Answer Addiction

Tag: Brian Michael Riley

  • Sober and Still Addicted: Compulsive Behavior in Recovery

    Sober and Still Addicted: Compulsive Behavior in Recovery

    There are plenty of us who discovered that even though the dope was laid to rest, that fiendish mentality kept on kicking, making us slaves to compulsive behaviors like overeating, gambling, sex, or shopping.

    Seems I need to make amends.

    You’re supposed to be reading right now about how after we put the dope down, that destructive behavior that went along with it often continues, our addiction manifesting itself in cunning and baffling new ways.

    But I just can’t seem to start writing.

    There’s always one more cigarette to smoke, cup of coffee to drink. One more level to get past on this new game on my phone. My side business is pet care and there’s always one more dog I can add to the walk, my mild hernia screaming as I mush my way towards a serious medical condition. My fingers are wrecked, too, from gnawing on the cuticles. Maybe after one more Band-Aid I’ll be able to sit down and type. I really do want to share all the information I’ve gathered about how most people in recovery find themselves still struggling with these sorts of “replacement” addictions.

    But as a hobby I make models and I just scored this kickass new car online, so I’d better try to finish at least one from the perpetual batch before the new one gets delivered.

    And even if I do get around to writing this article, what the hell sort of message would I be conveying anyway? Here I am two years sober (November was my sobriety birthday), and still feel practically paralyzed by addiction. Cigarette, coffee, dog walk, repeat. Once again I have found my life bordering on unmanageability, my health suffering in the grips of these persistent new vices.

    Yes, as I’ve said, there have been health complications and they are directly related to some of these addictive tendencies which I simply refuse to give up.

    At least not any time soon.

    And certainly not today.

    After all, I’ve got this…thing to write, for God’s sake. How can I expect to work, or get anything done for that matter, if I don’t give in and continue to feed the beast? Not only would I be in serious discomfort, but you, dear reader, would have nothing more to read.

    No, the best course of action is for me to continue with these behaviors in order to keep everything moving along. And look at this, I seem to have begun after all.

    Fantastic.

    I knew I couldn’t be the only one struggling with these issues and that if I just opened my mouth in the meeting rooms, others would feel comfortable sharing their own experiences. There are plenty of us who discovered that even though the dope was laid to rest, that fiendish mentality kept on kicking, keeping our sobriety from being as happy, joyous and free as is so often promised.

    Erin was a cinch to relate to. Like me, she was anxiously awaiting her recent Amazon delivery, jonesing for that cardboard smirk to appear at her doorstep. “Oh, I love that smiley face,” she confessed with a shiver. “I always open the Amazon box first. I get a little rush.”

    A true addict, Erin now chases that little rush like she once chased her high.

    At 42 years old with over two decades of sobriety, Erin is now addicted to online shopping. “It used to be with credit cards, like from Target. I’d go in and wouldn’t leave until hundreds of dollars later. But now I’ve found that I can sit on my phone during a boring work meeting and just swipe right.” Then to clarify my obvious confusion she added, “You know, one-swipe shopping?”

    Realizing that she could swipe everything into her digital cart, from paper towels to yoga pants, Erin started a steady flow of those smiles coming to her door. 

    “Packages come every day, every other day,” she told me, “because I get groceries and household supplies. And I rent my clothes, so those are always coming. But it’s nice with Amazon because you can set it up where every month they’ll send you kitty litter and toilet paper. So you don’t have to think about it. They just show up.”

    Those are Erin’s favorite packages, the ones that surprise her. “I make sure not to track the deliveries so when one comes with my name on it and I don’t know what it is – I’m like, holy crap, it’s Christmas!”

    Of course with that kind of mindfulness, or lack thereof, it wasn’t long before Erin lost track of her spending as well. “I was always so careful, never buying anything too fancy, thinking it’s just $20. But then I was doing that like 50 times a week.”

    These numbers would increase in times of stress; Erin escaped into dot com bazaars to shop herself numb.

    In order to cover her increasingly reckless purchasing, Erin began manipulating the household budget, often lying to her husband of 15 years about where the money was being channeled. But then one month the debt had bloated to the point where she could no longer hide it.

    Her household allowance of $1,500 clocked in closer to $5,000.

    “The thing is, we don’t do credit card debt,” she told me. “My husband has had to bail me out a couple of times. The only time he really gets mad at me is about the shopping problem and how it’s preventing us from doing things like going on vacations or saving for retirement.”

    Inevitably our spouses are affected by our compulsive behaviors, even after we’ve gotten clean and sober.

    Tom, 41 and with 2 years clean, kept his newfound gambling habit to himself. “If my wife ever knew what’s really been going on, she’d be pretty surprised,” he said of his finances. “Yeah, there’d be problems.”

    Not long after getting the opioids out of his system, Tom found that an old habit had come back with a vengeance. He’d been a light gambler since his 20’s, and now his betting activity suddenly increased by as much as 500%.

    “Well I had all this extra cash because I wasn’t spending it on the pills. Near the end of my using I’d been dishing out around $1,600 a week.”

    To play it safe, so to speak, Tom worked out a deal with his bookie, recruiting new bets for a cut of those winnings. The idea was that he would bet only with the money he made from this arrangement, thus flipping it. “So I wasn’t spending ‘our’ money, my family’s, which was perfect.”

    Perfect, that is, as long as those bets he helped set up won – and he didn’t get carried away by the excitement of the game.

    “Football is my thing,” he said with excitement. “Nothing beats the feeling of your team being ahead. And when you have money down on it, you’re a part of that team. So wherever I am and a game is going on, I’m in it all the way!”

    Here was Tom’s Amazon smile. His cigarette and coffee. That thrilling little charge to help him through the day.

    Tom was consumed.

    “Then there was one bad week where everyone lost – so when it came time to cover my bets, there was just nothing there. I had no choice but to borrow from the family account.”

    He’d done it before, always replacing any withdrawals before his wife could catch on. “Only this happened during the same week our property taxes were due – and we were going to be short $3,000.”

    Panicked and humiliated, Tom confided in a cousin who he knew would be able to cover the loan. “But that was too close,” he told me, “and that’s when I quit. The day after that I asked (my therapist) for help.”

    At the time, Tom was still taking part in a biweekly group and one-on-one counseling for the opioid abuse. He realized that his best bet was to start treating the gambling addiction as seriously as his substance use disorder.

    “Very rarely, if ever, have I seen anyone come in with just one significant disorder going on,” said Christy Waters, MD, of Bright Heart Health in San Francisco. Waters’ specialties are addiction psychiatry and addiction medicine, and she is in recovery herself. “For a long time there was this sort of romanticizing of recovery. Addicts thought and were told that if they could just stop using, all would be well, not understanding that the drugs were really just a small part of what was really going on.”

    “Our liquor was just a symptom,” echoes the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. The Big Book explains that the substance that we thought was the root of our problem was, in fact, just an indication of that problem.

    “A lot of patients come in just hanging on by their fingernails,” Waters continued. “They’ve stopped using and they’re depressed or they’re anxious or they’re just plain miserable. And now they’re acting all this out in completely new ways. Maybe they’re smoking a lot, or overeating, or whatever it takes to get that ‘lift.’ At first they might think, ‘Look, at least I’m not doing heroin, so what’s the big deal?’ But then they see how their quality of life is suffering. And that’s not the promise of recovery, is it? The promise is that your life will get better.”

    AA and other 12-step programs’ suggested solution is for us to “launch out on a course of vigorous action” to face and exorcise “the things in ourselves which had been blocking us.” In other words, take the steps. The hope is that after all of our personal inventories and amends and prayers, we are released from the torment that used to compel us to drink or use; we become free of the behavior once and for all.

    This is a solution in Dr. Waters’ world as well. But it’s not the only one.

    “We meet so many people in recovery who wind up with a dual diagnosis. They’ve been living with a disorder for years, sometimes their whole lives, but it remained undiagnosed beneath the substance abuse,” said Waters. “Maybe they have post-traumatic stress. Or ADHD. Then finally in treatment they realize, ‘Oh my God, all this time I’ve been self-medicating?’”

    Or shopping themselves into smothering debt?

    Or gambling away their marriage and home?

    Was she saying that just as our using was a symptom of a larger issue, the same can hold true for these “replacement” behaviors?

    “Absolutely,” Waters confirmed. “It’s important to always approach the disease of addiction with a much bigger lens. For instance, we now know that 80% of women who abuse substances also struggle with a mood disorder – and that’s even before the first ‘fix’.”

    Intrigued, I brought up the question with Erin during our follow up interview. I knew she had worked the steps of NA with great success, so much so that she was now applying a 12-step program to her shopping problem. But was therapy a part of her solution? Could the shopping possibly be linked to something else? 

    “That’s funny you should ask that,” Erin said. “I actually made an appointment with a therapist not too long ago. I’m going in later today.”

    A conflict between Erin and her son had come to a head and triggered the compulsive behavior; Erin’s online shopping increased exponentially once again in response.

    “I used to have problems with PTSD,” she confessed, “and I think this stuff with (my son) might’ve stirred that back up.”

    For Tom’s gambling habit, however, the solution, or at least the path leading to it, was not so clear. By the time I followed up with him he had stopped searching for help altogether. Though his check-ins with the rehab center continued, his therapeutic work focused only on his recovery from opioid addiction. He was back to placing bets weekly.

    “I quit for two or three weeks,” he said, “handling just the bookings. I was able to look at where I went wrong – and now I know the warning signs. As long as I don’t use my own money, I’m okay. And as long as I keep the whole thing as entertainment there’s not a problem.”

    But surely there had to be other activities Tom enjoyed, things he liked to do that weren’t as risky?

    “Not once you know the rush you can get from gambling,” he said. “And the pills are out of the picture for good, so this is sort of all I have left.” 

    As for me and my own vices, the cigarettes and coffee and busy-work in between, I imagine the doctor will read me the riot act on Monday morning. I have an appointment to get this little hernia checked out and when he inquires about my lifestyle, I plan on telling it to him straight. For over 20 years I was trapped in the grip of drug addiction and I thought I was in the clear once I was released. But as my eyes open wider, I see the true nature of this beast; I still have some shackles holding me captive.

    But I think I just found the keys.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • My Journey from AA to NA, with Stops Along the Way

    My Journey from AA to NA, with Stops Along the Way

    While making my own transition from one fellowship to another, I interviewed people with experience in both AA and NA to find out what’s working for them, and what’s not.

    For a long time, I considered myself an alcoholic with drug addict tendencies. This is why, for the most part, I was a member of AA exclusively for the first six years of my sobriety. Besides, where I lived in Connecticut at the time, Narcotics Anonymous meetings were too far and few in between – as is often the case in more rural areas of the country.

    Also, while in AA I’d heard things about that other fellowship.

    Yes, I was fine right where I was, thank you very much. Like my mother and my uncles and my grandfather before me, AA would remain my easier, softer way til death do us part.

    And then I relapsed: a year and a half bender in which my disease had progressed to include cocaine and prescription pills and after which I was detoxing from alcohol and benzos.

    That’s when the rooms of recovery turned strangely uncomfortable.

    I can’t say it was because I was no longer welcome. No, my mutual friends of Bill were there with open arms when I came back from the relapse… As long as I didn’t share openly about the drug problem.

    “I came to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” an old-timer quickly informed me, “because this is where I come to hear about alcohol – not pills!”

    This got me to thinking. (Not about the chapter in AA’s Big Book entitled Acceptance Was the Answer in which an alcoholic physician describes in painstaking detail his struggles with prescription pills. No, why would I think of that? The old-timer certainly wasn’t.) 

    No, I was thinking I ought to give Narcotics Anonymous a try for a while. Not only would I be able to share more candidly about my relapse but I’d have some time to work through the little resentment I’d suddenly copped against AA and its old timers.

    So, I began asking around. I knew the best way to transition between fellowships was to look to the rooms themselves for advice and guidance. I found four people in recovery, each of them knowledgeable about both AA and NA, who were willing to share their experience not only with me – but with you as well.

    About the Personalities:

    “I had been in AA for 11 years and just kept relapsing,” recalled Christy, 45, from the San Francisco Bay Area. Hers was a vicious cycle of diet pills and wine, always using one to offset the other. “I was sure that people were sick of hearing me talk about how I just couldn’t get it. Well I was sick of talking about it, anyway, at least to the same people again and again. It was embarrassing.”

     Taking the advice of her husband – a former amphetamine addict of 15 years – Christy decided to give NA a try.

    The kinship she felt was immediate, not only because she felt able to share more freely in a room full of new faces, but also because “NA’s a little bit ‘roughie-toughie’ and I liked that. NA had more people with missing teeth,” she joked. “There were so many people just totally out of their minds – exactly like me – and everyone seemed ok with it.”

    Three years later, Christy’s bond with NA is stronger than ever.

    “I find myself spiritually connected to that craziness,” she said. “There’s stories of abuse, there’s sharing about the prison time. It helps keep my recovery feel fresh. NA reminds me of how bad it can get out there.”

    For Johnny L., 39, from New England, the NA group in his area had a more adverse effect.

    “Well there I was, a newly clean and sober gay white man in a heavily black, heterosexual, inner city NA meeting,” he laughed. “I really gave it a shot, too, but after about three or four meetings I still wasn’t relating at all.”

    Thankfully Johnny found himself having to move for work to a more rural area within that first year of recovery and along with the change of geography came a new atmosphere within his meetings. Though he considered himself dually addicted (meth and drinking), Johnny ultimately settled into the rooms of AA, finding the comfort of a home group he’s still part of to this day.

    Back in California, Trey S., a 22-year-old addict, compared the members of fellowships like this: “NA is definitely more of a mixed crowd. There’s a lot of diversity, incorporating more experiences with much heavier drugs, and I think there could be stronger personalities in the rooms because of that. This means a lot more opportunities for conflict.”

    As is so often the case with young people with substance use disorders, Trey was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous through a rehabilitation center at the age of 16. He eventually gravitated towards NA, identifying more strongly with those rooms, particularly young people’s meetings.

    “At the time AA felt more rigorous and less free-flowing. And I think in general NA attracts a younger recovery crowd, which makes sense because of the pill problem these days. I mean, I was on Adderall at 5 years old and I think that’s fairly common for my generation.”

    As for the old-timers, like Red from the West Coast who has been a member of AA for over three decades, it’s often their job to remind us of that tried-and-true adage, principles before personalities, regardless of the fellowship.

    “Whether it’s AA or NA, as long as you’re living your life according to a program of spiritual principles you’ll do okay,” he told me. “It doesn’t matter what gets you into the rooms, but what you do with yourself once you get here.”

    About the Literature

    Of course, changing recovery programs also means a change in the accompanying literature. After six years of study groups, sponsor assignments, and constant references to the Big Book, I had developed a deep appreciation for AA’s “bible” and was hesitant about NA’s basic text as well as the rest of the program’s literary canon. 

    “So many people claim that all the answers are in the Big Book,” said Christy. “But Living Clean – it seems like every time I pick it up, whatever I read feels like it was written just for me.”

    Living Clean is NA’s version of AA’s book, Living Sober, and both address the nitty gritty of living in recovery. Like instruction manuals for the soul and mind of an addict, both publications offer insights on topics such as relationships, aging, failure, and isolation.

    I quickly learned that my AA books had NA counterparts that were just as valuable and respected. 

    According to Trey, “Even though AA’s literature has more program history, it has more character. It actually feels more playful to me – while NA’s stuff strikes me as much more serious.”

    But when Trey does his step work, he combines the books of both fellowships, studying all the information each program has to offer. “They each bring their own material to the table and all of it is important.”

    “But the NA basic text is so much more international,” Johnny told me. “It feels all-inclusive. Through it I get an idea of what it’s like to be an addict in Iran, in Africa, all around the world. It makes the Big Book feel very old. Like an older language.”

    When it comes to step work, Johnny also works with the writings of both fellowships, first reading what the Big Book and Twelve and Twelve lay out and then hitting the NA’s Step Working Guide afterwards.

    This workbook is the most significant difference in program offerings.

    “That thing makes you feel like you’re in a Master Class for sobriety,” Johnny claimed. “It challenges you to think things through more deeply.”

    Finding that the Guide has become such a big part of his recovery, Johnny has begun searching for a new AA sponsor who would be willing to integrate the book and its myriad of intensely provoking questions into his program; a sort of AA/NA fusion.

    Christy felt just as strongly about the Step Working Guide:

    “Going through it reminds me of the kind of effort I put into my recovery at the very beginning,” she said. “My self-awareness is much higher because of it. And I’m sure my recovery is evolving more strongly as well.”

    Like Johnny, Christy found that mixing and matching materials gave her a more balanced and satisfying program. In fact, while Christy’s primary fellowship was NA, she continued to go to one weekly AA meeting.

    As for Johnny, his six meetings a week were equally split between AA and NA (Crystal Meth Anonymous, more specifically).

    Trey was the purist of those I’d talked to, attending only NA meetings.

    At this point in the conversations, I felt ready to start altering my own meeting schedule. Thoroughly advised on what to expect, I was excited to head over to NA and start sharing from the heart again.

    But first I would have to learn how to talk.

    About the Language

    “We are presented with a dilemma; when NA members identify themselves as addicts and alcoholics or talk about living clean and sober, the clarity of the NA message is blurred.”

    From NA’s Clarity Statement, read out loud at a meeting’s start. The gist of the announcement, from what I could gather, was that I was to no longer call myself an alcoholic because: “Our identification as addicts is all-inclusive.”  

    And all I could think was, Here I go again.

    “I was stopped mid-sentence at an NA meeting when I tried talking about the Promises,” said Johnny, referring to AA’s 9th step list of spiritual and material rewards. “I was disappointed in that. It was embarrassing and awkward. I wound up never going back to that particular meeting.”

    Of course, censorship within the rooms goes both ways:

    “I once saw someone completely shut down in AA when he mentioned his struggle with crystal meth,” Trey told me. “The chairperson interrupted him, saying, ‘Sorry, we don’t talk about that here.’”

    That chairperson had been acting in accordance with the Singleness of Purpose, AA’s version of the Clarity Statement: “We ask that when discussing our problems, we confine ourselves to those problems as they relate to alcohol and alcoholism.” Remember the scolding I’d received from the old-timer when talking about the pills?

    “In my first year of sobriety I was going to all the A’s – AA, NA, CA (Cocaine Anonymous),” joked old-timer Red. “I found out real quick that I couldn’t say this or I couldn’t say that, depending on where I went. In NA I couldn’t claim I was an alcoholic, and vice versa in AA and on and on and on. I don’t know about you but in the beginning I just wanted to say what I needed to say in order to get better!”

    Trey agreed. “Sometimes you can feel negativity in the air when the Clarity Statement is read. I worry it stops people from speaking from the heart. I mean, as long as they’re sharing about appropriate behaviors and it’s coming from a loving and caring place, that’s great.”

    About Recovery

    As I compiled all my notes, the quotes and information, I was relieved to find an absence of what I’d feared most. Nowhere in my talks with these four fellow people in recovery did I find any negativity or slander from one fellowship against the other.

    “I’ve always been aware of the contention between AA and NA,” Johnny had told me, “but I’ve been lucky to stay out of it. The groups I go to are small and intimate and I don’t have to hide whatever I may be struggling with, alcohol or drugs. They’re very supportive regardless.”

    Christy agrees: “I can say that both AA and NA are responsible for saving my life and I gladly still participate in both.”

    With Trey, one of the things he’d always admired most about NA is how the program openly acknowledged its roots. “Right on the first page of the introduction of the basic text, Narcotics Anonymous expresses gratitude towards AA for‘showing us the way to a new life.’”

    Yes, by the end of my inquiries it was clear that the fellowships of AA and NA can work together well, with a combined effort and goal of unity, service, and recovery.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    About 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil.

    For the second time in my life I was saying goodbye to my mother and moving to California, and this could have been a very sentimental moment if it we hadn’t found it so damn funny. With all of my worldly possessions packed up into two great Jenga towers of luggage, Mom and I were doing our best to control the fits of laughter while maneuvering these teetering carts of death toward the terminal. It was the irony that had finally gotten to us. There we were—wrestling with this stuff that could at any second escape our control and come toppling down on top of us—when for the past two months we had been living through a very similar scenario; but one that had been nowhere near as funny.

    And one where my mother’s life had been quite seriously at risk.

    My mom suffers from a clinical hoarding disorder. According to a recent survey by the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), about 5% of our entire planet’s population struggles with this condition typically characterized by the cluttering of a home with personal possessions to an often debilitating degree. A type of anxiety disorder, hoarding is still working its way into the medical books, but thanks to a steady stream of reality TV shows featuring the worst case scenarios of the condition, social awareness of hoarding has reached an all-time high.

    These were the shows that I YouTubed as I tried to better gauge the house that I had walked in on during a surprise visit to Mom’s. Compared to the episodes I watched, my mother and her hoard weren’t ready for primetime just yet—though at the rate she was going, next season was quickly becoming a strong possibility.

    Mom had turned her two bedroom, single level ranch style house of around 1,400 square feet into a storage unit, filling it up with everything from groceries on clearance to thrift store finds too good to let go. As toys, crafts, books, tools, plants, snacks, clothes, shoes, bags and boxes slowly rose to the ceiling, my mother’s home began to look like the bottom of an hourglass, only the sand was her stuff—and once filled up there’d be no easy reset.

    Once her cover was blown, so to speak, she felt the time had come to not only admit she had a serious problem but to finally accept some help dealing with it. And as fate would have it, Mom’s epiphany just happened to coincide with a major shift in my own life. After 15 years of working through my own addiction (drugs and alcohol) I was moving back to California, clean and sober. But, since there was a two-month gap between the lapse of my lease and the end of my teaching year, I just happened to need a place to live.

    So we came up with a plan.

    I would spend those final two months living at Mom’s house, helping her get the clutter under control. At the same time, we would go scouting for some professional help, agreeing that therapy to address the hoarding was in Mom’s best interest. We had a plan: by the time I left Connecticut, Mom would have regained a sturdy foothold on the road to recovery and I could move away, assured that I had done my part in helping.

    And it worked, too. Until it didn’t.

    In that previously mentioned survey by NAMI, about 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil, though the toilet wasn’t too tough to get to. A garage sale seemed like the perfect solution for opening up some much needed space. Plus, instead of just throwing things out (and to be fair, a lot of Mom’s stuff did have some value) this would give my mother and me an opportunity to really start working together as a team, as opposed to simply strangling one another—which started to have its own appeal once we realized what we were up against.

    Hoarding is a disease based very much on feelings. Boston University Dean and Professor Gail Steketee LCSW, MSW, PhD, who has been studying the condition since the mid-1990’s concluded that “Hoarding may induce feelings of safety and security and may reinforce identity.”

    In other words, Mom’s things helped her feel safe.

    Her stuff was in many ways who she was.

    So emotions began to run high as we debated on what in the house could be sold. At first we were able to work for just a few hours before Mom had to quit, visibly shaken, promising better endurance for the next attempt. Sometimes a span of days would pass where no progress was made at all. Because my mother had the final say on every item’s fate, during these times of indecision there was little more for me to do than just sort through the piles. This part of the process was most challenging for me.

    Finding myself truly face to face with my mother’s disorder, I often spiraled into great bouts of anger and deep depression. Getting lost in the work for hours, I would start dissecting a section of the hoard, piece by frustrating piece, trying to make sense of it. It was during these times that I began to realize my mother was in the grips of a very serious and complex mental illness.

    Hoarding has been listed as a symptom of OCD for years. As defined by the Mayo Clinic, people who have obsessive compulsive disorder experience unwanted thoughts that incline them to perform an action repetitively—usually outside of their control—in hopes of alleviating stress, when in actuality the behavior is only compounding the discomfort.

    Did this explain the bags upon bags of clearance items and price-reduced canned goods? The gathered pile of expired and stale holiday candy? The drawers of zip ties, rubber bands and Tupperware lids. That infuriating metropolis of 7 Eleven cups always collapsing off the microwave. The balls of yarn, rolls of fabric, reams of paper, baskets of shoes. Bed sheets, power cords, energy drinks, sun catchers. Nesting shelves, cleaning fluids, shampoos and conditioners. Paper plates, napkins, condiments—bags of them. If I was disturbed while sorting them, I had to imagine what it must’ve felt like to always need more of them.

    But what I really needed was to seek out that professional help Mom had agreed to from the beginning. In addition to the increasingly alarming nature of the collected stuff, according to a report by Compulsive-Hoarding.com, “A hoarder’s problem will not be solved by someone else throwing away or organizing their possessions.”

    Another invaluable online resource, HoardingCleanup.Com, offered an impressive roster of psychiatrists and psychologists dealing specifically with the disorder. Fortunately, we found a local doctor with whom Mom felt comfortable with right off the bat.

    Then, suddenly, positive results were coming in from every front.

    Once the garage sales got started, they quickly gained momentum and we were setting up the driveway with Mom’s wares every Friday through Sunday. So by the time my departure date rolled around we had become old pros—and one hell of a team. There was nothing at the airport but sincere gratitude and a shared sense of accomplishment. We had done it! We’d beaten the monkey off of Mom’s back, shoved it in a box and sold it in front of the house for a dollar.

    No, fifty cents!

    Seventy-five!

    Okay, seventy-five, sold!

    Over the following months, as I worked on getting my own home together, I would check in with Mom to see how things were coming along. She continued with the garage sales until the weather no longer agreed. The therapy continued unabated. Her psychiatrist was big on baby steps, discouraging Mom from taking on too much at once. Instead, the piles were shrinking through consistency and perseverance, my mother showing him photos from week to week. Also, my father was visiting the house regularly so he was able to give me a report every now and again. 

    According to an article in Psychology Today, “willful ignorance” occurs when a person knows the truth, or at least fears it, but chooses to ignore it altogether. Turning a blind eye was an especially easy behavior for me to indulge in from 3,000 miles away, so I was flabbergasted when one night my father called and told me that Mom’s house had reverted to its previous state of congested disarray and that her hoarding was back with a vengeance.

    What an awful moment of deja vu. Were we really right back to where we had started, just like that?

    Though my 12-step meetings and sponsor helped calmed me down with some much needed perspective, for the first time in recovery I found myself resenting the solution that was being offered—which was, as always, acceptance. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” blah blah blah.

    No.

    I refused to accept it. I would not sit idly by while my mother sat on the one spot she had left on her sofa, watching a TV she had to crane her neck around piles of junk to see—the same piles that were slowly but surely burying her alive. Somebody had to take charge of this mess. Who was responsible? I blamed her, her doctor, my father, myself. I blamed thrift stores, dollar stores, America, God.

    What went wrong? How could Mom go back to hoarding after such encouraging progress? This had been the strongest attempt at complete recovery from her disorder so far.

    There was a night I called Mom up ranting and raving, horrendously demanding to know exactly what was the problem—and her timid response to me, plain and simple was:

    “It’s hard.”

    That was a mouthful. And it’s actually the one thing all the research and professionals in the field agree on. Recovery from hoarding is incredibly difficult. The statistics tell us it’s downright unlikely. A study conducted by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on patients with various forms of OCD, including hoarding, found that after five years only 9.5% of hoarders achieved and maintained full recovery from their condition.

    But then this begs the bigger issue—and it’s where my eyes opened.

    When we’re looking at recovery from hoarding, are we also looking at recovery from OCD? This experience showed me that my mother isn’t just struggling against shopping and filling her house up with stuff—but she’s battling an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unlike my substance abuse where complete abstinence from drugs and alcohol is the solution (though of course there’s lots more to it), my mother is dealing with a behavioral disorder. And when it comes to long lasting recovery, therapy continues to be the key.

    Compulsive-Hoarding.com told me that if a hoarder’s space is just cleaned out, “The clinical compulsive hoarder will simply re-hoard even faster and fill up their home again, often within a few months.” However, that NAMI survey showed that as much as 70% of hoarders responded positively to cognitive therapy.

    So Mom is on the right track.

    It’s just that the odds are not in her favor.

    But so far she’s beaten a lot of those odds, hasn’t she? My mother’s already admitted to having a problem when NAMI reports that only about 15% of all hoarders do so. And she’s in therapy where her recovery has the highest likelihood of success. How many attempts will it take before Mom finds long term recovery? Nobody knows.

    All I know is that recovery from hoarding seems to be an inside job and that’s the stuff that really needs to be worked through. Once I accepted that about my mother and her hoarding condition I knew the best thing to do was leave that work to her.

    Find info about hoarding here:

    https://namimass.org/hoarding-and-ocd-stats-characteristics-causes-treatment-and-resources

    View the original article at thefix.com