obsession | Patty Powers

THIS POST IS FOR THOSE PEOPLE WHO GOT CLEAN AND SOBER NEW YEAR’S DAY OR ANYONE STARTING OUT IN RECOVERY.

When I was a kid I remember thinking the year 2000 sounded futuristic so I did the math to see if I would still be alive. (I’d be 40 – which is like saying 80 to an 8 year old). Little did I know that in my teens I’d adopt the belief system of “live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse” basically accepting I’d be dead before 30 – which was a real possibility given the way I was living. Glad I got clean at 28 and not only lived to see 2000 but am still here in 2012.

I love the phrase “Welcoming in the New Year”. It sounds so cheerful and optimistic. I’ve never been big on New Years’ resolutions but I know people make them. In fact, if you decided to make January 1^st your first day clean and sober, I applaud you. I bet when you made that decision you were feeling pretty optimistic. It’s the 6^th as I write this so by now you probably have had 6 days of inner dialogue that sounds something like this:

“Maybe I should have waited and done this______ (1,when my vacation time comes up, 2 when I don’t have so many things to do, 3. When I get a job/apartment/car, 4. Some other time).”

“I feel like shit. I didn’t feel this bad when I was getting high/drunk.”

“I haven’t slept all week. I have too much to do. Maybe these other people can go without sleep – but I need it. I should call my doctor and get something to help me sleep.”

“If another person tells me to join a gym or meditate or go to yoga I am going to start screaming. These people don’t have any idea how I am feeling. Are they crazy? Half of them don’t look like they’ve been to a gym in their life. I hate everyone.”

“What I need is a drink. I bet if I have one drink I will be able to sleep tonight.”

“It feels like I have no skin and my nerve endings are exposed. Everything makes me feel so intense. I cried during a commercial yesterday. I’m going crazy.”

“If I don’t take something soon I’m going to end up hitting someone – then I’ll wind up in jail. Seriously – why am I even doing this? I feel so angry that I’m probably a danger to society.”

“I feel so lonely – like “I’m so lonely I’m gonna die” lonely. How the hell am I ever going to meet anyone if I can’t go to bars? This makes no sense. I can go to a bar and order a coke. Yeah, right – and then what? Sit with a coke and feel crazy. I won’t be able to talk to anyone. Great – I will be clean and sober and in the end I will die alone.’

“What the hell is wrong with me? I have been masturbating like a teenager. I’m pathetic. I feel crazy. I bet if I got laid, it would straighten my head out. At least maybe it would help me sleep.”

“I don’t even remember why I decided to get clean Jan 1^st. I never make resolutions. This is ridiculous. I have been useless and crazy for 6 days and it’s affecting my life. I don’t have time for this.”

“I just talked to ____ and told them I’m clean and they told me I wasn’t an addict. Maybe they’re right. I wasn’t that bad.”

Does any of this sound familiar to you? The crazy part is that this dialogue is probably occurring even when you’re having an okay time.

HERE’S THE TRICK: don’t use or drink NO MATTER WHAT and this noise and discomfort will lessen and eventually stop – guaranteed. If you stay completely abstinent, these feelings will pass. If you cheat – if you have that one beer or an ambien or anything to make your feelings more manageable – you will remain in the obsession and it will get worse not better.

Getting clean and sticking it out those first few weeks isn’t easy. The worst thing you can do is spend too much time alone with your mind. Television, Netflix, and gaming will not keep you clean – whatever bullshit your head is telling you about how these things are calming you down more than meetings do.

What you need is a plan for each day. Include this in your 24 hours:

1. Drink lots of water (move those toxins out of your system).

2. Eat healthy food. Don’t skip meals. Healthy food means incorporate fresh fruit and vegetables into your daily routine. Make that a start anyway. I’m not saying stop with the pizza and fried chicken but don’t have it every day and balance it out with salads and apples and food that is not processed.

3. Get fresh air for an hour. WALK! Even if you feel too weak, walk as far as you can, sit, and walk back. Aim every day for a little further.

4. Exercise. Not every day but try to do something at least 3-4 times a week. If you belong to a gym, great. If you can afford yoga, perfect. If you have access to a pool, swimming is the best starting point for someone who never exercises. If you have no financial resources, you can go to the library and take out a home workout video, find something online or on YouTube, you can jog, bike ride, power walk, you can do sit-ups. There is no reason you can’t move your body. It will reduce a lot of the anxiety you are experiencing. That alone makes it worthwhile.

5. Take some quiet time somewhere peaceful – not on your sofa or bed. Look at the clouds, whatever nature you can find. I mean REALLY look at the details – the way a child can be fascinated by a spider. (Most likely, this is one suggestion you are most likely to want to skip but it really is an important one. It will feed you in a way that will bring a sense of wellbeing and – really – at this point in the game you need whatever you can get).

6. Write a list of everything you are grateful for – even if it turns out to be the same as the list you wrote yesterday.

7. Call, email, or text a few people you met at meetings – whether you know them or not. If you have nothing to say, simply ask them to recommend a meeting that day. Who knows – maybe they will meet you there and go for a bite to eat afterward. Its funny how after you talk to someone on the phone once, they pay more attention to you when they see you. You go from feeling invisible to feeling visible. (BTW this is the hardest thing for people to do. When I work with clients they will wrap their legs around their head in a yoga class they don’t want to go to before they will take any action to try to make new friends. I always tell them that without friends who are also in recovery, they really are not going to ANY LENGTHS to stay clean and sober. It works by going to any lengths – which means doing things people suggest that worked for them even when you don’t want to).

8. GO TO AT LEAST ONE MEETING. (If you aren’t working and it’s possible to go to more, do it). If you are like me, it was never too hot, never too cold, never rainy too hard, I was never too busy or too tired to get high so there should be no excuse to not be able to get to a meeting. Even if you hear nothing and sit looking at the floor counting the minutes until it’s over, the act of going to a meeting sends a signal that you are serious about staying clean and sober to that part of you wanting to give up. It will help weaken it. And like I said before – by weakening it, the obsession to drink and use, the compulsive thinking about it will go away.

Look at this list. I didn’t even give you 10 things to do each day. That means there is time for a movie, family, an outing, or a social activity with friends.

End each day with a hot bath (or shower if you don’t have a tub). In fact, whenever you feel your body uncomfortably tense and your legs are cramping, a hot bath will make you feel better.

And if you can’t sleep and feel crazy, go online. Intherooms.com as online meetings, groups, and members you can instant message with who can help you.

Check back. I will be posting here every week now.

I posted two blogs already about the holidays but the amount of email and conversations I have lately seem to keep going back to this subject. Here is what I noticed: people who have been clean and sober for a period of time (18 months or more) have a built in memory of the sneakiness of the disease at this time of year so they have upped their recovery time, maybe by going to more meetings or by making extra effort to connect with their sponsor and support group. They are not living in fear of the holidays – they are simply taking the actions needed for a smoother ride through the month. Almost everyone I know who has less than a year down to early days in recovery do not seem to think the holidays are going to be an issue for them. Some have even thought it out logically and are convinced that all this ‘high alert” stuff program people keep talking about will not apply to them.

I don’t fault the newcomers for it. From their point of view, they are being honest in how they feel. What they don’t seem to have yet is an awareness of how the disease of addiction continues to lurk, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Before I got clean, the insanity in my thinking and the level of stress I experienced was intense and only seemed to hit a level of calm and clear thinking after I used. Part of this was because the stress of withdrawal was removed by using but since the disease lives in the obsession/compulsion part of my mind it would come up again even while I was high – to get more, to say that amount wasn’t enough or it wasn’t strong enough – get more. Basically, the disease really only ever had one thing to say “MORE” and the rest of me – body spirit and mind – was enslaved to make it happen. Trying to exert control over it “I’ll get more tonight” resulted in a subtle level of mental agony and physical discomfort until the whole idea of getting more “tonight” turned into “getting more within the hour”. I’m sure we all know what it was like to be controlled by the disease, cave in to the compulsion and obsession by putting everything we wanted to do second to feeding the disease. When we first stop using, we are so amazed to look back at how completely enslaved we had been. We recognize how – despite our intelligence – the disease was more powerful. So we get clean and around the holidays, a sort of amnesia comes over us in early recovery. We can’t seem to connect with how powerless we had been. We feel like the disease is in the past (if it even is a disease) because we’ve been free from that level of obsession and compulsion for a while. In fact, most days, we feel all right.

“What’s this holiday panic we hear about in meetings?” This is how the disease works – newcomers often hear the experience of old-timers as if we are all panic-stricken about the holidays, living in fear of using. Meanwhile, this “panic” is not happening. People with clean time are simply stating that this is the time of year to be vigilant because the disease is “cunning powerful and baffling” and is capable of sneaking in and gaining a foothold if we are complacent about recovery. We say this because we have years of experience going through various feelings, early recovery emotional rollercoasters, core issue trauma and pain surfacing out of nowhere at this time of year and we have watched many people relapse. Old-timers are not biting their nails anticipating crisis. Instead we acknowledge the power of the disease and do what we have been told so that we can stay one step ahead of it – so it can be a smooth sailing holiday season. But – the newcomer doesn’t hear this – the newcomer hears fear but since they don’t feel the fear themselves this must not apply to them. This warning must be meant for someone else who is new at the meeting. Not them. But this line of thinking is precisely how the disease gains foothold, making them believe they are the exception to the rule. Closing their mind to recovery tools that will strengthen and protect them.

What I know as an addict with 23 years clean who has watched numerous friends with 20 years relapse, is that when it comes to the disease, we are never fully free of it. It lurks in the shadows of our Being waiting for ways to make the “program” experience of others no longer apply to us, as if we are cured. Someone’s advice on jobs, dating, or financial matters – it really may not apply to me. But their experience with recovery usually does. I am not immune to relapse but as long as I continue to take actions the disease can not blind me and move me away from recovery, there’s a good chance I will stay clean.

This time of year – if you are new to recovery and you hear people sharing about their struggles during the holiday season recognize that this sharing is recovery in action. If you feel fine but notice yourself attending less meetings, feeling like you are “over” some of your friendships with people you’ve met at meetings and decide it’s time to clean house on your cell phone, you start spending a lot of time alone because it feels better than being with others – beware. Take the opposite action to what your head is telling you is true.

If you are new and starting to feel like this recovery job takes up too much time and you miss the simplicity of your life before you got clean – this sort of thinking will put you in a dangerous place this month. Even if it’s true you that miss your old life and old friends and hate going to so many meetings – do yourself a favor, put in the extra time this holiday season and trust me – it won’t always be like this. Being self reliant shouldn’t come so early in recovery. Remember – your best thinking is why you ended up in meetings in the first place. This holiday season, keep and open mind and let experience members guide you. This is not the time to do it alone.

Patty Powers

Recovery Coach // NYC

Tag Archives: obsession

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