Three seconds

One of the first tools of recovery I learned in SAA was the Three Second Rule (TSR). The subject recently came up in a meeting, and I've had a chance to think and meditate on it and I'd like to share my thoughts.

Ogling or leering at women was a big issue for me when I first got into recovery. Check-out clerks, waitresses, co-workers, movie characters, stage actors, relatives at a family reunion, there really weren't many situations when I wasn't trying to check people out, to get some small thrill that I could relish in the moment and also take home for later.

I really wasn't all that conscious of it. It was just a part of my life, like breathing air.

Recovery opened my eyes. I learned that my ogling was part of my addiction. It was very painful and shameful to be out of control all the time. I started feeling like a creep and I wanted it to end.

The TSR allows a short look. It doesn't expect you to be perfect. It doesn't expect you not to notice that another person is attractive. Ideally, it encourages you to "notice" and no more. It sets boundaries around my behavior. Ultimately, the TSR is a mindfulness practice.

It does have its drawbacks, or rather I have my drawbacks that make the TSR less than ideal. I can get a pretty deep scoop of objectifying in three seconds. If my attitude is "I get my three seconds", the boundary-testing addict in me will take advantage of that. I was with a struggling member once at a coffee shop who was looking out the window, meticulously taking only three seconds to leer at each woman that walked by. For a full hour. I've never -- by the grace of God -- been as bad as that, but I have to admit I'm in the same ballpark.

So, if my intention, my desire is to get a sexual charge out of looking at people, the TSR is meaningless. It's just a brief shot of insanity. There's no recovery there. I need something more elemental than the TSR.

I have three possible states of mind when I come into contact with an attractive person.

1. Obsess over their attractiveness, stare at body parts, fall into fantasy, etc.
2. Obsess over their attractiveness, don't look at body parts, try to control my thoughts, etc.
3. Accept their attractiveness, let it go, and move on to being in true contact with them.

Whichever state of mind I'm in is completely dependent on my spiritual health at the time. If I am in poor spiritual condition, in denial, I fall into #1. If I want to be a better person, but am not working my program, not attentive to all my needs, I am in mode #2. If I'm spiritually fit, accepting life on life's terms, I can live free in mode #3.

I'm not in control of my state of mind, but I am in control of my spiritual practice.

So, at best, the TSR is a technical stop-gag until my spirituality catches up. The TSR is not an end in itself. It just keeps you safe until you're no longer a danger to others.

Now, in my own experience, I find myself in all three states from time to time. Most of the time, I'm in mode #2, "wanting to be better". I'd like to live more of my life in mode #3, and that is actually how I'm living. To be honest, which is also to be kind, I do have my #1 moments. Or days. These are also the days when I'm not asking God to be a part of my life.

Here are a few suggestions to append a spiritual component to the Three Second Rule:

Daily Prayer. I ask God every morning to remove my desire to look at women's breasts. Every day.

Preemptive Prayer. When I know I'm going to be in a challenging situation, say, going into Target, I say a prayer along the lines of "God, please let me be just a shopper" or "God, please let me let women be people in this store today." That tends to level me out and deflates whatever addictive anticipation I might have built up.

Prayer of Gratitude. When I leave the store, or leave work, I thank God for helping me through a difficult environment. This acts as a bookend to the preemptive prayer.

Pray for the Person. I learned this one from a very spiritual member. He believes that his addictive sexual desire is a perversion of his strong and healthy desire to feel connected to other people. So, he says a prayer for the person he is attracted to, something along the line of "Please, God, help this person towards their true heart's desire." He doesn't say it to the person, it's a personal moment, not an evangelical moment. I think. Praying for the other person puts you in a God-centered mindset, and it also turns a negative into a positive. I have used this, altho I must admit I don't often have the awareness or the willingness to do so.

Any Old Prayer. Any prayer at any moment helps to take me out of my addictive mindset. Prayer makes me right-sized. My standard prayer is "thank you, God, for bringing me to this place." It's a nice, neutral prayer that covers however I feel and whatever is happening.

Now, you might note that all of the suggestions are spiritual, and all of them are prayer. Yep. The practical way to be free of our addictive tendencies is turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God. It works.

Shoulds

I was driving to work today and I was thinking "I should be thinking this way." The "way" I was hoping to be was some tuned-in Buddhist practice, I suppose. I don't completely remember. What did catch my attention is that I'm constantly thinking that I should be thinking in some other way.

Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Judging, judging, judging. Where does it let off?

I don't think it lets off. I think my mind is set up to trap myself again and again in thinking. And the end point of that thinking is that I don't measure up. I'm not a half-empty kind of guy. I'm a completely empty kind of guy. Except when I'm completely full of myself. The more I think about a thing, the more certain I am that I'm not right in some way.

There's a certain attitude in recovery that I recognized long ago, but I keep forgetting and forgetting. So much of the life of recovery is working through pain. If you want to be free of pain, you must become very intimate with it. The problem, of course, is that I am very sensitive to pain and really, really want to avoid it. That is the root, trunk, branch, leaf and fruit of my addiction. Fear of pain keeps me from working through it.

But let's say I take a real honest first step and realize that I can't take it any more, that I am really, truly introduced to my pain in such a way that I want to do something about it. Then I take a really honest third step and agree to do whatever it takes to come into agreement with God's will. In that situation, I am living with pain and it's okay.

I am living with pain and it's okay.

I think that is the ultimate attitude to have in recovery. To deny pain, either the pain of the past or the pain that comes in every day is not serenity. It's a deep denial. Pain is real. That is unavoidable. That pain is unavoidable is a first step issue, I believe.

I believe the piece that I am missing in my recover to day is the acceptance of all that is good in my life. I'm missing the gratitude. I'm afraid my attitude towards life and recovery right now is:

I am living with pain and I need to end that by doing something.

Shoulds. I should do this. It should be this way.

The truth is, things are not too bad for me right now. I am doing as well as I ever have and in many respects better than I have ever done. And yet, am I "happier" now than before? No, I'm just about at happy as I've ever been. Yet my "shoulds" and my attitude of scarcity obscure this goodness at all times.

I think the issue is my attitude. I am just looking at the situation as 1) bad and 2) intractable. The truth is that things are 1) good and 2) solvable. Perhaps I find the various solutions distasteful, but they are real and they work.

So, I'm committed to living today (just today, one day at a time) in gratitude. The attitude of gratitude. I think this attitude can work where the shoulds cannot. This feels right in me right now. Right.

Invested in life

I had coffee yesterday with a friend in recovery. He told me that he had a difficult conversation with his partner on Sunday, but that on Monday he felt better and has been feeling good all week. I think that's a parable of recovery.

Recovery involves courage and hard work today. It's not something to put off for tomorrow. Courage is nothing more than doing the thing that your fear tells you not to do. Every Step of recovery is an assault on your fear. And every assault on your fear is a step in recovery, no matter if it involves making amends to your wife or merely thanking God for another day of life.

The upside is that I think my life today is the product of what I did yesterday. My recovery work puts a deposit in my bank that I enjoy tomorrow. Much of the benefit of recovery is seen down the road. When you're in the mindset of tomorrow, you start to listen more to God, because when you're invested, you want to make sure your effort goes towards something of real value.

Unfortunately, I'm not set up to think and act like that. I'm an addict and my addiction is all about feeling good RIGHT NOW. My life in addiction was a string of "live for the moment" days that really didn't add up to much. And each day I'd wake a little less happy with myself and a little more sure that I didn't have what it took to get better.

Whatever good things might come into my life would be quickly consumed. I was always living just on what was available right at that moment. Worse, I "sold off" whatever credit I had in good will with everyone I knew: burning my furniture for heat until I didn't have a chair to sit on.

Things have taken a different turn in recovery.

I woke up this morning feeling okay about being me. I didn't feel that way because I'm suddenly a good person now. I feel that way because I've slowly become a good person.

The theme for this week for me is giving up the obsession with things being "right" right now.

I didn't wake up wanting to be someone else. I didn't have regrets about yesterday, or any yesterday back and back and back. I'm reconciled with life. There was a lot of work to get where I am and there's still work today. The task was and is a lot lighter because of the people in recovery who came before me and those who have directly guided me with their example and words.

My life is precious now, because I'm invested in it. I thank God that I was able to learn how to live through 12-step recovery.

One year

Yesterday was one year of continuous abstinence from my bottom-line behaviors. I've had the date in mind of course all year. But I've not been too attentive to it.

It passed without notice.

I remembered it this morning at the meeting.

I'm ambivalent about it. I suppose it's because I don't feel very good these days. Too often I don't feel good. Too often when I do feel good it seems to be followed by a fall.

I don't have the slightest interest in celebrating.

I take too much for granted. I am very grateful to be sober today, even if I don't feel very good. I wouldn't feel any better if I had only one day right now.

Expectations. Impatience. Trying to force outcomes. Please God, help me to let go.

My Daily Practice

I'd like to share my daily practice and some thoughts about each practice.

Morning Practice

Eight Pieces of Silk. This is a set of simple Chinese exercises I learned as a young man. The instructor said I would live a healthy life if I did these twice a day. In typical fashion, I do them once a day. Here is a description I found in this PDF from a Google search. The instructions are very similar to the eight I was taught.

Greeting the Sun. Another Chinese exercise, a basic yoga move, I believe. I breathe in while raising my hands together up the center of my body. When my hands get to my face and my lungs are full, I exhale and push up and out with my hands in a big circle. When my hands come down to my sides and my lungs are empty, I start another inhale and bring my hands slowly up again. I do this eight times to clear my mind and get my breathing right.

Mindfulness Meditation. I sit in a half lotus for 20 minutes. On my best days I spend the first couple of minutes putting my attention on relaxing each part of my body from head to toe. Then, I try to concentrate on my breath, the breathing in and breathing out. It's best for me to concentrate on the air as is comes in and out of my mouth. Other people concentrate on the belly expanding and contracting. When a thought comes into my mind, I try to let it go. If a feeling comes into my body, I try to stay with the emotion, to just live it without judging it. If my cat passes by and rubs against my leg, I will pet her a while. On many days I sit there and worry about my life. I'm not very good at meditation, but I'm willing to be bad at it for as long as it takes. An interesting note: for a few years I did only 10 minutes and did not see a lot of benefit in meditation. Recently I upped it to 20 minutes and I've noticed a big difference. The spiritual lesson is that half measures really do avail us nothing.

Then I get on my knees and say my prayers:

"God I'm an addict and I need help." This is my first prayer of the day. It's pretty basic. This is my first affirmation of the day and it's all about humility.

"God, I can't do this on my own." There's a distinction between needing help and thinking I need someone else's help. It's also an invitation for God to join me today. God is very hands-off if you haven't noticed. God doesn't show up unless you ask him.

The Serenity Prayer. Of course.

The Third Step Prayer. It's from the Big Book, but it's written in King James English! I think Bill and Bob were getting a little grandiose there. I recite it, "God, I offer myself to you..."

The Seventh Step Prayer. This prayer says a lot about the purpose of the Seventh Step that is not in the actual text of the Seventh Step.

List of character defects to be removed. "God please remove from me my grandiosity, my arrogance, my patronizing and my hostility. Please remove my hostility, anger and resentment towards my wife, whom I love." Funny how I've never really had to update that list.

Prayers and affirmations specifically for my addiction. "Dear God, please remove my breast fetish. I don't need to control women to be okay. Dear God, please remove my desire to look at pictures of women's breasts. Sex is a part of my life, it's not my whole life." These are remarkably effective for me.

Any other prayer that comes to mind. I should probably look forward to what is coming up in the day, but I don't.

Daytime Practice

Spot Check. If anything is upsetting me, I do a 10th Step spot check. I ask myself, "What is my part in this?" I ask myself if there's any amends that need to be made. And then I do them. Promptly admitting my wrongs is very effective.

Spot Prayers. The Serenity Prayer is a good one to throw in at any time. A favorite daytime prayer for me is "Thank you, God, for bringing me to this place." This works for whatever situation I find myself it, "good" or "bad". A prayer I use just before doing something that I'm worried about is "God, I don't know how to do this." It's a great prayer especially when I think I know damn well what to do. Finally, "Thanks" is just a great, quick prayer.

Calling an addict. I try to get a call in to my sponsor or another addict every day. It grounds me.

Bedtime Practice

Gratitude list. I fill out a little list of things I'm grateful for. I actually just started this about a month ago after eight years of thinking it was "not for me". It's been a great month. This one you should try especially if you think it's a stupid idea.

Tenth Step inventory. I have an actual form I've created, a scoresheet. It's good for me to quantify things. I list positive behaviors and negative behaviors and tally which ones I've done during the day. I'll write a whole post on this some other time.

Recovery Reading. I read a little from a recovery book every night. My commitment is to merely open the book and close it. Occassionally that's all I do. Usually I read about a page. The book I'm opening right now is Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions.

Spiritual Reading. This is the Bible or some other spiritual, non-recovery text. Right now I'm reading Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance.

There are other things, of course, I do throughout the day (attending meetings, step work, etc.), but these are the things I do every day.