Living as an addict to the urge of anything is a lot like having a song in your head 24/7 you’re constantly fighting not to sing. You recall it as something you once enjoyed but know it’s dangerously capable of stealing your sanity.

There was a point in my 15 year career as a marriage and family therapist when I thought my shit didn’t stink.

My calendar was booked out for weeks, I had a hospital practice and influential private practice referral sources, and I made a lot of money. I scored high on the licensure exam, my masters thesis was on record as an example for younger students on how it is done, and I was the unanimous staff vote for the top counseling student of the year. I started on a fast track to success, or so it seemed back then.

It may indeed be true that pride comes before a fall.

Despite my subsequent long and painful fall from grace due to my divorce and decade-long addiction to crystal meth which left me penniless and homeless and full of self-hatred and regret for all the relational fallout I had caused, I clawed my way back to sobriety.

Since then, I’ve found that the more of life’s experiences I consume, the more prideful and delusional I had been about how good a therapist I’d believed I once was.

It’s taken a lot more than just time and spending more years clean and sober than I’d spent in drug and sex addiction. While I now work in an entirely different profession, once a therapist, always a therapist, the skills of which transcend most others and become useful when parlayed into the vast self-discovery required in the process of becoming and staying sober.

But sobriety is more than getting and staying off drugs. That’s called being “clean.” Sobriety, once set in motion, is the never-ending process of self-discovery about what makes you tick and why you tick the way that you do. You see the world differently and years of mental health training and practice help you to learn disgusting things about yourself. Once embraced, that never-ending process is what KEEPS you sober for years to come. Thanks to sobriety, I’ve recently discovered that as a therapist, my shit stunk to high heaven.

These years, I read articles and listen to podcasts about mental and spiritual health, self-preservation, and insights from practicing professionals whose work is inspirational at the very least. Therapy has come a long way since I was schooled and to a trained eye, the truly insightful and skilled practitioners are as obvious as diamonds in a coal mine.

If I can swing the expense and find a gem of a therapist, I plan to re-enter the field as an eager client with so much more to learn about myself. Bad therapy can sour the experience and expense of counseling, but good therapy conducted by skilled practitioners is worth every session.

In retrospect, I wasn’t such a bad therapist. I was pretty damn good compared to some of my graduate classmates who eventually put their names on counseling center doors around town to begin their careers. I’d seen them work first-hand in our training and wondered how they would ever become gainfully employed in this profession.

But from my view these days, it seems poor practice standards aren’t tolerated either in school or by clients and therapeutic skills and interventions are much improved perhaps because more therapists themselves have sought therapy and continue unabated on a course of learning. And perhaps best of all, they accepted early on that their shit stinks just as bad as everyone else’s.

If you can, seek out a good therapist. Ask which books they’ve read, what continuing education courses they have attended, what spiritual orientation they practice. Ask them if they are good therapists and how they arrived at that conclusion. Ask them what they believe they do best in their practice and what they don’t treat in their practice and why.

You may just discover the right fit with someone able to help you discover how to fish yourself out of the toilet of misbeliefs and set you on a better path. And hopefully, ours will cross in the process.

Dreams are nothing to be ashamed of, but you can learn a lot about yourself from them.

No, it wasn’t a crazy X-rated one but it might as well had been from the way I felt waking up. The circumstance was benign, simple and harmless but I was caught lying red-handed and yet I continued to lie like a six-year old school boy. Though I was a parent, I persisted in putting on what was such an unconvincing act of innocence that as my lie deepened I even indicted my kids as the culprits. I’d defended what was a hand-in-the-cookie jar infraction as if it were a felony with pending prison time. Fake tears shed for my guilty heart hoping I’d be believed and vindicated. It was such a truly disgusting act on my part, even now I feel I should go rip my shirt and confess to someone. So here we are.

Bad way to start a Monday.

Two mugs of coffee brought me back to my senses but clearly, the moment you pride yourself to be so far beyond such a dastardly deed is the very moment you will be shown its sinner with the darkest of hearts willing to sacrifice others in your path and even so, willing to take a simple lie to your own fiery grave.

My doctor explained that people who are immunocompromised by certain specific conditions are also particularly susceptible to the more common opportunistic illnesses like colds and flus and the like. Not everything is the C-word these days. Some illnesses are just old fashioned temporary and non-life threatening conditions like mom used to fix with soups, juices, rest and forehead kisses to check your temperature.

I could have used a mom yesterday when I woke up with all the symptoms, no soup, no juice and lots of work deadlines awaiting my urgent attention. My temperature broke at some point during the night and while I’m still a world of hurt, I’m over the hump in my home office satisfying yesterday’s email requests of my coworkers.

It’s comforting to know I’ll survive this but I’m convinced those magical mom kisses are the real antidotes to healing at any age.

We get more than our share of odd and unusual folks at my church located in a highly traveled homeless neighborhood. Many show up at services looking for a hand up or a hand out and we’re happy to oblige and get them resources to begin their path out of a life of drugs and danger on the streets.

Today, during one of those conversations, a man asked me if I was ready to die today. I told him that was an unusual way of greeting someone when hi-how are you would’ve been just fine. But as I said, it’s sometimes a strange crowd. He pressed on with his greeting and I consented that if it was my day, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

For him, living on the street, I suppose it must be a question he asks himself more than once every morning so perhaps it was well-intentioned.

I invited him in and he was welcomed by everyone. I suppose that’s what I enjoy most here.

‘Come as you are’ is a real thing.

Driving around listening to podcasts, it became apparent that I need an alignment.

My tires are fine but the accumulated wisdom of some well-informed podcasters indicated some critical life trajectories are off, slowly dragging me out of my own lane and into directions and places I shouldn’t be traveling at my age and maturity.

Interesting how we can sense that uncompromising tug in one direction or another and you know things aren’t rolling on as ideally as they should.

Diet, money, sleep, how I spend my elective time, all just went enough right or left of center to make a perceptible difference which I fear, without a realignment, could easily send me off roading on paths for which I am not designed nor well-suited.

For some, this may sound like a labored metaphor of a perfectionist splitting hairs but living by higher-than-average standards was something I was taught from a very young age. Moreover, living life according to a singular mission cues you to the ever so slight variations from that mission, demanding corrections to keep you on course.

So, I got home and had a chat with my Mechanic.

The perks of being beautiful are undeniable.

By nature’s good genes or by other more costly means, life usually works in their favor. While the eye of the beholder is a factor, the result is generally the same. Handsome and pretty, (maybe a little of both these days) they hold an edge in most of their endeavors and advantages in life for which the rest of us slave to earn. Seems a bit unfair and privileged but it’s the way of the world–which brings me to my point.

This world of ours preaches standards unrealistic for most of us, yet we take the bait each morning spending ungodly amounts of time, product and money on a meaningless move from maybe a 5 to a 6 and a half on a good day. We put more effort into our outer appearance than we often devote to our own inner peace about who we are.

You were born with the gift of being truly beautiful in all the ways it matters most.

I’d like to think

That all my friends

Who’ve met their ends

Caught flights to the heavens

And into the arms of a loving God

Now walk their streets of gold in wait for others like me.

I’d like to think

The best of them all

That it wasn’t the fall

Which took them down

To that fiery second death

For lack of belief in something and someone so much better.

I’d like to think

There are exceptions

And blessed receptions

For good people and nice folks

Who hoped that was enough

And paved their way with good intentions.

I’d like to think

I did my part

To win their heart

For One who saves

From eternal graves

To live the one and only life that truly matters.

I’d like to think

It all works out

And yet I doubt

It does or will for those who believed

Forever deceived by the lies of this world and now exist

No more.

And while I’d like to think I will miss you forever

no doubt I surely will.