Blank Cheque

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.