alcoholism

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 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 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)

SHARE THIS:

He’ll Be Back

 

This is an oil painting expressing emotional co-dependency in a dysfunctional relationship especially as it pertains to alcoholism.

I think there is a condition called para-alcoholism whereby the partners of alcoholics become emotionally drunk and deluded in their thinking. They believe they are better and more in control than their alcoholic partners whereas in reality the abnormal conditions of living with an alcoholic have existed for so long they become the normal state of affairs. The abnormal becomes normal.

We all get lost in alcoholism, partners, wives, husbands, children, family and friends. It is a fog thrown over many.

The partner in the painting is convinced her partner will return after yet another heated argument. That he has no where else to go.

She clings to this smug realisation. He Needs Her. Without realising he is her addiction.

That is alcoholism, para alcoholism and addiction – another slide into ever  degrading moral, spiritual,  emotional and psychological well being,.

We walk hand and hand into that hell.

 

IMG_5229

Well that’s the First Session Done!?

Just had my first session of therapy for my Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD) two days ago. Still a bit tired. It is good to have gotten the process going.

But it may take some time. I was hoping the therapist would say we should get this done in 20 sessions but it seems we will be in this process for quite a while.

Possibly most of this year!

My Complex PTSD is very complex and involves repeated traumas inside and outside the home so will take time to process my past.

The good news is that I really like and respect the therapist.

I like her as a person, she is nice and considerate which is important.

I have heard it mentioned that the relationship with the therapist is often key in these therapeutic sessions.

She looks like she knows her stuff and can help me get a bit healthier.

C-PTSD appears to fragment the self and the processing and reprocessing memories from the past also appears to be a process of unifying shattered fragments of the self at the same time. This is my intuition that this will occur anyway.

One of my main issues with C-PTSD is dissociation. I simply had not realised how much I  dissociate and have dissociated throughout my life. In fact, I have probably been doing this since very early childhood.

So what is dissociation?

In psychology, the term dissociation describes a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experience. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.

Dissociation is commonly displayed on a continuum.[5] In mild cases, dissociation can be regarded as a coping mechanism or defense mechanisms in seeking to master, minimize or tolerate stress – including boredom or conflict.

More pathological dissociation involves dissociative disorders – These alterations can include: a sense that self or the world is unreal (depersonalization and derealization); a loss of memory (amnesia); forgetting identity or assuming a new self (fugue); and fragmentation of identity or self into separate streams of consciousness (dissociative identity disorder, formerly termed multiple personality disorder) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Disassociation is very common to PTSD and C-PTSD.

Obviously it is something that has bothered me. I have thought that maybe I have dissociated a few times in recovery under extreme distress but there appears to be smaller more moderate dissociations going on a lot of the time.

It is essentially a coping mechanism against  emotional distress and anxiety but also it seems to have become a coping mechanisms in terms of troubling emotions.

I have learnt to regulate my emotions in maladaptive ways. I dissociate and use other use immature ego defense mechanisms such as denial, rationalising, minimising, justifying, projection etc. I hasten to add that after 10 years in recovery I also have learnt to adaptively regulate emotions so this process has become more automatic as my brain as healed and my emotion regulation improved.

However, this ego defense mechanisms have been rife throughout most of my life.

Especially denial.

One of my first reactions to any extreme emotional disturbance is to deny it’s happening or has happened.

This is the main reason I have not entered into treatment for PTSD before. There is a large part of me that denies I was traumatized although the evidence is there in so many ways. Chronic dissociation, regression to traumatized childhood experience, explicit memories of trauma incidents  etc etc would suggest not only that I have been traumatized but on multiple occasions over a long period of time.

Regardless, my head tells me “are you sure this happened? But your parents loved you?” It is very similar to when I finally went into recovery after almost dying from alcoholism, my head would say “yeah but you didn’t drink that much?” This isn’t simply denying alcoholism it is also denying the fact I have lost control over me. My denial minimised and rationalised this so that it was not overwhelming. This is why we need to be careful accusing newcomers about being in denial about their alcoholism. We tell them our story and let them identify, this is much better as it does not scare them into even more denial as ego defense.

It was less about denying alcoholism than denying reality and actual lived experience. I will deny anything which I find threatening to my sense of self.  Without consciously knowing I am in denial.

Anyway, my dissociation also appears linked to very insecure attachment to primary care giver, e.g. a parent like one’s mother. It is particularly common among those with disorganised attachment styles and very much so with children how have reacted at a young age to their mother’s fear and trauma.

Basically when events are traumatic or overwhelming emotionally it is often common for children to dissociate. Also growing up in a extremely stressful outside environment and society can lead to using this coping mechanism to survive. So in essence a survival mechanism that was crucial to surviving trauma in childhood.

My dissociations over the years has covered so many emotional states. I grew up in a very violent society so dissociated to deal with physical threat. I could and still can dissociate into a “powerful alpha male” state when threatened with violence for example.

I can dissociate to the extent I have no idea who significant people are in my life are, can’t remember names, etc, can dissociate to the extent that I feel my body isn’t mine and so on. I can also dissociate in a way which somehow returns me to feelings of early childhood, almost like I am temporarily a child again which is very traumatic to re-experience. I discussed some of these with my therapist.

She was very enlightened about the subject. She said it was just as it is,  for now, it is neither good or bad. It was and is a coping mechanism.

It is not to be feared as it passes but we will become more aware of it’s triggers. It is good to know that it is not “Bad” it just is. It will be dealt with in due time. I liked how she took the “sting” out of my anxieties over it.

I actually dissociated prior to the therapist session, a couple of nights previously as it was obviously distressing me at some unconscious level, the idea of starting treatment, the idea of the emotional pain to come.

The other point that was discussed a lot was the overlap between guilt and shame.

I generally believe shame is a major controlling emotion with me but that I had dealt with my guilt a lot during my 12 steps, steps 4-9 in particular. I have since realised that this guilt over wrongdoings to others primarily as a result of my drinking is very different to post traumatic guilt. All the way through the session I had this knot of guilt in my heart so tightly wound up it felt like a chestnut.  I tried to talk about shame but the guilt kept getting in the way.

We discussed this. Essentially PTSD and C-PTDSD are linked, one affects the other. Essentially we have PTSD with complex other issues added on.

I had trauma incidents which would constitute PTSD diagnosis alone plus other things too.

When a person has experienced trauma,  one has an overriding feeling of terror and helplessness and a very strong feeling of guilt.

This guilt tells one that they are somehow to blame for everything happening as it did – it whispers that one could have somehow prevented it happening. The self balks against helplessness.

We may feel that it was our fault that it happened. For me this is one of the roots of my troubles.

I once dissociated back to childhood (regressed perhaps) and I suddenly said “when I make mistakes people die!” which is a very extreme thing to say and a statement obviously steeped in trauma.

This memory related response and  associated networks of memory still lives in me and it is this and other traumatic memory  associations which need to be reprocessed.

It may even be that there are memories preceding this that I cannot access in my memory at present but which will crop  up in my mind as all memories are linked in memory networks to other memories. It is in reprocessing certain memories that other memories appear in one’s mind too.

It may even be a “memory” of something that did not happen in the sense that I interpreted something as happening in a way it didn’t. For example, two parents having a violent argument in front of a child may lead to the child blaming himself instead of the parents as it would be too emotionally overwhelming to blame the idealised “perfect” parents. This is more interpretation of events rather than the actual events themselves.

This is called the encoding of a memory. Memories are often encoded emotionally especially if the memory was encoded during a moment of emotional distress. Mood congruent memories, for example, happen when we remember something from the past because we are in similar mood to when other memories were encoded, hence the emotion helps us retrieve this and similar memories.

The same happens with trauma memories. They are often retrieved during similar heightened distress or states of hyperarousal as when first encoded.

A problem with C-PTSD memories is that we cannot always consciously access them at times or sometimes we have little memory at all of traumatic events.

This does not mean they are not in our memory banks are that they do not have influence on our behaviours, they simply do so implicitly without much explicit and conscious representation in our minds.

They do still influence our reactions and behaviours regardless of being really recalled. I used to say they lived in our bones but they more accurately they  live in our nervous systems.

The guilt and helplessness is linked to shame in me. The situations of my trauma were exposed to the community I lived in – people in the surrounding area had to intervene  in certain traumatic episodes to help us and so knew about our crazy family.

My guilt has thus been compound by shame, by not only being guilt but my self-perceived “guilt” and it’s repercussions had been exposed to wider society. Everyone knew what I did and that I was to blame  for everything that happened. They knew it was all my fault and what I was really like. A secret I have kept hidden since then, decades later. So toxic shame is linked to traumatic guilt.

This fear that people die when I make mistakes has led to a chronic perfectionism for myself and those around me. If I am perfect then all will be well. All will be controlled and bad things will not happen and everyone will be not fighting.

I set the bar high for many other people too as well as myself. It is like I can’t afford to make mistakes and either can others, particularly men as I have obviously blamed my father for our shared traumas and assigned my mother as the victim of the trauma. Hence I am wary often of men and protective of woman.

In fact, I grew up too quickly because of this, to protect my mother and guard against my father.

Although I consciously love both and have forgiven both and myself for what happened in our shared traumatic past, the memories of the events live on and colour my responses to and views of the world, men and women, even today. My memories of decades ago are like a computer virus corrupting my data files.

I write all this to process my therapy but hopefully to connect with others who are experiencing this stuff too.

I need to write to understand exactly how I am feeling and also to make connections in my brain/mind.

Whatever happened prior to my trauma episodes from childhood which led I believed to a life and death situation in more than one occasion was not the fault of a child who was say 6-7 years old. A child does not affect the behaviour of adults in such a profound way.

What happened, as is common in PTSD, is a mis-appraisal of what happened, a levying of unfair guilt on the person who witnessed the event. This guilt,  that it was their fault or they could have done something, keeps the trauma going – it becomes post trauma but still lives on in one’s mind and body and behaviours.

It is the misinterpretation of events that is internalised and processed as memory. It is this mis-appraisal that gets embedded in memory as if it was the truth, as a true reflection and recollection of what actually occurred when it was not what actually occurred.

Sometimes the trauma is so profound that the child does not want to think his parents did not love him or would hurt him (why would the be acting the way they do if they did?) and takes the blame rather than face this overwhelming emotion.

It being his or her fault is more tolerable at the moment. This too lies on in inaccurately embedded memory. It is a memory that perpetuates a traumatic lie throughout our lives. It is this lie which lives on in our negative self concepts. Telling us untruths about ourselves, that we are defective, not good enough, that if people really knew US?

It is a poisonous, malevolent neural and mnemonic ghost which haunts us decades later.

It needs to be re-addressed and the memories need to re- encoded accurately instead, that way we allow them to rest, embedded in our long term memory.

Via this process memories are reconsolidated, all the fragmented parts of self, stored away from each other in faulty interpretations and falsehoods about ourselves, that we keep alive in our memory networks and listen to as if they were the truth.

This is how I think EMDR helps exorcise the past leaving a past reality closer to the truth.

More will be revealed…

 

“My Name Is Paul. I’m A Recovering Alcoholic”

For all my US friends and friends from around the world who did not have access to UK television here is the link to “I’m An Alcoholic: My Name Is…” documentary on alcoholism which aired last night on Channel 5. Well worth checking out.

It was like a “collective” experience strength and hope (to use 12 step terminology) and will hopefully have highlighted the progressive nature of alcoholism as well as highlighting that there is treatment for and recovery from alcoholism. It was a message of hope. I’m sure it will be a useful starting point for many in “identifying” with other alcoholics to help in the process of self diagnosing.

It was great to see a documentary in the UK address alcoholism and recovery “from the horses mouth” – too often in the UK alcoholics are marginalised or absent in informing the public, by telling their story, of their alcoholism.
It was informative also that we could see the progression of this condition via all the interviewees regardless of how they later described or named their condition, how they “treated” it themselves or described their “recovery” from it.
So at least we can all agree, it starts in a seemingly innocuous manner, gets worse, then a whole lot worse, then chronic and life threatening, causes untold emotional damage to loved ones and requires both acute and long term therapeutic redress. Sounds a bit like a disease state to me that but each to their own.

As long as we all pass on the message, you can stop, you can recover from your present condition. There are lots of help in various places, in different organisations, thousands of people who suffer from the same condtion as you. They want to help you too, and you can even recovery to such an an extent that life becomes more fulfilling than anything you could ever have imagined. All the things you “treated” with substances and behaviours can be “treated” via recovery, this will happen and a whole lot more it you put the effort in.

Just click the image.

full_left_column_HD_My-Name-is---And-I'm-Alcoholic_40

My Name Is…And I’m An Alcoholic

 

My Name Is… And I’m An Alcoholic

1 × 60mins for C5, TX January 13th 2016, 10pm

In a country awash with booze, 8 million Britons are considered alcohol dependent – and all of us know someone whose affection for the bottle is damaging to their health, their friends and family, their careers. In this groundbreaking documentary, My Name is… And I’m an Alcoholic tells the frank story of 8 people and their tempestuous relationship with alcohol: from their first drink, their love affair with booze and their despair as they hit rock bottom – to what it took to get sober as they built a new life in recovery.

Alcohol is society’s great leveller – alcoholism doesn’t care about where we come from, where we live, or how successful we are. Far from obeying the stereotype we all imagine, the alcoholics we hear from include a professional cellist, too stressed to play on stage without a bottle of vodka disguised as water at her feet; the former Editor of the Sun, too anxious to run Britain’s biggest newspaper without being bolstered by booze; a single mother, drinking through her loneliness and her shame at her failed marriage; a criminal who became alcoholic aged 13, grieving the loss of his mother; a local GP drinking to escape the problems of her patients, and a student counsellor who relapsed just days before filming.

As much a story of the struggle as it is one of hope, this sensitive and resonant film takes us straight into the heart of one of society’s most prevalent and misunderstood addictions.

MY NAME IS… AND I’M AN ALCOHOLIC – promo from Knickerbockerglory TV on Vimeo.