Al-Anon pt 3: Fertile Ground

And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: a sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.
- Luke 8:4-7

Al-Anon's self defeatist message found fertile ground with me. There were so many of this cult's ideas I'd already absorbed from mainstream and fundamentalist Christianity.

Inherently Defective
Al-Anon taught me, like Christianity, that I am inherently flawed and defective, and only my Higher Power can fix this. No amount of effort, learning, therapy, wisdom, or charity I do can make up for the flaws I was born with - a sinful nature or codependency. However, confessing my powerlessness, my sinfulness is only the first step. In the case of both religions, this creates the need for the group or church to fill. I must attend meetings (or services) at least once a week if I expect God to fix me. After all, I must do my own part of my salvation too, even though my part will never be sufficient. I am fallen and I am powerless. It's up to God (as I understand him) to come save me now.

Learned Helplessness
"All have fallen short of the glory of God" and "We admitted we were powerless." Both of these messages, from Christianity and Al-Anon, take away our impetus to create positive change in our own lives. In Al-Anon I was told repeatedly to "Let go and let God" and to just leave other people to their own devices and character defects. I needed to keep "my side of the street clean" and not worry about that mote in my brother's eye (or bottle in my husband's hand.) At a time when I needed help and empowerment the most, I had my legs kicked out from under me by a bunch of bitter people who probably would have been far happier if they'd just left their alcoholic spouses and bypassed the Steps completely.

Acceptable Abuse

They had stayed, so I should stay. I "shouldn't make any major decisions for the first six months" - really the first year, but I had it wrong at the time. I found out, after telling my sponsor I'd finally broken things off with my husband who belittled, raped, and abused me, that I was really supposed to stick in there another six months before making that choice, since I hadn't yet completed the steps or attained Serenity. I remember feeling profound relief that no one had told me that before hand, because i didn't think I could take another six months of torture, but I was glad I didn't have to knowingly choose to go against one of Al-Anon's principles in order to escape it.

As a Christian child, I knew it was right and godly of my parents to abuse me physically and emotionally. After all, they were following the Bible and Focus on the Family, so they must be right. It simply wasn't safe enough to question authority for me to even consider it. My brother tried that, and he'd been kicked out of the house at 12. But the idea that I should take a certain amount of abuse as my lot in life, and what's more that I'd somehow earned the abuse through my own actions, was an idea I learned early and it took decades to break. My family treated me horribly, and I was fighting an uphill battle to become a person and not just a cult clone. I married badly.

But Al-Anon would have me believe that my fledgling, ill-conceived and frankly never willingly consummated marriage (spousal rape doesn't count) held the weight of my entire integrity, my word, my vow. They made it more serious than it was. I mean yes, I wanted to have a family with him. I married him. But I quickly learned that he was an absolutely horrible human being. He got so drunk one night, he peed out the living room window screen because he thought it was the bathroom toilet. And that wasn't the first time he'd made an error of that kind. (There was also, for instance, his ex-roommate's vacuum cleaner.)

Al-Anon told me I needed to take the focus off of him and his actions, and instead I needed to look for my part in his drinking. Bear in mind, we'd been married all of 10 weeks when I separated from him, taking my son and moving into my mother's. That's when I started going to Al-Anon. I wasn't even with him for three months before leaving, but because I thought Al-Anon told me to wait six months (really a year), I spent twice as long separated from him and trying to work things out as I did living with him as man and wife.

God Micro-Manages

I had been taught to believe in the power of prayer before I'd been taught to read. I believed that I had both free will and a sinful nature, and that the god who gave me free will would intervene in my life and others. Even though God had some overarching multi-millenial Divine Plan, he would fiddle around with the daily minutiae like lost keys, insufficient funds, or bad traffic, if I asked him to.

Bill Wilson's Higher Power is a meddling god. Free will is talked about much less often in 12 Step programs than traditional Sunday morning churches (sorry Adventists.) "Self will" is considered a sin in Al-Anon, the way that the "Adam nature" or "flesh" was sinful in my childhood brand of learned helplessness.

Perpetual Confession
In Christianity I was taught that when I "sinned", the real problem wasn't the people I may have hurt. No, no. The great offense of course was that I'd sinned against God. He was the one who I had hurt the most. Remember, he died for my sins, so the least I could do is make his death meaningless by never sinning again. Since that was bound to be impossible (as Christianity generally is), my only alternative was confession for each and every offense.

At deliverance camp the pastor had us write down a detailed list of all our sins, past and present, great and small. In Al-Anon this would be known as a "fearless and searching moral inventory" or the 4th Step. Christianity had already taught me that I have been judged, and found wanting in the balance. Al-Anon just continued the lesson.

Christianity was fundamentally destructive to my self-esteem as a child, teenager, and young woman. Original sin is a terrible weight to assign every newborn on the planet, and I don't see how I worshiped a god for so long who I believed did exactly that.

Marriage is Sacred (Except When it's Not)

My mother was divorced. My father was not a good husband so, well and good. He was feckless and unfaithful and on one occasion - and one only - he struck her. I could understand and at least some other Christians could as well. My mother had to write a letter to the Christian school we attended, justifying her divorce, in order to get a job teaching computer classes to the high school students. But they had given her the position, and treated her well once she was hired.

My grandmother had been divorced twice. She absolutely should have left her second husband, a darker version of my father's same sins, much sooner than she did. But my grandfather, her first husband, was a good man. She left him because their daughter died at 10 weeks old of a congenital heart defect, and she couldn't be in that house a day longer. Marriage is sacred, unless you've got a good excuse.

In Al-Anon it was the same. The pressure to stay was subtle but constant. The greatest success story couple at my home meeting had been married for 50 years - 27 of them abusive, 23 in 12 step groups. These were the role models of everyone in the room, and so all advice I got was tinged with this poison of the mind - that if you just followed the steps, even the worst marriage could become enviable. Yet if an old-timer, automatically respected for their longevity in the cult, had been divorced three times or more, it was none of my concern and I needed to focus on my self, and work a selfish program, and not try to control people and situations in my life. (Because after all, doing that makes your life unmanageable.)

Some Feelings are Wrong

As a child, I was taught it was a sin to fear, since fear meant not trusting God. Al-Anon told me the same thing. FEAR was nothing more than "false evidence appearing real" and I really needed to just focus on working my Steps and turning my will over to my Higher Power. There was no sense in recognizing fear as a useful warning emotion, and investigating why I had the fears I did (including fears of my husband's possible behavior.)

I was also told "in the rooms" that resentment was always, always, without exception or fail WRONG. The "defilements" of my demon-haunted childhood were replaced with the "resentments" of my 20s. These were the things (almost without fail, just as in Christianity, done by others or merely by environment) holding me back from my "spiritual awakening" and serenity. Resentments were so bad and so inherently self-destructive that I should not only get rid of all current ones, but should do everything in my (powerless) power to prevent them. I remember the day I first heard this sentence and thought it was brilliant.

"Expectations are premeditated resentments."

If I didn't place expectations on people, like the alcoholic, then I wouldn't be so disappointed. Al-Anon taught me, like Christianity, to lower my standards for how well I should be treated. After all, I was a sinner. I was sick - just as sick as the alcoholic, even though my "disease" of codependency had no physical effects at all.

It Will Never Get Better

Even though I was saved by the grace of Jesus (and certainly not by works, so that no man may boast!) I would still always struggle with sin. Being a Christian doesn't make you perfect, just forgiven, and so I would constantly fail at perfection. Al-Anon told me that I had a spiritual disease of codependency, that I was sick and that I would always be sick, and that the best I could hope for was to let go and let god, and hope he did a better job of running my life than I did. After all, my "best thinking got me here" so it was obvious I was not an empowered person capable of making good decisions for myself.

Al-Anon is not a self-help group. It is a self-annihilation group. And it needs to be stopped.

More soon. This post took a lot out of me. Writing about my ex-husband is always extremely difficult. I have a whole mixture of emotions like betrayal, and fear, and humiliation (what the fuck was I thinking marrying that creep?) But I know writing will make me feel better, and I'm at least more emotionally capable of approaching those dark and scary stories now than I was a few months ago. Hopefully the writing flow continues and improves. Much love to all my Anteaters!

* Throughout the 12 Step posts I'll use certain slogans and phrases that were spoken a lot "in the rooms" (like "in the rooms" which refers to 12 Step meetings collectively.) Sometimes I'll remember to put air quotes around them, but sometimes I won't. Cults use buzzwords and slogans as thought-stopping devices, and it's only by recognizing them as such that we can strip them of power over us. So I will use the cult-speak of those days, in the hopes that current and former 12 Steppers who find these posts will be able to recognize in their own meetings and literature the things I'm saying.

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My time in Al-Anon pt. 2

The first post is available here.

In Al-Anon meetings we hear the three Cs describing our powerlessness over alcoholism: we didn't cause it, can't cure it, and can't control it. We begin to learn the basic Al-Anon premise of taking our focus off of the alcoholic and keeping the focus on ourselves. Hard as it is to look at our own part in our problems, acceptance of Step One brings relief from impossible responsibilities. We were trying to fix a disease - and someone else's disease at that!

Powerlessness. The first step of Al-Anon, like the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous and a whole host of other 12 step groups, begins with powerlessness. The biggest problem in my life - my husband's drinking - was out of my control. I wanted to cure him. I didn't want to give in to the idea that he must drink forever, and these people seemed to believe their spiritual principles would help him quit and stay sober, and maybe even find this "serenity" they all spoke of.

But Al-Anon said, even though 12 Steps was the best shot at sobriety he had, I couldn't cure him or control him. But he wouldn't go to the meetings. He always had some excuse why he didn't want to go, even if I offered to drive him. For all his talk of not wanting me to leave him, he wasn't making any effort to keep me.

Still, it was time to take my focus off of him and turn it to myself. Like most of the advice I got from Al-Anon, this was double-edged. As a brand new mom in financial straits and poor health, I had a lot of my own stuff to focus on, and being away from Roni and his problems was good for me. But it also invited me to ignore his bad behavior. After all, I shouldn't worry about that mote in his eye till I'd done an exhaustive "moral inventory" of everything I'd ever done wrong in my entire life and confessed it to my sponsor.

Of course, I hadn't caused Roni's alcoholism or his "problem drinking" and Al-Anon was quick to tell me that. Just as quickly, Al-Anon let me know it was important that I look at "my part" in his drinking. Let me say that another way: I can't cause, cure, or control his drinking, but I need to focus on my part of his drinking problem.

They kept telling me alcoholism was a disease. My husband loved that. He would remind me, gleefully ad manipulatively, "You took a vow before GOD to love me in sickness and in health. I have a disease! It's not my fault." But even as I accepted most of what Al-Anon told me unquestioned, it seemed like an imperfect analogy to me.

Maybe some people do have an allergic or addictive response to alcohol. They shouldn't drink. It's just incredibly simple to me. Okay, that's probably over simplisitc. I know I'm not a big fan of people saying the cure for anorexia is to "just eat" but really, that IS what an anorexic must do to recover. The most I could ever swallow the "addiction as disease" model was to think it might be like diabetes. Some people really do just have to abstain from sugar, and some from alcohol.

Still, they stressed, it was a spiritual disease. I should treat him just the same as if he had lung cancer. But having lung cancer doesn't make people violent. Drinking alcohol did for my husband (even worse was when the buzz wore off.)

I tried to get myself in line with Al-Anon principles. I tried to accept my powerlessness, my lack of agency. Later steppers would assure me this would be freeing. Once I turned my life over to God and quit trying to run things myself (which I was obviously no good at, or else why would I have to come to Al-Anon?) everything would be great.

Having a "conscious contact" with a "Higher Power" has nothing to do with stopping drinking. Of course, at the time I was very religious. Nothing drew me closer to God than a desperate attempt to salvage my marriage and to be a good godly wife and mother. I hadn't meant to play the part so soon, but I was damn skippy going to do a good job of it, now that I'd landed the role.

So how could I be the best I knew how, while getting myself out of "denial" and accepting my own powerlessness? A sponsor would guide me on that path.

(More to come soon.) Excerpt from "Paths to Recovery: Al-Anon's Steps, Traditions, and Concepts and use under Fair Use terms.

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My time in Al-Anon pt. 1

I've answered a couple Formspring questions on AA and 12 Step groups recently, and I've talked about why I think they are cults. What I haven't talked about in any depth is my own experience with these groups. This will be a series of posts, mixing in current research and data and my own memories of my two years in Al-Anon. I will try to show why I believe they are a cult, and provide evidence to back up my claim.

Initial Impression

I knew Roni's drinking and drug abuse was a primary cause of our marital strife. I thought if I could just get him to quit drinking, then we could work on everything else. I could hold my marriage together through sheer effort and force of will. I picked up a book on "Seven Keys to Sobriety." Apparently, if I just spent a few hundred dollars on vitamin supplements and kept my husband locked up somewhere for a week, I could detox him through the healing powers of alternative medicine and make him a brand new man. Unfortunately, I didn't have the couple thousand bucks it would have cost to do such a thing, before even looking at the expense of an inpatient addiction recovery center. We were going to have to do this on the cheap.

So I looked at Alcoholics Anonymous. I'd only ever heard good things about the group, and I'd even recommended on a vague sense of their good reputation that a high school boyfriend attend Ala-Teen meetings, to get help coping with his dad's excessive drinking and the violence that went on in their home.

I decided to attend an Al-Anon meeting. I'd heard it was a support group for the family and friends of alcoholics, and I sure needed some support. I had, after all, just gotten married, had a baby, and separated from my husband to go live with my disapproving mother. I had also just undergone unanesthetized surgery at a walk-in clinic to remove a staph infection that was killing me, and I had a broken ankle I couldn't afford to have looked at by a doctor.

I had my mom go with me and the baby, since I couldn't exactly drive with my broken right ankle. We got to the Methodist church and school about a mile down the road and looked for the meeting. It was in one of the classrooms -upstairs. I had brought my son's stroller, because I thought that would make it easy for my mom to keep him placated while I listened, but I hadn't counted on stairs. Two AA guys, meeting in the room next door, were kind enough to hoist the stroller up the stairs while my mom carried my son, and I hobbled up the stairs with my crutches, in a too-large borrowed walking cast.

My first impression was that the people in the meeting were off somehow. I told my mom as we left that they seemed like cult members. Some things stood out as "not quite right" like the part one lady read aloud about "only conference approved Al-Anon literature may be read." I was reading everything I could on addiction and alcoholism, and it seemed weird to limit myself to just one possible course of action. But, the women assured me, there really was no other way my husband would get sober. He needed AA and he needed it now.

Well, it was worth a shot. They themselves advised that I attend six meetings before deciding whether or not Al-Anon was right for me. So, it wasn't like I had to make up my mind right away. I could just check it out for a few more weeks, and I could always leave if I didn't like it, right?

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The Last Straw

This is part 2 of the excerpt "The Last Week" detailing the end of my marriage. Part 1 is available here.

I sat in the bend the huge blue sectional, with mountains of laundry piled up on either side and the baby in bouncer in front of me, and cried. It seemed like I was crying all the time. Ronnie and I fought constantly. He hadn't quit drinking when I had moved in, like he had promised, or when we got married, or after the honeymoon. Now our son was born and I was struggling to find a way to keep our rent and electric bills paid, but there was perpetually a 12-pack of Budweiser in the fridge. When we'd first met, he was drinking Miller High Life and other cheaper beers, but since we got married, he was enjoying the fruits of my better paying job.

I was in pain, with my right ankle propped up in front of me. I had spent the day taking care of Little Man and doing laundry - five loads of the Little Man's cloth diapers, my spit-up and milk stained shirts, and Ronnie's dirty work clothes and aprons - by crawling from the couch to the stacked washer/dryer in our front closet. I'd never wanted a cast so badly in my life.

...

I looked at the clock on the bedside table - 2 am. I was alone in the bed. Little Man was sleeping in a plastic laundry basket lined with blankets beside me and Ronnie was gone. (I'd planned on co=sleeping and we hadn't bought a crib, but then I'd been worried about dropping my son off the bed, or else of Ronnie drunkenly smothering him if I placed him between us.) I sat up in the bed and used the manual breast pump to collect a 6 ounce bottle, then crawled along towards the kitchen to put the bottle in the fridge.

I came out of the room and saw the kitchen light on and heard voices. What the hell was RJ doing over here at 2 in the bleeding morning? I hastily buttoned my pajama top and, using the wall beside me, rose up to standing and started to hobble their way. It wasn't RJ - it was some man I'd never met before. He and Ronnie didn't notice me at first.

*Sniff!* Ronnie straightened up and caught my eye, a rolled up dollar stuck in his nose, making him look utterly stupid and pathetic. It wasn't the worst thing he'd done, by far, it was simply the last. He'd promised to quit drinking, and had lied. He'd spent money we didn't have on things we didn't need. He'd yelled at me and humiliated me and stolen my post-partum Percocet. He'd cashed in Little Man's change jar just the week before for weed money. I didn't have the word for it yet, but he'd raped me too. Doing lines of blow with some guy I didn't know off my kitchen counter at 2 o'clock in the morning wasn't the worst thing Ronnie did in our three-month marriage, but it was the last.

I don't remember if I scolded or screamed or just gave him a look of disgust and crawled back to bed. The next day, with the help of my sister's husband, I moved back home to my mother's.

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Coming Out Straight & Other Lies

Because of the strong response I got to yesterday's pro-gay post, and because I'm still pissed that Ugandans are facing imprisonment for the "crime" of being gay, and because that's absolutely ridiculous, I decided to spend more time on ChangeisPossible.com. This story is from a man who claims the program is helping him to lose his Same-Sex Attraction (SSA or homosexuality for non tards.)

Tom's Story
“Out of the forthright admission of one’s frailties and the determined commitment to go on, comes a laminated strength powerful enough to overcome those who have not made such a struggle.” –from “Fantastic,” by Lawrence Lerner

Who the heck is Lawrence Lerner, another cure-the-gay quack? No, Laurence Lerner is the author of Fantastic but that's not the whole title. It should read Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Somehow I doubt that quote is about coming out homosexuality.

By the time, at age 32, I began to seriously address my SSA, I had been struggling with it for so long I could barely remember life without it. There are no words to adequately express how consuming and crippling it was. As I write this, I am thirty-five and continuing on my journey of recovery, moving toward the reclamation of my true masculine potential which lay dormant for so long. Although two and a half years have passed since I decided to finally confront my SSA, the start of this journey seems like it was a lifetime ago. In some ways, it was.

Maybe you could "barely remember" life without homosexuality because you were born gay, and at 35 you are still gay. Not all men are masculine, and almost no men are entirely masculine (though I can sort of see why a program that lionizes machismo might admire Arnold.) I'm including straight men in this category. Just as I know very masculine gay men, I also know some fairly effeminate straight or bisexual men. I know guys who do martial arts and also get manicures. As one friend put it, "Bunch of pretty girls touching me for an hour while I sit in a massage chair? Hell yeah." There are straight men who like to dress nicely, and there are gay men who couldn't care less. This program is such obviously fake bullshit.

It all began when I was six years old. My father was at that time a raging alcoholic, my older brother (seven years older than I) was rebelling against him, and my mother was desperately trying to hold our family together. At about this time I started school, and I began to see how other kids behaved with their parents and how life appeared to be in their homes. I was and am a very sensitive person, very quick to read the surroundings and underlying mood of a situation. I recognized quickly that something was not entirely right in our home, not only with my father but with our entire family. As the years went on, it was very painful to watch my father deteriorate into his addiction, and along with him our family life deteriorated too.

You grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional home. That sucks. Your brother, like my brother, fell into the rebel role. It's not a fun one, but it is actually the healthiest. Your mom became an enabler, and you became an appeaser. I've loved and lived with an active alcoholic before. It's hell. You had a terrible childhood, and you didn't deserve that. I'm sorry it happened to you, but it did not cause your homosexuality.

When I was 10, my mother gave my father an ultimatum: “Stop drinking or I am leaving you!” He did stop, and never touched a drink again. Still, although the nights of wondering if my father would come home drunk ended, I still never felt comfortable with him. Particularly in the early years of his sobriety, it was as if our family was playing a game of make-believe; as if the turmoil caused by his drinking-or the anticipation of that turmoil-had never existed. To this day, my father has never once acknowledged that he was ever wrong. Even after nearly twenty-five years of sobriety, he cannot speak of his drinking days, and worse, he takes no responsibility for them.

My ex-husband didn't respond to my ultimatum the same way, and I'm glad. I think even if he had quit drinking he still would have been an asshole and that man would have died before admitting he'd made a mistake. He absolutely could not have a conversation about what went wrong and how we were gonna fix it. He's probably still an asshole, but he's not my asshole anymore.

As I’ve grown and come to better understand my father, I recognize that he is in many ways what Alcoholics Anonymous calls a “dry drunk,” someone who is no longer drinking but whose thinking is still distorted by the thought patterns of addiction. I also recognized very early on that I would rather die than be like him. It gives me no pleasure to say that; it is in fact profoundly sad to do so. But it is true. While my father was staying sober, my brother-with whom he never got along-was going his own way. My brother had the unique ability to infuriate our father on many occasions. Why couldn’t he just shut up and keep the peace? I made the decision somewhere around the age of 13 that I was never going to be like my brother, either.

AA calls anybody who's not a member of their cult a "dry drunk" (especially atheists.) Your brother was actually the healthy one. He was "going his own way" and going against your father - of course it caused friction, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong thing to do. I'm glad I rebelled. It was important to get practice making different choices, so that when I became a mom, I was able to be a completely different kind of parent. Now I've found love, and it's nothing like what my family or my ex gave me. But I had to learn to go against them and go against the way things had always been, and rebelling gave me years of practice.

During those turbulent years, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was to protect my mother. In my view, she’d been through enough. My father’s insensitivity to her, the stress she took on mediating between my brother and father, the pain the entire situation caused her-it was too much. I vowed that I would never hurt her. I would be the perfect son. In the process I became her sounding board, in a sense her emotional “husband.” To say I became overly attached to her is an understatement.

My mother tried to make me into her co-victim, too. I fell for it for years, but one day I woke up and I realized she should have done more to protect me. Just as surely as your father hurt you, your mother let him. She is no better than the omnipotent god who sits by and watches as priests rape children and cults poison minds and kill people. Also, you've trapped yourself in with always/never thinking - you'll never be like your dad, never like your brother, never hurt your mother... It's a lot for one kid or adult to handle.

Meanwhile, I was discovering that my extreme sensitivity and lack of athletic ability in a hyper-masculine hometown were crippling me. I did not fit in with the other boys. I was passive, afraid to fight. I liked to dress nicely, and I was weak and overweight. I felt in some ways, really in many ways, crushed by the circumstances of my life. I wanted to be someone else. By this time I was 13, in the spring of the seventh grade, and now my SSA began.

It sounds like you've been getting the message that you "ought" to be more masculine for a long time; that's unfortunate. There is nothing wrong with being sensitive to others' feelings or to dressing with care. While it is of course preferable to be healthy rather than unhealthy, it doesn't determine who you are or how much you matter. Trust me - losing the weight alone, without learning to love yourself, will never make you happy. You hit puberty, and your sexuality woke up. That's normal. For gay teens, that means being attracted to people of the same gender.

The first boy I became attracted to was a year older than I, and he was everything I could have been “if only.” He was smart, athletic, preppy, and seemed very nice. At that point I didn’t consciously think it was weird for me to be constantly thinking about this guy. What I remember asking myself was, How can I be more like him? How can I turn into him? How can I get him to like me?

As I entered high school, I re-experienced those feelings for other boys. They were always the same-lean, preppy, baby-faced, safe. I studied how they dressed and acted, what they liked and tried to emulate them. Above all else, I worked hard to get them to like me and be my closest friends. The tension and excitement that this all-consuming quest caused me cannot be overstated. I often masturbated while thinking about them, trying to relieve the anxiety that all of those feelings caused. Yet I remained in deep denial about the nature of my feelings.

I think probably a lot of us who felt uncool in middle and high school formed these kind of hero-worship infatuations. I certainly followed after a few alpha-females during my years of insecurity. And I'm attracted to woman who I would want to look like - I am pretty femme, and I'm more usually attracted to thin, femme women. It's what I find beautiful both in myself and in other women.* I dated girls and women of all different builds though, just as I've formed meaningful and sexual relationships with people who I didn't necessarily think were gorgeous the moment I met them. However, I most frequently fantasized those women I found most appealing - duh.

In the rare moments when I reflected on what I was doing, I recognized that it was highly unlikely that these boys, whom I so admired, felt the same way about me. But this didn’t stop me-my emotional cravings and need for belonging were too strong. Time after time, no matter what guy I pursued, obsessed over, and longed to be with, every single time I got my heart broken in some way. Nothing ever worked out the way I wanted it to. Before long I would turn my attention toward someone else, and the same thing would happen all over again.

It doesn't sound like you were pursuing mutually satisfying healthy relationships, and you had a poor self-image. That's a terrible combination for early dating years and I remember it well as sucking royally. However, I'm still hearing a lot of "always/never" statements - time after time, every single time, nothing ever worked, all over again - and those suggest to me a distorted image of what was really going on. My grandmother was a monster who led to the deaths of dozens of innocent children, yet even she had moments of kindness. Perhaps the only absolute statement we can make is that nobody is all one thing or another. So it's possible those boys would have liked you, were attracted to you, or would have enjoyed being your friend. It's easy to put someone unattainable on a pedestal - it's much harder to be someone's friend.

My religious tradition was Roman Catholic, and my SSA feelings were a source of guilt and shame to me. I had “girlfriends,” but only because it was what was expected of me. I would never have admitted to anyone that my feelings for guys were stronger and more intense than what I felt for girls. It was an exercise in stamina and required tremendous acting to pretend that I was “normal.”

Ah, now we get to it. The reason you don't want to be gay is because you were taught, brainwashed really, into believing that a Sky Daddy god wanted you to dig chicks. If you had instead come out of the closet, particularly if you'd been in a loving and supportive environment of accepting people, you could have discovered what satisfying emotional and sexual relationships with men could be like. You could have made gay friends and boyfriends and had a full and meaningful life as a gay man. Instead you were a gay man trapped in a straight facade, unable to enjoy the company of women or have the relationship you sought with men. That's heartbreaking. And it's an indictment on religion, not on homosexuality.

In the summer between seventh and eighth grades, a man I had come to trust and tried to emulate offered me a ride home from an event. I was shocked when he started asking me questions about how often I masturbated, how I did it, and whether I liked it. His questions made me extremely uncomfortable, but I wanted his attention too much to say so. Then, after a few minutes of this kind of talk, he softly said, “Show me how you do it.”

It has been twenty-one years since this incident took place and I still cannot adequately explain the fear I experienced in that moment. Why did I accommodate him? Why did I do what he asked? Because I was afraid-too afraid not to. I was afraid that if I didn’t do what he wanted, he wouldn’t like me anymore.

As I complied with his request and pulled down my pants, he took one look at me and then began to mock and laugh. I was humiliated beyond words. Even more confusing, minutes later, as he continued to drive me home, he kept talking about nothing in particular, as if the incident never had happened. In the months and years to come I saw this man frequently and he never again asked me to do such a thing. But what he did, which was perhaps even more devastating, was continue to belittle me as he had done during the incident.

You trusted someone and he exploited your vulnerabilities and your age for his own sick ends. I'm sorry. I used to ask myself, why did I keep going back to Pam's house where her dad would molest me? Because as awful as it was, on some level, I realized that at least someone was paying attention to me. You were starved for love and for attention and this man hurt you, and then mocked you, and never apologized for what he did.

I promised myself not to speak of that event to anyone-never, ever. I tried to put it out of my mind, but for the next two decades I carried it within me, feeling deep shame and confusion. As I got older, I heard about other boys who’d had absolutely horrifying experiences of sexual abuse over long periods of time. I tried to convince myself that my own experience was really nothing-a moment too insignificant to remember. But in my heart I knew that simply wasn’t true.

That was a really unhealthy response. Talking about sexual abuse makes it less shameful, less personal, and less terrible. And it really does no good to compare our pain to someone else's. I remember even as a little girl in group therapy, feeling so grateful that the man who molested was someone else's dad, and not mine. Out of all the girls in there, I was the only one who hadn't been touched by a dad, stepdad, fosterdad, fosterbrother, granddad, uncle, or mom's boyfriend. Yet my pain was sufficient to need help and healing and someone to talk to. There is no minimum threshold for sexual abuse that is okay and not worth remembering or recovering from. Any abuse is destructive and needs to be addressed.

Meanwhile, even as I tried to pursue a normal life, my attraction to guys continued. There were still girlfriends, too, but as soon as our relationships led to intimacy, whether physical or emotional, an automatic barrier closed in around me. Finally, after “fooling myself” for a couple of years, when I was 24 I concluded it was very likely that I was gay.

Ten years after you noticed your first attractions for guys, you concluded you were gay? Okay well then when you look back on the "unhappiness" of your gay life, remember that you were made miserable by religious guilt and pretending to be something you're not. The homosexuality itself wasn't the problem, just how your religion and family made you feel about it, and your decision to try to bury your feelings rather than meet your needs.

Now I actively began to seek out other gays. I wanted to explore my feelings further, even though I felt almost nauseated every time I did so. Gradually my emotional attachments to men turned into physical relationships. Every time it happened, I came away more sad, confused, lonelier than ever, and sickened by my behavior. I tried to convince myself that everything was OK, but something inside me knew very well that it was not.

You jumped into physical intimacy before you had become comfortable with your sexuality. That's bound to cause pain, especially if you've been brought up to believe that homosexuality is somehow evil, unnatural, or wrong. That sense of nausea you describe isn't typical of healthy emotional or sexual encounters.

This pattern of playing straight while having a double life went on for the next three years, until the night I met the man who would ultimately set me on the path to self-recovery. He was the ultimate combination of all the qualities I had sought for the past fourteen years. He was impossibly good looking, preppy, baby-faced, physically unimposing-everything I had ever desired in one package. I fell not into love but into an obsession that I now shudder to think about. I clearly remember thinking, if I could win his friendship, my life would be complete. I was convinced that, with him beside me, my life of longing and loneliness would be over.

The fact that you were "playing straight while having a double life" tells me you never experienced life as an openly gay man, dating other openly gay men and being comfortable with your sexuality. One person can never fill the hole left by our parents. We have to fill that with friends and lovers and therapists over many years, but we can get better. We can't rely on one person to make us happy, though, no matter how much we might admire them and be aroused by them. I have been convinced though, that gaining one simple unattainable thing (thinness) would make me happy. It didn't. It was insufficient to meet my need.

For the next year and a half, I pursued him with sick determination. And every time I went out of my way to prove myself to him, every time I sacrificed, every time I drove past by his house in the middle of the night, I knew deep inside that I was in serious trouble. To the best of my knowledge, he never knew the extent of my feelings. Or maybe he did. The point is my yearnings were never reciprocated. Worse than that, I got the feeling he didn’t really care at all.

Again, this sounds like a very unhealthy way of dealing, although I can recognize you didn't have good modeling of emotional management or wish fulfillment growing up. If you had been an openly gay man in a community of gay friends, you would probably have been protected from some of the worst aspects of this unhealthy obsession and unrequited desire.

The pain was crippling. I could never stop thinking about him, and to alleviate my obsession, I impulsively went out in the middle of the night to hook up sexually with the first guy I could find. This went on for months, until one winter night, I sat down alone in my apartment, lonelier and more isolated than I had ever been. I cried bitterly, thinking of the wreckage my life had become, thinking of all the men I had pursued, especially over the last year. I wrote down a vow that I fully intended to keep, even if I didn’t know how to do so. All I knew was that this emotional torture could not go on. This will never happen again! I promised myself. Of course my SSA desires continued despite my best intentions. For the next few years, I emotionally cut myself off, despite the fact that I occasionally slipped up and hooked up when the craving became too strong. Three years after I made my vow, and after I repeatedly broke it without really wanting to, I admitted to myself that I needed help.

Acting-out sexual behaviors, like hooking up with the first guy you can find because you're unhappy, is unhealthy. Like so many other aspects of your story, it's also understandable. Again, if you'd been openly gay and in supportive friendships and relationships with other gay people (instead of just obsessing over one man and having meaningless sex with others) you probably would not have been nearly so unhappy. You might have had friends or close romantic relationships. You might have been fulfilled, but when you were pretending to be straight, and fantasizing about an unattainable man, you had sex out of misery, not love or desire or intimacy or fun.

I dated a Catholic. He would periodically decide that he felt horrible guilt over his heathen lifestyle (that I quite enjoyed) and would go confess to his priest, and then make vows not to touch beer or women or pot again. These were ridiculous promises for him to make, and only amplified his sense of guilt. Like a perfectionist trying to do the impossible, you were trying to make yourself be straight by sheer force of will. And sexuality isn't a choice; if it was, I imagine fewer people would be gay because Christians in our society so often treat gay people unfairly.

But my fear of seeking help was overwhelming. What would I find out if I actually talked to someone about my life? Was I truly gay? Was there any hope for change? I continued to struggle with these questions for close to a year. At last, shattered by one more intolerable relationship, I finally did a search on the Web for some kind of an organization that could help men like me. I found the International Healing Foundation website, where I read, “No one is born with SSA.”

That was it. I had been right all along. I wasn’t supposed to be gay.

Well, if you'd talked to PFLAG, an SGA, or anybody else who wasn't a quack, you would have found out that about 1 out of 10 American men are gay, and that isn't an insult to their character or anything else; they just happen to like dudes. Instead you found an organization that promised to remove your homosexuality, which is impossible. You weren't right all along. That's okay - I've been wrong about a great many things, more things than I have been right about. But I continue to grow and learn and get healthier. I no longer believe in God, I no longer think I suck, and I am no longer miserable.

Then I read Richard Cohen’s book Coming Out Straight. I identified with so much of what he wrote and recognized in myself several of the causes of SSA that he listed. I learned that I was a classic SSA male-extremely sensitive, with an alcoholic and abusive father, a very close connection to my mother, and a history of sexual abuse. This confirmed what I had always suspected, that my SSA feelings did not happen by accident. After wrestling with my fears a little longer, I made an appointment to talk to Richard.

Your dad's drinking, your mom's enabling, and your unhappy childhood didn't make you gay - they made you unhappy. Richard Cohen is a hack who exploits people's pain and loneliness for his own sick ends, much like the man who took advantage of you as a boy. And I've learned to be suspicious of a cure that "confirmed what I had always suspected" and to instead question what I've always believed. After all, just like you, I grew up in an abusive, unhealthy, dysfunctional home. I didn't get good models of sex, love, parenting, money management, healthcare, or work/life balance. I've had to look for sources that disagreed with the teachings of my family - religious and guilt-laden, like your own - to find real healing.

I thought we could figure all this out in his office, just between the two of us, until he stressed to me the importance of reaching out to other people. Tell other people? He had to be kidding. But he affirmed and reaffirmed this necessity, until I finally agreed to try. “You’d better be right about this!” I warned him.

Before long I discovered that I was blessed with a handful of men in my life with whom I could share the most intimate details of what I’d been through. These men were fantastic. I kept them and Richard captive for hours on end, talking through the heartaches, disappointments and failures I had never talked about to any one before. It was radical for me to open up like this.

Yes, of course you needed to talk to someone. And it makes sense, both as a gay man and as someone who was abused by a man, that you would want to talk about this with men. You were finally open with people about who you were, even though you were trying to change it, and you began to form healthy, strong, intimate relationships with other men on an emotional level, rather than an obsessive or hookup level. If only you'd been doing this in the context of accepting yourself, you could be very far on the path to healing from your horrible childhood by now.

Meanwhile, Richard explained that I had to spend the next year reconnecting to my inner child-the wounded little boy within me. Now at first I thought this was crazy. I did not sense any connection to any child, inner or otherwise. But I slowly realized that it was indeed my inner child who had to be healed, not the 33-year-old adult. This process was not easy, and it took a lot of time for me to connect with my inner child, because “he” had been hurt so deeply. I learned that I had to become a loving father to him-the kind of father I’d never had. Only in doing so could I overcome the lifelong pain, fear and loneliness that had led to my SSA. As I followed this healing path, slowly but surely my SSA feelings started to disappear.

Richard Cohen is a homophobic homosexual, unlicensed and kicked out of the American Counseling Association for ethical practices, who takes respected therapeutic principles and then blends them with guilt, Christianity, and cuddling and hurts people badly by convincing them their natural homosexuality is something that needs fixing.

Other difficult issues arose. Confronting the man who had humiliated me became necessary. Looking back, I am still surprised that I was so gung-ho, because being confrontational has never been part of my nature. When the moment finally came, seventeen months after I started my healing of SSA, I can honestly say that I have never felt God’s power more strongly than I did as I spoke to him. As empowering as that experience was, it was still only a part of the larger process of setting things right.

I screamed "You SUCK" at the top of my lungs at my mom. I called my grandmother and let her know I held her responsible for a little boy's death. I felt an exhilarating rush of relief, excitement, and triumph with both of these, but I did not mistake those feelings for the presence of an omnipotent god.

I wish that I could say the attempts I made in connecting with my father had gone well, too, but I learned something I had never considered: That I had the courage and insight to confront my demons, even if he could not. This process of confrontation, of setting things in order, of dealing with the pain, of listening to my inner child, of sharing with other men, and of embracing what I felt was my true nature, slowly but surely took away the underlying fear I had of “losing myself.” At last I am getting to know the man that I was truly meant to be.

I'm all for confronting demons, seriously. This blog and the book I'm writing are both ways I fight my fears and move behind my tragic past into a bright new tomorrow. It's nice that you've found friends, although the fact that your friends are invested in you becoming straight may place additional burdens on you. It will probably take you even longer to come to terms with your sexuality, as a result of following Cohen's teachings.

As I write this, I am in what Richard calls “Stage Four” of the healing journey. My next step is to speak about these things with my mother and heal my opposite-sex wounds. I am not sure how it will turn out, but I am not worried. I hope to establish a relationship with a woman soon, and believe that I will. The healing process takes a lot of time. You cannot rush something like coming out of SSA. But I can say with certainty that I cannot imagine returning to my past behaviors. I know that change is possible. I am living proof.

You are only proof that brainwashing is possible, and we already knew that. Telling your mom how much she negelcted you, and let your father's alcoholism and rage run your house, is important. It can be cathartic. But it won't make you straight, nothing will. You're a gay man, and the sooner you come to terms with that, the sooner you'll be able to find real love and real peace within yourself. It's sad to think you've wasted two and a half years in this program, and you're still gay. Just accept it - be okay with it. Your religion is nothing but myths, fairy tales, and lies and you are a human, prone to errors, hurt by your protectors, and in pain. Healing those wounds is necessary for happiness, but cannot change your sexual orientation.

That man is 35 years old and has never been in a real relationship. I think this is one of the saddest posts I've ever written. I need ice cream after that. Or at least something humerous to lighten the mood.









* I find lots of things beautiful in women, and think women of every size can be beautiful. I'm only talking about attraction though, and that's naturally a more specific definition.

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My Second Cult

The things that used to confuse me so much are so easy to understand and even easier to mock. Questions like, what about the kittens who died in the worldwide flood? and Why on earth would the Israelites build a cow statue to worship, when it would be so obviously not a real god, since they had made it themselves? Since they'd just seen him curse Egypt with ten spectacular curses - plagues and swarms of frogs! - then part the Red Sea at Moses' prayer and then close it over Pharaoh and his army, saving the Jews once again. And we're supposed to believe that after Moses being up a mountain for a couple days or weeks, they decided to abandon completely this evident, obviously existing and communicating and powerful god, who by the way fed them daily with manna falling from heaven, to build a cow out of their gold jewelry to worship instead?


In the Twelve Step program, people are encouraged to define their own god. Members will say things like, "This pen could be your god if it means something for you, and helps you stay sober." Which sounds great, till you actually read the steps. Steps 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12 are the "give me" list. You just can't in a remotely rationalized way ask a pen to remove your defects of character, or seek to have conscious contact with a pen. (Okay, so there are a few possibilities with the close contact but, yuck.) Of course, one of my main objections to the 12 Step programs is that these steps all relieve the person of responsibility. Combined with the disease model of addiction (you drink too much because you have a disease, like cancer), this allows the alcoholic/addict/gambler/whatever to confess their "sins", be absolved by the group, ask "the god of their understanding" to restore them sanity, care for their lives and their wills, remove their defects of character, to have contact with them, to tell them what to do (knowledge of his will), to give them the power to function, and to provide them with a "spiritual awakening". Notice that nowhere is "God" (pen, doorknob, whatever) actually asked to help the person stay SOBER.

Have I mentioned yet that AA is a cult? I was in Al-Anon for two years, from the week I moved out of my marriage home with my six-week-old little man, through the six months I tried to get my husband in AA and sober and into marriage counseling, and after that through the painfully adolescent experience of living in my mother's house, while attempting to date and have sex and be mother to my own child. (The laundry room people, that's how unwillingly my mom was to let her adult, divorced, obviously sexually active (ahem, child) daughter with her exclusive boyfriend and a condom. Who honestly has laundry room as their first choice location?) Al-Anon is the program for spouses, parents, and children of alcoholics (who the group sincerely hopes are AA members).

Like most people are when they join a cult, I was at an extreme low point in my life. I had just failed at marriage. I had just realized how bad my husband's substance abuse problem really was. (Nothing quite like waking up to pump breast milk at 4 in the morning and finding your husband and a stranger snorting lines off the kitchen counter to make you reevaluate your marriage vows.) I also had a broken ankle, a severe bout with flesh-eating bacteria (ooh, giant purple ghastly belly scars are sexy!), a mother-in-law who attempted to kidnap my son at 10 weeks old, a baby who cried out in pain every night from 6:00 to 9:00 pm., and I had to return to my mother's house, like a dog with my tail between my legs, or like the prodigal daughter, who had squandered her meager inheritance too soon.

That first meeting, my mom went with me. Which was good, since the meeting was on the second floor of a Christian school attached to a church, and I had a broken ankle (and no cast, people, no cast. Or pain killers.) and a baby in a stroller. There was a lot of weekly things - reading all the steps and the welcome message, etc. that I realize now were a subtle form of indoctrination. We read it over and over and over - every single week. Then of course, the whole point of any Twelve Step program is to "work the Steps".


My first sponsor was an English grad student at the university my mom had gone to and taught at, and that I'd attended for one semester before learning I was pregnant. She didn't seem to find it necessary to tell me that she had schizophrenia, however. It ended when she had a break one night, in the parking lot of another meeting. She still came to the group and we were still friends, but I didn't want to take her counsel or advice or pour out my darkest secrets to her. Thes econd woman I asked to be my sponsor seemed to have things much more together. Her husband was "in recovery" and attended AA, and led an AA/Al-Anon couples meeting with her. She lived across the street from the church my mom and I were attending and ran a successful massage therapy business. Her jewelry suggested a hippie attitude, but her shoes indicated she was successful. She was also a bitch who clearly had no respect for me. I figured that out pretty quickly and was able to back off from our arrangement. The third and final sponsor I had was very nice, very busy, and because her teenage daughter had taken the class at the Y, we soon entered into a financial relationship. We talked a few times, but once I learned that her husband and she had married young, divorced, she'd married and divorced someone else, and was now REMARRIED to her 13-year-old daughter's father, I realized I didn't want to take her advice either.

Like a good conspiracy theory or religion, it helps to have some truth on your side. Some of the program and literature suggestions were helpful. I started writing a "gratitude list" - in the midst of that really hard time - and just jotting down all the things I was grateful for: food, a roof even if my mother's, Medicaid for my son, etc. Because I have OCD (and a diagnosis - finally), I've read up a lot on cognitive processing, and meta-cognition and how you can steer your thoughts. OCD is like having ruts in your neural pathways, so that thoughts can get stuck in an obsessive cycle, rather than progressing onto the next thought, and then the one after that. Finding ways to change negative self-talk ("I'm fat, I'm ugly, nobody loves me" to "My body is healthy and I am worth liking" for example) really does help. But the people who were supposed to be helping me were crazy, mean, and foolish. I left because the central part of the Twelve Step program - the sponsor, the person who indoctrinates you and leads you into the cult like a Big Sister in a sorority - was such epic FAIL. Because the program didn't have any standards for mental health or personality or compassion aptitude for who could be a sponsor, it's a really bad idea. If there had been someone more appealing to me at the meeting close enough to my house that my mom would watch my son that one hour a week (another reason I liked going), I might be one of those crazy women who still goes twenty years after her alcoholic husband has died of cirrhosis.

(Is it wrong to hope my ex-in-laws have a handsome life insurance policy on my ex, and that it becomes viable soon, and that then I can sue them for the $6,000+ I'm owed in back child support? Never mind., I don't actually care if it's right or wrong. I'm cool with that little mental fantasy. As a Christian I used to pray my husband would get run over by a city bus, so I could collect money, since I knew he'd never provide for his son any other way.)

All that ramble was to say, what makes the Twelve Step members who design a god of their own understanding, any different from Israelites building a golden calf? Nothing. Which tells me that the Israelites hadn't actually seen any miracles either. If something good happens, even just you learning how to change your own attitude through cognitive therapy techniques, you credit it to god. If something bad happens, it's because you're diseased. Just like religion.

Here's an incredibly thorough site dedicated to outing Alcoholics Anonymous as the cult that it is. OrangePapers.org. This page lays out the AA scores on the Cult Test (100 traits that define a cult). This site is a really great cult info resource in general, but especially for "spiritual" behavior modification programs, like teen boot camps and Twelve Step groups. It's also a really model of how someone could lay out a similar site for, oh I don't know, Mormons? $cientology? The Amish? I'm sure you kids will have fun. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

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