Answer Addiction

Tag: 12 step

  • You Can't Keep It Unless You Give It Away

    You Can't Keep It Unless You Give It Away

    The responsibility to give honestly is my job; the responsibility to take honestly is theirs and not for me to determine. I could go crazy trying to decide which homeless person is worthy and which is not.

    It’s one of the odd truths about life in New York City that some days a homeless person might just be the only person who talks to you, especially if you work solo and live alone. During my months-long stay in New York this year, I walked alone, ate alone, sat alone at two plays, shopped alone, got lost alone, took the subway alone, all with no conversations and no interactions. Of course, I was partially to blame. In my zeal to be considered what I thought a real New Yorker was, I had an impassive face perfected and was proud of my aplomb. I wasn’t a tourist, after all. I was there taking a class, trying vainly to get the city out of my bloodstream so that I wouldn’t suddenly run away from my husband in Arizona and move there permanently.

    One of the things I had to do to be like a native was ignore the homeless. I took my cue from those around me, rushing to wherever I needed to be, looking impassively straight ahead when the solicitations started on my subway car. It was hard. Hands beseeching, cups outstretched, people sleeping in piles of blankets on the sidewalks, the distinction between blankets and human being inside not always apparent.

    This plan seemed to work. At least, until my depression recurred and I began to feel I was dying. One night, before burrowing into my hotel room, I went to get some fruit from a market on Park Avenue, passing a man on the way there whom I thought was loudly ranting into his phone about “some woman.” Certainly none of my business so I knew I needed to paste on my impassive face and walk on by. But on the way back, carrying a bag of bananas and oranges, I listened more closely and I realized the woman he was ranting about was me.

    “Look at her with all that fruit. She can’t give me some. Don’t even care, walking on by with bananas and oranges, swinging that bag. She’s evil, don’t care about nothing and no one.”

    At my home in Arizona I carry money in my car’s center console in case I happen to be pulled up alongside a person with a sign standing in the center median at an intersection. I’m a little cautious so I move my purse away from the window, roll it down, look in the person’s eyes and wish them the best.

    But I was in New York and taking cues from real New Yorkers. Yes, the homeless problem was overwhelming here, so overwhelming that perhaps the only way to deal with it is not to encourage it. I understand I was dropped here out of the blue with no history and no understanding of the differences between the New York homeless problem and that of my home state.

    Back in my hotel room, the fruit put away, I was shaken. What did I think I was doing? My 12-step program teaches me that I am no better than any other human being on earth, and certainly no better than any possible person who may have a substance use disorder. It teaches me that judgement is poison for any addict. And that the responsibility to give honestly is my job; the responsibility to take honestly is theirs and not for me to determine. I could go crazy trying to decide which homeless person is worthy and which is not. I know from the program that if I hold something too closely I’ll lose it and only by living fearlessly and letting go can I be free. And I read somewhere that the universe, God, Higher Power – whatever – doesn’t handle money, that what we have in excess is for us to give.

    It turns out that it’s impossible to get New York out of my bloodstream. If anything, I fall more in love with it, with the grid lines of the streets and avenues, with the museums, with the crowds and food, and with the beauty of spring when it suddenly appears, and I find myself basking in the unbelievable sunshine at Bryant Park.

    I know all the controversy out there about the homeless and giving. I know that some say New Yorkers should only give to the Coalition for the Poor. Others say that giving only increases the homeless population, encouraging them to stay in certain neighborhoods. Some people give food, others nothing. It’s a seemingly unsolvable issue, even with nearly two billion dollars in the state’s budget to fix it.

    But the political became personal when I suddenly understood that I hadn’t become someone else when I came to New York; I had to stop pretending.

    I checked my wallet. Among some larger bills, I had nine single dollars. I folded them all and put them in the back pockets of my jeans, so they’d be easy to reach. The next day when I heard someone ask for help I looked into my fellow human being’s eyes and remembered that I’m one of them. It changed how I felt about the streets, the dread of the nonstop pleas. Suddenly I sought the encounter. I was waiting with their money in my back pocket.

    I never ran out of single dollars and each night I had more of them in my wallet to hand out the next day.

    In recovery programs, they say that what we’re doing by sponsoring people and doing service and putting ourselves out there is not so much to help others as it is to help ourselves, so we can stay sober. What I learned was that I wasn’t giving money to save all the homeless people in New York. I’m not that important and one dollar isn’t going to do that much. I was giving the money to save my own life. I was doing it so I could stay human.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • When the Obsession Isn’t Lifted

    When the Obsession Isn’t Lifted

    Before, when someone with 20 years would say “it’s still a day at a time,” I couldn’t really hear them. I do now.

    I was a typical low-bottom case. I was drunk most days, and a car wreck, an arrest, and a liver enzyme problem couldn’t pry me from my favorite thing to do. What would be the point of a life without alcohol? Now over five years sober, though, one thing astounds me even more than my abstinence. I don’t miss drinking. I hardly think about it. How can this be? Drinking was at the center of my existence. Surely sobriety would be a lifetime of longing for what I couldn’t have anymore, of feeling terribly excluded from the magical things I associated with its effects: wildness, fun, escape, adventure. Now it’s like, drinking? Oh right, that…

    In AA-speak, I had an “obsession” with alcohol, and that obsession has been “lifted.” The totality of this transformation was enough to make me, an atheist before this, feel a bit mystical indeed.

    Over the years I have come to realize that unfortunately this freedom from obsession does not characterize everyone’s recovery experience. I first noticed this when I was out to dinner with a friend from the program. Both of us had over a year sober. Our server began listing drink specials, as servers do, and my friend cut him off and demanded that he remove the cocktail menu from our table immediately. I felt embarrassed and confused. These were not the vibes of someone “placed in a position of neutrality.” Instead she was coming across as anxious and aggressive and she seemed to be feeling unsafe. We talked, and she said, “Yeah, for me, the obsession has not been lifted.” I was stunned. I thought, really?

    Keeping her anonymous, I brought this interaction up to other friends who had been sober for decades. They knew. They reminded me that Dr. Bob’s obsession lasted well into his third year. Bob wrote in the Big Book, “Unlike most of our crowd, I did not get over my craving for liquor much during the first two and one-half years of abstinence. It was almost always with me.” He notes in this passage that it used to make him “terribly upset” to see his friends drink when he “could not.”

    I have become attuned to this. While there are as many experiences of recovery as there are people in recovery–it’s a deeply personal path after all–perhaps two broad types emerge, one in which the obsession all but disappears, and another in which it remains even while abstinence is achieved and maintained. How can these not be vastly different?

    This seems like a big deal, yet the issue gets scant air time in shares. I suspect we don’t hear about this more in meetings owing to our strong unity, per the triangle of recovery, unity, and service. We are at our best when we are united, identifying with each other rather than comparing. On this matter of the obsession, perhaps we are divided. (Of course there may be many people in the middle, whose obsession has weakened but has not “been lifted” or “removed,” or whose obsession comes and goes. I don’t know.) Out of the thousands of meetings I’ve attended, this issue has emerged just a few times as a share theme. In those shares, people whose obsessions have remained have expressed gratitude for others’ honesty who shared this ahead of them, and relief at the permission they felt it granted them to share similarly. They shared not wanting to drag anyone down, not wanting to be an unattractive example to newcomers, and not wanting to be seen as a “bad AA.” They wondered if they were doing the program wrong.

    I imagine that, on the contrary, it must take an especially strong program to maintain sobriety in the circumstance of an obsession that endures. When I share about its being lifted, including writing this now, I feel a sense of survivor’s guilt. I worked the same 12 steps as everyone else, and my active disease was plenty strong. Just for me, abstinence was a prerequisite for the freedom from obsession that followed, but after that, the freedom from obsession made ongoing abstinence feel easy. Life can be hard. Last spring, my sibling got a life-threatening illness, and that was very hard. But I don’t find not drinking to be hard anymore. When I use the slogan “getting sober is a lot harder than staying sober,” that is what I mean.

    Olivia Pennelle’s recent article in The Fix, “Is there Life after AA?” caught my attention. She wrote about wanting to leave AA and being tired of the “fear-based conditioning” that if she left, she wouldn’t stay sober. I identified with her experience, not because I wanted to leave AA (I didn’t), but because I too faced dire predictions when I wanted to reduce my time commitment to the fellowship. In my first four years sober I had been attending meetings almost every other day; making daily calls to sponsors (something like 1,500 total to my two consecutive sponsors); hundreds more calls to friends, acquaintances, and newcomers; taking around half a dozen sponsees through some stepwork (not all at the same time!); and fulfilling service commitments ranging from greeter to meeting chair to speaking in prisons and psych wards and what seemed like half the groups in my large metro area. My recovery felt solid, and I’d learned the difference between the program, which I could apply in my daily life, and the fellowship.

    I’d returned to grad school to become a psychotherapist. (Incidentally, while there I discovered that mental health professionals have studies and theories about why the obsession leaves some people more easily than others, having to do with particular co-occurring mental health issues. In the future, I hope to write about this too.) With more focus and energy, I felt ready to pursue the new career and other life goals including getting non-alcoholic friends and dating outside the fellowship. I found myself needing more time. Trust me, I did ask myself and a higher power within: Am I “drifting?” Am I “resting on my laurels?” Then as now, I relied heavily on meditation. In my depths, I knew this was not the case.

    Pennelle quoted someone who wrote to her, “I know lots of people who have left 12-step recovery. They are all drunk or dead.” When I reduced my involvement, some people made it clear how extremely dangerous they thought this was, and how worried they were. When I told a friend I was down to 1 to 2 meetings per week, she looked at me like I was out of my mind. My sponsor was distraught to be working with me in my new approach, and she couldn’t seem to talk about anything other than how my disease must be “tricking” me. I had affectionate feelings and a lot of gratitude towards her, but we couldn’t seem to see eye to eye on this. Eventually I referenced my obsession’s being lifted as part of my rationale for feeling safe cutting down on the time commitment. She then used almost the same words my friend used years before and said that for her “the obsession has not been lifted.” She added, “for some people, it never does.”

    Many considerations likely play into people’s decisions regarding how much or how little time they spend in the fellowship, but it stands to reason that the persistence or disappearance of the obsession factors into it. I have no wish to take chances. Sobriety is the most precious, important thing in my life. It is my life. This disease has killed at least five members of my extended family, and it’s got one immediate family member in prison. I have never once questioned that if I take so much as a sip, I take my life into my own hands, and I don’t want to die. I try never to take my recovery for granted. AA is still a part of my life, but it is “a bridge back to life,” and life was pulling me in another direction. I couldn’t be true to myself and continue at the same level of time commitment I had in my first few years. I didn’t want to let anything get between me and my recovery, including my program.

    “A day at a time” has become a spiritual way of life for me, a reminder to live in the present. In early sobriety it was “a day-at-a-time” quite literally. I struggled hard not to drink through the first 90 days and then some, thinking about drinking almost nonstop. As I remember it, the obsession only began to falter for brief spans in months four and five, when I would have these amazing moments of realizing, hey wait! It’s been a whole afternoon and I haven’t been missing it. What freedom! Though I was desperate, exhausted from sleeplessness, grieving the loss of the only coping mechanism I’d ever known and coming to see the wreckage and trauma for the devastation that it was, these gaps in the obsession spurred me on. Even beyond my first anniversary I was still a little shaky (figuratively that is, my actual shakes were long gone). Now there are just moments when a liquor ad will catch my eye, or I’ll have a twinge of nostalgia for my old life. I’m still an alcoholic, but these come very rarely and never amount to a craving. Not even close.

    Before, when someone with 20 years would say “it’s still a day at a time,” I couldn’t really hear them. I do now. Taking sobriety “a day at a time” can remain literal, for life. For some cutting back on involvement in the AA fellowship may indeed be a death wish. We share a common problem and a common solution, but we are different people with different lives and recoveries. However well-intentioned, using fear or guilt to coerce people into a level of time commitment that for them is no longer authentic or wanted may only alienate them and take them away from a level of commitment that is working well, or inhibit them from re-engaging should a need arise in the future. Accepting this doesn’t require being dismissive or doubtful of other people’s need for continuous, intensive involvement. Compassion, as always, is best. We must do what is right for our own selves, and, unto our own selves, be true.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Anatomy of a Relapse

    Anatomy of a Relapse

    When my father died, I hadn’t been to a meeting in over a year. I had no active knowledge of how to apply healthy coping mechanisms to a devastating situation so I just went back to what I knew: opioids and numbness.

    Two years ago I wrote a controversial feature for The Fix, “I Take Psychedelic Drugs and I’m in Recovery.” It was controversial in the sense that the response from the publication’s readers — many of whom have an obviously vested interest in topics related to addiction recovery — ranged from sarcastic, hyperbolic criticism to open-minded consideration, with some even condoning the perspective I was sharing.

    The reason I chose to write this honest, albeit uncomfortable “Part 2” of sorts, is to do what folks in certain recovery circles do best (when at their best): share experience, strength, and hope, so that whoever may be listening, reading, or watching may, at the very least, relate and ideally, be helped by it.

    Full disclosure: My name is not James Renato. It’s a pseudonym, adopted out of respect for the principle of anonymity in a 12-step offshoot group I am a member of. It’s also, of course, meant to protect myself from facing unnecessary personal backlash merely for engaging in public discourse.

    Now that I’ve successfully buried the lede, in the spirit of qualifying in the style of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “here’s what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”

    Last April, I ended a full-blown relapse of what previously was an opioid use disorder in remission. In other words, I’d started injecting heroin again eight months earlier, for the first time in over six years.

    It was the culmination of a tripartite experiment involving: firstly, a noble attempt to actively practice a program I helped form (namely, Psychedelics in Recovery [PIR]). Secondly, a misguided lack of acknowledgement that I was inviting a serious risk to my life by no longer practicing abstinence (not just from psychedelics). And lastly, a gradual ceasing of the daily commitment to personal growth in the form of meeting attendance, regular contact with a sponsor, associating with peers in recovery, and just continuing to work on improving the overall quality of my life and relationships with others.

    People in recovery continue to regularly engage in their program of choice because life is unpredictable, and the myriad tools we learn are not always the same ones we rely on for every situation. One day a simple phone call can be all that’s necessary to get ourselves out of “a funk.” Another day it’s hitting four meetings, extensively praying and meditating, and taking a newcomer out for coffee because we were just laid off from a full-time job and needed to avoid the danger that can come from “feeding the poor me’s.”

    In my case, when I stopped participating in my ongoing recovery process, I made an inexplicably impulsive decision to reintroduce opioids to my system. When the DEA announced that they were planning to classify kratom as Schedule 1, I purchased a kilogram from an online vendor for literally no good reason. Several weeks after I received the package of high potency kratom leaf powder (of the “super green vein” variety), I conducted a dose-response self-experiment. I have a history of progressing down the road of “continued use [of opioids] despite negative consequences” (the current best definition of addiction), and within a few months I developed a dependency and went through the entire kilo, despite attempts to reassure my partner that the amount I purchased was intended to last for years, and would only be used when absolutely necessary.

    Right around the time my supply ran out, a friend who had no idea of the habitual relationship I had with kratom use told me about another mild opioid sold on the supplement market called tianeptine sulfate. Tianeptine had undergone clinical trials as an opioid-based antidepressant in the 1990s but did not progress past the second of three phases required by the Food and Drug Administration (for unknown reasons). With the drug’s unscheduled status, enterprising entrepreneurs in the unregulated supplement industry capitalized on tianeptine’s acute, short-acting antidepressive effects at low doses, but savvy opioid connoisseurs discovered the euphoric high it brought on (also short-acting) at much larger doses.

    My kratom habit switched to tianeptine, in large part because of how disgusting I found the taste of the tea I made from brewing the leaf powder, and the hassle of masking the taste by encapsulating the amount I needed to take to reach the effects I preferred. In addition to the perfect storm of things perpetuating my now very active addiction, I’d even stopped attending PIR meetings, was becoming increasingly disillusioned with my graduate studies, and was now too ashamed to admit to anyone that I was seriously struggling.

    Then, tragedy struck. My father, a seemingly healthy 64-year-old on the verge of retirement, suffered a sudden, fatal heart attack on a scuba diving trip in the Caribbean. I was already treading on thin ice, and this kind of event is something I’d long heard people in 12-step meetings share reservations over in their commitment to recovery. But I hadn’t been to a meeting in over a year at this point, so I had no active knowledge of how to apply healthy coping mechanisms to a devastating situation. It was a situation that countless people have gone through, relying on their recovery program to help them navigate as safely as possible, but I’d learned from the opioids I’d been relying on that if I could just figure out how to stay numb 24/7, that’s all I needed to do.

    After the standard bereavement rituals of a wake, funeral, and burial at the family cemetery plot, which was actually a very supportive and comforting assemblage of close friends, loved ones, and long-lost acquaintances paying their respects, I ended up alone in a dangerous situation. I called my old dealer, whose number I still had memorized after over six years of no contact, and one night drove out to meet him just like old times. No need to bother snorting or smoking whatever powder he claimed to be heroin; I had already been well reacquainted with the too-mild results of those routes of administration, so I went right back to the needle.

    I’ll spare you all the details of the familiar downward spiral and just hit on the highlights: I depleted all of my savings, misappropriated funds from an award I’d received, stole thousands of dollars from my father’s still active bank account, then my mother’s shared account, totaled my partner’s car from multiple accidents, couldn’t maintain my job, took a leave of absence from school, and wreaked a devastating emotional toll by shattering the trust of my friends and family.

    Miraculously, I was not arrested, did not overdose (though I came close), and was not robbed (although certainly ripped off repeatedly). About six weeks before I was confronted about the missing money, I obtained a 15-day supply of Suboxone from a chemical dependency clinic, but I shelved it, having no intention of taking it. Towards the end of the first week of April, my partner was preparing to go out of town for the weekend, and I had just been asked by my mom if I knew anything about the empty bank accounts.

    I woke up alone on April 5th, a Thursday, and began my morning ritual of taking stock of the heroin I had left, trying to negotiate with myself on how to titrate the remaining amount throughout the day. I always lost these negotiations and usually just did all of it, or the rest soon thereafter. But after I injected the last of it, I didn’t feel the slightest bit high. Instead, I wept. With only the company of my two cats (who avoided me as much as possible), I realized that I could no longer hide. I faced a crossroads: I could escalate my lies and attempt to find another hustle — knowing full well how inept I am when it comes to actual criminal behavior — or, surrender.

    I remembered the Suboxone sublingual film, and without really taking any time to talk myself out of it, I tore open the package and put the film under my tongue — realizing that if I kept it in long enough to absorb the full dose, I’d be inducing opioid withdrawal. I felt incredibly lonely and remorseful, so I begged my partner to come home from work, admitting to her what she had long known but felt powerless to help me with. Then I texted my mom, hinting to her that I was in a desperate state, and needed to spend the weekend at her home or I wouldn’t be able to “see things through.”

    Tears were pouring down my face in these moments, and I was wailing — one of the deepest emotional pits of despair I’ve ever found myself in. I’ve never found the concept of rock bottom useful. Instead of labeling that moment or attempting to explain it, I attribute my actions to grace.

    A New Perspective on an Old Idea

    I’m a wholehearted believer in the potential of psychedelics or plant medicines in recovery. I have heard first-hand tremendously powerful stories from people who have overcome their reluctance and the doubt instilled upon them by their peers, and are actively integrating the spiritual insights from their psychedelic journeys into their lives. PIR continues to meet regularly via an online meeting, twice a month, and our members gather from across whatever time zones they’re in to come together and share experience, strength, and hope with each other. We’ve formulated a list of guiding principles, meant to clarify the scope of our suggested program. I had strayed from those principles and met the predictable outcome we’re hoping to help others avoid.

    There are ongoing FDA-approved clinical trials for the use of psilocybin (the active pro-drug of psilocin, a psychedelic found in several species of mushrooms) for nicotine, cocaine, and alcohol use disorder, as well as a recently approved study in Europe looking at MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treatment of alcohol use disorder. While these trials are aimed at treatment of an acutely manifesting substance use disorder, one of the primary guidelines for PIR is that our members should have a firmly established foundation of recovery in a primary qualifying recovery fellowship, and are actively working that program as it’s suggested.

    Recently, now just five months out from ending my relapse, I considered having a ceremony with iboga (the alkaloid-containing root bark of a shrub indigenous to western equatorial Africa), as I wanted to commemorate the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. After soliciting the feedback of my support network, none of whom gave me any advice, but instead offered honest and open perspective to help guide me in making a decision, I decided against it. Ultimately, the decision to commemorate the anniversary unaided came during several of my morning sitting meditations, a practice that has become vital to my ongoing recovery.

    Instead, friends, family, and loved ones gathered at our house on the anniversary day, and shared memories, pictures, and videos of my father.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Depression in Recovery: Do You Have Low Dopamine Tone?

    Depression in Recovery: Do You Have Low Dopamine Tone?

    I just felt like shit and slept as much as I could. I showed up to work. I kept my commitments. I spoke when asked to, but I felt more than unhappy. I felt like I just didn’t care.

    (The Fix does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, nor does anything on this website create a physician/patient relationship.  If you require medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, please consult your physician.)

    I just came out of a six-week depression. That might not sound very long, but when you’re in hell it feels like forever. Good news: I didn’t bone any 25-year-old strangers; I didn’t cut myself; I didn’t get loaded; I didn’t smoke or vape although I really, really wanted to. I didn’t even eat pints of Ben and Jerry’s while binge-watching I Am A Killer. I just felt like shit and slept as much as I could. I showed up to work. I kept my commitments. I spoke when asked to, but I felt more than unhappy. I felt like I just didn’t care. I didn’t return phone calls. I didn’t wash my hair. Suicidal thoughts bounced around my head, but I ignored them like I do those annoying dudes with clipboards outside Whole Foods.

    I’ve suffered from symptoms of depression since I was 19, so it’s an old, old friend. What really annoys me was that some (dare I say many?) people think at five and a half years of sobriety, you shouldn’t feel depressed. What I kept hearing from AA fundamentalists was:

    “It’s your untreated alcoholism.”

    “Listen to these tapes about prayer and meditation.”

    “You’re not connected enough to your Higher Power.”

    “You’re not going to enough meetings.”

    “You need to do more service.”

    Thankfully my sponsor, who has a foot in the medical world, did not say something along those lines.

    One of my big problems with AA is that it looks at every mental problem through the paradigm of your “alcoholism.” If you’re suffering, you should look to the program for relief. Nobody would tell you to “drive around newcomers!” more if you had diabetes or kidney failure, but if you’re feeling down, that’s what you’re told to do. As it turns out, AA is not completely off the mark: “Addiction is a not a spiritually caused malady but a chemically based malady with spiritual symptoms,” addictionologist and psychiatrist Dr. Howard Wetsman told me. “When some people start working a 12-step program, they perceive a spiritual event but their midbrain is experiencing an anatomical event. When they’re working a program, they’re no longer isolated and they no longer feel ‘less than,’ so their dopamine receptor density goes back up [and they experience contentment],” he explained.

    But what if your program hasn’t changed or feels sufficient and you still feel depressed? What if you’re working your ass off in your steps and helping others and you still feel like shit?

    “Well, low dopamine tone experienced as low mood can be brought on by fear and low self-esteem (the untreated spiritual malady part of alcoholism/addiction) but it can also be brought on by biochemical issues,” Wetsman added.

    Huh?

    So was I experiencing the chemical part of my “addiction” or was I having a depressive episode? Perhaps my whole life I’d been confusing the two. Of course, all I wanted, like a typical addict, was a pill to fix it. But as I’ve done the medication merry-go-round (and around and around) with mild to moderate success, I was hesitant to start messing with meds again. I didn’t have a terrific psychiatrist, and SSRI’s can really screw with my epilepsy. And Wetsman was talking about dopamine here, not serotonin. Hmmm…

    Dr. Wetsman has some interesting stuff about brain chemistry and addiction on his vlog. He mentions something called “dopamine tone” which is a combination of how much dopamine your VTA (Ventral Tegmental Area) releases, how many dopamine receptors you have on your NA (Nucleus Accumbens), and how long your dopamine is there and available to those receptors. Stress can cause you to have fewer dopamine receptors and fewer receptors equals lower dopamine tone. He’d explained to me in previous conversations how almost all of the people with addiction he’d treated had what he described as “low dopamine tone.” When you have low dopamine tone, you don’t care about anything, have no motivation, can’t feel pleasure, can’t connect to others. In addition, low dopamine tone can affect how much serotonin is being released in the cortex. Low midbrain dopamine tone can lead to low serotonin which means, in addition to not giving a shit about anything, you also have no sense of well-being. Well, that certainly sounded familiar.

    Dr. Wetsman has a very convincing but still somewhat controversial theory that addiction is completely a brain disease and that using drugs is the result, not the cause. I really suggest you get his book, Questions and Answers on Addiction. It’s 90 pages — you could read half of it on the john and half of it while waiting at the carwash. It explains in detail why most of us addicts felt weird and off before we picked up and why we finally felt normal when we used. Again, it’s all about dopamine, and it’s fucking fascinating. No joke.

    In his vlog, he explains that dopamine production requires folic acid which you can get from green leafy veggies (which I admittedly don’t eat enough of) but it also requires an enzyme (called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase or MTHFR for short) to convert folate into l-methylfolate. Certain people have a mutation in the gene that makes MTHFR, so they can’t turn folate into l-methylfolate as effectively, and those people are kind of fucked no matter how many kale smoothies they drink.

    But it’s not hopeless. If people with this genetic mutation take a supplement of l-methylfolate, their brain can make enough dopamine naturally. Of course once you have enough dopamine, you’ve got to make sure you release enough (but there’s medication for that) and that you have enough receptors and that it sits in the receptors long enough (and there’s meds for that too).

    So this all got me wondering if maybe my MTHFR enzyme was wonky or completely AWOL. Dr. Wetsman urged me to find a good psychiatrist (since I’m on Prozac and two epileptic medications) or a local addictionologist in addition to taking a genetic test for this mutation. In his experience, patients who had a strong reaction to taking the l-methylfolate supplement were frequently also on SSRIs. They either felt much better right away or really really shitty. But if they felt even shittier (because the higher serotonin levels work on a receptor on the VTA which then lowers dopamine), he would just lower their SSRI or sometimes even titrate them off it completely. And voila. Success.

    It’s all very complicated, and this whole brain reward system is a feedback loop and interconnected with all kinds of stuff like Gaba and Enkephalins (the brain’s opioids) and Glutamate. But you guys don’t read me for a neuroscience lesson so I’m trying to keep it simple. The basics: how do you know if you have too little dopamine? You have urges to use whatever you can to spike your dopamine: sex, food, gambling, drugs, smoking, and so on. What about too much dopamine? OCD, tics, stuttering, mental obsession and eventually psychosis. Too little serotonin? Anxiety and the symptoms of too high dopamine tone. Too much serotonin? The same thing as too little dopamine tone. Everything is intricately connected, not to mention confusing as all hell.

    Being broke and lazy and having had decades of shitty psychiatrists, I decided to go rogue on this whole mission (not recommended). I mean I used to shoot stuff into my arm that some stranger would hand me through the window of their 87 Honda Accord so why be uber careful now? This l-methylfolate supplement didn’t require a prescription anymore anyway. What did I have to lose? I did however run it by my sponsor whose response was: “I’m no doctor, honey, but it sounds benign. Go ahead.”

    I ordered a bottle. A few days later I heard the UPS guy drop the packet into my mail slot. I got out of bed, tore open the envelope and popped one of these bad boys. A few hours later I started to feel that dark cloud lift a little. Gotta be a placebo effect, right? The next day I felt even better. And the next day better still. I didn’t feel high or manic. I just felt “normal.” Whoa. It’s been weeks now and the change has been noticeable to friends and family.

    Normal. That’s all I ever really wanted to feel. And the first time I felt normal was when I tried methamphetamine at 24. It did what I wanted all those anti-depressants to do. It made me feel like I knew other people felt: not starting every day already 20 feet underwater. I found out later that my mother and uncle were also addicted to amphetamines which further corroborates my belief that there is some genetic anomaly in my inherited reward system.

    When I emailed Dr. Wetsman to tell him how miraculously better I felt, his first response was “Great. I’m glad. The key thing is to take the energy and put it into recovery. People go two ways when they feel amazingly better. One: ‘Oh, this is all I ever needed. I can stop all this recovery stuff.’ Or two: ‘Wow, I feel better. Who can I help?’ Helping others in recovery will actually increase your dopamine receptors and make this last. Not helping people will lead to shame, lowered dopamine receptors and it stops being so great.”

    So no, I’m not going to stop going to meetings or doing my steps or working with my sponsor and sponsees. Being part of a group, feeling included and accepted, even those things can create more dopamine receptors. But sadly I’m still an addict at heart and I want all the dopamine and dopamine receptors I can get. However, I also know that enough dopamine alone isn’t going to keep me from being a selfish asshole…. But maybe, just maybe, having sufficient dopamine tone and working a program will.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Enabling, Self-Seeking, and Recovery

    Enabling, Self-Seeking, and Recovery

    Every moment there’s the possibility of falling back into self-seeking after having recovered much of our spiritual, financial, and physical health.

    Recently, I was accused on a community website of being an enabler. The article and discussions that followed were regarding a proposed affordable housing project in our community and how some members of the local city council were concerned that if fed and housed, the persons in poverty would become dependent. After I participated in a recent homelessness count that provided the government and other organizations with information on the population of homeless people, I felt I was informed enough about the topic to comment on my recent experiences. I wondered about the label someone attached to me and how valid it was. The question I ask myself is, “how do I know if I’m an enabler?”

    As an addict, I am going through a set of steps with a sponsor, which is a big part of the success of the 12-step program. Currently I’m on step 6, which states: “We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” It seemed an appropriate time to look at this behavior—and to find out if in fact it is a “defect of character.” What is an enabler?

    en·a·bler (From Wikipedia)

    noun

    1. a person or thing that makes something possible.

    “the people who run these workshops are crime enablers”

    1. a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another.

    “he criticized her role as an enabler in her husband’s pathological womanizing”

    I liked “A person that makes something possible,” but then the definition erodes into some negative rhetoric. Could I be attaching my own definitions to justify my behaviors? I also wondered about alternatives to enabling.

    What is the opposite of enabler? From Word Hippo:

    Noun antonyms include: deterrent, hindrance, impediment, inhibitor, preventer, and prohibitor.

    I don’t particularly like those words either. It almost seems like a lose/lose scenario. I can attempt to clarify both sides of an argument and chose to either “make something possible” or be a “preventer” of a possible catastrophe. These implied absolutes can place people on opposite sides of the fence of their own making and create polarity and strife. 

    Before I started down the path of recovery, choices were a lot easier. I was just concerned with myself—because at its core, addiction is about being self-obsessed. If something benefited me, made me feel better or allowed me to avoid uncomfortable feelings or just looked fun, I could justify the choices and my actions.

    Today, through the recovery process, I choose a new way of living:

    I invite a higher power into my life and my decisions. It is a manner of living that involves more than my own self-seeking ways. I know some people do not agree with terms like “God” or “Higher Power” or even the concept of a spiritual existence. I struggled with the concept too when I first started in recovery. At some point, those who live a life based on the principles learned in 12-step recovery must decide what concept is working for them today. The idea is that a higher power, whether it is “God” or my support group, it is a greater power than myself. As the saying goes, “it was my best thinking that got me here.”

    I try not to complicate things too much these days, but difficult choices are inevitable. The fact that I have difficult choices to make is a choice…but that train of thought gives me a headache and might be overthinking things – another seemingly common trait among addicts. I often wonder if life would be easier if I was less concerned about those around me and more concerned about myself- as that is also a common trait among those in active addiction. After all, addicts without recovery really only think about themselves and how to satisfy their compulsion to use.

    It makes sense that the early successes of living free from active addiction re-opens the door to self-seeking behaviors. Every moment there’s the possibility of falling back into self-seeking after having recovered much of our spiritual, financial, and physical health. In fact, all those healthy options are affected by the choices we make and are part of what molds us into who we are and what the fellowship of recovering addicts around us looks like. The literature in Narcotics Anonymous even warns about the dangers of self-seeking, but some people fall back into that habit:

    “…However, many will become the role models for the newcomers. The self‐seekers soon find that they are on the outside, causing dissension and eventually disaster for themselves. Many of them change; they learn that we can only be governed by a loving God as expressed in our group conscience.” 

    In Alcoholics Anonymous, they have The Promises: “Self-seeking will slip away.” 

    If you are no longer self-seeking, then the choice of what, if anything, to seek becomes apparent. I remember very clearly in early recovery when my wife suffered a life-threatening incident. After an invasive surgery to correct a serious defect in her foot and ankle bone structures, she developed a blood clot. A piece broke off and went through her heart and damaged her left lung. She was in the hospital for quite some time as they dissolved the clot with drugs and dealt with the damage to her body.

    I tried to balance work, looking after our two small daughters, recovery meetings, and support for my wife. I thought often of praying to this new “God” I was developing a relationship with. I questioned what I should pray for. Save my wife’s life? There are many people who deserve to live but their lives end. A prayer came to mind: “Please don’t leave me a single father who is barely capable of looking after himself.” This seemed to be a desire for my own selfish needs. In the end I prayed for knowledge that I should be at the right places, doing the right things, and to find the strength for myself and others, including for my wife, regardless of what happens. Also, “Please don’t leave me alone” – and I wasn’t. Friends stepped up and many offered support. 

    In time, my wife recovered. The point to this story and how it relates to enabling is that at no time did anyone criticize the choices I made. People did what they could to support me and let me live with the consequences of my choices. 

    Mother Theresa dedicated her life to easing the suffering of the poor and destitute in India. Did she spend her entire life simply enabling people, with little or nothing to show for her work? Possibly she could have become a motivational speaker and had a far greater effect by inspiring those same people to change their lives. Not that my actions are comparable to Mother Theresa, but the choice I make today is that rather than accomplishing 100 tasks to benefit myself, I would rather accomplish 100 tasks to benefit others, even if a few lives are changed as a result. Even if only a single life is affected, or no lives at all, I would still rather spend the time for the benefit of others. In early recovery it was explained to me that I needed to separate my “needies from my greedies.” What I do after my needs are met is the basis of my recovery. Recovery from addiction and the 12 steps are based on a single premise- which is explained in the 12th step:

    “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

    I don’t always have answers to life’s questions. I might not be doing the right things at the right moment. I always try to be grateful for the life I lead. Gratitude isn’t a feeling, it’s a virtue. Gratitude is a manner of living that expresses our love for what we have by sharing and not hoarding. Sharing is best when it’s unconditional, as is love, and if that looks like enabling, well, I guess I’m okay with that.

    In the end what I share is freely given and my needs are met. I’m not looking for platitudes, but an appreciative “thank you” is always welcome since that can be your gratitude. What you receive and what effect that has is all on you. You choose how to apply the help someone gives you. I can be free of the burden of expectation or false hope. In the end did I enable you? That’s not for me to judge, is it?

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Microaggressions: How Subconscious Biases Affect Recovery

    Microaggressions: How Subconscious Biases Affect Recovery

    An example of a microaggression in the recovery universe: someone from NA asks someone who’s considering Suboxone: “Are you in denial? A drug is a drug is a drug.” No malicious intent is involved, but the fellow member is left feeling disparaged.

    Politics and Religion: we’re encouraged to avoid these conversations, socially. Conviction can escalate to hostility, hurt feelings and polarization, turning a fun-loving conversation into… “Awkward.”

    Has anyone noticed polarization-creep migrating from political intercourse into our addiction/recovery discussion? A diversifying recovery community means different tribes and subcultures with differing views on recovery and addiction. Many Fix readers are members of a mutual-aid group that gives a sense of identity and belonging. Being tribal is human nature; so, what’s the problem? Maybe it’s a hangover from the current political climate but I’m feeling a little microaggression-fatigue. It’s great to cheer hard for the home-team; but does that mean diminishing the other(s)?

    “We tribal humans have a ‘dark side,’ ironically also related to our social relationships: We are as belligerent and brutal as any other animal species,” says author and UC San Diego Professor Emeritus Saul Levine, MD, in “Belonging Is Our Blessing, Tribalism Is Our Burden.” “Our species, homo sapiens, is indeed creative and loving, but it is also destructive and hostile.”

    Levine cautions that for all the psychological good that belonging offers us, “Dangers lurk when there is an absence of Benevolence. Excessive group cohesiveness and feelings of superiority breed mistrust and dislike of others and can prevent or destroy caring relationships. Estrangement can easily beget prejudice, nativism, and extremism. These are the very hallmarks of zealous tribalism which has fueled bloodshed and wars over the millennia.”

    How does “zealous tribalism” present in the recovery community? Abstinence-focused tribes have dearly held views that differ from our harm-reduction fellows. Inside the abstinence-model tribe, it’s not all Kum Ba Yah, either. Refuge Recovery clans, SMART Recovery, Women for Recovery and the 12-step advocates may feel a superiority/inferiority thing that comes out in how we talk about each other. SMART followers may look down on 12-stepping as stubbornly old-fashioned. 12-steppers might see Life Ring or other new tribes as acting overtly precious with their dismissal of tried-and-true methods. Focusing in even more, we see NAs, CAs and AAs each rolling their eyes at each other’s rituals or slogans. In AA, secular members and “our more religious members” finger point at each other about who’s being too rigid and who’s watering down the message. These are examples of what Levine calls “belonging without the benevolence.” Finding “our people” is great. Part of what makes us feel included might also over-emphasize the narcissism of small differences.

    “Meeting makers make it!”
    “That’s not sober; that’s dry. The solution is clearly laid out in the 12 steps—not meetings!”
    “AA’s a cult that harms more people than it helps!”

    These are tribal battle cries—sincerely held feeling based in part on our unique lived experience and in part on an ignorance we’re not conscious of.

    If you love the fight and you don’t care what others think of you, this article might not hold your attention. We’re going to talk about how to get along better. On the other hand, if you see yourself as empathetic and regret falling prey to us vs. them conflicts, let’s talk about cause and corrective measures.

    Recovery professionals curb their own biases through professional practices; we can borrow their best practices to avoid getting defensive or dismissive with people who hold divergent worldviews. If our goal is to connect with others, an increasingly diverse world of others presents challenges.

    “In my early career, I was adamant about abstinence as the only viable solution to alcohol and other drug problems,” recalls William White, author of Recovery Rising: A Retrospective of Addiction Treatment and Recovery. As a historian and treatment mentor, White learned from lived-experience, clinical practice, study and research. His 2017 book advocates for treatment professionals to exercise “professional humility and holding all of our opinions on probation pending new discoveries in the field and new learning experiences. Many parties can be harmed when we mistake a part of the truth for the whole truth.”

    If 100% of my knowledge about harm reduction is from harm reduction failures who tell their story of decline in a 12-step meeting, I could “mistake a part of the truth for the whole truth.” What would I know about harm reduction success stories if I only go to 12-step rooms?

    Treatment professionals are adapting to cultural diversity in their practices. Bound by a Code of Ethics, NAADAC (the Association for Addiction Professionals) has embraced the concept of “cultural humility.” Cultural humility is a fiduciary duty for professionals to be sensitive to client race, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity and physical/mental characteristics when providing healthcare.

    “Cultural humility is other-oriented. Cultural humility is to maintain a willingness to suspend what you know or what you think you know based on generalizations about the client’s culture. Power imbalance between counselor and client have no place in cultural humility. There is an expectation that you understand the population you’re serving and that you take the time to understand them better,” explains Mita Johnson, the Ethics Chair for NAADAC, who teaches cultural humility to addiction/treatment professionals. Dr. Johnson says, “Addiction professionals and providers, bound by ethical practice standards, shall develop an understanding of their own personal, professional and cultural values and beliefs. Providers shall seek supervision and/or consultation to decrease bias, judgement and microaggressions. Microaggressions are often below our level of awareness. We don’t always know we are doing it.”

    Microaggression—today’s buzzword—google it. In The Atlantic’s “Microaggression Matters,” Simba Runyowa elaborates on the insidiousness of this behavior: “Microaggressions are behaviors or statements that do not necessarily reflect malicious intent, but which nevertheless can inflict insult or injury. … microaggressions point out cultural difference in ways that put the recipient’s non-conformity into sharp relief, often causing anxiety and crises of belonging on the part of minorities.”

    Here’s how that might look in our recovery universe: someone from NA, a complete abstinence-based fellowship, asks someone who’s thinking about medication-assisted treatment with Suboxone: “Are you in denial? A drug is a drug is a drug.” No malicious intent is involved but the fellow member is left feeling disparaged. Maybe the well-intended NA had a negative experience with medically assisted treatment (MAT) and has a visceral feeling about it, “Taking drugs to stop drugs isn’t clean.” But NA doesn’t work for everyone. Yours or my anecdotal experience will bias us. Maybe expressing my own personal experience, or just listening without commenting, would be more culturally humble.

    The same is true of the MAT fan who says, “12-steppers are deluded by a faith-healing 80-year-old modality; only five-percent of people get helped from the 12 steps.” These types of arguments are not other-oriented. This is tribalism. 

    A simplistic solution to avoiding lane-drift is to listen more and share in first person. Prescriptive communicating—as opposed to a descriptive narrative—will, inadvertently, engage us in microaggression.

    Just when “Why can’t we all just get along” seemed hard enough, there’s more than one subconscious microaggression we need to be aware of. Derald W. Sue, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Columbia University, describes three microaggressions: micro–assaults, micro–insults and micro–invalidations.

    Micro–assaults are most akin to conventional discrimination. They are explicit derogatory actions, intended to hurt. Here’s an AA example: disparaging a humanist AA in a meeting by quoting Dr. Bob’s 1930s view, “If you think you are an atheist, an agnostic, a skeptic, or have any other form of intellectual pride which keeps you from accepting what is in this book, I feel sorry for you.” No one feels “sorry for” their equal. Inferiority is implied.

    “A micro–insult is an unconscious communication that demeans a person from a minority group,” Dr. Sue reports. Using another 12-step creed-based example, “CA includes everyone; it’s ‘God as you understand Him.” Who is likely to feel demeaned by Judeo/Christian-normative language?

    We could rightfully credit 1930s middle-America Alcoholics Anonymous founders for their progressive—always inclusive, never exclusive—posture; “everybody” in 1939 America meant Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The AA of the 1930s was culturally humble. Today, inadvertently, this same language is less effective at gateway-widening. Today, just 33% of earthlings embrace this interventionist higher power of the early 12-step narrative. According to the Washington Times, globally, 16% of people have no religion and 51% have a non-theistic, polytheistic faith. Sikhs or Muslims may share monotheism, but they worship a genderless deity; no room for “Him” of any understanding. Cultural humility accommodates all worldviews, without asking others to speak in the language of the majority.

    “Minimizing or disregarding the thoughts, feelings or experiences of a person of color is referred to as micro–invalidation.” This is how the American Psychiatric Association rounds out Dr. Sue’s three types of microaggression. “A white person asserting to minorities that ‘They don’t see color’ or that ‘We are all human beings’ are examples.”

    Disregarding or minimizing in our community might be telling someone: “You can participate in your online groups if you like but don’t treat InTheRooms.com like real meetings. Face-to-face is the only way to connect with real people.” If expressed in first person, instead of disregarding the other, the message could relate a personal experience and an informed belief. Have we learned everything about the person we’re talking to? Social anxiety disorder or a dependent partner, parent or child at home could be reasons why the online meeting is the superior option for them.

    To William White’s point, what do I really know about the comparative benefits of online community vs. traditional meetings? Maybe I could consider his informed advice of “holding all of our opinions on probation pending new discoveries in the field and new learning experiences.”

    Mita Johnson identifies a challenge with microaggression—it’s subconscious. How do we correct subconscious behaviors? Dr. Sue authored a couple of books to help combat microaggression at an individual, institutional and societal level: Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender and Sexual Orientation and Microaggressions and Marginality. Sue offers five steps to help connect us with more varieties of addicts/alcoholics. “Microaggressions are unconscious manifestations of a worldview of inclusion, exclusion, superiority, inferiority; thus, our main task is to make the invisible, visible.” Here are Dr. Sue’s five practices:

    1. Learn from constant vigilance of your own biases and fears.
    2. Experiential reality is important in interacting with people who differ from you in terms of race, culture, ethnicity.
    3. Don’t be defensive.
    4. Be open to discussing your own attitudes and biases and how they might have hurt others or revealed bias on your part.
    5. Be an ally. Stand personally against all forms of bias and discrimination.

    I gave it a try. Taking inventory—in these five ways—of my prejudices and preconceived ideas helps identify my insensitivities. It helps thinking/acting more other-oriented. Secondly, more than ever, it’s a good time for more active listening and less instruction. Getting defensive, even to microaggression coming my way, escalates the divides. Admitting my assumptions and the faulty conclusions is a version of “promptly admit it” that is so familiar. Finally, how can I “Be an ally?” It’s not hard, today, to stand up for myself when I’m being disrespected. Now will I say something when someone else is being invalidated, insulted or dismissed? Yes, there’s a time to mind my own business but if I’m committed to “be an ally,” can I stay silent when another is being ganged up on by the tyranny of the majority?

    When I’m tempted to be tribal when confronted with other individuals or recovery groups, I try to remember that all people who suffer from process or substance use disorder have been subjected to microaggressions. William White identifies a few of the more cliché slights we all face:

    • “Portrayals of the cause of substance use disorders as personal culpability (bad character) rather than biological, psychological, or environmental vulnerability.
    • Imposed shame, e.g., being explicitly prohibited by one’s supervisor from disclosing one’s recovery status out of the fear it would harm the reputation of the company.
    • Misinterpretation of normal stress responses as signs of impending relapse.”

    In this regard there is no us vs. them. Just “us.”

    Not everyone believes that shining a light on microaggression will solve hostilities towards each other. “There are many problems with studies of microaggressions, technical and conceptual. To start, its advocates are informed by the academic tradition of critical theory,” Althea Nagai argues in “The Pseudo-Science of Microaggressions.” Nagai identifies confirmation bias found in almost all focus groups and the problem of unintended consequences when institutionalizing anti-microaggression policy.

    Nagai’s National Association of Scholars article continues, “There is nothing in the current research to show that such programs work. I suspect most fail to create greater feelings of inclusion. Research suggests they create more alienation and sense of apartness. The recent large-scale quantitative studies suggest that increased focus on ethnic/racial identity exacerbates the problems they are supposed to address. In other words, ‘social justice’ and diversity programs may actually backfire, creating less inclusion, more polarization.”

    Dr. Sue cautions us about weaponizing microaggression; other-oriented cultural humility is to take inventory of my microaggressions—not to fault-find other’s behaviors. Social psychologist Lee Jussim in Psychology Today says keep it personal—not global: “To understand how we can all unintentionally give offense through our own ignorance or insensitivity—thereby increasing our ability to make the same points without being hurtful.”

    “I’d rather step on your toes than walk on your grave,” is a rationalization we hear in the rooms. How do I neither pussy-foot around and avoid being a dick? Beyond intellectualizing, cultural humility is introspective. In “Cultural Humility versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes,” cues from professionals show me how to re-frame how I interact with others: “Cultural humility incorporates a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique to redressing the power imbalance in the patient-physician dynamic and to developing mutually beneficial and non-paternalistic clinical and advocacy partnerships with communities on behalf of individuals and the defined population.”

    For me, this nails how to stay other-focused: Professionals (or anyone who wants to relate to others better) should “relinquish the role of expert and become the student of the patient with a conviction and explicit expression of the patient’s potential to be a capable and full partner in the therapeutic alliance.”

    I don’t need a course or a degree to “become the student” of others. Instead of acting like I know what’s best for others, I can be a fellow traveler; think about other-focused approaches globally; but act locally.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in their alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    I’ve heard it repeated as a recovery truism that nobody is too dumb to stop drinking, but plenty of people are too smart. One supposes that’s the sort of thing intended to be helpful. I’ve no idea on the particular veracity of the claim, though I’ll say that people who are smarter (or think they’re smarter) can certainly generate some novel justifications for their alcoholism. 

    When I was deep in my cups, after stopping for one drink after class that turned into a blackout which had me checking the soles of my shoes for evidence of which way I stumbled home, I could structure an argument with recourse to French philosopher Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic about how “alcoholism” was a construction of the medical-industrial complex.

    After I woke up another countless time cringing as I recalled how I’d embarrassed myself yet again, it was only a short period until I was crafting a rationalization that drinking expressed an idyllic, pre-capitalist, medieval past that was based in revelry and joy.

    While noticing that my hangovers seemed to go on a bit too long, or that my hands were a little bit too unsteady, or that I seemed less and less able to stop that second drink from sliding into that twelfth, I could wax philosophical about how intoxication evoked the Dionysian rites, for after all it was Plato in The Symposium (a booze-soaked party) who claimed that “For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet,” and when I was getting my PhD in English what I loved was pints of lager, gin and tonic, and Jameson on the rocks, and sometimes if I was drunk enough and squinting with one eye, I could convince myself that I was a poet.

    If I was smart, it certainly manifested itself in the same tired old story as any other alcoholic, even if my justifications seemed clever to me. Because whether or not it’s true that some people are too smart to quit drinking, many academics might enthusiastically agree that’s the case, the better to avoid church basements. Psychologists call this “rationalization”…

    Lots of discussion is rightly had about the problems generated by substance abuse among undergraduates, but much less is had about alcoholism on the other side of the podium. Something is surprising about this – the cocktail hour is valorized in academe, especially in the humanities where with cracked pride there is a certain amount of cosplaying Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?, where the past tweedy imagined pleasures of sherry fueled conviviality run strong. Rebecca Schuman (who is not an alcoholic) writes in Slate about how this “campus alcohol epidemic, one largely ignored,” is often “heralded as an inextricable virtue of the Life of the Mind.”

    But for alcoholic academics there are also often darker particulars for returning time and time again to the bottle. The unnaturalness of living in one’s head all of the time, the stress and intermingling of life and work so that it almost always feels like you’re stuck in the latter (and people think we get summers off!), the often incapacitating imposter syndrome. Professors aren’t the only alcoholics of course; there are plenty of alcoholic plumbers, alcoholic nurses, alcoholic accountants, alcoholic cops, alcoholic lawyers, alcoholic janitors. Yet academics too often share a simultaneous denial and pride in that alcoholism, and the profession does little to dissuade such a sentiment, even with all the attendant problems it brings, preferring to interpret self-medication as mere collegiality.

    University of Notre Dame history professor Jon T. Coleman writes movingly of his own struggles with alcoholism in academe, explaining in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education that one of the “most sinister aspects of alcoholism was the intramural loathing it encouraged,” describing how he drank to “mute the feelings of guilt, failure, and panic that came from not being able to control my drinking,” despite having “graduated from college, earned a Ph.D., secured a job, won book awards, and received tenure from a top-tier university while engaging in a habitual behavior that rendered me a dumbass.”

    In her remarkable new book The Recovering, Leslie Jamison similarly sees the appeal of annihilation and escape as central to the professorial preoccupation with self-destruction, explaining that drinking “plunged me into a darkness that seemed like honesty,” misinterpreting that “desperate drunk space underground” as “where the truth lived.” As a way of proffered hypothesis, that’s some of what fuels the alcohol problem among humanities scholars, a misapplied radical skepticism that’s suspicious of recovery-speak (which allows for convenient rationalizations). Combine this with the accumulated boozy romance of past generations, and one sees part of what motivates the problem.

    Even now I’m hesitant to use the word “alcoholic” in describing myself, chaffing at the “One Day at a Time” folk-wisdom of 12-step philosophy, historicizing and critiquing recovery in a manner that at its worst could easily justify relapse (though it hasn’t yet). But a certain saving grace also is gifted from my vocation, for as an English professor nothing is more paramount than the sanctity of words, and if I’m not an alcoholic, then the word itself has no meaning. One of the bits of hard-earned wisdom I’ve been gifted through the haze is the understanding that if my disease isn’t my fault, it’s surely my responsibility. I believe that had I not been an academic with a drinking problem, I’d have had some other job and identity – with a similar drinking problem.

    Even as a personal responsibility, the wider academy, because of its particular culture and history, must also do more to provide support for graduate students and faculty with substance abuse disorders. Graduate student Karen Kelsky in a guest blog for “The Professor is In” writes that the “stigma associated with addiction may be stronger than stigmas for mental illness,” in part because alcoholism is so often perceived as a “choice,” and not a complicated issue of heredity, acculturation, and brain chemistry. Even moderate drinkers face opprobrium in the wet groves of academe, with Shuman writing about how after she decided to quit excessive social drinking, she was “cut off socially” and that as she “drank less and less,” she was “accepted less and less by my peers.”

    There needs to be a shift in how academe grapples with alcoholism, and with alcoholics. In the short term, a small start would be to provide alternative possibilities at conferences and symposia that are so often permeated by alcohol. Jeffrey J. Cohen, a scholar of medieval literature at Arizona State University (who is not an alcoholic himself) argues in The Chronicle of Higher Education that those “who arrange conference social events were alcohol is served must ensure that they are not the sole access provided to conference conviviality.”

    In the long term, academics need to become more sensitive to and aware of the definitions of alcoholism and addiction. Kelsky writes of how a “common misconception… is that once someone has gone through treatment, they are ‘cured.’” Consequently, non-drinking graduate students and faculty are often shut out of professional opportunities, their self-care interpreted as being the behavior of a scold or a Puritan. With an important awareness of how difference is manifested for various marginalized groups in our culture, too often academics don’t extend the same consideration to those in recovery, or provide assistance for our colleagues in need.

    Of course even if mental health and substance abuse care are woefully lacking in professional contexts, most fellow individual academics can and do respond to those in recovery with care and empathy. I first read Coleman’s essay after it was sent to me by a concerned colleague and I was able to recognize the malady, so eloquently described, as my own. I drank for two more years.

    My thirst was unquenchable, simply confirming Coleman’s observation about being “Caught in a trap… [with] an inability to break loose.”

    The kindness in being sent that essay had an effect, though, part of that arsenal in my spirit that I was able to drudge up after numerous shaky mornings haunted by fear, a little indication in which I knew that the center could not hold, and in which I could sometimes glimpse the awful grace of that thing called hope, which we alcoholics know as a “moment of clarity.” Coleman did break loose, and so have I for the time being, while always remembering that “There but for the grace of God go I.”

    Three years after my bottom I still work on that first step sometimes, but I find that the organ which made those old rationalizations so evocative can be helpful in actual not drinking. I wake up sober in the morning, and I can reflect on the ways in which recovery bares the mark of the conversion narrative, I can trace the historical antecedents of 12-step groups, I can examine how important issues of race and gender affect how we discuss addiction and recovery. More than enough intellectualism in sobriety; actually, more than there ever was in the tantalizing hum of drunkenness. There can be, as it turns out, as much hope in the classrooms as there is in the rooms, occluded though it may seem, but for that I am grateful.

    Ed S. is a widely published writer and an academic.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Re-Balancing Act: How to Restore Marital Equilibrium in Recovery

    Re-Balancing Act: How to Restore Marital Equilibrium in Recovery

    Was I really at an AA meeting as I claimed, or was this the night that I—and all hope for our marriage—would vanish anew?

    For my wife Patricia and me, it’s been a long road to even. Ish.

    My wife said “I do” in April 2007 to a man who, despite depression and anxiety issues, did not suffer from addiction. The honeymoon period didn’t last long: By 2009, I was a full-blown alcoholic. A year later I became unemployed and, as substances other than alcohol steepened my spiral, unemployable.

    After a semi-successful rehab stint in early 2011, I began stringing together sober weeks instead of days, disappearing once a fortnight while my wife waited hopelessly. Finally, with one of Patty’s feet firmly out the door, I started my current and only stretch of significant sobriety in October 2011.

    We’d been wed just 4½ years, and the rollercoaster marriage dynamic was about to take its third sharp turn. Patty had gone from a warm wife to a cold caretaker – from a blushing bride to blushing with anger and embarrassment as her husband descended into addiction and all its indignities. She was fed up and worn down.

    And now she would be asked to transition yet again, to cede the necessary high ground she’d claimed so that someday, hopefully, we could once again stand on even footing.

    Our journey together has been imperfect, but has taught us both about how addiction warps the dynamics of a marriage – and how that damage can be repaired in recovery. For couples committed to staying together in addiction’s aftermath, let’s explore likely marital dynamics at three stages of single-spouse alcoholism: active addiction, fledgling sobriety and long-term recovery.

    Active Addiction

    Ironically, perhaps the least complicated dynamic any marriage can have is when one partner is mired in active addiction. One spouse has lost all credibility and the capability to make mutually beneficial contributions, while the other has, onerously, had the scales of responsibility tilt completely into her lap – or, more accurately, fall on her head. The addict has been stripped of all rightful respect and authority; he is a nuptial nonentity, because adulthood is a prerequisite for marital influence.

    Simply put, my wife signed up for a husband and got a child instead.

    The logistical stress my wife shouldered—scraping by on one income, coming home to a drunk husband in a smoke-filled apartment, the transparent excuses and laughable lies—should be familiar to most spouses of alcoholics.

    Throughout this stage, the marital power dynamic is non-negotiated and unsustainable. It is also deeply scarring, for both parties. My guilt and shame, her resentment and disappointment. My elaborate schemes and emphatic denials, her eroding ability to give me the benefit of the doubt. For us both, a creeping sense of confusion, hopelessness and doom.

    All of this creates a silo effect. The deeper my bottom fell, the higher the wall between us rose. For the marriage to once again become… well, a marriage—a union of two equal halves—the walls would need to crumble. But they had to crack first.

    And then, after one last humiliation comprised of a drunken hit-and-run and handcuffs, I was finally done.

    A marriage stumbling on a high wire now had a chance to regain some balance. But for couples, one spouse’s early recovery can shake like an earthquake, causing seismic shifts to a power dynamic that, though broken, proves nonetheless stubborn.

    Fledgling Sobriety

    However simple (albeit awful) the marital dynamic during active alcoholism, the relationship during nascent sobriety becomes, conversely, exceedingly complex. This timeframe is crucial to the marriage’s long-term survival, as both parties simultaneously try to heal fresh wounds, regain some semblance of normalcy and find a workable path forward together.

    For Patty and me, my fledgling sobriety was, at the same time, emergency and opportunity. This might not have been my last chance at recovery, but it was likely our marriage’s last chance at enduring.

    In those vital first months, the power dynamic shifted dramatically, despite my wife’s understandable reluctance to budge an inch lest I take several yards. After being on the receiving end of years of lying about our actions and whereabouts, our spouses struggle to believe we’ll come home at all, let alone come home sober. Was I really at an AA meeting as I claimed, or was this the night that I—and all hope for our marriage—would vanish anew? The PTSD of a waiting wife, burned too many times to trust, is an excruciatingly slow-mending injury.

    That injury is soon joined by insult. Because my wife watched as perfect strangers did something her most fervent efforts could not: get and keep her husband sober.

    She felt suspicious, and scornful… and guilty for feeling either. Her downsized role in my recovery seemed unfair given the years wasted playing lead actor in a conjugal tragedy.

    For alcoholics, swallowing pride is a life-and-death prospect pounded into our heads by program literature, AA meetings and sponsors. For their spouses, though, this ego deflation is just as necessary to the survival of their marriage, and generally comes without guidance or reassurances. Considering this, my wife’s humility-driven leap of faith was far more impressive than my own.

    And throughout this, she was forced to cede more and more marital power to a man who, mere months ago, deserved all the trust afforded an asylum patient. I was gaining friends, gaining confidence and, sometimes, even gaining the moral high ground.

    When your spouse has been so wrong for so long, the first time he’s right is jarring. Somewhere in my wife’s psyche was the understandable yet unhealthy notion that the one-sided wreckage of our past absolved her of all future wrongdoing. Fights ensued as I argued for the respect I was earning while she clung to a righteousness never requested but reluctantly relinquished. Unilateral disarmament—intramarital or otherwise—is counterintuitive and, given my history, potentially unwise.

    The harsh truth was that the marriage had to become big enough for two adults again, and the only way that could happen was for one partner to make room. This is patently unfair and, I believe, a key reason many marriages end in early recovery. That my wife and I navigated this turbulent period is among the most gratifying achievements in each of our lives.

    Long-term Recovery

    Our road became considerably less rocky when my wife, for the first time, became more certain than not that her husband’s sober foundation was solid enough to support a future. For us, that unspoken sigh of relief came about 18 months into my recovery, though this timeframe can vary widely.

    For couples, an invaluable asset ushered in by long-term recovery is the ability to openly address not only each individual’s feelings, but the likely influencers behind those feelings – especially those concerning the disparate, often difficult-to-pinpoint damage one spouse’s alcoholism inflicted upon both partners’ psyches. My wife and I each have our own semi-healed, often subconscious wounds that, still frequently, reopen in the form of a visceral repulsion, reflexive resentment or other knee-jerk reaction.

    At times, then, there remains residual weirdness between us. But the reassurance of my reliable recovery provides safe harbor to explore these issues as our marriage’s power dynamic draws ever closer to even.

    Many of these mini-problems are a blend of individual personalities and lingering, addiction-related trauma. My wife and I both have foibles that, we agree, are part intrinsic and part PTSD; fully parsing the two is impossible, even when examining ourselves rather than each other.

    An example: My wife is markedly introverted, and I certainly know her better than anyone. But even for her closest comrade—me—praise and positive acknowledgement come sporadically at best. At least some of this, she admits, is not simply her quiet nature but rather a prolonged hangover from years of my alcoholic drinking. Perhaps seven years is too little time for proactive cheerleading; check back with us in another seven.

    There are also times when my 12-step recovery delivers on its promise of making me, as the saying goes, “weller than well.” For my wife, who’s been consistently well enough her whole life—insomuch as she’s never sideswiped a taxi blind drunk and then tried to outrun a cop car—sometimes this growth is mildly threatening, especially in terms of our still-tightening power dynamic. Her character defects were never so dangerous that they required emergency repair. Still, as my demeanor has become less volatile, there has been a softening of her own character. Whether this is her absorbing some of my progress or simply letting her guard down another notch is anyone’s guess – including hers.

    No matter the progress, we will both always be damaged, however minimally, by my addiction – a permanent weight that makes truly equal marital balance unlikely, if not impossible. We will always be better at forgiving than forgetting, and the inability to accomplish the latter carries a weight that tips scales, slightly but surely.

    We have, we believe, as much balance as possible considering where we were and where we are now. For couples with a spouse in long-term recovery, appreciation for that tremendous leap forward in fortune can more than make up for the inherent inequality addiction inflicts on a marriage – a gap that shrinks substantially but never completely closes.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • I’m Open and Willing, Dear Sponsor, but Wait a Minute!

    I’m Open and Willing, Dear Sponsor, but Wait a Minute!

    We know “our best thinking got us here,” but that doesn’t mean we need to be open and willing to take abuse or be manipulated.

    When you first came into the program, you might have heard your “best thinking got you here.”

    You’re told since your way hasn’t been working, maybe it’s time to try something else.

    You’re told you need to surrender.

    You’re told you need to start listening and follow directions.

    Well, if you were like me (gung ho!), and made the decision to be “open and willing,” I’ll bet you gave the program your best shot: you took the suggestions readily; you went to 90 meetings in 90 days; you read the Big Book daily; you got a sponsor; you did the steps. And hopefully, you started to see some progress. Your life began to improve. You cleaned up the wreckage of your past, mended relationships, got involved in service work, and really started to feel better about yourself.

    If the “your best thinking got you here” aphorism played like an endless loop in your brain, you might have felt that you’d lost the ability to think rationally for yourself and that you needed guidance. Should I break up with my addict boyfriend who just happens to be violent?  Well, um, yea . . . but you might have been so enmeshed in codependence while simultaneously combatting your addiction that you honestly didn’t know what to do.

    If you were like me—with some crazy, delusional thinking going on—and you were put on a six-month waiting list by your insurance to see a therapist, you’d need some help, and fast, and that help might have come by way of a sponsor. And if she was a good one, she’d listen, be empathetic, and gently suggest healthier ways of coping with your problems.

    Some people will say that a sponsor’s job is solely to lead a newcomer through the steps—not be a counselor, therapist or life coach. And while some sponsors may stick to this definition, most of the ones I’ve met take a much more involved role. My peers in recovery say they call their sponsors when they want to drink, when their ass is falling off, when they need help! The many times I discussed a problem with a fellow member after the meeting, I invariably heard, “Have you run this by your sponsor?” Or “Call your sponsor, that what she’s there for.”

    Sponsors can be unquestionable lifesavers. Through the years, I’ve had sponsors who have really saved my ass. One time, I was dealing with a relative who had a meth addiction and bipolar disorder. She was delusional but also cruel and selfish. But because she was “blood,” I enabled her. After one particularly trying event with her, I remember calling my sponsor and telling her I didn’t know what to do. She told me to do nothing—walk away. And not feel guilty. It ended up being the smartest thing: my relative got much better learning how to cope and take care of her problems herself instead of manipulating me into doing her bidding.

    But be careful. Not all sponsors should be sponsors. They may only recruit potential sponsees because their sponsor told them it was their turn to get one, not because they are qualified. And if you get with one who isn’t right for you, she could cause you some damage. As a newcomer, you’re incredibly, nakedly vulnerable—and impressionable. So can you see the conundrum here? You want to be open and willing, you want to start following suggestions and take direction—but you still have to listen to your gut and not confuse vulnerability with gullibility.

    When I first met this particular sponsor, I was blown away by her enthusiasm for the program. She was very bright, seemed very together, articulate, funny, educated, empathetic, kind, the whole enchilada. She told me she had tried myriad ways to recover because she’d always been searching for that thing that would fill her up that wasn’t drink drugs food men money or status, and after searching far and wide, she finally surrendered to AA. She claimed it was the best decision she’d ever made. Since she seemed to have what I wanted, I asked her to be my sponsor. I was sure she’d say she was way too busy, because at the time she had six sponsees and was working. But to my delighted surprise, she said “Oh, my of course I can.”

    I was wildly excited and hopeful. I was not working at the time and was willing to do just about anything asked of me. She could see I was clearly broken, my life practically in ruins, and assured me she would help me get through these very trying times of early sobriety.

    We dived right into the steps. She also instructed me to do 90 meetings in 90 days and get a coffee commitment. But gradually—almost imperceptibly—I discovered something else: She wanted to mold me. At first there were mild corrections of my speech or attitude, but it got to the point that I felt oppressively censored. If I ever said “should” or “have to” she’d immediately correct me and say, “not ‘should,’ not ‘have to’” it’s “I ‘get to’” do blah blah blah. In hindsight, I would have told her “Look, ‘should’ is an intrinsic word of the English language, it means something needs to be done. I think I know the difference of when I ‘get to’ do something and when I ‘should’ do something.”

    Another thing she’d do when I told her of a problem I was having with someone, was immediately cut me offbefore I could even finish. She’d interrupt and say, “I want you to think of three good things about this person. Remember, they are doing the best they know how. Find your compassion.” Which is good spiritual advice, but when the shoe was on the other foot and she was pissed at someone, she’d get downright eviscerating, nary mentioning three good qualities of the victim of her rant.

    But her all time fave platitude was: “If you spot it you got it!” said immediately to moi every time I complained to her about a person I felt was being unfair, selfish or mean. And she did have a point: sometimes, when we see something we don’t like in a person it’s because we recognize it in ourselves. But not always! For example, do we renounce the bully because we are bullies ourselves? Maybe, but usually not. Then she’d get into mystical stuff and go on about karma and say, “Everybody gets what they deserve because it’s all karma.” When I asked, “So the old lady that gets raped by a stranger, how did her karma cause that?” Her reply, “Well maybe she did something to deserve it. Now, personally, I’ve never been raped.” Whaaatt?

    But what put me over the edge was something she said that I knew, even with my broken brain, was incontestably wrong. I didn’t have to chide myself this time for thinking that I wasn’t being open and willing enough to learn, or was being controlled by my ego.

    While we were taking a walk, I confided in her about a doctor who had sexually assaulted me when I went in for a pelvic exam.

    She responded: “Well, you aren’t going to like this, but can I say something to you?”

    “Well, sure, I guess.”

    She took a dramatic big breath, squared her shoulders and said, “Okay here goes. I think, that maybe you asked for it.”

    I was dumbfounded. At the time, I explained to her, I was 19 and alone in New York City. I’d gotten my first bladder infection, couldn’t pee and could barely walk straight I was in so much pain. All I wanted was some antibiotics.

    “What do you mean I was asking for it?” I asked, frightfully confused.

    “Well, I didn’t want to bring this up, but now is as good of time as any. I see the way you talk to the men in the meetings. You’re very sexual, you know.”

    “What?” I boomed. “Are you fucking kidding me? I try to treat everyone, men and women alike, with respect, and hopefully, kindness.”

    “Well that is not how it is being perceived. People talk you know. I’m hearing all kinds of things, like ‘God, I can’t believe Margaret is married! The way she talks to the guys.’”

    Now I was pissed. I am an incredibly happily married woman. I adore my husband dearly. I would never, ever, go out on him. I am not even remotely attracted to other men.

    I realized then that her thinking was irrevocably off and I had to cut bait. I finally got the courage to fire her but it took time; she wielded a lot of power at the meetings and she intimidated me. It was an incredibly painful experience. I was already so vulnerable and sensitive, and totally confused. To have my sponsor, the one I’d done my steps with, the one who knew my deepest darkest secrets, become something slightly resembling, well, delusional, was demoralizing to say the least!

    It took me a while to get back to my homegroup. I was so shattered. I really thought of everyone as family there: they were so nice and kind, it was easy to be friendly back. But . . . but, what if my sponsor was right? Could I have been so wrong, so delusional? Was I flirting and were dudes coming on to me and I just didn’t see it? Eventually I went back and shared what she told me to a couple of trusted AA pals. They told me they’d never heard or seen any of the behavior she was reporting about me. 

    The reason I’m sharing this story is not to criticize AA, or gossip about members, or diss sponsors. I’m sharing my story because I don’t want the same thing to happen to another vulnerable newcomer, a newcomer who knows her thinking is off and is willing and open to change, but may be confused about the accuracy and validity of some of her sponsor’s suggestions, opinions, or directions.

    Listen to your intuitions, and your higher power. If you’re having problems with your sponsor, share your experiences—without using names—with other trusted members in order to get some perspective. Because we are scared and alone when we come into the rooms. We know “our best thinking got us here,” but that doesn’t mean we need to be open and willing to take abuse or be manipulated.

    Most of the time, sponsorship is a wonderful example of people helping other people. Sponsors can help talk you out of a drink, and because they’re drunks like you, they usually get where you’re coming from. But just because someone is a sponsor or old-timer doesn’t mean they are perfect.

    Face it, we are all deeply flawed in some way. But sponsors have a very serious job to do, and they should be doing it out of altruism, not as way to assuage their own ego by lording over vulnerable newcomers who they can control, manipulate or abuse. So be careful. Be open and willing but keep your boundaries firmly in place. And if things get creepy, don’t spend too much time being resentful (like I did!). Instead, break it off with him/her before you develop another codependent, dysfunctional relationship, and chalk it up as an invaluable learning experience.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dating While (Newly) Sober

    Dating While (Newly) Sober

    When my sponsor told me about the suggestion to not date for a year, that I should just concentrate on getting sober, I said: “I’m a really good multi-tasker.”

    I thought that when I got sober, I’d get into the best shape of my life, start going to the gym all the time, train for a triathlon, become super successful and meet the man of my dreams. Basically, my version of what advertising says is the perfect life. I wasn’t thinking along the lines of what some people say: the gift of sobriety IS sobriety. Boring. I mean, I was and I wasn’t; I mostly just wanted to stop being miserable. I did a 90 and 90, got a sponsor, joined a gym, took a class in my career of choice, slept a lot, and met a guy.

    When my sponsor told me about the suggestion to not date for a year, that I should just concentrate on getting sober, I said: “I’m a really good multi-tasker,” and “I can get sober and date at the same time.” Luckily for me, she didn’t say it was a rule, because there are no rules in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nowhere in the Big Book does it say: “no dating allowed in the first year.” It just talked about some people prefer a little more pepper in their sex life or whatever (page 69) and who are we to tell people what spices to proverbially cook with?

    So thank god for that because in my first 90 days, I met a guy. He was a friend of a friend and when we met, he told me that he was going through a big transition in his life.

    “What kind of a transition?” I asked, while thinking Oh my God! We have so much in common! We’re both going through transitions! As if a relationship could be built on that alone. Or even a marriage, because I thought that now that I had opened the book of sobriety, everything would change in the blink of an eye. It would be like I just woke up to a new life. That’s how it happens, right? I mean, don’t you kinda hear that all the time? The person’s life was shit and then they got sober and now they’re in this awesome marriage/job/house/car/babies and it all like happened in a year or maybe two? I’m smart and attractive. That shit should happen for me too! I can make that happen. I. CAN. MAKE. THAT. HAPPEN. Higher power who?

    So, when I asked the guy what kind of transition, he said poetically, “It’s like my house was taken away so now I have no house, but at least I can see the moon.” And I was like “Wow, coooooool. I totally love the moon.”

    For our first date, we went on a bike ride along the river, had lunch where I did not order a glass of wine (the first time that has ever happened) and ordered a coffee instead. I didn’t tell him that I was newly sober. I just told him I didn’t drink, and he said that was cool and he’s thought that maybe he should quite drinking too (uh oh); that he meditates and when he meditates, he feels super clear and drinking gets in the way of that (uh yeah). Then he walked me home and I remember feeling very sensitive and insecure. It was like I was eight years old again with a crush on a boy at school and I forgot how to walk my bike. Or talk. I felt awkward. Which is why, at 16, drinking and boys went hand in hand. Less feeling. More yay.

    When I got home, I realized there was no way I could date right now. I knew that if I was rejected or even felt rejected, it would probably cause me to drink. I didn’t have the emotional tools. I talked to my sponsor about it and then called him up and said, “I really like you, but I’m going through something right now where I need to take a year off of dating. I hope you understand.” And he said, “Wow. I should probably do that, too.” Turns out he was going through a divorce and was in no place to be in a relationship or be the man of my dreams/dysfunction right now.

    For the rest of the year, I concentrated on going to meetings, fellowship, making new AA friends, eating cookies and milk, binge watching Netflix at night, and it was the most awesome/horrible year of my life. I highly recommend it. I gained 10 or 20 pounds which was weird. Dudes can go through a rough time and get fat and grow a beard and still be considered likeable — but as a woman, it’s harder to hide behind a beard and 50 pounds and be cool. But a girl can dream.

    So, a year later, guess who I ran into? No-house-moon dude. And yay! I was like a year sober so totally awesome and fixed, right? It. Was. On. We went on a few dates, and I honestly can’t remember if we had sex. It was only seven years ago and I know we did sexy things but I cannot for the life of me remember. I don’t think we did, because we would have needed to have the talk and well, let’s just say that the time I chose to have the talk was not a good time to have it. Take it from me when I say DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HAVE THE TALK WHEN HIS HEAD IS BETWEEN YOUR LEGS. That should be in the Big Book. It’s a real buzz kill for one and all. And our relationship (if you can call it that) ended shortly thereafter which was okay because he was seriously still mourning the loss of his ten-year marriage.

    So that’s my take on dating in the first year. I do know a couple people who hooked up in their first year of sobriety and 30 years later are still married. That might happen to you. I knew that wasn’t going to happen for me. It wasn’t until year two that I met the man of my dreams AKA qualifier who really brought me to my knees (not in a good way) and into Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous which is like the nicest thing a guy can do. Kidding. But not in a way because Girrrrrrrl, I needed some of that SLAA in my life. Since then, I’ve moved to a place that I am happy to call home, am “healthy” dating and more will be revealed. But the best thing is that I like myself – dare I say love myself? I love my friends, my career, and my life and I don’t expect a man or any person or thing to save me. Because I don’t need saving any more. Thank god. Thank HP. Thank program. And thank you.

    View the original article at thefix.com