“She says it is like having an emotional affair.” he said, almost incredulous that his wife could feel that way.

“Well, let me ask you. When you are upset at her or you guys are fighting do you go to the porn instead of her?” I asked hoping I might be able to help him explore this issue without feeling attacked or judged.

“Well….yeah.”

“And, when you feel rejected or abandoned by her do you go to the porn?”

“Well…yeah. And she told me to stop watching it because she said it was like me cheating on her so I said I would stop. ”

“And you didn’t, right?”

“Right. Who is she to tell me what to do?”

“Okay, so that becomes an excuse for you to lie to her in your marriage? And you wonder how she could say it is like having an emotional affair?”

******

Imagine you are a man like Kevin and you have just had a fight with your partner (male or female.) Your feelings are hurt. It hits a wound inside of you from the past. You may or may not realize this. Regardless, you run to your lover. You go into the basement and turn on your computer. Or you pull the magazines out from your newest hiding spot. Maybe you run down to the local adult video store. With the wound still hurting you run straight into the arms of your lover. Porn will never turn you away. Porn does not demand your vulnerability or accountability for your behavior. Or for you to simply communicate. Or to stop and listen to acknowledge the other being who is part of the relationship. Porn is always there for you and does not demand any risk or intimacy.

Maybe you are a man who finds it difficult to talk about sex with his partner. You do not know how to ask for what you want. Or you simply don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Porn doesn’t care. Porn will give you whatever you want and you don’t have to ask for it. Just put close to the content you are looking for into Google or Google video and, as if your lover is covering you in kisses, hundreds of sites appear from which you can choose.

There are many other scenarios I could describe. Newly sober and don’t know how to talk to women or men. Wounded as a child sexually and never been able to be open about your sex or sexuality with another. You’re simply curious. Or looking for something to enhance your sex life. Or your partner doesn’t want to have sex as much as you do. Regardless of the scenarios, one thing I can say with confidence is if porn is a secret in your relationship it is a problem.

If we, men, could be honest with each other the kinds of conversations described above would be happening every day all over the world. But it seems hard for men to talk openly and honestly about sex without the bravado and the sixth-grade humor. You may find some benefits to the use of porn, perhaps as a way to enhance your relationship with your partner. Ultimately, if you have concerns about your porn use only you can make that determination as to whether it is a serious problem for you – with the help of others, such as sites like Feed the Right Wolf. The rest is your journey to explore for yourself.

My new friend, Patty Powers, and I are going to be exploring this issue  as well as many other topics about sex with the In the Rooms community in the coming months because we believe that the recovery community, on the whole, shies away from having very frank conversations about sex and sexuality. Then, sex becomes a secret and men and women in recovery get to stay in the shame and confusion we have. And, when it comes to porn, many men get to keep a mistress in their marriage without ever realizing it.

In my book, A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps, power is a part of much of the discussion throughout the book and the second chapter, which focuses on the First Step, is all about men’s relationship to power. I interviewed men with different lengths of sobriety from various addictions and yet, much of the ideas and wisdom could help any man. This is what one of the men had to say about powerlessness: “Admitting and accepting powerlessness at face value challenges the notion that men are strong, self-sufficient, and should not admit weakness. Paradoxically, recognizing and admitting powerlessness takes incredible strength and courage and is more manly than living in the fantasy world of denial.” So many of us spend so much of our time trying to control so many things—other people, our emotions, the future, etc. Much of our suffering comes from not realizing that we do not have power in a certain situation. Certainly, that I, alone, do not have the power.

The power inherent in powerlessness is a wonderful paradox. Think about it this way: You are a day laborer and are tasked to move all of the rocks in this one small area. You look over to where you are going to work and it is far enough that you cannot tell exactly what the landscape looks like. You see all of the other workers going to their respective lots. You are ready to work and feeling invincible. You start moving some of the rocks: no problem. Then you see a huge rock that you decide to move next. It will not budge. You keep trying to force this rock to move. If you admit you cannot do it a whole new freedom opens up and you have choices—maybe you keep trying to move it or you turn your attention to all of the other rocks in your area that you can move or you ask some of your fellow workers to help you move the really big rock. We, men, spend a lot of time trying to move these huge rocks by ourselves refusing to ask for help or accept the futility of it—wasting our time and others’ time as well. If we admit we cannot do it somehow that is a reflection of our worth—and our manliness. All of this because of our great fear of being powerless.

A good friend, also quoted in my book, said this: “When I was young, I thought of power as additive, the more I took the more I had. Kind of like money. The program [of the Twelve Steps] has helped me to see that the more I take the less I have. Being powerful enough to experience my powerlessness is being awake and fully alive.” The truth is we are all powerless, to varying degrees at different times throughout our lives. It could be a great fact to connect us all because rooted in our powerlessness is our need for others and our need for community. The irony is that one of the greatest ways to experience true power is when you create enough space in your life for powerlessness.

You can also read this post on The Good Men Project.

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My job requires me to be out of town anywhere from two to four weeks a month. This kind of travel schedule really challenges me to dig deep to find some balance. Add to that, on the “life” side of things I am a husband and a father of a two-and-a-half year old. Guess who is picking up all of the slack while I am out of town? That’s right, my wonderful wife. I could make a convincing argument as to why it is so difficult for us to have anything like work-life balance in our lives. However, the content of that argument would also point to exactly why it is so important for both of us to strive to have it in our lives. For instance, my daughter’s morning and bedtime routines can be stressful for one person doing them. I could bother my wife and call her and my daughter because I am out of town and want to talk to them, but we have found that sending short videos via my iPhone recorded each night and morning works great. Or maybe my wife Nancy, who is stressed as it is with her full-time job, has a difficult time just doing some of the self-care things. So I arrange for her to have a babysitter while I am out of town as a surprise. Or I support her taking extra time to go to her yoga class when I am in town. I could continue with numerous examples of how I have tried to incorporate work-life balance into our family as a core value. But it took work for us to come up with these methods. Our commitment to balance and our fundamental belief in its importance allows us to always be assessing how we are doing and supporting one another.

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One fact seems to be clear: Life will not just give you work-life balance. If you passively wait for it to happen, you’re relying on sheer luck. It is in the discipline and the constant failing to achieve balance that I have found its value. There will never be a perfect balance. Life simply doesn’t work that way.  I believe this adamantly: there is nobody who cannot find some degree of work-life balance.  We all can make excuses or argue why our situation is so [fill in the adjective of your choice] that it prevents us from being able to think about balance let alone incorporate it into our lives. It is a choice. A choice we make every day and some days are better than others. Some have more work. Others have more life. In fact, as I finish writing this piece I am sitting on our sun porch with my daughter, whose daycare closed at noon, who has just woken up from her nap, and we are about to go to our local park. And part of work-life balance for me is knowing that it all comes to down to it, she is the most important part of my life. That means being able to say that this is good enough because I get to spend time with my daughter now.

You can also check out this blog here on the Good Men Project website.

Nothing pushes our limits more than when our little toddler is acting “crazy” – which often is nothing more than her trying to navigate the challenging pathway between dependence and independence, in one of the two greatest phases of brain development (the other phase, not surprisingly adolescence.) My wife and I have been using the “1, 2, 3 Magic” as one of the tools to help us help our daughter and it has been working very well. She is beginning to make different decisions as soon as one of us says, “That’s one……..” But what about us?

James Baldwin said, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” I hated the hypocrisy of adults when I was growing up – do as I say, not as I do. I will do my best not to be that kind of example to our daughter. God knows I can act out. I have a temper. I can get upset. The big question is: am I willing to model for my daughter the whole point of a timeout? Up until this morning the honest answer would have had to have been, “No” because I never communicated with our daughter that was what I was doing, as rare as it was anyway. Maybe I took a deep breath. Or asked Nancy, if she was home, to step in. But I never said, “Daddy has to take a timeout because he is having a hard time communicating just like you do sometimes.” When I said those words you should have seen the smile on her face. She pointed at the stairs where she now has timeouts. “No, honey, Daddy has to go downstairs for his timeouts.” And then she smiled again, pointed to our basement, and said, “Daddy…1,2,3.” She gets it. After taking some deep breaths and centering myself I came back upstairs and I apologized for her seeing my little temper tantrum. She looked at me, grabbed my face and kissed me and gave me a hug. She knew to do that, too, because that is what she sees. Our daughter is always paying attention to us. I pray we do the same.

What have you most learned about yourself as a parent (and adult) in your efforts to discipline your children or children you have cared for? Make a comment below or on my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/twelvestepsformen.

So at the beginning of this current season I hit bottom. I was at a place where I had lost all confidence in my serve – not using my old form and not comfortable with the form Nate, my doubles partner, had been trying to teach me. I called up my old tennis coach to set up a lesson: “I just want to work on my serve. I am tired of it being such a handicap – for me and for Nate. I have been trying on my own to figure it out and I just can’t get it.” Bludgeoned into humility, once again. Sound familiar?

I spent one hour with Mike and in that time he took me back through the fundamentals. I was willing to start over from scratch. You want to start with the grip? Fine. You want me to hit short serves from the service line to begin? Fine. That was all that it was going to take – one lesson. Oh…and hours and hours of practice.

You mean it is not enough to simply take a lesson, get the concept down, and then have my serve transformed? Well, where has that ever worked in my life? The reality is – if I am truly honest with myself – I simply don’t want to practice. I can be fairly lazy. I pretend that it is fear but I am just not buying it anymore. I keep thinking that I shouldn’t have to practice things I want to be good at. I seem to think that if I practice it means that I am not naturally talented. I still have that classic “magical” thinking that says I am special and wonderful enough that I should just be able to pick something up and be a “natural.” Always forgetting that even the supposed naturals – Jordan, Woods, Federer, Agassi – with incredible talent have spent hours and hours of their lives practicing. What a shock.

I would love to see what I could do with my serve – and my tennis game as a result – if I were willing to put just some of the time necessary into practicing. Just like practicing the principles of my recovery program, I know that I do not have to have all of the answers, it benefits we to ask for and accept help, and, most importantly, that I am most interested in progress not perfection. I just have to take the action.

What is something you would love to do but haven’t been willing to take the time to practice? Comment here or on my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/TwelveStepsForMen

How do you experience solitude? How is it for you spending time with….yourself?  How often are men even asked that question? Whether we like it or not, it is a universal truth that if you can’t spend time quality time with yourself then you can’t spend it with anyone else. Many people know me as outgoing, funny, some would even say charismatic. My public persona. The one who shows up when the stage lights are on. Those who know me intimately also know how much I used to struggle with insecurity, self-doubt, and intense social phobia – and still can to this day. It was debilitating. Around others I was often the life of the party but by myself I was a totally different person. Years ago, after ending a long term relationship, a good friend challenged me to learn how to spend time with myself; literally date myself. I took his suggestion to heart because I was tired of needing to be around people to be okay. I was tired of losing my mind when I got in relationships because I was trying to get them to fill a hole in my life that nobody is big enough to fill.

I called the restaurant and made a reservation, “Table for one, please.”

“One?” The woman’s voice sounded as sarcastic as it was surprised. They made the reservation but I swore I could hear their laughter. Who calls and reserves a table for one?

I showed up for my reservation shaking to death internally. I sat through my whole dinner petrified that everyone else in the restaurant was looking at me with pity. Self-centered fear, no doubt; it still felt real at the time. But I did it. I then went to a movie by myself. Some men and women have no problem doing these things alone but for me they were quite difficult.

Today after years of practice, I enjoy time with myself. I travel a lot for work and love to go for walks or dinner by myself. I have discovered the difference between restorative time and isolating or hiding from the world.

I know a lot of men who struggle with loneliness. Many, like me, seem to be social experts but they constantly feel as though they do not fit in or people don’t really want them around. But it has nothing to do with other people. They can’t stand their own company!

In solitude we gain true intimacy with ourselves and we also deepen our connection to Life. Or The Universe. Or God. A man’s relationship with others is his gift to them. A man’s relationship with himself is his gift to himself.

What are you going to do to become more comfortable being with you?

If you are a man who is particularly interested in this topic check out my book, A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps.

Apparently, men’s narcissism can have serious negative health effects! A recent study looked at levels of cortisol, a physiological stress hormone, in both undergraduate men and women in stress-free situations. If the cortisol level was elevated in a relatively stress-free situation it was likely a sign of chronic stress. The incidence of increased cortisol and narcissism was significantly greater in men.

“Even though narcissists have grandiose self-perceptions, they also have fragile views of themselves, and often resort to defensive strategies like aggression when their sense of superiority is threatened,” study co-author Reinhard says. Sound familiar, guys? Be honest…..

Now, I have known a lot of narcissists in my time – they would appear to be in no short supply in the addicted male population. But why? Sara Konrath, states: “Given societal definitions of masculinity that overlap with narcissism—for example, the belief that men should be arrogant and dominant—men who endorse stereotypically male sex roles and who are also high in narcissism may feel especially stressed.”

I am not sure the belief is that men should be arrogant or dominant as much as we can’t be the opposite of these – passive or weak. We put a lot of our energy (Read: STRESS) into not being a lot of things we think aren’t manly. More evidence that being a man in this society really takes a toll on us …as well as everyone in our lives. Luckily, narcissism is not a fixed trait. Men in recovery have been successfully chipping away at the hard shell of narcissism for decades now – and quite successfully. We come to realize that self-centeredness is the root of most our troubles.

Why not take the quiz and see how you do?

Interested in exploring more of the solution? Check out my book A Man’s Way through the Twelve Steps.

Greetings!

I have a favor to ask some of you. I have switched from Feedblitz to Feedburner.

If you currently receive my blog and the subject heading says “Feedblitz” in it, please “unsubscribe” and then go to my website at www.dangriffin.com/dans-blog and down on the right you can subscribe again. Unfortunately there is not a way to migrate all of the Feedblitz subscribers.

Your future blogs will come from Feedburner and have the title Dan Griffin’s Blog

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you join me on Feedburner!

Happy Wednesday!

Dan

When I was a boy, I was a boy’s boy – I collected live spiders and bees, took things apart to see how they worked, loved all sports. I had my own tool set. I built benches (a small plank and two wooden blocks on each side) that I thought I would be able to sell. I went door to door. I think I sold one.

Like many children of alcoholics, I had a parent who was hyper-critical and perfectionistic and anytime I would help with anything mechanical it would end with me being yelled at, told to go away because if you want something done right you have to do it yourself,”it was tough being able to learn and grow in an environment where you were expected at age 6 or 8 to be able to do something as well (read: perfectly) as a 40 year old man.

Almost all of us have things that we used to love as kids that we have given up because someone told us that we weren’t any good at them. Or they were a waste of time.  Or we were stupid. For the longest time I was afraid to do anything around the house out of fear that I would screw it up.I lost my love for building things and taking them apart- my father’s voice was always in my head. I pretended that I wanted nothing to do with those various tasks because they were not my interest. I am more of a Renaissance Man. It has taken time to give myself permission to make mistakes and be willing to screw up a door, or a faucet, or a cabinet.  And I have screwed up. But I have also learned. I have asked questions and had enough humility to learn from my wife and ask for help from other men. Now, I look forward to the next task realizing I may not be able to do it but I do not have to let my father’s voice control what I am willing to attempt. I get to decide what I am good at and I am responsible for anything in my life I am not willing to try. Nobody else.

So what did you give up? Are you ready to try it again?

You can comment below

Well, sort of. This article in the LA Times talks about how the new Duchess has decided to make addiction and recovery one of her primary focus areas for her charity work. I sensed that Kate Middleton was a class act from the few interviews I saw whenever I happened upon my wife watching  them (honest!)  She seems to have brought a fresh perspective, beauty, and now courage to the British royalty. Similar to Princess Diana, the Duchess is following her heart but she is also following the stats – where one study says that 1 in 3 Britons will have a problem with addiction in their lifetime, according to the Times article. That is a staggering number!

Now, one might conjecture on how the Queen Mother and other members of the Royal Family are reacting to this announcement but hopefully, given some of the attention a few members of the family have gotten over the past couple of decades regarding their own addictions, there is an understanding that having the weight of the Royal family behind such an important topic could make an amazing difference.

This is a welcome recognition at a global level about the importance of addiction and recovery. Everyone knows someone struggling with addiction. We are getting to the point where everyone knows someone in recovery. But we still have a long way to go before we truly deal with this disease in accordance with its societal impact – all around the world.

What do you think?

Please join the conversation below, share on Facebook, and re-tweet.