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Maybe It’s Time for a New Therapist

Lately I hate going to my therapy appointments. I dread getting in the car to go, and once I leave his office my head goes from slight ache to migraine in the course of an hour. It’s not the therapist’s fault as much as it’s a change brewing within me.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7rvD6aTf1Aa2OMwzAQbQwO]

I’ve written about my therapist before. He’s taught me a lot about how the brain works, what happens when a mental disorder takes hold and how specific drugs go to work on specific defects. In that regard, he’s been a godsend. I’ve never agreed with everything he tells me to do, especially the bit about not drinking caffeine. To protest that suggestion, I usually show up for an appointment with a Venti Starbucks bold in my hand. But that’s never taken away from what he’s helped me with. In fact, his good humor under my needling has only made me like him more.

But lately I keep feeling like we’ve hit a wall, that he can’t take me any further on this journey.

I’ve been here before with other therapists. They help me move forward up to a certain point, then we start going in circles, covering the same ground over and over again — sometimes simply for the sake of using up the 60 minutes that I pay for.

To some extent you have to retread the same ground in therapy, because the patient is usually dealing with the same old issues. Retracing the old steps is how a therapist checks to see how well you’re managing and using the tools you’ve developed.

But lately, I’ve had less and less patience for covering the ground I know all too well.

It could simply be that I need a fresh face to dump on every few years, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I used to hate having to change therapists because in my mind it meant I would have to tell someone the whole back story all over again. What I’ve learned, however, is that I can tell the backstory through a fresher mindset, one that works differently now that I’ve significantly improved my ability to manage the demon.

I’m not the anxious, fear-filled introvert who first walked into a therapist’s office in 2004 when I first realized I had big issues that were making my life unbearable. Today I’m a lot more outgoing, sure of myself and at ease with who I am. But I’ll always need therapy to ensure that I’m still using all my coping tools the way I’m supposed to. Besides, life is always changing, throwing new curve balls my way. Through the normal challenges of life, I need help keeping my balance.

Maybe that’s part of my current dilemma: I’ve gotten better to the point where I’ve become too comfortable with this particular therapist. In life, we’re always searching for the comfort zone, but sometimes being in the comfort zone makes you forget what really needs to be discussed in that 60-minute block.

I could be imagining all this right now. It could be that I’m looking for excuses to stop talking about things I actually need to talk about. Taking the necessary medicine is often unpleasant.

But for now I have that feeling in my gut, telling me that something isn’t working like it used to when I first step into that office.

Time for a change? We’ll see.

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How I Spent My Writing Blackout

While prepping this new site, I decided to take a break from writing fresh posts. I didn’t want to live between two sites. Doing this and writing a security blog in my day job can be confusing enough. During this break, I’ve learned some important things about myself.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:4VMAmxsxncyRhZGsT1IQep]

Breaking wasn’t easy for me. Daily writing has been a vital tool for me for a long time now, and while I continued to keep a private journal, I worried about the lack of public communication. The give and take that often results from a post has been immensely helpful to me. Trust me, I learn more from you than you do from me.

I was also getting obsessed with posting a lot of repeat content, because I’ve always had this fear that everyone will forget me if I go away for too long. Call it an OCD quirk or the mark of a narcissist. Both descriptions are accurate.

Though I’ve resumed the repeat posts this week, I did almost no re-posting for a couple weeks.

During that time, we celebrated Mother’s Day and Duncan’s First Communion. I went to California for a security event and spent a lot of time in San Diego and Los Angeles and then spent a very intense but awesome day and a half at my company offsite meeting.

Did I miss the daily dose of posting OCD DIARIES content? Not as much as I thought I would.

A beautiful thing happened: I found that I could go away and abstain from all promotion and not go into a painful withdrawal. Despite little to no promotion, the old version of the blog got just as much daily traffic as it did before. My audience, which has grown from a few dozen to several hundred a day, stuck around, digging through old posts, commenting on several and sharing them with others on their Twitter and Facebook pages. That was reassuring, to say the least.

I also enjoyed some more relaxed mornings.

Writing the daily OCD DIARIES post is usually the first thing I do every morning. During the blackout, I eased into work with a bit more serenity. It was especially nice during the California trip, where I filled the usual writing time with more adventures. I still worked the information security beat hard, writing a bunch of posts in my security blog while there. But I also found some spare time to walk the beach at Torrey Pines in San Diego with former co-worker Anne Saita. I spent the first night in the spare room of her home and got to know her husband, Gilbert, who I’ve heard about for years but had never met.

The drive back to L.A. was long but I didn’t mind. Avis gave me a brand-new Ford Edge SUV to drive, and I hated having to give it back. It was a smooth ride and was loaded with such modern technology as a GPS, a view screen that lets you see what’s behind you while backing up and multiple USB ports for charging the phone and iPod.

Once back in L.A., I walked up and down the Sunset Strip for a bit and went back to work. I spent that night sleeping on an air mattress on the kitchen floor of my friend Mike D. Mike is from Lynn, Mass., and was part of the circle of friends that included Sean Marley back in the day. For the last 23 years he’s been living in North Hollywood. We got some good quality time this trip, and I drove him around the Hollywood Hills to gawk at the homes of famous people and infamous murders, not telling him where we were headed as we drove around.

I was burnt when I got back home and spent much of the first day back crashed on the couch. That’s the sort of thing I don’t do easily, because I have trouble leaving the laptop closed.

Truth be told, I wanted to launch the new blog far sooner, but Erin made me wait. The email needed fixing and she didn’t want it launched until that was fixed.

There was another lesson: to be part of a team effort I need more patience than I currently have. We’re both control freaks in our own ways, and we knew it going in. Now the fun begins.

It was a good break and I’m glad I did it. I learned that I can in fact go away without being rendered irrelevant. I was never irrelevant, mind you, but my brain doesn’t work like most people’s.

I also remembered how important it is to take breaks. That’s something I easily forget in the heat of life.

All that said, I’m glad to be back in action. Now to see if I can use the lessons of the past two weeks to moderate my behavior.

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Welcome to the New OCD DIARIES!

After many hours spent re-categorizing 900-plus posts, buying a new domain and building a new blog from scratch on WordPress.org — plus a few spousal disagreements along the way —  I give you the new OCD DIARIES.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:7zKPPqSGLAfc8nfuCmg4PF]

What’s new besides the new banner, design and background color, you ask? Quite a bit:

  • A broader theme that captures our ongoing struggles between darkness and light. I started this adventure a couple years ago to focus squarely on my own battles with OCD, depression and addictive behavior, but with time it’s become more about the demons we all live with and how we deal with them. Expect more commentary from me on politics. I’ll never tell you who to vote for or who I’m voting for, however. I’m more interested in how candidates behave and how we the masses react to and participate in the political discourse. Politics is a case study in how we talk to each other and what is says about us as human beings.
  • Recipes for healthy eating, including the no-flour, no-sugar meals I live by. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to participate by sending in your own recipes. The only requirement is that it’s healthy stuff, because healthy eating is critical to better mental health as well as physical health.
  • More guest posts where others talk about their struggles, because this stuff isn’t all about me. If you have something to say about a struggle you’ve had with depression, addiction, relationships and life in general, this is a forum where you can share. You’ll feel better afterwards, and you’ll help others in the process by showing that we are indeed all in this together. Share your coping tools and, if you’re a mental health professional, share your knowledge.
  • Mood music straight from my Spotify library. Rock ‘n’ roll is one of my main coping tools, and instead of using YouTube to deliver the music, I’m going to draw straight from my Spotify library. Spotify rocks and can be downloaded for free. Almost every album from every artist known to man can be found there. I want to introduce more people to Spotify and share my music without the YouTube copyright police breathing down my neck. You’ll need to have Spotify running to play the mood music now, but it’s well worth it. If it doesn’t work out for most readers, I’ll revert back to YouTube. For now, this is a worthy experiment.
  • A category list to the right of this space to help you find posts more precisely related to the subject you’re interested in. By clicking the music therapy category, for instance, you’ll get all previous and future posts dealing with music as therapy. By clicking the children’s issues category, you’ll get to posts all about children and the mental health issues they deal with. We’re also going to include more book reviews, and there’s a category page for that, too.
  • Advertising. This new platform will allow us to include advertisements from entities who deal in the subject matter I write about — mental health organizations and professionals, for example. If you want your ad on here, let us know.
  • A husband-wife team. Perhaps most important about the new OCD DIARIES is that it’s now a team effort. The fabulous Erin C. Brenner has played a critical role in developing this new site, and she’ll edit everything you see on here from now on. She’ll also be in charge of the marketing effort.

Welcome to OUR world.

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The Freak in the Newsroom

A tale of terror in newsrooms across the state of Massachusetts.

I love my job. I love the subject matter (IT and physical security, emergency preparedness, regulatory compliance). I love the people I work with, many of whom I’ve worked with at other points in my nearly 19 years in journalism. And I love my daily dealings with some of the smartest, passionate security professionals on the planet.

But it wasn’t always this way. Work used to be something to dread, binge eat and get sick over. And I had no one to blame but myself.

For me, one of the main triggers for obsessive-compulsive behavior was work. I was driven to the brink by a desire to be the golden boy, the guy who worked the most hours, wrote the most stories, handled the most shit work and pleased the most managers.

Golden Boy

I got my first reporting job at Community Newspaper Company, covering the school system in Swampscott, Mass. It was part time, but I put in more than 40 hours a week. Not terrible. I liked the people I worked with and felt pretty dang good about having the job even though I was still one course shy of earning my degree. But I spent much of the time in fear that I wouldn’t measure up. My head would spin at 3 a.m. as I tried to come up with things to write about and prove my worth. My weight soared from 230 pounds — already too much — to 260.

Sullen Boy

The next job was full-time as reporter for the Stoneham Sun. I pretty much worked around the clock, trying to show the editor, managing editor and editor-in-chief (all friends to this day, BTW) that I was THE MAN. Late in my tenure on this beat, my best friend killed himself and I binged as much on work as on food to bury my rage. It didn’t work. I gained another 20 pounds and wrote a column about my friend’s suicide, naming names and describing the method of death in way too much detail. To this day, his parents and sister won’t have anything to do with me, and I can’t say I blame them.

Lynn Sunday Post and Peter Sugarman

This was a bad year. My best friend had just died and I was given the task of editing The Lynn Sunday Post, a newspaper that was on its deathbed. You could say I was chosen to be its pallbearer. There was barely a staff. Few people read it anymore. My only day off was Monday. And my only reporter was an eccentric guy with a cheezy mustache: Peter Sugarman.

He infuriated me from the start, writing epic stories dripping with his personal passion and political agenda instead of the objective writing I was taught to follow in college journalism classes (Peter would call it my J-School side, and it wasn’t a compliment).

It was only natural that he would become my new best friend, another older brother who was always tring to get me to see the light (his way of doing things).

He and his wife Regina were a constant presence from that time until he choked to death in May 2004, three weeks after I started my SearchSecurity job. But while he was around, I learned a lot about using my writing as an agent of change, a force for good, and about thinking about the readers instead of the higher ups I had been trying so desperately to please.

Another person put in the right place at the right time by God.

Interlude

Much of the same behavior while editor of The Billerica Minuteman, though there was some level of stability during this period.

Deep Slide

During this period I was night editor at The Eagle-Tribune.

Before I go further, I should mention that what follows is HOW I SAW THINGS AT THE TIME, NOT NECESSARILY HOW THINGS ACTUALLY WERE.

For a year and a half of that I was assistant editor of the New Hampshire edition. It started off well enough. But this was a tougher environment than I had experienced before. Editors were tougher to please and often at cross purposes with each other. Part of the task I was handed was to be the bad cop that called reporters late at night to rip them over one perceived injustice or another. I sucked at it. I mostly came off as an asshole, and it never made a difference for the better.

The most insidious, bitter part of the experience was during my time on the New Hampshire staff. The managing editor I worked for directly seemed to relish cracking down on reporters, putting them down and ripping their work to shreds. And he expected me to do it the same way, exactly as he did it.

To be fair, the guy wasn’t without a soul. He tried to do the right thing most of the time and genuinely cared about the people under him. But he was also consumed with the idea that all the other editors on staff were out to get us and undermine our efforts. Everyone was a back-stabber. Whenever I had the impulse to collaborate with editors from other sections or let some things slide, he came down hard.

More than ever, I was being the editor he wanted me to be and not who I really was. I called reporters at all hours. I put them down. I fought with other editors and hovered over the page designers on deadline.

I also came as close as I had to an emotional breakdown at that point. I started calling in sick A lot. I’d wake up with the urge to throw up. By mid-afternoon, the urge switched to binge eating.

That managing editor eventually moved on and I returned to the night desk. By then, I was burning out, a shell of the man I once was. By the time I left there, everyone on staff was evil in my eyes; the cause of everything that had gone wrong.

I was wrong for the most part. Fortunately for me, most of my co-workers from the period looked past my insanity and today many of them are among my dearest friends.

Working a Dream Job But Trapped in the Mental House of Horrors

For the next four years I wrote for SearchSecurity.com, part of the TechTarget company. The job was everything I could have hoped for. Excellent colleagues, a ton of creative freedom and plenty of success came my way.

It also coincided with another emotional meltdown as I started to wake up to the mental illness and the fact that I needed to do something about it.

I think I hid it from my colleagues pretty well, except for my direct editor, Ann Saita, who became something of a mom to me, a nurturing soul I could spill my guts to. I’m pretty sure God put her in the right place at the right time, knowing my time of reckoning was at hand. During this period, I untangled all the mental wiring, started taking Prozac (See “The Bad Pill Kept Me from the Good Pill“), officially became a devout Catholic (more on that later) and finally started to feel whole.

Managing Editor, CSO Magazine and beyond

My current job is truly the best I’ve had. I get to work with people like Derek Slater, Joan Goodchild and Jim Malone, who was my editor-in-chief during my first reporting jobs at CNC and one of the folks I went out of my mind trying to please. A side note that amuses me greatly: Peter Sugarman used to drive him nuts, too.

The most noteworthy thing about the last year and a half is that a personal focus has been to get a handle on the eating. In 2008 I discovered OA and started to regain the upper hand. I quit flour and sugar and started putting all my food on a little scale. My mind cleared.

Here’s the best part about my present situation: From Day 1 at CSO, I have not once worried about being a people pleaser. I’ve just focused on the projects I believed in and my bosses have been content to let me have at it.

I don’t work much more than 40 hours a week, and the funny thing is that I’m more prolific now than I ever was before.

Business travel I used to dread has become a joy. Speaking in front of people has gone from something to fear to something to do more of.

Now, five years into my stint at CSO, I’m headed for a new challenge, focusing all my writing and editing skills on the security data at Akamai Technologies.  I feel no dread, only happiness and glee.

And to think — All I had to do was get out of my own way.
Eagle-Tribune staffers