Author: The Fix

Stone Sour Guitarist: Maintaining Sobriety While Touring Is “Difficult”

In a new interview, Josh Rand discussed the ups and downs of being in early recovery while out on tour with the band.

Stone Sour guitarist Josh Rand revealed that staying sober on tour has been “more difficult” than he ever expected. Earlier this year, Rand sat out the Canadian leg of Stone Sour’s Hydrograd tour in order to receive treatment for alcohol and Xanax abuse.

During a recent interview with Des Moines, Iowa radio station Lazer 103.3, Rand admitted that adjusting to life on the road hasn’t been easy.

“Europe, for me, was really trying,” he said. “When I was touring in the U.S., it was easy for me to have structure, and that’s one thing that I learned on both of these tours—the U.S. one and then the European summer tour—I’m a guy that needs structure.”

He added that while he faced “temptation” a number of times while in Europe, he made it through.

“I have a great support group within the band and the people that work for us, and then my fiancée came out midway through, so that was the extra support,” he noted. “But it was a little bit more difficult than what I thought going into it.”

Rand said that “nobody had any idea” that he’d been on the prescription anxiety medication, Xanax, since 2010. (He’d been prescribed the drug for anxiety related to flying.)

“And then, over the course of the last couple of years, I started drinking, and when we started touring, I was basically day-drinking,” he told 103.3. “But [I was] not drinking to get messed up, but just to maintain, I guess. Or to be able to cope, to have this buzz.”

Eventually, Rand found himself feeling “horrible and miserable” and left his bandmates shortly after the ShipRocked cruise in mid-January to get treatment.

In a June interview with Loudwire, Rand observed that while maintaining sobriety on the road remains difficult, the decision to get sober was something of a no-brainer: “In January, I just hit a wall with things, felt just terrible and decided that it was in my best interest and the band’s best interest to step aside and get stuff sorted,” he said.

The guitarist further detailed his decision, claiming that it didn’t take an intervention to get him into treatment. Instead, he made the decision himself.

“To be quite honest, everybody had went through check-in at the airport and they were already through when I made the decision that I wasn’t going to fly to Canada and I was flying back to Des Moines,” he told Loudwire. “I had just spun into a funk, depression thing. I just wasn’t happy and so that’s why I made the decision. I just felt like every day was a burden. I was just like, ‘This is crazy. I know I don’t have to feel like this.’”

Following treatment, however, Rand has found solace in his exercise routines (“Sometimes I’ll go to the gym twice”) as the band continues to find success.

“We have a very open communication with the five of us and truly a brotherhood,” he said.

View the original article at thefix.com

23 August 2018
Fentanyl Found In Startling Number Of Heroin Samples In Canada

“Something like 60% of the drugs that we check are not what people think they are,” said the author of a new drug-testing study.

Drugs in Vancouver, Canada may be even more dangerous than normal, according to a new pilot project.

The project from the B.C. Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) found that more than 80% of drugs sold as heroin in Vancouver do not actually contain heroin, but rather a dangerous synthetic opioid called fentanyl.

For the project, the BCCSU gave local users the opportunity to test their drugs for fentanyl as well as other substances. The study took place from November 2017 to April 2018 at two supervised-consumption sites in the Downtown Eastside part of Vancouver.

In total, 1,714 samples were tested with fentanyl test strips and an infrared spectrometer.

The results, which the Globe and Mail reports will be published in September in the Drug and Alcohol Dependence journal, demonstrated that fentanyl was present in a great deal of local drugs, especially heroin. The project also found that types of drugs such as stimulants and hallucinogens are more likely to contain the substance they are sold as.

The findings, according to co-author Mark Lysyshyn, give insight into how problematic the contamination of various drugs is locally.

“Something like 60% of the drugs that we check are not what people think they are,” Lysyshyn said on Tuesday, according to the Globe and Mail. “We’ve always had the idea that drugs could be something different, but right now [the contamination rate] is really high.”

During the study, the Globe and Mail states, authors found that the majority of drug samples (58.7%) were expected to be opioids. They received 907 samples of what was thought to be heroin, but only 160 (17.6%) contained heroin. Of the total 907, 822 contained fentanyl.

Lysyshyn says the results aren’t necessarily indicative of the illegal drug market as a whole since the study was concentrated in downtown Vancouver.

He also added that the intention of the study was not to prove whether an illegal drug is safe, but instead to encourage those who use the drugs to seek out more information about what they are putting into their bodies.

“I don’t think the purpose of drug checking is to say, ‘These are safe; take them recklessly.’ That’s not what we’re trying to do,” he said, according to the Mail and Globe. “We’re saying, here’s a bit more information about these substances; they still could be risky. Because even if you find out there’s no fentanyl in your heroin, heroin causes overdoses, too. We don’t want people to forget all about the other harm-reduction advice that we’re giving; this is just additional information that we think could be helpful.”

View the original article at thefix.com

23 August 2018
Suboxone: A Tool for Recovery

With medication-assisted treatment (MAT), people with opioid addictions are given the chance to rebuild their lives—often from the ashes and debris of drug-induced destruction—without having to fight cravings and withdrawal.

Suboxone is a prescription medication that treats opioid addiction. It contains buprenorphine and naloxone, active ingredients that are used to curb cravings and block the effects of opioids. Although a major player in addiction recovery today, and often referred to as the gold-standard of addiction care, many in the recovery community remain resistant and even wary, including a large portion of rehab facilities and many members of the 12-step community.

How does Suboxone work? When an opioid like heroin hits your system, it causes a sense of euphoria, reduced levels of pain, and slowed breathing. The higher the dose, the more intense the effect. Buprenorphine and heroin are both considered opioids, but the way they bind with the opioid receptors in the brain differs. Heroin is a full agonist, meaning it activates the receptor completely and provides all of the desired effects. Buprenorphine is a long-acting partial agonist. While it still binds to the receptor, it is less activating than a full agonist, and there is a plateau level which means that additional doses will not create increased beneficial effects (although they may still cause increased adverse effects). In someone who has been addicted to opioids, buprenorphine will not cause feelings of euphoria—the sensation of being “high.” Naloxone is paired with the buprenorphine to discourage misuse; if Suboxone is injected, the presence of the naloxone may make the user extremely ill.

Jail Physician and Addiction Specialist Dr. Jonathan Giftos, M.D. offers this analogy: “I describe opioid receptors as little ‘garages’ in the brain. Heroin (or any short-acting opioid) is like a car that parks in those garages. As the car pulls into the garage, the patient gets a positive opioid effect. As the car backs out of the garage, the patient experiences withdrawal symptoms. Buprenorphine works as a car that pulls into the same garage, providing a positive opioid effect—just enough to prevent withdrawal symptoms and reduce cravings, but unlike heroin, which backs out after a few hours causing withdrawal—buprenorphine pulls the parking brake and occupies garage for 24-36 hours. This causes the functional blockade of the opioid receptor, reducing illicit opioid use and risk of fatal overdose.”

Critics and skeptics of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) believe that using Suboxone is essentially replacing one narcotic with another. While buprenorphine is technically considered a narcotic substance with addictive properties, there are important differences between using an opioid like heroin or oxycontin and physician-prescribed Suboxone. Similarities between using heroin and Suboxone are that you have to take the drug every day or you will experience withdrawal and likely become very ill. Aside from the physical dependency, which is without a doubt a burden, Suboxone offers people in recovery the opportunity to live a “normal” life, far removed from the drug culture lifestyle they may have been immersed in while using heroin.

People are dying every day from heroin overdoses, especially now in the nightmarish age of fentanyl. People in recovery from opioid addiction are living, free from the risk of overdosing, on Suboxone. Suboxone is a harm reduction option that while initially raised some eyebrows is gaining more traction, and considered an obvious choice for treatment by addiction medicine professionals. While someone using heroin is tasked daily with coming up with money for their drugs, avoiding run-ins with police or authorities, meeting dealers and often participating in other criminal activity, someone using physician-prescribed Suboxone is not breaking the law. They are able to function normally and go to school or get a job, and they are often participating in other forms of ongoing treatment simultaneously. People are given the chance to rebuild their lives—often from the ashes and debris of drug-induced destruction—without having to fight cravings and withdrawal.

There is a common misconception about Suboxone, and medication-assisted treatment in general, that it is a miracle medication that cures addiction. Because of this idea, many people use Suboxone and are disappointed when they relapse, quickly concluding that MAT doesn’t work for them. When visiting the website for the medication, it reads directly underneath “Important Safety Information” — “SUBOXONE® (buprenorphine and naloxone) Sublingual Film (CIII) is a prescription medicine indicated for treatment of opioid dependence and should be used as part of a complete treatment plan to include counseling and psychosocial support.”

So, as prescribed, Suboxone is intended to be only part of a treatment plan. It is but one tool in a toolbox with many other important tools such as counseling or therapy, 12-step meetings, building a support system, nurturing an aspect of your life that gives you purpose, and practicing self-care. It is medication-assisted treatment, emphasis on the assisted.

With that being said, the type of additional treatment or self-care a person participates in should fit their own individual needs and comfort level and not be forced on them. Like a wise therapist once said, “Everybody has the right to self-determination.” Twelve-step meetings, although free and available to everyone, are not the ideal treatment for many people struggling with addiction. Therapy is expensive. People using Suboxone or other MAT shouldn’t be confined to predetermined treatment plans that have little to do with an individual’s needs and more to do with stigma-imposed restrictions.

It’s unlikely that you’ll find a person claiming that simply taking Suboxone instead of heroin every day saved their life. It is not the mere replacement of one substance for another that is saving lives and treating even the most hopeless of people who have opioid use disorder; it is the relentless pursuit of a new way of life, a pursuit which includes rigorous introspection and a complete change of environment, peers, and daily life. Through the process of therapy, 12-step, using a recovery app, or whatever treatment suits you best, a person can face their demons, learn healthy coping mechanisms, and build confidence without the constant instability of cravings and withdrawal. Suboxone is giving people a chance that they just didn’t have before.

So why is there such a stigma tied to the life-saving medication? Much of it comes from misinformation and is carried over from its predecessor—the stigma of addiction. It is hard for people who have a pre-existing disdain for addiction in general to swallow the idea that another “narcotic” medication may be the best form of treatment. In addition to addiction-naive civilians or “normies” as 12-steppers might call them, many members of the Narcotics Anonymous community are not completely sold on Suboxone’s curative potential either. Some members of the 12-step community are accepting of MAT, but you just don’t know what you’re going to get. You may walk into a meeting and have a group that is completely open and supportive of a decision to go through the steps while on Suboxone, or you may walk into a meeting of old-timers who are adamant that total abstinence is crucial to your success in the program.

Another reason people are unconvinced is the length of time Suboxone users may or may not stay on the medication. Again, there is a stigma that shames people who use Suboxone long-term even though studies have shown long-term medication-assisted treatment is more successful than using it only as a detox aid. If Suboxone is helping a person live a productive life in a healthy environment, without the risk of overdose, that person should have the right to do so for however long they need without the scrutinizing gaze of others. While their critics are tsk-tsking away, they may be getting their law degree or buying their first home.

Suboxone is a vastly misunderstood and complex medication that has the potential to not only save the lives of people with opioid addictions, but also allow them to recover and rebuild lives that were once believed to be beyond repair.

View the original article at thefix.com

23 August 2018
Former Amazon Employee Quit Job To Chronicle Journey To Sobriety

Kristi Coulter decided to focus on her sobriety more than her life as a person with alcoholism as she wrote Nothing Good Can Come From This.

For 12 years, Kristi Coulter, who graduated with an MFA from the University of Michigan, worked at Amazon in a variety of executive roles. She also had a big drinking problem and would drink at least one bottle of wine a night.

Now she’s written an acclaimed series of essays about her drinking and recovery called Nothing Good Can Come From This.

In an interview with Seattle Magazine, Coulter helped shed light on addiction in “tech culture,” which she says has been overlooked for some time. “Tech culture is drinking culture.”

People in the tech sector not only drink from the high levels of stress, but also to deal with the rampant sexism that has infected that world for years.

Coulter discovered she had a gift for writing when she penned an essay for Medium called Enjoli, which received wide acclaim and led to her book deal.

Coulter told The Woolfer that her book is “a raw, frank, feminist look at what happens when a high-achieving, deeply unhappy forty-something woman give us the ‘one’ thing she really thinks she can’t live without—wine—and has to remake her entire sense of self from the ground up.”

In writing Nothing Good, Coulter focused on her sobriety more than her life as a person with alcoholism. “My drinking life was so monotonous,” she explains. “I really wanted to spend some time on ‘here’s what it’s actually like to live in a world like that.’”

Coulter says she’s now five years sober, and she found writing about it to be a great catharsis. “I never expected to make it to this side of the pool. I never thought I’d get to be here.”

Coulter also runs her own blog called Off Dry, and each blog entry marks her sober days. (The latest entry, where you can win a copy of Nothing Good, is marked “Day 1,879.”) On the front page of her blog, Coulter writes, “I got sober. Life got big.”

When asked what advice she would give her younger self, Coulter jokes, “I thought, given where I ended up, was ‘Don’t start drinking!’ But that’s an oversimplification. Instead, I’d say, ‘Be aware that you can’t drink away your pain. You can’t drink away the things you don’t want to face.

“Reality is reality whether you like it or not, and it will still be waiting for you when the alcohol wears off, along with whatever you did to make things even worse while you were drunk—and by the way, people don’t generally make their problems ‘better’ while they’re drunk. Okay! Glad we had this chat, kiddo. Proceed.’”

View the original article at thefix.com

23 August 2018
More ERs Are Providing Withdrawal Meds As First Step To Recovery

Patients in need are receiving buprenorphine to address their withdrawal symptoms.

Kicking an opioid habit comes with a host of physical withdrawal symptoms so severe that people often end up in the emergency room.

There, they are usually treated for diarrhea or vomiting, but not the underlying issue. Now, however, more emergency rooms around the county are providing buprenorphine to help ease withdrawal and get more people into treatment.

“With a single ER visit we can provide 24 to 48 hours of withdrawal suppression, as well as suppression of cravings,” Dr. Andrew Herring, an emergency medicine specialist at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, told The New York Times.

At Highland, people who come in presenting with withdrawal symptoms are given a dose of buprenorphine, also known as Suboxone, and are told to follow up with Herring, who runs the hospital’s buprenorphine program.

“It can be this revelatory moment for people—even in the depth of crisis, in the middle of the night,” Herring said. “It shows them there’s a pathway back to feeling normal.”

Although the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) requires doctors to receive special training and a license to prescribe buprenorphine, doctors in the ER can provide the medication without this training. Still, Herring said, many healthcare providers hesitate to provide the first step toward medication-assisted treatment (MAT).

“At first it seemed so alien and far-fetched,” he said.

Yet, research into the practice is promising. A 2015 study showed that people who were given buprenorphine in the ER were twice as likely to be in treatment 30 days later than those who were not given medication to help with withdrawal.

“I think we’re at the stage now where emergency docs are saying, ‘I’ve got to do something,’” said Dr. Gail D’Onofrio, lead study author. “They’re beyond thinking they can just be a revolving door.”

California has plans to expand treatment for withdrawal in emergency rooms, using $78 million in federal funding to establish a hub-and-spoke system where people would get their first dose of medication in the emergency room before being connected with ongoing services.

Dr. Kelly Pfeifer, director of high-value care at the California Health Care Foundation, said this is the next step in providing quality care for people fighting addiction.

“We don’t think twice about someone having a heart attack, getting stabilized in the emergency department, and then getting ongoing care from the cardiologist,” she said. “And the risk of death within a year after an overdose is greater than it is for a heart attack.”

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018
Mixing Energy Drinks With Alcohol May Put You At Risk

A new study investigated how the main ingredient in energy drinks affected behavior.

Red Bull, according to the company itself, does not have any dangerous effects when mixed with alcohol. However, a new study indicates that this may not be the case—at least not with zebrafish.

According to Esquire, researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil took a common energy drink ingredient called taurine, mixed it with alcohol and tested it with zebrafish.

The zebrafish that were given the combination were then compared to zebrafish that had been exposed to water, taurine or alcohol separately. The fish, Esquire reports, were then observed to see how they interacted with one another and how they responded to potential threats.

Researchers found that the fish that had been exposed to alcohol and taurine combined were less likely to socialize with the other fish and were more likely to engage in risky behavior, like spending time in what researchers referred to as a “predator zone.”

“Taken together, these data appear to suggest that mixing alcohol and taurine might be a factor in increasing some of the negative effects of alcohol,” said Dr. Matt Parker, study co-author and senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, according to Science Daily. “People should be aware that drinking energy drinks in combination with alcohol may impair their judgement, and should do so with caution.”

Parker also stated that this particular study was the first of its kind to indicate that mixing alcohol and energy drinks can increase the risk of behaviors like fighting and violence.

“Binge drinking and general alcohol misuse is a key problem in the UK and across the world, with the numbers of hospital admissions resulting from illness or injury following intoxication costing the NHS millions per year,” Parker told Science Daily. “Alcohol reduces our inhibitions, and in low doses can cause relaxation and euphoria. However, in higher doses this low inhibition can cause problems with fighting or risky behavior. Zebrafish have similar biological and behavioural responses to alcohol, and are a highly social species, making them ideal for studying the effects of alcohol on behavior.”

While the results of this study seem to imply that the combination of alcohol and taurine can lead to risky behavior, it’s important to note that the study was done on fish, not humans.

Meanwhile, Red Bull maintains that there are no side effects of drinking the beverage with alcohol.

“There is no indication that Red Bull Energy Drink has any specific effect (negative or positive) related to alcohol consumption,” the company’s website reads. Red Bull also states that this claim is backed up by a 2012 decision from the UK Committee on Toxicity.

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018
Wells Fargo Closes Political Candidate’s Bank Account Over Marijuana

The bank reportedly decided to terminate the account after being told the candidate’s campaign would accept donations from MMJ-related entities.

Florida political candidate Nikki Fried claims that Wells Fargo Bank recently terminated her bank account because of her stance on marijuana.

On Monday (August 20), Fried’s campaign shared the details of what transpired.

According to the Washington Post, Wells Fargo asked if Fried, who is running for Florida agriculture commissioner, would accept donations from the medical marijuana industry.

When the campaign replied that it would accept donations “from lobbyists for the medical marijuana industry, as well as from executives, employees and corporations in the medical marijuana industry,” the bank decided to terminate Fried’s account, citing its “responsibility to oversee and manage banking risks.”

According to the campaign, the decision had to do with the candidate’s “relationship to the medical marijuana industry.”

Wells Fargo’s decision once again sheds light on the complicated relationship between the legal marijuana industry and financial institutions.

A rep for Wells Fargo stated that it is the bank’s policy “not to knowingly bank or provide services to marijuana businesses or for activities related to those businesses, based on federal laws under which the sale and use of marijuana is illegal even if state laws differ.”

Businesses operating in states where marijuana is legal in some form must contend with the fact that marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In fact, by the federal government’s definition, cannabis is as dangerous as heroin—defined as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

As Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated, the disparity between state and federal marijuana laws “puts federally chartered banks in a very difficult situation.”

As a result of many banks’ reluctance to deal with legal marijuana businesses, many must operate as cash-only, making them a target for robberies.

However, new data shows that the tide might be turning. In June, Forbes reported that the number of banks and credit unions that are willing to work with marijuana businesses has been “steadily climbing.”

The data came from a report from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Fried criticized Wells Fargo’s decision to terminate her campaign’s account. “Wells Fargo’s actions against my campaign are emblematic of what is wrong with our government and politics today,” she said in a Monday press conference.

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018
Carson Daly & NBA Star Kevin Love Discuss Anxiety on Today Show

“I had a moment where I thought I was going to die. I had never experienced something like that. I thought I was having a heart attack,” Love told Carson Daly.

NBA All Star Kevin Love and Carson Daly have something in common—they both struggle with managing their anxiety.

This came up in a recent interview on the Today show, where Love, who plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, described the panic attack that set off his quest to spread mental health awareness.

“I had a moment where I thought I was going to die. I had never experienced something like that. I thought I was having a heart attack,” he told Carson Daly.

Love is sharing his experience in hopes that he’ll encourage more people to feel comfortable doing the same. Men in particular, Love says, have a hard time opening up about mental health issues.

Raised on this mindset, at first Love, too, tried downplaying his panic attack. “I kind of brushed it off, because in our sport or in life, and being a man, you’re taught to suppress it. You’re taught to suffer in silence,” he said.

Love’s essay “Everyone Is Going Through Something” was published in The Players’ Tribune in March 2018. In it, Love discussed the panic attack and the importance of talking about mental health.

“To me, it was a form of weakness that could derail my success in sports or make me seem weird or different,” he wrote.

“If you’re suffering silently like I was, then you know how it can feel like nobody gets it,” he wrote. “Partly, I want to do it for me, but mostly, I want to do it because people don’t talk about mental health enough. And men and boys are probably the farthest behind.”

With Love and fellow NBA players DeMar DeRozan and Channing Frye speaking up about mental health, the NBA has addressed mental health in the league. It launched a new initiative under NBA Cares called Mind Health, aiming to teach people how to recognize and manage stress, while providing support.

And the NBA Players Association appointed its first director of mental health and wellness, Dr. William Parham.

TV anchor Carson Daly previously shared his struggles with anxiety disorder in March. The former Total Request Live (TRL) host said he was a “worrywart kid” and was “nervous my whole life.”

His anxiety reached a breaking point the more success he achieved. “I had no idea what [a panic attack] was at the time,” he recalled. “The success of my career, I flew to New York, and my life changed overnight. I had a hard time breathing. I was terrified for no apparent reason.”

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018
Demi Lovato's Backup Dancer Denies Rumor That She Gave Singer Drugs

Dancer Dani Vitale took to Instagram to refute claims that she provided the singer with the drugs that led to her apparent overdose.

Dancer Dani Vitale has issued an impassioned statement that pushed back against allegations that she supplied singer Demi Lovato with the drugs that caused her apparent overdose.

Vitale, who performs with Lovato and described herself as a friend of the singer, shared her thoughts on the overdose and Lovato’s condition on her Instagram page, where she stated that she has “NEVER touched nor even SEEN a drug in [her] entire life,” and added that she did not use drugs, encourage their use or supply them to “anyone I love.”

Vitale also detailed how the rumors about her alleged involvement in Lovato’s overdose have impacted her life, stating that the “circulation of an UNTRUE story on the internet yanked my life, my reputation and everything I have worked so hard to stand for, out from underneath me.”

In the post, written on August 16, 2018, Vitale wrote that she was celebrating her birthday with friends on July 23, only to wake up the next morning and discover that Lovato had suffered an overdose.

“My whole being was ridden with sadness, confusion, love and hopelessness,” she wrote.

However, Vitale was not prepared for the outpouring of criticism from social media circles, much of which placed the blame for Lovato’s overdose on her. To complicate matters, she claimed that companies with whom she had worked and individuals she considered friends began to distance themselves from her.

“I wound up not leaving my house nor my bed for three weeks,” she wrote. “Terrified to open a blind or to get out of bed, my house remained just as dark as my mind daily. I thought if I stayed asleep, that was the time I didn’t have to be conscious living in this hell that was being forced upon me. And there were nights I would honestly hope I wouldn’t wake up the next morning so I didn’t have to live through this anymore and it would all go away.”

Lovato has since recovered from the overdose, and posted a message to fans via Instagram on August 5. “I am forever grateful for all of your love and support throughout this past week and beyond,” she wrote. “I now need time to heal and focus on my sobriety and road to recovery.” Vitale’s life has also found a degree of stability; though she is again leading dance classes in Los Angeles, but the pain of the social media outburst is clearly still with her.

“I’m still scared to touch my phone and open it, and trying to resume a ‘normal’ life has been brutally unbearable,” she wrote. “This UNTRUE narrative is damaging innocent people’s lives, mine included. We are so quick to point the finger with little to ZERO facts at all.”

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018
Recovery Myths That Can Hurt You

I could be saying how well I was doing, while the psychic megaphone over my head screamed, “Can’t you see how lonely I am?” Not surprisingly, I wasn’t drawing healthy people into my world.

When the words “feelings aren’t facts” first pierced my brain, I was hooked. My baseline was misery, so it was a huge relief to believe I was lying to myself. Over the years, I repeated this gospel, too. Until I saw it for what it was—a form of emotional abuse.

I get it. Many of us have a tendency to dramatize that we’re unaware of, largely because our addiction made life a fuckshow. But our lives continue even after we put our substances down, and the show rolls on. When my sober boyfriend of five years died, I was 24. And five years clean. The tragedy was real.

In truth, I’d barely learned to identify my feelings. My therapist had finally resorted to pulling out a chart with stick figure faces, each labeled with an emotion. “Pick one,” she encouraged. I needed that chart for a long time. When I tried to express myself in the real world, however, I had a very different experience.

“Don’t believe your feelings,” I was cheerily told as I moped around the rooms. But my emotions were the only thing that seemed solid. Even if I wasn’t great at describing them, I experienced the world through my senses. My mindscape was a constant stream of love and hate, desire and abstinence, hunger and disgust.

I tried to act the part, fake it till I could make it past this sadness, but my actual sentiments came out despite these efforts. I sensed that I was making the people around me uncomfortable. Left alone, my mind went wild. This grieving is going on too long. He was only your boyfriend. No one will ever love you like that again.

Trying to change my mind about how I felt wasn’t the same as changing my feelings. Yet ignoring my feelings and listening to my supposedly rational mind felt equally horrible. The only thing it did help me succeed at was questioning my every move. I must be doing this wrong, I’d think, vowing to hide better.

The Psychic Megaphone

There was just one problem with suppressing the truth—it didn’t work. I didn’t merely sense I was repelling people, I was. I could be saying how well I was doing, while the psychic megaphone over my head screamed, “Can’t you see how lonely I am?” Not surprisingly, I wasn’t drawing healthy people into my world. This had the added bonus of giving me something new and shiny to mull over. These people are messed up!

My feelings, I now know, were never the issue. It was the stories I told about them that caused the problem, a habit that, like any addiction, got stronger every time I did it. I turned my unworthiness into legend.

I was scared, too, that I’d be overwhelmed by my emotions. In some sense, I was right to be afraid. Overwhelm reeks of powerlessness, and when I’m powerless, I’m tempted to act out—smoke, spend, eat, fuck, drink.

I had to learn to grant a healthy to respect my feelings, to pay attention to them without reacting. This is also known as self-soothing, which many people are taught, or learn. But I don’t know of any addicts who sober up with this ability intact. I didn’t get anywhere near it for a decade in sobriety. I’m slow.

The light at the end of the tunnel is this: when we stop believing our feelings, they lose their power to stop us in our tracks.

But How Is It Emotional Abuse?

Telling a person not to believe their feelings is the same as saying they shouldn’t trust themselves. It’s a recipe for slavish dependence. Who are we suggesting that person trust? Why, God of course! And how do we connect with God? Through the steps. The steps lead toward accountability in our lives, and also, prayer and meditation. What happens when that reflection leads back to our emotional lives and we disbelieve ourselves? Some of us develop co-dependent relationships with sponsors, or take hostages in the form of sexual partners. In my case, I relapsed.

I was desperate to be better already, but I was stuck in disavowing my sorrow. That loop gave me no way to address my grief. I had to believe in something, so I created stories that I could believe, stories that had little to do with the emotions that created them. When telling myself I was garbage got boring, I’d romanticize my addiction instead.

Psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach says that when we disconnect from the entirety of our experience this way, we put ourselves into a trance that keeps us from living fully. This concept of an “unlived life” feels more relevant than the idea that I can’t know happiness if I don’t know sadness, because it points to a solution.

Now, 22 years away from that relapse, I’d say that suggesting feelings aren’t facts is contrary to the core of 12-step recovery—the freedom to choose a Higher Power. The formula is spiritual. The steps are designed to awaken spirituality within us. If denouncing our needs and desires as liars is part of the program, then this places a condition on our spiritual awakening. And it’s not a condition I’m willing to accept. My spiritual life has to be big enough to encompass the full spectrum of who I am. I’m not interested in “growing up” to be without feelings, good or bad.

I’ve spoken about this with friends in long-term recovery. “I don’t get it,” one woman said, unable to wrap her mind around the idea that her feelings were legitimate, even after more than 20 years of sobriety.

I explained it was like being in traffic, and getting angry when someone cuts you off. “I want to run that car off the road!” I might think. It’s true, in the moment I was mad. But my thoughts told a lie. I have zero desire to use my car as a weapon. Am I hair-trigger rage-y in traffic? Maybe something else is going on. Or maybe I was just startled. Our minds exist to find danger, and so tend to be negative.

The first thing I had to learn to do—rather than criticize myself for being angry, which leads to identifying with the idea that I’m an angry person—was to find comfort. In the car I can put my hand on my chest and remind myself everything is ok.

Another person commented, “Facts don’t change. Feelings do!”

I understood where she was coming from, that feelings are malleable. But that doesn’t mean I should deny their reality. Facts have been known to evolve, too. The surest way for an emotion to become fixed is by gaslighting myself. Then my thoughts get murky, and it’s hard not to identify with the thinking. Like with the car example, if I don’t allow myself to see my anger for what it is—mortal fear, or perhaps anger at my boss—I get trapped in, “There’s my anger. I am such an angry person.”

In fact, I count on my changing emotions—it’s the exact freedom I was seeking in a bottle. By allowing my emotions to settle, I can master the thoughts that arise. If I don’t, who’s running the show? The boyfriend who rejected me? The kids who called me Stinky? My mom?

When René Descartes made his famous declaration, he was looking for an irrefutable statement. He believed if he could doubt his existence, that was proof of it. But what’s doubt if not a feeling? My thoughts are another matter: my best thinking got me into rehab. I think, therefore I am a liar.

View the original article at thefix.com

22 August 2018