Beer Bad, Friends Good

I know I haven’t written much this summer & right now the stuff I’m going through is such that there is no way to write about without everyone I know knowing all the characters involved which wouldn’t be fair. I am going to pick up on Sundays again (starting 8/5) as the new semester is approaching but I am leaving you with a re-post of a blog about living in the solution. It is so important to me right now to stay living in the solution that I must re-post this and honestly I can’t re-post it enough.

I am very thankful to all my friends who have helped me to work through all of my crap and support me by listening, caring, and/or facilitating shopping sprees (yeah, bestie, you know who you are!)

When the going gets tough & my brain gets frazzled I just have to remember: Beer bad, friends good! It is my version of  ”don’t drink, go to meetings.”

Here is that re-post: (from Living in the Solution is Living in the Moment)

Problem Oriented Thinking:

• I am unlovable/ bad/ worthless / selfish/ spineless/ stupid / ugly, etc., etc., yadda-yadda-yadda
• I don’t have enough money/ power / appreciation / beauty / time, etc.
• My job doesn’t appreciate my work. They suck.
• I always do something wrong. I suck.
• I’ve always been mistreated … why should it be any different this time? Everyone sucks.

In my problem thinking, I have noticed the following patterns:

• My problem thought focus largely on a scary future. Either something bad will happen or, usually the idea that I am stuck in a never-ending pattern of badness, ex: I will never have enough; I will always be stupid/ mistreated. The words always and never come up a lot. My negativity is full of vast, sweeping generalizations.
• Speaking of vast, sweeping generalizations, my negative, problem-oriented thinking is fond of them. They suck, I suck, Everyone sucks.
• I am seeing that my problems are always “glass ½ empty” thinking. Why do I magnify the very few things I don’t like about my life and blow up them into epic proportions? Hey, I have a job. Yay me.
• Also, there is a lot of worry about how others perceive me in my problem thinking (nobody loves or appreciates me, Boo-Hoo).

 

All that is really insightful but what does it mean to live in the Solution and not the Problem? To me it means taking that part of the serenity prayer “change the things I can” without an ounce of thought about the future. Solution thoughts are choices in the moment to do or think something positive and nurturing.  The negative reactions have been my conditioning for years, so they are bound to pop up even in the best of times. I have discovered that when they come up, in fact in every moment, we have a choice. In every moment we can choose to continue the thought patterns above or move, however reluctantly, toward the thoughts and actions I’ve below as my personal solutions:

Solution Oriented Thoughts:

• I can choose to pray (in whatever way feels comfortable in the moment)
• I can choose to go to a meeting
• I can choose to do a 4^th step (or re-visit any step that feels needed, really)
• I can choose to do yoga
• I can choose to meditate
• I can choose to help others by listening, being there, being present at a meeting, etc.
• I can choose to read something (AA approved or not as long as it helps to move through/forward/ UP/OUT)
• I can choose to just focus on the smallest next right thing (make the bed/ take a shower/ feed my cat) and completely give my attention to it.
• I can choose to live in the now
• If I am at work, I can choose to completely just do what is required by my job in that moment without regard for what others think or how it will affect my future
• If I am with friends or family, I can choose to completely be there without thinking about work or problems to solve. I can choose to enjoy the moment with those I love!
• I can choose to make a gratitude list
• I can choose to focus on things I have done RIGHT lately (make a “Done Good” list. I love these!)
• I can choose to hold my cat (for the few seconds she lets me … bliss!)
• I can choose to do affirmations
• I can choose to do a breathing exercise
• I can choose to dance
• I can choose to take a walk
• I can choose to journal
• I can choose to do call an AA person or other uplifting friend
• I can choose to schedule a facial or healing (http://www.healthforlifeisgood.com/)
• I can choose to hug a tree (I really love trees!)
• I can choose to invite a friend over for coffee and listen to their worries and help them grow
• I can choose to make a sincere amend where needed
• I can choose to look for other jobs, career paths, situations, all while focusing on the beauty of the now
• Knowing that I can only ever choose to do the best I can with what I have right now

The point of power is always in the present. My hope is that everyone who reads this gives themselves the gift of the NOW by letting go of the past and future and living in the solution this week!

 

Sorry

Sorry I haven’t posted lately. Shakespeare is demanding more of my time than a new lover. Here is the scene I just can’t get right (I am the Friar only I’m a girl so I am actually a pastor. And i am much sexier.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLY56SZDOn4&feature=relmfu

 

Shakespeare’s Wisdom for Alcoholics

I am acting in a play this summer – Shakespeare, no less. Doing anything Shakespeare requires a bit of an obsession with the bard; every line he utters has layers of meaning. Luscious language layered like fragrance: with new, surprising, and provocative meaning washing over your soul at any moment. No matter where your brain is, his words follow like an alluring and inescapable scent.

In this relentless obsession, I looked up what Shakespeare would have to say about alcohol and did find a few quotes, each one more hilarious in truth than the next and all seemingly divined to inspire us to play that tape to the end: past the seduction of that comforting first sip to the stupidity, the urine, the performance issues, the death and, of course, the beating of the very ground that steadfastly holds us up. I start off with my favorite Shakespearian alcohol-related quote from one of his most masterful plays:

“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”

“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!”

-          Othello*; Act 2, Scene 3

“What three things does drink especially provoke? Nose-painting, sleep, and urine”

“It provokes the desire but it takes away the performance.”

-          MacBeth; Act 2, Scene 3

“… they were red-hot with drinking; so full of valor that they smote the air, for breathing in their faces, beat the ground for kissing of the feet”

-          The Tempest; Act 4, Scene 1

 

*From my perspective, Iago plays the role of our disease in this scene: http://nfs.sparknotes.com/othello/page_112.html

The Message of a Drinking Dream

My favorite meeting is at 7:30 on Wednesday and I woke up about 7:35 convincing myself it was Tuesday so I didn’t have to worry about it anyway. My guilty conscious conspired with my fears to produce a nightmare, the very nightmare all of us in sobriety fear the most: the drinking dream. We all have them and know they are harmless but that doesn’t take away their power to creep us out for a few hours at least.

This particular dream followed a rather convoluted plot which ended with my brother calling me on my cell phone as I am walking through traffic. “Dude,” says my brother in this dreamland. “You were soooooo drunk the other night when you called. You must be so embarrassed cause you were crazy. Now that you are off the wagon, wanna get a beer later?”

Soooo, is it a drinking dream if you don’t even remember drinking in the dream? Apparently, my dream blackouts are so intense I don’t even remember drinking in the first place. Dreamland kind of sucks. Actually, the dream was true to the way I drank in the real world: even though I didn’t remember a damn thing, I knew somehow that everything that was reported to me was true.

I’ve been sober 1227 days & I have had at least 30 of these drinking dreams during my recovery and I know they are harmless. Yet they always scare the crap out of me. They remind me of the life I had and the life that is waiting for me if I don’t take my sobriety seriously.

So, drinking dreams always include a positive message for me: remember who you were when you were drinking and who you are now in your sober life.

Creepy as it was, I am glad to wake up in my sober life with this reminder!

© Eugenp | Dreamstime.com

The Wild Side of Recovery

Where Heather Kopp blogs about faith, craving, and grace. (Her boots quit drinking in 2007 when she stopped hiding alcohol in them.)

via The Wild Side of Recovery.

Anonymity and the Shame Monster

I went to a writer’s workshop in Asheville over the weekend. More financially broken than usual, still a bit worn out from the kidney stone attack, and totally terrified of the exposure that sharing my secret desire to be an author would bring, I went to the workshop anyway. No one looked at my work or asked me to reveal any secret desires; yet, I was forced to question something that surprised me – my anonymity.

The publisher hosting it does mostly self-help/self-empowerment books and it is important in that genre to build up followers; in other words, you have to promote yourself.  Yuck. Self-promotion has always been the blind spot on any endeavor I have taken on; the reckless driver I know is still behind me but cannot look at directly. I didn’t want to hear much about it, yet self-promotion was a main theme throughout the weekend. Still, I listened carefully, since I am trying to unstick myself from the glue on every floor of my life; I am in a state of willingness.

Though I was really interested in the fiction part of the workshop; I had often thought of turning my blog into a book and this was the opportunity to ask questions about that. Curious about the potential for this, I asked one of the workshop directors about using a pseudonym. He said that was a good question and requested that I ask about it in front of the group because other people would benefit from the answer.

The short answer is, basically, it is too hard to have a pseudonym and promote yourself.

So, in front of a room packed with 170 bodies, each of which seemed to come with a secure purpose in life, I awkwardly took the microphone and asked my question about how to proceed with a pseudonym. The response I remember was a question:

“Why do you want to be anonymous?”

I had already said my blog was about recovery from addiction, so my first thought was “DUH.”

But in front of 170 people who seemed so clear about their purpose, I was forced to ask myself: Why do I really want to be anonymous? Simply because I am part of a group that values anonymity? Seriously, it is right there in the title of the group. I should be a good girl and respect that. As I stood there, frozen, three things popped into my rapidly shrinking brain:

1. The AA tradition: In case I fail, AA is left out of it and can go on helping others in spite of my fall from grace.
2. The self-protection instinct: to protect myself from criticism from colleagues and other non-alcoholics.
3. The spiritual foundation of anonymity: to prevent myself from falling into pride by making my sobriety all about me.

I picked the spiritual answer which my brain, now the size of a sugar cube, thought sounded the best in front of the nice, purpose-filled people. But the truth is that I knew it sounded really dumb. The truth is that I know I looked like a fool. That truth was confirmed in the faces and the breathing patterns of the audience. They breathed, “Who is this weirdo and when will she take her seat?”

I felt ashamed. Even though no one was there to do anything but help me, I felt ashamed. What the hell am I doing here?, I questioned. I am no self-help guru. I’m a dark and dreamy sort of person and I don’t ever want to see my smiling face on the cover of anything. I want to write profound, life-changing novels with really cool artsy covers and a small, tasteful picture of me on the back of each – pictures that no one actually looks at because the words that come before those pictures are so profound. This is stupid, I think to myself. I am stupid. Stiff like the corpse of an animal stunned by the sound and then the bullet of a gun, in front of the microphone, I forced myself to finish asking all the questions I wanted to ask, but I really just wanted to go home. I wanted to say “look, I was just joking about the writer thing, don’t take it so seriously people.  I’ll take my seat now.”

Another voice, however, said something like, I am supposed to be all spiritual and self-actualized and stop running away; I am supposed to be running toward something. How does anonymity fit with that? Do I want to be anonymous?

I fully understand that an organization founded on anonymity provided the foundation for my sober life and all of the aforementioned reasons for maintaining anonymity are good ones.  Still, I feel like I just have on a ‘good girl’ hat when I protect my own anonymity. My thoughts center around questions like What will colleagues think if they know I am in recovery? What will my AA friends think if I break my anonymity?

Anonymity is supposed to be a spiritual principle; yet anonymity results in a fragmented life. It demands secrecy and, for me, secrecy inspires shame. I have moved forward over the past years in the spirit of rigorous honesty. In this blog, I have been honest about alcoholism, anger, sexual abuse, and jealousy – all kinds of monsters. I have been honest with a lot of people and a lot of people tell me it has helped them. That thrills me and spurs me on.

But I also want a life that flows.

Doesn’t anonymity just feed the shame monster, forcing us to don Lady Gaga-sized sunglasses and hide our true selves? I don’t want to be one person at work and another with family and another with one set of friends and yet another person with another set. All this work over the past 3 years on rigorous honesty makes that feel repulsive. I realize this doesn’t apply to everyone at every stage in sobriety but it is where I am now. Wouldn’t it just be refreshing to come out of the closest? I don’t like it in there.

So, what if I have spiritual reasons for NOT being anonymous?  What if I have non-spiritual reasons as well? What if I do want to promote myself because I think have something important to say & because I actually want people to read what I write? Is it really gross of me to promote myself? Can I ever do that and acknowledge that AA has been the start of it?

Clearly, I am at that awkward stage where I have more questions than answers.

My prayer is that my answers will come from the heart, not from following rules and trying to be a good girl. The Shame Monster lives in a closet and has no voice.

***This all applies to MY OWN anonymity – If anyone feels their identity if compromised by my anonymity being broken, please tell me and I will make sure your anonymity is protected***

Anonymity and Comments – Important!

Hello,
I just created a new website and right now, I have a link from that web-site to this one. This will make it pretty easy to infer my identity!
It also may make some of your comments traceable to back you. If you have made anonymous comments, could you please check the comments you made for anything that would make you uncomfortable now that I am a little more ‘out of the closet?’

New Website!

Hello, fellow travelers!
I have created a new web-site. Sort of an on-line portfolio. Eventually, I may move my blog there, but for now have a look and tell me what you think!

http://www.drshannonwhitten.com/index.html

 

Turning Darkness into Light

“I have seen suffering in the darkness, yet I have seen beauty thrive in the most fragile of places. I have seen the Book – the Book that turned darkness into light”.

Opening lines of “The Secret of Kells” movie

The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript created in approximately 800 AD, and currently much of this magical manuscript is on display at Trinity College in Dublin. This is one of the most important documents in our culture, and this is evidenced by the enormous lines and mobs of people perpetually trying to glimpse over shoulders to the gifts preserved underneath boundaries of glass.

I was fortunate to see this exhibit during my Irish journey last year, pushing my way through the throngs of people who, like me, came to experience this important and mysterious document firsthand. Though the text mostly conveys the Christian gospels, I was personally captivated by a poem about a writer and his cat and their parallel life experiences: as the cat hunts for mice, the writer hunts for words. The last lines of that poem followed me across the ocean:

I get wisdom day and night,
Turning Darkness into light

The exhibition at Trinity is entitled, “Turning Darkness into Light” and this phrase is a motif throughout the enchanting animated movie inspired by the Book of Kells, entitled The Secret of Kells.

As I later pondered this phrase, a truth illuminated inside myself as these words shone a spotlight on a dark corner of my soul.  I know now that I write to turn darkness into light. I had heretofore resided in the shadow of shame, housed in that dark fear of disconnection, yet came out of that false shelter through the courageous, honest, and illuminating words of others; the words of my friends, inspiring authors and leaders, and the storytellers who have created light before me. My purpose is to be one such illuminator by humbly sharing my experience of the darkness and the ongoing journey toward illumination wherever it leads.

I believe that humble words of honesty can, in fact, turn darkness into light.

http://www.connemaracelticgems.com/page6.html

Medicated Pain

Quick announcement: for the summer I’ll write on Wednesdays due to weekend rehearsals and writer’s conferences and such. But this week, I wanted to present readers with something to think about – this issue of pain medication.

This week I had a kidney stone blasted or zapped or whatever you call it. It hurt. The pain was more intense than I had ever felt in my life. Someone else described it as getting kicked in the kidney with a steal toed boot. I wish. The metaphor could work if, instead of a steal toe, there was a knife attached to the boot and there were 3 of them repeatedly kicking and twisting into the kidney. That just about describes it with some accuracy.

I understand why people writhe in pain instead of say sitting in pain. It is because they are frantically trying to find any possible way to make the pain bearable – some position or place or action that lends some relief. It doesn’t work. The kind of pain I have described likes to multiply.

Here is issue – even addicts don’t seem to question pain meds for suffering like that. 100% of doctors, nurses, and friends; all of which are privy to my alcoholic history agree. There is no need to suffer through that without pharmaceutical help. I agreed, too.

© Davidyuk | Dreamstime.com

Now, truthfully my issue is alcohol and I never liked the buzz pills gave me. Thankfully, they usually just make me sick. So, I never felt like I was risking sobriety. I wrote down every pill I took and the time so that I could scrutinize it with my sponsor later if I needed to. Luckily, I never needed to. I was happy to get stop taking the pills as soon as possible and avoid the associated nausea and drowsiness. But this doesn’t seem to be the case with everyone.

Moreover, I know what led me to alcohol addiction in the first place was a need to numb emotional pain. For many years, I was writhing in emotional pain; and, just like with the physical pain, I was not at all sure what to do, trying to find a place in my body, my life, this world where I felt comfortable enough to take a breath.

Alcohol just seemed logical at the time. It was medicine.

Thankfully now I have meetings and friends and a spiritual program that helps me with the emotional pain. At the time, though, it was the logic of the suffering.

So, comment or FB me if you have any insight into this issue of pain meds for addicts/alcoholics. I’ll probably write more about this Wednesday.