I wanted to be in the office today plowing through some work. But another winter storm forced me to work from home.
Some would say it’s great I can do that, and it is. But when there’s a lot on the plate, I prefer to be in the office. Especially when the kids are home from school for February vacation. At least in the summer I can write from the back deck while the kids play in the field behind the house.
This time of year we’re all indoors and the kids are loud.
A few years ago the snow, the change in schedule and the kids in my workspace would have unhinged me.
I’d get a story written. Maybe three. But I’d be a puddle of lava by day’s end, good for nothing except sleep.
Not so today.
I’m enjoying the cozy chair by my living room window, watching the snow fall.
I’ve gotten as much writing and editing done from here as I would have from the office.
The kids were indeed loud and distracting, but I enjoyed that, too. What used to be stress is now comic relief, especially when Sean tells Duncan he looks adorable when he cries and Duncan responds by pouncing on his older brother, yelling, “Who’s crying now?!”
I smoked one last cigar before Lent begins tomorrow, since that’s one of the things I’m abstaining from until Easter. It was a Cuban stick at that. Thanks to my friend Bob Connors for parting with it.
The coffee is French-pressed and bitter. Just the way I like it.
A much different day than what it would have been five years ago, before I gained the upper hand over the OCD.
Days that don’t go as planned are especially difficult for people with OCD. We do, after all, crave control over everything we can control. And we badly want to control things we can’t, like the weather.
Forget about the small stuff, like checking a doorknob seven times or tapping your feet to the count of 60. A carefully crafted schedule in shambles is the big stuff; hell for a sick mind.
That’s when someone like me turns to the food or the booze to comfort the troubled mind.
But the food is well under control today, and bottles of wine that once taunted me from a kitchen counter rack have gone unnoticed in the corner.
I’m not the same man I used to be.
Credit the therapists, the Prozac, the religious conversion or all of the above.
The youngest son of Edward M. Kennedy has often been criticized as a lightweight Congressman who gets away with things other people would get arrested for. But the author salutes him anyway. Here’s why.
Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election to the Congressional seat he has held since 1995.
Some will tell you it’s just as well. The Congressman, after all, hasn’t done much except for living off his family name and crashing cars into roadside barriers while high on narcotics. That’s often what I hear from my more conservative friends, who hate everything having to do with the Kennedy name.
In this book, Patrick is described as a spoiled kid who has accomplished nothing in Congress other than repeatedly winning re-election. He’s described as someone who blindly follows the Democratic leadership.
Some of that may be true. But Patrick has done some courageous service for those who suffer from mental illness.
Kennedy has been open about his own struggles with bi-polar disorder and the addictions that go with it. He has been in and out of addiction treatment centers and once noted how his addictive behavior could latch onto anything from pain medication to something as simple as cough medicine.
What’s more, he did one of the hardest things people like us can do: He lived in the spotlight as a public servant, where critics can be cruel and a lot of people like to hate the Kennedys just for the hell of it.
Patrick has carried a lot of pressure being a Kennedy. There’s the pressure to match his father’s towering legislative record and live up to the legendary stature of his uncles.
Some would have dropped to the floor long ago, curled in a fetal position, over the pressure. Some would not have survived. One of Patrick’s cousins, David Kennedy, one of RFK’s sons, didn’t survive the battle with the demons. He died of a drug overdose in 1984.
I loved Lawford’s book for a variety of reasons. He recounted his sordid tale with humor and was brutally honest about something addicts are all to aware of: When you quit the thing you’re addicted to, it doesn’t automatically turn you into a good person.
In fact, recovering addicts often become big jerks before they find their footing. They’re learning how to behave in public without being drunk or high. A deep depression often sets in because years of abuse leaves the brain with deep chemical imbalances that hit you like a brick to the head once the booze, food or narcotics exit the picture.
Patrick has dealt with all of these realities and still carried on in public service.
He continued to show up for life when life was at its most unbearable.
It gave people like me a little inspiration when we needed it most. So as Patrick prepares to exit the public stage and embark on a new life, I thank him for his service and wish him the best.
It’s easy for people to pass judgment on him for his flaws.
But people who do so often forget about their own flaws.
None of us are truly without sin. But we like to cast the first stones anyway.
Whenever I share my experiences with OCD and the related binge-eating disorder [See: The Most Uncool Addiction], there’s a word I always refrain from using if I’m outside the safe confines of my OA group: Abstinence.
I don’t hate the word. But I don’t like it much, either.
All anyone ever thinks about when it’s uttered is refraining from sex or studying for the Catholic priesthood. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am a devout Catholic, after all.)
Nevertheless, it’s a word I can’t get around any longer, so let’s talk about it.
In the world of a recovering food addict, abstinence means to abstain from eating compulsively. It’s the exact same thing as the word sobriety in the world of a recovering alcoholic.
Think of OA and AA as essentially the same thing, only OA folks are addicted to compulsive overeating to the point where they walk around dazed like zombies, unable to manage their lives. Ailments boil over and friends and family suffer with you.
I’m abstinent from binge eating, which means I eat nothing with flour and sugar in it and most meals are portioned out on a small scale. I’m sober, too. I used to drink a lot of alcohol when traveling. This weekend I spent a security conference sober. [See: ShmooCon and Snowmageddon and The Engine in Hyperdrive]
This weekend was challenging to be sure. It wasn’t always easy drinking club soda while everyone else drank wine, beer, etc. And while I kept it together with the food plan, being away from the normal routine makes it challenging to keep all the portions straight. I probably could have done it better, but I think things worked out pretty well on balance.
Of course, other, smaller addictions try to reassert themselves [See: How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano]. One of them is spending. I have a weakness for collecting political and historical knickknacks, especially when I’m in Washington D.C. That weakness is evident to anyone visiting my work space. [See: Someone to Watch Over Me (A.K.A.: Desk Junk] This time, I held back.
I also like a good cigar when traveling, and probably enjoy it more than I should. I’m going to abstain from the stogies during Lent, which starts next week. We’ll see what happens after that.
The author admits that his OCD behavior includes an obsession with the Manson Case. Here’s why.
Ever since I was a kid and I first saw the 1976 TV movie on the Manson Murders, I’ve been fascinated. I’ve read “Helter Skelter,” the book by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, dozens of times.
I own the 1976 and 2004 versions of the film on DVD, along with a documentary called “The Six Degrees of Helter Skelter,” where host Scott Michaels, keeper of the popular Findadeath.com site, takes the viewer on a tour of places connected to the case, including Cielo Drive, scene of the Tate murders:
Why the fascination with such an awful tragedy?
Not because of the brutal nature of the murders. I’ve seen the crime scene forensic photos, and they made me sick to my stomach.
It’s really part of my fascination with history. Like it or not, this is a piece of American history. It’s a snapshot of everything that went wrong in the 1960s, where a counterculture born of good intentions — a craving for peace in Vietnam and at home — lost it’s way because there were no rules, no discipline and there was no sobriety. I agree with those who believe the promise of the 1960s died abruptly in the summer of 1969.
I’m also fascinated because it shows how easily seemingly stable people can be brainwashed and controlled to the point where they would willingly heed orders to commit the worst of sins.
I’ve learned from my own struggles with mental disorder that when a person is at their lowest and they’re looking for purpose, even the sweetest among us can fall prey to a monster like Charles Manson.
It shows the dark path someone can take without help from the right people.
That’s not to say I see myself in these people. I don’t. I could never embrace what they embraced, even when I was at my lowest.
But the bottom line is that these people were controlled, that a defect of the mind allowed this kind of programming to happen.
It has nothing to do with my own struggles with OCD. But since that struggle has forced me to do a lot of homework on the brain and what makes it tick, I can’t help but be drawn to these cases.
This one is a lesson in history and mental disorder all wrapped into one.
How could I resist?
I just hope others who are fascinated by this case are sucked in for similar reasons and not because they glorify what happened.
Unfortunately, the latter certainly exists in society.
The author has found that service is an excellent tool for OCD management. Simply put, it forces him to stop being a selfish bastard.
In OA, those of us in recovery from our compulsive eating disorders rely on a set of tools that go hand in hand with the 12 Steps. There’s the plan of eating, writing, sponsorship, the telephone and literature. There’s anonymity. And there’s service to others.
The plan of eating is what’s most necessary for me, but I think my favorite tool is service.
I’ve been doing a lot of service of late. Last month and then this morning, I qualified at an OA meeting, which means I led the meeting and, as part of that, stood in front of people and shared the story of what I used to be like, what happened to make me seek help for my addiction, and what I’m like now.
Tonight, I’ll take the kids to a dinner in the basement of our church to celebrate the start of Catholic Schools Week, where I’ll help with the cleanup afterward.
I thrive on these things for one simple reason: It forces me to step out of that selfish little world where addicts live.
Here’s a fact about addicts: We are among the most selfish people on the planet. Or, as Nikki Sixx says in the final track on Sixx A.M.’s soundtrack for The Heroin Diaries: “You know addicts. It’s all about us, right?” That selfishness usually leads us to do stupid things that make us feel shame. In the midst of that shame, we lie.
That sort of behavior can overwhelm us, no matter how much we want to be better people. That’s why the tools of recovery are so important. They force us out of the hole. In the process, the people around us play an active role.
When I do service, the people I may be trying to help are helping me as well. If it’s through OA, everyone is supporting each other. It’s the same at church, be it through school activities or actively participating in Mass. That’s why I do lectoring. Actively participating in Mass helps me to pay attention to what’s going on instead of sitting there locked inside my head.
The battle with selfishness is an ongoing, brutal thing. But through service, I’m getting a little better each day — bit by bit.
I’m three weeks into the higher dosage and it’s working — mostly.
I woke up feeling blue this morning and still feel that way, though the sunrise through the living room window helps. Sunday, I went through some pretty wild mood swings.
But most of the time I feel balanced. A friend recently commented in this blog that he sees anti-depressants as more of an art than a science. I see it as both.
Another friend, who has worked as a mental health worker, said my mood swings seem more like a bi-polar thing than OCD.
OCD is the root problem, though one of the byproducts is certainly bi-polar feelings and behavior.
I mentioned Sunday’s mood swings to the therapist, who reminded me that I went through the same thing last time the dose was adjusted. I had a couple touch-and-go weeks and then all was well. I’m starting to see the same trajectory, which is good.
Remember: I’m writing about this from my personal perch. What works or doesn’t work for me is not going to be the same for most other people who deal with some form of mental illness.
That fact is why I like the comments that are coming in. I want to be disagreed with when someone who knows what they’re talking about feels strongly about something.
So I say thank you and keep it coming.
I leave you with the song that best captures my mood this morning: “The Ballad of Love and Hate” from The Avett Brothers:
Truth: People who engage in addictive behavior lie all the time.
Mood music:
You might remember a few years back when the author James Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces; his memoir on life as a 23-year-old alcoholic and drug abuser and his rehab in a Twelve-step program.
The credibility of the book was eventually ripped apart after it came to light that a lot of the book was fiction. You might remember how Oprah Winfrey took him apart piece by piece on her show over his lack of honesty. She was especially livid because the book had once been at the top of her book club reading list.
But when I think of the book my thoughts turn to horror novelist Stephen King. I’ve never been much of a Stephen King fan, though I did love “The Stand.” But at the height of the Frey controversy, he wrote an absolutely brilliant article called “Frey’s Lies.”
King, himself a recovering addict, shines a bitter, devastating light on one of the most uncomfortable truths people like us live with: When it comes to honesty, we suck.
Here are some of my favorite parts of the King article:
“Substance abusers lie about everything, and usually do an awesome job of it. I once knew a cokehead who convinced his girlfriend the smell of freebase was mold in the plastic shower curtain of their apartment’s bathroom. She believed him, he said, for five years (although he was probably lying about that, it was probably only three). A recovering alcoholic friend of mine reminisces about how he convinced his first wife that raccoons were stealing their home brew. When she discovered the truth, she divorced him. Go to one of those church-basement meetings where they drink coffee and talk about the Twelve Steps and you can hear similar stories on any night, and that’s why the founders of this group emphasized complete honesty — not just in ”420 of 432 pages,” as James Frey claimed during his Larry King interview, but in all of it: what happened, what changed, what it’s like now.”
He concludes: “Surely there are more important lessons to be learned here. They have to do with drugs and alcohol as well as truth. Addiction is a plague on American society. The cruelly ignorant assumption that addicts bring it on themselves (and thus can take care of the problem themselves) only exacerbates the problem. No child on third-grade Careers Day says he wants to grow up to be an alcoholic like Mommy or a rock hound like Dad, and no addict struggling to get clean before the spike or pipe can do him in deserves to be told, ”Just pull yourself together and clean up your act like James Frey did.” Because, dig: James Frey isn’t the way you sober up…and if you think I’m lying, let’s go to the videotape.”
I’ve mentioned my own talent for lying to those around me during times where my demons were out of control in The Most Uncool Addiction. The lies aren’t built around malice. It’s more about the shame an addict feels after giving in to the craving and feasting on their chosen substance like a wild animal in the sewer.
To help you understand, I need to repeat the story I told in that earlier post:
In my case, the addiction is food, something we need to survive. It’s not the least bit cool. Certainly not a “normal” addiction.
That food would be my problem makes perfect sense. As a kid sick with Chron’s Disease much of the time, I was often in the hospital for weeks at a time with a feeding tube that was inserted through the left side of my chest. That’s how I got nourishment. I wasn’t allowed to eat or drink anything. At a very early age, my relationship with food was doomed to dysfunction.
It didn’t help that I was from a family of over-eaters who would stuff themselves for comfort in times of stress and fatigue.
In our society it’s considered perfectly OK to indulge in the food. Time and again, I’ve heard it said that overeating is a lot better than drinking or drugging. But for me, back when I was at my worst, binge eating was a secret, sinister and shameful activity.
Here’s how it works:
You get up in the morning and swear to God that you’re going to eat like a normal person. You pack some healthy food for the office. Then you get in the car and the trouble starts before the car’s out of the driveway. Another personality emerges from the back of the brain, urging you to indulge. It starts as a whisper but builds until it vibrates through the skull like a power saw.
The food calls out to you. And you’ll do whatever it takes to get it, then spend a lot of time trying to cover your tracks.
Before you know it, you’re in the DD drive-thru ordering two boxes of everything. It all gets eaten by the time you reach the office. You get to the desk disgusted, vowing to never do that again. But by mid-morning, the food is calling again. You sneak out before lunchtime and gorge on whatever else you can find, then you do it again on the way home from work.
You pull into McDonald’s and order about $30 of food, enough to feed four people. From the privacy of the car, the bags are emptied. By the time you get home, you wish you were dead.
The cycle repeats for days at a time, sometimes weeks and months.
For many years I hid it well, especially in my early 20s. I would binge for a week, then starve and work out for another week. That mostly kept the weight at a normal-looking level.
Call it athletic Bulimia.
In one inspired episode, I downed $30 of fast food a day for two weeks, then went a week eating nothing but Raisin Bran in the morning, then nothing but black coffee for the rest of the day. After the cereal, I’d work out for two hours straight.
In my mid-20s, once I started working for a living, I kept up the eating but couldn’t do the other things anymore. So my weight rose to 280. In the late 1990s I managed to drop 100 pounds and keep it off through periodic fasting.
Then I started to face down what would eventually be diagnosed as OCD, and I once again gave in to the food. The gloves were off.
The binging continued unabated for three years. The weight went back up to 260. I also started to run out of clever ways to mask over all the money I was spending on my habit. I was slick. I’d take $60 from the checking account and tell my wife it was for an office expense or some other seemingly legitimate thing. But she’s too smart to fall for that for long.
Then I discovered Over-eaters Anonymous (OA), a 12-step program just like AA, where the focus is on food instead of booze. I didn’t grasp it immediately. In fact, I thought everyone at these meetings were nuts. They were, of course, but so was I.
Thing is, I had reached a point in my learning to manage OCD where I was ready to face down the addiction. If it had to be through something crazy, so be it.
Through the program, I gave up flour and sugar. The plan is to be done with those ingredients for life. Put them together and they are essentially my cocaine. I dropped 65 pounds on the spot. But more importantly, many of the ailments I had went away. I stopped waking up in the middle of the night choking on stomach acid. The migraines lessened substantially. And I found a mental clarity I never knew before.
I can’t say I’ve slaughtered the demon. Addicts relapse all the time. But I have a program I didn’t have before; a road map unlike any other.
When Erin read that post, she was pretty shocked, even though I eventually told her the truth. I told her the truth in bits and pieces, though, which is different than having it delivered in one, vivid flashback in the form of a blog entry.
That she was surprised makes sense on review. Even though I eventually gave her the honesty she deserved, I’m sure that in coming clean, I used the most passive, diluted language possible. Shame makes people talk that way.
King was right about another thing: Addicts don’t find recovery on their own. They need help from others who have suffered.
They are dragged up those 12 steps kicking and screaming in the beginning.
As a result I’ve gotten a fair amount of questions about the true value of anti-depressants. I’m not a doctor, so don’t take my perspective as Gospel. Also remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. What I write here is based on my own personal experiences. What works for me may not work for the next person.
The more I read up on depression, mental illness and the drugs prescribed for it, the more I see the human brain as an engine. Comparing it to an engine makes this whole think easier to understand.
We know that the engine of a car is made up of many small parts and when one part gets worn out the rest of the engine can fail. We know that a car needs just the right amount of oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid etc. to function properly. If the oil runs out, the engine seizes up. If the brake fluid runs dry, the breaks fail. On the flip side, too much of these fluids can harm the engine.
We also know that the auto mechanic uses many different techniques to keep engines healthy or fix them when they break.
The brain works much the same way.
Think of the different drugs as different tools to deal with very specific problems in the engine.
In my case, Prozac addresses the very specific fluid deficiencies that spark OCD behavior. The effect is not as simple as the image below suggests (though I do like the image and need to find the artist so I can properly credit him/her):
It may also be useful to think of the therapist as the auto mechanic who is well versed in how to regulate the different engine fluids and pinpoint specific fixes for specific problems. It’s also true that there are good mechanics and bad mechanics who sometimes make the problem worse. [More on this in my previous post: Have Fun With Your Therapist (A.K.A.: The Shrink Stigma)]
In the brain, when certain fluids are running low, the engine stops working properly. The result is depression and a host of other mental disorders.
Since OCD is essentially the brain pumping and spinning out of control, I like to think of my specific problem as a lack of brake fluid.
But the good folks at WebMD explain it much better than I ever could. Here’s some WebMD wisdom I included in a previous post, Prozac Winter:
How Antidepressants Work
Most antidepressants work by changing the balance of brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. In people with depression, these chemicals are not used properly by the brain. Antidepressants make the chemicals more available to brain cells like the one shown on the right side of this slide:
Antidepressants can be prescribed by primary care physicians, but people with severe symptoms are usually referred to a psychiatrist.
Realistic Expectations
In general, antidepressants are highly effective, especially when used along with psychotherapy. (The combination has proven to be the most effective treatment for depression.) Most people on antidepressants report eventual improvements in symptoms such as sadness, loss of interest, and hopelessness.
But these drugs do not work right away. It may take one to three weeks before you start to feel better and even longer before you feel the full benefit.
And, just as weather can impair the performance of your car engine (my father‘s car went for a swim when Revere got flooded out in The Blizzard of 1978 and never worked properly again), too much bad weather can keep the brain from working properly:
Why do I seem to get so gloomy each winter, or sometimes beginning in the fall?
You may have what’s called seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. The condition is marked by the onset of depression during the late fall and early winter months, when less natural sunlight is available. It’s thought to occur when daily body rhythms become out-of-sync because of the reduced sunlight.
Some people have depression year round that gets worse in the winter; others have SAD alone, struggling with low moods only in the cooler, darker months. (In a much smaller group of people, the depression occurs in the summer months.)
SAD affects up to 3% of the U.S. population, or about 9 million people, some experts say, and countless others have milder forms of the winter doldrums.
So this worsening of mood in the fall and winter is not just my imagination?
Not at all. This “winter depression” was first identified by a team of researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1984. They found this tendency to have seasonal mood and behavior changes occurs in different degrees, sometimes with mild changes and other times severe mood shifts.
Symptoms can include:
Sleeping too much
Experiencing fatigue in the daytime
Gaining weight
Having decreased interest in social activities and sex
SAD is more common for residents in northern latitudes. It’s less likely in Florida, for instance, than in New Hampshire. Women are more likely than men to suffer, perhaps because of hormonal factors. In women, SAD becomes less common after menopause.
I’m still learning the science of mental illness, and remember I’m not a doctor. I just share my personal experiences and explain what works for me.
As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he (cough) weigh in (cough) on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.
The cattle prod for this item is a new 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 the story “David Kessler: Fat, Salt and Sugar Alter Brain Chemistry, Make Us Eat Junk Food.”
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’m going to read Kessler’s book because it sounds like he has some breakthrough findings that can help make people better.
But when someone suggests regulation as a solution, don’t ever believe ’em.
A suffering brain will always find a way to disregard the rules for the three minutes of rapture that follows the binge.
Mental-illness sufferers often avoid therapists because the stigma around these “shrinks” is as thick as that of the disease. The author is here to explain why you shouldn’t fear them.
Mood music for this post: “Just Another Psycho” by Motley Crue:
It’s a funny thing when I talk to people suffering from depression, addiction and other troubles of the mind. Folks seem more comfortable about the idea of pills than in seeing a therapist. After all, they’re just crazy “shrinks” in white coats obsessed with how your childhood nightmares compromised your adult sex life, right?
Since I rely on a therapist and medication as two of MANY tools in my recovery, I’m going to take a crack at removing the shrink stigma for you.
I’ve been to many therapists in my life. I was sent to one at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a kid to talk through the emotions of being sick with Chron’s Disease all the time. That same therapist also tried to help me and my siblings process the bitter aftermath of our parents’ divorce in 1980.
As a teenager, I went to another therapist to discuss my brother’s death and my difficulty in getting along with my stepmother (a wonderful, wonderful woman who I love dearly, by the way. But as a kid I didn’t get along with her).
That guy was a piece of work. He had a thick French accent and wanted to know if I found my stepmother attractive. From the moment he asked that question, I was done with him, and spent the rest of the appointment being belligerent.
That put me off going to a therapist for a long time. I started going to one again in 2004, when I found I could no longer function in society without untangling the barbed wire in my head. But I hesitated for a couple years before pressing on.
The therapist I started going to specialized in dealing with disturbed children and teenagers. That was perfect, because in a lot of ways I was still a troubled kid.
She never told me what to do, never told me how I’m supposed to interpret my disorder against my past. She asked a lot of questions and had me do the work of sorting it out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a good therapist does. They ask questions to get your brain churning, dredging up experiences that sat at the back of the mind like mud on the ocean floor. That’s how you begin to deal with how you got to the point of dysfunction.
She moved to Florida a year in and I started going to a fellow who worked from his house. I would explain my binge eating habits to him, specifically how I would down $30 worth of McDonald’s between work and home.
“You should stock your car with healthy foods like fruit, so if you’re hungry you can eat those things instead,” he told me.
That was the end of that. He didn’t get it. When an addict craves the junk, the healthy food around you doesn’t stand a chance. The compulsion is specifically toward eating the junk. He should have understood. He didn’t. Game over.
The therapist I see now is a God-send. He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Yes, friends, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.
That’s not to say I blindly obey his every suggestion. He specializes in stress reduction and is big on yoga and eliminating coffee from the daily diet. Those are two deal breakers for me. Yoga bores the dickens out of me. If you’ve been following this blog all along, I need not explain the coffee part.
I also find it fun to push his buttons once in awhile. I’ll show up at his office with a huge cup of Starbucks. “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you,” he’ll say.
Thing is, he’s probably right about the coffee. But I’ve given up a lot of other things for the sake of mental health. I’m simply not putting the coffee down right now.
I think part of this is about testing him, too. I can’t help but push the buttons sometimes just to see what I can get away with.
But on balance, it’s a productive relationship that has helped me to find a lot of peace and order in my life. I thank him for that.
He kind of reminds me of Dr. Keyworth, the shrink who counseled Josh Lyman and President Bartlet on “The West Wing.” He took their crap with a straight face, not the least bit concerned that these were powerful, intimidating people.
The main point of this post is this:
There are good therapists and not-so-good therapists, just like there are good and not-so-good primary care doctors; just like there are good cops and bad cops.
But if you feel like you need to talk to someone objective and you hold back for fear of being in the same room as a quack, well, then you’ll never know what you could have accomplished.
I chose to talk to a professional despite my deepest reservations. I’m grateful that I did.
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