Therapist Shopping

A few months ago my therapist retired and moved to warmer environs in the south. He said I was managing my OCD well and that I didn’t need therapy until the autumn.

Mood music:

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That last appointment was in the spring, with the season’s increasingly long periods of daylight, the environment I function best in.

Now it’s late October, with shorter days, and the seasonal issues are starting to kick in. Sunday I started getting chest pains and Monday I was breaking out in a sweat for no good reason. I’m familiar with these symptoms. It usually starts as heartburn and then my OCD runs wild with thoughts that I might be having a heart attack. When that worry increases, the sweat appears.

It’s a classic anxiety attack.

I used to get them all the time, but in recent years they’re few and far between. When I get one, it usually means I’m experiencing some big stress in my life.

I thought about what might be causing it. All in all, life is good. My wife and children are healthy. I love my job. Most things are status quo, except that we’re still helping the kids adjust to life in a new school. But that’s been an ongoing processes and hasn’t kept me up at night. So what’s the deal?

Of course, that’s what therapists are for: helping you yank out the underlying issues you can’t see on the surface.

I’ve been shopping for a new therapist for a couple months now. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve called several that I researched online. Most haven’t called back. The rest weren’t the right fit.

Fortunately, I have great friends looking out for me. One friend, herself a mental health specialist, is working her contacts and getting me names. From that list, I may have found the therapist I’m looking for.

Wish me luck.

patient therapist

Red Sox Player Jonny Gomes: Profile in Fortitude

I’ll be honest with all you rabid sports fans: I’m not much of a sports guy. While my peers were playing on various ball teams in high school, my recreation was listening to heavy metal, going to concerts and getting into trouble. In adulthood, I’m always happy when the Boston sports teams do well, but I don’t stay up late to watch games or banter with colleagues about sports.

I still have an admiration for athletes, especially those who rise to the occasion despite heaping piles of adversity. A good example is Boston Red Sox player Jonny Gomes.

Mood music:

Since the Red Sox are my home team and are in the World Series, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to hear about Gomes. Here’s a kid who survived a car accident as a teenager while his best friend, who sat beside him in the backseat, was killed. Then, at the age of 22, he suffered a heart attack.

Yet here he is, playing professional baseball. In the World Series, no less. Tonight is game six at Fenway Park, and it could be the clincher.

When I was a kid fighting severe Crohn’s Disease, my fifth-grade teacher suggested I write to a fellow suffer: Rolf Benirschke, who at the time was playing professional football with the San Diego Chargers. He actually had severe colitis, a disease with many of the same effects as Crohn’s Disease. He wrote me back, and for a while we were pen pals.

Even at that early age, it was clear that I wouldn’t be getting into sports with the enthusiasm of my classmates. But the fact that a grownup had been through what I was going through and had made it to the top of his profession thrilled me and inspired me to stop feeling sorry for myself.

I also lost a best friend to a violent death and know how that can damage one’s soul. To get past that experience as a teenager, as Gomes did, is truly something to behold.

I’m pretty sure there are kids out there today who are being inspired by Gomes the way I was inspired by Benirschke.

May he enjoy many more years in professional sports.

Jonny Gomes on June 15, 2013

For Those Mourning Colleen Ritzer

I didn’t know Colleen Ritzer, the 24-year-old Danvers High School math teacher found dead in the woods behind the school this week. I also don’t know Philip Chism, the 14 year old charged with murdering her. But I’m affected by this tragedy all the same.

My first job as a reporter 20 years ago was at the weekly Danvers newspaper. Andover, Ritzer’s hometown, is where my kids go to school. It’s a town I know well as a Merrimack Valley resident and former editor at The Eagle-Tribune. I truly feel for everyone touched by this sad turn of events.

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We know almost nothing about the circumstances in which this happened. But we do know this is going to be hard for Danvers High School students to absorb. For a lot of these kids, it’s probably their first taste of death. Even for those with previous experience, the loss of a grandparent, for example, this is likely something new and terrible. The victim was young, not much older than her students. Her accused killer was one of them, a pleasant kid by most accounts.

I’ve experienced a lot of death in my life, including that of a 17-year-old older brother and a best friend who committed suicide. I’m not going to claim you get used to these things, but I have developed a six-point road map that I try to live by in these situations. I share it here in hopes that it will help some of you.

  • Let it suck. Don’t be a hero. If you’re feeling the pain from losing your grandmother, let it out. You don’t have to do it in front of people. Go in a room by yourself and let the waterworks flow if you have to. Don’t worry about trying to keep a manly face around people. You don’t have to pretend you’re A-OK for the sake of others in the room.
  • Don’t forget the gratitude. When someone dies, it’s easy to get lost in your own grief; there’s a self-pity reflex that kicks in. Try to take the time to remember how awesome your loved one was. Share the most amusing memories and have some laughs. The deceased would love that. And you’ll feel more at peace when you remember a life that was lived well.
  • Take a moment to appreciate what’s still around you. Your girlfriend. Your friends. If the death you just suffered should teach you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them.
  • Don’t worry yourself into an anxiety attack over the fact that God could take them from you at any moment. God holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
  • Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
  • Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than being of service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m helping out in the church food pantry or going to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings and guiding addicts who ask for my help, I’m always reminded that my own life could be much worse. To put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.

This isn’t a science. It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.

Life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely. Sometimes, it hurts. But that’s OK.

Colleen Ritzer

Erin Cox Case: The Rush to Judgement Is a Two-Way Street

Some say criticism of North Andover School administrators in the Erin Cox case is a rush to judgement. No one knows what information was revealed behind closed doors, they say. And based on comments from other teens at the drinking party, Cox wasn’t the innocent, good friend the media has painted her to be.

On someone’s phone there’s video of Cox drinking and puking, they say.

Maybe that’s true. But the rush to judgement is a two-way street, as the local Valley Patriot newspaper demonstrated yesterday.

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Earlier in the day, Duggan published a story citing anonymous law enforcement sources in North Andover who claimed high school student Erin Cox was to appear in court on charges of possession of alcohol and that her family was returning donations from supporters.

Hours later, Duggan was forced to retract the story and publish this one, which drops the first claim and retains the latter.

Other publications blindly ran with Duggan’s new information and looked stupid for it later in the day. This Yahoo! article at least captured the uncertainty of it all.

This isn’t the first time Duggan has rushed out misinformation. On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, in the frenzy to be first with new details, he was on Facebook reporting an inflated death toll. He did so with the gusto of a football commentator announcing a touchdown. It’s an approach I’ve called him out on in the past. To his credit, Duggan pulled the original story and was honest about it.

This whole affair captured a human weakness we all share: We love to find things to get outraged about and then shoot our mouths off before we have all the facts.

I’m guilty of it, too. I once wrote a post defending Lance Armstrong amid all the allegations of doping. Then the facts came out and I had to admit I was wrong.

It’s always been this way, and it won’t change. We are, after all, human beings.

The best we can do is acknowledge that we rushed to judgement once we’re proven wrong. Doing so takes courage. Few things are as humiliating as discovering you’ve made an ass of yourself. But the truth always comes out eventually. The key is what we do with the truth once we have it.

Erin Cox

The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ and Charles Manson

I’ve been listening to The Beatle’s White Album a lot lately. I played it relentlessly in my younger years, admittedly out of curiosity. I had just read Helter Skelter for the first time and wanted to hear the songs Charles Manson used, along with the Bible, to brainwash his followers.

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It’s been several years since I listened to the album; most days I prefer classic heavy metal. But I’m currently reading Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn, and he spends quite a bit of time talking about this album and The Beatles in general.

As Guinn tells it, Manson first heard the band on a prison radio when he was serving one of his many jail sentences in the mid-1960s. Manson had an epiphany: Once released, he could take his singing and guitar-playing and make himself bigger than The Beatles. Later, he’d write songs with the express purpose of spreading his warped messages and cozied up to the likes of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in an attempt to land a record deal. Around that time, the White Album came out and Manson became obsessed with it. He told his followers The Beatles were predicting a coming war between blacks and whites, which he called Helter Skelter, named for one of the songs on the album.

The song “Blackbird,” Manson told his followers, was The Beatles telling African Americans to rise up against their oppressors. “Piggies” was about the white establishment and how they needed, as The Beatles sang, a “damn good whacking.” “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9” told of the coming apocalypse. Manson fused the lyrics with passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelations and painted a picture where the blacks would rise up, kill all the whites in a race war (Helter Skelter) and come out on top.

During the chaos, Manson told his followers, the family would hide in Death Valley. The blacks would eventually realize they couldn’t rule without the white man’s help and would come to Manson and his family for help. Then, they’d rule the world.

The murders that followed were Manson’s attempt to start Helter Skelter. A bloody paw print was left on the wall of murder victim Gary Hinman’s house in an attempt to make it look like the Black Panthers were responsible. At the Tate murder site, pig was scrawled on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood, pig being what the Panthers and other militant groups called police.

Against the backdrop of Guinn’s book, I’m listening to each song. The experience is different from when I listened to them in my teens. Back then, the songs scared the crap out of me. Today, they’re just a nice collection of songs, arguably The Beatle’s best. “Revelution 1” actually ridicules the militant revolutionaries of the day. “Helter Skelter” was about an amusement park ride.

It still sickens me to think about how Manson distorted beautiful music to brainwash young kids who were down on their luck and suffering from social discontent and varying degrees of mental illness into cold-blooded murderers.

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The Power of Admitting Ignorance

I’ve often gone through my career feeling like an impostor.

I work with some ridiculously smart people and know many more in my industry. They seem interested in my opinion on things, and I try to deliver. But many times I don’t know the answer. So I sit wondering how the hell I got here. I know people who can bullshit their way through the answer to a question, but I lack that special talent. So I usually just admit that I don’t know.

Mood music:

That answer has only led to more good fortune. We think we’ll be dismissed if we admit ignorance, but the smarter folks among us actually appreciate the honesty. When I write about complex security issues in my work blogs, I often admit my befuddlement and open the floor for discussion in an effort to make readers — and myself — more aware of the given topic. In this blog, my frequent admission of ignorance clicks with readers, who find comfort in knowing they’re not the only clueless people on Earth.

The benefits of admitting you don’t know is the focus of a new book, simply titled I Don’t Know by Leah Hager Cohen. I haven’t read it yet, but I have read the essay it’s based on and have listened to her on WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate.

It’s a refreshing, comforting, even, take on learning to honor one’s doubt. In the essay that started the project, Cohen writes:

Fear engenders lying. If we want our colleges and universities to be bastions of academic integrity, we need to look honestly at the ways they might encourage fakery by stoking fear. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile: Or, Treatise on Education,” the philosopher writes, “’I do not know’ is a phrase which becomes us.” Too often we fear uttering these words, convinced that doing so will diminish us, will undermine our status and block our advancement.

In fact these words liberate and empower. So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and — speaking of learning — the more able we become to grow.

As someone who used to suffer from crippling fear and anxiety, I get that now. Fear of being diminished in the minds of those you respect makes the lies pour from your mouth before you have time to process what you’re actually saying. Then you’ve made matters worse.

By admitting ignorance from the outset and saying “I don’t know,” you’ll have spared yourself a lot of future pain and indignity and instead set yourself up to become wiser. It’s good to see that point has been articulated in a book.

I Don't Know book cover

Lies in North Andover Teen Drinking Case?

I’ve gotten a few messages since writing about Erin Cox, the North Andover High School senior punished by school administrators after driving to a teen drinking party to pick up an intoxicated friend. They suggested that I fell for a fabrication weaved by the girl’s lawyer, that she was in fact drunk and I should be prepared to rewrite my post.

Mood music:

The feedback I received is that the girl was in fact drinking and that it was caught on video. Maybe, someone suggested, the parents and lawyer are trying to change the story so the girl doesn’t lose her scholarships. Maybe, someone else suggested, the girl lied to her parents to avoid punishment, not expecting her parents to hire a lawyer and make a big stir in the media.

If either situation is true, it wouldn’t be the first time someone lied to generate public sympathy. When we hear these stories, we get outraged and then feel like fools when the truth inevitably comes out.

Whatever the case may be, I won’t be rewriting that post.

One reason is that I left open the possibility that the story wasn’t what it appeared to be; you never know what kind of information is revealed in closed-door disciplinary hearings. The other reason is that posts like these are snapshots in time, my reaction to a story as presented in the moment. If I turn out to be wrong, I’m not going to rewrite it and pretend it never happened. I’ll simply write a follow-up. If that follow-up consists of me admitting I was duped, so be it.

For now, I continue to give Erin Cox the benefit of the doubt, because I haven’t seen any evidence that she lied. If a teen at the party has video-recorded proof she was drunk and the video hasn’t come out after a couple weeks, that’s a lot of self-control for a teenager. Videos like that tend to make it onto YouTube in short order. I’m not saying the video doesn’t exist. I’m just skeptical at this point.

Could police be covering for the girl, not wanting to see her scholarships pulled away? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened. But I haven’t seen evidence of that, either.

For now, I’m still inclined to believe North Andover School officials went overboard with the punishment.

The truth, whatever it is, always comes out in the end, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Erin Cox

Depression Takes Another Friend

Thomas John “TJ” Leduc was a constant companion during my childhood in Revere. I swam in his pool and slept over his house. The first time I was weirded out by the sight and sound of Boy George, it was during one of those sleepovers, when we were eating popcorn and watching Solid Gold, puzzling over the girl on the screen who sounded like a man.

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TJ had a sunny personality that was often tested by those who made jokes about his weight. TJ was a big guy. I was fat myself but still joked about his weight. Sometimes, I really earned my outcast status. More often than not, we were close buddies.

As we got older, I came to value TJ’s sense of humor. That dude could make people laugh. It was always small things, like referring to steroids as “roids.”

Over the years we lost touch, but I’d occasionally attempt to find him. I checked Facebook regularly, to no avail. It turns out he had moved to Groveton, NH, and was running a market with his father, who I knew well. Based on a news article from their local paper, the market was a popular hangout. TJ is described as a great storyteller with a bright personality and sharp sense of humor that kept customers coming back.

But somewhere along the way, things went horribly wrong. TJ’s dad was diagnosed with leukemia and was quickly slipping away. As the senior Leduc lay in a hospital bed, TJ apparently learned that his father had accumulated a mounting pile of overdue bills. Maybe discovering that debt made him snap. Maybe it was the trauma of losing a father and business partner. It was probably a combination of both.

TJ died on October 1 at the still-young age of 40. His father died the next day, apparently unaware of his son’s death hours earlier. The newspaper article quotes police officers who labeled the death as a probable suicide.

If true, that’s the third friend from the old neighborhood to die that way. Before him were Sean Marley and Zane Mead.

Sad as I feel right now, I don’t feel the gaping hole in the heart that was there after Sean and Zane died. Part of that is because I’ve gained a lot of perspective about depression and suicide over the years, especially in light of my own battles with the disease.

I wrote a list of things I always try to keep in mind when someone dies this way. If you need some guidance, I direct you to “Death of a Second Sibling.”

Sean and Zane died young, with dreams and potential unfulfilled. It looks like TJ lived a good life and made many in his community happy. That article describes him as someone who cared for his customers and always had a free ear for teenagers who needed someone to talk to.

It kills me to hear that his life ended in despair. I pray that he’ll find peace in the afterlife. But I’m very happy to see that he made a difference before he left.

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TJ, with his dad.

North Andover School Policy Trumps Common Sense

Friendships between teens is a tricky thing.

Sometimes your friends are up to no good and the right decision is to stay away. Helping friends steal hubcaps off cars or start fires are examples that come to mind. But when a friend drinks too much at a party and has the good sense to call you for a ride instead of choosing to drive drunk, you should help them out, even if the party might be raided by police when you show up.

That’s my opinion, and by that rubric Erin Cox was being a good friend — a courageous one, even — when she drove to a party to pick up a friend and get her home safely.

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When a friend has been drinking and you can keep them from getting behind the wheel and putting other lives in danger, it’s a no-brainer. It’s simple, common sense.

Unfortunately, as we’ve often seen in recent years, school administrators are perfectly comfortable casting aside common sense when there’s a rule to be upheld. That appears to be what happened when North Andover High School punished Cox for violating their strict policy against alcohol and drug abuse. According to the article Sara Brown wrote for The Eagle-Tribune,  the school demoted the senior and honors student from being captain of the volleyball team and suspended her from playing for five games for violating the policy.

“Two weeks ago, Cox received a call from a friend at a party who was too drink to drive,” Brown wrote. “When she got there to pick up her friend, North Andover police had also arrived. Police arrested several students for underage possession of alcohol, however, Cox was cleared by police for not drinking or in the possession of alcohol.”

Tim McCarthy, a reporter with The North Andvover Citizen, quotes a prepared statement from School Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson that says, “The rules for student-athletes strongly discourage students from engaging in conduct that is unlawful or fails to promote the health and safety of the youth in our community. Each incident is fully investigated and decided upon based on the individual facts and circumstances.” As a policy, he said the district doesn’t comment on student discipline matters.

Was information revealed in the hearing that we don’t know about — something that justified punishment? We’ll probably never know. Based on public reports from police and witnesses at the scene, however, nothing in Cox’s behavior justifies getting punished.

If she was indeed helping a friend in need and, in the process, keeping other people out of harm’s way, then she deserved better.

Rules are important. They help our children distinguish right from wrong. But when rules are followed with no regard for unique circumstances, kids learn something else — that those enforcing the rules are misguided and deserve to be defied.

Good luck with that one, North Andover.

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Binging a Path from Hilltop Steakhouse to Augustine’s

Many of my friends and family are sad to hear about the planned closing of Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass.

I’m not gonna lie: I never understood the affection people had for the dining experience there. I always found the food mediocre at best, particularly in later years. But I did do my share of binging there because it was close by and affordable. And I can’t argue the place’s significance as a landmark on that stretch of highway.

Mood music:

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The massive cactus sign. The cattle statuary all across the front lawn. If you’re from around there, you can’t help but feel nostalgic.

On hearing the news about Hilltop’s plan to close, one friend lamented that all the classic eateries of the area were gone, bulldozed for unremarkable restaurant chains. He ran off some names of places long gone: Hometown Buffet on Route 114 in Peabody. Augustine’s further up Route 1 in Saugus.

Something occurred to me upon hearing the names: All my old binging holes are gone.

As a kid I loved going to Augustine’s. It’s the first buffet experience I can remember. I loved that I could eat at the trough until I was ready to throw up — which I did more than once. As I got older I realized the food was actually pretty mediocre. But that didn’t matter. Binge eaters don’t care if their drug of choice is high-quality dining. What matters is availability. It’s why college freshmen tend to gain wait their first semester. The crappy food in the dining hall is free flowing and you sort of feel cheated if you don’t pile it high.

When I worked at Rockit Records in the early 1990s, Augustine’s was still open, and I binged there daily at one point. I was almost relieved when they finally tore it down.

Some days I’d binge at Hilltop, then do the same right after at Augustine’s. I was like the shark in Jaws, chewing my way from the barrel ropes to the boat.

I don’t miss doing that shit. But I don’t blame places like Hilltop and Augustine’s for what I did. Even without them, there’s plenty of binging ground on that stretch of highway to be done if I were so inclined. I’m not, thank God.

We like to heap all the blame on our enablers. But the problem always begins with the addicted mind.

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