Category Archives: Alcohol

Pride

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Pride has served me badly.  I put on a brave face all my life out of pride.  I wouldn’t acknowledge to anyone, including myself, how much I was hurting.  I was mourning my mother’s death, my rocky progress in school, my lack of athletic ability, and not understanding why I did impulsive things I instantly regretted.

I stood tall, lied, and ignored my feelings.  Fakery and bullshit were my default modes.  I’m smart, so I often got away with it unless I had to prove it.  “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.”  I was great at counter accusations because of my well-tuned bullshit detector.   I operated this way for probably 60 years.

In more recent years I developed enough self-awareness to detect my own bullshit.  Mostly.  I knew about my ADD/ADHD and had years of therapy and various group activities to build a reservoir of mostly honest behavior.  Except for the addictions.  Pride kept them in the closet.  I drank and drugged without admitting my helplessness.

I like to accuse oil companies of lying, cheating, and stealing.  I saw it because I was doing the same thing.  About three years ago my therapist / Jungian Analyst/ Addiction Counselor looked me in the eye and said “You are an Alcoholic.” did I begin getting it.  Despite all my prideful front, I was a mess.  I quit drinking and got serious about wrestling with my non-substance related addictions.  I go to meetings, pray, and meditate.

For the first time in my life I may be getting past all the pride and deception.  I do have to say the wrestling with non-substance addiction is a win some, lose some proposition.  Maybe I have to be more honest, less secretive, and humble with my shortcomings.

Posted in ADD/ADHD, Addiction, Alcohol, Meditation, Pride, Stories

Drinking

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I don’t drink.  I am coming up on three years alcohol free.  I don’t know how many other times I have quit, starting when I was seventeen.  I started drinking when I was fifteen, if you count Coors 3.2 beer as alcohol.  It isn’t very strong, so I just drank more.  I started and stopped several times after the first time.

My mother was an alcoholic, my father drank quite a bit.  Their entire social circle revolved around drinking.  One of my mother’s best friends choked to death on her own vomit on the kitchen floor.  One of her kids found her.  Alcohol was the culture I grew up with.

One of the issues I live with is ADD/ADHD.  Growing up, I knew something was wrong – always in trouble, unable do do schoolwork I wasn’t interested in, lots of other stuff.  I thought of it as the Fatal Flaw.  I have managed to lurch along with the ADD, but it affected all my life.  My college transcript is mostly A’s and F’s.  It helped ruin my first marriage.  The deal with it, I drank and did dope.

I used to buy pot by the quarter pound.  I never bought booze in less than 1&1/2 liter bottles, beer by the case.  A friend and I would go to the beer joint and drink seven pitchers in an evening.  I smoked three packs of cigarettes every day, more when drinking.

All the drugs and alcohol were self medicating.  I was heavily medicated for a long time.  I started therapy more than 30 years ago.  It seemed to help in a lot of areas, but the addictions remained. One day in a therapy session the therapist stopped and asked me if I had ever been evaluated for ADD.  Well, no.  That evening I did a checklist.  I was 48 out of 50 questions.

That is when my life began to change.  It all took a while, I didn’t stop drinking for about fifteen years, but I was doing better in lots of other areas.  I can now do tasks I was previously incapable of even starting.  It took a lot of cognitive therapy and the stimulant medication to get my prefrontal cortex working without stirring up a bunch of drama.

You are aware alcoholics go to lots of meetings.  I go to two meetings every week.  They are a tremendous help as other alcoholics share their experience, strength, and hope.  We humans need to associate with others  and the meetings are healthier than bars.

I am fairly sure I will never drink again.  That’s good, because it would kill me.  My stomach doesn’t like alcohol and kicks up a real fuss when I drink.  I like not having my stomach hurt.

I don’t agree with all the concepts of the program, but I can live with it.  Spending time with a bunch of sober alcoholics is a constant reinforcement for my sobriety.  As we say at the end of meetings, “Keep coming back, it works if you work it.”

Posted in ADD/ADHD, Addiction, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Craving, My Story, Stories

Counterattack

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The two recent pieces I wrote and posted here amount to something of an epiphany.  I have been aware of my addictions and history of sexual abuse and practiced the additions for most of my life.  What came to me while writing them is the realization I have long had a reliable way to deal with the addictions: Pray.

Prayer

I have been praying for years, starting with my conversion.  Praying has continued because it works.  I have known praying works on addiction for all those years.  Problem is, I knew it works but only practiced it intermittently.  Cunning, baffling, powerful.

Insight meditation has enhanced my praying and gives me more focus while praying.  The goal is to clear out the mental clutter I used to survive in a sometimes dangerous world.  Along with developing survival skills, I also create my own world.  Some of our worlds may be congruent with reality, sometimes not.  It takes lots of energy to maintain the personal world, and I am constantly revising and enhancing what is actually an artificial construct.

My inner world is filled with stories about what is going on, what happened, and guesses about the future.  In the process of creating all this, I ignore the present.  All those creations are the basis for my addiction.  The now, right now, is not.  So, it’s only logical to stay in the moment.  It ain’t easy, folks.  I have many years of reinforcement to stay with the mostly imaginary world I created.

I can get to the now in meditation and prayer.  It is said meditation can aid one in staying in the moment most of the time.  It’s called enlightenment.  Watch the breath.  When mind wanders, return to the breath.  Repeat.  I am not enlightened, although I strive to go there.  My mind wanders.  A lot.

I can, however, pray, which is an alternate way of staying in the moment.  Another word for prayer is mantra.  “Om mani padme hum”.  It can be a collection of Sanskrit phrases or English words transmitted by a teacher.  in my case I don’t know my teacher’s name.  He is a long dead Russian peasant who became a pilgrim seeking his teachers in Russian monasteries.  In his travels he used an ancient Orthodox Christian prayer known as the Jesus Prayer.  “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  He suggested starting with 3000 repetitions daily.  With sufficient practice, it is possible to synchronize the prayer with the heartbeat.  This means constant prayer.  How is that for staying in the moment?  His book is entitled The Way of a Pilgrim.

I may have reached 3000 a few times.  I have never synchronized the prayer with my heartbeat.  I do synchronize with my breath.  After writing those two pieces about addiction and spirituality, I had a solid week of prayer, peace, and freedom from addiction.  What a glorious time!  Once I had a year of respite.

Oops! Here came the counterattack.  In these cases, it’s nearly a total absence of prayer and almost constant addictive obsessing along with acting out.  You Tube is a great aid in distracting myself from the moment and reinforcing obsessions.  During this current counterattack I had a dream about finding myself in a room with baggage stacked to the 20 foot high ceiling. That’s my world-lots of baggage.  So, what to do?  One way I have found is to open up about what is going on and not isolate.  Remember George Thorogood singing “When I drink alone, I want to be by myself.”?  That is my addiction mantra.

“Confession is good for the soul.”  Here is my confession.  Now maybe I can get back to prayer.

Posted in Addiction, Alcohol, Buddhism, Current Activities, Insight Meditation, Jesus Prayer, Meditation, My Story, Obsession, Prayer, Sexual Abuse, Stories

Pain

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Pain

Pain, suffering, anxiety, fear, discontent, hate, sadness, on and on.  We have lots of names for conditions making life difficult for people.  Let’s lump them together under suffering.  All the world’s faith traditions offer either solace or hope.  Some offer healing.  The healing even works sometimes.

With the possible exception of pain, all the conditions creating suffering have the same origin-us.  All we really need are food, clothing, and shelter.  Everything else is desire, things created in our minds.  “Make it go away.”  There are more strategies for making it go away than there are people on the planet.

The strategies do offer some solace.  Another beer, a horror movie, ice cream, new car, getting laid.  Problem is, the craving always returns.  So, do it again.  And again.  Try something else, maybe jumping out of an airplane will work.  What about Everest?  Running a corporation, getting elected. Trying a long kiss in the stairwell and an affair.  We spend our lives trying to satisfy desire.  All the wise ones offer a supposed cure, usually requiring some degree of sacrifice in pursuit of deliverance.

Often, the sacrifices have to be repeated because the ones asking for a sacrifice are attempting satisfy their own cravings.  It don’t work, folks.  All the attempts at gratification just feed the craving.  Thus, we have a world of suffering.  It’s the wrong approach.

Now, I am going to tell you what to do.  Problem is, I am also trapped on the wheel of desire.  I know the technique works because I have experienced it in my life, once for as long as a year.  It’s simple, let go of desire.  No desire, no suffering.  Bad things still happen, but they don’t result in suffering if the desire is gone.

We all have in our core a condition of pure being, absent of all the world’s clutter.  The task is getting back there.  As we are in a body, to stay alive we must satisfy the body’s needs.  It means  going to school, working, forming associations and partnerships.  All this is hard work and we build our own little mental world and fill it with needs.

Let it go, give it up, just breathe without thinking and you will begin to rediscover the place in the center of your being. Now, do what I say, not what I do.  I built my own little ego world and constantly strive to keep it satisfied.  Sometimes while meditating I am able to enter the peaceful state.  Other times, all I do is think, often about what to write about not thinking.

When I am having a hard time letting thinking go I pray.  I pray for myself, for others. For the earth.  Prayer takes me away from my self.  I stop praying and am sometimes able to re-enter the empty space.  Often all I can do is pray.  And pray.

I think choosing a prayer is a personal, private thing.  It can be a mantra, a quote from the dharma, a prayer of thanks or for mercy.  It can come from any faith tradition or none.  It doesn’t seem to matter where the prayer is directed.  It doesn’t have to be directed anywhere.  What is important is the act of praying, of getting outside of the cluttered world where we spend most of out time.

The next time I meditate it can be easier to enter that space of peace.  Or not.  I used to say writing is the hardest thing to do.  Now I think it is meditation.  How to be without striving, without suffering, without escaping.

I think I will go to the store and then meditate.

Posted in ADD, Addiction, Alcohol, cigarettes, Obsession, Pain, Stories

Addiction

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I am an addict. At various times they have been tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, food, the internet, and sex, to name a few.  Currently they are food and the internet via the iPad.  Addiction runs in the family.  My mother and her brother were alcoholics.  I have managed to leave some behind, namely tobacco and pot.

I started smoking in 1960 at the University of Colorado when the tobacco companies were giving cigarettes away in order to get people hooked.  I quit smoking in 1965, three packs a day of Camel straights.  I quit pot in 1982 when I noticed I was having trouble remembering what I did yesterday.

Sex.  What adolescent male isn’t a sex addict to some degree?  I just kept it up too long.

I have left alcohol behind several times, but after a period I would start drinking again.  I controlled the drinking for a while then slowly ramp up until I scared myself and quit again, only to repeat the cycle.  I have been sober for almost two years, and I think I have left booze behind.  I realized alcohol was going to kill me if I kept it up.  I think of George Thorogood  singing “When I drink alone, I want to be by myself.”  Scotch or bourbon, vodka when money was tight.

I started when I was fifteen, drinking 3.2% Coors.  Those were the binge years.  I remember four of us in a line outside a Grand Junction beer joint vomiting in unison.  One time we drank some beer after a field trip and went to football practice.  We would hold our breath when the coach came into the huddle.  In the army my buddies and I drank steadily.  Fridays in the enlisted men’s club beer was a nickel and mixed drinks were a dime.  That’s when I developed a taste for scotch.  The well bourbon was Ten High, which isn’t fit for cleaning floors.  See? I have discerning taste in choosing my poison.

I think I realized the danger of booze for me when I saw “Leaving Las Vegas.”  Nic Cage’s character had sold everything and was in Vegas deliberately drinking himself to death.  I saw myself.  It took years, however, to give the stuff up.

Food.  Chocolate and ice cream.  Ice cream craving came from my father.  He had a big bowl every evening.  Chocolate? Who doesn’t like chocolate?  In grade school, a friend and I came across a box of Hershey bars that fell off a delivery truck.  We snuck around and ate the entire box in one afternoon.  A few years ago, it was the ice cream sandwich summer.  I would buy a box of them, eat four or so, and ditch the rest.  It was cheaper than buying singles.  I gained fifteen pounds.

I have a gastric condition resulting from a lifetime of acid reflux.  Chocolate tends to cause reflux.  Alcohol, of course is the worst, especially straight whisky.  I am a lot better after quitting drinking and drastically reducing the chocolate intake.  Now I just pick Ice cream flavors that don’t have any chocolate.

The iPad.  Currently it is Words With Friends, Facebook, and You Tube.  I hate boxing, so of course I watched a lot of boxing and mixed martial arts.  I then went to car crashes.  There are lots of dash cams in Russia, and they are terrible drivers.  I like to watch Jeeps get mangled in the Utah red rock country.  Currently it is firefighting.  Urban fires, wild land fires, even car fires.  I was a volunteer firefighter for a while.  There is nothing more exciting than going into a burning building with a fire hose.  No better way to waste time than watching it on line.

Quite a list, isn’t it?  I have taken up Buddhism, and a major tenet is that craving is a root of suffering.  I guess suffering has been a big part of my life for a long time.

Posted in Addiction, Alcohol, cigarettes, Family History, My Story, Stories

Insight Meditation

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Meditation

Meditation

I recently wrote about my struggle with addictions.  Yes, multiple addictions.  It is just now coming out that the root cause of addiction is abuse at some time in the addict’s life.  It is true for me.  I turned to addictive behavior to get a feel good in a life that incorporated pain or suffering stemming from the abuse.  

The mental pain or suffering arises, and I seek to eliminate or blunt the pain with the feel good.  It can be alcohol, food, exercise, sex, tobacco, work, drugs, shopping, gambling, music, or other obsessive behaviors.  I tried most of them, and they worked-briefly.  The pain returns.  Another round starts, but it takes a bit more to drive the pain away as the guilt and shame grow.  The wheel turns. 

The result? I have had a lifetime of suffering with futile attempts to escape.  The addictions have not been all-consuming.  I have a good marriage, a comfortable retirement, many interests to keep me occupied and engaged, and a family I am close with.  I have had years of therapy that helped in some areas, but the addictions remained.  The addictions have consumed a tremendous amount of time and energy.  All this stems from events in my childhood continuing to haunt me. 

Well, that was then, and it is now.  So, why addictive behavior when the abuse happened so long ago?  We store the feelings from abuse in our minds.  Those feelings and sensations stay with us and arise later as suffering.  They exist as neural connections in our brains.  Those connections and stored memories and feelings are not permanent or hard wired.  The brain is plastic and those old demons can be dealt with, the connections altered or eliminated.  

There are a number of techniques, including 12 step programs, cognitive therapy, psychoanalysis, immersion in a religious organization, and other therapies.  Some work, some don’t or are just mental band-aids.

Recent neuroscience research indicates that insight meditation is an effective means of altering or eliminating those old neural pathways.  In many cases, ten or fifteen minutes per day seem to be effective.  In deeply entrenched addictions, fifteen minutes is not enough.  I try to do a forty minute meditation along with the morning fifteen minute session every day.  I also attend two formal insight meditation meetings per week. 

Insight meditation is fairly simple.  Find a comfortable position where you are not likely to fall asleep.  Observe your breath.  It may be your nostrils or your abdomen or chest rising and falling. Just focus on the breath.  Thoughts will arise.  Just note and name them.  Hungry, hungry.  You will find the thought changes or fades, leaving you a moment without thoughts arising.  When they do, note them name them, and observe them changing.     

You will find yourself drifting away, planning, worrying, most anything.  When you notice this, gently return to the breath.  I find it useful to say a short prayer several times until I am able to return to the breath.  At times, it seems like all I am doing is praying, with no stillness.  Other times I can return to the breath right away. 

The process is frustrating at first, because it seems like there is almost no time just watching the breath.  No big. Deal, just keep it up.  You will find those thoughts arising with less frequency and intensity.  You are reprogramming your brain. 

Insight meditation is used in schools, some workplaces, in prisons, and in psychotherapy.  It sometime seems it is the next big thing.  Well, no.  It is a Buddhist practice in use for twenty five hundred years.  It is not really a religious practice.  It is a practice used to get rid of all the mental clutter so one can lead a life free of the suffering all that clutter causes. 

Next time I will illustrate the process with my own experience.  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Alcohol, Buddhism, Insight Meditation, Jesus Prayer, Meditation, Mental Health, My Story, Pain, Stories

Addiction

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addictI have an addictive personality.  My first addiction was to chocolate.  In grade school, Teddy and I found a box of Hershey chocolate bars lying in the street.  Not realizing this was a true case of finders keepers, we hid in some bushes and ate the whole thing.  No, I didn’t get sick. 

I remember sitting in a twelve step meeting when one of the guys said he had to have his “feel good”.  He nailed it for me as well.  I am not sure I have more unrest and pain than others, but I have always sought the “feel good”.  

For the most part I can overcome the addictions.  I quit a three pack a day cigarette habit after five years.  I have quit drinking several times and started again, convincing myself I can control it.  Later I realize I have gradually ramped up into excessive drinking and quit.  I have probably done this seven or eight times, starting in high school.  This time I have been sober for a year.  I’m pretty sure I am done with booze forever.   

I have smoked a haystack of pot.  At one point In the late 1970’s I was buying a quarter pound at a time.  I would go to work, go out on my rounds and light up.  Parties were lots of booze and weed for a lot of years.  One day at work I realized I couldn’t remember things I had done the day before.  I have had about two tokes since.   

Food is another matter.  I am something of a binge eater.  My main weakness is ice cream, chocolate, of course.  My pattern is much the same as with alcohol.  I will eat too much, scare myself, lose some weight, than ramp up again.  I weigh about 215 pounds now.  At one point I was up to 260.  The problem is that I can’t give up eating altogether.  So, I struggle.  And then there is caffeine.  AA meetings always have coffee. 

I think you can see the pattern.  I probably won’t kill myself with my addictions, but they have consumed vast amounts of time and energy I could have used productively.  The addictions are accompanied by a lot of obsessing and compulsive behavior.  I have repetitive thoughts and rituals around the behaviors, from rolling the joint, lighting a cigarette at every change, such as standing up, or sneaking ice cream out of the downstairs freezer.   

I am currently engaged in the spiritual practice of letting go.  This means letting go of everything keeping me from staying in touch with my true self.  This is not an easy process, and I am sure I will be engaged in it for the rest of my life.  “Trapped on the wheel of desire.”  The problem with desire is that it cannot be satisfied.  The new BMW, the Bud Lite, the new clothing style, cool Adidas sneakers, whatever.  The proper number of bicycles to own?  N+1; N being the number of bicycles you currently have.  

Addictions are just the most pathological of this phenomenon.  Our consumer society is driven by desire.  Chasing money, chasing stuff, chasing the latest hit, it all pulls us away from our true selves.  I want to get in touch with my true self, which means letting go.

Posted in Addiction, Alcohol, cigarettes, Health Issues, Jesus Prayer, Mental Health, My Story, Pain, Stories