Answer Addiction

Tag: mental health

  • Can Video Games Help Treat Depression?

    Can Video Games Help Treat Depression?

    Some believe that a mind at play experiences beneficial neurological effects.

    Video games could be beneficial for those suffering from depression, some experts believe. It may seem counterintuitive as players seem to use video games to isolate and distract themselves from the world, but the mind at play helps people feel more confident and energetic.

    Anyone who has played video games knows it stimulates the mind, designed to tickle a person’s reward pathways when they achieve a goal or task as well as develop memory and learning in the hippocampus.

    In depressed people, these parts of the brain shrivel. Engaging in a combination of strategy, diligence, and effort to achieve a virtual goal can yield a very real sense of accomplishment that can help restore these critical regions.

    Fighting Depression

    Researchers have even created a video game specifically tailored to combat depression. In SPARX, players navigate a fantasy world and fight creatures called GNATs (short for gloomy, negative, automatic thoughts) that represent the mental formations of depression. The game is actually a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, wherein players are lead to literally confront and defeat their negative thoughts.

    While the game may seem hokey, it works. About 44% of those who played SPARX recovered from depression, up from the 26% of patients recovered though treatment without the game. In recovery, around 66% of SPARX players felt that their depression symptoms had been reduced by at least 30%, while a relatively fewer 58% of non-players could say the same.

    This could explain why some people link depression and video games, mistakenly assuming that the lonely escapist gamer is falling deeper into depression as a result of their self-imposed isolation.

    However, this cause-and-effect explanation is probably reversed — a depressed gamer is likely already depressed and is actually managing their own symptoms through the use of video games.

    Problematic Gaming

    That said, video gaming can become problematic if it is used only as an escape and distraction from life. It’s become a prevalent enough problem that the World Health Organization has officially recognized gaming disorder in its International Classification of Diseases.

    Like many forms of media, it comes down to which titles are played. Games like Minecraft engage the creative imagination of players, while Nintendo Wii games help people stand up and get moving. Online games like Fornite provide social interaction that can be increasingly harder for children to find as public gathering places, such as malls, fall out of fashion.

    Considering that over 26% of adults in the United States suffer from depression, it’s necessary to get to the truth of what helps and harms people suffering from depression.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • I Tried “Medical” Marijuana in Sobriety, Here's What Happened

    I Tried “Medical” Marijuana in Sobriety, Here's What Happened

    I was a destructive, chronic blackout drinker for years; marijuana, on the other hand, always seemed like a potential safe zone.

    Three years ago, at six years sober, I decided to try medical marijuana. “Try” is a cuter word than “relapse,” and “medical” made it seem like it was under the care of a doctor. But there were no doctors involved. And I should’ve known that for the kind of addict I am, when it comes to drugs, there is no try. There is only do, and do, and do more until one day you are on your floor sobbing because all the doing is making your life a living hell but you don’t know how to stop.

    I Know I’m an Alcoholic, but Pot Is Not Alcohol

    I was a destructive, chronic blackout drinker for years (not to brag). This is a gift only in that I have the clarity to know that “casual” drinking is not an option for me. Even the idea of a glass or two of wine with dinner makes me shudder because I want the whole bottle for dinner, followed by a dessert course of hard liquor and total chaos. I could one day forget this and convince myself that things might be different, but luckily it hasn’t happened yet. I’ve made too many amends and recounted too many drunk horror stories at dinner parties to ever go back.

    Marijuana, on the other hand, always seemed like a potential safe zone—a gray area in between complete sobriety and destructive annihilation. Before getting sober in 2010, I was too busy getting wasted on booze to give weed much attention. Unlike with alcohol, I don’t have a back pocket full of marijuana horror stories to put things in perspective. 

    It doesn’t help that the drug has a reputation for being extremely cool and relatively harmless. In TV and movies, heavy weed use gets to be the punchline while heavy alcohol use is the point of tension or tragedy. Alcoholics on screen always seem to crash their cars and destroy their families, while the potheads make dumb jokes and go on snack-related adventures. Sign me up please!

    Plus, medical marijuana really does help a lot of people—it’s been reported to work wonders for people with PTSD, cancer, epilepsy, and other problems I don’t have. It also seems to help people with problems I do have: anxiety, depression, insomnia, ADHD, feeling bored, feeling restless, feeling feelings, the pain of being alive. Based on what I’d read and heard, weed was the potential antidote to about 95% of my problems. 

    Weed’s public image has gotten even better as it becomes legal in more U.S. states, which I fully support even if it does me no favors. The days of reefer madness have been replaced by a culture of vape pens, gummy bears, bud-tenders, and medical marijuana. I live in LA, where you can’t go a block without a billboard or a storefront touting the drug as a solution to all your problems. Fun, glamorous, and soothing, it’s both therapy and leisure! For someone who loves therapy and medication as much as candy, an anti-anxiety medication in gummy bear form is almost irresistible.

    At six years sober from alcohol and drugs, I knew intellectually that smoking, vaping, or eating weed was probably a bad idea. But my imaginative addict brain convinced me I could be a “functional pothead” like I’d seen on TV and movies. I told myself I could smoke up like Frankie from Grace and Frankie or Ilana from Broad City. I didn’t take into account that I’m neither a divorced aging hippie with a bottomless bank account nor the most confident 20-something in the world. Or that neither of these characters are real people.

    Functional potheads exist in the real world, too. I know because I’m friends with them. Many are super-successful and seem happy with their lives. 

    So, with no doctor in sight, I made the decision to join the usually-high club.

    I Was a Dysfunctional Pothead from the Start

    Moments after getting high at a friend’s apartment, I realized my sobriety, which I’d worked so hard to attain, was gone. I also realized the universe was a simulation and everyone I’d ever met was mad at me. I had a debilitating panic attack and woke up the next day on my friend’s couch covered in Dorito crumbs. So, I did it again. And again. And again. For years.

    Weed didn’t torpedo my life the way drinking had. It worked slowly, gradually eroding my mental health and the life I’d built for myself. Like a frog in water slowly heated to boiling, I didn’t realize what was happening until the damage was done. Even then, I didn’t realize, because any time I had a bad feeling, I got high. If I felt shame, sadness, dissatisfaction, worry, pain, or longing, I got high. But emotional pain, like physical pain, exists for a reason. It’s your brain’s way of saying “SOS! We have a problem! Fix it!” Instead of listening and resolving the problem, I just shut the voice up with a weed pen.

    In some ways, weed did improve my life, especially at first. It made parties, which I had avoided since getting sober, more fun and easier to navigate. There’s a reason people numb their brains to ease the discomfort of interacting with groups of other humans all crammed into one place. One of my biggest struggles at parties is how to escape a conversation without the excuse of “grabbing another drink.” You can only go to the bathroom so many times before people get suspicious or try to do coke with you. Weed helped me detach from my anxious, people-pleasing brain and just enjoy hovering right outside the moment, looking in. 

    Sometimes I miss being high at parties. But since most of my life does not take place at parties, it’s not worth it.

    Must All Addicts Be Completely Sober?

    I want to make this clear: I’m pro-weed, just not for me. Like most rational people, I believe that it should be legal. It’s not marijuana’s fault I can’t use it wisely. And it’s certainly not the people wasting their lives away in prison for possessing or distributing it, most of them men of color. Draconian and racist U.S. drug laws have been shamelessly exploited by the police and the prison industrial complex for way too long. So I support the legalization of weed for medical and recreational use. Even if that means I have to smell weed smoke on every street corner and see it passed around at parties like pigs-in-a-blanket. 

    I also disagree with the idea that all addicts must be completely sober. Addiction is a complex problem that manifests differently for everyone and we don’t all benefit from the same treatment. Total abstinence works for some people (i.e. me), but I know recovering addicts who benefit from weed, sometimes as a form of harm reduction. I have lost friends to overdoses because they couldn’t stay sober. So if one kind of high prevents you from a much more lethal one, I’m all for choosing the lesser of two evils. Especially in a society where most people can’t afford therapy or prescription medication. Maybe some people need weed to just make it through the day, and that’s okay.

    For me, it didn’t work. I wanted weed to provide a temporary escape from this reality to a wackier one where food somehow tastes even better, like it does in every Seth Rogen movie. But the “temporary” part didn’t work out for me. I’ve never been good at dipping in and out of reality. If I find an escape, I’m buying a one-way ticket, learning the language, and putting down roots. Bye, reality! I’m an ex-pat now.

    The good news is: I finally got my high horror story. The bad news is it’s not exciting enough to tell at a dinner party. It involves long stretches of panic and paranoia, paralyzing depression, compromising my creative dreams, and isolating myself from people. Shortly before getting sober, I had a panic attack from taking too many edibles while hiking and two very kind strangers had to help me down a mountain. I’ll revisit that one next time I try to tell myself it’s a good idea to “treat my anxiety” with weed.

    Since quitting, my anxiety and depression have improved, in part because the doctor-prescribed medications I take are no longer cancelled out by weed use. I’m more productive, which makes me happier. And food, it turns out, tastes just as good sober. My life isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than it was. A big part of me wishes I’d never taken that 2.5-year vacation from reality. But at least next time I pass a billboard advertising weed as “therapy,” which happens at least once every time I leave my apartment, I know to smile and just keep walking.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • But I’m Depressed, Not Addicted

    But I’m Depressed, Not Addicted

    I was there to treat my depression. I couldn’t tell the truth. I couldn’t say I got smashed almost every night, whiskey whistling through my veins, thinning my blood and seeping into my brain.

    “Why are you here today, Emma?”

    Hungover and filled with self-loathing, I’d just revved my car onto a usually-busy street, hoping to get hit by a truck, but nothing happened. Not even a Smartcar in sight. Shakily, I’d walked back into my apartment and asked my boyfriend for a ride to the St. Vincent’s Stress Center. After I’d sat for an hour in a sunny lobby with green chairs and green carpet, a man in glasses and khakis called me into a lamp-lit room.

    “I’m in crisis.”

    “Are you going to harm yourself?”

    “No. I mean, I don’t think so.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention the high-speed reverse onto one of northside Indianapolis’ main thoroughfares. This guy would have to work to get the truth. “I have a history of suicide attempts, though. And depression. I just can’t do it anymore. I’m so overwhelmed with school and work and my dogs and my boyfriend and my house and my…”

    He cut me off and flipped to a new page on his clipboard. “Would you say you’re having suicidal ideation? Do you wish you could just ‘go away?’” Air quotes. Meaningful pause.

    “Yeah. Sort of. I want things to get better, but I don’t know what that looks like. I’ve been through stuff like this before. Depression, I mean. If I have to be hospitalized, it’s okay.” I didn’t want to be responsible for myself anymore. Being in the hospital would mean I could blank out for a while and let someone else take care of me.

    The intake assessor tilted his head at me. “We won’t hospitalize you unless we have to. Let’s talk about your day-to-day. What does that look like?”

    I ticked off my work schedule, school schedule, social schedule; listing my life as if from a résumé. One boyfriend. One job. Two dogs. Fifteen credit hours. Good grades. Dad nearby, but we weren’t that tight. Close with my mom, but she lived far away. No clubs. No sports.

    “Do you drink alcohol or use drugs?”

    I looked up from my lap. “I drink. I mean, I’m a college student.” If there had been a window in the room, I would have glanced out of it. I needed something else to look at.

    “How much?”

    I couldn’t tell the truth. “It depends. Between one and six beers a night.”

    He blinked and frowned for a millisecond. Oops. That was an underestimate. Is between one and six too much?

    He didn’t say. Just returned to his neutral expression and kept moving down his clipboard. “How often do you drink between one and six beers a night?”

    “Oh, maybe three times a week? I guess it depends.” Again, I couldn’t tell the truth. I couldn’t say I got smashed almost every night, whiskey whistling through my veins, thinning my blood and seeping into my brain.

    He blinked again, made a note on his board, and kept questioning, reducing my depression to a list of symptoms. Suicidal ideation. Feelings of worthlessness. Guilt. Sleep disturbance. Headache. Was I missing work? Missing school? Maintaining good hygiene?

    I just ran my car blindly into traffic, I thought, and this asshole wants to know if I brushed my teeth. Medicalizing depression sure was depressing.

    In the end, Mr. Blinky decided that I didn’t need immediate hospitalization. Instead, I’d be admitted to IOP: intensive outpatient treatment. Three hours at the Stress Center, three days a week. “With all your commitments, this will be perfect for you,” he assured me.

    Although I downplayed all my problems, part of me must have known I needed help—serious help. But I couldn’t admit it, not even to a person whose job description included “assessing mental health condition and recommending appropriate care.” I wanted the help forced on me, wanted to be figured out, fixed. Someone needed to see beyond my deception. That would take the burden of recovery off of me and place it on them. Secretly, I wanted to spend a few days in the psych ward, locked away from work, papers, dogs, and dishes. I couldn’t confess that, I thought. I’d sound crazy. I didn’t see the irony of worrying about sounding crazy when I sat in a mental health intake office.

    Instead of screaming, I nodded. Blinky placed me in a “dual-diagnosis program,” a familiar phrase from my teen years that meant I’d qualified as both mentally ill and addicted.

    “Most folks graduate in four-to-six weeks,” he said, handing me a pamphlet. “Good luck.”

    ***

    On my first night of IOP, I entered the Stress Center’s lobby to find a sweater-vested receptionist behind the tall desk. “Walk straight down the hall to the first office on the right. I’ll tell Dave you’re here.”

    Dave, a soft-spoken therapist with glasses, a mustache, and a lisp, met me at the door of his office. Instead of sitting behind his desk, he pulled his chair around to sit across from me.

    “Bring this with you every night,” he instructed, passing me a maroon folder with the St. Vincent’s triple-dove logo stickered on the front. “It’s like your Bible for this group. It’s pretty empty now, but by the time you graduate, it’ll be full of handouts, worksheets, and journals.” He lowered his chin and raised his eyebrows. “Many of our patients hang on to these for years after they leave us because they find stuff they can use and reuse for the rest of their lives.” He closed his eyes, re-opened them. “That’s what we’re here to do. Help you get the skills you need to live.”

    I nodded, arranging my expression into eager, pliant, and friendly, my eyes sparkling, my smile full. Already, I was trying to charm my way out, as I had in my psych ward trips years before. Had I forgotten that putting up a front back then had led me to this place, this office, with its commercial-grade chairs, fluorescent lights, and a non-ironic “Hang in There” kitten poster?

    For the next 15 minutes, Dave explained what I could expect from my 12 weekly hours of IOP. Then he looked at me over his glasses. “You’ll also need to go to three meetings a week. Here’s a schedule of all the recovery groups in the area.”

    I took the pamphlet, thick as a chapbook, and showed off my nod-and-smile routine again. Skepticism crept in. Couldn’t this guy see that my problem was depression, not drinking?

    “We’re all set then. Let’s get you to your first group session. Don’t worry, we won’t expect you to speak up on your first night. Feel free to just sit and listen.”

    Dave led me to another fluorescent-lit room at the end of the hall. In it, a circle of identical chairs with padded green vinyl seats and backrests. I took an empty seat and surveyed the six nametagged patients around me. Robin, a thickset, bowl-cutted, auburn-haired, lip-ringed woman. Jack, a soft middle-aged guy who looked like Dave, but with a weaker mustache, aviator glasses, and adult acne. Madison, a thin girl who couldn’t have been more than 18. Ryan, a young guy with sagging, wide-legged jeans and a backwards baseball cap. Jane, a twitchy blonde with scars skimming her forearms. And Gladys, an older black woman who looked like an elementary-school principal.

    Dave walked in the room, smiling softly. “Everyone, meet Emma. This is her first night.”

    They replied in unison. “Hi, Emma.”

    Inside, I squirmed, but outwardly, I exuded alpha-dog confidence. Smile, lips closed. I told myself. Chin up. Relax in your chair, elbows hooked over the back. Cross your legs. Look at their foreheads when they talk. It’ll look like you’re making eye contact.

    The first group session consisted mostly of Ryan, the baseball-cap boy, talking about his “Moral Inventory.” To me, it looked like a scribbled list, but Ryan blushed with pride when he held it up. The other patients clapped as though he’d found a cure for lymphoma.

    “I finally did it,” he said. “I kept relapsing every time I got to this point, but now, I did it. I have my inventory.”

    Dave beamed. “Ryan, we’re proud of you. We all knew you could do it. Now, what did you learn?”

    Ryan’s gaze dropped to the floor. “It’s mostly fear. Fear is like this big demon, ready to eat me alive. It’s why I dropped out of school. Why I let my girl leave. Why I get in fights.”

    Dave turned to the group. “What are our two responses to fear, folks?” His lisp swallowed the “s” sounds. Rethponthes. Folkth.

    Robin raised her hand. “Fuck Everything And Run.” Dave looked at her over his glasses. “Sorry, Dave. ‘F’ Everything And Run.”

    “Or Face Everything And Rise.” Gladys, the school principal, finished the saying.

    It all sounded like cheerleading to me. Acronyms. Group responses. And a moral inventory? How could that not make me want to kill myself? If Dave hadn’t released us for a break, I might have asked to slit my wrists then and there.

    When we returned, I listened to the group members talk about hitting bottom. Four words bounced around my skull. I do not belong. Ryan had slugged his ex-girlfriend and blamed it on his dad, who had used him as a punching bag. Jack’s wife had left him after he got his third DUI and lost his license forever. He’d never been able to stand up to her, probably because he was raised by an overbearing mother. I do not belong. Jane smoked meth in the bathroom between double shifts at Burger King, her first job since she’d stopped prostituting. When she was eight, her dad had molested her. Gladys had gotten fired and had to move back in with her alcoholic mother. Church used to help her, but she couldn’t get herself out of bed before noon anymore. I. Do. Not. Belong. I was in college. I had a job. My driver’s license was intact, unsuspended. My parents loved me. I’d never been molested. I’d never stood on 38th Street in a miniskirt, hoping to snag a john. How could I be an addict?

    The next Monday, Dave invited me to his office after group. He wanted to “check in.” Air quotes. Meaningful look. He must have gone to the same training as the intake coordinator who’d interviewed me when I first walked in.

    “Have you found any meetings you like yet?”

    I hadn’t gone to a single one. “Adding on three hours’ worth of meetings on top of the 12 hours a week I’m here, on top of my 15-credit hour school load, on top of my 20-hour work week—it’s too much. I came here because I felt stressed and overwhelmed. How can I add more to my schedule when the main source of stress is my schedule?” My voice had risen in volume. I looked away, toward the door, and hunched my shoulders.

    Dave sighed. “If you want to get better, your sobriety should be a priority.”

    “But I’m depressed, not addicted. Maybe I could cut back a bit on the drinking, but addiction isn’t ruining my life. I don’t belong here. I’m not a meth-head. I haven’t lost my job. I haven’t lost my kids — I don’t even have kids. I’ve never gotten a DUI. I don’t do heroin.”

    Dave nodded and motioned for me to continue. He wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

    I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at my feet. “I’ll try, okay?”

    That night on my way out I threw my folder in the trash can, hoping the other patients would see it. I didn’t return. Instead of climbing the steps to IOP the following Wednesday, I slithered into a bar booth and ordered the usual, beer and a bourbon. Then a pitcher to split with my boyfriend. Fuck it, another shot. And another. Then—oblivion.

    That summer, while walking my dogs in the evening, I stared at the lives inside the yellow squares of windows I passed. I defined these lives, these people, as “good.” Young couples unloading groceries. Families sitting around oaky tables, eating dinner. A girl my age doing yoga in her living room. Husbands and wives suiting up for an evening run. It looked like love, warmth, virtue, balance. When I walked the dogs in the morning, I gaped at the men and women jogging or biking past me while I sucked on a cigarette and squinted my hungover eyes against the sun. Every morning, every night, as I contemplated everyone else’s healthy normalcy, I felt like an ugly exoskeleton, wishing I could fill myself with whatever they had. I could see it, but I couldn’t access it. Instead, I stumped down the road with my unwashed body and my stringy short hair, pulled along by two ill-behaved dogs. In my mind, my body, I couldn’t find those families’ goodness and light. The closest I knew to it was liquor, so I filled myself with that instead.

    ***

    That first round of IOP didn’t take, but maybe Dave and, more importantly, Ryan, Jack, Gladys, Robin, Jane, and Madison had planted a seed. A year later, I walked into my first meeting and said Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m an alcoholic. As soon as I said it, something cool and smooth moved to the center of my chest and clicked. That sentence was the most honest thing I’d said in years. It removed the barrier of I do not belong and replaced it with the doorway of Help me—I’m just like you. 

    Today, I’m ten years sober. When I give a lead, or speak at the psych ward, I try to remember the scared girl I was. Head thrown back, chin up, elbows wide; putting up a tough front to hide my fear. I look for her in every crowd, and when I find her, I make eye contact. She usually looks away, but that’s okay. Someday, she might be able to hold my gaze.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Magic and the Tragic: Falling in Love in Recovery

    The Magic and the Tragic: Falling in Love in Recovery

    I wondered if the bitter taste of the endings would overpower all the other memories of my first sober loves.

    I met C at the most inopportune moment imaginable: I was a full-blown heroin addict. He was not. We met on a video chat website called ChatRoulette, both of us drunk with our respective friends; he lived in California, I in New York. After a few months of daily phone calls and video chats I was head-over-heels in love and flew out to San Diego to meet him, doing my best to appear healthy and normal. I hadn’t told him and didn’t plan to.

    C was less a boyfriend than a hostage, an innocent pulled onto a rollercoaster he didn’t yet realize was brakeless. The only reason I was able to hide my addiction from him for a while was because he was so impossibly normal—he surfed, played guitar, had a tight-knit group of equally normal friends. What he saw in me, tattooed and cynical, I still don’t know; perhaps, like me, he needed something different. He’d never known any heroin addicts in his idyllic suburban life, so he missed all the tell-tale signs. Naturally he would think the marks on my arms were inflamed mosquito bites and not track marks, because who would lie about something like that?

    I’ll never forget the look on his face when he finally caught me. I get why using heroin would be unfathomable to someone who has never tried it. It must be near impossible to understand the kind of pain and self-loathing that makes heroin seem like a viable solution. By the time he’d caught me I had been making half-assed attempts to get clean for months, but the look on his face was the final push I needed. I left New York and moved in with him in California and despite some false starts, despite the odds, I got better.

    In the cold hard light of my fledgling sobriety, the fantasy guy I’d created in my mind began to crumble the way real-estate euphemisms do when you see the actual apartment. You really want to believe that they actually meant cozy and not suffocatingly claustrophobic, but they never do. Never. In my heroin haze I’d romanticized all his flaws: instead of being emotionally repressed with awful communication skills, he was pensive and mysterious. He wasn’t living at home to save money, he was too cheap and emotionally enmeshed with his mother to move out. I loved him even so, tenaciously, holding onto him with white knuckles as the relationship unraveled over the next few years.

    The night it finally ended, I felt like I’d been thrown off a cliff. I’d gone straight from drugs to love and for the first time it was just me, unadulterated, crying alone in my car in an empty parking lot. For the first time, I was really, truly sober.

    After the breakup, I decided to move back east to go back to school to study film, or writing. A few days before Christmas I stopped by a college in Brooklyn to figure out admissions, and, smushed into a packed rush-hour train on my way back, happened to look up and lock eyes with a guy a few rows away.

    An electric current pulsed through me. He looked tired and messy—two days of beard, deep circles under his eyes, terrible posture, dark-blonde hair stuffed into an awful neon orange ski hat. But there was something about him.

    I took my notebook out of my bag and started writing about him, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness, private thoughts I’d typically never share with a stranger, especially one I was so attracted to. I filled over a page and then decided to give it to him. Why not? What’s the worst that could happen? With this burst of confidence, I wrote my number at the bottom of the page but even before I’d finished folding it up, I lost my resolve. The note was still in my palm when the train slowed and he walked towards me, mumbling something unintelligible and thrusting out his hand: he had written something for me. I handed him my note and he looked down at it, then back up at me. We grinned at each other. Just like that, I’d somehow stumbled into a cute first-meeting worthy of Nora Ephron herself.

    At dinner a few nights later, he spoke slowly, deliberately, eyes crinkling when he smiled. He told me his name—E—and that my note had made him laugh. He was a musician, and like most musicians I’d known he was a bit of a disaster. Maybe more than a bit: a self-diagnosed narcoleptic, a diabetic who struggled to stay on top of his blood sugar, an ex-cocaine addict. (He didn’t specify how long. Weeks? Days? Hours?) As he told me all this, I knew the sensible thing was to make up some excuse and book it the hell out of there, yet there I was, moody and self-absorbed, a writer (enough said), an ex-junkie. I was an insecurity-ridden raw nerve fresh out of a spectacularly painful breakup, far from the picture of perfect mental health. So I didn’t book it; I stayed put.

    After that first date we saw each other constantly. We listened to records, played Scrabble (I always won), talked late into the night, laughed, made out in his driveway. I met his friends; he sent me albums he thought I would like. One night I sat on his kitchen counter eating a yogurt and he stood there with the refrigerator door open, staring at me with a big, dumb smile.

    “What?” I said.

    He shook his head and closed the refrigerator door, still smiling. I’ve never felt more beautiful than I did right then.

    “What are you scared of?” he asked me once after we’d had sex.

    “Failure. Success. Mediocrity. Rejection. You?”

    “Well, everything, I guess,” he replied. “I’m afraid of everything.”

    We both had piles of baggage, but there was a major difference—I was in recovery, depressed but going to therapy, an addict but a clean one who went to meetings, afraid of everything but doing it anyway. In his bed when he thought I’d fallen asleep I felt him pull away, back into a dark part of himself he didn’t want me to see. I couldn’t help but remember the way C did the very same thing.

    After I returned to California we continued to talk, but over time he stopped answering my calls, calling back days later at odd hours sounding distracted and paranoid. He would tell me he didn’t believe I was actually moving back to New York and I’d repeatedly reassure him that my return ticket was already booked. Eventually he stopped calling back at all, and though I was angry, I also felt something else, unmistakable and undeniable: dread. After a month of radio silence, I Googled his name.

    “Tappan Zee Jump: man’s family ‘blindsided’ by death.”

    He must’ve been so cold, I remember thinking. It was the beginning of April—temperate in San Diego, but miserably wet and chilly in New York. Over the next few weeks I jumped from denial to anger and back again, unable to comprehend the amount of pain he must have felt to justify jumping off a bridge. I thought about what my mom’s face would look like if someone told her I’d killed myself, or the way she’d feel if she found out I had died of an overdose. I realized it wasn’t all that different.

    That summer, I was compelled to google another name: C’s. We hadn’t spoken since the breakup and I’d thought up all kinds of reasons as to why he had never reached out. Interestingly enough, none of these reasons included him having a pregnant new girlfriend. I didn’t feel all that different looking at C’s baby registry than I did when I saw E’s obituary. Both felt devastating and permanent; both had nothing to do with me. I wondered if the bitter taste of the endings would overpower all the other memories of my first sober loves.

    In AA they often talk about “selective memory”: Play the tape through, they say. Instead of just remembering that one perfect drunk night, play the tape through to how you felt the next morning, to the shame and panic of waking up after a blackout. Instead of just remembering little moments of a relationship, look at the whole thing, the magic and the tragic. I knew the tragic parts by heart, but as the years passed I began to see the magic, too: C and I on motorcycle trips together, holding hands in the dark, recording songs in his bathroom (the acoustics were better). Then, the magic of learning how to love someone; the way I felt on the train on that cold winter day when I met E; the way he looked at me in his kitchen, his big smile illuminated by the white light of an open refrigerator. The note he gave me: “to me you’re perfect and I LOVE your hair” in a loopy script on the back of an old business card. I still have it, somewhere.

    Those are the things I remember now, not because I’ve forgotten the endings or the sad bits, but because at almost eight years sober, I’m beginning to finally see the big picture: the sad parts are gifts, too, maybe more precious than anything else. I play the tape through, and all I feel is grateful.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Recovery Month: A Time of Celebration and Hope

    Recovery Month: A Time of Celebration and Hope

    September is National Recovery Month. We celebrate the millions of Americans who are living their lives in recovery from mental and substance use disorders and honor those who work to make recovery possible. We also take time to remember the people who have lost their lives and those who still need help.

    We are in the midst of a public health emergency. An average of 115 people die each day from an overdose of heroin or opioid-based pain medication, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental illness, particularly serious mental illness, also presents an urgent need for treatment. People with serious mental illness constitute approximately 20 percent of people incarcerated every year, one-third experience homelessness, and have a suicide rate 25 times that of the general public. Tragically, these and other factors result in people with serious mental illness dying anywhere from 10 to 25 years earlier than the general population.

    Even those who don’t face the worst outcomes from having a mental illness or an addiction still feel significant effects. Mental and substance use disorders affect people in every community in the U.S. so we must provide effective treatment and recovery services to all those in need. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that in 2016, approximately 20 million people aged 12 or older had a substance use disorder and about 44.7 million Americans aged 18 and older experienced a mental disorder. In addition, an estimated 2.6 million adults aged 18 or older had co-occurring serious mental illness and substance use disorder.

    To help the millions of people with a mental and substance use disorders, Recovery Month serves to educate Americans about the benefits of treatment and recovery services. It also promotes three key messages:

    • Prevention works.
    • Treatment is effective.
    • People can and do recover.

    Communities across the country celebrate Recovery Month by hosting events that provide understanding, hope and help to people living their lives in recovery.

    The 2018 Recovery Month theme is “Join the Voices for Recovery: Invest in Health, Home, Purpose, and Community”. It highlights how a full range of treatment and support services are important to supporting recovery for people with mental and substance use disorders. Examples of such services include healthcare, housing, employment, education, and social supports. This theme represents the efforts of people working toward recovery, their families and friends, peers in long-term recovery and those who provide care to make recovery possible.

    SAMHSA will host the 29th Annual National Recovery Month Kick-off on September 6, 2018. The event will highlight SAMHSA’s treatment and recovery activities as well as share perspectives from the field and people living in recovery. I invite you to watch this special observance via webcast at https://www.hhs.gov/live/live-2/index.html#9156.

    Finally, I encourage everyone to get involved. Visit the Recovery Month website to see the available material and products, such as the Recovery Month Toolkit, public service announcements, logos, banners, flyers, posters and more. You can also find out what is happening in your state or local community through the Recovery Month event listing.

    View the original article at samhsa.gov

  • New Year’s Resolution 2019: Tobacco-Free Recovery

    New Year’s Resolution 2019: Tobacco-Free Recovery

    Quitting smoking is a resolution many smokers set for themselves.  It’s widely known that quitting has significant health benefits, but did you know it also can improve a person’s mental health?  And for those with substance use disorders, smoking cessation is associated with increased odds of long-term recovery.

    Smoking cessation is linked to decreased depression, anxiety, and stress.  It’s a factor in experiencing improved positive mood and quality of life, and is also related to improved substance use disorder recovery outcomes.  Research shows that quitting increases the odds of long-term recovery, whereas continued smoking increases the likelihood of relapse.

    As a result of this evidence, SAMHSA developed the recently released toolkit, “Implementing Tobacco Cessation Programs in Substance Use Disorder Treatment Settings” to aid in the integration of tobacco treatment in behavioral healthcare treatment.  The toolkit contains a quick guide providing an overview of the challenges associated with tobacco cessation and the benefits of being tobacco-free for those with substance use disorders.  It also includes tips that can be used in substance use disorder treatment programs to implement tobacco cessation programs of their own.

    In addition, SAMHSA awarded a five-year grant to the University of California at San Francisco to establish the National Center of Excellence for Tobacco-Free Recovery.  The Center provides technical assistance, training, and educational resources to promote the adoption of tobacco-free facility/grounds policies and the integration of tobacco treatment into behavioral healthcare.

    Research has consistently found that smokers with behavioral health conditions—like other smokers—want to quit, can quit, and benefit from evidence-based smoking cessation treatments.  Cessation counseling and medication significantly increase the chances of quitting.  The combination of counseling and medication is more effective than either is alone.  There are evidence-based resources to help smokers quit at www.smokefree.gov.

    View the original article at samhsa.gov

  • Letting Go of Control: How I Stopped Trying to Force Solutions

    Letting Go of Control: How I Stopped Trying to Force Solutions

    Recognizing that I am not responsible for and cannot fix other people’s feelings is powerful; it frees up so much space and time for me to do my own healing and growing.

    When I was a little girl, I remember becoming so overwhelmed with feelings that I would send myself to my room until I could cry through enough of them to clear my vision. If I got in a fight with someone, I would write an apology note and beg them to take it off my hands. I didn’t seek to understand who was at fault, I only wanted to ease the uncomfortable tension. I was sorry it happened and I wanted to undo it. I needed to erase it, but I could rarely get the resolution I was so desperate for. Adults told me: “Not everyone is ready to resolve a conflict as quickly as you.”

    No one told me: “It’s not your responsibility; you cannot fix it.”

    I respond too strongly to my perception of others’ reactions. I always wonder if I read physical and social cues too strongly. I consider the presence, the look, and the tone of voice more important than the content of what they’re saying. Maybe I’m right in my assumption, maybe I’m wrong, but if someone doesn’t want to tell me how they’re feeling, I can’t make them.

    I have lived the majority of my 32 years on earth in this way: A conflict arises and all I want is for the issue to go away and be resolved immediately. If it isn’t fixed, I feel my world is collapsing and I freak out. I cry and panic and become desperate for resolution. My mother recalls that I was predisposed to such behavior in my very early years. She told me that even as a toddler I had these panicky freak-outs.

    I hate the idea of causing hurt feelings, and particularly disappointed feelings, in others. But other people are often more well-adjusted and can handle the blows of disappointment as easily as a ship rises over a large swell. It’s not comfortable, but it’s a normal part of the ups and downs of life. Yet I’ve always handled it like my ship is about to wreck. I know I’ve had feelings of being over-sensitive and disappointed from a very young age. I didn’t want anyone to be mad at me, ever. It’s a part of how I’ve always understood or misunderstood the world.

    I never knew any other existence. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to force a solution. I didn’t know how to balance emotions—I didn’t see it as a possibility.

    My feelings run deep and the current is disproportionately strong. I am headstrong and emotionally reactive. I struggle with the tendency to overreact, but life is not as dramatic as I make it out to be. There are times when I need to be reminded of the true proportions of what is happening, so I can weigh them against my feelings and try to cut some of the excess heft. I’m not exaggerating my feelings; I feel so intensely and so deeply that learning to balance myself in a world that does not feel this way has been a lifelong challenge.

    Imagine a life full of dramatic conflicts, and you can never control the level of your emotions; they always overflow or break the dam. Joy is out of this world happiness and sorrow is the deepest despair. But the ups and downs are consistent and the rocking from one to the other is comforting because it’s familiar. Then, after decades of this you begin to feel different. It’s not overnight and it isn’t that the pendulum has stopped the perpetual swinging. But you feel different, as if now there’s more light than dark. You realize you can feel angry or anxious or sad without flooding or sinking.

    That’s me, right now. I feel generally content and I don’t know what to do with it. The mellow ups and downs of a content – even happy — life feel too safe. Part of me is waiting for the next massive swell. Of course, something will happen, that’s life, but this normalcy that feels so good can sometimes feel so strange. It’s like waking up in a new home and forgetting, for a moment, that you moved there.

    I still struggle with feeling responsible for everyone’s feelings. And the feelings I have are not just imaginary: I might sometimes actually be left out, or I might sense someone else’s sorrow. Someone might dislike me and I might realize it. When I sense tension, it might not be a delusion, but my awareness of it doesn’t mean I’m responsible for it (or for fixing it). Making someone like me isn’t my job. I am not here to be an emotional sounding board for everyone who is suffering.

    Recognizing that I am not responsible for and cannot fix other people’s feelings is powerful; it frees up so much space and time for me to do my own healing and growing.

    My life was so filled with panic and fear; that panic of needing to resolve the issue immediately. I felt that way in any interpersonal conflict, whether real or imagined. I had to force a solution. I felt as if my worth was intrinsically tied to the other person’s acceptance of me. This set the stage for an abusive relationship where the other person never validated me, which further reinforced my own negative self-image.

    I have been discovering my own sense of serenity over the last five years. I started going to therapy and then to a psychiatrist and then to a 12-step program followed by two other step groups. The combination of these different sources of support has changed my life. I don’t feel such intense panic over real or imagined conflict with others. I still feel anxious sometimes, but my response is much healthier. I am becoming more capable of controlling my behavior and my reactions, even when the feelings linger. I can usually put my well-being first and don’t follow through when I get the impulse to explain and rationalize my behavior to others.

    You can’t change other people; you can only do something about your own perspective. I always had the capacity to do that, I just hadn’t acquired the coping tools to handle my own feelings and respond to others.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How It Feels to Be the Reality Show Villain: An Interview with Kari Ann Peniche

    How It Feels to Be the Reality Show Villain: An Interview with Kari Ann Peniche

    Those shows continue to haunt me and do me damage in my personal life. I was portrayed as this crazy person, and that portrayal is something I find myself having to fight against on a regular basis.

    Kari Ann Peniche was thrust into more scandals before the age of 30 than most fictional Hollywood starlets. She was crowned Miss Teen USA 2002 before her 17th birthday, then in 2004 the title was taken from her after she appeared nude in a celebrity pictorial for Playboy magazine. Then, from 2009 to 2010, Kari Ann appeared in succession on the reality shows Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, and Sober House. Set up as the troubled bad girl by the producers, Kari Ann received little help and lots of negative press. She was also the subject of tabloid celebrity stories covering her volatile engagement to Aaron Carter in 2006, a nasty public quarrel with the late singer Mindy McCready in 2009, and the leak of a controversial nude home video that included married actors Eric “McSteamy” Dane and Rebecca Gayheart in 2009.

    With hard work, Kari Ann moved on from that chapter and today she is happily married with two children. She found her true calling as an interior designer and creative director, and in 2017 she launched DAF House, a “luxury design, fashion and art firm.” 

    The Fix recently had the pleasure of speaking with Kari Ann about her journey. 

    After appearing nude in the November 2004 issue of Playboy magazine, you were stripped of your crown. Why did you decide to appear in Playboy? Since Hugh Hefner was still alive at this point, I imagine you spent time at the Playboy mansion.

    When Playboy was introduced to me, I didn’t really know how I felt about the idea. All I knew was that it was a nude magazine that my Dad had kept hidden in a drawer when I was growing up. I thought it was weird to even consider the idea at first. Then, the agent went on to tell me about all these iconic women who had posed for the magazine in the past: Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett, Sharon Stone, Shannen Doherty, Drew Barrymore, and many more. I thought, “If they posed for the magazine, then I definitely want to pose for the magazine and do a celebrity pictorial because I will be in such good company.”

    So, I agreed to do it, and I did spend time at the mansion. I lived there for a couple of months, and Hef was always very nice. He taught me how to play backgammon, and he let me stay in the guest house. I don’t think it was too much for me, but it definitely opened my eyes to a world that I hadn’t been exposed to before.

    In an interview with Steppin’ Out magazine, you revealed that you had been raped twice before you turned 18, first by a neighbor when you were 13 and later by a U.S. military officer when you were modeling in South Korea. You also had a series of abusive boyfriends that took advantage of you and introduced you to hard drugs. How difficult was it to be in the national spotlight while dealing with such extreme trauma?

    I know now that being busy with modeling and Playboy and all the attention that I was getting at that time really helped to distract me from that trauma. At the same time, I never really dealt with what happened. I just pushed everything aside because I was too busy to stop and really think about it. I would tell myself that I was fine, I’m not a victim, and those things aren’t about me. The ones that did those things to me, they’re the ones that need help and they’re the sick ones. They should deal with it, and I don’t need to deal with it because I’m just fine. That was my attitude about all that back then.

    When I did the Steppin’ Out interview, I was starting to kind of crumble, and I was reaching out for help. Everything had slowed down, and suddenly I had a lot of time to myself. Finally, being with myself allowed me to reflect on what had happened. I realize now that I shared stuff that they didn’t even really ask me questions about. The interview really captured where I was emotionally and mentally. I was breaking down, and it felt like everything was falling apart. It happened to be the same time that I got the calls to do the reality shows. I knew I needed something so I thought it made sense: I would help my career and help myself at the same time, but that’s not what ended up happening.

    You went on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew because your manager thought it was a good idea. Today, you say that you were never a sex addict. Instead, would you describe yourself back then as a love addict or a relationship addict?

    I like to say that I had more of a shopping problem, I mean, I didn’t even know what sex addiction was and I didn’t know why I was going on that show. I was the first person cast for that show, and I had only been intimate with a handful of people. Never had I ever had a one-night stand or hooked up with people I didn’t know. I was never promiscuous in that way, but I knew how to play that part in a weird sense.

    I do know that I used sex as a kind of protection. I would use sex as a way to ward off guys that I thought were trying to make moves on me. I thought that being graphic or explicit would intimidate my guy friends and keep them in line. I always had people over at my apartments and my houses. I would buy sex toys and bondage stuff that I would have in my bedroom and on my bed, but I had never even used these things before. It was all like some kind of strange decoration, and it was my way of protecting myself. I don’t know if that makes sense, and I know it sounds kind of confusing, but it actually worked really well. Rather than use sex toys and bondage equipment, I really just shopped for them and displayed them, and that’s why I like to refer to it as more of a shopping problem. My goal was to make guys think, “I’m not even going to try to hit on her because I am inadequate. I won’t be able to keep up with a girl like her.” In truth, it was all one big illusion. I had been through so many bad things in the past, and I needed to have a way to protect myself.

    When you were on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew and Sober House, it seemed like the producers cast you as “the villainess.” Did you feel unfairly portrayed on these shows?

    When I did those shows, I had really bad management, and I was coached to be a certain way by the producers. I was told that VH1 was looking for a new starlet to come out of these reality shows, and the cast was going to include Tom Sizemore and Dennis Rodman. We had big names on the show, so I thought it made sense to be a part of that group; I thought it would help my career.

    I do feel unfairly portrayed because the producers did a lot of things to provoke negative behaviors. I could have behaved differently, but so much of what happened wasn’t shown. You saw the reactions but never the provocations. We’re being filmed 24 hours a day for 21 days, and all that’s aired is 47 minutes once a week for ten weeks. Obviously, a lot of the story is edited out. They never showed the full story of what led to my outbursts on the show.

    I also felt like they were digging things up and putting words into my mouth that weren’t true about my drug use and past trauma. At first, I would just say whatever they wanted me to say. I didn’t really know the answers to the questions they were asking.

    As time passed, I knew I wasn’t being true to myself. It really started to bother me, and I started regretting a lot of the things we had filmed earlier. I didn’t want to be there anymore, and I knew that doing the show wasn’t right for me. At the same time, I also knew that I needed some kind of intervention because I was going down a bad path in my life. I really wanted to be helped, and it was a struggle to try to get something positive out of the experience when I also felt manipulated and not properly cared for.

    At the end of the day, we were just a cast, and our pain didn’t matter. All that mattered was them getting the material that they wanted. They were creating characters, and I hated the character that they created for me. Rather than help me get well, it felt like it was designed to do just the opposite.

    If you could sit down and talk to the producers of those reality shows today, what would you say? Should behavioral addictions like love addiction, relationship addiction, and sex addiction be used as fuel for the engine of the entertainment machine?

    I would first thank them for the experience because I did learn a lot. However, I don’t think they were fair or considerate. Rather than manipulate those experiences, they should have let things unfold naturally. If they had done it naturally, I believe they would have had great content anyways. There already are enough things that unfold in rehab anyhow. I don’t understand why their focus wasn’t helping the patients as opposed to doing things to provoke the drama.

    The producers and people on the show used our addictions and our traumas in these therapy sessions as entertainment, but they didn’t provide any follow-up care. It was a bad idea, and it caused a lot of hurt for my family and for me because they opened wounds without trying to heal them. It was like pulling off psychic scabs, and they would be blaming my mom or my dad for what had happened to me when I wasn’t even blaming them. I have never blamed them for anything. I was an adult, and I made those choices on my own. I knew better, and I knew I shouldn’t have put myself in those situations or done those things. Rather than help, they made me more confused.

    After those shows, I left each one of them feeling worse than I had before I went on them. They had ripped off those scabs, and I left filming with all these open wounds and no one to help heal them. Even today, those shows continue to haunt me and do me damage in my personal life. I was portrayed as this crazy person, and that portrayal is something I find myself having to fight against on a regular basis.

    I don’t think those settings should be televised. Everyone comes off poorly, and it’s not a good message. It does more harm than good.

    On the DAF House team page, you are quoted as saying, “Change is possible no matter who you are, what you’ve done or where you’ve been. It starts with creativity.” How did your creativity help you overcome the trauma you experienced as a girl and young woman? When did you realize that it was time to change and how did you change?

    I believe we are all artists in our own way, and we are all here to create, whether we are creating art or music, writing or designing, building or financing, marketing or selling. It all depends on our identity, but everything can be done creatively. For me, the quote on the DAF House website refers to that chapter in my life. There has been so much said about me that’s honestly not true, and I had spent four or five years honestly embarrassed about who I was or even who I am. I was afraid of anyone Googling me and finding out about what had happened because the reality had been so twisted. I was scared about what was going to happen.

    I recently went through a tough time in my marriage where my husband and I spent almost two years divorcing. It was really ugly and crazy in retrospect because we never got divorced, and we are still together. During that time, everything from my past before I was even married and before I was ever a mom was being brought up in court. I was being portrayed as a bad mother because I was an addict, and I had been on those celebrity rehab shows. It was all in the past and completely irrelevant to my being a mother or being married at that point in time. It was so in the past, but still, the judge ordered me to do random drug testing where they go in the bathroom with you and watch you pee three times a week. It was awful, and during that period, I did over 80 drug tests in a six-month period, and every one of them came back negative.

    Look, I was happy to do those drug tests because I knew I had nothing to hide, but never did any of that get publicized. Only the negative headlines are focused on by the eyes of the world. My husband’s lawyer brought forth a torrent of allegations against me, all this bad stuff that had happened long before we were married and all this bad stuff that was untrue. What was so disturbing is that the false picture that lawyer tried to paint of me kept coming out in the press and being published as truth. I cannot tell you how hard it was to go through something so awful.

    My husband and I did manage to reconcile, and we have done our best to repair our marriage. He was going through his own crisis mentally at the time, and the divorce had little to do with me and our relationship. However, given my celebrity and the scandals in my past, I became the punching bag of that process. He was influenced by a lot of outside people, and he let those people dominate his perspective. For a long time, all I could do was love him from far away and do my best to let him know that I wasn’t playing games. I wouldn’t say anything mean about him because I knew it was all going to be public record. I didn’t say anything about him being a bad father because it wasn’t true. He’s always been a good father, and I would never say such things about the man I love.

    We have been married for nine years, and we have put that behind us. For me, that quote is about focusing on the present and the future, leaving the past behind. I am trying to create a new picture of who I am for the public so I can be seen for who I really am.

    This interview was edited for length and clarity.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mother’s Day: Recovery, Love, and Light

    Mother’s Day: Recovery, Love, and Light

    At night, tucking my kids into bed, I would make a deal with myself: hold on just a little longer until they needed me a little less and then I could go through with my suicide plan.

    Mother’s Day is Mothering Day, isn’t it? A day that honors all of us who mother our children—loving, caretaking, nurturing, offering our time and energy, setting aside more selfish pursuits and pleasures to help support our children’s journeys. Of course, we love receiving the homemade, crayoned cards, the store-bought roses or dandelion bouquets, and the pancakes delivered in bed (even with kitchen disasters). These gifts remind us of our essential role in our children’s lives. But for me? Mother’s Day is my chance to offer my gratitude that I am now a sober and stable force of love, hope, and healing for my children.

    Almost 10 years ago, I started writing my blog, Momma May Be Mad, during a complete bipolar collapse: I was anorexic, alcoholic, in and out of psychiatric hospitals and rehabs, and determined to die. But what anchored me to this world were words; more specifically, my blog, a public journal that allowed me to wrestle openly with the lies and the truths of illness and wellness, of despair and hope, of isolation and community.

    At the time, recovery seemed an impossible and cruel promise: light and hope and love would always be just out of reach and I believed it would be better for my children if I died. In the morning, I woke up too early and at night went to bed too late because of a ruminative argument that forced this point: How could I ever be a safe and loving harbor for my children when I was the storm threatening to smash us all against the rocks? I did not believe that I could get sober and stable and well enough to mother my children into their own growing, complex, miraculous lives.Rather than feeling like a mother, a source of creative nurturing power, I felt like one of the furies, a toxic destructive cyclone.

    Do you know that “mother” also refers to the thick scummy substance in liquor, the filthy dregs? This truly was how I thought of myself. At night, tucking my kids into bed, I would make a deal with myself: hold on just a little longer until they needed me a little less and then I could go through with my suicide plan.

    My first post was a manifesto to truth. For years I’d been lying about how much I drank, how often I cut myself, how little I’d eaten, and how I was planning to die. It was a way to hold myself accountable to a deliberate, intentional, and public directive: to recover my health, my balance, and most importantly my integrity. My aim was nothing less than radical transparency:

    March 1, 2010: Truth: Here I am, Self and the Blank Page, fingers nervously typing. Time to write this down, to deal with the shame and the self-loathing, and turn it around. This is the story of IT: ‘IT’ is my abstract pronoun, the catch-all for my variety of afflictions. IT inhabits capital letters, an impassive, unfeeling monolith. In contrast, ‘I,’ (or for your sake, ‘me,’) who lives in love, in forgiveness, and in the shrieks of pleasure I hear coming from my kids right now in their playroom. I am thirty-seven years old, the Momma of two, the wife of one, and I have bipolar disorder, and eating disorder. Oh yes, and the nasty habit of cutting myself. And drinking, too much. I am in therapy, on mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, and sleep meds. But what I must accept: Life on Life’s Terms. No mere 12 Step cliché, but practical truth. I’m ragged and frayed and scattered, fractured and splintered by shame. I want to be whole for my children.

    My essential sacred directive was to stay alive. Short-term goals at first. Stay alive for my son’s cookie crumb, sloppy kisses, his warm hand on my cheek, his tiny body finding mine at night, spooning up against me. He needed me in the primal way four-year-olds need their Mommas, close and tight. He is my son, and, at the time, I was his sun—the one he revolved around. When I picked him up from preschool, he would tackle me and say, “I love you Momma. Will you marry me?” A sincere proposal—live together forever.

    And to stay alive for my daughter who needed me more and differently as she navigated the intricacies of being a seven-year-old who preferred dragons, bugs, and furry creatures over Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, and boyfriend-girlfriend role playing. And then there were the rapid-fire, shifting friendships that often relegated her to third-in-line best friend. My heart broke over and over as she tearfully told me that she had “a funny feeling in her belly all day long,” and wanted to move far away. “Vermont,” she said, “or Greece.”In her Mother’s Day Card from that year, she wrote that I made yummy muffins, was, contrary to fact, good at mathematics, loved when I tickled, hugged, and kissed her, and that she “relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly” loved me.

    Twelve relly’s.

    Stay here and love us, forever: this was the sacred directive given to me by my children.

    In the years since that public declaration, I’ve done the hard work in therapy, I take my meds, respect my body (no cutting, no starving), got sober, and continue to write my way out of hell and into health. Sobriety and stability are clarifying and being a Mother in recovery means showing our children that they don’t have to stay stuck in a bad situation. By our own example one day at a time, we show them how to persevere, to stay hopeful, to recover and thrive after what seems insurmountable failure. 

    I am mostly happy these days and can hardly remember those years foundering at the bottom of the dark well, the years I believed I would never find joy again, never be the mother I wanted to be for my children again, never write another word that mattered again, never look forward to the next day and the day after that again. Now? I know that I am not (and never was) the scummy, filthy dreg at the bottom of a bottle of booze, and that while I might have been a mad Momma for a time, I have always been loved. Now? I am the safe harbor, my steady beacon blinking: Here-Here-Here-Always Here-Always Here-Always Here.

    Bipolar disorder is not curable, but it is manageable; sobriety is hard even on the easy days; and I fought to regain my life and my life with my children.

    Know this to be true: if you are where I was, please do not despair because you are worth fighting for, skinned knuckles and scraped knees, bruises and blood. Fight for your life, your joy, your own self-love. The world wants you back, the light is waiting, and your children are here.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How I Found My Mother Through Forgiveness

    How I Found My Mother Through Forgiveness

    I realized that in order to change my family’s lineage I would not only have to forgive everyone who ever hurt me, I would have to learn to forgive myself.

    It was early morning when the security guard at the cemetery came and used the weight of his shoulder to open the heavy gate. I drove in, making my way through a long tunnel of magnolias. The sun threw pillars of light through the canopy of trees while a gust of wind sent brown leaves spiraling along the roadside. Headstones and crypts were spread out like pop-tarts in rows across the lush green lawns. At the end of the road I turned left, driving all the way to the chain link fence where I parked my car.

    After I turned off the ignition, I took a deep breath. I got out and walked with my flip-flops snapping against the bottoms of my soles. When I got to the curb I counted five graves in and froze when I saw my mother’s name etched in a stone: Nancy Adamson, 1922 to 1960.

    Why is it, when you say “I will never be like my parents,” it’s almost like you’re giving the universe the exact coordinates for where you need to land?

    My mother was schizophrenic. At 38, she had a psychotic break, cut her wrists, and pulled a large shipping trunk over her in the bathtub where she drowned. I was only seven at the time.

    But, as if the universe had conspired against me, I was 38 and the mother of two young boys, 16 and 9, when I had my own drug-induced psychotic break. I shot my husband’s mistress in the arm and landed in jail on assault charges.

    I recently attended a conference on trauma and addiction where a renowned clinical psychiatrist said, “As children, our relationships with our parents are unconsciously imprinted on our psyche.” So yes, we are destined to repeat the same mistakes unless, and I’m paraphrasing here, we wake the fuck up.

    The process of waking up for me has been one eyelash at a time. It started 25 years ago when I was released from jail and went to live at a shelter for women and children. Up until then I had been extremely self-sufficient, but as I found myself leveled by the circumstances in my life, I started to ask for help. I was extremely fortunate to fall into a group of people who were kind to me when I needed it the most.

    The image of my mother drowning under a trunk stuffed with photographs of her children haunted me for years. I couldn’t even tell people what she had done, let alone write it down for the world to see as I’m doing now. I was deeply ashamed that she had chosen to leave this world and me behind. By the time I was a teenager I was filled with rage and as I turned to alcohol and drugs for relief, I turned that rage loose on myself.

    I blamed everybody for what was wrong with my life and became extremely fluent in Victimese. It was my mother’s fault, my father’s fault, and later it would be my husband’s fault. What I didn’t realize was this belief system that I had adopted was giving me the exact excuse I needed to use drugs and alcohol with abandon. All of my so-called justified resentments were the very things that were drowning me. And if I wanted to stay sober I would have to drop the rocks and swim to the surface.

    After a lot of therapy and self-reflection, I wrote down a list of the resentments I had toward all the people who I believed had harmed me. As I unspooled the jumbled thoughts from my mind onto paper, a clear pattern emerged: While I had been busy blaming everybody else, I had also been giving away my own power. I knew, instinctively, I would have to change that.

    And that’s how I found myself standing in front of my mother’s grave 45 years after she died.

    A lump formed in the back of my throat as I reached for the letter. I looked both ways to make sure no one was watching me before reading it out loud:

    Dearest Mom,

    It’s taken me a while to get here because I’ve been so angry that you left me like you did. I was resentful and those resentments defined my life, they defined who I became.

    I missed having a mother and I was profoundly sad but no one talked about you after you were gone.

    I wish you could have been there in my teenage years. I could have used some maternal guidance because dad clearly didn’t have a clue.

    I wish you could have been there at my wedding day. I wish you could have been there when I was pregnant and when I gave birth to my two boys. I wish you could have watched them grow up into the men they are today. You would be so proud of them. I certainly am.

    Every single thing in my life, large and small has echoed with the absence of not having you by my side. But I want you know Mom, I’m okay now. I want you know that I’ve finally learned how to move on with my life.

    Getting sober was the hardest, yet, the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to reconcile things I was holding on to, including my relationship with you. It seems if I wanted to be free I had to let you off the hook. And so, Mom, I’ve come here to say I’m not angry at you anymore and want you to know, I love you very, very much.

    Your Daughter Forever…

    A soft rush or air escaped my lips. I stuffed the letter in my jean pocket and turned to leave. I wasn’t struck by a lightning bolt, there was no burning bush or chariot in the sky, but I did realize that in order to change my family’s lineage I would not only have to forgive everyone who ever hurt me, I would have to learn to forgive myself.

    It didn’t happen overnight and it wasn’t easy. It took willingness combined with herculean effort, but over time, as I became more and more present for my boys, showing up for them through all their failures and successes, I eventually found the mother I had always wanted.

    She was inside of me.

    View the original article at thefix.com