KNOWLEDGE JUNKIE

Asking for what I need

2009-08-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

Last week Dr. K switched me to 10mg of Adderall twice a day instead of 70mg of Vyvanse once a day and I feel so much better! I get almost no irritability and discomfort when it wears off in the afternoon. I can also control when I take it in case I have a late afternoon meeting or for when I want to eat lunch. I had assumed that the drugs were basically identical but my reaction to them is completely different.

I messed up my appointment with Dr. K about 3 weeks ago and had to reschedule which left me with a gap in my medication for about 3 days. Mike gave me some of his Adderall and it worked so well I wanted to try it for myself. The only slight problem right now is that 10mg in the morning isn’t quite enough which I suspect might be my body trying to acclimate to the new medication.

It feels so great because I had given up on hoping that I would ever find a medication that didn’t give me such bad rebound irritability in the afternoon. There are some days now that I don’t even notice when it wears off.

Today life is good and I am grateful for the ability to ask for what I need.

How do I respond?

2009-08-05T11:44:00.000-07:00

In 'Courage to Change' they talk about some people having a long-standing habit of responding to problems by feeling like a helpless victim. How do I respond emotionally to problems?

I feel the need to have the answer or find the answer right away.
I feel tired that I have one more thing to deal with.
I feel scared that I won’t be able to deal with it.
I try to ignore it.
It weighs on my chest and stomach.
I feel like it may obliterate the façade of perfection that I have spent so many years developing.
I am scared that it will expose me as the fraud that I am.

What are some different ways that I can choose to respond?

I can say the serenity prayer.
I can remind myself that no problem will change who I am as a person.
I can remind myself that I deserve love and care.
I can choose to delay responding for a few moments.
I can remind myself that I have a lot of resources available to me.
I can choose to look at and acknowledge the problem but not internalize it.

Today I am grateful for options.

Thought of the Day

2009-06-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Serenity and empowerment require giving up the presumption that I have the right to dictate how my life should unfold. -The Tao of Sobriety page 159

I have experienced the truth of this saying hundreds of times during the short time I have been working my program. And yet I can catch myself reflexively trying to control the world as often as I care to stop and look. My problem is not in understanding or recognizing the truth of the teaching of the program. Instead it is with trying to incorporate those truths into myself to the level that they motivate my actions and not just my thoughts.

My Limits

2009-05-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

I am reading Bradshaw’s book “Healing the Shame that Binds You.” So much of it resonates with me and I see myself as an example of toxic shame leading to perfectionism. The perfectionism is an attempt to fit into my family by becoming their redeemer. My shame is part of my being and is unconnected to the world or anything external. It is not the guilt connected to doing something wrong or making a mistake. I am wrong and I am a mistake. I have constantly tried to validate myself by being a good student, a good athlete, and above all self-sufficient. I have tried to have relationships with attractive and sociable women in order to look well rounded.

For most of my life I have had chronically low energy. I want to stay up late into the night and then sleep until early afternoon. I feel crushing shame for both of these. I feel chronically unproductive and like I am dragging others down. Since I started dating I have been unable to get aroused by a woman until we have been dating for a few months. In all three situations I feel like I am not living up to my responsibilities. The world expects me to be energetic, productive, and virile. I just want to do what is right so that everyone will love me. I want everyone to admire me.

I have spent a lot of time feeling shame about my body. I am powerless over my energy level, motivation, and ability to perform. I am absolutely powerless. I would like to break this cycle of shame and will have to be kinder and more understanding to myself in order to do so. My normal response is to push through and white-knuckle it. This is a painful way to live and I am entirely ready to have god remove this destructive habit. I am ready to trust my body and that things will work out.

Higher Power, I have tried for years to overcome my normal physical limits by pushing harder. It makes all of life unpleasant and I have lived with a lot of exhaustion. Please help me to listen to my body and trust that everything will work out. Please help me remember to treat myself better.

Gratitude After Some Time Away

2009-05-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

Today I am grateful for:

Being safely back home
My program
My wonderful friends. The more time I spend working my program the more I appreciate how much each of my friends add to my life.
My family
Choices

"Know the male, yet keep to the female: receive the world in your arms. If you receive the world, the Tao will never leave you and you will be like a little child."

Dukka

2009-03-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

As I was going to a meeting last night I recognized that I am still afraid and uncomfortable with the possibility of being happy. I ask myself “If I could be completely happy but I had to give up X (some behavior or goal), would I do it?” I have never been able to answer yes but not because X is too difficult to let go of. I feel like my life would become meaningless if I suddenly became happy. I feel important when I am unhappy or in pain. I feel like a unique and special person. I am where I’m intended to be.

I feel like pain and discomfort give me a special insight into life and that without it I would become oblivious to the world – a quality I despise in others. Discomfort keeps me alert and keeps me asking questions. It keeps me at a comfortable distance from other people and reassures me that I will always have something to think about.

I want others to see me as being constantly involved with important activities. If something is painful then I assume it must be important.

I think that experiencing pain is the only way I have known to give myself attention. It is the only way I know how to focus on myself. I feel the least amount of guilt when I take some time out of my busy day to focus on my pain. I need that excuse.

It was bound to happen

2009-03-05T14:48:00.001-08:00

Well it was bound to happen – I don’t think I have written in about 3 or 4 weeks. I would like to blame it on being busy but I have just had less motivation to write, especially since my meds wear off in the early afternoon. My new doctor switched me to Concerta which doesn’t work as well but I get no crash when I am coming off it so I’m not sure what to do.

In general I am in a good place right now. Recovery and serenity feel more and more natural as I continue to spend time with my friends from the program. Whenever I get to a meeting the worries and stress of the rest of the day seem to disappear. I feel so at home and can completely forget any negative feelings I may have had earlier in the day. I look forward to the day that I can reproduce that experience outside of the Al-Anon setting. Someday I hope to be able to wake up and feel that first thing in the morning.

I have also been feeling the desire to be in a relationship. Sometimes it’s the purely physical desire for a woman’s body. Most of the time I would like someone to see and talk to at the end of the day – someone my age who I can spend my time with. My engineering mind starts to ask me what kind of girl I would like to have – as if it would go after her if I knew and if she were available. I am so afraid of rejection and so distrustful of my choice in women.

I also like relationships because I sleep so well next to a girl. Being around a woman helps me to focus on something other than myself which in turns enables me to relax. I find it soothing to hear someone else talk or breathe or roll over in bed. On the other hand I am doubtful that I would be able to find someone my age who I can relate to as well as I do to my friends in the program. I’m not sure if that should be a requirement but my Al-Anon relationships have been my only experience of true intimacy. It’s going to be difficult to recreate that feeling and I should probably take my time – easy does it.

I’m going to head home because I have a lot of laundry to do and Michelle is coming over to cook dinner. I am so grateful for everything in my life.

What I Enjoy

2009-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

A large part of my struggle in Al-Anon has been learning to live my own life. This involves pursuing my own goals and finding ways to enjoy my free time. My co-dependant coping mechanisms meant that my goals and motivations are based entirely on what other people think and what I believe they expect of me. When I initially stopped to try and figure out what is important to me and what could motivate my life in recovery I found myself looking into a giant empty void. I didn’t have the first clue about what I wanted, enjoyed, or could motivate me.

Last night I was talking to my pseudo-sponsor about this and realized that playing my guitar and learning about the world are two things that I have always done for myself and that still give me a lot of pleasure. It feels good to now know at least this tiny bit of what makes me happy. I often feel that my recovery is not a process of returning to sanity that has been lost, but rather of building a new and healthy person who can learn for the first time what sanity is. Finding these two things feel like a first step towards building a personality that isn’t simply a reaction to abuse, neglect, and alcoholism. It is a part of me that is neither running from nor trying to deal with my past. It is a part of me that is completely and totally in the present moment.

I am so grateful.

My dinner with Kevin

2009-01-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

I had dinner with my sponsor last night because I was feeling very down at the end of the day. We talked about the usual topics of abandonment, co-dependency, the steps of my recovery, and some issues I have been dealing with recently. Toward the end of the meal I was beginning to feel a deep emptiness that I was having trouble describing or understanding.

Recently, I feel directionless and disoriented. I was describing how my mental committee often tells me that I need to keep accomplishing things with my life. I have listened to them a lot and have lived my life believing that accomplishments and outside admiration are the keys to happiness. These beliefs have given my life direction from school to sports to my social life to my relationships.

As I get more in touch with myself I am losing my drive to impress people. Any energy that goes into me diminishes my ability to monitor, anticipate, and accomplish the things that impress the outside world. I am afraid that people will stop admiring me.

As I continued to talk to Kevin I began to see for the first time how much every action in my life revolves around the expectations and desires of other people. I can’t control the expectations of others. I can’t always fulfill the expectations of others. Living my life according to others has made me miserable. In order to recover I will need to sever my attachment to expectations and learn to live for myself.

These realizations brought me to a very deep, dark bottom.

I don’t know, nor can I imagine what would give my life meaning or direction if I didn’t rely on winning the approval of others.

What other people think and feel is completely out of my control. If I try to rely on them I will continue to get jerked around for the rest of my life. The best I can do is to live my life based on what I think and feel. I’m not sure I understand yet what that means or how to do it. This will take a while.

“Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success of failure: which is more destructive?

If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.”
-Tao Te Ching

About Me

2009-01-16T14:48:00.000-08:00

I am unsure where or how to start the story of my ADHD because it only occurred to me as a possibility when I was 23 (about 18 months ago). There is so much I am still learning about it even though my dad and sister were diagnosed almost 10 years ago. It never really interfered with my grades – until college – for a few reasons:

I have a good deal of natural intelligence. I don’t say this to boast only to try and explain that building conceptual models in my mind for how the world works has always been easy for me. In classes that meet 5 days a week this is enough time to incorporate the model and learn a few facts well enough to pull a B.
Listening to other people talk – especially lecture – is very soothing for me. I’m not always paying attention but I am able to sit still because I feel calm.
At a very young age I came to believe that any love I received and any self-worth I could attain would come by demonstrating my perfection. Achievement equaled acceptance.
Since I can remember I have loved to daydream.

I had a few years – third grade, fifth grade, sophomore year of high school, and sophomore year of college – when the grades didn’t come. But on the whole I was a B+/A- student.
I think my ADHD interfered more with my view of day-to-day life than with anything in textbooks. As far back as I can remember I couldn’t think about the end of the day without becoming depressed because I knew that it would never arrive. Getting through school or work was never a realistic possibility because it seemed too far away to even consider. I would go through periods of believing that I was doomed to live a moment-to-moment existence of boredom for the rest of my life. It sounds gloomy but I couldn’t recognize it because I had nothing to compare it to. It astounded me that others could look forward to the end of the day with excitement and not notice the insurmountable hours that lay in between. I would look at them and wonder if they were in denial?

All the external indicators of success, like grades, were above average but I felt like they were a façade. I didn’t talk, think, or act like the other “smart” kids in my classes. I always felt different. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My world view slowly began to materialize in high school as persistent low-grade depression that became the background noise to life. It was almost impossible to notice at first because it felt like it had always been there. The only clue I had was that other people appeared to take joy in the most trivial tasks – talking to friends, working out, going on a trip, or reading a book. Anything I did in my free time was an escape. I smoked cigarettes, I ate compulsively, I sat in front of the TV for hours, and I had sex whenever possible. I also developed the ability to daydream in exquisite detail. I dreamed about being a star athlete or a Nobel prize winning scientist. Why live in reality when I could create my own world?

I had one recurring daydream about owning a remote control that could pause time. I could pause a test to open my textbook so that I would never have to study. I could pause at recess to look under the skirts of the girls in my class. I even dreamed of making a device that could pause and unpause time 50 times a second while I was running so that it would look like I was moving at incredible speed.

As my eating and smoking got more out of hand I began having recurring daydreams about having a computer that would allow me to custom design my body. It would allow me to precisely design my muscle tone, body fat, teeth, eyes, speed, sleep patterns, and disease states. I would never be fat or tired and all the cigarettes in the world would never slow me down or give me cancer.

But my fantasies were only that and I continued my moment-to-moment struggle against frustration. I began to believe that I did not deserve happiness because all I ever wanted to do was complain. I saw myself as a cry-baby. The few experiences of true contentment that I remember from growing up were during summer vacations. After about a month of doing nothing but eat, sleep, and watch TV I would start to forget about the misery and stress of the school year. I would regain interest in reading and learning at my own pace. My passion for science, math, and computers would return and I would dedicate myself anew to my education – each year vowing to remain motivated and not get sucked into my old habits of frustration, boredom, pessimism, and self-pity.

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 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 extremely difficult. 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 and should be very proud of that.

The learning environment in college is what finally broke my denial. I could not study and there was far too much material to learn by going to class. My trips to the library to study became marathons of frustration and self-loathing. Other people in my program would talk about getting a big cup of coffee and studying for two, three, or four hours for finals. I would sit down with a pot of coffee but would never drink it because after 10 minutes would want to scratch my eyes out and tear my hair in clumps.

I tried so hard freshman year that I nearly made myself sick. I finished with about a 2.8 GPA and I was so embarrassed. Never in my life had I put an honest effort into a task and come up short of my own expectations. I had made sacrifices like going to the library on Saturday nights and letting my weight get out of control. Sophomore year I wanted to put the same effort into my classes but just couldn’t muster the energy. I all but stopped doing homework and started to party on the weekends with my roommates. I almost never went out more than one night a week but I always felt guilty. I never missed a class but I always felt like I should be doing more. I felt guilty when I woke up, when I went to class, when I worked out, when I watched TV, and when I went to bed. Quitting never crossed my mind because I knew it wasn’t my major – it was me.

I limped across the finish line of sophomore year after having failed electric circuits class and accumulated a 2.09 GPA – pathetic. I was so depressed all summer that I couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Junior year miraculously found me with a moderate amount of motivation that allowed me to re-take and ace my failed class. My motivation was that I was sick of feeling like a fat idiot. I pulled my grades back up to their previous C+/B- level and lost a bunch of weight. I was always hungry and became obsessive about running. I lived every day feeling like a fraud. I constantly felt like I was on the edge of getting fat and failing out. Throughout Junior and Senior years it is difficult for me to remember one thing that I did for myself. What did I do for fun? Nothing, because doing anything would involve letting my guard down. It seems so logical to me now that my world began to crumble into a giant smoldering panic attack halfway through senior year. A system can only withstand that amount of stress for so long before something gives.
After the anxiety started the ADHD took a back seat. The revulsion I felt toward studying was barely audible in comparison to the daily feelings of impending death.

I began to deal with it again when my anxiety subsided in the winter of 2005-06. The thought of getting an office job – especially the one at a big government agency I had worked at in college – scared me because I knew how bored I would be. I remembered vividly how miserable I had been as an intern there during college. My options became more and more limited and finally I applied for the job.

It was hell at first. I did more online Sudoku and Crossword puzzles than I care to admit. Over time I developed certain strategies and coping techniques that too the edge off and allowed me to get some work done. It’s incredible how much constant boredom and frustration can wear a person down emotionally.

My depression kept popping up every few months and my shrink would increase my medication. On the whole my life was improving because I was learning to take care of myself but it felt like I was taking 2 steps forward and 1.5 backward.

Finally, last year – after many months of discussion – my shrink started me on Vyvanse for ADHD. Those first few months were miraculous. It was as though the clouds had parted and I saw my life from a whole new perspective. I knew that the euphoria wouldn’t last but I also knew that I had discovered a huge part of myself. At first I was so productive at work that I never wanted to leave. After years of doing just the work I knew others expected of me I could finally do a project completely and take pride in what I was producing.

Because I no longer used all my energy to fight the ADHD I could start to see patterns and problems with other areas of my life. It became clear to me that I had endured a lot of abuse from my family when I was a kid. I had the desire and energy to recover so I started attending Al-Anon meetings. They have started to teach me the tools I need to take care of myself and build a little self-esteem.

Although it may sound cliche, my life is far from perfect – but I am so much happier. The honeymoon I had been on with my medication came to an end a few months ago and I had to accept that it is not a silver bullet cure for my ADHD – it’s an important tool that I can use to manage my symptoms. I still go a little crazy in the afternoon when it wears off, but I have learned to take some time for myself to deal with it.

I still have trouble with intimate relationships because it’s difficult to give a woman the attention she expects. I still lose things all the time. I still forget almost everything if I don’t write it down. I still get distracted at work and am not always as productive as I would like. But now I can appreciate (sometimes) that all these qualities belong to me and make me who I am. I am working – feverishly of course – on accepting my limitations enough to gain some peace and serenity.

Until then it feels good to let myself just go crazy sometimes!!!

2009-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

I called my mom at about 1 this afternoon to talk some business for this upcoming weekend. We had a very pleasant conversation and I got back to work. She called me about 20 minutes later and I could hear the tears in her voice. Her sister Gina had just called to say that their mother - my grandmother - had just died.

Grandma has been in a hospice facility for about 2 weeks so I knew it was just a matter of time but it still hit me hard. Somehow it came as a great surprise. She was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma about 2 years ago and after a few months of treatment went into remission. It came back about 6 months ago and she has been on a downward trajectory since. At about noon today she vomited a lot of blood and then became unresponsive.

What surprises me is that I don’t feel sad or scared – just empty. I sort of feel bad that I haven’t taken more time to keep in touch with her. I called her about 6 weeks ago and we had a nice talk. I sort of wonder if I should have done more but between all my aunts, uncles, and cousins I feel like she had all the love she needed. I doubt I could have added anything substantive other than one more person she felt obliged to talk to.

I am also happy that her suffering is over. Chemotherapy and radiation took a lot out of her and she has been tired for a lot of the last 6 months. I am grateful to have known her and to have many memories. My dad’s parents died when I was about 5 so I never really got to know them.

I am also grateful to have my program because otherwise I would feel the pressing need to do something. I would probably start to imagine the invisible expectations that everyone had of the perfect grandson which is my key to insanity.

I would also have experienced the burning resentment that my mom’s emotions used to arouse. It would have been difficult for me to see past the old feelings that my mom’s tears bring up. I would have been more focused on my repressed emotions than on grandma.

My grandmother lived a long life and was surrounded by those who love her. She knew that I loved her and that gives me peace.

Letting Go

2009-01-08T10:49:00.000-08:00

Al-Anon teaches me to turn my will and my life over to the care of my higher power. Many people in the program describe this as “turning it over to god,” with the “it” being the hardship of whatever current moment they are in. Since my higher power is the knowledge of the program, and doesn’t lend itself as easily to the personification necessary to turn something over, I prefer to “let it go.”

Let it go.

This works for me because I hold on so tight. I have held on tightly to pain and fear, and am now ready to let them go. I have held on tightly to my emotions so that they would never get out of control. I have and continue to hold on very tightly to what others think of me. I have held on tightly to life in general and have succeeded in choking the life out of life and making myself exhausted and sick in the process.

In letting go of this mindset I am ready to start loving myself and paying attention to myself. I am ready to pay attention to what I want and what I feel. In the past I have tried so hard to ignore or destroy any shred of desire or emotion. I am beginning to understand what is meant when people say that before anyone can love you, you must first love yourself. It would be like hating the state of Virginia with every breath of every day and yet still expecting to fall in love with someone who was born and raised there. I need to learn to love me, and only then can I have any respect for the love that someone else shows me.

I like to say that I am ready to start loving myself. I AM ready to start loving myself. I have a lot of great and loveable characteristics. I am a smart guy and I am good person. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I deserve to feel love and happiness. I am a good person and that is completely independent from any relationship I have been in, any people I have angered, or any shortcomings I have had. I have always tried to do the best I could with the tools I had available at the time.

I am ready to let go of the habit of thinking about others first. I am just as important as everyone else in the world and deserve just as much attention. I am unaccustomed to paying attention to me and as a result can infer the attitudes of others with ease but don’t have a clue about how to look at myself. What would I see if I turned the same skilled observation tactics on myself that I constantly use on others? Right now I see confusion.

I see a person who doesn’t know what to do without the cues of other people. I see someone who is bored a lot of the time and exhausted the rest of the time. I see someone who needs a break and a hug and someone to listen. I see someone who is scared of being like other people and making the mistakes that others make. I see someone who is very scared to be average. I see a child who wants with all his heart to be unique and special and powerful and loved. I see a child who started telling himself that these feelings were wrong before he could ever understand why.

I never allowed myself to explore these feelings and so I was never able to come to an understanding about their powerful dynamics. Selfishness is when we take the principles of caring for ourselves too far and start infringing on the rights of others. The only way to learn where the line is that transforms self love into selfishness is by exploring it. I was always so afraid of imposing on others that I never wanted to go anywhere near the line. I never wanted to risk my needs becoming a burden to anyone so I tried not to have any needs. I deserve to make mistakes.

I deserve to be loved.
I deserve to be cared for.
I deserve attention and I deserve to be happy.

This is my brain on ADHD

2009-01-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

One time I remember sitting in the library and watching a guy read a page in a textbook straight through. His eyes started at the top of the page and moved progressively along each line to the bottom. HOW IS HE DOING THAT!! There was no flipping back and forth to other pages or nervous fidgeting. I tried to imitate him but by the time I read the first sentence I could feel my skin start to crawl. My eyes began to search the page for an illustration or equation or other object to focus my attention on. I would realize what my eyes were doing and return them to the first sentence again. I looked back at the studier again for clues as to how he managed to read each sentence in succession. He appeared to be just sitting there. He made it look so easy. I returned my attention to my book and the first demonic sentence. I could feel a physical revulsion in my chest and stomach toward the textbook. I wanted to set it on fire. I wanted to throw it out the window. I wanted to throw my mind out the window. I needed to get up and go back to my apartment because the library was driving me crazy. Maybe if I played a few video games it would settle my mind and then I could study. Yes, that’s what I would do and then study later. I packed up my books to leave knowing that I wouldn’t be studying anything for a few days.

Whoa - I think I'm starting to like myself

2008-12-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-19T13:25:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-15T10:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-04T09:30:00.000-08:00

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?

Worthlessness
The compulsion to amount to “something”
Loneliness
Embarrassment
That I owe people something with my life
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

2008-12-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-26T11:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-24T13:49:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-14T12:32:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-12T14:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

"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

2008-10-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-15T08:25:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-10-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

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.