Whoa - I think I'm starting to like myself

Just over the last few weeks I have been trying to develop more of a sense of self while making sure that it is a positive sense of self. I feel very successful and credit a lot of that to my writing and also to trying to feel my emotions. I also have been able to stop – temporarily at least – thinking that at certain points of the day I “should” be doing something more constructive. I don’t know if I was criticizing myself but I never took any time to consider what I wanted. I want a lot of things – like I want to feel good all the time, to relax once in a while, to talk to people, to eat chocolate, to ignore one of Mike’s bad moods. Not all of these are things I can or should do but it doesn’t hurt to admit that I want them nonetheless. The rest of them I can do if I want but I just have to do them in moderation.

It is very difficult to say why I feel like a better person today than I did a few weeks ago. I like myself sometimes and even take myself seriously. Everybody else makes mistakes in life so I should be able to also. Perhaps that is part of it. I have lived a lot of my life thinking that I was not allowed to make mistakes. That one fact alone is a totally self-defined assumption that is responsible for much of my unhappiness. I have a better relationship with myself today because I know that I am allowed to make mistakes.

More Gratitude

Today I am grateful for:

• Serenity on a Monday morning
• Serenity in the face of the holidays
• Unexpected moments of calm - both internal and external
• Courage to Change

As I gear up for the holidays and to go visit the family I am feeling more at peace with the world than I have in many years. I don't even feel the need to sabotage my serenity or worry about what will happen if I lose it. Feelings come and go - that's life. What a wonderful experience.

A Life Narrative

Just a few thoughts on a lazy Friday because I have not been very good about blogging recently. I have been directing the bulk of my writing to coming up with my entire story, which some people – like psychologists – like to call a Life Narrative. I have two main motivations for trying to tackle such a huge task.

First, I recently finished my fourth step and it raised a lot more questions than it answered. I can see pretty clearly what my positive and negative behaviors and habits have been but I am at a complete loss as to why I feel the need to do them. For example, I get very defensive and even angry when people have expectations of me. I couldn’t quite tell why I react this way but have a gut feeling that it relates to the abuse I endured as a kid. This leads me to my next point.

Second, I just finished a book called “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller. My sponsor recommended it and it’s about children who survived abuse and adapted to extreme cruelty by becoming numb. She emphasizes again and again the point that in order to deal with the emotional scars we need to face the abuse and our resulting emotions. In order to face them most of us need to unpack a lot of repressed memories and figure out exactly what happened to us.

This is where I have to put in my plug that I always thought the idea of repressed memories was something drama queens made up to get more attention. I thought this until about 6 months ago when I was doing some writing and started to remember traumatic events that I hadn’t thought about since they happened 10 or 15 years ago. If you have ever suspected that you might have endured abuse, you owe it to yourself to do some exploring of your own.

So I sat down about 10 days ago to write my life story and have been going ever since. It’s currently at about 18 pages and growing. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to attempt to write down a traumatic event and realize for the first time that such experiences are not normal. It was as if my brain had previously refused to label the experience as bad or scary or dangerous. It was a memory labeled with the same emotions as my memory of eating breakfast this morning. There were no emotions – until I looked at it and realized the abuse for what it was.

I don’t even mean for this to sound dark because it has been one of the most surprising experiences of my life. I had always taken for granted that I would remember big events in my life because that’s the way it’s supposed to work. I guess the mind has its own way of surviving. So much to learn…

Gratitude

Today I am grateful for:

• My program - especially the literature
• My apartment
• My job
• My sisters

The people I have in my life right now encourage and demonstrate how I can start to live a healthy life. They help me maintain perspective when things go wrong and simply enjoy it when things go right.

Suppressing Emotions

For years I have considered myself to be a person who is empathetic, understanding, and loving; especially concerning the abuse I endured at the hands of family members when I was young. I learned that forgiveness is a gift I give myself so that I can put the hurtful actions of others behind me and move beyond self-destructive feelings.

But there is a huge difference between forgiveness and suppression.

Forgiveness is about making a conscious decision to move on with life and not dwell on things that I cannot change. Emotional suppression is a survival instinct I learned in order to disconnect from a life-threatening situation. Suppression allowed me to live in my abusive house without seeing that the people I cared for most were endangering my life on a regular basis. With practice I was eventually able to avoid emotional reactions to all but the most dangerous or unexpected situations. But without emotional responses I became unable to interact with the world.

After this type of detachment the overwhelming fear and anger were replaced by chronic emptiness and depression.

It has been very difficult to try and learn what a genuine emotion feels like. It’s like trying to see the 3D image in those pictures that require you to relax your eyes and look through the image.

Yesterday I was overcome with an anger at my parents that I don’t ever remember feeling before. I was able to see them as adults whose actions were unequivocally wrong instead of co-victims that needed my sympathy. I was not prepared for this aspect of my recovery. But even though I felt drained at the end of the day, I felt none of the emptiness and depression that I have come to know so well. Today I feel light and energetic yet calm. What a wonderful and unexpected experience.

Feelings

I want to do some writing today before my medication starts to wear off and I get edgy or irritated. Sometimes my writing can get dark or obsessive if I write too late in the day.

This ties into today’s reading in Courage to Change which is about feelings and how we have learned to deal with them. A very, very large part of my recovery is learning to feel my feelings and accept them for what they are. The first step of getting to an acceptance of my feelings is coming to a belief that I am worthy of having feelings. I have written in the past about growing up with ADHD and feeling like I constantly wanted to sleep, eat, watch TV, run outside, play on the computer, or any other number of things to the point that it interfered with going to school and especially doing homework. I had to try and convince myself that none of these feelings were appropriate because I NEEDED to do well in school. In short, I suppressed all of my natural desires.

I needed to do well in school because many times it was the only positive attention I got in my alcoholic home. I needed approval to compensate for the neglect. I sought – and still seek – approval rather than love or affection. I learned how to stuff my feelings.

So where am I today? First of all I am learning that feelings pass and it is okay, and even healthy, to let them go. I take myself so seriously that I believe every emotion is special and needs to be indulged, analyzed, or even documented. My feelings are mostly unconscious and - much of the time - are out of proportion with reality. It is okay to laugh at a feeling and then let it go. I am working on not becoming so attached to my feelings.

It is also possible for me to value my feelings without bending to their every command. What are some feelings that I act on the most?

1. Worthlessness
2. The compulsion to amount to “something”
3. Loneliness
4. Embarrassment
5. That I owe people something with my life
6. That I don’t deserve peace or happiness
   

I am worthy of having feelings.
It is okay to acknowledge my feelings.
It is okay to value my feelings.
It is okay to let a feeling pass – this does not amount to disrespect.
It is okay to talk about my feelings.

The Perfectionist

Adapted from Kelly and Ramundo

“The Perfectionist: Luke has decided that being the best regardless of the cost, is the only way to hide his deficits. Luke is a perfectionist. He has ADHD but those who know him would never believe it. Although his poor conduct grades reflected his restlessness, his behavior wasn’t disruptive enough to cause serious discipline problems in school. In general he followed the rules and did what was asked of him. Before he graduated he took part in many extracurricular activities and could be counted on to volunteer for any task that needed to be done.

You might be asking how someone with ADHD could function so well. Actually, he wasn’t really functioning very well despite his carefully constructed façade…Sometimes he longed to get off his treadmill but didn’t dare risk disclosure. If he failed to do everything, his secret would be out. Everyone would know he wasn’t normal. The hitch was that Luke didn’t have a clue about what normal was. He had kept his secret so long that he had inflated ideas about what other people could accomplish. His impaired sense of self, distorted by differences he didn’t understand, caused him to do anything that would bring acceptance.

Today he still works himself to death, compelled to do it all. It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to do it all with so many conflicting demands on his time. Lately he feels that he’s losing control and that at any moment something horrible is going to happen. He can’t keep all the pieces together anymore. While Luke may look good to outsiders, he feels terrible inside. He has to spend all his energy running and hiding behind his façade of perfection. Knowing that he has just about pushed himself beyond his limits, he wonders when he’ll totally self-destruct.”

This was me two years ago. I ran across this description of a woman named Debra in the book “You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy.” It explains me better than I have ever been able to so I changed the name and a few pronouns to suit me. When I first read it I had to put the book down because it was so powerful. I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry or vomit.

In the past I have tried to write about or explain why I have always felt like an outsider. I always ended up frustrated or sad because I didn’t have the structure or descriptive characteristics needed to describe myself. I didn’t fit the stereotype of the disruptive and under-achieving ADDer but I could see every one of those qualities in my inner life.

I wanted to put this out there for anyone else in the same situation. I have come a long way in the last two years and am happy with a lot of my life today. There is hope. There are others who have been there or are still there. Things can get better!

ADHD and Worthlessness

My undiagnosed ADHD has made me feel worthless for most of my life and has had drastic effects on my self-esteem.

As a young kid – until about 3rd grade – I was constantly at the top of my class in terms of intelligence, athletic ability, and social skills. Everything I did was right and it felt natural. As I progressed into the grades where more sustained study and effort was required, my self-esteem began to suffer because I couldn’t make myself work the way I knew I needed to. I could see clearly what I needed to do to get As, but just did not have the energy. I still felt smart but also started to feel like I was always behind – always trying to catching up. This is when I started to overeat and became one of the kids who were always about 20 pounds overweight. The weight gain and poor performance in school hurt my self-esteem a lot.

Growing up in a family with a lot of abuse had also led me to the conclusion that nothing was more important than the approval of others. Sometime before I went to high school I concluded that doing well in school was the only way I could get approval. I also noticed that people respected academic accomplishments more when the person played sports. My ADHD was going to make it very hard to do well in school, and sports just took up more energy. I was fighting a constant uphill battle because I thought I was supposed to. My self-esteem was as low as it could go because others were doing the same stuff as me with little or no effort.

I overextended myself at every opportunity. I abandoned the hope that I could motivate myself and relied on the fear of approaching deadlines. The fear of failing out of school made me study. The fear of looking like a fool on the football field made me exercise. I could never focus on anything but my exhaustion and depression. I thought the only solution was to keep moving.

I continued the same behavior into college and right after graduation suffered and emotional collapse in the form of a panic disorder. My self-esteem was almost non-existent.

I set myself up for failure because I have always thought that I could feel good if others approved of me. My criteria for approval involved academic “success” which my undiagnosed ADHD made almost impossible. I spent years beating myself up for being lazy.

Recently I am learning that my criteria of approval and success are all self-imposed and artificial. My self-esteem right now is questionable but that is higher than it has been in a long time. I am taking time to value myself and beginning to realize that it has taken a lot of energy and determination to fight my ADHD for so long. I never gave up and have even accomplished some things with my life. I can be and should be very proud of that.

Getting Towed

So I was leaving to go to work this morning and my car wasn’t where I had left it last night. Our parking lot is contiguous with the shopping center across the street so when I came home last night and there were no spots left in our lot I parked in the shopping center lot – something I have done numerous times before without ever thinking twice. It turns out overnight parking isn’t allowed and my car way towed early this morning.

My thoughts usually follow a predictable pattern when stuff like this happens:
1. This is going to be such a chore and I don’t have the patience for it
2. How dare those a**holes do this to me
3. Of course this would happen to me because I am stupid and don’t pay attention and probably deserve it.
4. There’s no use getting angry or frustrated because no one cares and life is unfair so be a man a stop crying
5. I have no right to get angry because there is so much other pain and abuse going on the in the world that it is childish to lose my temper over a car

The last point is the one that I usually get stuck on because as much as I tell myself to be calm I am very angry and - like a normal human being - want to justify those feelings. I try to remind myself of all the horrible stuff that happened while I was growing up and to use that to squash the current frustration. At some point I came to believe that if I concentrate enough on memories of alcoholism and abuse that I will forget about what is going on in front of me. This is my insane defense mechanism that inflicts so much more pain than it relieves.

I hate feeling angry! But if I concentrate on old pain I just feel depressed and worthless which is so much more familiar. This is insane.

I called a cab and then took out one of my daily Al-Anon readers. I probably read 30 days of entries by the time I got to the impound site. I was still angry but at least I felt I had tried to cope in a healthy way. As I stood in the office filling out the papers to get my car back I could hear one of the employees in the other room on an intense phone call. I heard her hang up and angrily describe the exchange to one of her co-workers. It made me feel better because I had maintained more composure even after having my car towed than she did on a phone call.

I realize this type of self-righteousness is contrary to what the program teaches. I also realize that I was feeling better at the expense of another person. But this is at least a start because I didn’t get into my normal routine of self-deprecation and depression which would usually last all day. I did something new and even though it wasn’t perfect I now have something to work with. I was able to maintain a little more of my sanity than usual and I’ll call that a victory.

The 12 Steps of ADHD

The 12 steps of ADHD

1. We admitted we were powerless over ADHD – that our lives had become unmanageable.

I started to write out the 12 steps of Al-Anon and apply them to ADHD by inserting ‘ADHD’ in place of ‘alcohol’ or ‘alcoholism.’ It turns out that only the fist step mentions alcohol and the rest are about our own minds, attitudes, and relationships. This is incredible!

I am without a doubt powerless over my ADHD and it has made my life unmanageable – unlivable at some points – for just about as long as I can remember. It has impacted and continues to impact every area of my life I can think of:
Self-esteem
Education
Career
Relationships
Family
Friends
Sleep
Exercise
Eating
Drinking
Hobbies

I used to think the alcoholism in my family of origin was my biggest problem and was responsible for why I felt bad so often. I am starting to feel like although the alcoholism created some pain and shaped how I act in relationships, my ADHD is mostly the cause of my day-to-day frustrations and disappointments. Throughout my life, I could see what needed to be done but never had the energy or concentration to do it. Because of this I would punish and criticize myself for being lazy. I thought of myself as a very intelligent person who was wasting my talents.

My prevailing attitude in life has been: “Every desire I have is wrong or detrimental.”

In school I hated sitting still for every class but science.
In sports I hated practice but loved games.
I love playing music but hate practicing.

Not only did I hate studying, but most of the time – no matter how hard I tried- I couldn’t do it. There were times when I couldn’t read even a single sentence without feeling a deep physical revulsion. I approached studying the way most people approach scraping dog shit off their shoes. Where I think the alcoholism comes in is that at the same time I desperately needed approval from everyone in my life.

I noticed that very intelligent and/or educated people got a lot of approval and thought that this was my best option. Whenever I fell short in school it meant that I was failing at life which made me depressed. But I also noticed that depression helped me to sit still and hating myself gave me the motivation to study. Depression and self-criticism became my tools for squashing my perceived character defects. I entered into a battle royal with my ADHD that would be a fight to the death. Surrender, compromise, or relaxation were not viable options. If I couldn’t win then I would make sure there was nothing left for ADHD to claim victory over.

I’m not sure exactly when I came to this conclusion but I was still very young. How does a kid come to such a morbid conclusion?!?! This is true insanity! It’s not an insanity that I am solely responsible for creating, but it belongs entirely to me now.

If I were looking at someone else in my shoes now, what would I tell them? Forget about your family and focus on yourself. Find out what makes you happy. Find out what you like to do. Find some little way to experience enjoyment every day. Learn what it means to be happy. Learn what it means to be calm. Learn what it means to love. Do whatever it takes to be happy because you need it.

Life is funny. Life is fun. Life is interesting. My life is much more manageable and I am thankful everyday.

An Aimless Friday

I’m feeling especially aimless today. It could be that it’s Friday, or that I’m trying to scale back on the amount of meds I take, or just that shadow of existential doubt that likes to crawl into my soul from time to time. I am also perfectly content at the moment which is a bit of a new feeling and may be part of the problem. Contentment is foreign and thus disorienting.

I want to go to medical school but I don’t want to change. I’m scared of doing this job for the rest of my life but I am fairly happy now. I used to know what I wanted but I was miserable. Today I have no goals but am content. My discomfort is perpetually caught between the future and the present. My brain tells me that the present is all that matters – my gut tells me to keep moving, don’t look back, I must become something.

I initially thought this was a result of my ADHD but I am also coming to notice that survivors of childhood abuse often have a deep driving need to never stop moving. It’s a compulsion. It’s rooted somehow to the belief that I can never let my guard down at any time or for anyone – not even myself.

BUT some of the most successful people in history also had a relentless desire to achieve.

I am a container of objectless ambition. I think this is the point that some people start to ask if there is anything more to life. I am starting to hope there is less to life so I can make some decisions.

I went to a concert last week with a friend of mine from college – lets call her Sharona – because she grew up with the members of one of the opening acts. She got free tickets and I bought the drinks. Her friend’s band was okay but the other opening act was called Nashville Pussy and rocked so hard that I nearly had a mental orgasm. Despite their name (or perhaps because of it) the bassist and lead guitar players were both women. The bassist was young and slim and dressed like the chick from Guitar Hero – tattoos and all. The other woman was perhaps 40, a mess of head-banger hair, and undoubtedly one of the top three guitar players I have ever seen live. Her style is what you would expect if Slash started to play a lot of ZZ Top.

By the time it was over I needed a cigarette, a sandwich, and a nap. I found myself wanting to get home to my little fender strat and see how long it would take me to learn a few of their songs. I wanted without a doubt to play guitar for the rest of my life. I looked at Sharona – noticing the curves of her body – and imagined what she looked like first thing in the morning. I was three quarters of the way to falling in love with her.

I finished my beer as we watched the main act set up. We were tired and decided to go home – after all, the tickets had been free. By the time we got to my car I had forgotten about being a rock star and my love for Sharona. I was thinking about the new episode of South Park my roommate had taped and about doing laundry the next day. The laundry didn’t get done for another week. The whole experience is my life in microcosm.

My God Complex

I remember when things started going bad in my family it seemed like my world was coming apart and nothing was manageable. The alcoholism in my house mostly took the form of quiet neglect which left me a lot of time to think. I was only in sixth grade at the time and I remember feeling like I could only be disappointed if I relied on other people for something and they didn’t deliver. I don’t remember exactly when I made the change but by eighth grade my thoughts and feelings were completely separate from the emotions of others (with a few rare exceptions). I had made the decision that I could only rely on myself and that if a solution was not forthcoming then I must not be working hard enough. My character armor was to convince myself that I could do anything and that I never needed any outside help. I got to the point where I wasn’t afraid of failing at anything because I didn’t believe it was possible for me to fail. This was a very effective survival tool inside my alcoholic family but wasn’t a sustainable way to live.

One of the many problems with this approach is that when I didn’t get something or it didn’t work out just the way I wanted, it was because I was lazy or unmotivated. The thought that something might be out of my power was not an option I could comprehend. I started to test myself by pushing for the hardest thing I could find. I became a 3 sport athlete, I got into a great college, I joined the military, and I tried to become the most perfect person possible. By the time the wheels started to come off my express train to disaster I had no idea what it felt like to do something that made me feel good.

I could blame a lot of things for making me the way I am, but no one forced me to treat myself like shit for so many years. Even though I may not have known better, most of my wounds are self-inflicted. This was such a liberating thing to learn because I immediately stopped doing the things that were killing me the fastest. But that doesn’t mean I am to blame either. I can’t change anything that happened to me or anything I did in the past but trying to place blame will not help me heal. My happiness, serenity, and well-being are what are most important to me now. Finding something to blame is the same thing as finding a place to focus resentment, and resentment isn’t something I choose to have in my life.

A little humor for Friday

It’s Friday so I thought I would try to think of something funny to write. The following true story also took place on a Friday back when I was a senior in college. Hopefully it shows that although alcohol has had many negative influences in my life it also has its positive attributes (like humor).

A friend of mine named Tim, lived in a big house off campus and he and his roommates were throwing a big party that night. I went over early to help set-up and after a good deal of cleaning, organizing, and drunk-proofing the house, 5 or 6 of us were standing around the keg before people started showing up.

The group was about equally split between those who had been raised Jewish and those of us who were raised Christian so one of the guys (lets call him bill) volunteeres a joke: “A priest and a rabbi are sitting on a bench and a soccer ball rolls by. A young boy runs up, picks up the ball, and runs back to the playing field across the path. The priest leans over to the rabbi and say ‘Hey, you wanna screw that little kid?’ and the rabbi says ‘Sure, out of what?’”

We all give the joke a little chuckle, nod our heads, and most of us forget about it.

Fast forward about 8 hours – the party was a ton of fun and after the keg dried up most of us went bar hopping. At about 4am – and after the equivalent of a full work-day of drinking – Tim and I find ourselves at the only after-hours place we knew. Bill is doing his best to bring home a blonde girl who is way out of his league except for the fact that she is obviously under 21 and he is buying all her drinks. He’s slurring his words and stumbling like a champ, but still trying his little heart out to impress this young lady who is quickly getting fed-up. He’s pulling out all the stops and Tim and I hear him shout

“SO A PRIEST AND A RABBI ARE SITTING ON A BENCH.”

It just so happens that he yells this in that unpredictable moment between songs when a new DJ should have a seamless transition, but instead allows a tiny fraction of silence into the otherwise unbroken wall of sound that is mandatory in bars like this. Bill’s opening line is so clear and so audible that I can see the head of everyone within a 20-foot radius whip around in surprise and anticipation. The blonde barely bats an eyelash, disinterested, but he charges ahead like a bull in a china store.

“and a ball rolls by with a little kid chasing after it and the priest looks at the rabbi and says…uh…uh”

The music has resumed so everyone who heard the initial remark is pushing toward the speaker – trying to get a front-row seat for the impending disaster. The blonde glances at him.

“Oh yeah,” says Bill confidently. “The priest says ‘do you wanna fuck that little kid in the ass,’ and the rabbi says ‘sure but can we steal his wallet afterwards?’”

The blonde looks at Tim and me. We back away. Bill goes home to sleep in the bathtub.

Unpleasant Realities

One of my readings for today talks about the fact that sooner or later we will all face unpleasant realities and the only positive way to deal with them is acceptance. Right now I am in the midst of applying to medical school and am terrified about not getting in. I applied last year and after a lot of time and money was turned down. Although my undergraduate degree provides me with a lot of options, the program was rigorous, and my GPA is not as competitive as it could have been if I had chosen standard biology or liberal arts. I have a lot of career paths open to me and yet this is the only one I have wanted for as long as I can remember. I feel selfish sometimes that I have so much and still want this.

I have studied the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – and although most of the time I feel like I have accepted my situation enough to keep working toward the goal; other times I glide smoothly from anger to bargaining or anger to depression. I can get very resentful that my ADHD wasn’t diagnosed before I went to college and then start bargaining about how much better my grades would have been if that had happened. I think about all the nights I couldn’t sit still long enough to finish an assignment and then giving up to get my usual C homework grade. I always did well on tests because that was the kind of high pressure environment I thrive in.

Only recently has it occurred to me that I may never become a doctor and I cringe. I suppose that is my denial breaking down. There are always options open to improve my GPA, but at what point would I need to accept that it’s just not going to happen? It feels like a huge gaping hole in my life that so much unrealized potential could haunt me for the rest of my life. I’ll be just another sad story of someone who never got to live their dream. I know logically that life is about dealing with disappointment but the feeling of loss is so much more painful than the uneasiness of knowing that it will happen some day. A feeling is so much more real than a thought.

I remind myself to be grateful for all the positive things in my life like my job, my friends, and the sobriety of my family members. I am still an intelligent young man who has most of my life ahead of me – even if I now have to figure out what I’m going to do with all this time. I am grateful for all the blessings in life and although having to give up my dream my distract me from them, it doesn’t detract from the joy they can bring me.

Cognitive Surplus

Recently, Edge.org posted a talk by Clay Shirky called Gin, Television and Cognitive Surplus (you have to scroll about half way down the page for the original talk).

He gives a number of fascinating statistics about how Americans currently use their time and how they have in the past. He goes on the argue, quite persuasively, that the interactive medium that is the internet can be a powerful tool for deploying the surplus cognitive ability that is being ignored or underutilized by television and other forms of passive entertainment.

After my meeting last night a few of us were sitting around talking about the ways we use our free time. The other four had kids and were decrying the abundance of sex and violence that kids have access to through the internet and tv. I've been trying to reconcile the enormous utility of the internet with the fact that it is also being used for less "productive" means. The topic of pornography and violent rap music came up a number of times and I completely agree that no child should ever be exposed to either as an acceptable template for living ones life.

This morning I pulled up the article from Shirky and am beginning to see the less desirable aspects of the internet, like porn, as a coping mechanism that the brain can fall back to in times of fear or boredom. Its a fact of human history that most societies have made entertainment out of sex or violence at some point. I have written before that human consciousness can be burdensome when not engaged in some type of activity, and this is exactly what we are trying to deal with now. We don't always know the best way to use a tool as powerful as our brain so the best we can do is pacify it with perennial favorites like sex and violence. It shouldn't come as a surprise that we do the same with a tool like the internet.

But we are progressing. Eventually we start to explore and create new ways to employ our powerful new tools. Communities start blogs and forums about things that interest them. Support groups and information centers become available to people who have trouble with alcohol, marriage, math, history, career, or illnesses. We can begin to use our cognitive surplus to make ourselves better people; but usually after a fair amount of trial and error shows us some of the less productive ways to use it.

Finally, we can begin to use our cognitive surplus to grow and create in ways that would otherwise have been impossible. I can use this as a means to heal, connect, contribute, and learn. In the past I could keep a journal and through study and reflection try to become a better person. Today I can write my mind and, in real time, get feedback from others all over the world who have been in the same place or who have a different perspective. I can learn about options for living and techniques for coping. I can utilize my cognitive surplus instead of just distracting it. This process has been repeated many times before throughout history and is the hallmark of progress.

I have faith that this kind of engagement will always be more appealing to people than mere entertainment.

Self-Care

"I grow in my ability to relate to others when I allow them to be exactly as they are. The greatest gift I can give to myself is my own attention."

"We are best able to help others when we ourselves have learned the way to achieve serenity."

These are two great quotes that I looked up today because currently the biggest obstacle to my recovery is my relationship with myself. I have unreasonably high expectations of myself and then feel terrible when I can't meet them. I switch seamlessly between the roles of overbearing parent and guilt-stricken child. What a curious and insane adaptation to have developed!!

Most of the literature reminds me to devote some time everyday to me. I can accept and even love myself by learning to let go. I can accept and love me by remembering to look at myself the same way I look at everyone else.

I go to the gym with a close friend about 4 times a week. I never cancel because I would consider it a lazy and worthless thing to do. But it's so funny that when he has to cancel, I never level the same accusations at him. I just assume that he has something else he needs to do. Why do I expect so much more of myself than I do of others? So today I cancelled and am blogging instead. What a wonderful relief!

I think that the golden rule can also work in the opposite direction. I am going to start treating myself the way I would treat others.

ADHD and Substance Abuse

In last months edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital reported the results of a 10 year prospective study designed to look at stimulant medications and their possible link to substance abuse disorders in adult males with ADHD. The study findings revealed no evidence that stimulant medications increase or decrease the risk for substance abuse disorders when used in children or young adults. Specifically, they looked at alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence, drug abuse, drug dependence, and nicotine dependence.

I have mixed feelings about these results. On the one hand I am glad to know that these medications don’t appear to put those of us who take it at any greater risk than we already are for substance abuse. On the other hand, dozens of studies over the years have concluded that people with ADHD are between 5 to 12 times more likely to become drug or alcohol dependant, and the use of stimulants (which is the most common current treatment for ADHD) does not improve the odds. In my own journey with ADHD, I have found that my medication makes me much less prone to abuse alcohol and I have been hoping that the same might hold true for other ADHDers in general.

My father and sister both have ADHD and are both alcoholics. I also did the math for my extended family (very large and very irish catholic) a little while ago and found that 1 in 4 of my cousins is a recovering alcoholic or has had at least one intervention. With over 20 cousins and half of them already having kids the numbers just don’t look very good. Studies also confirm that ADHD is approximately 75% heritable, which means that 75% of children with ADHD have at least one parent who has it. I think if I ever get married I will go adopt a bunch of those Chinese babies.

But I need to acknowledge that although ADHD seems to be largely uncontrollable, it can be effectively managed. I also need to acknowledge that environment plays a huge role in the development of alcoholism and I am living proof that education can change the outcome. Growing up I never went more than a few days without hearing an AA slogan or insight from my dad. I remember him telling me his story when I was in 3rd grade and thinking that I had heard it all before. Sometimes he even took me to meetings so that I could hear the stories, and as I got older I could begin to recognize the progression in friends who had a drinking problem.

The day I learned my mom had cancer was a Friday and after my football game I went to see her in the hospital. Then I went to a friend’s house, got black-out drunk, and spent the night on the bathroom floor. What’s ironic is that my dad, who had been sober for over 20 years, probably did the same thing. Fortunately, after that night I realized I couldn’t get away continuing to drink and can probably count on one hand the number of drinks I had in the remaining 3 years of high school. But it wasn’t easy. Even knowing all I did and watching my family fall apart because of alcohol, it was difficult to maintain a social life and always be the sober one.

I was scared of alcohol and what it might do to me, but at the same time hated to be different. I used to wish for a pill that would neutralize alcohol so that I could drink and be social but never get drunk or suffer the effects. I guess this is a plug to parents out there that despite the best efforts of teenagers, some pressures will always exist.

Before I started in Al-Anon I did my best to crush any thoughts that something wasn’t fair. Life’s not fair – I would think – so just deal with it. But, since coming into the program I have started to let myself say it. It’s not fair that those of us with ADHD have to work harder than normal folks to make the same gains in life. It’s also not fair that we need to be so much more careful about drinking – which is how a lot of people relax after doing extra work. It’s okay to say because it’s true. It’s okay to say because it helps me to accept the situation. After that I can choose what to do.

I got dealt my hand from a different deck of cards than most other people. Consequently, the rules of my game are a little different and I will most likely need to figure them out for myself. I have opportunities open to me that other don’t, which is good because I can’t just do what others do and expect it to work. I need to question. I need to explore. I need to learn. I’m never quite going to fit in, and that’s okay because I never wanted to in the first place.

About Me

After getting a lot of the philosophical reasons for my blogging out in my first two posts, I thought I'd devote one to who I am. This is more of an attempt to see what I come up with than it is to give anyone else an explanation of who I am. For the time being I will remain anonymous, partly for my job but mostly for me.

I was born and raised in and around Washington DC. My dad is an alcoholic who got sober in the 70s, but starting when I was in middle school began having periodic relapses. My mom’s response was to become cold and distant to him while being neurotic and hysterical toward me. When I was 15, she got cancer, my dad started drinking, and they got a divorce. Today he’s sober and she lives a few states away with her new husband and my youngest sister…but this isn’t supposed to be about them.

Today I am an outwardly successful twenty-something who has a comfortable job and is trying to make sense of my life. Current alcoholism in my family brought me to Al-Anon about 6 months ago and 6 months before that I was diagnosed with ADHD. The kind of introspection that both of these events encouraged has had me uncovering a lot about myself that I never knew existed. Mostly it has made me begin to think that I don’t have the first clue about what constitutes a healthy relationship. I have heard it called co-dependence or a neglect of the inner-child or dissociation, but that really seems to put my various emotional adaptations in a purely negative light. I also think that my greatest character assets are the result of the events that drove me to Al-Anon and to begin treating my ADHD.

I have a horrifically short attention span, but because of that I also learned how to return to a problem 10, 20, or 100 times until it is solved. There are very few issues in life that don’t respond to persistence.

I have a difficult time trusting other people, but because of this I have been financially independent since I was 18.

I am very self-critical, but that has turned into a work ethic that led my supervisor to remark that I am the most responsible person under 40 she has ever known.

But neither am I blind to just how much my character defects are killing me. The habit of constant vigilance that I learned as a child leaves me exhausted most of the time. My self-criticism about a lack of attention and low energy makes me feel shitty for no reason at all. My inability to find and maintain healthy relationships is most apparent in my relationship with myself. Before two weeks ago it never occurred to me to think of myself as a human being with emotions and needs. I treated myself like you would treat a dog that kept peeing in the house – it’s just a dumb animal that needs to be given firm commands and put in a crate at night.

This blog is an attempt to explore the process of building a relationship with myself. I also hope that because it is online I will be encouraged to keep writing. In the best of all possible worlds I hope that it’s something someone else can learn from and maybe derive a bit of strength and hope. I'm basically a happy guy most of the time and would like to share some of that.

What's my responsibility?

What is my responsibility (if I even have one) in spreading rationality or fighting bad ideas that may be more harmful than helpful? With religion, for example, the idea of faith has become a major obstacle to human progress. I’m sure there was a time in history when faith served a beneficial role in creating the social cohesion necessary to build the foundations of culture. But recently with issues such as stem cell research, nuclear weapons, and climate change we need to let go of the false certainty offered by faith in order to see the facts of our world.

So having come to this conclusion, should I engage this subject anymore? If I do, I feel as though engagement might be with the intention of telling believers that they are wrong. Do I simply want to reassert my intellectual dominance over them and regain control? Or can I learn enough about myself and the situation in general to let others fight this battle and be content to engage in my own life? Can I be secure enough in myself to let other believe what they will? I think that as long as I remain aware that as a human I will always have a tendency to want to be in control, I can engage others in this topic without the aim of gaining some kind of power. I must remain always mindful of my motives.

But beyond that, is there some imperative to engage believers and try to open their eyes to what I see as the truth? Can I do this with compassion and not out of the need to feel superior to them? I really feel as though this sort of engagement falls under the category of education. It should be an attempt to educate people about an alternative, and more productive, view of the world and the accompanying mind set. I think that most people in the world (including myself) would agree that there is a moral imperative to educate those who are unaware of alternatives. This philosophy is the centerpiece of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which is widely used in support of education. After I engage someone then they are still free to decide how they want to live their life.

If I truly do believe that I have a moral imperative to educate others for the sole purpose of spreading truth, then it would seem clear that I should engage as many believers as possible. However, this line of reasoning strays dangerously close to an ideology and ideologies are the hallmark of religion. But is an ideology of education possible? Aren’t the ideas of ideology and education incompatible? I am not completely sure that I am capable of answering that question but when I think through the problem there does seem to be a logical conclusion. Education is primarily concerned with presenting facts and it is a fact that there is very, very, very little evidence (I only leave the door open a little because I am aware that I don’t know everything) to support the logical existence of a god. In fact I would argue that what people call evidence of the existence of god is simply the lack of evidence of anything else (e.g. the origins of the universe and the laws that govern it). It is certainly very easy to come up with reasons (which some people would call evidence) to support a belief in god but very had to produce evidence of god itself. On the other hand, ideology rests entirely on the unprovable. An idea does not need to be good or bad, just thought up and spewed into the world. Some ideas are obviously better than others, but the strength of an ideology is fundamentally groundless and as such is completely at odds with education. The strength of an ideology actually rests in its ability to create a place for itself in the mind of a person and then create some action from them. The ideas of education and ideology do appear to be incompatible.

I also feel that transcending a need for belief in god would enable people to avoid the kind of manipulation so common throughout religious history, and as a result would create a better society. It would not avoid manipulation all together, but would be a very large step in the right direction. It would give peoples a powerful tool to start truly thinking for themselves, which is the basis of free will (even though I don’t really believe in free will except as a matter of semantics that can be practical when discussing the human thought process, but that is a topic for another day).

But just working from personal observations, it doesn’t appear that many people want free will or (perhaps to be a little more generous) they have never been able to understand the true implications that free will holds. Free will means the ability to decide what you think. I ask myself why so many people question their faith and then end up going right back to believing anyway. No doubt there are many interconnected answers but there does seem to be one very powerful explanation.

I believe that most people do not want as much free will as they are capable of having. I believe that most people do not want to slosh around in the murky waters of moral reasoning long enough to come to a concrete understanding (understanding, not knowledge) of their belief structures. It is much easier and faster to have one person do the thinking and then take that person’s word that a certain set of actions is moral and acceptable for living ones life by. This is especially true for those who do not possess an aptitude for abstract thinking, and I think we can agree that some folks just aren’t cut out for that. Accepting certain morality structures without questioning every square inch of it leaves one much more time to work and play and raise a family. Is this kind of shortcut “wrong?” It is probably not wrong in the absolute sense, but at very least it is lazy. Is telling your child that they are not allowed to question your shortcut wrong? Some, including myself, would say yes. Is it wrong to kill or enslave another human being for taking a different shortcut? Absolutely!

The other reason I believe that those who question ultimately return to their faith is the social pressure to have a faith. I know from personal experience that it is very difficult to always have to define your own belief structure outside of the social norm (although some studies indicate that as many as 30 million Americans do not identify with a particular faith).
These people who take the shortcut seem to be in the majority. Would this majority still hold if most people ever thought to get outside their belief structure and truly question it? I think that most people are unaware that they are allowed to dive into that murky water and take the long way around to a truly ethical philosophy of the world that is independent of unsupportable dogma. This long way to the truth is in my opinion infinitely more rewarding as well as practical in a way that dogma can never be. It is practical because it is flexible and can change with the world. There is nothing as beautiful to me as true understanding. To others maybe it is beautiful to live a simple life of black and white decisions where rules are absolute and everyone knows their part in the act.

But even with shortcuts in place many folks cannot make heads or tales of their life. Do I honestly hope to make these peoples’ lives better by destroying their ideological crutch? I will say up front that this is a question that no one can claim to answer. No doubt this period of change or fall from grace would be very painful for some if I were to successfully change their mind. Some might decide that life is not worth living if a god truly does not exist and they might commit suicide or become severely depressed. Some would no doubt go on a crime spree or binge on sex, drugs, materialism, etc. This would be the result of the unfounded idea that without a god there is no morality. But I have confidence that most would adapt. After this initial period of transition, subsequent generations should have no problem accepting the idea. I believe that the human mind is more flexible than we can possibly know. I also believe that a good deal of the people would feel liberated and begin to see life for the first time.

The most important thing they would begin to see is that an absolute human ethical system does exist. Ironically the people who would come to this conclusion first would probably be those who reacted to their new “freedom” by binging on sex, drugs, materialism, etc. I have no doubt that they would not get the satisfaction from these indulgences that they expected. They would also begin to experience that true fulfillment comes from connection to other human beings and to their own consciousness. ALL HAPPINESS AND ALL ETHICAL SYSTEMS ARE CONTINGENT UPON ONES RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS AND TO ONESELF. Without fully understanding the dynamics involved with this statement, most people attempt to describe certain aspects of these relationships by invoking a supernatural entity who either understands it or who is responsible for creating it. I readily admit that without the proper tools and perspective, these relationships can seem mysterious, arbitrary, and just too good to be an accident. So what is the correct perspective for viewing relationships? That’s probably a question that each person needs to answer for themselves.

So whats in a name?

Its weird that I didn't start out to write a blog, just find out what one was about. They asked what I wanted to name my blog so I said "what the fuck, I'll give it a shot." Then they asked for a name and I thought of all handles like soccerprincess or jesusfreak that people use to succinctly describe the entirety of their being. So what's important to me? Well its not soccer or jesus.

It's not a god or gods, a school, a club, a job, girlfriend, a car, or even the collective good will of all humanity.

The way I see it, the only thing worth anything is the collected body of humana knowledge. This may at first sound unimpressive or uninspired but it makes sense to me. It works for me because knowledge is the most valuable object that the human mind can seek, attain, or pass on to others. Knowledge has enabled humans to transcend much of the brutality and harshness of nature that drove our distant ancestor’s day to day life. It has also allowed us to repeatedly overcome the brutality we have inflicted on ourselves throughout human history. Knowledge is not a physical entity but it has allowed us to shape and then transform the physical world we live in.

Knowledge is defined as a true and justified belief. When put so simply, knowledge may appear quite unremarkable, until one stops to consider how many beliefs we hold that are true but not justified or that are completely justified but false, almost true, or indeterminate. Examples are almost too numerous to count which demonstrate the inadequacy of the mind in determining justification for a choice or action (See The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow).

Knowledge is almost never something we gain easily. At best we can acquire it from loving teachers and diligent study. It requires interaction with the world because “nothing is true but reality makes it so.” It requires us to make an assertion about the orientation of objective reality and then test it. This assertion will almost always be wrong and require us to reject it and try again. Only after much searching and learning and testing and thinking are we sometimes lucky enough to find a tiny nugget of thought that satisfies the criteria for knowledge.

This process is daunting, but also much more difficult than it appears, because the second indispensable criterion for knowledge is that the truth creates a belief that is justified. One can note that the truth of the seasons and cycle of the moon was known long before people ever knew about gravity, the tilt of the earth’s axis, or the solar system. It becomes almost impossible because very rarely is a belief created by truth. Mostly, we come to a belief and then work backwards to try and rearrange the facts.

Thus our knowledge is a collected body of truth accumulated and validated, at no small price, by those who came before us. Think about all the false assertions about the world that must have failed the acid test of reality before we arrived at what we have today.

Jared Diamond tells the story of the almond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The wild plant produces an almond that is high in cyanide and thus extremely poisonous to humans and any other animal unfortunate enough or stupid enough to eat them. In order for us to get the nut we eat today, must have taken not only a very timely genetic mutation of the plant, but also many generations of people determined enough to keep trying until they found a plant that didn’t taste like death or cause them to vomit. A beautiful metaphore.

Knowledge is my love. This is what I spend my energy on.