Some of my readers don’t like to talk about religion. It’s something where most of us simply can’t find common ground. But I often write about my Faith anyway, because it’s essential to my recovery. If some find it uncool, so be it.
Step 2 – Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
This is where people get all confused about the 12 steps. They see Step 2 and think they’ve stumbled upon some bat-shit crazy religious cult. At best, people get the mistaken impression that this is some fringe religious denomination or cult.
In reality, Step 2 is simply about realizing you can’t kill your demons without help from a higher power. Maybe that higher power is rooted in Buddhism. Or that higher power could be rooted in Wiccan beliefs. It’s literally a higher power as you understand him-her-it to be.
It’s not hard for me to write about OCD, binge eating and pills. These are a part of life for people across political and religious divides. Depression and anxiety will hit you whether you’re Catholic, Baptist or agnostic.
But I walk a delicate path between friends and family who are all over the map when it comes to Faith. So I wasn’t going to touch it in this blog.
Eventually, I realized I had no choice. To write about my experiences with OCD and addiction without mentioning my Faith is impossible. It’s too much a part of who I am and how I got here.
In April 2006 I was Baptized a Catholic after going through the RCIA program. This, after more than a decade in the religious wilderness. I was born into a Jewish family but we observed it in a mostly secular manner. By the time I reached my 20s, there was nothing keeping me there.
My first taste of the Catholic Faith was when I met my wife. She grew up going to church every Sunday and going to the same parochial school our boys go to today.
Erin never forced her faith on me, and our marriage certainly wasn’t built on the condition that I convert. I slowly inched toward my Faith over time, and my battle with OCD marked a turning point.
Among my friends and family are people who don’t believe in God and don’t want to hear others talk about it. Then there are those who believe in a higher power but are too angry over perceived wrongdoings in the Church. A lot of that anger is justified, especially when observed through the prism of the Priest Sex Abuse Scandal and atrocities that have happened in God’s name at the hands of misguided people over the centuries.
To the right are those who follow their Faith with a sometimes blinding passion. Bring up things about the organized church you disagree with and they’ll shut the conversation down with a few terse words. On this side of the court, to disagree with what the Pope or Bishops say is to be a fake Catholic or worse.
My misgivings, mainly the intolerance that often abounds in the church, are summed up pretty nicely by this West Wing clip, when President Bartlet, a devout Catholic, rips apart a TV pundit who claims to be an authority on the Word of God:
I also get a big kick out of movies that lampoon religion when it’s handled well. A special favorite is this one:
http://youtu.be/HE7tTT8khf0
But all that aside, I believe in the central teachings of the Catholic Faith — that through the death and resurrection of Jesus, sinful humans can be reconciled to God and be offered salvation and the promise of eternal life. (Wikipedia’s definition, but it’s essentially what I believe).
A big part of my conversion involved my battle with OCD. Part of the mental disorder involved relentless self criticism and loathing. Self-hatred is not too strong a description. I was so convinced that I was flawed beyond repair that I simply plowed along with my self-destructive behavior. I couldn’t get out of my own way.
Catholic conversion entered the picture because, as I was peeling back layer after layer in the struggle to find myself, I found that I simply couldn’t get there without help from a higher power.
I could have been drawn to one of the Protestant denominations or something like Unitarianism. But for me, the Catholic Faith resonated above all others. As I studied the Faith and applied it to my own history, I started to understand that I was not sinful beyond hope. I learned that it’s never too late for any of us, and so I found the strength to move forward and get better. It’s a journey that will continue to my dying breath.
I cherish Mass each week, along with all the Sacraments. My favorite is the Sacrament of Reconciliation — Confession. By spilling out the junk on a regular basis, I feel lighter, less burdened and able to deal with the lingering byproducts of my condition.
The community aspect has also been a tremendous source of strength. I’ve made some dear friends along the way, some of whom don’t share my skepticism of the Church as a governing entity. But we’re able to put those things aside. After all, we’re in full agreement on the central aspect of the Faith.
This is how my faith in a higher power evolved.
It’s not for everyone, but it IS for me, and that’s all that matters.
Without this element in my life, recovery from addiction and mental illness would simply not be possible for me.
Readers have been sending me all kinds of articles lately about where addiction and mental illness come from and how best to recover. It’s useful and appreciated. But there’s a missing piece. A big missing piece.
Mood music:
Here’s the thing about addicts: We know all the things you’re supposed to do to get well. We know full well what is good for us and what is bad.
And when the itch takes over our brain, all that stuff doesn’t matter. We want the thing that’ll make us comfortable. In that mode, we avoid all the good stuff at all costs.
Yoga is fantastic for you and helps you learn to live in the moment. But when my head is in that other zone, there’s just no way I’m going to try it. A big fat cigar is what I REALLY want. (I just quit tobacco, which is why I’m prickly as I write this).
Fruit and veggies are terrific for you. But when the binge eater wants to binge, only the bad stuff will do. Forty dollars of McDonalds. That’s what I go for.
These are the things people just don’t understand when they try to help people like us with advice. When the addictive impulse strikes, the overriding craving is for something that’s very bad for us. Sure, gluten is bad for you. But if my binge-eating compulsion were active and I had gluten intolerance, I’d swallow all of it anyway.
Because I want that momentary feeling of rapture more than anything, regardless of the pain I know will come minutes and hours later.
That, my friends, is what escapes you when you’re trying to help me.
Now, let’s stop here for a reality check: I AM NOT going on a binge right now. I’ve been clean of that for more than two years now. Fundamentally, I am doing well. I’m going to my 12-Step meetings. I’m writing. True, I am edgy right now because I quit smoking cold turkey Friday night. But that will pass. I’m holding steady on that front, despite the constant twitching.
But I am feeling vulnerable. My disease is doing push ups in the parking lot and it’s just dying to kick my ass.
I’ve written much about how my addictive behavior is a byproduct of mental illness (OCD). But addiction itself IS the mental illness. My friend Alan Shimel sent me an article from the AP that states the case pretty well:
Addiction isn’t just about willpower. It’s a chronic brain disease, says a new definition aimed at helping families and their doctors better understand the challenges of treating it.
“Addiction is about a lot more than people behaving badly,” says Dr. Michael M. Miller of the American Society for Addiction Medicine.
That’s true whether it involves drugs and alcohol or gambling and compulsive eating, the doctors group said Monday. And like other chronic conditions such as heart disease or diabetes, treating addiction and preventing relapse is a long-term endeavor, the specialists concluded.
Addiction generally is described by its behavioral symptoms — the highs, the cravings, and the things people will do to achieve one and avoid the other. The new definition doesn’t disagree with the standard guide for diagnosis based on those symptoms.
But two decades of neuroscience have uncovered how addiction hijacks different parts of the brain, to explain what prompts those behaviors and why they can be so hard to overcome. The society’s policy statement, published on its website, isn’t a new direction as much as part of an effort to translate those findings to primary care doctors and the general public.
“The behavioral problem is a result of brain dysfunction,” agrees Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
That’s some very enlightening stuff, and it will be helpful to people going forward. But THE answer to the problem will remain elusive.
I get a lot of dietary advice lately. People read about how I don’t eat flour or sugar as part of my recovery from binge eating. And that leads to questions like this: “Have you tried a gluten-free diet?”
It’s a fair question, and the person who asked about it just wants me to be well. I suppose a diet devoid of flour and sugar is gluten free. Mostly gluten free, anyway.
But in the end, the gluten itself was not my problem. The problem was my overwhelming instinct to eat all the gluten.
The problem is about control. I have none. The sensor in the brain that tells people when they’ve had enough doesn’t work in my head. It broke long ago. So I need a set of coping tools and the 12 Steps to keep my head in the game.
That’s not THE answer, either. But it helps a lot.
Thanks for sending me the articles, friends. I might balk at some of the information, but I appreciate the spirit in which it’s delivered.
I have a major case of OCD Fidget Syndrome today. It started with an 8 a.m. meeting in work and seems to have gotten worse as the morning has dragged on.
In the meeting I noticed I kept swiveling my chair back and forth and changing positions. I kept tugging at my clothes. I must have gotten pretty slick about it, because people didn’t seem to notice.
Then we had a small editorial meeting and the itch started to feel more intense. Doodling on a piece of paper as we discussed business kept me from flailing wildly.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what my problem is. Quitting smoking cold turkey Friday night is having the expected effect. It’s all I can do not to smoke. From there, the urge to binge eat is high.
I’m not going to do either of those things, though. I’m strong enough and I know I’ll feel better in a few days.
The key for now is to chew lots of gum so my sharp tongue doesn’t fly out of my mouth and slash whoever is unfortunate enough to get under my skin.
This afternoon I’m doing a site visit with some old friends in the security community. Wish them luck. 😉
Here was the question, as posed to me on Facebook:
“Bill, do you think prednisone had anything to do with your OCD? You are the second person I know to have Crohn’s and depression, I have taken the drug in the past and it definitely messed with me mentally.”
The short answer is that I don’t know. I’m not a doctor and I can’t speculate on scientific questions I know nothing about. All I have are scientifically unsupported theories based on personal experience. I’m willing to explore the question from that perspective.
Of this I have no doubt:
Prednisone had brutal side effects that linger to this day. It damaged my vision, making glasses necessary at all times. It sparked migraines that still come and go. It gave me mood swings that have never really left me. And it had plenty to do with the binge-eating habit that has hounded me as an adult.
Prednisone does an excellent job of cooling down a Chron’s flare up. If not for the drug, chances are pretty good I wouldn’t be here right now. More than once the disease got so bad the doctor’s were talking about removing my colon and tossing it in the trash. Each time, the medication brought me back from the brink.
But there was a heavy price — literally and figuratively.
The drug quadrupled my appetite, which was already in overdrive because of the food restrictions imposed upon me during times of illness.
It corrupted my relationship with food forever.
But I can’t say it was the cause of me developing OCD. There are many reasons I developed the disorder. Prednisone may have had a role, but I’ll never know for sure.
But that’s fine with me.
At this point, it doesn’t matter how I got it. I have it, and the best I can do is manage it with all my coping tools, with extra help from Prozac and the 12 Steps of Recovery, which I use to control the addictive behaviors.
You’ve heard the sorry old tale of the addict who cleaned up from the addiction that made his life unmanageable, only to pick up three more vices. That’s me. Take the surprise Erin got when opening my work bag.
Mood music:
She was cleaning and found earphones that belonged to me. She unzipped a front compartment in my laptop bag to put them away and had the unpleasant shock of discovering where I’d been hiding all my smoking products.
Everyone knows I like cigars. What people don’t know — and what Erin discovered — is that I’ve been sneaking cigarettes, too. Two packs were hidden in the pocket.
She took it better than I expected. I probably deserved a far harsher reaction. But she knows how addictions make someone like me tick. Instead, she talked me through the things I might be able to do to replace this crutch.
I agreed to stop smoking immediately — the cigarettes and cigars. And you know what? I’m pissed off right now. Not at Erin, but at my lot in life. I can’t seem to do anything in moderation, and so I have to put everything down.
I resent not being able to have vices. It makes me want to put my fist through a wall.
It’s nobody’s fault. It’s simply a problem with how my brain ticks. This is just the latest in a big shift I resolved to take three years ago when my binge eating compulsion brought me to my knees.
When you give up your worst addiction, you go looking for crutches to help you through. In the first year of not binge eating, I used alcohol as a crutch. Then I put that down, too. I picked up cigars, and, more recently, cigarettes.
If you think that’s pathetic, that’s because it is.
As I write this, I’m on day three without my smokes. I’m pretty fucking irritable. Nicotine cravings have nothing to do with it.
Like I said, I resent having to give up all my vices.
Coffee is all that’s left.
If you think I’m giving that up, you’re out of your fucking mind.
My initial reaction to that was irritation. Too fucking bad, I thought. So sorry I allowed Mr. Sunshine to take a sabbatical. How inconvenient for everyone.
After a few minutes of that, I realized I was being a prick.
People simply care about me and they are worried.
Thank you for caring. Sorry for being a prick.
I guess it has been a long, rough road. I’ve been back and forth to the rehab center each week, and it’s an hour from my home and my office. Seeing Dad in the wheelchair, plainly depressed, has had a rub-off depressive effect. I know how hellish the inactivity is for him, because he passed that trait down to me.
Meantime, I’m keeping it full steam ahead with my own work. And it’s taking all I have to keep from sliding back into binging.
Naturally, trying not to binge means I’ve picked up another destructive crutch. I put that crutch down on Friday, and while it’s the right thing to do, I’m resentful as Hell about it. More on that tomorrow.
The bottom line is that I am not a sunny guy right now. But don’t worry. I’ll be fine. This is life, and despite all the toil and trauma, I am a lot better at this shit than I used to be.
In the meantime, thanks for being patient and caring. I do appreciate it.
Former Warrant singer Jani Lane was found dead last night in a Comfort Inn in L.A. at age 47. It’s unclear at this point what the cause is, but his death is making me re-think a few things about my attitude.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/cSdvxocgbAg
I remember when Warrant came out in the late 1980s. I couldn’t stand them. Sure, they sounded good. Crunchy guitar sound. Good vocals. But it all sounded so fake. I thought “Cherry Pie” was the dumbest song I’d ever heard. Again, the sound was good. But the lyrics were stupid and the feel wasn’t real to me. Admittedly, though, I liked “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and hated the fact that I liked it.
The band also came out at a point in the late 80s when every band was starting to sound and look alike. I decided I was too cool for it all.
I did what a lot of other metal heads did in the early 90s when the metal scene imploded under the weight of all the copycats: I started listening to so-called grunge: Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains. My own band, Skeptic Slang, sounded a lot like the grunge we were listening to, with hints of old-school metal here and there.
I still listen to all those bands, but in recent years I’ve returned to my 80s hard rock roots. Warrant has not been part of my playlist.
I’ve seen interviews with Jani Lane over the years where he lamented writing “Cherry Pie” and took a crack at reality TV. He looked and sounded like a troubled man in those clips, and he did indeed wrestle some demons. He was recently sentenced to serve 120 days in jail after pleading no contest to a 2010 DUI charge — his second in two years.
As for his death, no one really knows what happened. We can speculate, but I won’t. I’ll just wait for the follow-up news reports.
Instead, I’m examining my own reaction to his death and what it says about me and human nature in general.
When I first saw the news an hour ago, I felt bad. I went on Youtube and started playing Warrant songs. I was thinking that they sounded much better with age, then I had a “what the fuck?” moment.
Here I am, thinking these songs sound pretty good. And I’m sneering at all the nasty comments people make about being glad he’s dead. Then I catch myself, because in my self-righteous anger I quickly remember that I used to say things about how bands like this sucked and needed to be destroyed. I’m pretty sure I’ve joked from time to time about how it would be nice for bands like this to go down in a flaming plane wreck.
That’s not nice. It’s certainly not a good fit with my Christian beliefs. But there it is.
It’s funny how we get when musicians and celebrities we don’t think much of die. I found it amusing that people were tearing Michael Jackson down in the last decade of his life because of his alleged pedophilia, yet, when he died, everyone magically forgot that stuff and acted as if Jesus Himself had been crucified again.
When Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx opined about Jackson being a “child rapist” and I wrote about it, the comments section of this blog descended into all kinds of name calling. Most of it came from people who love Michael Jackson’s music.
More then one person noted that Jackson was never found guilty of such things. When he was still alive, people were not defending him so ardently.
We do this stuff a lot when famous, tarnished figures die. We play up the good stuff they did and conveniently forget the bad stuff. Or, at least, we minimize the latter as some unfortunate little interlude between the acts of greatness. Richard Nixon comes to mind.
And now we’re remembering the good stuff Jani Lane contributed to the world in his 47 years.
You know what? That’s how it should be.
Everyone deserves a shot at redemption, and making music I personally didn’t care for doesn’t mean there was something wrong with Jani Lane. He wrote the music he wanted to write. It spoke to him, and it spoke to others, even if I wasn’t one of them.
The band’s success in the late 80s and early 90s happened because the music made a lot of kids happy, just as Motley Crue’s “Shout At The Devil” and Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” gave me moments of happiness during a troubled youth.
We all have our tastes and opinions. We all tend to think our opinions are better than everyone else’s.
That’s part of the human condition. We don’t just do it to celebrities. We do it to everyone. We are judgmental savages sometimes.
Rest in Peace, Jani Lane. I apologize for any of the bad stuff I said about you over the years.
Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over (insert addiction) — that our lives had become unmanageable.
Mood music:
I am powerless. Or, you could say, my addictions have absolute power over me. Even when sober and abstinent, they are right behind me, doing push-ups, waiting for my one reckless moment of weakness.
Now that I know this, life is a lot better. I can do what I must to be well and I’m a lot happier and healthier for it.
The problem with addicts is that we’re experts in the art of denial. It takes many years of damage before we are ready to even consider that we have absolutely no control over our lives.
When we really hit bottom and spend some time there, things become so desperate that we become willing to admit how weak we are. How pathetically powerless we are. When that happens, we arrive at the first of the 12 Steps of Recovery. Simply put, admitting there’s a problem is the first step in dealing with the problem.
My most destructive addiction involves binge eating. That is followed by other addictions: to alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and, to a lesser extent, pills.
I’ve often lamented that mine is the most uncool of addictions. We need food to survive, after all. This is certainly not what most of society would accept as a “normal” addiction.
Still, it makes perfect sense that food would be my problem.
As a kid sick with Chron’s Disease, 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.
One I admitted I was without power over all this insanity, I was ready to do something about it.
That’s when 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.
My odds of success are better than ever.
But before I could get there, I had to unravel the wiring in my head, learn to live with a mental disorder and then make a bold change in my way of eating.
It’s not cool at all. If you’re laughing because I let the food drag me to such a state, I don’t blame you. In a way, it is funny. Crazy people do stupid things. And stupid is often funny.
