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Sponsor Shopping

The changes I need to make to take my recovery to the next level are well  underway. But an important piece of the puzzle might prove more challenging than I first thought.

Mood music (I’m on a deep Smashing Pumkins kick this week):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4gFpiRD2PI&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I’m shopping around for a new sponsor. I need a male sponsor, and I need to change focus to a deeper study of the 12 Steps.

Seems simple, right? Well, it’s turning out to be a bit more complicated.

Sponsorship is a tricky beast. Some sponsors are way too controlling of their sponsees, in my opinion. You’re to do everything they say without debate. I know why this happens. There’s a saying in OA that when you seek out a sponsor you want what they have and want them to show you how to get it. A lot of sponsors take that to mean they should make sponsees do everything 100 percent the way they do or take a hike.

I don’t believe in that. In fact, I think it’s possible to get so obsessed with the mechanics of the program that it becomes another addictive behavior. A more healthy addictive behavior than binge eating, drinking and drugging, of course; but it’s addictive behavior nonetheless.

Don’t get me wrong. I think a sponsor has to have rules and enforce them. Otherwise the person they try to help will always go looking for the easier softer ways that lead to failure.

At the same time, no two people are exactly alike. Our needs are unique, and I think it’s a stretch for a sponsor to think a sponsee can do everything exactly like they do. Some people have medical conditions that mean they can’t follow the same exact food plan as a sponsor.

Some sponsors won’t take on someone like that because, in their mind, they are in no position to guide someone who has to eat differently.

For example, I don’t eat flour or sugar, and so some sponsors might say I shouldn’t sponsor someone who does eat flour and sugar.

I understand the logic, but I don’t necessarily agree with it.

There’s no specific playbook for an OA plan of eating. There IS NO playbook, actually. There’s no specific diet plan. The only requirement to be here is that you badly want to stop compulsively overeating. There are a lot of ways to get there. Discipline is a must, but discipline comes with a lot of moving parts.

As long as a sponsee badly wants to stop and is willing to be honest and open-minded, a sponsor should be willing to work with them. But that’s just my view. Sponsors have a choice in the end, too. And if they choose not to sponsor someone because that person doesn’t want to be a carbon copy of them, that’s their right.

It’s just not what I want in a sponsor right now.

I’m also a firm believer that everyone in this program should take their food plan to a nutritionist for adjustments. Sponsors are not nutritionists, though some like to think they are.

I have Crohn’s Disease, so I had to make adjustments that weren’t fully in line with what my first sponsor wanted me to do. I had to dial back on the raw vegetables, for one thing. I also had to add a couple ounces of potato or rice to lunch and dinner. My sponsor wasn’t comfortable with that, but went along with it.

Sponsors also have differing opinions on how many meetings to attend each week. Some demand three a week. I do two live meetings and one phone meeting a week. Some sponsors might call that too little. But then they probably don’t have children below the age of 10 and a full-time job. 

If that sounds mean, I apologize.

I want a sponsor who will guide me and help me stay clean without trying to outright control me. I want someone who doesn’t subscribe to the belief that I’ve failed if I don’t live my program exactly as they do.

Of course, we can’t always have what we want.

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Bullied Minds, Bad Choices

I’m quite taken with this Boston Globe article about the long-term impact of bullying. There’s some truth to the conclusions, but also a lot of bullshit.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:0xwK8KzT8gFa7f4MsYYpQu]

Of the new research, the Globe article says the following:

A new wave of research into bullying’s effects … is now suggesting … that in fact, bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being ostracized by one’s peers, it seems, can throw adolescent hormones even further out of whack, lead to reduced connectivity in the brain, and even sabotage the growth of new neurons.

These neurological scars, it turns out, closely resemble those borne by children who are physically and sexually abused in early childhood. Neuroscientists now know that the human brain continues to grow and change long after the first few years of life. By revealing the internal physiological damage that bullying can do, researchers are recasting it not as merely an unfortunate rite of passage but as a serious form of childhood trauma. This change in perspective could have all sorts of ripple effects for parents, kids, and schools; it offers a new way to think about the pain suffered by ostracized kids, and could spur new antibullying policies.

My compliments to Emily Anthes for a well-written, thoughtful article. The opinions I’m about to express are not a dig against her or the article itself. There’s a lot of value in what she reported and wrote. My issue is more about the mindset that seems to be taking hold where being a bullied kid somehow becomes an excuse for doing something terrible later in life.

My view can’t be taken as the final word. I’m no expert in the field. I only have my own experiences and how they’ve applied to my actions.

I was bullied a lot as a kid. But I did my share of bullying as well. Kids do stupid things. I was a stupid kid, and I had run-ins with other equally-stupid kids. Truth be told, the bullying I experienced led to plenty of depression and addictive behavior. I’m sure it had an impact on the troubles I would have as an adult.

But I think I’ve been equally scarred — with the same results — by the cruelty I let loose on others. A lot of guilt over how I treated others led me to the kind of self-destructive behavior some people don’t recover from.

The article makes comparisons between the verbal and physical abuse kids suffer at the hands of their parents and what they suffer at the hands of their peers.

Another snippet from the Globe article:

Martin Teicher, a neuroscientist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, has been examining just these kinds of scenarios. He began by studying the effects of being verbally abused by a parent. In his study of more than 1,000 young adults, Teicher found that verbal abuse could be as damaging to psychological functioning as the physical kind — that words were as hurtful as the famous sticks and stones. The finding sparked a new idea: “We decided to look at peer victimization,” he said.

So Teicher and his colleagues went back to their young adult subjects, focusing on those they had assumed were healthy in this respect — who’d had no history of abuse from their parents. The subjects, however, varied in how much verbal harassment — such as teasing, ridicule, criticism, screaming, and swearing — they had received from their peers. What the scientists found was that kids who had been bullied reported more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders than the kids who hadn’t. In fact, emotional abuse from peers turned out to be as damaging to mental health as emotional abuse from parents. “It’s a substantial early stressor,” Teicher said.

Here’s the thing: Though I experienced trauma at home and school, I’ve ALWAYS had the choice of whether to lash out or take the high road. I did a lot of lashing out. But I didn’t grow up and decide my lot in life was a reason to kill someone or rob a bank.

I think of this bullying article and can’t help but recall the recent story of the mother who killed her baby because the child was disturbing her game of Farmville. That story hit me where I live because it’s a story of addiction. My impression is that this woman has an online gaming addiction, which can be just as insidious a disease as alcoholism, drug dependency and, in my case, binge eating.

That’s where my sympathy ends. In fact, I can’t say I have any sympathy. My friend Lori MacVittie sounded off on this case in language I wholeheartedly agree with. On her Facebook page she said:

“There’s an excuse for everything, even killing a 3-month old child over a stupid game. I’m addicted, I’m depressed, I was deprived as a child, wha, wha, wha. Grow up. It’s called choice. Everyone has them. She made the wrong one.”

And there it is. We all go through traumatic experiences, and in the end we all have a choice.

At any point along the way I could have used my troubles as an excuse to go into a life of crime and maybe kill a few people along the way. I certainly had my moments where, if you interrupted my binge or gave me shit about my OCD quirks, I would fill with rage.

I’ve thought about punching people many times. But I never did.

Because I had a choice. I chose not to step over the line.

Now, to say we all have choices and we all have the power to do right or wrong is to oversimplify things. When a person suffers from an addiction or a mental struggle, they are not always in their right mind. When that happens, you’re capable of all kinds of evil, no matter how hard you try to hold back.

I strongly believe there are suicide cases where the person is so far gone into the world of depression and despair that they no longer have the capacity to make sane decisions.

My childhood friend, Mark Hedgecock, became a thrice-convicted pedophilebecause of his baggage. The baggage was only part of it. He had a choice and made the wrong one three times.

He acknowledged as much over the phone a few months ago. He knows he’s a monster and that he probably shouldn’t be on the street. Bottom line: He did what he did and has to pay for it for the rest of his life. It’s sad, though. It’s a waste. But he was trolling for teenage girls on Facebook over the summer, showing he can’t help but repeat his mistakes.

He had a choice. He made the wrong one.

This FarmVille-addicted mom had a choice. She made the wrong one. Now she’s gotta pay.

That doesn’t mean we have to like it. She killed her kid in a moment of insanity. It’s a tragedy. period.

Unfortunately, getting bullied by your peers can knock loose the wiring in the brain that makes you hold back from bad choices later in life.

This stuff is hopelessly complicated.

The study on peer bullying is just another thread in the larger, gruesome tapestry of human nature.

I’m still waiting for the day when we’re able to take what we learn from these studies and concoct the perfect bad choice prevention program. It won’t be in my lifetime.

I’m just glad that when I faced those moments of choice and made the bad calls, nobody got killed. Good friends and family pulled me through.

May it be the same for you.

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Saving My Recovery, Continued

I huge weight is off my shoulders. I’ve gone from talking about the changes that’ll help me preserve my sobriety and abstinence to doing what I said I’d do.

Mood music: Pearl Jam covering Mother Love Bone’s “Crown of Thorns”

I told my sponsor that hitting the reset button means I have to replace her. She said she would never do anything to get in the way of my recovery. She’s a dear friend who has helped me so much this year. It’s not about her. It’s about me needing to change things up. She gets it.

Another cherished friend, the guy I sponsor, seemed to take it well when I told him that come Jan. 1 I need to step back from sponsoring people for awhile. He gets it, but I don’t think he likes it. He’s worried that I’ll push him out of my life. That’s not going to happen. He’ll figure that out in time.

The tweaks to my food plan are underway. I moved up an ounce on the morning oatmeal. Other changes will happen, mainly in terms of adding variety to the plan. I’m not necessarily changing what I eat. It’s more about how I cook the stuff. The one constant that can never be broken: No, flour, no sugar. The two ingredients together are like heroin to my fucked up mind.

I’ve been asked a million times how I exist without flour and sugar. No pasta? No pizza? What else is there? The simple answer is plenty. But that’s not the whole story. You can have an abstinent food plan and stay away from the flour and sugar. But if you eat more than the allotted amount, you’ve still relapsed.

Having an addictive mind that revolves around food is a particularly tricky beast to tame. Quitting drugs and alcohol is painful. So is quitting an addiction to shopping or porn. The problem with food is that you need it to survive. You can’t purge it from your life like the other things.

That’s why in the Overeater’s Anonymous crowd we have to talk to our sponsor every day and tell them what we’re eating that day. Make no mistake about it: I think it can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes I don’t want to talk on the phone. But, really, I have no choice.

The alternative is to be owned by the substances I’m addicted to. Then my wife and children suffer. After that, my work suffers. And in the end, I just fill my life with the fix until God no longer has anything to do with anything. 

I’m not letting that happen without one hell of a fight. And you know what? I’m going to win. I’ve been exposed to too much of God’s Grace to turn back now.

The beauty of making changes now is that I’m not having to do it because I relapsed.

I’ve been abstinent since Oct. 1, 2008. I was lucky enough to see myself headed for trouble and have decided to take preemptive action.

Of course, I realize that in the final analysis I’m never totally safe.

No addict ever is.

We’re never more than five minutes away from relapse.

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My Program at the Crossroads

My mood was all over the place yesterday, but I couldn’t figure out why. I chalked it up to the usual things: too much to do, too tired and not enough down time. On the drive to work this morning, I started to realize what the real problem is.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqHv3L7e8-U&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Now, yesterday wasn’t all bad. Mass was good, I got up and did a reading without incident, and Duncan and I marched in Haverhill’s Santa Parade, helping Scout Pack 27 and the Betsy Conte Food Drive collect food for those who are having trouble finding enough of it.

The day was sparkling, and once we got going, I enjoyed the three miles of walking.

It was also nice to get some quality time with Duncan. He wore his pink hat, and no one gave him crap about it. I’d like to think more than a few people learned to keep their stupidity to themselves after reading this post.

Probably not, but that’s OK.

Unfortunately, he spent two hours before the parade grousing about having to walk three miles (he stayed in the Radio Flyer wagon most of the time while I pulled him along) and I lost my cool trying to talk him off the ledge.

He had a great time, so all that difficulty amounted to a waste of a couple perfectly good hours.

But that’s life — the normal ebb and flow of family life. Back when my demons had me by the balls, I would sink into major depressions over this sort of thing. In the last couple years I’ve had a much cooler head about moments of parental challenge.

Yesterday I let things get to me more than I should have, though.

Erin chalked it up to everyone being overtired, and that’s certainly part of it. She made sure all three Brenner boys were in bed before 8 p.m.

But on the drive in this morning, I started thinking about a few things, and then it hit me.

I’m hitting a wall in my recovery program.

The things I do to manage the OCD are working fairly well.

But the program to keep my addictive impulses at bay is at a crossroads.

I don’t know what the answer is.

But one thing is certain: If I don’t figure it out and make some changes, I’m headed for a relapse.

Since I’m not about to let that happen, I’m going to figure out what I need to do. I took the best possible step forward once I got to the office: I talked to my sponsor about it. Together, we’ll figure out the right adjustments to make that’ll keep me sober and abstinent.

One area where I know I’m having misgivings: The sponsorship thing. I’ve sponsored others in the program for more than a year now, but one of my sponsees has turned out to be a lot of work. The emotional baggage with this guy is immense. We’ve also become good friends, and that might be part of the problem. He needs me to be a friend more than a sponsor. He just doesn’t realize it yet. He requires so much of my time that I’m starting to worry about him getting in the way of my own recovery. 

That sounds selfish, and it is. But in the end, my first responsibility is to my own recovery. My family, friends and colleagues deserve nothing less.

So I’m going to talk to him.

We’ll see how that works out.

Stay tuned.

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The Joyless Happy Meal

I’ve been hearing a lot of stink over this toyless Happy Meal story. Maybe I can put the whole thing in perspective.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU16EBurb1Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

First, here’s the AP to tell you what happened to the beloved Happy Meal in San Francisco:

Unhealthy kids’ meals to get less ‘happy’ in San Francisco

San Francisco has become the first major American city to prohibit fast-food restaurants from including toys with children’s meals that do not meet nutritional guidelines. The city’s Board of Supervisors gave the measure final approval on Tuesday on an 8-3 vote. That is enough votes to survive a planned veto by Mayor Gavin Newsom. The ordinance, which goes into effect in December next year, prohibits toys in children’s meals that have more than 640mg of sodium, 600 calories or 35 per cent of their calories from fat. It would also limit saturated fats and trans fats and require fruits or vegetables to be served with each meal with a toy.

The horror. The frakkin’ horror. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen the Happy Meal come under assault.
When I worked at The Eagle-Tribune, Gretchen Putnam — then the features editor — got a little present in the mail from P.E.T.A.  She opened the package and out popped a “McCruelty Meal.” There was the Happy Meal-like box, with a blood-splatter pattern. You open the box to find P.E.T.A. literature and the toy — A Ronald McDonald doll covered in blood with a knife in its back.
The idea was to convey that Ronald was a murderous bastard for chopping up cattle for those world-famous burgers.
I checked out the “McCruelty” website and it appears they’ve modified things, shifting attention to the genocide of poultry.
Gretchen, if you read this and still have that lying around, I’ll buy it from you.
So now a few government officials decided to suck the joy out of any Happy Meal that doesn’t meet their nutritional standards.
It takes a recovering compulsive overeater to put this in the proper perspective, and I have a couple thoughts on this whole affair:
For one thing, banning the toy isn’t going to do a thing to keep kids away from McDonald’s food.
Kids know they can always find a toy someplace else, and at the end of the day it’s the fatty food they’re really after anyway. Maybe they won’t get the Happy Meal, but they will still go there and get the same stuff: The burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, etc.
And if you think it’ll keep parents from feeding their children junk, just remember that parental stupidity is one of the things that sends children down the unhealthy path to begin with. If I’ve learned anything on my long journey to recovery, it’s that addicts can almost always trace their behavior back to their parents.
That’s certainly the case for me. My mother was always pushing food on me. She did it out of love and meant no harm, but that and the Crohn’s Disease battle certainly tilted my addictive behavior toward the compulsive binge eating.

If a parent drinks or drugs to excess, there’s a better-than-average chance their kids are going to do the same thing in adulthood.

Recovering addicts have noted this thread in their own lives time and again at the 12-Step meetings I go to.

Chris Hoff, a good friend of mine from the Internet security industry and perhaps one of the most prolific presences on Twitter, saw a good example of this brand of parental failure in a coffee shop over the summer. I’ll share his tweets on the subject, since his content is all public record at this point:

Noticing a fat guy feeding his obese son three doughnuts and yelling at the poor kid for being too slow, Hoff (Twitter handle is @Beaker) wrote:

Hint: If your 4-foot-something 8-year-old weighs more than me, you’re doing it wrong. Makes me want to cry. F’ing up your life is one thing, but his? :( It’s not that I’m insensitive to his plight; been there. However he’s helping end his kid’s life early by poisoning him with junk and mean words.

He noted, correctly I think, that kids inherently know what’s healthy but they still fall into bad behavior that parents either can’t or won’t stop. Often, they enable it.

Banning the toys in Happy Meals won’t change this one bit.
I see this as another example of trying to regulate addictive food — it may be well-intentioned but it never works. I’ve mentioned this before, most notably in the post “Regulating Addictive Food: A Lesson in Futility.”
Since I know what it’s like to be deep in the muck of a binge-eating addiction, my wife thought I might find interest in an article from The Environment Report suggesting that the regulation of foods that are bad for you — same way as with cigarettes — might help some sufferers.

The cattle prod for this item was book called “The End of Overeating.” The author is David A. Kessler, MD, and a former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I actually have a lot of respect for this guy, whose tenure included the successful push to enact regulations requiring standardized Nutrition Facts labels on food.

That, in my opinion, was a huge win for those of us who want truth in advertising.

In “The End of Overeating,” Kessler makes a compelling argument: Foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain’s chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat.

“Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology — what’s going on in our body,” The Washington Post quoted him as saying in a story brilliantly headlined “Crave Man.”

http://starvingwritersbooks.com/bookstore/images/endofeverlasting.jpg

The real question is what’s going on in the brain, Kessler says.

His theory on food as an addictive substance is as on the mark as you can get. Trust me. I’ve lived it. Binge eating is all about addiction for me.

It’s tied directly into the same corner of the brain where my OCD resides.

He is also right that sugar, salt and fat are addictive substances, though for a lot of people, the components of our poison boil down to sugar and flour.

Of course, most of the food that has flour and sugar also tends to be high in salt and fat.

The first and most important tool in my OA recovery program is a plan of eating. Flour and sugar are off the table — period. Almost everything I eat goes on a little scale. 4 ounces protein, 4 ounces raw vegetable, 6 ounces cooked vegetable, 2 ounces potato or brown rice, etc. Every morning at 6:15 I call my sponsor, someone who hears my food plan for each day and gives me the necessary kick in the ass.

But salt and fat are not forbidden for me. In fact, I’m allowed to substitute 4 ounces of meat with 2 ounces of cheese or nuts.

To some, this may sound like a typical fad diet, but people in OA have used a plan like this since the beginning. And the plan isn’t the same for everyone. If you have diabetes, for example, removing every scrap of flour from the diet isn’t usually an option. No matter. The only requirement of the program is to stop eating compulsively, no matter how you get there.

This isn’t something I pursued to drop 65 pounds, though I did lose that amount pretty quickly. This is a food plan for life — a key to my getting all the nutrition I need and nothing more. Just as an alcoholic must put down the booze or a narcotics addict has to put down the pills, I have to put down the flour and sugar.

This is the plan that got me out of the darkest days of addictive behavior and I’m a true believer.

Flour and sugar mixed together becomes a toxin that knocks the fluids in my brain out of balance. Kessler’s research is definitely in line with what’s happened to me.

But the idea of regulating food the same way as something like cigarettes? It won’t do much good.

It certainly couldn’t hurt. The nutrition labels at the very least gave us an education on what we put in our bodies, and it’s been especially helpful to parents who are trying to raise their kids healthy. Regulating cigarettes has certainly made it harder for minors to buy them.

But for the true addict, regulation is a joke.

Knowing what’s in junk food won’t keep the addict away. I always read the labels AFTER binging on the item in the package. And the labels have done nothing to curb the child obesity pandemic.

If you smoke, it’s certainly more expensive to buy a pack than it used to be. But if you crave the nicotine, you’ll find a way to get your fix. It’s the same with drugs, and with food.

I have nothing against the government types in San Francisco who want to do something about this nightmare by targeting the Happy Meal. I just don’t think their approach is going to work.
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Why I Hate the Saying, ‘Taking Inventory’

A lot of my 12-Step brothers and sisters have a saying: “I’m taking inventory.” It’s supposed to be about reflecting on your own growth and behavior. But it’s really about trash talking other people.

Mood music:

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

One of my friends in the program always follows the sentence “I’m just taking my inventory” with a long tirade against everyone who stared at him the wrong way that day. I give him crap about it every day.

This behavior tends to be an epidemic among the recovery crowd, especially folks who move from AA to OA. It’s all part of the whack-a-mole problem addicts have. We put down the addiction that almost destroyed us, only to use other, smaller addictions as a crutch. For some people, the crutch is a stink eye they give everyone who doesn’t act exactly the way you would act yourself.

At the risk of exposing my own hypocrisy, I admit that I take inventory at times, and it can be just as bad as when others do it.

I don’t like this about myself, and I’m working to change it.

I just wish others would try to do the same.

I’m mixing with the AA crowd a lot more these days, perhaps because one of my sponsees has been in AA for decades. We have the big things in common. We developed addictions that made our lives unmanageable. Having found recovery, we latch onto each other pretty tight.

But something’s different.

In OA, there’s a tight fellowship in meetings and on the telephone. But the AA crowd really sticks together. It’s more like a gang. Recovering addicts often live together, several in a house. Not a halfway house. They just live together, watching out for each other. 

It’s cool to see. But I’ve also found that there are some real animosities among the AA crowd. One of my sponsees, an OA drop-out for now, spent a lot of time telling me about how I shouldn’t trust this person or that person because one likes to tell lies and the other likes to steal money. The lying part didn’t shock me. All addicts lie.

To be fair, sometimes people like us can’t help ourselves. It’s the same tick in the brain that made us into addicts in the first place. We developed a hole we couldn’t fill, so we frantically tried to plug it with food, drugs, alcohol, porn, and trash talking other people.

It just goes to show that when you clean up from the junk it doesn’t automatically make you a better person.

It can be hard to know how to act without your crutch. I’ve been there many times.

Instead of becoming the salt of the Earth, you just become the salt in someone else’s wound.

Fixing yourself is a task that’s never done.

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Me and My Wall

When I get tired and angry, I have this wall I put up. Erin is usually the one who crashes into it.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpAbUvl3eTk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

She’s been building a freelance editing business for the past year, and the hours she puts in would kill a lesser person. I’ve taken on a lot of extra things around the house to help, and for the last week or so the fatigue and frustration has set in.

Not frustration with Erin. Frustration over the situation.

This is a much better situation than what we faced several months ago, when all the freelance work dried up and we couldn’t figure out how we were going to get all the bills paid. Now there’s a ton of work, and at the end of the day we’re both wiped out.

The problem is that I don’t immediately catch on that I’m frustrated. I figure it’s just me going into OCD mode. I’m just tired, I figure.

That’s when I become a prick.

Erin will try to engage me in conversation and I’ll shut down. I put the wall up. I don’t realize I’m doing it, and that’s a problem.

For all the sharing I do in this blog, sometimes it’s still ridiculously hard to open up to those closest to me. I’ve worked hard on fixing that in recent years, but I’m far from there.

One reason is that I’m still a selfish bastard sometimes. I get so wrapped up in my work and feelings that it becomes almost impossible to see someone else’s side of things. That eventually blows up in my face.

I also don’t like to be in a situation where there’s yelling. There was plenty of that growing up, and I tend to avoid the argument at all costs.

I’ve gotten better at this stuff, but I know I still put that wall up at times. Putting up a wall can be a bitch for any relationship, because sooner or later bad feelings will race at that wall like a drunk behind the wheel of a Porsche and slam right into it. Some bricks in the wall crack and come loose, but by then it can be too late. The relationship is totaled. 

I’ve come to realize this will always be a danger we have to watch for. It’s a danger in any marriage. Carol and Mike Brady never really existed. If they did, they could have used a few good fights. They wouldn’t have wasted so much time sitting up in bed reading boring books.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, it’s time to put the big-boy pants on and get back to work on that wall.

Maybe one of these days I’ll tear it down once and for all.

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Alcohol Deadlier Than Heroin?

I love studies that state the obvious. Especially when the no-brainer conclusions still manage to shock people . Latest example: “Alcohol More Deadly Than Heroin, Study Finds.”

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSih4o2YfmA&fs=1&hl=en_US]

According to the Associated Press report, “British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole. Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.”

The report says booze scored so high because it’s legal and, therefore, much more available than the hard drugs it was compared to. When abused, alcohol damages nearly all organs and is connected to higher death rates, higher crime and higher rates of collateral damage (the families devastated by living with an alcoholic, for example).

I don’t take issue with the folks who conduct these studies. There is a lot for the masses to learn from them. The reason I’m feeling snarky about it is that the results are always so painfully obvious to someone who has struggled with addictive behavior. And to me, it’s painfully obvious that addictive substances that are legal will always kill more people than the illegal, harder-to-get stuff like heroin.

Anything will kill you if done to excess.

Drink a lot of alcohol every day and it’ll destroy your organs quicker than it will for the person who drinks in moderation.

Binge eat all the time and you’ll get heart disease, colon cancer and other maladies more quickly and severely than the guy who eats everything in moderation.

If you’re a recovering addict as I am, you know that it’s really the compulsive behavior itself — not the substance — that will kill you eventually.

You can’t solve the problem by outlawing the substance. Prohibition didn’t work. I don’t think it works with pot and harder drugs either.

Smokers understand. They know cigarettes cause cancer, but they do it anyway. It’s a compulsion they can’t control, and they can’t stop until push comes to shove. Even then, it’s not always enough.

You have to find whatever is at the core of your soul, the pain that makes you abuse the substance. Then you have to address that core problem. Otherwise, it’ll kill you someday. I did this with intensive therapy, medication and lifestyle changes.

But saying “just do it” or “just say no” oversimplifies things. If you’re under the spell of whatever you’re addicted to, those statements are a joke.

Some of us are lucky enough to get beyond the joke and take action, but man, it’s hard. One of the hardest things ever. 

I guess my point is that these studies, while valuable, are never the definitive, final word. It’s easy to declare one substance more lethal than another.

But in doing so, we skate over the more insidious beast at the heart of the matter.

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Why Halloween Doesn’t Scare Me Anymore

I used to hate Halloween with a passion. It’s one of the worst days for someone with a compulsive binge eating addiction. Now that I’ve broken the binging cycle, I find myself in the odd position of looking forward to the holiday.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohB922c2uQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I used to dread it because I knew there would be candy everywhere. I would stuff it in my pockets, in the car and every other hiding space. Then I’d spend the next week binging on sugar. That would trigger the urge to go deeper down the rabbit hole, so a vicious, almost crippling cycle of binging would take hold from Halloween straight through the rest of the holidays.

That didn’t happen in 2008. It didn’t happen last year. It’s not going to happen this time, either. 

The chain is broken.

Hey, Halloween: You don’t scare me anymore.

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Moderation is a Myth

Some interesting conversation with friends in Toronto this evening about addictive behavior. At one point, the focus turned to another truth about people like me: Moderation doesn’t exist.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eVQh0TPbos&fs=1&hl=en_US]

People like to say it all the time: “Why do you have to give certain things up? Can’t you just have everything in moderation?”

Well, my friends, that’s the problem. Moderation is an alien concept to me. When someone leaves half the food on their plate or a half-glass of wine on the table, I just don’t get it. Period.

There is no middle speed for me.

I either abstain from all flour and sugar or I eat it all. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of something old and stale. It can’t be left on the table when I’m in binge mode.

I either abstain from all the wine or I drink all the wine.

When the latter happens and I binge, everything important in my life suffers. So I either give the stuff up entirely, or I ruin everything for the sake of the fix.

If you can have things in moderation, I say good for you. In fact, I envy you. Unfortunately, I can’t be you.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m OK with that now. It helps that life has gotten so much richer and sweeter for me without THE STUFF.

I stood around this evening’s event with my hands in my pocket while most of the folks around me had alcoholic beverages. I’m fine with that.

I didn’t have a beer or dessert when the friend I had dinner with tonight did. I’m fine with that, too. 

Last night, another friend — worried that his drinking was getting to me — offered to just drink water for the rest of the night so I’d feel more comfortable. I appreciate the thought more than words can say. But you don’t have to do that.

It’s my responsibility to stay sober and abstinent at all times. It’s nobody’s problem but mine, and that’s as it should be.

Still, I’m blessed to have friends around me who care.