By Richard Reeve

In his carefully scripted response during today’s press conference Tiger Woods began to face the music of his actions in the public arena.  Tiger, unlike many who face similar behavioral difficulties, will never benefit from the gift of anonymity.  The gauntlet of critics lined up for years to come will likely be harsh and relentless.  The ten minutes of diatribe I tuned into on New York sports radio after the speech revealed a level of hostility that has little to do with the actual man who is suffering.  It has all to do with his brand and the power it holds.

None the less, his statement today was filled with all the hallmarks of an individual embarking on recovery.  He used the words amends, and demonstrated that he knows it will not be words but future actions that demonstrate his sincerity in learning to live a life of integrity.

Woods went on to state “I never thought about who I was hurting,” noting that he lived his life believing the rules didn’t apply to him.  He repeated a few times that his failing was rooted in selfishness, echoing the slogan “selfish self-centeredness is the root of our disease.”

Woods also referenced his spiritual roots in Buddhism, indicated though a shared textual passage that he became lost in the world’s illusions. Woods said “Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security.”  He defined his need to reconnect with a spiritual perspective to center his life which is another hallmark of a recovered life.

Woods made an appeal to the families and youth of the world to find “room in your heart to one day believe in me again.”  It’s an interesting request because it recognizes that some will never make that room, regardless of what he does.  Such a recognition shows a level of acceptance of the damage caused by his actions.  A asked a student at our therapeutic boarding school his opinion about Woods and he struggled to express his emotions.  Finally this student said “All I know is that I’ll always see him in a different light now.”

As Woods makes his slow re-entry into the world he will be mocked.  I witnessed this a few weeks ago as airplanes pulled banners around the PGA event at Torrey Pines advertising adult clubs with the messages “We miss you Tiger” and “Rehab Special!”   Again, acceptance will be needed to overcome the mocking.  But not everyone will continue to taunt and mock the man.  If he keeps his word a transformation will be noticeable.  For instance, little things, like the cursing and club throwing  during tour events will likely cease.

For millions that take up the slow walk of recovery, the promises are simple:

“If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.”

These audacious promises are just as valid for Woods as they are from any ordinary Joe.

Finally, his insistence that he is learning to ask for help and that will continue his journey which has no clear time line felt more authentic then the many repetitions in his speech where he stated “I am sorry.”

Time brings healing, and as Woods noted, these are his “first steps.”

By Rita Argiros, Ph. D.

Never Saying Sorry?

When I was 13 the movie Love Story was in the theaters. The most famous phrase from the movie was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” At 13 my personality was prematurely cynical. And I thought that phrase stunk.  All these years, I never felt like I understood my own visceral reaction to the statement. I just “knew” that saying you are sorry was important. Neurologists would tell you that you remake your memories every time you revisit them. So the memory may be a complete fabrication. But my memory of the film and my reaction comes back every time I sit down to think about love and forgiveness.

There must have been plenty of grown-ups who liked Love Story because it was a big box office hit.  But the most important adult opinion in my life at the time was my mother’s and she thought the entire movie was stupid. (I liked the movie a lot. Just hated that tag line). I remember her telling me the story was completely unrealistic. She was always looking for a “realistic romance”.   The movie was perfect for teenage girls.  There are two star-crossed lovers, Oliver and Jenny. Oliver is rich. Jenny is from the working class. He goes to Harvard. She goes to Radcliffe. There is a lot of verbal sparring. She’s gotten to Radcliffe on her intellect. He plays hockey. She is very defensive. He is emotionally open. They fall in love. His father practically disowns him over the relationship. They get married anyway. He becomes a lawyer. They moved to New York. She gets cancer which they discover when they go to the doctor to see if she is pregnant. She dies. Son is reunited with his father in grief. Lots of romance. Lots of tears. Just enough conflict to move the movie along.

Amends and The Family Foundation School

The concept of love is central to everything that we do at The Family Foundation School and I have this fantasy that it is possible to derive all other important values starting only with love,  just the way my 10th grade geometry teacher brought forth an entire geometry starting with only a few simple postulates. So it is important for me to have a good answer to the question, “What’s wrong with the statement, Love means never having to say you’re sorry?” I need an answer that goes beyond a gut feeling that it’s wrong.

With love comes the possibility of intimacy and trust. Intimacy requires openness and that takes trust. To be trustworthy means to be responsible and to follow through on my commitments, to honor the relationship. But I am human and the people that I love are also human. We are all fallible, and separate. We don’t always live up to our word.  In our separateness and uniqueness we misunderstand each other, and we disagree. Conflict is inevitable. And while we may strive to resolve conflict skillfully and with as much compassion as possible, because we are human, injury is inevitable. So, inevitably, human love implies conflict and hurt.

For me, the measure of my true love is my willingness to apologize. When people who love each other are making up after a fight, we use our reservoirs of love to re-approach each other with trust and understanding.  Therefore, an apology may be unnecessary to hear.  But, nevertheless, the apology, will be said.  The feeling of love will compel the apology.  When I was 13 and  “in love”, the words, “I love you” were in my heart ready to gush out. It took all of my strength to hold them back  since girls were never supposed to say them first.   Today, If I am wrong and I know that I am wrong and I love you, then the words, “I’m sorry” fill my heart in exactly the same way—ready to gush out.  Love might mean that you don’t have to say you’re sorry, but it also means you won’t be able to help yourself.

Love not in the steps, or is it?

We use the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to teach core values at the Family Foundation School. The word, “love” never appears. Yet it’s there, especially in steps 8 and 9.

Step 8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

I wonder if AAs founders left the word “love”  out on purpose, knowing that it would be too mushy and sappy for the typical alcoholic of the day—the 1940’s white male. Even my mother, who got sober in 1968, would have been turned off by a program that was all about love. That’s not surprising.  The object of our addiction is our love object. It’s a false love to be sure but it’s all we have.  So many of us are turned off by talk of love, and seem to avoid love.  Yet, if we are to recover, then we need to replace our addiction with real love.  The steps do that in a sort of underhanded way. If you work the steps, you will back into love. It hits you and you never see it coming.

I brushed up against the 12 steps when I was a teenager. I put off doing the eighth and ninth steps for a long time because I thought I knew what I needed. The child of an alcoholic and a very dysfunctional family, I was full of hurt and resentment and I wanted love. Since I had been injured, I would be healed when the people who injured me, my parents mainly, made it right.  They tried—they were in the program of AA too. But I could not forgive my father. I wanted to. But I was missing something. I thought I loved him. But I did not, not enough for the relationship to mend.  My heart was full of grief and longing for love lost or never felt.

I did not understand any of this at the time. I only knew that I was sad.  Sappy statements about love made me mad. and the steps made no sense to me because I was the injured party. They seemed backwards. Why should I apologize?  Yet I believed in the steps—or I had hope in them. I saw the miracles that the steps were working for others.  I had to make sense of them for myself.  So, I reframed myself as the villain.  I focused on my character defects, my shortcomings, my wrongdoings. I thought that if I could see myself, and the part that I had played in our family’s drama clearly enough, that somehow the equation would balance itself out, my wrongdoings = theirs. And I would be able to forgive my parents.  It didn’t work. Although this exercise taught me tolerance for others. Tolerance is not love. And the nasty side effect of this approach was that I confused resignation with acceptance. I was resigned to the fact that we are all sick people. But there was no comfort in that belief. I felt bad about myself and bad about everyone else.

I was no longer fantasizing about how I was going to get even with dad but I didn’t feel open, warm and loving toward him yet either. I lived in limbo.  I was stuck because forgiveness requires that we already have love in our hearts and  I did not have enough.  What to do?  It turns out my adult sponsors were giving me the right advice all along, even if I twisted what they were saying.  Apologizing and being open to the forgiveness of others without any expectation of receiving it, creates the conditions necessary for love to emerge.  I may have harmed you without you even knowing it.  But when I come to you and apologize, I am vulnerable to you in that moment and the possibility of a relationship is created. The emotion or energy sustaining that relationship is love.  And  that ability to be in loving relationships gets better with practice. It’s as if you could store up the love you experience in one relationship in a battery and then use it to create or to heal other relationships. This spiritual truth is present in all religions and in much psychotherapy as well.

My early sponsors told me to work the steps to the best of my ability and I would feel better.  I didn’t feel better for a long time.  I misinterpreted their message and it’s nobody’s fault.  There is a big gap between adults and adolescents. What my sponsors and therapists and the great religions of the world were saying made perfect sense but only from a perspective that I didn’t have.  And because I didn’t get it and I am now the adult, I must accept that many of my students won’t get what I am trying to say here.  All I can do is hope that I don’t create the possibilities for the same misinterpretations that I suffered from.  That my mistakes will be different.   I hope the kids at the school can understand this.  If you are in serious conflict with people who you are supposed to love and who are supposed to love you– people like your parents–your instincts are going to mislead  you.  Revenge, restitution, getting even, are not the answer.  It is if there is a hole in your heart, regardless of where it came from, regardless of whose fault it is, you have it in your power to fix it and to fill it with love. Love can be created when say you are sorry and make amends.  Don’t try to make sense out of this because there is a good chance you will misunderstand.   Simply try making amends wherever possible and see if it doesn’t get easier to love and feel love in return.

(image from Prairie Cottage)

By Richard Reeve

It’s an interesting phenomenon that sprouts up in all sorts of disturbing ways both within and without of the therapeutic community.  Clearly the difficult problems person X is having must be the fault of somebody, right?

It’s as if we still have trouble recognizing even within the professional community that psychopathology, or as we simply say in recovery the disease, is the cause of the difficulty.

A sad example of this is related by Dr. Jann Gumbiner in her post What Causes Addiction? In it she shares a story of a teen with a drinking problem whose therapist focused on the mother-child relationship and in effect blamed the mother for the substance abuse behavior.

“To Kevin’s therapist, it was his mother who over-protected him, indulged his id, and cause his excessive drinking. Several sessions later, Kevin still hadn’t stopped drinking, was still avoiding responsibility for his behavior but the rest of the family was blaming Mom and she felt very, very guilty.”

In recovery, many sponsors will guard against this very human tendency by saying “whenever you are pointing your finger at someone else, three of your fingers are pointing back at you.”

(addendum: this fascinating article Blaming Others is Contagious is more than a little relevant…)

By Richard Reeve

For many that enter the world of recovery, one early hurdle that begins to loom in the not-so-distant future is the need to get up before a group of others in recovery and share “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”  Also known as sharing one’s experience, strength and hope, the practice of telling ones story has a surprising curative effect on the individual.

A new report on resilience in troubled teens likewise finds value in the individuals ability to construct and share a personal narrative:

“… it shows the personal narratives we all engage in as ongoing acts of sense-making, as sources of renewal and growth. Potentially exciting, too, in this study of resilient teens is the new slant we can take on the so-called talking cure. The curative powers come not from an expert who claims to hold the master key to interpretation, as in psychoanalytic theory, but from honing the skills of reflection and understanding and revision.”

The ability to frame one’s experience before and throughout a student’s stay at The Family Foundation School has always been a vital task which culminates in the graduation speech.  The therapeutic value of the task, which for many of the students is quite formidable, is certainly variable.  While some students will will approach the task with a level of dishonesty, and others with a lack of specifics, many will seize the opportunity to claim the benefits of owning their story.

It will be useful for our community to consider these questions when working with students that are coming to terms with expressing their experience, strength and hope.

“…those who were able to process difficult material had richer and smoother narratives. They came to realize that the significant questions to ask were: Does a speaker stick to generalizations, or can she see nuance within a situation? Is a story flexible and inclusive, or closed and static? Does the speaker welcome opportunities for change, or resist them? Are relationships tolerated, recruited, or rejected as threats? Can a speaker focus on emotionally taxing experiencing with vagueness, avoidance, confusion or changing the subject? Does the speaker see herself as a force in the plotline, or a bystander? Dr. Terry Apter, Resilience in Troubled Teens

By Richard Reeve

A studied phenomenon that has an interesting wrinkle in the age of cyberpolarization, do we give consideration to how the tales people tell are changing our own memories?  As this abstract on how memory reconstruction gets influenced by group pressure demonstrates, intentionally fabricated stories can have an immediate effect on our memories of recent events.

“Each subject watched a 10-minute segment from a movie and then answered questions about the movie segment. Treatment subjects were questioned orally with three confederate subjects who responded to the questions before the subject responded and who lied on 8 out of 20 questions. Control subjects answered the same questions in a written questionnaire. Each subject returned in one week to answer the standard written questionnaire. The results indicated that treatment subjects’ performance was much poorer than that of control subjects during the initial session. Their performance improved in the recall testing session but remained poorer than that of the control subjects.” Diane Martichuski, Effect of Group Pressure on Memory Reconstruction, Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the Southwestern Psychological Association (32nd, Fort Worth, TX, April 17-19, 1986)

Memory distortion can be caused by a variety of factors including the need is to have a story fit the emotional complex that surrounds it. A fascinating study on this phenomenon is Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past, edited by Daniel Schacter. As one review points out:

“Human memory is not like a photograph album, a collection of cassettes, compact discs or videos or any other accumulative archive of the past. Rather, memories are fragmentary, condensed, often distorted and inaccurate representations of past experience.” Martin A. Conway (Nature )

This issue also brings up a challenge specific to helping others in recovery.  One of the reasons the newcomer in recovery is cautioned against “war storying” is to counter the tendency to exaggerate and/or fabricate the facts of their story.  The grandiosity of these denial behaviors can lead to a memory distortion which in the end only lead the individual further away from facing the reality of their own actions.

By Rita Argiros, Ph. D.
(This post started out as part of a lecture I gave to my social problems class on January 11, 2010.  It morphed into something more suitable for adults who care for and about our students.  Rita Argiros )

” Like [Navajo] sand painting, particular cultural representations serve as therapeutic frames that communicate to us who and what we are and how we figure in the larger order of things. These representations are therapeutic because they help people resolve the contradictions and ambiguities that it are inherent in any cultural definition of reality and self…

In capitalism, the sand painter works in churches, synagogues, or mosques, and in theaters, in front of television sets, at sporting events, or in the shopping malls that reaffirm the vision of abundance central to the consumer’s view of the world…a vision of the world designed to maximize the production and consumption of goods. … It is a culture in which virtually all our everyday activities — work, leisure, the fulfillment of social responsibilities, and so on —-take place in the context of commodities and in which shopping… serves as a therapeutic activity”  (Global Problems and that Culture of Capitalism by Richard H. Robbins, Page 16)

FFS represents an alternative to the sandpainting that is modern youth culture–one that doesn’t place much value on consumption. On arrival most students are scandalized by the degree of structure, certainly. But they are also scandalized by all the aspects of consumer culture that will be denied them while they are at the school.
What exactly are they most upset about?  I think that they are upset about the school’s structures and rules..  Adolescence is a time when there is a struggle between dependence and autonomy.  But that is not how they put it.  This is what they say.  Why can’t we choose our own food?  They must have eaten out a lot. Or, perhaps their parents cooked different meals for each member of the family. The point is that 30 years ago most teenagers ate whatever their parents cooked for them.  Today children and teens support their own separate segment of the prepared food industry–as they grow older Count Chocula,  gives way to Dominos and Mountain Dew.  Our students arrive beliveing that they are entitled to choose what they will and will not eat.

The second most common complaint is lack of communication and communication technologies at the school.  They feel entitled to, and therefore denied access to, all the gadgets that support current teenage culture — cell phones, MP3 players, computers with unlimited and fast Internet access, MySpace, Facebook, and the latest Napster replacement.  Students tell me that they are angry when they leave here because they are not up with the latest.  What they are worried about is image, is fitting in.  The fashion scene and the music scene change rapidly. So we do rob them of their teenage years in this sense. They are going to have a hard time telling what music their friends will approve of them listening to.  The time at the school is very unlikely to change actual musical tastes.  If they still care about image when the leave the school then that 18 months seems like a life-time. They don’t know what is OK to buy, to wear, to listen to and still fit in.

I point out that they have lots of chances here to create their own music but few of our students are mollified by this.  Their identities are formed  by what they listen to and what they wear.  But most of his comes ready-made.   In today’s culture, you purchase almost every aspect of your identity.  Even the process of figuring out what “type” might fit you, is done from a consumerist point of view.  You define yourself by seeking out knowledge about what other people think belongs in the closet or play-list of a person like yourself. For most of our kids start out being defined by what they wear and what they listen to.  How much more authentic to create music of your own, to learn to dance, paint or write, to dominate a basketball court, or cook a great meal.

Few of our students initially embrace the opportunities we give them to define themselves this way.  Some come around after they are unplugged and detoxed from constant consumption.  Many recover arts, and activities from childhood that they lost and they start playing a musical instrument again or get reconnected with a favorite sport.

Because they are at FFS, they complain that they do not have the opportunity to work (i.e., have a paying job.)  But isn’t the main reason most teens get a job is to have spending money–that is, to have the money they need to buy the stuff they need to maintain their image? All the really important things that you can learn about work–how to take and give direction, how to show up on-time, how to take pride in a job well done, we teach.  True, they don’t get much experience managing money. But again, they aren’t asking to learn how to save and invest and be truly responsible with money. What they mean by managing money is how to control themselves as consumers–because until recently in our culture that’s what being responsible with money meant for most of us–simply living within our means.  And I doubt the after school job teaches even that degree of money management. Too many college students get into trouble with credit cards.

On the surface other complaints seem more genuine. I have heard that the Family Foundation School has denied adolescents the opportunity to learn about relationships and to spend time with their family. Sounds plausible. Certainly our students spend less time with their mothers and fathers than their mothers and fathers would like. But in the struggle for autonomy that defines adolescence, parents always lose. Most kids can’t wait to get out that door. Most teenagers spend their time with their friends, not with their parents.  One senior told me that he spends more time talking to his parents now, and has more fun with his parents now that he is at the school than he ever did when he was home.

As far as relationships go, the stories I hear from our kids rarely involve fairy-tale first love. Increasingly what they are “missing out on” is the “right” to experiment with sex for the sake of sex, to “hook-up”–relationships are an afterthought.  And let’s not forget pornography, the most direct form of sex as consumption.   Today it’s all but expected  that both male and female high school students have some experience with cyber porn.  In contrast, at FFS students have real relationships.  Even in the stories told by the most disgruntled former students you will hear comments about the many long-lasting friendships that they made here.   Talk about a failure to connect the dots. These friendships would not be possible in a suburban environment in which every student lives in suburban splendor with their own room and private bath.

Indeed when I think about the teenage “fun” that we are keeping our students from within the framework of the culture of Capitalism this is what I see.  Being a teenager or child is the stage of life where your main role is to be a consumer.  In the old days, people romanticized the innocence of childhood. It was a time when you were free from adult knowledge of the harsh realities of the world.  Today we romanticize adolescence as a time of freedom from the responsibility of having to make your  own living, of having to work. When we talk about the “irresponsible” child or teenager, what we mean is they aren’t acting in a way that is going to turn them into someone who can support themselves eventually, to take up the role of worker or the role of investor so that they can pay their own way. But we are partly responsible.  Our culture valorizes and legitimizes their time to be “free as adolescents and young people” and then wonders when some of them can’t find a way to balance the fun and freedom we tell them is their right, almost their obligation, with just enough discipline and self-control to prepare themselves for the next stage in life. For many young people, “just enough discipline” is no better than no discipline at all.  What some may see as over-correction at FFS is no more than the minimum amount of structure and external control that is needed to save these kids.

If students reframe their experience here as the opportunity for personal growth and healing that it is, then by the time they leave us their initial feelings of denial will dissipate. Human beings are most happy when they balance fun and productivity, freedom and responsibility, creativity and consumption.   Of course some never take the plunge and others recover their old song–”You denied me my teenage years.”  For the most part, however, after 18-22 months at the school, students take their new sandpainting back into the world of iphones , facebook, music, cars, shopping, relationships and sex.  This time, however, instead of being defined and controlled by all that stuff,  they will be able to use these great new tools in the next stage of life. For most that is college. In our consumer culture, college has become the last stage of adolescence. No doubt it is a transitional period. But why not see it as the first stage of adulthood.

The culture of capitalism is all about abundance and for many that  becomes abuse and addiction.  But things change. There’s been lots of talk in the media about a new frugality in American culture.  I hope so.   FFS  should fit right in.  We are an  antidote to consumerism and an antidote to the prolonged adolescence that our consumer culture fosters.

By Richard Reeve

“Lonely individuals used the Internet and e-mail more and were more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than others. Social behavior of lonely individuals consistently was enhanced online, and lonely individuals were more likely to report making online friends and heightened satisfaction with their online friends. The lonely were more likely to use the Internet to modulate negative moods, and to report that their Internet use was causing disturbances in their daily functioning.” Loneliness ans Social Uses of the Internet

Internet addiction as it pertains to those who live in social isolation is a subject that does not get much attention, especially with the rapid growth of social media websites over the past five years.

The ability of addiction to seize almost any human behavior should not be underestimated.  It’s interesting to see how the topic is relevant to current users in this twitter search.  While comments range from humorous and dismissive to questioning and concerned, is the ability of the new media to grip our behaviors in unhealthy ways surprising?  Are not billions of dollars being spent to keep us “signed in”…i.e. hooked?

This internet addiction assessment tool is an interesting survey to evaluate where you might be on the internet addiction spectrum.  Of course, the accuracy of the results depend on the accuracy of the answers provided, and all that work with addictions know how difficult it can be to elicit an honest answer.

By Richard Reeve

There is little hesitation in our culture to speak about physical illness.  For instance distant acquaintances and strangers will often disclose the difficult challenges they or or a family member face with cancer.  It’s a different story with mental illness.  Psychiatric disorders are not openly discussed even with the closest of friends.   So what’s behind the stigma?

At the heart of the stigma attached to all psychiatric disorders seems to be fear and a lack of understanding.  It’s as if a type of magical thinking still governs our collective behavior.  We remained “hushed” about those things which might find an unknown way to harm us.

Another difficulty with the stigma is the projection of moral judgments onto individual suffering with mental illness.  It’s not uncommon to hear a comment like “just shake it off” relating to an individual suffering from depression, as if thy had a switch to flip to make it disappear.    Would such a suggestion ever be given to a person with a skin ailment?  Implied is that the individual has full control over the experience they are struggling with.

What can we do to address these issues so that the millions suffering from psychiatric disorders do not have to deal with the added difficulty created by the social stigmas?

By Richard Reeve

The constellation of the “zealot” and/or “martyr” archetype is clearly an aspect of the collective shadow being constellated in American society this century.  The extremism in political ideologies, the war on terror, even the cyberpolarization we’ve discussed, all resonate with a force that wants to tear down.  Much of this collective  energy gets channeled into the fanaticism that surrounds professional sports.  On a daily basis the most outrageous dialogues get spun on sports talk radio which acts as a container for our collective need to “be on top,” “to destroy our opponent,” “to conquer and defeat.”

“People who are possessed and spun up in a cocoon about the people they ought to relate to are caught up in the most amazing assumptions, which they neither doubt nor make quite clear to themselves because they seem to be completely evident.  They are sure of everything and never say, “why do I assume such a thing?” The obsession becomes a complete semi-conscious conviction.  That happens when fantasy material has found a wrong mode of expression, e.g., in accusations against neighbors and friends, and it is never checked.  It skulks at the back of the mind of such a person and amplifies itself.  Little irrelevant instances are picked up and built into a paranoic system and every idea adds a bit more.”  Marie-Louise Von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales, pg. 103.

Partially this tendency to rely on assumptions is exacerbated by the flood of information that has dominated society with the advent of the internet.  How do we learn to appropriately filter the mountains of information at our disposal?  How can we find firm footing without relying on assumptions?  While the answers are not easy, the challenge faces all of us, especially those of us that work with troubled teen girls and boys whose adolescent development gets off track.

By Rita Argiros, Ph.D.

AAs fourth and fifth steps are often misunderstood. When I was first introduced to them they evoked feelings of fear and anger in me. All I could see was the potential for humiliation. I didn’t believe that people told me that these steps would liberate me. I was 14 years old, living in the Bronx, and going to Alateen meetings once a week.

How much could a 14-year-old have to feel guilty about? Plenty, I guess. Each time the fourth and fifth steps were read at the beginning of the meeting, I got the same sick feeling in my stomach as things floated to the top of my consciousness. I expected to feel much worse if I actually went through with a 4th and 5th step.

I left Alateen a year later. Returning to the program at 19, I had the same bad feelings whenever I thought about the fourth and fifth step and with 4 more years of living I had even more to feel guilty about. But, this time, I took the chance and worked the steps.

Bill Wilson’s metaphor, “inventory,” or, “housecleaning,” really does capture the emotions you feel as you go through the process. If you’ve ever had a really messy office and taken the time to clean, sort, throw out, and organize, you have an inkling of these feelings. Getting started is very hard. You feel a great deal of resistance. You don’t really build up a head of steam until you’re almost halfway through. Then you start to get a feeling of freedom. The inventory or cleaning metaphor only goes just so far however. Because you’re processing things that make you feel guilty, or embarrassed–instead of last year’s junk mail, the positive feelings at the end of the 5th step are much more profound.

I recently read an anti-AA diatribe (http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q1.html#cq_induce_guilt) attacking this process. Framing AA as a cult, the anonymous author charges the fourth and fifth steps with being designed to invoke and create guilt, shame, humiliation and embarrassment in order to make the participants more tractable. When a sponsor asks us to suspend our thinking temporarily and trust theirs, this author sees manipulation, and the creation of lifelong infantile dependency. That’s not how I see it.

A few months ago I read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress-Free Productivity. In that book he describes the way un-done tasks can nag at you to the point where they impact your effectiveness. All those little things that you have to do, schedule your mammogram, pick up the cleaning, write the review for that person that you supervise, etc. You’ll be in the middle of dinner with your husband and all of the things that you have to do tomorrow start percolating up to the top of your brain. Robbing us of life in the moment. Worse, we live with a subtle but perceptible sense of worry. We fear that won’t have time to get done all that needs to be done. Or, my favorite, that we must do that thing right this very minute because if I don’t do it right now, I will forget to do it all together. It doesn’t matter what “it” is. It is the worrying and the repetitive wasting of attention the robs us.

The very first step according to Allen is to write down everything that you have to do. In other words, inventory. And just like alcoholics and their moral inventory, people who are swamped with work will avoid taking stock. So hotshot executives and CEOs pay David Allen good money to come to their home or the office and coach them through the process. To me that sounded more like my experience with 12-step sponsorship. My sponsors have been guides, mentors, coaches. Not somebody on a power-trip.

I see other parallels between working the steps and Getting Things Done (GTD). Both programs reduce stress. Allen reduces the fear and worry that sabotage focus and productivity. Like the title says–his focus is on things. The AA program targets fear and worry too, but I think it does an even better job reducing negative emotions around our relationships with people–guilt, hate, resentment, embarrassment, distrust, contempt, disdain and pride. By the way, the same guy who criticized sponsors criticized AA for its seemingly incessant focus on the negative–all that talk of character defects, and seven deadly sins. Selfish self-centeredness is the root of our disease we are told. And, “resentment is the number one offender.” How can that help us to live better happier lives. Seems like we’d all get depressed thinking of ourselves as a group of permanent losers. But my experience is that the opposite is true. A good look at the habits of thought and feeling that have gotten us in trouble is essential if we are going to develop all the things we really want: atonement, love, gratitude, self-confidence, trust, empathy, approval and humility.

After I read Getting Things Done, I put it down. Listing everything I had to do seems overwhelming and then you have to organize your to-do lists in a certain way. And, get this, it never ends. He wants you to develop life-long habits. That seems like a bit much, when all I was looking for was a way to get just a little more control over my work. But I am reconsidering. Because I have seen what a good accounting will do for me emotionally and spiritually. I am going to give the Allen’s program a serious try. I’ll keep you all posted.