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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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Run Out of Town (Or Off Facebook, Twitter)

One of my security friends thinks she needs to delete her social network accounts because she lacks social skills. She tends to offend people sometimes, you see, and she wants to go away until she can learn to behave. Though admirable, it’s a bad idea for lots of reasons.

At the height of my mental illness and addictive behavior, social skills were alien to me. Isolating myself from the rest of the world was the better thing to do, so that’s what I did. There was no Facebook or Twitter back then, mind you. I sometimes wonder how I would have behaved on those sites if they were around at the time. My behavior probably would have been a hundred times worse than anything my security friend is worried about.

A few notes about this friend: Her posts are laced with sarcasm. She uses the word “fuck” a lot in the adjective form and she makes it plain that she is an atheist.

Of course, as I’ve discovered, sarcasm is a tricky skill that can get you into trouble. When you make comments about someone’s faith or the way they look, it’s almost always going to be negative. So you have to use it sparingly.

Can my friend do better with how she conducts herself on Facebook and Twitter? Sure. But then most of us can do better.

Consider the following:

–A ton of people on Facebook and Twitter use it as a political soapbox. If they’re Republican, almost every post is a tirade against “elitist socialistic liberals.” If they’re a Democrat, it’s the reverse. That stuff has offended me before. Not because they are expressing their beliefs. That’s something I respect. What annoys me is that they never have anything else to talk about, which makes them too one dimensional for my tastes.

–Too many people for my tastes pour their frustrations out on Facebook. If someone’s having a bad week, they complain about everything. Maybe their cat looked at them the wrong way. Maybe their job sucks. One of my friends constantly complains about her job on Facebook.

–Though I don’t set out to insult anyone, I know I do. I push out a lot of links that are relevant to my work in the information security community. If it’s something I wrote, be it a security article or something from this blog, up it goes. I know I’ve been “un-friended” for that. People don’t like their feeds dominated by one person. That person comes off as egotistical and full of himself. I’ve already confessed to that sin. I also write openly about my Faith. That friend at the focus of this post? She’s an atheist and I’m surprised she hasn’t un-friended me by now. And I’ll confess I was a little pissed off last Saturday — the anniversary of 9-11 — when she made a crack about how science flies us to the moon and faith flies us into buildings.

And yet I don’t think she should leave the social networking realm. Why? Because we all have our stuff to work on, and I’ve learned from experience that it’s better to do it out in the open than in isolation.

Hell, I’ve done far worse than being sarcastic on Facebook. I’ve lied to people in the past about my addictive behavior. I’ve hurt people along the way and have spent a lot of time lately trying to make amends to them. There are worse things in the world than being an ass on Facebook. Besides, as I’ve said, we are all asses on Facebook from time to time.

In the end, we all have the choice to disconnect from a connection we find offensive. I’ve un-friended people on Facebook or un-followed them on Twitter for annoying me. It’s like the old saying about how if you don’t like the music, turn to another station.

To this friend of mine who thinks she needs to drop from the world: Don’t be silly. People are connected to you because they want to be. We already knew of your sarcasm when we decided to connect to you on these sites. Some of us enjoy your posts for the sharp, edgy humor you provide.

You need more social skills? OK. But you can’t build those skills in isolation.

And if your friends aren’t willing to hang around as you work through that stuff, then they’re not really friends, are they?

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Discriminating Against Head Cases

I’ve seen plenty of examples of failed justice in my day: A judge letting an abusive dirt-bag dad get unsupervised weekend visits just because he reappeared after a few years. A thrice convicted pedophile being let back out on the streets. I never expected to hear about the court discriminating against someone for having OCD.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3RneGO_ks&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I usually try not to write posts in response to comments that flow into this blog. I like to let readers’ statements stand on their own. But when someone flags something particularly insidious, I have to share.

The two examples that follow came my way by way of a couple mental health forums on LinkedIn where I post blog entries.

I’ll keep their names to myself to protect privacy.

But to help you appreciate the first person’s perspective, I’ll tell you she’s a certified mediator who provides psychotherapy for adults, children, couples and families. She also does group sessions for anger management, domestic violence and parenting.

I have a special respect for someone in this line of work. As a kid suffering from a particularly vicious form of Crohn’s Disease and, by extension, behavioral issues, I firmly believe I was saved by the children’s therapist assigned to me. That same person kept me on the sane side of the line when my parents’ marriage dissolved in hatred, abuse and mistrust.

In adulthood, my recovery from OCD would be nowhere without the three therapists who have helped me in the last six years.

I’ve had a couple really bad therapists along the way, too, so I never take someone’s word as Gospel just because of what they do for a living. But the person who contacted me yesterday seems solid and worth listening to. Here’s what she wrote to me in response to Monday’s post, “More Bullshit About Mental Illness“:

My clients just lost their kids in family court because the mom had OCD. She “counts” and so this was considered “traumatizing to the two older kids.” They are in their teens, however; the bureau allowed them to keep their two younger children. The Child and Family Services organizations are off their rocker. I see kids returned to abusers and drug addicts, I don’t get it.

There are elements about this that I have questions about. For starters, why take the teenagers but let the younger kids stay? I suspect it’s because the teenagers are at an age where seemingly abnormal behavior is going to freak them out more. Teens are almost always confused. But the larger suggestion that someone got a raw deal in the courts because of her OCD quirks is totally believable to me.

I’ve seen more than one fellow OCD sufferer scorned in the workplace for being a little different. Not in my workplace, but in other companies.

True or not, I think that when someone has OCD, they always need to be prepared to defend themselves against someone else’s stupidity. Of course, it’s not enough to say someone discriminated against you for having a mental illness. You need to be able to prove it. That shouldn’t be hard for obsessive people who are known to be painfully diligent at documenting things.

Breaking a stigma is hard. There’s no play book. There’s always the danger of coming across as delusional or whiney. Come to think of it, some of us ARE delusional and whiney.

Despite all I say about breaking stigmas and fighting back, I have to be honest and say that I’ve never experienced the kinds of things people write to me about. I’m very lucky. I’ve gotten nothing but support from every office I’ve ever worked in. If I was going through depression and needed time off, I got it. When I decided to write this blog, the folks at work were very supportive.

You might say that for an OCD patient, I’ve led a charmed life.

I do know this, though: When you take a skeleton like mental illness out of the closet and toss it to the middle of the street for all to see, the control it has over you lessens and the bones of the disorder turn to ash.

I’ve lived it. I know it. I used to live in mortal terror of speaking up for myself. Once I got over that initial hump, there was no turning back.

Another reader recently wrote to me about the injustices she has suffered for having a mental illness:

I have two very bad instances of discrimination based on mental illness. I worked for medical doctors for ten years, had all outstanding performance reviews, and received bonuses periodically. I began to have trouble functioning because of undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder. I had doctors working with me who told me I needed a leave of absence to get medical care. I went to my boss, the executive director and an MD, and told him what my therapist and neurologist recommended. His words were “I’m a doctor, I can’t have someone with a mental illness in a position of authority in a company I run!” Second case, my supervisor docked my pay for going to the doctor even though I was exempt. Also, she told me that I had to have therapy sessions via phone or email because she couldn’t afford to let me leave the office. She also told others about my illness without my permission. It was at that point I decided I have to try and find a way to work for myself even if I had to leave in a homeless shelter.  I will never be treated that way again.

Me neither, my friend.

I can’t tell someone how to fight back when a judge or employer screws them over their illness.

I only know what I do: Minimize the impact of my OCD by exposing it for all to see through my writing.

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More Bullshit About Mental Illness

Every once in awhile I read something on mental illness that sends my blood boiling. Please indulge me while I rant about one such item.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPfkK7bcyfE&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I recently tripped across a website called HeretoHelp, a project of the BC Partners for Mental Health and Addictions Information. It’s a great resource for people like me who are recovering from mental illness and addictive behavior. It’s chock full of articles from medical professionals and people who suffer with various mental disorders. There’s also a news feed that includes upcoming events like mental illness screenings. I like the no-bullshit approach to the writing and layout.

The item that set me off was a fact sheet on discrimination and stigmas around mental illness. Specifically, it documented instances where employers view mental illness as a weakness; a reason not to hire someone. I’m not suggesting this form of prejudice is limited to something like depression. How many job candidates admit freely to having a heart problem or cancer? Employers discriminate against that, too, especially when they worry about health care costs and potential disability leave. I’m not even going to suggest that those are evil concerns.

But there’s something that strikes me as more insidious about the perception society has of people with mental illness. If you’re depressed, that somehow makes you a weakling who can’t cope with the normal challenges we’re all supposed to know how to deal with.

It’s true that someone in the grip of depression can’t cope with those challenges. I’ve greeted many “normal” situations like a crisis that threatened to bring everything crashing down. When I worked at The Eagle-Tribune, I was so paralyzed with depression and worry that I missed a lot of work. I also spent many a shift so mentally weak that I could barely edit properly. By the end of my time there, I was as close to a nervous breakdown as I’d ever come. I’d come much closer in the two years after I left that job, but I was in a pretty low place.

I still feel badly about leaving half-baked edits for the morning editors.

But here’s where I was lucky: Though I might have been looked at as weak by some of my colleagues, I wasn’t tossed out on my ass. I worried that I would be, but I had a lot of support from bosses like Gretchen Putnam, who I consider a dear friend today. At SearchSecurity.com, I had another nurturing boss in Anne Saita. I was in her employ when the mental illness, depression and addiction really started coming to a head. By some freak of nature, I was able to do some quality work for her during that time, but trust me on this: Had she not been the type of person I could open up to about what I was working through, I almost certainly would have failed at that job. I was that close to the edge.

In my current job, I’ve been Blessed enough to work around open-minded people that I was able to start up this blog without fear of getting blackballed.

So yes, I’ve been lucky. Others have not been as fortunate, however, and their livelihoods have suffered.

The article makes the following point: “Even clinical depression, which has arguably received the most media attention this past decade, is still stigmatized. A 2005 Australian study noted that around one quarter of people felt depression was a sign of personal weakness and would not employ someone with depression. Nearly one third felt depressed people “could snap out of it,” and 42 percent said they would not vote for a politician with depression.”

Considering that one of our greatest presidents suffered from crushing depression, that last sentence is particularly unfortunate.

The article also noted how addiction is also viewed as a weakness of character, something that a “strong” person could stop simply because it’s wrong.

“Addiction, which is a chronic and disabling disorder, is also often thought of as a moral deficiency or lack of willpower, and there is the attitude that people can just decide to stop drinking or using drugs if they want to. The study of the effects of stigma on substance use disorders is still a fairly undeveloped area, but research is revealing that social stigma and attitudes towards addiction are preventing people from seeking help.”

I love the description of addiction being a lack of willpower, because in the bigger picture a lack of willpower never held a person back in society. It suggests that someone who can’t help but eat junk food all day is somehow better than someone who can’t stop shooting heroin or drinking. Hell, smoking cigarettes with a few beers or a few glasses of wine is more accepted than the illegal addictions.

True, something like heroin can take you to a place where you no longer function in society. But my addiction was binge eating. It was perfectly legal. But the state it brought me to was about as bad as a heroin addiction. When all you can do is lay on the couch and isolate yourself from the rest of the world, it doesn’t matter what you’re addicted to, does it? The result is the same.

Maybe expecting society to  stop thinking of the depressed and addicted as weak outcasts is asking too much. It probably is.

All I know is that nothing will change unless more people in recovery work to break the stigma. I know many drug counselors, therapists and 12-Steppers who are doing just that. But we clearly have a long, long way to go before an environment exists where most sufferers can get the help they need and return to the world as productive members of society.

I’ll do my part by continuing to write this blog and sponsoring others who want to turn their lives around.

That’s all I can do, I suppose.

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Another Unsettling Truth About Facebook

My friend Linda noted that I changed the settings on my Facebook page to allow wall comments. It amused her because it was my birthday. She knows me well. Truth is, I wanted to see the birthday messages. Here’s the uncomfortable thing that says about me…

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxeFCaEx3w0&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I suffer from an inflated ego. It’s a side-effect of where I’ve been. I have this odd fear of being forgotten. And I didn’t want to be forgotten on my birthday. It sounds ridiculous. But there it is.

OCD types have big egos. Achieving big things is one of the ways we try to fill in that hole in our souls.  In my profession, getting access to the major power players of information security is a rush. I feel like I am somebody as a result. When I don’t make it to a big security conference, the wheels in my head start spinning. I start to worry that by not being there, I become irrelevant.

With this blog, when I write something that really connects with people, the ego grows a few sizes larger.

I’m somewhat ashamed about this. But I also think it’s a common thing among us. When people say they want their birthday to pass quietly without hearing from people, I don’t buy it.

Everyone wants some attention. That is exactly why Facebook took off. People suddenly found they had a way to project themselves in ways never before possible. Wannabe writers suddenly got to become “published” writers because they had a platform to do it with. For the most part, this has been a good thing, because a lot of those writers are very good.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how I worry every time I discover I’ve been “unfriended” on Facebook. I get itchy thinking about why someone decided to drop me.

I think the reason is because at the height of my mental illness and addictions, I was alone. In my adult years, I isolated myself because it was too painful to show my bloated face to the world. When I snapped out of it, I became a lot more social.

Some of the ego comes from the addict in me. Addicts truly believe EVERYTHING is about them. You wouldn’t believe how people like us manage to find ourselves in every situation real or imagined. When you’re at a party for someone else, you think about how much attention you may or may not be getting. The best description of this came from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, eldest daughter of one of my heroes, Teddy Roosevelt.

Of here father’s ego, Alice said, “He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

I shuddered the first time I saw that quote, because I identified with it. And it made me feel shame.

If Facebook had been around in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, he would have been absolutely insufferable with it. He might have found that it was a grander “bully pulpit” than the presidency.

Maybe he would have wasted all his time on Facebook instead of going on his African safaris or journeying down the infamous River of Doubt in South America.

Who knows?

All I know is that I do have a big ego.

I suppose the first step of finding more humility is admitting it.

All that said, I’m grateful as hell for all the people in my life. I felt truly blessed to have so many friends and family yesterday. It made for a wonderful birthday. I felt loved. And we all want to feel loved, don’t we?

That is something I’m NOT ashamed of.

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You Think Too Much

I have friends who spend a lot of time raking the same problems over the coals in their heads over and over again. The worry consumes them. I always tell them, “Don’t over think these things. That’s how you get the tumors and shit.” I know, because I used to let worry incapacitate me.

Mood music:

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

This shouldn’t surprise readers of this blog. I’ve described it before. OCD is very much about worry spinning out of control. If it’s something routine, like sending an editor a flawless story, it’ll eat away at a lot of precious time. I used to write a story, read it back aloud, polish it, read it aloud again, then I’d still be afraid to file it for fear that it wasn’t absolutely perfect. I got home late many nights and lost a lot of sleep because of it.

When it was about health, I’d make myself sick for real by fixating too hard on what MIGHT happen. That’s when the anxiety attacks would come. In 1991, after a colonoscopy to monitor the Crohn’s Disease, I was informed that my colon was covered with hundreds of polyps — more scar tissue than polyps, but something that had to be kept an eye on. I was advised to get a colonoscopy every year to ensure it didn’t morph into colon cancer unnoticed. Good advice. So I let more than eight years pass before a bout of bleeding forced me to get one. Until then, I wasted a lot of time in fear that every stomach cramp, however small, was colon cancer. I’d spin it in my head repeatedly, rationalizing why I shouldn’t get the test. Just following doctor’s orders in the first place would have saved me a lot of over-thinking. That was clear when I had the test and found out everything was fine.

I’ve spent too much time thinking about plenty of other things. It ages you.

But I’ve learned something in my recovery from OCD and the related binge eating addiction: When you learn to stop over-thinking, a lot of things that used to be daunting become a lot easier. You also find yourself in a lot of precious moments that were always there. But you didn’t notice them because you were sick with worry.

I’m a lot happier now that I quickly file an article right after writing it. I move on to the next item on the agenda more quickly and am a lot more productive at work as a result. Does that mean my stories need more editing? Not that I’ve noticed. But hell, that’s what editors are for anyway.

By making doctor appointments and just getting the next blood test or colonoscopy, I do away with a lot of physical pain that worrying used to cause me.

That doesn’t mean I never worry or think about anything. What’s the use of having a brain if you never think about things? There are also a lot of people out there who don’t do nearly as much thinking about their lives as they should.

But there’s a fine line between useful thought and white noise, and my challenge has been to keep myself on the right side of that line. I’ve learned to pick my mental battles more carefully.

It’s easier said than done. If you’re a chronic worrier and someone tells you not to worry you want to punch that person in the face, right? I sure did. When the worry is rushing out of every corner, you can’t even begin to figure out how to shut the valves.

I eventually did it by getting years of intense psychotherapy. I had to peel back each layer of worry and figure out how it all got there. It sucked. A lot. Every painful memory of childhood came to the surface and I had to deal with it head on. Prozac definitely helped. Without getting all the therapy first I don’t think the medicine would have worked as well as it has. In the end, all the Prozac did was fix the flow of my brain chemistry, which was hopelessly out of whack from years of self-abuse.

Delving into the 12 steps through OA was huge, too. Eliminating flour and sugar from my diet cleared out my head in ways I never thought possible. Sugar and flour consumed in massive quantities gummed up my mental gears as bad as any bottle of whiskey would have done.

Letting God into my life was the most important move of all. [See “The Better Angels of My Nature“]

Yeah, I still worry about things. But not like I used to.

It feels better that way.

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One of My Biggest Regrets

Yesterday I saw many old friends from my Eagle-Tribune days at the retirement send-off for legendary editor Cheryl Rock. It was a great afternoon. But one of the people I saw there brought back the powerful memory of one of the worst things I ever did.

I didn’t talk to Sally Gilman. I guess I felt too awkward and nervous. She didn’t say anything to me, either. She probably doesn’t remember me. But what I did to her was awful.

It was sometime in late 2000 or early 2001. I was the assistant editor of the paper’s New Hampshire edition and I reported to a manging editor who made my brand of control-freakism look like a minor, passing cold. I’ll keep his name out because I’m about to say some not-so-nice things about him.

I was warned about him when I was about to take the N.H. job. One editor said I would have to play good cop to this guy’s bad-cop style. That was very good advice that I didn’t take.

Instead, I gave in to my instinct to please my masters — this particular master, anyway. 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.

Some could try to absolve me of fault because I was carrying out orders. But the truth is that I could have stood up to this managing editor and told him that was not the day to push this poor woman.

I could have been the good cop, smoothing out the rough feelings reporters were having over his management style. It would have been insubordination on my part, but it would have been the right thing to do. Instead, I was just another bad cop, no better than he was.

I badly wanted to tell Sally I was sorry yesterday. But I couldn’t get up the courage to approach her.

I’m going to find her phone number and let her know how sorry I am.

One more note about that managing editor: I eventually reached my breaking point with him and asked for a transfer. Al sent me back to the night editor’s chair. Al was always a hard guy to read, but I think he knew I was a pile of rubble at that point, so I thank him for giving me that second chance.

One night after I returned to that position, I was asked to help the New Hampshire desk process election results from the various towns we covered. Around 4 a.m., the managing editor started to go into a diabetic shock. Another reporter called his wife and I hit the streets in search of a store that was open so I could get him some orange juice.

He later recovered enough to drive home. I stuck around and finished his work. It wasn’t hard, because I’d been left to finish his work many times.

I’m not proud of this, but there were moments after that where I would think about that orange juice I got him and regretted doing so. Maybe, I thought in my delusional mind, I could have saved reporters a lot of future suffering. Fortunately, I’m not the kind of guy who would do such a thing. If someone’s life is in danger, you help them. Pure and simple. That I had those thoughts still fills me with shame.

He’s still in the business, but I have no interest in connecting with him. The feeling is mutual, I’m sure.

In hindsight, that incident with Sally was a classic case of OCD run wild. Back then the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed, but it was there, eating away at my brain, making me do bad things.

I don’t think I can ever apologize enough for some of the things I did in that job.

I was really coming undone at that point, but I hadn’t yet hit the series of bottoms I had to reach before I realized I needed help.

Today, the lessons are clear to me:

–Treat everyone as you wish to be treated yourself because that’s what God wants and it’s right.

–People who report to you will always do more for you if you skip the hard-ass bit and be more caring and nurturing.

–Finally, being a people-pleaser is just plain stupid, whether it’s a family member, a friend or a boss. People-Pleasing never works. You can never make everyone happy.

When you try, you do really stupid things.

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An Exaggerated Response

A reader asked me for my thoughts on “rollercoastering,” that exaggerated response to life’s normal challenges that creates high drama and the feeling of being on a rollercoaster. Hell yes, I’ve been on that ride.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I6y5-GuLPM&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Here’s what my new friend had to say by e-mail (name kept anonymous to protect privacy):

“Part of my addiction(s) is experiencing an exaggerated response to normal life events. Granted, I have a history of creating drama and placing myself in bizarre situations, but my program of recovery has helped that tremendously over the years.”

Here are three examples of how I’ve been down that road:

—Obsessing about girls I liked (long before I met Erin). I always had the fear of not being loved, and my dating life in high school was pretty much non-existent. In a couple of cases, I would fixate on a girl (two, actually, though not at the same time) because she was nice to me. Being friendly signaled an interest in romance in my mind. So I would call them too much and think about them all the time, which, naturally, got in the way of everything else I should have been focusing on. If translating human kindness into a mating call isn’t an exaggerated response to something more normal, I don’t know what is.

—Obsessing about an impending job performance review: Job reviews are a normal part of a job. Sure, they can be stress-inducing, especially right before it happens. But my anxiety attacks would begin weeks — sometimes months — beforehand. During that time, I would go on vicious food binges. It would always be a waste of emotion, because the reviews would go fine, especially when Anne Saita was my boss.

—Obsessing about travel: I used to have a massively exaggerated response to business trips. Mostly, I would worry about the plane blowing up in flight. That’s because I always had a fear of loss. I’m also a control freak, and when you’re in a plane you have no control. It’s funny to think back on, because now I love travel.

Exaggerated responses are a trademark of OCD cases.

How did I get beyond it? Well, I haven’t completely. There are still days — a lot of them — where I’ll have an exaggerated response to the basics. Messy rooms are an example. I just can’t leave a messy room messy. When you have two children below the age of 10, that’s asking a lot.

But my exaggerated reactions are are a lot less than they used to be.

It’s taken years to minimize the drama. It took extensive, emotionally draining therapy, a spiritual awakening and a 12-Step program. Medication has helped, too.

But make no mistake about it: Keeping the exaggerated responses at bay is a life-long challenge.

This much I can tell you: I’m a lot happier now that I’ve learned to limit those rollercoaster rides.

File:The Scream.jpg

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Bully’s Remorse

There was a kid in high school everyone used to pick on. He had a monotone voice and was frail. Kids were terrible to him, including me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:5Qy0zLjQy3czoj0yZ7DFkk]

For you to understand what I’m about to get into, a review of the 12 Steps of Recovery are in order, with special emphasis on 8 and 9:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert addiction. Here’s mine]—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. [Here’s what I’ve come to believe]

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I’ve been thinking about my former classmate a lot these days. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we graduated 23 years ago. I often wonder where he is, what he’s doing and if he’s ok.

He was the kid everyone made fun of — brutally. And I was probably one of the biggest offenders for the first two and a half years of high school. On the surface he took our taunts with an expressionless face. How he reacted out of view I can only imagine.

There were a lot of bullies at Northeast Metro Tech (it used to be “Vocational School” and we all called it the Voke) and I was made fun of a lot. I was picked on for being fat, for my lack of skill in sports and other things real or imagined.

So what did I do after being picked on? I turned around, found the kids who were weaker than me and attacked them verbally and physically. Mostly verbal, but I remember throwing punches on occasion. Some of it was the reaction to getting picked on. Most of it was from the growing chip on my shoulder over my brother’s death and other unpleasantness at 22 Lynnway in Revere.

By junior year, I had lost a lot of weight and grown my hair long. I was deeply into metal music by then and I started to make friends among some of the so-called metalheads. He had also latched onto metal as a refuge from his pain (he was also pretty religious), and we started to relate over music.

Junior and senior year I made a big effort to be nicer to him, and in the mornings before classes began I would hang out with him. Or, I should say, I let him follow me around. I was still a jerk but was trying to be nice because I was under the influence of another brother, Sean Marley.

So why have I been thinking about him? Because I don’t feel like I did enough back then to set things right. It’s one of my big regrets.

At our 20-year high school reunion in 2009, someone mentioned seeing him at a bus stop going to work.

Sometime soon I’m going to track him down. I have a couple leads on his current whereabouts.

I simply want to say I’m sorry. Someone once suggested I want to make amends to make myself feel better; that I want everyone to see how cool I am doing things like this and writing about it. Maybe there’s some truth to that — the first part anyway. But it’s about more than that. I want to get to know the dude again, if he’s up for it.

If I get to make my amends, you won’t be reading about it here. Righting a wrong will be good enough for me.

bullies

 

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Sometimes, You Gotta Cut Ties

A friend of mine asked Facebook friends if it’s right to cut ties with someone you care about when the relationship is too laden with dysfunction. I’ll keep the person’s name out to protect privacy, but it’s something I’ve had to confront in my long, messy road to recovery from mental illness and addiction. So here are a few thoughts.

Mood music:

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

I come from a family full of addictive behavior and mental illness. Since high drama is a constant guest in this type of family, it can be hard to be around family and just feel comfortable. On the one hand you want to smack a few people around — and they want to smack you around as well. On the other hand, you love them and badly want to please them.

In my recovery, I’ve found it a lot easier to peacefully co-exist with family dysfunction. Truth be told, I enjoy some of it. Most of all, I’ve gained a new appreciation for some of them in recent years, because I’ve been able to see their side if the situations we quarreled through [For more on this, see my compilation post on my Revere attitude.].

But some relationships bent and broke along the way as well. The most glaring example is the fractured relationship between me, my mother and some step-siblings, aunts and uncles when, inevitably, sides were taken.

I’ve wrestled mightily over this one.

We often look at abusive relationships in black and white. There’s the abuser and the victim. But it’s never that simple. I forgave my mother a long time ago for the darker events of my childhood. I doubt I would have done much better in her shoes. Her marriage to my father was probably doomed from the start, and the break-up was full of rancor. Me and my brother were sick a lot, and one of us didn’t make it.

I didn’t fully appreciate what a body blow that was until I became a parent. After Michael died, she became a suffocating force in my life. I did the same to my own kids until I started dealing with the OCD.

I think she did the best she could under the circumstances. So why has the relationship been cold for four years? There are many reasons. Some her fault, some mine, and a lot of other relationships have been bruised and broken in the process.

There’s a lot I can get into about this, but the simplest answer is that this relationship is a casualty of mental illness and addiction. This one can’t be repaired so easily, because much of my OCD and addictive behavior comes directly from her. She is my biggest trigger.

This is an old story. Mental illness and addiction are almost always a family affair. I was destined to have a binge-eating addiction because both my parents have one. They were never drinkers, though my step-father was. Food was their narcotic. And so it became for me.

My friend on Facebook is in a much different situation from mine, of course. I have no idea if addictions and mental illness are factors in that relationship. And those things don’t have to be a factor, either.

All I know is that you try hard to love your family and everyone else around you. But when the relationship makes life unmanageable, it can’t go on. That’s my own uncomfortable reality.  It’s always worth trying to make things work, but when abuse continues despite all your efforts, it’s time to make a break.

That doesn’t mean you toss that person in the trash heap forever.

I still have my hopes that one of these days I can repair the relationship with my mother. But for now, for the sake of my recovery and for my wife and kids, I have to stand my ground. I don’t have to like it, nor should I. But it’s an unfortunate, sucky necessity.

That’s going to be the case for some relationships whether addiction and depression are part of the problem or not.

My Faith tells me to honor my mother and father. Every time I go into the confession booth at church it’s the first thing I bring up.

One priest put it this way: “Honor thy mother and father doesn’t mean you roll over and allow abuse to continue.”

Yet still I wrestle with it.

But for the sake of my immediate family, recovery has to come first. Without it, I fail EVERYONE.

I hope that’s somewhat helpful to my friend.