My Outer Circle

One of the interesting things about my Fourth Step Inventories are the things that just don’t make sense. I’ve found that like most addicts, I’m a narcissist. I’ve also found that I lack self confidence. You wouldn’t think those two qualities can exist in the same person, but I’m living proof that anything is possible.

For much of my life, and definitely my career, I’ve felt like a fraud. I keep expecting someone to notice that I’m in over my head, and that I’m not that good at whatever it is I’m doing. I never felt deserving of awards or promotions, and I always had to compare to someone else, and usually felt myself lacking. I was the youngest Lieutenant in the county when I was a volunteer fireman. I had only been a member of that department for a year when I got promoted, and the promotion came the same day that I was named the Firefighter of the year. Yet my first thought was, “I’m 22, my dad was 18 when he was a Lieutenant.”

In the past two weeks I’ve had three pretty significant things happen. First, I got an e-mail from my future boss. He asked if I would be interested in a major job. (There are only two of them on Fort Hood, so I can’t say what the job is without making myself very un-anonymous, but it is a full Colonel’s job, and would make me one of the most important people in the division.) He told me that looking at my records and talking to some people who know me and my reputation, he thought I would be a good fit for the job. Pre-recovery I would have turned the job down, or at least agonized about whether or not I could handle it. Thanks to recovery I accepted it, and told him I knew I would do well.

Two days later I was at Sunday Mass. During announcements, the priest said that there were four people who had made significant contributions to the parish that were redeploying soon, and he wanted to recognize them. I was shocked when I was one of them. My initial thoughts were I haven’t done anything to warrant any kind of honor from the church. I’ve only returned to the church in the past year, and I consider myself very much the prodigal son. After mass I asked a friend who served as the head of the parish council what I did to deserve the honor. He pointed out that I was a regular lector, and I helped set up the Stations of the Cross every week during Lent, and lead the Stations most weeks. I realized that I was merely being recognized for a very real contribution.

Finally I got my annual evaluation. I told my boss (my real boss, not the guy I worked for) that he shouldn’t use any of his silver bullets with his boss (my senior rater) on me. I realize that I no longer have potential for promotion, I told him that I will always strive to give above center of mass (the highest rating) performance, though I no longer have above center of mass potential. I was shocked when I received my evaluation. Besides being rated above center of mass, I was identified as the best Lieutenant Colonel in the Brigade and among the top 10 of 62 in Kuwait. I was floored, but I came to realize that I deserved it. It won’t make a difference in my career, but I took pride in being recognized for what I accomplished. Legitimate pride in my performance, not the narcissist’s pride in just being.

Thanks to recovery, I’ve come a long way. I have a long way to go, but I’m getting there. Progress, not perfection.

Well, my ten month odyssey in Mesopotamia is over. I’m back home, just in time for Mothers’ Day. As I’ve chronicled here over the last ten months or so, my deployment wasn’t without it’s challenges. I struggled with sobriety, especially from masturbation. I had to deal with working for someone with more rank and much less experience than I have. I’ve dealt with some serious resentments. However, I’m grateful for the entire experience.

Why grateful? A lot of reasons. First and foremost, this deployment more than anything has helped me see how lucky I am to be blessed with my wife and daughters. My first deployments occurred before I entered recovery. I didn’t appreciate my wife. The hardest thing about this deployment, beyond the work issues, was missing my family. The time away made me realize just how much I love my wife and daughters, and that I never want to spend another day away from them. I’m also eternally grateful that I married someone strong enough to not only deal with my addiction, but strong enough to deal with running a household and raising our daughters while I go off to keep the world safe for democracy.

I’m also grateful that this deployment helped me determine what I don’t want to do when I retire. I don’t want any job that involves traveling. That means giving up a couple of lucrative opportunities, that align perfectly with my skill sets and my professional experience, but I figured out during this deployment that I don’t want to be away from my family, even for just a month at a time, and I can’t be away from my recovery friends.

I’m grateful for my extended family. As we were out running errands on Sunday my wife took me by one of the houses we looked at when we were house hunting. We liked the house, but we didn’t love it, and it was interesting driving through the neighborhood and comparing it to the one we live in now. We talked about how our house isn’t perfect, but the perfect house doesn’t exist. If we looked for the perfect house we’d still be looking. What is perfect is our situation. We have a nice house, that’s comfortable and meets all of our needs. We have neighbors that we like. Best of all my sister-in-law lives two houses down from us, and soon my niece will live around the corner. I love that my wife has her sister and her best friend next door. I love that my daughters are growing up with family around them. I’m grateful that we found a house and neighborhood that affords us that opportunity.

I’m sure eventually I would have come to all of these realizations without deploying for ten months. It would have taken me a lot more than ten months to do it. I also know that I would never have come to all of these realizations without being in recovery.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a great saying in a meeting, “Holding resentments is like taking poison everyday and hoping the other person will die.” I’ve been doing my best not to hold on to resentments. I’m working the Fourth Step again, to find my own role in some long lasting, deep seated resentments and hopefully I can let go of those too.

Sometimes it’s hard to give up a resentment, especially when I’m not the one at fault for the situation that caused the resentment. For a long time I had a hard time trying to figure out why someone doing something bad to me ends up on my Fourth Step inventory. I could engage in mental gymnastics (truthfully rationalization, and as I’ve mentioned before, rationalization is not my friend) for days as I justified to myself that since the situation wasn’t my fault it was okay for me to hold on to the resentment.

My sponsor finally beat it into my skull that my resentments were mine. No one can make me feel anything. Worse, it was actually a manifestation of one of my worst character flaws, being self-centered. Or, to sum it up, as my parents used to point out to me often, life isn’t fair. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes someone just goes out of their way to do you harm. I don’t necessarily own the blame for the cause of the resentment, but the resentment is all mine. It does me absolutely no good to poison myself.

So today, I’m going to rid myself of two resentments. I mentioned before my some of my favorite novels are the Repairman Jack series by F. Paul Wilson. In the latter books Jack is told that since he now works for an alien force known as the Allie there will be no more coincidences in his life. I still believe in coincidence, but today I’m taking a coincidence as a message about resentments from my higher power.

Last night I called in to a tele-meeting. Things were fine for about twenty minutes, then the call was completely drowned out my music…or more specifically muzak. The kind of stuff they play in elevators, dentists’ waiting rooms, and hold music. We were unable to continue our meeting. It was absolutely impossible to be heard over the music. I assumed that it was a matter of someone calling in from their office, having a business call come in on another line and accidentally putting the meeting on hold, and treating us all to an orchestral version of The Beatles’ Greatest Hits. Inconsiderate, but hardly worthy of resentment. I called into another tele-meeting tonight. For twenty minutes or so, everything was fine. Then came the muzak again. Two meetings in two nights. I believe it was intentional.

Which leads me to the coincidence part. I checked my recovery e-mail account and found an email from Blog Spot asking me to moderate a comment on my post about public acceptance ( http://myoutercircle.blog.com/2009/12/13/public-acceptance/ ). Of course it was spam. For a dating site. Some search bot hit on some keywords in my blog and figured I wrote about adultery, prostitutes and pornography, therefore it was the kind of website that would attract potential customers.

It caused me to reflect on the electronic warfare being conducted by against our SAA Tele-Meetings. I realize that it will be a long time before society is accepting of the thought that sex addiction is really an addiction. There are those who will always look at me as a pervert and a sinner. I don’t think in my life time I will ever be able to put an SAA sobriety chip on my key chain like I’ve seen Alcoholics Anonymous and even Narcotics Anonymous members do. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is that there are people who will actively try to disrupt us as we try to seek relief from our addiction.

We’re trying to live up to our potential, to be the husbands and fathers that our families deserve, and there are those who try to disrupt us. There were newcomers at both meetings. If my first SAA meeting were disrupted, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to go back. Whoever decided to ruin our meetings has no idea that he may have doomed an addict, and his family, to a lifetime of suffering.

Some of my friends at my home meetings talk about the bad old days, when our meeting locations and times weren’t published. When to attend a meeting you had to call a number and be screened to determine if you were really an addict, or just someone who wanted to ruin one of our meetings, or do harm to one of our members. I hope whoever is disrupting our meetings doesn’t drive members away. I hope they don’t doom my fellow addicts and their families to more suffering.

How do I avoid resenting them? I’ll just have to pity them. I’m sick. They’re sicker than I am. At least I’m trying to get better. Progress, not perfection.

The last week has been a time of insanity. As we begin our transition with our replacements and prepare to return home, the demands on my time and attention have been brutal. For the past week ten and twelve hour days have been the norm. Worse than the time is the stress. On any deployment there is an inversely exponential relationship between the number of days left on the deployment and the number of rumors circulated.

Having a boss who has never done this doesn’t make matters easier. He doesn’t grasp the concept that we won’t finish every mission, that’s for the guys who come after us, and probably the guys who come after them. He makes statements like “we’ll stay here until the mission is complete” and it causes people to get angry and agitated.

To make matters worse, for months I’ve been pressing my higher headquarters for an order, so we can tell our replacements what there mission will be. Are they going to do the same mission that I’ve been doing, or are they going to take things in a different direction. It’s difficult to integrate them without knowing what direction to point them in.

Yesterday my higher headquarters, with a staff of over one thousand, including Foreign Area Officers (experts on the middle east), Comptrollers, Lawyers, and specialized planners, told me (with my staff of two, and both of us are DATs, dumb ass tankers), to come up with a concept for the new guys, and be ready to brief the general on it next week.

A stressful week, a stressful mission, and people freaking out. Hardly the ideal circumstances for continued sobriety. People started with the usual…we’re getting screwed, we can’t fix this, this isn’t even legal, etc. I was sorely tempted to join in. It would have felt good. It wouldn’t have done any good. It would have just allowed my resentments to fester, and distracted us from the work that really did have to get done.

As my staff started to go down rabbit holes and point out all the flaws that we couldn’t fix, I actually told them, “Don’t worry about the things we can’t change, let’s just fix the things we can change.” The rest of it wasn’t our burden to carry.

Funny how much that sounds like the Serenity Prayer and the Third Step. We’ll work on the things that we can actually affect, and leave it up to our higher headquarters instead of our Higher Power to take care of the things that we can’t affect.

Amazingly, seeing me calm, and taking my advice to only worry about fixing the things we can, things calmed down at work.  There was a lot less cursing and feeling sorry for ourselves, and a lot more laughter.  We’re way ahead of schedule on putting together our plan and our briefing for the general.  You could almost call the things at work serene…almost.

It’s working at work, and it’s working for my sobriety. When I finished work last night I went to Mass then I came home and talked to my wife and daughter on the phone. I did a little recovery reading, listened to some baseball on the computer, and went to bed. I accepted the things I couldn’t change, I worked on the things I can change, and left the rest up to God. I went to bed sober, I woke up that way, and I’ve stayed that way for the rest of the day. God is granting me serenity, when I use the tools of my program. Progress, not perfection.

My sobriety date is April 5, 2012. My inner circle consists of sex outside of my marriage, using pornography in any form, and masturbation. I am in the survival phase of recovery. Last week I earned 90 recovery points. My last slip was masturbation to pornography.

I realize that masturbation is an addictive behavior for me. When I went back and worked the First Step again it became very clear that I use masturbation as a method to medicate, not as an outlet for a physical need. There really is no doubt in my mind that it belongs in my inner, not middle circle. It’s also the reason that I’m struggling with sobriety right now.

Something else occurs to me. I want to masturbate because I can’t. Because it was my therapist’s idea that it go into my inner circle not mine. I hate when people tell me I can’t do things.

The whole issue reminds me of steak in the messhall during Lent. Catholics can’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. The Pope says so. Catholics make up about 25% of the Army, and nearly 35% of the officer corps. So what day is steak night in the messhall here? Friday of course. They serve fish on Thursday and fish on Saturday. Steak on Friday. The sad part is it isn’t good steak. It might have been a good steak at some point. The point before it was boiled (yes, boiled*) then thrown on a grill for thirty seconds so it tastes like smoked boiled meat instead of just plain old boiled meat. Every Friday outside of Lent, I look at the steak, I know it’s going to be awful, but I take one anyway. Then I take two bites, remember it’s awful and leave the rest. During Lent, I walked by the steak, wanting it more than anything, and I didn’t take one.

Masturbation is like that for me. To be honest, it isn’t all that pleasurable. It’s really a mechanical act. It seems like a good idea, it seems like I should enjoy it, but I know that I’m just going to feel guilty after. Yet several times in the last month I did it anyway. It wasn’t particularly pleasurable. I felt guilty after.

Boiled steak and masturbation. Similar in so many ways. I really want both, knowing that they’ll only disappoint me. Yet one I was able to live without for forty days, the other I have only managed to live without for about three weeks at a time. If only I can equate masturbation with boiled beef perhaps I can put my disease back into remission yet. Progress, not perfection.

* The British Army was an early pioneer in boiled beef products. To the best of my knowledge, they actually like it. Then again they get a rum ration. I’m betting there’s a connection there.

Just a brief summary of my day and my email to my friends in recovery. Today was a very good day. My replacements are here and we held our first round of briefings. It meant a lot of work, but it also means the end is in sight. I have about 33 days left until I return home.

Besides my routine activities I attended a telemeeting tonight. Due to lag in VOIP it was hard to get on the meeting but I kept at it, and it was worth it. The subject of tonight’s meeting was fears, which fit in very well with the Fourth Step work I’m doing now. I no longer believe in coincidence, too often in my addiction it turns out that things I thought were coincidence turned out to be my Higher Power trying to keep me from acting out. I took the fact that I’m working on my Fourth Step and the meeting being about fears to be a sign that I’m heading in the right direction.

I’m actually in a good place right now and I’m feeling hopeful. I wasn’t triggered at all today and I’m not having any withdrawal anxiety or restlessness. I didn’t even get angry last night when the Red Sox blew a three run lead in the 9^th inning or a two run lead in the 11^th. I realize there is nothing that I can do to help them so it isn’t worth getting angry. For someone who believed that the Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series because I changed seats in the dayroom, or lost Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS because I had to take a shower before work (I was in Baghdad at the time) that’s progress.

I worked for an hour on my Fourth Step and identified my role in ten of my resentments, read a chapter in a recovery book, and I’m getting ready to go to bed. Most important I was sober again today. Progress.  

As happened the first two times I worked the Steps, I hit a wall on the Fourth Step. I’m not a fan of moral inventories, fearless or not. I think a lot of it has to do with being afraid of what I’ll find. Right now I’m doing a decent job of keeping my resentments in check, fears? Not so much.

Why do I need to inventory my fears? After all, everyone has fears. Who doesn’t fear something? Audie Murphy had fears. I’m afraid of snakes and heights (made life as a paratrooper stationed in North Carolina more fun than a barrel full of monkeys). However fear of snakes and heights aren’t really causing me many problems right now.

Simple mathematics are causing me problems.

Fear x Self Obsession= Resentment

Resentment + Entitlement= Rationalization

Rationalization – (Fellowship + Sharing) = Relapse

So, all I have to do is get rid of one of these variables. Ideally I’ll eventually get rid of them all, but that might take awhile, and I really don’t have awhile. I need to get sober and maintain my sobriety now. Right now the easiest variable to change is adding Fellowship and Sharing to my program.

When my friend and I discussed my situation last week he was quick to point out to me that all was not lost. I haven’t given up on recovery, I’m not taking half measures, I’m more connected with my higher power than I’ve been in thirty or so years. My problem was I’m isolated from the people that I count on in my program. By making contact with some of my closest friends in recovery every day, I can prevent rationalization from causing me to relapse. This is a good thing, and right now I’m in a position where I can make contract with someone every day. I’ve committed to not just making contract and letting them know whether or not I’m sober, but asking for help when I need it, and getting advice and assistance. This is good, but rather than focus on the third equation, which is pretty defensive, I need to go on the offense and attack things where they start. I need to identify my fears to prevent resentments.

So that’s where I am know. This week my goal is to spend forty five minutes a day working on the Fourth Step, with the goal of sharing it with my friends on Saturday. I may not conquer my fears, but knowing what they are and how they affect me will go a long way towards reducing the resentments in my life.

Today was a good day. It was my first actual full day off since I returned to Kuwait back in January. A day alone in my room with it’s TV, internet connection and my imagination would have been dangerous at worst and isolating at least, but I chose not sit in my room all day.

I got up at 930 and made it Easter Mass. Now that I’m not a Christmas and Easter Catholic, it was amazing to see how crowded it was. There were also four people confirmed today, causing me to reflect on my own decision to return to the church. Easter is my favorite time of the year in the church anyway, with it’s theme of forgiveness, so I left the chapel with a sense of peace.

From church I left to have lunch with four friends. As usual lunch with us is not a short thing. We tend to talk a lot, since any of us could fix all of the Army’s, if not the world’s problems if they’d just put us in charge. After lunch is was a couple of loads of laundry.

One of the things I’ve noticed as I reflect on my sobriety troubles over the last six weeks is the state of my room tends to reflect my state of mind. If I get up in the morning and don’t make my bed, if I let laundry pile up, if I don’t hang up my clothes, it means something is not right with me and I’m in danger of relapse. I’m not the neatest person who ever lived (just ask my wife about my “habitat” as she calls the coffee table at my end of the sofa), but when things get really cluttered I need to be careful and connect with my program.

I called home and talked with my wife and daughters. It is amazing how much I’ve missed them, and how much my girls have grown up just since I’ve been gone. One of my Christmas presents was a calendar full of pictures of my girls, seasonally themed. It’s on my fridge and is the first thing I see when I get home. It makes me smile every time.

I was very careful with the internet today. I checked all of my favorite news and opinion sites, left one comment on a gun blog and logged off without surfing elsewhere. Then I read a book while listening to the Red Sox on the radio. That’s also kind of a comforting thing with me, even when they’re loosing. The Sox have had the same radio play by play announcer (the great Joe Castiglione, who I hope is elected to the Hall of Fame soon) and listening to a game on the radio (via internet) with Joe reminds me of being a kid listening to him with my giant AM headphones under the covers reading a book after I was supposed to be asleep.

Finally I summed up today’s activities and assured my friend back in Austin I’m still sober, and committed to being sober again tomorrow. Progress, not perfection.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I am an addict, therefore I am insane. I don’t need to apply insanity to my recovery process. I find that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve had three slips in the last month. Three slips in a month is really a relapse, not slips. Looking at my recovery points scores and my actions, it makes no sense. I’m working my program, I’m doing telephone meetings, I’ve been more connected with God over the last several months than I have been in forty years, yet I’m struggling with sobriety. This scares me.

I contacted one of my closest friends in recovery. He has two years of sobriety from his addictive sexual behaviors, and more than twenty years sober from alcohol. I trust this judgment and value his advice. We talked for a long time about why my program isn’t working for me right now. He helped me to realize my problem, and it’s an old one.

Right now my problem is isolation. Not from other people. One of the things I’ve worked hard on during my deployment is not being a hermit and I have succeeded. I’ve made two good friends, I don’t eat my meals alone, and we spend time together outside of work. I am isolated from my program.

Part of that isolation comes from the nature of telephone meetings. Though telephone meetings work for many people, particularly those too famous to be anonymous at in person meetings, they don’t work well for me. I don’t have friends in telephone meetings. People on telephone meetings don’t have dinner together before the meeting, or lunch together after, or even just talk in the parking lot before going home. I don’t have a connection with folks on telemeetings. Making friends isn’t one of my strengths and not having regular contact with friends in recovery is an issue.

At home I attend two meetings a week. I never go more than three days without seeing my recovery friends, and I never go more than two days without talking to one. That’s a huge issue with the time difference here. They are asleep during most of my waking hours, or at work. Not discussing my recovery activities and my state of sobriety with a recovery friend daily is an issue for me right now.

My friend has come up with a solution that I think is going to help. Every day I’ll send him an email before I go to bed, letting him now how I’m feeling, what recovery activities I did that day, and that I made it through the day sober and am committed to be sober the next day. It will help me reconnect with my friends in recovery. With luck in about five weeks we’ll be having dinner before a meeting back home, until then it’s the best idea we can come up with.

The email I’m about to send him is something along the lines of today I’m feeling hopeful. I went to Good Friday services last night, and left feeling a sense of forgiveness that I haven’t felt in a long time (I might do a separate journal entry on that). Today I had some frustrations at work, and used the Serenity Prayer to deal with those. I attended a telemeeting tonight where the subject was the 4^th Step and picked up a couple of tips that will help me get over a mental block in my own 4^th Step. I spent an hour in prayer with my Rosary and journaled. I stayed sober today and I’m committed to staying sober tomorrow.