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.

Honesty as antidote

Just got off the phone with a friend in recovery. He's having a hard time with middle circle behaviors, checking out women. At the same time, he shared with me how he is being honest with his partner about this, and that sharing his struggling helps to defang the obsession.

That gave me a lot of hope. In the last week I've been very miserable about my job, my creative life and even my service in the program. I feel powerless, but also very willful. This is a powerful admixture of negativity.

I seem to have three responses to these sorts of events: acting out, living in misery and letting go. I won't do the first. I can't seem to do the third, so I live in the second. The limbo. The dry, unhappy place.

But this morning, Monday morning, with so much to do and so much anxiety and bitterness around it, I decided to surrender. First off, I told my wife about my anxiety about work, about all the things I need to do today that I should have done last week and my keen sense of inferiority about this. I just told her how I felt.

Second, I came to work and admitted I needed help on my current project. That's equally tough for me, because I get a lot of self-satisfaction out of being capable at my job. I had to admit in a little way that I've not got my act together. I admitted it, asked for help and I'm getting help.

And then this friend called. I am getting a triple message of honesty today, and it is making things a lot more manageable.

I still have much to do, and I need to get back to it. But it's not as scary and not as triggering as it was an hour ago.

Emotional growth or emotional injury?

I was walking my dog through the neighborhood yesterday when I was suddenly overwhelmed by a dark, heavy feeling. It seemed to come out of nowhere. It was a feeling of heaviness, like great grief in my chest and stomach and it felt like there was a weight upon my shoulders. The air seemed close and quiet.

I can't say I've ever felt like that before.

As far as I know, it didn't start from some though, it was just a spontaneous sadness. The feeling came so suddenly, I couldn't do anything but just stand there on the sidewalk.

"What is this?"

Life has been a little different for me since the first of the year. I've been practicing less control really, which means that I feel like I've been open to things. Part of this is just taking the time -- a pause -- to feel my feelings. So I paused, even in the face of this dark wave.

What I experienced in that pause was unsettling. I'd never really felt that bad about just being before. The only equivalent feeling was when I learned my grandmother was dead when I was an adolescent. This was completely out-of-the-blue. Because I couldn't peg it on something made it more unsettling, I think.

So I stayed with it. The mystery of it helped me to stay with it, because my mind had nothing to latch onto. The first thought that came to my head was "I've never felt this bad before." And truly, I haven't. The second thought was, "Is this reality now?" There have been some unique moments of serenity and its opposite in these last few months. And I was wondering: "Is this what I have to put up with when I feel my feelings?"

It's an odd question for me, a deep question. My native inclination is to strenuously avoid negative feelings, to stuff them. Lately I've had a looser grip on my emotions; letting things play out. But really, do I really have to face that level of discomfort? Is that how it's going to be? And furthermore, is that normal? There's always been a fear that if I really let my guard down, if I really jumped into life and let it wash over me that I would be drowned. If I've been afraid of my feelings, I think this experience was just what I was trying to avoid.

Is yesterday the new normal for me? And if so, will I learn to adjust to it? Or will I eventually get well enough adjusted to living my emotions that I don't have those large waves? You know? When you damn yourself up, you can expect a few floods, right?

Or did I crack?

Did one of the supports that holds this whole wild carnival of me together just crack and give out and give way? And is that a good thing, or a bad thing? If my life were destroyed, broken and irreparable, would I cease to be? Or would a new me emerge from the wreckage, like a snake sloughing its skin? Or was it just a touch of the blues on Wednesday afternoon?

So much of my life in recovery is walking into the dark.

The next thought was, "Is this depression? Is this what depressed people feel like?" The blanket of sorrow would be pretty much what I would imagine depression to be. I certainly wouldn't want to work or do anything if that's how I actually felt all the time. I was very worried yesterday, early, that I might feel like that all the time.

I'm pretty proud of my response to it. First, I just stayed with it. I didn't reject the feeling and I didn't reject myself. I didn't panic and try to direct my mind to something -- anything else to forget the feeling. I stayed with it. I walked home, my dog as happy as ever, and let myself in. While I didn't have any thought of acting out (for which I'm grateful), I immediately called my sponsor. He was there and we talked. During the talk I recalled some news I got earlier in the day that may have contributed to the event.

I described it as a "panic attack" to my sponsor. He shared his experience with things like that. It was good to talk with him because I trust him and I know he cares about me. My wife came home at about the same time and we talked too. It was good to open up to her. I have a tendency when I'm sick to get very childish, demanding and pathetic. I didn't do that. I didn't resent her for not dropping everything and making poor me the center of her universe. The aspiration to be present has a lot of unintended positive outcomes.

So, am I going insane or am I maturing emotionally? Both? I guess I'll find out.

In the mean time, I'm feeling better today, definitely better, although I still don't feel very good. I lived. I feel like a shipwreck survivor today: groggy, on edge but very relieved. How many more of those will I experience? I don't know. But I guess I know that I can be okay during and after. That much I've learned.

And that's okay for now.

Restoration of Sanity in the Second Step

There are three tests of faith in the 2d Step: faith in a higher power, faith in a process of coming to believe and faith that we can be restored to sanity. The last one is also remarkable in that it says sanity will be restored.

I don't know if I've ever been sane. I certainly know that I was innocent, but I don't really count that. The simplicity of childhood was just simplicity for me. There was a truck and I played with it. There was a Popsicle and I ate it. Once I really started to have to make decisions about my life, I can't say I've been very sane.

But there it is in Step Two, "restore us to sanity". I think there are three stages of sanity in recovery. The first is the insanity of my addiction. The second is the time when my addiction is in remission and now I have to deal with the fact that I still have a lot of problems. The third stage is recovered sanity, where I'm okay and I understand the word serenity and so forth; the promise of The Promises.

I'm squarely in the Second Stage of sanity. There is a book called Stage II Recovery by Earnie Larson and I read it after I passed one year's sobriety the first time. It was a gift from my sponsor. I'm grateful for the care and attention of my sponsor. I may be liberally quoting the contents of that book. If I am, my apologies to Mr. Larsen. Consider it a review.

The belief that there is a basic sanity, a core integrity to me is pretty novel. The religion I grew up in believes in original sin; a basic flaw to humanity. There's really a lot of spiritual opportunity in believing that there is an imperfection, an incompleteness to us, and I'm open-minded enough not to sell it short. I've heard that God enters through our flaws. But the shaming part of me takes the idea of a fundamental flaw and conflates it to: I'm all bad. I can be dissatisfied when the cup is 3% empty. My addiction was the treatment for the fundamental belief that I am flawed. Gradually and progressively, I came to equate my addictive self as the incarnation of that flaw.

Round and round and round. How I had convinced myself that my misery was just the fulfillment of my destiny. I don't think that way anymore and I don't live that way anymore.

The 2d Step is an early one, but what a grand promise. Restoration to sanity. If I have ever been sane, I'm either forgetting that I was sane or I was just to young to have actually noted it. Maybe, maybe the promise of the 2d Step is that there is a basic sanity to me that I have not ever experienced, that perhaps exists, spiritually, and the Steps can help me towards that. That seems reasonable, even hopeful.

But then I get caught up in the cycle of self-improvement, the march toward perfection. And there I am always falling short. Perfection is definitely the wrong road for me to take. It is more humane and more effective, actually, for me to accept who I am right now and move from there.

Perhaps I'm confused about sanity. I'm so far from it, really, that I think it's perfection. As an aside, it is almost humorous when people who are having difficulty with getting a few days' sobriety say they don't think they can be perfect. It's funny because I know damn well that sobriety is not anything like perfection. Perfection resides always beyond our reach.

Sanity might just be taking life for what it is. I definitely did that as an infant and probably a toddler, too. And then I grew up. Paradise Lost. So, is maturity, is adulthood insanity? I don't think that's it. There are people who aren't insane and who also are not in recovery. I think for me, perhaps I had difficulty being an adult and being sane. The freedom to make decisions for myself was definitely overwhelming. I didn't know what was good for me, didn't know how to nurture myself. And so I gravitated to insanity: erecting a uniquely skewed concept of what life is that no one else could understand or share. That's actually kind of a hard one to swallow. But there seems to be some spiritual traction there. I'm feeling some compassion for my young self right now. And compassion for my current self too. I was unprepared for the rigors of living.

I have so much to learn about being gentle with myself.

I'm finding reality difficult this week. I guess I've always found it difficult. But I'm not experiencing it as impossible these days. I've come to believe I can find a way to live sanely with God's help. That open-mindedness, the opening to the possibility of restoration is my experience of the 2d Step today. Dear God, it's slow, but like water wearing down a rock in the river, it is working.