There’s a lot of good in my life today. I’ll never take it for granted like I did back then.
Have I led a tragic life? No fucking way.
I’ve lost a lot of people I cared for and my body has been through the meat grinder. But that can never take away the blessings.
And it’s not over yet.
To understand this, just think about your own life. You’ve no doubt experienced sickness and death, family dysfunction and career ups and downs.
If you haven’t, you will.
In between the rough patches, I fell in love with and married the best gal on Earth, had two precious children who keep me laughing and loving, I’ve enjoyed a lot of success in my career, traveled to a lot of cool places and found God.
That stuff doesn’t suck.
Then there’s the joy I feel every day in recovery. All the great friends I have, doing a job I love and having the OCD under control.
Would I want to go through the bad stuff again? Of course not. But the weird truth is that I’m not sure I’d change the past, either. It’s easy for someone to wish they had a lost loved one back in their life and that they were less touched by illness.
But without having gone through these things, would I be where I’m at today?
I was talking to a priest the other night about therapy and getting diagnosed with a mental disorder when he frowned. “Everyone struggles with something,” he said. “It’s not good to slap a label on them and make them be defined by it.”
Back in the fall I was going over a talk I was to give at an upcoming Cursillo retreat. I mentioned the words “mental illness” in there because my struggles with that are partly what brought me to my Faith. The priest stopped me cold:
“I don’t think you should use those words,” he said. “EVERYONE struggles with something. If you throw out labels someone will get offended.”
A few years ago, that would have pissed me off. I would have seen it as the priest belittling me as I was trying to be honest about myself. I also would have cursed him for not understanding the nature of mental illness.
But this guy deals with emotionally distraught people all the time. He has seen people act in rational and irrational ways in his day, and knows that sometimes we have to be careful with words.
It’s also commendable that they don’t want people to have labels.
Some people use the labels they’re given to limit themselves, even feel sorry for themselves. As a kid, I used my Crohn’s Disease as an excuse not to do a lot of things. I cried flare-up the day I had to get in a swimming race during gym class. I used it as an excuse when the stress was getting to me at The Eagle-Tribune and I opted to stay home than spend another night in the newsroom.
Later, after I was diagnosed with OCD, I was tempted to break out the mental illness card when I was scared to death of a business trip that required getting on a plane. I laugh when I think back at that one, because today I love flying. And besides, at that point I wasn’t about to out myself. I was still too afraid of the stigma.
But I disagree with those who say a diagnosis is a bad thing.
I resisted getting treatment for years because I was terrified of what a diagnosis would mean. But I sank so low at one point that I became willing to do whatever it took to be sane.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
–A diagnosis can be a useful thing, if you’re willing to use it to make yourself better.
–Using a diagnosis as an excuse not to do things is pathetic. To do that is to be a slave to fear. I only started to get better after I faced down the fears.
–A diagnosis isn’t a label that’s tattooed on your back like a scarlet letter. It only defines you if you let it.
–Other people might still try to label you, but they’re just being stupid and they can’t stop you from achieving your full potential.
Yeah. I have a label on my back. But it’s not an excuse to get away with bad decisions.
It IS something that reminds me that I have to take care of myself.
This is the second post on my old friend Joe “Zippo” Kelley, who died last summer. Specifically, this is about the lives he made better just by being who he was. A benefit show in his honor is next week.
As I said before, my friendship with Joe played out when we were both attending Salem State College (it’s a university, now). He was a friend I would smoke cigarettes with outside the commuter cafeteria. We’d talk about everything from politics to Nirvana, his favorite band at the time. This was back when Kurt Cobain was still alive.
He eventually picked up a guitar and teamed up with my friend and fellow journalist Greg Walsh, forming the band Zippo Raid. When life gets me down, I think of guys like Joe, who plow through life’s challenges and show others how to live. That’s one way I find the strength to forge ahead.
In what may or may not be a case of irony, I find myself in a deepening friendship with Joe’s parents, who I never met when he was alive. They are sweet people, and I can see now where Joe got his big heart.
As you’d expect, Joe’s death has been hard on them. That, in fact, is a brutal understatement. As Joe Sr. told me in a note he dropped in one of my earlier posts, “The death of my son has cut me to pieces.”
My next post on Joe will include memories shared by his friends and bandmates. If you want to share a story about Joe, you can e-mail me at bbrenner@cxo.com.
Twenty-seven years ago today, my brother, Michael S. Brenner, died of an asthma attack at age 17. I can’t blame his death on the demons I’d battle in the years that followed. But it left deep scars all the same.
Mood music:
I think the end came for him at 8:20 p.m., though I could be mistaken.
That day a trend began where I would befriend people a few years older than me. A couple of them would become best friends and die prematurely themselves. It was also the day that sparked a lifelong fear of loss.
It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:
We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 31 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He grabbed the finger and snapped the bone.
We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.
He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.
He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected cold.
He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue. And when he did, he was fierce.
That last day was perfect for the most part. I remember a sun-kissed winter day. I was immature for a 13-year-old and remember reveling in the toys I got on Christmas two weeks before. The tree in my mother’s house was still up, though the decorations had been removed.
My mother and I think my sister took off to run an errand. My father’s house was only a five-minute walk from my mother’s, and when they drove by, an ambulance was outside the house. I’m told Michael walked to the ambulance himself, and he was rushed to Lynn Hospital, which was torn down long ago to make way for a Super Stop & Shop. I sometimes wonder if he died where the deli counter now stands or if it was where the cereal is now kept.
While I was at my mother’s waiting to hear from someone, a movie was on in which a congressional candidate played by Dudley Moore befriended a woman played by Mary Tyler Moore and her terminally ill daughter, who was about 13. At the end of the movie, the young girl succumbs to her cancer on a train.
That freaked me out, and I went to my mother’s room to bury my head in a pillow. To this day, I refuse to watch that movie.
It was in that room that my mother, father and sister informed me my brother was dead.
I spent the remainder of my teenage years trying to be him. I befriended his friends. I enrolled at his gym, Fitness World. That lasted about a week.
I started listening to his records. Def Leppard was a favorite of his, hence the mood music above.
I even wore his leather jacket for a time, even though it was about three sizes too tight. I couldn’t zip the thing. I looked like an idiot wearing it, but I didn’t care. It was part of him, and I was hell-bent on taking over his persona.
But then there could only be one Michael Brenner. I eventually grew up and realized that. Then I spent a bunch of years trying to be just like Michael’s friend and our neighbor, Sean Marley. But there was only one Sean Marley. Unfortunately, people tend to remember him for how he died rather than how he lived.
I eventually had to learn how to become my own person. I did it, but it was pretty fucking messy. There’s only one Bill Brenner, and he can be a scary sight to behold.
The years have softened the pain, though I still have some regrets.
I regret that I often have trouble remembering what his face looked like. Fortunately, I found this photo while rummaging through my father’s warehouse last summer:
It’s a good image, but it’s in black and white. I still have trouble picturing him in color.
I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.
At the wake of a friend’s mom right after Thanksgiving, I found myself thinking of Michael and others who died too soon.
In a bizarre game of mental math, I started thinking about how long it took me to bounce back from each death. It’s a stupid game to play, because there’s no science or arithmetic that applies. The death of a grandparent is part of the natural order of things. The death of a sibling or close friend, not so much. Unless, perhaps, everyone is well into their senior years. Even then, you can’t put a measuring stick on grief.
But I tried doing it anyway.
With Michael and Sean, I’m not sure I ever really recovered. To this day, I’m cleaning up from the long cycles of depression and addiction that followed me through the years.
Along the way, good things happened to fill in the black holes. I married the love of my life. We had two beautiful children. My career hummed along nicely for the most part.
As you might expect, I failed to emerge with a general timeline of the grieving process. It turns out we’re not supposed to know about such things. That would be cheating.
I do know that it gets better.
Understanding that as I do, I have the following advice for those trying to get through the grieving process:
–Take a moment to appreciate what’s STILL around you. Your spouse. Your kids. 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, and, for goodness sake:
–Don’t sit around looking at people you love and worrying 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 doing 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. Or, to put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
Like I said: This isn’t a science.
It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.
I’ve learned that life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely.
I write all the time about my recovery, but I sometimes neglect to mention that many of my OCD quirks continue, even though I’m not paralyzed and anxious like I used to be.
I don’t need an OCD screening quiz to know what I’m up against. Here are five signs that the condition is always there below the surface:
–1. The other day, after putting away a new pair of boots and new pants, I opened and closed the drawer two or three times to make sure everything was in place.
–2. When Duncan was doing his homework yesterday, the table cloth on the kitchen table kept wrinkling up. I knew it was pointless to fix until he was done, but I kept trying to do so repeatedly.
–3. Whenever the kids pull the bottom cushions off the couch, it makes me CRAZY.
–4. Whenever I get ready to leave my office in Framingham, I check the position of the chair once or twice to make sure the leather arms aren’t rubbing up against the desk.
–5. When I’m in the car, I put my Android phone in one of the empty drink holders. Obsessed with keeping it from going into locked mode, I repeatedly flick at the device with my index finger.
Don’t worry. I’m fine. Though these little things persist, the insidious parts of the condition have not come back — namely the fear, anxiety and out-of-control worry.
Those are the things that make a disorder impossible to live with.
A friend asked that question yesterday. I’ve certainly been accused of being too hard on myself before. My step-mother reads this blog and told me I should give myself a break. Steve Lambert, former editor of The Eagle-Tribune, said I was too hard on myself when I wrote the “One of My Biggest Regrets” post.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:0OXjHxbrmrkpvqudvzWlDR]
The short answer is that sometimes I am, most of the time I’m not.
When I was at my absolute worst, I knew my soul was in deep trouble and I hated myself for not having the will to do something about it. I call it my long road through self-hatred. Back then I would be hard on myself by wallowing in the corner or, more accurately, in my car, where I would go on many, many binges.
If I had the ability to cry it out back then, I would have probably binged less. But I’ve never been good at crying, so I’d let the rage fill me and I’d do my best to destroy myself. It’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I hated and wanted to punish myself. Giving in to my addictions was a lot like taking a thick leather belt and lashing myself a few hundred times.
That’s what happens when mental illness and addiction burn wild with no management. You end up being hard on yourself, and nothing good comes of it. In fact, it just makes things worse.
Today I’m hard on myself in a different way. I come on here and write about what a shithead I was the day before, and in the process I fix my course and work on doing better. That’s much more healthy.
I was feeling stupid yesterday because I purchased a new pair of boots and a pair of pants on Amazon.com. I needed the boots, but not the pants. It was a splurge with money we don’t necessarily have. Call it no big deal, but I know better. Sometimes, when I’m not letting the food addiction or wine guzzling control me, I let the spending addiction control me. Or the Internet addiction.
That’s when I have to remind myself that I’m being a jerk. And then I try to do better.
The Sunday night step study meeting I wrote about yesterday gave me more to think about than I could cram into one post. Another thing that stuck with me is how society continues to mistake addiction for choice.
I’ve tackled this subject many times in this blog. In the first “It’s a Disease, Not a Choice” post a few months back, I noted that the addicted brain works differently.
My problem was binge eating and a growing dependence on wine, further complicated by the variety of pain pills I was prescribed for the aches and pains caused, ultimately, by my bad habits. I was a less-than-ideal husband and dad. You just couldn’t rely on me. I’d sneak around feeding my addiction and then cover my tracks. Sometimes I would blatantly lie about it. [See “The Liar’s Disease“] I didn’t lie to be evil. I did it because the shame was too much for me to handle.
You might also say I didn’t know any better.
One thing’s for certain: I didn’t wake up one morning and decide it would be a laugh riot to slowly destroy myself and hurt everyone around me in the process.
To someone watching a loved one in relapse, the question is always “How the fuck could HE/SHE do this to ME?”
Here’s the ugly truth: Alcoholism — addictive behavior, period — is a disease. Nobody chooses it. They are chosen instead. It controls you like a puppet. You know as you’re doing that addictive action that it’s wrong and you hate every second of it. But your motor skills have taken over and you CAN’T stop.
Sure, we can shake it in time and find recovery, but relapse is a natural part of the disease. In fact, relapse is something I probably worry about the most, because I’ve been relatively lucky up to this point in my 12-Step program.
I know it can creep up on me and regain control at any moment, before I know what hit me.
In one of my favorite TV shows, “The West Wing,” Leo McGarry describes where the mind goes:
“My brain works differently,” he says, followed by,” I don’t get drunk in front of people. I get drunk alone.”
It’s the same way for a food addict. You can’t have just one slice of pizza. It has to be the whole box. I once joked to a friends that I can’t eat just five. And when I really wanted to numb my frustrations in a bag of junk, I always went peddle to the metal out of sight from others; typically when I was alone in my car.
At Sunday night’s meeting, someone brought up another thing about addicts and choice: We all have choices in life, but when we become addicted to something, choice is destroyed. We become slaves to an evil force that’s far more powerful than our sense of reason, right or wrong. We become slaves to the substance. We have no choice but to feed it.
But the story doesn’t end there.
My own experience is that there is NEVER a point of no return. Slaves sometimes break free of their captors. On rare occasions they come back with a shotgun and kill the bastards. Most of the time the slave just runs away, hoping to avoid recapture. In a world where addiction is the captor, relapse is when the oppressor catches up to you and puts you back in chains.
I broke free. But I always have to watch my back.
A family friend has a dad who has suffered a long time with alcoholism. He achieved years of sobriety, only to relapse. Now he’s in a very bad place.
He’s a slave again.
I’m praying for him.
Even when the addict is returned to slavery, they still bring something to the table that the rest of us can learn from:
They show you what it’s like to suffer, and their example serves as a warning.
Make no mistake about it: This is some seriously complicated shit.
I’m just glad to be free today. I managed to see through the haze one day and I got my choices back.
A lot of changes to my program of sobriety and abstinence are under way, and I feel like I’m running on nuclear power. Last night was my first Big Book Step Study meeting, which is quite different from the speaker-discussion meetings I’m used to. It only took me a few seconds to realize why I had to be there.
Mood music:
A lot of times when someone sobers up or stops binge eating, it’s a white-knuckle experience.
It’s not just because you’re missing your junk and the momentary feeling it gives you. It’s because the hole in your soul — the thing that drove you to addiction in the first place — is still there. If you don’t deal with that hole, you might stay clean for a year or two. But sooner or later, you’ll fall right back into the old, insidious patterns.
Speaker-discussion meetings are a vital tool for the initial clean-up. You can’t start working on the hole until you stop the addictive behavior. It did me a ton of good and I still need to go to those events, but it’s no longer enough. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is all about dealing with the hole, and studying it more closely is a must if I’m going to stay clean.
Studying the pages will also pull me deeper into the meaning of working the 12 Steps.
I also have a new sponsor starting this week. Instead of me simply telling him my plan of eating for the day, we’ll talk about the deeper issues at the heart of sobriety and abstinence. I’m looking forward to it.
My life is full of Blessings. This program is the one that allowed for everything else.
I’m glad I’m starting to take it more seriously.
A guy at last night’s meeting noted that there are two types of addicts:
–The type who is doomed and DOESN’T KNOW IT, and
–The type that’s doomed and KNOWS IT.
The latter type has a better chance of escaping that fate, because in knowing you’re headed for disaster you might be willing to take action. I’m glad I was that type.
I had an advantage: Several years of brutal therapy for OCD. The tools I had to develop to manage that are a lot like those you need to clean up. And it was all about identifying the hole in my soul.
It’s still there, but I think it’s getting smaller all the time.
Cleaning out the trunk of my car yesterday, I came across a stack of cassette tapes from a period in my life when I was so desperate I’d spend stupid sums of money on anything to remove my fear and anxiety.
These tapes were part of a program that cost me some $450. Each tape, sold by the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety, is designed to help people learn the skills to defeat anxiety and depression without medication.
I ordered the so-called free trial in 2006 after seeing all the late-night TV infomercials with Lucinda Bassett, mastermind of the program. I worked the program diligently. But overall, the program wasn’t even close to what I needed.
I called the Midwest Center before the free trial period was up to tell them I’d be sending the tapes and DVDs back. No go, an impatient phone rep told me. They had already charged the card number I gave them. No refund.
Meanwhile, I received a package of vitamins in the mail with ingredients designed to reduce stress and balance the brain chemistry. At first it struck me as odd, since the concept on paper was a lot like other pills the center typically railed against. They weren’t anti-depressant-caliber pills like Prozac. They were just vitamins. I saw them for what they were: an expensive placebo.
I never asked for the vitamins. Yet there they were, and they were charging me extra for something I didn’t order or want.
The phone reps basically told me too bad, they had already charged my card and there were no refunds. I should have read the fine print.
So, the program to attack anxiety and depression simply made those things rage within me even worse than before.
At some point, I dumped the tapes in a box in my trunk, forgot about them and moved on. I found more lasting tools to manage my OCD and the resulting fear, anxiety and depression, and that was the end of it.
When I found the tapes, I chucked them in the trash along with the rest of the rubbish I was clearing out of the car.
When I came back inside, I found myself looking up articles about the Midwest Center and found some surprising items.
Still, I couldn’t help but find it sadly, painfully ironic that THIS GUY would end his own life.
Here’s something I found that was written shortly after Bassett’s death. The author is STEVE SALERNO, author/essayist, musician, teacher, and blogger. (Check out his SHAMblog) He wrote:
This past June 7 (2008), 53-year-old David Bassett walked onto a California beach and ended his life with a shotgun. This took place not far from the home he shared with his wife, Lucinda. If the names sound vaguely familiar, it’s because David and Lucinda Bassett were principals in the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety.Not a few of those who left their thoughts were refugees from the Center’s in-house discussion forum, where their critical remarks had been expunged or edited; a few claimed to have been banned altogether. Collectively, they seemed to feel they’d been abused, if not conned. The gist was that the Center had used misleading claims and credentials to charge them a lot of money for programs that didn’t work (or at least hadn’t worked for them). To be fair, a number of Center apologists also weighed in, and for a while we had a spirited, thought-provoking give-and-take going.A prospective customer might reasonably ask: If the Center’s programs can’t even prevent one of the Center’s owners from killing himself…?
I also found a site known as the Complaint Board, where a fellow by the name of Alfred logged his complaints about the Bassett empire:
Lucinda and David Bassett flood late night infomercial TV with their overpriced Attacking Anxiety and Depression schlock program. They advertise a ’30-day risk free trial’ for just $9.95, the so called ‘shipping/Handling charge’ (inflated as any typical infomercial ripoff), the hook being that the S/H charge is all you pay for the 30 day ‘trial period’.Then when you aren’t magically cured by this collection of cassette tape in 30 days, send it back with no obligation to pay the $75.00 a month that they bill your credit card for the next 6-7 months. Do not believe this CRAP for a minute. They start ripping you off immediately with the inflated shipping charge and then start removing your money 30 days from the ORDER DATE which typically is 10-14 days BEFORE the 30 day trial period STARTS. By the time the ’30 day trial’ is over they have already taken the first FULL payment of $75.00 (+ tax) by 2 WEEKS, even when you decide you don’t want to buy this craprogram. One of Lucy’s top-secret cures is to ‘Drink 8 glasses of water everyday’ and ‘quit smoking and drinking’ DUH!! Gee for such wisdom it only costs 450 bucks! If these amateur Pyschobees had a grain of credibility would they operate so Don Lapre-like? It will take weeks to get your refund (if ever) A wiser approach would be to work for the Bassett’s. Then you can buy the ‘program’ for $20 and save yourself $425 just 90% off the ripoff price they charge everyone else.
That sounded a lot like my experiences with the program.
To be fair, this program probably has worked for people. I’ve seen plenty of positive reviews over the years. It’s just that there is no one size fits all. What works for one won’t work for another. It’s the same with medication. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for the next guy or gal.
There’s always that roll of the dice.
I just don’t think it should cost someone $450 to handle the dice.
Here’s the real problem, though:
You can tell a person to read the fine print, but a depressed, anxious person isn’t thinking about the fine print when they’re up at 3 a.m. watching those infomercials.
A person like that is desperate, and when they see a TV program telling them how easily the program will work in their lives, they’re not thinking about the fine print. They hear the words “free trial” and dash for the phone with credit card in hand. They figure the credit card number is just a placeholder. They don’t expect to actually be charged. Sure, they’re engaged in stupid thinking. But when you’re mentally and emotionally sick, stupid thinking is a way of life.
That’s what this program is: A money-sucker that preys on desperate people.
The lesson here is that you can’t go for anything packaged as a quick fix.
Nothing — and I mean NOTHING — will cure you in 15 weeks or even 30.
Getting truly well is a process that takes years. And you are never cured.
Last night I freaked out my 2-year-old niece with one of my loud laughs. I felt awful for scaring her, but Erin’s explanation of my voice volume immediately made me feel better.
Of course, I’ve always had a loud laugh. It’s also true that many of the stereotypical bad guys in the movies have a loud laugh. The emperor from the Star Wars movies comes to mind.
An editor named Bill Ketter used to have an ear-shattering laugh, and not many people in The Eagle-Tribune newsroom liked him very much at the time (my attitude toward him has softened with time).
I guess to Madison’s little ears mine is a sinister laugh.
But she’ll get over it.
And in the end Erin’s right: My loud laugh was the result of something my niece did.
