blind addiction

Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I’ve been using it for years. – Tallulah Bankhead

Most addicts do not acknowledge their addictions. They can’t. They don’t know what they don’t know, which is that their carefully-controlled habit has taken control of them.

“I can stop {insert behavior here} any time I want to; I just don’t want to yet” has become a punchline. It is so overused, but it got that way because of the sad truth behind it. The addict still believes he or she is holding the reins, while those around them, if they are aware, can see the harness on the addict.

I speak here from sad experience. I stumbled blindly through years of addiction, quite sure that I could control it, assured that I was the master of my destiny, confident that this thing was serving me.

I was blind.

I had a Damascus-road type experience, not unlike the apostle Paul, where the truth knocked me (figuratively) off my feet.

Paul, however, probably never felt the urge to go back to stoning Christians. He’s got one up on me there.

A guy from my meeting Monday night shared that he was doing something this week that would require him walking into what I would consider a lion’s den. I was tempted to give him a slap on each cheek and say, “Are you a fool?“, but I believe that would be crossing the boundary of not offering advice in a meeting. I’ve thought about that a lot this week, and I’m still trying to get my head around some of my internal reaction to his announcement.

I was reminded, above all else, that part of an addict’s modus operandi is to point to others’ actions/follies, to pull the focus away from what I do and focus on what someone else is doing. I do that a fair amount here. And like any good addict, I explain it away. I’m doing something to try to help others, right? But if I start focusing on how others behave and take my mind off my own battle, I slip back to being the hypocrite I once was.

I’m not saying that I have no right to exercise good judgement regarding the people around me. It is crucial that I do keep a wary eye on those I bring into my inner circle. The last thing I need is to find someone else who so fully understands me that they start enabling poor choices.

But I have to balance that against the fact that I need community and accountability. Community will include others who are farther along in their recovery, as well as some who are just beginning the journey. The ‘elder addicts’ can help me see some of the fallacies in my thinking, can spot a poor excuse a mile away, and can smell a rat. The ‘newbies’ remind me of the raw terror I felt when I first submitted myself to doing whatever it would take to be a whole person.

The blind addict doesn’t have any of that. They continue in their stumbling. They continue to get bruised and bumped, and they’re never quite sure where that last blow came from, or why.

Having your sight restored doesn’t mean you won’t get whacked now and then; it just means that you’ll begin to understand where it is coming from, and that you can begin to make better choices.

I face a dilemma every summer. My family goes to the beach for a week. I could take half of my very limited vacation time, and go with them, or I can use this week as the chance to get some projects done. That’s the cover story I use for my extended family who are also at the beach that week.

The truth is, I haver to choose the lesser of two evils. The beach isn’t a great place for me. Oh, did I mention that I’m a sex addict? But it isn’t just the amount of skin that creates a problem for me. My extended family has a whole set of dysfunctions that push my buttons in a major way. So I can spend a week with my immediate family (good choice), but I get the rest of the brood as well (very bad choice), accompanied by a lot of women in bikinis (incredibly bad choice); or I can stay at home (dangerous choice if left to my own devices).

Back when I was blind, I went to the beach to make others happy and then acted out when and where I could to get through it. Now I stay at home, keep in steady contact with my accountability partners, and focus on projects I can’t do around the house when children are running through it. I’m only in day two of a ten-day solo flight, and I can already feel the gnawing of the enemy trying to pull me back down.

But I’m not blind anymore. I can see the enemy at work. And I can make good choices.

a half-hearted man

His arm would twitch every once in a while. We never really thought that much about it; it wasn’t that noticeable, at first. But then it became a tic, a repetitive movement which he could not control. That was when he decided to go to the hospital.

It was Tax Day, April 15th, 1991. I was working at my office when my parents’ neighbor called me.

I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but your dad is at the Emergency Room.

I left work and went to join my mom. We waited for a few hours, not hearing anything, not seeing anyone. Finally they called us back to his bedside. He told us about a battery of tests, where they seemed to be focusing their attention, what little anyone had said thus far. About then the attending physician stepped in.

I’m afraid I have some bad news. It’s a tumor…

…somewhere about an inch and a half in and behind his right ear. They would schedule surgery immediately. There could be no prognosis until they did a biopsy of the tumor, but it was not encouraging to note that a scan they had done on New Year’s Eve hadn’t shown anything, and there was now something this large, this soon.

He had seen his regular doctor somewhere between New Year’s and Tax Day about the spasms or tics. The doctor had told him to take an over-the-counter medication and let him know if the spasms got worse.

As it turns out, had his doctor pursued the cause a little more deeply, it probably wouldn’t have made a bit of difference for my father – he had a gliablastoma multiformae. The thing that killed my dad is now in the news because it is the same animal that is stalking Teddy Kennedy.

My dad would find some irony in the idea that he and Teddy Kennedy had anything in common.

My father had a tumor that is 100% fatal, thus far. He was one of the lucky ones – the tumor was relentless, and he only had a short time of suffering. He was gone before the next March came around. Others live for a couple of years as this beast eats away at their faculties, robbing them of their personality and dignity before taking away their cognitive ability and eventually their control centers. My father died, officially, of a massive organ failure. But like the tics or spasms, the organ failure was just the final symptom of a terrible disease.

I, on the other hand, have a heart disease; but not the kind that a doctor would be interested in. My symptoms have included acting out sexually and eating nearly everything in sight. It is tempting to think that I could use some over-the-counter approach to those issues. There are pills you can buy that will expand like styrofoam in your stomach, convincing your body that it is full. There are medications that warn of ’sexual side effects,’ which can mean either an effect on desire or performance. Yep, we could stop those symptoms pretty darn quickly.

But I’d still be left with my heart condition. There would still be a hole in me, something that is incomplete, something that goes a lot deeper than the symptoms.

I’d still be a half-hearted man.

The first serious attempt I made at dealing with my addictions was a behavior-based program.

Follow these steps, and keep your zipper closed, and you’ll be cured.

So it was all about my performance. As an American and a man, I liked the sound of that. I could make it happen, I was in control.

But the reality was, and is, that if I continue to focus on behavior, I’ll just develop a different set of symptoms.

If you find yourself trying to stop some behavior, and failing time after time, it isn’t because you are weak. A compulsion that overcomes your rational mind repeatedly is not going to go away that easily. The good news is, there are qualified people nearby ready to help you with your treatment. You just have to get past yourself, and be willing to admit that you can’t beat it alone.

Your sickness need not be fatal.

coming clean

A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all,  when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. – Oscar Wilde

I’ve rejoined a group that was very instrumental in helping me find my sanity a few years back. This time around I am going to be moving into a role of servant-leadership, hopefully helping others find their sanity as well.

As we went around the room last week introducing ourselves, there were several in the group who mentioned that they were married, and several had already had a session with their spouse ’spilling the beans’ on the hidden stuff in their hearts and lives.

Lest my next thoughts be misunderstood, let me say that this is a crucial conversation which (I believe) must happen, rather like re-breaking a bone that fractured and then set incorrectly from lack of proper care. However, there are good and bad ways to have that conversation.

The temptation for many addicts is to get a case of ‘verbal diarrhea‘ and pour out all of their stuff in one cleansing eruption. This feels emotionally satisfying for the teller; ‘there, that’s done’.

But this probably is more about you than it is about your spouse or significant other, and even less about the two of you.

In my 12-Step program, I had my confessional with my sponsor. It is probably best to start with someone other than your spouse, preferably someone who already knows a little about you and understands the nature of addiction.

By the way, I keep using the term ’spouse.’ Being single doesn’t release you from the need to do this. One of the things that keeps people in the power of the sickness is the secrecy. ‘If I keep my darkness in the dark,‘ one might think, ‘I won’t be rejected, more lonely…‘, or whatever. But giving a voice to the part of you that really does want to be free gives that part of you more strength. It doesn’t stop your knee-jerk reaction to your triggers, but it helps you start to build resistance. If you have no one in your life who is your partner in life, then you will need, eventually, to tell someone who is close enough to know the you you want people to see, not the you who acts out.

In the group I first attended, there were maybe a dozen guys that did some form of confession to their wives the wrong way. I don’t have any great body of research to draw from here, but I can tell you that most of those marriages were over within a year. Those who took a measured approach, not blurting everything out as soon as they were either caught or dinged by their conscious, had a marital survival rate above 50%.

That may not sound very encouraging. But bear in mind that the truth has a nasty habit of coming out, one way or another.

So if I were writing The Rules of Self-Disclosure, they would look something like this:

Law #1: Thou shalt go to someone you trust in clergy or a solid counselor to start the process. If their response is to beat you with a wet noodle, or a verbal dressing-down, consider going to someone else. They should neither condone nor condemn. If you are having this conversation, you are likely doing enough self-condemnation.

Law #2: Thou shalt tell your spouse or significant other that you would like for the two of you to have a talk with said clergy person/counselor. The timing should not be a month ahead, nor should it be at the last minute, but with enough time for your partner to steel themselves a little bit for something that will be tough to hear. The purpose in letting your partner know there will be another party present is that nobody brings a pastor along to announce they’ve found someone else, etc.

The delay between the notification and the meeting will seem an eternity, but please don’t start down the road to disclosure when it is just the two of you.

Law #3: Thou shalt let the clergy person/counselor guide the discussion. They are trained in tough conversations; you aren’t. Make no mistake; this conversation will not be easy, and there is no way to make your partner feel like this isn’t a personal attack on them. In addictions that involve either porn or interaction with other people, your partner will feel betrayed. And they won’t be incorrect. That will hurt.

Law #4: Thou shalt make no demands of your partner. Let me use my experience here, rather than impersonal pronouns. My wife seemed to take the whole thing fairly well when we had our talk. Truth is, she was in shock. She had known about my issues before we got married, but I had convinced her that her suspicions were her own paranoia, and I was ripping the mask off of my lies – several years of lies at that point.

I’m not sure how, beyond the grace of God, but we made it through those next few very tense months. After our initial conversation, I had to let her process things quite a bit. If I had been defensive during this period, I suspect I would be writing from an efficiency apartment or my mom’s basement at this point; but I took her moods and doubts and questions as they came. She had every right to question me, and denying that would have made her think that I was still hiding something. Oh, that reminds me…

Law #5: Thou shalt put everything on the table at once. Your partner may not need or want the gory details of when and with whom, but she might. A good approach is to start in general categories (“I’ve visited adult bookstores since we were married, even in the past few months“), and then get more particular if she asks.
Starting with things that would get my blog marked as ‘inappropriate’ may make you feel better, but it won’t help her process what you’re throwing out there.

Law #6: Remember that you are not in charge of the outcomes. This goes somewhat with #4 above, but it goes further than that. If you are fortunate, you may be sleeping on the couch for a while. But you may find yourself knocking on your best bud’s door asking for his couch for a while.

Depending on what you did, you may find yourself in jail.

But trying to manage the outcomes will nearly guarantee failure. Do what you can to make sure the initial disclosure doesn’t end in violence. But don’t expect your partner to say, “Aw, that’s okay punkin’” and invite you to continue your marital bliss anytime soon.

As I said in an earlier post, this may sound discouraging – please don’t let that stop you from doing the right thing. Your sin will find you out, they say; I’d rather have some input on the finding out.

So here I sit, three years after the toughest conversation of my life. I’m still married to the same woman (by God’s grace), and my children adore me. What my wife and I have learned is a level of honesty I never thought I would find. It isn’t always pretty, but it is always real. I used to think reality was overrated; now I understand that fantasy is overrated – reality is very cool.

trusting is pleasing; pleasing is not trusting

Sometimes I find that I can do things with the best of intentions but still miss the mark.

• I work hard to provide for my family, but my kids need my love more than they need my money.
• I try to give my wife breaks from her constant care for the kids, but she wants time with me more than she wants time alone.
• I try to give my customers at work what they want, but sometimes my attention to detail on a project means the project takes a lot longer than was desired and planned.

Trying to please can be a back-breaking load. How much more is this true when I’m trying to please God?

What do you give the God who has everything?

What can I offer that will make Him happy?

My daughter is becoming quite the little artiste. About once a week when I come home she presents me with her latest work of art (she specializes in crayon) for me to take to my cubicle. Her heart is tuned to wanting to please me. That is pleasing to me, in temporary and somewhat selfish ways.

What really makes me happy is what happened last Sunday. We went to a water park for Father’s Day, and waited to ride a raft down a tube. My daughter was scared. She didn’t want to go. But when I told her that I’d hold her close, and that she would be safe, she said, “Okay, Daddy” and didn’t put up a fight. She covered her eyes most of the way through the ride, but she didn’t moan. In fact, she was smiling a little towards the end.

What made me happy was that she trusted me. I said she would be safe, and she relaxed. At least a little.

So what can I offer God that will please him? Crayon art? Hand prints in clay? Or maybe what He wants is something more personal, like my trust.

In TrueFaced, Bill Thrall, Bruce McNicol, and John Lynch explore the difference between trying to please God versus trusting (and thereby pleasing) Him.

It is easy to take the approach of doing things for God, trying so hard to win His affection by doing good things. We try to win approval based on our performance.

The fact is, He already loves us – no performance required.

There is nothing we can do that will make God love us any more than He already does. In Lynch’s words, He is crazy about us.

7 But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, 9 and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith
- Philippians 3

I count all my stuff as rubbish. Not just my possessions; any peer recognition, any achievements, anything that I earn or is given to me counts for nothing. What counts is that God has designed me with Christ in me. He lives and breathes through me.

If I fall in my recovery, He still loves me.

If I give in to fear or anger, He still loves me.

If I forget who I really am, and Whose I really am, He still loves me.

This is where I can find contentment in a world that tries so hard to make me discontent. And here is where I can rest, safe and secure in the knowledge that it is not about me or what I do; it is about the One who loves me most, and always will.

a dysfunction in search of an object

There was an article yesterday on foxhealth.com titled something like “8 Signs of Porn Addiction.” The article was a little skimpy on details, and the author apparently contradicted something she had written earlier regarding whether there is such a thing as porn addiction, but I found the comments more interesting than the article itself.

Most of the responses fell into fairly predictable groups:

• Spouses (mostly female) whose lives have been destroyed by porn addiction
• Men denying the existence of porn addiction
• Men trying to deal with porn addiction
• People writing that they use porn constructively in their sex life (a few of these appeared to be men writing with a female pseudonym, but I could be wrong)
• Men blaming women because they’ve put on a few pounds, don’t want sex as frequently as the men, don’t want to experiment like the men, etc.

As to the reality of porn addiction, I offer my opinion, which is informed by my personal experience and a great deal of observation – almost all addictions come from the same basic root, which is some form of dysfunction; and this dysfunction usually grows from something we didn’t get in our formative years that ‘normal’ people got.

They have as much of a chance of understanding that dysfunction as I have of learning to speak Mandarin fluently.

We have a dysfunction that is searching for an object.

The object may be the more traditional type – drugs, alcohol – or it may be something less obvious, like sex, food, or shopping.

It is no less of an addiction just because the object is not alcohol. The root causes are the same, and the solution is the same; we will remain imprisoned in our dependence on our drug of choice until we become a whole person. And if we focus strictly on controlling behavior, we will likely end up just switching to a new drug. I’ve met people who were in a support or step group five nights of the week, each night on a different topic.

Are there people who can use porn constructively? Maybe so. I have a hard time imagining that, but maybe that just means that I cannot. I can certainly argue against it on moral grounds, but not everyone has the same moral code. Most of us seem to agree that there are a few lines that should not be passed, but not everyone sees lust as dangerous. Maybe some people really do read Playboy for the articles.

But the category of writers that I pity among those respondents were the men who were blaming their wives, or women in general, for men turning to porn. The term ‘denial’ comes to mind. I used to think many of the same things, and I even wrote them occasionally when offered the relative anonymity of the internet; but the fact is that I was struggling with my own break from what I knew to be right. And it was much easier to blame that break on someone else than to admit that I had a problem.

Besides, I don’t remember reading anywhere about spontaneous combustion caused by a lack of sexual activity. Anger, hurt, and frustration, sure – but no gonadal explosions.

Porn is about retreating from the real world into a world where every fantasy is indulged and there are never consequences. The reality is quite different. The number of porn-starlet suicides is a telling statistic. In a recent scandal, a governor was caught after a series of encounters with ‘professionals.’ One conversation between the manager and scheduler of the business was reported in the New York Times, and included a candid discussion about which of the girls was getting into drugs and booze, and going down a path that was accepted as a cost of doing business in that industry.

The airbrush is quicker than the eye, but you’d need a very large airbrush indeed to gloss over the damage done by people bowing to the altar of Adonis, Baal, and Osiris.

coping

Recovery, as noted before, is not about becoming a happy, shiny person.

Thank God for that.

It is about finding a space where you can be content, can let pain and frustration happen without reaching for your ‘medication’ (whatever that may be), and can hang on for a better day.

Boy, that’s uplifting, huh?

Oh, there are definitely really good days. Anymore, the good ones far outnumber the bad ones.

But there will be times when ‘life happens.’

My career path is not taking the upward trend I expected, my house was hit by a tornado a couple of weeks ago, and today I’m sitting in 92-degree heat with no air conditioning.

Thank goodness very few people actually read my blog, else someone would probably remind me that the majority of people living on the planet would find me clueless for complaining about these things. Well, maybe not so much for the tornado.

But regardless of whether it is appropriate for me to be whining, these are still annoying.

I fear this isn’t the best time to become the new man on some company’s totem pole, so the career thing is going to be hanging out there for a while. It is Friday, and I can’t get a guaranteed service call on the air conditioner until Monday afternoon.

There was a time in my life when this would have prompted a stop at the local ice cream eatery. Or adult bookstore. There are two options you don’t often see in such close proximity; guess that’s how I know I’m sick.

But how I know I’m getting better is that this time I feel the need to express how I’m feeling. This time I feel the need to let it out and let it go instead of holding it in and acting out.

Eventually, the air conditioner will be fixed. Eventually, I will either find a position with some potential for improvement, or I will adjust my expectations.

For today, this is enough. It ain’t much, but it is enough.

tear down this wall

Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?
If you wanna find out what’s behind these cold eyes,
You’ll just have to blow your way through this disguise.
- In the Flesh? , Roger Waters, 1979

I listen to a lot of wholesome, uplifting music. Lately I’ve been listening quite a bit to Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Not so wholesome or uplifting? Maybe not. But Roger Waters seems to understand a bit about addiction, and some of the things that help us to build walls around ourselves.

Addiction is generally born through pain. Many of us are wounded, somewhere deeper than we would like most others to see, and we find a way, almost any way, to ease the pain. Any way, that is, except to actually lay it out for others to see, out in the light of day where we would be exposed. That would not do.

10 The man answered, “I was naked, and when I heard you walking through the garden, I was frightened and hid!” – Genesis 3:10

The need to be covered, to have a wall to hide our souls from exposure, is as old as humanity.

I don’t think we need to wear shirts listing our faults for everyone to see. However, I think that our culture encourages camouflage to hide the real person, the one who bears the scars of an abusive childhood, or a passive father-figure, or whatever else you might have hidden behind your wall. My wall is sarcasm. On good days, it may come out more as self-deprecating humor. But it is my cover. As long as I can get a laugh, people won’t look closely enough at me to see my scars.

What I hope to reach, someday, is that point of balance where I recognize appropriate times and places to be transparent. One day, I’ll be comfortable enough with who I am, warts and all, that I won’t need the wall. Eventually, the wall will come down.