Beyond AA

At my first detox center, a couple of years before I actually got sober, a counselor confronted me directly: “I know what you are. You’re a sociopath.” I was surprised, and — strangely — relieved. I thought, okay, maybe this is the answer to my problem. Maybe this is just what I am. I found a dictionary and looked the word up. It described me perfectly. I still had no idea what to do about it.

The empathy came later, and it came through practice, not feeling. Following the directions of the steps — simply following instructions, whether or not I believed they’d work, whether or not I believed they were even true — because I was sober now and I was going to do what I was told. That’s how empathy grew in me: not as something that arrived on its own, but as a skill built through repetition.

Building an accountability system was harder than it sounds. Lying to people had always come easily to me. I found out recently, from someone who knew me back then, that a lot of people were simply intimidated by me — they’d move on or say nothing rather than confront me directly. So building a real network of people I could talk to, people I felt were wired similarly to me, mattered more than I understood at the time.

The clearest example of choosing the harder honesty came years later. I saw a man coming out of a store I’d robbed him at, years earlier, during my addiction. I knew him well, and he knew me. Instead of walking away, or saying nothing, I found the nerve and told him: “Remember that time at the party when your dope went missing? That was me. I want to pay you back for it.”

He said, “I knew it was you. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it — and I honestly didn’t think you had it in you to ever come clean about it.” He didn’t want the money. I gave it to him anyway. I was surprised he’d thought I was incorrigible. A tough lesson — that even the people who know you best sometimes bet against the change.

— — —

What This Means, For Now

AA and NA taught me that recovery was possible. They gave me structure when I had none, consequences that didn’t bend to my manipulation, and men willing to tell me the truth about myself when I couldn’t yet see it.

What they couldn’t give me was a conscience that operated the way the literature assumed, or a remorse that arrived on schedule. That gap isn’t a criticism of the program. It’s just the honest edge of what any program built around a typical conscience can do for someone whose conscience was never typical to begin with.

If you’ve sat in those rooms and felt that same gap — if the steps worked, but not quite the way they were supposed to — you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just wired differently, and there’s a way to work with that instead of against it.

— — —

Why Again

Next Week — Week 15: The Lien Detection Test — the first framework I built once I understood where the gap was. And the restitution plan I’m living right now, as proof it works.

— — —

Why, Why… Again?! is a 52-week Substack series documenting one man’s recovery journey.

If this reached you, share it with someone it might reach next.

1976. I am twenty-two years old and I am going to Texas.

The oil embargo had choked new construction in North Carolina down to almost nothing, and two of my friends and I were not the kind of young men who sat around waiting for things to improve. Tony and I climbed into the open bed of Rusty’s old ’43 Dodge pickup and rode 1,118 miles to Dallas with the wind in our faces and not a single thought about what we would do if it rained.

We must have believed it never rained on a road trip.

There was oil in Texas and a construction boom was on, and we were carpenters, and we were twenty-one, and the road was open in front of us. What else was there to think about?

The truth, as it turned out, was not glamorous at all.

• • •

We crashed at Rusty’s brother’s apartment first. Then we found our new digs.

A condemned house. Separate garage apartment, also condemned. It took about two days to figure out that the open garage beneath our place was a shooting gallery for local junkies. Tony and I shared a double bed in one room — broke, not intimate — and our daily routine was simple: get some cash by whatever means available, buy a big bag of dried beans and a bigger bag of potatoes, spend the rest on drugs and booze.

We paid rent by stealing materials from construction sites and doing repairs for the slumlord. We once sided that garage with full 2x10 lumber. It was available and the landlord did not ask questions. We also ran what I would politely call a daylight-only breaking and entering operation — knocking first to make sure no one was home, taking only what we needed to survive.

I was arrested once. Barely slid out on lack of evidence. I had been taught early to stay quiet when arrested, and that lesson served me then in ways it probably should not have.

Dread. Drugs. Disease. Dysfunction.

That is what the glamour looked like up close.

• • •

I was not thinking about any of this yesterday morning.

I was writing — working through another section of the memoir — and something shifted. A feeling arrived that was not the writing itself. Something that felt almost like the beginning of that road trip. That particular blend of hope and recklessness that lives in a twenty-two year old body pointed west toward something new.

Then I felt it.

A twinge in the solar plexus. A tightening in the gut. And then — slowly, insistently — something that felt like a ball of constipated energy beginning to build in the center of my body. Not pain exactly. Pressure. The physical sensation of something that had been stored for a long time beginning to stir.

This is what Dr. Michael Ryce means when he talks about unresolved energies — the stored content of experiences that were too large to process in the moment, locked away in the body, waiting for a matching frequency to unlock them. The hope of the present moment had resonated something from 1976. The feeling of the open road had called up everything that came after it.

The depression arrived next. Then the anxiety. Then the particular quality of bad thinking that feels like truth when it is actually just old weather.

I recognized it. That recognition is the beginning of everything.

• • •

I did what I teach.

I sat with it. I located the energy in my body — that tightening in the solar plexus, that compressed ball of accumulated experience — and I did not try to fix it or explain it or push it away. I let the felt sense speak. In Focusing terms, this is what Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense: the body’s knowing that precedes language, the pre-verbal truth that lives below the stories we tell about ourselves.

I breathed. The kind of deliberate, present breathing that Ryce’s stillpoint work teaches — not forcing, not performing, but genuinely making space.

It requires effort. And then, after the effort, something else takes over. The Buddhist teachers call it non-doing action — Wu Wei. The action that is not action. The effort that releases into effortlessness. All the good koans come from this territory, because this territory cannot be fully explained, only pointed at.

I sat in it. I let it move.

• • •

Then a song arrived.

Not metaphorically. Literally — in my head, unbidden, the opening notes of Let It Be.

I am not going to explain why that song arrived in that moment. Some things do not require explanation. The body finds its own medicine when you give it space. The unconscious reaches for what it needs. Forty years of recovery and I still find this mysterious and I hope I always will.

What I can tell you is that something shifted.

An odd laughter came up — spontaneous, slightly out of place, the kind that arrives when something releases that has been held for a long time. And then a phrase came with it, something a teacher once said to me during a session when I was sitting with difficult material:

Just be curious about it.

Not fix it. Not understand it. Not make it mean something.

Just be curious.

I took a deeper breath. And then another. And then the longer session I had planned for later that afternoon.

By evening, the ball of constipated energy in my solar plexus had loosened. The depression had not vanished — it rarely does in a single session — but it had become navigable. The bad thinking had lost its authority. The 1978 material had been visited, breathed with, given some room.

Everything shifted.

Not because I am exceptional at this work. Because the work is real and I have been doing it long enough to trust it when it is difficult.

• • •

This is what the Why Again Workshop is built on.

Not theory. Not a framework I read about somewhere. The actual practice of a man who has been going into his own material for forty years and coming back with something he can use.

The Dallas trip. The condemned house. The shooting gallery. The beans and potatoes and the B&E’s and the arrest and the long slide down.

And then the long climb back. And then the tools that made the climbing possible. And then the discovery that the climbing never really ends — it just becomes less terrifying and more interesting.

Just be curious about it.

If something in this moved you — if you recognized something in the ball of energy in the solar plexus, or in the moment when the song arrived, or in the laughter that comes when something finally releases — that recognition is worth paying attention to.

That is where the work begins.

Terry Wray Bowling

TerryWrayBowling.com

The Why Again Workshop • whyagain.org

A Structured, Somatic, and Spiritually Grounded Process

for Interrupting the Pattern at Its Root

Presented by Terry Wray Bowling

When Terry Wray Bowling was thirteen years old — years before his first drink, years before the addiction that would consume his twenties — he had an experience during meditation that he would spend the next fifty-five years trying to understand.

Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha had opened a door. What entered was real — a superconscious expanding experience, arrived through meditation alone, before any substance had ever touched his body. The soul recognizing its own territory.

Then impatience. The oldest spiritual trap. Things did not change fast enough, the inner world would not yield on demand, and the shortcuts appeared. Psychedelics first — themselves a form of misdirected spiritual reaching. Then harder substances. Then alcoholism, and the full horror of what addiction does to a human life and everyone around it.

Recovery arrived through Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps — not the destination, but the door back. A sponsor encouraged meditation. Eighteen months sober, thirty years old, the original experience returned. Identical. Not similar. The same superconscious expansion that had arrived at thirteen, before any drug use. This was not a flashback. This was a return to origin.

The thread had survived everything.

The Path to Dr. Michael Ryce

James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy opened another doorway — specifically its understanding of prana, living energy, and the body as an energetic system capable of being raised or lowered in its capacity to hold life and process stored trauma. What millions of readers encountered in that book, they were encountering — often without knowing it — the foundational work of Dr. Michael Ryce, acknowledged in the book’s opening pages.

Inspired by that understanding, Terry spent seven years as a vegetarian and three years as a raw live foodist — deliberately raising the vibrational capacity of his body, building what Ryce would later call the vitality barometer: the energetic threshold required to safely surface and process hidden generational trauma.

Then he met Dr. Ryce. During his first workshop, in his first stillpoint breathing session, the superconscious expanding experience arrived twice. Not manufactured. Not sought. Arrived.

The instrument had been prepared. The methodology confirmed what the experience had always known.

What the Why Again Workshop Offers

Most of us keep living the same story with different people, different circumstances, different decades — and cannot understand why.

The Why Again Workshop addresses that question at its root. Not through willpower, reframing, or positive thinking. Through a structured interior process that goes to where the pattern actually lives — in the body, in the unconscious, in the multi-generational field each of us carries without knowing it.

The workshop draws on three foundational streams:

The Foundational Mechanism — Dr. Michael Ryce’s lifetime work with ancient Aramaic forgiveness: the deny-dissociate-project cycle, generational transmission of unresolved energies, the 9-bit mind, the law of resonance, and the process of canceling the goal to collapse distorted perception. This understanding forms the intellectual and spiritual backbone of everything taught in this workshop. It is credited fully and taught faithfully.

The Somatic Portal — Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing methodology, applied by Terry as a certified practitioner. Where Ryce’s worksheet approaches the interior cognitively and energetically, Focusing enters through the felt sense in the body — the somatic doorway into the same territory. Both reach the same room. The workshop teaches participants to use both keys.

The Scientific Foundation — The research of Dr. Candace Pert, neuroscientist and discoverer of the opioid receptor, whose landmark work demonstrated that emotions are biochemical events stored in every cell of the body as neuropeptides — and that the body is, in her words, the subconscious mind made flesh. Her findings give Ryce’s teaching its scientific language and Focusing its cellular rationale.

The Living Proof — Forty years of continuous sobriety. AA and the Twelve Steps as the entry point into a decades-long interior journey. A verified, recurring superconscious experience that predates drug use, survived addiction, returned in early recovery, and was confirmed in Ryce’s own workshop. Terry Wray Bowling is not a theorist. He is a witness.

A Note on Origins

Millions of people encountered the ideas behind this workshop through The Celestine Prophecy. What moved them in that book was moving them toward a source they did not yet know by name. That source is Dr. Michael Ryce, whose decades of teaching preceded and informed that work.

The Why Again Workshop sends participants directly to that source — fully named, fully credited, and as alive and active as the day Terry first sat in his room. That source lives at whyagain.org.

Who This Workshop Is For

The Why Again Workshop is for anyone who has ever asked the question Dr. Ryce named — and suspected the honest answer lived somewhere inside them rather than in the people around them.

Those in recovery who sense their addiction was never really about the substance

Those who keep finding the same relationship in different people

Those who have tried geographic cures, new circumstances, new decades — and found themselves in the same story

Those who sense that something real was underneath their seeking — even when the seeking took destructive forms

Serious students of Ryce’s work who are ready to go deeper through a somatic and structured application

About Terry Wray Bowling

Terry Wray Bowling has been in continuous sobriety for forty years. He is a certified Focusing practitioner trained through the International Focusing Institute, a published poet (One Hundred Haiku of God), a visual artist, and a contemplative practitioner.

He holds two Certificates of Completion presented by Dr. Michael Ryce: Why Is This Happening to Me…Again!? (September 15, 2010) and Laws of Living (August 10, 2012). Both programs covered Forgiveness, Responsibility, Communication, Conflict Resolution, Stress Management, and Reality Management — the foundational principles this workshop teaches. Terry was trained directly by the source.

His interior journey began at thirteen with an unsought superconscious experience that has returned — spontaneously, verifiably, consistently — throughout forty years of recovery. It was confirmed twice in his first session of stillpoint breathing with Dr. Ryce himself.

He is not a theorist. He is a man who lived the question, completed the training, and kept showing up until the answer became livable.

The Why Again Workshop is presented with the full support and endorsement of Dr. Michael Ryce.

For scheduling, availability, and inquiries:

Terry Wray Bowling

whyagain.org • TerryWrayBowling.com

The Adventures of a Reluctant Recovering Sociopath

Week 13 of 52

The Family Tree

Connecting the Dots

Trauma → ASPD → Addiction: How the Wiring Became the Behavior

It has never been a single moment.

I’ve spent years looking for the clean origin story — the one clear instant when I looked back at my life and saw the line running through it. Trauma to disconnection to addiction. The moment it all snapped into focus. But it didn’t happen that way. It was more like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom: slowly, over years, the shape of the thing emerging from the chemical dark until one day you realize you can see it clearly, and you’re not sure exactly when that happened.

What I knew early in recovery was simpler and more uncomfortable than any framework. In AA meetings, people talked about being basically good people who had been overtaken by a substance. The alcohol had turned them. Without it, they were fine. I sat in those rooms and listened and thought: that is not my story. The alcohol didn’t turn me. The alcohol amplified something that was already operational. Something that had been running quietly and efficiently since I was four years old.

I thought the others were lying. Or hiding. I genuinely believed they didn’t want to admit what they actually were. It took a long time to understand that they were telling the truth about themselves — and that my truth was simply different.

The first real crack in that confusion came when the counselor in detox looked at me and said the word. Sociopath. I’ve told you that story. What I haven’t told you is what happened in the quiet afterward — the absence of denial. I read the clinical definition and felt something I can only describe as recognition. Not shame. Not relief. Recognition. Like finding the name of a country you’ve lived in your whole life but never had a map for.

That was the beginning. The rest of the map took another forty years to draw.

— — —

The Fourth Classroom: My Father

Last week I told you my mother was not a monster. I need to be more careful about saying the same for my father.

The first time I met him — the first time I remember meeting him — I was somewhere between four and five years old. My grandfather picked me up early on a Saturday morning on Water Street in Greensboro and drove me to the Smithfield Penitentiary. My father was inside. He and his associates — they called themselves the Dixie Mafia — had hijacked a tractor trailer full of color television sets. It was 1962. Color TVs were a hot commodity. They nearly got away with it. They sold one of the last sets to an SBI agent.

I remember the back seat of my grandfather’s old Dodge, the smell of it, the way it rumbled as I laid down and falling asleep on the drive down. I remember the parking lot, the fence with the razor wire, the double perimeter — one fence wasn’t enough, so they built two. We passed through both and I watched my father come strolling down a hill toward us, unhurried, in full denim — jeans, shirt, jacket — with a couple of cronies trailing behind him.

He reached up to shake my grandfather’s hand. My eyes were exactly at the level of that handshake. And I saw it: tucked under my grandfather’s thumb, folded small, a twenty dollar bill passing from one hand to the other. A quiet transaction. Done before the greeting was finished.

I was as tall as a handshake, and I was already learning how the world actually worked.

We sat at a wooden picnic table. The cronies watched as my dad produced leather wallets — three of them, one for each of my brothers and me. My father told me he had made them himself in the leather shop. I believed him. I carried that wallet for years. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that he told me, almost laughing, that he’d bought them off those same cronies and made up the story so I’d think it was special.

My brothers’ wallets had a cowboy on one side and a star on the other. Mine had the Lord’s Prayer stamped into the leather and a picture of Christ nailed to the cross.

I never understood why he gave me that one. Was it a message? I didn.t ask. Questions were not raised in our family. Events unfolded and that was it.

— — —

Progression

His Curriculum

My father’s lessons were different from my mother’s. Hers were about control and the silence around pain. His were about power, and what it meant to move through the world without constraint.

When I was thirteen, I was arrested at Carolina Beach. I’d gotten drunk on the boardwalk — I was six feet tall and two hundred pounds with the beginnings of a goatee, so no one was entirely sure I was only thirteen — and I’d been picked up alongside two of the biggest drug dealers on the strip. They took me to a private cell, told me to strip, and a large officer informed me to turn around and spread my cheeks. What? I said. He said it again, only more forcefully. I was thirteen years old and had no idea what a cavity search was. I only knew it was the most humiliating thing that had ever happened to me.

My father came to get me. I came out of that cell like a wild animal, full of the story, ready to report the injustice. He backhanded me. I hit the concrete wall. The officer watched with obvious satisfaction. Telling me to shut my *&*!*#*^* mouth. I was stunned.

When we got in the car, my father let the silence sit for a while. Then he said: “When you get arrested —” note that he did not say if — “keep your goddamn mouth shut until me, your grandfather, or a lawyer get you out. You don’t say a word to anybody.”

That was his version of a safety talk.

A few years later, when I was seventeen, I committed armed robbery. I was in jail for nine days before he came. His first question when I sat down across from him was: how much did you get?

I told him seven hundred and fifty dollars.

He said he could make that much busting four checks. He had been forging checks since he was fourteen. He was not appalled by what I had done. He was offering a professional comparison. Then added what if she had shot you in the back? Dumbass.

There is a distinction that therapists make between the sociopath and the psychopath. The sociopath — the ASPD presentation — retains some capacity for feeling, some occasional pull of conscience, however faint. The psychopath does not. Looking back across the distance of forty years of recovery, I believe my father was closer to the psychopath end of that spectrum. I was his son, shaped by his world, running his patterns. But something in me — something small and persistent — kept interrupting the program. I didn’t know what to call it then. I know now it was the thing that eventually saved my life.

—

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— —

The Framework: Why Addiction Was Almost Logical

I want to walk you through a sequence. Not as a clinical explanation — as my own story, laid against a structure that finally made it make sense.

The trauma came first. Water Street. Ms. Conrad. My mother’s rope and her pudding. My father’s curriculum of silence and power. By the time I was seven or eight years old, I had built an interior architecture designed for one purpose: to keep me safe in an environment where safety was never guaranteed. Threat detection. Emotional shutdown. Detachment on command. The ability to read a room and respond before anyone else knew what was happening.

Those traits — which clinicians would later map onto ASPD — were not defects. They were solutions. The problem was that solutions don’t know when the problem is over. They keep running.

By the time I was twelve, I was running those solutions in a world that no longer required them at every moment. And I had no other settings. No way to be soft. No way to be still. No way to be simply present with another person without calculating the angle.

The first time a friend handed me a quart of beer under a bush in the park, I hated the taste. My father’s alcoholism had given me a genuine revulsion for it. I watched my friend get obliterated and had to carry him home. The next day, I told everyone I had drunk the whole thing and carried him. It was a lie, I had poured it out on the ground, between my friends chugs, but I loved the way it landed. That was the first lesson alcohol taught me: it didn’t have to be in you to be useful. The story around it was enough.

I decided drugs were a cleaner path. I had stumbled into meditation and the Eastern traditions around that time — my first real expanded experience, something vast and quiet opening up behind ordinary consciousness — and I thought LSD might take me back there. It didn’t, not reliably. But the search itself became organizing. I had a purpose. I had a project.

At fourteen I fell in love. For about a year, love was enough. Then it wasn’t. It never quite was, for me — because love requires a kind of trust I had been systematically trained not to have. I introduced her to marijuana. That led to other things. By the time I was injecting, I had found the thing I didn’t know I was looking for: a substance that did what my psychological architecture had always done, but better. It turned off the noise. It created distance. It produced, for a few hours at a stretch, the sensation of being inside the sealed room I had built as a child — the one where nothing could reach me — without the constant effort of maintaining it.

She saved my life five times. She would come into the house, find me passed out, check my pulse, clean up the mess, and leave. The fifth time, she couldn’t do it anymore. I don’t blame her.

After she left, I turned to alcohol. I had vowed I never would. I knew what it did. And it did exactly what I knew it would do: it didn’t numb me, it activated me. The rage that had been sitting behind the detachment for thirty years found its accelerant. I was arrested seventeen times over the next decade. I crashed and burned at twenty-eight and a half.

This is the sequence. Trauma produces the architecture. The architecture — the detachment, the manipulation, the inability to feel consequences in real time — makes addiction not a mistake but a solution. And addiction deepens every trait the trauma planted. They feed each other. They always have.

— — —

The Child Who Learned Too Well

There is a particular quality to operating without guilt. I want to describe it honestly, because I think it’s important for people to understand — not to excuse it, but to understand it.

It felt clean.

There was no emotional clutter in the decision-making. I could see things clearly, assess a situation without the interference of feeling, move toward what I needed without the friction that seemed to slow other people down. I came out on top with a regularity that deepened my belief in the system. I thought everyone had this capability and simply chose not to use it.

I had a friend — a good man, genuinely good in ways I was not — who told me on his deathbed that he had always hated the fact that no matter what I did, I came out smelling like a rose. He said it without malice. Almost with wonder.

It was disturbing and comforting at the same time. Both of those responses should tell you something.

What I understand now is what that child gave up in order to run that system so efficiently. The ability to be known by another person. The ability to stay. The ability to need something from someone and let them give it to you. The ability to love without the constant low hum of calculation underneath.

He learned too well. He survived perfectly. And the cost of that perfection was paid slowly, across decades, in a currency so quiet it barely made a sound.

— — —

What Finally Changed the Wiring

Near death. That’s what it took.

I was in a jail cell in Florida, sick in a way that had moved past dramatic into something quieter and more final. When the bondsman came and picked me up, I ended up at my father’s place. There were drugs and alcohol there — there always were — and I took a Percocet and a shot of vodka because the sickness demanded it. Then I looked in the mirror.

What I saw was a sickness that went all the way down. I was beaten and desperate, but I still didn’t have the language for what I was looking at. I only knew that whatever this was, it was the end of something.

My father put me on a plane to Ohio. My aunt had arranged for me to enter a hospital. I was in and out of a coma for five days, on an IV. When I came out, the doctor looked at me from the foot of the bed and said to the nurse: take that IV out. Then he looked directly at me and said: Mr. Bowling, there is nothing I can do for a man like you. And he left.

The nurse helped me into a wheelchair. She was kind in the way that people are kind when they have nothing to prove. When she was taking me back to my room, she asked: would you like to go to the meeting tonight? They have one here in the hospital.

I thought: what do I have to lose?

There were about a hundred people in that meeting. When they came around with the chips, I raised my hand. A man in a green army jacket and a beret came over to me. He pressed the chip into my hand without ceremony.

That was February 1986. Forty years ago now.

What followed was not transformation. It was work. Meetings every day. A sponsor. The Steps — slowly, imperfectly, with all the sabotage my damage could bring to bear. But something had been removed. The obsession to drink was gone. Not reduced — gone. I could not explain it, could only assign it to something larger than myself, a Higher Power whose logic I did not always understand and sometimes resented. Why remove the craving and leave the character? Why take the bottle and leave the man who needed it?

Those questions kept me honest. Kept me working. Eventually led me to Dr. Ryce, whose forgiveness work gave me a framework for the grief underneath the rage. To Focusing, which gave me access to a felt sense I had spent fifty years shutting down. To the understanding that the wiring could not be replaced — but it could be interrupted. Rewired, slowly, in specific places, by specific practices, with specific help.

AA gave me everything I needed to begin: sobriety, community, structure, meaning, purpose. The foundation that made all the rest possible.

That was the turn. Not a moment — a direction.

— — —

A Note If Any of This Lands

If you recognize yourself in this sequence — the adaptations, the architecture, the substance that finally gave you the distance you’d been trying to manufacture since childhood — I want you to know something: the system you built was not the problem. The system was the solution to the problem. It kept you alive.

What the Sovereign Reset offers is a way to look at that system honestly, with the right tools, and ask which parts of it you still actually need. Not to dismantle it overnight. To begin the slow work of choosing, deliberately, what you carry forward.

If you’d like to talk, I’m here. [Book a discovery call →] 336-639-2239

— — —

Next Week — Week 14: AA’s Gifts and Limitations for ASPD. What the program gave me that nothing else could — and where it asked me to go further than the Steps alone could take me

www.whyagain.org

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Zoom Link Beatings and Banana Pudding Ryce

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Terry Wray Bowling -

Naturally Occurring Fibonacci Spiral In a Peacock Feather

WHY, WHY… AGAIN?!

The Adventures of a Reluctant Recovering Sociopath

Week 12 of 52

Beatings and Banana Pudding

Root Trauma #3: When Love and Pain Speak the Same Language

Last week I told you about Ms. Conrad and what I learned in first grade about power and pain. Two weeks before that, we were on Water Street, in 1962, the night the lights went out on whatever version of normal I might have had.

Three root traumas. Three different classrooms. All teaching the same curriculum.

This week we go home.

— — —

The Chair

My mother tied me and my brothers to chairs.

I want to say that plainly, without drama or preamble, because the drama is already in the fact itself. She would tie us to kitchen chairs when she needed us to stay put, when something had gone wrong, or when she’d simply had enough. The rope wasn’t brutal. It wasn’t about injury. It was about control and about making sure we understood who had it. It was a tactic she used when she was at the end of her rope — which turned into our rope.

I don’t remember the first time. That’s the thing about early childhood experiences that become normalized — they don’t arrive as events, they arrive as weather. You don’t remember the first rainstorm. You just know that it rains. And some storms are more violent than others.

The chair was a known quantity. So was what came before it.

— — —

The Orphanage

She threatened the orphanage.

This was her other instrument. Not used every time, but present enough that it lived in the air of the house. On the bad days, when we’d pushed past whatever invisible line existed, she would tell us we were headed to the orphanage. “I should take you sons a bitches to the orphanage.” That was where children who couldn’t behave ended up. That was where we were going.

Reflecting back, she was out of her mind when those words came. I remember that look in her eyes — the human had left the building. It was a place I came to know very well myself - the sealed-off place inside yourself where nothing can reach you. I was learning, even then, to build that room.

I was maybe five or six. Small enough that the threat was architecturally enormous. A child has no reason not to believe a parent’s threat. The orphanage was real to me. It was waiting. It was where children who weren’t good enough ended up.

I decided very early that I would not let her see what that threat did to me. If she couldn’t see it working, maybe she’d stop using it. You’ll recognize the strategy. It’s the same one I used with Ms. Conrad and her paddle - don’t flinch, give nothing away. Make yourself unreadable.

My brothers were not as quick a study as I was.

By six years old, I had practiced this enough that it was becoming second nature.

— — —

The Pudding

Here is the thing that made it complicated — and the thing that damaged me in ways the beatings alone couldn’t have. Even at that age I understood the strangeness of it, the contradictions stacked up and unresolvable.

She also made banana pudding.

Not store-bought. Homemade. One deep Pyrex bowl for each child, made specifically, individually, with care. She baked the meringue — no artificial whipped topping for us. Nothing but the best. She’d put them on the table without explanation. Without acknowledgment of what had happened the day before. Without apology, without discussion, without any verbal bridge between the punishment and this.

Just the pudding and a diverted gaze. The shame, maybe. She couldn’t look us in the eyes.

That was her language for ‘I’m sorry.’ Or maybe for ‘I love you.’ Or maybe for both at once, fused together in a way she had no other way to express. I don’t know. I never knew. We never talked about it. You didn’t talk about it. You ate the pudding.

And there was something terrible in eating it. Because eating it meant accepting the reset. It meant agreeing, without words, that yesterday was over and we were starting again. It meant pretending the chair hadn’t happened. The orphanage threat hadn’t happened. It took effort to hold it down, to push it somewhere deep and unreachable.

You ate the pudding and the ledger was cleared - until it wasn’t.

— — —

What This Teaches a Child

A child raised this way learns several things simultaneously.

He learns that love and pain come from the same source. That the person who hurts you is also the person who feeds you. That you cannot separate the two because they are not separate. They are the same person on different days, and you never know which version is walking through the door.

The child learns that there is no language for hard things. That apology is a bowl of pudding and reconciliation is eating it in silence. That what happens between people is never discussed, processed, or resolved. It is simply replaced by something sweet and then forgotten.

The feelings about all of this are irrelevant. There is no space for them. You don’t ask ‘why did you tie me to a chair.’ You don’t say ‘that hurt.’ You don’t name what happened. You eat the pudding and you move on.

Most dangerously of all, a child learns that the people who love you are also the people you cannot trust. And that love is always potentially a setup for the next bad thing. That word — love — has been very difficult for me to come to terms with. My understanding of it has always been distorted. Bent into something I couldn’t hold without getting cut. Even decades later.

If you’ve been following this series from the beginning, you may already see what I see. I was a very good student. I learned every one of these lessons perfectly.

— — —

The Three Classrooms

Water Street. First grade. Home.

Three places where the curriculum was identical. Where the lesson was: you are on your own. Where the education was: don’t feel it, don’t show it, don’t trust it, don’t need it, and absolutely do not believe it.

By the time I was seven or eight years old, I had a graduate-level education in emotional self-sufficiency and a pre-K education in everything else. I didn’t know how to be close to people. I didn’t know how to be vulnerable. I didn’t know what safe felt like because I had never stayed in a place long enough to find out.

What I had instead was a very sophisticated threat-detection system, a complete inability to let anyone see me flinch. I had a deepening suspicion that the whole game was rigged and I was the only one who knew it.

That’s not a monster. That’s a child who adapted perfectly to the environment he was given.

The tragedy is not that the adaptations were wrong. The tragedy is that they were right — and that they didn’t stop. My training and practice continued for years.

— — —

A Word About My Mother

I want to say something carefully here, because it matters.

My mother was not a monster either.

She was a woman who had been formed by her own classrooms — her own Water Streets, her own Ms. Conrads, her own version of this same inheritance. She didn’t have language for hard things because no one had given her language for hard things. She made the pudding because the pudding was probably the most articulate thing she knew how to do.

She came by that limitation honestly.

She was raised inside a family system of dysfunction so deep it had its own weather. Alcoholism was rampant. She had nine older brothers — one didn’t survive childhood. Another lost a leg after passing out on a train track one drunken night, the train severing it while it lay across the rail. She had one younger sister. Eleven children, growing up in the Depression era. She was born in 1930, at the height of it.

She spoke of a garden so large it fed the whole family. That sounds almost pastoral until you remember she was the child tending that garden, putting up the harvest. Nine hundred quarts of food one year. Yes, nine hundred — canned and stored for a family who otherwise would go without.

She described my grandfather as an alcoholic womanizer. He always had money, and a Ford Model A, one of the first in High Point NC, our hometown. He bought the car and drove his hussies around town, drinking and carrying on, while the family made do. My mother moved herself, her sister and her mother from house to house trying to get clear of him, only to have him find their location and come piling back in. An invasion my mother survived over and over again.

It was a skill my father, a violent periodic alcoholic himself, would later perfect between his visits to the penitentiary. He cycled between charm and brutality with no warning I could ever detect.

Understanding all of that doesn’t erase what happened. The chair was still a chair. The threat was still a threat. The damage was still damage. But holding both things at once — what she did and why she might have done it — is part of what recovery eventually asks of you.

It took me a very long time to get there. I’m not sure I would have made it without AA, the Twelve Steps, Dr. Ryce’s forgiveness work, and Focusing. Each of them giving me a different way to hold two true things simultaneously, without having to resolve them or collapse one into the other.

They can both be true. She loved me and she hurt me. She did her best and her best wasn’t enough. I survived and I was damaged. All of it at the same time.

— — —

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What Comes Next

Next week we reach Week 13, and we turn a corner. We’ve spent three weeks in the root system — the original soil where the patterns were planted. Now we start tracing the line forward: how trauma becomes adaptation, how adaptation becomes character, how character — when left unexamined — becomes destiny.

The framework for Week 13 is the one that changed how I understood everything: Trauma → ASPD → Addiction. Not as a clinical sequence. As a story about a child who learned too well, and a man who had to learn it all over again.

— — —

A Note If Any of This Lands

If you’re reading this and some part of it is familiar — not the specific details but the texture of it, the shape of love that came with conditions attached or pain that arrived without explanation — I want you to know that what you built to survive it was not a flaw. It was engineering.

The Sovereign Reset program exists for people who are ready to look at that engineering honestly. Not to tear it all down at once. To begin, carefully, to understand what you’re actually holding — and to find out whether you still need to hold it.

If you’d like to talk, I’m here. [Book a discovery call →]

— — —

Next Week — Week 13: Connecting the Dots — Trauma → ASPD → Addiction. How the wiring became the behavior, and what it finally took to change it.

The Adventures of a Reluctant Recovering Sociopath

by Terry Wray Bowling

Me at about age four.

How do you turn this into an unconscious monster? Keep reading.

Week 11: First Grade — The Power of Fear

Root Trauma #2: Caesar Cone Elementary, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1963

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I want to tell you about the day I learned that power was the only thing worth having.

I was six years old.

— — —

Caesar Cone Elementary School. Greensboro, North Carolina. First grade.

My teacher’s name was Ms. Conrad. She was old — or seemed old to a six-year-old — with grey hair pinned up in a tight bun like Aunt Bee from Mayberry, if Aunt Bee had never smiled a day in her life. Ms. Conrad didn’t smile. Not once that I can remember. Her only visible emotion was rage, and she deployed it like a weapon.

She had a paddle.

Not a metaphorical paddle. An actual wooden paddle, hung on a hook near the front of the room where every child could see it. A reminder. A promise.

I sat in the second row. My friend Kent Lewis sat next to me — big kid, loud, the kind of boy who laughed easily and talked too much. We were prime targets. Close enough to reach. Interesting enough to notice.

Ms. Conrad noticed us often. Not in a good way.

— — —

The day it happened, she called us both to the front of the room. With that stern grim dead eyed look.

The class went quiet. That particular quiet that children make when they know something is about to happen and they are both terrified and grateful it isn’t happening to them.

Kent went first. I was right next to him on the firing line.

She told him to bend over and touch his toes. He did. She took the paddle off the hook. She swung. Whap!!!

The sound lifted Kent off the ground. He wailed — a raw, animal sound — and then he was crying in front of everyone. Great heaving sobs. Tears running down his face. The whole class watching.

I watched too.

Then it was my turn.

— — —

I bent over. I touched my toes.

She hit me.

I did not make a sound.

Not because it didn’t hurt. It hurt. But something else was happening simultaneously, something that mattered more than the pain. I straightened up and I looked directly at her. Not away. Not at the floor. At her.

A dead stare - flat, unblinking. It was my threat, no a promise, that she did not know me.

I watched her face change.

She had expected what she got from Kent — tears, submission, the confirmation that she held the power in this room. What she got from me was something she didn’t have a name for. I saw her register it. I saw something move behind her eyes that I had never caused in an adult before.

She was afraid of me.

A six-year-old boy had just frightened his teacher. And I felt, for the first time in my life, something that I can only describe as power.

— — —

What I Understood in That Moment

She left me alone for the rest of the year. Not kindness — avoidance. She had looked into whatever was behind my eyes and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

I had won.

That’s what I took from it. Not that violence was wrong. Not that adults shouldn’t hit children. Not that I deserved better. What I took was the lesson: if you don’t give them the reaction they want, you take away their power. If you don’t flinch, you win. And it was easy for me, it came naturally. The violence I had witnessed created a schism, a separation in me. My feeling mechanism was totally autonomous and lived in a neat little “box” inside me.

I was six. That lesson calcified into my bones and stayed there for decades. The files were separate yet connected - a controlled connection.

But there was something else I didn’t understand until much later. Something I lost that day that I didn’t know I was losing.

— — —

What Happened to Kent

Kent Lewis never talked to me the same way after that.

He’d watched me take the paddle without breaking. He’d been the one who cried. And whatever that did to him, whatever comparison his six-year-old mind made between his response and mine, it changed things. Kent pulled away. He became quieter around me - more careful. He was afraid too.

Kent had been my friend. The first real friend I could remember having.

After that day, he was gone. Not gone from the classroom — gone from me. The distance between us in that second row became something neither of us knew how to close.

I had won against Ms. Conrad, but I had lost the only friend I had.

I didn’t understand that trade-off for a very long time. But it was not totally unfamiliar, Shortly after the brutal beating of my mom by my father I was invited over to Eddie’s house. Eddie lived just across Yanceyville Street. About two blocks from the little apartment we lived in but it was just enough to put me on the “wrong side of the tracks”.

Eddie had two parents that lived together and from all appearances appeared to be a perfect “Leave it to Beaver” household. I remember the evening well. I had been invited over to supper. Then it came. About halfway through the meal Mr. Mendenhall made a side glance at Marge, his wife, and then focused in on me and asked me what my dad did for a living. I could sense the energy in the room, this was a trap, a set up. I stumbled and mumbled a few short responses that probably made little sense. I never played with Eddie again and certainly was never invited back for supper. They knew. They just wanted to see it for themselves.

That friend was gone too.

— — —

The Next Year: Mrs. Heffinger

Second grade brought a different kind of shock.

Mrs. Heffinger was young, maybe late twenties. A redhead. Beautiful in the way that made a seven-year-old boy suddenly aware that adults existed as whole, warm, real people. She smiled. She was patient. When she spoke to you, she looked at you like you were worth something. She seemed genuinely happy and interested when she spoke to me.

I fell in love with her the way only a child who has been starved of genuine warmth can fall in love — completely, desperately, with the full weight of everything he hasn’t been getting at home.

What Mrs. Heffinger represented, I understand now, was safety, care -the experience of being in a room where an adult’s attention toward you didn’t mean pain or crazy time was coming.

I didn’t know that’s what I was feeling. I just knew I would have done anything for her. I behaved in her classroom. I tried. I wanted her to see me as worth something.

Two teachers. Two completely different responses from the same boy. That’s not character. That’s neuroscience — a nervous system learning to read threat and safety and respond accordingly. It became one of my superpowers, chameleonism - the ability to change to suit your environment.

Ms. Conrad taught me that power was the only protection.

Mrs. Heffinger showed me, briefly, that there might be another way to exist in the world.

I didn’t have the tools to build on what Mrs. Heffinger offered - not yet, not for a very long time. Still don’t to a large degree. I guess you could call it a learned behavior.

— — —

What I Know Now

A child who doesn’t cry when hit isn’t stronger than one who does. He’s more frightened. He’s learned that showing pain is more dangerous than feeling it — that vulnerability is an opening for something worse.

That’s not toughness. That’s a nervous system in survival mode doing exactly what survival mode does: shutting down the signals that might attract more danger.

What I called power that day was really a very sophisticated form of self-protection. I had learned to go somewhere inside myself where no one could reach me. I got very, very good at it. Only in the process of a deep fourth step inventory did I realize this is how people commit murder - via a disconnect.

The problem with being unreachable is that it works in all directions. The things that can’t hurt you also can’t touch you. Love. Connection. Warmth. The things Mrs. Heffinger was offering — I could feel the pull of them, but I didn’t know how to receive them. I’d already started building the walls - and experimenting, trying to be human.

Forty years in recovery. I’m still learning how to let people in.

It started in a first-grade classroom with a wooden paddle and a friend I didn’t know I was losing.

— — —

A Note for Those Who Recognize This

If you learned early that not flinching was the safest way to live — if you built walls so effectively you eventually couldn’t find the door yourself. I understood that from the inside.

That’s exactly where the Sovereign Reset begins. Not with tearing the walls down — with learning, slowly, that you’re finally safe enough not to need them.

If you’d like to talk, I’m here. [Book a discovery call →]

Terry’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

— — —

Next Week — Week 12: Beatings and Banana Pudding — Root Trauma #3: The arithmetic of love in a house where no one had the language for it.

One Session. No Charge. No Obligation.

Focusing Founder

Forty years ago I got sober. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I thought sobriety was about stopping — stopping drinking, stopping using, stopping the behavior that was burning everything around me to the ground.

It took me years to figure out that stopping was the easy part.

The harder thing — the thing nobody warned me about — was what was still running underneath. The patterns. The old conclusions I had drawn about myself and the world before I had any business drawing conclusions at all. The data I had accepted as truth because a child doesn’t know the difference between what is true and what the people around him say is true.

I spent years in therapy. Seven therapists, if I’m counting. Good ones, bad ones, and ones who meant well. I worked programs. I read everything I could find. I sat with Dr. Michael Ryce’s work for years. I found pieces of what I was looking for in each place.

And then I found Focusing.

What Focusing Is — And What It Isn’t

I’m going to tell you something about Focusing that most people get wrong when they first hear it described.

It is not therapy. It is not analysis. It is not a technique for managing symptoms or reframing negative thoughts.

Focusing is a way of listening — specifically, a way of listening to the part of you that already knows what’s wrong and has been trying to tell you for a very long time.

Eugene Gendlin, who developed this work at the University of Chicago, discovered something that sounds simple and is actually profound: the body holds knowledge the thinking mind doesn’t have access to. Not metaphorically. Literally. There is a physical sense — he called it the felt sense — that arises when you turn your attention inward and ask, with genuine curiosity, what’s here.

Most of us were never taught to do that. Most of us were taught the opposite — push through, think harder, talk yourself out of it, stay busy, don’t feel what you’re feeling.

I use a demonstration when I introduce this work. A clear glass pitcher. Red food coloring in the water. You don’t empty it. You don’t fight what’s in it. You add clear water — continuously, patiently — and watch it flush clear. That’s what we’re doing. We’re not removing the past. We’re flooding it with something truer.

That image came from my own experience. Not from a book. From forty years of trying everything else first, and then finding something that actually worked at the level where the problem lived.

Why I’m Training to Do This Work

I am well into the certified Focusing process, training through Annette Dubreuil at pupa.ca — one of the most respected Focusing training programs in the world. Annette’s work is rigorous, grounded, and deeply aligned with Gendlin’s original methodology.

But I want to be honest with you about something. The credential matters, it is important, and so is the lived experience behind it.

Focusing - Terry Wray Bowling

I am not a clinician offering Focusing as a technique. I am a man with forty years in recovery who found something in this work that nothing else had given me — a direct, somatic, trustworthy contact with what was actually happening inside, beneath the story I had been telling about it.

I bring that into every session. Not as a therapist. As a coach and a fellow traveler who knows the territory.

The Sovereign Reset

Focusing is the somatic foundation of the work I call the Sovereign Reset.

The Sovereign Reset is a framework I developed over decades — part cognitive, part somatic, entirely practical. It’s built for people who have done the intellectual work, who understand their patterns, who can explain their history — and who are still stuck. Because understanding is not the same as resolution. You can know exactly why you are the way you are and still be the way you are.

Focusing addresses the gap between knowing and shifting. It works at the level where the knowing hasn’t landed yet — in the body, in the felt sense, in the place where the old data actually lives.

Together, the framework and the somatic work address the whole problem. Not just the story. Not just the symptom. The root.

The Offer

I am offering one complimentary Focusing session to readers of this newsletter who are genuinely curious about this work.

Not a sales call. Not a consultation. An actual session — sixty minutes, one on one, conducted the way I work with all my clients. You will experience the process directly. You will leave with something real, regardless of whether we ever speak again.

I am making this offer because I believe the best way to understand Focusing is to feel what it does. No description, including this one, adequately prepares you for the experience of making contact with a felt sense for the first time. Some things have to be encountered.

Who this is for: People who have done significant self-work and feel like something is still not resolving. People in long-term recovery who want to go deeper. People who are intellectually clear about their patterns but can’t seem to move them. People who are simply curious about what it means to listen to the body as a source of wisdom rather than a source of symptoms.

Who this is not for: People in acute crisis or active addiction. People looking for therapy. People who want to be told what to do. Focusing requires a degree of internal stability and willingness to sit with what arises — it is not a rescue. It is a practice.

What Happens After the Complimentary Session

At the end of the session I will ask you one question: was this useful?

If the answer is no, we part as friends and you walk away with an experience that cost you nothing.

If the answer is yes — and in my experience it usually is, for the right person — I will tell you what ongoing work looks like and what it costs. Clearly, simply, with no pressure.

Paid sessions are available individually or in structured packages. The Sovereign Reset program integrates Focusing sessions with the full cognitive and practical framework. Pricing is straightforward and available on request.

I work with a limited number of clients at a time. I am not trying to build a volume practice. I am trying to do serious work with people who are ready for it.

How to Reach Me

To request your complimentary session: Reply to this post, or reach me directly through TerryWrayBowling.com. Tell me a sentence or two about where you are and what’s drawing you to this work. I will respond personally.

Sessions are conducted by video. I work with people across the country.

I will hold this offer open to the first several readers who respond with genuine interest. I am not setting an arbitrary limit — I am acknowledging that I have a finite number of hours and I intend to use them well.

The pitcher doesn’t have to stay red. You don’t have to fight what’s in it. You just have to be willing to let something cleaner in — again, and again, and again, for as long as it takes. That’s the work. That’s what I do. That’s what I’m offering you.

With respect,

Terry Wray Bowling

Certified Focusing Practitioner In Training · 40 Years in Recovery
TerryWrayBowling.com

Why, Why... Again?! is a 52-week Substack series documenting one man’s recovery journey.

If this reached you, share it with someone it might reach next.

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Got it, Terry. Week 3 was already queued up as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Here’s your full review:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. Why willpower was never enough — and what actually works

Why I’m Recommending This:

For most of my life, I thought my problem was weak character: bad choices. A broken moral compass — I was just a different person. I can’t even say a bad person because I would have had to feel bad to know the difference.

Forty years in recovery will teach you otherwise. And it is a constant challenge to keep working on myself. I am either moving forward or moving backwards. There is no treading water.

What I didn’t understand until much later — and what this book explains better than anything I’ve read — is that trauma doesn’t live in your memory. It lives in your body. In your nervous system. In the automatic responses that fire before your conscious mind even knows what’s happening.

That’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation. And there’s a difference. Because with awareness comes the possibility of choice, which brings the possibility of change.

The Core Concept:

Trauma reshapes the brain. Literally. It rewires the structures responsible for threat response, impulse control, and the ability to feel safe — which means that behaviors rooted in childhood trauma can persist long after the circumstances that created them are gone.

Van der Kolk spent decades working with combat veterans, abuse survivors, and people with complex trauma. What he found was consistent: you cannot think your way out of trauma stored in your nervous system. Insight helps. But insight alone doesn’t rewire the body.

Why This Matters for Recovery:

If you grew up in a home where you couldn’t trust the people who were supposed to protect you — where love came wrapped in unpredictability, pain, or silence — your nervous system adapted. It learned to stay ready. To scan for threat. To protect itself at all costs.

For those of us with ASPD traits, that wiring runs deep. The manipulation, the emotional detachment, the hair-trigger responses — they weren’t born out of nothing. They were survival strategies that calcified into personality.

Van der Kolk doesn’t excuse the behavior. But he explains the architecture behind it in a way that finally made sense to me.

Key Takeaways:

The brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) doesn’t distinguish between past and present danger — which is why trauma responses feel immediate and real even decades later.

Language and logic live in different parts of the brain than trauma, which is why “just talk about it” often doesn’t resolve the physical symptoms.

Healing requires engaging the body — through movement, breath, rhythm, and somatic awareness — not just the mind.

Recovery isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about reclaiming the parts of yourself that went offline to keep you safe.

How This Connects to My Work with Dr. Ryce and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing:

When I started working with Dr. Michael Ryce’s tools, I didn’t fully understand why breathwork and forgiveness practices affected me physically. This book provided the neuroscience underneath that experience. The body and the mind are not separate systems. What you do with one affects the other.

Focusing — the practice developed by Eugene Gendlin — deepens that connection further. It’s a self-directed practice of bringing awareness into the body and attending to the sensations that arise there, sensations that often carry meaning we haven’t yet found words for. Simple to learn. Profound over time.

Forty years sober, I’m still learning how to live in my own body without bracing for impact. This book helped me understand why that work takes as long as it does and why it’s worth doing.

Who This Book Is For:

Anyone whose childhood shaped their adult wiring in ways they can’t fully explain.

People in recovery who’ve tried willpower and found it insufficient.

Those working with ASPD, complex PTSD, or addiction who want to understand the underlying neuroscience.

Coaches, counselors, or anyone supporting someone in long-term recovery.

Subscribe now

The Bottom Line:

You didn’t choose what happened to you. But understanding how it lives in your body gives you a path to do something about it.

That path starts here.

Available: Amazon, Audible, most local bookstores

This recommendation is part of Terry’s Recovery Reading List. See all recommendations →

Next Week — Week 4: Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin

Start - Stop.

Try it again

Move

Back Forward to and fro

To feel the

aliveness

that I am

To have

the friends

who know me

To feel the richness deeply as it cuts my soul with hot buttered knives

with blades of glistening

emotions

Sprinkles and sparkles and yes

a little salt in the wounds

Smacking the lips lightly

with slippery silvery

saliva

The smells of you

the earth

my soul

Penetrating my sinus

membrane pushing

fragrant air into

my brain

Seeing suns both

rise and set

knowing that

The last

will come -

But at Last

I am who

I am

INTRODUCTION

The View from the Logic-Anchor

My name is Terry Wray Bowling. I am 68 years old. I have been sober in AA for 40 years. I also live with a diagnosis of ASPD — Antisocial Personality Disorder, commonly called sociopathy.

In the world of New Age spirituality and soft self-help, that background is seen as a liability. In the world of Sovereignty, it is my greatest asset. Growing up with a master manipulator taught me how the con is run. Forty years of recovery taught me how to stop running it on myself.

I am also a certified Focusing practitioner — trained in the tradition of philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin through the Focusing Institute, under the direct mentorship of Annette Dubreuil (pupa.ca). Focusing is the discipline of reading the body’s pre-verbal signals — what Gendlin called the felt sense — as a source of accurate, somatic data. Where the Logic framework reads your bank statement, Focusing reads the knot in your stomach before you even open the envelope. They are different instruments measuring the same truth.

I wrote this manual because I am tired of watching good people get mined by predators — people who use beautiful words like presence, ego, mirror, and forgiveness to siphon away their money, their time, and their sanity.

WHAT THIS MANUAL IS — AND IS NOT

This is not a book about healing your inner child. This is a Manual for Human Adulthood.

We are going to treat your mind as an Evidentiary Device — a machine that takes in data to ensure your safety and independence. We are going to strip away the spiritual spin and return to Sane Logic.

You will find no affirmations here. You will find tools — specific, testable, repeatable tools — that allow you to identify manipulation, regulate your nervous system, and make clear decisions under pressure.

By the time you finish this manual, you will have a complete operating system for your own mind: a way to detect Red Dye when it enters your pitcher, flush it out with evidence, and govern your own life as a Sovereign Adult.

“One human helping another is a power without equal. Let’s clear your hard drive and reclaim your life.”

✦

INTRODUCTION — The View from the Logic-Anchor

CHAPTER 1 — The Mind as an Evidentiary Device

1.1 The Red Dye and the Clear Water

1.2 The Logic of Data Input

1.3 The Sovereign Truth-Strip

1.4 The Somatic Data Channel (Going Deeper)

CHAPTER 2 — The Sovereign Translation Guide

2.1 The Weaponization of Language

2.2 The Sovereign Translation Table

2.3 The Lien Detection Test

CHAPTER 3 — The Hard Drive Flush — Daily Tools

3.1 The Personal Hard Drive

Tools 1 & 2 — Mind Dump, Sovereign Breathing

Tool 2.5 — The Felt Sense Check-In (Going Deeper)

Tools 3 & 4 — Goal-Cancellation, Sovereign Petition

CHAPTER 4 — The Fortress — External Boundaries

4.1 The Cell Wall

4.2–4.4 Tools 5–7

CHAPTER 5 — The Maintenance — Daily Operating System

5.1 Sustainability vs. Crisis Management

5.2–5.4 Tools 8–10 & The Human Adult Oath

The Sovereign Reset

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“One human helping another is a power without equal. Let’s clear your hard drive and reclaim your life.”

Grandfather Pittman Richard “PR” Bowling - he always wore a hat!

WHY, WHY... AGAIN?!

The Adventures of a Reluctant Recovering Sociopath

by Terry Wray Bowling

Week 10: 1963 — The Night the Lights Went Out

Root Trauma #1: Water Street, Greensboro, North Carolina

In Week 2, I mentioned Water Street. I told you something happened there — something that I’ve come to understand as the moment the lights went out. I said I’d come back to it. As I have many times before, it still has that feeling to it.

We’re here now. And I’m back in the small brick duplex that overlooks the Proximity Printworks Textile Mill and the ballfield. We had no air conditioning or television for that matter. I remember looking out the window on those hot summer nights with a fan blowing in the background, hearing the occasional crack of the bat upon the ball and watching the small people moving to and fro from bathroom to bleachers to concession stand.

I want to be careful with this story. Not because I’m protecting myself — I’ve done enough work over forty years that this material doesn’t undo me anymore. But because what happened on Water Street is the kind of thing that deserves to be told with some respect for the weight of it. Respect for the five-year-old boy who was there, just weeks shy of his sixth birthday. For his brothers. For his mother.

Respect for what a child had to do — and what that doing cost him.

The Duplex on Water Street

We lived in a small duplex on Water Street in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was 1963. I was five years old, nearly six. My brother Darryl was four, and Alan was three — two babies and a toddler, all of us already living in the shadow of a man who took up more space than any house could hold. When he was there, which was not often, it was devastating.

My father — Big Fat Don, as he liked to be called — was six foot three and three hundred and fifty pounds. He was a periodic alcoholic, which meant there were stretches of relative quiet and then eruptions that seemed to come from nowhere and went everywhere at once. He fancied himself a criminal strategist, always working the angles toward what he called the big score. He had mob connections. He had a violent streak that ran bone deep. He had my mother in that house on Water Street with three small children and no easy way out.

I don’t know exactly what set him off that night. I’m not sure it matters. He was drunk again, probably lost a bet. What I know is what I saw, and what I heard, and what I was asked to do.

What a Five-Year-Old Saw

My mother’s screaming startled me. The sounds coming from the other room were not the sounds of an argument. They were the sounds of something worse. I got up off the couch.

What I walked into was bloody. My father was attacking my mother with a violence that a five-year-old has no framework to process — only to witness, and to store somewhere deep where the body keeps what the mind cannot yet hold.

My brothers reacted the way small children do when the world stops making sense. Darryl went into shock — just went somewhere inside himself and stayed there, sitting on the couch, unreachable. Alan crawled into the closet and pulled the dark around him like a blanket. Two little boys, doing the only thing a child can do when there is nothing to be done.

I was the oldest. And I experienced something I would spend decades trying to name: a presence of deep, emotionless awareness. The world went very quiet inside me. Very clear.

My mother, in the middle of what was happening to her, found enough of herself to scream at me. Not in panic — in instruction. Go get help. Call the police. Go.

My father heard her. He turned to me — all six foot three of him, all the rage of whatever had broken loose in him that night — and he made himself very clear: if I called the police, he would kill me.

I was five years old. I believed him. The evidence was plentiful.

And I went anyway.

The Neighbors Who Heard Everything

I went to the neighbors. I knocked on the door. I told them what was happening. I begged them to call the police. At first Pauline was afraid to answer the door, but I kept knocking.

Here is what I have never forgotten: they could hear it. The walls of a duplex are thin, and what was happening in our half of that building was not quiet. They knew. They had heard it. And they had not moved. She was terrified too.

It took a five-year-old boy standing at their door before anyone called for help — asking in a flat monotone voice: please call the police.

I don’t carry bitterness about this anymore. People freeze. People don’t want to get involved. People tell themselves it isn’t their business, or it will resolve itself, or they don’t want the trouble. I’ve done enough recovery work to understand fear and its mechanisms. But I’ll tell you plainly: the fact that a child had to be the one to act is something I have never entirely made peace with. My fifth therapist, years into recovery, helped me find some.

The police came. My father threatened them — they were visibly scared. He was removed. My mother was alive.

The Disconnect

Something happened to me that night that I wouldn’t understand for decades.

The best way I can describe it is this: I went somewhere. Not physically — I was still there, still present, still functioning. But something that had been connected came loose. Like a wire pulled free from a circuit. The lights were still on, but something essential had shifted in the wiring. I was walking around emotionally silent.

In later years I would learn words for this: dissociation. Trauma response. Survival adaptation. The “bubble helmet” I’ve described in earlier posts — that sense of watching my own life from slightly behind glass — began on Water Street. The boy who walked into that room was different from the boy who walked back out.

He had learned something that would take forty years of recovery to unlearn: that the world is not safe, that feeling is dangerous, that the only reliable protection is the ability to shut down and act without the interference of emotion.

For a five-year-old who just saved his family, that was a reasonable conclusion. For the man that boy was going to become, it was a blueprint for suffering.

What I Was Never Told

For most of my life I carried Water Street as a weight without a name. I knew what happened. I never knew how to hold it. Fortunately, it was locked in a vault, wrapped in energetic steel.

It wasn’t until years into my recovery — working with my fifth therapist, somewhere around 1995 to 2004 — that anyone said it plainly to me. This therapist looked at me after I told the story and said something no one had ever said:

“You know you were heroic that night. You were five years old and you did what grown adults around you wouldn’t do. You saved your family.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I sat with it for a long time. I’m still sitting with it, in some ways. But it shifted my whole perspective. At some level I was free from a big part of that situation.

The boy on Water Street didn’t think of himself as heroic. He thought of himself as terrified. He thought of himself as small. He went to the neighbors not because he was brave but because his mother was screaming and he was the oldest and there was nobody else.

That’s often what heroism actually is. Not the absence of fear. Just the decision to move anyway.

I’ve been able to access that at critical times. Years later, skipping school one afternoon, I watched a boy drowning. I didn’t think. I just ran and dove into the lake — clothes, wallet and all — and pulled him out. Laid him at the feet of his crying mother and walked away without a word or a feeling. Another woman who had witnessed it came up to me and said, “She appreciates what you did. She just can’t say it right now.” We left before the reporters and rescue team showed up, drove around the lake, and fired up another joint while my clothes were drying.

The heroism and the self-destruction running on the same track, side by side. That’s Water Street’s legacy.

The Teaching

I’ve spent a lot of time over forty years trying to understand how a person becomes the way I became. How the boy in the strawberry field — that luminous first mystical conscious moment, pure awareness and beauty — became the young man I described in earlier weeks. The one who felt nothing at his brother’s accident. The one who could look at someone’s pain and process it like information rather than feeling.

Water Street is a big part of that answer. A pivotal moment.

When a child is forced to act in the face of extreme danger — when survival requires shutting down the emotional system and just moving — the brain learns. It learns efficiently and it learns fast, because that’s what brains do. And what it learned on Water Street was: feelings will get you killed. Shut them down. Stay clear. Act.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s an adaptation. A survival strategy developed by a five-year-old who needed one urgently and used the only tools he had.

The problem — and this is the core of what I work on with people today — is that survival strategies don’t come with an expiration date. The mind that learned to disconnect in the face of danger doesn’t automatically understand that the danger is over. It keeps the strategy running long after it’s needed, long after it’s helpful, long after it’s costing you more than it’s protecting you.

You stop feeling to survive. Then you can’t feel even when you want to. Then you reach for something — alcohol, drugs, control, risk, power — that makes you feel again. The spiral has it’s beginning and frequently a tragic ending.

For Those Who Recognize This

If you are reading this and something in it sounds familiar — not the specific events, but the shape of it — I want to say this to you directly:

You adapted. Whatever you did as a child to survive what was happening around you, you did it because you needed to. Your nervous system responded to real danger with real intelligence. There is nothing wrong with the strategy. The problem is only that you’re still running it, and the danger has changed, or passed, and the strategy is now the thing that hurts you.

That’s not a moral failure. That’s a pattern that can be understood, and worked with, and over time — with the right tools and the right support — shifted.

Forty years of recovery have taught me that much, at least.

Next week: First Grade. Caesar Cone Elementary. A teacher named Ms. Conrad. The moment I first felt power — and what it cost me.

“To Thine Own Self Be True.”

The challenge is knowing what that means for you.

This is Week 10 in a series of 52 publications I will be releasing weekly.

Working With Me

If you’re carrying something like Water Street — a moment, or a season, or a whole childhood’s worth of material that shaped you in ways you’re still untangling, I’ve been where you are. I work with people exactly like this.

I offer one-on-one coaching for people navigating recovery with ASPD or complex trauma backgrounds. Not therapy — coaching, from someone who has done the work from the inside. I call it A Return to Sovereignty.

TerryWrayBowling.com | TerryBowling.com

Subscribe now

I also consult on construction fraud and contractor protection if that’s your world. Two different kinds of survival, same principle: knowing what you’re up against before it does damage.

Reach out to me. I’m here.

AA • Reality Management • Busting Loose • Autolysis• Focusing • Butterflies Are Free to Fly

Date: __________ What’s happening? ______________________

1. HONEST ADMISSION (AA Step 1 + All Six)

Right now I am struggling with: _______________________________

Physical sensation: ________________________________________

Emotional state: ___________________________________________

How is this making my life unmanageable? ____________________

☐ I admit I am powerless over this pattern/reaction/situation

2. CLAIM AUTHORSHIP (Busting Loose)

☐ I recognize I created my entire reaction and feelings about to this experience.

My reaction in creating this: ____________________________________

Sit with the discomfort. Breathe. Feel it without changing it (60 seconds).

Thank you [Higher Power/Expanded Self/Source] for showing me:

3. EXCAVATE THE PATTERN (Reality Management + AA Step 4+ Focusing)

The story/belief driving my reaction:

What I want from this situation/person: ______________________

So that I can: ______________________________________________

My hidden fear: ____________________________________________

Who might I have harmed with this pattern? ___________________

4. TEST FOR TRUTH (Autolysis)

Can I prove my story (#3) is absolutely, completely true? ☐ Yes ☐ No

What actual evidence exists (not interpretation)? ______________

What am I assuming? ________________________________________

If this belief collapsed, what would remain? __________________

5. SURRENDER & RELEASE (All Six)

AA: “Higher Power, I cannot manage this alone. I surrender my will.”

Reality Management: “I cancel my need for __________________

to happen. I cancel this goal: _________________________________.”

Busting Loose: “I reclaim all power I embedded in this illusion.”

Autolysis: “I release attachment to unprovable beliefs.”

☐ Breathe deeply. Feel the release in your body.

6. HUMBLE MORAL INVENTORY (AA Steps 5-7)

My part in this (what I actually did, not what was done to me):

Character defects showing up (fear, selfishness, dishonesty, etc.):

What I’m willing to have removed: ___________________________

7. MAKE IT RIGHT (AA Steps 8-9)

People I may need to make amends to: ________________________

What I can do (if it won’t cause more harm): _________________

When: ______________________________________________________

8. WHAT’S ACTUALLY TRUE NOW? (All Six)

Without my story, what’s really here? ________________________

What remains that I cannot doubt? ___________________________

From this clearer space, what wants to emerge? _______________

9. GRATITUDE & AWARENESS (AA Step 11 + All Six)

I’m grateful for: ___________________________________________

Meditation/Prayer/Quiet Contact:

In silence, I ask: “What do I need to know? What is being revealed?”

(Sit for 2-5 minutes in quiet awareness)

What came through: _________________________________________

10. DAILY PRACTICE (AA Step 10)

Pattern check: Have I created this before? ☐ Yes ☐ No

What’s the deeper pattern? __________________________________

Today, when I was wrong, I: ☐ Admitted it promptly ☐ Made it right immediately ☐ Need to address: ________________

11. INTEGRATION & COMMITMENT (All Six)

New awareness I’m taking forward: ___________________________

What shifts when I see this differently? ______________________

Commitments: ☐ Notice when this pattern returns ☐ Question my stories before believing them
☐ Recognize my creations as my own ☐ Surrender what I cannot control ☐ Make amends where needed ☐ Practice daily inventory ☐ Remain with truth over comfort

12. SERVICE & SHARING (AA Step 12 + All Six)

How can I share this learning/be of service today?

Who might benefit from what I’ve learned? ___________________

Living these principles: ☐ In relationships ☐ At work
☐ With family ☐ With myself ☐ In recovery ☐ Everywhere

NOTES & INSIGHTS

Worksheet guidance available!

Why I’m Recommending This:

After my spiritual awakening in that Orlando jail reading the Bhagavad Gita, I spent years trying to reconcile what I’d experienced with what made logical sense.

I’m not a natural “woo-woo” guy. I need frameworks that hold up under scrutiny. But I also couldn’t deny what happened to me—seeing that white light in a gnat, feeling actual emotions for the first time, recognizing something fundamental had shifted.

Truax’s book bridges that gap. It’s for people who refuse to choose between rational thinking and spiritual experience.

The Core Concept:

Consciousness isn’t a byproduct of matter. It’s the foundation from which matter emerges.

This isn’t mystical hand-waving. Truax builds his case using:

• Quantum physics (observer effects and measurement problems)

• Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (showing pure materialism has logical limits)

• Cross-cultural philosophy (without requiring you to adopt any belief system)

He calls it “Essentia Theory”—a consciousness-first model of reality.

Why This Matters for Recovery:

When you’re rebuilding your life after decades of manipulation, addiction, and ASPD behaviors, you need answers to hard questions:

• If I’m just neurons firing, why does recovery work?

• If consciousness is an accident, why does spiritual experience change people?

• If free will is an illusion, why does making different choices matter?

Materialist science says: You’re just a meat robot. Your choices don’t really matter. Consciousness is a trick your brain plays on itself.

Faith-based answers say: Just believe. Have faith. Trust the process.

Neither of those worked for me.

Truax offers a third path: consciousness is real, fundamental, and scientifically defensible.

Key Takeaways:

1. The “Third Path” - You don’t have to choose between cold rationality and fluffy spirituality

2. Consciousness is central - Not an accident or byproduct, but foundational to how reality works

3. Observer effects matter - Quantum physics shows observation literally shapes what we call “reality”

4. Materialism feels hollow because it is incomplete - Not wrong, just insufficient

5. You’re not “just” anything - Not just chemicals, not just programming, not just your past

How This Connects to ASPD Recovery:

For those of us with antisocial personality disorder, consciousness and identity are particularly fraught.

We’re told:

• ASPD is hardwired (you can’t change)

• You lack empathy (you’re fundamentally broken)

• Your brain is different (you’re not fully human)

All of that might be neurologically accurate. But it’s not the whole story.

If consciousness is fundamental—if there’s something underneath the wiring that’s unchanged by trauma, addiction, or personality disorder—then recovery isn’t about becoming a different person.

It’s about remembering what was always true underneath the damage.

That’s what Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: “You are not your actions. You are the eternal self, unchanging, untouchable by what you’ve done.”

Truax gives you a scientific framework for understanding why that might actually be true.

Who This Book Is For:

• People who’ve had spiritual experiences but can’t reconcile them with rational thinking

• Anyone torn between “science says...” and “faith requires...”

• Those in recovery who need meaning but refuse to abandon critical thinking

• People rebuilding identity who need a framework bigger than “fix your brain chemistry”

• Anyone asking: “If I’m just neurons and conditioning, why does changing my behavior change who I am?”

What You’ll Get:

• Clear explanations (no equations, no academic jargon)

• A framework that dissolves the “meat robot in a meaningless cosmos” dread

• Tools for applying this worldview to relationships, creativity, and purpose

• Permission to take both science and spiritual experience seriously

The Bottom Line:

You don’t have to choose between your brain and your soul. Between logic and experience. Between what you can measure and what you can feel.

Reality is bigger than materialism allows. But you don’t have to abandon reason to see it.

Subscribe now

Available: Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

Next Week’s Recommendation: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk - Why trauma lives in your nervous system, not just your thoughts, and what actually works to heal it.

Bodhi - my youngest grandchild!

I walked out of that Orlando jail thinking the hard part was over.

I was wrong.

The charges were dropped. The warrants were cleared. I had five years of sobriety, a spiritual experience, and a marriage that was already dead but hadn’t been buried yet.

What I didn’t have: a plan.

Coming Home to Nothing

"My ride pulled into the driveway after a bus journey that felt endless. But the trip home had been filled with small miracles—strangers helping, connections falling into place, like I was being carried."

She’d made it clear on those collect calls: I was a financial liability. The marriage was a mistake we’d both made for the wrong reasons.

I’d married her to prove I could be normal. She’d married me thinking she could save me.

You can’t build a life on either of those foundations.

We lasted three more months.

The Divorce

People ask me how I felt when the marriage ended.

Honest answer? I didn’t know.

Six years sober and I still couldn’t reliably identify my own emotions. I knew I should feel something—sadness, relief, failure, freedom—but mostly I just felt... blank.

Not numb. Not high. Not dissociated.

Just... observing my own life like I was watching someone else go through it.

The only thing I felt with certainty was this: I will not drink over this.

That became my mantra. My anchor. The one thing I knew for sure when everything else was uncertain.

The Meeting Room Floor

For three months after the divorce was finalized, I slept at James’s house. I had helped him buy some old houses from Vickie’s father.

Not because I didn’t have money for rent. Because I was terrified. I didn’t like being alone.

Five years sober and I had:

• No wife

• No career that was doing anything

• No warrants (for the first time in 14 years)

• No idea who I was supposed to be

Every morning, I would say the same thing: “Get up. Meeting somewhere today. I’m going.”

Every day, I went.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel inspired. I didn’t feel connected.

But I went. Because that’s what you do.

The Skills Inventory

Tom, my sponsor, suggested I do something I hated: a skills inventory.

“Write down everything you’re good at,” he said.

I stared at the blank paper for an hour.

Finally, I wrote:

• Lying

• Manipulation

• Theft

• Forgery

• Breaking and entering

• Surviving

Tom looked at the list. Didn’t flinch.

“Now write what those skills actually are,” he said.

I didn’t understand.

“Lying is communication. Manipulation is reading people. Theft is problem-solving. Forgery is attention to detail. Breaking and entering is mechanical aptitude. Surviving is resilience.”

He slid the paper back to me.

“Now. What kind of work uses those skills without hurting people?”

I had no idea.

“Figure it out,” he said. “You’ve got time.”

The Labor Jobs

I was driving a loaner vehicle.

Picking up jobs.

Moving furniture. Landscaping. Painting. Demo work.

Nothing that required too much scrutiny.

It was humbling. I was 34 years old, working below my abilities, making what I could get.

But here’s what I learned: I was good at physical work.

Not because I enjoyed it. Because I could turn off the part of my brain that complained.

Hot sun? Ignored it. Sore muscles? Didn’t register. Repetitive tasks? Perfect. No thinking required.

The Guy at the Meeting

Six months after the divorce, a guy at a meeting mentioned he needed help framing.

“You ever done a commercial job?” he asked.

“No.”

“Can you read a blueprint?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show up on time?”

“Yes.”

“I provided a bid and the job was mine.”

That was it. That was the interview.

I showed up Monday. And Tuesday. And Wednesday.

By Friday, he said, “You’re fast. You want more work come back next week.”

I did.

What I Was Learning (Without Knowing It)

Five years sober, and I still didn’t understand how recovery was changing me.

I couldn’t feel the difference. But other people could see it.

The construction crew saw:

• I showed up on time

• I did what I said I’d do

• I didn’t steal tools

• I didn’t create drama

• I worked until the job was done

In the criminal world, these would have made me weak. In the straight world, they made me valuable.

I wasn’t charming, although I could be. I wasn’t likable. I wasn’t inspiring.

But I was reliable.

And reliability, it turns out, is worth more than charm.

The Slips I Didn’t Take

Year five was full of moments I could have used as excuses:

• Marriage ending

• Living on a couch

• Working manual labor at 34

• No career prospects

• No clear future

Every single one was a reason to drink.

I didn’t.

Not because I was strong. Because I was terrified.

I’d been sober long enough to know what I’d lose. And for the first time in my life, I had something I didn’t want to give up:

A clear record. A sponsor who answered the phone. Work that paid legally. The ability to sleep without paranoia.

It wasn’t much. But it was mine. And it was real.

The Foundation (Literal and Metaphorical)

By the end of year five, I’d worked on maybe 15 different job sites.

I started noticing something.

Every house started the same way: clear the lot, dig the foundation, pour concrete.

You couldn’t skip steps. You couldn’t rush it. If the foundation was wrong, everything built on top of it would eventually fail.

I was learning—through my hands, not my head—what recovery had been trying to teach me for five years:

You can’t build a life by covering up damage. You have to dig down. Pour a new foundation. Build from the ground up.

One board at a time.

What I Learned in Year Five

1. Hitting bottom doesn’t just happen once.

Even sober, even doing the right things, life can strip everything away. The question is: will you drink over it?

2. Identity can’t be borrowed.

I’d tried to be a husband. That didn’t work. Now I had to figure out who I actually was.

3. Reliability is more valuable than charm.

For someone with ASPD, this was revolutionary. I’d spent 30 years trying to charm people. Turns out, just showing up works better.

4. Sometimes “not drinking” is enough.

I didn’t have a grand vision. I didn’t have a five-year plan. I just had today. And today, I didn’t drink.

5. Work saves lives.

Not because it gives you purpose. Because it gives you structure. And structure keeps you sober until purpose shows up.

What’s Coming:

Next week (Week 9): Six years sober, 1993. How building houses helped me rebuild myself. From day laborer to running crews—and why the skills ASPD gave me actually worked in construction.

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For Those in the Messy Middle:

Recovery doesn’t happen in a straight line. Sometimes everything falls apart after you’ve done the right thing.

Stay sober anyway. The foundation you’re building now will hold later.

I offer coaching for people navigating the ugly middle years of recovery—when you’ve done the work but can’t see the results yet. Let’s talk.

“To Thine Own Self Be True.”
The challenge is knowing what that means for you.

This is week 9 in a series of 52 publications I will be releasing weekly.

The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins

Why I’m Recommending This:

For people in recovery—especially those of us wired with ASPD—learning to stop controlling others is both essential and nearly impossible.

We’ve spent our lives manipulating outcomes, managing perceptions, and trying to control how people see us. The exhaustion is real.

Robbins’ “Let Them Theory” offers something radical: permission to stop.

The Core Concept:

Use two simple words: “Let Them.”

• Let them judge you

• Let them misunderstand you

• Let them make their own mistakes

• Let them live with their choices

• Let them be wrong about you

Why This Matters for Recovery:

When you’re rebuilding your life after addiction, crime, or chaos, everyone has an opinion about who you should be and how fast you should change.

Family members want proof you’ve changed. Employers want guarantees you won’t relapse. Friends want the old you back (or gone completely).

You cannot control any of this.

But you can control whether you waste your energy trying to.

Key Takeaways:

1. You can’t control other people - Trying to is futile and draining

2. “Let Them” is freedom - Let others make their choices; you make yours

3. Focus on yourself - Your thoughts, actions, goals, and happiness

4. Reclaim your power - Stop managing everyone else; start building your life

5. Build confidence - Make choices that are right for you, even if they make others uncomfortable

How This Connects to ASPD Recovery:

For those of us with antisocial personality traits, the manipulation instinct runs deep. We’re wired to:

• Read people and adjust our behavior accordingly

• Control situations to avoid vulnerability

• Manage others’ perceptions to protect ourselves

Recovery requires the opposite: letting people see the real you and letting them respond however they respond.

That’s terrifying. And necessary.

Robbins’ framework gives you a tool to practice this without feeling like you’re giving up all control—you’re just choosing what to control (yourself) and what to release (everyone else).

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Who This Book Is For:

• Anyone exhausted from trying to manage other people’s opinions

• People in recovery learning to live authentically instead of manipulatively

• Those rebuilding their lives who need permission to focus on their own path

• Anyone who needs to hear: You don’t have to convince anyone of anything

The Bottom Line:

You can’t build an honest life while trying to control how people perceive you.

“Let Them” is the permission slip to stop trying.

Available: Amazon, Audible, local bookstores

Next Week’s Recommendation: Reality 2.0: A Revolutionary New Look at the Universe and Life by William Truax - A consciousness-first framework that bridges science and spirituality without requiring faith.

Another Beautiful Daughter of Mine!

Day 1.

33rd Street High-Rise Jail, Orlando, Florida.

I’d been in county lockup 17 times before I got sober. But never like this. Never clean. Never with five years of sobriety to protect. Never with something real to lose.

Tom Sears my sponsor, continued to take my calls. He had a few Simple messages: “Your inability to connect with any program material or meetings in lock up is a message. It is time for you to see what you have eternalized as your program. It’s just you and your Higher Power now. ”

My wife at the time said to me on a phone call, “You have to stop calling me collect. I’m not accepting the charges and you aren’t here to help out with any bills.” I sat with that for a minute, and she added, “You don’t even know how long you will be gone.” And she hung up.

I knew that was the end of our marriage. Why is This Happening to Me ….AGAIN?! Was happening to me again.

Four years earlier when after I had went into detox and moved over to the extended twenty-eight day program, my wife at that time had said something similar and added, “You need to get out of there and get back here and pay these bills.” That seven year wild ride of an addiction addled dysfunctional relationship. Her heart exploded from cocaine abuse a few years after I got clean. Her mom said it was my fault, I broke her heart.

The First Week: Survival Mode

Jail is designed to break you. That’s the point. Strip away your identity, your dignity, your autonomy. Reduce you to a number and a jumpsuit.

But here’s what they didn’t count on: I’d already been broken and rebuilt.

Five years of recovery had taught me:

• How to sit with discomfort without numbing it

• How to find routine in chaos

• How to connect with people even when I didn’t want to

• How to survive one day at a time

The bubble helmet that protected me as a child was back. But this time, I was using it consciously. I could observe the situation without being destroyed by it.

I wasn’t dissociating. I was detaching. There’s a difference.

Week Two: The Bhagavad Gita

Once I made trustee, which was surprisingly fast things changed. There was a giant cardboard box out in the yard, drug out once a week. Mostly westerns and outdated magazines.

But tucked in the bottom: The Bhagavad Gita.

I’d never heard of it. Picked it up because there was nothing else. For two weeks I’d been asking for recovery literature, anything, and a meeting. No luck.

I thought, at least it’s something.

It was something alright. A lifeline.

The Bhagavad Gita: Teaching Integration

For those unfamiliar: The Bhagavad Gita is ancient Hindu scripture. A warrior named Arjuna stands on a battlefield, facing an impossible choice. His teacher, Krishna, explains duty, righteousness, the nature of the self.

Why it hit me:

Arjuna’s question: “How do I do the right thing when every option feels wrong?”

My question: “How do I live with who I’ve been while becoming who I need to be?”

Arjuna’s struggle: He’s supposed to fight, but fighting means killing people he loves.

My struggle: I’m supposed to be honest, but honesty means admitting I’ve lied about everything.

Krishna’s answer changed everything:

“You are not your actions. You are not your past. You are the eternal self, unchanging, untouchable by what you’ve done or failed to do.”

For a sociopath in recovery, this was revolutionary.

I’d spent five years trying to become a different person. Trying to erase the criminal, the addict, the ASPD-wired brain. Trying to be “good” when I didn’t even understand what good felt like.

The Gita said: You don’t have to become different. You have to remember what’s already true underneath all the trauma and addiction and performance.

For ten days I read that book.

Not because I understood it all. Not because it “fixed” me. But because it gave me a framework that made sense when nothing else did.

Week Three: Continuous Spiritual Experiences

I don’t know how else to describe it.

Sitting in that cell, reading that book, something shifted. Not a lightning bolt. Not a voice from heaven. Just... opening.

Like the bubble helmet I’d lived in since age five started to crack. Not breaking—I needed it for protection—but letting light through.

I started to feel things.

Not the chemical-induced feelings from drugs. Not the manufactured emotions from trying to be “normal.” Real, quiet, undeniable feelings.

I remember the moment it happened. Day 14, sitting on that metal bunk, reading Krishna’s words about the eternal self. As I sat out in the common yard at a stainless steel permanently mounted to the ground table, a gnat flew around my head. I watched it, it landed on my finger. And as I looked at this gnat, a tiny pure white bright light shone out from the tiny gnat body. Everything has a “Soul” or innate common divine energy.

I felt... sadness. Not the intellectual acknowledgment that I’d hurt people. Actual, chest-tightening, throat-closing sadness. And a deep awareness of something.

For someone who’d spent 33 years either numb or chemically induced, this was terrifying. I didn’t trust it. Thought maybe I was having a breakdown.

But it kept happening. Like the moment in the hospital five years earlier, this perfect quiet stillness presented itself.

Gratitude when I thought of Tom. Fear that I’d lose this sobriety. Hope that maybe I wouldn’t.

Small feelings. Quiet. But undeniably real.

For someone with ASPD, this was mystifying and miraculous in equal measure.

I’d spent five years sober learning to act like I had feelings. In that jail cell, I started to actually have them.

The Attempt on My Life

Day 19.

I don’t want to get into all the details—jail violence is its own genre, and this isn’t that story. But here’s what you need to know:

Someone decided I was a problem. Someone wanted to use me to better their standing.

I don’t know why. Maybe I helped the wrong person. Maybe I refused to help the right person. Maybe I was just the biggest target around and someone wanted street cred.

But the hit was coming. And I knew it.

Then something extraordinary happened.

An inmate I’d barely spoken to—a guy who’d watched me help another inmate with his GED homework a few days earlier—pulled me aside.

“Why’d you help him?” he asked. “What?” I was confused. “That guy. With his test. Why’d you help him? What’s in it for you?” “Nothing. He needed help.” “Nobody does nothing for nothing.” “I did.”

He studied me. Hard. Looking for the con. The angle. The manipulation.

He didn’t find one. Because there wasn’t one.

Three days later, he saved my life.

It happened fast. We were standing in the chow line. I saw something out of the corner of my eye—movement, aggression, intent. The inmate who’d questioned me intercepted a guy coming at me from across the room and took him out. Hard. Fast. Efficient.

The threat disappeared. The hit was off.

Afterward, I asked him why.

He said: “Because you actually meant it. When you helped that guy. You actually meant it.”

That’s when I understood:

Five years of faking it had turned into something real.

The actions I’d been performing—helping people, showing up, being honest—had become who I was.

Not because I’d erased the ASPD. But because I’d built something on top of it.

Day 21: Walking Out Free

They dropped the charges. Suspended sentence. Time served.

I stood motionless in front of the judge on the teleprompter. That was part of this surreal prison of the future happening now experience.

He paused and looked at me, allowing me the moment to feel his pronouncement to be received into my understanding. Then waived me on.

I walked out of that jail on Day 21.

A free man for the first time in 14 years. No warrants.

Unbelievable feeling of euphoria, a new and profound experience for me.

I made it to the bus station. A ticket was waiting for me—Mike had arranged it. Seventeen hours of Greyhound buses, a string of small miracles. Like walking on air floating above the ground!

My life was different.

Not fixed. Not cured. Not suddenly normal.

But changed. In ways I couldn’t explain and wouldn’t fully understand for years.

The Marriage Ending

I went home to Vickie.

The marriage was already over. We both knew it. I’d married her to prove I could be normal. She’d married me thinking she could save me.

Neither of those are reasons to stay married.

We divorced within the year.

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What I Learned in 21 Days

1. Sobriety isn’t about erasing who you were. It’s about building on top of it.

I didn’t stop being ASPD-wired in that jail. But I learned I could be ASPD and honest. ASPD and helpful. ASPD and connected.

2. Spiritual experiences don’t require feelings. They require openness.

For five years I’d thought I couldn’t have a spiritual awakening because I couldn’t feel it. The Gita taught me: awakening isn’t a feeling. It’s a recognition.

3. People see the real you, even when you can’t.

That inmate saw something in me I didn’t know was there. He saw I’d changed before I felt it.

4. You can’t build a life on a lie. Even a sober life.

Turning myself in was the right thing. Not because I got off easy (I did, but that was luck). Because I couldn’t keep living halfway.

5. The work is never done. It just gets different.

I walked out of jail with five years sobriety, a spiritual experience, a divorce pending, and no idea what came next.

But I knew one thing: I wouldn’t drink today.

What’s Coming:

Next week (Week 9): Seven years sober, 1993. How building houses helped me rebuild myself. From criminal to contractor—and why the skills ASPD gave me actually worked in construction.

Week 10: Meeting Dr. Michael Ryce at 11 years sober. The tools that actually work for ASPD recovery. Why I wasn’t ready before, and what changed.

For Those Facing Legal Consequences While in Recovery:

You don’t have to choose between sobriety and facing what you’ve done. You can do both. But timing matters, and support matters more.

I offer coaching for people navigating recovery + legal systems + ASPD. If you’re struggling with this contradiction—building a life while running from your past—let’s talk.