Answer Addiction

Tag: AA

  • My Experience in a 12-Step Cult

    My Experience in a 12-Step Cult

    As part of my therapy I had to cut contact with my family and tell my professors I was recovering from sexual abuse. It was excruciating, but I wanted to do the “hard work” of recovery.

    “If you leave here, you will be on the street.”

    From her red upholstered chair, my psychotherapist Marlene launched one of her famous surprise attacks at the beginning of group therapy. This was another week-long intensive I was doing because I was in crisis. My ex-husband Terry* and I attended couples’ group and we were also in separate individual groups which were primarily inpatient treatment for addiction or codependency. We both attended various week-long “intensives” and all of our friends were also members of this group.

    Both Terry and I were many years sober. We were long-time members in this therapy community, started at the beginning of the codependency and ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) movement in the late 80’s when we were newly married. Marlene’s daughter, also a counselor there, her husband, and many other clients were our close friends. We all went to the same AA meetings and clubhouses.

    This counseling center started with a new kind of experiential therapy that took many of its practices from EST. They did psychodrama, beating pillows with bataka bats, breath work, confrontation and guided imagery, among other things. Breaking someone down— like “breaking a horse” —was the guiding therapy modality. Marlene, also in long-term recovery from alcohol, recruited people from AA meetings. At the time, this therapy was considered pioneering and so transgressions like this were considered necessary for “real recovery.” Or that’s what she told us.

    In the early 90’s, we moved abroad for several years to pursue Terry’s hopes for a career in his sport. When his prospects did not turn out, we returned to the states and the community, which was where all our friends and sponsors were. Upon our return to the States, Marlene suggested we live apart for a few months. It had become common practice for her to have couples in marriage counseling spend some time living apart. Terry moved in with Marlene’s son, our good friend, and I moved in with another woman from the community. We were told that after a few months we would move back in together. I got a job right away and Terry continued pursuing his sport, still hoping for the big break. Many people, including friends, sponsored him financially. Four months stretched into four years.

    During this time, the counseling center also grew to include treatment for food addiction, gambling, sex, as well as codependency and all the other relational disorders that are so common for so many of us in recovery. The recovery treatment movement at large was going through a similar change. I had sexual abuse issues from when I was younger and would have to say embarrassing things like: “I enjoyed the power.” To be a good client, of course I would comply. One woman was told: “If I were your husband, I would have an affair with your best friend, too.” And this was considered the most progressive therapy available.

    Many wealthy families sent their teenagers or young adults who had drug or alcohol misuse problems to the center, located in a tony suburb in Florida. It was similar to other addiction treatment centers that were booming at this time; clients would come for a week-long “intensive” and then move in with someone from the community for aftercare. Month-long aftercare would frequently turn into years. The more affluent the family, the longer they stayed.

    Eventually, Marlene and some of her wealthy clients purchased homes and turned these into group homes for aftercare. Every recovering person in the community was required to attend a daily 6:30 a.m. AA meeting with Sundays off for good behavior. Many members were asked to eat on a food plan and attend Overeaters Anonymous which is a tremendous program for food addicts. If you had sexual issues, you attended SLAA. If you had money issues, DA. If you were a gambler, GA. If your spouse was a gambler Gam-Anon, Al-Anon, S-Anon. In other circumstances, all of these organizations can be very helpful. Being an addict, I easily fit in with all of these groups regardless of whether or not I would have come to each of them individually on my own. My weekly calendar was full of these meetings, therapy groups, work, and then times set aside to supervise new members and take them to all these meetings.

    The group had a strong hierarchical structure. Marlene was the lead therapist and her daughter was also at the top. Then came the other therapists, then the group of “strong” people, and then everyone else was at the bottom somewhere. Terry was handsome and charming and one of Marlene’s favorites so he was in the strong group, very close to her. The strong people supervised the new members as well as each other. Once someone was in crisis, they fell out of whichever group they were in. Most of the time, a person in crisis would not go home but would go spend the night with someone else after group and have to follow certain rules. You would leave your car there and ask people for rides or whatever was needed. One time, I went to my friend’s house and had to wear all her clothes to work the next day, too-big high heels and all. One of my treatments was to ask for rides everywhere for two weeks: to work and home, to group, to 12-step meetings. And that meant that I often did the same thing: sponsoring or supervising new members, meeting them for lunch or dinner, driving them around.

    As the years passed (I was associated with this center for more than ten years) and Terry and I dealt with our relationship issues, as well as ancillary addictions, I was told to detach completely from my family. Even though my father was in AA and my mother in Al-Anon, I had to write letters to them explaining why I couldn’t interact with them any longer. I was not permitted to contact my siblings who had always been supportive of me. It was an excruciating exercise, but I wanted to do the “hard work” of recovery so I complied. Marlene would say that people with unresolved codependency were at risk for cancer or other diseases. Someone with codependency certainly couldn’t have a successful relationship with another without intensive, long-term therapy. But any other kind of therapy besides this therapy was “bullshit” and regular AA meetings were not “real recovery.” This, too had a purpose: if we weren’t spending holidays with our families, we spent them with the therapist, her staff, and her family. This was always unsettling to me, but I complied. The other members of the community spent holidays together at someone’s home, or typically one of the group homes. Terry would stay with Marlene at her vacation home with her family. In fact, Terry and I celebrated every holiday at Marlene’s home.

    After four long years of separation — thousands of groups and meetings — Terry finally went back to college to finish his degree. We were both considered “strong” members of the community, sponsoring many people, holding Big Book studies and step-groups. So separated had our lives become over these four years that our interactions with each other were constantly monitored and evaluated as part of our therapy process, to a degree where casual time spent together was not casual and what might have otherwise been a normal desire for a husband and wife to share each other’s company had ramifications for how we were counseled in our therapy sessions. Consequently, by this point we had advanced to starting to “date” and were making plans, all therapist-sanctioned, to finally move back in together. Like most of the married or unmarried couples in the group, we lived separately, completely celibate. Dating meant attending dinner or movies, always accompanied by other members of the group. Moving back in together was the ultimate carrot in the couples’ group, and ours was not an unusual situation as bizarre as it now sounds. A few new couples to the community lived together but the majority lived apart.

    On the surface, this system appears to be consistent with much of what we know is successful in legitimate addiction treatment centers. Young people or newly recovering addicts or alcoholics could and sometimes would stay clean and sober in this arrangement, because it was a variety of situations, all with 24-hour supervision. Outside the week-long intensives which were held at a hotel, all the supervision would come from other members in the community like myself. Several people in long-term recovery would schedule an hour or so to spend time with the new person and frequently give them rides or provide meals. Several members of the community had businesses where they could employ new people on an hourly basis. People traded services like home cleaning or rides to the airport for treatment. A new person would leave the group home in the morning and pack lunch and dinner (often prescribed by a food plan) and end the evening in a 12-step meeting or group or a planned group activity. My weekly schedule was packed with meetings, work, group, going to graduate school, and helping newcomers. This too is superficially consistent with best practices: the weakest part of addiction treatment today is the lack of solid aftercare programs. This group handled that part well, but at great cost, and not at all ethically.

    In addition to supporting the newcomers, to be a good member of a group meant participating in the confrontational functions of that group. Because it was a psychodrama-focused group, you would stand up in the middle of the room and act out any problem you were having. The other members played the roles of your family or friends. If you weren’t getting quite honest enough, others would get up and act you out for yourself—the more brutally honest, the better. I now regret many of the things I said to my fellow group members in that situation. If a member did everything properly and complied with all the demands, they might get rewards, like dates with their spouse.

    After dating steadily for many months, Terry and I purchased a small home and a group of the new guys painted the interior, getting ready for us to move in. After attending a movie, one of my good friends who had chaperoned us said that she felt “sex addiction coming off” of me in the movie. She and her dashing husband had come to therapy many years before, both looking as if they stepped off the set of Dallas. But when Marlene recommended they separate, he stormed out of couples group, never to return. He was not the first. When Marlene and my friend confronted me in group that week, I listened but I also knew what was coming. I had seen this happen to so many other couples. It was always a terrifying waiting game to see who was going to be the group’s victim-of-the-week.

    Being the designated person in crisis could actually persist for a year or more. Once, another therapist and her daughter were kept apart from each other for years, neither person in active addiction. And special treatment was not just reserved for the weakest in the group; the strong members would also frequently get special treatment. One of my friends started dating a man from her group who happened to be married at the time. His wife was just starting to get sober and struggling with recovery. I was vocal that I didn’t think it was right for this couple to get together even if his marriage was ending. But my reservations were not welcome.

    I also expressed concerned about my husband’s best friend from his primary group, a woman he would eventually marry.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    The Eternal Holiday of the Alcoholic

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else.

    The following is an excerpt from Jolly Lad – The Expanded North American Edition, published this month by MIT Press and available here.

    After I stopped drinking in August 2008 I went to Alcoholics Anonymous a lot at first – most days in fact for about half a year. I don’t go that often anymore and I haven’t done any of the twelve steps but I’d still say the programme was a crucial aid to me quitting.

    I guess even before I joined the fellowship I already had an inkling of what AA would be like. I’d seen enough soap operas, so I was prepared. Generally speaking, it was as I’d imagined it – a neon strip-lit, magnolia painted room with trestle tables and stackable chairs – usually in churches, village halls or community centres. Careworn people in comfortable clothes, chatting, sipping tea, rolling cigarettes. The 12 commandments and the 12 traditions would be unrolled and hung on the back wall. The yellow card (“Who you see here / What you hear here / When you leave here / LET IT STAY HERE!”) would be placed prominently at the front, resting against a small tub for the collection of voluntary subs at the end of the meeting. There would be a literature table full of pamphlets, information sheets and books and a box containing chips, or commemorative engraved metal tokens, for those who had hit a notable anniversary in sobriety – including the most important one: 24 hours. There would always be one or more copies of The Big Book there – the text written in 1939 by Bill W, to help alcoholics.

    Chapter Three of The Big Book says: “Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is mentally different from his fellows. Therefore it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterised by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.”

    I had been prepared to pursue the chimera of controlled drinking right through the gates of death myself. When I gave up I was close to dying and had nearly checked out accidentally once earlier the same year. But I’d made my peace with death. I had come to believe that alcohol was the only thing that made life bearable. And in a lot of ways it was.

    Image via Krent Able

    There was dirt, horror and disfigurement everywhere I looked. But after one stiff drink I could leave the house; after two drinks the fear started lifting and after the third drink I’d feel like an artist. Or to be more precise, I would see the world through the eyes of an artist. And after five drinks, well, I could take my pick of them. On a good day I felt like Picasso. But there were all kinds of days. Imagine being Gustav Klimt in Hull, the golden light of the low winter sun at 3pm in the afternoon radiating along The Avenues. Imagine being Walter Sickert in Manchester, the violent brown and black smudges radiating from your feet and along canal towpaths. Imagine being Vincent van Gogh in St Helens, the sky ablaze with stars. That is something close to victory, something close to beating death.

    They laughed at me and called me a piss artist. And how right they were. I was an aesthete with a broken nose in a stained shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, drinking the world beautiful.

    When you drink constantly, you become numb, slipping down into a sub-life, a waking coma. You become a chaotic ghost that exists almost at one step removed from everything else. You float through the film of your own life. You see the sublime in the augury of fried chicken bones and tomato sauce cast upon the upper deck floor of a bus. You can divine a narrative among the finger-drawn doodles on the misted windows. You can feel your destiny in hundreds of individual condensation droplets on the glass turning red, then amber, then green.

    Everything that you’d worried about a few hours previously… Where will I get the money from? What if he beats me up? Am I seriously ill? Am I dying? Have I got cancer? What will she say when I finally get home a week late? Will she cry when we eventually go to bed together? Will she pack her things and leave the next day? How near is death? What will it be like? Will I scream and cry? What is it like to die? And now, after some drinks, there is just the sweet sensation of your life passing you by with no struggle and no fuss. The rope slides through your fingers with no friction, just warmth as a balloon rises higher and higher out of sight. I have bottles and bottles and bottles and my phone is out of credit. A Mark Rothko night. A Jackson Pollock night…

    This is the eternal holiday of the alcoholic. Once you create as much distance from your everyday life as you naturally have from orange tinted Polaroids of childhood caravan trips or stays in seaside hotels and Super 8 film reels of school sports days, then you start to experience your quotidian life like it’s the sun-bleached memory of a happy event. You feel nostalgia and warmth for boring events that are unfolding right in front of you. You feel wistful about experiences that most people would find barbaric or gauche or unremarkable. You experience the epic, the heart- warming and the hilarious in post office and supermarket queues. You develop permanently rose-tinted glasses.

    But there’s no getting away from it, after a while the strategy starts failing. You start seeing everything through the eyes of Francis Bacon, through the eyes of Edvard Munch, through the eyes of HR Giger…Your vision becomes stained and cracked.

    It is pretty tough stopping drinking but it’s not like I want a pat on the back for it.

    Image via Krent Able

    I see alcoholism as a self-inflicted leisure injury to some extent, disease or not. But going on the wagon is nothing compared to coming to terms with what you are like sober. The trouble with stopping drinking is that the only thing it solves in your life is you being drunk or hungover and ill all the time. When you stop drinking, everything you drank to avoid dealing with is still there, as bad as ever. Mental illness, debt, depression, the impulse to self-harm, the impulse to commit suicide, anxiety, social dysfunction, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, stress, anger, violent rage… I started drinking when I was 13 and was drinking every day by the time I was 15. I stayed pretty much constantly drunk until I was 37. When I stopped I had no real idea what I would be like.

    Alcoholism is debt consolidation for your life. Submit to alcoholism and your life becomes incredibly simple. Drink becomes the only thing you care about – and you will end up just fine with letting all the other stuff slide to the extent that it doesn’t even matter if you die or not. The only real problem with this arrangement is what happens if you decide to stop.

    Picture a reservoir surrounded by mountains. You have been tasked with draining the massive body of water away to repopulate the area. But once the water has gone you are faced with the former town that was initially flooded and the now wrecked buildings which need to be pulled down. Call several construction firms. People have been fly tipping here for years. There is tons of rubbish here. You will need help to clean the area up. There are corpses wrapped in carpet and chains. It was the ideal place to dump bodies. You’ll need to call the police and the coroner’s office. The press are on their way. There are rotten and half eaten animal carcasses that need to be cleared up and disposed of. Environmental health need to be involved. You have never seen so many mangled shopping trollies, broken children’s bikes and unwanted cars. The clearance job will be massive. There are burst canisters of toxic waste that have long since leached into the ground. It will be years before you can do anything with this land. The water was merely the stuff that was making this area look picturesque. What you have left in its place is an area of outstanding natural horror. It probably feels like you should have left well enough alone.

    Before claiming a seat by putting my coat on the back of it, and even before queuing up for a coffee, I went into the gents to try and freshen up. I scrubbed my hands hard and splashed freezing cold water onto my face – prodding the dark purple streaks of flesh under each eye with a fingertip. I stood for some time looking into the mirror as the water dripped off my face.

    What did I look like? A middle-aged man with long hair in a heavy metal T-shirt. The beard of someone who slept behind a hedge on an A-road roundabout. Face permanently blotched red down one side with hundreds of burst capillaries after spending three days awake doing amphetamines in 1996. A Monday night which culminated in nurses shouting: “Shave his chest, shave his chest!” A nose broken 17 times and eventually surgically rebuilt. Forehead like the cover of Unknown Pleasures. Right eyelid drooping down over a partially sighted eye, scarred and damaged beyond repair.

    George Orwell said we all get the kind of face we deserve by the time we turn 40. I had mine hammered irreversibly into place by my 25th birthday. Ostensibly I looked like the same person, but somehow as if reflected in the back of a rusty soup spoon instead of a mirror.

    Image via Krent Able

    I was comfortable with going to AA now that I’d been going for nearly two years but still, the back of the room suited me just fine – it’s not a Kate Bush concert, you’re not missing anything if you don’t sit in the front row.

    Comfort was not on the agenda the first time I went to AA however. My first visit to the rooms might as well have been my first day at senior school, or my first day in prison, for all the stress it caused me. I went while visiting friends up north and it was terrifying. A bare concrete room with old school chairs, bare lightbulbs and spiders in the corners. A retirement age man with a nose like a red, purple and blue blood sac mumbled brutal things as other broken people looked at their feet. When I stepped outside into the freezing cold night after the 60 minutes were up I had to sit on a garden wall for ten minutes, staring at the ground under an orange sodium light. I was unable to stand properly because of anxiety and I was still dizzy with fear walking away afterwards. It struck me quite clearly that there might not even be any point to giving up drinking, that it could even make things worse in some ways.

    It’s bad form to talk about the meetings or AA at all. Tradition 11 says: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” I’d like to apologise for speaking about AA here, even if it is just in very general terms. I would never repeat what anyone else said there; I never talk there myself, I just sit and listen. I wait for the reassurance of identification and nothing else.

    “I was like that once. I was that bad. I never want to go back to that again.”

    Buy Jolly Lad here.

     

    This excerpt has been lightly edited for context. All identifying details of AA meetings have been changed.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • God Hates Pikachu and He Also Killed My Daddy

    God Hates Pikachu and He Also Killed My Daddy

    My higher power doesn’t want me sticking a needle in my arm. For me today, it’s as simple as that.

    I didn’t want to unpack this story so soon. My aim was to share my experience with getting and staying sober in a dry and witty way, do that for a while with you, maybe unpack the heavy stuff after we got to know each other a little more, and then go for the gusto. I didn’t want to bring up a subject that might rub you the wrong way but I recently finished a writing exercise that really got me thinking about my dad. He’s dead.

    My father died when I was two years old. He was a heroin user who shared needles. Nobody was talking about harm reduction in the late 80’s nor were they concerned about the consequences of IV drug use. After he got sober, he found out that he had contracted HIV. It wasn’t long after that diagnosis that he lost his battle to AIDS.

    I believe growing up without a father had an effect on the man I am today; but this isn’t a story about my dad. This isn’t a story about harm reduction or AIDS awareness. This is a story about God.

    Wait! Stay with me, please. Don’t go.

    I promise you this isn’t that kind of story. I’ve done right by you with the last two articles. I plan on doing the same with this one. I know the God word bothers some people. It bothers me sometimes. It’s okay, just keep scrolling. We’ll do this one together. Besides, you have to at least get to the part about Pikachu. I’m sure you’re wondering what the heck he’s got to do with all this. Stick around, I’ll tell you.

    I grew up in an extremely charismatic religious household; the crazy dogmatic type. Let me tell you how crazy: Did you know that if you listen to any music that isn’t religious, demons will literally fly out of your headphones like a vapor of smoke and possess you? It’s true. My aunt told me that when I was only eight years old. Also, if you watch any movie that isn’t rated G or about the crucifixion of Christ, you run the chance of committing your soul into the fiery pits of hell. Here’s a good one: My younger brother and I were not allowed to watch Pokemon because our grandmother told us that those cute little Japanese cartoons were actually demons and it was Satan’s master plan to trick unassuming kids into falling in love with his minions.

    Here’s a few more examples:

    1. Don’t drink beer. You’re ingesting the semen of the devil.
    2. True love waits. So if you have sex before marriage, you’re going to burn in hell.
    3. Never smoke cigarettes, you’ll accidentally inhale a demon.
    4. Don’t use profanity unless you want God to give your tongue cancer.
    5. Hey boys, do you like your hands? Well, don’t play with your penis, that’s how you lose them.

    Here’s my absolute favorite. When I was kid, my mom brought my younger brother and me to this old-time-holy-ghost Pentecostal church in the hood. The younger children had to go to Sunday school with some 16-year-old babysitter while the adults went to “big church” in the main auditorium. While we were waiting for our mom to pick us up, our babysitter kindly told me that God killed my dad because he was a junkie.

    Yup, that’s right. This ignorant girl basically told me that God “gave” my dad AIDS because he was in love with heroin. And it was God’s perfect judgment to execute my powerless addict of a father. Cool, right? I’m going to grow up to be a perfectly normal man, unscathed by any of this tomfoolery.

    When you grow up in an overbearing legalistic household and finally start doing some of the things that they told you not to and nothing bad happens, you end up slamming your foot on the gas, speeding straight into the freedom to do everything you’re not supposed to. The things you didn’t do growing up because you believed they would kill you turn into myths created to control you.

    This isn’t going to end well for an addict like me. Once I started thinking for myself and realized that my dick wouldn’t fall off if I watch porn, I started watching all the porn. When I realized that I wasn’t possessed after smoking a cigarette, I started smoking all the cigarettes. Add sex to the mix, sprinkle a little drugs on top, and my newfound freedom as a junkie sinner is complete.

    Let’s fast-forward a few years because I don’t want to get into other stories that deserve their own headline. Let’s land where I’m walking down the steps of the courthouse with a piece of paper that mandates that I start attending 12-step meetings. Meetings that I must go to or I’m going back to jail and possibly prison.

    Imagine my delight, sitting in my first meeting while they’re doing the readings. I hear the 3rd step read aloud for the first time and everything within my gut cringes. I die on the inside. I’m powerless over drugs and alcohol. I can’t stop. I need to stop. And now I’m being told that the only way to do this is with God. I’m in big trouble. 

    I have a confession to make. Remember when I told you that this story was about God? It isn’t. I mean it is and it can be for you, too, but it really isn’t. It’s about a higher power; something greater than you. It’s crucial that you hear what I’m about to say.

    If you’re a 12-stepper who’s all gung-ho about the 3rd step, that’s cool. If you’re not a 12-stepper who’s grasped the God concept, that’s cool too.

    What I want to be explicitly clear about is just one thing. It’s my experience, being an addict in recovery— whether it’s the 12-step route or not—that at some point I have to accept the fact that I need saving. And it’s not going to be me that’s going to do the saving. It’s got to be something greater than me. What I’m good at is getting high. Getting sober is easy. Staying sober isn’t. That’s where the saving comes in for me.

    In the beginning. G-O-D meant a lot of things.

    • Group of Druggies
    • Group of Drunks
    • Grow or Die
    • Guaranteed Overnight Delivery (kidding)
    • Good Orderly Direction

    A wise man once told me, “I don’t know what God’s will is for my life… but I know what it isn’t.” I know that my higher power doesn’t want me stealing in sobriety. I know I shouldn’t be smoking crack. I know that now that I’m attempting to live a new way, maybe I should concern myself with my physical health since I neglected it for so long. My higher power doesn’t want me sticking a needle in my arm. For me today, it’s as simple as that.

    For people who don’t subscribe to an acronym but actually believe in a God, it can be slippery if it’s not kept simple. It’s common for people to get sober and say, “Okay, what do I do know? What is my life’s purpose and what is God’s will for me?” If they do that, they end up stressing themselves out and thinking themselves out of the game, thinking that they have to understand the meaning of life at 12 months sober; or that they should have a roadmap for their life drawn out, down to every little specific detail.

    It’s not that serious. Instead of concerning yourself with some huge existential question mark, keep it simple. Get off the bench, get back on the field and play. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself sober years later with a beautiful life filled with purpose and meaning. I can promise you that only because I’ve seen it happen for many of my junkie friends around me.

    My higher power doesn’t hate Pikachu. That’s just silly. If you believe in God, that’s cool. If you don’t, that’s cool too. Just find something greater than you when the days get dark in your life. Hey! Maybe it’s this story. Who knows.

    If nobody told you that they love you today: I do. I love you.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • When the Obsession Isn’t Lifted

    When the Obsession Isn’t Lifted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Me, My Psych Meds & My 12-Step Recovery

    Me, My Psych Meds & My 12-Step Recovery

    Now that I have double-digit sobriety, I have no qualms about pulling aside people who disparage the use of psych meds in meetings.

    As I sat in my jail cell I had to question the admonition I got from an old-timer at a 12-step meeting I frequented.

    “If you trust your Higher Power enough, you don’t need psych meds.”

    Really? How well did that work for me? Prior to my psychotic break I wore my sobriety well. I had married the love of my life. My IT consulting practice was netting me a mid-six figure income. The custom house we bought and furnished was paid in full.

    Funny thing about alcoholics. When things are going well we want to fiddle with the recipe that got us there. Why do I need meds? After all, I have been symptom-free for years. I have never been manic in sobriety.

    For some reason the under-utilized abacus in my head couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do the math that me plus meds equaled sanity. That old-timer’s advice started to resonate. After all, I was a Higher-Power-trusting kind of guy. Never did it occur to me that maybe there was power and inspiration behind the development of the medications that kept me sane.

    A salesman at heart, I broached the subject of discontinuing meds with my wife—my wife who had never known me symptomatic.

    “I’m doing fine,” I said. “Just look at all these articles I found on the web about managing symptoms with vitamins and exercise.”

    I closed the deal and by August of 2009 I was med-free.

    All was well until it wasn’t. In November of that year my wife was hospitalized with COPD exacerbation. Talk about the need for a lung transplant and end-of-life-planning marked many of our conversations with physicians. Up went the anxiety level.

    As the stress level began to rise, the amount of sleep I was getting decreased proportionally. Funny thing about bipolar I disorder, nothing triggers mania like lack of sleep. Or so I learned later.

    Around January or February of 2010—the timeline gets a little distorted… a little racy—my response to my wife’s health condition was to pick up more clients, sleep less and work more. One of my clients, a large county government, went under investigation by the state’s Attorney General.

    The subject of the investigation? The contents of a database I maintained.

    The state wanted the unvarnished data. The county wanted it “scrubbed.” Stress bombs were being lobbed at my increasingly fragile state of mind.

    Somewhere in the spring of 2010 there was an audible snap. Distinguishing the seemingly real from the false got a little tricky. Paranoia replaced anxiety. Clients began pulling me into meetings to explain why I was sending late-night emails about Russian cell-phone hackers and suspicious activities on the part of my co-workers.

    Apparently, my explanations were none too satisfying. First there was a mandated two- week “vacation.” A week after I returned I guess no improvement was noted as the County Manager’s personal security detail escorted me from the premises. My monthly billing dropped by 75% at a time I was spending and gambling like, well, like someone in the midst of a full manic break. The bank accounts were drained and the credit cards began to max out.

    My wife reminded me of a promise to resume medication if she ever deemed it necessary… and she was definitely in a deeming-it-necessary mode. Funny thing about psych meds, the maintenance dose that had worked so well for years really wasn’t up to snuffing out full blown mania. I resumed my meds, but it was like trying to battle a raging forest fire with a squirt bottle.

    By May, loved ones were more than a little concerned. That came to a head in the aftermath of a pool party/cookout gone awry. For some reason I thought our guests needed to be greeted by the entire content of my garage spread across the front yard and folding tables piled high with $3,500 dollars’ worth of random magazines, toys, household goods, and an inordinate amount of Febreze from a 2 a.m. Walmart shopping spree.

    Twenty-four hours later there was a late-night visit from the local police to take me to a 72-hour psych hold my wife and daughters had arranged.

    Agnosognosia. A Greek term for lack of insight. The medical profession has reserved it to describe the phenomenon of people in the throes of mania denying that they are manic. I had it, but good. Four hours into my psych hold I pretended to be asleep and then put on a very calm front for the psychiatrist who had just come on shift to make the rounds.

    By hour six I was released, and my wife and daughter got a tongue-lashing from the doctor for wasting her time. I delighted in that, but not once did it occur to me that if I had to consciously act calm, maybe things weren’t quite right. Life at home got a little more strained.

    Five days later I agreed to be hospitalized. Then I reneged on my promise and decided to storm out of the house to underscore how healthy-minded I was.

    As I packed, among other things, a two-and-a-half-foot tall Buzz Lightyear action figure, a cloth “green screen” for shooting videos and manipulating the background, and a folded American flag. I also decided to pack an unloaded .22 pistol that was going to be the centerpiece of a yet unscripted cellphone video masterpiece.

    As I turned from my dresser to the duffle bag I was packing on my bed, my wife entered the room. The gun was pointed in her direction. She didn’t see a budding videographer; to her it was a little more “assaulty-ish.”

    A half hour later, I was cleaning the pool at an unoccupied rental house of ours where I had decided to camp out. Not five minutes into it, I noticed a helicopter directly overhead. In my paranoid and delusional state, I assumed the helicopter was there to film me in all my glory.

    Turns out, a very real S.W.A.T. team had encircled me and I wasn’t so delusional after all. My mugshot made the front page of our major online newspaper… in all my glory.

    Over the next six weeks in jail my symptoms subsided, my marriage was repaired, and I got a felony assault charge reduced to disorderly conduct. (I really couldn’t argue that I had been a little disorderly.)

    Still, I had one full year to learn how difficult it is to stay employable until that felony disorderly conduct was reduced to a misdemeanor. I am now very sympathetic towards sponsees who are trying to get back on track following incarceration.

    You guessed it. If I am still sponsoring, I am still active in 12-step recovery. It may not be for everyone, but it works very well for me.

    Now that I have double-digit sobriety, however, one thing has changed. I have no qualms about pulling aside people who disparage the use of psych meds in meetings. I share my story and explain rather firmly why they might want to reconsider that position.

    I am also not shy about sharing in meetings about an article from AA’s Grapevine magazine published in the 1970s when groups were first wrestling with the subject of psych meds. The home group in that story? Well, it arrived at a position that still holds true to this day: If advised to take psychiatric medication by a physician, you should not take one more, nor one less, than prescribed.

    Rick Bell, a bipolar alcoholic in recovery, holds a M.S.in Addiction Science and is completing a PhD in Psychology. He blogs at recoveryrules.com/blog.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • No More Attendance Sheets In AA

    No More Attendance Sheets In AA

    Having court-ordered people at our meetings is like being, “a little bit pregnant.” We are either anonymous or we are not anonymous.

    Our Traditions are important to Alcoholics Anonymous. We also want to see AA continue to provide a way out for alcoholics.

    The responsibility statement located on so many meeting walls says it all. AA is an all-inclusive organization, too. We offer aid to anyone who needs help in their drinking life. However, that comfort and aid are meant to be given in an anonymous way.

    My question is, how anonymous is a court-ordered person who leaves our meetings with a signed attendance sheet? Surely everyone can remember hearing someone at an AA meeting state, “You can say that you were at this meeting but you cannot tell them I was here.”

    What good is that statement when we then turn around and sign attendance sheets? Having court-ordered people at our meetings is something like being, “a little bit pregnant.” We are either anonymous or we are not anonymous. Let’s look at some of the results of our current practice.

    In order to clear out overcrowded prisons, criminals have been released if they agree, in part, to getting attendance vouchers signed at AA meetings. One of those parolees killed an AA member in 2011 and a lawsuit against AA was filed.

    We didn’t hear about that from the General Service Organization or their Public Information Coordinator, and that is where the legal papers were delivered.

    Instead, the news broke at some later time on television. While the suit was eventually dismissed, that AA member surely would not have been murdered and that lawsuit filed if we did not sign attendance sheets.

    Greg Hardy, a former NFL player banned from the league after being charged with beating his girlfriend, has been sentenced to three AA meetings per week rather than going to jail. Look at pages 155 and 156 of the Twelve and Twelve. It states that judges would gather derelicts from society and, “parole them into our custody. We’d spill AA into the dark regions of dope addiction and criminality.”

    Look, too, at page 190 where it states that we are not to, “lend the AA name in either a direct or indirect manner to anyone.”

    Our founders predicted back in the 1950s this very situation happening today.

    The Second, Seventh and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal have all ruled that sending criminals to AA meetings is illegal. It’s in violation of the First Amendment. That public controversy would not have happened had we kept our meetings anonymous.

    What if AA decided to stop signing attendance sheets? What could the courts do? Are they able to set up their own classes to teach lessons about alcoholism and addiction? Could the courts take their own attendance?

    The Traditions allow AA members to go to those classes and talk about alcoholism. We could still offer aid and support to alcoholics without signing attendance sheets.

    After the above-mentioned murder, the GSO has felt compelled to hand out the Safety Card for AA Groups statement to clean up this situation. They did so without fully explaining to the public the issues noted here. Perhaps this is the time to reevaluate things more closely.

    Maybe this is an opportunity to gather the insight and courage to see if we are compromising our Traditions as well as our Alcoholics Anonymous name when signing attendance sheets.

    The author is a member of AA and chooses to remain anonymous.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Comedian Jake Fogelnest: From Self-Loathing to a Life Beyond His Wildest Dreams

    Comedian Jake Fogelnest: From Self-Loathing to a Life Beyond His Wildest Dreams

    Notice they don’t call it the “9th Step Maybes.” It’s not the “9th Step Possibilities.” It’s the “9TH STEP PROMISES.” It’s very clear: we must be painstaking and take the suggestions. But if we DO…some amazing stuff will happen before we know it.

    Comedy Central, VH1, MTV, Netflix. Jake Fogelnest’s TV writing/producing credits are too long to list – and he wouldn’t want me to. I know Jake as a kind, funny, and humble man I met outside of the Hollywood Improv last summer, who treats everyone he meets with the same consideration. I was thrilled when he agreed to be part of this interview series.

    The Fix: What is your favorite thing about being sober in comedy?

    Jake Fogelnest: My favorite thing about being sober in comedy is that I’m ready to work WHENEVER. Whether it’s late nights or early mornings, I’m ready to show up. If I’m writing alone, there’s nothing better than going to bed at 10pm, waking up at 6:00am and just starting to write as the sun comes up. If I’m in a writers’ room, I love being able to come in fresh and ready to go until we need to stop (hopefully at a reasonable hour – usually we do). Or if I’m shooting something, I love that I can make a 4:30am call-time and be relatively alert. Adding a hangover into any of those situations? NO THANKS.

    I even have friends who can drink “normally.” Maybe they’ll overdo it once a year and then have to show up for work hungover and just suffer through it. I always feel SO bad for them! My sobriety ensures I never have a day like that! It’s such freedom! The worst thing I’ve had to endure in sobriety are days where I didn’t get enough sleep or if I have a minor (not contagious) cold. 

    This may sound really simple. I’m basically saying, “My favorite thing about being sober in comedy is that I can show up to work like every normal person on the planet does for their job every day.” I know there’s gotta be some Al-Anon people reading this right now going: “Oh, he’s all proud that shows up for work on time? Let’s throw this little asshole a parade.” Sorry. I know it’s small, but even after all these years of recovery, I’m grateful I can show up. I could be dead! 

    What is the most challenging thing?

    The most challenging thing is recognizing where alcoholism shows up in other areas of my life. Just because I stopped drinking and using drugs 12 years ago doesn’t mean that I don’t have the disease of alcoholism. I’m in recovery, but the alcoholic thinking is still there. It has been HUMBLING to recognize how my character defects can still show up. They find new creative ways to do so all the time!

    If there was an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Achievement in Holding onto Resentment,” I’m afraid I would be at least eligible for a nomination. I might not win, but I think I’d be a strong contender. I could list who I think some of the other nominees might be. It would give you a hell of a headline! Sadly, through recovery I’ve learned restraint of pen and tongue… which really fucks up clickbait! 

    Seriously, it’s all challenging, you know? It really depends on the day. You get some time under your belt and you think, “I got this.” And yeah, maybe I do “got this” in the sense that I’m probably not going to go out and drink tonight. However the underlying stuff that made me reach for a drink in the first place? That comes up all the time. Most people would never know. Or maybe everyone knows! Truth is, I don’t care anymore. As long as I’m taking the night right action and not being a jerk. 

    I can say I’ve been a LOT better this year about practicing self-care, reaching out for help and making sure I stay in touch with my higher power. It sneaks up on me, but I do get reminded: this journey is never done. I think I’ve only recently come into TRUE acceptance of that. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with the concept of uncertainty. I had to because I realized IT WAS NEVER GOING AWAY. They say this disease is cunning, baffling and powerful. What I have found challenging is how cunning, baffling and powerful it can be… and it has NOTHING to do with drinking. Now it’s just about living. 

    How has your career evolved since you committed to recovery?

    I wouldn’t have a career if I didn’t have recovery. Recovery has to come before everything else. There are times in my sobriety and my career where I didn’t put it first and WOW did that always come back to bite me in the ass. Recovery first, everything else second. Always. 

    I also think accepting that things don’t happen on MY timetable has been a huge blessing in making my way through career stuff. It’s show business. There are so many ups and downs. There is also so much waiting. You also need to self-motivate. All things that can totally activate an alcoholic. 

    Today I am grateful for a fantastic career. Is it exactly where I want it to be in this moment? NOPE! But I don’t think it ever will be. I think that has less to do with alcoholism and more about being any type of creative! Even for the most successful people in the world, there’s always going to be SOMETHING unfinished or unrealized. Some script you can’t quite crack, some project you can’t find financing for, some scheduling that doesn’t work out. Who’s a big successful person? Steven Spielberg? He’s big, right? I bet even Mr. Steven Spielberg himself has at least ONE thing he just can’t get made. Maybe it’s a sequel to E.T. where E.T. comes back to teach Elliott about SPACE JAZZ! I just made that up, if Steven likes the idea, he can call WME. But bringing it back to recovery (sorry I brought it to SPACE JAZZ), I truly believe that everything happens when it is supposed to. Some days do I get a LITTLE impatient with that stuff? FUCK YES. But that’s when I turn it over… or call a friend and complain. 

    No compare and despair shit though. Someone else’s success is NOT my failure. Others might be able to do that. For me, it’s bad for my brain and recovery. 

    I’m just incredibly grateful that nothing has come to me a SECOND before I was truly ready to handle it. If it were up to me and things were operating entirely on my timeline, I bet “my best thinking” would lead me straight into a brick wall. Having a spiritual connection and knowing that more will be revealed is essential to me. But yeah, at the same time, I really should have an overall deal somewhere. I mean, fucking come on. (It’s good to have a HEALTHY bit of ego.)

    In the Big Book of AA, the 9th step promises say: “If we are painstaking about this phase of our recovery, we will be amazed before we are halfway through.” Are you amazed?

    I love the promises so much. It’s probably my favorite thing in the big book. 

    Am I amazed? CONSTANTLY. Where my life was before sobriety and where it is today? They say “beyond your wildest dreams” and they aren’t kidding. I could sit here and rattle off all the ways the promises have come true in my life. I could even throw in some stuff about the “cash and prizes.” But I don’t want to speak from a place of ego. I think it’s more valuable to share about the promises and how important they are to show to newcomers! 

    Whenever I find myself talking with people early in their sobriety, I point them straight to the 9th step promises. I think it’s a BIG thing to make a promise. Think about how cruel it would be to promise all that stuff to someone and not deliver on it? Notice they don’t call it the “9th Step Maybes.” It’s not the “9th Step Possibilities.” It’s the “9TH STEP PROMISES.” It’s made very clear: we must be painstaking and take the suggestions. But if we DO… some amazing stuff will happen before we know it. 

    Here’s another way I’m amazed — and this one isn’t so cheery. Even though I have felt the promises first hand and I’ve seen them come true for others, as I continue to deepen my recovery— I still battle with willingness! I have a lot of fear of fear that holds me back. Not so much with career stuff anymore, but in other areas of my life. That being said, it feels really GOOD to talk about this knowing that I am back at being painstaking as I continue to look at this new stuff. For example (and this is a lame small one), after 12 years of sobriety, today is one month and 24 days without smoking a cigarette. It feels great. I hate it.

    How did you handle your first 30 days in relation to your comedy / writing career?

    For my first 30 days I didn’t worry about my comedy/writing career. I worried about getting sober. It’s not like anyone was knocking down my door at that time, but even if they were — I still had to put recovery first. There is no career if I’m sick. 

    I did what I had to do to make a living and that’s about it. I was VERY lucky that my employers at the time were actually directly responsible for getting me to a place of acceptance that I needed recovery. The “wildest dreams” took a backseat. I think there’s this misconception people have in early sobriety that they’re going to “miss out” on something, particularly “momentum in show business.” Guess what? Show business keeps moving without you. If you’re talented and you work your program, show business will be waiting for you when you’re healthy and ready. Whatever big opportunity you think you’re missing out on is NOTHING compared to what could come your way in sobriety. 

    What do you think it is about comedy and the entertainment industry in general that attracts so many addicts? Or the addicts that are attracted to comedy?

    Addicts are sensitive people. So are creatives. It makes sense that sensitive creatives would seek to self-medicate. That’s all creatives, not just comedians! But let’s talk about people who do comedy for a second. The job of a comic is to be hyper aware of the world and reflect it back to people in a funny way. That can be a painful process filled with sensory overload. You’re gonna want to numb out. Shut your brain off. In fact, it’s essential that you do so, otherwise you’re gonna go insane. There’s just a healthy way to do that and an unhealthy way to do it. Ugh, I remember sitting in a meeting early in sobriety listening to some asshole saying something like, “Just breathe” and I wanted to punch his fucking lights out. 

    The guy was right by the way. Breathing is good. Sorry.

    What advice would you give a comedian who struggles with chronic relapse?

    Relapse is part of recovery. I’ve relapsed. I’m very grateful to have 12 years now, but it took a few rounds to get there. The biggest piece of advice I could give? That SHAME you have around relapsing? Yeah, that’s fucking useless. I’m not saying don’t take it seriously. I’m not saying there’s not consequences to your actions. I just find addicts and alcoholics put this tremendous extra layer of ULTRA-SHAME and SUPER-GUILT on top of everything that really serves us NO purpose. It’s bullshit self-loathing. Believe me, I’ve been sober a long time and I’m a fucking expert at doing it. I could teach a masterclass on that website. 

    Here’s the thing though: FUCK THAT SHAME. Just come back. No one gives a shit. No one is judging you harder than you are judging yourself. I guarantee, you’re your own worst critic when it comes to relapsing. Just fucking come back. 

    Anything I missed?

    No one’s life has ever gotten worse because they decided to stop drinking. No one. Ever.  

    Jake’s story shows that it’s possible to stay fully grounded despite achievements, never forgetting what recovery has always been about: one addict helping another.

    View the original article at thefix.com

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

    Depression in Recovery: Do You Have Low Dopamine Tone?

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

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

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

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

    “It’s your untreated alcoholism.”

    “Listen to these tapes about prayer and meditation.”

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

    “You’re not going to enough meetings.”

    “You need to do more service.”

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

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

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

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

    Huh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • All My Friends Are Junkies

    All My Friends Are Junkies

    Once we switched our attention away from getting high and learned how to stay sober, we quickly realized that if we put at least one percent of the same effort it took to get trashed into other areas of our lives, the results were astronomical.

    All of my friends—each and every last one of them—are junkies. I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill junkie. You know the one: steals your purse and helps you look for it. No not that kind. Not even the one that bangs four bags of boy then tells you five minutes later that they’re dopesick so you help them out by splitting your shit. Not that type of junkie. I mean yeah, they meet that criteria, but I’m talking about the other type, the been-there-done-that kind of junkie.

    All of my friends have been to hell and back. They’re the type of junkie that society labels as hopeless. But for whatever reason, they’ve found a way out of their living hell and have begun living and pursuing a life worthwhile, a life greater than anything imaginable. Any goal they set, anything they dream of, it comes to fruition and then some! It’s unbelievable, very encouraging, and, from my experience, it’s very contagious. Words like: seductive, attractive, inviting, enticing, alluring and captivating come to mind.

    They’ve entered into a lifestyle that appears to be nothing but hope to any outsider looking in. So much so, even “normies” wonder what the fuck my friends are on. It’s next-level type shit.

    I bet you’re wondering why I still refer to my friends as junkies if they no longer get fucked up. It’s a valid question. Why would someone call their friend a junkie when they have years sober? Why would someone use a word that carries such a bad connotation when describing another individual that they themselves currently see as the opposite of that word? Why the hell does Walmart only keep two check-out aisles open on a Saturday afternoon?!

    To answer that first question, let’s break down the word “junkie.”

    According to Webster:

    Junkie

    noun |  junk·ie | \ ˈjəŋ-kē \

    1. a narcotics peddler or addict
    2. a person who gets an unusual amount of pleasure from or has an unusual amount of interest in something

    Okay, that first definition sounds about right. My friends sure as hell qualify as addicts/alcoholics. They also know how to acquire and distribute their drug-of-choice quite successfully until that dreaded day comes where they break the cardinal rule, “don’t get high on your own supply.” If you’re a junkie like me, then you know we have another term for that rule: “mission impossible.”

    Now, let’s take a look at what good ol’ Webby had to say in that second definition: A person who gets an unusual amount of pleasure from or has an unusual amount of interest in something. Sexy, right? Did you hear it? Did you relate when the word “unusual” appeared twice in that definition? Did something deep inside you begin to stir when the words “pleasure” and “interest” hit your shot-out way of thinking?

    I hope so. If you’re fucked up the way I am, then you felt something. I also know from a personal collective experience that once my friends and I got sober, the world became our oyster. What I mean by that is, once we switched our attention away from getting high and learned how to stay sober, we quickly realized that if we put at least one percent of the same effort it took to get trashed into other areas of our lives, the results were astronomical. It’s like a one thousand percent return on our investment. Crazy, right? Sure. Sounds like bullshit? Fuck yeah it does. It took me a while to grasp it, understand it, appreciate it and then cultivate it.

    When I see the word “unusual” appear in that definition I can’t help but laugh. I know that my friends and I—or any junkie I know, for that matter—are far from normal. When I think about “pleasure” and “interest,” I think about all the dreams that I had shit on in the past as a result of the bridges I burned. Now, those dreams have come back, I have goals that appear to be attainable, relationships that bring my life an overwhelming amount of joy, and opportunities to take part in unimaginable endeavors. Sound good? Sign me up!

    I geek out over music. Since my money ain’t going to the dope man anymore, I’ve been able to create some really dope recovery-based music. I’m a music junkie. And I got friends that have turned their attention to their physical health and wellness, and they’re seeing amazing results. They’re fitness junkies. I got this one friend who’s got the “lick” on all the best spots to eat around town. I mean you can pick an ethnicity, voice your preference and he’s got a spot for you. My little, hipster, foodie junkie. He’s adorable.

    Do you get it now? My friends and I are still junkies. We find ridiculous amounts of pleasure doing the things we love and pursuing the things that interest us. We enjoy it so much that you might call it unusual. Crazy ass ex-dopefiends turned into super-cool people. 

    I know we all have a million stories of where we’ve been and what we’ve done to get high and stay high. I know what it’s like to be in rehab and exchange “war stories” with the guy next to me. After a while it gets old. If you’re a repeat offender like me, then you know it gets old really fast when you check back in and hear the same shit again. It’s the same story with a different face. I get it.

    Having said all that, I want to let you in on a little secret: I’ve solved my existential crisis that I’ve always run into when trying to stay sober. I never found my purpose before, that “something” that brings me an unusual amount of pleasure… until now.

    It’s in these stories. It’s in the telling you, the reader, what my junkie friends and I have done, where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, what we’ve felt, how we’ve died, how we’ve lived, how we’ve found relief, how we’ve recovered, how we’ve relapsed, how we’ve come back and how we’ve survived one day at a time. If The Fix allows it, I’d love to share with you some of these “ghost stories,” as I lovingly refer to them these days. It would bring me an unusual amount of pleasure to get some of this shit off my chest and outta my head.

    I want to let you into my world, tell you why “All My Friends Are Junkies” (and I’m pretty sure all your friends are, too). I want to take you through drug court, through my first time in “the rooms,” through my first love in recovery, through that heartbreak, through that first relapse after believing I’d be a one-chip-wonder. I want to take you through that probation violation, that geographical change I thought would help, and holy shit, I want to bring you to that six-month inpatient rehab I went to that turned into a 13 month stay, the place I “loved so much” that I went back for another six months. I want to tell you about the relationships I made in these places, the fun we had, the crazy cool road trips we took. I want to tell you about all the musical gigs and the junkies I met there. I feel like recovery has brought me around the world while my lifestyle of addiction brought me to the deepest darkest areas of Satan’s ass crack. I want to tell you about that too.

    So for now, I’ll leave you with this: If no one told you today that they love you, fuck it, there’s always tomorrow.

    Check back next week for the first Ghost Story, “A Dopeman’s Grocery List.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Enabling, Self-Seeking, and Recovery

    Enabling, Self-Seeking, and Recovery

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

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

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

    en·a·bler (From Wikipedia)

    noun

    1. a person or thing that makes something possible.

    “the people who run these workshops are crime enablers”

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

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

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

    What is the opposite of enabler? From Word Hippo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com