Tag Archives: addiction

“Am I going to be staring at glasses of wine for the rest of my life?”

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© Copyright 2010 CorbisCorporationA friend of mine said when he finished his program he was “like a wet dog on a back porch. They couldn’t get rid of me.” They ended up offering him a job. For me, getting out of rehab was like being pushed out of the nest not knowing whether or not my wings would work. I’d have stayed there forever if they’d let me.  From the minute I was admitted into treatment the thought of “life after rehab” literally took my breath away.  After all, forty-two days in a program built around relapse prevention made one thing clear – this place didn’t give guarantees.

I went straight from rehab to a friend’s apartment in New Orleans’ Quarter. I would wander  the streets feeling as though I’d been skinned alive. I’d sit on a step at every corner, smoke a cigarette, and pray that I would stay clean for the next five minutes. The word “terror” doesn’t come close. My first two weeks in the real world consisted of laying on a sofa for hours trying to make sense of the third step, smoking cigarettes on random steps killing time between meetings, and going to bed – where sleep failed to come. The only thing I had on my side was that I had no personal history with New Orleans. I knew no one. Thank God.

Recently I was in a shopping mall with a client who’d just returned home from treatment. She suggested we grab lunch in a little restaurant on the ground floor. It wasn’t until we were seated that she casually mentioned she’d spent many afternoons there drinking martinis. I would have known even if she hadn’t told me because the place electrified her. I handed the wine list back to the waiter and a look of disappointment came over her face. She sunk behind her menu. “The food here is great. I totally forgot about the bar when I suggested this place. Honest!” I’m sure she had. I’m never surprised at the tricks the brain will play on the newly sober person. They’re unconsciously drawn to risky situations and, once there, begin to play a form of mental chicken. They test themselves – which is a really dangerous game to play. While she commented on the cocktails at nearby tables, her disposition flipped from euphoria to gloom. We ate quickly and skipped dessert. I knew there’d be emotional backlash. She’d either become surly or would want to crawl back into bed when we got home. The experience gave us a lot to work with and talk about – how to safely navigate through day to day life without setting yourself up for additional emotional fallout.

“Am I going to be staring at glasses of wine for the rest of my life?”

In early recovery, my stomach would flip every time I passed a freeway exit that lead to any bathroom I’d ever shot coke in. Some days all it took was the Hollywood Freeway South sign to constrict my chest.  It felt like I was losing my mind. If the whole world reminded me of using, how would I ever stay clean?

There will always be restaurants, parties, and work functions. There will be comedy clubs and rock shows. You get clean so you can become part of life – not hide from it.  In early recovery, the key is to not test oneself by going it alone.

It takes time to build sober memories. Things that used to send me over the edge seldom affect me now. The Hollywood Freeway South sign is now just a sign. When I see it I’m filled with pleasant memories of fun times I’ve had and people who have passed through my life in recovery. I no longer look at the underside of spoons. People drinking wine at the next table are simply strangers experiencing a moment in their own life.

I would have never believed that the haunting memories of people, places, and things connected to my drug days would ever be replaced by equally powerful memories of my life clean and sober. It happened when I wasn’t paying attention. It will happen for you too. Remember – it takes time to create a new history. In the meantime, be mindful not to play chicken by deliberately placing yourself situations that are going to push you out on an emotional ledge. If you have to go anywhere that you know will be slippery, don’t go it alone.

 

 

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National Survivors of Suicide Day

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National Survivor’s of Suicide Day November 17 2012

Today I spent time thinking about those I’ve lost to suicide and their families.

I got news this past week that another friend from my early recovery overdosed and died. This makes six friends since March. Five had been in recovery at one point for anywhere from one to twenty years before they decided that they could drink or smoke weed without getting caught up in old ways.  The news is never easy. Over the years I ‘ve been clean, there’s been a lot of death. Overdoses and suicide top the list followed closely by AIDS and Hepatitis C. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for meaning, contemplating life and death, and coming to terms with it in a way that makes sense to me personally. At one point I started to numb out. I would hear of a new death and mentally delete their number from my cell phone – gone! They were gone. Over! The end! I noticed my lack of emotional response and figured, really, how much death can one take? Nowadays, I’m back to feeling that funk land hard in my stomach and the sad sound as my head whispers “Fuck!”

My best friend committed suicide in the mid-80s. I wrote about her in an earlier blog on my other site http://www.pattypowersnyc.blogspot.com/2011/09/finding-one-day-at-time.html. That death hit me at a time when my own life was spiraling out of control. I felt I understood what she was feeling at the time -that feeling of not wanting to play anymore, of being tired, of not believing things would ever change. Little did I know that within three years I’d find recovery and my life would change radically.

I’ll confess that, for years, I held a little idea at the back of my most private thoughts: I would do this life-on-life’s-terms recovery thing as long as I could but if I ever got tired and want off the ride instead of getting high, suicide would be my way off.

At seven years clean I was hit by a depression I’d never experienced before – coming out of the blue and unattached to any plausible explanation. There was nothing going on in my life I could pin it to. I felt like I was inside a bubble preventing me from feeling a connection to anything or anyone.  I spent days laying on the sofa telling myself “This too shall pass.” The next day I’d awaken to realize nothing had changed. I had no desire to get high and wondered how long I could live this way.  When would enough be enough and I’d check out? I was also writing a novel where the main character would attempt suicide so a variety of methods were at my fingertips. Needless to say, it wasn’t a good time to spend days alone with my mind. Was this feeling ever going to pass?  The day I woke up feeling alive again was one of joy and relief. Shortly after this, a friend’s son hung himself.

While laying in my self-absorbed darkness fantasizing about suicide, it never occurred to me to consider how my death would affect others. Witnessing first hand how his suicide impacted the lives of his family and friends eradicated suicide as my exit strategy.

There was a hint that the latest death may have been intentional because of his history with depression.  Addiction and depression are closely linked. Perhaps this has played a role in all the earlier suicides. Much has been discovered and documented linking addiction and depression since my early years in recovery. Back then many recovering addicts shunned the idea of taking any sort of pill. Instead they believed in toughing it out, working a stronger program, finding a god. Many struggled with undiagnosed mental health issues for years, living in pain, until they finally sought help. It wasn’t that recovering addicts wanted to martyr themselves. Antidepressants were a new concept and many of us twelve-steppers were naïve and ill-informed.

I think a lot about my friends who’ve died, wondering how many of those overdoses were suicide.  How many kept their depression a guarded secret in recovery? How could we have helped?

That is the biggest question survivors of suicide torment themselves with – “What could I have done?” It’s heartbreaking to see and hear the grief lingering years later, wrapped around them like a blanket for the remainder of their lives. If a loved one has committed suicide please find support groups and professional counseling. The impact of suicide can be trauma.

For anyone who is considering suicide I will pass on something someone said to me during a particularly difficult time:

Patty, life is like a long phonograph and right now the needle is skipping but there is still a long beautiful song left to play. I know the pain is so big you can’t breath and it feels like it will never go away but this is really just one moment in time of a very long story and when you get past it, you will always look back and remember this period as a hard one but you won’t even be able to connect with the pain that right now feels like its going to kill you.  It will just be a memory that things were rough. While you’re in it, it feels so much more meaningful – but it’s really a just rough patch in a skipping record. Not worth killing yourself over. Because then it’s over forever.

Hang on and ask for help!

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Friends dissing Recovery

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This week I’m taking the lead from my Facebook friends’ topic suggestions. Laurie CS wrote: How about respecting your recovery when others don’t (or just don’t have the understanding). I may have gone off-topic but it inspired me.

I was the only one in my crowd to get into recovery. Until then, I thought not shooting dope meant I was clean. Every now and then, a few of us would decide to get clean. We’d hurry off to a bar so that we could drink enough to make it through the day without using. Sometimes I’d go to Amsterdam to kick my habit. Drinking and smoking hash didn’t count. I’d arrive back in New York clean (as far as I was concerned). A few went on the methadone program to be clean.  It’s not that we rejected complete abstinence. It simply never occurred to us.

I ended up in a treatment center outside of New Orleans and at 69 days clean boarded a Greyhound bus destined for Los Angeles. I arrived with $100 dollars and a desire to stay clean. In my heart I knew I couldn’t go back to New York – not yet. I started my life over from scratch, which included building relationships. I spent my first year clean surrounded by recovering addicts. We were young, crazy, clean and enthusiastic. Twelve-step meetings were our life.  Together we learned how to expose our true selves to one another and the level of intimacy created a bond that I still have with those people. Our lives were about recovery – it’s all we talked about. I chuckle when I imagine what it would have been like to have been stuck in a restaurant booth behind us. One step short of Scientology is one way I’ve heard it put. I’m sure we were a bit fanatical and over the top but we were having a blast and the alternative – well, I probably wouldn’t be here to write about it.

At a year clean I flew back to New York City anxious to see my old friends. I knew it was a dangerous move but I loved these people and they were the only evidence that the stories I told had actually happened, that my past was real.  Although I hadn’t really thought too much about it, I’d spent a year existing only in present time with people who only knew me clean. My old friends had lived through my relationships, my marriage, had known my dog, and met my family. I wanted that connection back.  I hadn’t considered what they would think of the “new” me.

After a few drinks, they startled to dismantle my belief system. “All that happens is that they get you addicted to God” was a major point with them. I said that I wasn’t a believer but they didn’t want to hear this as they laid all their opinions of 12 step programs on me. And no – they had never been to one.  “We’re worried about you Patty. They’re brainwashing you.” I was caught between wanting to cry and wanting to laugh. “You’re right. It probably is brain washing but I guess I needed my brain washed.” That sort of ended it for a while. I knew they loved me but I knew they did not want recovery. The funny thing is, I did not go to New York to get them clean. Truthfully, the lack of support was upsetting and my expectations on my homecoming had been shattered. I was experiencing so many feelings from heartbreak to disappointment to anger to shame that I knew in my gut that if I stayed in that apartment the entire week I could get loaded so I found somewhere else to stay for a few days. As soon as I was away from my old friends, I was able to get grounded again. When I called LA and rehashed the events, my friend Ron summed it up, “I guess you forgot you were powerless.”

Fast forward to four years clean. By now my life was full. Recovery was at the core of it but there was a lot of other stuff going on. I was writing again, performing, working. I had friends both in and not in recovery. I didn’t wear it on my sleeve anymore because the “inside job stuff” had happened.  I’d matured and so had my recovery. I now had other things to talk about. I was married to a musician who’d had a long career in Europe so there was a never-ending stream of touring musicians coming through our house.  These were his old “using” friends.  I was enjoying the company of one in particular but after a few drinks he started spewing all of his opinions about the idiots who end up in recovery. “They are nothing but weak sheep who lack willpower”. Naturally, this led him to the God-addiction and brain washing argument.  I laughed and asked  if he was calling me a weak sheep.  “Is that what you think of me and – “ I listed five of his closest, most respected friends who were now all in recovery. He was on his back staring at the ceiling, silently watching his cigarette smoke curling upward. “That is what I don’t understand. My friends are brilliant – yet everyone is doing this thing. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”  The silence between us was filled with pain. He was surrounded by friends who were in recovery but it was not going to be for him. He drove his car at sixty miles an hour into a brick wall two months later.

Here’s some advice for anyone who is having a difficult time with friends not fully understanding or supporting their recovery:

Make sure you have a lot of other friends who do support your recovery.

You have to know why you are in recovery – what it means to you. Be unshakable. And you don’t have to defend it – just live it.

Check your side of the street. If you’ve been unintentionally trying to recruit them, lay off. If people want what you have they will ask you how you did it and if they don’t, they won’t.

Active addicts and alcoholics are uncomfortable with friends who have gotten clean. They are most likely the ones to start up these discussions. Avoid all conversations about recovery with people who are loaded. They will keep up the argument for days if you let them.

If you are too early in recovery to have boundaries, you shouldn’t be there. It is easy to change the subject or to cut out early. Save your recovery talk for people who want it.

Remember, if you are new, your foundation is still fragile. Don’t take unnecessary risks.

Recovery is YOUR path; every human being is entitled to choose their own path.

Expectations lead to disappointment.

Today I still get people telling me that after all these years I should be able to drink now if I want to. I used to have clever answers like “Well, if I have a drink now, I’ll probably rob you later.” Now my answer is, “I don’t want one”.

Oh – and my old friends that I mentioned – they’ve been back in my life for years. In fact, when I held a party for the premier of Relapse, they were the ones who stayed closing the bar, long after everyone had left, discussing how great the show was.

 

 

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Anatomy of a Vacation

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I don’t know about you but getting clean made my life a whole lot busier. Twenty-three years later and the need for downtime and timeout from the day-to-day grind is as essential to my well-being and recovery as it ever was.

I’m writing this blog from my parent’s house in rural Ontario Canada. Every summer I spend two weeks here, a combination of amends and vacation time. My parents left the city of Toronto six years ago and moved to a town of eleven thousand people who are spread out across thousands rolling acres of farmland and forests.  A seven-minute drive ends at a sandy beach on Lake Ontario.

Usually I spend the majority of my time here in the yard or in my room working on whatever project I brought along. This trip has been different. I’ve spent a lot of time playing ball with a twenty-month old Jack Russell named Harley. Most days I take Harley to a stone beach and throw sticks into the lake for him, go on long country bike rides, walk the dog to the horse farms, and at some point drive back to the beach for a long swim. This routine is broken up by whatever scenic drives my parents want to take. Occasionally I will go to my room and check email or my cell to see if I am missing anything from my life in New York. I’m not. Until tonight, I also haven’t been writing.

Vacations are a time-out from the daily grind of life. I don’t know about you but I tend to forget this. I hear friends talk about doing nothing on island vacations but that has never been my style. Normally a vacation means visiting a new city somewhere on the planet and exploring it from morning until bedtime. My vacations are usually heightened stimulation and inspiration and a break from my regular life. Coming to Canada and forcing myself to work everyday at my computer was as close to doing nothing as it gets for me. This year I am having a real vacation. I must under-estimate the sheer levels of stress city life imposes: the noise, the crowds, the pressures to be here and there, the effort to maintain healthy balance with recovery, exercise, leisure, work, diet – the effort to stay sane. I love city life but it is important to take time out.  It took three days for my body wind down and a new level of rest come into me. I see this vacation as a re-up.

I arrived here with a lot of noise in my head. The list of what I need to get finished, emails that need to be sent, dates I need to schedule – there seemed to be a lot of things I “needed” to do – so much that I felt overwhelmed. Two weeks in a heat wave without air conditioning and I’d done nothing. So I arrived with stress and anxiety and exhaustion. This of course felt like low-grade depression. Free-floating waves of despair swept through me. I arrived depleted. Thank God. I was too beaten to summon the fight to keep going at my usual pace. Defeat was the silver lining of that heat wave.

Two days of napping and my spirit lightened. On day three I went to the beach. From that point on, my days have been spent as I indicated above. I now notice clouds, the smell of cedar as I bike past a forest, the sound of the waves hitting the shore, sunsets on the water. I have a sense of peace that is deeper than what I am able to get in the city with yoga, meditation and visits to the park. Sometimes you just have to step away from your life to get these needs met.

In recovery, I have learned to listen to my heart (or to my gut). It always lets me know what I need. This was even true in early recovery. You may not know you are stressed or burnt out until a friend tells you but if you take some quiet time, your body will let you know what it needs. It could be an air-conditioned movie to buy 90 minutes of not thinking about your life or texting anyone. It could be a long walk in the evening, a bike ride, a dance class. Your spirit will always cry out for some relief from the grind but it is up to you to feed it.

If you can’t get a vacation, give yourself one weekend day as a day for yourself and schedule in something that will feed your spirit: nap time, a country or beach walk, a river stroll, a picnic in the park with your favorite book – and please leave your cell and your i-pad at home for a minimum of 6 hours. I’ve checked mine and 8 days later, my real life has not fallen apart.

If your life is so busy that you can’t afford a whole day for yourself, schedule in several hours a couple times a week and use it to go outside. Pay attention to the small details in your view. We all have scenery, even in cities, so take some quiet time and look at whatever beauty there is around you. Think of it as a mini re-up.

Visiting parents can be the most stressful thing people in recovery can do and during the first 7 or 8 years of my recovery I never knew what to expect. Would I revert back to asshole teenage behaviors? Would old resentments take over my thoughts? Would I arrive with expectations and be disappointed? Would I blurt out something hurtful I couldn’t take back?  Visiting family didn’t always feel like a vacation. Luckily, the ongoing process of recovery has healed a lot of old wounds, given me perspective, and has changed my relationships – even with my parents. I am enjoying a peaceful vacation without busy-ness, without having feelings I need to escape from, and in the company of two people I am grateful to still have in my life.

In recovery, we change and our relationships with others change. You may cringe at the idea of two weeks with family but if it is something you do, who knows, maybe one day you’ll discover yourself enjoying it. Summer is a glorious time. Wherever you are and whatever you do, set aside some time to enjoy it and be rejuvenated by it.

 

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What’s all this talk about willingness?

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When you get clean you start to hear a lot of stuff about willingness. Are you willing to go to any length  (for your recovery)? But what does it mean? Where does willingness come from?

I believe the magic of recovery exists in the willingness to try. Imagine an arrow being shot into space  and time. At the very tip of the arrow is willingness. It’s the first thing to pierce the air, changing the  energy and molecular configurations around it.  Simply by launching the arrow, change begins to  happen.

Willingness is akin to saying “I’ll try ___ even though it doesn’t make sense to me and I see no point in  it or understand why I’m doing it.” Willingness is trying something when a voice is crying out not to.

At the beginning of recovery willingness is usually born out of desperation. First we are willing to  consider not using drugs. Next we are willing to not get high for 24 hours even though we don’t believe  we can do it.  We become willing to consider that maybe the people who are clean might not be full of  shit with their suggestions on what to do next, how to make it for another hour or another day without  using.

When we are willing to admit we need help it seems to come to us.  Our life starts to shift. We begin to see that when we become willing, things usually start to change for the better. It becomes easier to not have to be in control of everything all the time. We allow for some sort of falling of the cards to take place.

Willingness comes out of a desire to believe that all is not hopeless.

Even when we don’t know what move to make next, especially during our darkest, most confusing times, change begins as soon as we become willing – even when it means being willing to wait to see where the universe will blow us next.

 

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Eating Right & Feeling Better

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I’ve had food on my mind lately so it’s going to be the subject of this week’s blog. If you’ve just discovered this page and were hoping to read about recovery, don’t be discouraged. Food is an important component of the recovery process. How, what, and when we eat says a lot about where we’re at with self-care.

For example, when I notice I‘ve been leaning more toward sweets, carbs, white flour or extra caffeine and eating less protein, fresh fruits and vegetables, it’s usually an indication that something’s affecting me emotionally. Maybe I’m feeling depressed, lonely, frustrated, or angry. When I catch my diet moving in this direction, I can take stock of my life and my feelings and address them. I’m able to do this is because typically my daily eating habits are healthy and balanced.

Eating habits aren’t always dictated by emotional states. When the seasons change, my diet often changes with it. Winter it’s more soups, yams, winter vegetables and carbs and summer is lighter Mediterranean-style fare. One thing is certain – a healthy balanced diet helps me to deal with emotional turmoil better than if I ate poorly.

This blog Health Food and Heroin (part one and two)  will take you back to the roots of my becoming a vegetarian in the early 80’s and my interest in nouveau cuisine when it hit the culinary scene during my 20s. Keep in mind  that even with this information my last year getting high I existed mainly on vanilla cake mix with milk, chocolate chip cookie dough, and tortillas with sugar. Seriously, when I gave up on my life I gave up every bit of self-care I’d ever known. My bottom was complete abandonment of self.

When I got clean in the late 80s, one of the first things I did was join a gym and start eating better – but change didn’t happen overnight.  Late night espressos or ordering four or five Thai ice coffees while fellowshipping probably had a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t get a solid night’s sleep for my first six months clean (though I assumed it was some hold-over effect of drug addiction). The day my 1969 Dodge Dart was stolen I ate all the icing off a large sheet cake until I was so sugared-up I passed out. This seemed a better alternative to getting loaded (which was what I wanted to do). For fun, my recovering friends and I would come up with bizarre food combinations to create speedball effects such as high sugar/caffeine followed by heavy dairy and carbs. That would be our wild Friday night entertainment. Basically during my first year clean, we were taking as much pleasure as we could acting out with whatever was at hand without the use of drugs.

In spite of the insanity we encouraged in one another, we were still going to the gym, eating healthy food, and spending days off at the beach. Once I began experiencing the positive effects of the healthy side of my lifestyle, I lost my tolerance for sugar hangovers and junk food sluggishness.  A healthy lifestyle in recovery became a natural preference for one reason – I like feeling good. When my body felt good my emotions were also in balance.

I started this blog wanting to write tips for eating well in hot weather. If you are new to recovery you may walk away wondering how to create a food speedball. Hopefully you also are thinking “If I eat better maybe I won’t feel like shit”. It’s true – you won’t.

Here are some tips for your hot weather diet and grocery list:

Greek yogurt or cottage cheese with fresh or frozen fruit and nuts make a great breakfast. Until you eat protein you will stay hungry. This is why people who start the day with a couple donuts keep going back to the box until they are horrified to see they have eaten a half-dozen donuts before noon. Start the morning with a breakfast high in protein to maximize your energy and mental clarity.

Other protein you can keep around the house to throw into other meals on hot summer days – canned tuna/salmon/sardines, boiled eggs. Cook a chicken or turkey. The meat will stretch across numerous meals. If you are on a budget, split the cost of a turkey with a friend.

Meal-sized salads are perfect during a heat wave. It’s great to keep pre-cut vegetables in containers in the fridge. Stock up on cans of beans, nuts, feta or goat cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, a variety of dressings and anything else you want to add to create a meal salad.

Fresh fruit is delicious but buying frozen fruit is often cheaper and on hot days is a much healthier alternative to popsicles or ice cream.

Always throw a few apples, peaches, pears or your favorite fruit into a bag to bring with you when you leave the house.  Midway through morning and afternoon or during the long stretch between meals on busy days, a piece of fruit will help you maintain energy.  The same goes for unsalted nuts. I am not anti-salt but choose wisely. Without adding extra salt, most people get the amount they need in the course of a day through regular eating.

Stay hydrated.  Drink water. If you think 8 glasses of cola is the same as 8 glasses of water, think again. Water is water – don’t include the water used to make coffee or tea. Pure water helps flush toxins throughout your body. Cola doesn’t.  If water seems too bland, add a slice or lemon or lime. Once you start drinking water, you will begin to thirst for water.

This blog is not a diet plan by any means. When I work with clients, I insist on lots of water, fresh fruit and vegetables with every meal, and clean protein (meaning protein that isn’t hidden under mounds of melted cheese or deep fried). Changing a diet will happen naturally over time if you continue to lean toward healthy choices. Go online to educate yourself on the basics of nutrition. It’s possible to eat healthy and still eat cheaply.What about pizza, fast food, or dessert? Go for it but remember -it’s going to be the healthy fresh food giving you energy, better skin, mental clarity, alleviating depression, and aiding in sleep so don’t neglect one in favor of the other.

What you eat affects how you feel. Recovery gives us choices. Choose wisely.

 

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Will the truth set me free?

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truth will set you freeThe disease of addiction thrives on lies and self-deception. The only way to get and stay clean is by learning how to be honest. Yep, us addicts have to learn how to do this.

When I was getting high I told myself, “This is the last one” thousands of times over the years. Sometimes I’d even throw away my paraphernalia to prove that I meant it. By morning (or even earlier) I’d be wading through rain-filled dumpsters searching for my old trash bags or laying out money on new syringes and cursing myself for being stupid enough to believe my own bullshit. This game was old. All I got from it was more self-hatred to use over.  I’d become silent on the subject of stopping years ago – friends will only listen to bullshit for so long – so this dialogue was my own inner torture chamber. At some point my head said “This is the last time” and I quit falling for it. Repeatedly disappointing myself was more painful than accepting I’d never stop using no matter how horrible I felt.

In 1988 something miraculous happened that changed my life. While trying to get into rehab, a friend called and basically told me to come over for free drugs. This was in the middle of my withdrawal so the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. I have no idea how I was able to be honest with myself but I knew if I gave myself “one last time” it meant I was still playing the “getting clean” mind-game. The only way things would be different was if I did something different. I told my friend “Thanks but no thanks.”

The saying “You are only as sick as your secrets” doesn’t just mean that we need to reveal all our sneaky devious deeds in a relapse-prevention way. It means, in order to get clean and stay clean, we have to practice honesty with others so we can learn how to become honest with ourselves– and let’s face it – we have suffered the most from our lies.  Trusting our own thinking is our greatest downfall and it is foolish to assume a major transformation in our ability to perceive reality and the truth happens simply by putting down the drugs. It comes from the work we do after.

This is why it is absolutely necessary to have at least one person we are willing to expose ourselves to fully – not just the questionable decisions we make, or the sneaky shit we are able to get away with but the very stories we tell ourselves in way of rationalizing or justifying these behaviors. It’s worth the risk to find that one person – whether it is a therapist or a sponsor or a friend. The only way we can begin to have an honest relationship with ourselves is to learn it by practicing honesty with another person. This can begin before putting the drugs down.

Here is how I approached this:

Before I got clean, when I’d feel uncomfortable or too exposed, judged, or if my behaviors caused too much drama, I’d move onto a new crowd or a new city. Sometimes this happened without me ever questioning how I lost touch with old friends. It was just the way I was carving out my path. Seemed perfectly natural. I embarked on my adventure into recovery using this model to give me courage. I was willing to be completely honest because I knew if it became unbearable, I could dump my new friends and find others. This gave me the courage to give it my best shot. The funny thing is that I am still very close to the original core group of recovery friends I made 23 years ago. In fact, honesty gave these relationships a level of intimacy I had never known prior.

Recently I was helping my oldest friend in the world get clean. Over the years, she would ask for help. She wanted directions on how to do it but reserved space to include her own ideas she still believed were valid and trustworthy. She was unable to see or accept that for years she had been trying to get clean this way and it never worked. Occasionally she could hear this argument and say, “This time I will try doing it your way.” She began to lower her methadone intake by 10 mg every couple weeks. I knew she was having trouble sleeping but it took several weeks before she admitted she was using wine to sleep at night (followed by a list of logical-sounding reasons why she couldn’t do her job if she was exhausted). I warned her that when she had her first days off of methadone she would be craving her nightcap. She promised she would stop when she began counting clean days.

By day 6 she said “I should have listened to you about the wine. The cravings are coming back and I am feeling worse today than I did on day one.” It took several email exchanges before she told me the truth. She had continued drinking wine before bed throughout those first 6 days clean and now she was thinking of nothing other than having a drink and taking the leftover methadone she had sitting on her dresser. “What leftover methadone? You shouldn’t have had wine or methadone in your house when you started counting day one.” It took 6 days of lying about her clean time until she was able to tell me the truth – and it was only because she was deep in the obsession of using again.

For two months she had suffered levels of withdrawal coming off methadone and if she picked up again, it would have all been in vain. On day 6 she told me the truth – or at least that is how it appeared. She overdosed and died on the 7th day. Even her confession about the wine and methadone was only a partial truth. She never revealed that she had Oxycontin in the house. Maybe that is what she meant by the “methadone on my dresser” that she kept thinking about all day. She tried to tell on herself but was incapable of going all the way. I will never know what other secrets she had held onto. I firmly believe that if she had been capable of telling me the truth, she would have. She wanted so badly to be in recovery again and my heart is broken that she will never have another opportunity to do things differently.

The disease wants us to protect our secrets. Even clean it will tell us that we deserve the right to some privacy so we will withhold information and not recognize this as secret-keeping behavior.  If you want to get clean or you want to stay clean for the long haul, share your secrets with someone – even if you aren’t ready to change the behaviors connected to them. Honesty is the first step. It will save your life.

 

 

 

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Too Much Too Soon – How to sabotage getting clean

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If I wrote a science fiction movie, addiction would be a computer virus that infiltrates individual hard drives and adapts itself in a way to be almost undetectable by the general public. It would control the host’s body and subtly distort perception to protect itself from being discovered and eliminated. Most of all, it would reprogram the hard drive so that the host continues to feed it. It thrives on your drug of choice but any drug will do. The only way to stop the virus is to starve it.

This analogy explains why insane choices seem perfectly logical to us. And why our best plans on how to stop using have always failed.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had some variation of this conversation: “Patty, I’ve decided to get clean. I’m really doing it this time. I haven’t done any coke or had a drink since last week. I’m done this time, for real! It’s been almost a week and I feel great. It’s time that I get off my fat ass. I feel really motivated. I’m going to work out every day and I even hired a personal trainer three times a week to help keep me motivated. I also started an amazing diet – no sugar and no carbs. I gained so much weight from the booze I can’t stand to look at myself naked. I’m really kicking ass at work too. And I have this new boyfriend who’s totally supportive.  I’m really going to get my life together. I know you’ve heard this before – but this time I mean it. I’m really committed this time.”

A couple weeks pass and when I ask how it’s going, I hear all about the boyfriend and the diet and some excuses about why it’s been hard to get to the gym every day but how they’ll do better next week. What I rarely hear is what they are doing to stay clean and sober.  Some will start out this self-improvement regiment with 12 step meetings being part of the mix. Usually they are too focused on weight loss or making money and swear they have nothing against meetings but there’s not enough time. Since they aren’t even thinking about getting high, they aren’t worried.

It’s important to understand how the disease operates.  Quite often our downfall is that we believe our own thinking is healthy and accurate. For years, we were baffled by how, regardless of our intentions, we always ended up using when we swore we wouldn’t. Imagine the disease has infiltrated our hard-drive, like a computer virus, and our thinking remains hostage until we weaken its hold on us by starving it. Until then, we lack the clarity to recognize when we are setting ourselves up for failure or relapse.

Staying clean has to be the top priority. If we use, the diet won’t fix us. The relationship won’t save us. If you’re like me and using is a full time job, when would you get to the gym? For most addicts, once they pick up, nothing else really matters.

My advice is to not take on too much too soon. Trust me, as you stay clean, you’ll have time to take on every facet of self-improvement. High school dropouts become doctors and couch potatoes become marathon runners. Anything’s possible with some clean time under your belt.

If you are getting clean and thinking now’s the perfect time to quit smoking, give up sugar, give up caffeine, cut down to 1000 calories a day and spend 2 hours a day at the gym then lock yourself up in your love nest – good luck.   Don’t underestimate the ongoing effort and commitment you have to invest in early recovery. It’s like learning how to ride a bike without training wheels all over again. If you get hungry angry lonely or tired in the early days because of your diet, your exercise routine, your inability to jump off the hamster wheel,, life will feel like one big exhausting job and you’ll  wonder why the hell you bother.  This sort of thinking often leads to “I was happier when I was getting high”.

I believe in exercise.  The key is taking a gradual approach to change in early recovery. Perfectionism is another downfall so put down the whip.  An addict who plans on ten hours of exercise who only gets three will use this lack of discipline as a weapon for inner torment. The worse we feel about ourselves,  the more we set ourselves up for relapse.  Aim for a minimum of 45 minutes 3x a week to start. Walk instead of drive when you can.  Even if you are kicking narcotics and feel like any movement will kill you, take a walk anyway. Scroll down to January’s blog posts for tips specific to anyone getting clean.

Begin to make healthier food choices. This is not the time to fast, go on a juice diet, eliminate carbs. Your body is already going through a lot. Add fruits and vegetables and limit fast food and sugar. Don’t be rigid. If you want ice cream or pizza, have it. The first couple weeks are going to be uncomfortable enough. It’s not the time to  try to make up for years of McDonald’s fries. January’s posts also address diet for people getting clean or new to recovery.

Romance, sex, love, and companionship are wonderful things – in fact they can make us feel so right drugs don’t even enter our thoughts. But when there is trouble in paradise, getting high will be the first thing on our mind. Not to mention who wants the responsibility of being someone’s lifeboat in a relationship? Well, there are 12 step programs for those people too. A relationship is a relationship -not a substitute for recovery.

If you are thinking about getting clean or if you’re in early recovery, do yourself a favor and make staying clean your priority. Don’t let not living up to your unrealistic expectation of being perfect become an excuse to give up on everything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Therapy & Psych Meds in Recovery

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In the early years of my recovery, a lot of my friends tested positive for HIV and the AIDS virus. I went along with all the lifestyle changes to support them. Overnight we became non-smoking, macrobiotic, vegan, aerobic-class enthusiasts reading A Course in Miracles and quoting Marianne Williamson. Considering we’d all been art-damaged, punk rock-nurtured criminals and sex-working gay & straight IV drug users, throwing ourselves enthusiastically into every possible holistic and spiritual way to heal ourselves expressed our collective desire to live. And we never missed an opportunity to laugh at ourselves. Some of our adventures in spirituality-seeking bordered on the ridiculous but we needed more miracles – the first miracle being that the desire to use drugs had left us.

Years passed, we accumulated clean time, and life-saving HIV cocktails became available. The miracle had happened. Without the threat of impending death motivating lifestyle change, some people started picking up and putting down cigarettes again, ordering steak, going from sex-abstinent to sex-abundant, opting out of cardio for yoga. Over time, we exited the self-help route and found therapy.

In recovery we continue striving to enrich our lives, our relationships with others and most importantly, our relationship with ourselves. I encourage people to seek professional help whenever needed. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day. For many addicts, learning how to live with our feelings must come before we are ready to dig deeper. We do this by staying clean, building a foundation, and gaining courage by living life on life’s terms. For others, staying clean would not be possible without healing the wounds of trauma with a professional early on. Wherever you fit in this spectrum, the combination of listening to your heart and the suggestions of those with more experience will be your guide.

Therapy is a commitment to show up and be honest so it is important that you find a therapist who is a good fit. This can be done with a little research and interviewing. You can often get names of therapists from various centers connected to organizations dealing with GLBT, Women’s Services, victims of violence or sexual abuse, sex workers, runaways etc. You can Google “therapist, your location and whatever specific issues that may concern you” and see what comes up. You can ask your doctor, ask friends about their therapists. Once you begin seeking, names will come. You can find sliding scale often connected with larger university mental health facilities, some therapists take insurance and others are cash only. Prepare questions for the first meeting – it’s okay to ask them about themselves and their practice. You will intuitively know who you feel safe with. Remember, you are building a new relationship so don’t expect an instant fix. It takes time for many of us to build trust before we are able to be thoroughly honest. This is not surgery. Healing happens over time. Therapy is really a case of “more will be revealed”. The willingness to begin is all you need to start the ball rolling toward change.

People often ask “Was it worth it?” and want to know what I got out of the experience. Often during therapy I’d be asking myself the same question. I tackled many different issues according to what was happening in my life, how I was handling situations, and feelings. For example, nothing ever seemed to get me angry yet I would cross a line (usually because I felt I wasn’t being heard) and literally see red and start swinging. I knew this was strange and wanted to know how to have a different experience. That was one reason I sought help. In retrospect, what I have gained from therapy is that I now experience my feelings as they come up. I don’t intellectualize them and I don’t check out. This has enabled me to live fully in my body and be present in the moment in my life.This had not been the case for most of my life. I numbed out feelings that either were painful or scary first with drugs and then clean with escapist behaviors. These days I wouldn’t even know where the switch was to flip it to the “off” position if I wanted to. I believe this change is definitely the key to the contentment I feel most days.

I’m going to talk for a moment about medication. Personally, I’m not against meds in recovery. I do not believe we have to suffer to prove our willingness to be clean. I also know addicts have a history of preferring a pill to hard work, that we are self-deceptive and very skilled at deceiving others. So this is my own personal philosophy on the matter. I was offered anti-depressants a number of times by my therapist. It  is her job to offer solutions – and medication is a solution. I decided to exercise, meditate and get fresh air to see if it helped first. I also pinpointed things in my life I could change (people, places, jobs) that were bringing me pain. I did the work and felt better. The depression lifted without medication. If you do not try alternative methods first, my guess is you want a pill to fix it. Now there are people who will not find relief from depression or anxiety no matter what holistic avenues they take or what lifestyle changes they make. And there are people with other mental health issues. It is important to be completely honest with your psychiatrist and to choose one who has a lot of experience working with addicts. I know a psychiatrist in NYC who believes no one needs more than 3 medications to deal with disorders common to addicts. I’ve had clients come to me who have a regiment of 8 pills a day. Since I’m not a doctor all I can do is insist they get a second opinion. Also, if you came into recovery on anxiety meds, Adderall, antidepressants and sleep medication, my question is always “Did your doctor know you were abusing drugs? The symptoms that he treated, could they have been partial withdrawal symptoms from your drug of choice?” I don’t care if you’re 30 and you have been on these meds since you were 16. It is possible you were misdiagnosed because you were using at the time. Be willing to get honest with a psychiatrist who specializes in working with addicts in recovery and trust him to evaluate you.

At the end of the day, we have to learn to be honest with ourselves and honest with mental health professionals. We have to be willing to make lifestyle changes and to heal old wounds in order to find peace and comfort in our skin if we are to stay clean and sober for the long haul.

 

 

 

 

 

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What do you mean I have to feel everything?

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FEELINGS

The first time I heard someone say “I used over my feelings” the first thing that popped into my head was “Really? I used to have fun.” I couldn’t relate. In fact, I felt kind of sorry for him. Using over feelings -what did that even mean?  By the time everyone in the room finished admitting that they had also used over their feelings, I felt like I was in that depressing group therapy scene in Drugstore Cowboy. The lighting is stark in the bleak, institutional room and we see Matt Dillon’s character disengage emotionally as everyone takes turns being grateful for their seemingly pitiful little lives.  I knew how he felt at that moment and recognized the look on his face. He wasn’t going to stay clean and neither was I. After this experience, I continued to get high for a few more months but I couldn’t get that guy talking about “using over feelings” out of my head. Once I’d heard the truth everything changed. I couldn’t seem to get high enough to forget that I had a choice about it.

Until then, I’d never given any thought into why I used drugs. As an adolescent I was consciously constructing my persona. Rebellion was in the air throughout my childhood – in the news and in the movie theatres. There was a new generation saying, “fuck you” to conformity and kowtowing to authority. I was too young to really grasp what was going on in the world but it mirrored something I felt deep inside. Until then, I’d felt very alone. I found my people, the counter-culture freaks and anti-heroes, on the big screen. It was a look, an attitude, and a style. Once I adopted the image of the edgy, thrill-seeking, wild girl all I had to do was find drugs to legitimize it.

Writing this as a long-time recovering addict, it’s obvious that I was searching for a way to change the feelings inside of me. And I found something outside of myself that did the trick. Like every other addict, I used over my feelings.

Recovery is about learning how to deal with our feelings. Since experiencing feelings is not in our skill-set (even clean and sober) we continue to find ways to avoid them – always seeking something outside of ourselves to change the way we feel. In early recovery we drink pots of coffee, chain smoke, try or hope to have lots of sex, or search for love. Later in recovery, we spend endless hours on the Internet,  work out until we’re injured, fast for ten days instead of four, spend until we’re bankrupt, work 60 hours a week, stay busy every minute. We tend to create drama in situations because one large pain is easier to focus on than feelings of insecurity, loneliness, worthlessness, disappointment, self-doubt and self-loathing. When life is going great, we worry about what it’s going to feel like when something goes wrong. I’ve known addicts who take Tylenol in case they get a headache. Simply put, addicts can face down the barrel of a shotgun but we don’t do well with emotional discomfort.

So what happens when we stop running? We feel fear. Remember how the fear of withdrawal kept you using long after you wanted to be clean? Fear controlled us. It doesn’t just go away because we are clean and sober. So we do what we’ve always done – we try to control it. Seeking outside stuff to escape into, to alter our feelings, to change the direction of things. We’re fortunate to have a lot of pillows to land on when we get clean. I think going from feeling nothing to feeling everything, we’d surely explode and run back to using. So while we get comfortable with some of our feelings, we avoid others by throwing back pots of coffee, eating until we can’t move, having sex, shopping, getting 40 tattoos. As long as we don’t use, we gain positive experience from the feelings we do sit with (they didn’t kill us) and it helps give us courage to face new ones. But there’s a trick to all this: if you get clean and spend all your time “acting out”, avoiding feelings, seeking comfort, pleasure and escape and you don’t deal with anything you’ll probably relapse. Remember we use over our feelings and this also means if we don’t start to get comfortable in our own skin, we will use again. Pain and fear don’t magically disappear no matter how great the sex was, how many tattoos you got, or how whole your new relationship makes you feel. It takes work to stay clean.

You need someone to talk to. This can be your 12 step community, a therapist, friends you trust who love you – do not give this job to your romantic partner. You need a safe place where you can be honest about what is going on in your life and in your head and how it makes you feel. To lower the pressure on a tire you have to let some air out. Becoming vulnerable and honest with other human beings is how this process begins. You don’t need advice – you just have to let it out. This is often the first experience addicts have acknowledging how they feel. And I will give you a tip: it’s easy to talk about how angry you are, how much hate you have but it takes real courage to reveal jealousy, loneliness, disappointment, sadness, hurt. These are the feelings under the anger. Our feelings get hurt – just like when we were kids. Talking about this stuff, taking the air out, will reduce the pressure. It will feel weird at first but you’ll notice a shift in your mood and it will give you momentum to do it again. Remember – you don’t need feedback or advice. We start the process by hearing ourselves connect with what we are feeling. As time goes by, feelings become less frightening.

You’re tired all the time, you’re masturbating every day, can’t believe your appetite? My guess is you are having some feelings. Look for the signs. We don’t have to run anymore. Sometimes feelings suck. There’s no other way to describe it – thankfully feelings also pass. Feelings may not be facts but it is a fact you’re experiencing feelings. Face them and recover or run from them and hope you find some courage before you use again.

Although this post is geared toward early recovery, even after years clean our knee jerk reaction to an uncomfortable feeling will still be to find something outside of ourselves to change it or delay it.  With practice, it happens less and less.

 

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