Responsible? Hell No!

By Daniel Miklos Kolos

This book is about messing up and getting over it. Like the time he got orders to go to Nam, showed up on a Friday night and other than the desk Sergeant the barracks were empty. By then he was in the army long enough to notice that practically no one worked on weekends, so he left and returned Sunday night. The barracks were still empty. But the desk Sergeant was there so Daniel asked, “Where is everyone?” He said, “In Viet Nam. Where were you?” “In Philadelphia,” Daniel said totally innocently. “You went AWOL! I could send you to Leavenworth for that,” and he stared. “OK,” Daniel said and waited. “What the hell,” Sarge said, “I’ll send you off with the next group.”
Daniel went to study ancient Egypt with VA support, and had a prof whom he could not talk to. His heart would double its speed, his mouth would go dry and he would forget what he was going to say anyway. Why? This book is all about Daniel’s adventures and how he learns to cope

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982235147

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Copyright © 2019 Daniel Miklos Kolos.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3513-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3515-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-3514-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019914357

Balboa Press rev. date: 11/07/2019

CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

Introduction Part 1 Where Do I Begin?

Introduction Part 2 There is Only One Diagnosis: Trauma

Chapter 1 I Am Not Held; Therefore, I Am Not Loved.

Chapter 2 I Am Not Held, Therefore, I Am Not Loved. Part 2

Chapter 3 My Story, Part 1 What Happened: The Facts

Chapter 4 My Story, Part 2 The Feelings, Interpretations, and Consequent Beliefs

Chapter 5 Connecting with My Anger

Chapter 6 If I Feel Bad, It’s My Fault!

Chapter 7 I Love You! Why Don’t You Love Me Too?

Chapter 8 Can I Love Myself? Part One: Self-Love

Chapter 9 Can I Love Myself? Part 2: Self-Care

Chapter 10 Can I Love Myself? Part 3: What Are the Boundaries of Addiction?

Chapter 11 Can I Love Myself? Part 4: Resolving the Loss of Self-Love

Chapter 12 I Don’t Ask. I am Afraid of Being Rejected.

Chapter 13 My Story Part 1: The Facts: University College, University of Pennsylvania

Chapter 14 My Story Part 2: What Happened? The Feelings, Interpretations, and the Consequent Beliefs

Chapter 15 What is a Belief System? Part 1: The Personal: How Did I Get a Belief System in the First Place?

Chapter 16 What is a Belief System? Part 2: Propaganda: The Anatomy of ‘Belief’

Chapter 17 What is a Belief System? Part 3: How Do I Change a Belief System?

Chapter 18 My Story Part 1: The Facts: How I Was Bullied in First Grade

Chapter 19 My Story Part 2: How I Formed, Played Out and Resolved One Childhood Belief

Chapter 20 What is the Boundary Between Illusions and Delusions?

Chapter 21 Perception Part 1: Illusion or Reality?

Chapter 22 Perception Part 2: Is Illusion My Reality?

Chapter 23 Perception Part 3: Who Do I Think I Am?

Chapter 24 Perception Part 4: Fire Walking: An Object Lesson to Recognize Illusion

Chapter 25 Perception Part 5: Technological Reality?

Chapter 26 Who Speaks Through me? Am I Responsible?

Chapter 27 My Story Part 1: The Facts About One Relationship

Chapter 28 My Story Part 2: Analysis of the Fear That Speaks Through Me

Chapter 29 Who Speaks to Me?

Chapter 30 Do I Perform Ceremony? Who is Responsible for It?

Chapter 31 Am I a Bully? Then I was Bullied Myself!

Chapter 32 What is Emotional Pain?

Chapter 33 How Do I Face my Emotional Pain? Part 1: Who Will Help Me with How I Feel?

Chapter 34 How Do I Face my Emotional Pain? Part 2: How long have human being been aware of their pain?

Chapter 35 How do I Face my Emotional Pain? Part 3: Do I Have Any?

Chapter 36 How do I Face My Emotional Pain? Part 4: What is Trauma?

Chapter 37 How Do I Face My Emotional Pain? Part 5: What About the Pain of Birth?

Chapter 38 Becoming Aware Part 1: Why Habits and Thoughtlessness Get in the Way

Chapter 39 Becoming Aware Part 2: How Do I Find a Therapy or Therapist?

Chapter 40 Becoming Aware Part 3: What’s the First Step to Finding a Therapist?

Chapter 41 Becoming Aware Part 4: How Do I Search for My Repressed Feelings?

Chapter 42 My Story: Another Boy Threw a Rock at My Head

Part 1-The Facts as I Remember Them

Chapter 43 My Story Part 2: What Happened Next—The Feelings, Interpretations, and The Consequent Beliefs

Chapter 44 Becoming Aware Part 5: Find a Practice and Reap Happiness

Chapter 45 Am I Conscious? Part 1: What Do I Know?

Chapter 46 Am I Conscious? Part 2: Who Shifts My Consciousness?

Chapter 47 Am I Conscious? Part 3: Are Habits Unconscious?

Chapter 48 Am I Conscious? Part 4: Where is My Consciousness?

Chapter 49 Am I Alone? Part 1: Introduction

Chapter 50 Am I Alone? Part 2: Am I Disconnected?

Chapter 51 Am I Alone? Part 3: When Did it Start?

Chapter 52 Am I Alone? Part 4: What’s My Perspective?

Chapter 53 Am I Alone? Part 5: I Am Never Alone!

Chapter 54 Am I Alone? Part 6: The Etymology and Religious Roots

Chapter 55 Am I Alone? Part 7: The Soul: Psyche in Greek Mythology

Chapter 56 Am I Alone? Part 8: Historical Separation of Religious and Intellectual Knowledge

Chapter 57 My Story Part 1: Am I Alone? The Facts

Chapter 58 Judgment

Chapter 59 Emotional Reconnection Part 1: The Story

Chapter 60 Emotional Reconnection Part 2: Applying the Compassionate Inquiry Process

Chapter 61 My Story Part 1: A Life of Emptiness: The Facts

Chapter 62 My Story Part 2: Emotional Absence: Dumb Luck or Fate or Divine Guidance?

Chapter 63 My Story Part 3: The Interpretation

Chapter 64 Emotional Reconnection Part 4: Connecting with My Pain

Chapter 65 Emotional Reconnection Part 5: Where Does my Pain Take Me?

Chapter 66 Emotional Reconnection Part 6: What Happens to the Pain?

Chapter 67 Emotional Reconnection Part 7: I Choose a Meaningful Discipline

Chapter 68 Emotional Reconnection Part 8: Recap and Reconnection

Chapter 69 Emotional Reconnection Part 9: Lesson and Takeaway

Chapter 70 Do I Have to Be Responsible for Myself? Part 1: What About My ‘Comfort Zone’?

Chapter 71 Do I Have to Be Responsible for Myself? Part 2: What About my Food?

Chapter 72 Vulnerability Part 1: What Do I do When I Feel Vulnerable?

Chapter 73 Vulnerability Part 2: Can I Be Assertive and Resentful at the Same Time?

Chapter 74 Vulnerability Part 3: Finding Anger and Fear

Chapter 75 Who Will Hold Me? Part 1: What Happens When I am Not Held as a Child?

Chapter 76 Who Will Hold Me? Part 2: When I Am an Adult?

Chapter 77 Who Will Hold Me? Part 3: When the Tribe Doesn’t?

Chapter 78 Do I Need Healing? Part 1: Cultural Roots of My Trauma

Chapter 79 Do I Need Healing? Part 2: Then Start Breathing

Chapter 80 Do I Need Healing? Part 3: Three Ways to Recognize My Pain

Chapter 81 Do I Need Healing? Part 4: Three More Ways to Recognize My Pain

Chapter 82 Seeking Enlightenment Part 1: Am I Ready?

Chapter 83 Seeking Enlightenment Part 2: Comfort Inhibits Learning

Chapter 84 Seeking Enlightenment Part 3: What is ‘Seeking’? What is ‘Truth’?

Chapter 85 Seeking Enlightenment Part 4: What Gets in the Way?

Chapter 86 Seeking Enlightenment Part 5: What About Addiction?

Chapter 87 Seeking Enlightenment Part 6: Reinventing the Wheel

Chapter 88 Seeking Enlightenment Part 7: Is Being Pissed Off the Key to Enlightenment?

Chapter 89 Connecting with Your Child Part 1: What’s the Problem with My Daughter?

Chapter 90 Connecting with Your Child Part 2: I Am the Problem!

Chapter 91 Connecting with Your Child Part 3: Reconnecting

Chapter 92 Responsible Self-care Part 1: Am I Responsible for What I Think About Myself, or For the Way I think About Myself?

Chapter 93 Responsible Self-Care Part 2: What is Self-Care?

Chapter 94 Responsible Self-Care Part 3: Resistance to Commitment

Chapter 95 Responsible Self-Care Part 4: What Do I Gain and Lose by Resisting Commitment?

Chapter 96 The Holy Grail of Spiritual Pursuit

Chapter 97 Intuition Part 1: Intuitional/Rational Balance

Chapter 98 Intuition Part 2: How Do I Develop Intuition?

Chapter 99 Intuition Part 3: Role of the Body and the Unconscious in Developing Intuition

Chapter 100 Intuition Part 4: Can Intuition Be Soul-Guidance?

Chapter 101 Intuition Part 5: The Conundrum of Certainty and Uncertainty

Chapter 102 Intuition Part 6: Confident in My Unconscious?

Chapter 103 Self Correction Part 1: How I Responded to a Toxic Situation

Chapter 104 Self Correction Part 2: Wherever You are, Make Peace

Chapter 105 Self Correction Part 3: From Blame to Responsibility

Chapter 106 Self-Correction Part 4: Everything That Happens Has a Reason

Chapter 107 Self-Correction Part 5: Resolving Conflict.

Chapter 108 Upholding Our Importance

Chapter 109 Why am I Afraid to Ask for a Date? Part 1: I am Too Shy

Chapter 110 Why am I Afraid to Ask for a Date? Part 2: Fear of Rejection

Chapter 111 Why am I Afraid to Ask for a Date? Part 3: Rejection and the Fear of Abandonment

Chapter 112 Why am I Afraid to Ask for Information?

Chapter 113 Why Am I Afraid to Ask When I Want to?

Chapter 114 What is the Downside of Believing You Know Everything? The Story

Chapter 115 Courage Part 1: Definition

Chapter 116 Courage Part 2: Can I Handle Pain?

Chapter 117 Courage Part 3: Can I Hurt Other People?

Chapter 118 Courage Part 4: How Deep Does it Go?

Chapter 119 Meaning

Chapter 120 Redemption Part 1: Who Needs Redemption?

Chapter 121 Redemption Part 2: How Do I Begin to Seek Redemption?

Chapter 122 Redemption Part 3: How Do I Find Redemption?

Chapter 123 Who Am I? Part 1: Who Am I as Far as You are Concerned?

Chapter 124 Who Am I? Part 2: Pretending to Be Objective

Chapter 125 Who Am I? Part 3: I Am a Body With Feelings

Chapter 126 Who Am I? Part 4: I Am Potentially Omniscient!

Chapter 127 Who am I? Part 5: How Do I Contact My ‘Divinity’?

Chapter 128 Who Am I? Part 6: I am a Dualistic Being

Chapter 129 What About Astrology?

Chapter 130 What is a ‘Reflection’?

Chapter 131 Are We Light Beings?

Chapter 132 Do I Need a Physical Practice? Do I Need to Have a Discipline?

Chapter 133 What About My Mind? Part 1: What’s in My Mind?

Chapter 134 What About My Mind? Part 2: The War I Tried to Avoid For So Long

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I n 2014 Dr. Gabor Mate held a one-day workshop in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. A dear friend had to drag me, protesting, resisting and denying that I have anything to do with addiction. She bought me Dr. Mate’s book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which opened my eyes.

Dr. Mate ‘spoke my language.’ I don’t just mean that he was a fellow Hungarian. No. Every sentence he spoke turned out to be meaningful for me. The lecture hall was filled with professional mental health workers. I am sure there were other ‘lay’ people like me, but I felt no deficit at all. Not a single one of these people, from psychiatrists to hot-shot therapists and addiction specialists had any idea what was coming. In fact, having read the popular book on childhood brain development, The Magical Child, written in 1978 by Joseph Chilton Pearce, I had far more knowledge about how trauma interrupts brain development than most people in the lecture hall.

Dr. Mate came to Owen Sound, Ontario, because Sat Dharam Kaur, N.D. had invited him. She had just developed a holistic teaching program called Beyond Addiction. Having read Dr. Mate’s book on addiction, she saw a perfect fit. She enhanced her program with his knowledge about addiction. Sat Dharam Kaur had combined a basic Life-Coach teaching with Kundalini Yoga and the teaching of Yogi Bhajan, with holistic health practices, including specific food and supplementation for various body cleanses, and finally with the latest scientific research on brain development.

At that event, I asked Sat Dharam Kaur ‘what is the next step?’ In April, 2014 I enrolled in her Beyond Addiction Program. At the same time, she had convinced Dr. Mate to create a workshop series based on his studies and experiences with addicts and trauma. At first, he was reluctant. I don’t have anything to teach, he thought. A series of workshops in Vancouver and Toronto changed his mind. Even though he thought nobody would show up, he consistently filled lecture halls with 360 or more people. He claimed that you cannot help others reach their pain and learn to cope with their painful emotions until you face and accept your own pain. Wherever we are in our emotional development is exactly the point where we can bring others.

I was present for the two Toronto Workshops called Compassionate Inquiry. I took the opportunity to sign up and participate in two more series of on-line workshops with Dr. Mate, then asked Sat Dharam Kaur’s permission to study and practice for a Compassionate Inquiry Certification course she had organized from Dr. Mate’s workshop series. Instead of having ‘nothing to say,’ Gabor Mate found himself at the forefront of a therapeutic revolution that starts with the practitioner: if the Practitioner can get in touch with his or her pain, then so can any client that wants—or needs—to!

INTRODUCTION

Part 1 Where Do I Begin?

A nywhere. Every page in this book is relevant to something I do, something I have done, or something I have observed. I may begin reading anywhere. This book is created in such a way, that I may pick it up, read a chapter, skip to another, and so forth. It is meant to support me on my very individual journey.

Where I begin may be due to my personality-type. How redundant! On the one hand there are perfectionists, administrators, categorizers; on the other, anti-authoritarians, creatives, free spirits.

The march of psychological and neurobiological research keeps uncovering simpler and more effective standards of emotional health and therapies. Judith Lewis Herman, a Harvard psychiatrist, wrote a book called Trauma and Recovery in 1995. Basically she said that there is only one psychiatric diagnosis, and everything else is just a variation on this theme. She called this diagnosis Complex Post Traumatic Stress.

Since then, psychiatrists continued to find and name more and more personality dysfunctions (whether or not they were aware that all dysfunctions developed from a series of childhood traumas) for which drug companies have developed new psychotropic medications.

Personality, within this evolutionary context, is a defense mechanism we pick up, or adapt, as small, pre-verbal children, every time one of our needs is not met. In one sense, we develop a personality every time our brain development is interrupted both in the womb and as pre-verbal infants and toddlers. These interruptions are not our fault! At that age we are not responsible for these developments.

Hardly anyone escapes these early emotional (pre-verbal) responses to apparent survival issues. The mother’s ordinary stresses and strains replace oxytocin and serotonin (two feel-good hormones) in her bloodstream with adrenalin and cortisol (two hormones that are connected to stress levels and distress in the body). It is completely natural.

In the uterus, however, this hormonal exchange becomes a survival issue for the gestating child. The repeated loss of the feel-good hormones stresses the fetus. It is ‘interpreted’ by the fetus, in its emerging sensitivity, as a potential threat to its life.

Our survival responses are few: fight, flight or freeze. The fetus can kick its legs, flail its arms, but the most common response is for the fetus to freeze—to go into a trance! In this stress-induced trance, while the fetus waits for the oxytocin and serotonin to return, it stops developing. The loss of connection to its emotional development creates trauma.

There is nothing the mother can do about encountering the stresses of everyday life. It is not the mother’s fault that the developing fetus is acquiring this trauma. It is simply the natural process that occurs within the womb. However, that trauma stays with us as we move through our lives.

This book is about how that repeated trauma plays us, drives us, and preoccupies us for the rest of our lives.

INTRODUCTION

Part 2 There is Only One Diagnosis: Trauma

Y ou will notice that I often write in the first person here, because as you read this book, I want to welcome you to see yourself as that I. There is hardly any human interaction, from personal relationships to group dynamics, where individuals are free of self-consciousness, limiting judgments, resentments, fears, anger or insecurities.

This book is a testament to how I came to recognize the influences that seized me in childhood and drove me, unconsciously and irresponsibly, into