- Alcohol
- Mental Health
I started drinking at my christening. I was six years old, and my parents, both drinkers, had recently realized that to get us into a good school they would need us to at least appear to be Christians. So I was drunk at my christening. It was great. I felt wonderful. I understood why people drank and vowed to myself I would henceforth drink as much as possible and as often as possible. That is the one promise in my life I have actually kept! Later on, I discovered drugs and took loads of them too.
Time passed and the reward of feeling great diminished to a disappearing point. The effects, such as withdrawals from a bad hangover, had increased to the point of not knowing what would happen the minute I picked up a drink. I kept up my denial system by having a job, a home and a relationship. But finally, the whole charade collapsed around me, and I found myself in my mid-twenties on the streets with nothing and no one. I made it into a mental hospital, where I detoxed physically, and found a treatment center that would take me. I went to 12-step meetings and slowly got better. I got so much better, in fact, that after some years, I was able to work in the addiction field myself. I took courses and qualified in counseling and therapy. I started to believe that knowledge was the route to salvation. I thought that, now that I understood myself better, the world was my oyster. Eventually, I stopped going to 12-step meetings.
What I couldn’t understand was why, with all my new found confidence and with nine years of sobriety under my belt, I still felt so empty, lonely, hollow and angry. There seemed to be no reason for it, and I found it hard to handle. It wasn’t all the time, so I buried it in work and my love life. I was getting by and had no real problems. Then my relationship ended and I simultaneously was having difficulties at work because I wasn’t able to cope with a promotion that had distanced me from working with addicts and made me a staff supervisor. And I relapsed.
I was overwhelmed with guilt and confusion. I could not understand how I had let this happen. After all, I knew so much about addiction. I had fallen for the idea that, if I relapsed in spite of all I knew, I must be a weak, morally deficient person. That internalized shame and stigma kept me using for the next seventeen years.
I guess we are now getting to the happy-ish ending. I am one of the very few who got a second chance at recovery. My partner paid for me to go into a private treatment center for 28 days last summer, and I have been clean and sober since. The key difference this time is that I have a new understanding of what the disease, the powerlessness and the unmanageability actually mean. Addiction is a behavior. I personally believe that human beings tend to change behaviors that aren’t working for them, except in the case of addictions, where some of us just take a wrong turn and keep on going. These days in recovery, I don’t really care about why that is. What I do to remove obstacles and change matters more.
When I first went to meetings, I wasn’t told to understand myself. I was told not to pick up and to keep coming back. In counseling, I have not been told to understand myself. I have been told I need to drop my masks and defenses. In the steps, it doesn’t tell me to understand myself. It tells me to write stuff down and talk it through. These are all behaviors. And if, by chance, some catharsis, release or insight arises from these behaviors, then that’s great. But the knowledge won’t be what keeps me safe this time. It’s all in the behaviors for me.
So, is it great to be in recovery? No. At the moment, it’s actually pretty crappy. I have lost the partner who was kind enough to fund my initial treatment. I am staying in a new town where I have only a few fledgling friendships. I have not yet been able to get a job and the money is fast running out. My shame causes me to trip over my addictions into self-pity, rage and depression all the time.
I practice the behaviors and I get up again. And again. And again. However many times it takes, I will keep getting up again. I have a much better level of acceptance of that fact that I will have feelings I don’t like and I will have difficulty managing. But these things will pass! The less I fear my feelings, the quicker they pass and the less power they have. I am not cured and I never will be. With some of the emotional rubbish I put myself through, I frankly think I am actually just going to bore myself into change. And that’s OK. I don’t have to be OK to be OK with me. If I keep up the right behaviors, I will be fine.
Some words to live by:
Fall down, get up.