I have come to accept that I have no control over life. I can make choices regarding what I do and how I want to feel, but I don’t have any authority over what happens to me or when. Therefore, my security is not placed in my own strengths or abilities. My confidence lies in knowing that everything will be okay. Okay does not mean I will get what I want. I do not ever expect anything to turn out the way I want it to. I’m grateful when it does, but my happiness doesn’t depend on it. Bad things happen. Hard times happen. Losses happen. There are times to grieve as well as times to celebrate. The human life experience encompasses the full range of emotional experiences. Take it all in. Release your clenched fists and open your hands to receive all that life has to offer you.

Depression is as much of a mental illness as having a brain tumor. The misfiring of neural activity, the bypassing of the prefrontal cortex, and the systemic jamming of the limbic regions are physical processes not mental ones. Mental functioning is impaired, but so is digestion, blood circulation, and other neurological functions throughout the body. Involuntary muscle contractions and muscle spasms are other non-mental symptoms of the depression illness. Labeling depression as a mental illness is a terrible misnomer. Depression is not merely chronic sadness, which can be healed through strategies such as therapy and meditation. Depression, like any other physical illness, requires physical intervention to promote healing. Sometimes, a regimen of supplementation is enough to restore an adequate neural balance. At other times, pharmaceutical medication is necessary. The term “mental illness” makes it sound like one’s depression is all in their head, which not true. Depression stems from the brain, but it affects other parts of the body as well. It’s a physical illness in need of physical solutions.

What a sorry-sack bunch of losers we are, I thought to myself as I scanned the closet-sized office space. There were a couple of old guys, a couple of stereotypical nerds who looked as though they still lived in their mother’s basements playing video games semi-professionally, a Hispanic dude, and me. And then, holy fuck no, you have got to be kidding me, directly before my eyes, the pretty boy. The type of guy whom I was constantly scanning dating sites to find, the exact fulfillment of everything I was looking for in a man, physically anyway, right there. Right in front of me. I could literally fall to my knees and be right at his feet and beg him to run away with me and be with me forever. Yep, I was triggered.

I was triggered, but I was there. I had made the first giant leap of faith and showed up. Once I was in the meeting room, I was hooked. I had a place where I felt I could belong. These guys were in worse shape than I was, or so I thought at the time. I didn’t realize how messed up I actually was. I didn’t realize how out of control and unmanageable my life had become. All I knew was that I kept having sex compulsively and couldn’t stop. It was out of hand; it was getting dangerous, and something had to be done about it, something had to give.

I’m weird, and I’m proud of it. I’m wired in such a way that I don’t impress many people. In fact, I’ve always felt life an outsider. I’ve always been a loser. I suck at sports. I have zero charisma. I often make people uncomfortable because I’m content to sit in silence observing the world through a wide-angled lens. I don’t need much to make me happy. I could spend all day walking along a stream singing to myself with my head in the clouds, the breeze on my face, and not a care in the world. I have ADHD, so I often zone out, have difficulty participating in conversations, unless it’s a conversation with myself, but even then, everyone else fades into an oblique peripheral. People tend to desire conformity; the word conform is very similar to comfort. There’s a time and a place for comfort, but it needs to be confronted by stretching ourselves beyond that which we find familiar, which I do every time I have to talk with another person.

I am a helper. I want to do everything for everyone. I give and give and give, and everyone else takes me for granted and fails to respond with any appreciation for all of my sacrifice. They take advantage of me and my generosity. No one seems to understand that I have needs too and that they need to meet my needs as reciprocation for everything I do for them. I slide into anger and feel a desperate need to control everything around me when my needs are not getting met. How do I escape this continuous pattern of everyone else disrespecting me, not appreciating me, and throwing all their garbage in my face as if I’ve done something wrong? I don’t get it. All I do is help and get treated like crap in return. What more could I possibly do?

You can stop. Hit the pause button and get still with yourself. Where does this need for approval come from? What motivates you to do so much for other people who may not need or want your help? Do your gifts come with strings attached (I’ll do this for you so you will do this for me)? Does your helping prevent others from doing things for themselves? Are they really so incapable? How does your continually stepping in to do something for them make them feel? Have you ever asked? Do you care? Are you entitled to help and to give just to make everyone else obligated to thank you, to fawn over you with gratitude and praise? What are your real motives? Are you the only one who’s good enough to do it right? Are you trying to make up for past feelings of guilt? Are you giving in order to ease your own shame of being a flawed human being? Learn to love and accept yourself just as you are and you won’t need to get into such power struggles by using your current pattern: trying to earn love through helping and giving too much.

Feelings often get stuck in our bodies when we don’t allow ourselves to feel them. If I feel sad about how about how someone else has treated me, I need to be honest with myself about how I’m feeling and allow myself some time to get really sad and upset about it instead of pretending to be okay when I’m not. Another tactic I often use is distraction. If I choose to watch a movie or otherwise try to push it out of my mind, it’ll only come back stronger at a less convenient time. However, if I speak my truth and feel my feelings, though, they dissipate on their own. The more I try to control my feelings, the stronger the grip they have on me. Acceptance of what has happened and acceptance of how I feel regarding what has happened are the only sure way to keep the feelings flowing instead of stopping up my emotions like a clogged pipe. Let it flow. Let it flow. Be honest, open, and then vulnerable. The pain in our lives will continue to control us and be our driving force until we stop fighting it and allow ourselves to integrate the emotions into the realm of our daily human experience.

There are two types of people: controllers and controlees. And yes, there are also people in this world who are responsible enough to assume control over their own lives and empathetic enough not to need to exert control over others. Those are the type of people I strive to emulate. However, I grew up as a controlee with a controller older sister. As if coming into this world as an overly caring, overly sensitive, and overly kind person isn’t hard enough, I was also raised in a household where I was practically attached at the hip to a narcissistic, controlling person. We didn’t just grow up in the same house; we grew up in the same bedroom, often sharing the same bed. We had to share all our toys, all our friends, and we even had the same birthday. We were the embodiment of Hegel’s Master/Slave philosophy. She needed to have me to boss around, and I needed her to tell me what to do because I was incapable of making an assertive decision on my own. I was too afraid of hurting someone else, and too afraid of experiencing more rejection, which occurred daily for me. If no one else rejected me, I projected it onto myself because it was such a strong expectation. To numb the hurt, I dissociated. I first became addicted to the television, then to fantasizing (which I refer to as “theater of the mind”). Then, I fell into full-blown sex addiction. It wasn’t until I got into 12-Step recovery, nearly ten years ago now, that I finally began to heal. I started to learn how to take responsibility for my own choices, how to ask for what I needed, and how to stand up for myself when I thought my boundaries were being violated.

According to neuroscience, “we can use awareness, the mental experience of consciousness, to intentionally alter the structure of the brain.”[i] How mind blowing is that? Read it again. “We can use awareness, the mental experience of consciousness, to intentionally alter the structure of the brain.” We can intentionally alter the physical structure of our brains by paying attention to what we’re thinking and choosing to think something else. Anything else. When we interrupt the firing pattern of neurological synapses, we make it more difficult for our brain to repeat the same pattern in the future. The reverse is also true. The more we allow our brains to go on autopilot, repeating the same old messages, running the same old programming, the more we reinforce that firing pattern and make our brain more likely to repeat it in the future. We have got to get this simple concept through our thick skulls. If I keep thinking the same things I’ve always thought, I’m going to keep getting the same results I’ve always got.

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[i] Daniel Siegel. The Developing Mind 15

Addiction really is a swirling vortex of doom. When I was alone in my little one-bedroom apartment, I remember thinking that my life was stuck in a downward spiral, a whirlpool of misery from which there was no escape. And I was right. Each negative experience generated a new negative expectation, and each negative expectation generated the next negative experience. There was no stopping it. It was a continuous cycle that I was not able to break on my own. It required intervention. Did I get thrown? Yes. Was I injured? Yes. Did it hurt? Hell yes. Did I eventually heal and crawl my way out of the trench I had dug for myself? Yes, or at least, I’m working on it. Ascending from a grave I had spent most of my life digging was going to take time, effort, and a lot of intentionality. But I was willing to do whatever it took to get sober. And it took going to meetings. It took working with a sponsor. It took letting go of all I had previously clung to as my lifeline of hope and taking ahold of something greater, something I had always known existed but was never willing to rely on, connection.