The OCD Diaries

February 17, 2010March 16, 2015

Addicted to Feeling Good: A Love-Hate Story

Every now and then, it’s useful to look back at who I used to be so I can appreciate who I am today.

I do it partly to laugh at how — in many ways, despite the progress I’ve made — I can still be as stupid in adulthood as I was 20-plus years ago.

As I write this we’re halfway through Lent — a time to sacrifice habits you love — or, in my case, habits you’re addicted to.

Giving something up always brings back acute memories of some of the dumber things I’ve done in the compulsive-obsessive drive to feel good.

Indulge me as I take inventory.

Mood music:

Age 18: I’m living off 8 cups of black coffee and a mug of Raisin Bran a day in an attempt to be rock-star thin. I discovered an after dinner drink — Haffenreffer Lager Beer. There were little puzzles on the underside of the bottle caps, and your ability to solve them would steadily decline — or increase — depending on how drunk you were. Being addicted to instant gratification, I’d suck down three bottles in quick succession so I could immediately enjoy feeling like I had just absorbed half a keg of lighter beer.

Age 21: I’m pacing up and down the driveway of the old Revere house in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. I’m freaking out because I’ve just consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio.

The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.

We partied a lot in that basement. It was the scene of many impressive and entertaining mood swings.

I called my friend Danny Waters and asked him to come over. He did, and found me pacing up and down the driveway in my bathrobe. He took me down the street to Kelly’s Roast Beef and got me an order of chicken fingers to munch away the anxiety. Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.

Age 29: I drop 100 pounds of fat I packed on while binge-eating my way through the middle 1990s. I’m inspired by the quadruple bypass surgery my father has recently had. I lose the weight by pigging out Thursday through Saturday and starving myself Sunday through Wednesday. The binge eating continues through the next few years but I manage to keep the weight down, fooling most people.

Age 33: Around this time, the binge eating gets a new playmate in the form of red wine, which I decide I can’t live without.

Age 39: No more binge eating — not today, anyway. No wine. I work the 12-step program of recovery.

Age 44: I’ve had my slips along the way, but I continue working to give up my bad habits for good.

February 16, 2010

What Kind of Day It Has Been

The author’s day has not gone as planned. He’s OK with that, though he wasn’t always.

Mood music for this post: “Adrift And At Peace” from NIN:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMnv8zrmAyU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

This day has not gone as planned.

I wanted to be in the office today plowing through some work. But another winter storm forced me to work from home.

Some would say it’s great I can do that, and it is. But when there’s a lot on the plate, I prefer to be in the office. Especially when the kids are home from school for February vacation. At least in the summer I can write from the back deck while the kids play in the field behind the house.

This time of year we’re all indoors and the kids are loud.

A few years ago the snow, the change in schedule and the kids in my workspace would have unhinged me.

I’d get a story written. Maybe three. But I’d be a puddle of lava by day’s end, good for nothing except sleep.

Not so today.

I’m enjoying the cozy chair by my living room window, watching the snow fall.

I’ve gotten as much writing and editing done from here as I would have from the office.

The kids were indeed loud and distracting, but I enjoyed that, too. What used to be stress is now comic relief, especially when Sean tells Duncan he looks adorable when he cries and Duncan responds by pouncing on his older brother, yelling, “Who’s crying now?!”

I smoked one last cigar before Lent begins tomorrow, since that’s one of the things I’m abstaining from until Easter. It was a Cuban stick at that. Thanks to my friend Bob Connors for parting with it.

The coffee is French-pressed and bitter. Just the way I like it.

A much different day than what it would have been five years ago, before I gained the upper hand over the OCD.

Days that don’t go as planned are especially difficult for people with OCD. We do, after all, crave control over everything we can control. And we badly want to control things we can’t, like the weather.

Forget about the small stuff, like checking a doorknob seven times or tapping your feet to the count of 60. A carefully crafted schedule in shambles is the big stuff; hell for a sick mind.

That’s when someone like me turns to the food or the booze to comfort the troubled mind.

But the food is well under control today, and bottles of wine that once taunted me from a kitchen counter rack have gone unnoticed in the corner.

I’m not the same man I used to be.

Credit the therapists, the Prozac, the religious conversion or all of the above.

Whatever it is, I’m grateful for it.

February 15, 2010

No Prozac for These Presidents

In honor of President’s Day, I direct you toward the following posts about past presidents and other leaders I respect for having carried the weight of the world on their heads while suffering from varying degrees of depression and other byproducts of mental illness.

It’s all the more impressive because they did this long before there were anti-depressants and modern therapy to fall back on.

Why Lincoln’s Melancholy Is A Must Read

I’ve always been something of a history nerd and am especially drawn to stories about those who have achieved greatness despite the crippling impact of mental illness. Winston Churchill was a sufferer (he called it his Black Dog). Theodore Roosevelt suffered from bipolar disorder. And Abraham Lincoln’s depression is well documented.

I recently read an excellent book on the latter: “Lincoln’s Melancholy” by Joshua Wolf Shenk. For anyone who has struggled with mental illness, it’s a must read because Shenk goes beyond simply detailing Lincoln’s episodes of depression and outlines the coping mechanisms he developed to get through the fog. In fact, the author argues, those very coping mechanisms fueled Lincoln’s greatness.

OCD Diary: 6 Guys I Look To In Times of Trouble

The historical figures I revere all had to overcome disease, mental illness and personal tragedy through the course of their lives. I look up to them because they dealt with challenges greater than anything I will probably come across in my own lifetime. And they achieved what they achieved despite crippling personal setbacks. I’ll stick with six examples, though there are many more…

OCD Diaries: Someone to Watch Me (A.K.A. Desk Junk)

For all of my professional life, I’ve had a habit of littering my desk with trinkets. It’s a very organized form of clutter. I do have OCD, after all. What might surprise folks is that all this junk serves a very specific purpose. It is, in fact, one of my coping tools.

February 14, 2010

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

The author goes to Church and comes away with a strange feeling.

Mood music for this post: “Faith.” The Limp Bizkit version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpPM-5TJIZ0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Yesterday at All Saints Parish Father Michael Harvey delivered one of those Homilies that sent my mind and soul all over the map.

I like Father Harvey. I wasn’t sure about him at first. He had the massive shoes of Father Mark Ballard to fill, so the deck was stacked against him from the start. He’s very conservative, and sometimes I wonder if his collar is stuck to his neck with thumb tacks. He tackles the most taboo of topics — politics — when he delivers a homily.

Truth be told, I like how he goes for the throat in his Homilies without fear of offending someone. One Sunday he gave a Homily about Natural Law, otherwise known as the “contraception is bad” talk. After Mass, we got in the car and Sean, the 8 year old, blurted out, “Gee, I guess Father Mike wasn’t expecting there to be any kids at Mass this morning.”

Being moderate in my political views, I get itchy when he’s up there trashing a politician I like or praising one I despise. Yesterday, without naming him, the Homily turned to the subject of Patrick Kennedy, who I defended in this blog yesterday for showing up for public life despite a withering battle with depression and addiction.

The larger message of the Homily was that the pursuit of power takes a person further and further from God, because when one is spending all his or her time groping for attention they’re too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about God.

He then brought up “a politician from Rhode Island” who decided not to run for office anymore. “Oh, great, here it comes,” I mumbled to my wife.

He brought up the fact that the Bishop down there had asked Kennedy to stop taking Communion because of his pro-choice stance. The Bishop tried to handle it in private, but Kennedy took it public.

In the end, Father Harvey speculated aloud, Kennedy was probably coming around to the decision that it was time to leave public life because holding onto power had corrupted his soul. I’m not sure Kennedy would share that exact assessment, but I think he would agree that power isn’t worth having when it plunges the rest of your life into a dark, unhappy place.

So I walked away with mixed feelings. I am pro-life but get incensed when someone paints a pro-choice person as evil personified. I don’t think it’s so simple. I know a lot of people who hate abortion, but believe it’s between a woman, her doctor and God. They are pro-choice but NOT pro abortion. They are the types that vote for someone based on a wider range of issues than abortion alone. But they are told they’ve voted against God if they vote the wrong way. [See also: The Better Angels of My Nature]

I have a lot of trouble with that notion.

But in the larger picture, there’s no question that the pursuit of power is a tricky thing, and the longer one wields it the worse off they are.

I see myself in all this. As I’ve admitted before, I have a fairly big ego that comes with being a writer. The ego is frequently driven into overdrive by the OCD [See: The Ego OCD Built]. It’s painfully true that this ego carries a certain level of attention seeking. After all, it’s the writer’s goal to make sure people are reading their work, and that involves a lot of self promotion.

I’m guilty as charged.

It’s a double-edged blade, really. I don’t write with the idea of sticking the papers in a drawer for someone to find after I’m dead. I’m a journalist whose goal is for people to see what he’s writing today, not 30 years from now. Social networking makes it all the more dangerous. I’ll let this illustration drive home the point for me:

At the same time, I have a faith that has deepened with time, and my Religious beliefs often come into direct conflict with my profession. In the end, it doesn’t have to be that way. I just have to find my way on this twisted path.

That’s why I keep coming to Church. It’s ultimately about my relationship with God and how to strengthen it. People can get uptight about church politics and get angry because their beliefs have been challenged by the priest. But to me those things are distractions that are as big as any shiny object that distracts us from our core Faith. I think that’s why Confession is my favorite Sacrament. It forces me to come clean with God on a regular basis. It keeps the emotional trash from piling up and stinking too much.

In this particular case, the priest gave me something to think about. He zeroed in on an unpleasant truth.

And so, he did his job.

It’s up to me to ultimately reconcile it with how I live my life. I think I’ve come a long, long way. But I have a long way to go yet.

February 13, 2010

In Defense of Patrick Kennedy

The youngest son of Edward M. Kennedy has often been criticized as a lightweight Congressman who gets away with things other people would get arrested for. But the author salutes him anyway. Here’s why.

Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election to the Congressional seat he has held since 1995.

US Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island announced that he will not seek reelection, capping a 16-year career in politics. Patrick, the son of the late Senator Edward M. 'Ted' Kennedy, said his father's death caused him to do some soul-searching about his future. With Kennedy's departure, this will be the first time in more than six decades the Kennedy family will not have a member in Washington. Scroll through this gallery for a look at how the Kennedy lineage has impacted politics and public life.

Some will tell you it’s just as well. The Congressman, after all, hasn’t done much except for living off his family name and crashing cars into roadside barriers while high on narcotics. That’s often what I hear from my more conservative friends, who hate everything having to do with the Kennedy name.

Stew Milne/AP Photo

But as someone recovering from OCD, depression, a binge-eating disorder and other addictions, I have plenty of reason to defend this man.

In my view, this fellow has gotten some pretty unfair treatment. Let’s start with Laurence Leamer’s book, “Sons of Camelot.”

In this book, Patrick is described as a spoiled kid who has accomplished nothing in Congress other than repeatedly winning re-election. He’s described as someone who blindly follows the Democratic leadership.

Some of that may be true. But Patrick has done some courageous service for those who suffer from mental illness.

Kennedy has been open about his own struggles with bi-polar disorder and the addictions that go with it. He has been in and out of addiction treatment centers and once noted how his addictive behavior could latch onto anything from pain medication to something as simple as cough medicine.

What’s more, he did one of the hardest things people like us can do: He lived in the spotlight as a public servant, where critics can be cruel and a lot of people like to hate the Kennedys just for the hell of it.

Patrick has carried a lot of pressure being a Kennedy. There’s the pressure to match his father’s towering legislative record and live up to the legendary stature of his uncles.

Some would have dropped to the floor long ago, curled in a fetal position, over the pressure. Some would not have survived. One of Patrick’s cousins, David Kennedy, one of RFK’s sons, didn’t survive the battle with the demons. He died of a drug overdose in 1984.

RFK Jr. also struggled with addiction. So did Christopher Kennedy Lawford, who wrote an excellent book of his own on the subject: “Symptoms of Withdrawal: A Memoir of Snapshots and Redemption.”

I loved Lawford’s book for a variety of reasons. He recounted his sordid tale with humor and was brutally honest about something addicts are all to aware of: When you quit the thing you’re addicted to, it doesn’t automatically turn you into a good person.

In fact, recovering addicts often become big jerks before they find their footing. They’re learning how to behave in public without being drunk or high. A deep depression often sets in because years of abuse leaves the brain with deep chemical imbalances that hit you like a brick to the head once the booze, food or narcotics exit the picture.

Patrick has dealt with all of these realities and still carried on in public service.

He continued to show up for life when life was at its most unbearable.

It gave people like me a little inspiration when we needed it most. So as Patrick prepares to exit the public stage and embark on a new life, I thank him for his service and wish him the best.

It’s easy for people to pass judgment on him for his flaws.

But people who do so often forget about their own flaws.

None of us are truly without sin. But we like to cast the first stones anyway.

February 12, 2010

When Pain Drips from the Mind to the Body

The author on why it’s true that mental illness leads to physical sickness.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:24PttQAgkYLdpR4TOgdV4C]

I’ve heard a lot of people argue over whether this person’s or that person’s aches and pains were “all in their head.” You know the types: Never any real underlying disease, but they’re always calling out of work with a headache or some intestinal discomfort.

It’s all in their head, you say?

Well, yeah.

It’s called psychosomatic illness, when mental anguish leads to physical sickness.

I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.

But it wasn’t always clear that what ailed me was in my head. Childhood illness confused matters. A huge chunk of my digestive track was in flames and spewing blood because of Chron’s Disease. I’m told by my parents that the doctors came close to removing the colon more than once, though I don’t remember that myself; probably because the doctors had that conversation with the parents instead of the patient.

To throw it into remission, they used the maximum dose of a drug called Prednisone, which caused another kind of body blow in the form of migraines. You can read more about that in “The Bad Pill Kept me from the Good Pill,” but the bottom line is that these headaches came daily; always making me sick to my stomach.

Later in life, I developed severe back pain, the kind that would knock me onto the couch and keep me there for weeks.

All legitimate physical problems. But at some point my brain lost the ability to differentiate a real Chron’s flare-up or back spasm to an imagined one.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. It may as well have been one of those things. Because when the mind thinks it is, it has a habit of BECOMING real.

I found an article in About.com that describes the problem better than I ever could on my own:

Any illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.

For me, it was easy to separate the Chron’s episodes from the tricky stuff described above, since the disease was sitting there for the doctors to see. I was always told mental stress could trigger flare-ups and I guess they did, especially when my parents divorced 30 years ago and a lot of stress over custody ensued. I’m fairly sure the after-effects of my brother’s death set off the last real flare-up in 1986.

But the migraines and back problems seeped seamlessly into the things that were going wrong with me mentally.

Anxiety attacks felt essentially the same as a heart attack, complete with the pain shooting from the chest to the neck and down the arms. Migraines followed. Work stress often sparked migraines and back pain.

While it was difficult to separate other legitimate physical problems from those stemming from mental distress, I can tell you that dealing with my underlying OCD, depression and addiction made a lot of ailments go away.

I’m not sure I can credit it with ending the back problems. Though mental illness most likely enhanced the back pain, that problem was eventually diagnosed as three out-of-whack vertebrae the chiropractor knocks back into alignment every other week. No more imprisonment on the couch.

But these things have gone away — and have not returned — since I got a handle on the OCD and related binge-eating disorder:

–Puking up stomach acid in the middle of the night

–Numbing of the feet

–A strange poked-in-the-eye sensation that would hit me early mornings and leave me with blurred vision for a day or more.

–A dull ache in the left hand, which often got worse as my mind spun out of control with thoughts that it MIGHT be a heart-attack.

–Fatigue that would cause all my joints to ache unless I were to lie down and go to sleep.

–Heart palpatations.

All disappeared once I started to attack the core problem.

The ultimate take-away from all this is that something in your head can cause real, physical pain.

And when you deal with what’s in your head, the pain in the rest of your body can be eradicated.

February 11, 2010

When the Back Breaks…

The author offers words of encouragement to a friend going through a rough patch.

An old friend of mine — I won’t name the person here — is going through a rough time with some very painful back problems. This post is my attempt to cheer that person up.

I won’t get into all the “everything’s going to be ok/I’ve been through similar stuff” talk. We’ve done that already. Nope. This time, I’m just going to make an attempt at getting my friend to laugh. Laughter is, after all, excellent medicine.

First, some vintage Bloom County:

Or maybe some Spinal Tap:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeGteg74mjw&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Or a King Diamond Christmas song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a5fHMlb4V0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Savage Chickens is always good for some comic escapism:

Savage Chickens - Carl Jung Valentine

That new “Creature Double Feature on WLVI 56” Facebook group is good for a laugh, and plenty of nostalgia to make you forget about that back — for a while, anyway.

And if all this fails, gimme a call.

February 9, 2010

OCD Diaries: The Office Mom

The author salutes Anne Saita, a former co-worker who showed me how to stand up to people and face down my fears — and whose blog is a must-read.

I’ve been reading the blog Run DMZ a lot lately.The main reason is that it’s chock full of excellent content on how to eat and exercise properly. The other reason is that the author is someone near and dear to me: Anne Saita, my former boss at SearchSecurity.com.

She’s an avid runner, an inspirational Mom to her two daughters and to people like me, and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. [Side note: She sends Christmas cards each year featuring her daughters, and last time my six-year-old saw it he declared: “Wow. They’re really, really pretty.”] The boy is a flirt and knows what he’s talking about.

With her I’ve power-walked along Lake Michigan in Chicago and gallivanted with her on the rainy streets of San Francisco during security conferences.

She literally rescued me from a job that was killing me (because of the late-night hours and the still undiagnosed impact of OCD).

At SearchSecurity.com, she was a nurturing soul. She encouraged me to make time for family, something I wasn’t yet good at. She knew I feared travel at the time, but gently coaxed me into doing more of it. Now I love travel. She showed me what courage is by constantly standing up to the TechTarget/SearchSecurity brass when she felt the brand’s reputation was being compromised by stupid marketing ploys. At the time I often thought she was being stupid. But at the time I was also so obsessed with pleasing my masters that I didn’t know any better.

I always got a chuckle out of her gift for gab, especially when she was offering up explicit details on a medical procedure she was having.

Because of her motherly disposition, I was able to come clean with her in late 2004, when I was inches from a nervous breakdown and realizing for the first time that I needed some serious help. The morning after I had my first appointment with a therapist, I told her about it, along with the rest of my warped behavior. She didn’t flinch. She urged me on, and in the coming months, when I was pushing up against depression and emotional breakdowns, she gave me the room to fall apart and then pick up the pieces.

When I started to react to the pain of therapy and digging deep into a sordid past by embarking on the most vicious binge eating stretch of my life, she saw that the weight was piling on but didn’t shame me over it. I was feeling shame in her presence anyway, because she had once told me that when checking my references before hiring me, the deal was sealed when a former CNC co-worker told her about my singular determination to lose 100 pounds in the late 1990s.

That kind of toughness impressed her, and there I was, losing that toughness as I packed on each pound.

Unfortunately, I only started to gain the upper hand on my demons after she left SearchSecurity.com for another job.

But thanks to the Internet and our two blogs, we still keep in touch regularly.

She’s gone through a lot herself, with physical injuries that kept her from running, blinding headaches that came and went without explanation, and the loss of a job she loved last year, as the Great Recession gunned down millions of jobs.

But she always comes back. Stronger than before.

In the photo above: Anne at the right, with Dennis Fisher, another former [and good] boss and avid runner, after a run in San Diego.

If she didn’t know before how much her friendship means to me, I think she’ll understand after reading this post.

She may also yell at me for revealing a bit too much about her. But then I always did enjoy the motherly rebuke that only she can provide.

February 8, 2010

Sobriety vs. Abstinence

Whenever I share my experiences with OCD and the related binge-eating disorder [See: The Most Uncool Addiction], there’s a word I always refrain from using if I’m outside the safe confines of my OA group: Abstinence.

I don’t hate the word. But I don’t like it much, either.

All anyone ever thinks about when it’s uttered is refraining from sex or studying for the Catholic priesthood. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am a devout Catholic, after all.)

Nevertheless, it’s a word I can’t get around any longer, so let’s talk about it.

In the world of a recovering food addict, abstinence means to abstain from eating compulsively. It’s the exact same thing as the word sobriety in the world of a recovering alcoholic.

Think of OA and AA as essentially the same thing, only OA folks are addicted to compulsive overeating to the point where they walk around dazed like zombies, unable to manage their lives. Ailments boil over and friends and family suffer with you.

I’m abstinent from binge eating, which means I eat nothing with flour and sugar in it and most meals are portioned out on a small scale. I’m sober, too. I used to drink a lot of alcohol when traveling. This weekend I spent a security conference sober. [See: ShmooCon and Snowmageddon and The Engine in Hyperdrive]

This weekend was challenging to be sure. It wasn’t always easy drinking club soda while everyone else drank wine, beer, etc. And while I kept it together with the food plan, being away from the normal routine makes it challenging to keep all the portions straight. I probably could have done it better, but I think things worked out pretty well on balance.

It was challenging at Christmas, too. In fact, that was probably the closest I’ve come to a relapse. Not helping matters is my tendency to come down with depression around the holidays, partly due to the lack of daylight. Thankfully, I managed to hit the breaks in time to avoid that.

Of course, other, smaller addictions try to reassert themselves [See: How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano]. One of them is spending. I have a weakness for collecting political and historical knickknacks, especially when I’m in Washington D.C. That weakness is evident to anyone visiting my work space. [See: Someone to Watch Over Me (A.K.A.: Desk Junk] This time, I held back.

I also like a good cigar when traveling, and probably enjoy it more than I should. I’m going to abstain from the stogies during Lent, which starts next week. We’ll see what happens after that.

The Internet is an addiction, too, but it’s a hazard of my profession. Staying away would be like a miner trying to do his job without stepping into the mine. But I stay away from the porn sites and Facebook applications, which are as dangerous as they are dumb, in my opinion.

I drink a lot of coffee, but I’m not giving that up right now.

All in all, I have a lot to be grateful for.

For someone who lived at the bottom of the Dumpster inhaling the stench for as long as I did, abstinence and sobriety is the gift of all gifts.

But it will always be a work in progress, with good days and not-quite-as-good days; always with room for improvement.

That’s OK, though. It is a journey, after all. A journey that you have to take one day at a time.

February 7, 2010

Headed Home

The Shmoobus is slowly rolling northward, away from Washington DC, the snow and #ShmooCon.

It was an excellent security conference, and a productive one. Six pieces of content written and produced in three days: 1 opinion column, three articles and two podcasts.

I just wrote and posted the column from the RV. Because I could.

Everyone is settled in with their Blackberries, iPhones, laptops and hand-held games. Thanks to the blizzard and the inability of the Greater DC area to clear snow the way it’s done further north, we have a long journey between here and home.

I can’t wait to see Erin and the boys again.

I’m hoping this ship sails into home port in time for me to get the kids up, dressed, fed and off to school.

I have to figure out a way to take them with me for more of these trips.

We’ll see.

For now, I’m happy to savor the gratitude I get from a journey where the work gets done and the mind stays clean.

Rock on.