The Dark Side Warrior In My Backyard: A Commentary By Anastasia

See the full article on Exploring Your Dark Side: The Adventure Of A Lifetime, as Anastasia shares details of her sexual harassment abuser.

The Man Who Believed In Evil, Revisited

Or, the magic of transforming hate into passion.

Or, the goose who laid the golden egg and gave it to me.

“Convicts and high leadership people have the same basic personality structure; the only difference being that convicts play the game of life from an anti-social position and high leadership people play their games in socially acceptable ways,” said the man. 

With these few words, spoken by psychiatrist, Martin G. Groder, M.D., the course of my life was altered forever more. The time was April, 1980. The place the Washington Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C.

You would need to be an investigator/super sleuth to connect all the dots. But this I can offer as a clue; every single word on the New Horizons’ Small “Zones of Peace” blog site and this one, mine, personally, that I offer about the dark side originated with what Groder (and, later, myself) figured out about Washington, D.C. and the political game as lived out in that territory.

Marty:
the goose that laid the
golden egg.

Coming soon!  The stories behind the stories, nothing held back.

As soon as I can write it on these two sites and tell on the two new radio shows I am hosting.

Be prepared, this I pledge to you, to discover, with my guidance, the “how” and the “why” of the saga that is the shared journey of Marcia E. Rosen and Marty Groder, containing within it a formula that you, as a citizen of the U.S.A., can draw upon to help transform the dark side of our political landscape, if you choose to use it as an addition to your own wisdom and good sense.

Insight: When I got down to the core of my hatred about my radio show stumbling blocks and re-routed it into passion, with a lot of help from my friends, I remembered something essential about how I learned that transformative process.

It was Groder, the goose, who gave me my original understanding; emotionally, psychologically, transactionally and spiritually, that is the golden egg of how it is done; transforming the dark side. A golden egg meant for all. So join in the feast.

Now with the addition of the two new radio shows that I host, I am about to, piece by piece, share his/our formula with you, if you are into investigating.

Stay tuned in!

P.S. Be sure to check out the Anastasia The Storyteller label, Camelot.

The Man Who Believed In Evil

“Once I met a good man who believed in evil. He had learned a great deal about it in prison. He had figured out that everybody in the prison; mental health people included, was crazy and that if he wanted to retain his own sanity, he’d better cure somebody, fast! He was the prison psychiatrist at the Marion Federal Penitentiary back in the late ‘60s and his name was Martin G. Groder, M.D. “ 

I write this today, excerpted from one of my three unpublished books, written in the 1990s, “Surviving Addictions,” as almost ceaseless controversies emanate from our national political scene. Seemingly they are more generally pervasive today than they were when first I knew Marty and his theories changed the course of my life.

I met Marty in April, 1980. Soon after that he became my mentor, shaping the direction of my thinking about human functioning and society forever after. Understanding the nature of evil and how to transform that human darkness into light was the singularly, most important aspect of the many gifts I received from the man and his creative genius.

Last weekend when I began reflecting on the progress of our democracy, albeit sometimes so subtle as to be almost invisible, at least to the untrained eye, I found myself reflecting on my years with Groder and what I learned under his tutelage.

At a two day regional, pre-conference workshop of the International Transactional Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA) in 1980, Groder introduced participants to his theories on the direct, character similarity between convicts and high leadership people. Witness Bernard Madoff, Strauss-Kahn and most illustriously Richard Nixon.

Certainly, I was the participant most inspired. For the close to one dozen years I spent under Marty's clinical guidance and supervision (1980 – 1991), I devotedly followed his footsteps wherever they tread, picking his brain for every little nuance of his theories and treatment strategies.

Oh, how liberated was I by these socio-biologically based theories that lifted my still evolving theoretical foundations and clinical skill to high art.

Until 1991, Groder and Rosen (now Rosen-Jones) were a student-teacher team to be reckoned with, topping off our influence with my Random House contract to publish it all in its entirety. Three, still unpublished books on his theories and my expansion of them that became the Survivor Addiction Development theory (SAD), were written for Random House. Publication interrupted by my losing my eyesight thirteen years ago today.

It was Marty who professed, with certainty that --

“Washington is next only to Moscow as the world’s center of darkness.”

“You are wrong, said I, the student, now grown more sure of herself. Washington is the center of light.”

“Today, I believe we were both right; the nation’s capitol is a teeming cauldron where an ongoing battle is fought between the dark and the light, both publicly and behind the scenes, night and day. I know it well.” However, with certainty, I discovered where the light lies in the society surrounding the Washington, D.C. White House and its nearby environs.

Keep tuned to the New Horizons’ Possible Human, Possible Society Study so you can discover it, too. Take a fresh look at the Washington you are unlikely to discover, if all you rely on is the news media. I promise you that!

The GAME’s On You, Mr. President!

... but only long enough for you to realize what you need to do to self-correct. You don’t get to hang out in the spotlight as though you are the almighty. Make a commitment to do what you need to do to be fully accountable for the mess we are in. Then take the necessary follow-up actions to back up your commitment.

No talking back either. And, you, Mr. President, don’t get to put a GAME on anyone else until you have fully looked at your part. You DO NOT get to re-direct the flak you are getting.

Now, it’s your turn Ms., Mrs and Mr. “other” politicians, the GAME’s on you. Then it moves on to the next elected representative politician with whom we, the constituents of America, wish to speak. Then onto the next and the next and the next after that.

Same procedure; listen to the words of that with which you are being confronted, make a “searching moral inventory” and clean up your act!

Eventually, of course, the GAME has to move on to you and me. We have to take that same responsibility; a searching moral inventory of what we are doing to help this country run well, or not doing that is contributing to the mess we are in?

Then clean up our acts. And make no excuses, that inventory must be fearless and so, also, must be our clean up operations!

Be sure to use your metaphoric, deep-cleaning, personal vacuum. And, take a good luck in the mirror at who you really are and what you are doing here.

It’s time to put a stop to the mediocrity of our leaders and of the mediocrity of ourselves; the “silent majority,” which is apparently doing a good bit to mis-manage this country with its passive-aggression.

Let’s really dig deep, now, to get to the truth, even the subtle ones that are holding us down.

Of The People, By The People And ....

... Instead Of The People!

It has taken me, as well as everyone else I know over age fifty, more than thirty years to get over Watergate. But who really “gets over” Watergate?”  Or, those “big” three assassinations of the ‘60s; of JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.

Mourning is a process that follows on the heels of a significant, life changing loss. Mourning takes time, often a very long, long time. Managed conscientiously, it paves the way to an acceptance of a new reality. Mourning teaches us things.

New opportunities emerge out of our losses. Still the original wound lingers on. If it was important enough to our lives, the wound may never fully heal; a fact that becomes, after a time, meaningful in and of itself.

I have come to accept that myself, like many others, will never fully recover from what we lost in those assassinations and from Watergate. Still, as Jews proclaim of the Holocaust, “we remember that it may never happen again.” Remembering teaches us things we need to learn.

I’m never going to forget the April, 1968 day I stood by an apartment window in a high rise across from the Pentagon, watching Washington, D.C. burn. And, I am never going to forget the Friday, following the 2008 election of Barak Obama that I finally went into Washington, for the first time since that April day with joy and hope.

Unlike many of my fellow metro riders, also optimistically astir that November, 2008 day, however, I did not presume that the second coming of America’s “Messiah” was finally at hand. I had learned that lesson well.

Washington’s political scene, as long as I, or anyone else has truly known it, is a “game.” And, quite a mean-spirited one a great deal of the time, at that. People should know that and accept it. Maybe this time, after our recent, nasty debt ceiling debating showed, more people will.

How many eyes must we have to see that “We, the people…” are the hope of this country.

There is no coming Messiah!

We, who were yesterday’s youthful “Arab spring” are supposed to be today’s grown-ups, living out the wisdoms of what once were the elders upon whose shoulders we were carried. And, those truths we have come to know ourselves.

Our president is truly, like all others before him, “of the people, by the people, and instead of the people.” Those most invested in either attacking him or living through him are, more than anything else, projecting on to him that which they, at either extreme, are rejecting or wishing for in themselves. Both extremes are a way of using a person, typical of our American-way.

We love to live vicariously through our high profile people. Our own lives don’t seem to be enough to fulfill us. (Also known as co-dependency. With celebrities we do the same, albeit from the distance; same dysfunction, different venue from the one with which one might be sleeping.) So be it.

But, come on, try to get this, if you really be a true citizen of this democracy, stop pointing your fingers in blame at the president or “turning on” to him with your excitement addiction. Instead, try on this new way to think:

“Ask not what your country (or your president) can do for you, but what you can do for it (or him).”

Grow up, if you are even a bit shy of it, and accept that some of our greatest leaders of the second half of the twentieth century are gone! The American Messiah is not coming, again, to save our great and wonderful country. Complaining, blaming etc. are ways to avoid accepting what's real.Let’s mourn these losses and keep learning from them how to be leaders ourselves.

Mourning is not an event, such as was naively attributed to reactions to yesterday’s massive downslide on Wall Street. Mourning is an honorable process that paves our way to learn.

And, it behooves us to do just that! Beginning right now.

P.S. Though I be a registered Democrat, I cannot, personally, promise now who I will vote for in 2012 so don’t be blaming that fact on me for my words here.