Fearless Confessions

Sue Silverman is one of those authors that was a big help to me when I desperately needed help. I’ve mentioned her book, Love Sick here and here. I talked about the made for TV movie based on that book here. The new book is Fearless Confessions. I should have my copy in a few days.

It’s funny. I was already thinking about Ms. Silverman because my sobriety anniversary is coming up. Contemplating going to residential treatment for sex addiction is a big deal. At the very least, it’s expensive and your day to day family life is seriously disrupted. You have to figure out what to tell people about where you’re going. When it comes down to it, it’s only worth going to rehab if it’s going to work. I didn’t know anyone who had been to rehab for sex addiction, even though I’d been going to meetings for quite awhile. I knew lots and lots of people who’d gone for drug and alcohol addiction and clearly it made a difference if you went someplace “good” and if you “really wanted” recovery. It wasn’t too hard to find someplace good. When I was looking there was a choice of oh, let’s see; about five treatment centers that dealt specifically with sex addiction. And they were all unbelievably expensive so I wanted to be sure this wasn’t a mistake.*

So I asked the only person I knew that was a female sex addict and had been to treatment. Not that Ms. Silverman is so important and famous. Oprah hasn’t picked one of her books yet, but still, I didn’t really expect a reply to the email I sent her.

—– Original Message —–

Subject: did rehab work?

Hi Ms. Silverman,
 
I’ve read your book, _Love Sick. I was wondering, what
 your thoughts about rehab are in hindsight. Someone
suggested to me that if I can’t get sober in SA I
 should look into rehab but it freaks me out on several
 different levels.
 
 Thanks, [My real name].

 

But she did reply. Maybe I was reading too much into her words, but it felt like she was giving me a helping hand, which was just what I needed. I started researching treatment facilities, just in case. 

I’m looking forward to reading this book because I really want to write a memoir. I’ve wanted to write a book for most of my life, but the problem is I’m more of a reader than a writer. But that doesn’t mean I can’t become a writer, right? I’ve surely read enough about how to do it; I’ve got as many how to write books on the bookshelf. I use semicolons and when I fragment a sentence it’s deliberate. To add emphasis, style, and pace. It’s a little embarrassing, really. Like having a bunch of cookbooks (that you read!) and then eating takeout every evening. (The “it’s” is implied, making that sentence complete.) (And when the entire sentence is parenthetical, the ending punctuation goes inside the closing parentheses.) I know the rules without having to look them up but the actual creation eludes me.

Because I don’t just want to write a memoir, I want to write a good one, like Sue Silverman’s. Or like Augusten Burroughs’s,  Anne Lamott’s, Jeannette Walls’s, or Jeannette Fulda’s. You know what I mean – something that people would actually want to read, not some “yet another wordpress blog” kind of book. I want to write something that gets published. And sold. Shit, Burroughs wrote three memoirs, and they’re all good.

I think the key is humor. Good writing doesn’t hurt either. I think I could do as well as some of the turds that are burbled into Dragon NaturallySpeaking, spell checked and printed. 

If any editors are reading this, I promise I’d never complain about having to rewrite or delete.

*Since sex addiction isn’t in the DSM-IV, it’s technically not a disease and insurance usually doesn’t cover the treatment. Actually it would be more correct to say there’s some argument about the term “sex addiction” as a possible diagnosis. As it stands now, there’s no way for health care providers to specifically code for sex addiction. However, as we learn more medical texts are updated so there’s a very good chance the DSM-V will include sex addiction among the compulsive-impulsive disorders. There’s a good article here about how sex addiction can be classified under the current DSM-IV.

**Based on this book, it sounds like the decisions about the DSM are made by committee and not always based on research.

Addiction is . . .

Here are today’s words of wisdom from my current recovery reading. This is on 

page 203 of The Survivors Club by Ben Sherwood. 

“The truth is that I am not prone to accidents,” she writes in her memoir. “I am prone to jumping on the back of a horse and riding until the rush of wind in my ears erases the screaming and name-calling between the two women I love most in the world. I am prone to going to the stable rather than asking my (ex) husband if he can please take that . . . bong out of his 

mouth. I am prone to panic over when I’m going to get paid for my last freelance article and whether the check will arrive before the phone bill is due. I am prone to fly off the handle. I am prone to be sad for reasons that I don’t really understand. I am prone to want to see myself bleed rather than admit I’m scared. Accidents are just part of the deal.”

” ‘Accident-prone’ is not a description of my character,” she has written. “It’s a state of mind I enter” Survival means mindfulness. To live well and dodge bad luck, you need to focus on the “state of mind of good possibilities,” Sam tells me, “or the state of mind of safer possibilities.”

Although I am prone to addictive sexual behavior, not accidents, I’ve also had to recognize some important realities, just like Sam has. 

On page 199:

“I am blue-eyed because of genetics; I am math-phobic because of bad teaching; I am redheaded because my hair-dresser stands behind my refusal to accept brown hair,” she writes. But she couldn’t pinpoint the underlying reason for her accidents. 

Interesting, isn’t it? Addiction is a state of mind. So is sobriety.

Some states of mind are more conducive to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than others.

Be here now.

“To be open to the world in which you find yourself, to be able to experience wonder at its magnificence, is to begin to admit its reality and adapt to it. Be here now. It is to place yourself in relation to it, to say: Before I came here, the world was as it is now; after I am gone, it will be that way still. To experience wonder is to know this truth: The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it. To experience humility is the true survivor’s correct response to catastrophe.”

Page 204-205 of Deep Survival.

One of the things that bothers me about my involvement in 12-steps is the amount of religious stuff (okay, okay, spiritual stuff) that I hear. Usually I practice a live and let live attitude and just ignore it. I’m not the atheist apologist for the 12-steps. However it does get on my nerves when people start to rant that “. . . God is in the Big Book” and therefore they’re not going to apologize for talking about Him. Blech. Big Book thumping, just like Bible thumping leads to a direct shut down of critical thinking and that’s not where I want to go.

But I digress.

What I meant to talk about was how I’ve gotten away from “conference approved literature.” It’s not that I think those books or readings aren’t any good, quite the contrary. It’s just that I’ve changed. I’ve grown. And the books that appeal to me now are different, which makes sense, right? I’m different. 

You know that old adage about the three blind men in a room with an elephant? One says the elephant is like a broom with a flexible handle. The second says the elephant is like a rough leather wall. The third says no, the elephant is soft and flexible, like a well worn leather jacket. I don’t remember exactly how it goes, but you get the idea. They’re all right and none of them are right. Books like Deep Survival can be an asset to anyone’s recovery because they help you get a different view of the (recovery) elephant. 

Click on the cartoon below if you want to read a poem that was based on the original folktale.

 

The blind men and the elephant. Poem by John Godfrey Saxe (Cartoon originally copyrighted by the authors; G. Renee Guzlas, artist).

The Processionary Caterpillar

See how that line of caterpillars goes on and on into the distance? Those are processionary catterpillars. When they go searching for food, they follow the leader, which is whoever happens to be the first guy out of the next in the morning. He lays down a thread that each other caterpillar follows and adds to. As you can see from the photo, they form a head to tail “procession.” The lead caterpillar lifts up his head and sniffs around for food every once in awhile but there’s really nothing special about him. If you remove the leader, the second caterpillar in line takes over and becomes the new leader.

Jean Henri Fabre  wondered what would happen if processionary caterpillars somehow got stuck without a leader. He constructed an experiment where he got a line of caterpillars to go around the rim of a flowerpot and as soon as they filled the rim, he knocked the extras off. Voila. Caterpillars walking in a circle without a leader. He put some food nearby.

The caterpillars walked around that flowerpot without stopping for 6 days until finally some of them died from either exhaustion or starvation. That broke the circle allowing for a new leader and a new direction.

What a powerful metaphor for addiction — where we go ’till we can’t go any more.

And for recovery — where we follow a new leader to get out of the circle.

But it’s hard for an individual caterpillar to tell when they’re going in a circle. Sometimes recovery seems a bit circular, particularly when someone’s quoting scripture from the Big Book. There’s just no getting around it. I’m going to have to pick my damn head up now and then and do some sniffing for myself. 

That’s now. A few years ago when I was marching around the addiction flowerpot, I couldn’t pick my head up and the whole world smelled like shit. If that’s where you are in your recovery, just worry about following someone who’s going in a direction that seems right. First things first, right? As your brain and nose start working better you’ll be able to pick your head up too.

This neat story comes from a book I’ve just started by Tim Hurson entitled Think Better (your companys future depends on it… and so does yours. It’s on page 5.

To the Spouses

A few days ago, Sonia commented on one of my more popular posts, The Anatomy of a Relapse. It’s been a busy few days getting ready for back to school so I didn’t have the time to give her more than a brief answer. While she’s been reading everything she can get her hands on, her husband’s therapist has been telling him that it’s okay to masturbate and watch porn as long as it’s not secret.

 

Dear Sonia,

I’m so sorry to hear you and your husband are dealing with sexual addiction. And worse, your husband has therapist who obviously doesn’t know the first thing about sex addiction. Sometimes I wonder. Don’t therapists like this watch Intervention? Everyone in the family knows. And so far, I haven’t seen an episode where doing drugs together helps anybody. It’s just not an effective strategy.

Besides that, it’s not very respectful to you, is it? I’ve heard more than one woman share that they’ve done things sexually that make them feel dirty, sad, and ashamed in an attempt to satisfy their husbands. To sacrifice yourself, change yourself like that is the epitome of co-dependent behavior.As I’m sure you’ve read, co-addicts misuse their sexuality when they try to bleed off their spouses sexual tension so they won’t act out in worse ways. They think it’s better to suffer a little sadness and degradation than take the chance their spouse will pick up a prostitute. It doesn’t work.

Here’s my truth based on my experience. Good sex has nothing to do with vibrators, porn, outfits, fantasies, or positions just like a good dinner depends more on the company and the conversation than the food. Peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches can be more satisfying than filet mignon. And that’s not to say that filet mignon can’t be great too, it just depends on the company. It’s all about intimacy. And intimacy comes with talking, laughing, and crying together. You have to tell the truth.

Telling the truth isn’t easy though. One of the hardest things I did was to tell my husband the truth about what goes through my head when we have sex. I was frustrated because without this violent porn tape playing in my head, I couldn’t reach orgasm. But I knew that running that tape was bad for me. First of all, it triggered my addictive cycle; secondly, it was gross. I want to be turned on by my husband, not by porn, especially not by sick, violent porn. Sharing this problem with my husband was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I tend to think of him as sexually pure and innocent, and assumed he’d be disgusted with my depravity. But that wasn’t the case at all. It made perfect sense to him, given my childhood experiences that my fantasies trend in a certain direction.

But that’s us now, well into recovery. When our marriage was on the rocks, I was suicidal, and my husband was reeling from disclosure, we weren’t thinking in terms of good sex, we were just trying to survive as best we could. Luckily, we had very good help. I can’t over emphasize the importance of a csat trained therapist. 

My therapist gave my husband a book edited by Stephanie Carnes called Shattered Hearts. I have met and talked to Stephanie and can personally attest to the fact that she has compassion and understanding for the addict – this book doesn’t demonizes us. Neither does it excuse or rationalize addictive behaviors. Although he’s not finished the book yet, my husband says that it’s very good. He wished he’d had it to read a few years ago.

There are also some excellent blogs written by spouses of sex addicts.  A Room of Mama’s Own is one I really like. MPJ has a list of  bloglinks to other co-addicts’ blogs that would be well worth checking out.

Finally, Sonia, here are some insights that really helped my husband:

1. It’s about pain, not sex and not about him (my husband). 

2. I am a good person. His intuition about that was right.

3. He can survive and eventually thrive without me. 

That last one is the most important. Knowing he can survive and thrive without me has cut a huge swath through the enmeshment that entangles us. It makes our relationship together a choice, not a necessity. We are both intelligent adults and neither of us would have ever said that we were enmeshed with each other. But we were, we just didn’t see it. Today, we’re more separate as individuals and more intimate as a couple. We both healthier, both more free. 

At the time I was in treatment and going through disclosure, it was pure hell for my husband, without a doubt the most painful thing he’s ever endured. But he isn’t in pain now. We both changed and our relationship is stronger and better than it was before. And if I hadn’t changed, we’d be apart and he’d still be doing well.

Bully Dance

I’ve been thinking about the complexity of bullying situations lately. And today I happened across the blog of an inspirational woman who is in the midst of an ugly bullying drama, fully casted. There’s the victim, the bully and her two supporters, and the innocent bystanders. It’s all tying in nicely with the book I’m reading by Dr. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect. I’m particularly interested in the role of the innocent bystander, which of course is not the powerless roll we believe it to be. I think that’s where the banality of heroism (Zimbardo’s term) as well as the banality of evil grows, according to our individual reactions to the situation at hand.

All of this thinking brings me to this little film short. It’s written for parents and teachers, but I think it’d be great for use in community groups. There are supplemental classroom materials are available at Bullfrog Films. It’s an expensive film but you can borrow it from the nearest college or university library. The interlibrary loan service at your local public library might be able to get it for you too.

Enjoy!

The Psychology of Evil

It’s funny how things swim together in your head. I’ve just started reading The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo and thinking about how his words apply to me. On page 4, this is written:

Lucifer’s sin is what thinkers in the Middle Ages called “cupiditas.” * For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme “sins of the wolf,” the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it. For those suffering the mortal malady called cupiditas, whatever exists outside of one’s self has worth only as it can be exploited by, or taken into one’s self. In Dante’s Hell those guilty of that sin are in the ninth circle, frozen in the Lake of Ice. Having cared for nothing but self in life, they are encased in icy Self for eternity. By making people focus only on oneself in this way, Satan and his followers turn their eyes away from the harmony of love that unites all living creatures.

The sins of the wolf cause a human being to turn away from grace and to make self his only good – and also his prison. In the ninth circle of the Inferno, the sinners, possessed of the spirit of the insatiable wolf, are frozen in an egocentric reality.
____________________________________

*Cupiditas, in English, is cupidity, which means avarice, greed, the strong desire for wealth or power over another. What cupiditas means is the desire to turn into oneself or take into oneself everything that is “other” than self. For instance, lust and rape are forms of cupiditas because they entail using another persona as a thing to gratify one’s own desire; murder for profit is also cupiditas. It is the opposite of caritas, which means envisioning oneself as part of a ring of love in which each individual self ahs worth in itself but also as it relates to every other self. “Do unto others as you wold have them do unto you” is a weak expression of caritas. The Latin, “Caritas et amor, Deus ibi est” is probably the best expression of the concept “wherever caritas and love are, God is.”

After typing this out for you, my mind is flying in so many different directions it’s hard to choose one to write about. So let me just say that recovery has disabused me of the notion that I could never do that. Given the right set of circumstances I could. So could you.

In terms of sex, I know I could sink to abysmal levels of depravity. Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it. But in other areas I still think there are some things I’d just never do. Like I just know I’d never torture a prisoner of war. This one hits home for me since I once had the job description of interrogator. And I am quite certain now, as I was then, that I would not torture anyone. Ever. I’d never abrogate a person’s basic human rights under the Geneva Convention. Period. Except this book suggests otherwise. I find that pretty damn scary. I’d much rather think of myself as a good person, one who would do right no matter what. Unfortunately, that’s just not the way things are.

I’m not talking about a religious view that we’re all sinners or fallen from grace.
This book is a realistic exploration of human behavior, which is not as internally governed as we believe. It’s shaping up to be an interesting but disturbing read that I hope will elaborate on ways we can strengthen ourselves and our institutions to better maintain moral behavior.

A recovery program can be seen in this light: a discovery of ways to maintain moral (i.e. sober) behavior.

Thank You, “K”

You know that saying, “They loved me until I could love myself?” That’s what happens in treatment.

I just heard that someone who helped me get better is moving on to a new work opportunity. I don’t know if it’s normal (whatever that is) to have such overwhelming feelings of gratitude toward the people who have been helpful to me as I’ve been trudging this gentle path of recovery. I don’t know if I’m going to actually send the letter to this person. Every word is how I genuinely feel, but I sound fawning and stupid to myself when I reread it.

Anyway, I sought help knowing that deep down inside I was a worthless piece of shit. I thought recovery would be me coming to terms with that fact. With that mindset, it was disorienting to be treated with kindness and respect. K was one of the first people to cause that mind wobble in my head, but actually nobody there saw me as the sub-human piece of crap I knew I was.

Dear K,

I heard that you’ve decided to move on to helping a different set of people in need. I wish you all the best. When I got to treatment, I was such a mess. At that time, it was almost painful to be treated with kindness. I’ll always remember how understanding you were when I had to wait to begin the intake process. Most people look like hell when they land on the doorstep of a treatment facility and I was no exception. I had big black circles under my eyes, black nail polish, and a huge black cloud of shame. Sometimes just existing is painful.

I was jittery. The guy on the phone had said there was no smoking on the grounds, but that I didn’t have to quit smoking unless I wanted to. It had been several hours since my last cigarette and I was ready to start gnawing my fingers off. The nurse would be there soon and I could get some patches but for now, I’d been parked on a chair to wait. The underneath part of my eyelids itched. I couldn’t keep my hands and legs still. My throat felt weird and my tongue was filling up my mouth. This was looking more and more like a big fat mistake.

I asked you if I could go out and smoke – made some lame joke about it being my last cigarette. Addicts push and push and push. They hear a rule and instantly start putting their toe across the line. Somehow you knew that I wasn’t pushing, that I really was at the absolute end of my rope and you extended me some kindness.

I sat outside on the curb, technically off the grounds and smoked that cigarette. Later when another staff member thought I was lying, that I was sneaking, you immediately stepped in and said that you’d given permission.

How does that seem now, almost two years later? Well, it really was my last cigarette. So you definitely didn’t have a deleterious effect on my long term “nicotine recovery.”

You were kind to me and that made a big difference. One of the most dangerous lies I told during my active addiction was to you and the rest of the staff at the treatment facility. I was worried that if I told you the truth about how I felt and the plans I had, I’d find myself on a locked ward. So I didn’t. In hindsight, that was a big mistake. Suicidal addicts are necessarily handled a bit differently than addicts stewing themselves in a pity pot. But you treated me like a hurt human being and let me have a cigarette. In your eyes, I wasn’t some kind of disgusting slut, but someone worthy of dignity as you had.

That, more than any treatment modality was therapeutic. Evidently this is borne out in more than just my anecdotal experience. Martin Seligman calls this positive therapy and asserts this is why so many different types of therapy are effective. In his words, “The deep strategies are not mysteries. Good therapists almost always use them, but they do not have names, they are not studied … one major strategy is instilling hope (Seligman, 1991, Snyder, Ilardi, Michael, & Cheavens, 2000).

My children have a mother, my husband has a wife, and I have a life, thanks to you and the other therapists who helped me in treatment. Thank you for instilling hope at a time when I was quite hopeless.

Sue Silverman’s Book Will Be A TV Movie

The lifetime television movie of Sue Silverman’s memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey Through Sexual Addiction, will premiere Saturday, April 19 (check local listings).

If you’d like to see an interview with actress Sally Pressman, you can go to the Lifetime TV site. The first clip opens with a drinking scene, then a bedroom scene. I didn’t find those triggering, but you might. The third clip where her father tells her that he want’s her to write his memoir – I found that difficult to watch. The Lifetime TV site.

I found Sue Silverman’s website after reading her book, Love Sick. I checked it out of the library back when Fr. M. the wonder therapist diagnosed me as an addict, and was shocked that I could relate to a lot of what she’d written. The only thing was she’d been through hell though and had good reasons to be sick. Since nothing that bad had happened to me, I berated myself for being disgustingly weak and melodramatic. We are so cruel to ourselves. But I thought she was brave. Not only had she written a book (she’s written several excellent books); she’d gone to treatment. On her website there was a contact link if you had questions or comments and I asked her if she thought she could have gotten better without treatment. She sent me a kind and thoughtful reply and wished me well on my journey.

when the wonder therapist had decided that it wasn’t such a good idea for us to keep on having phone sex. It was great and all that, but he was worried about me. Yeah. Right. Whatever. I was falling off the edge of the world and so miserable that I wished I was dead. I told him that and you’d think a really caring guy would, I don’t know, make a f-ing anonymous phone call and tell my husband I was suicidal. That was a clue that he really didn’t care about me at all.

When your brain isn’t working well and you’re in overwhelming pain, that’s when suicide becomes an option. I figured if I could make it look like an accident, that would be less painful for my family. Along with that insane line of thought, there was a more sane “line of hope” that led me to treatment. That’s when I remembered Ms. Silverman’s email.

Deciding to go to a residential treatment facility is a big deal. It’s extremely expensive our insurance didn’t pay a cent. That’s usually the case with process addictions as opposed to chemical addictions. But more than that, there’s a huge stigma attached to this disease.* I have children. They still get scared if I’m sad or down in the dumps, but overall, they’re doing very well. They’re no longer trying to help me feel better by being unnaturally well behaved and we seem to have gotten past the acting out phase. There’s a lot of anger, fear, and stress when your mom is as sick as I was. Obviously they know I went to treatment, and they know a little bit about why. They know my grandfather did some bad stuff to me when I was little. They know that I had a bad therapist and instead of getting better I got worse. We have tried to be sensitive to their needs and answer questions as they come up. But nothing has come up. Last night I asked my youngest, who’s twelve, why she never asked about all the recovery stuff I do, the meetings and the phone calls. It turns out, she’s embarrassed. And she’s worried that talking about it will embarrass me. For her, it’s a secret that I was so sick I had to go to treatment. She doesn’t want any of her friends to know. We talked awhile – and at least now she knows I’m not embarrassed at all.

Except that I write this blog anonymously. I have tremendous respect for people who are willing to use their names when talking about addiction. Pat Carnes, Robert Weiss, Stanton Peele, and Thomas, Lauren, and the others at G.P. have all contributed to my recovery in some way or another.

But people like Sue Silverman are a real inspiration. I am still too ashamed to put my real name on this blog, but she isn’t. The content of her book is incredible. But her name on the cover is even more incredible. Talk about guts!

*Please don’t email me and tell me addiction isn’t a disease. Using the disease model when dealing with the shame of compulsive self-destructive behavior is helpful.

A New Book!

Augusten Burroughs has a new book out. I can’t wait till it comes in the mail. How did we survive before amazon.com?I read Running With Scissors toward the end of my stay in treatment. It was funny, kind of. Actually it’s not funny at all. I borrowed the book from one of the therapists and read it sitting on the floor in my room, crying and laughing my way through the pages. I was a little concerned that all that emoting meant I was falling off the deep end (again) but I wasn’t. That feeling your feelings shit is tough.

I went into therapy honestly believing I had never been abused or molested. It’s not that I’d forgotten what happened to me, it’s just that I didn’t name it. When I was going over my timeline, my therapist said when she heard me minimize my abuse, she felt sad. Hearing that, I felt angry. I despised weak people who blamed all their problems on their pasts. In the grand scheme of things, what happened to me didn’t seem that bad. And that’s enough of that sad story for today, boys and girls.

I’m an avid reader, but Burroughs is the first author I’ve ever contacted. I was embarrassed to say how much his book affected me so I made a joke about sex with priests. (His gave good head, mine gave good phone.) It wasn’t that funny but some friend who reads his email wrote back, which embarrassed but secretly pleased me. I was worthy of a reply. That felt really good!

clipped from www.amazon.com A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (Hardcover) by Augusten Burroughs (Author)