Poise or Thinking Like a Quarterback

Harvey Mackay, the business columnist says that poise is “grace under pressure.” He says, “Poise is what makes you a master of situations. He suggests that as an example of poise we look to great football quarterbacks. Great quarterbacks, he says, don’t lose their cool even when they’re behind with two minutes to go. He quotes Terry Bradshaw, the Hall of Fame QB for the Pittsburgh Steelers. As a Pittsburgher who grew up in the winning years (“One for the thumb”) that got my attention.

Terry Bradshaw said:

“Quite often the mark of an experienced quarterback—one who has poise—is the amount of time he holds on to the ball before releasing it. The quarterback who can be patient enough for lanes to open and receivers to clear will be more successful. I played a long time before I had poise, and I suffered for it, and so did my team.”

Today I used this lesson. A volunteer sent me a snippy email and just as I was about to reply I saw Terry on the field at Three Rivers Stadium backing off, waiting and living his poise even as six, 300-pound men were about to topple him. His lesson on poise served me well. I waited. The anger passed. I was not a jerk. Better for me—and my team.

Under Anger is Fear

I heard this at a meeting ages ago and I keep this note in my tickle file: Under Anger is Fear. Boy does that change my thinking when I can remember that. If I catch myself feeling anger and can ask, “What am I afraid of?”

Addiction to Fear

Last night I lay awake from 2am until 6am. In the first hour I was running an inventory of all the bad things that could go wrong in my relationship: he will do this or that; he will say this or that; he could get sick, die, leave me, love someone else. With each one I complete the thought with my possible response: I will say this or that; I will do this or that and always, always: I will feel terrible.

Now what is interesting is that I don’t need any of those things to happen to actually feel terrible. No, efficient gal that I am, I have already made myself feel terrible just by running through the scenarios and previewing or rehearsing the outcomes. The effect: I feel like shit.

It’s not new behavior. I have done this most of my life. I suspect I started this as a kid but then it was just background music. The sound track to a scared kid’s life. It was, I suppose, to be a kind of inoculation. If I can imagine it then I can be prepared for it maybe? But it took on a life of its own. Now it’s a habit.

It is an addiction too I realize because it actually produces a physical effect. I release adrenaline and cortisol into my body. Hence awake in the wee hours. That also is not new. I have been able to make myself crazy with rage or grief or terror with scenarios that never occurred. I produce the emotion and the physical effect.

You can imagine how good this is for the relationship.

But last night awake in bed and then in the living room I was able to see this from a slight angle. Maybe I was just tired enough to watch myself do this and I asked myself: If I spend 90% of my thinking time creating scenarios to scare myself what would I instead think or feel if I could reduce that by say 60%? I’m not sure I can stop this addiction to fear or this habit of shooting up my own adrenaline using only my mind but if I could interrupt it and reduce it what would that produce?

Shoes for Walking Out of the Woods

Women and shoes. Not every woman has the “shoe thing” but many do. We like them; we own more pairs than the average man. There are lots of reasons why women buy and love shoes. They are an easy reward, a prize, or a drug. Even when you have bad hair or a bloated waistline you can try on shoes. You don’t have to look at your face or hair or wrinkles or changing body when you try on shoes. And there’s a practical piece: new shoes can quickly update an outfit. The silhouette of your shoes can take you from shabby to chic and from dowdy to a doll. Yep, lots of reasons women love shoes.

But what do shoes have to do with recovery? What kind of footwear do we need to trudge the road of happy destiny?

Shoe story number one: Red High Heels: At 50 I began to think practical flats and low heels but I also longed for and lusted after some high-heeled, pointy toed shoes that would still mark me as a women with libido. That’s what certain shoes signal: “this is a woman who still likes sex”. So I bought red suede pointy toed and high-heeled mules. They had roses on the toe as well. These are shoes that say “I still like being a woman.” Later I gave them away. Now I’m looking at red shoes again.

Shoe story number two: Papagallo flats. This is a lesson that I learned from my husband’s therapist. While we know that nothing can fill a hole in us that exists in the past, and that no lover today can replace the love that our father didn’t give us and we are sure that no woman now can make right the hurt our mother caused, still, given that we know all that we often chase those very fixes throughout our adult lives.

We learn in AA and with outside help how to begin to heal some of those old wounds and we stop trying to recreate now what we really needed then. But the therapist, Dr. Bob, said to Peter one day, “Sometimes you can save time and money by just going out and buying the thing you longed for so long. He said, “If as an adult you can afford it and the longing is there, then go ahead and buy the 71 Camaro or the basketball hoop for the yard.”

When I heard this I knew what I needed to buy. I remembered the longing of my 9th grade year: that summer I sat in algebra class next to a girl wearing navy blue soft leather flats with lime green piping on the edges and a tiny bow on the vamp. I longed with all my heart for shoes like that and those shoes—I later learned they were Papagallo flats—became a symbol for all that hurt: the social class wounds and family dysfunction and not being able to ask for what I wanted. Girls from nicer neighborhoods and better schools wore Papagallo shoes. Those shoes became loaded with meaning.

How many years did I shop for shoes and how many other pairs of shoes did I buy to fill that ache for navy and green Papaagallos? Why not just go buy them. I could do and needed to do all the therapy and inventories and write letters to my parents to read on their graves all to exorcise the pain of the girl who didn’t think she was good enough for nice shoes. I did all those things and then one day I bought very expensive, glove leather navy flats and I thought, “Now, at age 50, I rule the 9th grade in my heart”.
Sometimes if the shoe fits you should just go buy it.

Envy

A friend called to talk. She was in agony. “I feel envy”, she said, “I’m envious of someone with a nicer house.” I listened. My friend has a very nice house but I understood. I have felt enough envy to know its acidy pain and the way that the shame of feeling it can silence us. Even those of us who swear to “feel all our feelings” step back from envy. I have envied people’s clothes, cars, jobs and success. It’s embarrassing; I have a nice life, but envy has little to do with having enough.

Philosopher, David Hume, writing of envy in 1739 said, “It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant. The greater number of people we compare ourselves to, the more there will be for us to envy”. It turns out that we compare ourselves most often to our friends. That’s what makes envy so painful. So what is envy good for?

My house-craving friend and I began to dig under our envies. What surfaced was a belief that the house, shoes, car, or whatever could fix us. But I have to keep relearning, you can’t fill a hole that exists in the past. What most of us want is connection and community, but we go to the wrong places to find it, and paradoxically we think that if we already have it, it’s not enough. Hence envy double-teams with marketing and we shop like addicts.

I look at my closet. Envy is the con man who tugs at my sleeve and says, “Listen, just for a second.” He points out the un-purchased shoes or bag and swears, “Come on, just one more.”
There is some truth to the accusation that advertising creates demand but that’s not the whole story. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him wear Hermes or drink Evian. The envy in me reaches out as much as advertising reaches in; I am at best a partner and at worst an accomplice.

Sharon Zukin, a sociology professor, and author of Point of Purchase writes that: “The appeal of a shopping spree is not that you’ll buy a lot of stuff; the appeal is that, among the stuff you buy, you’ll find what you truly desire.”

Restored to Sanity

It’s not new but it’s been worse than ever lately: I scare myself. I imagine these scenarios of things going wrong. A lot of it boils down to abandonment: “He will leave me”. “They will fire me.” “She won’t like me”. But the bad part is I work thru big scenes adding details and the script: He says, then I say, then he says… until I am a wreck and I am in my car in tears talking to someone who is not in the car with me.

Nutty. Really, really nutty. And not very productive either.

So I raise this as a topic in the meeting: “How can I stop this? How can I stop doing this to myself?”

And what I hear is surprising and good: You can’t stop this. The second step says that God will restore us to sanity, not that we restore ourselves to sanity. So I get it. When I am talking myself into a painful emotional frenzy what I can do is stop and ask God to help me stop this. Heal this part of me that wants to scare myself. Help me kinder to myself. Remove my fear and help me.

Recovery is a Habit

Recovery is not an insight; it’s a habit.

Meetings
Reading
Service
Phone calls
Working the steps

These build the HABIT of recovery.