Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Addictions


It seems like addictions have been on my mind a lot lately, so I decided that if I wrote about it, some of it might make sense and help me to move on.

Wikipedia defines addiction thusly:

Addiction is a state in which the body relies on a substance for normal functioning. When this substance is removed, it can cause withdrawal. It [the term "addiction"] was first used in 1906, in reference to opium (there is an isolated instance from 1779, with ref. to tobacco). The first use of the adjective addict (with the meaning of "delivered, devoted") was in 1529 and comes from Latin addictus, pp. of addicere ("deliver, yield, devote," from ad-, "to" + dicere, "say, declare").

Addiction is a term used to describe a devotion, attachment, dedication, inclination, etc. Nowadays, however, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual's health, mental state or social life. The term is often reserved for drug addictions but it is sometimes applied to other compulsions, such as problem gambling, and compulsive overeating. Factors that have been suggested as causes of addiction include genetic, biological/pharmacological and social factors.


Probably the greatest work ever done on addictions has been through Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't think anyone has ever improved on their work, and I don't hope to do so. I think the only way this organization fails is in their name: if they had called it Addictions Anonymous, it might have better served the sick society that needs them so badly. Of course, when Bill W. started AA, he was trying to overcome an alcohol addiction, and I'm sure he did not know at the time that all addictions have similar characteristics.

Shockingly, we live in a society saturated with addictions: drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, caffeine, nicotine, and unhealthy foods. Some have even suggested that television and video games have addictive qualities (the Plug-In Drug). Some people get obsessed with spending money to the point that debt is unavoidable and cannot be overcome.

I often wonder where this behavior began. There are stories in the old testament indicating addictive substances caused errant behavior, so apparently it has been around a long time. I wonder if addictive substances aren't part of the adversary's plan of destruction.

One of the primary components of addiction is denial that there is an addiction. This is certainly true of food. Someone told me the other day that she didn't think her food addiction was as bad as alcoholism as it didn't hurt anyone the way that alcohol abuse does. I don't agree with this. In my long lifetime of having food addictions and living with others who do, I think food addicts are every bit as destructive of themselves and others as alcoholics and drug addicts. I was going to say that perhaps the harder stuff does the job faster, but I think food addiction is more destructive in a subtle way. The end result is still the same: death (both spiritual and physical), but it is a more lingering and painful death. It usually begins killing us when we are children and drags it out until our bodies can no longer deal with the abuse, usually when we are older, but we are seeing more and more examples of humans who are being taken at a younger age.

I think the most amazing thing about any addiction is how much we lie to ourselves while consumed with the drugs of choice. First we do not believe we are addicted in any way even though we may admit we have a "little" problem controlling the substance. Secondly, we think we can stop it at any time. Thirdly, we don't think we are affecting others with our behavior. We don't think others know what we are doing; we are often secretive. We go to great extremes to be sure others don't know what we are doing.

The other thing that is amazing to me is how we continue to destroy ourselves even after we have the information at our disposal that we are killing ourselves. Even though the effects of our drug of choice are more and more unpleasant, we continue to use them. The few times we get on the wagon, we talk of how good we feel, yet fall off the wagon when the addiction rears its ugly head the next time.

What is the solution? Bill W. said it best. Many years ago I went through the AA program, and I know it works, but like everything else, one must stay on top of it. Here are the 12 steps of their program. I have reworded them to apply to all addictions.

The Twelve Steps of Addictions Anonymous

http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org/en_services_for_members.cfm?PageID=98&SubPage=117

1. We admit we are powerless over our addiction—that our lives have become unmanageable.

2. Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

3. Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.

4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Are entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.

11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we try to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I think the saddest thing is that most people do not recognize that these steps can help them. They do not see that their disease is serious enough for these steps. Even other addicts do not see it. I used to attend AA and NA meetings, and when the members found out I was there for food addictions, they thought it was ridiculous. Of course, they thought, their disease was much more serious and of greater consequence than mine. It is easy to think that it is, and that is part of the lie.

It is pride that holds us back from recognizing it for what it is.

I am grateful for the journey that I am on. Although painful at times, I feel as though I am progressing towards my eternal goals.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Spirals


I'm not sure what's going on with these wide gaps between the paragraphs. Some html mumbo-jumbo, I'm sure.

I feel as though the cathartic emotional outbursts this week have been very helpful. I would like to think it was even a turning point for me.

I had to laugh as I type as I am thinking of a piece I heard Ellen Degeneres did on journaling. She said it was amazing how we record things when we think we have it all figured out. Of course, when we read it back months or years later, we realize that we had no clue at the time even though we think we had it all solved.

So maybe turning points are relative. We make little progresses that seem large at the time, but in relation to the whole process they are minor angle changes. Kind of like how a circle is made of thousands of straight lines. Actually I just drew one, and it turns out to be more of a spiral due to the impreciseness of my angles. This is definately how life is. Our angles of renewal are rarely precisely the same each time. Sometimes there are huge angles, and other times just little adjustments. Oh, but wouldn't Professor Johanson be proud!? (He was always making fun of my geometry skills.)

Geri, a good friend from Utah, is here visiting her sister this month, and we are trying to spend a little time together. Her life is crazy right now, and it is interesting that I had contact with her AFTER my little episode when I am more together. I think that I can be a strength to her. We have been through a lot of health teachings together, but she, like me, has failed in them most of the time. She has finally determined that there are 2 reasons for this which is she is working to resolve. First, she is doing the bioidentical hormone treatment thing that Suzanne Somers has made popular. We heard a little about this at Hippocrates as well. Secondly, she is getting some serious counseling to get at the root of why she is so self-destructive. I'm sure this will be most beneficial.

I have actually been thinking about counseling myself. I have always been opposed to it as I think there should be other ways to accomplish the same thing. I am still not convinced that there isn't. I think counseling is a shortcut to the old-fashioned crash and burn method. I never believe in getting other people to do things for me that I should be doing for myself. The exception to this is when getting someone else to do something will help them more than it does me. I would be hard pressed to think I was helping a psychologist more than myself, so I guess that doesn't fit the paradigm. Guess I'll stick to crash and burn.

The main principle behind that being of course, that one gets tired of getting burned, so one decides to stop crashing. One has to wonder how long it takes to get to that point. And, again, we're back to the spiral...

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

It will not be in vain.



Having had a rough day yesterday required some analysis on my part to figure it all out. It was an amazingly emotional time, and I cried almost all day long. Fortunately, Roger was working in Palatka and was not there to witness most of it. We cried together over a couple of things after he got home, but he has no idea what I had been through during the day.

In the morning I had wanted to watch some of the baseball 2008 draft while I enjoyed my morning watermelon. When the first young man was drafted, I began crying while thinking of his family and how much this might mean to all of them.

When I went back to work after that, I plugged my Zune in, and I have a playlist called "working" that has all my favorites in it. I don't have to stop and program music as I like all the songs in there. Early on, "Earth Angel" came on, and the waterworks began anew. This was getting ridiculous! (If you're guessing that I'm not a particularly sentimental person, you are correct.) This particular song was the one I used to use as my ringtone for Bonnie, and I can never hear it without thinking of her. (The lesson here is to never use one of your favorite songs as a ringtone for someone who may walk out of your life.)



I've heard this song several times since she left, and I have always felt a lot of emotion, but this time it was more extreme than before. I started thinking about why that was, and I realized it was because I was feeling the loss of her in my life for the first time. Prior to this, I had felt a lot of emotions including anger, frustration, and sadness, but never loss. This time I realized I had truly lost someone in my life that I loved. I guess I had not wanted to acknowledge this before. So there you go.





Then, once I realized this, I started thinking about other losses, including Jac. While she is not out of my life physically, certainly emotionally she is. Again, I felt the same sense of loss. This is heightened by the sense of loss I have for Orion and Brooklyn too as they cannot be as large a part of my life with her gone.





I had a lot of work to do, thank goodness, and I tried not to think about it too much, but it was very hard to do.





After I finished working, I decided to catch up on some DVR'd material (no more draft right now, thanks), and turned on the Oprah show. There was my old friend Kris Carr (of course, she doesn't know we are old friends) who I have read about quite a bit since Darius started his cancer ordeal. She is a former model / actress who found out after she'd made it big in a superbowl Bud commercial that she had terminal stage 4 liver cancer. She has written a book called Crazy, Sexy Cancer Tips that we read while we were at Hippocrates. I had never seen her on TV, so I was delighted to see that she was on. Dr. Oz visited her at home where she made him a green drink on air along with a great salad. She explained how these things were part of her recovery and acceptance of her illness and how she felt better than she had before she got sick. They showed a few other alternatives to medicine she had chosen including yoga and meditation. She insisted that instead of the cancer killing her, it had helped her live. (For example, she was previously afraid of heights, and they showed a clip of her learning to fly on the trapeze.)





It was a wonderful interview, but, you guessed it, I cried all the way through it. As if that was not enough, there was another man on the show, Randy Pausch, who has 3 children under the age of 5 who has terminal pancreatic cancer. He has been given less than 6 months to live. He was very inspirational. He has written a book called The Last Lecture. (He was a professor at Carnegie-Mellon.) He has not chosen any alternative health practices, so it was a pretty dramatic contrast. I think everyone in the audience was crying as he finished thinking of him leaving his beautiful young family behind.





When Roger came home, I thought he might want to see Kris, so I played it again for him. Of course, we cried together. One of the questions Dr. Oz asked her was how was she going to feel if she found out this was all not working and that she was going to die anyway. This was hard for me because I fear that all the time in relation to Darius' healing. Of course, I never acknowlege it, especially to him, but Kris gave a wonderful response I will try to remember. She said her life was far better now than it ever was before the cancer, so she had no regrets. She was doing what she wanted to do with her life, she happily married, and she loved her family and had a good relationship with all of them. She said that we would all die eventually anyway, so while it was harder to think of dying earlier than later, as long as one lives while he / she is alive, one need not have any regrets.





I hope that Darius' life is better now and that he feels that the cancer has given him an opportunity to live and to analyze his relationship to others in his life and to his God. I think that this is the case. If that is true AND he is also healed from that cancer, he has received a double blessing.





I ended the day with the realization that his disease has given all of us a second chance. Roger and I, and I think Alicia too, were struggling to overcome some health challenges when Darius got sick. With his recovery, we have all found new life. What a blessing it can prove to be to all of us. Of course, there are family members and friends who are opposed to what he is doing and do not think it will work. This is unfortunate because what he is doing will address their health and mental health concerns as well. Whether or not it heals Darius, he will have been the vehicle for everyone with whom he has contact to get a new lease on life (whether they appreciate it or take advantage of it or not). My closing thoughts for the day: As for me and my house, his struggle will not be in vain. I will use the knowledge and experiences he has given me to make a difference in my life. I hope that I can share this with others in my sphere of influence as well, so that his struggle will be even more long-reaching.






As I was thinking of this today, I was thinking of the Savior's Atonement and the donut story shared in a seminary class somewhere. The student could eat the donut if one member of the class did a certain number of push-ups. By the time he had done several hundred push-ups, the latter part of the class didn't want him to have to do any more push-ups for them, so they told the teacher they didn't want a donut. The teacher answered that was fine, but the push-ups had to be done anyway. They could accept the donut or not.






The Saviour has died for all of our sins whether we choose to partake or not. Darius has gone through this horrendous ordeal whether any of us choose to learn anything from it or not. What a horrible waste it is when we choose not to benefit from the suffering of others. It is one thing not to listen to well-intentioned advice, but it is quite another to not accept the offerings of a sacrifice. I don't think Darius intended to sacrifice so that so many could benefit, but since he did, who are we to not pay attention? And who knows what kinds of conversations were had before he came to earth? Perhaps he did agree to have a terminal illness so that people could see the deceptions that were being taught on the earth.






Colin Campbell wrote a book (China Study) trying to expose these deceptions, and many do not want to listen; many do. Then there is Kris Carr telling us there might be a better way. There are many more too numerous to name. How many have to go through this before we will listen?






I have heard these teachings for many years, but not until my son went through his experience was it a life-changing experience for me. It had to touch me in a personal way before I would make the necessary changes. I suppose the Atonement is that way too: until it is personal, no one will listen. You have my attention: I'm listening.