Tag: AA

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

1 November 2018
Death Threat: The Unique Dangers of Grieving in Recovery

Though I’ve developed tools for dealing with heartache and anguish in sobriety, this level of grief is a sadness on steroids against which I feel futile and frightened.

My father’s older brother, Stephen Dale, died at age 69 in mid-August. He was more than the family’s patriarch; he was its ballast, its mooring. The home he made with my aunt Linda served as safehouse to a chaotic tribe on holidays, birthdays, and just-for-the-hell-of-it pop-ins.

Uncle Steve and I enjoyed a relationship where calls and text messages about long-debated or joked about topics would rouse the other in real-time. “Hey Uncle Steve, guess what I just saw…” We lived our lives in each other’s pockets — an intimate, instant-access closeness that is simply irreplaceable.

He died very suddenly. One day he was there; then the next morning, before I could even reach the hospital, he was gone. Massive heart attack. By the early afternoon, I was writing the obituary, a prelude to the eulogy I would deliver days later.

But this is not an obituary, nor a eulogy. This is about what happens next — when a recovering alcoholic, like me, finds himself mired in grief and unable to anesthetize himself with drugs or alcohol. It’s about the specific attributes of grief that, I’m finding, are particularly dangerous to people in recovery. And it’s an attempt to identify with my peers who may have suffered similarly but, as often happens to me, couldn’t quite congeal their disjointed feelings into a cohesive narrative.

Grieving has peculiarities and pitfalls for those of us in recovery. Let’s discuss why.

Pain That Many Know, Reactions That Few Experience

Everyone in recovery has heard the cliché: “Bad things don’t stop happening just because you got sober.” In my seven years of sobriety, my wife has miscarried and, during her next pregnancy, I had a small stroke a week before our son was born.

And given the recovery forums in which we now find ourselves — AA meetings, SMART, sober networks, etc. – most of us see death. We witness fellows with a common disease relapse and die. A record 72,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017. I personally knew three of them — people who, sadly, literally couldn’t get clean to save their own lives.

But Uncle Steve is different. He knew more about my past, my present and my psyche than anyone save my wife. He was incredibly well-read and unyieldingly tolerant, a combination that made him my chief counsel and safest sounding board. He was flesh and blood that, given a world of other options, I would have chosen to be my flesh and blood.

A lot of us have Uncle Steves, that most special of relatives. Upon losing that person, anyone — normie or alky — suffers a harsh blow. We feel like a piece of our foundation has been uprooted, part of our shared history deleted. There are secrets about us that die with our Uncle Steves. They leave an unfillable hole, forever, and we know it.

For those of us in recovery, though, grief of this depth has its own oddities and perils. Strangely, upon learning the terrible news, our initial reaction can be both validating and shame-inducing: When I learned that Uncle Steve had died, my very first thought was “Shit, I can’t drink over this.” And because I knew I couldn’t, I knew I wouldn’t; the work I’d done in sobriety was about to pay off again, big time.

Though comforting, this survival-minded reassurance brought an unsettling guilt exclusive to recovering addicts: the self-congratulation of passing a tough test to sobriety. It was just the beginning of what has become an ongoing struggle to rectify grief with recovery.

Disruption, Deserved.

Many of us in recovery have struggled mightily with both temperament and resentments. As someone for whom anger has been a tremendously burdensome issue, one AA literature passage that has always resonated with me is from the Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions. In the chapter discussing Step Ten, it cites justifiable anger as an emotion that “ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.” Alcoholics are inherently tone deaf when it comes to the level of outrage a given situation warrants – usually, we overshoot it considerably.

In sobriety, then, we work to temper most of our emotions — good and bad — to find a balance most of us never knew. My dramatically downplayed demeanor has been a crucial element to my recovery. In this space a few months ago, I discussed the importance of limiting the amount of people, places and things that can “anger, intimidate, or otherwise derail” us. In my opinion, this is as true a marker of sober progress — and maturity — as exists.

Grief, however, sticks out from this everyday mantra like a sore thumb. Especially when we lose someone of Uncle Steve-caliber closeness, deep sadness is not only justified but altogether appropriate. In fact, lack of sadness could be considered insulting to the deceased… our dead loved one deserves our emotional disruption. We owe our Uncle Steves that.

For those of us whose recovery includes maintaining healthy habits and routines, the combination of a broken stride and broken heart is uniquely troubling. The aversion we’ve built up to emotional disturbances can be a disservice to our sobriety in these instances.

Since my uncle’s passing, I’ve found myself nipping around the edges of a turbulent sea of grief, afraid to do anything more than dip my toe in lest I drown. Though I’ve developed tools for dealing with heartache and anguish in sobriety, this level of grief is a sadness on steroids against which I feel futile and frightened.

More than anything, I fear that wading into these waters may lead directly to diving into a bottle; as far-fetched as that may seem for those of us with longstanding recovery, this guarded approach to our most valuable asset — our sobriety — is entirely understandable. In grief, however, it can become a hindrance — a defense mechanism stranding us ashore, emotional landlubbers.

At least a portion of this procrastination, I realize, is rooted in fear of a less drastic reversion. With seven solid years of recovery, I know the chance of a physical relapse from this is slim. For one, it would be the absolute last thing Uncle Steve wanted. Whether they were in recovery themselves (my uncle was not an alcoholic), our Uncle Steves are vital aspects of our sobriety, and drinking or drugging upon their deaths is undoing part of their legacy. For that reason, among others, getting drunk over this is a nonstarter.

No, what many of us fear upon losing an Uncle Steve isn’t physical relapse, but rather regressing to a state of heightened emotional vulnerability. In addiction and fledgling recovery, we were often hypersensitive and underprepared to meet life on life’s terms. Now, atop solid sober ground, meeting death on death’s terms feels like a rare, even unique scenario capable of causing a catastrophic earthquake.

Sure, I’ve been shaken in sobriety before — but not this violently. I’m afraid of the aftershocks of so seismic an event. In recovery, we have healthy fears not only of drinking and drugging, but of revisiting the level of emotional rawness that made us stuck in addiction in the first place.

Gradually, in recovery we’ve pieced our lives back together, and we don’t want these blessings to unravel in one calamitous emotional nosedive. This may ring particularly true with the multitudes of addicts who, like me, also have struggled with depression. Regardless, everyone in recovery can recall a time when emotional fragility made us unable to adequately function. As a husband, father and career communicator, it’s that panicked, fuzzyheaded state that I most fear.

Like hard truths in early recovery, though, I’m finding that Uncle Steve-level grief has a ready-or-not resonance. When we lose someone that close, there’s simply too many things in our day-to-day lives that remind us of the deceased. Almost daily, I find myself reaching for my phone to share something Uncle Steve would find equally interesting or humorous. The resulting double-edged sword leaves me both missing my uncle and mad at myself for forgetting, albeit momentarily, to miss him.

And more frequently, during fleeting moments of calm in my crowded-with-blessings sober life, Uncle Steve is there, quietly commanding attention. Ever patient, his spirit seems to loom as large, or as little, as I can handle in that moment. I swallow manageable doses of sadness with limited side effects and reassurance that, like in recovery, more will be revealed.

That last sentence would have made for an artful sign-off, but life — or death — seldom provides such tidiness. As much as a loss can be a learning experience it is still, on the whole, a loss. And, like some of our worst acts in full-blown addiction, sometimes the knowledge and growth bestowed in recovery aren’t enough to offset the bad with the good. Some transgressions can’t be wiped away with transcendence.

Uncle Steve has been gone two months and I, a recovering addict whose present peak required a series of bottoms, still subconsciously — and egotistically —expects this is building toward something grander than the inglorious absorption of tragedy. Often, our post-relapse recoveries from addiction have been linear, accruing wisdom and utilizing lessons learned. I keep waiting for Uncle Steve’s death to ascribe to a similar, simpler healing process – an expectation that has proven persistently misguided.

No such revelations exist. In the end, those of us who struggle with addiction, despite being affected by grief in ways that differ from others, must deal with it in the same fashion: imperfectly, inconsistently, and with ultra-personalized feelings toward the dearly departed that were endearing in life but alienating in death. Unlike recovery, there’s no program for losing our Uncle Steves.

View the original article at thefix.com

30 October 2018
AA's "How It Works" for Everyone

Women have had to endure a generic “He” for God all these years. I am not rewriting the Big Book. I am simply asking for a moment to honor my God as a She; for a moment of freedom to express my God as I understand God.

After attending AA meetings for 12 years, I picked up a coin this month celebrating ten years of continuous sobriety. Throughout my sober years, when asked at meetings to read “How it Works” from the AA Big Book, I sometimes replace “He” with “She” for the word “God.” Recently, an old-timer in my AA home group became highly offended when he heard me read my “She” version of “How it Works.” My improvisation became such an issue that it was put on the agenda at our home group’s monthly business meeting. A motion was presented to place wording at the top of “How it Works” stating, “Please read as written, do not make changes.” After much discussion, members of my home group decided not to make this change to our meeting format. Whew! How interesting!

As with any issue in recovery, I learned from this experience. I learned that people get offended at meetings! Ha. We can’t please everyone. I mean, I get offended at meetings, but I just accept things and go on. If I do not like the way a meeting is held I move on to another one. “Attraction, not promotion.”

Thanks to my messing with pronouns, I find that I am no longer asked to read at AA meetings very often. Yes, the whole Big Book is written in He/Him-antiquated-patriarchal-Bible-form and I accept this. I mean, I got sober underlining everything in red that pertained to me as I worked my first step not caring about the gender terms! I simply did what my sponsor asked me to do. The pronouns were not important at that point. What mattered was that I did and do identify with the men who shared their message. Yet still, today, when asked to read at a meeting, I feel it causes no harm to insert She/Her instead of He/Him for my God. Women have had to endure a generic “He” for God all these years. I am not rewriting the Big Book. I am simply asking for a moment to honor my God as a She; for a moment of freedom to express my God as I understand God. That is all.

Lately I have begun using a gender-neutral term for “God.” Instead of saying “He” or “She,” I simply say “God as we understand God.” For truly, I have experienced God as a spiritual man, as a spiritual woman, and most recently as pure divine spirit, with no gender identity at all. How could GOD be reduced to a He or a She, to a mere sexual form? Hence, my favorite definition of God is “Group Of Drunks.” Namaste: “The Drunk in me greets the Drunk in you” (the sober drunk, of course). I see GOD in all of you at meetings! It is my favorite vision! I love you all so much!

I have to remember that “love and tolerance is our code.” If an old-timer is offended because I say that I have made a decision to turn “our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Her,” umm, hey, imagine what it took for me, a Hindu, and a lesbian, and a woman to read through the patriarchal (with Christian overtones) Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous! I am so, so grateful that my homies love and tolerate me enough to let me be me and accept me for who I am! As the Third Tradition of AA says, “The only requirement for AA membership is a desire to stop drinking.” And Tradition One calls for UNITY. That means members are given the freedom to think, talk and act. No AA can compel another to do anything. Nobody can be punished or expelled. Our traditions repeatedly say, “we ought,” never “you must.”

I have to remember that we are evolving. I believe the AA founders, Bill and Bob, left room for change when they wrote on page 164 of the Big Book: “Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us.”

Today, there is a new updated version of “How it Works” created by Hillary J and the Sober Agnostics Group. That alternative to the Big Book text is used at their meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada. There are also two gender-neutral versions of the Big Book available on Amazon: The EZ Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous Same Message -Simple Language and A Simple Program: A Contemporary Translation of the Book, Alcoholics Anonymous. Neither book was created by AA so neither is designated as “Conference Approved Literature” by the AA General Service Office (GSO). It is important to remember that the term “Conference Approved” has no relation to material not published by GSO. AA does not tell any individual member what they may or may not read. Each group is autonomous and is free to decide what material is read at the group level.

Offending someone at a meeting drove home the point that I’m a drunk, plain and simple. I just want to get and stay sober, that’s all. I learned that I am not the only one who replaces “He” with “She” when reading AA material. Many other people are doing this and changes are being made to the literature. Someday, we may see changes to the first 164 pages of our Big Book.

I have learned that God is beyond gender – and it is comfortable to refer to GOD as simply “God” instead of a He or a She. For me, God is pure divine spirit. Close the eyes. Feel GOD now. Pure Divine Love! God is Love! I love loving God, plain and simple. I love feeling Shiva embracing his beloved Devi in divine union. Sigh, bliss. This breath, here, now.

I also learned that AA has evolved enough to publish a new pamphlet already approved in British AA called, “The God Word: Agnostics and Atheists in AA.” There is a quote in this pamphlet that Bill W. wrote in 1965 that says: “We have people of nearly every race, culture, and religion. In AA we are supposed to be bound together in the kinship of a common suffering. Consequently, the full individual liberty to practice any creed or principle or therapy whatever should be a first consideration for us all. Let us NOT, therefore, pressure anyone with our individual or even our collective views. Let us instead accord each other the RESPECT and LOVE that is due to every human being as he tries to make his way TOWARD THE LIGHT. Let us always try to be INCLUSIVE rather than EXCLUSIVE; let us remember that each alcoholic among us is a member of AA, so long as he or she declares.”

I love the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. I love that we keep evolving and changing. I love that we get to ask questions. Here’s one more (ha ha): Why do we close some meetings with the Lord’s Prayer? I’ll have more to say about that topic later. That’s enough for today. Peace and love to one and all.

View the original article at thefix.com

25 October 2018
In Praise of the Geographical Cure

For me, leaving was about survival and going back to supportive friends and family who had known me my whole life and who would give me a temporary place to stay.

When I moved to the city of my dreams, I drove my Navy Subaru Impreza stuffed so full that I couldn’t see out of the rearview mirror the entire 1300-mile trek. My backseat was packed with my white cat Toby, my maple-bass guitar Helga, a vintage amp, a typewriter, a case of angsty journals, and a ridiculous amount of polka-dot and striped clothes. All things that I deemed too valuable for the moving truck. A month later, my serious boyfriend finished welding school back home and joined me. After finally leaving our sleepy home state of North Dakota, we were excited to start our new life together.

Fast forward a few chaotic years to a plot that is achingly familiar for those of us who struggle with addiction; a plot almost sad and pathetic enough to make me a country song — if only I drove a pick-up truck and was a dog person rather than a cat lady. When the city of my dreams became the city of my nightmares, I decided to leave. My addiction counselor warned me that running away from my problems wouldn’t fix me, but I didn’t care. My drug hook-ups practically lived outside the Whole Foods across the street from my apartment, the same store that I had been kicked out of for stealing. My rent check bounced so I was on the verge of eviction. I needed to get the hell out.

When I left the nightmare city, my cat Toby had died, my car had died, my identity had been stolen, and worst of all, I had broken up with that boyfriend who was supposed to be my forever mate. Then I fell in love again and that passionate, drug-fueled love also didn’t work out. Since I had sold or given away most of my possessions, pawned my bass and amp, there was no need for a moving truck this time around. I left, feeling broken.

I sobbed as I said goodbye to the stunning Pacific Northwest wonderland with its gleaming snow-topped mountains and volcanoes, waterfalls, rainforest. As I drove east, I felt as flattened and empty as the prairies of my home state.

I knew that just because I was moving home, it didn’t mean that I’d be magically fixed. I tried not to fall under the spell of what folks in the program call the “geographical cure.” Kerry Neville recently wrote a beautiful, lyrical, and illuminating piece on the geographical cure in which she says: “a change in external position on the map doesn’t reset the compass and point us to true north, because we always meet up with the self we are, no matter where we are.”

I agree with some of Neville’s points, namely that taking vacations to topical locales will not get rid of our problems and provide us with a healthy, extended recovery. Yes, I knew that changing my zip code wouldn’t necessarily change my soul. I knew that I’d have to really dig down and do the hard, gritty work of recovery. But for me, leaving wasn’t about a vacation. I couldn’t afford vacation, I couldn’t even afford my rent. For me, leaving was about survival and going back to supportive friends and family who had known me my whole life and who would give me a temporary place to stay.

Now that I mention it, the geographical cure warning is ironic because it contradicts other 12-step platitudes. These platitudes are like currency in the rooms, exchanged as freely as the collection basket for money and meeting lists: If you go to the barbershop enough times, eventually you’re going to get a cut, and: The only thing you have to change is everything. Change people, places, and things.

Why are those of us who do decide to change our location criticized? Why do certain meetings and rehabs keep using their one-size-fits-all mottos rather than listen and embrace the many winding paths that lead us to recovery? In the few meetings I attended and the online recovery groups I participated in, people reacted negatively when I told them what I was doing. The consensus was that I was making a mistake. Even my counselor was quick to remind me that I wasn’t “special and unique,” and if this plan didn’t work for others, then why should it work for me? But I chose to do the thing that I knew would help me and my recovery. It wasn’t a mistake; it saved my life.

Surely I wasn’t the only one who felt that perhaps the geographical cure may have been successful, so I decided to research the power of environmental cues, aka triggers, for addiction, relapse, and recovery. It’s likely you’re familiar with Pavlov’s classic dog study and the mechanics of classical conditioning, but I want to review it because it’s the foundation of every study that I read on this topic. Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was studying salivation in dogs when he noticed that the dogs salivated every time a door was opened, even when researchers didn’t have food. This was because the dogs began associating a neutral stimulus like opening a door (or, later, ringing a bell or flashing a light), with food. Researchers later used this model to study people with addictions.

Studies found that people who develop alcoholism and addictions develop strong associations with drug-associated cues and environmental stimuli like Pavlov’s dogs. In other words, after repeated experiences, drug users relate the rewarding effects of a drug (like euphoria and relaxation) with the people, places, and things that are present when we are using. For example, one study found that smokers who received IV nicotine still reported cravings, whereas smokers who received IV nicotine and nicotine-free cigarettes didn’t. Why? Because of the power of environmental cues, including the feeling of holding a cigarette in one’s hand, the smell of smoke, and even packaging of a cigarette box.

I mention these study results not just because they confirm what I already knew in my heart to be true and I love being right, but because they are vital for understanding recovery and relapse prevention. We must acknowledge the power of our environment and triggers. Although most of us won’t take the extreme step of moving across the country, we all can minimize our exposure to triggers until we feel strong enough to deal with them. We can also bring a friend or family member to face triggers and create new associations, as the studies I read suggested.

Above all, we should all learn to embrace our own unique path to find what works best for us, even if it goes against the current of AA axioms. I will always be grateful that I listened to the fluttering in my chest. Wisdom means knowing when to keep your feet firmly planted in place or when to take flight. Sometimes leaving is the thing that saves you after all.

View the original article at thefix.com

22 October 2018
Using Love as a Drug

I used drugs and alcohol to control my feelings and gave up on relationships early on since people are harder to control than substances. As I felt the other person pull away, my urge to control increased.

Recently I was sitting in a meeting with a little over two years sober, feeling completely insane. For a few months, my moods vacillated between elation and utter sadness, complete faith and deadbeat nihilism, raging excitement and total fear. I was leaning into the program of AA more than ever. I was attending meetings every day, sticking to my spiritual practice, sponsoring two women, and regularly checking in with my sponsor. Even so, I wasn’t able to find any middle ground. The emotional chaos raging inside me was very reminiscent of active addiction. I felt so twisted I asked myself: Am I even sober?

I googled the word “sober” and found a source that defined it as “being unaffected by alcoholism.” Fuck! I’M NEVER GOING TO BE SOBER, I thought. Over two years without any mind-altering substance in my body and serenity felt that far out of reach.

You hear about people feeling messed up and hitting bottoms all the time in sobriety. But there’s a flip side to that: you can feel just as good in sobriety as you did in active addiction when the drugs and alcohol were actually working. At its best, it’s what the Big Book calls “being rocketed into a fourth dimension.” In my experience, the highs in sobriety get higher and so do the bottoms. Even so, feelings can come as quite a shock in early sobriety since they’re no longer being regulated or masked with drugs or alcohol.

They say that for real alcoholics, the problems really begin once the drink is removed. My obsession to drink and do drugs was removed through working the 12 steps in AA (a few times) and the idea of picking up a drink or drug rarely, if ever, crossed my mind. This in itself is the ultimate miracle.

But alcoholism is a beast that will show up in many forms. Once the obsession is lifted, the addict/alcoholic mind will quickly move on to other things: coffee, cigarettes, shopping, gambling, sex, eating disorders, social media, take your pick. In my case, it shifted towards arguably the greatest drug of all time: love.

“Love” can mean different things to different people and our understanding of love has been shaped by what we saw growing up and our past experiences. As a point of reference, I use renowned spiritual teacher and physician David R. Hawkins’ Map of the Scale of Consciousness, which categorizes every level of consciousness a person can experience into levels of falsehood and levels of truth. Shame is the lowest energy field in falsehood where one feels hateful towards themselves and views a Higher Power as despising, and Enlightenment is the highest in truth where one feels completely attuned and at one with a Higher Power.

Based on this structure, I propose that love is an energy field in an array of consciousness that we can fall in and out of at any moment. In Hawkins’ scale, Love is sandwiched right above Reason and below Joy. So here, we see that love is literally beyond reason. According to Hawkins, it is here that a person experiences feelings of reverence and revelation before transcending into Joy where one views themselves as complete. Perhaps this helps explain why our culture is so fixated and obsessed with the idea that another person can “complete” us.

The process of revelation may come to an addict easily since, for many of us, any human connection at all in early sobriety is unprecedented and revolutionary. For years I used drugs and alcohol to connect with people around me. As I continued to develop a sense of belonging with others in sobriety, and saw it was possible that I could feel emotions of such a loving nature, I felt as if I had been “rocketed” into that fourth dimension the Big Book referred to.

In his excellent book Unsubscribe: Opt Out of Delusion, Tune in to Truth, recovered addict and Dharma teacher Josh Korda explains that feelings of attraction and infatuation create a neural surge of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is related to our rewards state and motivation. The same neurotransmitter that floods your brain after two drinks, that thing that makes you go “Ahhhh.”

As an addict, I was bound to chase that high. I was driven by an obsession of the mind and a phenomenon of craving. All I wanted was to feel that rush. Even a text message would send the dopamine levels up. It wasn’t long before this relationship dictated my every move, just like drugs and alcohol did. It was no different than when I chased one high to the next in active addiction, doing everything in my power to find relief and a sense of control. (For the sake of disclosure and to spare the theory of sex addiction, there was no sex involved.)

Without realizing it, I’d become hooked. And with every high, there comes a crash.

During the crashes, I found myself resorting to some lower-level behaviors I had not seen in a while. My behavior was extremely erratic, I couldn’t stay focused, and I was irritable unless my craving was satisfied. My addiction found its way into other areas of my life and unmanageability and insanity crept in once again.

Once someone becomes addicted, they lose their free will and will do anything in their control to satisfy the craving. Referring back to Hawkins’ Map of Consciousness, the addict falls into another state entirely: Desire. Often confused with Love, Desire is actually one of the states of falsehood, along with Guilt, Shame, Fear, and Hatred. Desire itself can never truly be satisfied, because it’s based in an illusion. One wants what they can’t have. It is here that nothing is good enough, everything fails to hit the mark, and any other place and time is better than the present moment. This conjures the state of restlessness, irritability, and discontentedness. This internalized state eventually turns so wretched that drugs and alcohol appear to be the solution again. My alcoholic mind took all its evil twists and turns so that once I exhausted all other alternatives, I “all of a sudden” had the thought, A line of coke and a shot would make all of this go away.

That is the insanity of drug addiction and alcoholism.

Naturally, there is an impermanence to all things and all states; a simple fact of life I could never easily accept and consistently fought against. Feelings ebb and flow, usually without any sense or rationale behind them. Relationships are not guaranteed. As an addict who is obsessed with control and wants to feel good all the time, these truths are not easy pills to swallow. I used drugs and alcohol to control my feelings and gave up on relationships early on since people are harder to control than substances. As I felt the other person pull away, my urge to control increased.

I tried to take control of my feelings back. I had no desire to pick up a drink or drug at the time, but my addiction manifested in my anorexia, chain smoking, excessive running, drinking too much caffeine. Meanwhile, I still attempted to control the course of the relationship. Even my participation in AA was extremely alcoholic in that I was using the tools to fix the way I felt, rather than simply living with it. (Yes, it is possible to do the 12 steps like a drug.)

It was suggested to me that I was perhaps a love addict, to which I countered: Am I love addict or am I simply an addict who now participates in relationships? I did attempt to dive back into the 12 steps yet again, but this time in the area of relationships, so I could just figure it out and then just not be that way anymore. It didn’t work.

One thing I’ve learned in recovery is that this is all super normal, human stuff. People meet other people, develop feelings and feel the adrenaline and dopamine rush of a crush and the heady feelings in the beginning of a relationship. Everyone experiences rejection and break-ups. However, my experience as an addict is that I did not thoroughly develop in these areas because I was never truly there for them. My emotional growth was stunted when I began to use drugs and alcohol, and sobriety is a big catching up game in terms of emotional intelligence. It’s how I cope with these normal life experiences that matters and what I found was that I was still living alcoholically, even without drugs or alcohol in my system.

Is all of this to say that addicts should shy away from connecting with others, initiating new relationships, and striving for new, unadulterated levels of intimacy? Am I doomed in every relationship because I’m an addict and alcoholic? Absolutely not.

One of the greatest things about recovery is its wide invitation to exist on this plane with other people, to feel things the way humans should. These developments can take years to even out. In recovery, we get to challenge our false belief systems and stumble around with everyone else learning how to care about each other effectively. Relationships are where we see our character defects in action, where we experience life, where we ultimately grow in the process. The longer I stay sober, the greater my capacity to connect with others and to be honest becomes. And it all boils down to this: There is no way to grow spiritually in isolation.

All I needed to remember was one of the simplest things I heard when I first got sober: The unmanageability would cease as soon as I relinquished control. Just as it did with drinking and doing drugs.

I was back at step one and had to get honest. With truth and reality can come a lot of pain and suffering, but it’s not the truth that causes it. It’s the extent to which and for how long someone lives in a false reality that perpetuates suffering. Not only was I driven by the same obsession of the mind and phenomenon of craving that drove me in active addiction, I was also driven by the false belief that people, places, and things are on this planet for me to prove my worthiness and to validate my experience.

The old ideas and beliefs that drive us in our relationships were constructed by years and years of living in falsehood. Now, in active recovery, we chip away at those old ideas and free ourselves from those false beliefs.

View the original article at thefix.com

16 October 2018
How Do You Define "Recovery"?

Our time would be better spent trying to help people recover in whatever way is most effective for them rather than pushing and shaming everyone into one particular recovery pathway.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say that a person might be sober, but that they’re not in recovery, or describe them as a “dry drunk,” because the person doesn’t attend some defined program of recovery. I find that attitude divisive, dogmatic, and unhelpful, particularly because it shames others to believe in only one gold standard of recovery. This simply isn’t true. And it’s harmful; we have too many people dying of substance use disorder. Our time would be better spent trying to help people recover in whatever way is most effective for them rather than pushing and shaming everyone into one particular recovery pathway.

This kind of mindset originates from 12-step fellowships — where members often believe that these programs, combined with abstinence, are the only effective way to recover — and from the outdated professional definition of recovery provided by organizations like the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). However, with the emergence of recovery science, this outlook is beginning to change. Leading researchers are painting a much broader, more inclusive picture of recovery. Instead of accepting dogmatic perspectives, we can now turn to science, which shows us how people recover, the impact of the language we use, the complexities we face as people in recovery such as trauma and co-occurring disorders, and offers more cohesive definition of recovery.

In 2005, according to ASAM: “A patient is in ‘a state of recovery’ when he or she has reached a state of physical and psychological health such that his/her abstinence from dependence-producing drugs in complete and comfortable.” Over the years, this definition has evolved. Other thought and policy leaders in addiction recovery have also updated their definitions, including the Betty Ford Institute (2006), William L. White (2007), the UK Drug Policy Commission (2008), the Scottish government (2008), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, 2011), researchers John Francis Kelly and Bettina Hoeppner (2014), and the Recovery Research Institute (2017).

One of the most popular definitions, and one I’ve favored as a writer in this field, is SAMHSA’s: “Recovery from mental disorders and substance use disorders is a process of change through which individuals improve their health and wellness, live a self-directed life, and strive to reach their full potential.” What I like particularly is that SAMHSA doesn’t define how someone should recover and they have no opinion on abstinence or the use of medication in the process of recovery.

Cognizant of the varying definitions and the lack of general consensus among experts in the field, recovery scientists and professionals from across the country came together to formulate a new concept. The Recovery Science Research Collaborative (RSRC) met in December 2017, evaluated various definitions of recovery, and reviewed essential components of recovery in order to more clearly define the process.

I spoke with Robert Ashford, one of the recovery scientists in the collaborative, about the process of formulating a new definition.

The Fix: What would you say were the main limitations of previous definitions that led to your aim to define a new concept of recovery?

Robert: We were hoping to bring together our understanding of recovery with the real-world empirical and practical evidence. Our desire for inclusivity was due to the high prevalence of co-occurring disorders (mental health and substance use disorder (SUD)) and the lack of inclusion of non-prominent recovery pathways (e.g. medication alongside abstinence modalities). We wanted to give the individual autonomy in self-directing their recovery process, both with and without clinical and other professional or peer recovery supports.

In reaching a consensus for a new definition, what were the main components that were critical to include?

It was a direct reflection of previous work describing the contention in recovery definitions, both real and perceived, by those in different “recovery” camps and between mental health and substance use disorder. Personally, I don’t believe recovery is reserved for the most severe and symptomatic individuals. If we conceptualize recovery as a series of interpersonal growth stages over time and in different settings or contexts, then recovery is a broad phenomenon that can apply to a range of issues. Our definition allows this to exist as a self-directed and intentional process that frames recovery as different in approach, style, and intensity depending on the range of diagnosis. Perhaps a good way to frame this, within the context of a continuum of SUD, is that recovery is also possible along a continuum that is proportional to the severity and type of SUD (mild, moderate, or severe), with most not needing to ascend along that continuum completely.

Our definition: “Recovery is an individualized, intentional, dynamic, and relational process involving sustained efforts to improve wellness.”

One of the main disputes within the recovery community is the belief that “true” recovery means complete abstinence. How did this belief factor into your discussions? And what would you consider to be the challenges of such a point of view?

I think the field at large stands to benefit, at least from an empirical perspective, because not having the focus solely on abstinence allows us to capture, estimate, and perhaps even predict, recovery in different pathologies, different severities, and at different life stages. This recovery typology is only possible with an inclusive definition in mind. The advocacy community also stands to benefit. Inclusive definitions allow the size of the population, or the prevalence of recovery, to increase — which is a good talking point and a strong policy lever for behavioral health. There is a potential for the “watering down” of recovery for the most severe of cases and for those traditionally following an abstinence modality, but this potential is moderated in my mind through the potential benefits.

At the end of the day, abstinence shouldn’t be excluded from the idea of recovery, but it should be situated where it best fits — as a potential outcome for a person who needs it. The definition of recovery can expand without diminishing those who are in abstinence-based recovery, and the expansion doesn’t negate anyone. If anything, not doing it negates the reality of millions of people seeking wellness.

View the original article at thefix.com

15 October 2018
Russell Brand On Rock Bottom, Importance Of 12-Step Fellowship

“Sharing your story with another addict, as I did in my recovery, proved vital. Nothing I said to this person was too boring or terrible or trivial to him.”

Russell Brand never shies from talking about his experience with addiction and recovery.

Ahead of attending Wellspring, the three-day “wellness festival” happening in Palm Springs Oct. 26-28, where he’ll be the keynote speaker, Brand spoke with the Los Angeles Times about hitting rock bottom, living mindfully, and the importance of fellowship.

“I hit rock bottom in 2003 with an addiction to heroin, which had cost me a job at MTV, a radio show, friends and girlfriends,” said Brand, who began using drugs at age 19.

He used heroin for four years before his manager and friend Chip Sommers put things in perspective, telling him “I’d wind up either in a prison, lunatic asylum or graveyard.”

He started going to a 12-step program, which he benefits from to this day. By accessing the support of others, he learned the importance of having a sense of community that the 12-step program provided.

“Inevitably, when reason wanes, when the spiritual experience wanes, being part of a community lets you remind one another. Addicts yearn for some sense of connection that makes them feel more healed, more whole, more happy,” he said. “Sharing your story with another addict, as I did in my recovery, proved vital. Nothing I said to this person was too boring or terrible or trivial to him. He related to me—and the disconnectedness that I had always felt lifted. And so did the need to take drugs.”

Brand also relies on a daily regimen of meditation—“a shower for the brain”—and exercise.

“You have to design your own program, what’s right for your body and your mind,” he said. “For me meditation is not nearly enough. I need exercise too. And community.”

In his 2017 book Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, Brand chronicles his path to recovery and shares wisdom accumulated from over a decade sober.

In the book, the comedian, actor, activist and advocate for addiction recovery and mental health adapts the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous in his own expletive-laced words.

“[Now] I don’t struggle with [addictive] urges because the program I live by helps me remain serene and prevents those urges from arriving,” he said. “If I feel those urges—even though I don’t feel them so often because I’m working the program—I talk to other people and I do stuff for other people and I meditate and pray. There’s a whole sort of series put in place for when I feel those urges.”

View the original article at thefix.com

11 October 2018
7 Reasons Why I Thought AA Wasn't for "Someone Like Me"

By the end, as we stood in a circle holding hands, I thought: “This is a cult, right? This has to be a cult.”

I remember the first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that I ever attended, about three years ago. I’ll be honest — I wasn’t the friendliest face at that meeting. I had a ready criticism for just about everything that anyone said.

By the end, as we stood in a circle holding hands, I thought: “This is a cult, right? This has to be a cult.”

I asked the newcomer liaison — who I was convinced was just a recruiter for this undercover religious operation — how I could know whether or not I was an alcoholic, and if I really needed AA.

One thing she said in particular stood out: “Sometimes you aren’t ready, you know? Some folks go and do more ‘research’ and then a couple years later we see them in the rooms again.”

In hindsight, I have to chuckle. Of all of the advice she gave me, the only part I seem to have listened to was the part that justified drinking more. (I’d later learn that this is the exact kind of “selective hearing” that alcoholics are known for.)

I didn’t know it at the time, but her comment would foreshadow my journey to the letter. A few years later, after another catastrophic relapse, I remembered her words: If it was meant to be, I would be back.

“Sam, you could’ve died,” my therapist told me when I described my latest binge. That’s when I knew my “research” was over. It was time to go back.

I sat in the back row (another typical newbie move, I’d later learn), and just as the Serenity Prayer was being read, I saw the same woman from before — the one who predicted, whether intentionally or not, that I would be in those rooms again.

“I know you, right?” she said to me after the meeting.

“Yeah,” I replied, smiling. “And you’re a big reason why I came back. Because I knew I could.”

I didn’t know what to expect, but that didn’t matter; I was just grateful to have a place to go where I didn’t feel so crazy.

As time went on, I quickly realized that the reasons I believed that AA wasn’t for me weren’t just misguided, they were completely wrong. While I wish I’d had these realizations sooner, I’m grateful now for the fellowship I found when I was finally able to open my heart and mind.

So what, exactly, held me back the first time around? These are seven of the big reasons why I thought AA wasn’t for me — and what ultimately changed my mind.

1. I’m not Christian (or even religious).

Despite being told that your higher power in AA could be virtually anything, the “God” language was so off-putting that I couldn’t get past it at first. What I didn’t know was that AA is home to people with all sorts of beliefs, including atheists and agnostics (for whom a whole chapter in the Big Book is actually written).

But why would someone who wasn’t religious opt for a program that talks about a higher power?

The short answer? To get outside of ourselves. Part of what makes addiction so tricky is that we often get stuck in our own heads, leading us to miss the forest for the trees. A focus on some compassionate, loving force outside of ourselves allows us to take a step back from the addictive obsessing and see the big picture at work.

That “God” can be your own inner wisdom or spirit (you know, the tiny voice or gut feeling that says: “I shouldn’t be doing this”). It can refer to your fellowship (e.g. Group Of Drunks) and community, or it can even be the stars or your ancestors.

Whatever your higher power is, it exists to anchor you in the present moment, when your own thoughts are derailing you (part of what fuels cravings, I’ve found, is the mental obsession that goes along with them). Projecting your focus outside yourself can be a powerful tool in recovery.

2. Alcohol wasn’t my biggest problem.

I always thought of my alcohol abuse as a symptom of a problem rather than an issue in its own right. As someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and a trauma history (C-PTSD), I figured that if I got my mental illness under control, my drinking would somehow become normal again; that it would, in essence, “work itself out.”

As irrational as it sounds, I really believed that if I just “stayed mentally healthy” for the rest of my life, alcohol wouldn’t be a problem.

It should be a lot easier to sober up than to be perfectly happy and healthy 100% of the time, but the alcoholic mind doesn’t care about what’s actually possible — it just cares about drinking again.

I’ve learned with time that my alcoholism is very much a compulsive behavior. And once compulsions are activated, they’re only made worse when you engage with them. As a person with OCD, and therefore lots of compulsions, I know this better than anyone.

A lot of alcoholics look at every other issue in their lives as The Real Problem, while their drinking isn’t much more than an inconvenient and temporary side effect. But more often than not, the only “phase” we’re really talking about here is denial.

3. I figured I could manage on my own.

Here’s the thing: Whether or not you can manage sobriety on your own, why should you? If there’s an entire community of people, ready and able to support you, why deprive yourself of that resource?

These days, I ignore the voice in my head that says, “You don’t need this.” It’s irrelevant either way; I don’t need to muscle through this and there’s no good reason to.

This fellowship is a gift I can give to myself — the gift of unconditional acceptance, and an opportunity for continued personal growth in a supportive community.

4. I thought I was too young and “inexperienced.”

My drinking didn’t really take off until I was 21 years old. Yet by the time I was 24, I was at my first AA meeting. Was it possible to become an alcoholic in three years? I didn’t think so. I hadn’t racked up any DUIs and I wasn’t drinking vodka every morning, so what did I need AA for?

But my definition of alcoholism has evolved a lot since then. Alcoholism, to me, is a spectrum of experiences defined by two things: (1) psychological dependence on alcohol and (2) strong urges to drink (which we call “cravings”).

Drinking had become a coping strategy (one that often failed me) to deal with issues in my life. And rather than choosing to drink and choosing to stop — which is usually, on some level, premeditated and deliberate — I had the urge to drink, and that urge often had me behaving in ways that ran counter to what I planned or wanted, assuming I had a plan at all.

Sometimes I drank only to resolve the urge itself — an urge which could involve unbearable levels of anxiety, agitation, obsessing, and impulsiveness.

It took just a few years for my drinking to reach this level of unmanageability. And when it led me to be hospitalized twice in my early twenties, I realized that if I continued I would die before I ever considered myself “experienced” or “old enough.”

You are never too young or inexperienced to get sober. If there are signs that your drinking has become dangerous, you don’t need to wait to get support — and you shouldn’t.

5. I’m queer and transgender.

One of the biggest reasons why I rejected AA was because I felt, as someone who was both transgender and gay, that I would feel like an outsider. And while I can’t speak for every meeting in existence, I’ve been fortunate to find meetings where I could show up as my authentic self.

Living in the Bay Area, I’m privileged to now have access to meetings that are specifically for the LGBTQ+ community, though I regularly attend all kinds of meetings and have found them to be fulfilling in their own way. My sponsor is queer, too, which is incredibly empowering.

Many people I’ve known in other parts of the country have been able to connect with their local LGBTQ+ community center (either city or statewide) to get recommendations on which recovery spaces would be best for them.

Some LGBTQ+ centers even have AA meetings specifically on-site for the community.

The best way to find out is to call around. You don’t know what’s out there, and recovery is always worth the effort.

6. I take psychiatric medications.

As someone who takes medication for my mental health conditions, I was scared that people in AA would look down on me or believe I wasn’t really sober.

In particular, I rely on Adderall to manage my ADHD. I take it exactly as prescribed without any trouble. If I don’t take it, it’s difficult for me to keep up at my job because my concentration issues make my life incredibly unmanageable.

But Adderall is a stimulant and has a reputation as a drug of abuse. I worried that I would be pressured to stop taking it.

Instead, I’ve been given the exact opposite advice in AA. I’ve been told repeatedly that if my psychiatric medications contribute to my mental wellness, they are an essential and indispensable part of my recovery.

With mental health conditions frequently co-occurring with substance abuse, you’re likely to find a lot of people in AA who rely on these medications to maintain balance in their lives. So don’t be discouraged: you aren’t alone.

7. My history didn’t seem “bad enough.”

Sometimes I’d listen to a speaker talk about getting drunk at age 12, growing up in the foster system, or getting their second DUI, and I’d think to myself, “Why am I even here? My story is nothing like theirs.”

But as I attended more and more meetings, I began to see the similarities, rather than focusing so much on the differences. I realized that even the most extraordinary stories had some kind of wisdom to offer me, as long as I gave myself permission to be fully present.

As I heard a speaker say last month, “Bottom is when you stop digging.” Recovery begins when you’re open to it, not when you’ve passed some magical threshold of having “suffered enough.”

Your story is enough, exactly as it is in this moment. You don’t need to have the most tragic backstory, the biggest relapse, or the most catastrophic “bottom” moment.

You don’t have to earn a seat at the table. As I learned this last year, that seat will be there for you when you’re ready, no matter how many times you fall down or slip up.

View the original article at thefix.com

10 October 2018
The Most Important Person in the Room

There’s no need to worry about my career, or lack of intimate relationships, or future, or even quitting nicotine. I’m taking it easy, I’m in my first year of sobriety.

Every time I relapse I forget I am not God.

I am no longer able to allow the darkness to bloom into the grand external circumstances I once did; when it does, while the bigger picture slowly darkens, there’s a life constantly poised to begin.

I think that continuous sobriety is boring; I must, based on the evidence of my own life, of my own lies.

Imagine this: You are playing soccer. You’re on defense, almost as far away from the goal as you can get but you take the ball from the other team, all the way through their offensive and then defensive line with intense speed. You’re in front of the goal now, with a wide open shot. You flub the kick. The ball rolls just a foot. The goalie grabs it. It was all for nothing. This is how I played soccer.

Imagine the beginning of the semester: You love beginnings and showing what you are capable of, so you get A’s and read everything for the first month or two. Then you lose interest, get bored maybe, stop paying attention. You let your grades dip until it gets scary, until a note gets sent home. And then you have to work your ass off to get back to maybe a B+ final grade. If you really pull it off you might get an A-. That is what kind of student I was.

It seems like I need others and myself to know that I am capable, but also that I can’t be counted on. I want you to know that I can win, but I won’t. I don’t want to be expected to. It’s been almost ten years since my first attempt at recovery. I’ve never been sober long enough to date, to move, to make any major life changes within the constraints of the program’s suggestions.

I’m addicted to each part of the cycle – the descent into not giving a fuck, the bloody climb from the pyre of my own making. As I get too close or move too fast towards what I want, the part of me that knows I am not worthy of it, the part that’s sure I don’t want the responsibility of a better life screws me. There’s a lot of fragmentation.

When we—and by “we” I mean my perception of you and the culture-at-large—when we look at a chronic relapser, our tendency is to look at the drug as the thing they can’t let go of – and it is, mostly. For those of us who know what the other side can hold and yet continue to throw the ships of ourselves against the rocks, chasing siren songs, the guilt and shame only add fuel to the orgiastic pull of destruction.

Shame is our primary emotion and perhaps our greatest addiction.

I recall every slide toward rock bottom I created, every flail out, the night spent hurling my body into the door of the drunk tank with piss-soaked pants, finally settling down to bite off each fingernail and howl. And I remember what comes after; being so broken I would allow help, would allow others to love me; how my father would prove he cared by letting me use a lawyer from his firm for my DUI case, how a nice lady from a meeting paid my October rent, how friends brought me to look for a job.

I get a new boyfriend, a new job, everything working out until I find myself moving down the mountain too fast, and, turning the tips of my skis inward to slow down, I fall.

And when I come back to recovery, it’s the same. Just a few people to believe that this time’s different. The climb feels like springtime, that’s why I make sure to do one at least every spring. In fact, looking back over the data, a bottom out in winter followed by a good 4-6 month sober stretch is my usual.

I won’t take AA seriously until I have nothing else left and nobody left to talk to. Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Now it’s more of an internal emptiness, as the fear mounts that I may not get another shot to take the ball all the way up the field. Until I start to feel better, until my life starts to get bigger, until I’m in front of the goal again. I choke, over and over and over, and I climb back out, over and over and over. I raise my hand: “I have two days back,” and I get the applause, again and again. I’m the most important person in the room.

There’s a sense that I will always be on the verge, never quite crossing the line into success. I want more, or do I? The cycle is a familiar distraction.

There’s no need to worry about my career, or lack of intimate relationships, or future, or even quitting nicotine. I’m taking it easy, I’m in my first year of sobriety. And there’s always new people.

I almost believe it.

This is the place where I used to blame my abusive mother, and believe me, I would really like to. She loved nothing more than to break me so that she could comfort my brokenness. But I’m an adult now. Once I was a victim, now I am a volunteer; now I have internalized my abuser. I have some of her weapons, and some I have added. I do it when I talk to myself, when I won’t get out of bed, when I couldn’t finish this article for a month.

And at the same time I have a picture of three-year-old me, my inner child, and ten-year-old me, my outer child, on my refrigerator. I talk to them, too. I tell them they are good enough, worthy of love and happiness and all the things the rest of the world seems able to allow themselves to have. I hope that one day we’ll all believe it.

What if life on the other side of a year of continuous sobriety isn’t beyond my wildest dreams? No need to worry about that, I’ll probably never get there. My promise is an unopened present, though I have shaken the box more than a few times. Now, it’s possibly rotting.

How do I change? When does my sobriety and not my ego, not my love of a pattern repeating, become the most important person in the room? Will this time be different? Every time is. Will it be different in the way that I need it to be? I don’t know.

If the first step is honesty, these words are my only hope. These are the thoughts I keep in the shadows, the patterns with which I choose to keep myself trapped, the self-victimization through which I am still waiting to awaken, still waiting to let down my golden hair for some knucklehead prince to save me.

What if I could climb past the first plateau of growth in recovery and keep climbing? What if I could continue to work on sobriety on the days I don’t feel like I need it? What if I could stop wanting to be something and start working on becoming it?

Every time I come back, I remember that I am not God. That I don’t have to do it on my own, that nobody really cares if I’m happy besides me.

I would say wish me luck, but I’ve had so much of that. Wish me consistency over time. Wish me willingness. I am tossed by the waves yet I do not sink; I have proven that. Wish me, to stay.

View the original article at thefix.com

8 October 2018
Setting Boundaries in Sobriety

Sobriety doesn’t come with a handbook. If it did, you’d have to be sober first to read it.

People with addiction issues are not used to setting boundaries, especially when those boundaries involve behaviors we have reinforced for years.

I spent years violating boundaries as a drunk. Particularly when it came to relationships. Piss me off and I’d become belligerent. Let me drink all night and I’d throw up on your carpet. Invite me to a party and I’ll embarrass you in front of your friends. Weddings? Absolutely! Sign me up as the drunkest attendee. For drunks, the people who let us violate their boundaries are the ones we come back to over and over again.

I chose to become sober and dry after drinking made my life unbearable. My fiancé Jill didn’t make that choice. She didn’t have to; she wasn’t experiencing the same struggle with alcohol abuse I was. Drinking was ruining my personal and professional relationships. I spent my days trying to make up for what I destroyed at night. She had a glass or two of wine when she felt like it and functioned fine the next day.

***

Sobriety doesn’t come with a handbook. If it did, you’d have to be sober first to read it. Perhaps I would have learned about being a decent sober person if I had gone to an in-house treatment program. I did my sobering up in the wild, so to speak. My changes, positive and negative, took place in front of everyone around me.

Jill and I were blindsided by boundary-setting issues early in my sobriety. Our relationship was one of the few things from my drinking days I wanted to save. At best, it was hanging by a thread. We agreed to stay together while I tried to get a firm grasp on sobriety. She gave me support and encouragement as I experienced little successes: one day sober, one week sober.

I appreciated Jill’s support. We never discussed the specifics of what I’d need from her. I wouldn’t have known what to ask for anyway. I intended to go to AA every day for the first 90 days and I was seeing an individual counselor and going to a weekly all-male support group. I was bursting at the seams with support; I was exhausted from so much support.

Jill drank wine. Not my drink of choice. I was the typical Philadelphia-living, bearded, tattoo-covered, craft beer drinker. The higher the ABV the better. The more ounces the better. Wine? No thanks. I hadn’t asked Jill to stop drinking or to keep alcohol out of the house but she had naturally done so, initially. I assumed we had an unspoken agreement.

A couple weeks into my sobriety, we had plans to spend a relaxing afternoon and evening together. I was leaving work early to watch a Team USA World Cup soccer match, an event I would have typically used as an excuse to overconsume alcohol on a weekday. Just like football games, tennis matches, holidays, and days ending in a y.

However, my newly-sober-person plan consisted of spending time watching soccer and eating takeout Thai food with Jill.

Jill sent me a text asking if I would pick her up a bottle of wine on my way home from work. It was a reasonable request on the surface; she didn’t have a car, so it was easier for me to pick up the wine on my way home. Pennsylvania has interesting liquor laws: you can’t walk into any random gas station or grocery store and grab an alcoholic beverage; there are special stores for buying wine and spirits and separate bottle shops where you can purchase beer.

Jill’s request didn’t offend me at first. She knew I didn’t drink wine and she was supportive of my sobriety and told me she was proud of me. I knew her request for a bottle of wine meant we were likely going to have sex that evening. I had no issue with that – of course I could bring her a bottle of wine.

On the way home, I picked up the finest bottle of $10 red wine I could find. I guess we weren’t going to watch soccer after all.

We had the kind of evening you can only have when you are in a relationship that’s starting to heal after a long period of damage. You know, sexual healing? Jill had a glass of wine or two over the course of the night. I found out later Team USA had won their game.

Everything was perfect.

Until it wasn’t.

There were a couple things I hadn’t told Jill about my trip to the wine store. First, I had broken out into a panic while I was in the store. I’m no stranger to anxiety attacks, but this one hit me hard.

Making matters worse, I chose to get her wine from a store directly across the street from the meetinghouse for the AA group I was attending. I felt like I was sneaking behind enemy lines as I came and went from the wine shop. I expected to see someone I knew from meetings standing outside smoking. I bent my head down and rushed back to my car.

To hell with them, I thought at the time. If someone sees me, I’ll tell the truth. I flashed back to the time my middle school friend told his parents the open beer he was holding was for a friend. Not a believable story then, still not a believable story as an adult.

No one from the group had seen me, but mentally the damage was done. I tend to ruminate on things until they drive me crazy and I spent the next few days stewing on what Jill had asked me to do. How rude. How disrespectful. Didn’t she understand my position? How absurd I should have to say that I don’t want to go into a wine shop as an alcoholic.

I decided I needed to tell Jill about my boundary issue when I picked her up from work that Friday. Every Friday I’d pick her up from the University of Pennsylvania campus where she worked, we’d get Indian takeout and go home to Netflix.

“You really screwed me over the other day,” I started the second she sat in the car.

“What are you talking about?” She asked.

“Why did you think it was OK to ask me to pick you up a bottle of wine?”

“You didn’t have to say yes. I could have gotten it myself.”

Our conversation spiraled into an argument.

“I don’t want that poison around me right now. What would I have done if someone from AA saw me?”

“I won’t ever ask you to pick me up wine again. That’s easy.”

“Oh, I’m beyond that,” I told her.

“Are you asking me not to keep alcohol at home? That’s easy too.”

“That’s the least you can do.”

“You can’t ask me never to drink. That’s too controlling for me. I’m a grownup.”

“Fine. I’d appreciate you not doing it around me for a while.”

We drove home without getting our food.

***

I told the story of the bottle of wine and our argument at my next men’s group meeting.

“I’d say I did a good job setting my boundaries,” I proudly told Counselor Gary and the group.

“You did a piss poor job setting boundaries,” Gary replied. “You willingly crossed your own unstated boundary. And then you got mad about it.”

“At least she knows now what I won’t stand for,” I shot back

“You don’t have a right to tell her what you won’t stand for. I’d say you have a lot of work to do on yourself before you get to that point. Especially with Jill.”

“Why should she get to drink still if I can’t? How will we get along?” I asked.

“You can remember she’s an adult and she can do what she wants. That includes choosing to stay with you. You should focus on that, and not nit-picking behaviors she has no idea rub you wrong.”

“I have boundaries, damn it!” I said.

“Right. That’s new for you. That’s new for the people around you. People can’t read your mind. You’re responsible for setting your boundaries. You’re responsible for maintaining them. Not Jill.” Gary shut me down.

I sat, arms crossed and unreceptive the rest of the session. Gary’s words stung. I was responsible for setting my boundaries? How could I do that? I drove home wondering how I could verbalize the things I was feeling.

***

I worked hard as my weeks of sobriety turned into months; hard at my work, hard at my relationships. Jill and I turned a corner. We found a way to work with each other and communicate our needs.

We set some basic boundaries, ones that would have made sense to a sober outsider. I would never be asked to handle alcohol in any way. No purchasing, no opening a bottle, no carrying a drink to her across the room. The tradeoff, although Jill didn’t ask for it, was that wine could exist in our house without upsetting me. She could have a glass of wine at a dinner out and I wouldn’t feel affronted.

Other boundaries were a little less perceptible. We had to negotiate the boundaries needed for a healthy relationship. I communicated my needs to Jill more often. She began to open up more to me about her needs. We found ourselves more in periods of harmony as we strengthened our bond.

Gary was instrumental on my end. He provided an unbiased view of my unacceptable behavior. He gave me feedback on how I could approach situations without sabotaging them. He coached me on identifying situations I wasn’t comfortable with, and how to better communicate them to my friends and family before things got out of hand.

Today, Jill and I are married with a three-year-old daughter. I recently passed the fourth anniversary of my sobriety. Parenting and being a husband are rewarding and challenging roles that require setting and respecting boundaries. It’s something I’ve gotten better at in my sobriety and something I’m thankful for the opportunity to continue improving.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 October 2018