Chapter 1 “Rock Bottom”

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 1

Rock Bottom

My alcoholism almost killed me. I had spent the last nine months in alcoholic psychosis, the so-called DTs (delirium tremems) hallucinating, drinking and vomiting, repeat.

I could hardly get the drink to my mouth with my violently shaking hands. Tin and glass, cracking against my teeth. I was so jaundiced my neck had turned a dark sickly shade of copper green! My eyesight deteriorated to such an extent, that it was about like straining to see through scratched plastic glass. Eyesight is linked to liver and my fatty liver had reduced by eyesight by half.  

I was so weak from drinking, not eating, a 8 and half stone weakling, who had to stop on the stairs, every three steps, to rest and start again. Sleep had been replaced by twenty minute snoozes, awoken by terror and the dripping sweats. How the hell had it come to this?

I had planned none of it. I thought of death and of suicide. There was a place worse than dying and I had somehow ended up there. All plans on killing myself foundered on my angrily held assertion to myself that I hadn’t asked for any of this. None of this was my fault! That indignation was as close as I could get to hope, which had recently left home. I drank because of my bloody tough upbringing, didn’t I, and that wasn’t my fault either? Many had had similar upbringing and they weren’t slipping down the plughole along with my stomach-heated up wine? Why me? Why the hell was I in this hellish hole of despair and utter defeat?

Worse still the drink had stopped working, only staving off the full horror of the hallucination and preventing me from having the alcoholic fit that would kill me.My wife would travel to the shops, reluctantly buy grates full of cheap Spanish wine and almost undrinkabe German lager that tasted like liquid Gorgonzola, unwittingly keep me alive. We were both ignorant of the reality that any prolonged period without drink could have killed me. That a diversion from the straight road home, after shopping , or a car accident,  or some other unavoidable occurrence that slowed the delivery of my alcohol, could have killed me via an alcoholic seizure.

My wife hated spending all that money on drink that rarely stayed long in my stomach. People would shout over to her as she waited at the till “Having another party!?” Little did they ever know how far they were from the truth.

Read more about Rock Bottom in my earlier Blog Post from 2016 “Do we Really have to Hit Rock Bottom to Recover?” here

“The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery

Introduction

Getting To the Root of All Our Troubles

I was born into trauma and know no different.

Trauma, with a helping of genetic disposition, gave birth to addiction and alcoholism which it then used to try and kill me. It led be to a place that I strongly believe was worse than dying. Eventually it has led to a place, and a way of life, which I would have scarcely believed existed.

This is a book about my journey though alcoholism, addiction, complex PTSD ( and related OCD) and my continued recovery from these conditions, via 12 step recovery and treatment centres, neuroscientific research and trauma therapy. It is about how I have survived addiction and, at times, recovery.

Recovery can kill you too; other peoples’ views and understanding of alcoholism has a bearing on whether you live or die. Their lack of understanding about co-occurring disorders can too. This may be unpalatable to some but it doesn’t make it less true. These people can include fellow recovering people and recovery groups (while acknowledging their crucial role in recovery), medical professionals, those working in treatment, your loved ones and many other professionals who deal with addicted individuals on a daily basis and the media.

The more each of these groups know more precisely the nature of addiction, what caused it and how this can be recovered from, via specific and appropriate, sometimes individualised, treatment, the better they can help people in recovery.

We tend to blame addicted individuals for not recovering rather those helping to treat them or giving medical advice.  Or those whose responsibility it is to provide clear understanding into the nature of addiction. Society continues to create stigmas in the absence of a common knowledge about these conditions. Stigmas blossom in ignorance.

Clarity of understanding leads to a compassion that simply wilts in it’s absence.

I have experienced much of this ignorance in my own recovery and have been moved to challenge it now in this book. I have found medical and treatment professionals and those in recovery to be lacking in precise definitions and the consequences are profound. It seems that the precise definitions of other chronic diseases, seen elsewhere in medicine, is somehow not as important in addiction, a condition that remains one of the worst killers.

So let’s start here with a clear definition of addiction and what causes it and then show how this manifests in the life of one alcoholic/addict.

Addiction is the progressive impairment of self control (regulation). This can be mapped in the brain and addiction has a brain signature.

It is driven, to endpoint addiction, by the effects of emotion/stress dysregulation (which itself is often prompted and often sustained by negative self schema, often post traumatic ) on reward (motivation) dysfunction.

In simple terms, most addicted individuals cannot process emotion properly and this causes them to flee feelings by substituting unpleasant, undifferentiated, feeling states with more controllable feelings of pleasure and relief from aversive feeling states. It represents the “fixing of feelings” externally, outside of self, as opposed to emotions being processed internally, in the brain . This is negative and positive reinforcement combined at the very onset.

This represents a defective and disordered survival network, an embryonic neurobiological disease state, as it represents a disorder of function, emotion processing, which will eventually create  a distinctive group of neurobiological changes, and thus, unwittingly, create the fertile ground for later addictive behaviour.

As emotion/stress dysregulaton escalates, the inital prompting of impulsive behaviour increasingly becomes compulsive addictive behaviour as increasing and continual levels of distress increase reward dysfunction and a patholical wanting (needing) results.

At the endpoint of addiction, the rewarding and relieving effects of addictive behaviour diminish in relation to chronic distress levels and even increasing levels of addictive behaviour no longer have sufficient effect on what often becomes compulsive behaviour; this automatic behaviour to relieve chronic distress yields increasingly diminished returns.

The addictive behaviour as “solution” profoundly diminishes while the “problem” of chronic emotion/stress dysregulation escalates.

Recovery is often particularly viable at this point and needs to address the cessation of the former “solution” with treatment of the underlying problem – emotion/stress dysregulation, the pathomechanism of this addictive behaviour.

This emotion disorder and thus impairment of self regulation, often born out of genetic disposition and/or environmental trauma, is the pathomechanism that drives addictive behaviour, not only in substance addiction but also in behaviour addictions. It can be diagnosed, it can be tested for. It need not be shrouded in mystery.

It need not be endlessly argued over. It is inherent in most addictive behaviour and it can be easily treated.

In this book, I will show how I came to be in recovery after almost dying from alcoholism. I will show my struggles in recovery and with the recovery programmes I have followed.

Leaving the 12 step recovery that saved my life, and which still offers me a template of recovery today, was very frightening but I felt I had no choice. Through neuroscientific research and, eventually, trauma therapy, I have been like a detective piecing the clues together to better understand my condition. To understand how I ended up the way I did. It has not only helped me more clearly understand my addiction, and the trauma that partly underlies it, but it has often saved my life.

The outside help I received in addition to 12 step recovery has not been an adjunct to addiction but has shown me the fertile soil in which my addiction grew. It showed me what partly fuels my addiction today, seventeen years into recovery. It shows me why my addiction still continues to be progressive, even in recovery.

Recovery has been discovery, often thrilling, often terrifying. It continues to be so today. Let me take you on that journey from despair to hope, from ignorance to understanding.

Let me take you through my traumatic childhood and life, through alcoholism and addiction to recovery. Through 12 step recovery and treatment to the research and trauma therapy to a new understanding that reconciles all treatment and arms it with greater clarity and understanding.

Structure of this project This book is split into three distinct parts – Addiction, Trauma and Recovery. These can be read separately, in order, or not, or concurrently. They interweave in their influence on my addiction and recovery. One feeds into the other, as in real life. In both parts I will marry my anecdotal and neuroscientific research into the nature of my addiction.

In this first part I will share my journey into recovery from chronic alcoholism, looking at what happened to bring me into recovery and what has happened in the seventeen years of my recovery

In recovery, I have journeyed through six years of 12 step recovery and AA anecdotal wisdom about addiction and recovery to twelve years of neuroscientific research into understanding how the brain changes as a result of addiction and what, in addition to substances, accounts for this dramatic change in how the brain controls our behaviours. 

Via this research where early understandings of addiction have been both complemented and challenged, resulting in a clearer insight into how addiction can effectively be treated.

Although this research gradually saw me gradually move away from 12 step recovery (although I still follow the steps on a daily basis) , my research also shows, in a more profound way, how this type of recovery is key to helping addicted individuals recover.

Finally the experiential wisdom of 12 step recovery has become more effectively married to the most recent neurosicentific research so I believe it is time, as Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, once declared, to be “friends with our friends”.

In fact, Bill Wilson has been a constant inspiration for me in my research, he was constantly striving learn more about addiction via his work with academics and would be, no doubt, fascinated by what neuroscience has unearthed about this strange illness of mind and body. He was also worried that 12 step recovery was based on a book “frozen in time”; I hope to unfreeze some of our understanding in this book. In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous it also suggests people in recovery should get “outside help” for conditions other than alcoholism, or co-occuring conditions as they are called today.

After ten years, I found that I needed to get treatment for Complex PTSD and attachment trauma as they were threatening my recovery. Thus the second part of this book is dedicated to Trauma and starts with my experience of trauma from childhood onwards until I started treatment for it at the age of 48 years old, ten years after seeking recovery from chronic alcoholism.

I will then explain the treatment I had before taking you on part of the actual therapeutic journey I undertook to get more healed. This is the part of my “experience , strength and hope” sharing how trauma, in the fertile soil of family addiction, led to my later chronic alcoholism. The complexity and severity of my alcoholism was caused by Complex PSTD and it’s treatment has greatly reduced the severity and complexity of my alcoholism while in recovery.

Although alcoholism and trauma are two tributaries running into the same river, I hope by clearly delineating them, the reader, and those who suffer from similar co-occuring conditions, can more clearly see how they influence each other and how they may need, at times, separate, and common, treatment in recovery. The treatment of one affects the recovery of the other has been my experience. This is my message of hope to you.

This is a work in progress and I am adding chapters all the time. I’m afraid that my chapter numbers might change or just be plain wrong as I revise the text. I will try an keep up double checking the indexing but organisation is a weak point of mine, so please bear with me!

Here a few links to posts on the following:- Addiction, Trauma and Recovery.

Getting To The Roots of All Our Troubles

 

Below is my feature article for Keys to Recovery Newspaper.

This article address how 12 step recovery treats the emotional disorder which underpins the “spiritual malady” that drives alcoholism.

http://www.keystorecoverynewspaper.com/

 

“My alcoholism almost killed me. It was only when my wife withdrew from me after she had exhausted all possibilities to try and help me—taking me to mental health professionals but with no success—that I asked her for the first time for help and she took me to my first AA meeting and booked me into a treatment center.

The professionals would treat me for something other than alcoholism, wondering if my drinking was linked to some other mental health issue. They all failed to see that the mental health issue that I was suffering from, and that was going to kill me quicker than any other possible disorder, was my chronic alcoholism.

They had very little idea of what alcoholism is. Most people in the world do not know what alcoholism or addiction is. They do not believe it is a condition that worsens and progresses neurobiologically in the brain over time.

Many in recovery are not completely sure what they suffer from and many coming into recovery are put off by the imprecise definitions they are met with. We still use a definition of alcoholism from 1935. It works—and that is the main thing—in treating alcoholism. It saved my life and gave me all I have but it does not explain all I suffer from and all that has threatened my recovery via relapse.

The professionals thought that by treating my other conditions it would alleviate the severity of my drinking.
They seemed to have little idea that my drinking was also partly the result of my brain having been changed due to the chronically high consumption of alcohol and other drugs.

They appeared to have little awareness that copious amounts of neurotoxic substances alter and damage the brain. They seemed to be of the idea that my ‘alcohol abuse’ was the result of something else, although 50-60 % of alcoholism is genetically inherited, making it one of the most genetically inherited conditions there is! I am
not saying that there aren’t other conditions, co-occurring conditions, which have contributed to the severity of my
alcoholism and addiction, like various tributaries running
into the same river.

In fact, I suffer from other mental conditions that existed
prior to and still run alongside my alcoholism and addiction.
Namely, complex PTSD and attachment trauma.

Mental health professionals do not seem to successfully
treat the most urgent problem very well, the alcoholism
and addiction. They seem, like most of the world I believe,
to be unaware that addiction and alcoholism become
permanently ingrained in the brain.

“Once an alcoholic always an alcoholic,” I have found to be true and science, in particular, neuroscience, which is the study of the brain,
shows this too. Once you have become a pickled gherkin
you will never be a cucumber again!

Science is catching up with what AA and other 12 step
groups and treatment centers have known for decades.

It has caught up with the idea that the condition of addiction
is ‘progressive.’ It only gets worse, not better, over
time. However, it can be managed and treated.

People in recovery are doing this, sometimes very successfully and
have lives they could not have dreamt of, regardless of still having this permanent and ongoing condition of the brain.

I believe my condition of alcoholism and addiction is ingrained in various parts of the brain that are connected to self-regulation such as emotion, motivation, memory and so on. When we are in emotional distress, our addiction becomes activated and acts like a ‘parasite’ on these parts of the brain that deal with ‘self.’ Distress activates addiction like a parasite—via our genes—which activates, for example, our memories to remember the good times when we drank, or activates our motivation to want more, more, more.

It also activates our emotional networks to make us feel bad or our self-schema, to think we are worthless.

This is addiction and it reflects how our brains became conditioned by addiction. Addiction has shaped our brains to do its bidding. Our addiction became a compulsion, which is an automatic behavior to relieve distress. It was not the substance that did the ‘thinking’ at the end of our addiction—it was distress. The thrill had long gone!

In early recovery, in particular, it is distress that leads us back.
We have to find a way of dealing with this distress in recovery.
My way was the 12 step program of recovery.

The longer we are in recovery, the more subtle the addictive voice becomes. Sometimes it lives on via ‘workaholism’ or too much food, porn, shopping, eating. All activated by emotional distress acting like a parasite on the brain networks regulating our ‘self.’

One solution is thus to get out of ‘self,’ to get out of having this distress. This is at the heart of 12 step recovery. I suggest getting out of self is done via a number of methods in 12 step recovery
such as: helping others, prayer, meditation.

There are also some ways of getting out of self which address the condition that seems to underlie our ‘spiritual malady,’ what I
call my ‘emotional disease’ of alcoholism.

In recovery, I have been given a toolkit to deal with me, ‘my self’—a toolkit I never had before. I was never taught by my family how to cope with me, how to deal with my emotions. My emotions have always disturbed me and I have always sought to escape them, to control them externally, via external means such as sweets, cigarettes, girls, and gambling, sport, deviant behavior and
then, in my mid-teens, via drink, drugs, and sex.

I was always fixing my feelings via something outside of myself
and the substituting of negative emotion with positive feelings of pleasure. I had this constant feeling of emotional distress even then, because of not being able to deal with my emotions, which would always impulsively lead me to fix my feelings

I have always had a limited ability to identify, label, process and regulate my emotions. I do not really have the fully developed brain networks that deal with controlling my own emotions.

Emotions can be undifferentiated and distressing to me as I am not sure what I am feeling and this creates an unpleasant feeling I try to escape. I acted out on this through impulsive and then, later in life,
compulsive behaviors. This is also called alexithymia, the impaired ability to identify, label and process emotion.

This alexithymia can be influenced by growing up in a traumatic or abusive environment or it can be genetically inherited
by a combination of both.

The vast majority of alcoholics have alexithymia.

My spiritual malady, as mentioned in 12 step recovery, has always been there too. In fact, I think my spiritual malady grows out of my emotional disease. If I can’t control my emotions it is then difficult
to live life on life’s terms. When I came into recovery I was shocked by how I could not control, or even read, my emotions.

In AA they say that people stay at the same emotional age as when they started drinking. I used to think this about me too but now I am not of this view. I think I never had the ability to read my emotions and tell another person how I feel. Fortunately, much of the program of 12 step recovery can help with this alexithymia
as well as the resultant spiritual malady.

Although I would also recommend outside professional help for co-occurring disorders, as I have benefited from outside therapeutic help for complex PTSD. My co-occurring conditions have threatened
my recovery and needed to be addressed as a result.

The 12 steps clear away the ‘wreckage of the past’ and allow us to make amends for past wrongs which is a massive exercise
in emotion regulation of past events. It emotionally relieves us of the distress we carried from our past lives. It allows us to
forgive which also helps in processing the emotions attached to the wrongs we experienced. It gives us a clear slate emotionally.

Step Ten allows us to regulate emotions by keeping this slate clean on a daily basis.

Another excellent technique for regulating emotion is sharing at meetings which allow us to talk through emotional issues—often to emotional resolution—to trust in a Higher Power and accepting that
things are as they should be (not how we want them to be!) All these are vital to recovery.

‘Wanting’ brings a whole host of emotional difficulties such as distress, selfishness, greed, gluttony, as well as other negative emotions/sins/shortcomings as it activates the ‘parasite’ that feeds on motivation and wanting.

Another very important technique in 12 step recovery is the use of a sponsor.

I will now explain how talking to a sponsor on a regular basis helps perfectly with treating our alexithymia.

In alexithymia, we have only developed two levels out of five in the development of our ability to process emotion.

According to one model, these levels include: awareness of physical
sensations, sensorimotor reflexive (level 1); sensorimotor action tendencies (level 2); single emotions (level 3); blends of emotions (level 4); and the capacity to appreciate complexity in the experiences of self and others, (level 5).

Those with alexithymia are usually stuck on the first two basic levels, being moved into action by emotion, which ties in with me as a young person being compelled to fix unpleasant feelings via action, externally. This was partly because I could not get to level three, identifying emotion—not to mention blends of emotions—and certainly not their complexity.

The magic of recovery is that ringing my sponsor and discussing my feelings allows me to process all these levels. Levels I cannot always do by myself!

When we ring our sponsor it is usually because we have a resentment against someone or something and it has resulted in our thinking going awry. We are usually in emotional distress. When talking to our sponsor, we can often identify an emotion (level
3) or character defects like shame, pride or guilt.

We can explore what we actually feel and this can often be linked to other emotions and feelings we have had about related themes and incidents—incidents we were not aware of as related (level 4).
We can also discuss the other person’s perspective and increase our understanding of self and also of others (level 5). This can help with other matters like empathy and forgiveness.

When we process emotion properly, the events that inspired distress are lodged away in our memory banks and are no longer swirling around in our minds. Most of the 12 step program of recovery is about doing this: processing our troublesome emotions and filing away their related memories (cleaning the slate).

Talking to a sponsor is also like a step 5 or a daily step 10.
Gratitude also helps in the regulation of emotion. We are happy with what we have, not distressed by what we want.
Practically all 12 step recovery is a program for growing emotionally, changing our emotional brains in the process.

Belonging to a 12 step group helps with attachment issues, increasing our sense of belonging, which relieves distress and
helps to regulate our emotions too.

In spiritual terms, 12 step recovery ‘restores us to sanity’ by spiritual and psychological processes which allow us to fully process emotion. It is the emotional distress which activates our spiritual malady and addictive behavior.

Treating this distress via effective processing of emotion allows us to root out the cause of all our troubles.”

 

About the author

Paul Henry lives in Wales, UK and has been in recovery for over 12 years. He completed various degrees in recovery, including
one in Psychology which led to him being a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience.

Paul is a published author in an academic journal and writes for ‘Inside the Alcoholic Brain’ and ‘The Alcoholic’s Guide to Alcoholism.’
He writes about how the brain is altered prior to, and after, addictive behavior; how this alteration remains in recovery and how it needs to be managed by spiritual practices, one day at the time.

For more information
please visit these websites: https://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/
& https://alcoholicsguidetoalcoholism.com/

 

Alcoholics Guide to Alcoholism Podcast

Extended Keys to Recovery Newspaper Interview

I was happy to be asked and honored to take part in one of the excellent “The Hope Interviews” with Steve Jones for the recovery newspaper “Keys to Recovery”
https://www.dropbox.com/…/Paul%20Henry%20Interview%20Keys%2…

An extended version of the interview is here on a new podcast I will be doing with my wife, chatting informally about all things alcoholism, addiction, the family disease of alcoholism, day to day recovery, as well as co -occurring conditions such as trauma related disorders and how the treatment of these conditions can greatly improve overall recovery.

Keys to Recovery Interview

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

http://www.keystorecoverynewspaper.com/

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.

 

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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