Screwing Your Kids in the Divorce

When people you know go through a divorce, much is made over who gets what and who loses what. The ex-wife gets the house. The ex-husband gets full custody of the kids. But here’s a constant that’s most upsetting: The kids almost always get the shaft.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/gvkvJo2VRJc

Parents don’t usually mean for this to happen. They start out determined to shower the children with love and shield them from the ugly stuff as much as possible.

Then, as the proceedings drag on, the parents look for ways to hurt each other. What better way to do that than by using the children as pawns?

When my parents divorced 30 years ago, they did their best to shield us. They sent us to summer camp, though I really hated that. I just wanted to go play on Revere Beach.

They got joint custody. We stayed with Dad during the week and Mom on weekends. In the summers that arrangement was reversed. Dad got the house.

As the years went on, my mother grew increasingly bitter toward my father. This is understandable to a point. Her oldest son died. How can a parent be expected to think clearly when that happens? But she blamed my father. Actually, she blamed my stepmother: some baseless bullshit about my step-mother not inserting the adrenaline needle properly during my brother’s final and fatal asthma attack.

After that, if my father stared at her the wrong way, she threatened to get full custody from him. She did this on a weekly basis. I don’t think it hurt my father as intended. He held all the legal cards. But it sure as hell hurt me. I would constantly worry about never seeing my father again.

Looking in the rear-view mirror as an adult, I hold no bitterness about it. Not anymore, anyway. I realized I would never move on until I forgave them. We all fail. I have too many times to count. I also realize she was just venting most of the time.

But when I see kids caught in the middle of a marriage in trouble today, I always return to the scars of childhood, real and imagined (when you’re a kid you imagine things, and if you grow up to be a head case like me, you REALLY imagine things).

I bring all this up because I know of a couple troubled marriages right now where children are involved.

In one case the parents are working hard to be honest with the kids and make sure they know they are loved. I don’t know what will happen to that marriage in the end, but I give the parents  credit for trying to keep the emotional scars off their kids. If the marriage fails scarring will be inevitable. But the parents can do a lot to soften the blow.

Then there’s the other case. One parents tries to hurt the other by deciding not to babysit when scheduled. Of course, in this case it’s not babysitting. It’s parenting.

Then one parent has the child for the weekend and lies to the other about where they’ve been.

It’s not for me to get into who is right or wrong. I’m biased because I’m only getting one side of the story.

All I know is that it makes me sad. I can only pray that this child escapes with as little damage as possible.

Nobody likes it when someone’s marriage hits the wall. And when lawyers are brought in, you can expect ugliness to ensue because the lawyer’s job is to make sure his or her client wins.

Of course, in these situations, nobody wins. Some marriages need to end because it happened for the wrong reasons to start with or there was abuse. And sometimes people just change and what happens happens.

I just hope the kids make out OK at the other end of these dramas.

Editing the Legs Off Your High Horse

Erin and I were talking last night about the often shaky relationship between copy editors and writers. We writers tend to see copy editors as nitpickers who just want to make our lives harder. Copy editors tend to see writers as spoiled brats. But what happens when the writer is in the grip of OCD?

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR6HPzhlvoc&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I usually shy away from posts about the mechanics of writing and editing because it’s all so — mechanical. And it’s not really relevant to the topics of this blog.

Or is it?

The writers Erin has worked with for more than a decade are professionals covering a particular topic. They get paid to offer their expertise. But there are also the writers who do it for therapy. It’s a critical tool in any 12-Step program and if you’ve been treated for OCD like I have, writing is considered an important method for removing obsessive thoughts from your head. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Most of the time it does.

Here’s where the writers in Erin’s world intersect with people like me:

Sometimes you get someone who writes as part of their recovery program AND as a professional journalist. Most writers have a certain amount of prima donna in them (that goes for the guys). You turn in an article and feel insulted as all hell when the editor has the stones to change something or tell you it needs work.

Now, if you’re like me — a recovering OCD head case with an arsenal of addictive demons pointed at my head at all times — that tendency toward the prima donna becomes monstrous. That’s why I picked the song clip above for my mood music today. Because I’ve had many, many days where I got on my high horse over my writing performance and really did feel like the “Motherfucker of the Year.” That’s really what the song is about: Rock stars whose talents attain them a certain level of recognition getting fat in the head, thinking it’s their way or the highway forevermore.

People like us think we’re better than others. Even though we’re so messed up we can’t see straight.

It’s that type of person — someone like me — who NEEDS an editor.

A good editor can be a  lot like a 12-Step counselor. They’re ready and willing to take a buzz saw to the legs of your high horse. They tell you how to do better. That’s something every writer should be grateful for. 

There are bad editors who can make an article worse and leave a writer feeling dejected for no good reason. But then there are good cops and bad cops, good priests and bad priests. That’s life.

The point is that when you have a good editor, you should expect to be knocked several pegs down the ladder of reality.

I’ve been blessed to work with some great editors in my day: Gretchen Putnam and Al White from The Eagle-Tribune; Anne Saita and Eric Parizo from TechTarget, and now Derek Slater. Eric and I used to have some pretty prickly backs and forth and I after awhile I enjoyed and even looked forward to these moments. We made a lot of decent stories into good stories.

The latter three were well aware of my OCD when we worked together. They could have thrown up their arms, but they chose to work with me instead. I’d like to think I’m a better writer for it. And a lot LESS of a head case.

I still write from a high horse. I still need to have the legs sawed off from time to time.

I’m Narcissism Inc.

I don’t know if I’d want to work with someone like me.

But I’m aware of the problem and I work on it every day.

And I happen to be married to the toughest, most loving editors around.

Thinking in Absolutes: A Bad Idea

One of the problems with a mind laden with OCD is that you think a lot in absolutes. It’s one of the first things you need to stop doing when you finally decide to get help. But six years in, I still haven’t conquered that beast.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CpRCc4Jre8&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Thinking in absolutes when your in a good mood is dangerous because you tend to think you’re so much better than you really are. Example:

Someone tells me I’m a good writer.

Translation in absolute: I’m the best writer in the business.

That’s rubbish, of course. But it’s the way someone like me thinks when I’m wearing my stupid hat. Another example:

Someone tells me they really admire how I am with my children.

Translation in absolute: I’m such an awesome dad.

I try to be. But trust me: I’m not.

Someone tells me I’m a great husband.

Translation in absolute: I’m the PERFECT husband.

Sadly, I am far from it.

Most of the time, when I’m thinking in absolutes, it’s on the negative side. Examples:

You missed the mark a bit with that headline you wrote.

Translation in absolute: 16 years into this career, I still suck at writing.

You shouldn’t have let the kids watch so much TV.

Translation in absolute: I’m a horrible father.

That’s what thinking in absolutes is to me. I either think about something in the best possible terms or the worst. The truth is always somewhere in the middle.

When I think in absolutes, I’m thinking outside the box of reality. It makes for some manic mood swings. Lately, I’m realizing that I’m as far away from getting a handle on this as I was the day I realized something was seriously wrong inside my head and that I needed to get help. 

With that in mind, I go thinking in absolutes again: I’m no better a person than I was all those years ago.

That’s not true, of course. I’ve made tons and tons of progress.

But I have a long way to go.

That’s not something that’s absolutely terrible or absolutely wonderful.

It’s just the way it is.

Fortunately for me, my wife, kids and friends are able to see me as I am, and that — for better or worse — they accept me anyway.

I’m thankful for that.

The Eagle-Tribune Revisited

Danny Goodwin and I decided on a whim to crash the newsroom of The Eagle-Tribune this afternoon. It’s where we forged our friendship. It’s where I was when my sanity really started to come apart and it’s where some damn good people still work.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9yuDEnMhhk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

The place hasn’t changed a bit. The computer screens may be flatter and a corner of the room is now taken up with multimedia gear, but the pictures on the wall are the same, as is the stained carpet and the old cubicles. The lunch room has the same peculiar smell it had when I worked there.

But the same dear friends remain, including Bill Cantwell, Gretchen Putnam and Taylor Armerding. Gretchen wasn’t there when we came through, unfortunately, but it was good to see old faces.

It was also nice to walk through there with a different mindset than the one I had last time I walked those halls in early 2004.

I did a lot of stupid things when I worked there — to myself and to other people.

I’d like to think I did some good when I was there, too.

That’s for others to determine, and it’s doesn’t exactly matter anymore.

Friends in Crisis

I have a few friends who are in crisis these days, making my own struggles seem trivial. Talking to them is a lot like living in the Twilight Zone. I’m used to being self absorbed.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7bv9wNXN3FHKMRTMdi48fL]

I have to admit something: I’m not that good at being there for others. Lord knows I try, but I get so stuck in my own head sometimes that it’s hard to see what’s happening around me.

My failure on this front is most evident on the family side. Even before the relationship with my mother imploded, I always sucked at visiting my grandparents and calling siblings. I was always too busy with other things.

Actually, I was always obsessed with other things, some real, some imagined.

When my great-grandmother was dying, I kept meaning to go visit her. The week I finally planned to was the week she died.

I was terrible at visiting my Nana. Instead of loving her unconditionally, I was fixated on her quirks. Here’s the thing with a head case like me: It’s much easier to stew about someone else’s faults than your own. That may sound like a contradiction, since I talk a lot about being stuck inside my own head. But that’s part of the problem. People like me will come outside my own head for a few minutes just to spit on someone else’s quirks.

I’ve paid the price along the way.

I’ve had a lot of friends come and go in my life. Two of the closest friends died on me. It took a long, long time before I was willing to even consider getting close to anyone ever again outside my family.

And, as I mentioned earlier, family relationships suffered.

So here I am, a few years into recovery from OCD and addiction, and people are coming to me for a shoulder to lean on.

God has a way of giving you payback and blessing you with His grace at the same time.

I’m fortunate to have the friends I have, after all the fucking up I’ve done in life.

I hope I don’t let them down.

Readings From The Book Of Crap

I’ve noticed a sad phenomena in the halls of recovery. And I’ve had just about enough of it.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60J6HlvfePM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

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. One person is doing too much of it lately.

Everyone who walks into an OA, AA or NA meeting is a little crazy. If we weren’t a little bit off, we wouldn’t have to be there in the first place. We’re entitled to our faults. But when someone corners you all the time, pushing the AA big book in your face and quoting from its pages like you’re desperately in need of hearing them recite it, there’s a problem. Especially when it’s clear they’re not coming from a healthy place.

Anonymity is an important tool of recovery, so I’ll keep the person’s name out. The person cornered me after Saturday’s OA meeting after I shared about needing to tweak my program. Me seeing my needs as they are turned into a tirade about me being in denial. He tells me to read page whatever in the 24-hour book and page something-or-other in the Big Book. After awhile, it’s like David Koresh pushing a Bible in your face and telling you what it means, just before the compound bursts into flames.

As I looked at the clock and saw a half hour going by, I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time: I wanted to punch the guy. Hard. That IS NOT OK.

This fella is having a lot of trouble relating to people lately. He walks around asking people for money and then spends it on cigarettes. He tells you we have to bomb the Chinese and the Iranians because Israel is going to be nuked and it’s in God’s plan. He goes on about how this person demoralized him or that one betrayed him simply because they called him to the carpet when he decided to interrupt or speak out of turn.

Most disturbing, God is becoming his excuse for every bad decision he decides to make. It’s an old story, people using God to justify their bad choices.

I bring it up not to flame anyone, but to point out something vitally important for anyone trying to hang onto their sobriety and abstinence. When someone needs help, you try to help. But when someone needs SO MUCH HELP that they latch on and suck the life out of you, calling several times a day and making a crisis out of every little thing, it’s time to back away.

A person like this is not evil. They need to be loved, and we should love them and try to guide them. That’s what God wants.

But in any program of recovery, limits are everything. Limits are meant to protect you from relapse. 

And when you let someone bring you down with crazy talk all the time, you’re putting your own recovery in jeopardy.

Relapse and you hurt your family, your friends, your livelihood, and your faith. And once that happens, you’re no longer in a position to help anyone else.

You can’t help yourself, for goodness sake.

To be of service to the most people, you have to cut ties with a few. It may not make sense, but it’s true. That’s what I have to do.

So when someone tells you we have to start bombing China in between reciting direct passages from the AA Big Book, it’s time to look them in the eye and tell them, as politely as possible, that it’s time to grow up.

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.

Fear and Loathing in the TSA Line

It’s rare that I connect the things I write on CSOonline.com with this blog. The two are separate entities dealing with different subjects. But once in a great while, the two intersect. The uproar over the TSA’s more “invasive” security tactics is a good example.

Last time the two intersected was over the summer when I got hassled by the U.S. Secret Service (the cops on bikes, specifically).

I look at this TSA controversy and I’m immediately reminded of my past battles with fear and anxiety and how something like airport security would freak me out.

So please indulge me and click on the column below. And if you agree or disagree, please do weigh in.

Thanks.

TSA and the freedom thing: We’re the problem

The nation is in an uproar over full body scanning and pat downs in the airport TSA security lines. Is it a necessary security measure or a violation of our freedom and privacy? Bill Brenner weighs in.


Be a Hard-Ass, Lose Every Time

I used to think I had to be a tough-talking, pushy bastard to get ahead in life. Instead, that behavior nearly destroyed me. I’ve learned a lot since then.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mn-3EqaO0E&fs=1&hl=en_US]

When I worked at The Eagle-Tribune, some of the editors carried on with the mindset that reporters always needed an ass kicking. If a sentence wasn’t written perfectly, the story got rewritten and the writer got a knuckle sandwich by way of e-mail.

Once, when the obituary writer was out with the flu, my bosses decided he was faking the whole thing and ordered me to call the guy and let him have it. I made the call, and the obit man, Danny Goodwin, was taken aback. Today he’s a close friend and we laugh about that call frequently.

No disrespect toward my former colleagues intended. I made some of my most lasting friendships there. And most newsrooms can be a cut-throat environment. It’s just the way it is.

The point of this post is really about how I tried to be the hard ass some bosses wanted me to be, and how — fortunately for me and everyone else — I failed miserably.

Before I go further, I should point out that this isn’t all about The Eagle-Tribune. When I was an editor for Community Newspaper Company, I thought I was really something. I treated reporters like my personal whipping boys. It didn’t make them better reporters. It just made me a bigger asshole.

When I worked for TechTarget, I had the same problem. I was nobody’s boss there, but I had the feeling I was superior to writers in other groups because someone stuck the word “senior” in my title.

Why did I carry on this way? Because I worried about everything all the time — as OCD cases are known to do — and I couldn’t control my addictions.

This made me feel like the scum of the Earth. Somehow, I reasoned, trying to be — or at least pretending to be — better than others would help me feel better about the absence of control in my life.

If I was going to suffer, I figured, I at least deserved something out of it, like being seen as the golden boy by everyone around me.

How’d that work out? Not so well.

You see, it’s one thing to hurt yourself. But when you hurt someone else to mask your insecurities, an evil is let loose that you can never control.

One New Hampshire reporter from the E-T days, Sally Gilman, got a taste of that evil.

In late 2000, early 2001, I was the assistant editor of the paper’s New Hampshire edition and reported to a manging editor who made my brand of control-freakism look like a minor, passing cold.

His attitude was that all the reporters were children who needed their ears slapped back on a regular basis, and he expected me to carry out his will. It was against my instincts, because I wanted to be known as a nice guy. But I pushed on. When he told me to take a reporter to the woodshed because that person wasn’t performing as he felt they should be, I did.

Sally was one of those reporters who was always in his sights. It was ridiculous, because she was older and wiser than we were. She had been covering New Hampshire for many years. She lived there. We should have just let her do her thing, because it was good enough.

But he wanted more. If an idea wasn’t something you could turn into a multi-story enterprise package with seven sources per story, then it was crap. Community journalism was a mark of laziness, apparently.

He was always on Sally to come into the North Andover, Mass. office to work more often. She resisted, because New Hampshire was where the action was. She lived there. She once noted that the New Hampshire plates on her car increased her credibility with sources, and she was right.

Still, it became my job to push her to come to the office. It seems absurd in this day and age, where you can easily work from anyplace that has a wi-fi connection. But even back then, e-mailing in a story was simple enough.

But we wanted the stories inputed directly into the newsroom’s Lotus Notes-based system. We felt we shouldn’t have to reformat copy on deadline. Perhaps we were the lazy ones.

One morning, Sally filed an incomplete story. I can’t remember exactly what the problem was. But the boss was pissed off about it, and he told me to give her a kick in the ass. Her husband was having some serious surgery that day and we both knew it. But he ordered and I got on the phone and gave her a talking to.

An hour or so later, Steve Lambert, the top editor, called me to his office. I went in there to find him, my direct boss, and editor Al White. Considering what I had done, they went pretty easy on me. There was no yelling. Steve just asked me what happened and I told him. The N.H. managing editor sat there with a very red face. It was always red, mind you. But it was particularly glaring in Steve’s windowless office.

It turns out that Sally had called to complain. She was really upset. How dare an editor call her early in the morning to give her a hard time about something trivial on a day when her husband’s life was hanging in the balance.

Steve agreed with her, as well he should have. But he was still calm about it. He told me I needed to ease up. He didn’t want reporters to see me as the newsroom ass-clown. I said I’d keep that in mind and left his office, feeling like I had just been simultaneously stabbed in the side of the head and slammed in the gut with a brick.

Ten-plus years later, the way I treated her is one of my biggest regrets.

It would be easy for me to blame that managing editor, and make no mistake about it: I’ve spent most of the last decade thanking my lucky stars that I don’t have to work with him anymore.

But I always had the choice to behave the right way, and I did the opposite because being the office rock star was too important to me. I needed that status to fill the hole in my soul.

I thought it would fill the hole. Since I did a ton of binge eating back then, it’s safe to say being a hard-ass didn’t fill the hole the way I thought it would. I binged away and worried about every little thing to the point of paranoia. I started to see conspiracies against me all around. I started getting sick a lot.

Here’s the other problem with being a hard-ass: The world becomes a lonely place.

People don’t want to hang out with you. And on the rare occasions that they do, you don’t have the slightest idea of what to talk about. When you try to be superior to people on the job, you have nothing to relate to outside the building.

Somewhere in my recovery program, I lost my appetite for all this stuff. Out of pure exhaustion, I just started treating people the way I WANTED TO BE TREATED. I just didn’t have the energy to be a hard-ass anymore.

My spiritual conversion was a big part of this, too. My religious beliefs were simply no longer compatible with riding people and trying to control them.

Do I slip up today? Probably. I’m still a control freak to some extent. I guess I always will be.

I’ll always have to work on it, reminding myself that I’m no better than those around me.

All I know is this: When I’m treating people with respect, I feel free. I’m not weighted down by animosity. 

More people want to be in my life.

A lot of problems take care of themselves.

You don’t have to take what I say as Gospel. In the end, I can only explain where I’ve been and what I’ve experienced.

And what I’ve experienced since changing my attitude is all good.

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.