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The Anxiety Attack

Overcoming fear and anxiety is a major theme of this blog, and people who think they’ve experienced it often ask me to describe what it’s like for me.

Mood music:

It’s been about four years since experiencing a real anxiety attack, but I remember the feeling well.

It starts with a worry. Maybe it’s concern that Sean and Duncan are sick. Kids below the age of 10 spike fevers all the time, especially in the winter. But when it would happen, I’d start to ponder all the worst-case scenarios.

That worry would simmer into full-blown fear that something awful might happen. Because of the loss I’ve had in my life, the anxiety attacks would always come back to that fear of loss.

If I had an argument with my wife, my brain would spin on that, and it would escalate into full-blown fear that she might leave me. That was never a real danger, mind you. But escalating fear is part of the process.

If I had a sore toe or a pain in the shoulder, it would escalate into fear that I might be having a heart attack. A history of particularly vicious Crohn’s Disease left me prone to the constant fear of impending death.

Then the anxiety attack would move from the worry stage to the point of physical discomfort. I’d start having trouble breathing. My chest would throb and hurt. I’d get the pin-and-needle feeling in the feet that one would get if those body parts fell asleep.

By the end of the anxiety attack, the imagined pain would be replaced by genuine physical pain.

The overall experience would last anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours.

As the attack eased, I would go looking for comfort. I always found it in the food or the wine.

In one particularly inspired moment, I took two Vioxx pills with a few swigs of wine. I was on Vioxx for back pain, and was pissed when the drug was taken off the market for causing real heart attacks.

Two minutes after swallowing the pills and alcohol, full-on wooziness kicked in. It felt good for a few more minutes, until the thought sparked into my head that maybe I was woozy because I was about to overdose. It’s also worth mentioning that I was doing house work during all this.

I called Erin, who was at her friend Sherri’s house, and told her what I did. Sherri, a nurse, said I’d live, and I started to calm down. But for a few minutes I was in full anxiety attack mode.

Though I spent years doing intense therapy to get the OCD under control, the fear and anxiety didn’t start to recede until I started taking Prozac.

When the fear and anxiety went away, it was one of the best feelings you could imagine.

I started to be hungry for all the experiences that used to generate the anxiety.

Life has been SO MUCH BETTER since then.

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An Exaggerated Response

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

Mood music:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exaggerated responses are a trademark of OCD cases.

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

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

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

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

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

File:The Scream.jpg

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The Trouble With Wanting It All

Ever since I got over my fear and anxiety I’ve had a bottomless appetite to do it all. I want to travel everywhere. I want to see everything. And I want to participate in as many events as possible. Sometimes that gets me in trouble. Here’s an example.

Mood music: “Serve the Servants” by Nirvana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztw2s3PZzY

Columbus Day Weekend there are two events I badly want to be a part of. One is something my security friends put together called HacKid. It’s going to be an epic experience for the kids, and I’ve been planning to be there.

The idea is to provide an interactive, hands-on experience for kids and their parents which includes things like:

–Online safety (kids and parents!)

–Make a podcast/vodcast

–How to deal with CyberBullies

–Physical Security

–Gaming competitions

–Interactive robot building

–How the Internet works

–Food Hacking

–Basic to advanced network/application security

–Website design/introduction to blogging

–Manipulating hardware and software for fun

–Meeting & interacting with law enforcement

–Building a netbook

–Low-impact martial arts/self-defense training

Up until this weekend, it was a given that I’d be dragging Sean and Duncan there.

Then, yesterday, the phone rang.

It was someone involved with the Cursillo retreat weekends at St. Basil’s in Methuen, Mass. It’s a Catholic retreat, and it’s very intense.

He asked me to be on team for the men’s retreat happening THE SAME WEEKEND as HacKid.

On the surface, it’s a no-brainer, right? HacKid is going to be a blast, and I’ve already written a CSOonline.com column throwing my support behind it.

But it’s not that easy.

As readers of this blog know by now, finding my Faith was central to my learning to manage a mental disorder and all the addictions that came with it. Without God, I am nowhere. That may not sound cool to some people, but I don’t care.

There’s also the fact that last weekend I was on here grousing about how I was giving God the short end of the stick lately.

I want to do both, but I can only do one. For a control freak like me, that truly sucks.

But I know there’s really no choice for me here. I have to choose Cursillo. My own Cursillo more than two years ago made a huge, lasting impact and I need to give back.

When God comes calling, you don’t say no. That’s a real pain in the ass, but it’s what I believe.

So I’ll be on team for the men’s weekend, and I’ll give it my all. The timing is also good because right after that I’ll start helping out with Haverhill’s RCIA program. My spiritual side will be finely tuned by then. Not perfect. Definitely not without sin. But I’ll be in the groove.

Meantime, I’ll just have to do other things to help HacKid succeed, not that they need my help. When my friend Chris Hoff gets motivated to do something, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to get it done.

But I CAN write about it and make sure as many people know about it as possible, so that’s what I’ll do.

It’s still going to suck missing the event.

But my security friends will understand.

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A New Jersey State of Rage

It’s been one of those days: Six states in 14 hours. The plan was to do it in nine. Then I took a wrong turn in New Jersey.  It was the second anger management test I had in a week. I guess I passed. But for a few hours I seriously considered diving off the wagon head first.

Mood music: 

http://youtu.be/2spuprrj4Pg

The drive was going well enough. We made it to New Jersey in record time, then hopped on the turnpike. The plan was to take the turnpike to I-95 South into Delaware and points further south. Somewhere we missed the turn. Before we knew it we were almost in Atlantic City, a good two-plus hours off course from where we were supposed to be.

It took us nearly four hours to find our way out of the mess we had gotten ourselves into. A couple of nice people in a CVS helped me plot the course back to Maryland. It worked, but we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic the whole way across. We finally rolled into Lusby, Maryland, some two hours south of Washington DC, around 7 p.m., having left Haverhill at 5 a.m. in an attempt to make good time.

So here I am typing this at 9:24 p.m. I have to leave here at 4 a.m. to get to DC and I should be crashed out. I don’t want to bitch about a long day of travel because I don’t really like it when other people bitch about such things. In that respect, I can be a jerk. But it’s better if I get these thoughts out of my head.

It’s worth noting a few things about today:

–I didn’t go into the full-on road rage as I would have a decade ago. I flipped off no one. I didn’t punch the steering wheel in anger.

–I do admit that I was in a pretty dark mood for the rest of the trip. I scowled. I didn’t say much. I felt angry.

–Most importantly, in the flash of angry emotion, I considered breaking my abstinence and my sobriety. I seriously considered it. I didn’t admit as much, but the thoughts were there. I was simply at the breaking point.

It would have been awful had I carried out the angry instinct, given all the work I’ve put into my 12-Step program. I thank God that I didn’t.

But it’s a scary reminder that I’m never far from a relapse. I have to work my program hard — definitely harder than I have of late. I’ve kept it together, but I’ve been getting sloppy. That can’t possibly be good.

And since I’m on the road all week, the danger level is high for me.

So I was tested big-time today, and I expect to be tested some more as I work two security conferences on a schedule that is more ragged than my normal schedule.

One thing occurred to me as we sat in traffic somewhere on the Atlantic City Expressway: With my Prozac dosage up by 20 milligrams since Aug. 1 in an attempt to head off the depressions I usually experience in December, I’ve been waiting for the wild mood swings that hit me as the chemicals balance themselves out. The emotional zigzag I experienced last time the dosage was upped was epic.

Today, lost in New Jersey, I think the mood swings I’ve been waiting for hit me hard. In fact, with my brain cells scrambled, I’m pretty sure I missed that turn because my head was in too many other strange places to comprehend the road before me.

If this is what happened, the rest of this trip will be much better, because I will have turned the corner.

We’ll see tomorrow.

I’m happy to say the day ended well. We arrived at the home of our cousins, the Deans, and they did everything they could to make the tired Brenner clan feel better. The Deans are quite a family, the kind of family everyone should try to be like.

When you have such beautiful friends and family around you, the effects of a bad day can never last.

Now I’m going to crash and hope for a better Monday.

Good night.

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How the Recluse Became a Road Rat

Since my OCD and anxiety used to make me deathly afraid of travel, it’s kind of weird that I do so much of it now without giving it much thought.

Mood music:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A47HVhzF6No&hl=en_US&fs=1]

This time, me, the wife and kids are driving down to the D.C. area. Not a White House tour like we had a couple months ago, but good times all the same. The family will stay with relatives in southern Maryland for a couple days while I drive on to DC to work two security conferences: Metricon 5 and one of my faves, the USENIX Security Symposium. After I’m done writing all there is to write down there for CSO Magazine, I’ll retrieve the family in Maryland and head home.

I still take my precautions, of course. I’ve enlisted people to look after the house while we’re away so someone will be here. I write about security. I can’t help but think of these things.

But the fact that I’m making this drive twice in one year really flies in the face of how it used to be, when I felt complete terror if I took a wrong turn and got lost in a city other than my own. Even getting lost in Boston would freak me out.

This week I’ve been driving all over Boston, taking side roads in the city to avoid traffic hell on I-93 as I traveled to and from Haverhill for SANS Boston 2010. It hasn’t bothered me one bit.

I used to have a fear of flying, too. Not any more. I get on planes all the time now. In fact, I start to get a little crazy if I go too long without leaving Massachusetts for a few days. It’s always for work, but I ALWAYS make sure I build in some time to experience the city I’m in.

Frankly, it would be easier to fly to and from DC on my own. But I treasure these long drives with the family as well, so it’s all good. I’ll be fried by the end of next week, but it’ll be worth it. And as a bonus, I’ll have several security articles to show for it.

This makes me happy. And it makes me feel weird.

These are just more examples of how I now crave most of the things I used to fear most.

I don’t have to over-analyze it. I just thank God and make the most of the gifts he gave me.

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The Pedophile, Part 2

A childhood-friend-turned-convicted-pedophile was kicked off Facebook a few days ago, much to my relief. But his case makes it uncomfortably clear just how dangerous social networking can be in the hands of an addict — including me.

Mood music: 

Before I go further, here’s the original blog post I wrote about this guy about a week ago. That’ll give you all the background you need for what follows.

After talking to him on the phone, I had a decision to make: Unfriend him on Facebook or stay connected to keep an eye on him? I chose the latter.

Sure enough, despite what he told me about cleaning up his act, he was “friending” scores of teenage girls from such far-flung places as Indonesia and Thailand. I was able to follow the conversation threads he was having with these girls:

“You’re pretty.”

“Can you IM (instant message) me?”

And so on.

My friend, Kevin Littlefield, started to quietly notify our Facebook friends. I alerted the authorities that they should keep an eye on him and reported the activity to Facebook. Since then, I’ve learned that several other friends were on to him and alerted Facebook as well. One of us got through, because by the start of this week, he was gone from Facebook.

It’s been sobering to watch this guy. I consider myself very lucky that my addiction was binge eating and, to a lesser extent, alcohol.

At least with those addictions, you have a fighting chance to redeem yourself and fit into society. For someone addicted to sex — especially pedophilia — you’re all done once you’ve been caught and convicted. You have to register as a sex offender and tell all your neighbors.

That’s as it should be.

It’s one thing to have an addiction in which you slowly destroy yourself. It’s quite another to prey on another human being and damage them for life because your addiction makes you do something to them instead of yourself.

He doesn’t belong in society. Pure and simple. We all have a chance to redeem ourselves to God, but justice means the punishment for some crimes has to be permanent for as long as you remain on this Earth.

That old friend of mine is getting exactly what he deserves.

That doesn’t mean I feel good about it all. As an addict, I know how powerful things like Facebook can be. I’m not on there trying to pick up women. But I do find myself on there for long periods of time, simply curious about how other people’s lives are going. You can find a page for everything — favorite bands, favorite topics like history and politics, in my case. It’s very easy for me to put the blinders on and just stare at it for an unhealthy amount of time. I’m working on that one.

I’m not a special case here.

But in the spirit of this blog it is noteworthy.

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A Lesson in Anger Management

As I’ve told readers before, I used to have a vicious anger streak. A big trigger used to be getting stuck in traffic. So I was surprised by my reaction yesterday when a sinkhole on I-93 North turned a 45-minute ride into a nearly 3-hour ordeal.

I left the SANS Boston conference at 1:30 p.m., planning to finish up some work projects from home for the rest of the afternoon. I hit the traffic jam and heard about the sinkhole on the radio. It was at Roosevelt Circle and the two right lanes were shut down.

Photo by Jim Davis, Boston Globe

Let’s rewind to about 21 years ago. It was registration day at North Shore Community College, where I was enrolled for the fall semester. I was just out of high school and angry at the world for a variety of reasons. I had been working long hours in my father’s warehouse in Saugus and was rubbed raw. I was frustrated because a girl I liked was getting cold feet about the idea of hooking up with a loose cannon like me. It didn’t take much to trigger a temper tantrum.

That day I was rattled hard by the long lines of college registration. I wasn’t expecting it and was full of fear that I wouldn’t get the classes I needed. Not that it really mattered, since my major was liberal arts.

Two hours in, I realized I had to give them a check for the courses I was taking. I had no money and panicked. They allowed me to drive to Saugus to get a check from my father. I was in full road rage mode on the drive there and back.

By day’s end, I was in supernova mode and breathing into a bag between the chain of cigarettes I was smoking.

There are many more colorful examples of my temper back then:

– Hurling a fork or steak knife at my brother in a restaurant on New Years Eve 1979 because he made a joke I didn’t like. The more dramatic among my family members say it was a steak knife, though I’m pretty sure it was a fork.

– Lighting things on fire out of anger, including a collection of Star Wars action figures that would probably be worth a fortune today. I would pretend they were kids in school who were bullying me. Never mind that I bullied as much as I got bullied.

–Throwing rocks through windows, especially the condominium building that was built behind my house in the late 1980s.

–Yelling “mood swing!” before throwing things around the room at parties in my basement. It came off as comical, as I intended, and nobody got hurt. But there was definitely an underlying anger to it. I was acting out.

– Road rage. Tons of it. I was a very angry driver. I would tailgate. I would speed. In the winters I would intentionally spin out my putrid-green 1983 Ford LTD station wagon in parking lots during snowstorms. While in college, I nearly hit another car and flipped off the other driver while my future in-laws sat in the back. Traffic jams would infuriate me. Getting lost would fill me with fear and, in turn, more anger.

There were a lot of legitimate causes of rage for me. The drug I took for Chron’s Disease had a lot of nasty side effects, including violent mood swings. A brother and two close friends dying — one by suicide — gave me a lot of anger. Being stuck in the middle of turf wars and working late nights while at The Eagle-Tribune certainly made me a a walking ball of fire.

I’m also sure the fear and anxiety that came with my OCD contributed to more anger.

So it was an absolute blessing for me that after three hours in traffic, my sanity was in check. Not once did I punch the steering wheel in anger or flip off someone in the car next to me or in front of me.

I don’t even think I dropped an F-bomb. I don’t remember doing so, anyway.

I got home, went upstairs and was just happy to see the kids. I emptied the dishwasher, folded some laundry and set the table for dinner. I was in OCD mode for sure. But sometimes it’s best to just let the OCD run hot. It always passes.

Just another example of how I’m not the same person I used to be.

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When to Let the OCD Run Hot

Sometimes the best way to deal with OCD when it runs hot is to simply let it run its course. That’s one of the things I’m learning about myself.

Mood music for this post: “Check My Brain” by Alice in Chains:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OK1HRqP-fg&hl=en_US&fs=1]

I’ve gotten pretty good at managing the disorder most of the time. Medication certainly helps, as do the therapy appointments and various coping tools I’ve developed over time. But even with those things, the OCD will kick in from time to time.

It’s mostly the little things these days: Obsessively picking toys off the living room floor even while the kids are still playing, re-checking and re-checking again the various project lists I have at work. Stuff like that.

When I first embarked on my effort to bring the OCD under control, I had the faulty notion that I could beat the disorder and drive it from me completely.

Six years on, I know that was a stupid notion, though I don’t beat myself over it. It was still a worthy goal.

But the lesson I’ve learned is that you never get rid of a mental disorder completely. You just learn to manage it and make sure the bad days are the exception to the rule. I’ve definitely won that battle.

I don’t spend every moment from sunrise to sunset spinning a web of mental chaos over every big and little thing that’s bothering me. I’m able to live in the precious present most of the time, and that’s a blessing.

Reigning in my addiction to compulsive overeating has been an enormous help on that score, because the brain works a lot more efficiently when it’s not all gummed up with processed flour and sugar.

But I now know and accept that there will be days where the mind spin is tougher to control, especially when I run into a big stress factor like family finances. There’s a little OCD in all of us, and I think it’s perfectly normal for people to get fixated on their troubles when they are particularly vexing.

In learning to accept that I’m going to have my occasional depressed or angry days, I’m able to get on with life and have a good time doing it.

Nothing is ever perfect. Some people are still more irritating than others. Worry still comes and goes.

I’m OK with that. And that’s progress.

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The Pedophile

Some people deserve to spend life in a box. But even they have a shot at redemption.

As a dad, I have zero tolerance for anyone who hurts a child. So when I discovered someone I’ve known for many years spent a decade behind bars for pedophilia, It was like a knife in the gut. Further complicating matters is that as a recovering addict, I can’t help but feel bad for this guy. But only a little bit.

He’s addicted to sex and that addiction drew him to kids. He certainly got what he deserved: Hard jail time in the midst of hardened criminals who draw the line at crimes against children. People like that wouldn’t think twice about killing a pedophile in their midsts.

So this guy has been back on the streets for a year. He’s homeless, has found it nearly impossible to find a job and is constantly watching his back. He’s required by law to register as a sex offender, and to inform people living around him that he’s a convicted sex offender.

My first instinct was to tell him to fuck off when he contacted me. But after he described his evil instincts as an addiction, I paused. As I’ve said before, when someone is in the grip of addiction, sanity and logic no longer apply.

I had to hear the guy out.

He understands why people shun him. He doesn’t blame them. He’s been working hard at putting his life back together and curses the day he was born because he hates the side of himself that led to three convictions for assaulting a minor.

In talking to the guy, I found myself thankful as hell that my addiction took the form of binge eating. I think even a heroin addict is more fortunate than someone addicted to sex, pornography and especially pedophilia.

The latter addictions hit a person like any other addiction. You hate that side of you and want to change. But you find it impossible to stop unless you’re lucky enough to find recovery. And recovery is back-breaking, emotionally-draining work.

To have a sex addiction like that has to be sheer terror and hell for someone who isn’t evil at his core.

My Faith also tells me that no person who is sorry is beyond redemption. So you pray for them and hope for the best.

That’s where my sympathy ends.

I once had a debate with my friend Ken White about the death penalty. He’s for it, I’m against it. I argued that it’s hypocritical for the state to take a life. Ken argued back that some people don’t belong in society and have to go. That includes pedophiles. Maybe they’re not evil people, but their actions are evil and if they can’t function in society they shouldn’t be in society.

It was hard to argue back against that logic. Thing is, I tend to agree with him now.

Should this guy on the streets be back behind bars or dead? I’ll let others debate that. All I know is that I’m never, ever going to meet this guy in person or create a situation that lets him anywhere near my kids or anyone else’s.

Walking around with a big scarlet letter on his back must really suck, but it’s for the best. Even he knows that.

In the years following the Manson murders, the four who carried out Manson’s orders turned against him and turned to God. They completely renounced what they did and Charles “Tex” Watson even became a minister behind bars. They sought and received forgiveness from God. But they will never get out of prison.

They may have a right to forgiveness. Everyone does. But they did the crime and have to take the punishment. They gave up their right to live among the rest of us. That’s justice.

The pedophile now on the streets probably deserves a similar fate. But for whatever reason, they let him back out.

But he doesn’t have his freedom. He’ll always be watching his back. That too is justice, I suppose.

Writing about this was not comfortable. I wrestled with myself over whether to even tackle the subject. I decided I had to because I know the evil things addiction will make you do.

I saw this as a necessary tale of caution.

I’ll tell you what: I’m just extremely grateful that my addictions revolved around food and substances. People around me were hurt along the way, but it’s easier to receive forgiveness for those things.

It’s a bitch having to relate to someone who has done far worse than me.

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Fear of Fat People

What do you tell someone who says they’re afraid of fat people because they might “catch the disease” if they get too close? Read on and discuss.

Mood music for this post: “Afraid” by Motley Crue:

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

Someone in program told me that she’s afraid of fat people. Being in the same room with obesity fills her with terror. She’s worried that if she shakes a fat person’s hand, she’ll “catch the disease.” I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. It’s for real.

Naturally, I was taken aback. For one thing, why is she willing to be in a room with me?True, I’m much lighter than I used to be. But the word “slim” doesn’t exactly fit me.

To me, the whole thing is too far off the sanity charts to comprehend. My first instinct was to tell her she’s an idiot.

Then I remembered something important: When you are trapped in the grip of an addiction or mental illness, logic and sane thinking no longer apply.

I should know. I’ve been in the grip of both. I’ve had fears that were just as whacked. I never felt anxiety around people who are heavier than me. But there have been times when I thought of them as a lower form of life than myself. Since I was thinner, I was better than them. I thought this way even when I was 285 pounds and binge eating multiple times a day.

That’s just as bad as fearing an obese person. It’s probably worse.

Long before I found recover and the 12 steps, I used to be set off by the dumbest things. If a very old woman was sitting behind me in church, I’d be afraid to shake her hand during the part of Mass where we offer each other a sign of peace. Old people spread germs, too — right? That’s what I worried about. Forget that I’m a father of two boys below the age of 10 and kids are the biggest germ factories around.

I was afraid of plastic chairs. I was afraid that if I sat in one, the chair would stay stuck to my behind when I stood up. Actually, right before I entered OA, that very thing did happen.

Crowds used to scare the life out of me, so much so that I chose to stay in my room all the time.

So, all things considered, someone’s fear of fat people doesn’t seem as far removed from reality as I first thought.

Still, it’s a bad obsession and I hope she can free herself of it.