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Blank Cheque

Reading over this entry I am reminded that perhaps a more pious life might suit me better that a life devoted to intensity.  Piety, we tend to use the word pejoratively,  saying more about our Godless world than the idea behind the action.

Today I crave piety, humility, silence..

Tres Triste urged me to go into one on one therapy.  I will have nothing to do with that.  I am bloated on my experience of one on one therapy.

I am, however, recommitted to the rooms of AA.  I know that they understand because I am just like them.  One on one therapy obviously suits many people but I don’t trust doctors, I don’t trust therapists who profit from the misery of others.  I resent paying them.  That I become their blank cheque.  In fact, I resent paying all doctors because I come from a country where visiting a doctor is free.

AA is free.  For fun and for free.

The simple fact is: I chose to abandon the principles of AA during the last few months.  Not taking a drink is just a small part of what we do in those rooms.  The rest of the time we help and guide each other toward sanity.  During the past months I deliberately abandoned my principles and let my alcoholic head run the show.

Many people ask why I moved to LA.  It really had nothing to do with film making.  I came to LA to be closer to the rooms of AA where I found comfort, solace and peace.  I made friends and found an extended family of people who understood me, who were always willing to forgive…no matter what.   I felt as if I needed, as if I NEED a great deal of forgiveness.

After a few years I became disgruntled and disillusioned with AA and went to fewer and fewer meetings.  As I did so my mind became more and more confused.  If I do not do the work to keep me sane I very quickly unravel.

I believe in the power of AA.  It is a church. It is my church.  For all to see during these past months I threw away my sanity because I wanted to use..so I did.  I used HIM.  He is not even real.  He is a bag of coke, a bump of crystal, my works, my baggy, my bottle, my paraphernalia.   He is not real.  Do I miss him?  I miss him like a glass of Montepulciano.  Full bodied red wine that I secretly want to drink when that day comes…and it very well might.  Never take your sobriety for granted.

You think that I have been cruel but I needed him out of my life and sometimes keeping your dealers number is the way back to active addiction.  If I had not jettisoned him that day I KNOW what would have happened.  We would have remained friends, we would have hooked up, my head just could not take it.

I napalmed the poppy fields.

This morning I chatted with Tim about the past.  A place one tends to reinvent as one gets older. It is invigorating having him there at the other end of the phone/skype.  He is in Worcester waiting for his triple bypass.  We are both waiting to have our skin cut open and our insides messed with by experts.

We talked about the power of prayer.  Our spiritual lives.  I needn’t tell you how important a loving God is in ones life but even though I know that prayer really works I am loathed to pray just in case is doesn’t.

That even God might let me down.

There is no doubt what so ever that for the past few months I used another man as my drug.  Intensity, fixation, obsession etc. etc.  Remember when you spent your last cent on drugs? When the getting and using was your main focus?  Remember the risks you took?  I am a crazy addict.  Yet, it is somehow easier for us to understand a man who cannot say no to drugs than a man who cannot say no to his addiction to people.  It is a far more complex and ultimately destructive addiction.

I think you have all been my witness to that.

I crave a healthy relationship with people who ever they might be, lover, family member, friend, shop assistant, telephone banker etc.    I am powerless and my life becomes unmanageable.  I am powerless over people, places and things.  This powerlessness causes me such misery. Powerlessness, vulnerability, weakness of any kind cannot be tolerated and as you have seen…I will bring you down if you challenge who I am, get to the heart of me.

I don’t think I am so different from most of you?

Yet, I most definitely am.  I do not think like normal people.

The idea that somehow, someday I will control and enjoy my thinking is the obsession of every abnormal thinker.

That was a quote from Bill Wilson with the word drink switched out for think.

Wether you believe it or not the rooms of AA are filled with men and women just like me.  When we sit together sharing our similarities and not our differences then I become aware of the presence of God.

I have struggled with SAA.

There is a big difference between being an alcoholic and a sex/love addict.  Alcoholics share the experience of abstinence.  Sex addicts do not.  The differences between sex addicts, when we share our stories, are all too apparent.  The similarities..scant.  Where there are few similarities I find myself divorced from God.

As I have reported in earlier posts, as the years pass and ones last drunk become a distant memory I am forced to deal with other more pressing, more destructive addictions.

The consequences of my actions are all too apparent.  I have rampaged like a spoiled child through another mans life.  Regardless of his part in it..I have only myself to blame.  As I have said before, it is none of my business assigning blame or becoming an interventionist for others.

We all learn by our mistakes, by the lies we tell, by the havoc we wreak.

So, today’s prayer:  God, relieve me from the bondage of self.  Help me be kind.  Let me be present.  Let me tell the truth.

Bind me so my arms do not flail,  gag me so I cannot speak, shackle me so I cannot walk, lay me down in some quiet place so I do not think.

15 replies on “Blank Cheque”

I get along best w/ people who aren’t normal, being that my OCD makes my thought patterns different myself. I met my best friend 17 years ago at a group therapy for teens w/ problems. She’s the one who’ll never leave. I imagine it’s similar in AA.

I’m not generally one to quote from the Bible, but remember Psalm 23 if you will.

Dear Duncan,

A peace and calmness does seem to have re-established itself within you – today – and for that I am happy. Piety, humility and silence is definitely a path worth pursuing for now as you attempt to regain your equilibrium.

I am not one who comments on blogs or reaches out to people I don’t know, but my conscience started to nag at me as I read your blog and saw you were spiraling out of control, doing harm to yourself and others. I felt guilty watching someone in serious trouble and not extending a hand. And I was horrified at what you were doing to Jake (no matter how bad his behavior was) starting in mid-August when you so publicly exposed him (I thought about how I would feel if someone I had been involved with did that to me, no matter how toxic our relationship had become). I felt I either had to speak up or stop reading, otherwise I would be tacitly enabling your harmful behavior through silence – which would make me no better than a mere voyeur or viewer of a print reality show, rather than someone who actually cared about a person I had been reading about who was in serious need. An actual life.

You are an exceptionally clever, intelligent person with enormous energy that can be used to create or destroy. While such qualities may seem a blessing (and they very well can be) they are also a curse. There will be (and I am sure have been) very few people who can engage you, meet your level of intelligence and be able to match you word for word as you overarticulate, cleverly rationalize and use all your wits to outsmart others when you are acting out and behaving badly. There will only be a few who can truly reach you and have an impact on you when you are using all your intelligence and energy/intensity to deny or rationalize destructive behavior because you are too gripped by fear to face what you must to get to the other side.

I suggested one on one therapy, because I had read of your going to meetings most days for the last year and those meetings did not help you avoid the downward spiral of the last few months. You say it was because you had stopped following the AA principles the last few months, but I don’t think that fully explains what happened.

As you have said yourself, you identify a lot of things you need to do, but don’t follow through. You started writing about your aching balls and back nearly a year ago. In your entry “Blood Clot” (Nov. 21, 2009) you wrote about your father dying of pancreatic cancer. I think you knew then deep down something was very wrong physically, but you did not pursue and protect your health. You let it fester and get worse. I hate doctors (and their bills) most of us do. It is all too natural to want to avoid them (there are so many bad ones and it is so hard to find the goods ones), but when it comes to something serious, like pooing blood clots or a constant ache in the balls living in denial and doing nothing is the same as doing harm to yourself. Likewise, if you are spiraling out of control hurting yourself and doing damage to others, denial and rationalization is not going to get you to a place of health.

Sometimes we need professionals. Remember what an epiphany it was for when you learned about re-traumatization. You learned this from someone trained while you were in therapy (albeit TV therapy, but still you had good feelings about Jill and her abilities). There is much more to learn. If you are honest, you know you need to be challenged and pushed to revisit and resolve deep seeded memories and consequences to finally find different behaviors to build a healthy happy life. The principles of AA and meetings alone are not going to get you there. Draw from that support/practice, but supplement it with therapy that will help you truly pull out the weeds knotted within. They are choking off so much more good in you not yet expressed.

When I saw your reaction to my post (OK, I went too far), I was struck by your quick outpouring of pain, but I was suspicious. You went 360 degrees from abuser to victim in one day. You expressed your devastation and self-loathing, but I didn’t see any real compassion/empathy for what you had done to Jake and his family in the last several weeks by exposing them with such vituperative rage and revealing far too many personal details publicly, which no doubt have caused them irreparable harm. You could always have written about the relationship, your anger, your rage and his behavior without ever exposing him publicly by name, with pictures and by reprinting his emails without his permission. Your blog would have been just as powerful, and in fact more so if this had all been done keeping Jake anonymous. Readers would have learned just as much without knowing his identity, and it wouldn’t have turned into a sordid exercise of humiliation and punishment.

I was very apprehensive with your threat of taking a drink, but I told myself to wait and see if truly you were in trouble or at a turning point as I know how easy it is for addicts use such threats to manipulate others. You claimed you were taking notice of your behavior at 8:43 pm that evening, that you understood you had been hurtful etc. etc. I thought to myself if you were truly ready to turn things around you would seek help and stop feeding your addiction.

Unfortunately by 5 am the next morning, you relapsed. Granted, you told us your demons were at their worse at this hour, but my hope was that you would seek professional help and stop hurting yourself and others before feeding your addiction again. That hope dissipated when you reprinted the mean spirited post “George Clooney/Whitstable. Yes, you had taken Jake’s full name off the tag part of the blog, you had edited out the really nasty parts of the Clooney post and taken away the distasteful picture, but you still reignited your humiliation of him by reprinting the post with his emails. And of course, there are still the pictures of his face throughout your blog and his full name is still on your twitter account for all to see, as with all the personal details. You said it gave you no pleasure to reprint the entry (which I don’t believe) but you did it anyway with the justification that it was already out there (which it wasn’t since after you took it down if one clicked on a google link it would lead to nothing). If you truly felt any remorse and wanted to undo some of the damage you have done, why, instead of reposting the entry didn’t take down all the photos and things that reveal his identity.

Once again, I have to ask you to be honest. Today’s entry, while in part poetic and soulful and once again giving us hope you will embrace recovery, is still laced with denial and rationalizations. You are bloated with one on one therapy, you tried it before it didn’t work, etc. etc. The thing is we grow, we evolve, we have new experiences that lead us to new places, what didn’t work before might work now. Maybe you never worked with someone good. The only reason I am making this one last attempt to push you is because I don’t think you can get to a good place without some sort of sustained one-on-one help.

You are still on the roller coaster of addiction. You aren’t going to be able to get off this merry-go-round on your own, even with the help of AA. There are many many layers in what you are doing that is keeping you from happiness and healthy interactions. From my view there are strains of trauma, fractured identity, fear of abandonment, narcissim, exhibitionism, deep, deep damage that needs to be treated and healed. If you don’t get at it soon, it is going to metastasize.

You need someone to challenge you when you say things like, “You think that I have been cruel but I needed him out of my life and sometimes keeping your dealers number is the way back to active addiction. If I had not jettisoned him that day I KNOW what would have happened. We would have remained friends, we would have hooked up, my head just could not take it. I napalmed the poppy fields.” Of course you needed to jettison from your life, most of us who read this blog knew that back in April and wanted to see you do it then. But what has jettisoning him from your life have to do with the sustained publicly brutalizing of him for all of us to see? You are deluding yourself if you think that was the only way to finally end it. You need to get at the root of why did not feel you had the power to express your anger privately and then walk away? What is it about dealing with this scenario publicly that is giving you such satisfaction? And if I remember correctly the fact is, the point at which you really spun out of control was when he shot back his short email and said he was done with you firmly and concisely (and he meant it). It seems that is what triggered the all out attack on him.

You very poignantly identified the core of what you are struggling – “I crave a healthy relationship with people who ever they might be, lover, family member, friend, shop assistant, telephone banker etc. I am powerless and my life becomes unmanageable. I am powerless over people, places and things. This powerlessness causes me such misery. Powerlessness, vulnerability, weakness of any kind cannot be tolerated and as you have seen…I will bring you down if you challenge who I am, get to the heart of me.”

The question is how do you get to root of what is preventing you from developing enough strength and confidence to open up to others without hurting yourself or them. I just don’t think AA alone is going to get you there and I want you to get there. I want you to know the joy of relating without torment.

Since the costs of therapy are covered in England, why not try embarking on intensive therapy there, after you have had the surgery. Yes, it will be hard to find someone good – but not impossible. If it truly does not help, walk away and know that you tried. The sooner you do the work, the sooner you get to the good stuff.

Dear Tres Triste,

I don’t think you really understand addiction. It is progressive disease and one that needs arresting rather than curing. I imagine that I will be on a roller coaster for the rest of my life.

I have owned up to the fact that it may very well keep me from having any kind of loving relationship in the future but be that as it may I will attempt to make my life as comfortable as possible and not having a relationship with an intimate may be the solution.

frankly I write what I have to write and you are welcome to read and comment as you see fit. I rather like what you write. It was inspiring the first time but your last comment perplexed me because I know what I have to do to get better and I am doing it.

I am getting back to the place I left the day before I met him.

Taking ‘substances’ may be ok with you but I made it clear that it was not ok with me..and his family I might add. He continued to do it regardless. As for your assertion that he told me from the beginning that he wanted to sleep with other men that is simply not true.

He went out of his way to assure me that he wanted me to be the only one.

It is rather easy to cast him as the victim. He certainly became the victim but that was not always the case. He knew what he was getting into and got into it anyway.

Perhaps I will try and get a therapist but I doubt it.

I would prefer to take the advice of my AA sponsor.

I have taken down his name and that is as much as I am prepared to do. I don’t care if you think it unreasonable that I change my position so quickly. I do and I will. There are pictures of him throughout my blog because he was my lover and my friend..the pictures will remain there.

As for doing anything privately? Why bother? I write my blog everyday and it was this very public blog that attracted him to me in the first place. One must ask oneself if it was something he wanted all along? Exposure.

I am kind of wondering if your interest in him stems from knowing him.

Today I feel free. I did not wake up thinking about him in any other way than I do my last drink. I have no intention of contacting him, meeting with him, etc ever again. My attempt to let him go with love was spurned and I over reacted. C’est tout!

Whilst I am not proud of my vile blog it is what it is and so must remain.

Anyway, thanks for your comment. I do really appreciate the time and trouble you take to contact me.

Tres Triste,

I agree with several of your points about Duncan’s denial of the need to take action regarding his health crisis and his on-going mental/emotional issues, what he calls his “mad head”. I think that after the stress of “Sex Rehab”, he was very vulnerable and despite talking about going on to “Sober House”, for whatever reason, he didn’t. And then Jake contacted him. And to a man experiencing extreme emotional thirst, he was like the beautiful mirage that appears to someone dying of thirst in the desert. And I must repeat, Jake contacted Duncan, purportedly under the cover of his job as a lit agent. HE could have walked away at any time. HE did not have to tell a vulnerable man that he loved him, especially, since as he was just coming out and jettisoning a seven year relationship with a woman, he had no intention of entering into another relationship with a man. And Duncan has consistently written that a relationship is what he wants. Not a friend “with benefits”. Jake, nevertheless, had no qualms about starting this folie a duex. And to someone like Duncan, a sex/love addict, it really was like a drug. A drug that he could lose himself in and run from the need to solidify the gains made during “Sex Rehab” with more therapy and the need to assess the questions about his health.
(If you have any doubt about the validity of sex/relationships taking the place of a drug, I might refer you to what Jill said to Kendra about her husband being her drug to the point that they were so enmeshed that she almost abandoned her therapy because she “needed” to be in contact with him.)

When Duncan talks about taking a drink or a drug, I really believe that it’s not a threat. As I’ve said before, it’s more in the line of “Tell the truth and shame the devil” or the idea that if you can get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper, you can more readily address them. It’s the basis for many cognitive therapies. The old mystical thinking was that if you could name something, devil or angel, you could control over it.

As for the blog post not being out there, if you notice at the bottom of the “Reply” or “Comment” window, there are two coxes that can be checked where you can ask to be notified of any follow-up comments after you’ve submitted yours and also, you can ask to get notified of new blog posts by e-mail. When you get the notification, you can read the full text of the comment or new post in the e-mail. I read the original blog post of “George Clooney/Whitstable” by e-mail before I went to the website to post a comment. Once posted on the site, it really was out there. And since it was, to re-post it without the egregious bits and commenting as to it’s altered version was being honest and owning up to what had happened. Especially, since people — you, included — were already commenting on it.

We don’t get “the truth” as God sees it here (or maybe with some of it we do, who knows) but the truth as Duncan sees it. Warts and all. And yes, sometimes, it’s a dark ride but the paramount issues dealt with in this blog – addiction, the repercussions of traumatization as adults or children, just living in this insane society — are things that need to be dealt with not with kid gloves but with the gloves off.

How many people have gone through a bad break-up and burned the person down to the ground on their Facebook page or on Twitter? While not behaviour to be proud of, it’s very human. Jake knew that Duncan lives out loud and in full view on this blog and has mentioned many, many people, past and present, friends, lovers and business associates. He read the damn blog for heaven’s sake. He had — I believe — editorial privileges for a while. He started the dance, and he should have been well aware of what music he’d face. His last e-mail in response to Duncan’s was the equivalent of a slap in the face and saying, “You can’t quit me; I’m quitting you”. Did you read THIS, from Jake, “The further I can get away from your twisted, judgmental, sycophantic universe, the happier I will be.”? That was in response to Duncan’s kind and pretty evenhanded goodbye. Jake couldn’t be satisfied to just let well enough alone. To just be silent. And this after Duncan had not filed the small claims court case for the money that he was owed because “a friend” had told him how upset Jake was about all the resentment. Not that he made known that he fully intended to pay the debt… just that his feelings were hurt. Please. You don’t twist the knife in someone who’s actually trying to walk away. He knew Duncan for 8 months. He knew exactly the reaction that he’d elicit. I have sympathy for his girlfriend and his family. I have none for him.

*And Duncan, seriously, why not call Jill? You trusted her. And you’re still in LA for the time being. Why not make the best use of it? Again, kid, THIS is your “push”.*

Blessings,

Amanda

i really enjoyed this entry.

i’ve been following your work and writing for quite a while and can really relate to your journey on the roller coaster of addiction.

i think one of the greatest gifts the steps have given me is the freedom to know that at any moment anything can change; including how i feel about life.

right now–i’m wrestling with anger and disillusionment. i want to throw the towel in with work, my house, friends, family, and a.a. i try to convince myself to stop going to meetings and after a few weeks of pain i remember that meetings were the first place i ever felt comfortable.

it’s a painful season, but i know that it can turn around at any moment–if i just surrender to the principles i learned in the steps.

so, thanks for writing and sharing your life, because it gives me hope–knowing i’m not alone.

Dear Duncan,

I love this post.

Reminds me tangentially of something i recently reread after many years, i think it’s related:

Mind your thoughts, for your thoughts become words.
Mind your words, for your words become actions.
Mind your actions, for your actions become your habits.
Mind your habits, for your habits become your character.
Mind your character, for your character becomes your destiny.

What happened with George Clooney? Speaking of… If anybody suffers of insomnia, please go and see The American.

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