Texas and St. Louis, Phil Mickelson and Jim Furyk, Rory McIl..something might say: “What are we, chopped liver?” Don’t get me wrong. As a business psychiatrist having that same challenge since Michael Bloomberg leveled at me fifteen years ago when I was at his 666 Fifth Avenue building appearing on one of his TV shows, and introduced myself as someone also from Boston, showed him my card and had him respond (in a mostly humorous, but revealing way), “What the f*** is a shrink doing in this building?” I kinda know the feeling.

I think Main Street is also having the same problem getting the attention of Wall Street and in getting any committed actions to help them. The Republicans seem dismissive or as Herman Cain recently gaffed even accusing Main Street for not having jobs or being rich. The Democrats seem like well intentioned Keystone Cops trying to gouge some of the “zip locked” money away from Republicans that feel entitled (notice I didn’t say deserving) to hold onto.

America in large part has turned into a bunch of star struck people, many of whom have little compunction against star f***ing to get into the party.

I think the problem is that fear and greed and star addiction have in common is that they are all adrenaline driven. So whether we’re afraid or greedy or addicted to what will happen next to the Kardashians, Lindsay Lohan‘s next cliff she falls over, Charlie Sheen‘s next bipolar rant, or whether in Occupy Wall Street fashion we’ve turned into raving Peter Finch’s from Network who are “mad as hell and not going to take this any more!” we’ve become a nation of adrenaline junkies.

Here’s the rub, the crash off an adrenaline rush is much worse than the excitement from the rush. In fact when the crash happens we will reach for anything else to re-excite us to keep the adrenaline flow happening.

As thrilling as adrenaline can be, until we realize that excitement will never bring us lasting satisfaction, that fun is not the same as joy, that lust is not the same as love or that taking a crap is not as fulfilling as giving a crap about life we will continue to chase after fool’s gold.

And buying into gold futures does not a future make.

However if at the center of your being and probably your golf game is the core belief that either you’re in control or you are out of control, then you are for lack of a better term, screwed.

Why is that?

Let’s check your recent and not so recent nine hole scorecard in the “In control” vs. “Not in control” parts of your life:

1. Your marriage – you couldn’t stop your ex from not being able go along with the lie that you were living.
2. Your sexual cravings – yes, you were… and I’m guessing… still not in control of where they take you.
3. Your body – you may have believed you were invincible and maybe even has some believers when you won the US Open at Torrey Pines on two legs that were about to fall out from under you, but your body is proving that it is hardly bulletproof or even injury proof.
4. Your body’s healing – you may have thought you were ready for prime time even though your medical advisors probably – or should have – warned you weren’t (as a medical doctor myself I know there is only so far I can go in trying to protect someone from themselves).
5. Your sponsors – you can probably understand why they have left you although I’m sure you believe that all you need is to win another Major or two and they’ll be back and judging from the men who the public has re-embraced after an embarrassing personal debacle, you’re probably right.
6. Your public’s perception of you – before your marriage problems exploded onto the front pages, you had guarded and controlled the public’s perception of you better than any other athlete in recent times.
7. Your former caddy’s loyalty – all narcissists injure poorly and when it happens it quickly releases a rage that is awful to behold.  Don’t know if that is an accurate description of Steve Williams, but it is clear that after you fired him you had very little control of what and how he would talk about you.
8. Your age – it tough to cheat father time with regard to your mind, body and spirit (oops, scratch the last one, it’s unclear where you are in the spirituality department) although you can put up a pretty good battle.  For instance I look and think much younger than my age, but from my skin inward I often feel “half past dead.”
9. Your dad – no kidding on this one.  Although he had some of his own flaws, I think you have not really been able to “live with life never being the same again” after he died.  I still tell the story (and retold it in my last book, “Just Listen” Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (Amacom, $24.95) of how in the 1997 Masters after you shot 40 on the front nine of the first day you turned to your dad with a kind of “wheels coming off the bus” look and I believe he said something such as: “Tiger you’ve been here before, just do what you need to do.”  After that you went on to shoot 18 under par and win by 12 strokes.

Here is the secret to getting through this and getting better than you have ever been. Rather than treating the “not in control” zone as if you are “out of control,” you need to lean into it and go Zen.

What does that mean?  Work on your fundamentals, swing, etc. and practice, practice, practice but if it’s not working, sometimes instead of trying to make it work, you need to let it not work and continue with practicing, but don’t attach to the outcome.  Don’t force it.  Stop trying to look for or force your game, instead let what your working on discover your game for you.  Practice what you used to do when you would hit every shot possible, get up to the ball, clear your mind of everything except for the directive you would give yourself, “Execute.!”

This would probably help as an overall philosophy to adapt for your life.

In my life I think I have had more than two hundred significant breakthroughs that exponentially accelerated my life forward.  However each and every one of them was preceded by a breakdown that was not pretty, was often scary, and often felt like something I would not get past.

Realizing that all my breakthroughs have been preceded by breakdowns I have now adopted the following approach:

1. Don’t try to make bad things happen, they undoubtedly will.
2. When they happen, resist the temptation to blame others, beat up on myself, make excuses or feel sorry for myself.
3. Instead I say many times to myself, “Don’t do anything for 72 hours to make it worse, continue your usual healthy routines and let time pass.”

When I do this I often have a breakthrough within 72 hours that never would have happened had I not had the preceding breakdown.  And often the greater the breakdown, the greater the break through.  In the past when I didn’t do this and did do things that made it worse, I often missed out on the breakthrough because I was too busy having to apologize, make amends or hide the self-defeating stuff I did to deal with it.

The “Not in Control Zone” is not the enemy, it is  where the game of life is played.

Resources:

• Get Out of Your Own Way: Overcoming Self-Defeating Behavior
• Get Out of Your Own Way at Work…and Help Others Do the Same
  
• “Unflappable” Conflict Effectiveness Training for Executives

Sex addiction in the rich and famous is slightly different than sex addiction in Jane and John Doe. For the rich and famous, the addiction is more about being hooked on adrenaline. However what such people that are excitement junkies never bargained for or prepared for is the fact that the thrill of an adrenaline rush is exceeded by the anguish of an adrenaline crash. It is similar to the crash off cocaine and people who are hooked on that will do almost anything to avoid it. Something that is both ultra-challenging (“Let’s see if I can get that babe at the bar to go upstairs and have sex with me”) plus forbidden (“Let’s see if I can get away with something that if caught could ruin my reputation”) is both a recipe for excitement, an adrenaline rush and disaster.

An element I would add to the above is that what all these men have in common is that they are extremely goal oriented.  When people become goal oriented to a fault (and this can occur in women as well as men, although men more often get into sexual problems) and then have a taste of achieving them, the power associated with it can become intoxicating and addicting. And when that happens, other people are no longer seen as people, but as a means to achieving more goals, be it money, a political victory or a sexual conquest.

It’s as if these hypertrophied goal oriented adrenaline driven individuals develop a kind of secondary Asperger’s Syndrome.  With primary Asperger’s, people don’t lose interest in connecting emotionally to other people, they simply have a limited ability to do that from the start.  In its place is often an extreme goal orientation and that combined with not being distracted by emotional issues of others can often result in major accomplishments especially in the technology and financial fields (where spouses and children are often frustrated by the lack of “relatedness” they feel from their parent with Asperger’s).

With secondary Asperger’s Syndrome, people may have once had a desire and ability to connect emotionally to people, but as they become driven, sucessful and intoxicated by power and goal achievement, they often lose the motivation to connect with people emotionally unless it serves the purpose of achieving a goal.

Whether is was a matter of adrenaline addiction or being goal oriented to a fault, there will now always be an asterisk attached to Bill Clinton’s, Tiger Wood’s, John Edwards’ and now Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s and Arnold Shwarzenegger’s careers because of their succumbing to it.

Sex addiction in the Jane and John Doe’s of the world is about finding something that often starts with dealing with sexual rejection where a mate who withholds sex can trigger in their partner sexual acting out through a prostitute, an affair or pornography. Unfortunately that can escalate and become a quick way to relieve tension or feeling scattered and to a certain extent anxiety and depression. Or it can just be a way to rescue them from boredom. In average people it’s less about the excitement of an adrenaline rush than it is about relief.

There usually is a window of relief and even some calmness and ability to focus after engaging in the addiction when people can focus on what they need to do. The problem is that over time those periods of calmness and focus become less and less. And despite sexually addicted individuals proclaiming, “This will be the last time I engage in it,” after each incident, their will power is sadly no match for their addictive urges.

The reason a residential rehab program is so critical whether you’re one of the rich and famous or Jane or John Doe is that once you become swallowed up by it, you need an immersion program to interrupt the cycle.

What do Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Tiger Woods and for that matter Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and Rosemary’s Baby have in common?

All of them were born with a God given gift (maybe not Rosemary’s Baby) that was recognized early, developed by and in the end exploited by others.  When they realized that instead of being loved they were being used and even lived through by others it was the greatest betrayal.

Also they knew they had those talents and weren’t about to throw them away since it was their main (and sometimes only) talent in life compared to the many other areas where they were incompetent.

Years ago I did house calls to a dying iconic entertainer.  He was known as much for his drug use and arrests as he was for his music.

When I have done house calls to “larger than life” people they have usually appreciated my directness when so many others were telling them what they wanted to hear.  So on one visit I asked him, “What were all the drugs and run ins with the law about?”

He looked at me and said, “I’ve been fortunate to know that I had a special talent from a young age.  And whenever I used it and did something terrific my handlers, and especially my mother would say, ‘That’s a good little boy.’  It made me want to vomit.  I hated that when I succeeded with something I worked so hard at, others took credit for.  I felt like that character Ivan Drago in Rocky IV proclaiming that he fought for himself, and not Russia.  Whenever I did drugs, they did two things for me.  They really did help me escape the pressure of my life, but more importantly, my drug use belonged to me.  No matter how talented you are, when other people are dirtying it by taking credit for it, you need to find something that belongs only to you.  And nobody wanted to take credit for my drug use.”

When I have worked with others who seemed to have it all except for what seemed to be a self-destructive core, I will frequently push them to answer, “What’s all your rage about?”

To a greater of lesser extent most of them when pushed would say they hated discovering that the people who they thought loved them, were using them.  After the rage came out a number of them revealed their underlying fear, that all they knew how to do was something that people would exploit.  They told me how they felt stuck.  Use your talent and be used or show the world how incompetent you are at everything else.

One beautiful women told me how she related to the Marilyn (Monroe) Syndrome, where: “When everybody adores you, but nobody loves you, you can die of loneliness.”

What’s the takeaway? I believe it is an adaptation of Proverb 22.6. The main and singular responsibility of a parent is to help your child discover what they can be great at and help them become it… and never corrupt something that solely belongs to them by taking credit for it.

When you’re a superstar performer and you’ve mainly humiliated yourself (and your family) and haven’t done anything to directly betray or cheat your adoring fans, all you have to do is let time pass to allow your ADD followers to “rubberneck” some other star’s or celebrity’s personal train wreck, then come back and perform superbly and not only will you be forgiven, you may be re-anointed as a hero.

What we’re seeing with Tiger Woods has less to say about him than it has to say about us. And what is says about us is that we are so hungry, smitten and impressed by performance that it doesn’t matter at all whether we respect the performer as a person.

No longer does a prodigal son have to repent, they just have to repeat as champion.

A: They discovered too late that the thrill of an adrenaline rush is exceeded by the listless, dreariness of an adrenaline crash… a crash they will do anything to avoid.

An adrenaline rush makes you feel powerful, bulletproof and invincible. Power, fame, money and capturing sexy women all supply it. But as those acquisitions become more common place, it takes more to generate that rush. And then like its unnatural cousin, cocaine, the crash off it is so awful that you will do anything to avoid it. Few things help to avoid or at least stall that crash more than danger.

When you do find those activities you can become compulsive about them because what causes you to repeat compulsive behavior is that each time you engage in it, it causes a very brief adrenaline rush which is followed by relief and usually shame and a pledge to not engage in it again (think about the the compulsive and tormented cocaine user, shopper or pornography addict who swears after each time he masturbates to it that he will delete all the files on his computer).  But then the crash sets in and the hunger for another rush sets off another round of your compulsive and addictive behavior.

The B movie “Crank” is all about adrenaline rushes, crashes and compulsive behavior.

What we see in the marriages of Woods, Sheen, James and Edwards is that early on they each intensely pursued the object(s) of their affection. But when they captured their prize and the chase stopped, when their partners “grew up” especially when children were added to the mix and finally when their partners had the gall to call these men on their childishness and even to say, “No” to them, their adrenaline highs all came crashing to the ground. It didn’t help that all of these men have big egos and more a streak of narcissism to make everything worse.

Part of the appeal of such men to the often unsuspecting women (who nevertheless should know better) they chase and marry is the thrill of being an object of intense adoration and pursuit by a powerful man who could have anyone, but chooses you.

Have you ever tasted the thrill of an adrenaline rush? If so, what was it like when you came off it?

Follow Mark Goulston, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markgoulston

for-give-ness: Pronunciation: \-ˈgiv-nəs\ – noun – The act of letting go of one’s anger towards someone for having hurt, wounded, betrayed, injured or harmed one. Forgiving does not necessarily mean forgetting the harm someone has done, your disappointment in them or giving them a second chance to harm you, but it does mean letting go of the anger one attaches to the hurtful incident and of begrudging the person for it.

With Tiger Woods’ apology, forgiveness is in the air.  But until it is also in people’s actions it is just words.

One of my favorite and most revealing openings in my talks, that I owe to Dave Hibbard, Founder and CEO of Dialexis who learned it from Caroline Myss author of, Defy Gravity: Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason (Hay House, $24.95), is to ask: “If I could give you the secret to happiness and peace of mind in one word, would you want to know what it is?”

Even to skeptical groups, most people are intrigued enough to reply, “Yes.”

“If you don’t agree with it, you can summarily reject it; but if you do agree with it, do you promise to embrace it and put it into action in your life?” I continue.

Since they are given a way out and since this seems like a logical request, this often triggers a, “Yes” from the group.

I then take out a piece of paper, write a word on it, fold up the piece of paper and hand it to someone in the group.  The message is then handed from one person to the next.

One by one the majority of the group will read the word, pause, take a deep breath and give out a big sigh of agreement.

The word is, “Forgiveness.”

The exercise does not stop there.

I ask them next:

1. “With a show of hands, how many of you when you read the word, ‘forgiveness,’ rejected it?”
2. “How many of you immediately thought of people you needed to forgive?”
3. “How many of you immediately thought of people you need to ask forgiveness from?”
4. “How many of you thought a combination of forgiving people and asking forgiveness from them?”
5. “How many of you thought more about forgiving than asking forgiveness?”
6. “How many of you thought more about asking forgiveness than forgiving others?”

I then explain to them:

1. If you rejected the word, you are most likely a “dyed in the wool” narcissist, because you feel entitled to hold onto negative feelings towards anyone you choose to and you are very poor relationship material.  You shouldn’t be in a relationship and I would advise others to not be in a relationship with you.
2. If you thought either exclusively or more about people you needed to forgive than to ask forgiveness from, you are most likely someone that has narcissistic features and feels entitled.  You can be in a relationship, but you are high maintenance. I would advise people to try a relationship with you, but to be on the look out for getting burned out being with you at which point they need to stop deluding themselves that you’ll change and just get out.
3. If you thought more about asking forgiveness than being forgiving, you are not narcissistic, are willing to take responsibility for your actions that hurt others.  You are low maintenance and the best relationship material.  I would advise others to be in a relationship with you.

Where are you when it comes to forgiveness?  If you want to improve your relationships share this blog with your partner, children, parents, siblings and friends and ask them where on the continuum of “Unforgiving to Forgiving” they see you.  If they see you as being more unforgiving than forgiving, ask them the effect it has had on them regarding being in a relationship with you. If they see you as more unforgiving than forgiving, stop it.

If you are so unforgiving and don’t care about any of this, realize that there is another word that is synonymous when you get to the end of your life.  That word is “bitter.”

It’s an opportunity to see if he can do what John Edwards and Bill Clinton were not able to do. Will Tiger do what’s necessary to earn forgiveness from his wife Elin primarily and then the rest of us secondarily?

In my thirty years of seeing couples who have dealt with and overcome infidelity, I have developed an “air tight” formula that is necessary to earn forgiveness after you’ve betrayed someone. I call it the Power Apology, but very few powerful people and power hitters are able to do it.

The 4 H’s

When you betray someone’s trust at such a deep level you trigger in them: Hurt, Hate, Hesitation to Trust, Holding onto a Grudge.

1. Hurt – When you betray someone’s trust and in the case of an affair let those you’re having the affair with, know just how little you respect your spouse, you trigger intense, devastating hurt in your spouse. They can become physically ill, mentally unhinged when as much as they thought they could trust you is as untrustworthy as you turned out to be.

2. Hate – After that direct blow to there gut, mind and soul rips a hole in them, they become infuriated and enraged. One of the things that is most enraging and difficult to get past is that during the time they suspected you were cheating and you kept reassuring them you weren’t or told them they were imagining things or being paranoid, you put them in an emotional Sophie’s Choice. Either you were lying to them or you weren’t and they were just crazy. Many spouses will choose to believe the latter, because believing you are lying to them is incompatible with their emotionally and literally remaining in the marriage.

3. Hesitation to Trust – After your partner went against their own instincts and were willing to think it was their imagination and that they were crazy, they are not going to lower their guard and trust you again only to be re-traumatized.

4. Holding Onto a Grudge – Being hesitant to trust is a way of protecting yourself, but having to be ever vigilant is exhausting. A much less exhausting way to protect yourself, but no less obstructive to repairing a relationship, is holding onto a grudge. Doing that enables you to keep your guard up and keep it up fortified with your anger.

The 4 R’s

In order for a person who has been betrayed to forgive, their 4 H’s need to be responded to by the 4 R’s: Remorse, Restitution, Rehabilitation, Request for Forgiveness.

1. Remorse – This is not the same as regret. Regret is saying, “Okay, I messed up. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. I promise, can we just move on?” Regret is almost insulting to the hurt that the injured party feels. In most cases it makes them feel worse as if they’re doing something wrong by not letting it go. Remorse is feeling incredible and almost unbearable pain for having hurt the other person, looking into their eyes, pleading with them to look into your eyes and show you what your betrayal did to them, having them see that your seeing that pain causes you unbearable pain. Think of what it might feel like if you loved both your parents (who were not manipulative or guilt tripping by nature) and you were too busy to visit them while your mom, who loved you, was dying. Think of arriving too late to see her before she died and your dad looking at you with intense sadness in his eyes and telling you: “Your mom was disappointed that she didn’t get to see you before she died. And I’m disappointed in you for not visiting her before she died.” This is something that John Edwards and Bill Clinton failed to do. In neither case did their apologies communicate what seemed like genuine remorse.

2. Restitution – Your betrayal cut the other person to their core and took something away that was incredibly important to them, the ability to unconditionally trust you. Hurt may be satisfied with remorse, but their hatred needs a payback. And that payback needs to cut to your core as deeply as your betrayal cut to theirs. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s a home, maybe it’s access to kids, or maybe it’s listening to you continue to verbally berate and vent until they’ve emotionally punched themselves out.

3. Rehabilitation – In order for your partner to overcome their hesitation to trust you, they will need to see you have changed the way you deal with upset, disappointment and frustration in ways other than betraying them, abusing them or lying to them. Furthermore they will need to see that you actually enjoy your new ability to deal with things in a healthy way. If they feel you have only learned a new coping mechanism to appease them and your heart is not into it, you really haven’t rehabilitated yourself.

4. Request Forgiveness – You can’t undo or take back what you did; all you can do is practice the first 3 R’s – Remorse, Restitution, Rehabilitation – over and over again until you have internalized them into your personality. And that can take 6 to 18 months. At that point, you have earned the right to ask for forgiveness, let their anger and distrust go and for them to give you a second chance. That doesn’t mean that they have to forget what you did. If they are unable to do that, the problem shifts from your being unforgivable to their being unforgiving. And then the responsibility for finishing up the relationship repair rests in their letting go of their grudge. When I’ve run into resistance about this I have often asked the unforgiving spouse, “Who did you learn to be unforgiving from that you swore you’d never grow up to be like?” They often make the connection to that mother of father who made their life miserable.

If Tiger Woods fails at this, we the public may still forgive him if he goes back to winning – much as we forgave Bill Clinton – who went on to achieve things after his Presidency that were greater than what he did when he was in office. One of the other reasons we forgive such people is that we see what they did in their personal life as something that hurt and embarrassed them as opposed to us and we like going back to looking up to how well they perform in their specialty area. If either President Clinton or Tiger Woods had pulled a Bernie Madoff that directly affected us, we never would have forgiven them.

I hope that Tiger Woods can succeed with his apology in ways that Edwards and Clinton couldn’t. But unfortunately I don’t think this is a championship that Tiger would be favored to win.

1. You know he can beat you
2. He knows he can beat you
3. He knows that you know he can beat you
That’s a competitive advantage!”

- as told by a PGA professional friend of mine

What gives Tiger his competitive advantage? His superior athleticism? Sure. His work ethic? Of course. His fierce determination? Absolutely.

Perhaps his greatest unforeseen advantage may not be a matter of his having a competitive edge, but rather how everyone else seems to lose theirs.

How do you lose your competitive edge?

When bad things happen and you blame, complain, whine or make excuses what does that do for your competition who at the same moment: a) “takes the hit;” b) feels the upset (even Tiger will bang a club into the ground); c) takes a deep breath and exhales; d) lets it go and puts it quickly behind them; d) recenters; e) refocuses; f) executes.

My favorite sports story of all time is one that I offer in my upcoming book, “Just Listen” Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (AMACOM, Sept. 16, 2009). It is in “Chapter 3: Move Yourself from ‘Oh F#@&’ to ‘OK’” and demonstrated to me the best example ever of not only keeping the wheels on after a bump, but becoming a “Turbo Porsche.”

In 1997, playing in his second Masters golf tournament, Tiger had shot 40 on the opening nine holes of the tournament. At that moment, Tiger turned to his dad Earl and said something along the lines that he didn’t know what was happening. Earl looked into his son’s eyes and reflected back just how well prepared Tiger was for anything and said to him: “You’ve been here before, just do what you need to do.”

Tiger went on to win the Masters by 12 strokes shooting 18 under par, two records that have never been equaled.

Tiger’s competitive advantage is that when he hits a wall that would cause others to fall apart, he stops, reaches inside himself and discovers what all champions find. He discovers he has “heart” and in his case it is still held up and given to him by the loving, caring hands of his dad.

This phenomenon is not restricted to the world of sports. You see it in business and politics. Isn’t that what we all saw as John McCain and Hillary both lost their competitive advantage when they hit a few walls and we saw their wheels come off?

What would happen to you if when you reached inside, you discovered the same thing that Tiger does? What would happen if when they hit a wall, you could be to your kids, your people at work, and your friends what Earl was to Tiger?

Imagine the possibilities.

Also please join me for my August 26, 9-10 AM PST, 12-1 PM EST, free American Management Association webcast, “The Simple Way to Get Through to Difficult People.” There are now 2600 people registered for it and you can help me set a record.

And check out my upcoming book, “Just Listen” Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (AMACOM, Sept. 16, 2009) which you can pre-order at a steep discount.