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  • Recovery Myths That Can Hurt You

    Recovery Myths That Can Hurt You

    I could be saying how well I was doing, while the psychic megaphone over my head screamed, “Can’t you see how lonely I am?” Not surprisingly, I wasn’t drawing healthy people into my world.

    When the words “feelings aren’t facts” first pierced my brain, I was hooked. My baseline was misery, so it was a huge relief to believe I was lying to myself. Over the years, I repeated this gospel, too. Until I saw it for what it was—a form of emotional abuse.

    I get it. Many of us have a tendency to dramatize that we’re unaware of, largely because our addiction made life a fuckshow. But our lives continue even after we put our substances down, and the show rolls on. When my sober boyfriend of five years died, I was 24. And five years clean. The tragedy was real.

    In truth, I’d barely learned to identify my feelings. My therapist had finally resorted to pulling out a chart with stick figure faces, each labeled with an emotion. “Pick one,” she encouraged. I needed that chart for a long time. When I tried to express myself in the real world, however, I had a very different experience. 

    “Don’t believe your feelings,” I was cheerily told as I moped around the rooms. But my emotions were the only thing that seemed solid. Even if I wasn’t great at describing them, I experienced the world through my senses. My mindscape was a constant stream of love and hate, desire and abstinence, hunger and disgust.

    I tried to act the part, fake it till I could make it past this sadness, but my actual sentiments came out despite these efforts. I sensed that I was making the people around me uncomfortable. Left alone, my mind went wild. This grieving is going on too long. He was only your boyfriend. No one will ever love you like that again.

    Trying to change my mind about how I felt wasn’t the same as changing my feelings. Yet ignoring my feelings and listening to my supposedly rational mind felt equally horrible. The only thing it did help me succeed at was questioning my every move. I must be doing this wrong, I’d think, vowing to hide better.

    The Psychic Megaphone

    There was just one problem with suppressing the truth—it didn’t work. I didn’t merely sense I was repelling people, I was. I could be saying how well I was doing, while the psychic megaphone over my head screamed, “Can’t you see how lonely I am?” Not surprisingly, I wasn’t drawing healthy people into my world. This had the added bonus of giving me something new and shiny to mull over. These people are messed up!

    My feelings, I now know, were never the issue. It was the stories I told about them that caused the problem, a habit that, like any addiction, got stronger every time I did it. I turned my unworthiness into legend.

    I was scared, too, that I’d be overwhelmed by my emotions. In some sense, I was right to be afraid. Overwhelm reeks of powerlessness, and when I’m powerless, I’m tempted to act out—smoke, spend, eat, fuck, drink.

    I had to learn to grant a healthy to respect my feelings, to pay attention to them without reacting. This is also known as self-soothing, which many people are taught, or learn. But I don’t know of any addicts who sober up with this ability intact. I didn’t get anywhere near it for a decade in sobriety. I’m slow.

    The light at the end of the tunnel is this: when we stop believing our feelings, they lose their power to stop us in our tracks.

    But How Is It Emotional Abuse?

    Telling a person not to believe their feelings is the same as saying they shouldn’t trust themselves. It’s a recipe for slavish dependence. Who are we suggesting that person trust? Why, God of course! And how do we connect with God? Through the steps. The steps lead toward accountability in our lives, and also, prayer and meditation. What happens when that reflection leads back to our emotional lives and we disbelieve ourselves? Some of us develop co-dependent relationships with sponsors, or take hostages in the form of sexual partners. In my case, I relapsed.

    I was desperate to be better already, but I was stuck in disavowing my sorrow. That loop gave me no way to address my grief. I had to believe in something, so I created stories that I could believe, stories that had little to do with the emotions that created them. When telling myself I was garbage got boring, I’d romanticize my addiction instead.

    Psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach says that when we disconnect from the entirety of our experience this way, we put ourselves into a trance that keeps us from living fully. This concept of an “unlived life” feels more relevant than the idea that I can’t know happiness if I don’t know sadness, because it points to a solution.

    Now, 22 years away from that relapse, I’d say that suggesting feelings aren’t facts is contrary to the core of 12-step recovery—the freedom to choose a Higher Power. The formula is spiritual. The steps are designed to awaken spirituality within us. If denouncing our needs and desires as liars is part of the program, then this places a condition on our spiritual awakening. And it’s not a condition I’m willing to accept. My spiritual life has to be big enough to encompass the full spectrum of who I am. I’m not interested in “growing up” to be without feelings, good or bad.

    I’ve spoken about this with friends in long-term recovery. “I don’t get it,” one woman said, unable to wrap her mind around the idea that her feelings were legitimate, even after more than 20 years of sobriety.

    I explained it was like being in traffic, and getting angry when someone cuts you off. “I want to run that car off the road!” I might think. It’s true, in the moment I was mad. But my thoughts told a lie. I have zero desire to use my car as a weapon. Am I hair-trigger rage-y in traffic? Maybe something else is going on. Or maybe I was just startled. Our minds exist to find danger, and so tend to be negative.

    The first thing I had to learn to do—rather than criticize myself for being angry, which leads to identifying with the idea that I’m an angry person—was to find comfort. In the car I can put my hand on my chest and remind myself everything is ok.

    Another person commented, “Facts don’t change. Feelings do!”

    I understood where she was coming from, that feelings are malleable. But that doesn’t mean I should deny their reality. Facts have been known to evolve, too. The surest way for an emotion to become fixed is by gaslighting myself. Then my thoughts get murky, and it’s hard not to identify with the thinking. Like with the car example, if I don’t allow myself to see my anger for what it is—mortal fear, or perhaps anger at my boss—I get trapped in, “There’s my anger. I am such an angry person.”

    In fact, I count on my changing emotions—it’s the exact freedom I was seeking in a bottle. By allowing my emotions to settle, I can master the thoughts that arise. If I don’t, who’s running the show? The boyfriend who rejected me? The kids who called me Stinky? My mom?

    When René Descartes made his famous declaration, he was looking for an irrefutable statement. He believed if he could doubt his existence, that was proof of it. But what’s doubt if not a feeling? My thoughts are another matter: my best thinking got me into rehab. I think, therefore I am a liar.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How to Stay Sober at Burning Man and Have the Best Burn of Your Life

    How to Stay Sober at Burning Man and Have the Best Burn of Your Life

    I mean, really, you’re never going to be at a meeting in the “default world” sitting between a rainbow unicorn and a naked old guy.

    Have you ever been to Burning Man, that strange, magical world where anything is possible? Where strangers become friends in under an hour? Where food, water, gifts, and substances are shared freely through the “gifting economy,” and the parties rage 24/7 for eight days straight? If so, maybe we’ve shared some common experiences on “the playa.” Have you ever woken up in a pile of dust, impossibly far away from your own camp, trying to piece together the events that led you to your blackout dust pile? Have you ever taken LSD so many nights in a row it actually stopped working? Have you come into Black Rock City with the best intentions of practicing yoga and meditating every day, only to fail once you got three PBRs deep by 10am? Have you booked it out of Burning Man to the nearest Motel 6 like a bat out of hell, driving your car feeling like it’s the most challenging video game you’ve ever played? Has coming down and getting “back to normal” after the burn felt like a torturously long, horrible process? Have you left the playa feeling like you had an incredible time but kind of wishing you could remember more of it? Me too.

    If you’ve only heard stories or seen news reports about Burning Man, the infamous “playa” is usually depicted as nothing but a mecca for party drugs, weird sex, apocalyptic art, and daytime debauchery. It’s the last place on earth a recovering alcoholic could willingly go to and stay sober. In actuality, behind all the psychedelic media-portrayed madness and in the midst of the drug-fueled frenzy, there exists a whole community of sober “Burners” who do the seemingly unfathomable. We come to this crazy place every year and let our freak flags fly, share our art and our experiences, dance until dawn, make new connections, survive in this thrilling temporary society, love it and hate it, and do it all SOBER.

    My first two burns were driven by my love for alcohol and drugs, so my Burning Man experiences reflected that. My third burn, however, came almost one year after some shit hit the fan in my life, forcing me into the reluctant journey of recovery. Despite my hesitant beginning, by the time I hit the one year sobriety mark and took off to Burning Man, I was fully in love with my new sober, sane (“saner” than I had been before but still going to Burning Man so not too sane, obviously) state of mind and my ability to be fully present and remember the adventures I was having. Thus, my third burn, which I experienced as a sober woman in recovery, while very different from my first two years on the playa, was actually the best Burning Man experience I’ve had yet! Here’s why it was so great and why I can’t wait to go back to Black Rock City—still sober—this year.

    There are endless opportunities to explore in Black Rock City: classes, workshops, lectures, parties, music, art tours, ultramarathons, you name it. When you get to Burning Man, you get a book that’s a couple hundred pages long of all the events and activities available. Before I got sober I would look through this book in wonderment, circling things and making grand plans for all the workshops I would attend and everything I would learn. In reality though, I would usually get distracted by a Blood Mary oasis on the way to whatever wellness-oriented activity I was trying to find. The self-improvement plan would end there.

    Nowadays, I can actually make it to a few of these events I pick out of the wonderful guidebook, because I have the willpower and determination to get to where I am going without “free vodka FOMO” stopping me. Well, sometimes I’ll still stop for a virgin Bloody Mary bar experience to giggle at and feel superior to all the raging hangovers around me. I’ve gotta let the misery of others remind me why I’m sober occasionally. Most of the time, I can make it to my intended destination. Having my activity options limited because of my sobriety is actually very helpful in that it forces me to focus my attention on a narrower but still huge range of the healthy “woo woo” non-booze-oriented options.

    I’m so grateful my sobriety allows me to participate in Burning Man more fully than I was ever able to when I was fucked up. Today I get to make real connections with fellow burners, give something back, and freely express myself, sober, along with all the best of Black Rock City.

    Seven tips for how to actually stay sober at Burning Man:

    1. Go to meetings, even if you don’t regularly attend them in the “default world.” Burning Man meetings are awesome, and you can even get your own Burning Man token for your 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on sober burns. Anonymous Village is the biggest sober camp and is located at 5:30 & G, with multiple “Any-A” meetings for anyone in recovery from any addiction every day. Other sober camps—Camp Run Free and Camp Stella—also offer daily open meetings. I mean, really, you’re never going to be at a meeting in the default world sitting between a rainbow unicorn and a naked old guy.
    2. Practice good self-care and rock your boundaries. If you don’t wanna stay up all night every night, then you don’t have to! If you don’t want to be a dirty, sleep-deprived dustball all week, you don’t have to be! Go find those life-saving nail salons or hair-washing stations when you feel the need for some real TLC. And if you’re an introvert like me, don’t be afraid to lie in your tent and read a book or nap when you need some down time to recharge your batteries. Sleep is great, and can really help you enjoy your burn more. If you’re not enjoying a party or activity or person, then politely excuse yourself and go find something else, or go home. The week stretches long when you’re sober, especially if you don’t take care of yourself.
    3. Find other sober burners! They are out there. Last year one of my best friends on the playa was four months pregnant, so we both had good reasons to have lots of sober fun together and practice lots of self-care.
    4. Choose one sober activity to structure your day around, then go from there. That overwhelming little booklet of activities can help you find a mind-blowingingly awesome good time that’s not caused by mind-altering substances. So next time you find yourself jonesing for an adventure, just page through your book and choose between “Naked Fire Spinning for Complete Beginners,” “Make Your Own Tutu and Pasties Party,” watching Tuesday’s Ultramarathoners run dusty laps around the city, an appointment with a Monkey Psychiatrist, or a classical orchestra concert with homemade ice cream at an art piece in deep playa. Get excited about that one sober activity and all the awesome people you will meet, then let the rest of your day flow from there.
    5. Embrace the daytime activities and workshops that you were too hungover to enjoy in the past.  Before I got sober, I would miss out on so much of the art and yoga and educational offerings on the playa because I would start every day with those morning Bloody Marys and beers. My FOMO and addiction would take over and not let me say no to a drink or a drug. Now with those options off the table, I have some of the most fun riding my bike around the playa in the early morning while most other people are still sleeping off the party or just trudging home. Last year I made it to an aerial silks class, two Shamanic breathwork sessions, multiple yoga classes, and a few guided meditations. Thanks to all these workouts and personal development activities, I left the burn actually feeling more physically and mentally fit then when I got there.
    6. Be of service. Be available to be of service to other burners. Participate in the gifting economy by bringing something to share, no matter how small. It could be fruit, coffee, cookies, hula hoops or Chapstick to give away. Or you could teach something, or set up a table of art supplies for passersby to stop and get creative. I’ve found that most burners really appreciate heartfelt, healthy offerings, because they’re rare in a popup city crowded with bars and clubs. You can also take on a temporary sponsee from one of the many meetings in the city.
    7. Enjoy being fully present.  Whatever happens on the playa, you get to notice it all, feel it all, and remember it all. Take the bad with the good and always look for opportunities to be of service. Remember, sobriety is a gift that lets us go anywhere and do anything! So enjoy it!

    Burning Man is from August 26-September 3. More info here about experiencing the playa clean and sober.

    2016 Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, USA

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Microaggressions: How Subconscious Biases Affect Recovery

    Microaggressions: How Subconscious Biases Affect Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • No Vacation from Recovery: A Packing List

    No Vacation from Recovery: A Packing List

    Recovery cannot be left to chance but requires planning, even—and maybe especially—on vacation with its temptations: tropical drinks, laissez-faire schedule, swim-up bars, and late nights.

    For a long time, when my bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and eating disorder were out of control, I believed that the geographic cure, specifically travel, was the antidote to all my ills, as if I could take a vacation from addiction and mental illness. I would pack my bags and land in some exotic port of call, a Greek island, for instance, certain that I would find happiness in the reliable sunshine, the deep blue water, the daily swims, the Mediterranean food, and in a self somehow suddenly better—better in illness and better in soul.

    “Surely, surely the less frenetic island pace will slow me down,” I would tell myself. “I’m always happy there, lying on the beach, eating ripe peaches, hiking through the olive groves, and snorkeling in search of sea urchin shells.” Within days of arrival, I’d be miserable, again, flat out suicidal, wanting to swim out into the blue sea, going and going, or wanting to hurl myself off a steep cliff. No vacation from addiction and mental illness.

    What I have learned in my eight years of stability and sobriety is that there is no vacation from recovery, either.

    My first sober vacation with my now-ex-husband was to Jamaica. Hubris testing those waters, which was a paradise for my ex with its endless supply of Red Stripe and ganja but treacherous for me, only a few months sober. My then-husband had been travelling to Negril for twenty years chasing that perfect beach buzz while I was trying to stay steady, surrounded by all these happy (seeming) vacationers, and trying to remember why I did not want to drink, why I could not ever drink again. Naively, I packed without a contingency plan, bringing just a bikini, sunscreen, and a dress. Nothing to support my recovery. Thankfully, my Higher Power had a contingency plan. 

    The first day while we were lazing in the sun, another couple, Amy and Rich*, sat in the lounge chairs beside us. We made small talk and my then-husband said, “I’m heading up to the bar for a Red Stripe. Anybody want anything?”

    “Coke for me,” I said.

    “I’ll take a coke,” Rich said. “Thanks.”

    “Me, too,” Amy said.

    My antennae attuned, I said, “Are you guys in the club, too?”

    They knew what I meant and from then on, we were inseparable. Amy and Rich, sober for decades, prepared in advance for the trip. With a little online research, they’d found a 12-step meeting off the beach in a tiny church and we went together, in flipflop solidarity. Lesson learned? Recovery cannot be left to chance but requires planning, even—and maybe especially—on vacation with its temptations: tropical drinks, laissez-faire schedule, swim-up bars, and late nights. What happens in Vegas or London or New York City or Rome or Kathmandu doesn’t stay there, but stays with you, a permanent souvenir. In recovery, we don’t get a free pass.

    I now have a packing list that I stick to for all my travels, the practical essentials and spiritual necessities that support my recovery and stability. When we leave home for the unknown, we can get lost, even with the precision of GPS, even with years of sobriety or stability, even if we are confident in our now reliable happiness.

    My Recovery Packing List:

    1. Proper Running Shoes: Know whether you are running away from your life or running towards a bigger life. I have used travel as an escape from myself, from the circumstances of my life that felt out of control (my drinking, my starving, my depression). Every time I tried to run away to some other place, I wound up desperate, without family or friends, without a support system, and hit a new bottom each time. But when I am running on stable ground towards a joyful life? A few years ago, I stayed at a yoga ashram in the Bahamas. One morning, I took a sunrise walk down the beach and felt utterly content breathing in the sun and sea, at ease with myself in my solitude. 
    1. A Map: Know where you came from, where you are now, and where you are going. On a three-week solo trip to Morocco, I meticulously planned the route between the Atlas Mountains and Marrakech and Ouarzazate and Essaouria—unfamiliar terrain without a co-pilot. But more, I needed to remember how far I had come in sobriety so that I could travel alone, out into the world, without family and friends worrying that I might hit bottom, and to know that my journey forward was now one filled with adventure rather than danger. So, I wrote myself a note that I kept inside my wallet: I was once at the bottom of the well; I am now on dry land; I am heading for the horizon!
    1. Carry On (Not Checked Luggage): That is pack light. Don’t carry the weight of the past, only your sober and stable self. What use are sandals and sneakers and snorkels and sunscreen and travel guides and a Kindle downloaded with beach reads if you don’t have room for The Big Book or a journal to record 12-step work? And what use are these essentials for continued recovery if they get lost in checked baggage? If books are too heavy, download 12-step apps and The Big Book to your phone. And why bring them along if you don’t read them? Begin the day reading whatever you might find that anchors you to recovery. Me? It is usually the poem “Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver:

    And did you get what
    you wanted from this life, even so?
    I did.
    And what did you want?
    To call myself beloved, to feel myself
    beloved on the earth. 

    1. Emergency Contacts: Not just family and friends, but sponsors, therapists, and doctors. Too expensive to call overseas? Download an app (such as WhatsApp) so it is free to call people who will remind you who you are becoming, to hear a familiar voice when you’re out there wandering the world and veer off map. In the middle of the Sahara, just off a camel ride through a sandstorm, I Skyped with my sponsor. “Hellooooo,” I said. “I’m calling from the middle of nowhere though I am somewhere beautiful and not at all lost!”
    1. Local Hangouts: Once upon a time, you might have researched bars and nightspots. Now, as I learned from Amy and Rich, I research local 12-step meetings and make it a traveling priority to attend the meetings. Fellowship exists across this world and all we have to do is walk through the door to find our tribe. And if no meeting exists? Keep our antennae attuned to those around us who aren’t ordering booze. On a recent trip to Ireland, I met a local over dinner who I noticed wasn’t drinking. I mentioned to him that I didn’t drink either. “Are you a friend of Bill W.?” he asked, then invited me to go with him to a 12-step meeting later that night. Home on the road.

    Of course, make sure your passport—proof of citizenship and of far-flung travel—is up-to-date. A passport is a dream journal: where have I been and where do I want to go? And in recovery, a passport is a record of courage (those stamps) and of hope (those blank pages) that says: I want to risk myself in the world and am ready for the journey. Necessities packed. Never alone on the road.

     *Not their real names

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Academics and Alcoholism

    Academics and Alcoholism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Alcohol, Drugs, and Rape

    Alcohol, Drugs, and Rape

    “We all know right from wrong. Yeah, maybe alcohol inhibits a person. But at the end of the evening, the little monster of shame, regret, or guilt is gonna be in your head saying ‘You really messed up, that was wrong.’”

    Alcohol and drugs are inextricably linked to a large part of rape culture. And that applies to both perpetrators and victims—before, during and after sexual assaults. Anyone who has battled alcohol or drugs knows that substances impair judgment and create an astounding lack of impulse control. Memories can be unreliable or absent entirely.

    For those of us who have limped our way out of blackouts and staggered in and out of recovery, we know the shame of finding out what we’ve done in a drunken stupor. Often, the only thing between me and a relapse are the all-too-vivid memories of wretched consequences. I’m no longer afraid to open my eyes in the mornings. When I don’t get high, I don’t awaken with a pounding headache and discover a stranger in my bed.

    Roll Red Roll is a documentary about a high school in the hard drinking, football-obsessed town of Steubenville, Ohio. The film premiered to sold-out audiences at Tribeca Film Festival 2018. It has hit numerous venues since then, including Michael Moore’s Traverse City fest. It will continue to make the rounds throughout August and into October.

    The doc is about “Jane Doe,” a 16-year-old from West Virginia. She’d attended a series of pre-season football Steubenville parties on the night of August 11, 2012. After downing too much liquor, she passed out. While unconscious, Doe was raped and carried around to more parties by several members of the football team. All evening the boys took photos and videos on their cell phones, then casually shared them on social media. Two of the youths—Trent Mays, 17, and Ma’Lik Richmond, 16—were found guilty. Mays was sentenced to two years and Richmond got only one. They did their time in a juvenile facility. Neither boy is on a sex registry due to their age. Both are now playing college football.

    After watching Roll Red Roll, I reached out to crime blogger Alexandria Goddard, who is the heroine of the Steubenville rape story. After only a brief mention of the rape in a local media outlet, Goddard found the horrifying tweets and videos that had been posted. She shared them on social media. When she posted the Instagram photo of Jane Doe being carried by the boys, it caught the attention of the local community and the social justice hacker group, Anonymous.

    In our exclusive interview for The Fix, Goddard began with a question: “Would the perpetrators have behaved that way if they weren’t drunk? No, probably not. But the alcohol in no way absolves what they did.”

    Goddard described Steubenville as “a sports town known for putting down women, talking about them like they’re meat. They show off for each other. Didn’t any of them have sisters? Mothers? The way they talked about her it was as if they forgot she was a human being. That was learned machismo.”

    Goddard added, “We all know right from wrong. Yeah, maybe alcohol inhibits a person. But at the end of the evening, the little monster of shame, regret, or guilt is gonna be in your head saying ‘You really messed up, that was wrong.’”

    Boys laughed on the video while talking about peeing on Jane Doe’s unconscious body. “But the girls in town were vicious, too,” Goddard said. “And the school staff. Coach Reno questioned whether it was even rape. You can see it in the film. He said, ‘Did they rape her? Or did they fuck her?’” (Warning: the linked video contains graphic content released by hacker group Anonymous)

    Another booze-saturated rape case, People vs Turner (aka The Stanford Rape Case), is back in the news this summer. The victim was a 22-year-old woman (referred to as “Emily Doe”). In January 2015 she attended a few parties, consumed too much liquor and passed out. The defendant was Stanford University swimmer and Olympic-hopeful, Brock Turner, 20. He too had spent the night drinking. Turner was caught humping Emily Doe’s naked body behind a dumpster.

    After he was convicted on three felonies of sexual assault with intent to rape, the not-so-Honorable Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to only six months. He was out in three. There was a public outcry that built over time. By June 2016, over one million people had signed the petition to remove Persky. In June of this year Persky was ousted from his judicial bench.

    And that’s not all…

    On July 26, The New York Times wrote about Brock Turner’s lawyer, Eric Multhaup, who had argued that Turner should never have been convicted of “intending to commit rape” because the Stanford swimmer had only sought to have outercourse with “Emily Doe.”

    I don’t know how Multhaup said that with a straight face. Twitter, of course, went wild over this outrageous claim. Thankfully, that appeal didn’t fly. The original decision still stands: Turner was guilty of assault with the intent to rape an unconscious woman. He was found guilty of using a foreign object to penetrate the victim. The definition of rape is: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” Rape with an object can be equally as traumatic as penile violation.

    Amber Tamblyn and Jodi Kantor

    Recently, I went to hear author-director-actress-activist Amber Tamblyn and reporter Jodi Kantor at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y. The two discussed Time’s Up, a legal defense fund organization Tamblyn co-founded soon after the #MeToo movement showed the world how many women are sexually harassed on the job. On TimesUpNow.com, the tagline reads: “The clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace. It’s time to do something about it.”

    Employers are changing work policies. Companies are doing away with holiday work parties because serving alcohol practically ensures that boundaries will be crossed. Unlike in old movies, we’ve learned that there’s nothing funny about a tipsy coworker patting a woman on the butt or grabbing her for a kiss.

    “Sorry I got so drunk last night” is no longer a viable excuse and companies want to avoid problems—especially lawsuits. Frequently workplace sexual harassment claims are linked to events where alcohol was available. In a recent article for The American Lawyer, reporter Meghan Tribe wrote that many big law firms are quashing boozy summer events. Behavioral health consultant Patrick Krill told Tribe, “In light of [the] #MeToo movement, an open bar at a summer associate event is potentially a tinderbox of liability.”

    Other companies are trading open bar parties with drink ticket systems. Employees are limited to two drinks to avoid the sloshed sexual harassment issues. I also find it encouraging to see so many changes in New York State laws for employers that go into effect this year, such as sexual harassment prevention policies including training for employees.

    My own #MeToo story predates my work life. At age 13, while I was high on liquor and pot, I was sexually assaulted by local kids in my hometown, Port Washington, Long Island. Consumed by shame, I spent the following 13 years on a drug and alcohol-soaked binge. At age 26, I came out of a cocaine and rum induced blackout locked in a detox ward with no memory of how I had gotten there.

    Currently, I’m working on a series about women who became addicted to drugs and alcohol after they were raped. One of the women I’ve interviewed—let’s call her “Navy Girl”—was not a drinker but, both times she was attacked, the men had been drinking. After the rapes, like so many of us, Navy Girl didn’t tell anyone. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic insomnia.

    After years of not sleeping, Navy Girl saw a doctor. He prescribed 5mg of Ambien, the lowest dose. Already in her 30s, she’d never been addicted to anything but, within six months, she was hooked. Doctor-shopping worked for years. Then, when prescriptions went digital, she couldn’t game the system anymore and her doctors began cutting her off. Desperate to stave off withdrawal symptoms, she resorted to buying it from dealers but could not get enough for her habit. After attempting to stop for years, she finally found help in a 30-day drug rehab and has been sober for three years now.

    Where will Jane and Emily Doe be 30 years from now? Will they be lost to addictions? I’d bet money that they will suffer for years with PTSD. Perhaps in the future perps will be held accountable and sentences will fit the violence of a rape crime. I pray pussy grabbers will no longer be eligible for political office and lawyers will be banned from asking survivors how much they drank. I look forward to the day when enablers won’t shrug and say, “Boys will be boys.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • SAMHSA Voice Awards Honor Walter Ginter’s MARS™ Project

    SAMHSA Voice Awards Honor Walter Ginter’s MARS™ Project

    Many people on MAT feel unwelcome at meetings, and this sense of alienation and rejection often leads to relapse. That’s where MARS™ comes in. We want people on MAT to be embraced and accepted in recovery.

    Held at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in Westwood, the 13th annual SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration) Voice Awards recognized an essential figure in the national battle against the opioid epidemic. As the founder of the Medicated Assisted Recovery Support (MARS™) Project, Walter Ginter was honored with a Special Recognition Award for his efforts in combating the opioid epidemic and helping people who use Medicated-Assisted Treatment (MAT) stick to the path of recovery. In the greater recovery community– ranging from treatment centers across the country to 12-step groups—many people have a negative view of MAT which has led to a lack of support for people trying to overcome opioid addiction. 

    SAMHSA has been at the helm of national efforts to destigmatize the medications typically used in MAT such as buprenorphine, methadone, and naltrexone. Beyond supporting physicians and researchers, SAMHSA has tried to reduce the negativity associated with traditional perspectives on opioid recovery. According to many loud voices in Narcotics Anonymous (NA), if a person is on medication that has been prescribed to help them overcome opioid withdrawal symptoms or to refrain from using heroin or other illicit opioids, then they are not really clean. In contrast to this judgmental perspective, the SAMHSA website states: “Medicated-Assisted Treatment (MAT) is the use of FDA- approved medications, in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies, to provide a ‘whole-patient’ approach to the treatment of substance use disorders.”

    Indeed, a “whole-patient” approach is what is needed to stem the tide of what has become the greatest drug epidemic in U.S. history. With the introduction of fentanyl and other powerful prescription narcotics to the illegal drug trade, the stakes are higher than ever before. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Every day, more than 115 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids.”

    Given such a devastating statistic, Arne W. Owens hopes the SAMHSA Voice Awards can raise awareness by bringing the recovery community together with the entertainment industry. As the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Owens was the highest-ranking member of SAMHSA at the Voice Awards Show on August 8, 2018. Asked by The Fix how the Voice Awards can make an impact on the opioid epidemic, Owens said, “We hope to incentivize more positive portrayals in film and television of treatment and recovery for substance use disorders. We believe hearing positive stories about treatment and recovery helps to inspire others, shifting negative attitudes. For example, it would be good to see writers and directors positively represent MAT in film and television. Beyond raising awareness, such representation would help to reduce stigma.”

    Walter Ginter is an ideal example of someone who has dedicated his life to reducing stigma and raising positive awareness about MAT. Dedicated to improving the recovery community, Ginter has been a board member of both the National Alliance for Medication Assisted Treatment and Faces & Voices of Recovery. In collaboration with the New York Division of Substance Abuse, Yeshiva University and the National Alliance for Medication Assisted (NAMA) Recovery, Walter Ginter became the founding Project Director of the Medication Assisted Recovery Support (MARS™) Project.

    MARS™ is designed to provide peer recovery support to persons whose recovery from opioid addiction is assisted by medication. To be in a MARS™ group through the Peer Recovery Network PORTAL™, a person has to be in a MAT program. As Ginter writes on the MARS™ website, “The Peer Recovery Network was created as a way for peers in recovery to more effectively organize their community, to communicate with each other, and to have a stronger voice for advocacy efforts.”

    In 2012, Ginter helped create the Beyond MARS Training Institute at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. With a variety of models and options, Ginter created a curriculum where opioid treatment programs and recovery professionals can be trained to implement MARS™. The original MARS™ project has expanded from its beginnings to include 17 programs across the United States and two in Haiphong, Vietnam. Ginter believes this is just the beginning of the expansion, both nationally and internationally.

    On the red carpet before the Voice Awards ceremony, Walter Ginter spoke with us about the struggles he has faced as an early advocate of MAT, revealing both an innate decency and a keen sense of humor. With a smile, he mentioned how people always ask him why MARS™ uses the trademark symbol. Some of them even think that he’s trying to corner the name of the planet for profit.

    But MARS™ has a trademark for a particular reason, Ginter explains. In the vast majority of cases, the organization does not mind when people use the name. They do enforce the trademark, however, when people who are not certified as trainers try to set-up MARS™ groups and conduct MARS™ trainings. In most cases, rather than follow the protocols, they are hijacking the name to do what they want and make a profit. As an organization with a mission that envisions “the transformation of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to medication-assisted recovery (MAR),” Ginter believes that protecting the integrity of the organization must remain a priority.

    Sitting inside, away from the hot Los Angeles sun and the red carpet, Walter Ginter went into more detail about the early struggles that MARS™ faced. “Very few people come to MAT as their first course of treatment. In the vast majority of cases, they’ve already been to 12-step meetings, particularly Narcotics Anonymous. Although they initially felt welcomed at those meetings, those feelings shift after they start to work a program that includes medication-assisted treatment. Suddenly, you no longer feel welcome at the meetings, and this sense of alienation and rejection often leads to relapse. To fill in the resulting hole, we want MARS™ to give the same type of mutual support that 12-step provides. We want people on MAT to be embraced and accepted in recovery.“

    We asked Walter Ginter to detail this rejection in context. Scratching his chin, he said, “Look, telling people that they are not in recovery is evil. People on MAT were told that they couldn’t share in NA meetings since they weren’t really clean. By not allowing people to talk in meetings, they become alienated. However, it’s worse than alienation because it undermines what they’re doing to get well. The thought process goes something like this: If taking the medication that I need means I’m not in recovery, then why should I act like I’m in recovery? What does it matter if I do a line of coke on the side or have a drink?”

    Walter Ginter saw too many people on the verge of getting well through medication-assisted treatment subvert their recovery with this line of thinking and some other thought processes as well. Not wanting to take any chances, he set up MARS™ as a viable alternative both to treatment centers hostile to MAT and non-supportive recovery support groups like many NA meetings. In the past several years, MARS™ has had remarkable success with people on MAT. It has helped them find true recovery, a fact that has left initial opponents quite frustrated.

    In fact, Ginter ended our talk with a description of one of these encounters. As he told the following story, Ginter’s smile appeared again. “One day an opioid treatment counselor from a local New York rehab burst into my office and banged her fist on my desk. She said ‘What kind of voodoo are you doing here?’ Surprised by such an accusation, I replied “Excuse me?” She went on to explain: “Well. I have a client that wouldn’t stop doing coke. She would get off the heroin, but she always tested positive for cocaine. Since she’s joined your program, now she’s not only off the heroin, she’s no longer testing positive for coke or any other drug. How did you make that happen?’”

    Ginter shook his head as if he’d gone through the same rigmarole many times before. He describes how he sat the recovery counselor down and explained to her quietly: “There’s no magic or voodoo or anything else. We simply gave her medication that worked while telling her that she was now in true recovery. We gave her a vision of medication-assisted recovery, then let her make her own choice. She realized on her own, ‘Well, now I really can be on medication and in recovery. However, I can’t be in recovery if I’m still doing other drugs on the side. Today, I like being in recovery and the future it promises, so I’m going to stop doing the coke. Indeed, I will embrace this path that is set before me.’” 

    Given the promising picture that he painted, it makes perfect sense that Walter Ginter was honored with the Special Recognition Award at the 2018 SAMHSA Voice Awards. After all, how many people are dedicating themselves in such a precise fashion to saving lives by shifting perspectives and offering a viable alternative like Medication Assisted Recovery Support (MARS™)?

    View the original article at thefix.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Active Addiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Fledgling Sobriety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Long-term Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • 5 Ways Sobriety Changes Over Time

    5 Ways Sobriety Changes Over Time

    I want to be able to use my story to let people know that getting and staying sober at a young age is possible and even enjoyable.

    When I first got sober a little over five years ago, I couldn’t imagine a time when sobriety wouldn’t be front and center in my life. The beginning of sobriety felt so all-consuming. It came into play in every aspect of my life and dictated what I chose to do and who I chose to do it with. It was the first thing I thought about when I woke up and the last thing I thought about before going to bed. I thought it would always be that way. 

    But now, five years later, sobriety is just a part of who I am. The role it plays in my life, as well as its prominence, has changed. I no longer think about it every single day. I no longer wonder how I will manage at a social gathering. I no longer worry about what people will think. 

    People so often talk about how sobriety has changed their life, but they rarely talk about how their sobriety itself has changed. As with most things in life, it doesn’t stay the same forever. Here are just a few ways I’ve noticed my recovery change as time has passed. 

    1. It becomes freeing rather than limiting. Five years ago, I viewed sobriety as something restrictive, something that was going to make my life smaller. I thought it would keep me from doing things like going out with friends, traveling, celebrating special occasions. I had no idea that over time, it would actually prove to be the opposite. Over the years, my sobriety has morphed into something that makes my life bigger. It allows me to take chances with confidence I’ve built, not confidence that comes from alcohol. It gives me the opportunity be fully present for every single moment, which is especially rewarding when it comes to traveling. 

    2. It fades from the foreground of your life. Maybe this isn’t the case for everyone, but for me it has been. Early on in sobriety, I thought about it all the time. I planned my days around treatment and 12-step meetings. I talked about recovery often, and about the milestones along the way. Now this isn’t really the case. It isn’t that these things aren’t still important to me, because they are. It’s just that they have become normal parts of life to an extent. Sometimes days can pass and I realize I haven’t even thought about the fact that I am sober. Today it’s just part of who I am at the core and that is something I have become comfortable with.

    3. The motivating factors change and evolve. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still glad I’m sober for many of the same reasons I had when I initially stopped drinking. I’m glad I don’t wake up having to apologize. I’m glad I know what I did the night before. I’m glad I get to skip over the whole hangover thing. But it’s more than all that now. Now, my motivation has deeper roots. Much of the time I’ve been sober, I’ve spent sharing my story and hoping to help others. Over the past few years, that has become my biggest motivator to stay sober. I want to be able to use my story to let people know that getting and staying sober at a young age is possible and even enjoyable. In early sobriety, that was far from a motivation for me because I didn’t think anyone would care what I had to say. Today, I know they do. 

    4. It becomes less taboo of a topic. Early on in sobriety, I often felt like people were tiptoeing around the topic of my sobriety. I’m not sure whether they didn’t know what to say or were just scared to bring it up. Either way, it felt like it was off limits for some people. As time passed, friends and acquaintances seemed to become more comfortable asking me questions, like if I minded if they drank around me, or how sobriety as a whole was going. I know my own comfort level played a role in other’s feeling comfortable speaking about it, but I think some of it was just a natural progression as well. When you stick with something for a long time, it becomes part of who you are and people seem to be more open to discussing it, which I’ve found to be beneficial for both myself and them.

    5. It becomes a source of pride rather than insecurity. It took me awhile, but today I can say I do not have a single ounce of insecurity about my sobriety. I no longer wonder what people will think or whether I should even tell them I am sober. I no longer worry that their opinion of me will change drastically. I’ve realized that it’s on them and not me if they have an issue with the way I choose to live. Today I get to be comfortable in who I am and how I choose to lead my life. Today my sobriety is something I am beyond proud of. I am 26 years old and I have been sober for more than five years. That’s pretty damn neat if you ask me, and I’ve learned that anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t someone I need in my life.

    In writing this, I fully realize these are my own experiences. No one person’s sobriety and recovery is the same as another person’s. As such, the way sobriety grows and evolves will vary. But no matter what, I think it’s important to stop every so often and evaluate how your sobriety is different now compared to early on, and whether those changes are positive ones. It’s so vital to stay in touch with yourself and know what is going on inside, and that is often tied into recovery.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Sex, Money, and Power in Recovery

    Sex, Money, and Power in Recovery

    What are the things you can’t live without in a relationship? Those are your needs. And what are the things you’d like but could live without? Those are wants.

    Romance and Finance. Two of the toughest things to manage in recovery—and the most likely to lead to a relapse. While someone with addiction can stay abstinent from drugs and alcohol, we must learn to moderate when it comes to love and money. This is a tall order for a group of “all or nothing” people. So what do we need to know to make sex, money and power work out more Hollywood ending and less tabloid headline? I spoke with three experts who offer their wisdom and tools for understanding and solving the riddle.

    Psychotherapist, Sex Addiction, and Financial Disorders Expert Debra Kaplan points out that underlying attachment issues surface a few years into sobriety from drugs and/or alcohol, and when they do, romance and finance become all the more difficult. ”Attachment is the process by which we gain our knowledge of self— we know who we are because it has been reflected back to us by a co-regulating other,” she explains. Most people with substance use disorders suffer from some ruptures in attachment— a bond that may not have been consistent throughout our developmental process. When this process goes awry, we may become insecure about our self-worth. Kaplan says we must understand that sex and money are “stand-ins for self-esteem and self-worth.” This is why so many people who start in one 12-step program like NA or AA also end up in DA (Debtors Anonymous) and SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous)—many times when they’ve been brought to their knees by these issues. So this this is a question of both living sober and relapse prevention.

    According to a 2016 Ameriprise study, “Approximately 31% of all couples clash over their finances at least once a month.” We all know this is a leading cause of divorce. Sex and money are tied like Christian Gray’s shoelaces: tightly. As Kaplan says, “When there are financial troubles, the bedroom is the canary in the mine.” Her years as a successful Wall Street trader and her work as a psychotherapist make her uniquely qualified to acknowledge the connections and disconnections between sex, money and power.

    All of the experts I spoke to agree: the first key to success in love and money is negotiation. There is no question that a power differential exists in romantic relationships. Just as we create contracts in business, we create contracts with one another. Would you sign a business contract without knowing what was important to you? And yet so many of us in sobriety will rush into relationships because of our insecurities. One pitfall Kaplan warns against is the tendency to blend money early in a relationship by buying or leasing property together too soon. Kaplan says, “Ask yourself, do I know how my partner operates when it comes to money and work?”

    These conversations are scary but in order to have successful relationships, we need to develop some negotiation skills. The truth is we are communicating all the time every day whether we speak or not. Kaplan says: “There are two levels of negotiation; spoken agreements and silent arrangements.” From the outset, even in the early stages of dating, we must acknowledge what Kaplan calls “relational currency.” She defines this as “My worth, what I’m bringing to the table, what we expect from each other.” It can be anything from youth or beauty to social access or financial wealth. This currency plays into the negotiations we are making silently, even with ourselves. For example: Well, he’s not making as much money as me, but he’s ten years younger and considerably better looking.

    Dr. Pat Allen, a Certified Addiction Specialist and Transactional Analyst and author of the recovery tome Getting To I Do, agrees: “Ninety percent of all communication is nonverbal,” she says. One of her five tools for negotiation is a marvelous way to bring that nonverbal communication into conversation. The script she suggests is: “I sense by the look on your face you’re upset, yes or no? What can I do?” Or, for a man: “I think by the look on your face you’re upset, yes or no? What can I do?” The languaging, Allen says, varies from gender to gender. Generally, the feminine “feels” and the masculine “thinks.” This tool brings the issue to the floor and allows it to be dealt with rather than festering in a dark corner and becoming a resentment.

    Allen explains her point of view: “Einstein said ‘everything is energy’ and we are both yin and yang, this is physics. Men have yang bodies but yin souls, women have yin bodies but a yang soul.” So there is a built-in duality in all of us to consider in relationships and in negotiating. People—even pansexual people— play different roles in relationships, not necessarily based on gender, but on the choice between masculine and feminine principles. They may not be static, but we usually have one that is more prevalent. So, Allen says, “Before you even go on a date, know which role you want to play.”

    Kaplan echoed the importance of self-examination, saying that the key in early stages is, “Know thyself.” Know what your needs and wants are and the difference between the two. What are the things you can’t live without in a relationship? Those are your needs. And what are the things you’d like but could live without? Those are wants.

    According to Allen, a quick way to determine which role you are playing is to ask yourself— “Do you want to get laid or paid?” The masculine wants to get “laid” and picks with his eyes. The feminine wants to get “paid” and picks with her ears.

    Once you know what role you want to play, the trick is negotiating the contract of the relationship. “Ask for help!” Kaplan says. Her work with couples involves uncovering some of the underlying beliefs about self, sex, and money in order to make conscious decisions. This is important considering the underlying attachment disturbances that may be triggered. Her book, For Love and Money: Exploring Sexual and Financial Betrayal in Relationships also has an inventory that can be helpful in identifying patterns. Allen says that couples should negotiate every three months for the first year, then once a year, or whenever any large issue arises.

    Dawn Cartwright is a renowned Tantra teacher who received her degree in psychology from the University of California, Davis, and has had extensive training in Tantra, Yoga, Sexuality, Bioenergetics, Meditation, and Expressionistic Movement & Art. When it comes to negotiating, she too brings it back to self-responsibility. “When I can keep myself regulated and stay in an emotionally available state even when I need to say no, that gives the person I’m involved with a lot more freedom to be my ally, rather than my therapist. I have to make sure that I’ve had enough sleep, eaten well, I’ve got some friends. I need to look at how many hours I’m working and make sure that I develop a well-rounded life so that when my partner and I come together it’s about being partners and it’s not about being rescued.”

    Cartwright suggests setting aside a specific time to solve problems and talk budget, “Create a chart of all the things that need to get done but only talk about that once a week during a family meeting— even if it’s just the two of you, so those things don’t bleed over into your romantic sexual connection.”

    It’s easy to get complacent at any stage of a relationship. Cartwright suggests: “We can continue to let every date be the first date.” She recommends a process she calls pleasure mapping. “Maybe we take some nights where we don’t actually have intercourse but we explore and experiment, what are some places on your body that you’d really love to be touched? Do we like massage there or feather kisses here? Do we want to hear sweet words? What is our pleasure map? When we do that we’re actually creating a greater bond with our partner and releasing more neurochemicals and we’re not falling into habits that are just highlighting certain parts of the brain over and over again. Each person has their needs and we negotiate. But we stay in the game. We stay in the yes and.”

    With tools like these, you are on your way to that happy ending! I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t mean it like that. Or did I?

    View the original article at thefix.com