Answer Addiction

Tag: AA

  • How I Stayed Sober Through College

    How I Stayed Sober Through College

    It took intense emotional, psychological, and physical energy to mourn my lifelong relationship with drugs and alcohol and process the trauma I had spent my life suppressing.

    I was lucky to get accepted into one of the top colleges in the U.S., but I brought with me a serious drug habit and alcoholism. In my first semester, I would down 3 ½ – 4 ½ bottles of cheap red wine in a night, paired with a combination of cocaine, angel dust, weed, and benzodiazepines. Most nights, I passed out by 8 pm and my friends slipped out to clubs without me. Two months into college, I started collecting write-ups for violating the school’s drug and alcohol policies, which snowballed until I hit my bottom. 

    The first sign that my style of “partying” was out of control was that three groups of friends each suddenly severed ties with me. I still don’t know what happened, but I can imagine, based on scenes I’ve snapped into from blackouts—my boyfriend trying to scream sense into me after I punched him in the face at a concert, rolling naked on the kitchen floor in a pile of broken glass while crying, friends dumping me on the doorsteps of psych wards. That’s how I partied.

    I somehow managed to squeak out mostly A’s in my first semester, but I struggled to show up. I was constantly handing in assignments late, rescheduling exams, and conjuring doctors’ notes to excuse excessive absences. I was oversleeping for classes and therapy appointments in the late afternoon. At the end of my first semester, my school forcibly relocated me to a new dormitory for erratic behavior and chronic drug use. 

    Friendless on campus, I turned to the local homeless population. That’s when I found heroin. It didn’t take long for consequences to reach a tipping point. Halfway through my second semester, I was arrested on two felonies and two misdemeanors after waking up next to my best friend’s lifeless body (she overdosed but was revived and survived). My school suspended me for a year, pending expulsion if I didn’t get sober. My probation officer pushed me into rehab and warned that if I left, he would send me to jail.

    I fought getting sober that entire year. But at the eleventh hour, something clicked and I suddenly wanted recovery. I abruptly left the dilapidated drug den I was living in and ran to AA meetings. I only had 30 days when a school psychiatrist evaluated if I could be readmitted. I think they saw that despite the little time I had, I was serious about sobriety. I was; I’m still sober 11 years later. And I only got through those first years of sobriety while in college because of the life I built and resolutely maintained.

    Solutions for Sobriety

    Getting suspended from student housing for two years was a blessing in disguise. I instead commuted from my family’s home an hour from school, which made it easier to build a new life free of drugs and alcohol and kept me far from the parties that were definitely happening back in the dorms. I made friends with everyone in my local AA groups; fortunately, there was a community of sober young people in my area. Those friendships showed me that I could have more fun sober than I could while using, and I was never pressured or tempted to relapse. Between classes, I went to local meetings and established a second support system at school.

    The first two and a half years of sobriety were my most challenging. I struggled with cravings every day, so I kept recovery literature with me at all times. In the streets of New York City on any given night, I was confronted with scenes of the cunning fantasy of social drinking, passing by clusters of casual drinkers jovially sharing laughs over sparkling cocktails at posh outdoor lounges. I often walked past clouds of weed smoke and stepped over empty dime bags. Like so many of us reintegrating back into society in early sobriety, temptation was everywhere, despite my careful avoidance of people and places that I associated with using. But I always had silent support from a Grapevine or copy of Living Sober conveniently stashed among my schoolbooks for when I couldn’t call someone. 

    I also developed the self-respect to walk away from situations when I was uncomfortable, like changing seats on the train when passengers were sipping liquor concealed in brown paper bags, or switching tables at a restaurant because nearby diners were drinking. For the first year, I took detours around the blocks where my homeless friends sat so I wouldn’t risk running into them. These extra buffers and barriers made it easier for me to keep my sobriety amidst incessant cravings.

    I shamelessly shared that I was sober with professors and classmates, so that when I had the opportunity to study abroad in Istanbul at two years sober, my professor helped make sure I got to and from AA meetings and fellowship in a city where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a cell phone. My study abroad classmates frequented clubs after class and drank during meals, so every effort helped since I had only e-mail contact with my sponsor and network. 

    I would have similar conversations with classmates when we planned group work outside of class. They always agreed to meet during the day at school lounges, libraries, or cafés when I asked. Strategies that kept alcohol out of sight proved to be the safest for me in early sobriety. During my last semester, I got to help form a recovery group for students at my school. These organizations are common on campuses now, and some schools even offer sober housing. 

    It took intense emotional, psychological, and physical energy to mourn my lifelong relationship with drugs and alcohol and process the trauma I had spent my life suppressing. After I got sober, I re-enrolled part-time in college and completed my bachelor’s degree over six years. My diligence paid off: I graduated Magna Cum Laude and immediately began a full-time position in my chosen field.

    Graduate School

    Five years after receiving my bachelor’s, I realized my career didn’t match what I finally discovered was my purpose and calling in life. After six months of meditating, therapy, and weighing feedback from my sober network, I left my steady career job and started graduate school. Unexpectedly, my new school hosted a heavier drinking culture than my undergraduate campus. The omnipresent partying frequently left me in uncomfortable situations with my recovery feeling tenuous. Everything involved alcohol, including lab assignments and fieldwork excursions. The school even hosted weekly drinking socials, with most students slurring and stumbling by 8pm. When my cohort got together several times a week, the event always included hard drinking. 

    I realized on the first night of orientation that I would need to double down on recovery again. Even though I entered graduate school with nine years of sobriety, I treated myself with the same care and caution as I did in undergrad as a newcomer. During graduate school, I felt I had no business in a place where the main activity focused on alcohol. When I’m tense or upset, the glamor of psychological escape can suddenly seem desirable. As an alcoholic, I know I have no defense against that first drink if my spiritual condition is anything less than fit that day. 

    Adding to the constant stress of endless coursework, my career change challenged my self-esteem, confidence, and self-worth. I rarely felt grounded. As a result, I only saw my cohort outside of class when I felt absolutely secure in my sobriety. I didn’t form as close of bonds with them as they did with each other, but I made a concerted effort to be fully present when we were in class or working in our offices. Though I wish I could have gotten closer to them, I don’t regret honoring the boundaries I had set to care for my recovery.

    I didn’t have to entirely avoid being around drinking; I just had to distinguish the acceptable conditions. If an event would be beneficial to my studies or career, I only went at the beginning when attendees were adequately sober and constructive conversations were possible. Cocktail receptions and academic conferences felt safe because professional networking was the main purpose, and the pressure to perform distracted me from the drinking. I found comfort in idly sipping on water throughout the night as others do with their wine or cocktails. And as attendees became tipsy, I remained articulate, poised, and professional, and carried impressively intellectual conversations in the eyes of the inebriated. If the night turned into a party, my cue to leave was when people started talking loudly and laughing infectiously at nothing intelligible. At that point, I couldn’t connect with anyone and there was little left for me to do there. If the drinkers stayed only mildly tipsy, I ended up enjoying getting to know them because they were relaxed enough to reciprocate the deeper conversations I’m accustomed to in recovery.

    I was lucky that my school already had a strong student recovery group that held meetings several times a week and frequent sober outings. They became my friends because I didn’t mesh with the local 12-step meetings. At this point in my recovery, AA had sadly become monotonous for me, but I was still committed to sobriety. I wanted to dive deeper into healing the trauma, childhood wounds, and character defects that continued to hamper effective relationships with myself and those around me. Over the years, I found guidance and wisdom in self-help books, A Course in Miracles, Refuge Recovery, Kundalini yoga, Western astrology, and Buddhist meditation. So in graduate school, I crafted a program of self-reflection and accountability around these practices, which doubled as solutions for stress management. 

    I also stayed close to my networks where I got sober. Those women remain my dearest friends and strongest support. I worked closely with spiritual advisors until I found a local sponsor. Strengthening my program was critical because graduate school was emotionally demanding. It required at least twice the amount of work as my undergrad classes; it wasn’t even possible to complete all the assignments each week. The psychological strain combined with a busy schedule left little time for much else. I quickly recognized the need for self-care and balanced it with the coursework I would be graded on. I went to my favorite exercise classes at least twice a week, also setting aside time to rest and prioritizing a full night’s sleep. 

    At the end of the day, all the effort paid off. I recently received my Master’s degree at 11 years sober and it is one of my most proud accomplishments. I graduated with a higher quality of life, stronger sense of self, and more solid sobriety than I imagined were possible, thanks to the unique challenges I had to face in the process of obtaining each degree.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Facts & Fables: William Schaberg Explores the Big Book's True Origins

    Facts & Fables: William Schaberg Explores the Big Book's True Origins

    Both Big Book zealots and AA’s harshest critics will have a problem with this book—you’re either blasphemous for criticizing a saint or not going far enough to expose a fraud.

    It’s been 40 years since Earnest Kurtz’s Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, which was the last substantial scholarly research into AA’s early years. This week, William Schaberg’s three pound, 800-page Writing the Big Book: The Creation of A.A. was released, and it’s already cracked the top 20 in both Amazon’s Twelve-Step Programs and Alcoholism Recovery categories. People are ready for something new.

    “The first chapter is called, ‘Challenging the Creation Myths,’” Schaberg explains. “The chapters that follow in Writing the Big Book do just that, again and again.”

    The “We” Myth

    The Fix: “I’ve heard the stories about the Big Book being a collective effort of AA pioneers recording their shared experiences. Bill W has said he was less the author and more the umpire, with members arguing, deliberating, and carving out Alcoholics Anonymous together, chapter by chapter, line by line. Is this story of an authorial ‘We’ a mischaracterization of how the Big Book was written?

    WS: “Bill is writing back and forth to Dr. Bob and sending him draft chapters. By the time of the third letter, Wilson writes, ‘I’m having a hard time getting input here in New York, Bob. I’m glad you like the chapters but I need some critical feedback, here.’ Bill gets zero from Ohio. 

    I think one of the reasons that Bill was having a hard time getting feedback was, despite his protestations, Wilson didn’t do very well with input. Bill said proudly that despite adding ‘as we understood Him,’ and taking ‘on our knees’ out of Step Seven, the Steps remained exactly as he wrote them. Bill was fighting a rearguard action all the time because people did want him to change it. A Dr. Howard famously reviewed The Big Book with many criticisms, saying, ‘You’ve got to take all the You out and replace it with We. You can’t tell an alcoholic what to do; tell them what you did; explain how it worked for you.’ Wilson did not want to make these changes. 

    Late in my research I stumbled across a letter Hank Parkhurst wrote 17 days before the book came out saying, ‘Bill you’ve got to make these changes. If you don’t, I’ll form a committee and we’ll make them for you.’ It was a huge powerplay by Hank to get what he thought had to be done in the book. Bill finally conceded but he didn’t want to do it. This is one example of how resistant Wilson was with anyone messing with anything he’d written.”

    The Fix: “So, Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t the work of a collective?” 

    WS: “The hundred men, who argued about the book in AA meetings, blood on the floor. It didn’t happen. It did in fact happen out at Hank Parkhurst’s Honor Dealers office between Hank, Fitz Mayo and Bill arguing about what should and shouldn’t be in the book. It didn’t happen in meetings; it did happen in a New Jersey office. 

    It’s amazing how recalcitrant and negative Akron and Cleveland was about this whole book. Dr. Bob got an old newspaper man sober—Jim Scott—and we are told a story that these Akron guys weren’t writers; they wanted to write their story, but they needed Jim to help polish it up. The truth was, aside from a couple of members, they didn’t want to do them. Jim was sent by Dr. Bob to go have coffee with them one at a time, he gets them to tell him their story, Jim goes home and writes their stories. Is that the same as this sainted story about how Jim just helped these guys? No. Bill was putting heat on Bob for stories. Bob was desperate and he found a way to get it done; Jim wrote the stories.”

    The Twelve Steps Origin Myth

    The Fix: “AA’s Pass It On describes The Big Book chapters as being written in the order they appear. How did the book come together chronologically?”

    WS: “‘Bill’s Story’ and ‘There is a Solution’ were written in late May of 1938. Hank Parkhurst and Wilson were shopping the sample chapters around in the hopes of raising money; June, July, August—nothing. Parkhurst comes up with a new idea. There’s a writer for This Week Magazine, Silas Bent, that they’re trying to sober up – he’s slipping and sliding – Hank convinces Silas to submit a story about Alcoholics Anonymous. Hank’s idea was that, at the end of the story, they’d ask readers to send $1 and for that dollar they’d get five chapters, Hank thought five chapters would make the buck worthwhile. So, he goes back to Wilson and says, ‘Two chapters isn’t going to cut it—we need more.’

    Wilson started writing on September 15th, 1938 and wrote ‘More About Alcoholism’ and ‘We Agnostics,’ Chapters Three and Four.” 

    The Fix: “Chapters Five and Six in the Book are “How It Works” and “Into Action,” all about the Steps. That’s not what Bill Wilson started writing next?” 

    WS: “Right, he didn’t have Twelve Steps yet. ‘Working With Others’ was written next, ‘To Wives,’ ‘The Family Afterwards’ and then ‘A Vision For You.’ Somewhere in there, Hank Parkhurst wrote ‘To Employers.’ So, these Chapters were basically done by December 1938.”

    Schaberg describes this stage in a section in his book called, A Vision for How to Get and Stay Sober:

    Wilson knew that sooner or later, he would have to face the challenge of creating a chapter that outlined, in the clearest possible terms the actions needed to get and then stay sober. It was, he later commented, a problem that “had secretly worried the life out of him for months before he finally got around to writing it.” But so long as there was at least one single chapter that still needed to be written, Bill would elect to write that instead of facing the intimidating task of putting down on paper the exact details of the program of recovery.

    WS: “’Writing the Twelve Steps’—Chapter 23—it was the hardest for me to write. It took months and months. I was trying to make sense of the contradictory stories I was hearing. We’ve all heard the story that Bill laid in bed with a yellow pad and a pencil, he realizes that he has to write something concrete, you know, that ‘drunks couldn’t wiggle out of.’ he gets inspired, he wrote them out, there were twelve, he thinks that’s the coolest thing in the world; he goes downstairs; two guys are there having coffee with Lois. They gave him all kinds of grief, ‘God use to be at the bottom; now he’s at the top. You have drunks getting down on their knees,’ in the original version of Step Seven. That’s how Bill tells it. And when I started looking at it, it just didn’t make any sense. Other times, Bill said that The Twelve Steps were based on the word-of-mouth six steps.”

    The Fix: “Pass It On gets referenced in AA meetings, it talks about a variety of six step programs being practiced. From your findings, when did the story of six steps first start getting told?”

    WS: “1950; that’s the first evidence I could find of him telling that story. The [six steps] story morphs from 1950 to 1951. First there was the ‘Ebby brought Bill the six steps’ story. Then, a story he often repeated later was that the six steps came out of the group’s collective experience. This was the pragmatic answer, in six steps to how you stop drinking. But here’s the problem: there’s no six steps before 1939. There are 28 stories of alcoholics in the back of the First Edition Big Book written by people from Ohio and New York. Now you would think that if there was a six-step program, people would be talking about it, somebody would be talking, most of them would be talking about working this step or that one. but read the original stories.”

    The Fix: “Zero for 28, right?” 

    WS: “Exactly, O for 28. The common theme is they were powerless, they turned their lives over to God and they stop drinking; no six-step program written about before 1939.”

    The Fix: “You write about Frank Amos, sent by the Rockefellers following the infamous December 1937 New York meeting to report on what Dr. Bob and the others did to get and stay sober.”

    WS: “He travelled to Ohio to check up on what Dr. Bob and the other members were doing. He writes a report highlighting seven things they were doing to stay sober; those seven things don’t correspond to the six steps that Bill Wilson was later talking about. So, I’m up against a wall, none of this is making any sense to me. 

    One of the great reveals was when I was given a copy of Bill’s first draft of his story. Written late May of 1938, the first version, if you will—there were a couple of versions before that were really, really terrible but this was the one—that, over time, morphed into what appeared in the book. And as we’re taken through Bill’s experience in Towns Hospital, you can number about ten of those Twelve Steps.”

    The Fix: “So, the Steps are Bill’s experience, not a universal experience?”

    WS: “Things did come together in a way that made sense to me and is a credible story about the genesis of the Twelve Steps, right there in that May 1938 version of his story. You put numbers on them and there’s (at least) ten of them, right there. So, what we’re doing here, we’re not using six steps that Ebby brought to Bill or any collective experience of early members, this is ‘What I did; how did I get sober?’ Bingo, there it is.

    In the archives there is a copy of a letter, before 1950; a lawyer, Paul Kirby Hennessy wrote to Bill to confirm a discussion they had on a train ride to Washington. Paul had asked him, ‘Hey, how’d you come up with the Twelve Steps. There is a lot more detail about this encounter in my book, but Bill wrote back to Paul confirming his story that the Steps came from his personal experience. That October 19, 1948 letter is in the archives, ‘Bill’s Story of the Evolution of the Twelve Steps.’

    Bill Wilson could have written ‘Do what I did and you could get sober, but isn’t it a better story to say here is what we did—one hundred of us did—we did this, we got sober, and you can, too?’ ‘We did this,’ is a powerful message.”

    Co-Founder Mythology

    WS: “The whole co-founder thing is another example of how Wilson wasn’t inclined towards historical accuracy. He was and still is a guy who is worshipped as a guy who walks on water. Bill knew he had an ego problem. One of the things he did to cope with that was to take the spotlight off himself as much as possible. The co-founder idea is one way that Bill could do this. 

    I’m almost offended when the co-founder thing comes up. Bill Wilson is the founder of AA. 

    Mel B, a really good AA historian, came into AA in the early 1950s. I heard a really great interview with David L whereby Mel B said that back then, ‘Bill W is referred to as the founder; Dr. Bob is the co-founder,’ giving primacy to Bill Wilson.’ Bill would call himself a co-founder and Dr. Bob is a co-founder, and somewhere along the line, William James or Sam Shoemaker, Sister Ignatius or Henrietta Seiberling is a co-founder, Frank Amos claimed he was a cofounder. Bob Smith isn’t mentioned as co-founder until 1946.

    Ebby Thatcher, who brought the message of recovery to Bill—the seminal moment in AA history—if Ebby isn’t a co-founder then who is? 

    I’m almost famous for saying this by this point: ‘No Hank; no book.’ That’s absolutely the truth. The book Alcoholics Anonymous just wouldn’t have happened without Hank Parkhurst. So, if Hank isn’t a co-founder then who is? Bob Smith was the last man standing who stayed sober, that’s why we call him co-founder today.” 

    Conclusion

    The Fix: “AA’s first official accounting of historical events was A.A. Comes of Age which the 1956 General Service delegates unanimously voted to approve, relying on Bill’s recollection of early AA—nearly twenty years after writing The Big Book. Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers didn’t appear until 1980 and Mel B’s Pass It On: The story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world wasn’t green-lit until 1984; relying on many of these AA folktales recounted by sources, many of which are secondhand.”

    WS: “The people in Ohio told stories after the fact that never happened, how deeply they delved into the chapters that were sent to them. What happened was this project that they were in open rebellion against became very successful. Five, ten, twenty years later they aren’t telling stories about how they opposed the writing of the book, they’re telling the story as if they were on board from the very start. It’s just people tell stories of the past in a way that reflects the current reality—say a 1950 reality, a 1960 reality or further out—contrary to what actually happened. It’s a perfectly understandable human tendency.” 

    The Fix: “There’s a difference between investigative inquiry and looking for fault like there’s a reward for it. It’s hard not to have an agenda when researching history. I’m not surprised that Writing the Big Book, maintains a fact-driven discipline. What did surprise me, as an academic text, it read like a detective novel. I’m surprised that it is such a page-turner.”

    WS: “The historian’s everlasting quest is to answer, ‘What really happened?’ I don’t know what really happened, but I have a better idea of what happened, having done all that research. When you start finding out the stories Bill told just aren’t true in some sense, you ask, ‘Was the guy a liar? What am I doing being involved with this project, with this guy who’s a liar?’ And I actually had a couple of people who came at me from that direction. 

    But it wasn’t too long before I came to see Bill Wilson as a man of vision. Wilson wasn’t a historian; he wasn’t trying to be. Bill Wilson wasn’t a liar. He was a salesman, with a solution to alcoholism, a problem that had ravaged the nation for centuries. He thought he could save hundreds-of-thousands of lives and that is what he was trying to do. Wilson was the ultimate pragmatist; he wasn’t a dogma guy; he wasn’t a this-is-the-way-it-is guy. If it worked, he was all for it. He was telling stories that left out messy details, closer to parables than a historical account. Frequently he slips into mythmaking. The stories were supposed to be powerful, incisive, impressionable stories for people who were trying to get sober or who weren’t quite convinced yet to get sober. A myth captures the essence—not the details—of truth.”

    The Fix: “It’s fair to expect that this book will put a target on your back by both the Big Book zealots and AA’s harshest critics—you will be perceived as either blasphemous for criticizing a saint or not going far enough to expose a fraud. To skeptics, what would you say?” 

    WS: “There are 1570 citations at the back of the book along with 416 footnotes throughout the text – if you don’t believe what I’ve said in the book, or the facts I’m quoting in the book, go down to archives and find another document; I’m on board with that. 

    We need to get back to primary document research; we have to get off of this quoting Bill Wilson thing because that’s not always what happened. It makes a good story. If you’re trying to tell an inspirational story, tell that story, but if you’re trying to tell a historically accurate story, go back to the archives and read the pieces of paper that are there.”

    Fix readers wanting to learn more about Writing the Big Book: The Creation of A.A., visit http://www.writingthebigbook.com/ and read a sample chapter for free. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Why Aren't There More People of Color in the Recovery Movement?

    Why Aren't There More People of Color in the Recovery Movement?

    For many white people, recovery is a redemption story, proof that they were good people all along. For people of color, a known history of drug use might be the only excuse a prospective employer needs to shut the door.

    When Art Woodard walked into his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, a sea of white faces turned to stare at him. Some of the faces showed kindness; others hostility. Most people just watched as he took a seat in the back of the room.

    Woodard’s shoulders slumped. As a black man who had recently graduated Yale, he was used to being the only person of color in a room. Still, he thought, it would have been nice to share the recovery journey with other black folks. 

    “None of these stories are like mine”

    As his fellow AAers stood up to tell their stories, Woodard found he couldn’t concentrate. None of these stories are like mine, he thought. Many of the stories involved childhood abuse or mental health issues. For Woodard, heavy drinking didn’t start until he graduated from Yale, when he finally couldn’t take the weight of living in a white world where he constantly felt the need to prove himself, to justify his presence, to assure others he wasn’t a threat. 

    “I got drunk because I thought I had fooled an institution into giving me a degree I didn’t deserve,” he says in a phone interview. “I never really felt I had a place in the world…I embraced alcohol because I needed a release for that insecurity.”

    Woodard never returned to that AA meeting, during which not a single person approached or welcomed him. Luckily, he found a program specifically for people of color elsewhere in the city. When the program nearly folded for lack of funds, he wrote grants to keep it afloat—he was adamant about continuing his recovery journey alongside his peers.

    Over the years Woodard became more visible within the wider recovery movement. He became a public speaker and trainer, often co-leading health and recovery trainings with his friend Jim, who was white. But the specter of race was never far off.

    “I can honestly say that every position or opportunity that I was able to achieve was achievable through a Caucasian male offering me opportunities,” he says. “I was invisible in those settings if I didn’t have [a white person] to speak for me.” 

    He endured the barbs from the people who ignored Woodard if he asked a question, directing their answer to Jim, and the people who expressed astonishment at his “good English,” as they put it. And always, the experience of his first AA meeting came back; almost every recovery space was a sea of white faces. 

    Racial Bias, Recovery, and Criminal Justice

    Woodard’s experience as a person of color in the recovery movement is not unique. It’s no secret that the movement is largely dominated by Caucasians, whether in staff or leadership positions, on organizational boards, or among membership. Why do so few people of color play visible roles within the recovery community, especially given how much the effects of harsh drug policy and chaotic drug use have devastated many communities of color? To merely blame racism, though it certainly plays a role, is oversimplifying a complex problem. 

    One of the reasons we don’t see many people of color in leadership positions within the recovery movement is that it can be harder for people of color to sustain recovery at all. We all know someone who spent a good chunk of their twenties using drugs or alcohol problematically. Perhaps they went to jail once or twice. Perhaps they were even homeless for a while. But today that person is married with children, thriving at a good job, and talks about recovery to anyone who will listen. That person is also probably white.

    Sustained recovery is not as easy for a person of color. For black men, especially, once the criminal justice system sinks its teeth into you, it doesn’t let go. There is little room for mistakes in a world that expects you to fail, and we all know the statistics: Despite similar rates of drug use, people of color are more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white people, serve longer sentences for the same crimes, and find it harder to break the cycle once it starts.

    Even for people of color who are able to find and sustain recovery despite the odds against them, they likely won’t be as quick to advertise their new status. For many white people, recovery is a redemption story, proof that they were good people all along. For people of color, a known history of drug use might be the only excuse a prospective employer needs to shut the door.

    For evidence of racial bias in recovery, one need only pick up the nearest newspaper or turn on the TV. When the story is about a white drug user, the addiction or overdose death is reported as a tragic loss of potential. But a person of color can suffer a death completely unrelated to drugs—being shot unarmed by a cop, for example—and the public will dig into his past for any evidence of drug use or criminal behavior, then use this information to justify the murder. Any drug history of any kind is enough to brand a person of color for life.

    The overdose crisis presents a conundrum. On the one hand, it provides an influx of funding and sympathy to a movement in desperate need of both. On the other hand, it exacerbates the racial divide by further entrenching the narrative of white recovery as redemptive and black or brown recovery as something else. 

    Follow the Money

    Donald McDonald, a white man from Raleigh, North Carolina with 15 years in recovery, explains, “The opioid crisis is seen as a white issue not just because of the predominantly white images we see in the news. It’s this message about the ‘worthy afflicted.’ We hear about people with legitimate pain receiving lawfully prescribed pain relief. We can then vilify the pill or the pharmaceutical company – not the person experiencing addiction. Historically this has not been the black experience in America.”

    The people whose faces are presented as sympathetic victims are almost always white. And this is no mere coincidence. The recovery movement is made up of people who have long suffered heavy stigma, but now, for the first time, thanks to the attention that the overdose crisis has sparked, the movement is experiencing more public sympathy and financial support. 

    Laurie Johnson-Wade, an African American woman who leads recovery efforts in Kensington, Pennsylvania, says that money lies at the heart of the exclusion of people of color in recovery spaces. 

    “If you show my face [as a black woman] or if you use me as the leader at a conference then you are not going to get the money that you would have if you had somebody representing a different community,” she says. “I think those in the recovery movement started out with good intentions, but if you want to win, you have to play the game…At the end of the day, it is all about dollars and cents.”

    Organizations are putting forward their most sympathetic faces to potential funders and allies—and the whiter and more connected to prescription pills (as opposed to street drugs), the better. Keeping the conversation revolving around pharmaceutical companies also makes it seem as though problematic drug use is a new phenomenon, which allows us to ignore the last few decades of harsh drug policies that have decimated communities of color. 

    Devin Reaves, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Harm Reduction Coalition and a black man in recovery, explains, “There is hyper focus on Big Pharma creating the opioid epidemic, but [problematic drug use] has been going on in the black community for a long time.”

    These narratives and “solutions,” in which drug problems among white people are the primary focus, further drive people of color away from recovery. Too often, out of genuine desire to be colorblind and put racial strife behind us, people believe that what works for white people should work for everyone. But that is not true in most spaces, and especially not in the recovery space, where racist drug policies have created a very different environment for people of color.

    “I don’t like it when white folks tell me how black I should be” 

    Reaves, who often finds himself the lone person of color trying to shift recovery conversations towards criminal justice reform and strong economic policies, says it’s more than just uncomfortable. It can challenge a person’s very identity.

    “[The recovery movement] is a pretty white space and when you go into white spaces they want you to talk white, dress white,” says Reaves, who says he has been reprimanded many times by white people for being too outspoken about race. “I don’t like it when white folks tell me how black I should be.” 

    For a person of color, living in a predominantly white world can be exhausting. You have to watch your behavior lest someone consider your very presence a threat. You never know when you might encounter someone who will show open hostility towards you. You have to put up with constant micro-aggressions. And often you are a solitary voice trying to remind everyone not to forget about people of color, not to pursue solutions that only benefit white people, not to pretend that race doesn’t matter. 

    Woodard explains that there is a price to getting ahead. The people who “succeed” in a primarily white environment are the ones who act in a way that white people consider socially acceptable. But when someone else is dictating the terms of your behavior—sometimes literally, sometimes passive aggressively—that experience can change you. Spend enough time straddling two worlds and you may find that you no longer belong in either.

    “People of color [who spend a lot of time in a white world] get locked into these insecurities,” explains Woodard. “There is an environment we want to have success in, but that environment is changing us.”

    For many people, that is too steep a price to pay, which is why historically white spaces often remain that way. It takes a long time for enough trailblazers to change the environment to one that feels safe and welcoming to people of color. 

    How to Be More Inclusive

    So how do we start that process of change so that recovery environments become more inclusive?

    Donald McDonald says that the first step is to acknowledge that race and gender inequality exists in recovery spaces and then to take action to correct it. He admits that although there is awareness within the recovery community about the lack of space for people of color, it hasn’t yet translated into action on a large scale.

    Devin Reaves says that people of color should be represented on organization boards, in community meetings and at conferences…but not in a way that implies mere tokenism. 

    “Every movement should be trying to find the next generation of advocates and pull them up,” he says. “Give people an opportunity to excel, but also try to mitigate the harms of being a black person in an all-white space.”

    Laurie Johnson-Wade says that rather than asking for more inclusion in white spaces, people of color have to organize on their own and become a “constituency of consequence.”

    Some self-organizing is already happening. At the 2018 Harm Reduction Conference in New Orleans, leaders of color came together prior to the main conference to hammer out priority issues for their communities. They are tired of having their identities challenged by a world that continues to put their issues on the back burner, tired of the steep price of participation in a white space. And tired of asking permission to speak.

    “We have to make ourselves visible, almost like a force to be reckoned with,” says Johnson-Wade. “We have to pull our own resources together and say we are going to do this work regardless. We will not sit around and wait.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Brad Pitt Praises Alcoholics Anonymous

    Brad Pitt Praises Alcoholics Anonymous

    “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Pitt said in a recent interview.

    Brad Pitt may be one of the most famous movie stars on the planet, but when he turned to an Alcoholics Anonymous group in a time of need, he found the compassion and anonymity that he was looking for. 

    “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Pitt told The New York Times about the 18 months that he spent attending AA meetings. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”

    Sharing in a Safe Space

    Despite his celebrity, Pitt felt that he could open up in the meetings, without worrying about other people spreading his stories. That helped him heal, coming off his divorce from actress Angelina Jolie. 

    He said, “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There’s great value in that.”

    Pitt and Jolie reportedly split after an argument about his drinking. In 2017, six months after he got sober, he told GQ, “I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something. I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know—things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much.” 

    When his drinking was at its worst, he could “drink a Russian under the table with his own vodka. I was a professional. I was good,” Pitt said. 

    He had to make a change, and decided to take control of it. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told the Times.

    Taking Inventory

    Going through his divorce and getting sober forced Pitt to take an honest inventory and face some long-time challenges that he had been avoiding. 

    “The fact is, we all carry pain, grief and loss,” he said. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. So you open up those boxes.”

    Part of that was realizing the impact that fame had on him. 

    He said, “In the ’90s, all that attention really threw me. It was really uncomfortable for me, the cacophony of expectations and judgments. I really became a bit of a hermit and just bonged myself into oblivion.”

    Now, he has learned to deal with those anxieties in a healthier way, or to put them out of his head entirely.  

    “Those dubious thoughts, the mind chatter, the rat in the skull—that’s comedy,” he said. “It’s just ridiculous that we would beat ourselves up that way. It doesn’t matter. I spent too much of life wrestling with those thoughts, or being tethered to those thoughts, or caged by those thoughts.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How I Learned to Show Up for Life Without Alcohol

    How I Learned to Show Up for Life Without Alcohol

    Sobriety means—or will come to mean—different things for different people. But I can attest to one thing: The path is beautiful, and the difficulties you may encounter along the way are worth it.

    You would think that being smart enough to get into an elite university would mean I’d be “smart enough” about recognizing the signs of my disease. It took me a nearly fifteen-year drinking career, a six-year engagement, at least five psychiatric hospital visits, and maybe fifty face-to-face run-ins with actual, imminent death before I knew something had to change. 

    Forced to Change

    This time, the change would have nothing to do with my intellectual rigor, the dynamic quality of my ideas, or really anything in terms of my personal pursuits. Neither was this about a spiritual makeover of sorts, or a renewed commitment to my health. I was forced to change or face the end. I hadn’t even turned 30 yet.

    My engagement—a union with an emotionally absent partner, the result of my desperate need to not be alone with my demons—was becoming more and more codependent, unhealthy, and financially dominating, and less and less loving, protecting, viable. Still, we smiled in all of our pics. 

    The hardest thing to admit was that I could no longer pursue “the life of the mind” when my own mind was lost—null—from an almost continuous state of being under the influence.

    The process of recovery has not been easy, even three years down this road. While I have since become comfortable not drinking, and with telling people that I don’t drink, it wasn’t always that way. There were times I felt not only uncomfortable but sad, and at times jealous or angry, wishing I could have a drink. There were times of full-body anxiety that made the sober life seem like another kind of death sentence. 

    But I am fiercer now. I defend my right to be well. 

    Recovery as Self-Love and Self-Preservation

    When Audre Lorde said that self-love is an act of political warfare, I think part of what she meant is that if I care about myself, then I have to defend my sole, autonomous house—my body. I take Lorde’s words to heart when I think about my own recovery—that I indeed have had to become defensive about my health. Being in active recovery is a lifelong process of sticking up for yourself—your best self and your worst self. It is also a way of being that demands you treat your body as a temple, rather than an outhouse. 

    Now that I haven’t touched a drink in three years, not only have the clouds lifted, but I know what to do when life gives me rain. 

    Today, I have to be diligent about my health and about the truth of my alcoholism. It is a disease with branches in the family tree(s). It is also a disease that can go from dormant to full-fledged before you’ve had time to give it a name.

    The myth of drinking as self-care (at least for some of us) was apparent in the ways I had been taught to “decompress” from the stressors of graduate studies, a place made all the more difficult to navigate as a black, mixed-race woman (who has struggled with anxiety, depression, disordered eating, and of course drinking—my favorite form of self-love and self-abuse). 

    The truth is that I loved drinking enough to have developed a habit of it. At the time, I loved what drinking did for me (despite the pain of what it was doing to me). It brought me a social life, it furnished me with (false) self-confidence. 

    It also stole time from me. So many years spent in various states of relative alarm—how to get my drinks for the day and morning after, if I had enough money (somehow I always did), would I be able to last through that 12-step meeting without a drink?

    Clearly, I wasn’t ready to heal yet. 

    I can’t tell you when I became ready, or precisely what day it was; I had been on and off the wagon so many times that I’d stopped believing in myself. 

    What I did want to believe in was the line of thinking that told me I could control my disease and drink like normal people. If I could control it, maybe I would be “cured.”

    Seizures, Psych Wards, and Liver Failure

    My thinking changed when I had my first withdrawal-induced seizure. 

    Or was it after my second major stint in a psych ward? When did I become ready to change? Was it when I resorted to hiding liquor in shampoo bottles? Oh, I know—it must have been when my eyes started to turn yellow (though I remember still drinking—at that point, having to drink—in the face of these obvious symptoms of liver failure).

    Eventually, the dreadful condition of being caught in the throes of all kinds of dependency caught up to me, as they do for the luckier alcoholics among us. 

    When you’re in the midst of active addiction, it’s the drug that keeps you “alive” and “well.” But when you’re in recovery, you see the drug for what it is—the thing that is killing you and keeping you unwell. To complicate matters, your drug was your best friend—the friend who was there when you were stressed, sad, or having suicidal thoughts… never mind that it was the same friend who implanted these thoughts in your mind to begin with. 

    Not everyone thinks of alcohol abuse as an illness or disease, and that’s okay. What isn’t okay is the promotion of cute slogans like “wine not?”—in a world where more women are abusing alcohol than ever before. 

    Getting sober from alcohol coincided with my decision to withdraw from my studies abroad. Becoming dependent on alcohol had largely destroyed my independent spirit—the same one that had guided me to want to study abroad in the first place. 

    For years I had chosen alcohol as my drug of choice—what I “used” when things were going well, not well, and also when I was well, or unwell. My kind of drinking was pure self-destruction—mind you, I had continued to tell myself it was a feasible form of self-care. Plus, I deserved it. At the end of the day, if you worked hard, you deserved some kind of reward, didn’t you? That’s why they invented martinis, wasn’t it?

    I’ll spare you the details of my last hospital stint, but it was arduous, and at times left me hopeless, wanting to burn the wagon if possible. Now I had to learn to live and cope with life without that substance, and accept that in the end, the drug chose me.

    I Made It Out Alive… And I’m Thriving

    Fast forward three years, and what I really want to talk about is all the amazing things that can happen when you’re not drinking—being willing and able to forge authentic relationships with people, for example, and learning what it means to heal emotions through the body. Oh, and meeting people, whether romantically or as friends, does get weird, though in some ways more exciting. 

    The list is long, and I am learning new things about myself, but I think it imperative we put a new spin on recovery rhetoric—not all of it is a struggle, there is so much to take delight in. There are things that will pleasantly surprise you (like getting a real good night’s sleep). 

    I eventually accepted that my kind of sobriety from alcohol would have to be a total one.

    Because the severity of alcoholism lies on a spectrum, there are people who can drink alcohol and not become addicted (must be aliens), there are folks (total weirdos) who can just stick to one drink. But I know after many years of trying and lying to myself, that I am not one of them… and never will be. 

    Likewise, there are many ways to get sober and no one right path. Sobriety means—or will come to mean—different things for different people. But I can attest to one thing: The path is beautiful, and the difficulties you may encounter along the way are worth it.

    This summer I am celebrating three years (okurrrrrrr?!) of sobriety from alcohol. I do not define myself any longer by my disease. Of course, I work to ensure I never lose sight of the fact that my disease isn’t ever “going away,” but recovery sure beats bodily warfare, chronic sickness, and a fear of the future. 

    Today, I identify as an artist, a writer; and more specifically as a Catholic witch, poet, and intuitive. If you told me during my drinking years that I would one day not only make it out alive but drink-free for over 1,000 days, I’d say you were lying. But here I am, not just surviving but thriving. I have my sad days, but I let them be what they are. It’s good to cry sometimes. It’s good to feel your feelings. Now, I have an array of tools and ways for navigating those feelings, especially when I think of the darknesses of my past. But mostly, and most importantly, I feel excited for the future. Now, I show up to life. And as long as I can show up to life (and for life), my intuition tells me it is bound to be an amazing ride.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Can 12-Step Programs Treat Dual Diagnoses?

    Can 12-Step Programs Treat Dual Diagnoses?

    Effective treatment needs to include both the substance use disorder and the co-occurring disorder in an integrated approach because the two conditions build on each other.

    Thirty-three percent of people with mental illness also have a substance use disorder (SUD); that number rises to 50 percent for severe mental illness. Fifty-one percent of people with SUD have a co-occurring mental health disorder. Effective treatment needs to include both the SUD and the co-occurring disorder in an integrated approach because the two conditions build on each other. People with mental illness may turn to substances to alleviate symptoms and severe substance misuse can cause lasting psychological and physiological damage.

    12-step programs are free, prolific, and available throughout the world. These mutual-help organizations are designed to facilitate recovery from addiction, but are they suitable for treating the large segment of people with addiction who also have other mental health conditions or psychiatric diagnoses?

    A 2018 meta-analysis  undertook a literature review on 14 years of studies related to dual diagnosis and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This extensive quantitative look into the effiicacy of AA for people with dual diagnosis found that participation in AA and abstinence “were associated significantly and positively.” The research supports the clinically-backed notion that an integrated mental health approach that encourages participation in mutual help programs is the best approach for treating patients with comorbid SUD and mental illness.

    Does it Depend on the Dual Diagnosis?

    There is enormous variation in mental illnesses, so does the potential effectiveness of 12-step programs change based on the type of disorder or diagnosis? The co-founder of AA, William Wilson (known as Bill W.), was afflicted with a co-occurring disorder. Wilson struggled with “very severe depression symptoms” and today his mental health issue may have been diagnosed as major depressive disorder.

    A study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment followed 300 alcohol-dependent people with and without social anxiety disorder who went through hospital-assisted detox followed by participation in AA. Social anxiety disorder is characterized by an intense fear of being rejected or disliked by other people. This study found that there was no significant difference in relapse or abstinence rates between the two groups and concluded that social anxiety disorder was “not a significant risk factor for alcohol use relapse or for nonadherence to AA or psychotherapy.”

    Do Sponsors Matter?

    People with dual diagnoses tend to participate in 12-step programs like AA as much as people with just SUD and receive the same benefits in recovery. Those people with co-occurring conditions may actually benefit more from “high levels of active involvement, particularly having a 12-step sponsor.”

    In many 12-step mutual help organizations, people enter into an informal agreement with another recovering person who will support their recovery efforts and hold them accountable for continued sobriety. This one-on-one relationship of sponsor and sponsee has been compared to the “therapeutic alliance” that is formed between patients and their clinicians. The therapeutic alliance is positively correlated with treatment outcomes and abstinence.

    The therapeutic alliance is one of the most important aspects of effective psychotherapy, as it helps the therapist and the patient to work together. The relationship is based on a strong level of trust. Patients need to feel fully supported, and know that that their therapist is always working towards the best possible outcome for the patient. In the sponsor-sponsee relationship, a similar level of trust and belief is essential if sponsorship is going to be beneficial. 

    As with therapy, it may take many tries with many different people to find the right fit. Not all people are suitable to be sponsors and not all sponsorships go well. A sponsor is generally expected to be very accessible to their sponsee, and available at any time, day or night. They are supposed to help with completing the 12-steps, and they often provide advice and suggestions from their own experiences. It’s a lot of responsibility.

    A strong therapeutic alliance has been found to be an excellent predictor for treatment outcomes. Does that mean a failed therapeutic alliance could derail treatment? In short, the answer is yes. Trust is critical to healing from any mental illness.

    Trauma and the Therapeutic Alliance

    Traumatic events have a serious impact on mental health. People with mental illness are at a higher risk of being further traumatized and people who are traumatized are at a higher risk of developing mental illness than the general population. Childhood trauma “doubles risk of mental health conditions.”

    Recovery from trauma is based on empowering the survivor and developing new connections to life, including re-establishing trust. Judith Herman, a leading psychiatrist specializing in trauma is adamant that recovery is not a solitary process. This may be why 12-step programs have been successful in helping some people recovery from trauma. 

    Being a sponsor to someone who has been traumatized requires a fine balance between listening and giving space. Herman explains that survivors need to know they’re being heard when telling their story. At the same time, “trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately.” Meaning that when the sponsor does not go away, their motives may seem suspect in the eyes of the survivor. Yet, if the sponsor doesn’t stay, it can reinforce negative self-appraisal and stoke a fear of abandonment.

    Individuals with psychological trauma can struggle to modulate intense emotions, such as anger. A sponsor or therapist has to have healthy boundaries with a sponsee/patient if the relationship is going to work. Providing good sponsorship is a huge undertaking that requires a firm commitment.

    The good thing about the 12 steps is that they are considered a long-term program which encourages revisiting the steps many times to sustain successful recovery. This is useful in terms of trauma recovery because most trauma is never fully resolved. A traumatized person will likely experience reappearance of symptoms; traumatic memories can surface in different stages of life. Stress is a major cause of these recurrences and having a place to process these events as they come up is important.

    Do 12-Step Programs Have a Role in Treating Dual Diagnoses?

    Integrated holistic treatment that addresses how the two conditions interact and affect each other will provide the best outcomes. Ultimately, what we want is to improve quality of life and to return to ordinary life with an open door to future support when necessary. The research shows that when the principles of 12-step programs are integrated with other treatments, we see improvements in self-esteem, positive affect, reduced anxiety, and improved health.

    Further research is necessary to compare 12-step programs with other emerging mutual and self-help organizations, as they have been around for less time and there are fewer published studies on their efficacy. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drinking in Japan

    Drinking in Japan

    Japan was never the problem: it had been me all along! That realization led to an important discovery about my relationship with alcohol.

    People’s alcoholism evolves in many ways: some folks know by the time they’re 13 that they have a problem with alcohol, some learn in college, others later in life. I happened to be one of the latter ones; my alcoholism reared its ugly head in my early thirties. 

    I’d gone to Japan to work as a dancer, and later became married to a Japanese man. He was never home and I became so abjectly lonely, I’d hit the ex-pat bars for company, partying with rock stars, movie stars, baseball stars, businessmen, students, teachers, models, people from many different countries. It was a good time. But I didn’t drink much. 

    Then, one day, this raucously drunk girl (who came from some posh ivy league university and was teaching English in some elitist student exchange program), ranted about how much she and her pals hated what they called Prison Japan, then began dumping on Californians, calling us flaky, shallow people. I was so mad, I was ready to walk out the door. When she saw my subtle rage, she tried to assuage me.

    “Oh, c’mon Margaret, we were just joking, here, sit down again.” Then she said: “Hey, how come you never get drunk? That’s probably why you seem depressed. Maybe if you got drunk with us, you’d have more fun.” 

    Why Not Drink?

    Since this was a novel idea, I thought, Why the hell not? I never get drunk, lose control. Maybe if I’m drunk, this whole convo won’t seem so bad.

    So I began drinking, shot after shot, about six in a 45-minute span. All of a sudden, a certain undeniable warmth and euphoria shot through my body; I felt so carefree, so happy! I got so lively I found myself on the bar doing an imitation of Mikael Baryshnikov’s drunken-albeit-perfect tap-dancing number in the film Casanova. Yes, I felt indestructible and over-confident, sure my performance was almost as good as Baryshnikov’s. And the crowd went wild! Suddenly, I was part of the group. And it felt so damn good.

    I had no idea until that night that drinking prodigious amounts of alcohol could turn me into a fun-loving party girl. I decided right then and there that I ought to get drunk anytime I went out. Nightclubbing while drinking moderately was fun, but nothing compared to the euphoria and freedom heavy drinking bought me.

    I also discovered alcohol was my conduit to bonding with the Japanese, to really forming a connection with them. Their stalwart façade, worn throughout the day, would melt and they‘d become lighthearted or sentimental, sometimes bellicose; pretty much behaving like anyone who has had a little too much to drink.

    I never saw Japanese men get in bar fights—with the exception of the Yakuza, Japanese mafia. When Yakuza drank, they could become fearlessly aggressive; shocking violence could be unleashed abruptly, anywhere, anytime. Once I witnessed a Yakuza break a bottle and cut his girlfriend’s face. A vermilion stripe ran down her cheek, yet no one got up to help her. I learned later that the public was afraid to do anything for fear of repercussions! The only help she got was from a waiter who brought her a towel to stop the bleeding. She continued to stay by her boyfriend’s side, towel to cheek, looking down. I tried to help her, but got pushed back by management, telling me “Damena, dekinani, No, no, no, danger; you can’t go over there.” 

    Progressive Disease

    After some time passed, I noticed my drinking was getting progressively worse. Now I was consuming about 20 beers when I drank. The hangovers were staggeringly hideous. And they made me deeply depressed; alcohol is a depressant and I had a predilection toward depression anyway. It bothered me so much, I knew I had to quit. The hangovers were interfering with my relationship with my husband, my Japanese language studies, and my interactions with others. I so wanted to moderate. I’d even pray to the big Buddha in the park before going out, “Please, please watch over me. Don’t let me get drunk.”

    It didn’t work. Hard as I tried, I just couldn’t stop drinking excessively.

    I convinced myself that it was the loneliness of living in Japan that was driving me to drink. I was positive that once I got back to America, my drinking problem would sort itself out. Wrong. It remained intractably intact, I was getting stupefyingly drunk at least three to four times a week; one day to nurse a hangover, and the following day right back at it. 

    I eventually learned how to moderate, which gave me the proof I so desperately wanted: I was no longer an alcoholic. I was able to successfully drink casually and not to excess for about seven years. Then, out of nowhere, I got fired from a really boring dumb job. Inexplicably, I took it very hard. I decided it was high time to cut loose: drink away my disappointments and my feelings of inadequacy, and finally throw in the towel on this thing called life. I’d let it all hang out and drink as much as I wanted.

    Well, what I thought might be a two-day bender turned into a two-year bender. I spent most of my time on the couch passed out, at the liquor store, in rehabs, jails, or hospitals. I was up to two fifths a day, drinking more than ever. Hey, I’d given up on life, surrendered to King Alcohol . . . Why even try to moderate?

    I also was anti-AA. I’d convinced myself it was a cult and refused to go. But looking back now, I realize the real reason was that I was too prideful to have to admit to the group relapse after relapse. Finally, at my wit’s end, I went to an African American Christian rehab. I ended up staying there for six months. 

    This rehab didn’t mess around. It was lockdown and you weren’t allowed to go anywhere without staff present. And it did the trick: I lost my taste for alcohol and stayed sober for five years. But I still wouldn’t go to AA.

    Then, when I once again resumed my egregious drinking habits, my husband gave me an ultimatum: “Go to AA or I’m divorcing you.” I was shocked he’d say that because he was a normie and thought AA slightly freakish. But I got the message, and I believed him. So instead of going to the 7/11 at 5:59 to buy beer, I went to a meeting. 

    And this time AA worked for me. It’s amazing how my idea of AA as a cult evaporated the minute I really needed to stop drinking. I’m now sober three years, and with the help of AA I’ve become a better, happier person. 

    Everywhere I Go, There I Am

    I learned in the end that geographics don’t help—once you’ve become an alcoholic. Japan was never the problem: it had been me all along! That realization led to an important discovery: Alcoholism may be triggered by certain life events, but once you got it, you got it, and sometimes you need a lot more help than just moving away.

    Check out Maggie’s new Memoir Hangovers in Japan by Samari Shelby (pen name).

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • I Don’t Always Feel Better After a 12-Step Meeting

    I Don’t Always Feel Better After a 12-Step Meeting

    Why would someone continue to go to something that they don’t always like and don’t feel immediate relief from? I’m playing the long game.

    I can’t seem to figure it out, the sinking feeling in my gut, the feeling that I am too visible, too likely to be ogled and leered at by some man old enough to be my father. What the actual hell is this feeling in my gut? I call it a homesick feeling. Maybe it is something else entirely, but it makes me want to cloak myself in a protective layer, strip myself of sexuality and erase the sexualized parts of myself. I feel a deep shame and am overcome with a sorrowful lonesomeness as if a hole has cracked into existence and swallowed me whole. I feel stripped naked: Too visible. Too human. Too vulnerable.

    It happens almost every time, at almost every 12-step meeting. I want to disappear. There is a black hole in my gut, a homesick longing that begs me to give in, and I would, if I knew what it wanted. I fear it wants to swallow me whole.

    An Emptiness Inside Me

    I don’t always feel better after attending a recovery group meeting; sometimes at the end I feel worse than I did before I got there. I don’t share the experience of always feeling supported and comfortable that seems to echo through the rooms. At nearly every 12-step meeting, someone invariably says, “When I walk into the rooms, I feel immediately at ease and at home.” 

    Well, I don’t.

    There are times when the entire affair goes swimmingly. I’ll laugh and relate and feel at ease. I will connect to other people’s shares and fully articulate my own. It will all be very nice and fun. It will feel really good, on all fronts. Then, as soon as I leave, a pit in my stomach opens and I can feel myself falling in. Other times the aching lonesomeness begins as soon as I step inside the room.

    Dangerous Adaptability

    I survived my life because I could change according to outside circumstances. It has always felt dangerous to do anything other than adapt. For much of my life, it was dangerous.

    From my adaptations have sprung multiple versions of me. Other people are privy to the Light-Hearted Jokester and the Loud and In Charge Diplomat. Being honest when sharing about my experience with addiction and recovery means another part of myself might become visible. I have spent a lot of time with Depressed Me and revealing her is scary. The Quiet One fears she makes people uncomfortable with her silence. She’s acutely aware that she is not the Jokester and doesn’t want to be noticed and doesn’t want to slip into Depression in public.

    My defenses are up in spaces where I’m allowing unvetted people to know something real about my life. I begin to feel unworthy and not good enough: proof that my worst enemy is my own mind. My instinct tells me: Don’t reach out for a while. Don’t be early for the meeting tonight, go late to avoid chitchat and leave early. My brain fills with excuses to avoid discussions and socializing.

    Getting to know me means you may grow to understand who I am in all my contradictions, which will make it harder for me to adapt. I know that facilitating communication between all of myself is necessary for healing. But the truth is, sometimes it’s really difficult. It’s difficult to be seen, to be open. Yet each time I attend a meeting, that is exactly what I’m doing. I’m expressing myself with complete honesty. I am trusting the process, despite my fear and discomfort.

    I can no longer neglect the parts I’ve long tried to keep hidden. Together we must heal. Together is the only way we can heal.

    Playing the Long Game in Recovery

    Why would someone continue to go to something that they don’t always like and don’t feel immediate relief from? I’m playing the long game. Seeking immediate relief is what I did in active alcoholism. In recovery, I’m learning to resist that behavior. 

    Over time I have seen the subtle and dramatic improvements in my mental wellbeing and quality of life. I can see the changes in my life outside of those meetings. The people around me notice my rediscovered joy, my grounded perspective, my newly formed boundaries. I go to the meetings because it’s part of a treatment plan that works for me. It’s a commitment I made to myself. A commitment to heal from trauma, because I deserve to experience a better life than I once lived. 

    I feel inspired by the possibility that if I keep trying, the healing work will be able to fill the hole that is always there; the emptiness which has eternally been ebbing and flowing in strength, making me happy and fearful in turn. I’m aiming for a stable emotional baseline. 

    It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is happening over time. The inspiration itself comforts the sorrow.

    Progress Not Perfection

    When I first got sober, I was in a very dark place. I was trapped in my own head and despite having survived everything, I couldn’t feel safe. I could only feel the pain from the past. I thought I was alone. I believed I was too broken, too sick, too lost. Finding anyone else who could truly understand what I was going through seemed out of the question. I didn’t think I was unique or special in my pain, I just believed I was hopeless. 

    Then I found a therapist, a psychiatrist, and 12-step meetings. All of which worked in tandem to lead me from the darkness.

    Today I’m not feeling that despair or sorrow. I feel content more often than I feel abject depression. I used to cry every single day and now I laugh every day. I used to swing from one overwhelming emotion to another, with no control over where my mind was taking me.

    Climbing out is an ongoing effort, but what kept me down—one of many things—was that I expected myself to be just be “better.” I thought I had to be different than I was. I now accept that this is hard work, but the results keep me doing it. It isn’t supposed to always be easy. I have to continually work on dismantling the defensive walls that have become maladaptive in their formations. 

    So, I let myself be, I take breaks to enjoy the view that is coming into perspective as the stones of my fortifications are disassembled. Sometimes I get scared, and put back a stone that was particularly heavy, afraid to lose such a significant tool of protection. That’s okay, too. I try not to judge myself. It’s a journey of progress, not perfection.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Staying Sober Through a Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment: My Story

    Staying Sober Through a Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment: My Story

    Two incredibly painful paths have made my life better: a design for living from the program, and a new reverence for life from cancer. Both brought me closer to my higher power.

    Clean Sheets, Healthy Food, and a Loving Relationship

    A little over nine years ago, I was working on my 3rd step when my sponsor asked me to share what it would look like if my life were restored to sanity. I said I would have fresh clean sheets, clean clothes, plenty of socks and underwear, food in the fridge, and a loving relationship. She said to me (and I remember this so clearly):

    “You can have all that if you want it and God wants that for you.” Okay, the last part of the sentence is less clear, but it feels right — that God wants me to have clean sheets, clothes, healthy food, and a loving relationship. It seemed impossible to have any of that at the time, even being sober. I was a mess and still couldn’t shower regularly, wash my (small amount) of clothing consistently, and I was in no place to be in a relationship. I was barely six months sober and still detoxing. I certainly didn’t have any tools in place. 

    A Design for Living and a New Reverence for Life

    Today my life is so different and it happened just like the program says it will when people wish us a “long, slow recovery.” Slowly, as I worked the program, went to meetings, and did the steps, my life changed. The pain led me to surrender and then to a better life. And shockingly, as I make it to the other side of cancer and cancer treatment, I’m realizing that my life got better from cancer as well.

    Two incredibly painful paths have made my life better: a design for living from the program, and a new reverence for life from cancer. Both brought me closer to my higher power. 

    This morning I got up and did what I always do: I prayed and meditated, read from my books, and drank the coffee my sweet, patient partner makes for me every morning. I finished packing for my trip this weekend and took a shower, put on clean clothes, and got some healthy snacks together. I’m going to Iowa to be with my family for the funeral of my beautiful Aunt Jody, who passed away on Tuesday. She died from lung cancer after a short but courageous battle. She is at peace now, and I am grateful that I can be present and be of service to my family. 

    My aunt’s passing from cancer hit me hard because I just finished cancer treatment five months ago. It’s terrifying that cancer took someone’s life in my family so quickly. Jody was a beautiful, bright, passionate, loving woman. Hopefully I can help lighten the load on my family a little. My mother always appreciates me making her laugh. I can’t imagine the grief she’s feeling after losing her baby sister.

    Recovery, Comedy, and Cancer

    As a breast cancer survivor, I had the opportunity recently to speak at The Pink Agendas 2019 Health & Wellness Educational Symposium at The Sheen Center for Culture & Thought in New York City. The organizers asked me to share my story and it was super challenging because of… me. It should have been a simple request: share my story. They said they knew I was a comedian and that they wanted to close the show with me to help lighten the mood of the evening. The event was a panel of doctors, nutritionists, and survivors; a fundraiser to help aid research for a breast cancer.

    But this is what I heard: “Hi, we want you to share your story at our fundraiser, please sound like a doctor, and by the way the entire possibility of finding a cure for breast cancer lies on your shoulders. Please don’t hurt anyone’s feelings about their cancer and, also, you must look very, VERY professional and have a PowerPoint presentation as well. Good luck, we’re all counting on you.” I drove myself and my poor guy crazy getting ready for this. My sweet brother who has a PhD helped me to edit my speech but I could not memorize it. I memorize stuff all the time, but I couldn’t get this in my head. Finally, my sponsor said that she was pretty sure they just wanted me to speak from my heart. Then my partner told me to add some of my jokes that I use in my standup act about my cancer. 

    So, I just got up there and did that. It was a little messy, but I spoke from my heart, told my story, and expressed my gratitude for the treatment I received and for fundraisers like this that help support the research to find the treatments. It was emotional, my aunt had just died from cancer and a dear friend was going in for breast cancer surgery the next morning.

    I feel I have a responsibility as a cancer survivor now, to share my story and my hope. Similar to what we do in the program.

    My aunt was a woman of grace and dignity and I aim to be half the woman she was. She always told me how proud she was of me for being sober (she also told me I needed to do sit-ups before I could find a husband!). Two hours after I landed in Iowa for her funeral, I went to a meeting. It was an open GBLT meeting and one of my sisters came with me. And they did what AA does all over the world, met me and my sister with open arms. They read The Promises at the end and I realized that the promises really are coming true for me. 

    Surrender and Gratitude

    I have a beautiful life. I am alive, and I made it through something that I never thought I could: cancer and cancer treatment, and I stayed sober. I have the program and all the people in it to thank for that. I was held up, I was loved, I didn’t have to do it alone. I surrendered to alcoholism and was finally able to get sober. I surrendered to cancer and was lucky enough to make it out alive. Hopefully I can remember each day that it is only one day at a time and that each day is a new opportunity to live well. 

    If you had told me ten years ago that I would get sober and that my life would change in completely unexpected ways I wouldn’t have believed it. If you told me that I would also get cancer and after 14 months of treatment my life would improve two-fold I wouldn’t have believed you and I probably would have gotten drunk over it. 

    I don’t share or talk about the program or my sobriety very much because it makes people uncomfortable and I try to honor the AA traditions. However, I can talk about breast cancer publicly and help raise awareness about the importance of early detection through screenings. So, I now have these two pillars helping to hold up my life now: sobriety and cancer. Here at The Fix I can express how much I need this program to survive and I don’t know how I could have gotten through cancer without it.

    Someone said to me from a different fellowship that it was no surprise that God got me sober before I found out I had cancer. I am so profoundly grateful that he did. I have learned to trust my higher power on a much, much deeper level. Now, one day at a time I will continue to practice that 3rd step, put on clean socks (and maybe do some sit-ups).

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Is Recovery Possible Without Abstinence?

    Is Recovery Possible Without Abstinence?

    If I told an AA meeting I was having wine once in a while, the group would tell me that I am headed for certain demise.

    Benders, Blackouts, and Finding Recovery

    In 2013, I bottomed out in no uncertain terms. After years of heavy drinking that spawned blackouts and dangerous behavior, I had a three-day bender that left a 24-hour hole in my memory and landed me on the doorstep of a local AA meeting.

    I attended those meetings for a couple of weeks, and they saved my life. In those rooms I found people who validated what I had suspected for a long time: I was an alcoholic.

    When I stopped going to meetings, it wasn’t because I rejected the program. It was because my lifestyle had changed: shortly after I stopped drinking, I uprooted my life and began traveling. Whenever I arrived in a new city, I always looked up a meeting, just in case I needed one. But I never felt the need to go, because I was never tempted to drink. 

    I was sober for nine months when I finally settled in one spot and I felt ready to tackle the program. I returned to the rooms and found a sponsor.

    I’d had high hopes that AA was the missing piece of my sobriety. Those nine sober months had been lonely as I struggled with the unpleasant feelings that had previously been ignored with the help of wine. My friendships had become riddled with conflict as I became sensitive to even minor misunderstandings. When I was drinking, those bumps had been smoothed over with alcohol. Without it, I couldn’t move past an argument. I thought maybe it was a sober thing, and other sober people would have advice for this new territory.

    But my return to AA lacked the same connection I’d initially felt all those months earlier. My new sponsor asked me, with undisguised disbelief, “Nine months, really? All on your own?” She went on to tell me how she had once been sober for three years without AA. She eventually began drinking again because she hadn’t been accountable; she hadn’t told people in her life that she was an alcoholic. 

    Without AA, You Will Fail

    I corrected her assumption that we were the same. “I tell people I’m an alcoholic, and that I am sober.” When she responded with visible relief, I realized that she’d been skeptical about my claim because she assumed I was still in denial. In that moment I felt the inflexibility of the program, and the words of speakers I’d heard echoed in my head: “Without AA, you will fail.” There was no room to do it any other way.

    After that coffee with my sponsor, the hope I’d had for AA dissolved. I realized I wasn’t looking to AA to help me stay sober, I was looking to AA to help me be happy.

    Instead of returning to AA, I found a therapist. At the end of our first session during which I had tearfully explained my sobriety and my sadness, she diagnosed me with severe depression. After hearing my history, she suggested that I had always been depressed and likely self-medicating with alcohol. 

    I asked her about AA, and if she felt it was necessary for me to continue attending.

    “Are you tempted to drink?” she asked.

    “No,” I answered truthfully. Even with the challenges of my new sober life, I’d never considered it. I wanted a solution, and I already knew drinking wasn’t it.

    “It sounds like your lack of connection to the meetings is only furthering the isolation you feel,” she told me. “If you feel like you want to drink, go. But otherwise, it sounds like you’re okay.”

    My sadness wasn’t a byproduct of new sobriety, my sadness was depression. When she told me I didn’t have to go to meetings because I wasn’t struggling not to drink, I was validated.

    Sober, but Not Abstinent

    I began having sips almost two years later. I don’t remember the first one, but I do remember having no desire to get drunk. They continue to be infrequent and small, leaving me with no desire to drink to the point of drunkenness. I have even had a sip too many on occasion: my cheeks flush and my tongue grows loose. I used to drink for that feeling. Now, it stops me in my tracks, repelling my desire for more.

    The commonly understood language of recovery does not allow for this kind of behavior. People on the outside only understand recovery in the terms presented in movies and on television: Alcoholic bottoms out. Alcoholic attends AA meeting. Alcoholic gets shitfaced after having one sip of a drink at a party and AA friends drag her out of a bar. Alcoholic is sober one year, speaks at AA meeting, and then eats cake. 

    And it isn’t just people on the outside. If I told an AA meeting I was having wine once in a while, the group would tell me that I am headed for certain demise.

    To be clear: I am not advising anyone who wants to stop drinking or who is currently sober to try sipping alcohol. Having any amount of alcohol while “in recovery” is a controversial topic and beyond the scope of this article. We all need to do what works for us to stay sober and healthy.

    But in my experience, there’s a difference between sipping and slipping. Before I received my depression diagnosis, there was one purpose to drinking: get drunk. Now that I manage my mental health properly and no longer self-medicate with alcohol by drinking to excess, I don’t have the desire to abuse it.

    Sipping vs. Slipping

    One week into my sobriety, I did come close to slipping. I’d had dinner with a friend after work and on the walk home I started to white-knuckle it. The walk was a landmine of my drinking haunts: the old man bar at the halfway point, the liquor store a couple blocks from my apartment, the fancier bar after that, and then, one building away from mine, another bar.

    Keep walking keep walking keep walking, I coached myself. You’ll go home and answer those emails and have mac and cheese for dinner. Then you’ll go to sleep and get up early tomorrow for your jog to the AA meeting.

    I made it inside my apartment with no detours. But then I checked my email and I read a piece of good news that I had been waiting months to hear. That’s when my resolve wavered. I wanted to celebrate, and my first thought was: Prosecco!

    I paused. I thought about it. What would happen if I did buy that Prosecco? I knew that I would drink it in its entirety by myself. Bottle done, I would head to the bar around the corner and have some more, and finish the night with my usual three-whiskey nightcap.

    I knew that meant I would not wake up early the next day to jog to my morning AA meeting. I knew if I didn’t go to my meeting I was probably going to take the day off being sober, and then the next one and the next.

    What stopped me from drinking that day wasn’t the thought of a horrible hangover, or even the prospect of soul-blackening shame, but the knowledge that my good news would not be any better if I drank to celebrate it. By the same token, the need to celebrate my little victory as a means to offset my usual sadness wasn’t really necessary, because I knew that sadness wasn’t going anywhere—with or without booze. If drinking wasn’t going to make things better—and I knew it wouldn’t—why bother?

    It was years before I recognized I was chasing a feeling of false relief that would never last long enough. Abusing alcohol was, in fact, only making me more sad and depressed. Once I understood the why of my drinking, I was no longer compelled to drink to excess. I had neutered its power over me.

    Will I Be Kicked Out of the Recovery Club?

    Up until I wrote this, I was hiding my sips from all but my closest friends, because there is no vernacular in recovery to explain it. It’s simply easier to say I’m sober, and play along with others’ commonly-held picture of what recovery looks like. That’s easier than opening myself up to the judgment of those who are in recovery—and even those who are not—who will tell me I will fail, as I was told so many years ago by people who had sipped and ultimately slipped. They’d say that by doing this, I cannot consider myself sober. 

    I’d be kicked out of the club.

    As they are, though, my sips are an indulgence, equivalent to the dessert I have a forkful of but don’t need to finish, or an expensive pair of heels I’ll try on, but talk myself out of buying. The sips aren’t samples of what I miss, and they aren’t tests of will. Along with the taste of the wine itself, there are overtones of pleasure and victory and a hint of bitterness mixed in with my relationship to alcohol. The bitterness isn’t because I want more: it is the memory of that never-ending chase and where it led me. The bitterness is the reason I only want a sip—a sip I will continue to take, at my discretion, because I want to, and still remain sober.

    View the original article at thefix.com