My mind has been raw all week for a multitude of reasons. Mostly, it’s a case of winter getting to me. The sun is setting later each day, which is good for me, but the cold and snow have done their damage and plunged me into a depression.
I’ve pushed myself hard with work and at home I’ve been a slug. I forget to do simple things and I just want to collapse on the couch. I sigh a lot and swear even more.
It’s not fair to my family. But I can’t seem to help it.
On a positive note, I’ve kept my recovery intact. That’s real progress, because this kind of mindset used to make me binge my brains out. Those days were so much worse.
That doesn’t make me satisfied about my current state of mind.
On one hand, I’m excited for the coming trip. I love the fast and furious writing and the copious networking that gets done. I love seeing friends I usually only see on Twitter and Facebook.
On the other hand, I feel terrible about abandoning my family for four days.
The depression hit me later this time than it usually does in winter. The happy lamp, proper Prozac dosage and program of recovery have served me well. But I’m starting to realize I’ll probably never be able to go an entire winter without feeling this way.
Tough shit. That’s my cross to carry, and I just have to keep getting better at managing the load without complaint and without becoming useless to those around me.
I was going to continue my tirade about people in AA and OA who take the program too far, but I find myself thinking about friends who are hurting. It’s the kind of hurt that’s justified. But after awhile, it stops being helpful.
Hurt can be a helpful thing at the beginning of a traumatic experience. In a whacked sort of way, it’s a survival tool. If you’ve lost someone or your marriage is crumbling, for example, the hurt is actually like a bizarre shot of morphine and adrenaline.
It keeps you numb enough to be around people, and just self-righteousness enough to walk and talk.
In a sick sort of way, hurt helped me survive during some of the worst moments of my life, including the death of Michael, Sean and Peter. Hurt also fueled my survival instincts when my parents split up, my mother was being abusive and my emotional health was coming apart early last decade.
Henry Rollins actually brought up this phenomena in one of his spoken-word performances, where he talks about the kid hiding in his black-walled room, writing on black paper and yelling, “Here in my room… I reign supreme!”
Teenagers love to feel hurt. It gives them a reason to not listen to their parents or teachers. It gives them something to talk about. I’m not trying to belittle the real, crippling pain kids have to endure all too often. I’m talking about the typical emotions of a rebellious teen. Somewhere in there, there are usually hurt feelings to rage over. Rage isn’t an energy we should hang onto. But sometimes, rageful energy is better than no energy at all.
The hurt that springs from losing someone you love is a lot more complicated and hits you like a knife to the gut, and it takes much longer to fade.
Hell, I’m still not totally over the deaths of my brother and two friends.
I bring all this up because an old friend from the neighborhood I grew up in expressed the hurt she still feels over the death of a dear friend who lost a blistering battle with drug addiction.
She thinks she could have done more to help her friend, and that feeling of failure hurts deep. The word she used was “sting.”
I felt the same way after one friend’s suicide, but at some point I had to drop the hurt. It’s easier said than done. I guess you could say I was able to pull it off my neck and lock it in a metal box under the stairs in the garage.
When the hurt weighs you down so you can’t move, it’s gotta come off.
For me, therapy and a recovery program for mental illness and addiction helped a lot, though my answers aren’t necessarily going to work for the next person.
This old friend lives on the other side of the country and appears to be doing very well for herself. I’m glad to see that.
Hopefully, she’ll wake up someday and realize she probably couldn’t have done much more to save her friend; that addiction has a way of closing a person off from the help friends and family try to offer.
And when that person gives up in the crushing onrush of depression, there’s nothing anyone can do.
Seeing The Neighborhoods perform at the Joe “Zippo” Kelley benefit last night reminded me of my old friend Danny Waters. He shared in many of the adventures — good and bad — of my youth.
Mood music:
It was Sean Marley who introduced me to Dan. It was 1986 and I dropped in on the Marley residence (2 doors down from me) on a Sunday morning. Sean and Dan had been up late the night before, drinking. Dan had a mop of blond hair and I couldn’t see his eyes.
The two were delighting in the sounds of a Randy Rhoads solo on a live bootleg one of them had acquired. That would be the first of many times the three of us would hang out like brothers. I was the little brother, and sometimes they treated me like it, laughing over and mocking something stupid I said. I gave them plenty of fodder.
At one point, Dan was living in a house at the very end of Pines Road, a street directly across from my house that ended in a boat ramp leading down to the water. I’d go there and check out his guitars. The man could play.
He was brutally shy, though, and he would be there one minute and gone the next. He also had an almost super-human ability to consume massive amounts of beer without dropping dead, though one time, after downing 20 beers, he practically spent the next 24 hours chanting, “I’m not well.”
The very first time I drank myself into a puking spree was in his apartment next the the Northgate shopping plaza on Squire Road. I sat on his bathroom floor for a long time counting the tiles. That somehow made me feel better.
I would get loaded in his company many times after that. I learned to hold my liquor, and the drinking parties would often alternate between his apartment (he later moved to an apartment off Revere Beach Parkway) and my basement in the Point of Pines.
Dan was good friends with Zane, a kid I wrote about in a previous post. Zane jumped off the top of a building in 1988. It would not be the last time Dan lost a close friend to suicide.
I always felt like Dan was more Sean’s friend than mine, and to an extent that’s true. Those two were joined at the hip between the mid 1980s and 1990s. I never would have met Dan or found common ground with him if not for the friend we had in common.
Dan and Sean also played a lot of guitar together. They eventually let me join in as singer. We wrote a few songs, but I can’t really remember them.
As the years progressed, Dan and I would hang out without Sean quite often. The three of us still hung out all the time, but at one point Sean was in an intense (some would say Sid-and-Nancy-like) relationship with a girl who looked like that singer from The Cure. The two fought as often as they took breaths, and their fights would usually start at one of the parties at my place or Dan’s.
Times where it was just me and Dan included a 1988 show at The Channel headlined by The Neighborhoods, the 1991 Lollapalooza festival with Rollins Band, Body Count, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction, and low-key nights in his apartment, drinking and watching late-night TV.
One night I freaked out because I consumed two beers and an entire stick of marijuana by myself in the concrete storage room beneath the front patio of my basement hangout.
The fellow who gave it to me was about 500 pounds and wore a black trenchcoat, even during the summer. He died Valentine’s Day 2009 of a heart attack. I lost touch with him as I became focused on career and learned after his death that he had led an admirable life of aiding the mentally disabled. Anyway, I was freaking out because, in the midst of lying on my bed enjoying the high, I suddenly got the idea that I just might have a heart attack. That’s one of my earlier memories of an anxiety attack.
I called Dan.
He drove over and found me pacing up and down the driveway in a blue-green polka-dotted bathrobe I used to own. It was well after midnight.
He took me to Kelly’s Roast Beef and bought me a box of chicken wings. The binge-eating addiction was well under way, and I downed the whole thing in seconds. That calmed me down. I settled into a state of high where I’d let out a “heh heh” every few seconds.
Kelly’s was always a favorite place for me to binge eat away my troubles. It was as good as any drug or liquor store.
Sean got a kick out of the retelling later.
Later, Dan and Sean got into a scrape and I failed to return the favor and come to their aid. It was the fall of 1991, around the time that photo of the three of us above was taken. We were at Kelly’s and as we started walking back we noticed 10 punks were following us.
I freaked and walked ahead, ducking into what was then a bar-restaurant called The Driftwood. I looked back to see the punks circling Sean and Dan, kicking the shit out of both. I had a bartender call the cops and went back outside. By then it was all over. Dan had a black eye. The two limped their way back to the Pines. I stayed a few paces in front of them.
If I could relive that moment, I would have stayed with them and taken my beating, too. It would have made me a better friend. I’d also enjoy retelling the story today, because I wouldn’t look so pathetic in the rear-view mirror.
In 1996, I was living back in The Point of Pines and me, Dan and Sean would walk to Kelly’s every Sunday morning for coffee.
They would usually walk a few paces ahead and talk about a Skinny Puppy song or whatever else I wasn’t paying attention to because I was starting a deep descent into a dark place marked by fear, anxiety and vicious binge eating. Those days, Sunday was for getting myself into a state of anxiety and depression about the upcoming work week. The job was fine. I wasn’t.
Sean was in much worse shape than I was. I don’t know how aware Dan was of just how bad he was getting, but I was all but oblivious. I was too locked inside my head to see what was happening.
Thank God Sean had Joy. She did everything she could to bring him out of his deepening depression. He took his life anyway, but I love her all the more just for being his wife and shouldering a burden I was too self-absorbed to share at the time.
The day Sean died, I spent much of the afternoon frantically trying to reach Dan. When I finally got him on the phone, he collapsed into a pile of rubble on the other end. It’s not a stretch to say that was one of the worst moments of my life. I knew how tight they were, and Dan was more of a loner than I was, which meant he wouldn’t have as much of a support system as I had. I alienated my support system, of course. But that’s a story for another post.
Dan and I continued the Sunday walks into the spring of 1997. We always bought three cups of coffee. We always left the third cup on the beach wall for Sean.
That spring, Dan dropped out of my world. I wouldn’t reconnect with him until 2009 on Facebook. I spent all the time in between thinking he hated me for not doing enough on my end to help Sean. I eventually learned I was just being stupid.
Today Dan is doing just fine. He got married, had two beautiful daughters and lives in Texas.
He plays in a band called Three Kinds of People.
I miss him, and know we’ll never hang out like we used to. But when I think of how we both managed to survive a lot of ugly shit, it makes me happy.
Two old friends have a son who’s been through the meat grinder too many times in his 12 short years. Some think he should settle in for a lesser life than he’s capable of. I say bullshit.
My young friend’s name is Mark. He lives in a city on the North Shore of Massachusetts. That’s all I’ll reveal about his identity. But his parents will know this is for him and will hopefully share this with him:
Dear Mark,
Because of the mental and physical challenges you face, some grownups think you should set your sites low. They think you’re not cut out for college or a career as, say, a scientist.
They mean well. They know what you’ve been through and they don’t want you to get hurt. But if I’ve learned anything in my own journey through hell, it’s that you can’t always hide from hurt and disappointment. Life is hard. But it’s supposed to be.
It’s how we find out what we’re truly made of.
Item:Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a pampered child whose world view changed when he was crippled by polio in 1921. A lot of people would have given up right there, but he rebuilt his life, became a mentor to other polio victims and was the longest-serving president in history, dealing with war and economic calamity that could have broken the spirit of healthier leaders. Through it all, he carried on an outward cheeriness that put people at ease.
When I was a kid there were plenty of roadblocks. I missed a lot of school because of Crohn’s Disease and lost a brother when I was only a year older than you are now. My studies suffered, and I was put in a lot of the classes where they put the problem children.
Things worked out, though. I got married and had two kids that are much smarter than I was at that age. I have a job that’s allowed me to do a lot of excellent things (excellent to me, anyway).
You shouldn’t settle for anything less than the life you want.
Item:Abraham Lincoln suffered crippling depression his whole life and lost two of his four children, all in a time before anti-depressants were around. He led the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery.
There will be setbacks and those can be discouraging, but you CAN survive them with the right perspective.
Item: The drummer from Def Leppard had an arm ripped off in a car wreck. A lot of people thought his career was over. Twenty-six years later, he’s still drumming.
So just keep trying, and never give up on yourself. Nobody can hold you back. Only YOU can hold yourself back.
One more thing: Having a good life doesn’t mean you get to live without the bad stuff from time to time.
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.
Twenty-seven years ago today, my brother, Michael S. Brenner, died of an asthma attack at age 17. I can’t blame his death on the demons I’d battle in the years that followed. But it left deep scars all the same.
Mood music:
I think the end came for him at 8:20 p.m., though I could be mistaken.
That day a trend began where I would befriend people a few years older than me. A couple of them would become best friends and die prematurely themselves. It was also the day that sparked a lifelong fear of loss.
It’s been so long since Michael was with us that it’s sometimes hard to remember the exact features of his face. But here’s what I do remember:
We fought a lot. One New Year’s Eve about 31 years ago, when the family was out at a restaurant, he said something to piss me off and I picked up the fork beside me and chucked it at him. Various family members have insisted over the years that it was a steak knife, but I’m pretty sure it was a fork. Another time we were in the back of my father’s van and he said something to raise my hackles. I flipped him the middle finger. He grabbed the finger and snapped the bone.
We were also both sick much of the time. He had his asthma attacks, which frequently got so bad he would be hospitalized. I had my Chron’s Disease and was often hospitalized myself. It must have been terrible for our parents. I know it was, but had to become a parent myself before I could truly appreciate what they went through.
He lifted weights at a gym down the street from our house that was torn down years ago to make way for new developments. If not for the asthma, he would have been in perfect shape. He certainly had the muscles.
He was going to be a plumber. That’s what he went to school for, anyway. During one of his hospital stays, he got pissed at one of the nurses. He somehow got a hold of some of his plumbing tools and switched the pipes in the bathroom sink so hot water would come out when you selected cold.
He was always there for a family member in trouble. If I was being bullied, he often came to the rescue. And when he did, he was fierce.
That last day was perfect for the most part. I remember a sun-kissed winter day. I was immature for a 13-year-old and remember reveling in the toys I got on Christmas two weeks before. The tree in my mother’s house was still up, though the decorations had been removed.
My mother and I think my sister took off to run an errand. My father’s house was only a five-minute walk from my mother’s, and when they drove by, an ambulance was outside the house. I’m told Michael walked to the ambulance himself, and he was rushed to Lynn Hospital, which was torn down long ago to make way for a Super Stop & Shop. I sometimes wonder if he died where the deli counter now stands or if it was where the cereal is now kept.
While I was at my mother’s waiting to hear from someone, a movie was on in which a congressional candidate played by Dudley Moore befriended a woman played by Mary Tyler Moore and her terminally ill daughter, who was about 13. At the end of the movie, the young girl succumbs to her cancer on a train.
That freaked me out, and I went to my mother’s room to bury my head in a pillow. To this day, I refuse to watch that movie.
It was in that room that my mother, father and sister informed me my brother was dead.
I spent the remainder of my teenage years trying to be him. I befriended his friends. I enrolled at his gym, Fitness World. That lasted about a week.
I started listening to his records. Def Leppard was a favorite of his, hence the mood music above.
I even wore his leather jacket for a time, even though it was about three sizes too tight. I couldn’t zip the thing. I looked like an idiot wearing it, but I didn’t care. It was part of him, and I was hell-bent on taking over his persona.
But then there could only be one Michael Brenner. I eventually grew up and realized that. Then I spent a bunch of years trying to be just like Michael’s friend and our neighbor, Sean Marley. But there was only one Sean Marley. Unfortunately, people tend to remember him for how he died rather than how he lived.
I eventually had to learn how to become my own person. I did it, but it was pretty fucking messy. There’s only one Bill Brenner, and he can be a scary sight to behold.
The years have softened the pain, though I still have some regrets.
I regret that I often have trouble remembering what his face looked like. Fortunately, I found this photo while rummaging through my father’s warehouse last summer:
It’s a good image, but it’s in black and white. I still have trouble picturing him in color.
I miss him, and find it strange that he was just a kid himself when he died. He seemed so much older to me at the time. To a 13-year-old, he was older and wiser.
At the wake of a friend’s mom right after Thanksgiving, I found myself thinking of Michael and others who died too soon.
In a bizarre game of mental math, I started thinking about how long it took me to bounce back from each death. It’s a stupid game to play, because there’s no science or arithmetic that applies. The death of a grandparent is part of the natural order of things. The death of a sibling or close friend, not so much. Unless, perhaps, everyone is well into their senior years. Even then, you can’t put a measuring stick on grief.
But I tried doing it anyway.
With Michael and Sean, I’m not sure I ever really recovered. To this day, I’m cleaning up from the long cycles of depression and addiction that followed me through the years.
Along the way, good things happened to fill in the black holes. I married the love of my life. We had two beautiful children. My career hummed along nicely for the most part.
As you might expect, I failed to emerge with a general timeline of the grieving process. It turns out we’re not supposed to know about such things. That would be cheating.
I do know that it gets better.
Understanding that as I do, I have the following advice for those trying to get through the grieving process:
–Take a moment to appreciate what’s STILL around you. Your spouse. Your kids. Your friends. If the death you just suffered should teach you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them, and, for goodness sake:
–Don’t sit around looking at people you love and worrying yourself into an anxiety attack over the fact that God could take them from you at any moment. God holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
–Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
–Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than doing service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m helping out in the church food pantry or going to Overeater’s Anonymous meetings and guiding addicts who ask for my help, I’m always reminded that my own life could be much worse. Or, to put it another way, I’m reminded how my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
Like I said: This isn’t a science.
It’s just what I’ve learned from my own walk through the valley of darkness.
I’ve learned that life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely.
A friend asked that question yesterday. I’ve certainly been accused of being too hard on myself before. My step-mother reads this blog and told me I should give myself a break. Steve Lambert, former editor of The Eagle-Tribune, said I was too hard on myself when I wrote the “One of My Biggest Regrets” post.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:0OXjHxbrmrkpvqudvzWlDR]
The short answer is that sometimes I am, most of the time I’m not.
When I was at my absolute worst, I knew my soul was in deep trouble and I hated myself for not having the will to do something about it. I call it my long road through self-hatred. Back then I would be hard on myself by wallowing in the corner or, more accurately, in my car, where I would go on many, many binges.
If I had the ability to cry it out back then, I would have probably binged less. But I’ve never been good at crying, so I’d let the rage fill me and I’d do my best to destroy myself. It’s not that I wanted to die. It’s that I hated and wanted to punish myself. Giving in to my addictions was a lot like taking a thick leather belt and lashing myself a few hundred times.
That’s what happens when mental illness and addiction burn wild with no management. You end up being hard on yourself, and nothing good comes of it. In fact, it just makes things worse.
Today I’m hard on myself in a different way. I come on here and write about what a shithead I was the day before, and in the process I fix my course and work on doing better. That’s much more healthy.
I was feeling stupid yesterday because I purchased a new pair of boots and a pair of pants on Amazon.com. I needed the boots, but not the pants. It was a splurge with money we don’t necessarily have. Call it no big deal, but I know better. Sometimes, when I’m not letting the food addiction or wine guzzling control me, I let the spending addiction control me. Or the Internet addiction.
That’s when I have to remind myself that I’m being a jerk. And then I try to do better.
A lot of changes to my program of sobriety and abstinence are under way, and I feel like I’m running on nuclear power. Last night was my first Big Book Step Study meeting, which is quite different from the speaker-discussion meetings I’m used to. It only took me a few seconds to realize why I had to be there.
Mood music:
A lot of times when someone sobers up or stops binge eating, it’s a white-knuckle experience.
It’s not just because you’re missing your junk and the momentary feeling it gives you. It’s because the hole in your soul — the thing that drove you to addiction in the first place — is still there. If you don’t deal with that hole, you might stay clean for a year or two. But sooner or later, you’ll fall right back into the old, insidious patterns.
Speaker-discussion meetings are a vital tool for the initial clean-up. You can’t start working on the hole until you stop the addictive behavior. It did me a ton of good and I still need to go to those events, but it’s no longer enough. The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous is all about dealing with the hole, and studying it more closely is a must if I’m going to stay clean.
Studying the pages will also pull me deeper into the meaning of working the 12 Steps.
I also have a new sponsor starting this week. Instead of me simply telling him my plan of eating for the day, we’ll talk about the deeper issues at the heart of sobriety and abstinence. I’m looking forward to it.
My life is full of Blessings. This program is the one that allowed for everything else.
I’m glad I’m starting to take it more seriously.
A guy at last night’s meeting noted that there are two types of addicts:
–The type who is doomed and DOESN’T KNOW IT, and
–The type that’s doomed and KNOWS IT.
The latter type has a better chance of escaping that fate, because in knowing you’re headed for disaster you might be willing to take action. I’m glad I was that type.
I had an advantage: Several years of brutal therapy for OCD. The tools I had to develop to manage that are a lot like those you need to clean up. And it was all about identifying the hole in my soul.
It’s still there, but I think it’s getting smaller all the time.
Cleaning out the trunk of my car yesterday, I came across a stack of cassette tapes from a period in my life when I was so desperate I’d spend stupid sums of money on anything to remove my fear and anxiety.
These tapes were part of a program that cost me some $450. Each tape, sold by the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety, is designed to help people learn the skills to defeat anxiety and depression without medication.
I ordered the so-called free trial in 2006 after seeing all the late-night TV infomercials with Lucinda Bassett, mastermind of the program. I worked the program diligently. But overall, the program wasn’t even close to what I needed.
I called the Midwest Center before the free trial period was up to tell them I’d be sending the tapes and DVDs back. No go, an impatient phone rep told me. They had already charged the card number I gave them. No refund.
Meanwhile, I received a package of vitamins in the mail with ingredients designed to reduce stress and balance the brain chemistry. At first it struck me as odd, since the concept on paper was a lot like other pills the center typically railed against. They weren’t anti-depressant-caliber pills like Prozac. They were just vitamins. I saw them for what they were: an expensive placebo.
I never asked for the vitamins. Yet there they were, and they were charging me extra for something I didn’t order or want.
The phone reps basically told me too bad, they had already charged my card and there were no refunds. I should have read the fine print.
So, the program to attack anxiety and depression simply made those things rage within me even worse than before.
At some point, I dumped the tapes in a box in my trunk, forgot about them and moved on. I found more lasting tools to manage my OCD and the resulting fear, anxiety and depression, and that was the end of it.
When I found the tapes, I chucked them in the trash along with the rest of the rubbish I was clearing out of the car.
When I came back inside, I found myself looking up articles about the Midwest Center and found some surprising items.
Still, I couldn’t help but find it sadly, painfully ironic that THIS GUY would end his own life.
Here’s something I found that was written shortly after Bassett’s death. The author is STEVE SALERNO, author/essayist, musician, teacher, and blogger. (Check out his SHAMblog) He wrote:
This past June 7 (2008), 53-year-old David Bassett walked onto a California beach and ended his life with a shotgun. This took place not far from the home he shared with his wife, Lucinda. If the names sound vaguely familiar, it’s because David and Lucinda Bassett were principals in the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety.Not a few of those who left their thoughts were refugees from the Center’s in-house discussion forum, where their critical remarks had been expunged or edited; a few claimed to have been banned altogether. Collectively, they seemed to feel they’d been abused, if not conned. The gist was that the Center had used misleading claims and credentials to charge them a lot of money for programs that didn’t work (or at least hadn’t worked for them). To be fair, a number of Center apologists also weighed in, and for a while we had a spirited, thought-provoking give-and-take going.A prospective customer might reasonably ask: If the Center’s programs can’t even prevent one of the Center’s owners from killing himself…?
I also found a site known as the Complaint Board, where a fellow by the name of Alfred logged his complaints about the Bassett empire:
Lucinda and David Bassett flood late night infomercial TV with their overpriced Attacking Anxiety and Depression schlock program. They advertise a ’30-day risk free trial’ for just $9.95, the so called ‘shipping/Handling charge’ (inflated as any typical infomercial ripoff), the hook being that the S/H charge is all you pay for the 30 day ‘trial period’.Then when you aren’t magically cured by this collection of cassette tape in 30 days, send it back with no obligation to pay the $75.00 a month that they bill your credit card for the next 6-7 months. Do not believe this CRAP for a minute. They start ripping you off immediately with the inflated shipping charge and then start removing your money 30 days from the ORDER DATE which typically is 10-14 days BEFORE the 30 day trial period STARTS. By the time the ’30 day trial’ is over they have already taken the first FULL payment of $75.00 (+ tax) by 2 WEEKS, even when you decide you don’t want to buy this craprogram. One of Lucy’s top-secret cures is to ‘Drink 8 glasses of water everyday’ and ‘quit smoking and drinking’ DUH!! Gee for such wisdom it only costs 450 bucks! If these amateur Pyschobees had a grain of credibility would they operate so Don Lapre-like? It will take weeks to get your refund (if ever) A wiser approach would be to work for the Bassett’s. Then you can buy the ‘program’ for $20 and save yourself $425 just 90% off the ripoff price they charge everyone else.
That sounded a lot like my experiences with the program.
To be fair, this program probably has worked for people. I’ve seen plenty of positive reviews over the years. It’s just that there is no one size fits all. What works for one won’t work for another. It’s the same with medication. What worked for me won’t necessarily work for the next guy or gal.
There’s always that roll of the dice.
I just don’t think it should cost someone $450 to handle the dice.
Here’s the real problem, though:
You can tell a person to read the fine print, but a depressed, anxious person isn’t thinking about the fine print when they’re up at 3 a.m. watching those infomercials.
A person like that is desperate, and when they see a TV program telling them how easily the program will work in their lives, they’re not thinking about the fine print. They hear the words “free trial” and dash for the phone with credit card in hand. They figure the credit card number is just a placeholder. They don’t expect to actually be charged. Sure, they’re engaged in stupid thinking. But when you’re mentally and emotionally sick, stupid thinking is a way of life.
That’s what this program is: A money-sucker that preys on desperate people.
The lesson here is that you can’t go for anything packaged as a quick fix.
Nothing — and I mean NOTHING — will cure you in 15 weeks or even 30.
Getting truly well is a process that takes years. And you are never cured.
This isn’t a post about New Years resolutions. I don’t need a holiday to make changes in my life. IT IS about lessons I’ve learned in an effort to make resolutions.
A big fistful of goodness slammed down on me, too. Me, Erin and the kids took two drives to the DC area and back. During the first trip we got a private tour of the White House West Wing, seeing the Oval Office, Rose Garden and press briefing room. I got to meet up with good friends in San Francisco, Toronto, New York and Chicago, among other places. My recovery was tested daily, but I held it together.
Making New Year’s resolutions used to be a compulsive activity for me. I was always so desperate for something better that I fiendishly and feverishly made lists of what I would do in the coming year:
I used to go crazy about all that stuff, all to no avail.
By the end of the first week of a new year, these resolutions were cast aside. The eating resolution went first, then the bit about worrying about what others think.
Thing is, I eventually tackled everything on the list. But it was a much longer process than the instant-reset fixes we have a habit of pursuing at the start of every new year.
As far as I’m concerned, there is no reset button. The journey begins when you’re born and ends when you die. Case closed.
In that spirit, I promise to KEEP AT the following:
–I will keep drinking coffee and savoring the occasional cigar. I put down the food and have sworn off alcohol. We all have a collection of addictions, and my approach is to hold firm against those that cause me the most dysfunction. Coffee suits me just fine, and the cigars are infrequent.
–I will keep listening to metal music, because it keeps me sane.
Yesterday’s post on children and divorce hit a tender nerve for a lot of you, so I feel a few clarifications are in order.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/kJHFaU0lpZ8
Here’s what yesterday’s post WAS NOT:
–A rebuke of single parents. I know a lot of single parents who bust their ass and give their children a lot more love than some of the married couples I’ve met in my day.
–A plea for people in troubled marriages to stay together for the sake of the kids. Actually, as one reader correctly pointed out, it can be more damaging to a child if his/her parents hate each other but stay together anyway. If that’s not a recipe for addiction, abuse and a passing of demons to the next generation, I don’t know what is.
–A suggestion that you’re a lousy parent if you can’t keep your marriage together. It takes two people to make a marriage succeed or fail. And sometimes things beyond your control can damage a marriage. That doesn’t make you a less loving parent. And sometimes, you find someone else to marry who turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the family. Bottom line: A bad marriage can’t go on. My parents were smart to divorce in 1980. A lot of bad things followed, but things surely would have been worse had they stayed together.
It WAS:
–A reminder that kids pick up on a troubled house immediately and they need constant love and reassurance.
–A big “fuck you” to parents who use their kids as pawns to hurt each other. Doing so just makes you mean, and your child is probably better off without you around.
I mentioned two troubled marriages yesterday, but I have to be honest and tell you that I was particularly fixated on the second case I mentioned.
I also need to admit — again — that I’m only seeing one side of the drama.
But since I’m keeping the names of the players anonymous, I’m just going to roll with the one-sided version of events and say a few things:
1.) It is NEVER, ever OK to tell the other parent you took the child one place for the weekend when you were actually someplace else. It’s one thing if you’re shielding the kid from someone abusive. It’s quite another thing if that parent is not abusive and you’re just doing it to be spiteful. Parents need to know where their kids are at all times because we live in a dangerous world. You lied about a child’s whereabouts, and that makes you a punk. And, contrary to what you may think, it does matter.
2.) When it comes to deciding who gets the child and when, it’s about what’s best for the kid, not you.
3.) Not living at home doesn’t free you of certain responsibilities, like helping to pay the bills. You may not live there anymore, but the kid still does. And like I said, it’s about the child, not you.
If this sounds like a rant that veers too close to a temper tantrum, I make no apologies. The scars from my childhood fueled an adulthood ripped apart by mental illness and addiction.
In the final analysis I made a lot of bad decisions and most of what I’ve been through can’t be blamed on everyone else.
And the difference is that in my case, everyone else did their best, even if some things took a sour turn.
When I see a parent who isn’t trying, I get angry. If a child is dragged through the mud when the parents are trying to do it right, just think of the damage done when the parents aren’t trying.
You’re not trying, my friend. And for now, I wish I had more middle fingers for you than the two God gave me.
