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.

Encasing my suffering ... in ice

I promised to post again about yesterday. I promised to post again last night, but today will have to do.

I didn't stay with my suffering yesterday. About an hour after I wrote the previous post, I opened up my browser and started reading about Iran. I don't live in Iran, I'm not of Iranian descent, I'm not a diplomat, I'm not a politician. But I decided that it was important that I know just what was going on there.

There's something admirable about staying on top of important news stories; staying informed. But that is not what I was doing.

What I was doing was avoiding. I was in turmoil and I reached out for something that would help me forget. I equate it to putting my emotions on ice. Television is my traditional numbing device. In recent years, the Internet has taken that position. What's yours?

So, there were a couple of hours there where I knew a lot about the pain of Iranian disenfranchisement, but not a lot about my pain. And then, of course, I started to "gently" berate myself for being lazy, for wasting time, for not living up to my word, for not taking care of myself. Do you know this trap?

I realized I was in that trap and started taking better care of myself. I called a friend in recovery, actually two. I made and ate lunch. Then I went to a 12-step meeting after work. These things all brought me back to reality.

Recovery is sort of like a jigsaw puzzle. If you work on it, you'll make progress. If you just leave it there on the card table, you won't. So, I actually had an opportunity to process some of the pain that was lying within me, but I took a pass. It wasn't that the pain was too much, it's just that I decided to go another way. I'm conditioned to avoid. That's just how I am.

This is an example of taking the 2d Step without taking the 3d Step.

I have made a decision to live differently, to feeling my feelings straight through. I didn't do that, not completely. I have a little bit of a raw feeling about that, like I let myself down. I did. But I'm also aware that I am learning, slowly, how to take care of myself. I need to both recognize my shortcomings without shame while acknowledging what progress I have made.

And, all things considered, yesterday was a good day. I took one step forward and no steps back.

Permiable boundaries

We discussed boundaries at a meeting the other day. It was a good discussion.

Boundaries work both ways: they let things in and they let things out. Boundaries protect, but they also allow. Healthy boundaries keep bad things out and let good things in. And maybe they let good things out and keep bad things in?

One boundary difficulty I have is that I let negative criticism in too easily and fail to let in positive criticism. Say something bad about me, and I believe that. Say something good about me, and I discount it. It's a strange thing; a sad thing. I do believe good things about myself, but maybe I don't believe that other people really believe those things?

There are good reasons to have defensive boundaries, but I tend to maintain defenses long after they are needed. I'm over-insured.

There's a bit of a sphinx about me. I don't share enough of myself with people. That's confusing to people, because they don't know where I stand. And also, I am very likely to let my hostilities show to people and that's off-putting.

Then there are just the normal, human interactions that don't make their way into my heart. How often do I stand perplexed while others laugh? Or cry? Or even get angry? My boundaries make me aloof.

How do I loosen my boundaries? My hard boundaries were all built as a defense, so I think renovating them is a matter of trust:

1. Trust that people like me.
2. Trust that people want the best for me.
3. Trust that the occasional injury is outweighed by the continual benefit of openness.
4. Trust that I won't be destroyed by my vulnerabilities.

I guess it all comes down to a trust in God, in the universe of caring love, support and understanding. It's out there. It's truer than my fears. And it's better too.

Today.





There are valves in our arteries and veins that only allow the blood to flow one way. This seems to be the way

Why does God need me to do anything?

Most of the time we spend trying to understand the nature of God -- the way that God works -- is wasted time, at least in my opinion. I shouldn't say that. I should say that it is of very little use to me or to God for me to spend time trying to figure out God. It may be entirely valid for other people with greater knowledge and understanding to contemplate the nature of God. It's just not for me.

I have simpler needs and simpler goals.

The substance of my recovery is my decision to follow God's will and the actions that result from that decision. God has something that He wants me to do; some bit of work cut out for me each day. Through prayer, meditation and moment-to-moment mindfulness, I can get a sense of what that work is, and then I can go about doing it.

This is what helps me to grow. This is what keeps me healthy. All of my progress in recovery has come out of doing God's will. I didn't always understand it that way, but that's what it was and is.

Sometimes the assignment is pretty simple: don't act out, go to a meeting, call that person back. I don't have to know how my actions fit in to any grand scheme. I can just do my part. The great debilitating question of my life has always been "what should I do next?" Following God's will -- the simple things -- has meant more to me than all the exquisite reasoning that I've created, mulled over and discarded over the years.

But still there is a nagging question. I've struggled with this question since first working Step Three:

Why does God need me to do anything?

God is all-powerful, right? He can just make it so. Why does God need little old me? Part of my asking the question, I suppose is just my laziness. Maybe I'd rather not work and am griping about God asking me to do things. "Why did you call me over here if you could have done it yourself?" But setting aside my sloth, it's a fair question: why does God need me?

Is doing God's will just a make-work project? Some sort of celestial work-fare program? I hope not. Although my hopes don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Thursday night I had a realization that helps me to answer this big question.

I'm not a theologian, and I apologize to any who might by some unfortunate accident stumble across this post. And again, I intentionally try not to ruminate on the nature of God, Man or myself too much. I do this because I have an aversion to religion, which is very concerned with defining God. I can't afford to dislike my own theology, so I have little.

The realization on Thursday is, "God needs my help because addicts don't listen to God."

The foundation of 12-Step recovery is addicts helping other addicts. Addicts tune out any right-minded person who wants to help them out.
The self-centered, long-suffering addict has been lectured to enough, thank you. But addicts will listen to this story "My life was miserable, completely out of control and then I found help through a program of recovery." That is the foundation story of AA and its subsequent spin-offs.

God is talking to us all the time. The pain in my back is a message from God. So is a symphony, the price of a loaf of bread and the misery of my addiction. The clearest messages, the ones that say I should mend my ways and seek help for my worst deficiencies are many. But I ignored them. I discounted them. I resented them. God was speaking to me, and I ignored Him. I even cursed Him.

And then I started to attend meetings. My meetings weren't filled with wise, well-reasoned men and women, they were filled with addicts, young and old, happy and sad. These people spoke the words of God to me through their stories. I listened and learned and eventually made progress in living a life of recovery rather than misery.

And that's the key. We're all a bunch of knuckleheads. God can't get through to us. God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, does not force the solution on addicts or any other person. I think that's why religion or faith alone can't help us out of our mess. We need each other and the message of the program.

So, that is why God needs us. Through our spiritual practice and our service work, we carry the message to another addict. If we do not do this, the message will not get through.

This realization calls to me. It urges me to stay sober and help others. There is so much pain out there and I can help. I and others like me who have made that decision to help are the only ones who can. That is inspiring and it makes my life and my work seem valuable, even holy.

"Now matter how far down the scale you have gone, you will see how your experience can benefit others." That's a promise.