entropy

Though it is oft stated differently, entropy is seen in physics as the amount of energy no longer available in a usable form to do work. Once an ice cube melts, the energy that was in the atoms of the ice cubes has been dispersed throughout the warmer air surrounding. And unless you have some device capable of trapping the energy used in that process, that energy is essentially lost.

One of the byproducts of addiction is a kind of entropy.

There is within us a great deal of potential energy, just waiting to be applied to the world around us. Each episode of acting out reduces that by some measure. And without some kind of intervention from some outside force, that energy is lost.

The laws of physics apply to addiction – who knew?

Think about this one, Newton’s First Law:

A body in motion tends to stay in motion

Having a little trouble breaking the cycle of your addiction? Newton tells us why. And with each cycle, we have less energy available to affect a change.

That’s why I find it difficult to understand those who try to break out of addiction without some serious Higher Power.

Consider this; if you had it within you to make the change, to break the cycles, on your own – wouldn’t you have already done it?

Or do you like living with the constant threat of losing the people you hold dear?

Or of hurting those who love you?

But you don’t have it within you to change yourself.

I go back to the man who sought healing from Christ – “You have the power; I know it. All that is required is that You would be willing.”

A body in motion tends to stay in motion … unless acted on by an outside force.

You need a force greater than your own to provide the energy you lack. You aren’t getting free of that repetitive motion otherwise.

It has been said that gravity is not just a good idea – it’s the Law!

Don’t think yourself to be the exception. You need a Higher Power. One with limitless energy. One that is above the Law.

unmedicated

Doctor my eyes cannot see the sky.
Is this the prize for having learned how not to cry?
- Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne

I was talking with a friend last night who suggests that I may be suffering from ‘Post-Tornadic Stress Syndrome’. This was not meant to make fun of or denigrate post-traumatic stress sufferers – this is just our neighborhood version.

I have trouble sleeping. I wake every few hours thinking I hear trees snapping, falling. In my sleep I feel the shaking that gripped our house as the tornado passed a week ago, and I wake to a pillow wet with my sweat.

This isn’t fun.

I’m going through this unmedicated. I don’t mean I’m not taking aspirin; I mean I am letting myself feel what I’m feeling without finding some way to get around it. Okay, maybe that isn’t completely true – I’ve spent most of the last week with a chainsaw and clippers, turning perfectly innocent branches into piles of not-more-than-four-feet-long clippings. But I think of that as chainsaw therapy, not as medicating. Sounds wierd, I know, but there is a certain level of satisfaction in watching a tree trunk succumb to my saw, a little less of the powerlessness that pervades my world.

There is another feeling that I’ve been having trouble identifying, but a coworker who rode out Katrina in a town near New Orleans put a label on it for me this morning – guilt.

Our street has half a dozen homes. I think it is likely that two of them will have to be torn down. An elderly couple in another home is camping on their front porch because the living space of the house isn’t livable. Another neighbor is living with friends for the next few months. And we are sort of back to normal, other than having a messy yard. I feel a little guilty about that. Probably sounds stupid, but it is fairly normal (or so I hear).

You might wonder what any of this has to do with the primary subject of this blog. Here’s the thing; I spent so many years trying very hard not to feel much, wanting to protect myself from the real world of emotions, that it is strange, wonderful, and scary to feel stuff like I am right now. In some respects, I can identify with a certain blind man I read about once:

1 And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? 3 Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 4 We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. 5 When I am in the world, I am the light of the world. 6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and anointed his eyes with the clay, 7 and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went away therefore, and washed, and came seeing. – John 9

Imagine what it would be like to go through much of your life without sight, then to have it all come at once thanks to a little dirt and spit. I wonder why Jesus didn’t just say, “You’re healed” and leave the spit out of it … but I digress. Frequently.

I suspect there were times when the man formerly-known-as-blind must have wished for his sight to be taken again.

The light probably hurt.

There were things he would rather not have seen.

But the gift was worth the pain and discomfort.

I’m not fond of the feelings I’m experiencing right now. But I’ll take them, and be glad that I can feel.

the long run

Lawd, I am so tired. How long can this go on? – Working in a Coalmine, Allen Toussaint, 1966

This week has been a whirlwind. Forgive me, you wouldn’t understand the pun – we had a tornado cut through our subdivision Tuesday night. I’ve been chainsawing, trimming, raking, roof-climbing … it has been rough.

Our little huddle made it through unscathed, though we lost the most beautiful old oak tree and the corner of our garage. We were the only house on the block without a tree through the roof of the living space, and it is miraculous that the three 50′+ trees that fell all managed to miss anything critical.

But tonight, as I reeled in the extension cord and schlepped the last bag o’ leaves for the day down the driveway, I took a look back at the house.

Tuesday at twilight, it was a sad and scary scene. Tonight, it is still a mess; but it looks a lot better than it did.

Still so far to go; but so much ground covered.

Bet you’re a mile ahead of me on this, but it made me think about recovery.

Oh, the damage I did. The total wreck I made of so many relationships, the way I abused positions of leadership for selfish gain, the immaturity that I flaunted … that’s where I was not so long ago. But by approaching life one day at a time, setting realistic expectations regarding milestones in recovery, and celebrating the little victories in a sane way, I’m looking back and thinking, “I’m still a mess – but there has been progress.”

Occasionally we find that the things that we thought were liabilities can be assets. I’ve been promising for the last few years to build a span over the backyard mud hole to get from the swings over to the playhouse – two poplar trees that were clipped by the storm are an excellent length and breadth for the main supports for that bridge.

My personal weaknesses have provided a means for me to connect with other wounded warriors and find more strength than I would have had I been “strong” and kept flying solo.

Tuesday night was terrifying. Tonight I sit here typing a sunburnt and very sore man. But, one square foot at a time, we are recovering.

getting non-busy

Noise.

There is so much stinking noise around me.

I wear headphones at work and keep music going to cover the noise generated by people talking in the surrounding cubicles. I turn the volume up to where it hurts because I am distracted by their conversations. The HVAC system for the building has been tuned up, and now I can hear a constant hum overhead and the whispering of the vent just above and to my right. The corporate video conference room is right around the corner from me, and everyone using the facility seems to think I want to hear their meetings (door open, volume up).

Maybe I need to cut down on the caffeine.

This weekend was not particularly restful – lots of driving, long hours – but there was a period Saturday that reminded me of just how noisy my everyday life has become. We dropped off the kids with my in-laws and went for a picnic. We probably spent a couple of hours just sitting in the sunshine, talking some about where we’ve been and where we want to be, and shooing away aggressive ducks and geese … but otherwise, just looking up at the clouds and watching the trees grow.

I need more of that. I need times that are not about anything.

I need to differentiate this from numbing-out time in front of the TV or playing video games. Those are like my headphones at work – a more intense variety of the very stuff I’m trying to get away from.

No, this was just plain peaceful. No speculation about who will be voted off next week, no worlds to conquer, no debating the relative merits of this candidate versus that one, no discussion of how our way of life is or isn’t threatened … just peace.

That was so good, I think I’ll pencil it in my calendar sometime again … let’s see … I have an opening in August …

get control of yourself

You’ve got to learn to pace yourself. – Pressure, Billy Joel

We were talking at the dinner table last night about how to handle emotions. My son is very young, and is still learning how to process the way he feels about things.

Turns out it isn’t just him.

The issue as I saw it was that virtually any emotion he experiences ends up being expressed through crying.

E, if you read this later, I’m not trying to shame you with this. It just explains what happened next.

My Princess said something along the lines of how “mommy cries a lot. ” My wife agreed. Then my Princess floored me.

Daddy, you don’t cry; you just get mad.

She just turned five, and she understands so much. I’m embarassed and ashamed.

I felt a little numb as I tried to explain that my daddy didn’t cry in front of me more than once or twice in his lifetime, and that we tend to learn how we handle our emotions from what we see in our parents … and I could see her very sharp mind processing “and daddy gets mad, so that must be an OK way to handle emotions.“

It isn’t an OK way. It is what I turn to because I refuse to numb out in my old patterns, and I haven’t figured out how to express my hurts, my joys, any of it in a consistent, appropriate way.

So I get mad.

And my five-year-old therapist is pointing this out to me as I’m trying to explain appropriate behavior to my three-year-old.

I’m getting a tension headache just thinking about it now.

One of the real challenges to overcoming addiction is the struggle I’m facing today – figuring out how to deal with my stuff. I think this is one of the reasons that addicts tend to cross from one addiction to another – we treat a specific behavior, but we tend to not want to deal with the underlying issues. The result is that we find another substitute for dealing with whatever the root issue may be.

This is, of course, where we go back and blame our parents for everything, right? Um, no. This is where we figure out what it is that triggers our behavior, that initiates the feelings that used to take us into our addiction. This is where I recognize that, for me, most of my frustration stems from situations where I feel disrespected. And that does, in my case, have a lot to do with a subtle kind of abuse I endured as a child, and how I chose to interpret that as I grew older.

I’m typing this as I sit at my desk, waiting for feedback on something “mission-critical” for my company, a project that interrupted another “mission-critical” project. Those who can answer my questions are busy, so I can’t get an answer I need. My natural tendency is to interpret that as some sort of slight towards me, as if they are ignoring my questions just in spite. The fact is that one of them was derailed by a car accident this morning, and hasn’t been anywhere near his email yet. The other person has been in a meeting about another mission-critical project, and walked out of that meeting as I typed this paragraph. They aren’t ignoring me out of spite; they have other stuff going on too.

That may sound trivial, but I offer it as an an example of what goes on in my semi-aware mind, of how I build a case to justify my frustrations, to find a way to blame someone else for my inability to properly process the situation. If all of that sounds like I’m just being childish, you’re beginning to see the heart of the issue.

At the heart of it, there is some adolescent milestone I have not yet passed – the point where I was supposed to have learned that the world is not about me, and that things sometimes happen that aren’t a slight towards me.

It would be simple, and fairly honest, to say I learned this from family. My dad was not deficient in this way, but everyone else from his birth family was. Their temper-trigger was set to fire on very low pressure, and then in full-automatic mode. Dad was more restrained, but once he reached his melt-down point – well, he never beat anyone; but he could be pretty harsh.

So I’m trying to find a better way. I’m trying to find a vent that isn’t a cover-up. I’m trying to release honestly, without some vehicle that becomes my next addiction. I fear that my dedication to fitness over the last several months is verging on becoming just that. Hmm, something unhealthy about my efforts to get healthy.

I come back to that point in the 12-Step liturgy where I come to a point of not only admitting my defects of character, but of being open to, and asking, God to remove those defects.

40 A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” 41 Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” – Mark 1:40, 41, NIV

Lord, if you are willing …

royal lineage

My family is royalty.

When I come home each night, my Queen greets me with a kiss, followed by kisses, hugs, and/or snuggles from both my Princess and Prince.

Sometimes the Princess will even say, “How was your majesty’s day, Daddy?”

It’s good to be the King.

But it is even better, I think, to be the Princess or the Prince.

Ignoring the Peter Pan aspect of me wishing I were a kid again, here’s what I mean.

My Princess was born in a far off land. She was born to parents who didn’t feel they could properly care for her, so they made a loving choice to leave her where she would be found, and cared for. And adopted.

She was not born into our royal lineage; we chose her, made her the Princess she is today. That would probably sound conceited, like she owes us something, but I mean it in much the same sense as how God has adopted us.

3 So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the world: 4 but when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 that he might redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. 6 And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. 7 So that thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. – Galatians 4: 3-7

‘Abba’ = ‘Daddy’

My Prince was born into this royal bloodline. He was longed for no less than the Princess; his path home was just a little more conventional.

In him I see myself. He is no longer a toddler; he is fully a child now. And in every goofy grin, every story that goes on for what seems an eternity and never reaches a point, every session of tickle torture he endures, I see myself. I see a version of myself before the addictions. I see me with limitless possibilities still open, no doors shut by poor choices.

And once in a while it hits me that there is something about that which echoes the way God sees me. A little copy of Him. A goofy, rambling, laughing and laughable copy of the Original.

17 The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. ; He will take great delight in you, ; he will quiet you with his love, ; he will rejoice over you with singing.” ; – Zephaniah 3:17

He takes delight in us, much as I take delight in my children.

My Princess makes my heart smile; my Prince makes my heart laugh.

God has called us into His family, made us Princes and Princesses. Our Father wants us to call Him ‘Daddy.’ In the NorthPoint Community Church series, “Faith, Hope, and Luck“, Andy Stanley said:

Formality is the enemy of intimacy.

It doesn’t get much less formal than calling someone “Daddy.” It makes my heart sing when I hear my children call me that. I think it makes God feel the same way.

identity crisis

In C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, a young man seems to have forgotten who he is. During the day, he is a protege to the Lady of the Green Kirtle, but at night he seems to be someone else entirely. And so the Lady has him bound, every night, to a silver chair while his ‘psychotic episodes’ pass.

We come to discover that the young man is really Prince Rillian of Narnia, and has been enchanted to believe himself to be the witch’s apprentice. His ‘nightly ravings’ are the hour he remembers who he really is.

So it is with my addictions.

When I am at my worst, I can spend most of the time in a bit of a fog, going through motions that aren’t really me, making choices that I know I wouldn’t make if I had my head on straight – and it is tempting to think that is who I really am. It would be easier. I would very much like to go on, but these poppies are so beautiful… and I … feel … so … sleepy.

Part of coming out of addiction is remembering (or maybe discovering for the first time) the real you.

You are not the intoxicated, edgy, nervous animal that your addiction brought out in you. Do not let your addiction define you.

It has been said that the people of my ancestry are drinking people with a working problem. That is the kind of identity theft we need to avoid in ourselves.

I am not the sum of my weaknesses. I am not a druggie, a drunk, a pervert, a big boil on the posterior of humanity; I am a person who has a weakness – a deficiency of character in 12-step-speak – but I am not the weakness itself.

In Christianity, we refer to this as separating the sinner from the sin.

I’ve always found it easier to do this with others than with myself.

So if my addiction is not my true identity, what is?

Next post, coming soon.