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And Then There Were Three

God has a warped way of giving you what you need. Here’s an example.

Mood music for this post: “Epic” by Faith No More:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERTT_sv8sV0&hl=en_US&fs=1]

God has a warped way of giving you what you need. Case in point: He keeps sending me people to sponsor in my 12-Step recovery program. It’s as if He knows I’ve been walking a tightrope and need other addicts around to keep me in check.

Yesterday during work the BlackBerry went off. It was another guy from Haverhill. He saw my name on an OA list and called. He announced himself as a compulsive overeater and addict, and said he was in his fifth day of abstinence.

He had been around OA before, and had a food plan ready to go. I’d barely known the guy for five minutes and he was rattling off his food plan for the day. I was impressed.

My second sponsee is doing well, too. She’s been abstinent since the day she called me and asked for help on June 21. The first sponsee, who tends to disappear for long periods of time, is at least back to sending me his daily food plan by e-mail. That’s progress.

So here I am, clean from compulsive binge eating since Oct. 1, 2008, 65 pounds lighter but going through a rather dirty period of late where I’ve had to eat meals away from home without the little scale nearby. Yesterday I spent a lot of time in the car, my back in shambles (I’m going to the chiropractor for a fix at 4:30), feeling a bit low about having to borrow money from my father, and for a few milliseconds I contemplated stopping at a drive-through for some junk.

I came to my senses pretty quickly. I have way too much going on these days to fuck it all up with a relapse. But now there’s an added motivation to keep it clean:

If I screw up, I have to let these three people down. I’d have to stop sponsoring and sharing my story at meetings until I reached 90 days of back-to-back abstinence. Then one or all of them could go into tailspins.

So, you see, God has a funny way of doing things. To help me hold my recovery together he sends me people to offer guidance to.

The three sponsees are keeping me in check without even realizing it.

How strange is that?

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Summertime Blues is a Punk

The author on showing up for life — especially when you don’t feel like it.

Mood music for this post: “Die, Die My Darling” by The Misfits:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBPfC9FzDL4&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Some days the OCD runs so hot and the addictive impulses are so strong that I just want to go sit in the corner, drink my coffee and smoke a long, fat cigar and tell the world to go screw. This is one of those days.

I’m not special. We all have these days. And even in my current mood, I know I live an incredibly blessed life. I also admit that when I hear other people vent dramatic prose about how sucky their lives are, I just want to tell them what they can do with their drama.

Hypocritical? Absolutely. But then obsessive-compulsive people are almost always hypocritical when it comes to complaining — and being selfish.

Which brings me to the point of this post:

When I experience the kind of mood swing I’m in the middle of right now, I’ve learned to work my tools of recovery. Sometimes I don’t want to and I curse the day I discovered them. But when I put them to use, things always get better. Always.

When I’m at that point where the tools make things better, the best way to describe it is that I get out of my own way and show up for life.

So which tools am I going to lean on today? The same ones I pretty much rely on every day:

–My food plan, which I can tighten up on now that the holiday weekend is behind me. The state of dirty recovery I’m currently in is part of this morning’s mood problem.

–My sponsorship. I’m going to be there today for the two OA members I’m sponsoring, no matter how pissed I get if one of them calls me too much. My sponsors have always put up with the grief I give them, so I’m going to keep doing my best at this form of service. After all, as Red Green would say, we’re all in this together.

—My writing. I’m already working this tool by banging out this blog post. Once I push the publish button, I’ll feel a lot better for having vented some of my negative brain smoke.

And then there are my own tools, which aren’t exactly part of the official program. But they work for me.

—Metal. I’m listening to a strange mixture of metallic-punk attitude this morning, including The Misfits, Dead Kennedys and Guns N Roses.

—Sarcasm. I’m not going to be sarcastic myself, this morning. But I have plenty of sarcastic people in my life, and today I’m going to enjoy the hell out of anything that comes from their voice boxes.

By using these tools, I’ll be able to show up for a couple things I don’t want to do but have to: Borrowing money to right the family finances (or start to) and attend a wake.

No cowering in the corner for me. Though a cigar is not out of the question.

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Dirty Recovery

The author on how his recovery enters a sort of Purgatory around summer holidays.

Mood music for this post: “Locomotive” by Guns N Roses:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvYWyPKZ5G4&hl=en_US&fs=1]

There’s a danger for a recovering addict around summer holidays like July 4th. It’s a rather obvious statement. But I’m feeling it from my own perch as a recovering binge eater.

I’m in a place I’ll call dirty recovery. My abstinence is intact. I have not gone on a binge. I’ve steered clear of all things with flour and sugar. But I’ve had a lot of meals lately away from the comfort of home, where I can carefully weigh out everything I put in my body.

The last month has been crammed with cookouts. The standard fare is hamburgers and hot dogs with the usual sides. The most recent event was my friend Chris Hoff’s birthday bash.

Birthday boy and cloud security guru Chris Hoff

The man knows how to throw a party, and it was a great time with friends from the security industry and their spouses and kids.

The event is known for its abundance of pork, mojitos and a lot of other stuff. When an addict like me sees a pile of bacon on flames like the picture on the right, the demon starts to roll around in my head.

Hoff is great about making sure their are a lot of veggie options on the table, and that helped me out tremendously. He was also generous in sharing his cigars. Since that’s one of the few items I will still indulge in, that also helped a lot. I’m also lucky because many of my security friends read this blog and are well aware of my dietary restrictions. God provides is many ways.

Still, when someone like me is at an event like this without my trusty food scale, perfect abstinence becomes all the more difficult.

I’ll pile up the plate with salad and coleslaw and try to estimate what LOOKS like 10 ounces. I throw in what I think LOOKS like 4 ounces of pork. But I can never be sure I’m not taking in MORE than what I should be having.

With so many cookouts lately, I’ve been dancing on this barbed wire quite a bit. I’m feeling slightly bloated this morning, leading me to believe my measurements have been off.

It’s still a vast improvement over the days where I’d get drunk and then shovel food down my throat until I couldn’t look down and see my feet because the gut was swollen and obstructing the view.

My head is still clear, which is the most important part of my abstinence and sobriety. I pursued recovery to end the mental insanity more than the weight gain.

So in the big picture, it’s mission accomplished.

But recovery is dirty of late, and I need to clean up my act and tighten the portions.

The reason is simple: Dirty recovery, if you let it go on for too long, inevitably crashes head-on into full-blown relapse.

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Real Men (and Women) Ask for Help

The author learns that sometimes he has to put his pride aside to do the right thing.

Mood music for this post: “Ride On” by AC/DC:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZo12LIWqYw&hl=en_US&fs=1]

One of the more unfortunate byproducts of my OCD is that I don’t like to ask for help when I need it. This flaw has taken me to the brink of a nervous breakdown many times.

When you struggle with addiction and mental disorder, you cling hard to an ego that’s always bigger than what the reality of the situation justifies.

In my warped world view, to as for help has always been to admit weakness. It’s a huge contradiction for me, because the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my 12-Step program is that nobody breaks free of addiction without help. That’s why we have sponsors to kick us in the ass.

One of the reasons James Frey was so easily exposed as a fraud over the fabrications in his book “A Million Little Pieces” was that he claimed to have overcome his demon on his own. Anyone who has been down this road knows it’s impossible to kick your most self-destructive demon without help. A Million Little Pieces.jpg

I don’t fault Frey all that much, though, because as I’ve noted before, addicts are among the best liars on the planet.

I’m no exception.

I’m a lot like the character Quint in “JAWS” in that I suffer from working-class hero syndrome. (One of the many excellent lines in that movie was when Hooper told Quint to knock of the working-class hero crap, after Quint kept picking on Hooper for not getting his hands dirty enough.)

In my case, I like to believe that adults should be able to make a living without any help from family and friends. In a financial rut? You figure it out and avoid asking your parents for help at all costs. I’ve looked down on people who have done that in the past. I described one case as someone using their father like a piggy bank.

To me, asking Dad for help means failure. I think some of that attitude comes from the fact that I leaned on my father‘s financial assistance a lot in my 20s. When my 1981 Mercury Marquis finally died a painful death at the hands of its abusive driver, I went to Dad and nagged for a new car. I got one — a 1985 Chevy Monte Carlo.

Being a cash-strapped parent on the edge of his 40th birthday, I look back on that sort of thing and realize what a burden that was on my father. When I got married and settled into my 30s, I vowed never to bother my father for money again. I would manage on my own at all costs.

For the most part, I have. In fact, until this year, Erin and I have rarely paid a bill late. Erin deserves most of the credit for this, because spending money on stupid things has always been a weak spot for me, and most of the time she has handled the bills and made it work despite her husband’s $40 fast-food binges and early-morning spending sprees on Amazon.com.

We’ve managed quite well on our own, even managing to send the kids to a Catholic school to the tune of $600 a month.

But as I’ve been noting in this diary in recent days, we’re finding ourselves in a real financial bind this year. Our story isn’t unique. The economy is in a shambles right now and most everyone we know is in a financial hole. But in our case, we finally ran out of clever ideas to keep the boat afloat.

So this week, I did something painful: I asked my father for financial help.

I spent yesterday in a real funk over it, because to me it felt like a big admission of failure. My father, God Bless him, was pretty nonchalant about it and told me not to worry. But I worried anyway. I care quite a bit about what he thinks of me, and the ability for someone to work hard, earn a living and be independent is one of the ways he measures a person. Remember that post I wrote on how being a people pleaser is dumb? Well, sometimes I’m still guilty of trying.

I’ve expressed my dismay to some friends this week, and all have told me I shouldn’t feel the way I do. One friend, who doesn’t speak to his parents, said I should feel lucky to have the kind of relationship where I can get the kind of support my father can give me.

Another friend said that I shouldn’t feel bad because when you have a family to take care of, you do what you must do for them. If borrowing money is what it takes to keep Sean and Duncan in school, that’s what I need to do, one person pointed out.

Someone else put it simply, “Family is family. You help each other out.”

As this crappy week limps to its conclusion, I am starting to absorb the lesson God had in store for me. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn time and time again, most recently during my road to recovery from addiction and mental disorder:

We all need help in some form.

Life is about ups and downs, and when you’re down you usually need someone to throw you a rope so you can get out of your hole.

And in the end, this isn’t failure. Erin and I made a choice over a year ago: She would leave a job she was unhappy in, and try to build a freelance editing business. She has worked her ass off, and in many ways we’ve done well. She has gotten clients and earned their respect. Until recently, we were keeping the bills paid, albeit late in some cases. We have to refine the business plan. And we need an exit strategy in the event this thing doesn’t succeed.

But we’ll get there. And we knew full well that we’d hit ruts like this.

In the end, I wouldn’t change the path we embarked on last year. Despite all this turmoil, Erin is still much happier than she was in that job. And I’m much happier than I was a couple years ago, when our money supply was a lot healthier. Back then I still had a lot of recovery ahead of me, and that led to some pretty dark periods. I’ll take this over that any day.

In the present situation, I just need to get over myself and get out of my own way. And let family help.

There are ways I can immediately pay my father back. I can keep being the best parent I can possibly be. I can continue to swing for the fences at work. And I can hold my recovery together.

Further out, I’ll have to make sure I repay in other, still to be determined ways.

For now, I did something I had to do. It sucked for me. It truly did.

But as my father used to say to me when one of my unreasonable kid requests couldn’t be met and I’d start to tantrum over it:

“Too bad.”

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Things You Do When You’re a Sponsor

The phone rings. It’s one of people I’m sponsoring in OA. Here’s the conversation that followed.

Me: “So how you doing?”

Sponsee: “Not so good. There’s a bag of potato chips in the house and I want them badly.”

Me: “I see.”

Sponsee: “I’m not sure what to do.”

Me: “Get the bag of chips and do everything I say.”

Sponsee: “OK.”

Me: “Open the bag and stick it under the kitchen faucet.”

Sponsee: “Uh, OK…”

Me: “Turn the water on and fill up the bag.”

I hear the water running, so I’m pretty confident she’s doing what I suggested.

Sponsee: “OK. I did it.”

Me: “Now those chips don’t look very good to eat, now, do they?”

Sponsee: “No. Not at all.”

Me: “Now you can move on.”

Sponsee: “OK. But that really hurt.”

Me: “I’m sure it did.”

Later that night, Sponsee calls again. It’s after 10 p.m. and I was half asleep. She was hungry and wanted to know what to do.

Me: “Go to bed.”

She did.

This gal is a trooper. She’s following my lead with complete abandon. She is ready for abstinence.

She has been through a lot. She’s been through AA, Big-Book 12-Step studies, and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s been to hell and back more than once.

And she is relying on me to help her.

I wonder if she realizes she has a lot more recovery under her belt than I do — and that she’s actually a lot stronger than I am.

I hope I don’t let her down.

Mood music to end this post: “Love, Hate, Love” by Alice in Chains:

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

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Don’t Let a Hard Week Take You Down

Nothing challenges recovery like a bad week. Or was it a good week?

Mood music for this post: “Outshined” by Soundgarden:

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

This has not been the best of weeks. It started with a lot of worrying about money and has taken a lot of twists and turns. Things are looking up, but now I have to nurse the physical damage that happens when the OCD runs hot.

As I write this my head is pounding. I’m feeling restless and tired. I’m ultra sensitive to the sound of the birds outside my open living room window. But, oddly enough, beneath it all I’m in a pretty good mood.

For one thing, a week like this used to be my perfect excuse to plunge into my favorite addictions.

I’d spend $40 a day on fast food and drink wine from the bottle. I’d forget to shower for days. I’d sleep a lot because that was better than facing the world.

I’d lie there and worry about all the things I had no control over; things that were not there in the real world but were very real in my mind.

It used to be fairly easy to get into this kind of state. A fight with a family member would be enough to set off the chain of events. Work worries could always be counted on to flip the switch. The neighbor’s dog looking at me the wrong way would send me into a mood swing.

None of that stuff has been part of this week.

Sure, I’ve worried about a few things, but I haven’t binged over it. I did waste Sunday afternoon in shut-down mode, but as Erin told me, I shouldn’t feel bad about it. It’s a gift that I have this kill switch that shuts me down and forces me to cool off sometimes.

I had to do something this week that was extremely hard for me. It was the kind of thing that stabbed at my sense of self respect. A real body blow to my pride. Something that made me feel like a leech. But I’m now seeing it as something I needed to do; something that has turned out to be a sign of personal growth. I’ll give you a lot more explanation on this tomorrow or Saturday, when I have a better fix on the outcome.

As crappy as this week has been, I know I don’t have to eat or booze over it. I can still pull myself together and have a very productive work week.

The 12 Steps make it possible. So does the realization that I have deep family support and a wife and kids that complete me. I have many more friends than I had a decade ago. Not sure how that happened, but I’m grateful for it.

All of what I just described is possible because I have God in my life. He doesn’t give me anything more than I can handle. I guess that means I can handle quite a bit. I’m actually grateful for that.

Recovery can be a messy thing. There are always setbacks that test you. Relapse is always seconds away.

But I’ve learned that if you trust God and those around you — and if you refuse to let your stupid pride be a barrier — you can do the right things and everything will work out.

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The Love Story Continues (Happy Birthday, Erin)

Today is my wife’s 39th birthday. Without her, I would be nowhere. My recovery from mental illness and addiction was only possible because of her. So in honor of this day, I’ve dug up THE POST on the two of us:

Mood music for this post: “An Easterly View” by Bear McCreary, because nothing says love like a sweeping piece of music from Battlestar Gallactica:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmvNJiylUa0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

The Freak and the Redhead: A Love Story

I wasn’t looking for a soul mate when I met her. It was the summer of 1993 and I was doing just fine on my own. I was in a band and we were busy pretending we were really something. This was long before I woke up one day, realized I really don’t know how to sing, and decided to spare the masses the agony of me trying to play vocalist.

I was driving around in a beat-up Chevy Monte Carlo. I had recently crashed it into the side of a van and the door was held shut with a bungee chord. I had recently tired of my long black hair and shaved my head for the first time. For some reason, that attracted her.

I was still a few months away from finding my calling as a journalist, and I was busy hiding from any real work. I pretended to work in my father’s warehouse but was really hiding behind boxes most of the time chain-smoking cigarettes.

I was starting to write for the college newspaper at Salem State College. She was editing the college literary journal, “Soundings East.” I joined the staff to get closer to her so I could make my move.

My first memory of her was on the drive home from classes one afternoon. Stuck in the vile traffic that often snarls the road from Salem to Route 114, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a red-headed (strawberry blond, to be more accurate) bobbing her head back and forth to music. I later learned she was listening to The Ramones, and I’m pretty sure she was bobbing her head way off key and off beat from the music. That’s one of the things that attracted me.

On our first date, I took her to meet my mother. The first time she took me home to meet her family, I had forgotten my glasses and was wearing prescription sunglasses and a Henry Rollins T-shirt.  It was my first trip to Haverhill and getting home that night in the dark with sunglasses was an experience in mild insanity. But it was worth it. Her dad, by the way, was worried because he’d heard I was Jewish and pork chops were on the menu. I also met her whacky 12-year-old baby sister, who would eventually grow into the woman I would brand for life with the nickname “Blondie.” I taught Blondie the important things in life, like how to carefully put a string of tape on the back of a cat, to show how it would trick the cat into thinking it was under a piece of furniture and would, as a result, crawl as low to the ground as possible.

That wasn’t even enough to scare away my future wife.

In the years since, she has stayed with me through my bouts of depression following the deaths of many friends and relatives, obsessive-compulsive behavior, fear and anxiety and the binge-eating disorder that at one time pushed my weight to the upper 280s.

She was well within her rights to run for her life. But she stayed, gave me two precious children and helped me to overcome my demons and become the man I am today. She also gave me an extended family that I cherish, even the father-in-law who is to the right of Attila The Hun. I make the latter comment with complete affection, by the way.

My demons weren’t easy for her to understand, to be sure. My path was not the same she had been on. Yet she stayed.

She listens to folk music and puts up with my Heavy Metal. She puts up with the off-color language I picked up during my Revere, Mass. upbringing, which still surfaces in times of anger or intoxication.

She’s dedicated to her Church, sings in the choir and is a Eucharistic minister. Her parenting is the reason my sons are smart and caring beyond their years. She had the courage to leave a relatively safe full-time job to try and build her own business, something that’s not for the faint of heart.

I would never have gotten on top of my OCD without her. My birthday  gift to her is the relative sanity I carry around today. I hope she likes it. :-)

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The Downward Spiral

The author searches for a way out of his latest bout of depression.

Mood music for this post: “The Downward Spiral” by NIN:

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

I was going to start this with some amusing anecdote about how I’m suffering so others might be saved. Jesus already did that sort of thing, of course. Dopes like me think it’s good to suffer to benefit others, but it’s just delusional thinking we engage in to feel better about ourselves when the chips are down.

That aside, I have been in an emotional downward spiral these last few days.

Financial woes kicked off this latest bout of depression. You can read more about that in “Emotions Come from a Strange Place” and “Turning the Tables on Those Who Whine.”

Yesterday started with a gloomy mood, then my spirits lifted as I started to tackle some work projects. Then my mood sunk deep after something I thought would help the family finances fell through.

All things considered, it wasn’t a bad day from there.

I had a pretty productive work day, getting a podcast done and launching a new crop of articles, though it took everything I had not to let my mood interfere with the tasks at hand. I also didn’t go on a fast-food binge on the way home like I used to do. I just went home — sitting through two traffic jams on the way — and collapsed into my bed for an hour. That was better than throwing away my sobriety and abstinence.

Seeing that I was in a fragile state, Erin insisted I go to an OA meeting, which I did. It helped a lot. It was nice to get out of my head for an hour and hear people talk about their recovery and how they’ve hung on to it despite difficult times like these.

From there my mood started to lift. I came home to find that Sean and Duncan had done all my chores for me, and Sean hugged me and called me the “best Dad ever.” Those kids can tell when their Dad isn’t himself. After putting them to bed Erin and I collapsed into bed and talked about the day’s events.

We didn’t figure out the solution to our troubles, but the conversation knocked my perspective back into line.

We talked about other people we know who are going through their own financial troubles, and by comparison our situation isn’t as bad. Our marriage is still rock-solid. We have beautiful children and a vast support network of family and friends. God is never far from us, and if we keep our cool it’ll all work out.

One thing’s clear: I have to keep my recovery whole.

I have to because when I’m in the vice-grip of my addictions, I’m useless as a husband and father.

I also sponsor people in OA, and if I blow it I can’t help them.

There are also family members with troubles of their own, and I have to keep it together for them.

There are some bright spots to this story.

For one thing, my family is getting better at knowing what to do when I’m in a funk, which is basically to let me be withdrawn for a while.

Most importantly, looking at the last couple years, I’m much happier today, even though money is tight.

A few years ago money was no problem, but I was seriously fucked up. I was 280 pounds of self-destructive mayhem under the control of his addictions and riddled with fear and anxiety.

Today I’m sober, abstinent from binge eating and the fear and anxiety went away a long time ago.

I’ll take today’s state of affairs over the old way any day.

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Emotions That Come from a Strange Place

The author finds himself walking between depression and hope. A strange place to be. (Written during a depressive episode in 2010.)

Mood music for this post: Henry Rollins’ “I Think I Know You” performed over “A Warm Place,” from Nine Inch Nails’ “Downward Spiral” album:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CPIT4nsT24&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Yesterday was a perfect example of the strange place I’m in emotionally these days.

It started well enough. A good Mass at church in the morning, a phone conversation with an old friend, the laughter of my wife and kids filling the house. I found myself looking forward to the coming week’s work projects and was especially looking forward to my 2-year-old niece’s birthday party in the afternoon. I even made it through several pages of Slash’s autobiography.

Then, somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m., I had a brutal mood swing. It came on as suddenly as the flame that ignites when you drag a match across sandpaper.

The match in this case was more worry about the financial difficulties I wrote about over the weekend. The allergies assaulting my senses didn’t help matters.

I’m usually pretty talkative at family events, but once we got to my sister-in-law’s house I found myself feeling socially awkward. I looked around at family members who I usually love to be with and decided I really just didn’t want to put on a happy face and socialize. My head started to throb.

So I did what I’ve always done in situations like this. I found a room nobody else was in and dozed off. I’ve always had a kill switch inside me that goes off in times of heavy emotional stress. I go right to sleep. Then I wake up later feeling fine.

It’s a gift, I suppose. It keeps me from doing other things, like getting smashed or being mean to people whose only crime was to me in my presence when I wanted to be alone. I used to binge eat during moments like this, too. But as the reader knows by now, that’s not an option these days.

So I’m pissed with myself now for letting my emotional weaknesses get in the way of what should have been a nice afternoon with family. Fortunately, my sister-in-law Amanda took a lot of great photos so I can at least see what I was missing.

This is one of the few pictures with me. The fuse in my head was burning at this point and within minutes I'd be hiding.

As a result, I missed precious moments like…

Sean showing off his latest Lego creation:

Duncan running around with the remains of his snack all over his face, along with a little blood from some rough playing:

The birthday girl blowing out her candles:

Why toss my dirty laundry on here, when the better thing to do is just let it go and move on? Because it’s a relevant example of how one’s demons can still surface at the worst moments, even when you’ve reached a solid level of recovery as I have.

No matter how strong a person in recovery is, he/she is still ALWAYS seconds away from failure.

That’s not a complaint. Just a simple fact. I’m not a special case.

As is usually the case in this blog, I have a positive ending for you:

Because I have God, an amazing family and recovery on my side, the troubled emotions will surely pass. They’ll pass because instead of sitting on my problems, I’m going to do something I’ve learned to do in recent years.

I’m going to tackle the source of the bad emotions head on and do what I must to set things right.

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Careful How You Help Others

The author on the need for boundaries when helping people in need.

Mood music for this post: “Ten Years Gone,” The Black Crows with Jimmy Page:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWovzhNH4TQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Being someone who has benefited greatly from the kindness of others, I’m forever trying to pay it forward. One way I do this is by sponsoring people in my 12-Step Program.

But if you don’t handle this blade carefully, it will cut you deep.

That’s what I’m learning, anyway.

I’m new at this sponsorship thing. I’m pretty sure I still suck at it.

Here’s how it works: In a 12-Step Program like AA or OA, the person in search of recovery from their addiction needs someone to coach them along. In the case of OA, you find a sponsor who has achieved recovery (long-term abstinence from compulsive overeating) and ask that person how they are achieving it.

For this to work, the sponsee has to be willing to toss aside all their stubborn thinking about what’s acceptable in recovery and essentially do what their sponsor tells them to do.

In this case, the sufferer checks in with his/her sponsor by phone just about every day for 10 or 20 minutes. You tell the sponsor what your food plan is for the day and what meetings you plan to attend. You also talk about any anxieties in your head that might cause you to go on a binge. When you reach a more advanced stage of recovery, the check-in calls can be more about discussing the 12 Steps and other things instead of running down the daily food plan. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.

The sponsor typically has all their sponsee calls set up over an hour or two-hour period each day — time set aside just for this. If a sponsee calls even a few minutes early or late, the sponsor’s schedule can get screwed up.

A bad sponsor can be a nightmare for someone trying to find recovery. A sponsor who casually skips call-ins or refuses to adjust to any special food needs their sponsee has because it differs from their own food plan can do serious damage.

A common tactic for OA recovery is to nix all flour and sugar. It’s not a requirement. The only requirement in OA is to stop eating compulsively. But it’s something that’s necessary for a lot of people, including me.

Some sponsors have real trouble sponsoring someone who does not give up flour and sugar. The sponsor typically fears that they might slip in their own recovery by guiding someone whose food plan is different from theirs.

I have a problem with this, because if you have certain medical conditions, you need a specialized plan that’s inevitably going to differ from what the sponsor does. And I’ve met people struggling to find recovery who sink deeper into their addictive behavior because their sponsor was too stubborn to work with them.

This cuts both ways, of course. Sometimes it turns out the sponsee SHOULD ditch the flour and sugar, but they’re so desperate for those ingredients for their junk fix that they close themselves off to anything their sponsor is trying to tell them.

My first sponsor was brutally strict. But that’s what I needed — someone who would give me a deep kick in the ass.

But I was ready to do anything for recovery. Had I not been, I would have just lied to her on the phone every day about what I was doing. People like us tend to lie a lot, as I’ve mentioned before.

Right now I have two sponsees. One, in my opinion, should be off the flour and sugar, but he remains blind to that fact. I could be totally wrong about his needs, of course. But his behavior closely mirrors my own before recovery, and I’ve urged him to try ditching the flour and sugar to see how he feels for a bit. No dice.

My other sponsee is very responsive to my guidance. She has suffered enough that she is ready to do what she must. But boundaries are a problem. She sometimes misses the regular call-in time, then calls me several times later in the day. She’s the type that can suck the life out of you if you don’t set down some tough boundaries.

There are some people you try to help who will try to lean on you for things that are way outside your duty as a sponsor, like buying their groceries and running to their house at 2 in the morning because they’re having a bad night.

Am I screwing up as a sponsor somewhere along the way? Probably. I’m still pretty new at this.

My biggest fear is that instead of helping people, I’ll just make their damage worse. But I do warn those I take on that I’m not a doctor and any plan of recovery I suggest should be run by a real doctor and/or nutritionist.

So here’s why I’m bringing all this up:

Yesterday I went to pick up my sponsee to take her to an OA meeting. She has no car but lives only about 5 minutes from me so I was glad to do it.

But when I called her at the appointed time, she didn’t pick up the phone. I tried several times to no avail, then decided to just head to the meeting. I was almost there when she called. It turns out she fell asleep on the couch and didn’t hear the phone.

I wound up turning around and going to her apartment to talk over some boundaries I felt we needed to have. I was pissed about missing my meeting, but something still compelled me to change course.

I’m glad I did. Seeing this person’s environment was useful to me. And I turned the visit into a mini-OA meeting. During the course of the conversation, I set down some boundaries and she agreed to follow them. She is ready for the challenge.

Hopefully I am, too, because I’d much rather help this person get well than drive her further down the road to hell.

This business with helping others in recovery is tough stuff.

If I ever master it, I’ll let you know.