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Sober in Toronto (Better Than in San Fran)

The #SecTorCa security conference finds me surrounded by more booze than I confronted at the RSA conference back in March. But I think I’m learning how to be sober at these events.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB6a2jYfxNs&fs=1&hl=en_US]

A little history: A little over two years ago I gave up flower and sugar and started weighing almost all of my food as part of my 12-Step program of recovery from a binge-eating addiction. But I clung to the alcohol for awhile after that. I used booze as a crutch to keep away from the food, and by late last year I decided it was getting out of control.

So right after Christmas, I committed myself to sobriety as well as abstinence.

Most of the time I’m comfortable with it. But once in awhile I find myself getting thirsty for something hard. Especially when I go to security conferences.

The booze flows freely at these events, and at the RSA show in March I really struggled with that. I drank club soda and Red Bull as everyone around me enjoyed their alcoholic beverage of choice. I found myself unsure of how to act around people. 

Fortunately, I have a lot of great friends in the security industry. Many of them read this blog, and they watch out for me. That was the case in San Francisco, and it’s the case here in Toronto. Friends like Dave Lewis, Zach Lanier and Rob Westervelt put me at ease.

The flowing booze tonight tested me more than at any time since the San Fransisco trip. There were moments where I couldn’t help but think of how sobriety can really suck. Part of the problem was that we were in a small and very crowded bar space. Walking from point A to B without human contact was almost impossible. When I get claustrophobic I want comfort. It could be food or alcohol — or cigar smoke.

But in a happy turn of events, I felt a lot more comfortable around my friends than before.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s real progress.

I’m getting better at just enjoying the company of people. I don’t need the glass in my hand.

Thank God for that.

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Out of the Closet, Into the Light

My kid sister-in-law told me a friend of hers has admitted to some hefty demons. I won’t mention the person’s name (I don’t know her, actually), but I know where she’s been.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5F6rwEF15hN1jnhNk2YQHn]

This is a little message for her friend, in the event she someday stumbles upon this blog:

Outing yourself is a hard thing to do. When I did it, I was terrified at first because I thought my mental struggles would be used to define who I was. It gave me an appreciation for what it must be like when a gay person comes out of the closet.

I felt weird around my family at first. Ill at ease might be the best way to describe the feeling. I’m sure they felt the same. That I had OCD and related addictive behavior didn’t surprise them much. As my sister-in-law will tell you, I’ve always had an abundance of strange behaviors.

The people I work with were most surprised. I guess I did a good job of fooling them back in the day. But they have never defined me or treated me differently over what I’ve opened up about. I get the same fair shake as everyone else.

Since people keep their demons hidden for fear of bad treatment at work, it was an eye opener for me when I got nothing but support for coming out with it.

After awhile, it’ll be like that with your friends. They’ll appreciate you more, and they’ll be grateful that you came clean. Some of them will learn from your example, even though they may not know they need it yet.

I understand one of your problems is compulsive lying. There’s no need to feel like a freak over this, because everyone with mental health struggles and addictions lies. I certainly have. Hell, I’ve never met a so-called normal person that hasn’t lied. It’s not something to be proud of or accept. Lies imprison us and make our troubles deeper. But when we can stop living the lie, there’s a new peace and freedom that’s very powerful and hard to describe.

When I decided to stop living lies, I felt 100 pounds lighter. Physical pains went away.

I understand you are looking at taking medication. I take Prozac and it works. But I’m convinced it works as well as it does because I went through years of hard therapy as well. That’s the most important thing you can do: Find the right therapist to talk to. Therapy will provide you with mental coping tools that will make you stronger. By that point, medication becomes the mop that wipes away the remaining baggage.

Things may get worse before they get better. When you start dealing with this stuff, you find yourself learning how to behave all over again. You will still go through periods of depression.

This is when any addictions you may have will tempt you. Fight it at all costs. I didn’t at first. I completely gave in to my addictive behavior and I paid dearly for it. Even if you don’t think you have an addiction, it might be worth considering a 12-Step Program. The tools you learn from that will help you cope with the mental struggles at the heart of your troubles.

Coming clean doesn’t mean you get to live happily ever after. But happily ever after has always been a bullshit myth. But you will have an easier time dealing with the tough times. That may not make sense right now. But it will.

Here’s the thing about one’s demons: When they hide in the dark, out of view, they own you. They’re too powerful to beat.

Opening the door and forcing the sunlight on them is hard as hell. But once you take that step — as you just did — the demons start to shrink. The light always kills demons. They turn to ash and you become a lot bigger than they ever were.

That’s what I’ve learned from my experiences, anyway.

Congratulations on taking that first step. I wish you the very best.

–Bill

 

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Cut the Drama, Rage Boy

My old friend Clarence liked the post I wrote about him awhile back and jokingly asked me to write another one. OK, buddy, but you’re not gonna like this one.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72rWAe0pUdQ&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Note: I’m keeping your true identity out of this, so your anonymity is preserved.

I meant everything I said in that post. In fact, I cherish your friendship a lot more than I did even then. But you have a special challenge I have a little experience with (a lot of experience, actually). I’ve tried to explain it to you in person and on the phone, but I’m not doing a very good job at it. So I’ll do what I always do in situations like that and put it in the written word.

You carry a lot of rage inside of you. An old priest I used to know described it as Irish Alzheimer’s Disease — you forget everything but the grudges.

You talk a lot about how this friend has betrayed you or that friend is driving you to the point where you want to “rip his f-ing head off.” You describe these verbal rages as “taking moral inventory.”

It’s good to take moral inventory. The problem is that your taking inventory of other people’s morals instead of your own.

Taking inventory is probably not the best way to describe it. I used to have to take inventory of shoes in my father’s warehouse and all it did was bore me and make me do stupid things like chainsmoke and talk trash about others.

I used to spend every waking hour stewing over everyone I felt had wronged me that day, week or year. I call it my angry years. Stewing is an exhausting activity, and nothing good comes of it. Build up enough resentment over time and it’ll eat you alive before you have time to feel the teeth going in.

I had one hell of a temper when I was younger. To call it a byproduct of OCD, depression and addiction would be a stretch, because I think the temper would have been there even without the mental illness.

Some of the more colorful examples of my temper:

– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.

– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.

–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.

–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out. 

– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.

I could go on, but you get the picture, Clarence.

You gotta drop the rage because it’ll never make you feel better. It certainly won’t help you deal with the relationships that give you the rage.

Focus on your own betterment instead. You ARE doing that and you’ve made a ton of progress.

But that rage will hold you back from your full potential as a human being, so cut the bullshit and move on.

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The Sponsor’s Lament

I’ve gone from sponsoring four people in my OA 12-Step program to two, and one of them only e-mails once in awhile. I’m perfectly fine with that.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9jX1KAKp78&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I was a reluctant sponsor in the first place. I can barely take care of myself, after all.  Some days, it takes every ounce of my strength to keep from sliding off the wagon.

But people in program came to me for help. I couldn’t say no.

Let me tell you a bit about these folks. To preserve their anonymity, no names are mentioned.

The first guy I sponsor never calls. Once in awhile he e-mails me his food plan for the day. He’s never really listened to me, but having me on standby makes him feel better.

The second sponsee has become a dear friend. He can be a real pain in my ass, but he’s worth it. He was 400 pounds when we met and, because of diabetes, goo oozed from his legs like tree sap. He’s down 20 pounds and just reached 90 days of back-to-back abstinence from binge eating. He works the program hard and I’m proud of him.

He’s also taught me a lot about some of the people in AA. Every 12-Step group has it’s fair share of dysfunction. We wouldn’t need a program in the first place if we weren’t fuck-ups. But when someone who has been sober for a few years turns to OA because they’ve developed a binge-eating addiction, it can be a bitch.

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. This brings me to the next sponsee:

She’s an OA drop-out for now. She 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. She is a battle-scarred AA veteran who has had a tough life. She would call me throughout the day, each call a crisis. She finally decided she couldn’t handle OA.

The next sponsee dropped out of OA for the same reasons. He couldn’t handle the honesty and discipline required. I don’t knock him for that. Clean living is very hard. He also has some severe mental illness going on. Our phone calls would consist of me listening as he spilled out all his pain. Controlling the addiction had little to do with it.

So now there are two, and it’s a much more manageable load for me to handle.

I didn’t want to cut anyone loose because I felt like I’d be doing something cruel. But the truth is that when you sponsor people who don’t want to put their full faith in the program, it can put your own recovery in danger.

If you let them slide a little, you start thinking it’s OK to loosen up your own program.

I can see how it’s hard for someone to go from AA to OA. In AA you have your sponsor and go to meetings, but once you’re sober you can use those tools on a more as-needed basis. In OA, because food is the problem, you have to talk to your sponsor every day and tell that person what you plan to eat for the day. We have to do it that way because food is everywhere and we need it to survive. It’s not like drugs and alcohol, which you don’t need for daily existence.

The extra discipline of OA can be a shocker. It certainly was for me, and I didn’t come to the program from AA.

The OA crowd looks freaky to those who go to that first meeting. I thought everyone in the room was crazy and that they had a little cult going on.

Now I know better.

This stuff is hard. But God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.

I guess He was helping me out by sending two sponsees away.

This stuff is hard. But it’s worth it.

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The Trouble With Wanting It All, Part 2

Overcoming fear and anxiety has been a beautiful thing. But it has not been without trouble along the way. In recent months I’ve taken on too much and I’ve paid a price. I’m entering a new phase of recovery where my ambitions are readjusted so they gibe with reality.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCzkT5H7Udg&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I got into some of this stuff in last week’s “Say Hello to My New Limit” post. But when I wrote that, I was feeling emotionally raw and was going through mood swings. This weekend I’ve had time to put it into perspective.

Here’s what I’m thinking and feeling now:

I have definitely taken on too much lately, partially because of my hunger for new experiences. I want to be of service to people who are going through what I’ve gone through. I want to soak up as much time as I can with people I ignored far too much over the years. And I want to continue to work my security beat hard, because I just won’t have it any other way.

But I need to give the best of that energy to Erin, Sean and Duncan. And that means dialing it back a bit.

My dilemma has been how to do that without retreating from the world again, because I really don’t want to do that. And besides, there’s really no turning back.

So this weekend, I pondered how to achieve the right balance.

First, I should mention that I don’t regret a thing about the last few months. To be a team leader for this weekend’s Cursillo retreat is a huge honor and I know it will only make me a better person. And it’s been worth every minute spent writing the talk I’ll be giving. Traveling around to different security events has also been well worth it, because I’m a true believer that you can’t do this job well unless you get out from behind the desk.

I don’t have to stop doing any of this stuff, nor should I. But I CAN learn to say no once in awhile. Saying no is something I’ve always sucked at and it has almost always gotten me into trouble. I’m realizing that the recent mood swings were partly due to my realization that the next part of recovery must be about learning to say no without going back into full retreat.

Maybe that means passing up a few more security events than I’d like. Maybe it means cutting back on my 12-Step sponsorship of people — continuing to be there for the two sponsees I have but saying no to new requests for now.

The learning curve for this is going to be pretty steep. I admit that I don’t really know where to start.

I’ll figure it out, and at the other end I’ll be better for it.

I hope.

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Two Years Clean

Two years ago yesterday, I went on my last binge. Actually, it was more like reaching the end of a final, two-month long binge. The abstinent and sober life hasn’t been perfect by any stretch. But it beats the hell out of where I was at the start.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pdQ3z1Ji8U&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Appropriately, I’m leading an OA meeting tonight, which means telling my story in 15-20 minutes without notes. Here’s some of what I’ll have to say:

Compulsive overeating was my biggest, most destructive addiction. It led to health problems that only got worse with time. I became a waste of space and fell short as a husband, dad and friend. I used to think about food all the time — where to get it, when to binge it and how to hide the aftermath.

People think of drugs and alcohol as addictive things, followed by gambling, pornography and the Internet. Food, on the other hand, that’s something we need to survive. If you’re a binge eater, it’s not an addiction, the thinking goes. You’re just a glutton who eats too much. The truth is we are ALL addicts. Some of us need chocolate, others need to watch every episode of their favorite TV show.

The other day, my sister Shira asked me what the difference was between someone with a binge-eating addiction and someone who just eats too much without thinking.

It’s a fair question, and a wise one. Here’s how I see it:

Though we all have our addictions, there’s a line someone with an overpowering habit crosses. On the other side of that line, life becomes unmanageable. The fix becomes more important than anything else. You spend ALL your time thinking about how to get it. You burn through money you don’t have and become crafty at lying about it to everyone around you, including the people you love most.

In short, the need for a fix takes your entire brain hostage.

I guess that if I were just a casual overeater, I’d be overweight but life would hum along pretty much as it’s supposed to.

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s what it means to me.

When you realize you need to deal with it, the 12 Steps of Recovery is the map to take you there. It’s very simple. The first steps are the admission that you have a problem that has made life unmanageable, and that you can’t bring it under control without help from a higher power.

There are the basic tools: Having a food plan (mine is devoid of flour and sugar and I put almost everything I eat on a scale). There’s the sponsor, writing, meetings, etc. But along the way, you learn things about yourself and grow in ways well beyond what you expected.

My recovery has lead to many healed relationships and a clearheadedness I never knew before. I’ve been able to reach out to people I’ve hurt in the past and set things right.

It isn’t all roses. The first few months of abstinence were not sober days. I used a lot of wine as a crutch to keep from eating. How fucked up is that? Eventually I put that down too, because I saw where it was taking me and it scared me. And I’ll be honest: I don’t really miss the food anymore, but I DO miss the wine. Sobriety can be an awkward thing.

I also enjoy more cigars than I probably should, and I’m an absolute coffee fiend. I’ve also learned that being clean doesn’t make you a better person. I’ve seen people in AA and OA that will make your skin crawl, and they’ve been clean a long time. Sobriety doesn’t mean you instantly learn how to behave like a good human being. Some people find they were better at that when they had a glass in their hand. Me? I have a runaway ego and some days I still have a bad attitude.

I’m a work in progress. A lot of work.

But I’ll take it.

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A Pastor Moves On

Dennis Nason, pastor of All Saints Parish, steps down Oct. 1. He’s struggling with cancer and decided to step aside so the parish can move on. He’s earned a tribute here. He made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.

We have it in our heads that priests are supposed to be perfect and sinless. That’s why the sex scandal hit people so hard. We were taught to trust priests at all costs, and some of them betrayed that trust in evil ways.

When you’re a screw up like I once was — and still am in some ways — and you find someone you hope will help you out of the abyss, it’s a crushing blow when the mentor fails.

But as I’ve settled deeper into my Faith, I’ve realized those mistakes are part of the long journey out of Hell.

But for that theory to work, all parties involved have to have the capacity for honesty. That’s a big theme in the 12 Steps, too. Honesty is a bitch when you wrestle with addictions. I’ve said it before, addicts are the best liars on Earth. The depth of my own deceit was like a bottomless pit by the time I hit bottom.

That’s where Father Nason took me to school. He was an alcoholic who could have covered his tracks and carried on. Instead, he revealed everything to everyone. What follows is an older post I wrote about that very incident and what it has meant to me:

The Priest Who Came Clean

Originally posted on April 11, 2010:

I’ve met many priests, some good and some not-so-good. People criticize priests because they’re athiests or they’re angry about the sex abuse scandal. Father Dennis Nason made a believer out of me by coming clean about his own sins.

You would have to be sick in the head NOT to be outraged by the sex abuse, and especially of the cover-up. In the end, though, people forget that priests are human, with all the sin-making embedded into their genetic code just like the rest of us.

When a priest is able to lay his own flaws bare for all to see, I think it takes an extra level of courage, since there has to be a lot of pressure around the lofty standards they are held to.

Father Nason rose to the occasion.

I met Father Nason about 11 years ago. He took over our parish, All Saints, when several other churches were closed down and consolidated into the All Saints Community.

He had a lot of angry people on his hands. One’s church becomes home, and when you close it and force them to go someplace else, trouble is inevitable.

Then the priest sex abuse scandal burst open like an infected sore, shaking the Faith of a lot of people like never before.

I started going to All Saints regularly in 2001, the year my oldest son was born. It would be another five years before I chose to convert, but by then the church had become a source of comfort at a time where my mental health was starting to snap off the rails.

At one point over the summer, Father Nason vanished. Few knew why.

Then at one Mass, the deacon read an open letter from him.

In the letter, Father Nason revealed that he was in rehab for alcoholism. It would be several months before he emerged from rehab, and while he was there the sex abuse scandal really began to explode. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks also happened around that time, and people’s souls were tested like never before.

Once he did emerge from rehab to rejoin his parish, there was a new sparkle in his eyes. It was like a weight had been lifted. Then another weight dropped on him. It turns out one of the priests in our parish was one of those sexual predators we had read about in the papers.

Something like that would test the sobriety of anyone forced to come in and deal with the mess. Father Nason met it head on.

He was angry with his archdiocese over the fact that pedophile priests had been enabled for all those years; cases swept under the rug like dust. You could hear the anger in his voice and see it in his eyes. He would rage about it in more than one Homily.

His reaction is a big reason I stuck with the church instead of bolting.

Around that time we also had trouble hanging onto the other priests. One left after less than two months, apparently freaked out by the amount of work this parish demanded of him.

Through it all, Father Nason kept it together and brought his parish through the storm.

I don’t always see eye to eye with him. Sometimes I think his administration is disorganized and that his Homilies are all over the place; though when he nails it, he really nails it.

But those are trivial things. When he came clean about his addiction, it hit me deep in the core. At the time, my own addictions were bubbling in my skull and preparing to wipe out what was left of my soul. I just didn’t know it at the time.

His honesty kept me going. And now that I’ve spent the last few years getting control of my own addictive behavior, I have a much better appreciation for what he went through.

This post isn’t meant to put him on a pedestal. He is only human, after all, and he sometimes misses the mark like the rest of us.

It IS meant to thank him for the time he came clean, inspiring me to do the same.

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Happily Ever After Is Bullshit & That’s OK

Often, when depression slaps me upside the head, it’s on the heels of a prolonged period of good feelings and positive energy. Especially this time of year, when the daylight recedes early and returns late. These setbacks can be discouraging, but you can survive them with the right perspective.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/NqTuN-35580

It’s easy for people who fight mental illness and addictive behavior to go on an endless, futile search for the happily ever after, where you somehow find the magic bullet to murder your demons, thus beginning years of bliss and carefree existence.

I’m sorry to tell you this, folks: That line of thinking is bullshit.

There’s no such thing as happily ever after. If you want it that badly, go watch a Disney film.

I used to grope around for eternal happiness in religious conversion. But some of my hardest days came AFTER I was Baptized a Catholic. I eventually found my way to abstinence and sobriety and got a pretty good handle on the OCD. But there have been plenty of sucky days since then.

The slide back into depression this past weekend was an example.

I like to think of these setbacks as growing pains. We’re supposed to have bad days to test the better angels of our nature. We’re supposed to learn how to move forward despite the obstacles that used to make us hide and get junked up. When you can stay sober and keep your mental disorders in check despite a bad day, that’s REAL recovery.

This is where I consider myself lucky for having had Crohn’s Disease. That’s a chronic condition. It comes and goes. But you can reach a point where the flare ups are minimal.

It’s the same with mental illness and addiction. You can’t rid yourself of it completely. But you can reach a point — through a lot of hard work and leaps of Faith — where the episodes are minimal.

The depression flared up this weekend, just like the Crohn’s Disease used to. But I’m better now. And I didn’t have to take a drug like Prednisone to get there. I just needed a little extra sleep.

Prozac, therapy and the 12 Steps have helped me immensely. But they don’t take the deeper pain at your core away. These things just help you deal with the rough days without getting sucked back into the abyss.

The depression I experienced this weekend felt more like a flare up of arthritis than that desperate, mournful feeling I used to get. It was a nag, but it didn’t break me. It used to break me all the time.

That’s progress.

Maybe I’m not happy forever after, but that’s OK. My ability to separate the blessings from the bullshit has improved considerably in the last five years.

That’s good enough for me.

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Surrender Does Not Mean Give Up

In my journey through Faith and recovery, I hear the word “surrender” over and over again. I used to hate the word for the same reason you might hate it. To surrender means to give up, toss in the towel and go home defeated, right? Not exactly.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e04OBJzbvc&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Let’s see if I can sort it out by the end of this entry.

If you look up the word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you see all the wrong descriptions:

1. a : to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand (surrendered the fort)
b : to give up completely or agree to forgo especially in favor of another
2. a : to give (oneself) up into the power of another especially as a prisoner
b : to give (oneself) over to something (as an influence)

 

2 b comes closest, but it’s not enough.
They are accurate descriptions, mind you. They just don’t do justice to what the word means in faith and recovery.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the word so far: It DOES NOT mean to quit life and stop trying to be better and stronger. In the context of Faith and the 12 Steps of Recovery, it DOES NOT mean  that you stop thinking for yourself.
It IS about admitting you can’t control everything and that you need the aid of a higher power. For many of us (for me, anyway), that higher power is God. It IS also about putting your trust in others.

As addicts in the grip of the demon, we trust nobody. We picture everyone with a knife in their hand, ready to stab us in the back. We see someone trying to tell us to clean up our act even though they could not possibly understand what it’s like to be truly out of control. We also watch over our shoulders because we expect someone to swoop in and steal our junk at any moment.

When we start to realize we have a problem, we labor unsuccessfully under the delusion that we can clean up on our own, without any help. In that regard, we refuse to surrender. We think our will is enough to get the job done, even though the art of will power has eluded us repeatedly. That’s the insanity of being a control freak.

I tried all kinds of things to clean up from a binge eating addiction. I thought I could tame the beast by chain smoking and drinking 14 cups of black coffee per morning. I thought I could do it by fasting twice a week. I even thought I could do it by drinking wine instead of eating.
Since I grew up with a chip on my shoulder, I looked at the word surrender with pure hatred. To surrender meant to do whatever my mother told me to do. Since her desire was for me to always play it safe and never take risks, it would have been the wrong thing to surrender to.
To surrender also meant to do what my father told me to do, which as a teenager simply didn’t fit into the joys of staying up all night getting high. He had a lot of good things to teach me, but no fucking way was I going to heed his advice. That would mean surrendering.
Surrendering to God seemed like the worst idea of all. That meant giving up my free will and following some unseen being over the cliff.
Motley Crue bassist and lyricist Nikki Sixx once described a similar reaction when he was asked to get on his knees and pray for help to break his heroin addiction. His reaction went something like this: “Fuck God!”
Let go and let God? Screw you.
As I got older and my addictive behavior was about to destroy all my hopes and dreams, I reached a point where I was willing to do anything to stop the pain.
Some would call that giving up, and I guess that’s what it was.
One time I was at a party listening to a group of moms talking about the pain of childbirth. Someone noted that in that moment of agony you lose all modesty. You just want that baby out of there. After a while, you stop caring if the doctor is male or female.
I wouldn’t know, but it is a pretty decent description of an addict who has maxed out their tolerance for pain.
Suddenly, the word surrender doesn’t sound so bad.
Professional life coach Rich Wyler nails it in his write up on the 12 Steps. He brilliantly boils it down to this:
–Effecting a spiritual awakening in which God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, as we humbly submit our self-will and our heart to his will (Steps 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 11).
–Overcoming pride and resistance to change through rigorously honest self-examination (Steps 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 10)
–Making amends and repairing the harmful consequences of our self-destructive behaviors – especially the harm we’ve done to others (Steps 5, 8, 9, 10 and 12).

There it is, all laid bare. To surrender isn’t to give up and stop thinking for yourself. It’s exactly the opposite. It means doing a gut check, finally being honest and realizing you need help. When you surrender to God, you’re letting in the people who can help you.

It’s about honesty, trust and taking a leap of faith.

Here’s the truly whacked part: In doing so, I suddenly experienced more freedom than I ever had before.

I stopped being afraid to leave my room, getting on airplanes, taking on challenging work assignments that previously would have made me sick to my stomach, and I stopped being afraid to get up and talk in front of a room full of people. I also stopped being afraid to speak up when I disagreed about something, particularly in work.

In other words, I finally started becoming the man I wanted to be.

I still have a long, long way to go. But this beats the hell out of what life was like when I was clinging to that old, stupid will of mine.

Yeah, I surrendered. I gave up the idea that I could go it alone, without people who know better and without God.

Some might think that makes me weak.

I don’t care.

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The Clarence Syndrome

Sometimes God puts certain people in your life to show you how you’re screwing up and how to fix it. Sometimes, these guardian angels are disguised as people who need YOUR help. This post is about one such man.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyb7dt9nz_g&fs=1&hl=en_US]

In 12-Step programs anonymity is a big deal, especially in OA, because there’s an extra level of awkwardness that comes with being a binge-eating addict. So I’m changing this friend’s name to Dan.

I first talked to Dan on the phone a few months ago. He got my number from someone else in program and called me out of the blue. I picked up the phone and heard the following:

“Hiya Bill. My name’s Dan and I’m a compulsive overeater!”

The exclamation mark is appropriate, because that’s how he said it.

He proceeded to tell me that he needed a sponsor and I was it.

“Uh, ok,” I said. I had just started sponsoring and this guy was asking for help, so in I went.

The first time I met him in person, I was picking him up for a Saturday-morning OA meeting. He’s so obese that he needed help getting the seatbelt on. His legs were purple from diabetes.

“This guy is going to be a lot of work,” I thought.

Then, at the meeting, I start to realize that he knows a lot of people there. He was greeting and hugging people like it was old home week. It turned out that he had been in OA before.

What’s more: He was a 20-year veteran of AA. He had done it all. He was once a drunk and a drug addict. He shot heroin. He had lost just about everything. After kicking booze and drugs, he turned to the food. He needs a truck scale to weigh himself and last time he did, he was an even 400 pounds.

But it didn’t matter. He was and still is one of the more cheerful people I’ve ever met.

And since then, of all my sponsees, nobody works the program as hard as he is. We talk every morning. Sometimes we talk several times a day. He’ll bend your ear for hours if you let him. Sometimes, it can get exasperating.

Here’s the problem: I can be a selfish, egotistical bastard. It’s not hard for me to think I’m better than other people, especially a 400-pound 50-something who lives in a room the size of my walk-in closet. And my ego is probably too big to weigh on a truck scale.

I’m pretty sure that’s why God put Dan in my life. That’s what He does, you know: puts people in your life who will help you, but he sneaks them in as people who need YOUR help.

Ever see “It’s a Wonderful Life?” It’s like the angel Clarence. He dives in the water and acts like he’s drowning so George Bailey, who is standing on the bridge contemplating suicide, will jump in and save him.

I guess you could call what I’m experiencing the Clarence Syndrome.

Dan, you see, is teaching me a lot more than I’m teaching him. I may be his OA sponsor, but he’s my own Clarence.

As a 20-year veteran of 12-Step programs, he knows every current and former junkie on the streets of Haverhill. We’ll drive up Winter Street or down River Street and he’ll point out every person walking the streets as we pass. He’s seen them all in AA meetings. He’ll tell you their full history and how they’re doing today.

He’s also taught me that people in AA are NOT the same as people in OA.

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. Another 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.

Come to think of it, Dan warned me that this other person does the same things and shouldn’t be trusted. Ah, the webs we weave.

Dan gives people nicknames. There’s Happy Harold, New York Mikey (called that because he has a pimped-out car with New York plates) and Georgie-B.

He’s always bringing new people into AA. He calls them prospects.

That was one of my first lessons: He’s not just a poor obese boy living in a box. He gives freely, helping others every day. He doesn’t have a job, but he fills his time in meaningful ways.

I’m better than him? Hell, no. He’s taking ME to school. He’s so busy looking for my guidance in OA that he doesn’t seem to realize it.

Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

It’s been a powerful, humbling lesson for me about not judging a book by its cover or thinking of yourself as above others.

We’re all in the same struggle for redemption. And God keeps giving us a shot at it by sending along guardian angels disguised as people “worse off” than we think WE are.

The trouble is, we’re often too blind and/or stupid to see it.

I know I was.