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Be Yourself, Even If People Hate You For It

The more I talk to fellow recovering addicts and emotional defects, the more I realize we have one big thing in common: We want to please everyone and be loved for it. Unfortunately, it’s an impossible goal that can lead to crushing disappointment.

Mood music:

It’s an especially stinging problem in the age of social networking, where some people have learned to measure their worth by how many “friends” and “followers” they have. Facebook in particular is full of peevers who get picky about what you post even as they post things that annoy others. It’s an atmosphere tailor made for resentments.

Whenever I go to an OA, AA or 12-Step Big Book study meeting, someone always brings up their need to have everyone like them. The reason they became an addict was because that hunger could never be satisfied.

I wrote about my own experience with this in a post called “Why Being a People Pleaser Is Dumb.”

I wanted desperately to make every boss happy, and I did succeed for awhile. But in doing so I damaged myself to the core and came within inches of an emotional breakdown. It caused me to work 80 hours a week, waking up each morning scared to death that I would fall short or fail altogether. I wanted to make every family member happy. It didn’t work, because you can never keep everyone happy when strong personalities clash.

In the face of constant let-downs, I binged on everything I could get my hands on and spent most waking moments resenting the fuck out of people who didn’t embrace me for who I am.

I’d like to tell you I’ve learned to shrug it off and let people go when they didn’t want to subscribe to my personality. But the truth is that I still struggle with it.

When a family member gives me the cold shoulder, it affects me. Never mind that I’ve cold-shouldered many a family member in my day. When I discover someone on Facebook has unfriended me, I go on a hunt to find out who it was and why. Never mind all the people I’ve disconnected from for annoying me.

With this disease, hypocrisy is a constant companion.

As conflicted as I remain, I am coming around to the idea that I have to be myself, even if some people hate me for it. It’s a slow and messy process, but you could also say there’s a survival instinct kicking in.

I’m a devout Catholic who wants to be accepted by everyone in my church community. But my gallows humor and metal-head ways are going to bubble to the surface and I can’t expect everyone to like it.

On the other side of the blade, I can’t expect all my friends in the music and writing worlds to share my views on faith.

I also can’t expect everyone to approve of everything I write here. By extension, I can’t expect everyone to want all the content I insist on pushing through my social networking feeds.

All I can do is be myself and hope that the better parts of me surface more often than the unsavory parts.

Being someone else is simply too hard. Besides, in the end we get judged on who we were, not on who we pretended to be.

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Three Years (Almost) Clean

Three years ago yesterday, I went on my last binge. Actually, it was more like reaching the end of a final, two-month long binge. The abstinent and sober life hasn’t been perfect by any stretch. But it beats the hell out of where I was at the start.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/IKpEoRlcHfA

Compulsive overeating was my biggest, most destructive addiction. It led to health problems that only got worse with time. I became a waste of space and fell short as a husband, dad and friend. I used to think about food all the time — where to get it, when to binge it and how to hide the aftermath.

People think of drugs and alcohol as addictive things, followed by gambling, pornography and the Internet. Food, on the other hand, that’s something we need to survive. If you’re a binge eater, it’s not an addiction, the thinking goes. You’re just a glutton who eats too much. The truth is we are ALL addicts. Some of us need chocolate, others need to watch every episode of their favorite TV show.

This year has probably been the most challenging for me since ditching the flour and sugar. There have been stress factors that didn’t exist before, including my father’s multiple strokes. Last month I decided to restart my program at square one, with a new sponsor and a tightening up of my food plan.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment my recovery started getting wobbly and I started getting sloppy. I don’t know if it’s fully accurate to call this a relapse, but was pretty damn close.

Twice in as many weeks, I forgot to pack an abstinent lunch before leaving the house. When you’re recovery is on sturdy ground, that’s a mistake you NEVER make.

I was skipping too many 12-Step/OA meetings and I stopped calling my sponsor.

One morning I woke up, had a what-the-fuck moment and decided to kickstart things. Hence the “almost” in today’s title.

Last year, my sister Shira asked me what the difference was between someone with a binge-eating addiction and someone who just eats too much without thinking.

It’s a fair question, and a wise one. Here’s how I see it:

Though we all have our addictions, there’s a line someone with an overpowering habit crosses. On the other side of that line, life becomes unmanageable. The fix becomes more important than anything else. You spend ALL your time thinking about how to get it. You burn through money you don’t have and become crafty at lying about it to everyone around you, including the people you love most.

In short, the need for a fix takes your entire brain hostage.

I guess that if I were just a casual overeater, I’d be overweight but life would hum along pretty much as it’s supposed to.

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s what it means to me.

When you realize you need to deal with it, the 12 Steps of Recovery is the map to take you there. It’s very simple. The first steps are the admission that you have a problem that has made life unmanageable, and that you can’t bring it under control without help from a higher power.

There are the basic tools: Having a food plan (mine is devoid of flour and sugar and I put almost everything I eat on a scale). There’s the sponsor, writing, meetings, etc. But along the way, you learn things about yourself and grow in ways well beyond what you expected.

My recovery has lead to many healed relationships and a clearheadedness I never knew before. I’ve been able to reach out to people I’ve hurt in the past and set things right.

It isn’t all roses. The first few months of abstinence were not sober days. I used a lot of wine as a crutch to keep from eating. Eventually I put that down too, because I saw where it was taking me and it scared me. And I’ll be honest: I don’t really miss the food anymore, but I DO miss the wine. Sobriety can be an awkward thing.

I’ve also learned that being clean doesn’t make you a better person. I’ve seen people in AA and OA that will make your skin crawl, and they’ve been clean a long time. Sobriety doesn’t mean you instantly learn how to behave like a good human being. Some people find they were better at that when they had a glass in their hand. Me? I have a runaway ego and some days I still have a bad attitude.

I’m a work in progress. A lot of work.

But I’ll take the me of today over the me of three years ago.

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Steve Clark Lost His Battle But Helped Me With Mine

I’ve been listening to a ton of Def Leppard this week. It started when I caught two documentaries on the making of “Pyromania” and “Hysteria” on Youtube. I’m remembering what this band did for me during my troubled teenage years.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/DOxHmzO1498

One of the big points in both documentaries is that those albums wouldn’t have been the classics they became without the late guitarist Steve Clark. When we think of this band, we tend to think of Rich Allen, who showed us all how to overcome adversity when a severed arm failed to stop him.

Steve Clark is remembered for losing the fight against his demons. Alcohol took over his life and destroyed him. I remember the day he died in 1991. My friend Denise, an equally passionate Def Leppard fan, called me with the news as if she were reporting a death among our friends.

Looking at these two documentaries, I have a renewed appreciation for the songwriting he brought to the band. Without question, I can credit his riffs for helping to keep me from going over the edge in my formative years.

It’s sad how the demons took advantage of his gentle nature. As Rick Allen says in the “Hysteria” documentary, “Personal situations took him to a place that was very dark. I think there was a part of him that didn’t want to be here.”

I’m glad he got to help make those first four Def Leppard albums before the demons got him, because I don’t know what would have happened to me without those albums to sooth me through the death of a brother (also a Def Leppard fan, by the way) and the alienation I often felt in junior high and high school. I could have lost myself in drugs and alcohol. Instead I listened to Def Leppard. I listened to a lot of hard rock, but they were one of my favorites next to Motley Crue.

My favorite album is actually the second one to come out after his death, “Retroactive.” Though he didn’t get to play on it, his presence is all over those songs, most of which he helped write. It’s a collection of songs that were first released as B-sides or were meant for Hysteria but didn’t make the final cut.

His riffs are as clear as if he were playing them himself. I’ll end with two songs off that album that really capture his essence and simply thank him for the music he gave me when I needed it most.

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Finish What You Started

Funny thing about people who suffer from serious mental illness: They tend to make all these big plans but never really follow through with anything.

I don’t fault them. For one thing, they have an illness. Also, I used to be just like them.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:37A5wFomo4EVz5tGInAynI]

Watching the start-stop-start-thud behavior of a friend is reminding me of what I used to do. My friend, who I won’t name, always has some big plans afoot. There was the plan to go half way around the world to film a documentary that was downgraded to a book project when the better thing to do in the face of technical difficulties was to collapse in despair and quit. The book project never got off the ground.

There was the plan to relocate to another state to teach that was somehow downgraded to various odd jobs that ended quickly over petty disagreements.

Then there was a return home to do more educational work that ended after less than three months.

There are plenty of reasons why these things happen. Sometimes a person is simply plagued by all kinds of bad luck. But when mental illness is at work, all of life’s curve balls become overwhelming, seemingly insurmountable calamities.

In college my great passion was to be a great journalist. Every class I took and every side activity I did was devoted to that goal. I rose far and fast in my first reporting and editing jobs, and the ultimate goal was to be a top editor for a daily newspaper. I got the night editor job at The Eagle-Tribune and that quickly turned into an assistant editor job for the paper’s New Hampshire editions.

Then my fear and anxiety started to surface. I had a difficult boss. The hours were brutal. Whenever a really big news story was unfolding I’d start to feel cold panic, even though I wasn’t one of the reporter’s running to the scene. A couple of my projects ran into trouble, and I started to seriously believe that I was no longer capable of coming up with a good idea and following through on it.

I lasted another couple years in the job but did nothing of any real importance. I started to dream up the next big chapter of my life: A writing job of some sort in the healthcare field. I was so overwhelmed with my disease that I felt like I’d be making a hell of a dent in the world by working for a hospital or some other health organization. Jobs in that industry proved hard to find, so I seriously started considering jobs that had nothing to do with any of my dreams and goals. I thought about joining the U.S. Postal service and actively looked into what it would take.

A week later I was talking to my father and step-mother about returning to the family business. Surely, I thought, I could do great things there with all the management skills I had learned as an editor. I could make it more than the obscure job I remembered throughout high school and college by starting up a couple charities. Surely, Dad would pay me to spend all my time on that.

That grand plan lasted about two weeks. My father brought me back down to reality by telling me he didn’t have any open positions. Thank God he threw cold water on me. Otherwise, I might have gone backwards instead of forward.

Things ultimately worked out. I got a job writing about cybersecurity — a topic I’m passionate about to this day — and I’ve kept at it. The reason, I think, is that I finally reached a point a few months into that job where I knew I had some deep issues I had to deal with. My emotional and spiritual growth has run a parallel course with my career and it has made all the difference.

I’m told that I was always a stubborn kid who would decided to do something and stick with it hell or high water until I reached the prize. When I wanted to lose weight I would focus in on it like a laser beam and throw myself into diet and exercise until I was thin. I got there by some unhealthy means, mind you. But that’s another story. The bottom line is that I did what I felt I had to do to get where I wanted to be.

That stubborn resolve definitely served me well early in my career as I clawed my way into the news business. And it served me well when I decided to start doing something about the problem that was eventually diagnosed as OCD.

But the fear and anxiety certainly sent me off course several times along the way.

I was lucky, because I’ve usually regained my footing just in time, or smarter people would stop me from making dumb moves, like going back to the family business.

Some are not as lucky. They set goals that look insurmountable the second fatigue and frustration set in. I really feel for them.

I hope my friend is able to snap out of it.

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Midwest Center For Fraud And Bullshit: Epilogue

When I wrote about spending $450 on the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety program designed to help people defeat anxiety and depression, I had no idea that it would strike nerves the way it has.

The post, written on Jan. 2, 2011, is easily the biggest traffic generator of this blog on a daily basis. Some days it gets so many page views that I’m left dumbfounded.

It has also gotten by far the most comments of any post. Some of the comments defend the program. The vast majority are from people who had equally bad experiences.

Since comments are always tacked to the bottom of a post, they are often overlooked. I’m writing this follow up specifically so you will go back and read what people have had to say.

To be clear, I’m not on a crusade against the Midwest Center. I had a bad experience. Others say the program helped them tremendously. Everything in this blog is a retelling of my own experiences and lessons. The posts are laced with my opinion. But you can never really learn all you need to know off of one person’s point of view. I’m just one guy.

As my friend Joy noted last time I saw her: “Everyone has a story or ten.”

Very true.

I’ll end here and direct you to that post about a time when I was so desperate I’d spend stupid sums of money on anything to remove my fear and anxiety.

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Entourage Disease

Entourage Disease: A disease where the sufferer surrounds him or herself with people as a shield against painful encounters.

Mood music:

The sufferer will show up in a hospital room, at a family party or a funeral surrounded by up to six people. Usually the number is about three. If it’s a hospital visit and the room is really small, the sufferer will be brave and only come in with one hanger on.

There are drugs to mitigate the pain, particularly alcohol, food and drugs. But they all have side effects and usually are not worth the trouble.

As with any disease, there is collateral damage. The family of a cancer patient, for example, may experience pain from watching their loved one suffer.

The third party suffering with entourage disease is usually a feeling of claustrophobia and the discomfort that comes from a lack of personal space. The people who comprise the sufferer’s entourage have a special talent for getting in the personal zone of everyone else in the room.

The ultimate cure for this disease is self confidence, forgiveness and faith.

Unfortunately, those things can be hard to come by.

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Narcissism Is A Fatal Illness

Call it what you will: Narcissism. Selfishness. Ego. We’re all a little full of ourselves. But people like me are worse than others. It’s a shameful thing, but it’s the truth.

People with addictive tendencies tend to be the most selfish souls alive.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:76Je5Wklky23mVoxiRszcN]

And that’s why we have Step 3 in the 12 Steps of Recovery: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

This is all about doing something about the addict’s overwhelming desire to control everything. It also applies to people suffering from a variety of mental illnesses, including OCD, the one that plagues me.

At a Big Book step study meeting I went to last night, the speaker talked about this in language I won’t soon forget. He described himself as a “rebel without guts,” the guy who talks tough but lacks the balls to BE tough. He also described selfishness as a terminal illness.

Selfishness hasn’t killed me yet. But I’ve lost friends and family over it along the way.

It all comes back to the need to control everything and everyone around me. I want everything to go my way, and when it doesn’t my world comes crashing down. If the day doesn’t unfold exactly as I planned it, the day is ruined. Someone took my parking space? The restaurant didn’t have the ranch dressing I planned to have on my salad? That was it.

That’s how it is with everything when you’re a control freak. The obsession with control and self-fulfillment also leaves you feeling adrift and anxious when things are going relatively well for you.

That’s how it used to be with me, anyway.

People like us crave control like a junkie craves a shot of smack to the arm. It grabs us by the nose and drags us down the road until our emotions are raw and bleeding.

That’s why I used to be such an asshole at The Eagle-Tribune. Every story I edited then went through three more editors and then to the page designer. Along the way, everyone after me had to take a whack at it. I’d hover over the page designers because it was the closest thing I had to control. Ultimate control would have meant laying out the pages myself. That would have been a stupid thing to do, mind you. I couldn’t lay out a news page to save my life.

When I was the assistant news editor for the paper’s New Hampshire editions, I was out a week when my son Sean was born. I came in one night to catch up on e-mail and saw the message where my boss announced my son’s birth. In it, he joked that I probably stood over the doctor and told him how to deliver the baby.

I wanted to punch him. I saw red. Because I knew how close it cut to the truth.

The control freak has emerged in a variety of other ways over the years. Getting stuck in traffic would send me into a rage because all I could do is sit and wait. Getting on a plane filled me with dread because I could only sit there and wait. There was the fear that the plane might crash. But the bigger problem for me was that i was at the mercy of the pilots, the air traffic and the weather. I had no control over the schedule, and that incensed me.

I still get this way sometimes, but I’ve tried hard to take Step 3 to heart, turning my will over to God and trusting Him to push me in the right direction.

When I do that, I never fail. It always works out.

People think surrender means quit. That’s as far from the truth as you can get.

For people like me, you don’t start to experience victory until you surrender. It sounds crazy, but I’ve lived it.

Part 4 in a series. Here are the previous posts:

My Name Is Bill. I’m Addicted To Stuff

I Am Absolutely Powerless

No Faith, No Recovery. Period

chickennarcissisttest

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Why Is This Blog So Dark?

People occasionally ask me why this blog covers so much dark ground. Let’s see if I can explain:

My life has been much like any typical run. We all go through our sad and tragic episodes, with a lot of good times and beautiful experiences mixed in. There are happy moments and terrible moments. Some get swallowed up by the darkness and descend into a life of crime, addiction and death. Others find a way out of the darkness and learn to find joy in all the things they were once too blind to notice.

Mood music:

I write a lot about my darker episodes because there has always been a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve learned to look at adversity as an opportunity to always get somewhere better. I also believe in the saying: “When you find yourself in hell, the only way out of it is through it.”

I write a lot about my addictive behavior so you can understand just how joyful it is when you find recovery.

I write a lot about what I went through at the hands of OCD, fear and anxiety because I found a way through the worst of it and believe I need to share where I’ve been so those who are in their own personal hell can see the way to some peace.

As awesome as my life is today, I still find myself veering into episodes of darkness. I’m not a special case. We all go through that sort of thing. This blog being part diary, I need to write down the bad as well as the good because by documenting it I can put things in perspective and push myself out of the painful periods.

I always try to end a darker post on a positive note. If you skim, you’ll miss it.

I’ve been through some rough patches lately and it has shown through here. But I never stay in the rough patch for long, because I keep moving and learning. Many of you help me do it, and I’m grateful.

I try to be like Leo, the chief of staff in the TV series The West Wing. The character was a raging alcoholic and pill popper who got through it and kept living a life of public service. This clip pretty much sums up the purpose of this blog:

 I don’t know my way out of every dark situation, but by sharing stories of the struggles that ended well, I’m hopefully helping a few of you.
Thanks for reading.
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Be Yourself, And Let The Chips Fall Wherever

If someone doesn’t like you, too bad for them.

Mood music:

From the good folks at “Choose Happiness” — something to keep in mind when people get all snotty and hypocritical about who you are and what you do:

You are a person, not a Facebook status. Other peoples "like" is not needed. Everyone isn't going to like you and that's ok. Just make sure YOU like you...
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Paranoia Was My Destroyer

There’s a particularly insidious side of my OCD that I have to fight hard to contain, because it’s the thing most likely to destroy me. This is a story about paranoia.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/_WJ6FbcWYRU

Let’s start with a definition from Wikipedia:

Paranoia is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself.

Anxiety and fear once played a major role in how my OCD manifested itself. I would become so full of fear about people, places and things that I would see conspiracies against me around every corner.

My time as night editor of The Eagle-Tribune is a perfect example.

Working the night shift and then waking up after only a couple hours of sleep each night to spend time with the children eroded my sanity to the point where I was absolutely convinced that the day staff was conspiring against me.

I’d sit at home working the scenarios over and over in my head. I was certain that anything that went wrong with the morning deadline cycle would be blamed on me because of something I may or may not have done the night before. That turned into a constant feeling that a conspiracy was afoot to get me fired.

I would think about it day and night, ruining God knows how many precious moments with my wife and kids. I was right there with them at home or on family vacations. But mentally I was somewhere far away and dark.

Going further back to my late teens and early 20s, I would grow obsessed about what people thought of me: how I looked, how I talked and walked. I lost a lot of sleep worrying about something I took as a certainty: that people were talking about me behind my back, making fun of my mannerisms.

My mind would spin and spin until I was too much of a wreck to do anything but sleep.

I haven’t suffered with this stuff nearly as much in recent years because of all the work I’ve done to get my OCD under control. I’ve faced a lot of fears and killed them in the process. That has made me far less anxious, which in turn has made me far less paranoid.

But once in awhile, especially if my sleep is off, some of it will nudge its way back into my head. Not fear or anxiety, but a nagging feeling that somewhere people are talking about me, complaining about something I may have said or did.

I have to be on constant alert for those moments. You could say I have to be paranoid of the paranoia.

I’ve found some valuable weapons in the fight against this demon:

–I try most nights to be in bed as soon as the kids are in bed, so I can read or just fall asleep. When I get enough sleep, a lot of the wreckage in my head is cleared out.

–I hang on tight to a diet devoid of flour and sugar. The main reason is to control a binge-eating disorder. But as a pleasant byproduct, the absence of these things from my body has also had a clarifying effect.

–I’m always working at prayer. I don’t do it nearly as much as I should, but when I do, God finds a way to set my mind at ease.

–I make time to talk to fellow addicts and mental illness sufferers because when I help them sort out their emotions, I have less time to drown in my own mental juices. Besides, a lot of people do the same for me and giving it back is the least I can do. This is a double-edged sword though, because when you let enough people vent their emotions on you, the load can get heavy indeed.

–I have regular visits with my therapist, though I often suck at remembering when my appointments are.

What I’ve just mapped out isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s very easy not to do the things I know I should do. In fact, that’s happened more in recent months.

But it’s like any kind of self improvement. You don’t have to perfect everything all at once. You can take baby steps and get to where you need to be.

The paranoia, like one’s addictions, will always be doing push-ups in the parking lot.

Sometimes, it will sneak up behind you and kick your ass.

But if you kick its ass more than it kicks yours, you’ll be winning the war.