addiction

Chapter 10 – Rebirth

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

First Day Sober!

One day I woke up but didn’t go downstairs.

I had a very odd experience while lying in bed.

Odd, it was more like a phantasmagoria.

To be honest I wasn’t sure what it was, didn’t have any way of describing it or explaining it. It was just so profoundly weird but it left me strangely altered, different to before.

I lay in bed and time seemed to slow up and then speed up, images from the past blending into each other and being rearranged, defragged somehow. A celestial resculpting of my brain seemed to occur.

The heavens seems to move across my mind. Stormy black clouds raced to lighten and new sunny realisations illuminated my heart.

Something was changing in me.

My roots were grasping new soil.

I wasn’t going to mention this bit.

It is so difficult to explain! I didn’t even want to mention it.

This book is mainly based on scientific research and reason and here I am talking about a experience that I couldn’t explain.

Please bear with me and don’t stop reading here.

It may have been the psychosis or lingering hallucinations or the residual product of a still feverish brain but it wasn’t, I don’t think. Looking back it was like I was somehow being prepared to become sober. That my brain was somewhow was preparing itself for a momentous change in my behaviour. For a momentous change in me.

Hours seem to pass but it was two hours only. I don’t know what happened to me but something profound happened to me. My wife checked on me, worried about my absence.

I said I was okay.

I followed her downstairs feeling somehow different. Full of some unfamiliar conviction.

I didn’t say anything to her.

Couldn’t’ as I didn’t have the words, still don’t, really.

I was too ill and so weak to even try a crude approximation of what happened.

I didn’t know how to explain something I couldn’t fully understand myself.

Did admitting I was an alcoholic have such a profound effect?

I gingerly sat down on the living room sofa and started drinking my cranberry juice and asked Emma for some vegetable and fruit smoothies. I had decided these smoothies would help replace my much needed vitamins and nutrients, help my brain recovery. How did I know these things?

Emma seemed a bit surprised by my requests too but not completely.

She reminded me I had also used White Thistle during my drinking to protect my liver from the excessive alcohol consumption .

My liver was fatty and led to my partial eyesight but it seemed to lag behind the psychological effects and brain damage involved with months of alcoholic psychosis so it may have worked to an extent? It is difficult to say for sure.  

I just sat there chewing on carrots and other fresh vegetables, this is a guy who hadn’t eaten any good for months.

I probably hadn’t eaten properly for over a year. Or more. Much more?

I was greatly perturbed and nauseated that every time I moved my head from side to side there seemed to be liquid, blood maybe, swooshing around my head, giving me the sensation of being on a ocean liner.

Or rather my head felt like an ocean liner.

Or both.

My head was all wooshy.

I still today do not know why I had this liquid swooshing round my brain or what the liquid was, or if it was a liquid?

It was all very confusing, practically everything didn’t make complete sense.

Thinking about it in detail on my first day sober was not the time.

I thought it must be brain damage but it was sickening to dwell on this type of thought.   

Thoughts were painful enough without giving them fearful gravity and the only thought I needed to deal with was the thought of staying sober for another five minutes. That is all I could cope with. I had some resolve this day, an unfamilar conviction.

However, I had terrible difficulties trying to get through those first arduous minutes and hours of sobriety. 

I hadn’t told Emma I was trying to stay sober which was ununusal as the few times I had tried before were all heralded with a fanfare of good intentions, unrealistic confidence and false bravado.

Not this time, it all proceeded with patient and humble determination.

I had this fear I would drink at some stage but no urge as such.

It was not like craving but the distress of my fear made the image of drinking come into my head.

I hadn’t put it there, it had been poked into mind by fear.

I considered this “craving” to be more like a haunting. The whispers of a ghost not keen to leave my mind. They scared the life out of me for sure, but they would come and go I learnt.

Come and go, hoping to spook me enough to react in some way.

It wasn’t I wanted a drink (or did I?), it was more I wanted to be relieved of feeling so terrible, in so much emotional pain. To be relieved of these constant torturous thoughts. I wanted something to take any the pain away but l also knew this was an unrealistic expectation so brought my mind continually to what could be done now, in this moment.

What could I do now to recover, if only to recovery some of my health and even my brain function. The vegetable smoothies  Emma started to make me that day, and for weeks later, would improve my liver function and reduce my jaundice. They would make me feel better and stronger however fleetingly.

It was start, a good start. A recognition I needed a good start. Based on an unfamiliar humility and realism.

It all helped.

It was similar to the the vitamin-rich injection recovering people get in Mental Health instititutionns when they are drying out/rehabilitating. A rehabilitatory boost.

Liver damage was affecting my eyes and this really perturbed me. I wanted to improve my eyesight as soon as I could.

I was getting real about a life threatening problem. Although to think such thoughts would have made me ill. I just proceeded with positive behavior, one thing at a time. I took actions with little deliberation.

I could act, do things to help me now.

The first hatching of a behavioural strategy was occurring without me realising.

Recovery was according to one AA, not what we think or feel but what we do, the actions we take to feel better. I was taking an action, when I could, wth Emma’s help.

So called cravings would crash in waves through my mind throughout the day and five mintues seemed to be like an hour but I waited until the waves crashed and enjoyed the momentary calm after that. I observed more and more this phenomenon.

It was similar to hallucinating on “magic mushrooms” (Psilocybin) when the waves of ecstatic feelings followed frightening, sometimes terrifying, moments or even like when in deep Buddhist meditation when past traumas or deep seated anxieties linked to previous memories arose in the mind, before moving past like images on a movie screen of the mind. The only dfference was these images and thoughts were not as life threatening as the ones I was having on my first sober day.

The only way to survive was to surf the waves of these images and related emotions.

I was trying not to attach to these fear based thoughts involving the possibility of alcohol.

As if they weren’t doing, my creation, my volition. They were happening to me because of actions in the past not the present.

Sometimes the thoughts and images were so real, as if I was there drinking in the bar, chatting to a gorgeous buxom barmaid with the golden sunlight steaming though the windows to illuminate my heart with glad tidings in a momentary toxication and I would fight to suppress these thoughts which would only make the thought come back even more prolifically.

More thoughts and memories would rebound into my mind and consciousness and further attempts to submerge them would lead to a Hydra effect of many memories sprouting heads and creating an imaginery relish and inquisite torture in my psyche, all completely unsanctioned, uncalled for and not expressly given permission by me to illuminate my mind.

I hadn’t ask for any of them. It was so confusing, did I want to drink?

If not, why the hell were all these images swirling around my mind?

Also, why such rosie thoughts when my last experience of drinking was hellish, vomiting and DTs and hallucinations. The TV weather girl would tell me to kill myself on a daily basis, apart when I looked down at the carpet and it stopped!?

Why wasn’t my memory bank throwing up these later memories of alcohol drinking? Why was it choosing from another completely unrealistic brochure, based more on wish fulfillment rather than reality?

Cunning, baffling powerful.

These strangely appetititive memories were more powerful at times than the scary thoughts that drinking was simply inevitable. At least I could cower from these until they went quiet. The other craving that tricked you into craving via other desires such as lust were more difficult not to get sucked into.

Other negative emotions could be utilisied too. Self pity was a constant threat.

Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.

False pride another and the ever present shame.

Shame was the conductor of much of this orchestrated attack of my fragile, fledging sobriety.

Aided and abetted by self loathing too.

Practially all these contributed to emotional pain and obsessive thoughts about drinking.

All negative emotions could be explosive.

Instrusive thoughts fed off them, the worse the distress the more the thoughts. My emotions seemed to want to get me back to drinking but that wasn’t me, was it?

It seemed like me but strangely not me. I wanted to go a different direction and quite frankly my thoughts and errant emotions weren’t helping, they were making things much worse. If they weren’t helping me they would have to be ignored as much as possible. So practically everything in my head, in between my ears, was ignored, if at all possible. Life was less painful without them rattling away in the attic, however briefly.

They weren’t even on my side I felt. They were against me and what I wanted to do. They were now contrary to me even surviving!

Where they my warped spirtual malady, my emotion disease?

No wonder I drank so much if there was this constant cacophony in my head and heart.

.

These were all the lessons I learnt in the first few days after my first meeting. All painful lessons learnt in a very short time, or rather in a short time that felt like forever.

So I tried to do what an AA had suggested “giving in to win”, “don’t fight anyone or anything” and they would have less to bite into and get a hold off.

Letting them come and go was the key, however incredibly difficult this could be.

Emma punctuating these mental struggles with offers of green tea, water, vegetable smoothies etc which helped so much too.

Fear is the greatest enemy I found not craving; looking back I was not craving, I was fearful of not staying sober and this was automatically eliciting thoughts of drinking.

I felt so ill, desperate, struggling to get from one sober moment to the next. It was like jumping from one life boat to the next on a stormy sea.

Just when I despaired of getting through the next five minutes of sobriety I would often get this reassuring presence in my heart. I wasn’t sure what it was. A nice hallucination for a change!?

It had a voice and a warm soothing reassuring feeling that would spread out from heart to my chest and calm me for a moment or too. If it was a movie it would be “how to get a heart in recovery.”

“Everthing is going to be okay” it would reassuringly say.

It was like a big brother or something, it is hard to describe. I was glad of it suddenly appearing I have to say. Whatever it was? I could do with all the help I could get!

So one interminable minute bled into the next.

Emma continued to make me the most vile looking but highly nutritional smoothies and I ate carrots slowly while trying not to move my head, so that the liquid would not swoosh around my head and make me nauseous, while being comforted by this reassuring presence emanating in my heart to calm me, reassuring me that all would be well.

For the first day I had a really crazy head offset at times by a very strange calming heart.

This is how it went for a few days.

My physical strength very slowly improved too and I could walk half a staircase now, in one go, instead of a few steps.

In my early days of sobriety I would always think of a drink when the pub closed for half an hour in th afternoon or at last orders at eleven in the evening and ring my sponsor, to get me through this period then I was safe for the day.

The fear of going to the pub at last orders was a compulsive and terrifying feeling like I had no choice but go there, somehow being dragged there like via magnetism. It was no use I would scupper by sober day. Speaking to my sponsor got me through this compulsion.

It showed how much addiction is embedded in the memory banks of the brain.

How habitual it was.

Recovery actions would have to be habitual too. I had been told to get to ninety AA mettings in ninety days as in order to make recovery more automatic. This would start a process of embedding recovery in my memory, my habitual memory eventually.

Hopefully, in time, recovery would become as habitual as the habitual working of my addiction.

Already I had an idea that fear prompted thoughts of drinking. How to become less fearful in my thinking and emotional reactions seemed part of all this.

Keeping one’s serenity was key one AA shared on Saturday nght.

Ths was all new but vaguely familar too.

It wasn’t a million miles away from Buddhist thought and action.

The missing bit was knowing why I needed to be serene, or equanimous, in the moment. My need to be peaceful in the moment was now urgent. Needed to be applied continually to keep my addiction and it’s many lying whispers at bay. For however long I could at least, until I remembered how to act to quieten it down again.

Using a behaviour strategy to deal with emotions and thoughts which were the terrifying catalyst for the distress that prompted automatic thoughts and images of possible relapse.

Looking back the getting through the first day sober still goes down as my greatest achievement of all time!!

The odds against if were huge, It brought amazing relief and sense of satisfaction and belief.

The start of the day and the end were worlds apart.

28th December 2005.

Although I strangely think my recovery started on the 24th December following my first meeting and psychic change and although I drank for three days while tapering off the drink. The drink wasn’t as before and meant little to me. I had found the answer, the solution on the 24th December.

Thanks to Emma, vegetables and fruit, the voice in my heart and the BB I had made it through a day of not drinking.

I told myself that today would probably be the worst day of it and that tomorrow might even a bit easier. The next two days were still hellish but I now knew it could be done if I did what I did before and this gave me confidence. The voice in my heart was still helping me through too.

Recovery would be a constant journey from a crazy head to a serene heart.

I had rarely used the medication – I think I used 2 tablets (used in 1/3s)  in the 3 days of home detox.

There were 3 and ½ left in the packet. I would keep them in case I knew another alcoholic who couldn’t get essential medication for detoxification from alcohol from their local doctor.

Chapter 8 Don’t They Know Who I Am?

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 & Treatment

I didn’t like the people in the treatment centre much. Well the first people I had met there anyway. I went there and spoke to two women, one who was in recovery, a heroin addict and the other a normie, non addict, earthling. It showed. They were so impressed with my jaundice that they insisted on looking at it outside in the daylight, parading me, like some freak, around in the front of the treatment centre. It was humiliating. Not as humiliating as when the posse of Chinese students starting shouting and gesturing towards me on the way home. Just as they had done when I went to the Pathology lab in the University Hospital to get my blood tested and my fatty liver checked out.

Luckily I had already been given the gift of desperation and had no choice but to suck these things up. They hurt and upset me but they were the least of my problems. I took to walking down the back lanes to avoid any more such scenes. Three weeks I walked these furtive furroughs, until my jaundice started fading. It was under doctor orders that I did, he suggested the daylight would help lighten my skin. He seemed unconcerned that this was difficult while still suffering from psychosis.

I was to start treatment the following week. It was called pretreatment. I would be interviewed by a counsellor and would have a few weeks in pre group treatment before joining ten other peope in group therapy. I was fast tracked into the treatment program as I had shown commitment by going to AA meetings and plus I was an emergency case. Although, I am not too sure this emergency case would have gotten me into treatment if I hadn’t gone to AA first of all. This showed commitment to recovery supposedly. I am not sure the severity of my addiction would have gotten me in and I may have died then. But that was a parallel route that I was not forced to take.

I was first interviewed by one of the Treatment centre’s counsellors to get some background information. He was late for the appointment. I remember damning him in my mind for being late! For me! Didn’t he know who I was! A jaundiced, half blind, half dead, pscyhotic alcoholic! I couldn’t bear it, him being late. How dare he!? I had things to do! Although I can’t recall now what these things were. My impatience, intolerance and ignorance of the reasons he was late were extreme. I wondered if I had always been this emotionally immature. This emotionally overreactive, surely not? Was I like this as a young man? I didn’t think so. It was bad enough being constantly on the verge of relapse and death without having to contend with the fact I had gone strangely mad?

I consoled myself it was the legacy of the psychosis, the thought of which made me fell like vomiting. The liquid swimming around my brain had subsided somewhat but hadn’t retreated completely. I still felt a lot worse than dead. Looking back on the past I had held a number of responsible jobs and had lots of friends. I had been very different to this! Once upon a time, I had been very different to this. What the hell had happened to me? Without my express permission too. It must have worsened over the years and decades of drinking and taking drugs and I hadn’t noticed? Maybe they had gotten worse as the result of decades of taking drugs and drinking?

I did have many mental health problems in that time and perhaps these had been stage posts on the road to this complete decline. I also felt like a freak – I was so jaundiced I looked like an ad for Ready Break! I was very conspicious and every minute waiting heightened this distress. I was full of self pity and self loathing, shame ate into my soul. What was the point of this, I would be dead soon enough, wouldn’t I? What were the chances of someone like me, this far gone, ever having any length of sobriety? The longest I ever managed was when I was in mid twenties and that 6 months was supported by an addiction to Buddhist meditation. The only other period was 14 months earlier when I managed two weeks of stark raving sober. Walking miles and miles everyday to stay sober. Coming to think of it, I was really mad then too. Not this mad, however. I had never been this mad! How was I going stay sober while really mental?

The counsellor eventually  arrived. He said he was sorry for the wait. I muttered to myself that he better be. Didn’t he know who I was? Given he had just met me, no. He had no doubt heard of me. That really jaundiced, mad guy! I had no doubt been the talk of the recovery world. You know, the half blind, half dead guy! Him! My paranoia was still on the ceiling even after a week or so of sobriety. Maybe the paranoia had progressed alongside my general madness over the decades. This was alarming as I had always been paranoid even when relatively sane. I had always thought it was better to be paranoid just in case. Especially growing up in Northern Ireland.

I was led up to his office. I felt like the Elephant man. I felt like the elephant in the room too. The guy who was about to die but no one mentioned it. It was obvious wasn’t it? They could hardly turn me away, I was another statistic on their books. Another client seen. Ticked on the list. Maybe they had to take the odd no hoper, last gasper. I wasn’t going to make it, I knew that and he probably realised that too. “Sorry again”, he said, “I was dealing with a potential suicide”. Whatever!

After finally getting is act together he sat down opposite me. He didn’t really look at me, the first time he did, he said, “You probably don’t have another recovery in you Shay” he said, conforming my suspicions, for once my paranoia was spot on. Shay was my name in Dublin, when it wasn’t Seamas or Seamie in Belfast, or Seamus to my parents and people of Derry. Seamus is Irish for James, pronounced Shimmus in Derry, which I was rarely ever known as given people in Britian struggled with pronuncing it properly so Shay was easier all round. James, however, is written on my birth certificate. I liked he knew what was my my preferred name. I felt he was addressing me now.

Like most alcoholics I have been a chameleon all my life, shapeshifting to fit in to any situation or group of people, guard against being rejected. It helped in a Protestant area when a Catholic. I liked Shay as it reminded me of good times as a 16 year old courting a lass from Dublin. It was me away from the troubles and Derry and the North of Ireland and my family. It was me without that baggage, the new me. The counsellor puntuated this reverie.

“Okay?”

I nodded tersely. It was as bad as my crazy head had thought, and that wasn’t good. He told me that I wasn’t alcoholic. My my eyes lit up in a mixture of hope and surprise, inwardly applauding myself for my diagnosis of simply drinking on a tough childhood!

“Really?”

“No, you are a chronic alcoholic!”

 I deflated at this and felt very embarrassed at falling for line again, this twice in a week. I was way beyond alcoholic he insisted. Alcoholic was barely visible now in the rear view mirror, it was so long ago.

“Only dead alcoholic people are more alcoholic than you!”

And some of them weren’t? This was it, no more goes. A once in a lifetime opportunity. Get this recovery thing right or I would either be dead or in a mental health institution with permanent brain damage. I was close to this already. He knew that too. Most people did.

I was booked into pregroup which would last for a couple of weeks until a place in group therapy came up. I attended pre group the next day and the week after. It was assessing our motivation to change. I still tried to convince anyone who would listen that I drank because of my tough childhood in Northern Ireland. Most nodded in some sympathy. One person said he had once heard a guy for Belfast say that growing up in Northern Ireland didn’t cause his alcoholism, it just didn’t help it any. I thought about this and disagreed with him and the other guy from Belfast. Northern Ireland caused my drinking I was convinced. The Counsellor looked at me again. “So what about all the people you grew up, are they all alcoholic too?”

“Not all”, I said back.

“See!”, he replied, happy to have scored a point. Made a breakthrough!

“Nah, the rest are drug addicts!”

Chapter 6 – Fear Without Solution

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.

Trauma

My mother’s dependency on Valium didn’t help much. As I explained eralier, she had been prescribed Valium soon after I was born (possibly before) and was dependent on it all her life. This meant that she mothered me in an emotionally distant, inconsistent and, frequenty, dismissive manner. She spent much of my childhood in her bedroom, bluntly asking me to leave her alone. Leaving me with the feeling it was my fault this had happened to her. A fear embedded into my heart that she never assuaged, a fear without a solution. She never recognised or addressed my fears and they were left to grow, my anger to simmer and boil over into rage.

I believe this lack of attachment and also in earlier in the first weeks and months, after being born, contributed to later introceptive and emotion processing problems. But much of the damage to my later life was done in infancy (and childhood) I believe. A damage, I think, coontributed to later addiction and C-PTSD. As we grow from infancy, our close bonds to our primary care giver is crucial for future development of our brains and our abilty to regulate our emotions, stress and ultimately ourselves (self regulation). In the first few months of life, the emotion and social parts of the brain that regulate emotion and distress develop during this initial two way relationship between primary care giver, mother in this case, and baby, me, which models behaviour that successfully regulate emotions. The brain architecture for emotion (and stress) regulation did not get properly manufactured in my brain. It did not mature properly and this led to later emotional immaturity.

I feel I was born into trauma, an attachment trauma, that I never fully bonded with my mother, the primary caregiver and ended up with a insecure attachment, one they call disorganised attachment, an attachment that provokes a fear without solution. In other to understand this type of attachment disorder, we can imagine a mother and son playing in a room, the mother leaves and a stranger comes into the room. When the mother returns and the child is reunited with the mother, following this period of absence,  a child with disorganised attachment would experience inconsistent fearful reactions that never resolve themselves, such as approaching the mother initially, then stopping or falling to the floor, it is also called fear without solution. The child does not treat the mother as a secure attachment he can return or not, safe in the knowledge she is there when he needs her. He can return when he likes, he can explore, play or come back to her when he likes as she is there, cosistently available to his emotional needs.

The disorganised child is not sure that his mother, primary caregiver, is there in a consistent manner to care for him and his emotional needs, she is there sometimes, not always, she is inconsistent in her caregiving and he is insecure in his attachment to and bonding with her. His fear is not satisfactorily solved by his mothers caregiving. Her care and love seem conditional, based on her availabilty not on his emotional needs. This lays down a template in his mind about people and how available they are to him, it infuences his future reactions, an internal working model, that care and love are not always available or that they are available sometimes and not others. It leads to a fear of rejection.

A fear of not being deserving enough of unconditional love and care. It is a pattern of responding that can lead into later adolescence and adulthood. It can lead to a wide range of mental health issues, including C-PTSD and addiction, where “substances” become a type of “secure” attachment.

Unresolved fear.

Even in later in life I would phone her armed with a tin of beer and a spliff. She unsettled me at a profoundly deep level. I was never sure of her, or safe in her presence, I was always guarded against rejection. I never felt fully secure although I loved her dearly. I was also inconsistent in my behaviour to her, especially in later life when I would exact petty revenges on her which sometimes involved abandoning her to see how she liked it. I remember once leaving her for hours with a portrait painter, a complete stranger, who made he feel very uncomfortable and anxious with his awkward questions as he painted her. Abandonment was what I felt in relation to her, even when talking to her on a phone call.

I felt I received conditional love from her although I believe and feel she loved me. It was through an emotional haze, she wasn’t fully present. She wasn’t fully available. I waited for a love that I would never fully receive. I waited for her to come for me but she didn’t and I grew up feeling strangly rejected and abandoned.

I internalised this as being my fault most of the time, sometimes unconsciously, as this “not being worth it” and this became part of my view of myself in relation to the world. My negative self perception automatically retrieved rom my negative self schema. I wasn’t worth it, I was defective in some way, not worth the effort. I wasn’t worth saving! So what did I do with my distress and my everdyay negative emotions. I buried them, suppressed them , didn’t share them. Sharing how you felt increased the chance of having them rejected. It was too painful to have then ignored and dismissed so I started blunting my emotion resposnes. Sometimes I would demand to be heard and overreact and my mother would shout to my father to have me taken away from her, to stop bothering her.

Eventually I realised my mother heard what she wanted to hear and that was rarely the truth so I tried to not having emotions as they were too painful, when not shared or reciprocated.

This led to a toxic shame and a blunted awareness of my feelings. It was as if shame was prompted by having emotional needs that were thwarted. Shame then became the overriding feeling and took control of my life. My emotions almost became servents to this overriding shame, it was the master emotion provoking self pity, guilt, selfishness, self centredness, arrogance, intolerance, impatience, anger, rage, greed, gluttony, and in later years, lust. The very same emotions I list on my Step 10 inventory every nght. The shame based respsonding I have to life today and have had since eary childhood. Traumatic and toxic shame, the beating heart of all addictive behaviour.

Shame contributed to my alexithymia, the inability to recognize or describe my emotions too, the numbing of emotional repsonse. The fleeing from feelings. My feelings were troublesome and best not having. It was best to ignore them and take your mind off them instead, to live outside them. To act outside of yourself without realising, the internal shame was constantly animating your every action. I was fixing my feelings from an early age. I could run away from them but I couldn’t escape them. They would catch up with me one day.

I now know it wasn’t her fault. She was suffering from addiction but I never knew that fully at the time. We were all suffering from addiction as a family, but this realisation came decades later. For me anyway. It didn’t come for mummy, we never fully discussed it. She was dead by the time I came into recovery. So in the absence of an acknowlegement of the terrible effects of addiction I instead waited, in my own undiagnosed addiction and alcoholism, for some recognition of a shared but troubled past she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recall and re-examine as it may have been too emotionally overwhelming or she couldn’t reconnect with as she was fully involved in it initially.

I am trying to square that troubled past now in writing this book, to exorcise the ghosts of the past. To liberate us from our past. Memory recall often depends on the clarity and intensity of emotion that accompanied the episode remembered. Blocked off emotions weren’t conducive to this recall. For mummy it was if the past almost happned to someone else. It didn’t really happen to her because she wasn’t fully present at the time.

When I asked about the past it brought out angry reactions in her. She castigated me for dragging up the past so I cannot say if she had painful memories or didn’t want to contemplate her son’s pained reaction to the past. Emotions seemed to threaten to overwhelm her, before a shrug of the shoulders seemed to send them off, floating away on a distant cloud. As if they weren’t her resonsiblity, didn’t belong to her.  She didn’t seem to care sometimes. It was as if she was about to have some emotional response then it would dissipate like passing clouds, the Valium wafting it away.

She made me feel sad, not deserving of anything more. Thre was no explanation or commiseration, no acceptance of even acknowledgement of my pain, no empathy. I never felt fully seen, fully felt in her unconditional love. There was no safe haven or resting place in her affection. There was no solution to my fear and emotional distress.

This made me feel strangely not worth the effort or time, somehow defective. She made me angry, raging even, especially in childhood. I dismayed she wasn’t like my friends’ mother. How come my mother was so odd, so detached? Or depressed and uncaring? So useless. Why didn’t she care about us enough to love us. Why did she have us in the first place if she didn’t want us? We were all a big mistake to her it seemed. Worthless. I sought attachment everywhere I could, of course. From my sisters, from  my aunts. Friends and later from girlfriends. Anywhere I could find a fleeting solace and a place to rest from my errant painful emotions, for a while at least.

But is was precarious, I constantly guarded against a rejection I somehow was sure would come. It always did eventually, I felt. Later in life I would finish relationship with girls and woman before they did, just in case. The only constant relationship I had, that never rejected me was with alcohol, that was it until it sent me mad and almost killed me. I am so lucky that alcohol spat me out too otherwise I would have died.

It was a chemical attachment, a fairly consistent safe harbour. A solution to the fear and self loathing. A very, and increasingly crude solution. A medication just like my mother’s Valium. Strange how I never took Valium in case I became addicted like my mother? All the while slipping into alcoholism.

Decades of unresolved fear and emotion knawing away at my psyche, propelling me further and further into addiction and distress. I thought I was runnng away from my problems instead of running more deeply into them. Past addiction and trauma, the fuel for my present alcoholism. The alcohol, over years of chronic drinking, increasing the fear without solution. The fear becoming psychosis. My sisters suffered from this insecure parenting too and all the family dysfunction as a result of my mother’s Valium dependency. We all came second. Although my sisters probably didn’t always see it that way.

They thought, in my mother’s conditional love, I came first as the youngest child and only boy. God knows how little they received in terms of maternal love, if they were jealous of the scraps I got? I probably got more conditional love than they did, if that makes sense? They didn’t seem to have the same insecure attachment as me and grew up with ambivalent or anxious attachments rather than my disorganised attachment.

I believe we all grew up in the trauma of neglect and emotional abuse but I am not sure they ended up with C-PTSD and it’s associated dissocative disorder. Perhaps my initial attachment trauma left me more vulnerable to being traumatised by later traumatic events, some of which they witnessed too? Perhaps it affected me more as I was the youngest? Perhaps because I had already suffered from trauma, attachment trauma? It is difficult to say. Mental health problems, like alcoholism, are often self diagnosed, often with the help of competent professionals or through recovery circles. Most trauma, in life, seems buried in denial. I didn’t self diagnose my chronic alcoholism until it practically killed me or my C-PTSD until ten years into recovery when it threatened me with relapse. I had thought many times and discussed with my wife on numerous  occasions that I had trauma issues but only I accepted my C-PTSD when I started to profoundly dissociate, on one occasion all the way back to childhood. I even spoke in a child’s voice on one occasion, spluttering out

“When I make mistakes people die!”

https://www.benzo.org.uk/support.htm

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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This Fleshy Hunger

This Fleshy Hunger refers to that craving that consumes a man and takes up all his thoughts and possesses him with one intent, to satisfy those desires.
The title is a term used to describe sex addiction but it could also describe various pathological yearnings.
The man is no longer in his home, or even in his own mind and body. He is elsewhere, in a manic reverie, in another imagined place.
He looks insane, possessed, in his imaginary relish and exquisite torture.

https://www.artfinder.com/product/night-falls-f0a8/

 

IMG_5242

The Thing We most Run Away From is the Truth

 

I started writing this just after I completed my therapy on Wednesday but was quite depressed so stopped, so here we go again.

I have started getting to the horrible heart of stuff, physiologically re-experiencing some of the abuse I had as a child, principally from my mother.

Re-experiencing this physically and emotionally has been tough. It also shatters some of the distorted internal working models I have about me in relation to my mother.

For decades I have been constantly “defending” her against my sisters, who are older than me and see our mother as quite scary, abusive, manipulative, seemingly uncaring, divisive etc.

I have guarded emotionally against these ideas although intellectually I know they are correct  and she was these things and much more.

I could not afford until now not to feel and confront some of deceptions and denials  I have had about in relation to my mother. To be honest I was unaware I harboured so many of them.

My childhood internal working model of the world could not have dealt with the crushing emotional reality that my mother could sometimes act in a violent, apparently “monstrous” way. To me in particular.

I chose instead, in order to survive childhood, an internal working model, continually developed throughout my life, that mother was a victim of circumstances, she was tragic, had mental health issues, addiction issues, that it wasn’t really her fault!?

But this is denial. I have had this model shattered in the last few days. My mother did act in violent, monstrous ways to me for a number of years, especially in very early childhood and this was in addition to all the other emotional heart ache of living with a mother who was rarely there for me as a son needing maternal affection.

These things happened. I have to stop denying this. I have built  a view of the world built on this denial. Instead of addressing the hurt I have experienced, the sense of injustice, the rallying against the world, all the things I felt about my mother deep down inside I have instead projected these feelings onto the world while “protecting” a false view of my relationship  with my mother. Even to the extent I have been hostile to my sisters on occasion for stating things about our past that were true and I did not  want to hear.

My internal working model is a fabrication and needs updating.

The fights I have with the world are really with my mother, the injustice I feel sometimes is really against my mother’s behaviour. It has been a lot to take in but it is what I  have to accept this.

Internal  Working Models colour how we perceive the world and how we think and act in the world. The matrix that is the world, the world we perceive via our senses is also perceived or coloured via our emotions and feelings. We perceive the world not as an objective reality but, subjectively in relation to how we feel about ourselves.

Much of what we feel about our selves is the consequence of our upbringing and also often the unresolved feelings we have about that upbringing. In other words, negative emotions and feelings about ourselves and our significant loved ones can distort how we perceive reality.

My mother is no longer alive and cannot go into recovery like me and make amends – hence therapy is being accountable, not responsible for the hurt of the younger me.

It is the extracting of emotional thorns which I have not stuck into me but which I have increasingly pushed in over the years. Slowly but surely they are being forced to the surface and a new skin will heal over the painful hurt of the past. I feel it is this organic in many ways. Our human organism is set up to heal.

There are sins of commission and omission. Now I am dealing with what was done to me, omission. I dealt with my sins of commission in my steps 4-9.

My sisters were not subjected to the same scale of physical, emotional and mental abuse as me. Paradoxically, this seems to have allowed them an emotional distance to see my mother more as she really was at times.  I have never been able to. I was deep in the hurt and abuse and had to make sense of it more than they had to although it has left lasting emotional scars for them too. My eldest sister seems in a trenchant denial about all of it, as if it never happened which seems the most intractable condition of all.

For years I would return home to visit my family and often there would be a falling out or even physical fights between my sisters and my mother. It used to kill me and I could never figure it out, why my return would provoke such extreme emotional behaviour, such an eruption.

They were unconsciously fighting over our past, and  I was like an emotional bomb ready to go off. I now have an inkling why they argued and fought. They were powerless just like me. They reacted differently, hating my mother on many occasions for what she had subjected us to as children and adolescents. Two sisters dismayed at me for “defending” and protecting mum after all she had done.

They didn’t realise I had to emotionally, it would be too much of an upheaval to suddenly realise what they were aware of and the extent of my maternally-based abuse.

I am getting there, but I will never end up at the same emotional destination of hating my mother. I love her. I understand her predicament. I am just trying to get well. I forgive her completely. I am just attempting to straighten out this emotional reaction to the world, that was  seeded in early childhood and which has reaped a terrible consequence in the succeeding years.

I choose to love rather than hate and always have done and always will do.

The problem with C-PTSD as opposed to PTSD in the insecure attachment and emotion regulation issues that have to be dealt with.

After my first bilateral stimulation session we did not do this process again in my last therapy session. We didn’t need to in fact as the emotions of early childhood came flooding back.

Turns out the thing I have most run from in my life  is the truth.

The truth of my mother’s frequent psychical abuse, the night violence.

All my life I have defended my mother, mainly against what she had done to others.

Getting to the start of realising some pain around this stuff made me realise that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

It was too much for me to become aware of , my mum as a violent night time monster so I did not, I constructed another view of her as victim and me as being the reason why she acted the way she did. I constructed a lie to protect me, although it appeared to simply be protecting her. This is what my sisters and me also have not realised before.

The truth is sometimes unbearable.

I had to re-experience the violence and finally express the feelings of being subjected to it.

Throughout my adolescence I was I was also an enabler to my mother, serving her her Valium, her solpadeine, be codeine prescription, her cocktail of legal, medically prescribed “buzzes” .

Her drugs, I helped service, unwittingly serve her the drugs she had become addicted to, I anticipated that our chemical bonding would raise her spirits, overcome her depression, soothe her anxiety,  our forthcoming chats and chemically heightened affection and warmth.

I loved it, this medically prescribed attachment, it was a whole lot better than nothing at all.

It was here that I learnt the mechanics of being an addict. I would use this working model in later life with my pseudo family of drug abusing friends, the same rituals of chemically induced attachment to other human beings.

It was all I knew , it was how I reared, how I grew up.

Her drug use was like one of those intimation fires around which we congregated to feel the second hand glow of enhanced human warmth. Via her drug use.

It was a lot better than nothing.

The artificial fire of drug using and belonging.

The second hand love.

My heart would even soar as I saw and heard those nose tingling bubbles of solpadeine  fizz and gently hiss in the bubbly water as I brought my mother her next fix.

My mum took drugs increasing as she become more addicted and more divorced from the self than beat her son.

This is where I learnt my drug taking behviour.

The truth had been become a foreign country for my mother and then increasingly for me.

I am still trying to get back home. To me.

Almost Time?

Tomorrow I am set for my next EMDR session.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned about EMDR and I should really for any of you lovely people considering this excellent treatment and that is that the treatment is very exhausting.

I spent three days on an adrenaline high followed by three days of pure exhaustion.

This is worth noting as it certainly effects one’s ability to do the things they normally do, such as their job!

I run my own business, I am self employed and I am not convinced I could do this EMDR treatment if I was not self employed. My wife did it while on sickness leave from her work.

Although, equally, I know of other people who have had to hold down a job while having EMDR therapy and did so. I am only talking from my own experience. My experience is that by the time the next EMDR therapy session is about to begin I am still recovering from the last one.

I have been dog tired, way beyond how tired I normally get and I do get tired quite often as I have a tendency to over do things, well everything really.

In addition to running my business, I do academic research with two Professors in a UK University, I blog on two blogsites, and I am carrying our hard manual building at least twice a week on a regular basis which is physically taxing. Most of this I haven’t had the energy for, in the last couple of weeks of EMDR.

EMDR treatment is fairly quick in it’s ability to quickly positive outcomes compared to some treatments  but it does  have the price of being very tiring.

I am writing this because I do not want to give the impression that it is simply a case of rolling up to treatment, it being great and then back for some of the same the next week! It is not like that, as I say it is exhausting.

I have also had over ten years in recovery which has helped greatly. I am not sure how I could have coped with this level of exhaustion eight years ago? Maybe I could, it is difficult to say.

I am not saying this to put anyone off, I think EMDR works for people in recovery whatever their length of recovery. I am just stating that it is very tiring and this should be factored into one’s awareness about doing EMDR.

Obviously I do not like being this tired but it is part of it I guess?

I find this level of tiredness makes me a bit more snappy with people, not as able to cope with frustration as usual and also it can create a low or sometimes negative mood that is not really linked to anything in particular other than being very tired. I have panda black rings under my eyes.

Okay that’s me done. An unusually short blog from me this time (shows how tired I am, lol!)

I do try to write shorter blogs but it rarely happens. Things gush our of me a bit and then I have written a chapter rather than a blog!!

All grist to the mill as they say in the UK. I would like to put this writing in a book one day. Explaining what happens in the brain of recovery but also using personal stories of recovery like the blogs I am writing now.

I noticed in my other blogsite Inside the Alcoholic Brain   that the most popular blogs by far have been on the topics of PTSD and C_PTSD and the treatment thereof via EMDR.

I think many people in recovery catch on to the idea eventually that they actually suffer C-PTSD (and other co-occurring disorders) and also insecure attachment the longer they are in recovery.

Through time recovery is about more than not relapsing, more than addiction and becomes a voyage of discovery and a search for increased well being and quality of life – William White calls it “better than well!”

These factors are also prompting me to do EMDR and finally get past my past. A past that has troubled me for over forty years.

I want to fully engage in the now, the present, I want the past fractures to be mended and the love that  I know is scattered across different areas of past and present life to finally be reconciled. .

I have choice now, I never had when in active alcoholism and addiction.

What a wonderful thing, choice!

 

There is A Solution! To Complex Trauma

There is A Solution – To Complex Trauma

I suffered from my own active alcoholism for over twenty years and found a solution to my alcoholism via the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous and their 12 step program of recovery. A program of recovery  I still, for a large extent,  follow today. I generally trust God, clean house and help others, the three basics.

This program has not only saved my life but helped me acquire a new sense of self and a way of life and manner of living that I never knew existed.

I have added to my program of recovery by coming to understanding my disorder of addiction as one of emotional dysfunction.

I have difficulty identifying, labeling and verbalising emotions and this can lead to impulsive behaviour, poor decision making and  at times distress via undifferentiated emotions. In other words, I am not always sure what or how I am feeling.

I often need to discuss my emotions with others so that I can cognitively process them and identify them as feelings.

It is in identifying what I am feeling that then leads to rational goal directed behaviours rather than distress based impulsive decisions and behaviour. Processing my emotions, so that I actually know what I am feeling, helps with subsequent emotion regulation so that I do not emotionally react as much I used to, I do not need to react as much via ego defense mechanism, I do not need to have a life shot through with fear and resentment.

I can now say this situation or person made me feel like this, e.g. they upset me and I can then act accordingly and adaptively rather having rampaging revengeful thoughts fueled by  resentments and reactive behaviour.

These are some of the reasons why I have ten years in recovery, I have learnt ways, coping skills for dealing with me and my emotions, usually my negative emotions.

Via this new attitude and behaviour my brain I  believe has changed for the better, via neuroplasticity prompted by the adaptive behaviours of more mature emotional regulation, as opposed to immature emotional responding, the regions of my brain that control emotional response have altered and recovered.

My brain is now wired in such a way as to encourage more effective emotion regulation. Even when i do take something personally it does not last a mere fraction of the time it used and the intensity of the negative emotional reactions is so small compared to early recovery and the succeeding years. I can now live life on life’s terms a lot better (although far from perfectly).

However, regardless of all this improvement in my brain and behaviours, in my stress and emotion regulation, there have been several times when my recovery has been threatened.

Six years into recovery I thought I was going to relapse. I did not want to drink but I was so distressed emotionally that it seemed inevitable at one point. The more distressed I got the more my brain was screaming at me to drink. I was understandably shocked and dismayed, frightened and upset by coming so close to relapse.

To learn that I have a brain that will lead me to drinking alcohol when I have not desired to drink again ever! I showed me what could possibly meant in my case by the Big Book when it states “the alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink” !

The distress that led to me having scant mental defense against the first drink was not prompted solely by my alcoholism. It was my alcoholism, which is it seems a parasite that feeds on motivation and emotion, was feeding like a parasite on the distress caused by unresolved complex trauma from childhood. In fact the distress in this instance was at Christmas and I could not stop thinking and feeling very emotional about my parents, who are now both sadly deceased.

It was more than grief, however, it was traumatic distress I now understand.

Why was I so distressed. It was this distress that was so active and apparent in my alcoholic drinking, the unbearableness of this distress prompted many a drinking spree.

It took six years of recovery to realise that I was still very effected by something profound to do with my parents. I then in later months became aware of the fact I often dissociate in a variety of ways. So badly that I can almost return to real childhood experience, or rather the somatic re-experiencing of being a traumatized child.

On one occasion I was so worried that I had inadvertently hurt the feelings of some one in AA that  I was convinced it would lead to their relapse and  I kept saying to my wife that I thought this guy will relapse and die because of me and what I thought I had done, which was a minor incident blown up to extreme madness by my catastrophic and paranoid  thought processes. It became evident that this minor episode was a trauma trigger to another incident in childhood, still unresolved in my psyche after decades.

My reactions were not actually about this guy in recovery who was fine and oblivious to my mad thoughts or even what my crazy mind had convinced me I had done to hurt him. This smallest of triggers propelled me experientially back through time to early childhood experiences

Interestingly, what I thought at the time and what I now know to be true is that a misconstruction of what is going at one point in time can be internalised as the truth and live on in our bodliy and mental responses to similar episodes decades later. The past quite literally lives in our bones.

My miscontruction by which I mean I perceive or build up a picture of what is happening now based on what I have pictured in my mind as happening in similar episodes in the past.

Over the next few months and through year 7 of my recovery I was steeling myself to start therapy again. Then my wife had a car accident and ended up suffering PTSD herself. I then shelved my own treatment plans as my wifes’ condition needed more urgent attention. For the next year and a half I helped my wife recuperate and get steadily more mentally well.

She used this therapeutic process that I had read about called EMDR and which after much research I recommended to her although I wasn’t really sure it would work. It was more hope than faith.

Miraculously it did seem to work, in fact it seemed way to good to be true. The effects were so profound.

My wife would say that she felt like some vital part of her brain had been “plugged in again”

She had felt the trauma had pulled some plug out in her brain and it had led to a whole assortment of psychological difficulties such as hyper-vigilance and perceptual distortions, e.g. seeing Bees as flying zeppelins, or constantly seeing errors every where. She felt she had lost her mind, as life seemed to overwhelm her, there was too much information somehow which she struggled to mentally filter.

The part of the brain that supposedly deals with these things is called  the cingulate cortex, mainly the anterior cingulate cortex, wedged  between the neo-cortex and the limbic regions of the brain. it deals with among other things, attention, stress and emotion regulation, emotion processing, with monitoring error in the environment.

It seemed to have been overloaded and compromised by her trauma and the reactions of her brain afterwards to that trauma. amazingly for her and for me the EMDR therapy seemed to put it all back in place, got her broken brain working again.

I thought this amazing but remained cautious and at times skeptical about ti it. To be honest, part of me did not want it to be true, as it meant I would have to give it a go myself at some stage.

I researched and researched trying to find some holes in this miraculous therapy. All the studies universally said it worked well, that the patient outcomes were positive and long lasting.

Damn I thought.

How could reprocessing memories from the past lead to such a profound alteration in one’s consciousness. The cingulate  cortex is also said to be the seat of consciousness in the brain.

How could this be? All that was really happening, to me at least, in her therapy sessions was a therapist moving her finger from one side to the other  while her eyes tracked these fingers, and while simultaneously thinking about a trauma experience from childhood.

The therapist also supported this process  by prompting her to  talk about what she was feeling in relation to whatever came up in her mind in relation to this bilateral stimulation.

There is so much to this therapeutic process than this I can assure you  but I don’t want to go into details now – if you want the technical stuff please go to http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/2016/01/14/how-the-brain-reacts-to-emdr/

to see what happens to the brain etc during EMDR.

Here I want to describe how it makes you feel and maybe even suggest how it works.

The reason I am disclosing all of this, the inner workings of my traumatized and healing brain is simple – this EMDR does seems to be miraculous in it’s healing potential

Admittedly I have only had one bilateral stimulation session but i think I had good results already.

I have been a thirsty man for psychic healing for nearly 45 years so you will have to excuse me being so overwhelmingly grateful and overjoyed to have finally found a solution to the problems I had years before alcoholism and addiction and which not only fed into these disorders but which could actually prompt relapse in these conditions.

I left the session thinking what came up in our therapeutic exchange prior to the bilateral stimulation touched on things I had heard a thousand times before from the mouths of hundreds of people in AA meetings.

Are the majority of us in AA actually traumatised? If not by childhood or other traumas but by the trauma of addiction itself, having addiction or having had to live with addiction?

Is trauma the main reason people relapse?

All these questions have become increasingly pressing and urgent.

What is the bilateral stimulation like? Well originally you think what the hell is a bit of finger and eye moving going to achieve but I have to say that, under my therapist’s expert guidance I seemed to go back and find roots of some of my traumas, the roots of the self loathing and low self esteem and concept, the reason for  not thinking I am lovable, some of the reasons why my family grew into the thorny bush of recrimination in the way it did, out of the rough ground of our shared family trauma.

All from sometimes singular events.

In revisiting and re-experiencing one particular trauma that involved my sisters and i it suddenly occurred to me in my heart why everyone in my family grew up to be how they are, how they were amazingly based to a large extent on how they reacted to the actual trauma incident. We all reacted to trauma in different ways and this could have led us to have views about ourselves in the present that are steeped in reactions from the past. It showed how brain mechanisms conjure neural ghosts that haunt us decades later.

Echos of the past are materialised in  jaundiced perceptions of ourselves in the succeeding minutes, hours, days and decades, throughout the rest of our lives.

It is a startling insight.

How reacting to an event leads to a distress so powerful that flows around in the brain memory networks to fester in our psyches ever since. It is like a splinter that one knows is there but can’t quite get at.

The splinter,  the more you try to get at it, the worse it festers and day on day it gets worse and worse, more poisonous. It pollutes how we feel about ourselves, for years and years.

All because of not emotionally processing what was going on at the time, in a time long long ago. How profound is that?

When you are tracking the fingers as they move, and thinking about a trauma it feels like your brain elevates as the brain is super stimulated by all the activity –  one can almost feel like one is free falling to quote Tom Petty , free associating and free falling through the past to childhood. Or it is coming up the other way?

Either way,  one is suspended in lived experience, the amgydala has been hypoactivated so it is not as stressful as it could be – the brain is not cognitively imprisoned in the moment but letting the brain free to be how it is. It felt like the Matrix losing it’s coding script.

I returned to events prior to a major trauma and left my amazingly fractured memory of the trauma to come to the surface of my mind. As I did so I discussed the emotions I was feeling, being mindful of the sensations, seeing the past in a new light.

Taking out or allowing the emotional poison to be poulticed. In scientific terms I was properly processing the emotion, exorcising the emotional ghost.

It is the negative emotion, the traumatic distress which screams it’s echo through our lives. In taking the sting out of the emotion and the emotion out of the memory, we can not only silence the scream but put it to bed.

As I left the therapy session I remembered what my wife had said about some part of her being plugged back in again. I felt that some part of me that had been replugged that hadn’t been plugged in properly plugged in  for 45 years.

Is this not the root of my troubles when it comes to relapse risk – this trauma.

Should we not treat co-morbidity as soon as possible in addicts with co-morbid conditions? Do the high relapse rates reflect also  untreated co-morbid conditions and the effect this lack of treatment has on relapse.

Alcoholics and addicts often relapse due to distress or overwhelming negative or crippling negative self concept, most of which are exacerbated by co-morbidity.

Doesn’t this co-morbidity simply makes one’s addictve behaviour more chronic more severe?

I left the therapy on cloud nine, all strangely at one and attached to the world and it’s people. It was a very similar feeling to the feeling I had after doing my step 5 when I had confronted some of the damage of my past by admitting my wrongdoing to another person. It had that same cleansing feeling. That feeling that something was being or had been put right.

It turns out that marvelous feeling was on the surface of one layer of this onion called me. No doubt there will be more peeling of the onion to come, more tears and more wonderful days like today.

I have a way to go for sure. But I have that wonderful precious gift of faith that this will work, that I will one day get past my past.

I walked for miles afterwards stopping to have full blown conversations with people I know and haven’t seen in years. The sun shun on our conversations.

It felt like my emotional thawing is well under way.

I noticed the majestic clouds you get when you live by the hills which roll to  a seaside. I was fascinated by clouds in early recovery. And there they were again – floating past like great fluffy elephants,  great to be looking up, not always looking down, your downward gaze heavy with the past.

So far so good. I am energised today, I  thought I would be exhausted – I may be tomorrow but that will be another day.

Wrapped up warm tonight in bed with the knowledge there is a solution! Like in the early days of recovery when the Big Book, near by sleeping head, reminded of that fact too.

A Safe Place To Visit

Just finished my third EMDR terapy session and thought I would write now otherwise I probably will not get around to it. I find I am so exhausted the next day that it is difficult to blog.

I am finding that I have a lot of therapeutic benefit already from the treatment.

Today we got into the EMDR  protocol which mainly looked at mechanisms we will adopt if I dissociate while doing the actual eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) which we will tentatively start next week.

Essentially we spent 15-20 minutes learning the relaxing techniques and “safe place” techniques I will use if I dissociate as the result of the EMDR.

It is mainly to do with “safety of the client” protocols. I felt a great relaxing benefit from doing it today. I will practice the techniques once a day while I am doing this course of treatment.

We will also use smell as a way of coming out of dissociation if need be.

We may not need these techniques but they have to be put in place just in case.

My recent dissociation has been to do with feeling detached from “me” – my body and immediate environment. We discussed how we could deal with this possibility.

I have also dissociated to childhood on occasion and this was discussed too. This type of dissociation seems to take one back to the heart of the trauma. It is like a re-experiencing without having the memory associated  with it.  It is like being behind a wall on the other side of our life, aware of certain things but not able to see it clearly

I am not fearful of dissociating – I have a grasp now of what it is and how much I have been doing it over the course of my life.

I even research the brain regions involved in dissociation and it seems the parts that deal with self reference deactivate and there is a “coming away” from representations of self and associated memory.

I have the type of head that likes to know these things – you may have noticed!?

It is a disquieting, unsettling and stressful experience but is manageable I believe with these techniques.

I  have noticed how after only a few weeks my mind and behaviour has been tied to looking at photos of the past, my old friends and my family.

My nephew also contacted me out of the blue to say he wanted to visit  and I have resumed closer contact with one of my  sisters.

I have made it clear that I am doing therapy for trauma, whether my sisters need it too I am not sure. I am the youngest in the family and a boy so my circumstances might have meant I was more traumatised by events in my early childhood than others.

Interestingly I have found a school photo  of my sister and I which is a photo of us looking a bit shell shocked, in comparison to our smiling faces of the previous year’s school photo when we were beaming more confident, mischievous smiles at the camera. I am presuming this second photo was around the time of the major trauma(s) .

I also found a photo of me in my late 20s after a cocaine psychosis and I look haunted in the same way as the school photo.

I had presumed this was due to the psychosis which is not a very pleasant experience I can assure you. I now know where the phrase “climbing the walls” comes from after that experience I can assure  you!

Now, although the psychosis obviously affect me deeply I can also see trauma in this photo and many other photos of me. My wife told me I was very paranoid at the time too which is linked to psychosis but much of the paranoia linked clearly to what I had experienced in childhood.

It was not only alcoholism and addiction that ate into my soul like a parasite feeding on my troubled emotions,  in these photos of my emaciated drug using self but also complex post trauma.

Unresolved trauma too is like a parasite feed on one’s nerves too.

Then yesterday a person who married my cousin sent me a photo of me in a underage football team that  my dad and his friend organised. My dad is in the photo too of our team.   I suddenly realised how heart breaking it must have been for my dad, what happened to our family, my mothers breakdown and eventual Valium dependence. And the decades of consequence after.

My heart  went out o him. God bless him, he was a loving father, I miss greatly.

The plan now is to finish treatment – finish a novel I was writing for many years while drinking (which is 2/3s finished) and get my driving licence. I once passed the theory part but banged my head , got concussion and could not take the practical test.

So I will try again and then take time out, a month or so to travel back to Ireland and revisit my past and see some people I haven’t seen in many many  years.

Northern Ireland has been at peace for two decades but I have yet to call a complete ceasefire with myself and my past. Hopefully I will later this yer.

Recovery has given me so much and while others hit their mid life crisis I have barely begun living. I am a published scientific writer and want to follow that by the end of this year with a published novel too.

I have a very fragmented self, blow to bits by my traumatised mother and family and my traumatised, brutalised and war torn upbringing in Northern Ireland.

I can feel these disparate parts of self slowly and naturally drifting back into shape.

It will be a new me, the composite parts that make up me no doubt but it will have the same character I am sure.

I got lost thanks to trauma and chronic alcoholism and addiction. Ten years into recovery I am still beginning the amazingly exciting journey of uncovering, recovering, the person I am and the person I am supposed to become.

When the parts reunite I will be the fullness of me.