Answer Addiction

Tag: getting sober

  • Ex-Kiss Guitarist Ace Frehley Details Phone Call That Made Him Get Sober

    Ex-Kiss Guitarist Ace Frehley Details Phone Call That Made Him Get Sober

    “She goes, ‘Dad, it’s time to stop.’ She goes, ‘You better call your sponsor and tell them to take you to a meeting tonight.’”

    In an interview with Eddie Trunk, ex-Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley opened up about getting sober and the unlikely phone call that helped him realize it was time to get help.

    Frehley, who has been sober for 13, revealed on SiriusXm’s Eddie Trunk Live!, that he first used alcohol at the age of 13 and didn’t stop until he got a life-changing phone call in 2006.

    The Call That Changed His Life

    “I ended up with five girls in my room in Vegas. I think I kept it going for another month. And then I got a phone call from my daughter, Monique, and she was living in Florida at the time,” he detailed, according to Ultimate Classic Rock. 

    “A lot of alcoholics talk about how they had that moment of clarity… Monique called me up and she goes, ‘Dad, I heard you been drinking again.’ I go, ‘Yeah, but I haven’t done anything else bad, you know? I haven’t done any coke yet, I haven’t done any pills.’ She goes, ‘Dad, it’s time to stop.’ She goes, ‘You better call your sponsor and tell them to take you to a meeting tonight.’”

    Frehley took her words to heart and after a few beats he relented.

    “I looked in the mirror and I looked like shit. I just said to her, ‘Alright, honey, I’ll give Jimmy a call.’ … he came and picked me up right after dinner, he took me to my first meeting, and that was 13 years ago,” Frehley said. “He’s like my guardian angel on earth; I got a lot of them floating around me – after 10 car accidents, someone’s got to be helping me!”

    His fans have expressed their gratitude to Frehley for being so forthcoming about his sobriety.

    “[E]very time I perform a concert I usually have meet-and-greets after the show… at least one person comes up to me and says, ‘Ace, I’ve been sober two years,’ ‘Ace, I’ve been sober five years,’” Frehley shared. “I’m helping people live longer lives, more fruitful lives, because I’m a power of example. Go figure!”

    Other Kiss Members

    Back in 2017, Frehley’s former Kiss bandmate Gene Simmons, who’s no stranger to controversy, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune that he attributres his success to the fact that he does not imbibe.

    “I’ve never done drugs or alcohol, never smoked cigarettes, so my soul is intact,” Simmons told reporter Allison Steward. Drummer Peter Criss battled cocaine addiction during the band’s peak and beyond but hasn’t taken drugs since 1984. 

     

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Secondhand Drinking: When Your Alcohol Problem Becomes Everybody Else's

    Secondhand Drinking: When Your Alcohol Problem Becomes Everybody Else's

    Types of harm from secondhand drinking included being pushed or hit, feeling threatened or afraid, being a passenger of a drunk driver, marital problems, family problems, and financial problems.

    In my vast and storied drinking career of 20+ years, the damage to others was minimal. I mean, I was never in a drunk driving accident, I never even got a DUI (stumbling home on foot from dive bars solved that problem); the drunken brawls I was in usually happened at home with my ex, and there weren’t any arrests due to my insane behavior. The only person I was hurting by getting sloppy, blackout drunk seven days a week was me.

    Or at least that’s the story I like to tell myself.

    In reality, there were countless people affected by my drinking. From the landlords I didn’t pay and the employers I worked for while intoxicated to the innocent cashiers who had to help my slurring and sloppy ass at grocery stores and liquor stores and the cab drivers I would harass from the backseat, there were a slew of people taken down by my tequila-soaked tsunami. When you add those people to the list of family members, friends, coworkers, roommates, and neighbors who all suffered some sort of emotional fallout due to my drinking, the damage doesn’t look so minimal. It looks like a small town after a tornado.

    Studies Show Impact of Alcohol’s Harm to Others

    So when a new study came out last month about secondhand drinking, I could certainly identify.

    Nearly 9,000 participants answered questions from two surveys, the 2015 National Alcohol’s Harm to Others Survey and the 2015 National Alcohol Survey. They were asked if they had experienced any or all of 10 different types of harm caused by someone else’s drinking. Coming from an alcoholic home and being an alcoholic myself, I feel like I could answer, “Hell, yes!” to all of these questions without even seeing them. Causing other people harm is the only way I’ve ever known alcohol to work. I am not from civilized red wine sipping stock. For the record, the types of harm included being pushed or hit, feeling threatened or afraid, being a passenger of a drunk driver, marital problems, family problems, and financial problems, all caused by another person’s drinking. A staggering one in five answered what I would have answered: Hell, yes, they’ve been affected by the drinking of others.

    Researchers believe the number is probably even higher, given the study only asked the participants about the last year of their lives. Personally, this also checks out. I couldn’t even begin to come up with a total and comprehensive list of folks affected by my drunken douchebaggery over the years.

    According to the study, 23% of women and 21% of men reported experiencing at least one of those harms during the last year. Not surprisingly, women experienced the fallout of someone else’s drinking in marital problems, financial problems, and being the passenger of drunk drivers. Women were more likely to be the victim of violence, sexual assault, and harassment from someone who was drinking than their male counterparts. Men, on the other hand, felt the reverb in the form of property damage, vandalism, and harassment, in addition to drunk driving woes. Folks 18 to 25, the study found, felt the effects of alcoholism the worst, which makes sense as alcohol use disorder is on the rise in that age group. Children were not interviewed for the study but as a kid who grew up in an alcoholic home, I experienced the ill effects of secondhand drinking on a regular basis. All the things the survey mentions — personal violence, damage to property, feeling unsafe — that’s all part of daily life when you grow up around alcoholics.

    Advertising Normalizes Drinking, While Alcohol Destroys Communities

    Beyond the super relatable numbers and findings, the study packs an additional punch. The very framing of the study — calling it “secondhand drinking” — is somewhat revolutionary. By labeling it this way, the folks behind the study are emphasizing that drinking doesn’t just hurt the drinker, but it also affects the people around them akin to secondhand smoke. Sure, those of us in recovery who’ve had to write inventories or make amends are well aware of how we’ve effed up the lives around us. But for the rest for the world, drinking is fun, readily accessible, and not as bad as, like, heroin, right? Advertising agencies and big brands have worked really hard over the last decade to normalize drinking in every possible setting — airports, movie theaters, office meetings, and more. Initiating a conversation about how drinking messes up entire communities, economies, and the personal lives of innocent people feels like boldly bucking the system.

    This study in fact tells the truth of what people in recovery have known for years: the world is a safer and less shitty place if we stay sober. Beyond the loved ones who have to clean up our puke or the fender benders caused when we’ve had one too many, drinking — or more specifically alcohol use disorder — is destroying lives at an alarming rate.

    In addition to being a writer, I also work at a hospital on an addiction medicine team as a recovery mentor. Daily, our emergency room is filled with people brought in by the negative effects of drinking. Yet in a society where drinking is no big deal, these faces are commonplace and will be replaced by new ones the following day.

    “It’s Not That Bad…”

    Last summer in the hospital, I met a nice lady. She had a good life: She owned a successful business, she had beautiful and talented teenage daughters, a doting husband and concerned friends. Everybody lives next door to this lady. Your mom is friends with this lady. Hell, maybe your mom is this lady. And when they brought her in because of the negative effects of her drinking, she reported that it wasn’t that bad, she only had a few glasses of wine a night.

    Later, I shared my interaction with a doctor on her team. “Unbelievable!” he said. He told me that moments before I saw her, her medical team showed her detailed pictures of the damage that drinking had caused her brain. During her stay, I got concerned calls from her best friend and her daughters, all of whom had heartbreaking stories of how this woman’s drinking had negatively impacted them. It didn’t matter that she was white or successful or a nice lady. Drinking was ruining her brain, her life, and the lives of the people around her.

    In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the discovery of the effects of secondhand smoking changed how we thought about tobacco and nicotine. We started talking about how smoking was making the people around us sick, too. We changed how we smoked in front of children, in front of friends, and in public places. When we talk about secondhand drinking, we’re hoping for the same consideration and results. We’re saying it’s not just the alcoholic affected. It’s everybody around them, too.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Drinking in Japan

    Drinking in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

    Why Not Drink?

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

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

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

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

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

    Progressive Disease

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Everywhere I Go, There I Am

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

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

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Vanderpump Rules" Star James Kennedy Gets Sober

    "Vanderpump Rules" Star James Kennedy Gets Sober

    Kennedy took to Instagram to reveal that he is four weeks sober and loving it. 

    James Kennedy, who became famous for his drunken antics on the Bravo reality show Vanderpump Rules, is celebrating four weeks of sobriety. 

    Kennedy shared about his sobriety in an Instagram post that pictured him with a new BMW. 

    “#beamerselfie…. the #WhiteKanye is in sicko mode. seriously though when I came to the U.S and saw sunset blvd for the first I made it my mission to be one of those guys in a gangsta car driving like some ‘entourage’ shit,” he wrote. “And wow I’ve already exceeded my expectations. Im so thankful and my work to becoming the best human I can be continues. Also I’m 4weeks sober tomorrow feeling fre$h! Thank you all so much.”

    On the show, Kennedy lost his job because he was drinking too much. He also damaged his relationships with several of the other cast members, including co-star Lala Kent, who opened up about her own sobriety in March. 

    “Five months ago, I came to the realization that I am an alcoholic, and I am now a friend of Bill W., which you will never know how much this program means to me [and] has given me new life,” Kent said in an Instagram post, according to People. 

    “I always say if you don’t have to be sober, I wouldn’t recommend it, but me—as someone who does need to be sober—being in my right frame of mind every single day is truly incredible. When I’m having the roughest day that I could possibly have, I—for once in a very, very long time—see the light at the end of the tunnel. I know that tomorrow I’m gonna be okay,” Kent said. 

    Kent recently posted an Instagram picture with Kennedy. Although the two had a strained relationship on the most recent season of Vanderpump Rules, there was speculation that Kennedy’s sobriety has allowed them to be friends again. 

    Before Kent spoke out alluding to Alcoholics Anonymous, she shared that she and her partner were exploring sobriety together. 

    “We’re just kind of taking a different turn with our life,” she told People in December. “I have been open about suffering from anxiety, and [I’m] not saying that I don’t anymore, but it has gone down tremendously since I gave up drinking. I don’t smoke weed anymore. I’m a clean baby, and I feel like I glow a little bit… I’m ready to be a healthy person.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Connecting With The Police Helped Her Get Sober

    Connecting With The Police Helped Her Get Sober

    Sending a single text message helped one woman living with addiction get the help she needed to start her sober journey.

    When Shannon McCarty realized that she wanted to start living life—and not just try to escape it by using meth and heroin—she knew that she could turn to a police officer who had slipped her a card and said to call when she was ready for help. 

    So, McCarty mustered the courage to send the following text to Officer Inci Yarkut, a member of the Community Outreach and Enforcement Team with the Everett, Washington Police Department, according to NPR.

    “Hello Inci, I tried to send you a message a few weeks ago I’m not sure if you got it … I was hoping to set up a time to meet with you for your help on the stuff we had talked about. I don’t want to go to jail or have a record as I am just the lost, depressed, hurt woman who has made a few poor choices, basically trying to end my life because I can’t take pain and hurt anymore … I have lost a lot over the last three years including my will, it seems. I don’t want to be this judged person anymore. I just need some help and I am not usually one to ask for help, but I want to be me again. I am sorry and thank you for listening, and I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you for your time. Shannon.”

    That message set things in motion, and today McCarty has been sober for 10 months. Along the way Yarkut has helped her navigate sobriety, connecting McCarty with community resources like a local bus pass. 

    Yarkut said that success stories like McCarty’s show that community policing can have a big impact on helping people stay sober. Since the Community Outreach and Enforcement Team was founded in 2016, it has helped the department connect with people struggling with substance abuse, rather than just arresting them. 

    “The idea behind our team was to really focus on that outreach piece because just continually putting people in jail, putting people in jail, putting people in jail and having them come out and repeat that cycle of their drug use, that’s not doing anything for them,” Yarkut said. 

    The interaction between Yarkut and McCarty shows how a different approach to policing addiction can work. Yarkut first met McCarty when someone called the police because McCarty was shooting up in a car. But instead of arresting her, Yarkut opened a door. 

    “I explained who I was and what my role in the police department was,” Yarkut said. ”[I] said, ‘Hey, if there’s something that we can do for you—because I think there are things that we can do for you, that we can help you—give me a call.”

    Today, McCarty is a far cry from the skinny and pale woman who Yarkut met that first night. 

    “She looks healthy,” Yarkut said. “She has a big old smile on her face. You can just see in her face what a changed person she is, and it’s pretty awesome.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Zero Coping Skills: How Jackie Monahan Found Peace of Mind for the First Time

    Zero Coping Skills: How Jackie Monahan Found Peace of Mind for the First Time

    Contrast in life is inevitable, but I’m learning that I don’t have to have conflict. I don’t have to flip out because I got in the wrong line; I don’t need to make my poor planning everyone else’s emergency.

    I grew up being told over and over, “We are only given what we can handle.” I took that to mean, “If I flip out about the little things, nothing really bad can ever happen to me.”

    It has been said that if you have an alcoholic parent, the odds are good you will become an alcoholic. I had two. They say if you start drinking at 21, you might be okay. I did the inverse and started drinking at 12. I had a long run. I was surrounded by enablers. My mom still wants me to drink; she and my ex say things like “You weren’t this temperamental when you drank.”

    I want to be the best example of the program anyone has ever seen, but I am far from there yet. I have always been easily frustrated, and have always had zero coping skills, other than alcohol.

    My soul wanted to solve problems without alcohol, but I didn’t even know where to begin. If I got anxious for a second, everyone rushed to put a drink in my hand. It worked. I remember the one day in college that I didn’t drink. I was mad and yelling at all my roommates, wanting them to be as quiet as a mouse because I wasn’t drinking. Meanwhile, every other night I came home either with a party or from one, loudly.

    I entered parties saying, “You can start now, I am here.” I would black out and then yell at everyone the next day for letting me drink so much. They would say they had no idea I was blacked out; I was so funny and fun, they didn’t see what the problem was. I did. My life was getting really busy with stuff I wanted to do, and when I did have free time I wanted to enjoy the moment and remember it.

    My parents were functioning alcoholics. I say “were” because they are no longer functioning very well. My dad was far worse than my mother, but both are shells of what they could have been. They couldn’t get rigorously honest if someone paid them all the money in the world. I had to accept that at a very young age.

    There was never a way to know what I did to set my parents off. When either of them went into a rage, it was brutal. They were cheerful, cheerful, cheerful… then rage! They mostly raged when they were sober and it would come out of nowhere. I watched their tantrums work for them: with one another, with me, and with the unfortunate people who got my mother on the phone. You would think Colleen from Time Warner had stabbed her in the face. My mom unloaded all her marriage frustrations, alternately screaming at and belittling the customer service rep. And it worked every time — instead of getting overcharged, she got money off and reduced rates. She flew off the handle at everyone and got her way, then bragged about it.

    My parents would always say, “God made whiskey so the Irish could not rule the world.” Then they would laugh and laugh like they had something over on the rest of us. Meanwhile, I remember thinking, “Rule the world? How about trying to get through the week without throwing a plate?”

    With all this and more, it never even occurred to me not to drink. Of course I would drink, but I vowed to never be an alcoholic like you see on TV, or even a semi-functioning one like my parents. I could clearly see how their thinking was backwards, so backwards that my messed-up perception went undetected. They may have been successful financially, but their morals and values were out in space.

    In 2011 I made an independent movie and was too busy to drink. My wife at the time pointed out that I didn’t drink for two weeks. She was impressed with my work ethic. I was working 12-hour days because it took so long to put on and take off a bald cap for my role as an an alien. I couldn’t be hungover, so I wasn’t.

    A few years later I thought, “I wish another 12-hour a day project would come along to quit drinking for.” Now I know this should have been a red flag. But nope, instead I had an idea: “Wait, why don’t I make me the project. I will be sober for a while for me.” I was just going to do 11 days, until the Independent Spirit Awards. I would have to drink then. There would be free expensive wine and celebrity parties.

    The awards show came and went and I still didn’t want to drink. I felt almost addicted to being clear-headed. It felt euphoric. Then I was determined to tape Last Comic Standing sober. I was 33 days sober and I did great, but I just wasn’t myself. I wasn’t loose. I told a comic backstage who had five years sober that I didn’t feel comfortable. He said I was crazy, that he didn’t feel normal on stage until he had a year sober, and that I should have just had a drink. Looking back, he was right and I knew it. But I couldn’t drink. I liked being in my body so much. I hated blacking out.

    And I refused to do AA: I 100 percent thought it was run by the Catholic Church and I couldn’t go back there. I was a member of the CIA: Catholic Irish Alcoholic. I survived 12 years of Catholic school: priests living in a mansion with gorgeous antique furniture and driving fancy sports cars while the nuns lived in poverty, in what were basically jail cells. One nun siphoned gas—so she could sell the 20-year-old station wagon she had just filled—and accidently swallowed some of the gas. That same day, Father Zino threw a lit cigarette out of his brand-new Porsche and it hit me. It got caught in my coat.

    I had no intention of going back to the Catholic Church and saying yes to things I knew to be wrong. They told us not to lie, then made us lie.

    I had friends in AA, but they all seemed miserable and unhappy. I would rather drink than be miserable. And I had quit drinking on my own before: once for 90 days (I was proud because I hadn’t intended to go that long), and then for 200 days (I was disappointed I hadn’t made it to a year). Both times, when I finally drank, it was because of things happening that I couldn’t bear to feel. I called my friends and said, “I don’t want to drink but I can’t bear the pain anymore.” They said, “Just drink. Drink and don’t beat yourself up about it.” So I drank. I didn’t have a choice.

    Then I made a new friend who was in AA and thriving. She seemed genuinely happy. When I told her I could quit on my own but couldn’t stay quit, she said that happens to a lot of alcoholics. That was the first time I thought “Hey, maybe I am an alcoholic.” She also said “You don’t have coping skills.” Coping skills!?! I must have said those two words a million times since then. Coping skills sounded like exactly what I needed. I didn’t have coping skills. I’d never even heard of them.

    I said I wanted to give it a try. I really wanted to make it to a year without drinking, and I was willing to do anything. Once I made that commitment to myself, I gave myself over to the program and my higher power. That was a critical tipping point, and my life changed. I got a sponsor who I knew would kick my butt: she knew when I was lying. I wanted what she had—not the dream car, home, partner, killer style, and beauty (all impressive, considering she had been living on the street). I didn’t need any of those things. I did not have the same goals at all.

    What I did want was her close relationship with her higher power, her program, and her unquestioning belief in both. These qualities make her absolutely, positively unflappable and a force to be reckoned with. She gets annoyed by things, but as soon as she feels an ounce of anger, she takes a breath and realigns with her higher power and the solution.

    My sponsor knows I had major resentments, and that I had a lot to be resentful about, but she showed me how to let go of them, for myself. I am now two years sober and I have peace in my mind for the first time in my life. I wouldn’t trade this gift of sobriety and serenity for anything in the world. I treat it like a gem that I hold safe. I guard that gem with my life.

    Contrast in life is inevitable, but I’m learning that I do not have to have conflict. I don’t have to flip out because I got in the wrong line somewhere; I don’t need to make my poor planning everyone else’s emergency. I didn’t even know how anxiety-riddled I was. I thought I had ADD, and doctors were treating it as such, with Adderall. What I actually have is PTSD and chronic anxiety. That medication combined with those diagnoses was like treating schizophrenia with acid.

    All my life, I never wanted to be like other people. Even though my life was messed-up, I loved being me. I always wanted to live, but I really didn’t know how. I felt like I was improvising constantly, while everyone else had a script. It made me a great improviser, but I now have the ability to turn that side of me off. I feel like I am getting a new, revised version of my script every day. If something happens, I no longer go into fight or flight mode. I get upset, of course, but now I respond instead of react. I am proactive instead of reactive. I can have contrast without conflict. I can go into solution mode and stop focusing on and feeding the problem.

    I made a decision to be the change I want to see in the world—which is peace. To see peace, I first must be peace. Alcoholics do not have the luxury of a negative thought. A resentment can kill us. If someone hates me, that is on them. I cannot control how someone feels about me, but I can control how I feel about them.

    I feel safe for the first time. For a long time I hid my fear from everyone, even myself. Feeling safe, in the moment, in control, is better than any feeling in this world. I wouldn’t trade the solution for anything.

    Jackie Monahan appears in Wild Nights with Emily, in theatres on April 12th. Her album “These Lips” is streaming everywhere and on Sirius.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Five Finger Death Punch Bassist Celebrates Sober Milestone

    Five Finger Death Punch Bassist Celebrates Sober Milestone

    Before getting sober, bassist Chris Kael used about an eightball of cocaine a week to help manage untreated mental health issues.

    Chris Kael, who plays bass in the heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch, has been sober for a year and took to Twitter to celebrate his milestone. 

    “May my hitting my first sober birthday yesterday give hope to those of you also struggling with addiction. It can be done. And, you will thank yourself when you too hit these milestones. Keep your chin up and those feet moving! #ShitYesSon #SoberAsFuck #SFG” Kael wrote on February 4, according to Blabbermouth. 

    Kael had previously said that he used about an eight-ball of cocaine each week to help manage his untreated mental health conditions. 

    “That got to be the biggest problem for me,” he said. “That and depression, the two things, were not good. I didn’t realize it until I got into rehab that I was self-medicating with cocaine to get my dopamine levels up to fight the depression. I never even thought about that. And then when you come off it, you crash hard.”

    Kael said that it was difficult to watch the band’s lead vocalist Ivan Moody struggle publicly with addiction, while Kael kept his substance use more private. 

    “Ivan was going through his thing, and me, no one really knew, I was the quiet one that was kind of doing things on the side. That was one of the things that was eating away at me too—my guy had a huge problem, and here I am, a quiet problem.”

    Although Moody missed some tours for treatment, Kael usually was at his worst when the touring ended, he said. 

    “It hit me hard when I got off the road. Going home was always hard anyway, ’cause you’ve got so much stimulation out on the road, and then you come home and you’re, like, ‘Wait a minute? I’ve gotta take out the trash? That’s the biggest part of my job now?’”

    Kael said on Twitter his wife helped him get into treatment and kickstart his sobriety.

    “Had she not busted me trying to restock after burning through $1300 in blow in two days in late January [2018], I truly believe that I would not be here today,” he said. “She has silently and bravely dealt with far more than what would have crushed any other woman. Her loyalty, patience, TRUE love and resolve are unmatched by any other woman I’ve ever known.”

    Although admitting he was powerless was difficult, Kael is glad that he did it. 

    “Throwing my hands to the universe and admitting I was at a fucking low and no longer able to do it myself was one of the most humbling and powerful things I’ve ever done in my life.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Comedian Rob Delaney Celebrates 17 Years Of Sobriety

    Comedian Rob Delaney Celebrates 17 Years Of Sobriety

    The Catastrophe actor took to Instagram to pen a somber note about his sober milestone and his late son.

    Rob Delaney, creator and star of the celebrated Amazon Prime show, Catastrophe, announced his 17th year of sobriety on February 4th. This milestone is all the more meaningful for the comedian, who nearly a year ago lost his toddler son, Henry, to cancer.

    On Monday, Delaney wrote about his sober anniversary and his son Henry in a reflective post. Henry died in January 2018 after struggling with brain cancer. Rob and wife Leah Delaney had three boys, and not long after Henry’s death, another son was born.

    Delaney wrote on Instagram:

    “As of today I’ve been sober 17 years. 17 years ago I was in jail in a wheelchair. Today I’m not. I am profoundly grateful to the alcoholics who shined a light on the path for me and helped equip me with the skills to live life well.”

    In his memoir Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. wrote about his drunk-driving accident that landed him in jail and rehab.

    “Twelve years ago I was in jail, in a wheelchair. The hospital gown I was in was covered in blood from my bleeding face. My top front right tooth was missing a piece. My right arm and my left wrist were broken. They were broken so badly they both required surgery. My knees had slammed into the dashboard of the car I was driving the night before and split open to the bone. They weren’t broken, but they’d been operated on and sewed shut in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai hospital, just before I went to jail.”

    “This has been a brutal year for my family and me,” Delaney continued on Instagram. “Our first year without our son and brother Henry. Had I not been sober it would have been far worse. As it was, I squeaked by,” he confessed.

    “Sobriety allowed me to be a reasonably good dad, husband and worker though it all. (If you average it out. I think.) Sobriety allows me to grieve fully, and grief is an expression of love. Thank you to everyone who has helped me. I can’t do it alone.”

    Delaney announced on Facebook in February 2018 that his son Henry had died of cancer. Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2016, and after treatment the cancer reoccured in fall 2017.

    “Henry was a joy. He was smart, funny, and mischievous and we had so many wonderful adventures together,” Delaney wrote at the time. “Thank you, beautiful Henry, for spending as much time with us as you did. We miss you so much.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Samuel L. Jackson Details Past Drug Use And How He Got Sober

    Samuel L. Jackson Details Past Drug Use And How He Got Sober

    “I’d been getting high since, shit, 15, 16 years old, and I was tired as fuck,” Jackson said in a new interview.

    Years before he was getting paid millions to shout “motherfucker” at strangers on the silver screen, Samuel L. Jackson was a teenager with a drug addiction. 

    A former Black Panther, one of the workingest actors in Hollywood and a child of the segregated South, the 70-year-old oozes tough guy cool—but in this month’s Hollywood Reporter cover story, the vaunted Pulp Fiction star got real and raw about his past and what it finally took to overcome it. 

    “The whole time I was using, sure, I had a good reputation,” he said. “I showed up on time, I did my lines. I was great. But there was something that was keeping me from getting to that next place.”

    Talking about his years of addiction—before and in the early years of his career—is not something he’s shied away from before. But his latest interview offers difficult details about what rock bottom looks like for a man worth millions.

    Jackson initially got into drugs in the 1960s when a professor introduced him to acid. From there, he went on to heroin and cocaine and finally, when the crack epidemic hit, he turned to rock. Soon, that became his drug of choice, and throughout the early days of his acting career he managed to balance the two, clandestinely smoking crack outside Broadway theaters.

    But it all came to a head one day when his wife and daughter found him lying facedown on the kitchen floor, a mess of drug paraphernalia splayed out around him. They demanded he go to rehab—and finally he did. 

    “I’d been getting high since, shit, 15, 16 years old, and I was tired as fuck,” he told the magazine. 

    His first sober role was playing a person with crack addiction, a part Spike Lee offered him while he was still in treatment.

    “All the people in rehab were trying to talk me out of it,” he said. “‘You’re going to be messing around with crack pipes. All your triggers will be there. Blah, blah, blah.’ I was like, ‘You know what? If for no other reason than I never want to see you motherfuckers again, I will never pick up another drug.’ ‘Cause I hated their asses.”

    That role—playing Gator in Jungle Fever—nabbed him a best supporting actor award at Cannes and catapulted him toward stardom. That same year, he met Quentin Tarantino, who would later write his bloody cult classic with Jackson in mind. 

    It was that counterculture hit that won him an Oscar nomination and still brings him a constant new crop of fans.

    “It’s the kind of movie that every year, I gain 3, 4 million new fans because kids get old enough to see it for the first time,” he said. “They think it’s the coolest thing they’ve ever fuckin’ seen in their lives.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Parents Grapple With Cutting Off Children With Addiction

    Parents Grapple With Cutting Off Children With Addiction

    “It’s easy to pay for court costs and to bail them out of every situation. It takes a very long time to gain the strength, courage, and faith to say no,” said one parent.

    Parents often spend hefty amounts of money trying to help their children get sober, sometimes to the detriment of their own financial health, according to a new feature in Time magazine which focuses on the financial implications of substance use disorder. 

    “[Parents] are faced with this dilemma: Do I help them get out of this in the short term, or do I let them experience the natural consequences of their behaviors?” said Kenneth Leonard, director of the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions at the University of Buffalo. “You don’t want to do anything that will ruin their lives, but on the other hand, you want them to learn from experience. Nobody wants their child to suffer, short term or long term.”

    Diane Buxton, of Indiana, estimates that she spent more than $70,000 on eight stints in rehab, counselors and other approaches to try to help her son who was addicted to opioids. “I was going to save him,” she said. 

    Eventually, she realized that all her spending was fruitless. 

    “I remember walking through my living room one day and seeing my 130-pound son, who was supposed to be 160 pounds, sitting on the couch with needle marks in his arm,” she said. “And I heard this voice saying ‘You’re loving him to death.’”

    Buxton told her son he needed to leave: check into rehab or crash with friends. Now six years sober, her son tells her that tough love helped save his life. “If I had not given him that choice, he’d be dead or in prison,” she said. 

    Katie Donovan, of Michigan, said that she spent about $200,000 supporting her daughter through addiction—but her story did not end with a happy ending. “I was interrupting my whole life, constantly, on a daily basis, to take care of her,” Donovan said. “I didn’t realize that I had become a part of it. I was addicted to her.”

    Donovan started small in setting boundaries with her daughter, first refusing to buy her new clothes or take her to appointments. She says her daughter still struggles with addiction—with intermittent periods of sobriety—but that her own life is a lot less chaotic now. 

    “It’s easy to buy a car. It’s easy to pay for court costs and to bail them out of every situation,” she said. “It takes a very long time to gain the strength, courage, and faith to say no. I believe in loving with boundaries. She knows that, emotionally, I accept where she’s at. Am I going to give her money? No.”

    Ipek Aykol, a therapist in Newport Beach, California who specializes in addiction counseling, says it’s important for families to establish financial boundaries. “Families come to treatment with very unhealthy boundaries,” Aykol said. “If you’re giving your child money, and your child is spending that money on drugs, it’s not serving them.”

    Fred Leamnson, of Virginia, who blogs about personal finance, said he spent more than six figures supporting his son through heroin addiction. Now, he wants to give others permission to just say no. 

    “The best advice I can offer is advice we didn’t follow—protect yourself and your finances at all costs!”

    View the original article at thefix.com