I wanted to be in the office today plowing through some work. But another winter storm forced me to work from home.
Some would say it’s great I can do that, and it is. But when there’s a lot on the plate, I prefer to be in the office. Especially when the kids are home from school for February vacation. At least in the summer I can write from the back deck while the kids play in the field behind the house.
This time of year we’re all indoors and the kids are loud.
A few years ago the snow, the change in schedule and the kids in my workspace would have unhinged me.
I’d get a story written. Maybe three. But I’d be a puddle of lava by day’s end, good for nothing except sleep.
Not so today.
I’m enjoying the cozy chair by my living room window, watching the snow fall.
I’ve gotten as much writing and editing done from here as I would have from the office.
The kids were indeed loud and distracting, but I enjoyed that, too. What used to be stress is now comic relief, especially when Sean tells Duncan he looks adorable when he cries and Duncan responds by pouncing on his older brother, yelling, “Who’s crying now?!”
I smoked one last cigar before Lent begins tomorrow, since that’s one of the things I’m abstaining from until Easter. It was a Cuban stick at that. Thanks to my friend Bob Connors for parting with it.
The coffee is French-pressed and bitter. Just the way I like it.
A much different day than what it would have been five years ago, before I gained the upper hand over the OCD.
Days that don’t go as planned are especially difficult for people with OCD. We do, after all, crave control over everything we can control. And we badly want to control things we can’t, like the weather.
Forget about the small stuff, like checking a doorknob seven times or tapping your feet to the count of 60. A carefully crafted schedule in shambles is the big stuff; hell for a sick mind.
That’s when someone like me turns to the food or the booze to comfort the troubled mind.
But the food is well under control today, and bottles of wine that once taunted me from a kitchen counter rack have gone unnoticed in the corner.
I’m not the same man I used to be.
Credit the therapists, the Prozac, the religious conversion or all of the above.
Yesterday at All Saints Parish Father Michael Harvey delivered one of those Homilies that sent my mind and soul all over the map.
I like Father Harvey. I wasn’t sure about him at first. He had the massive shoes of Father Mark Ballard to fill, so the deck was stacked against him from the start. He’s very conservative, and sometimes I wonder if his collar is stuck to his neck with thumb tacks. He tackles the most taboo of topics — politics — when he delivers a homily.
Truth be told, I like how he goes for the throat in his Homilies without fear of offending someone. One Sunday he gave a Homily about Natural Law, otherwise known as the “contraception is bad” talk. After Mass, we got in the car and Sean, the 8 year old, blurted out, “Gee, I guess Father Mike wasn’t expecting there to be any kids at Mass this morning.”
The larger message of the Homily was that the pursuit of power takes a person further and further from God, because when one is spending all his or her time groping for attention they’re too busy thinking about themselves to be thinking about God.
He then brought up “a politician from Rhode Island” who decided not to run for office anymore. “Oh, great, here it comes,” I mumbled to my wife.
He brought up the fact that the Bishop down there had asked Kennedy to stop taking Communion because of his pro-choice stance. The Bishop tried to handle it in private, but Kennedy took it public.
In the end, Father Harvey speculated aloud, Kennedy was probably coming around to the decision that it was time to leave public life because holding onto power had corrupted his soul. I’m not sure Kennedy would share that exact assessment, but I think he would agree that power isn’t worth having when it plunges the rest of your life into a dark, unhappy place.
So I walked away with mixed feelings. I am pro-life but get incensed when someone paints a pro-choice person as evil personified. I don’t think it’s so simple. I know a lot of people who hate abortion, but believe it’s between a woman, her doctor and God. They are pro-choice but NOT pro abortion. They are the types that vote for someone based on a wider range of issues than abortion alone. But they are told they’ve voted against God if they vote the wrong way. [See also: The Better Angels of My Nature]
I have a lot of trouble with that notion.
But in the larger picture, there’s no question that the pursuit of power is a tricky thing, and the longer one wields it the worse off they are.
I see myself in all this. As I’ve admitted before, I have a fairly big ego that comes with being a writer. The ego is frequently driven into overdrive by the OCD [See: The Ego OCD Built]. It’s painfully true that this ego carries a certain level of attention seeking. After all, it’s the writer’s goal to make sure people are reading their work, and that involves a lot of self promotion.
I’m guilty as charged.
It’s a double-edged blade, really. I don’t write with the idea of sticking the papers in a drawer for someone to find after I’m dead. I’m a journalist whose goal is for people to see what he’s writing today, not 30 years from now. Social networking makes it all the more dangerous. I’ll let this illustration drive home the point for me:
At the same time, I have a faith that has deepened with time, and my Religious beliefs often come into direct conflict with my profession. In the end, it doesn’t have to be that way. I just have to find my way on this twisted path.
That’s why I keep coming to Church. It’s ultimately about my relationship with God and how to strengthen it. People can get uptight about church politics and get angry because their beliefs have been challenged by the priest. But to me those things are distractions that are as big as any shiny object that distracts us from our core Faith. I think that’s why Confession is my favorite Sacrament. It forces me to come clean with God on a regular basis. It keeps the emotional trash from piling up and stinking too much.
In this particular case, the priest gave me something to think about. He zeroed in on an unpleasant truth.
And so, he did his job.
It’s up to me to ultimately reconcile it with how I live my life. I think I’ve come a long, long way. But I have a long way to go yet.
The youngest son of Edward M. Kennedy has often been criticized as a lightweight Congressman who gets away with things other people would get arrested for. But the author salutes him anyway. Here’s why.
Patrick Kennedy, the youngest child of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, announced yesterday that he won’t be running for re-election to the Congressional seat he has held since 1995.
Some will tell you it’s just as well. The Congressman, after all, hasn’t done much except for living off his family name and crashing cars into roadside barriers while high on narcotics. That’s often what I hear from my more conservative friends, who hate everything having to do with the Kennedy name.
In this book, Patrick is described as a spoiled kid who has accomplished nothing in Congress other than repeatedly winning re-election. He’s described as someone who blindly follows the Democratic leadership.
Some of that may be true. But Patrick has done some courageous service for those who suffer from mental illness.
Kennedy has been open about his own struggles with bi-polar disorder and the addictions that go with it. He has been in and out of addiction treatment centers and once noted how his addictive behavior could latch onto anything from pain medication to something as simple as cough medicine.
What’s more, he did one of the hardest things people like us can do: He lived in the spotlight as a public servant, where critics can be cruel and a lot of people like to hate the Kennedys just for the hell of it.
Patrick has carried a lot of pressure being a Kennedy. There’s the pressure to match his father’s towering legislative record and live up to the legendary stature of his uncles.
Some would have dropped to the floor long ago, curled in a fetal position, over the pressure. Some would not have survived. One of Patrick’s cousins, David Kennedy, one of RFK’s sons, didn’t survive the battle with the demons. He died of a drug overdose in 1984.
I loved Lawford’s book for a variety of reasons. He recounted his sordid tale with humor and was brutally honest about something addicts are all to aware of: When you quit the thing you’re addicted to, it doesn’t automatically turn you into a good person.
In fact, recovering addicts often become big jerks before they find their footing. They’re learning how to behave in public without being drunk or high. A deep depression often sets in because years of abuse leaves the brain with deep chemical imbalances that hit you like a brick to the head once the booze, food or narcotics exit the picture.
Patrick has dealt with all of these realities and still carried on in public service.
He continued to show up for life when life was at its most unbearable.
It gave people like me a little inspiration when we needed it most. So as Patrick prepares to exit the public stage and embark on a new life, I thank him for his service and wish him the best.
It’s easy for people to pass judgment on him for his flaws.
But people who do so often forget about their own flaws.
None of us are truly without sin. But we like to cast the first stones anyway.
The author on why it’s true that mental illness leads to physical sickness.
Mood music:
[spotify:track:24PttQAgkYLdpR4TOgdV4C]
I’ve heard a lot of people argue over whether this person’s or that person’s aches and pains were “all in their head.” You know the types: Never any real underlying disease, but they’re always calling out of work with a headache or some intestinal discomfort.
It’s all in their head, you say?
Well, yeah.
It’s called psychosomatic illness, when mental anguish leads to physical sickness.
I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.
But it wasn’t always clear that what ailed me was in my head. Childhood illness confused matters. A huge chunk of my digestive track was in flames and spewing blood because of Chron’s Disease. I’m told by my parents that the doctors came close to removing the colon more than once, though I don’t remember that myself; probably because the doctors had that conversation with the parents instead of the patient.
To throw it into remission, they used the maximum dose of a drug called Prednisone, which caused another kind of body blow in the form of migraines. You can read more about that in “The Bad Pill Kept me from the Good Pill,” but the bottom line is that these headaches came daily; always making me sick to my stomach.
Later in life, I developed severe back pain, the kind that would knock me onto the couch and keep me there for weeks.
All legitimate physical problems. But at some point my brain lost the ability to differentiate a real Chron’s flare-up or back spasm to an imagined one.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. It may as well have been one of those things. Because when the mind thinks it is, it has a habit of BECOMING real.
Any illness that has physical symptoms, but has the mind and emotions as its origin is called a psychosomatic illness. Although you may be told that it’s “all in your head”, these illnesses are not imaginary. The aches and pains are very real, but because your doctor is looking for an actual physical cause, they are very tricky to diagnose and treat. The key is to look for a source of stress in the person’s life that the person is not coping with. By treating the underlying stress and depression, it may be possible to heal the physical problems as well.
For me, it was easy to separate the Chron’s episodes from the tricky stuff described above, since the disease was sitting there for the doctors to see. I was always told mental stress could trigger flare-ups and I guess they did, especially when my parents divorced 30 years ago and a lot of stress over custody ensued. I’m fairly sure the after-effects of my brother’s death set off the last real flare-up in 1986.
But the migraines and back problems seeped seamlessly into the things that were going wrong with me mentally.
Anxiety attacks felt essentially the same as a heart attack, complete with the pain shooting from the chest to the neck and down the arms. Migraines followed. Work stress often sparked migraines and back pain.
While it was difficult to separate other legitimate physical problems from those stemming from mental distress, I can tell you that dealing with my underlying OCD, depression and addiction made a lot of ailments go away.
I’m not sure I can credit it with ending the back problems. Though mental illness most likely enhanced the back pain, that problem was eventually diagnosed as three out-of-whack vertebrae the chiropractor knocks back into alignment every other week. No more imprisonment on the couch.
But these things have gone away — and have not returned — since I got a handle on the OCD and related binge-eating disorder:
–Puking up stomach acid in the middle of the night
–Numbing of the feet
–A strange poked-in-the-eye sensation that would hit me early mornings and leave me with blurred vision for a day or more.
–A dull ache in the left hand, which often got worse as my mind spun out of control with thoughts that it MIGHT be a heart-attack.
–Fatigue that would cause all my joints to ache unless I were to lie down and go to sleep.
–Heart palpatations.
All disappeared once I started to attack the core problem.
The ultimate take-away from all this is that something in your head can cause real, physical pain.
And when you deal with what’s in your head, the pain in the rest of your body can be eradicated.
The author salutes Anne Saita, a former co-worker who showed me how to stand up to people and face down my fears — and whose blog is a must-read.
I’ve been reading the blog Run DMZ a lot lately.The main reason is that it’s chock full of excellent content on how to eat and exercise properly. The other reason is that the author is someone near and dear to me: Anne Saita, my former boss at SearchSecurity.com.
She’s an avid runner, an inspirational Mom to her two daughters and to people like me, and one of the best writers I’ve ever seen. [Side note: She sends Christmas cards each year featuring her daughters, and last time my six-year-old saw it he declared: “Wow. They’re really, really pretty.”] The boy is a flirt and knows what he’s talking about.
With her I’ve power-walked along Lake Michigan in Chicago and gallivanted with her on the rainy streets of San Francisco during security conferences.
At SearchSecurity.com, she was a nurturing soul. She encouraged me to make time for family, something I wasn’t yet good at. She knew I feared travel at the time, but gently coaxed me into doing more of it. Now I love travel. She showed me what courage is by constantly standing up to the TechTarget/SearchSecurity brass when she felt the brand’s reputation was being compromised by stupid marketing ploys. At the time I often thought she was being stupid. But at the time I was also so obsessed with pleasing my masters that I didn’t know any better.
I always got a chuckle out of her gift for gab, especially when she was offering up explicit details on a medical procedure she was having.
Because of her motherly disposition, I was able to come clean with her in late 2004, when I was inches from a nervous breakdown and realizing for the first time that I needed some serious help. The morning after I had my first appointment with a therapist, I told her about it, along with the rest of my warped behavior. She didn’t flinch. She urged me on, and in the coming months, when I was pushing up against depression and emotional breakdowns, she gave me the room to fall apart and then pick up the pieces.
When I started to react to the pain of therapy and digging deep into a sordid past by embarking on the most vicious binge eating stretch of my life, she saw that the weight was piling on but didn’t shame me over it. I was feeling shame in her presence anyway, because she had once told me that when checking my references before hiring me, the deal was sealed when a former CNC co-worker told her about my singular determination to lose 100 pounds in the late 1990s.
That kind of toughness impressed her, and there I was, losing that toughness as I packed on each pound.
Unfortunately, I only started to gain the upper hand on my demons after she left SearchSecurity.com for another job.
But thanks to the Internet and our two blogs, we still keep in touch regularly.
She’s gone through a lot herself, with physical injuries that kept her from running, blinding headaches that came and went without explanation, and the loss of a job she loved last year, as the Great Recession gunned down millions of jobs.
But she always comes back. Stronger than before.
In the photo above: Anne at the right, with Dennis Fisher, another former [and good] boss and avid runner, after a run in San Diego.
If she didn’t know before how much her friendship means to me, I think she’ll understand after reading this post.
She may also yell at me for revealing a bit too much about her. But then I always did enjoy the motherly rebuke that only she can provide.
Whenever I share my experiences with OCD and the related binge-eating disorder [See: The Most Uncool Addiction], there’s a word I always refrain from using if I’m outside the safe confines of my OA group: Abstinence.
I don’t hate the word. But I don’t like it much, either.
All anyone ever thinks about when it’s uttered is refraining from sex or studying for the Catholic priesthood. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I am a devout Catholic, after all.)
Nevertheless, it’s a word I can’t get around any longer, so let’s talk about it.
In the world of a recovering food addict, abstinence means to abstain from eating compulsively. It’s the exact same thing as the word sobriety in the world of a recovering alcoholic.
Think of OA and AA as essentially the same thing, only OA folks are addicted to compulsive overeating to the point where they walk around dazed like zombies, unable to manage their lives. Ailments boil over and friends and family suffer with you.
I’m abstinent from binge eating, which means I eat nothing with flour and sugar in it and most meals are portioned out on a small scale. I’m sober, too. I used to drink a lot of alcohol when traveling. This weekend I spent a security conference sober. [See: ShmooCon and Snowmageddon and The Engine in Hyperdrive]
This weekend was challenging to be sure. It wasn’t always easy drinking club soda while everyone else drank wine, beer, etc. And while I kept it together with the food plan, being away from the normal routine makes it challenging to keep all the portions straight. I probably could have done it better, but I think things worked out pretty well on balance.
Of course, other, smaller addictions try to reassert themselves [See: How to Play Your Addictions Like a Piano]. One of them is spending. I have a weakness for collecting political and historical knickknacks, especially when I’m in Washington D.C. That weakness is evident to anyone visiting my work space. [See: Someone to Watch Over Me (A.K.A.: Desk Junk] This time, I held back.
I also like a good cigar when traveling, and probably enjoy it more than I should. I’m going to abstain from the stogies during Lent, which starts next week. We’ll see what happens after that.
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.
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.
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.
As an obsessive-compulsive binge eater, the author feels it’s only proper that he (cough) weigh in (cough) on the notion that regulating junk food might help. Here’s why the answer is probably not.
The cattle prod for this item is a new book called “The End of Overeating.” The author is David A. Kessler, MD, and a former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I actually have a lot of respect for this guy, whose tenure included the successful push to enact regulations requiring standardized Nutrition Facts labels on food. That, in my opinion, was a huge win for those of us who want truth in advertising.
In “The End of Overeating,” Kessler makes a compelling argument: Foods high in fat, salt and sugar alter the brain’s chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat. “Much of the scientific research around overeating has been physiology — what’s going on in our body,” The Washington Post quoted him as saying in the story “David Kessler: Fat, Salt and Sugar Alter Brain Chemistry, Make Us Eat Junk Food.”
The real question is what’s going on in the brain, Kessler says.
His theory on food as an addictive substance is as on the mark as you can get. Trust me. I’ve lived it. Binge eating is all about addiction for me. It’s tied directly into the same corner of the brain where my OCD resides.
He is also right that sugar, salt and fat are addictive substances, though for a lot of people, the components of our poison boil down to sugar and flour. Of course, most of the food that has flour and sugar also tends to be high in salt and fat.
The first and most important tool in my OA recovery program is a plan of eating. Flour and sugar are off the table — period. Almost everything I eat goes on a little scale. 4 ounces protein, 4 ounces raw vegetable, 6 ounces cooked vegetable, 2 ounces potato or brown rice, etc. Every morning at 6:15 I call my sponsor, someone who hears my food plan for each day and gives me the necessary kick in the ass.
But salt and fat are not forbidden for me. In fact, I’m allowed to substitute 4 ounces of meat with 2 ounces of cheese or nuts.
To some, this may sound like a typical fad diet, but people in OA have used a plan like this since the beginning. And the plan isn’t the same for everyone. If you have diabetes, for example, removing every scrap of flour from the diet isn’t usually an option. No matter. The only requirement of the program is to stop eating compulsively, no matter how you get there.
This isn’t something I pursued to drop 65 pounds, though I did lose that amount pretty quickly. This is a food plan for life — a key to my getting all the nutrition I need and nothing more. Just as an alcoholic must put down the booze or a narcotics addict has to put down the pills, I have to put down the flour and sugar.
This is the plan that got me out of the darkest days of addictive behavior and I’m a true believer.
Flour and sugar mixed together becomes a toxin that knocks the fluids in my brain out of balance. Kessler’s research is definitely in line with what’s happened to me.
But the idea of regulating food the same way as something like cigarettes? It won’t do much good.
It certainly couldn’t hurt. The nutrition labels at the very least gave us an education on what we put in our bodies, and it’s been especially helpful to parents who are trying to raise their kids healthy. Regulating cigarettes has certainly made it harder for minors to buy them.
But for the true addict, regulation is a joke.
Knowing what’s in junk food won’t keep the addict away. I always read the labels AFTER binging on the item in the package. And the labels have done nothing to curb the child obesity pandemic.
If you smoke, it’s certainly more expensive to buy a pack than it used to be. But if you crave the nicotine, you’ll find a way to get your fix. It’s the same with drugs, and with food.
I’m going to read Kessler’s book because it sounds like he has some breakthrough findings that can help make people better.
But when someone suggests regulation as a solution, don’t ever believe ’em.
A suffering brain will always find a way to disregard the rules for the three minutes of rapture that follows the binge.
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.
Mood music for this post: “Just Another Psycho” by Motley Crue:
It’s a funny thing when I talk to people suffering from depression, addiction and other troubles of the mind. Folks seem more comfortable about the idea of pills than in seeing a therapist. After all, they’re just crazy “shrinks” in white coats obsessed with how your childhood nightmares compromised your adult sex life, right?
Since I rely on a therapist and medication as two of MANY tools in my recovery, I’m going to take a crack at removing the shrink stigma for you.
I’ve been to many therapists in my life. I was sent to one at Children’s Hospital in Boston as a kid to talk through the emotions of being sick with Chron’s Disease all the time. That same therapist also tried to help me and my siblings process the bitter aftermath of our parents’ divorce in 1980.
As a teenager, I went to another therapist to discuss my brother’s death and my difficulty in getting along with my stepmother (a wonderful, wonderful woman who I love dearly, by the way. But as a kid I didn’t get along with her).
That guy was a piece of work. He had a thick French accent and wanted to know if I found my stepmother attractive. From the moment he asked that question, I was done with him, and spent the rest of the appointment being belligerent.
That put me off going to a therapist for a long time. I started going to one again in 2004, when I found I could no longer function in society without untangling the barbed wire in my head. But I hesitated for a couple years before pressing on.
The therapist I started going to specialized in dealing with disturbed children and teenagers. That was perfect, because in a lot of ways I was still a troubled kid.
She never told me what to do, never told me how I’m supposed to interpret my disorder against my past. She asked a lot of questions and had me do the work of sorting it out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a good therapist does. They ask questions to get your brain churning, dredging up experiences that sat at the back of the mind like mud on the ocean floor. That’s how you begin to deal with how you got to the point of dysfunction.
She moved to Florida a year in and I started going to a fellow who worked from his house. I would explain my binge eating habits to him, specifically how I would down $30 worth of McDonald’s between work and home.
“You should stock your car with healthy foods like fruit, so if you’re hungry you can eat those things instead,” he told me.
That was the end of that. He didn’t get it. When an addict craves the junk, the healthy food around you doesn’t stand a chance. The compulsion is specifically toward eating the junk. He should have understood. He didn’t. Game over.
The therapist I see now is a God-send. He was the first therapist to help me understand the science behind mental illness and the way an inbalance in brain chemistry can mess with your thought traffic. He also provided me with quite an education on how anti-depressants work. Yes, friends, there’s a science to it. Certain drugs are designed to shore up the brain chemicals that, when depleted, lead to bi-polar behavior. Other meds are specifically geared toward anxiety control. In my case, I needed the drug that best addressed obsessive-compulsive behavior. For me, that meant Prozac.
That’s not to say I blindly obey his every suggestion. He specializes in stress reduction and is big on yoga and eliminating coffee from the daily diet. Those are two deal breakers for me. Yoga bores the dickens out of me. If you’ve been following this blog all along, I need not explain the coffee part.
I also find it fun to push his buttons once in awhile. I’ll show up at his office with a huge cup of Starbucks. “Oh, I see you’ve brought drugs with you,” he’ll say.
Thing is, he’s probably right about the coffee. But I’ve given up a lot of other things for the sake of mental health. I’m simply not putting the coffee down right now.
I think part of this is about testing him, too. I can’t help but push the buttons sometimes just to see what I can get away with.
But on balance, it’s a productive relationship that has helped me to find a lot of peace and order in my life. I thank him for that.
He kind of reminds me of Dr. Keyworth, the shrink who counseled Josh Lyman and President Bartlet on “The West Wing.” He took their crap with a straight face, not the least bit concerned that these were powerful, intimidating people.
The main point of this post is this:
There are good therapists and not-so-good therapists, just like there are good and not-so-good primary care doctors; just like there are good cops and bad cops.
But if you feel like you need to talk to someone objective and you hold back for fear of being in the same room as a quack, well, then you’ll never know what you could have accomplished.
I chose to talk to a professional despite my deepest reservations. I’m grateful that I did.
Back in the day, when I was throwing parties in the basement of my house in Revere, Mass., I would reach a certain level of intoxication around 2 a.m. where I’d freeze in place, yell “mood swing!” and throw candy and other food items around the room.
People seemed to enjoy it, so I kept doing it. Even then, the ego was there.
Looking back, I now know that those mood swings, which were real, were the beginnings of some mental damage.
I can wake up in a perfectly good mood. Then, two hours later, a wave of melancholy will hit me for no good reason. Then I listen to some angry music and it eventually passes. Other days I’ll wake up with a feeling of dread for no particular reason and an hour later the mood turns sunny and I’m ready to take on the world.
It’s been happening more frequently in recent weeks, which I’ve come to realize is the winter effect. Minimize my sunlight and throw a lot of cold, gray weather my way and it gets a little tougher to hold it all together.
I started taking an extra 20 MG of Prozac last week, the idea being that I take a higher dosage for the duration of winter and dial it back to where it was come spring and summer.
It’s just starting to have the desired impact. The mid-afternoon mood swings I was having last month have gone away. But I still get up on a morning like this one, where I feel the brooding impulse for no particular reason.
And so I put on music like this:
[spotify:track:2yWOMbhPN2XJAiVy46Bhvz]
And now I feel better.
That’s how it works.
A tricky thing to manage, but it’s much, much better than it used to be. For that I Thank God.
I’ve been there. Migraines. Brutal back pain. A stomach turned inside-out.
