Might as Well Face it.... You're Addicted to Love

Recently I attended two speaking engagements.  I had to speak on addiction in the first and on ADHD and Anxiety Disorders in the second.   As I researched these topics I came to one resounding theme, our hearts and bodies are crying, no screaming for more.  Every year more and more medications are prescribed for anxiety and depression.  Every day more and more people are faced with the fact that they are indeed addicted to something. 

When we speak of addiction we generally speak of a drug, or an action that produces a feeling of relief or reward.  So many approaches to addiction come in the form of avoiding a certain outlet.  You’re an alcoholic, don’t drink alcohol and attend a group or therapy.  You’re a shopaholic, don’t spend, freeze your credit card in a block of ice and call your support group.  The list goes on and on.  Now let me be clear, I am not advocating that we not deal with the particular issue that we find ourselves hopelessly and compellingly drawn toward.  Rather when we avoid one addiction we quickly find another.  The issue is not the outlet of choice.  That is the effect to the cause.

Recently I was in the airport, which seems to be a regular staple in my diet. While I was waiting for my flight I watched a child, who was obviously tired and completely over the airport experience, clinging to his mother.  She looked tired as well.  Her response to her child’s constant clinging wasn’t to hold him and allow him to rest peacefully.  Rather in her exhaustion she reached in to her bag and pulled out an Ipad. She handed it to the boy and immediately his gaze turned from the affection of his mother to the shiny touch screen.  He played nonstop for the next forty-five minutes.  He made no sound and was content with the electronic embrace of unlimited apps and Angry Birds.  I am not criticizing the mother.  When it’s late and you are sitting in those incredibly uncomfortable plastic chairs after being herded like cattle through one line after the other there will be exhaustion.  She after all was giving what she had to give in the moment.  She wanted rest as much as he did.  Actually, as I watched him playing I gazed around the corridor and I saw teens, adults, and even some of the more elderly adults sitting quietly texting, playing apps, surfing the web looking for something to fill the void of sitting in a sterile and transient environment.  We are wired at our core and from birth to seek stimulation.  It’s what we hunger for, it is what we are addicted too and this begs the question, why?

Eventually as my gaze returned to the little boy I thought about his original expression.  He wanted to be held, he wanted to feel safe and comfortable and he sought that from his Mother.  When we look for safety as children, and again this is a snapshot not a judgment of a tired mom, and we are given an engaging distraction what does this produce in us over the long term?

Over time our brain normalizes distractions and we crave stimulation once again.  Why do we crave?  Simply put, it is just who we are.  What do we crave?, I believe this is the grandmother of all questions.  In the moment we crave the thing that fills the immediate need, but under the layers of coping strategies, habits and yes addictions I believe we crave something more, something that can not be normalized.  If it cannot be normalized it must be greater than our need, infinitely greater.  

I have written in the past about my own childhood.  It was filled with anger, abuse and neglect.  I found my outlet in books.  My best friends when I was twelve were men like C.S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway.  Lewis covered the constant grappling with God’s greatness and our inability to understand it in the midst of pain and suffering.  Hemingway covered the endless searching and pain that comes from seeking in empty places.  Lewis would dissect love and loss and turn it in to something greater.  He took children and put them in the hands of good but unsafe lion to be saved from those that sought to destroy them.  What a paradox that is to unpack.

Hemingway took an old man in a tiny boat and pushed him to the edge of his existence in an epic battle with the catch of his life.

Both men in their lifetimes fought through huge and painful circumstances.  At one point after the death of his wife, Joy, he even said that, “pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world”.  In the process of losing his wife he learned something greater than the philosophical and academically based idea of love, he learned of the experience of love and sadly loss.  He adopted his wife’s son Douglas and raised him as his own.  Years ago at a lecture I met with Douglas.  He was a cheerful man with a grand sense of humor.  He had become a pilot and loved adventure.  His childhood was a broken one.  His mother fled from the States with him, leaving behind an angry and abusive husband and finding England and Lewis.  Lewis was much older than Joy and had his share of adjustments to make from being a confirmed academic bachelor to a husband and Father.  Shortly after the marriage of Joy and Lewis, Douglas faced the loss of the one parent that stayed with him.  In the short time I spent with him I could see in Douglas a love and desire that cannot be learned it has to be experienced.

Hemingway who was known for his ability to avoid pain through the bottle and the typewriter took his own life, alone and depressed.  He was a regular haunt at a bar called Sloppy Joe’s in Key West.  I remember sitting under a picture of him having a pint just wondering what his days must have been like sitting in the same place.

I am in complete awe of both men as writers and adventurers in their own right but in the adventure of love I have found Hemingway at a loss. 

I remember reading Hemingway as a child and I felt like I was there in the moment with the characters.  Most of them were men that had suffered and were battle weary from rough lives full of loss and looking for that moment of redemption.  I related to that.  I was a child that had seen more than his share of abandonment and violence.  I had attended to overdoses and suicide attempts with some regularity by the time I was a man.

These pains, they build walls inside of us.  They drive us to look for safe stimulation.  Safe, in the sense that our hearts are not exposed.  We are masterful at composure in the right moments and brave with many risks but at the root we crave the very same thing that a little boy, unaware of an observer, sitting in an airport crave.  We want to be loved and accepted as we are.  We are worn and weathered and have so many complicated defenses that distract us from it, and turn those we love away, but it’s there.

I have often asked the question is it harder to know someone or be known by someone.  I believe it’s the latter.  I am terrified that if you knew the real me that you would run for the hills.  I’m skillfully avoidant, and carefully allusive.   These are the habits that you learn with a family that uses their hands for things other than embrace.  Deep down inside I believe that I am a lost cause and that if you knew the real me you would say the same.  At the low points in my life I’ve been told this very thing even to the point that I was not someone that one should cast their pearls before.   I lived for years with the notion that my train wreck was somehow different that yours or anyone else’s.  I thought that I was inherently flawed and I lived years swaying between trying so hard to make up for the lacking and just giving up and destroying any ground that had made.

The reality is that I am inherently flawed and that I shouldn’t be surprised when I fail.  My issue is that I thought that was the sum total of the man I was.  I was addicted to my own shame in ways that drove me to my own addictions.  I eventually became conditioned to the idea that I was and always be a lost cause.  I believed that I was a monster and I treated myself the way that a monster should be treated.  I disconnected, I disappeared, I caged myself so that I could do no harm to those who deserved more than a monster.  I had chosen the path of Hemingway and was headed for the same self destructive path that I had been raised to expect.

In the moments that came when I reached the bottom there were men, braver than Hemingway, more intact than Lewis that stood beside me and fought for me.  At first I remember being so suspicious.  I didn’t know what trust was much less how to offer it to anyone.  They were relentless, they would call and invite me for lunch, for dinner, for fishing trips.  They chased me down and would not let me be content with the monster that I saw in the mirror.

To this day when I am counseling I imagine them in the room and I wonder how they would handle things.  They have seen my tears, my terror,  my inner demons and looked at me as if to say is that it? Is that all that’s wrong with you?  We love you man!  These men have been the parents that stood with men when I begged like a weary child in an airport to be embraced.  Instead of distraction they handed me a new world a new life.  They mirrored the love that they knew, not necessarily from their own childhood memories but from the love they experienced from a God that pursued them just as relentlessly as they did me.  They taught me to love myself and to love Jesus.  They didn’t give me books but gave me the experience, the experience that Douglas had with Lewis and God still uses these men to this day as I am learning to pursue those that God brings to me, weary and broken carrying their own inner monsters and shame.

If addiction is a way of filling something that the action can never satisfy then it must be an endless void that we are trying to fill.  It will only come through and endless source and that endless source comes to us through those that He chooses to send to us when we are dying and broken on the side of road waiting for judgment.  It is at that moment when we have come to then end of ourselves and have no where to run, nothing to offer; it is in that moment that we are met by those that He sends and in the words of Lewis, we are, “Surprised by Joy”.

Journeys in the Storm

Ten years ago I began a journey that I would have never chosen for myself.  It began in the summer of 2004.  I had been surfing all morning.  I was at one of my favorite breaks and the waves were beautiful.  The swell was around six feet and the intervals were around twelve to fifteen seconds.  The soft winds were blowing off shore, which meant that the waves were showing a nice face.  I had made the forty-five minute drive and this seemed to be like any other morning.  I arrived at the beach by 6:30am and was in the water paddling out by 6:35.  It never gets old.  That first duck dive under a wave, when your face is completely submerged and you feel the power of the current sweeping the wave over your body.  Shortly after you emerge and without a moment’s thought you begin to paddle.  This is a process that you repeat until you reach the break point.  It’s that first dive though, it simply fills you with a sense of life, amazement and adrenaline. 

After a quick paddle I reached the break point.  I remember sitting up on my board and breathing in the peaceful and serene watery world that had completely engulfed my senses.  The swell, moving gently but powerfully met me with my first set of the morning.  I watched the waves roll toward me.  The first wave passed it was smaller than the ones to follow.  I waited patiently for just the right wave, the right moment. Then in a burst of momentum I paddled swiftly with the wave.  It picked me up and as quickly as it lifted my board I stood.  I remember just gliding down the face.  It was smooth like glass and I could hear the curl crashing behind me, pushing me forward faster and faster.  I pushed my board against the wave gaining momentum with each lunge.  It felt effortless, even natural.  I drank in the moment until the end of the ride.  As I drew closer to the sand bar I turned my board using the wave as a ramp and as the momentum pushed me ever faster defying gravity I left the water and for what lasted only a second I was airborne.  Quickly before gravity could steal the moment I twisted my body and dove back into the smooth warm water.  I repeated this over and over until the winds changed and the waves lost their graceful faces.

The sun was high above my head as I caught the last wave.  When I stood the nose of the board dug in quickly to the water and I found myself thrusted face forward into the base of the wave.  It was like being put in washing machine on spin cycle as the wave and it’s powerful current held me under.  It was just the right moment where the water agrees with the force of the winds and currents as I was held under water for what felt like an eternity.     Quickly I opened my eyes in the murky and turbulent waters, my hand quickly ran the length of my leash looking for the board to which my ankle was tethered.  As I found the board, still under water I grabbed it and held until it’s buoyancy could break the surface.  I was running out of breath as the board itself was held beneath the surface.  I waited, forcing my body out of a panic and conserving as much air as I could.  My tired limbs ached and my mind raced, until finally the current gave way.  I offered one last tired burst of energy and paddled the last stretch to the beach, grabbing hold of each wave as they pushed me closer and closer to the beach.  As the moment passed I didn’t find myself shaken or even afraid.  I chalked it up to another messy wipeout as I gathered my board and my senses and made my way back to the Jeep.

As I was driving home I made my customary stop at the convenience store.  I loaded up on boiled peanuts and a sugar-free Red bull.  This offered me a burst of much needed energy as I rushed to make it home.  I had to be at work in an hour and didn’t have time to waste by resting. 

As I made my way through the lowlands my body felt strange.  I remember getting very dizzy.  I thought I was going to pass out.  I waited a moment for the dizziness to pass but it held its course and I finally pulled over and stepped out of my jeep to the side of the road.  As I stood I remember a flood of emotions running through my mind, my heart was beating faster and faster and I drew deep breaths almost as if I had run a marathon.  This frenzy lasted about ten minutes and subsided as quickly as it appeared.  I pulled my wits together and continued my trek home.  As the day progressed I forgot about all about it and carried on.

Fast-forwarding a few months, I was driving with a friend.  We were on our way to a repair store.  The air conditioning unit at my house which had been on it’s last leg since I moved in had finally given up the ghost.  I am inquisitive by nature so I took the unit apart and found that the cooling fan had died.  So off we went to find a replacement.  As we drove the music on local radio station stopped and a weather bulletin boomed through the speakers.  A hurricane, which had been sitting off the Gulf Coast, had made an abrupt turn, defying the majority of the forecast models and was heading directly towards us.  We were informed that we had roughly three hours until the feeder bands would reach us.  The hurricane was listed as a category one and was expected to dissipate by the time it reached us to become a tropical storm.  We listened intently and were relieved with the news that we would only see tropical storm winds. 

As we reached the repair store, I described the motor that I needed and gave the serial number.  The clerk laughed and made a joke about disco being in style when they made my air conditioner.  I smiled purchased the part and we began our ride home.  Once again a weather bulletin sounded off.  The storm was strengthening and was now expected to be a category four by the time it reached land.  The National Weather Service was now predicting a category three hurricane to reach Orlando.  As we listened my friend Seth spoke up.  He said that it would be smart to pick up wood and supplies to board up the windows.  I agreed and we drove quickly to the next stop.  When we arrived we were amazed to see a line of cars waiting in line just to enter the parking lot.  We were apparently not the only ones grappling to prepare for the hurricane.  We parked quickly and made our way in to the store.  We picked up as much plywood as we could find, a saw, tapcon screws and several flashlights.  We made our way to the counter, paid and left. 

When we reached home we didn’t waste a moment.  We began cutting the wood and fastening each board over the windows.  We had enough for both of our homes and for our neighbors as well.  We worked intently not even noticing the first set of feeder bands.  Finally, as the winds picked up and the rain poured down we finished the massive project, and without a moment to spare.  Seth and I went in to my house along with his brother, some of our neighbors and some people I didn’t even know and we waited.

Within an hour the sky was black, the winds were consistently pushing at about a hundred miles an hour and I was at the door with my video camera catching every second.  The weather report came on the radio shortly after and announced that the winds were now at a constant speed of a hundred and twenty-seven miles an hour with gusts close to one-forty.  I was an adrenaline junky, to put it lightly, and my mind raced with ideas.  I mean, how many chances do you have to experience winds like that?  I grabbed my skateboard and an umbrella and ran out the front door.  I grew up watching a lot of cartoons and from my extensive research of Bugs Bunny I understood that umbrellas can make excellent sails.  I mounted the board, open the umbrella and was expecting the ride of my life.  The winds were so swift they tore the umbrella apart the moment I opened it.  Fortunately the wind pushed me along even without the sail.  The rain was so strong and was pouring so fast that each drop felt like a pinprick.  I lasted about three minutes and ran for the safety of my living room.  I watched intently as tree after tree toppled and power lines snapped.  We lost power around 8:30 that evening.  Fortunately, being outdoors men Seth and I had an adequate supply of candles, propane, battery powered radios and of course flashlights.  We filled all of our coolers with ice before the storm and put as many water bottles in them as we could.  The storm reached carried on for hours until there was an abrupt silence.  This was not the end of the storm and could only mean one thing; the eye of the hurricane was directly over us.  I stepped back out the front door and looked up into the dark sky.  The sky was clear and there were stars everywhere.  The wind was gone as we muddled around in the dark and eerie silence.  Everyone piled out and we all began to survey the neighborhood, each looking for damage and checking on the other neighbors.  This lasted for about an hour and the storm once again reared its ugly head.

The next morning, I was prepared for the worst.  The storm had passed but in its wake it left our town upside down.  I drove around with my video camera recording one pile of debris after another.  The roads were empty and quiet and littered with fallen trees, power lines, and anything else that wasn’t strong enough to withstand the torrent that had devoured the town the night before.  As I drove I began to feel light headed once again and all the symptoms that I had felt months before returned.  It lasted for about fifteen minutes and left just as it had before.  This time I was a little more aware and was a little shaken, as this was not just tiredness but something more.  It stayed on my mind a little longer but eventually faded as I was distracted by the damage of the storm.  As the week passed we realized that we would be without power for a while.  The gas stations were empty of fuel, water, and the basic necessities as were the grocery stores.  Finally after another week the power returned and life began to return to some semblance or normalcy.  Already there were two more storms forming in the Atlantic.  I remember joking about it and saying, “What are the odds of us getting another storm?  Really?  They’ll pass.” Unfortunately by the end of hurricane season that year we saw three more.   Just as a precaution we decided to leave the boards on the windows.  As slim as the chances none of us wanted to risk weathering another hurricane without the safety of covering.  The boards stayed on for the remainder of the summer and were exposed to all four hurricanes.  Somewhere in the middle of all of the madness, I woke up in the middle of the night.  I remember it vividly because to this day it still sends chills through my spine.  I woke startled, unable to move, unable to breathe.  My eyes were focused on the ceiling and I could see flashes of light pulsing through out my field of vision.  I panicked but could do nothing.  My mind was racing as I tried to take just one breath, but nothing..  Just silence and fear.  After about thirty seconds I began to breathe and was able to move, but the terror that went through my mind was unforgettable.  All of the what if’s were still coursing through my head. What if I hadn’t regained my faculties?  What if I had suffocated?  I stayed awake for the next two days out of fear.  I called my doctor and went directly to her office.  When I arrived I described all of the symptoms that I had been experiencing over the past several months.  She gave me a thoughtful glance and told me that I was experiencing panic attacks and night terrors.  I was not convinced but at this point was exhausted.  She prescribed some meds and told me to rest. 

After this I met with a counselor and this was again confirmed.  As we dug into my past it was more and more evident that panic and anxiety had been a constant staple to my mental diet.  I began to take the meds and over the next month I began to become much more calm.  My mind was working and focused in ways that it had never had before.  I could actually think even concentrate.  As I began to experience a mind that worked as it was supposed to I realized that I had been having panic symptoms since I was a child. 

These symptoms had permeated every thought and action as far back as I could remember.  As a student I had always scraped by, unable to study for long periods of time, I procrastinated as much as possible and my grades had always suffered.  My religious beliefs were based on fear more than faith and I lived in constant fear that I was not only a failure but that God must be angry and disappointed with me.  This is when I began to write.

Within three weeks of these understandings I had completed my first manuscript, Unshed Tears.  It was focused on how experiencing childhood abuse plays a major role in how we understand God.  If our first experiences with authority are abusive then we form the belief that all authority must be angry and abusive.  We choose not to live and enjoy the power of God but we translate Him into being the ultimate abusive parent just waiting for us to fail, then pouring on our hearts pain and anguish.  I had been in this frame of mind and survived with fear as my constant companion.  The journey of understanding that God is not an angry parent took time.  My faith moved from surviving an angry deity to being embraced by a loving, caring and nurturing God.  This pushed me to understand that even with the baggage of abuse in my past I had been given gifts that I had feared to even touch.  Yes, there was pain, but redemption looked less like having my sins painfully burned away and more like being loved to holiness.  I rested.  It was the first time in my entire life that I exhaled in relief and dared believe that God was not only all powerful but truly all loving.  All loving, in that He could actually love all of me.  He wasn’t surprised by my failures. As a matter of fact He was there, in the midst of my failures holding me, defending me like a roaring lion when no one else would.

This was not an immediate revelation.  God is patient.  It leaked in through the cracks of my life, my past and carries through to the present and to the future.  My world changed in amazing ways and it came through panic, fear, anxiety and paralysis. 

My burnout in one Masters program carried to an open door to a new Masters degree and a career that would give me the ability to walk with others who have been down the same ragged and broken path. 

So often we look for perfection as the moment that God will enter the picture.  It’s as if we wait to be good enough to win His praise and affection.  Thank God this is not the case, for we would be waiting in an empty shack in fear that we would never be met.  It was when God opened the doors in my broken world; in my complete and utter mess of a life that I realized that he wanted me.  Just me, the broken and humbled mess of a man that I was and am.  I came to a place in life where I had nothing left to offer, I had no drive, no ambition.  It was in this moment, the perfect moment to experience the ultimate judgment and rejection that God showered me with adoration and love.

Since that time I have experienced some of the most dreadful and heartbreaking moments in my life.  I have lost everything many times over and have seen the darkness that exists with in my intentions and actions.  I am utterly a selfish and self seeking person and left to my own devices I would do all the good works and actions with a darkened heart.   My main drive would be to work hard just to prove that I was ok.  Fortunately, God has allowed me to see the contrast between my inability and His unfailing promise to redeem me.

It was in losing everything that I realized that I was holding on to dirty rags.  The keys to my redemption were so much different than reality.  My actions always have motives; they have a heart tied to them.  God allowed my actions to be stripped away so that he could show me His heart, His compassion.  I am learning to truly love, to truly give with an open heart and mind.  My religion is no longer anger and fear.  I always have my moments but I can finally be honest without the fear of condemnation, and in honesty I can truly see what is embraced by God, me.