Answer Addiction

Tag: Shame

  • The Five Pillars of Recovery from Trauma and Addiction

    Believe in yourself. Tell yourself that you deserve happiness, joy, success, and a life free from the pain of trauma and addiction. You are worth your recovery.

    In my forty-five years, I enjoyed twelve years of quasi-normal childhood, which ended abruptly when I was raped. I spent the next ten years in a dangerous dance with addiction, suicide attempts, and more trauma. But then I reached a turning point, and my past twenty-three years have been spent healing and learning what works for me in building long-term recovery.

    There is no standard set of blueprints for long-term recovery, as everyone is different, but I have identified five pillars that have enabled me to build on a strong foundation of recovery. My daily choice not to use substances forms that foundation, and these rock-solid pillars stabilize that recovery into an impenetrable structure. These five pillars are not unique, and they do require work, but once built, they will stabilize your recovery fortress.

    1. Maintain rigorous honesty. In addiction, our lives were built upon lies and false narratives we told ourselves and others. But recovery demands honesty—only when we can admit the truth can we begin to heal. I had to get honest with myself about my addiction. I had to own it and then take a brutally honest assessment of my life. We cannot build a sustainable recovery on a false narrative. When we lie, we enable sickness, secrets, shame, and suffering.

    Dishonesty makes us vulnerable in all the wrong ways, but honesty conjures the true vulnerability we require to discover authenticity. Start practicing honesty in all your interactions—beginning with yourself. This must be the first pillar because without honesty, the rest will crumble. Anything created in a lie is chaos, and anything created in chaos will end in chaos.

    2. Expose your secrets. You cannot soak in the joy of today if your soul is still filled with yesterday’s garbage. Take out that trash. For me, this meant diving deep and pulling forth all the trauma, pain, and sorrow that I had packed tightly away. I thought this was for my benefit—why bring up old stuff? But in fact my secrets were keeping me sick. They were smoldering under this new foundation I was building in recovery, threating to burn it all down.

    Secrets require silence to thrive, and they allow shame to fester inside of us. Shame is an emotional cancer that, if left untreated, will destroy our recovery. I began by slowly exposing my secrets in my journal. At first, it was the only safe space for me. As I began to trust others in recovery, I began to share those secrets, and the smoldering was extinguished by their compassion and understanding. Begin exposing your own secrets. What thoughts and memories are you afraid to give voice to? Those are the secrets that will keep you sick if you do not get them out.

    3. Let go. All those secrets take up a tremendous amount of space in our mind, body, and soul. We must find ways to process that pain into something productive, useful, and healing. You must unleash this pain so it no longer occupies your mind, body, and soul. When you do this, you make room for hope, light, love, and compassion.

    Writing is my release. But when physical emotional energy rises in me, I need more intense physical activity to push the energy out of my body. I use a spin bike and weightlifting, but you might run, walk, or practice yoga—any activity that gets your heart rate up and helps you sweat, which I think of as negative energy flowing out. When I do this, I am calmer, I am kinder, and I am more the person I want to be. Meditation is another way for me to simply let go and sit with myself when my thoughts are plaguing me or I feel stuck emotionally. I often use mediational apps, guided mediations, or music to help me meditate. When you find what works for you, do it daily. Recovery is like a muscle; when it is flexed, it remains strong.

    4. Remember you aren’t alone. Connection is core to feeling hopeful. By interacting with other trauma survivors and others in recovery, you become part of a group of people with similar experiences who have learned how to survive. Being able to share those pieces of your past with others is incredibly powerful. Seek out support groups in your area, attend meetings, reconnect with healthy people from your past, and pursue activities you enjoy to help you meet like-minded people. Create the circle of people you want in your life—the ones who will hold you accountable yet provide you with unconditional support and love, without judgment.

    In our addiction, we push these people away. We run from them because they act like mirrors to our dishonesty. In recovery, these people become the ones we turn to when things get hard. Even one such person in your life—a family member, friend, sponsor, or trusted colleague—can make a difference. Surround yourself with those who seek to build you up.

    5. Know you matter. In order to grow, heal, and build upon your recovery foundation, you have to believe you are worth it, that you deserve joy and love. At some point in your recovery, you will have to rely on yourself to get through a rough patch. When this happened to me, I had to really dig down and get to know myself. I had to strip away all the false narratives I used to define myself, all the ways I presented myself to the world and to myself. Who was I? What did I love about myself, and what brought me enough joy to feel worthiness?

    I now know what I need to feel calm, to feel beautiful, and to feel deserving of this amazing life of recovery. I matter, and my life in recovery matters so much. It is this core truth that makes me fight for my recovery, my sanity, my marriage, and my job, because they are all worth it. I am worth the fight, and so are you. Believe in yourself. Tell yourself that you deserve happiness, joy, success, and a life free from the pain of trauma and addiction. You are worth your recovery. It is the foundation on which you build your new life.

    Building any structure requires hard work, and recovery is no different. While we each require different tools and plans to create them, these five pillars will sustain our recovery from trauma and addiction.

     

    Jennifer Storm’s Awakening Blackout Girl: A Survivor’s Guide for Healing from Addiction and Sexual Trauma is now available at Amazon and elsewhere.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Perils of Dating While Sober

    The Perils of Dating While Sober

    I am acutely aware of how careful I am to minimize my recovery journey when I first start dating someone.

    A few months ago, a male friend and I were talking about the frustrations and disappointments of dating. I mentioned how lonely it can be navigating this world on my own, without a traveling companion, a long-term lover, or a hiking partner, without someone with whom to Netflix and chill on a rainy Sunday.

    He said, “Dating is complicated for everyone, but for you, with your history? I can only imagine. Maybe guys are afraid of you, afraid of your intelligence and strength.” He hesitated and then continued, “Or maybe they’re just afraid to get close because of your bipolar diagnosis and…well, you’re an alcoholic. So a drink in a bar is out. Your history makes them wary. It’s going to take someone special, someone who’s willing to accept that risk and all your baggage.”

    All Your Baggage

    All your baggage. My old shame rose up, and his words fell on me like a one-hundred story building collapsing, cinder block by cinder block, The only words I could say in clipped retort? 

    “It’s called alcohol-use disorder now,” I said. “Update your vocabulary.”

    For days I replayed his assessment in a loop, an auto-play rumination and in self-defense, even wrote out a bulleted response:

    • Men afraid of me? Seriously? Maybe he’s afraid of my brain, but I’m afraid of his brawn. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice by two different men. Statistics show that women are more likely to be harassed and assaulted and raped—their lives endangered—by men than vice versa. 
    • I’m on a low dose of lithium now, and eight years stable and on an even keel since my divorce. My psychiatrist thinks I may not really be bipolar, or that maybe my bipolar instability was triggered by the conditions of my marriage.
    • And on dating apps, so many men post pictures swigging beer, wine, and booze and list beer, wine, and booze as hobbies. Almost always the first message they send is, “Do you want to get a drink?” And when I suggest a walk, a museum, non-boozy meetup? They disappear.
    • No drama, no crazies, no baggage: an oft-repeated list of No’s on dating profiles, but then these men (perhaps women do this, too?) indicate that they are married and looking for discretion, no strings attached; they also like to post photos of bloodsport: bare chested with AK-15’s and dead animals. But no drama!
    • And finally, too risky to love me? I’m a safe bet now! Look at the evidence: Sober, stable, all my s*** sorted!

    Doth the lady protest too much? Might my bulleted explanation be my armor against latent shame? Because what I am admitting to in my list is that I am lovable only now that I am well, and that when I was unwell? I was unlovable. 

    Love Is an Inherently Risky Proposition

    “I stopped loving you when you got sick,” my ex-husband told me when we decided to divorce, and it’s what I have secretly believed for so long. Hence, my adamant insistence that I am well, well, well and have been now for years, years, years. 

    But this narrative—I am such a scary person to love that it will take someone with extra-special love powers to love me—is one that no one with any diagnosis or at any stage of recovery should ever buy into. Love is an inherently risky proposition. We are at our most vulnerable when we love, trusting our hopes and fears to each other. And there is always the risk of love’s end, but, too, always the possibility of love’s beginnings, its growing and expanding.

    And yet, finding our way to a beginning of love with someone can be daunting and terrifying as we have to negotiate our commitment to honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. We must reconcile that old shame that rises up, sometimes in ripples, sometimes in waves, when we summarize our histories or share how we still struggle with one day at a time with a new partner. I am acutely aware of how careful I am to minimize my recovery journey when I first start dating someone.

    “Oh,” I might say, “I stopped drinking because I wanted to live a healthier life, and for a few years I struggled with depression, but it’s all good now. Really, all good now.” Again that adamant insistence, again that background noise in my head: If he can fall in love with me now in all my lovableness, then none of my previous unlovableness will matter. Of course, even for those who have not struggled with mental illness or alcohol or substance use disorders, it is impossible for “all” to be forever good.

    “Really Crazy”

    I recently ended a relationship with someone after two months of mostly happy, breezy fun but I realized I’d been dodging my shame. When we first met, he mentioned early on that his ex-wife was bipolar. “Really crazy,” he said, and gave me a look that put me on notice.

    So I casually mentioned to him that I had bipolar as well, but “Stabilized!” I said, with a giant calm smile plastered across my face, and I even fluttered my eyelashes in flirty dismissal.

    He said he could see I was in a “good place” and not at all like his ex. And because I want the world to believe that I am in a good place (and most days I am), I nodded in enthusiastic agreement. 

    But then, a few weeks later, he mentioned that my town was known for the State Psychiatric Hospital, opened in the 1840’s and now shuttered. 

    “Have you ever been there?” I asked, because it is now a tourist stop—The Walking Dead once filmed a scene at the mostly abandoned grounds and there are historical markers describing the troubling treatment of the mentally ill across its almost 150 year history.

    “No,” he said, immediately and with a laugh. “I’m not one of the crazies.”

    Of course, during a period of my own instability, I was once one of those “crazies,” in and out of a psychiatric hospital. He knew this by now, though maybe because I “presented” as so very very well, he couldn’t believe that was part of my history.

    To be fair, he made these comments casually, without malice, the kind of talk that generally surrounds those of us who suffer from mental illnesses or who are on a recovery journey. They were the kind of comments I often hear because most people assume, by looking at me and my “got it all together life,” that I am one of them, i.e., “not crazy.”

    But even if his comment was thoughtless, I felt that old shame rise up and stayed silent because I didn’t want him to suddenly see me as sick, and hence unlovable, and consequently maybe leave this beginning of us. So I made a silly remark about ghosts who must surely haunt those grounds. 

    No bulleted list at the ready but here’s what I should have said:

    “It’s hurtful to hear you call someone with my diagnosis ‘really crazy,’ and to call those in treatment ‘crazies.’ We all have our baggage, don’t we? We live and stumble and get up and try to live better, always. All of us.”

    But his remarks and my silence unsettled me. How easy it is for me to talk the talk, but how hard it can be to walk the walk. A few weeks later, I ended this beginning because, yes, I have baggage, and it is not just a free carry-on roller bag, but one of those $20K vintage Louis Vuitton trunks that have drawers and a hanger rod, room enough for my pain and my joy, my mistakes and my amends, my shame and my wisdom. 

    That is, a trunk big enough to carry all my necessities for this continuing journey.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • I Don’t Always Feel Better After a 12-Step Meeting

    I Don’t Always Feel Better After a 12-Step Meeting

    Why would someone continue to go to something that they don’t always like and don’t feel immediate relief from? I’m playing the long game.

    I can’t seem to figure it out, the sinking feeling in my gut, the feeling that I am too visible, too likely to be ogled and leered at by some man old enough to be my father. What the actual hell is this feeling in my gut? I call it a homesick feeling. Maybe it is something else entirely, but it makes me want to cloak myself in a protective layer, strip myself of sexuality and erase the sexualized parts of myself. I feel a deep shame and am overcome with a sorrowful lonesomeness as if a hole has cracked into existence and swallowed me whole. I feel stripped naked: Too visible. Too human. Too vulnerable.

    It happens almost every time, at almost every 12-step meeting. I want to disappear. There is a black hole in my gut, a homesick longing that begs me to give in, and I would, if I knew what it wanted. I fear it wants to swallow me whole.

    An Emptiness Inside Me

    I don’t always feel better after attending a recovery group meeting; sometimes at the end I feel worse than I did before I got there. I don’t share the experience of always feeling supported and comfortable that seems to echo through the rooms. At nearly every 12-step meeting, someone invariably says, “When I walk into the rooms, I feel immediately at ease and at home.” 

    Well, I don’t.

    There are times when the entire affair goes swimmingly. I’ll laugh and relate and feel at ease. I will connect to other people’s shares and fully articulate my own. It will all be very nice and fun. It will feel really good, on all fronts. Then, as soon as I leave, a pit in my stomach opens and I can feel myself falling in. Other times the aching lonesomeness begins as soon as I step inside the room.

    Dangerous Adaptability

    I survived my life because I could change according to outside circumstances. It has always felt dangerous to do anything other than adapt. For much of my life, it was dangerous.

    From my adaptations have sprung multiple versions of me. Other people are privy to the Light-Hearted Jokester and the Loud and In Charge Diplomat. Being honest when sharing about my experience with addiction and recovery means another part of myself might become visible. I have spent a lot of time with Depressed Me and revealing her is scary. The Quiet One fears she makes people uncomfortable with her silence. She’s acutely aware that she is not the Jokester and doesn’t want to be noticed and doesn’t want to slip into Depression in public.

    My defenses are up in spaces where I’m allowing unvetted people to know something real about my life. I begin to feel unworthy and not good enough: proof that my worst enemy is my own mind. My instinct tells me: Don’t reach out for a while. Don’t be early for the meeting tonight, go late to avoid chitchat and leave early. My brain fills with excuses to avoid discussions and socializing.

    Getting to know me means you may grow to understand who I am in all my contradictions, which will make it harder for me to adapt. I know that facilitating communication between all of myself is necessary for healing. But the truth is, sometimes it’s really difficult. It’s difficult to be seen, to be open. Yet each time I attend a meeting, that is exactly what I’m doing. I’m expressing myself with complete honesty. I am trusting the process, despite my fear and discomfort.

    I can no longer neglect the parts I’ve long tried to keep hidden. Together we must heal. Together is the only way we can heal.

    Playing the Long Game in Recovery

    Why would someone continue to go to something that they don’t always like and don’t feel immediate relief from? I’m playing the long game. Seeking immediate relief is what I did in active alcoholism. In recovery, I’m learning to resist that behavior. 

    Over time I have seen the subtle and dramatic improvements in my mental wellbeing and quality of life. I can see the changes in my life outside of those meetings. The people around me notice my rediscovered joy, my grounded perspective, my newly formed boundaries. I go to the meetings because it’s part of a treatment plan that works for me. It’s a commitment I made to myself. A commitment to heal from trauma, because I deserve to experience a better life than I once lived. 

    I feel inspired by the possibility that if I keep trying, the healing work will be able to fill the hole that is always there; the emptiness which has eternally been ebbing and flowing in strength, making me happy and fearful in turn. I’m aiming for a stable emotional baseline. 

    It’s not going to happen overnight, but it is happening over time. The inspiration itself comforts the sorrow.

    Progress Not Perfection

    When I first got sober, I was in a very dark place. I was trapped in my own head and despite having survived everything, I couldn’t feel safe. I could only feel the pain from the past. I thought I was alone. I believed I was too broken, too sick, too lost. Finding anyone else who could truly understand what I was going through seemed out of the question. I didn’t think I was unique or special in my pain, I just believed I was hopeless. 

    Then I found a therapist, a psychiatrist, and 12-step meetings. All of which worked in tandem to lead me from the darkness.

    Today I’m not feeling that despair or sorrow. I feel content more often than I feel abject depression. I used to cry every single day and now I laugh every day. I used to swing from one overwhelming emotion to another, with no control over where my mind was taking me.

    Climbing out is an ongoing effort, but what kept me down—one of many things—was that I expected myself to be just be “better.” I thought I had to be different than I was. I now accept that this is hard work, but the results keep me doing it. It isn’t supposed to always be easy. I have to continually work on dismantling the defensive walls that have become maladaptive in their formations. 

    So, I let myself be, I take breaks to enjoy the view that is coming into perspective as the stones of my fortifications are disassembled. Sometimes I get scared, and put back a stone that was particularly heavy, afraid to lose such a significant tool of protection. That’s okay, too. I try not to judge myself. It’s a journey of progress, not perfection.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Most Important Person in the Room

    The Most Important Person in the Room

    There’s no need to worry about my career, or lack of intimate relationships, or future, or even quitting nicotine. I’m taking it easy, I’m in my first year of sobriety.

    Every time I relapse I forget I am not God.

    I am no longer able to allow the darkness to bloom into the grand external circumstances I once did; when it does, while the bigger picture slowly darkens, there’s a life constantly poised to begin.

    I think that continuous sobriety is boring; I must, based on the evidence of my own life, of my own lies.

    Imagine this: You are playing soccer. You’re on defense, almost as far away from the goal as you can get but you take the ball from the other team, all the way through their offensive and then defensive line with intense speed. You’re in front of the goal now, with a wide open shot. You flub the kick. The ball rolls just a foot. The goalie grabs it. It was all for nothing. This is how I played soccer. 

    Imagine the beginning of the semester: You love beginnings and showing what you are capable of, so you get A’s and read everything for the first month or two. Then you lose interest, get bored maybe, stop paying attention. You let your grades dip until it gets scary, until a note gets sent home. And then you have to work your ass off to get back to maybe a B+ final grade. If you really pull it off you might get an A-. That is what kind of student I was. 

    It seems like I need others and myself to know that I am capable, but also that I can’t be counted on. I want you to know that I can win, but I won’t. I don’t want to be expected to. It’s been almost ten years since my first attempt at recovery. I’ve never been sober long enough to date, to move, to make any major life changes within the constraints of the program’s suggestions.

    I’m addicted to each part of the cycle – the descent into not giving a fuck, the bloody climb from the pyre of my own making. As I get too close or move too fast towards what I want, the part of me that knows I am not worthy of it, the part that’s sure I don’t want the responsibility of a better life screws me. There’s a lot of fragmentation.

    When we—and by “we” I mean my perception of you and the culture-at-large—when we look at a chronic relapser, our tendency is to look at the drug as the thing they can’t let go of – and it is, mostly. For those of us who know what the other side can hold and yet continue to throw the ships of ourselves against the rocks, chasing siren songs, the guilt and shame only add fuel to the orgiastic pull of destruction. 

    Shame is our primary emotion and perhaps our greatest addiction.

    I recall every slide toward rock bottom I created, every flail out, the night spent hurling my body into the door of the drunk tank with piss-soaked pants, finally settling down to bite off each fingernail and howl. And I remember what comes after; being so broken I would allow help, would allow others to love me; how my father would prove he cared by letting me use a lawyer from his firm for my DUI case, how a nice lady from a meeting paid my October rent, how friends brought me to look for a job. 

    I get a new boyfriend, a new job, everything working out until I find myself moving down the mountain too fast, and, turning the tips of my skis inward to slow down, I fall.

    And when I come back to recovery, it’s the same. Just a few people to believe that this time’s different. The climb feels like springtime, that’s why I make sure to do one at least every spring. In fact, looking back over the data, a bottom out in winter followed by a good 4-6 month sober stretch is my usual.

    I won’t take AA seriously until I have nothing else left and nobody left to talk to. Or at least, that’s how it used to be. Now it’s more of an internal emptiness, as the fear mounts that I may not get another shot to take the ball all the way up the field. Until I start to feel better, until my life starts to get bigger, until I’m in front of the goal again. I choke, over and over and over, and I climb back out, over and over and over. I raise my hand: “I have two days back,” and I get the applause, again and again. I’m the most important person in the room.

    There’s a sense that I will always be on the verge, never quite crossing the line into success. I want more, or do I? The cycle is a familiar distraction.

    There’s no need to worry about my career, or lack of intimate relationships, or future, or even quitting nicotine. I’m taking it easy, I’m in my first year of sobriety. And there’s always new people.

    I almost believe it. 

    This is the place where I used to blame my abusive mother, and believe me, I would really like to. She loved nothing more than to break me so that she could comfort my brokenness. But I’m an adult now. Once I was a victim, now I am a volunteer; now I have internalized my abuser. I have some of her weapons, and some I have added. I do it when I talk to myself, when I won’t get out of bed, when I couldn’t finish this article for a month.

    And at the same time I have a picture of three-year-old me, my inner child, and ten-year-old me, my outer child, on my refrigerator. I talk to them, too. I tell them they are good enough, worthy of love and happiness and all the things the rest of the world seems able to allow themselves to have. I hope that one day we’ll all believe it. 

    What if life on the other side of a year of continuous sobriety isn’t beyond my wildest dreams? No need to worry about that, I’ll probably never get there. My promise is an unopened present, though I have shaken the box more than a few times. Now, it’s possibly rotting.

    How do I change? When does my sobriety and not my ego, not my love of a pattern repeating, become the most important person in the room? Will this time be different? Every time is. Will it be different in the way that I need it to be? I don’t know. 

    If the first step is honesty, these words are my only hope. These are the thoughts I keep in the shadows, the patterns with which I choose to keep myself trapped, the self-victimization through which I am still waiting to awaken, still waiting to let down my golden hair for some knucklehead prince to save me.

    What if I could climb past the first plateau of growth in recovery and keep climbing? What if I could continue to work on sobriety on the days I don’t feel like I need it? What if I could stop wanting to be something and start working on becoming it? 

    Every time I come back, I remember that I am not God. That I don’t have to do it on my own, that nobody really cares if I’m happy besides me.

    I would say wish me luck, but I’ve had so much of that. Wish me consistency over time. Wish me willingness. I am tossed by the waves yet I do not sink; I have proven that. Wish me, to stay.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mommy Doesn't Need Wine: The Stigma of Being a Sober Mother

    Mommy Doesn't Need Wine: The Stigma of Being a Sober Mother

    “I’ve always wanted to film the real ‘after party’ when the mom is passed out with her little kid in the background, or she gets into her car and drives drunk. It happens all the time.”

    When I made the decision to quit drinking, one morning in June 2017 when my relentless hangover was surpassed only by my anxiety and self-loathing, I didn’t think about how sobriety would affect my role as a parent beyond the obvious positives: less time nursing a glass of wine and more time to engage with my kids; a clearer morning mind during the pre-school madness; more patience, less irritability. More money.

    What I didn’t consider was my exclusion from the Mommy Needs Wine club. Although exclusion isn’t the right word – it was my choice to leave. I just hadn’t realized how significant a part of my life it was until I canceled my subscription.

    When I first became a mother in 2007, I quickly realized there was an unwritten rule, one that was never mentioned in the parenting manuals: being a mother is hard, and wine (or gin, or vodka, or whatever your particular poison is) makes it easier.

    At that point, I didn’t yet have a Facebook account, and Instagram wasn’t even a thing. Today’s pervasive social media culture gives the Mommy Needs Wine club even more power. It recruits mothers from their Facebook and Instagram feeds, via memes that declare: “The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink” and “I can’t wait for the day when I can drink with my kids instead of because of them.” We’re encouraged to buy baby onesies emblazoned with “I’m the reason Mommy drinks” and prints saying “Motherhood. Powered by love. Fueled by coffee. Sustained by wine” (to put in a pretty frame and display on your wall, lest anyone should forget how crucial booze is to parenting).

    “The media makes a ton of money marketing alcohol to moms, playing on the difficulties of being a mom and offering alcohol as the only solution to stress,” said Rosemary O’Connor, certified life and addiction coach and author of The Sober Mom’s Guide to Recovery. “I’ve always wanted to film the real ‘after party’ when the mom is passed out with her little kid in the background, or she gets into her car and drives drunk. It happens all the time, yet it seems so harmless because wine is so much a part of our culture.”

    It’s so much a part of our culture that the Moms Who Need Wine Facebook page is liked by over 726,000 people; that the memes and baby onesies and wall prints are promoted by thousands of likes, shares and crying-with-laughter-face emojis; that even celebrity moms are in the club. Kelly Clarkson said in a January 2018 interview, “[Kids] are challenging. Wine is necessary.” And millions of mothers around the world raised a glass.

    The truth is, this alcohol-dependent culture—if you don’t drink you’re boring, judgmental, not to be trusted (Winston Churchill and his quote “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink” have a lot to answer for)—and the ensuing stigma around sobriety are far from harmless. Between 2006 and 2014, alcohol-related emergency room visits soared among women, according to a study published in January 2018 in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. A study published in the International Journal of Drug Policy in May 2015 found that a significant number of mothers said drinking helped them “assert their identity” as something other than that expected of a woman in early midlife. Mothers with young children told researchers the “transformative effects” of “excessive drinking” let them to revert, for a short time, to their younger, more stress-free selves.

    When I started to share my sobriety with friends and family, I received varying reactions. Many people were supportive, some stopped inviting me to parties, and the vast majority were surprised. Not just surprised that I—always the first to suggest a glass of prosecco, always the last to leave a party—was the person who had publicly declared my commitment to sobriety, but surprised that I could even contemplate being a parent without booze. How was I going to get through a challenging day with my kids without the promise of a few glasses of wine to take the edge off? How was I going to reward myself for surviving another week of homework, messy bedrooms, mini rebellions and Xbox arguments if I wasn’t going to do it with wine?

    Back then, I had no answers to those questions. I was simply concentrating on getting through one sober day at a time. That was enough of a reward. What I needed was support and encouragement, not interrogation.

    And then there was the pity. It came in various forms, from the “Oh, you must be so bored?” on one of my first sober nights out, complete with sympathetic head tilt (for the record, I wasn’t bored until I was asked that question) to the barefaced “I feel sorry for you!” at my first sober wedding. The pity was worse than the perplexity and the cross-examination, because it came with a “but.” But this is your choice. But you’re not an alcoholic, are you? (Because alcoholics have to be homeless, jobless, friendless losers.) But you won’t die if you have a drink, will you? But you could just have one, right? People didn’t feel sorry for me the way you feel sorry for someone with a broken leg. Their faux-pity made me feel guilty. It made me question my decision, not because I didn’t think it was the right decision, but because it was a decision that excluded me from so much. I didn’t fit into the drinking culture the other parents in my social circle celebrated and depended on, so where the hell did I fit in?

    O’Connor had a similar experience when she stopped drinking. “People who I thought were my ‘best friends’ stopped calling and inviting me to parties,” she said. “When I was newly sober, the feelings of not being included was one of the most difficult realities to face. Being newly sober, going through a divorce, and having people abandoning me was so painful. I found out who my real friends were and they are still my friends today.”

    Now, with over a year of sobriety under my belt, I feel differently. I’m proud of my decision and the strength it’s taken to get to this point, to stay sober at parties and weddings and nights out when everyone else is getting drunk, and, sometimes, to stay home and miss those occasions because protecting my sobriety is more important than worrying about what anyone else thinks. I’ve also realized that in most cases, how people react to my sobriety has actually nothing to do with me, and everything to do with their own issues with alcohol.

    O’Connor agrees. “I realized that when I was drinking I never wanted to hang out with non-drinkers because it made me self-conscious about my own drinking,” she said.

    It’s difficult to talk about alcohol dependency with a group of friends who’re all knocking back wine while you’re working your way through the mocktail menu. But it’s a conversation that needs to be had. How many mothers are functioning alcoholics or have alcohol dependency issues, but don’t know this because our culture tells them—repeatedly—that drinking is the answer?

    I’m no prohibitionist. (I say that so often I should have it tattooed on a prominent body part.) But I do believe that we need to question the media messages we receive about alcohol. If not for ourselves, then for our kids.

    “Parents of young children need to be aware that when they place themselves on the slippery slope to alcohol use disorder by frequently exceeding recommended drinking limits, they place their young children on that slope, too,” warned George F. Koob, Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “We know that young children learn from watching what their parents do and not just from what they say. The children of parents who are heavy drinkers are more likely to become heavy drinkers themselves and develop an alcohol use disorder than the children of moderate drinkers or abstainers.”

    I see my kids benefiting from my sobriety—in countless little ways, every single day. A lengthy bedtime story because I’m not counting the minutes down to wine o’clock. A relaxed morning before school because I’m not hungover, sleep-deprived and snappy. A healthier model for how to administer self-care. A lesson on how to question cultural norms and why, sometimes, taking the road less traveled is the most rewarding journey of all.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • How Facebook Helped Me Overcome My Anxiety

    How Facebook Helped Me Overcome My Anxiety

    More than the actual anxiety was the anxiety about the anxiety. I felt tremendous shame for having negative feelings at all.

    It was 3pm on a Tuesday, and I was sitting at my desk with my head on my keyboard; I was too revved up to sit still, much less concentrate on work. I was in the midst of a resurgence of my lifelong anxiety and couldn’t talk to anyone or even focus on anything. Months later, I would finally be diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

    The diagnosis was a relief. It made sense of overwhelming feelings I’d had my whole life that had mostly been regarded as a character flaw. I grew up in an alcoholic home, and I’d been going to therapy for years to face the trauma of my childhood. For the first time I was feeling my emotions instead of mashing them down, and expressing anger before it turned into resentment. My anxiety had decreased throughout this process, but then I decided to get married. My fiance did nothing wrong, mind you, but somehow the thought of marriage made me feel trapped and put me mentally back in my childhood home. I grew incredibly anxious — and yet completely unaware of it.

    I’d had trouble sleeping for months but I wasn’t upset or stressed about anything — at least not anything conscious. My stomach felt like it’d been glued shut. I couldn’t eat. Soon enough my weight starting dropping enough for other people to comment on it. Compliments at first that slowly morphed into expressions of concern. I felt nervous all the time and I was hyper-vigilant, no matter who I encountered or where I was. If I was in a car, I’d flinch at the sight of another vehicle pulling out of a parking space as though it was about to hit me — even if it was well outside my physical range. I was sleeping two hours a night and not even feeling tired the next day. Sitting still felt like torture, and I was constantly second guessing myself as if I couldn’t trust my perceptions. I’d had episodes like this off and on for most of my life but I’d always pushed it down. But now, after a lot of therapy and ACOA recovery work, when the anxiety attacks returned, I had to acknowledge them. My overwhelming anxiety was there and I couldn’t hide it no matter how badly I wanted to.

    But that was the problem: I really really wanted to.

    More than the actual anxiety was the anxiety about the anxiety. I felt tremendous shame for having negative feelings at all. (All you ACOAs out there know what I’m talking about, right?) Growing up in my house, negative feelings had been treated like a disease that had to be banished. This didn’t just come from family but from the entire culture where I was raised. I explained to my therapist that even as an adult I felt like a streak of tar ran through me that marked me as broken, and I lived in constant fear of people seeing it. So when my anxiety revisited me, I tried to hide it, but piling that shame on top of it only made it worse. I wanted simultaneously to jump out of my own skin and hide inside my house forever.

    Then I remembered what Brene Brown said in her book on shame: that silence fed shame while a sense of common humanity combatted it. That meant talking about what I was feeling. Reaching out to tell someone was a major part of fighting shame because it made you feel less alone. Then it occurred to me: what if I just preempted this terror of someone discovering my anxious state and just told them? If I owned how I felt in advance, perhaps I’d feel less shame because I wouldn’t be so desperate to hide it. Problem was, any time I tried to talk about it in person, I completely fell to bits and I didn’t exactly want to put myself through that over and over again.

    So instead I opted to put it on Facebook.

    Of course, Facebook is the capital of oversharing and I normally kept my digital shouting box strictly to jokes. But I just didn’t see a better way to inform people of what I was going through or that my behavior might be different than my usual. In fairness to Brene Brown, she clarifies that reaching out to others in order to combat shame needs to be aimed at people who are receptive to hearing your pain. She definitely doesn’t suggest blasting it all over your social media. But that’s what I did.

    I wrote a long explanation of my mental state asking for compassion rather than advice and hit “post” before I could change my mind. Now, I should be clear that I didn’t exactly blast this to everyone I knew on Facebook. I used customized security settings so only those in the same city as me and my oldest, closest friends could see it, and I blocked my whole family as well as loose acquaintances. I hit post and immediately shut my laptop, vowing not to log into Facebook for at least a couple hours. I’d purposely planned my post to coincide with a concert I was attending because I knew it would prevent me from checking my phone constantly. I figured if anyone was judgemental or shaming, the bite might sting less if several hours had gone by — or possibly I wouldn’t even notice it in a flood of other tiny red notifications.

    When I finally gathered the courage to open Facebook again, I had a torrent of messages and notifications. Most of them carried the same sentiment: I have anxiety, too. While I’d certainly blasted my personal world with my emotional state hoping to get some level empathy, I didn’t anticipate which corners of my social circles would be delivering it. Close friends of mine, people I used to share every secret with, messaged to tell me they’d recently gone through something similar and not talked about it. Acquaintances wrote with ideas and (indeed) some advice. Much of the advice wasn’t especially helpful, but knowing that I wasn’t alone made a world of difference. For months afterward, casual acquaintances told me that sharing my experience actually helped them feel less alone, which I hadn’t even thought about.

    I can’t pretend like simply talking about my anxiety made it go away or even lessen much. It still took another year of focus, self care, and work before I truly felt like myself again. Sharing my anxiety online allowed me to deal with it without shame and without feeling like I was broken. In other words, it meant one less roadblock to contend with, and — given my emotional state at the time — I might not have made it through the anxiety without it.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • The Walk

    The Walk

    I can effectively express two emotions, anger and rage, and if someone fucked with my little girl, they would be getting a double load of both.

    I hadn’t been back in the free world a month, but I was rolling. This time I was flat, no parole, no PO to fuck with, no fines, nothing. Things were back on track and it happened quickly. I had established an entirely new set of contacts on the inside who were in need of a man with my skill set. They helped me get up and running so I made sure I made good on their initial investment. After that, I carved out a deal to set myself up. My supply was steady and demand was… Well, demand in the drug game is something you never have to worry about.

    I got a text on my phone, not the prepaid burner phone that goes off non-stop, but my actual, personal phone. Only three people have this number and two of them are my children, so of course, I opened it immediately. It was my daughter, the one person who can melt my heart with a single word, touch, or look. She is 19 and a thing of pure beauty. She is the best of her mother and very little of me (I pray).

    “Daddy, I need you.”

    I can’t describe what went through me when I saw these words on the backlit screen of my phone. I’ve spent literally thousands of sleepless nights wishing I could do something, anything, to make up for the pain I’ve caused this sweet girl. This might be my chance.

    “what wrong” “u ok” my archaic thumbs desperately trying to type the letters and press send.

    “I’m fine Daddy just need to talk to you.”

    “where are you now”

    “at home.”

    “I’ll brite there”

    “??????”

    God damned mother fucking phone. “I’ll be right there”

    “Okay Daddy cu soon”

    I look around the house and think about what I would need. I dusted off a thousand dollars and stuffed it into an envelope. That’s not enough, I thought, and got fifteen hundred more. My phone… my keys… my gun… No, not the gun. Not around my baby, at least not until I know more. I lit a cigarette and got in my car.

    The drive was over too soon. I was consumed by anticipation. I was so happy to be going to see my girl, at her request, and to be wanted by her, or at least needed if not exactly wanted. That’s almost just as good. For a moment, I came close to letting myself be happy, but before the happiness set in, the worry of why she might be needing me kicked in. Happiness is something I have never quite been able to handle. I don’t think it’s meant for me. Of all the people she could have called, she called me. Her mother always handles the emotional stuff. Her stepdad is a good man, he makes decent money, but she called me. I am not a good man. I can effectively express two emotions, anger and rage, and if someone fucked with my little girl, they would be getting a double load of both.

    When I saw her standing there in her driveway, I forgot all about that.

    I got out of my car and walked up to her. She welcomed me in with a hug. Not the sideways kind either, but with her head turned, cheek against my chest, full embrace. The sweet smell of her hair filled my nostrils and transported me back to a time almost forgotten. My God this feels good, I thought to myself.

    “When did you grow up, baby girl?”

    “It happens fast, Daddy”

    Before I could ask her what was happening, she took me by the hand and started walking. It was a late spring day that was made for being outside. Her neighborhood wasn’t fancy, a bit run down, older, filled with young couples just starting out and old couples just finishing up. It was quiet today though, or perhaps I just wasn’t hearing anything around me. I was so intently focused on her, I realized, we were long past sight of my car or even her driveway.

    Just walking.

    She talked and I listened. She gave me the short hand version of the last 13 years of her life, the years I had wasted in prison. This remarkably strong, independent, young woman was five when she watched me get beaten until I was unrecognizable, handcuffed, and dragged out of our living room. She then watched as her home was completely torn to pieces for every dollar I had tucked away.

    But here we were today, walking.

    Stories of relationships, achievements, disappointments, highs, lows and everything in between went into my ears and swirled through my brain like an F5 tornado. I had no fucking clue whatsoever to say about any of it.

    So we walked, and she talked, and I listened.

    I listened to the struggles of a young woman, desperate to make her way in a hard, unforgiving world. I could hear the desperation and determination in her voice. Still, I had nothing to offer, no advice, no words at all.

    Before I knew it, we were back at my car hugging again. We were about to part ways and I had done nothing for her. Not one damn thing!

    “Wait! I brought you something!”

    I handed her the envelope that I brought and had forgotten until just then. She opened it a little, peeked inside, closed it, and pressed it against my chest.

    “That’s not why I called, Daddy. I just needed to talk to you. Thank you so much for walking with me, I hope we can do this more. I love you.”

    I was barely able to mumble “I love you too, baby girl,” before I got into the car. I drove on autopilot for a few minutes.

    “What the fuck just happened?” I felt the guilt of my life pile on so heavily I could hardly breathe. It was like a guy I heard about who had been hit by an avalanche. He said it was like the snow was all around him, squeezing him from every possible angle, and he had to make room around his body to get any air.

    This was a feeling I could not deal with. I did not possess any knowledge or skill that would allow me to work through this. The only thing I knew for sure was that I could make it go away. It would only be a temporary fix, but gone for right now was good enough for me. I knew what I had to do and getting home to do it as quickly as possible was my only objective. I had to get high.

    When I arrived, I went straight inside. I bypassed my personal stash and took out what I needed from my supply. I prepared a larger amount than usual and loaded it into a syringe. I considered that it may be too much and that I may overdose, but the way I felt, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I pressed the plunger of the rig until I saw a tiny drop hanging on the bevel of the needle. I tightened the belt around my bicep and with a familiar prick of the skin, the anticipation building, breath holding, a ribbon of red flashed in the barrel and .. .. .. .. gone.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Shame, Alcoholism, Stigma, and Suicide

    Shame, Alcoholism, Stigma, and Suicide

    In addiction treatment circles, conventional wisdom suggests we have to let people hit rock bottom before we can help them. But what happens if rock bottom is dying from suicide?

    Historical records as far back as ancient Athens have the underpinnings of the stigmatization of suicide. In 360 BCE, Plato wrote that those who died by suicide “shall be buried alone, and none shall be laid by their side; they shall be buried ingloriously in the borders of the twelve portions the land, in such places as are uncultivated and nameless, and no column or inscription shall mark the place of their interment.” Fast-forward a couple millennia and suicide is still criminalized in many places around the world. In the Western Judeo-Christian tradition, suicide has long been considered the ultimate sin, to such an extent that even the body of a person who died by suicide was legally brutalized and dehumanized. This long history of shaming and penalizing suicide has created deeply seated (mis)beliefs that are engrained in cultural norms. Suicidal ideation is stigmatized, and those who experience such thoughts often suffer in silence.

    Alcoholism (both alcohol use disorder and alcohol dependence) is also highly stigmatized. Past research has found that public attitudes are very poor towards people with substance use disorders (SUD). Across the globe, around 70% of the public believe alcoholics were likely to be violent to others. As recently as 2014, research has found 30% of people think recovery from SUDs is impossible and almost 80% of people would not want to work alongside someone who had or has a substance use disorder.

    Alcohol dependence and alcohol use disorder (AUD) are high on the list of risk factors for suicide. Mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, are even higher risk factors. What is particularly concerning is that mood disorders frequently go hand in hand with AUDs. Alcohol causes depression, and it can be hard to distinguish whether the alcohol or the depression came first because they feed each other. In his book Alcohol Explained, author William Porter explains, “hangovers cause depression whether you are mentally ill or not…the real cause of it is the chemical imbalance in the brain and body. ”

    People who have alcohol dependence are 60 to 120 times more likely to attempt suicide than people who are not intoxicated and individuals who die as a result of a suicide often have high BAC levels. Alcoholism is positively correlated with an increased risk of suicide and “is a factor in about 30% of all completed suicides.” A 2015 meta-analysis on AUD and suicide found that, across the board, “AUD significantly increases the risk [of] suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, and completed suicide.”

    Suicide attempts with self-inflicted gunshots have an 85% fatality rate. If someone does survive a suicide attempt, over 90 percent of the time they will not die from suicide. That margin of survival gets smaller with alcohol dependence. Being intoxicated increases the likelihood that someone will attempt suicide and use more lethal methods, such as a firearm.

    When a suicide attempt survivor encounters medical professionals, half of the time they will be interacting with someone who has “unfavorable attitudes towards patients presenting with self-harm.” (These statistics have cultural and regional variations.) When a patient with AUD encounters medical professionals, they are also likely to be met with negative perceptions. Myths about AUD and alcohol dependency are pervasive and not even nurses are immune to such prejudice.

    So what improves professional perceptions and treatment outcomes? Education. Training works to dispel myths and reinforce the fact that SUDs are diagnosable conditions that require as much care and attention as any other potentially fatal ailment. Perhaps increased understanding of these conditions and experiences could fuel progress for treating addictions and preventing suicide. Doctors are sometimes at a loss for what to do with alcoholic patients; interestingly, the physicians who had more confidence in their abilities in this area were associated with worse outcomes. Meanwhile, there has been little progress in treatment availability outside of basic peer support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

    Peer support groups do help a lot of people get and stay sober and to live happier and healthier lives: 12-step proponents credit the steps and meetings for saving their lives; many say they were suicidal and that after getting sober they no longer had those thoughts. But while suicidal ideation may go away for some people who receive treatment, it doesn’t work like that for everyone.

    People who are abstinent from drugs and alcohol still die from suicide. In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, quitting drinking can exacerbate feelings of hopelessness and despair. Continuing to drink may reduce the severity of the symptoms in the very short term, but ultimately “a diagnosis of co-occurring PTSD and alcohol use disorder [is] more detrimental than a diagnosis of PTSD or alcohol use disorder alone.”

    Suicide is a leading cause of death across the world and ranks as the 10th most common cause of death in the United States. For every completed suicide, there are an estimated 25 attempts.

    It’s clear that we must do something to reduce the number of lives lost by suicide. Raising awareness of the relationship between alcohol-dependence and suicide attempts is an important part of the equation. Medical professionals, social workers, law enforcement, employers, and others who are frequently the first point of contact need better training to improve attitudes and fine tune skill sets for taking appropriate action. The public also needs to be armed with information that they can use to help their family and friends who may be at risk for suicide, and in particular what to do if that person has a co-occurring SUD.

    Despite evidence to the contrary (particularly in the case of comorbidity with another mental illness) conventional wisdom in addiction treatment suggests that we have to let people fall to rock bottom before we can help them. But what happens if rock bottom is dying from suicide? It’s true that we can’t force health onto another person, but we also can’t help them if they’re no longer alive. For many people, prior trauma and mental health issues come before addiction. More evidence-based intervention and prevention programs are needed if we hope to make any headway in fighting this epidemic.

    Until that happens, opportunities do exist to help prevent suicide. After Logic released his Grammy winning song titled “1-800-273-8255” (the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline), calls to the Lifeline increased exponentially. There is nothing quite like hearing another human voice offering support and comfort. There is also a growing number of online crisis support services which provide help through live chat and email. These, unlike many crisis phone numbers, are not limited by location. Texting a crisis hotline such as the US Crisis Text Line at 741741 is also an option and can be done with just basic SMS, no data needed.

    If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. Find your country’s equivalent to 911 on this wiki page or through The Lifeline Foundation. Find a list of additional suicide prevention resources worldwide on this page.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Paramore’s Hayley Williams Pens Powerful Mental Health Essay

    Paramore’s Hayley Williams Pens Powerful Mental Health Essay

    “Writing kept me alive. Forced me to be honest. It helped me understand that emotional wellness and physical health are actually related.”

    Paramore’s lead singer Hayley Williams is taking the shame out of sadness.

    In the band’s most recent single “Rose-Colored Boy,” Williams sings, “Just let me cry a little bit longer/ I ain’t gon’ smile if I don’t want to.”

    The chorus is a perfect summation of Williams’ current incarnation, as she’s emerged from difficult times and is (at least a little bit) comfortable enough to talk about it.

    In a new essay for Paper magazine, Williams recalled when a lot came crashing down on her at the same time in both her personal life and her career.

    “I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t laugh… for a long time,” she wrote. However, she added, “I’m still hesitant to call it depression. Mostly out of fear people will put it in a headline, as if depression is unique and interesting and deserves a click. Psychology is interesting. Depression is torment.”

    But she said she managed to keep it together through writing. “Writing kept me alive. Forced me to be honest. Made me have empathy for [bandmate Taylor York] in his struggles with mental health. It helped me understand that emotional wellness and physical health are actually related,” she wrote.

    Lately, she said she has felt a shift, as well as in the people around her. Paramore had not released new work since 2013, until they came out with After Laughter in the spring of 2017. The music and the timing of the album were significant for the band.

    “[After Laughter] helps me mark this time as a significant turning point in my life,” said Williams. “I’m noticing similar movement in my friends’ lives too. More presence and awareness. More tenderness. I’m alive to both pain and joy now. I have my old laugh back, as my mom says… And only a couple years ago, I had hoped I’d die.”

    Williams discussed her struggles with mental health in a summer 2017 interview with Fader, as well. She described a feeling of hopelessness that crept up on her in the “past couple of years.”

    “I don’t feel as hopeful as I did as a teenager. For the first time in my life, there wasn’t a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel,” she said at the time. “I thought, I just wish everything would stop. It wasn’t in the sense of, I’m going to take my life. It was just hopelessness. Like, what’s the point? I don’t think I understood how dangerous hopelessness is. Everything hurts.”

    Paramore is currently on tour, which is set to wrap up in late August.

    View the original article at thefix.com