if you only knew…

The movie Sneakers featured a decryption device which could break any code. One needed only the secret passphrase to gain access to the secrets of the world, and the phrase was “Too Many Secrets.“

Secrets can be a good thing, when it comes to birthday parties or roses ordered but not yet delivered; but secrets in a relationship are often deadly.

A phrase my wife used when we first became more serious in our relationship was, “if you really knew me, you wouldn’t love me.” Of course, if she had known more about me back then, who knows how things would have developed…but the point is, we kept each other in the dark. We feared each others’ rejection and alienation.

I know that, as I became more aware of her issues, I felt that those issues were of little importance relative to the relationship we were building. They would certainly affect us, sometimes dramatically, but none were “deal-breakers.”

I wonder if she has felt the same way about my issues.

What I find now is that the more I am honest about my struggles, the more she respects me. Oh, true enough, it might be different if I was still cruising and acting out…but my honesty about the difficulty of remaining ’sober’ has only drawn us closer.

It is also important to say that I would not expect a person of lower caliber than my wife to be able to accept the darkness in my story. Since those things were/are a part of me (though not the definition of who I really am) , I would be stupid to pursue a relationship with her if she couldn’t handle my past.

I know several men who are ’single again’ because their spouses were not able to see through the history into the present tense of the person before them. I also know a lot of men who continued to act out, regularly,  after divulging the truth; that doesn’t usually work out so well either.

Secrets make it easier to keep secrets. New secrets. Dark secrets.

Honesty begets honesty. Harsh, brutal honesty.

I believe pain is always easier with a clear conscience.

getting defensive

Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A chord of three strands is not easily broken. Ecclesiastes 4:12

In military excursions of the Greek/Spartan era, a common maneuver was the phalanx. This arrangement  deployed soldiers in such a way that their shields were protecting not themselves, but the neighbor to their immediate left. This was refined by various groups – the Romans used it quite effectively, for example – but the principle was always the same: my job is not to protect myself; it is to protect my brother-in-arms.

This concept is often lost on addicts; we tend to be quite selfish.

If the enemy is charging, I’m covering my own rear, thank you very much.

Addiction – a war? Am I being a little dramatic?

What are the likely outcomes of substance abuse, or sexual acting out?

Death stalks the one who walks alone.

There is strength in numbers, but not ultimate strength. See, each soldier used his shield to protect the man to his left. That meant that the right end of the line was always the weak point, and any worthy adversary knew that and attacked at that point of weakness. As a result, the most experienced and strongest were put at that end. They anchored the line.

If two addicts decide it is time to get some honesty and come clean, but have no one stronger to lean on, they will likely collapse, potentially harming each other.

For me, recovery did not begin until I got myself into community with some people who had been down the same road – veterans of the war I needed to fight. And now I’m one of the veterans.

I don’t say that proudly – this is a fight I wish I was not in. And watching people fall because they give up the battle is painful.

I’m watching a family that is a mirror of my own in many ways, breaking and dying because the husband is not willing to fight. The wife is strong, and fights on…but her husband should be standing with her. She has friends, good friends, who will use their shields to defend her; but the loss of one weakens the phalanx.

Whatever your battle, don’t fight alone.

And once you’ve enlisted, don’t surrender.

judgement, or sympathy?

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:18 that we should flee fornication. Every sin we do is outside the body, except for sexual sin. In that, we sin against our own body (my wording).

I recognize that fornication has become a punchline in our society (thank you, Church Lady), but the point is that the Bible makes a distinction about sexual sin. Interesting to note, though, that the distinction is that we are hurting ourselves directly with sexual activity outside the Plan.

I think the church misses something here.

Sexual sin receives “special” treatment from churches as if Paul ended this section of his letter with an exhortation to immediately castrate the vile offender; what Paul does say is to explain that the body is a temple, and the offender is violating the temple.

By the way, this is not an attempt to justify anything. Sexual activity outside of marriage has mental, spiritual, and (sometimes) physical consequences; that should never be dismissed or trivialized. Even the person who seeks solace in self-gratification is cheapening the value of what is supposed to happen with one other person in an image of the spiritual connection between us and God.

So how does your church body react to a woman who comes into a service, wearing no ring and obviously pregnant? Men have the advantage here – we can be totally promiscuous, and there will be no outward sign unless we contract some horrendous disease. But it is sad to me to see how people with strong faith backgrounds generally react to a disclosure of sexual errors.

A close friend carried the weight of a relationship that included an abortion around for years, living in fear of the reaction she would get if her closest friends ever found out.

When she chose to disclose, I would say the reaction lent credence to her fears.

When I have disclosed my history to people who I believed were spiritually mature and knew me well enough to know where my heart is now, I have been disappointed. The two guys I thought would be the best prospects for accountability responded predictably – one was dismissive that I had a problem, the other withdrew to the safety of surface-level interaction.

I am fortunate that I have an accountability relationship with a couple of guys who don’t let me off the hook. They understand that there is a difference between the thing that I was and the man I am becoming. If I drop the ball (present tense), they don’t just dismiss it – they force me to face it. But they do not judge me as something less because of my sordid history (past tense), because they understand grace.

So the Church Lady was an accurate caricature, unfortunately, of the way many in the church respond to sexual brokenness.  There is a place for judgment, no question. Christ judged those who knew the Law the best; but He had compassion and mercy for those who were ignorant and repentant.

We should learn from that.

raging of the moon

So, tell me what I can’t explain; this howling deep within my veins,
Is it the pulling of some secret tide?
It’s the raging…
The raging of the moon,
Oh, we must awaken from the raging of the moon.
- Billy Smiley, Mark Gersmehl, Tales of Wonder, 1992

Full moon tonight. I had a friend who was a county deputy once, swore the crazies all came out on full moons. I used to claim the moon had an effect on me, that my acting out peaked with the full moon each month. Of course, I could as easily have claimed that days ending in “y” were the problem.

Tonight, the craziness is around me (note I said craziness, not crazies). I get up pretty stinkin’ early, so bedtime is around 9:00 for me. My wife leaves her Wednesday night group religiously at 8:15; she didn’t come home until after 9:00. My child’s nightlight burned out just as I was (finally) heading for bed.
We have a remote for our TV that comes straight out of a Star Trek movie (not the first one; that wasn’t cool enough) – touch-screen look and feel, blinks when the batteries are getting low. I was sleeping on the couch tonight because my wife was still wound up from her group when she got home, and the remote was blinking like a landing strip beacon.

Now I am awake.

This is how my struggle entices me most often.

I run on too little sleep (welcome to the 21st century, right?). I am almost always on the verge of going to sleep during any meeting at work, conversation with my wife … less trouble for me if I sleep at work. The old acronym of HALT fits me to a T – Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired are the times when we are weakest. “Tired” is always right behind me, and occasionally catches up.

“Hungry” gets us because the pleasure center activated by food is the same one activated by sex, or illicit drugs. Hunger pangs can increase impulsive/unwise choices. I’m currently eating five or six small meals a day, so this one isn’t usually an issue for me.

“Angry” leaves us wanting revenge. I’ll show him/her/them/God – I’ll go do my thing, and nobody is getting in my way. This is a strong pull for me. Anger comes easily.

“Lonely” is probably obvious enough. That’s part of the reason we need accountability partners – “sponsors” and the like in 12-step terms. The more I focus on relationships, the less of a trigger this becomes.

“Tired.” Defenses are down, thought processes aren’t so clear…I might be inclined to sit up late and work on a blog entry instead of getting to sleep. Oops. That’s what I’m doing now.

Remembering that acronym, HALT, has been very helpful to me. It isn’t magic; but I remember, now and then, and am inspired to guard my heart just a little more closely from the Enemy.

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.

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.

soular inventory control

A life lived out of control is not a life of deep reflection. It is so much easier to glide through our daily routine , including ill-advised behaviors, on autopilot than it is to stop and think about what we’re doing. I suspect that most of us would probably look at someone else with the same patterns of behavior and think “what a nutcase,” or “danger – trouble ahead.” That brings us to Step Four of the Twelve Steps:

Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves

Taking an inventory is critical. If you don’t have a pretty clear picture of what you have going for you, as well as what is working against you, success is unlikely.

Westley: Who are you? Are we enemies? Why am I on this wall? Where is Buttercup?
Inigo Montoya: Let me ’splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. So all we have to do is get in, break up the wedding, steal the princess, make our escape… after I kill Count Rugen.
Westley: That doesn’t leave much time for dilly-dallying.
Fezzik: You just wiggled your finger. That’s wonderful.
Westley: I’ve always been a quick healer. What are our liabilities?
Inigo Montoya: There is but one working castle gate, and… and it is guarded by 60 men.
Westley: And our assets?
Inigo Montoya: Your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel.
- The Princess Bride, 1987

An honest inventory usually doesn’t paint a very pretty picture for the person who is just coming to grips with their addiction.

However, this is not just taking an official moment to denigrate oneself.

This is where we take stock of where we are. We are not looking at root causes yet. An inventory is not a history – it is a snapshot of where things stand as of a particular point in time. This is critical, as there will be points down the road where you will need to take another inventory. If you take inventory once, never checking back to see how your “stock” has improved, the exercise is pointless.

There are several approaches you can use to work through the inventory. I’m a big fan of using the SWOT analysis used for basic analysis in many businesses. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I worked through this process the first time by sticking a blank poster board up on the wall and dividing it into quadrants (one region for each of the SWOT categories). Next I spent a couple of hours thinking through my attributes (good, bad, and ugly), and writing each in the appropriate region. While I was doing this, I shut off my phone and all other distractions. Over the next week, I added to the list daily. By the time I had finished, the poster was full and I had extra sheets of notebook paper stuck all over my wall.

This is not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine. The important thing is that you take some focused time to really dig deep and try to see yourself as objectively as possible. And that you make a record of it; memory fades and details get fuzzy, which makes the value of this limited for future reference.

The hard thing is getting around our natural tendency to see ourselves either as gods or monsters. Most fellow travelers with whom I’ve discussed this have said that they found it much easier to either list their failures (weaknesses) or their strengths; balance does not come naturally to an addict.

Could it be that lack of balance is part of our problem? Hmm.

This isn’t about beating yourself up. You probably did that about the time that you came to Step One.

The other thing I would caution about, with both this and the next step, is to be wary. Regardless of how screwed up our lives had become, there is a natural inclination toward the familiar. Thinking about where we are, and looking at the past (next step) is likely to bring up some nostalgia for our former comforter. I think this is where it becomes absolutely critical that you have an accountability partner – a sponsor, in AA-speak – who can help you talk and think through these steps without letting you drift.

Once you have a good, clear picture of where you are, you are ready to start looking at what got you here…but that’s another step.

Keep walking,

MNRecovery

grab your partner

The US Army has had moderate success with their slogan, An Army of One.

It appeals strongly to our American spirit of independence.

Everyone wants to be a hero. Preferably a live one.

But consider the Spartans in 300, or the crew surrounding William Wallace in Braveheart. One man can be a hero. A group of men, supporting each other, can be victorious. And yes, I know most of the 300 died. But they spat in the eye of Xerxes, and stopped the man-god’s conquest.

Point is, we need people around us to help us through the rough spots in life. And to whom we’ll return the favor.

Choose wisely, my friend. If you are currently caught in a spiral of addiction, it is simple to find people who want to help – but they may just enable you instead. “Enable” is not the same thing as “empower“. Enablers make it easy for you to fall back into your old patterns, and will make excuses for you at every turn.

You don’t need excuses. You’ve been making those up for years.

You need at least one, preferably a small group of people, who will look you in the eye and challenge you when you want to make a lame excuse.

You need someone who doesn’t let you off easy, but will stand by you when you need it.

You need a brother, or a sister, who won’t mind a call at the most ridiculous hours of the night because you’re needing to process something critical.

You need a person or people who are safe – people who will keep confidences, and not gossip about you.

You need a partner.

This person should not be your spouse. You need someone, preferably of your own gender, who can listen to your darkest secrets.

A chord of three strands is not easily broken.

You probably were quite successful at getting to where you are mostly on your own. Don’t trust those same instincts to get you out.