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The Rewards and Risk of Service: A Cautionary Tale

Service is a major tool of recovery. But it can also be dangerous.

Mood music for this post: “Serve the Servants” by Nirvana:

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Last night was one of service. I drove down to Salem State College to talk to graduating seniors about their portfolios and resumes. It was the least I could do, after all that college did for my career.

It was energizing to talk to the students, who are full of hope and ambition, not yet jaded by the throat-cutting ways of corporate America. And it was good to see Judi Puritz Cook, Ellen Golub and Robert Brown. Ellen was adviser to the Salem State Log while I was there. We were among her most trouble-making, rebellious charges. I’m proud of this.

After that I dropped by the home of old friends. Their son is going through a lot of the turmoil I went through as a kid, and I’m trying to help him out by teaching him some of the tools I’ve developed for the OCD and addictive behavior.

On the way home I spent some phone time with someone I’m sponsoring in OA.

By 5 a.m. I was back online, following up with students I didn’t get a chance to sit with last night.

I treasure service to others. It’s an important part of my Faith and my recovery. It’s odd that I feel this way, since I used to prefer isolating myself in a dark room, watching TV and shoving pint after pint of ice cream, canned pasta and other junk down my throat and occasionally taking breaks to smoke cigarettes.

Service, in fact, is one of the main tools of recovery in OA. It’s not just about helping other people. It’s about building and improving relationships, putting the stresses of your life in perspective and realizing your troubles are never as bad as you think. You’re not just helping someone who is down on their luck. They are helping you back, though they don’t realize it most of the time.

Sponsorship is a good example.

By sponsoring others, it forces you to work harder at your own recovery. My sponsor helps me every day, but I also take time to hear how she’s doing and offer advice.

It’s all about realizing we’re all in this together.

But there’s some caution to deliver here.

Service is a tricky tool that can explode in your face if not used responsibly.

The risk for me is that I take on too much. I can’t say no when there’s volunteering to do at church or someone in OA needs my time. Being a control freak doesn’t help.

I also have a job that keeps me busy, and doing good work on the job — writing articles that help security professionals do their jobs better and helping out colleagues when they need it — is also essential to my well-being.

The work thing used to be about pleasing the bosses. Then I woke up one day and realized it’s stupid trying to be a people pleaser.

The point, though, is that if I do a great job of volunteering all the time, the work can suffer and then someone who deserves my best gets screwed. Fortunately, I’m a lot better at this balancing act than I used to be.

The danger with sponsorship and helping friends in need is that you as a human being can only do so much. My instinct is to drop in and make their lives better in an instant. But it doesn’t work that way. I have a busy family life with two small boys. They must always come first, which means I have to take care not to get consumed by someone else’s troubles.

I have to remember that I can offer up what I know, but at the end of the day only the folks I’m trying to help can truly pull themselves out of the hole.

With sponsorship and giving students career advice there’s another danger: By trying to help too many people, I end up not helping any of them very much.

All perils aside, it’s great to be in the mental place I’m at right now. You all deserve thanks for that, because your service has helped me. Even though you probably don’t realize you were doing anything.

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Easter Morning

No real message about overcoming OCD, depression and addiction. I’ll get back to that tomorrow. Today, just a quick Happy Easter to you all.

All is well here. We experienced a brilliant Easter Vigil Mass last night.

Not even my starting in on the wrong reading could have spoiled it. I helped out with this year’s RCIA group, so seeing them Baptized was particularly special for me.

The kids got up at 5:30 a.m. all excited for their Easter baskets. We sent them back to bed for another hour.

Above: drawings Sean made for us for Easter.

Later we take the kids to Mass, then hang out before going to the in-laws for dinner. Somewhere in there, I’ll have a cigar (my Lenten sacrifice).

Tomorrow I head to California for another security event.

No anxiety. No fear. Just Blessings all around.

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An OCD Diaries Primer

A collection of posts that form the back story of this blog.

Mood music:

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The Long History of OCD

An OCD Christmas. The first entry, where I give an overview of how I got to crazy and found my way to sane.

The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill. How the drug Prednisone brought me to the brink, and how Prozac was part of my salvation.

The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom. Think you have troubles at work? You should see what people who worked with me went through.

The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story. About the wife who saved my life in many ways.

Snowpocalypse and the Fear of Loss. The author remembers a time when fear of loss would cripple his mental capacities, and explains how he got over it — mostly.

The Ego OCD Built. The author admits to having an ego that sometimes swells beyond acceptable levels and that OCD is fuel for the fire. Go ahead. Laugh at him.

Fear Factor. The author describes years of living in a cell built by fear, how he broke free and why there’s no turning back.

Prozac Winter. The author discovers that winter makes his depression worse and that there’s a purely scientific explanation — and solution.

Have Fun with Your Therapist. Mental-illness sufferers often avoid therapists because the stigma around these “shrinks” is as thick as that of the disease. The author is here to explain why you shouldn’t fear them.

The Engine. To really understand how mental illness happens, let’s compare the brain to a machine.

 

Rest Redefined. The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Outing Myself. The author on why he chose to “out” himself despite what other people might think.

Why Being a People Pleaser is Dumb. The author used to try very hard to please everybody and was hurt badly in the process. Here’s how he broke free and kept his soul intact.

The Addiction and the Damage Done

The Most Uncool Addiction. In this installment, the author opens up about the binge-eating disorder he tried to hide for years — and how he managed to bring it under control.

Edge of a Relapse. The author comes dangerously close to a relapse, but lives to fight another day.

The 12 Steps of Christmas. The author reviews the 12 Steps of Recovery and takes a personal inventory.

How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano. The author admits that when an obsessive-compulsive person puts down the addiction that’s most self-destructive, a few smaller addictions rise up to fill the void. But what happens when the money runs out?

Regulating Addictive Food: A Lesson in Futility. As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he weigh in on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.

The Liar’s Disease. The author reveals an uncomfortable truth about addicts like himself: We tend to have trouble telling the truth.

Portable Recovery. Though addiction will follow the junkie anywhere in the world, the author has discovered that recovery is just as portable.

Revere (Experiences with Addiction, Depression and Loss During The Younger Years)

Bridge Rats and Schoolyard Bullies. The author reviews the imperfections of childhood relationships in search of all his OCD triggers. Along the way, old bullies become friends and he realizes he was pretty damn stupid back then.

Lost Brothers. How the death of an older brother shaped the Hell that arrived later.

Marley and Me. The author describes the second older brother whose death hit harder than that of the first.

The Third Brother. Remembering Peter Sugarman, another adopted brother who died too early — but not before teaching the author some important lessons about life.

Revere Revisited.

Lessons from Dad. The author has learned some surprising lessons from Dad on how to control one’s mental demons.

The Basement. A photo from the old days in Revere spark some vivid flashbacks.

Addicted to Feeling Good. To kick off Lent, the author reflects on some of his dumber quests to feel good.

The lasting Impact of Crohn’s Disease. The author has lived most of his life with Crohn’s Disease and has developed a few quirks as a result.

The Tire and the Footlocker. The author opens up an old footlocker under the stairs and finds himself back in that old Revere basement.

Child of  Metal

How Metal Saved Me. Why Heavy Metal music became a critical OCD coping tool.

Insanity to Recovery in 8 Songs or Less. The author shares some videos that together make a bitchin’ soundtrack for those who wrestle with mental illness and addiction. The first four cover the darkness. The next four cover the light.

Rockit Records Revisited. The author has mentioned Metal music as one of his most important coping tools for OCD and related disorders. Here’s a look at the year he got one of the best therapy sessions ever, simply by working in a cramped little record store.

Metal to Stick in Your Mental Microwave.

Man of God

The Better Angels of My Nature. Why I let Christ in my life.

The Rat in the Church Pew. The author has written much about his Faith as a key to overcoming mental illness. But as this post illustrates, he still has a long way to go in his spiritual development.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. The author goes to Church and comes away with a strange feeling.

Running from Sin, Running With Scissors. The author writes an open letter to the RCIA Class of 2010 about Faith as a journey, not a destination. He warns that addiction, rage and other bad behavior won’t disappear the second water is dropped over their heads.

Forgiveness is a Bitch. Seeking and giving forgiveness is essential for someone in recovery. But it’s often seen as a green light for more abuse.

Pain in the Lent. The author gives a progress report on the Lenten sacrifices. It aint pretty.


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Rest Re-defined

The author finds that he gets the most relaxation from the things he once feared the most.

Mood music 

A strange thing happened to me on the way to recovery: I started finding peace and relaxation in the very things that used to fill me with fear and spark anxiety attacks. [See Fear Factor]

It used to be that relaxing meant holing myself up in the bedroom watching endless episodes of Star Trek. I watched a lot of the news, too, which instead of relaxing me would send my brain into an endless spin of worry about things happening at the far corners of the world.

Lying on the couch all weekend — sleeping for a lot of it — was relaxation.

Then Sunday night would arrive and I’d go into a deep depression about the tasks that awaited me the next day at work.

Writing — the very thing I earned a living from (and still do) — filled me with dread. Oh, I loved being a journalist even back then, but I was always in fear of not getting a story perfect. I would sit on a story for hours; writing, re-writing, polishing and reading it aloud multiple times to make sure it “sounded” perfect.

It drove my co-workers nuts. [See The Crazy-Ass Guy in the Newsroom]

If I had to make a business trip, the heart would pound. I’d obsess about the travel itself and whether I would actually make it there alive. Conferences filled me with dread. What if I didn’t manage to cover every piece of news coming from the event?

Oh, and when writing, it had to be absolutely silent around me. Noise would interrupt the gears in my mind — except for the sound of my voice when reading my articles aloud.

I would go crazy about getting the kids to bed by 7:30 so I could lie comatose in front of the TV. If my wife wanted to talk instead, rage would build inside, though I would try not to show it. I sucked at hiding it, though, and in my own passive-aggressive way, she knew she wasn’t getting through. And yet she stuck around anyway. (See: The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story]

I’m not sure when things changed. But here’s what relaxation and peace mean to me now:

–Family time. Of course, I’ve always craved being with my wife and children more than anything else. But it used to be that I wanted us all sitting around the house doing nothing. Now I love experiencing things together. Trips with Erin to Campobello Island off New Brunswick, Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire or Newport, R.I. for the Newport Folk Festival. Trips with kids in tow to Battleship Cove, Old Sturbridge Village, The N.E. Aquarium, The Museum of Science. I always cherished my time with them. Now I cherish it more. A lot more.

— Writing. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the reason for this, but writing is relaxing now. Other than when I’m with my wife and kids, writing is when I’m happiest. And I no longer re-read my stuff over and over again. I decided that’s what editors are for. Sure, I’m an editor. But every editor needs an editor. And no, I don’t read ’em back to myself anymore.

–Writing WITH music. In another bizarre twist, I went from needing quiet while writing to needing music. The louder the better. Henry Rollins. Motley Crue. Metallica. Thin Lizzy. Cheap Trick. All perfect writing music.

–Travel. Instead of fearing travel, I now relish it, though I don’t like being away from my family for too long. I start to miss them the second I hit the road. They’re on my mind the whole time I’m away. But I love to go places, see things, experience cities outside my own comfortable Bostonian walls. Last year alone, I visited Chicago twice, Washington DC twice, and went to San Francisco, Nevada, Arizona and New York.

One of the DC trips was in an RV with a group of IT security guys. That was the trip back from the Shmoocon security conference. It’s a 12-hour ride and it’s cramped. But I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in my industry.

Thursday, I leave on the RV for the trip down to DC for Shmoocon 2010. I’ll do a lot of writing for work this weekend. But I’m going to have a blast doing it. I’ll get impatient to be home by Sunday afternoon. I’ll miss my family. But I’ll be a better journalist for making the trip.

Wherever I go, I always try to carve out time to see things, especially items of historical significance. Especially in DC.

I’m determined to take the family to DC this year. There are logistics and financial realities to work out, but it’s going to happen.

I don’t spend much time wondering how I came to enjoy what I once feared. I know the answers.

Erin and the boys teach me something every day about living, whether it’s Erin showing me courage by quitting a steady job to try and make her own business work or Duncan, the youngest son, convincing his older, more skittish brother to go with him on a camping trip with the grandparents because “It’ll be fun, Seaney!” That was a couple years ago. Since then, Sean, who has overcome a lot of fears himself and made his Dad proud, relishes those trips as much as Duncan does.

But above all — and the family examples are a huge part of this — I think the transformation came with my conversion to the Catholic Faith. My bringing God into my life, everything has changed for the better. That includes my concept of rest.

To me, rest is not about lying down and shutting off. It’s about living to the best of your ability. When that living gets scary, I put my trust in God. And that makes everything come together.

Make no mistake: I still have a lot of work to do on these things. But I’m glad to be making the journey.

As Henry Rollins once sang:

No such thing as free time. No such thing as downtime. There’s only lifetime. It’s time to shine.

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Selfish Bastard

The author has found that service is an excellent tool for OCD management. Simply put, it forces him to stop being a selfish bastard.

In OA, those of us in recovery from our compulsive eating disorders rely on a set of tools that go hand in hand with the 12 Steps. There’s the plan of eating, writing, sponsorship, the telephone and literature. There’s anonymity. And there’s service to others.

The plan of eating is what’s most necessary for me, but I think my favorite tool is service.

I’ve been doing a lot of service of late. Last month and then this morning, I qualified at an OA meeting, which means I led the meeting and, as part of that, stood in front of people and shared the story of what I used to be like, what happened to make me seek help for my addiction, and what I’m like now.

Tonight, I’ll take the kids to a dinner in the basement of our church to celebrate the start of Catholic Schools Week, where I’ll help with the cleanup afterward.

I thrive on these things for one simple reason: It forces me to step out of that selfish little world where addicts live.

Here’s a fact about addicts: We are among the most selfish people on the planet. Or, as Nikki Sixx says in the final track on Sixx A.M.’s soundtrack for The Heroin Diaries: “You know addicts. It’s all about us, right?” That selfishness usually leads us to do stupid things that make us feel shame. In the midst of that shame, we lie.

That sort of behavior can overwhelm us, no matter how much we want to be better people. That’s why the tools of recovery are so important. They force us out of the hole. In the process, the people around us play an active role.

When I do service, the people I may be trying to help are helping me as well. If it’s through OA, everyone is supporting each other. It’s the same at church, be it through school activities or actively participating in Mass. That’s why I do lectoring. Actively participating in Mass helps me to pay attention to what’s going on instead of sitting there locked inside my head.

The battle with selfishness is an ongoing, brutal thing. But through service, I’m getting a little better each day — bit by bit.

I hope.

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Marley and Me

The author describes the second older brother whose death hit harder than that of the first.

Mood music:

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It doesn’t seem right that a friend’s death would hit me harder and fuel my insanity more than the death of a biological brother. But that’s what happened.

This is the story of Sean Marley, who introduced me to metal music, taught me to love life, and whose death was one of the cattle prods for my writing this blog.

I had known Sean for as long as I could remember. He lived two doors down from me on the Lynnway in Revere, Mass. He was always hanging around with my older brother, which is one of the reasons we didn’t hit it off at first.

Friends of older siblings often pick on the younger siblings. I’ve done it.

Sean was quiet and scholarly. By the early 1980s he was starting to grow his hair long and wore those skinny black leather ties when he had to suit up.

On Jan. 7, 1984 — the day my older brother died — my relationship with Sean began to change. Quickly. I’d like to believe we were both leaning on each other to get through the grief. But the truth of it is that it was just me leaning on him.

He tolerated it. He started introducing me to Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and other hard-boiled music. I think he enjoyed having someone younger around to influence.

As the 1980s progressed, a deep, genuine friendship blossomed. He had indeed become another older brother. I grew my hair long. I started listening to all the heavy metal I could get my hands on. Good thing, too. That music was an outlet for all my teenage rage, keeping me from acting on that rage in ways that almost certainly would have landed me in jail.

We did everything together: Drank, got high, went on road trips, including one to California in 1991 where we flew into San Francisco, rented a car and drove around the entire state for 10 days, sleeping and eating in the car.

This was before I became self aware that I had a problem with obsessive-compulsive behavior, fear and anxiety. But the fear was evident on that trip. I was afraid to go to clubs at night for fear we might get mugged. When we drove over the Bay Bridge I was terrified that an earthquake MIGHT strike and the bridge would collapse from beneath us.

I occupied the entire basement apartment of my father’s house, and we had a lot of wild parties there. Sean was a constant presence. His friends became my friends. His cousin became my cousin. I still feel that way about these people today. They are back in my life through Facebook, and I’m grateful for it.

He was a deadly serious student at Salem State College, and his dedication to his studies inspired me to choose Salem State as well. Good thing, too. That’s where I met my wife.

In 1994, things started to go wrong for Sean. He became paranoid and depressed. He tried to hurt himself more than once. I didn’t know how to react to it.

That fall, he got married and I was best man. I wanted to be the greatest best man ever. But I was so self-absorbed at the time that there was no way I could effectively be there for someone else, even him.

Over the next two years, his depression came and went. He was hospitalized with it a couple times. By the summer of 1996, he was darker and more paranoid than I’d ever seen him. But I was so busy binge eating and worrying about my career that I didn’t pay enough attention.

In November 1996, I got a call at work from my mother. She had driven by Sean’s house and saw police cars and ambulances and all kinds of commotion on the front lawn. I called his sister and she put his wife on the phone. She informed me he was dead. By his own hand.

I spent a lot of the next 10 years angry at him for doing such a thing. He had everything going for him. And he chose to end it. I didn’t understand it, even as I was descending into my own brand of craziness.

The reason his death hit harder than my own brother’s is complicated. I think it’s because I had been burned for the second time, which is always worse than the first. It’s probably that I was an adult the second time and had a greater awareness of circumstances behind his death. Or it’s probably just the nature of the ending.

It took my own struggle with depression and OCD years later to truly grasp what he had gone through. I wasn’t there for him, but by sharing my own struggles I can hopefully be there for others.

Life has been good in the years since his death. I married a wonderful woman, followed a career path that’s produced many Blessings, found God and had two precious children.

We named our first son Sean Michael Brenner. And with that, I guess I was able to move on.

My son is every bit as smart as the man he was named for. His wit tickles me every day. And he’s caring beyond his years.

You can bet your ass I’ll be watching him like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t become too much like the man he’s named after.

Continued in “Death of a Second Sibling“

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http://www.theocddiaries.com/2009/12/22/ocd-diaries-12-22-the-ego-ocd-built/
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Growing Pains

Despite all the progress I’ve made in managing OCD, there are still times where I forget to use my skills — momentarily, at least.

This morning is a good example.

I woke up depressed. Two hours later I was angry. Maybe I was getting tired of the winter outside my window. Maybe I was just plain tired. I was snapping at Erin and the children. I realized I was letting the crazy side loose and went upstairs to the bedroom because I didn’t want to lash out at my family for things that weren’t really their fault. Even if it were, lashing out is not my preferred way to deal with it.

The kids came into the room one at a time to see if they could do anything to make me feel better. Then Erin came in and we talked through it.

I feel no need to explain what exactly triggered my inner demon this morning, though through talking it over with Erin I figured it out. The important thing to point out here is that I can now see how I am managing things better than before.

1. I retreated to the bedroom instead of blowing up at those I love.

2. Instead of keeping it inside, I talked to Erin about what I was really feeling. She deserves much of the credit for bringing me to a place where I can purge the darker emotions.

3. I told everyone involved that I was sorry.

Now I feel better, and I can move on and have a better rest of the day.

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Scaring the People in Your Life

The author is hearing from a lot of old friends shocked to read about his past. Thing is, basket cases are good at hiding their craziness in public.

To most of my family, the stories I tell in previous posts aren’t all that surprising. They were there. My in-laws may not have known everything that was going on back in the day, but they saw my quirks.

Mood music:

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Even at work, my quirks were easy to see. It surfaced in the form of my over-intensity on deadline; my habit of hovering over page designers; my overbearing nature toward the reporters I managed on the night shift.

But I was much better at keeping it together — on the surface, at least — around most friends back then.

Which brings me to another truth about people with mental illness and addictions: We do most of our suffering and self destructing in private.

There’s a scene in a “West Wing” episode where Leo McGarry, recovering alcoholic and chief of staff to the fictional President Bartlet, tells someone: “I don’t get drunk in front of people, I get drunk alone.” I ate alone. And I ran through my darkest, most obsessive-compulsive thinking alone. Most of the time, the two went hand in hand.

But there were times in my life where I hid it well.

As a student at North Shore Community College and later at Salem State College, I was really coming into my own in terms of my look and attitude. I played up the long-hair and metal image, stayed thin through bouts of starvation and read a lot of books so I could talk about them and appear smart.

That’s not to say I was walking around with fake skin. I was who I was at the time. In many ways I’m still the same guy. It’s just that I waited till the door to my room was closed and locked before I let the Devil out.

Despite what I’ve written about being the crazy-ass guy in the newsroom, I’ve been pretty good a lot of the time at putting on a calm, cool face, especially in more recent years. As I was diving deeper and deeper into the food addiction to dull the unpleasantness of going through therapy, I was being prolific as hell at work, writing a ton of breaking news and doing so with a smile.

At one point, a boss at the time marveled that I was so relaxed and zen-like for a guy who had just spent 12 hours covering a big news event. I laughed hard at that. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but zen-like was a new one.

On the drive home that day, I ordered $35 worth of junk in a nearby fast-food drive-thru and downed the contents of the four bags by the time I got home.

I was also pretty good at hiding my depression. Part of that is because my brand of depression has never been the suicidal variety that essentially makes the sufferer close down. Mine was more of a brooding depression in which I internalized my feelings and withdrew as often as I could. But on the job, I pushed all those feelings into the proper compartment and went on with life.

There’s light at the end of this tale. The therapy, medication, Spiritual awakening and loss of fear have gone far in making me the calm, zen-like guy on the inside as well as outside. I still carry the restlessness of OCD, but I manage it all better and don’t let the condition get in the way of the precious present nearly as much as before.

To those who knew me in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Don’t worry. I’m basically the same guy you knew back then.

The difference is that the man inside has gotten a lot better at being the man on the surface.

But make no mistake: I still have my bad days. I am human, after all.

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The Bridge Rats of Point of Pines, Revere

In this post, the author reviews the imperfections of childhood relationships in search of all his OCD triggers. Along the way, old bullies become friends.

I used to blame childhood bullies and name-callers for all the things that led to an adulthood with OCD. I was bullied, you ask? You betcha. I was called a lot of names related to being fat. Some kids gave me the occasional beating. But I was no better than they were.

Mood music:

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For every five kids who picked on me, there were five other kids I picked on to feel better. In high school, there was one kid everyone called Stiffy because of something unfortunate that happened to him in the locker room shower. He had a speech impediment that caused him to talk in a low, tone-deaf drone. He was freakishly thin. He had double the body hair that I have today, and that’s saying something. I’m pretty sure he got a few beatings along the way.

There was the classmate in elementary school who got beat up a lot. I beat him up once because he was the only kid in the schoolyard I could take down.

So in one sense, the childhood vitriol that came my way was poetic justice. The other thing is that you grow up and realize all kids do stupid things, but most of us grow up.

I remember a gang called the Bridge Rats. They were all about my older brother’s age and hung out under the General Edwards Bridge connecting the Point of Pines neighborhood in Revere, Mass. to the neighboring City of Lynn. They smoked pot, sucked kegs of beer dry and bullied the crap out of me and some of my friends. Among their many works of graffiti under that bridge was a corrupted version of the Ten Commandments. Since I was a believer in God even as a kid, I was pretty certain they were all going to burn in Hell, and I wanted to be their bus driver.

In high school, when I wasn’t picking on Stiffy, I got my share of fat jokes thrown my way. And I was never allowed into any of the little groups that form among classmates. I even had trouble fitting in with the headbanger crowd.

Then I lost a bunch of weight in what was, in hindsight, the stirrings of athletic bulimia, where eating binges were followed by days, weeks or months of starving myself, existing on black coffee and Raisin Bran, and working out three hours a day. I grew my hair long. A few people started to actually think I was cool.

The trend continued into the college years, where I kept the hair long, got involved in all the extra-curricular groups and for the first time started making a lot of friends. I drank and smoked pot, the same things I used to think the Bridge rats were going to burn over. I chain smoked. And for most of college, it kept me thin and cool.

Of course, inside the empty hole in my soul was starting to grow, gathering up all that was dark in me to form the mental disorder that would stalk me in adulthood. The addictions were what I used to try filling the hole.

But on the surface, I was doing a decent job of holding up my facade.

Fast-forward to more recent years, when I turned to therapists to help me peel back layer after layer of what ultimately fueled my OCD. There was the family tragedy and childhood illness. There was the loss of dear friends and the constant fear that more loss was right around the corner.

But a funny thing happened in therapy: The memories of schoolyard bullies and Bridge Rats didn’t come bubbling to the surface. I now know why — because they really weren’t traumas at all. We were all being stupid kids, and since I was guilty of the same behavior, I wasn’t entitled to harbor resentments. If anything, I plunged into a period of self-loathing over the memories of things I had done to others.

But here’s the great part of it all: Those I’ve since reached out to have been pretty forgiving. We’ve also become friends. As for those Bridge Rats: I’m connected to many of them via Facebook and we often look back at those days and laugh. Most of us are too busy with our spouses, kids and jobs to lament past misdeeds. We learned from them instead. And we grew up.

I lost track of Stiffy after graduation and hope he’s ok. I am at least at peace over the fact that I did befriend him in our senior year and renounced what I had done to him.

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Fear of Loss

There was a time when fear of loss would cripple my mental capacities. I got over it — mostly.

It’s 6:30 Sunday morning as I write this, and a snowstorm is exploding outside my living room window. Sean and Duncan are already playing games on the family laptop.

I’m enjoying the precious present moment, more so since I can remember when my mind used to spin so fast with worry that I would barely recognize the wonderful things in front of me. Including my kids.

In fact, I was often looking at the miracle in front of me and, instead of enjoying it, would work myself into an anxiety attack. Because there was always the chance I could lose it all. Fear of loss.

A word about Sean and Duncan: Sean is an 8-year-old third-grader, one of the smartest kids in his class. Duncan is a 6-year-old kindergartner, equally smart but with more of a romantic streak. He gets crushes on the little girls in his class on a regular basis. They get their brains and their looks from their mom.

They constantly dazzle me with their razor-sharp wit and their kindness toward others. They can pray the Rosary from memory better than many adults. They love unconditionally.

Before I found a treatment program for OCD, I was in constant fear of losing them and their mom to imagined illnesses and other calamities. In 2005, long before the current H1N1 pandemic, when a much more deadly flu virus was killing people in Asia and health officials were worrying that that might blossom into a pandemic as lethal as the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, I worried around the clock that these precious children might someday be stricken with it. I searched five pages of Google search results every morning to get the latest news of every new death.

Looking back, it all seems incredibly stupid. But it also makes perfect sense.

Since OCD is essentially a disease of worry in overdrive, my mind was doomed to always be seeking out something new to worry about. Since I’ve watched a brother and two best friends die, fear of loss was destined to poison my mental juices.

I also used to worry relentlessly about impending snowstorms and hurricanes for the disruptions they might cause.

Then there was the fear of loss in work form, where I’d constantly worry that if I didn’t slave away 80 hours a week at work, I just might fall out of favor with the bosses.

Whenever I had to get on a plane for business travel, I worried that maybe — just maybe — the plane might blow up in flight.

Then I found my faith and found treatment. It was along time coming, but it came.

Don’t get me wrong. I still worry about my wife and kids all the time. When a former colleague recently lost her only child in a motorcycle crash, a fresh wave of worry flooded in.

But I don’t spin mental webs about things that MIGHT happen like I used to. I hardly spin those webs at all today. I know bad things can still happen. But I’ve learned that there’s no fruit in fearing things that are completely beyond my control. All I can do is be the best husband and dad I can possibly be, keeping everyone safe and healthy and giving them all the love I have to offer.

Instead of dreading the snow, I’m enjoying it, even though I have to shovel out the car in an hour because I’m on schedule to do the readings at the 9:30 Mass. Instead of dreading the next business trip, I find myself looking for all the cool, historic places to check out at my next destination. I’ll work hard while there, but I always build in a few hours to take a look at the things I don’t get to see everyday.

It’s a beautiful gift.