a message of hope

Chapter 9 The First Step Is The Hardest

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable” ,

Addiction Aftermath

Emma was bowled over by the AA meeting too. She was as shocked how the experiences of the other men there chimed perfectly with mine, how they all seemed to be like slightly different versions of me.  That we were all in the same boat. The meeting was already some portal in the universe that we didn’t realise existed. Now it was offering an understanding of my problems so profound we could scarely believe our ears. It was way beyond what we could have hoped for. These ideas seemed to have been around for at least 70 years (if not alot longer). We thought we were going there to hear tips on how to control my drinking or maybe we hadn’t got a clue why we were going there. We went there, like many do, in utter desperation. Not sure what we were looking for other that a way out of our hellish predicament. We had nowhere esle to turn.

I left the meeting a changed new man in many respects. A bit of hope now competed with overwhelming fear in my heart. How I felt about myself as an alcoholic, about to be in recovery, for however long, had utterly changed. Part of me worried it was a little too late. I must confess. I looked at Emma, at the fleeting relief in her face and resolved to try my best for her, to stay sober as long as I could for her. I was no longer sure I was worth it, but she was.

They told us you have recover for yourself otherwise you will not recover. I wasn’t completely of this view. I preferred to hang in there for Emma. I didn’t love me enough to stay sober, I didn’t even like me that much. I had felt so worthless for so long that maybe this is what happens to worthless people, they drink themsleves to death. Paradoxically I was willing to fight to my last breath to stay in the game. Something was going on here that I hadn’t expressly asked for. Something was happening to me against my wishes and had been doing so for decades, like some enemy intelligence.

I remembered being 27 and leaving a good job in Cardiff City Council to follow Emma to London. Before we came to Swansea. I was somebody then? Wasn’t I? I was popular, had many friends, the life and soul of the party. I did good things, worked in a Trade Union and helped my fellow worker. Where the hell had he gone? Where was that guy, he had gradually disintegrated. Falling apart, gone mad.

That guy had problems too mind, panic attacks and depression , a period of pyschoisis after a ten day Buddhist meditation course. I had seen a few counsellors and therapists. There was somethig going on then? In fact, when I first went to University in Cardiff, I was frightened by how my thoughts kept surging around my brain, and I couldn’t slow them down, turn them down, turn them off. They seemed uncontrollable? Was this a problem that I silenced with alcohol, and drugs, and sex, but that isn’t the spiritual malady? Questions furtively scurrying round my mind? My past was my past and although I was treated for it, my present kept getting worse. Why?

They said it was a progressive illness, it even progressed in sobriety and recovery? What did? What progressed? The drinking and the addiction yes but what else? Maybe these thoughts might dissipate along with the lingering psychosis? Nothing made complete sense and thoughts about it made me want to vomit. Maybe this was my madness talking away, gibbering away in my mind.

They said the illnes centred in your mind, was I mentally ill? They also said don’t ask why I am alcoholic or how? That will lead you straight back to drinking? They said the only how worth seeking is how to recovery? Thoughts were continually darting through my mind, piercing my heart with their posionous intent. Why was I having so many thoughts too. Much worse than when I first went to Cardiff, twenty years earlier. Did my obsessive thinking progress alongside my compulsive drinking? It might have been the slight reduction in my drinking, and watered down drinking too, that gave more clarity and less blurring the edges.

Anyway I was prepared to go down fighting. I had somehow survived months and months of alcoholic psychosis which was like having a bad trip for half a year, day in, day out, only interrupted intermittently by vomiting. Why I hadn’t killed myself I don’t know? It seemed almost a humane decision given the state I was in. Put me out of my misery.

I had obviously discussed the prospect with Emma as she would come back for her teaching job every day wondering if this was the day I had finally decided to kill myself. I was so indignant that I had gotten into this situation and it wasn’t my fault. I raged at this thought. Somehow I didn’t will this deletarious situation on myself. Something in the past had happened to me to help cause it. Although that only partly explained things? There must be more to this than I realised.

I related to the not being able to stay off the drink even when I tried and I also know somewhere deep inside of me that I never could stop taking drink, and drugs, when I had started. Any drinking would mean that a day would be written off and drinking and drugging would be what I would be doing that day, for the rest of that day and following night. I used drugs so that I didn’t get drunk, too drunk, as I didn’t actually like getting drunk. When I was drunk, I was out of control drunk and didn’t like it, didn’t like being that vulnerable to the intentions of others. Didn’t like not being able to defend myself. This never stopped me getting drunk but the drugs put brakes on the drunkneness, combined it with stonedness.

I always marvelled at people who had a drink at midday or in the afternoon and then went home afterwards to have a cup of tea! I tried that once or twice and felt like I was having withdrawals, like there were scampering spiders in my blood and veins, like there wasn’t enough skin to properly cover my skull, my tongue an arid desert. I sometimes felt a mini withdrawal just waiting for my drink to be poured. Already planning the next drink to deal with the effects of the first one? A pathological wanting. If that isn’t an abnormal (if not allergic) reaction to alcohol, then what is? Wanting a second drink when you have not had the first, the drink creating a thirst for drinking not quelling it? How is this not abnormal?

I remember one man saying that an alcoholic would prefer not to drink rather than have a couple and have to stop, that this was more painful than not drinking at all. I related to that. The psychic pain that went with stopping after drinking was much worse than not drinking at all.

Emma had bought the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of the AA meeting and other books and reading these would help with silencing my torturously obsessive thinking. Recovery seemed like it would be a tortouous route but at least we had a direction now, rather than going round and round in circles. She had been somehow transformed too.  She glowed a little with an inner conviction. Although, like me, she was too scared to be hopeful.

I had wine in the car waiting for me but didn’t drink it until I got home, out of respect. The wine felt different to before, and not because it had water in it. It no longer felt like the only solution to my problems.  It felt strangely redundant, previous. It was something I had to do now, to get somewhere else later. It was strange sensation not having the same utter dependence on it as before. Before it was everything, all I had. Now it was a mortal enemy, I couldn’t wait to be shot off. It was no longer the end and be all, it was a medication of sorts. Something I had relied on in the absence of what I really needed, a solution to my problems, to my alcoholism, a condition that was more than just about drinking.

One AA member even thanked alcohol for stopping him going completely mad, for keeping him alive long enough to get to AA! Another man said his alcoholism was more of a thinking problem than a drinking one. I remembered it was also about emotions and not being able to control them. Where these somehow linked, fear based thinking and out fo control emotions? There was much food for thought. And it all made me ill thinking about it?

It was tough thinking about these things, I thought hope would drown me. Or fear. Any future sense of reality somehow made me ill. Any future proejection or even past recrimination had the same nauseating effect on me. It was as if I could only handle this moment, this second and that any instrusions from the past or the future tenses would overwhelm me. All I could deal with and rely on was the now, this moment. Anything else was overwhelming, even the hope and the excitement of a new approach to this alcoholism.

Thinking and it’s rippling emotions were the enemy from now but not in the now. I clung to the now like a life boat on a turbulent sea. It was a life boat I didn’t know of the day before. This would be almost intolerably difficult. Would l be up to it, in a way I never had been before? What where my odds, they must have been slim. How the hell was this possible, doable?

Projection and bring back to the now, to this moment, that is how. This was my new mantra, get back to the safety of the now. This was how it went for the first few days in recovery. Constantly clambering back into the lifeboat before my thoughts and negative emotions threatened to drown me. The next day, Christmas day there was a social event for recovering alcoholics in the community hall just beside our house in Brynmill Swansea. Emma and I went along. I picked up alot of tips on how to survive the first dreadful days of sobriety from other recovering alcoholics there. Mike, my former drinking pal and chair for the previous evening’s meeting was there and was very helpful. I really appreciated his early help, as did Emma. There were quite alot of people there, some of whom had not been at the previous evening’s meeting. They looked visibly shocked by my appearance.

I think they gave me a lot of their time knowing that the chances of me recovering and staying sober were probably fairly slim. I think mainly they felt sorry for Emma, and all the effort she was putting in to trying to keep me alive! I had resolved to drink water diluted wine for two days while reading the so-called Big Book of Alcoholc Anonymous. I couldn’t work out why they called it the Big Book. I would then water down the wine even more the third day and would use the medication to taper off, only if I felt I needed too. I didn’t want to become an addict too! I had been given useful tips on how to taper off and then stop. I was told to have cranberry juice and drink this along with the watered down wine, and then to just drink this when I had actually stopped drinking. I drank the cranberry juice for weeks and weeks afterwards. It was still feeding my other addiction, sugar. In fact other AAs said it was important not to come off sugar as well as booze. So I was told to continually have bars of chocolate etc in my pockets. I was advised to carry bottles of water in my pockets too when going to meetings. All of which I would do religiously, habitually.

So the first days were reducing the drinking. I read AA literature as I did. I was still suffering from poor eyesight and the lines of black typed words floated and squiggled about a bit but that too would get better on a daily basis. I found the irst 164 pages of the Big Book difficult to take in. So I read the personal stories at the back of the book about other alcoholics from the 1930s, their stories and I greatly indentified with them. Many of them were what we called “last gaspers”, chronic alcoholics like myself, close to death or permanent madness. Although, the first edition of the BB has stories of AAs even more similar to me; those who had similar profound mental issues as me when they arrived to AA recovery. I was later to realise that the majority of AAs now were not last gaspers like them or me and this has often made me feel more of an oddity at meetings. I also wondered where all the last gaspers were now? Had AA changed so much it that time?

I felt it was strange, and it added to the general weirdness of my introduction to recovery, that the solution to the problem of alcholism was wtritten in 1935! It hadn’t really been updated on since, the first 164 pages have remained the same, only the personal stories changed. I wondered why there hadn’t been anything added since or that it hadn’t been updated, surely we had found out some more about alcoholism and addiction in the intervening seventy years? In my mind, it was like I was being transported back in time to the 1930s to get the solution, the solution wasn’t just retrieved via an unknown portal in the universe but that the portal sent you back in time too.

I imagine men in shirts and ties and hats and suits and sepia, with Model Ford T cars. Smoke filled rooms and Phillp Marlow type characters. It was all very peculiar. AA recovery came from a different era and a time when religion was much more common. Saying that the solution was God , if he were sought, would take some digesting, especially to a man who grew up in the religious and ethnic conflict of Northern Ireland where there was too much religion and not enough Christianity. It might be too bitter a pill to swallow to now accept God as the solution, after all He had done back there? Or around the world? I had the Buddhism to fall back on. It had worked before and that was when I did not know what the problem was , that I was an alcoholic.

One personal story of alcoholism stood out more for me that others as it dealt with drugs as well as alcohol. Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict: Like me he didn’t think he was an alcoholic as, he just had problems.

“If you had my problems you’d drink too.” It was the section on acceptance of things that normally disturb me that disturbed me most, “Until I could accept my  alcoholism I could not stay sober; Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much. On what needs to be changed in the world As on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.” 

This was revelatary and quite nauseating. It suggested giving up not only alcohol but a life long obsession with blaming others for my feelings and attitudes to the world. I didn’t like this at all. This personal accountabilty when it was their fault! In fact, it was terrible to even consider that it was my reaction to life that caused my problems . Then I remembered that this is what Buddhism taught me. Before it prompted my first period of Psychosis (I also left London after a period of Cocaine induced psychosis but that is a story for later). It too had said that we suffered because of how we reacted to fear and craving. It was our reactions to the world that caused our suffering and we had a choice over this. I resolved to now use the meditation to help me deal with the addiction that drove me to do too much meditating of the last time out! It was not perfect but it was better than having to rely, like some suckers, on a God of your understanding!

Chapter 4 – When All Else Fails

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

When all else fails

 My first AA meeting was on Christmas Eve, 2005 in a local Church Hall. Emma accompanied me there. Drove me and then walked me to the hall.  I was so weak I couldn’t  walk so needed her arm to lean on. I needed her moral support too. There were references to my jaundice waiting for me on the front door step, when one of the AAs sarcastically, in racist tomes, asked me if I had “just gotten off the boat?”His understanding and compassionate nature later went on the serve multiple years for child abuse.

Anyway, I was too weak to punch him and ventured indoors. I was surprised to see that a guy I had drank with, from time to time in my local bar, was there and seemed to be in charge of the meeting. I was surprised to see him as I didn’t think he drank that much! He had drunk about the same amount I had spilled off my chin. This made me feel stupid and ashamed, why hadn’t I come here before? Looking at him, I should have come to AA years ago, before, it was too late.

I felt at more at home, as someone with psychosis could do, with him being there. It helped me. It wasn’t just me in this boat. We joined a dozen men sitting in a circle around a large table. I felt like a freak with my glowing skin. We were told, perhaps for my benefit, that in the meeting people would share their stories and the rest of us would just listen, with interrupting, and try to identify with their testimonies. I was relieved that I didn’t have to speak and could get away with just listening, which, given my psychosis, was difficult enough.

There were sparkling multi-coloured Christmas lights hung everywhere, with a Nativity scene beside us. The Catholic feel to proceedings helped me feel at home for a moment too.  Then it made me feel ashamed. How far I had fallen, from the hopes and dreams of my parents for me. First of my family to go to University and now sat here? How the hell had I got here? My stomach flipped with emotion, anxiety and self pity. Maybe this was a waste of time, I was too far gone? Thoughts had long since become my enemy, creating tsunamis of emotions that overwhelmed me. They were unceasing in my mind. The meeting began and we listened to a preamble and a man reading from a book. The thoughts eventually quietened enough for me to listen to other people speaking.  

Right from the start, two things struck me. Firstly, there wasn’t much talk about alcohol, most of the sharing was about what they called alcoholism. Secondly, instead of dwelling on drinking and how to stop drinking, or even cut down, they talked about what made them return to drinking; a thing they kept referring to as a spiritual malady, which someone described as an inabilty to live life on life’s terms and another called being maladjusted to life.

They seemed to be saying that something, inside them, made them drink and return to drinking, even when they didn’t want to. It was that, that was their alcoholism, not the symptom, the drinking of alcohol. It was revelatory. There could be something done about this without simply whiteknuckling it! There was a reason for drinking that wasn’t just craving? In fact, in some cases, the craving must have been caused by something other than wanting to drink. Some said their craving dispapeared after coming into recovery. This was absolutely astonishing. I thought to myself, they can’t have drunk much? One person said they had been on 3 bottles of brandy a day and had the obsession to drink lifted after coming into AA. How? By admitting they were alcoholic! . My addled brain struggled to fathom this. How was this all possible? How could admitting you are alcoholic have such a profound result?

Until now, I had thought my upbringing in the “Troubles” in Northern Ieland in a dysfunctional family had been the cause of my drinking and mental health problems. They seemed to be saying it was my reaction to my life that caused my difficulties with alcohol, and other substances. Not everyone who lived there became alcoholic! Two of my three sisters weren’t alcoholic. Two out of four siblings weren’t alcoholic. They maybe reacting differently to life that me and my alcoholic sister? The reason I suffered from alcoholism was because I was an alcoholic. It was disease; I was not weak or bad but ill and suffering from a chronic condition from which there was no cure, but could to be managed, one day at a time.

Everything in the “shares”; testamonies to what it was like drinking, what happened for them to stop and what it was like now, in that first meeting would crop up again years later in my neuroscience research – the spiritual malady, emotion disease, hole in the soul, not belonging anywhere. The men saying they were not sure what they were feeling half the time, how they could be emotionally immature or grandiose, in the gutter looking down on the world. How they never fitted in. Felt less than, defective. How they were never given a manual on how to live. Their struggle to contain their emotions, their fear based thinking.

My paranoia gripped me at various times, made me wonder if these people had somehow been planted here by someone, to make me realise I was like them..an alcoholic! Emma must have played some part in it?How else would they know enough about me to share things which were practically about me? It was too uncanny, the similarities with their life stories and mine. It was difficult to explain otherwise. Other than, there were some peope in this world that are like me, and these people are alcoholics. They are like me for reasons to do with them being alcoholic but also in how they react to the world. There were people who had a combination of what someone called an emotion disease and problem drinking and this seemed somehow linked. I later found out that in meetings where there is a newcomer, in this case me, the shares are with the newcomer in mind. I really think all the people sharing pulled out all the stops, probably thinking if I didn’t get it soon, there would’nt be much time to get it later. They all probably felt sorry for Emma too and her desperation for me to get help.

It was life or death now. All the shares started with how it was impossible to stop drinking after starting or staying stopped after giving up drinking for a while. They were always led back to the drink, often against their will. They then shared on what brought them back, this spiritual malady, this emotion disease. In dealing with this malady, one day at a time, they stayed sober. They dealt with it by living a spiritual life.

There was alot to take in but it all sounded like me. Not only the malady and the alcoholism but the solution. I had long been interested in Buddhism and had practised it for a number of years, and for months had been sober doing so. In fact, Buddhist practise coincided with my longest period of sobriety, 6 months. So there had ben some connection there, I hadn’t fully understood. The piece of the puzzle I had missed was my alcoholism, whch had been there from the very start of my binge drinking at the age of 15. In fact, from the age of 27, I knew I couldn’t stop drinking when I started and the very few attempts to stay stopped were for pathetically short periods of time. I remember thinking this insight was too more to bear at the time so I buried it away from my consciousness. I didn’t want my crutch to be taken away. I couldn’t face life at that time, and afterwards, without it. How was this not a problem?

Denial of reality. But the drink was seeing me through these tough times, wasn’t it? It was my friend, my best friend. My lover. My everything. Seems like it was creating most of the tough times without me realising, making the bad worse. Progressively worse. It is a progressive illness one man stated. It never gets better, only worse. AA is where you come when you have been everywhere else, pyschiatrists, therapists, mental health institutions, prisons. It is the last step before the grave for many.

It is sobering, in the sense of creating a sane perspective, to realise, that alcohol is addictive and results in full blown addiction. It is strange it is rarely spoken about in these terms, in the same terms as other drugs. I could admit I was addicted to alcohol, it was admitting I was also stricken by this most ugly named condition, alcoholism. That would require me to say I was more than addicted somehow, that it was more than my tough upbringing. That there was something fundamentally wrong with me? That I had to be accountable. That alcohol had been a most addictive medication for my, as yet, undiagnosed condition. Admitting I was powerless over alcohol was what it came down to, that my life had become unmanageable. That was all I had to do now, today.

When the meeting was drawing to a close, my old drinking pal, and Chair of the meeting, asked if anyone else wanted to share? I was so so nervous but plucked up enough courage, to say,

“My name is Seamas, and I’m an alcoholic!”

“Hi Seamas!” was the warm heart-felt chorus back at me. I felt instantly accepted. I instantly belonged.

“Just wanted to say thank you for being here, I’m glad to be here”.

“Thank you Seamas”

I was where I should be. The relief of saying I am an alcoholic was immense, like a bottle had been corked and a spirit released. Like I had been released from my imprisonment, from my bondage, from my binding addiction. A catharsis! For the first time, I was out of the bottle, looking back at it, knowing there were now two possible versions of me. The drinking alcoholic and the fledging recovering alcoholic. For the first time in a couple of decades the prospect of being free to choose appeared. I had an option, other than the problem. There was a solution.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that a “psychic change”, a massive alteration in how a person thinks and feels about the world, is required for an alcoholic to recover for alcoholism. I left that meeting after having had a “psychic change”. I was different leaving as to when I was coming in. Transformed. Someone mentioned to me as I left, that at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope. I had a morsel of hope, enough to sustain the start of recovery.

Read my Blog from 2015 about Psychic Change and Stories of Transformation here

More on Acceptance here

Chapter 3 – The First Step

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Chapter 3

The First Step

Admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable

So the doctor proclaimed me an alcoholic, God Bless him! However, he also refused to give me any medication like diazepam to taper off alcohol and become sober enough to start recovery. He said he didn’t want me to get addicted to them! He did, however, suggest that I drink water with my wine. Like,  I was going to do that! I was the most chronically addicted to alcohol person who was going to start drinking water with it, a person who hadn’t gone near water in months. This is the typical insight of medical professionals to alcoholism. I could have done this, in a parallel univesrse, and still had DTs due to the drop in alcohol drunk, and those could have resulted seizures that might have killed me. Did he know this?

When we arrived home we realised that I had seen another doctor, a locum during the summer, filling in for another doctor, who suggested week’s course of diazepam, to help with withdrawing from alcohol as I had considered quitting then, before the severity of my alcoholic psychosis increased and I never left the house after that. He also seemed concerned that I would become addicted to this type of medication. Were both of these doctors just conceding that I was an addicted type of person? If so, why weren’t they suggesting treatment? They seemed more bothered about the potential to become addicted to medication but not as worried about the fact I was already completely and utterly addicted to alcohol. I think I had less than a week’s supply and that would have to do! I counted the pills, there were four and a half pills left. Would that be enough?

Emma booked me an appointment at a local addiction treatment centre and I was to contact Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I was to phone the AA helpline where I would talk to an AA member, that was the plan.I hadn’t really thought that there was any AA in the UK. I had heard of AA in American movies but had not realised that there were meetings nearby. In Swansea, Wales! It was like there was some strange portal in the Universe, previously undetected. I spoke to a guy from Cardiff called Jack, who was a recovering alcoholic. He seemed strangely familiar to me, I’m not sure why? He convinced me that I was not only an alcoholic but a chronic alcoholic and the craziest cat he had spoken to in quite some time.

Somehow in my damaged brain it was helpful to be classified as a chronic alcoholic as that meant I was really way over the line of alcoholism and that it was beyond discussion or debate. I took his diagnosis of my craziness in good faith too. Months of psychosis says it all really. It was strangely comforting to realise the alcohol had created most of this madness and there was a hope abstinence from alcohol would bring back some sanity. The strangest thing was I felt he knew me and I knew him, that I was a madder version of him in some way. There was some undefinable connection. Maybe it was the psychosis but it felt like we weren’t in the normal dimension of life but in some parallel or slightly separate dimension. In a quiet room, to the side of the staged production fo life. It felt really weird to have connected with another human being in a way that didn’t make me feel freakish and full of shame.

He wasn’t looking down on me, he was identifying with my plight in a way the others had not. He knew me, where I was coming from. He had been there, where I was now. Just maybe not a crazy! He was offering a solution to what had seemed an insurmountable problem, he had suggested the hope that all was not lost. He was offering a solution, which no one else had, the so-called professionals. He had this insight, this lived experience, which was compelling. He urged me to go to an AA meeting. It was urgent that I did. I would probably die without sobriety. It was what he had done and it ahd worked for him. He had been in recovery nearly twenty years.

He said that if I did what he die, I would get what he had. Freedom from alcohol and a sober life barely conceivable to me. It would all be one day at a time. That was the way it was for him. Life, one day at a time, was bearable and manageable. he urged me to do the same. I liked his straightforwardness, candour and plain speaking, even if it scared the life out of me. I resolved to go the following night, Christmas Eve, 2005.

Read more about the Twelve Steps here (Links to Resources)

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Keys to Recovery Interview

I was delighted  to be asked and honored to take part in one of the excellent “The Hope Interviews” with Steve Jones for the recovery newspaper “Keys to Recovery” – our interview is on page 9 and it was a  experience strength and hope type interview from both a 12 step recovery and a neuro-psychological perspective, showing how these perspectives are very compatible and how we need a spiritual solution to a neuro-psychological problem.

http://www.keystorecoverynewspaper.com/

You are Enough, We are Enough!

“The wounded healer” refers to us, who suffer greatly from shame, helping others via love, tolerance and understanding who also suffer greatly from shame.

We can help others and be helped because we all know what it is like to feel the chronic, toxic shame the drives addictive behaviours.

Our understanding of shame is not out of a book it is real, lived experience. We know how it can drive one into chronic addiction and we know how to recovery from the persistent effects of this shame.

The main thing that struck me when I first went to AA was a lack of judgement which was amazing considering I was very jaundiced at the time.

I was accepted in the group without  reservation. This greatly helped my damaged sense of belonging, my not feeling part of.

It made me feel that this is the place I need to be. Have always needed to be?

The “shares” or testimonies of other recovering people made we realise they suffered the same shame as me and had worked to overcome it via the steps, via having fellowships, people in their lives who understood and who helped them. They told me of their triumphs over their emotional difficulties, over their chronic lack of self esteem, over not feeling good enough, of feeling less than.

A failure –  they talked about me and how I felt about me. How I had always felt about me!?

I had never been in a group of people who had talked so openly about their intimate feelings which was amazing. In doing so they were talking about my intimate feelings too. This gave me a sense of not being alone anymore. They seemed to be shining a light of hope into the dark recesses of of my shameful psyche.

It addressed my sense of isolation right away.

I had spent my life feeling not good enough, bad, l had that knawing feeling of less than, that hole in the sole.

I was like these people. They were like me.

I felt and continue to feel more like these people than I do my own family.

They became my surrogate family, my newly learnt attachment.

They were like me. They had not learnt this stuff out of a book, by professional observation but by having been through this stuff themselves. This was real not learnt.

They had been there. They were here now for me.

They knew what they were talking about.

This was the beginning of my psychic change. A person who was to become by therapist at the local treatment  was at my first meeting and he later said that he felt I had a psychic change at that my first meeting.

I had come in utterly beaten, at  death’s door and had left with hope.

The journey started with hope.

I had found a portal in the universe – it was Alcoholics Anonymous but from the shares it might have been called Shame sufferers Anonymous.

Shame ran through every share. They say fear is the corrosive thread which ran through our lives but it is equally the case that shame does too and causes just as much distress and damage.

It is difficult to live life when you do not have your own back, believe in yourself as  worthy of the good, healthy, things  in life. That you are not worthy them. That these things happen to others. Not you as you do not deserve them.

Why recover at all when you are not worth it?

This is how many of us feel? We are not worth it, this recovery.

The truth is the opposite, we are worth it. We do deserve it.

We are heroes who suffered so much and come through so much. We deserve happiness more than most! As a result we have  so have so much to offer others. We are all wounded healers.

We are here to help others like ourselves, in a way that only we can!

It was via others, like parents that we have this shame and these negative self schemas.

It is through human relationships that these start to heal. Shame is a social emotion which needs a social treatment.

We need to reconnect to overcome the isolating force of shame.

You are enough! We are enough!

Do you Have to Hit Rock Bottom Before Getting Help?

Does a person with alcohol issues have to hit rock bottom in under to surrender and start recovering?

Does one have to go to the bitter end before surrendering to the recover process?

My own experience showed  that I had to concede to my innermost self that I was/m alcoholic and that I needed help from others.

For me it was a “low-bottom” or “last gasper” rock bottom but for many it seems to be a high bottom.

I had lost practically everything and for some they had lost little compared to me but they had seen the road ahead and realised it was not going to get any better without accepting help.

This shows there is more to alcoholism than alcohol, that these people realised their negative behaviours and their consequences were causing them as much distress as their drinking. They did not like who they were becoming or the effect it was having on others around them , their loved ones, families and friends and employers.

I maintain also that there are also many different variables that contribute not only to one’s alcoholism and it’s severity but also in one’s chances of getting into recovery sooner rather than later. Environmental factors such  as ethnicity, income, place in society, class can often play a role and social and therapeutic support networks as well as childhood maltreatment such as trauma, various types of abuse, insecure attachment issues etc in alcoholism severity.

 

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Many more alcoholics seem to have stopped drinking before losing what was important to them are motivated to pursue recovery than those who lost nearly everything, including health, family, friends, and jobs.

Individuals are accessing treatment via support networks much earlier in their drinking and may not have to experience the multitude of physiological, mental, emotional, financial, legal relationship and other problems low bottom alcoholics frequently do.

“The concept of hitting bottom persists within Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) even though the backgrounds, addiction experiences, and therapeutic options of AA members are now radically different than they were at the group’s founding. Understanding what AA members now mean by hitting bottom is important because the experience describes the point at which they become willing to seek help—professional treatment, AA, or both.

Among the most controversial aspects of AA is the idea that alcoholics will seek help only when their “illness” has led to “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization” (AA, 2001, p. 30). Those words originally appeared in the 1939 first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous, but by the time of the publication of the 1953 commentary, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (AA, 1953), the idea had changed in contradictory ways. The instance of help seeking received a name (“hitting bottom”) that suggested an objectively fixed point. On the other hand, the experiences of those entering AA demonstrated that such a point is relative, and not fixed. AA was helping “people who were scarcely more than potential alcoholics” so it was “necessary to raise the bottom” (AA, 1953, p. 23).

Denzin (1987) provided the succinct definition used in this article: “Bottom: Confronting one’s alcoholic situation, finding it intolerable and surrendering to alcoholism. Accompanied by collapse and sincerely reaching out for help; may be high or low” (p. 134). The hitting bottom concept originally reflected the experience and outlook of AA’s founders and pioneers in the 1930s.

“Which description best fits the ‘bottom’ you hit as an alcoholic?” This categorical variable had three potential values: high, middle, or low.

•
High bottom: I stopped drinking before I lost what was important to me.
•
Middle bottom: I suffered serious consequences but did not lose everything.
•
Low bottom: I lost nearly everything, including health, family, friends, and jobs.

The study found that Whites, religious people, and episodic drinkers were less likely to be low bottoms when they began recovering.

Alcohol-related problems were most clearly associated with level of bottom, supporting recent findings that problems increase the odds that an alcoholic will perceive the need for help and will seek help (Grella et al., 2009).

Findings were – high bottom (36.1%), middle bottom (44.5%), and low bottom (19.4%).

A fundamental tenet of AA is that alcoholism is progressive, so that alcoholics “get worse, never better” (AA, 2001, p. 30). Supportive of this progressive framework is the finding that problems distinguish high bottoms from low bottoms. The difference was most clear in the categories of social and physical problems, indicating that early identification of these problems could signal a need for intervention, particularly if the individual drinks constantly or uses drugs other than alcohol.

A recent study by Field, Duncan, Washington, and Adinoff (2007)reported an inverse relationship between motivation to change and alcoholic problem severity, suggesting low-bottom alcoholics might be less motivated than high-bottom alcoholics to pursue recovery.”

The salutatory lesson from this for me from this study is that we should never pronounce when another addict or alcoholic has had enough! That quite clearly is for them to decide not us!
It appears almost counter intuitive for some, if not many,  that many more alcoholics, who seem to have stopped drinking before losing what was important to them, are motivated to pursue recovery than those who lost nearly everything, including health, family, friends, and jobs.
This is very noteworthy as it runs contrary to AA experience in the early days when most alcoholics seeking recovery were low bottom.
This would suggest that widespread societal awareness that there is a solution has had a profound effect on alcoholics seeking help for their illness much earlier than in the early decades of AA.
This has profound effects on earlier intervention as these individuals can access treatment via support networks and may not have to experience the multitude of physiological, mental, emotional, financial, legal, relationship, family and other problems low bottom alcoholics frequently do.
If we can alleviate suffering we should also seek to do so and help others to do so as early as possible.
 
You do not have to lose everything in order to surrender to 12 step programs of recovery. For me there is  a real message of hope in this study, that alcoholics can seek help earlier without having to experience the various hardships of low bottom.

 

References
1. Young, L. B. (2011). Hitting bottom: Help seeking among Alcoholics Anonymous members. Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions, 11(4), 321-335.

Finally Found What We Were Looking For

Quenching that Spiritual Thirst

I have been keeping up  my regime of getting more spiritually fit – went to mass and then a meeting.

I have also been doing a lot of walking too (approx 5 miles a day).

Although I still blog on the neuropsychology of addiction on my other blog (kinda alcoholic having two blogs isn’t it?) http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/ my heart and soul is moving noticeably back into the world of recovery and doing recovery.

My head has been learning what my heart knows already.

Not just turning up at a meeting and sharing my experience and insights but also doing low level service, like always helping clear up after the meeting, stacking chairs, moving tables etc.

I have also enjoyed talking to newcomers. It has been fascinating meeting people where they are at.

Rather than using my memory banks to relate my stories of treatment and recovery,  I am more interested in their own spiritual journeys of self discovery.  I kinda feel excited for them.

It is always spiritually nourishing to see people suddenly get it, to see the light of recognition and acceptance of their condition start shining a new light in their eyes. The beginnings of psychic change and a spiritual awakening about their condition.

I go to chapel  but rarely see this type of transformation. Perhaps the people at mass aren’t as spiritually ill as us? I am not so sure sometimes.

I shared this with an earthling/normie who had some experience of 12 step groups and she agreed most enthusiastically that the conversions one sees in 12 step groups appears more profound than any she experienced in chapel.

It makes one think this – how is is that a hopeless drunk can suddenly be so dramatically altered in his or her views of the world and those in it. How come they can come to accept a higher power in their lives so readily? Almost as if they had some strange disposition towards this?

Is this part of the gift of desperation? Is it partly an acceptance of seeing it work in others and this encourages one to explore this themselves?

Is it because there is close link about being humiliated by alcohol and the necessary ego deflation which leads to humility (for me humility is tied up with accepting one needs help and then asking for and receiving it)?

When i came to AA I was determined not to do the God thing but I intuitively understood the spiritual thing.

I had been a practicing Buddhist on and off over a decade or more and firmly believed that all suffering comes from an attachment to the self. I still do.

Hadn’t I already been looking for a spiritual solution to my problems?

 

 

Both my parents were very religious and both had issues with alcohol (my father before I was born) and drugs (Valium in my mothers case). In fact my parish priest was an alcoholic and my father would have to go the the parish house at least half an hour prior to mass to make sure he was sober enough to take mass. A beautiful man he was too, our local priest but an active alcoholic.

Was I born into this world with a spiritual thirst, a thirst for communion with the infinite, something beyond the self, with the divine in order to escape the often emotionally painful limitations of the self?

Has it always been necessary for me, spirituality? Does in balance my inherent lackings?

Before I went to mass I meditated for half an hour. I used this Christian meditation where I simply lie in a corpse position on my back and wait or God’s Grace. Sometimes I utter the words “Come Holy Spirit Come” and give myself wholly to His Grace.

Then I have this creeping feeling of peace, of stillness, of quiet.

I have some of the thoughts I normally have but they do not effect me, they are no longer exerting any distress and I no longer react to them. They are no longer propelling me out of bed and into some course of action.

They are my thoughts devoid of anxiety, devoid of emotional pain.  But they are still mine but cwtched in the comforting embrace of God.

To be an addict about it – it is like an analgesic, a pain killer in a sense. Like an opiate but without the disappearance from reality, instead remaining still but present in the now, in this moment.

The best way I can help explain further is in relation to the video below where Thomas Merton describes contemplation and mystical union with God.

This helped me a great deal this video because when talking of God we have to be careful we are not creating a self construction of God which leaves us still in the finite parameters of self and self delusion.

It is beyond self but it is a realm in which the self communes with that beyond oneself. Thomas Merton explains it better than I ever could!

It is the sense of the infinite, the escape from the attached self, the transcendence that I have always wanted, craved and finally compulsively sought .

Why did I not find it fully before? Why, well I think this is because I had always had this other way of finding transcendence and that was in a bottle or in a drug or in a behaviour.

I could not fully find this divine transcendence until I saw the lies of this chemically created transcendence.

It had always been getting in the way of what I really need, a full God consciousness, full transcendence from self.

After the meeting I stopped and talked with two elderly woman and then walked them up the street to where they were going. We laughing and carrying on, gently making fun of each other, stopping to talk and go on, then stop again and go on, with silly talk and laughter.

We stopped and staggered our talkative ways on the hill to Main Street. Arm in arm with foolish fun. To the outsider we must have looked like we were acting like three drunks would, talking, and excessively gesturing, caught up in waffly exuberance. Slightly intoxicated by our merriment.

I remember thinking this is similar to going out on the town with friends, who mainly were alcoholics too and are mainly now dead.

We could have looked like three drunks who had finally  found what they were looking for!

Drink was never the answer, it got in way of the answer but also kept some of us from killing ourselves while we waited for this answer, His Mercy.

 

God blesses AA!

 

Trust

In order to  fully  recover from alcoholism, addiction and addictive behaviours, we find we have to trust at least one other human being.

This might be easy for some, to trust, but for me it was very difficult.

Considering my upbringing, this was a big step but as I had little choice…

I am not talking about trusting my wife, loved ones, family etc.

I am talking about trusting someone in recovery. A practical  stranger. Someone who is the same boat as you. Who has been where you have been, felt how you have felt.

Like a sponsor for exammple.

Someone you are going to open up to and discuss intimate stuff with, someone who will ultimately know the shameful secrets that can keep a person spiritually and emotionally sick and will continue to do so until we share this stuff and let it all go.

It chains us to the past and endangers recovery because we drank on shame and guilt.

I certainly know I did?

Sorry for being so direct in this blog, it is a message of hope, there is a way to completely turn your life around.

Shameful secrets can fester in the dark recesses of our minds and inflame our hearts with recrimination and resentment.

They  can have constant conscious and unconscious effect on our behaviors, how we think and feel about ourselves and how we interact, or not, with others.

Due to the nature of frequent episodes of  powerlessness over our behavior,  attached to addiction and alcoholism, we often  acted in a way we would never act in sobriety. We had limited control over behaviour at times due to intoxication  and acted on occasion in a way that shames us today.

Most of us were determined to take these secrets, these “sins” to the grave.

We often take them to grave sooner rather than later unless we  decide to  be open and share our secrets with another person.

This has been my experience.

Everyone in recovery has secrets they would rather not disclose,  but there are not many “original” sins as one suspects and that haven’t been shared in 12 step recovery.

Almost disappointingly I found some of my sins were quite tame when compared to other people I have spoken to in recovery.

That is not to say I did not frequently hurt others, especially loved ones,  but under examination they were not as monstrous as my head made them out to be.

These secrets are the emotional and psychic scars of our alcoholic past and they need to be exposed in order for us to fully heal.

In steps 4 and 5 we listed wrongdoings to others and although initially petrified to share them with another, found that it wasn’t as  difficult as we thought it would be, once you wrote down the worst top ten. There was an immediate release in fact. A sense of cleansing almost.

Sharing them was obviously awkward but a good sponsor shares his at the same time.

It is therapeutic exchange and shame reducing to know someone else has committed similar sins or has acted for similar reasons; they were powerless over their behaviours.  Just like me, just like you.

Alcoholism erodes our self will and choice.

There is nothing so bad that cannot be shared.

The 12 steps were influenced  by the Oxford Group who said sins cut a person off from God, and that there was such a thing as sin disease.

This sin disease had very real psychological, emotional and physical and physiological effect on the mind and body. Sins were a contagion that mixed with the sins of others and the sins of  families, groups, societies, cultures and countries.

The sin disease  idea became the “spiritual malady” of AA.

We can also see this as years of not being able to regulate our negative emotions properly, if you wish to see them as sins.

I see these “sins” also, and perhaps alternatively, as hundreds of unprocessed negative emotions from the past which were never consigned to our long term memories, so they just swirl around our minds for decades shaping how we think about ourselves and the world around us.

Steps 4 -7 and the amends to those people wronged in steps of 8 and 9 allow us to be completely free and in a sense reborn.

It can be viewed as spiritual or an emotional rebirth.

Isn’t this rebirth, catharsis, renewal, a becoming free from the old self, which was kept us ill in our shame and guilt about the past?

We have the chance to be free from the sick version of our real self, the self that has been in bondage, in addiction.

It is almost miraculous, the sudden transformative effect it can have on us.  I have seen it many times with my own eyes.

By freeing ourselves from the past,  we become who we really are.

We have a sea change in how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us.

In fact we never become who we really are until we have examined our past and consigned it to the past.

We do fully recover until we do this I believe.

Otherwise we have not really completely treated our alcoholism.

We have simply got sober, sometimes stark raving sober.   

We are not bad people getting good but ill people getting well.

All this because we plucked up enough courage to ask someone we barely knew to be our  sponsor.

Because we trusted one person enough.

In reality we asked a fellow sinner to hear our sins and through God’s help have them taken off us, or if one prefers, have had the past finally   processed and consigned to long term memory where it will take only a special and quite frankly bizarre decision and effort to go rooting around and digging it up again.

I look at the past fleetingly sometimes to help others but I never stare at it too long.

It is a former self.

I have been reborn, I have become who God had intended me to be.

I have become me.

 

You are Not Alone!

In the final months of my active alcoholism I was living in the attic room of my house.

I drank about 6 bottles of cheap Spanish wine plus a dozen cans of strong German beer every day.

The alcohol had little effect on me by this stage. I only drank to dampen the delirium tremens, the violent shakes. I often could not control my hand enough to get alcohol into my mouth, holding my wrist steady with my other hand to raise the drink to my mouth.

Usually  cracking the bottle or tin can against my teeth.

I was no longer getting drunk anymore.

You know you are fully addicted to alcohol when it does nothing intoxicating any more.

I slept in 5-10 minute fits and busts. I did not eat for months. The television told me to kill myself and voices not belonging to me talked insistently in my head.

Alcohol-related Psychosis it is called.

No one told me this would happen when I bought my first alcoholic drink when I was fourteen years old. There was no health or warning label saying “Could lead to Psychosis and Premature Death!”

Maybe there should be.  Or at least alcohol can be addictive for some.

Anyway there is more to alcoholism than alcohol.

In the depths of this alcohol induced madness, I rarely saw my wife, who could not bring herself to look at me and what I had become.

If I could have got it together I might have killed myself.

But I couldn’t get it together. Psychosis is all involving, doesn’t leave much time for planning anything.

 

 

So I staggered on. When I say staggered, I could not actually walk more than a few yards or climb more than a few stairs.

By  the time I reached my first AA meeting

1. the alcohol had stopped “working”.

2. I had surrendered.

Regardless of these two factors, I could not admit I was alcoholic. My pride and it’s best friend shame were still talking away to me.

I was willing to admit I was addicted to alcohol and that I was about to die from it.

But alcoholic?

We often wonder why some people don’t accept their alcoholism?

How did I start my journey to acceptance?

My wife came to my first meeting of AA, she practically carried me in!

The Chair of the meeting was a person I had drank with before – I though how come he is here?

I spilled more drink than he ever drank?

Then it dawned on me that maybe I should have come here before?

Especially when he shared that he had been trying to get sober and recovered for ten years!?

I then listened to the other alcoholics sharing their stories.

The stories mentioned the progression of the alcoholism, which I obviously identified with.

They also mentioned how they, even now in recovery, struggled with their emotions and anxieties, how they found living life difficult.

They talked about issues which had bedevilled them and me since childhood, this  spiritual malady they talked of was like the emotional disease I had  suffered from all my life, whether it was depression, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, PTSD, etc.

They had used alcohol to self medicate these conditions, especially as alcohol for them had felt like an elixir for them as it had for me.  We all had all dealt with our negative emotions since adolescence in the same way.

Now a new way had to be found.

When we left the meeting my wife had a psychic change similar to the one I had.

She said these people are just like you. They can help you, I can’t.

A week before I had heard a voice in my heart, through the psychosis, saying  to go down stairs to my wife and ask her for help. I asked her for help in that round about alcoholic way of “do you think I look a bit jaundice (I actually looked like Homer Simpson with a heavy sun tan!)?

The help I asked for was not to come directly from my wife but she led me to where I could get it. In a room, full of people just like me, suffering the same illness as me.

I will be forever eternally grateful for it being there for me. For them being there.

We will be there for you too!

Why?

This blog is written for alcoholics and those who love and live with them, by alcoholics in recovery.

 

For those who know what it is like to live with alcoholism but would also like to know why alcoholism affects the alcoholic and those around him in the way it does.

 

We write this blog to help us and you understand how the alcoholic brain works and why they sometimes do the things they do, why they act the way they do?

 

Why is it sometimes that everything is going great and suddenly the alcoholic in your life overreacts and acts in an emotionally immature way, which can often cause hurt to others around them?

 

Why do they suddenly cut off their emotions so profoundly it leaves your emotions in limbo, confused and upset.?

We hope to explain this disease state and behavioral disorder, which alcoholics themselves call an “emotional disease” , a “parasite that feeds on the emotions” or quite simply “a fear based illness”.

It appears that alcoholics in recovery are aware to a large extent of what they suffer from so why do they do what they do sometimes if they know what is going on? Are there times when they cannot help themselves?

Why do alcoholics, even in recovery, sometimes engage in endless  self defeating resentments?

Why do they project into future scenarios and then get emotionally paralyzed by doing so, get stuck in a cycle of catastrophic thinking?

Why do we run through the list of cognitive distortions on a daily basis?

This is not to condemn but to understand. Knowledge we believe is power. It aids understanding and compassion of another person’s suffering.

We as recovering alcoholics still, after several years of recovery, can still engage in such behaviours. We do not wish to hurt anyone, especially not our loved ones, but sometimes do.

We sometimes get wrapped up in ourselves and act in a selfish, immature and inconsiderate manner.

We need help with this, at times, distressing condition. That is what it is.

Distressing, based on a emotion and stress dysregulation, even in recovery, hence we have to manage it.

On a daily basis. It does not return to normal. To balance. To equilibrium. We have to take certain actions to restore emotional equilibrium.

Hence it can be hard work, hence we sometimes we come up short and emotionally overreact.

We have a distress based condition which has to be managed.

We also have to give ourselves a break, don’t distress ourselves further with perfectionist ideas of “should” – just do your best! That is usually good enough for most people. Why not us?

We are not saints, progress not perfection!

Or as progress not perfectionist!

Recovery changes the brains of alcoholics for the better.

As we are personally well aware, self knowledge does not bring recovery – only action does.

This action could be helping others, praying, meditating, going to meetings, talking to someone who knows what you are going through etc. Connecting with others, in the same boat as you.

It does work, if you work it. It removes the distress that feeds alcoholism and addiction.

The distress that makes us catastrophic thinkers, to having intolerance of uncertainty about the future, struggle with our emotional natures, etc

Recovery helps us deal with negative emotions and anxiety in a rational manner via the help of others.

We become different people in recovery. More considerate of others, more emotionally mature and emotionally sober.

We learn to deal with situations which used to baffle us! In dealing with these we deal with our alcoholism because we solve the problems that used to make us drink or use in the first place.