The Aftermath

The time comes after a major event in your life when everyone else has gone back to life as usual and you are left alone still trying to put yourself back together. People mean well and they typically truly want the best for you and your life, but they also have their own lives to live. You are then left with a singular burden and it is often too much to bear on your own.

Putting the pieces back together after a major change in the “status quo” of your life is perhaps the most difficult element of the whole struggle of life. Normalcy is never the same as it once was although life must inevitably go on. The world doesn’t stop turning for anything or anyone. Coping with a difficult loss after everyone else has stopped falling all over himself or herself to check up on you is a tough row to hoe.

When the inevitable temptation to pick up a drink, a gram bag, a joint or some pills arises, pick up the phone instead. Go for a jog.  Write down what you are feeling in a journal. Read some literature you find helpful, or go be with sober friends. Do anything healthy and constructive to get outside of yourself without leaning on something that will only make things worse.

It is important primarily to let yourself actually feel your feelings. You cannot work through something by ignoring it or pushing it aside. It must be met head-on and processed through with great care and rigorous honesty. Masking your feelings or emotions only leads to more damage and a longer timeline for processing.

One especially difficult element in the process is resisting the urge to deify a person after they are no longer physically with us. Not one human among us right now is perfect, and while it is easier to remember them through rose-colored glasses you may be doing your emotional recovery a grave disservice by so doing.

It is perfectly acceptable to feel angry, hurt or betrayed, let down or incomplete. What is not acceptable is leaning on an artificial coping mechanism to deal with those feelings. A drink or drug does nothing to help you truly feel better. Anything that offers only a temporary solution will never be able to help you handle a permanent issue. 

When you are feeling weak, remember that there is strength around you if you will only ask.  Often times what you need is only a short chat with your Higher Power away, or even the distance between you and a telephone. Those who love you would never begrudge you a meaningful conversation.

I hope a bit of this helps someone, somewhere as much as it has helped me to compose it. Thank you for letting me share. Peace, love, serenity and joy to you on this Christmas Day, friends.

BIG changes

Life doesn’t get any easier just because you have decided to live it in a more real way. No one is exempt from either the hard times or the great triumphs that so often propelled us through our very worst benders. Difficulty and instability touch everyone’s life, whether teetotaler or dope fiend. The different ways in which the spectrum of personality types may cope with these trials is a clear indication of our spiritual and mental health.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I lost my father in 2002 when I was 21 years old to a mysterious, incurable lung disease. This came barely more than a year after I was delivered from death’s doorstep by my higher power after a horrific car accident. This was also my very favorite thing to drink or use over and the wellspring from which great waves of resentment flowed over my life for years. I’ve been down that path time and again and I pray daily that I made my last trip several years ago.

On Friday December 7^th of 2012 my life changed dramatically for the better and unchangeably for the worse within barely an hour’s time. Had either of these things separately occurred a few years ago it would’ve been enough to send me even deeper into my addiction. Had they both happened together I very seriously doubt I would have survived the night.

I’d been going through the interview process with an exciting young education assistance company called InsideTrack, based in San Francisco with other offices in Portland, Oregon. At the conclusion of the first part of a dinner-and-a-movie date night with my wife I received a follow-up call to discuss the afternoon’s phone interview, which directly preceded a job offer from this amazing pioneer in the education industry. I accepted immediately and was instantly catapulted higher than I had ever before traveled.

A quarter-gram rail of blow had never made me soar like this. No roll or other pill had made me feel this good. All was right in my world after a long and seemingly fruitless job search tested the limits of both my resolve and my faith. I’d been toiling away in miserable bitterness for quite some time. I was often times angry, hurt and violently resentful. I was much quicker to explode than to believe, and it caused considerable turmoil in my personal life.  “This is it! This is the end of the struggle! It’s finally MY time!” echoed in my mind.

An hour later and shortly before the second half of our date night was to commence, I received a phone call from a Lexington, Tennessee phone number. My sister and brother-in-law had lived there for about four years. Surely one of them was calling to congratulate me on my tremendous blessing, I thought, just from someone else’s phone for some reason. I answered with expectant excitement in my voice and eager to gush on about how happy I was. This would not turn out to be the nature of that phone call.

“Your sister was in a car accident tonight, and she passed away. She’s dead.”

Silence.

“What?!?”

My brother-in-law’s voice cracked as he handed the phone off and began to cry. His brother-in-law then got on the phone and basically repeated to me what I had already heard and could not believe. My sister had been killed in a car accident a bit earlier in the night; the death certificate would later reveal the time of her death to be about ten minutes after I concluded the phone conversation wherein I’d gained my dream job.

I was literally as lost and confused as I hope to ever find myself. How could this be real? How could this possibly happen only an hour after being seemingly so high? How could my life be so immediately slammed down to the depths so close in proximity to the time when I was flown directly to the mountaintop?

The next few words are kind of blurry, but what I could make sense of was the request of me that I be the one to go and tell my mother what had become of her only daughter. Hesitation exploded in my mind at the thought of how much pain my disclosure would cause my mother.  After the longest car ride of my existence and with an immeasurably great deal of difficulty, I managed to convey the message to my mother. That was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life, but there could be no other way. It had to be done, and I had to do it.

Now, these circumstances by themselves represent a deadly quagmire for any recovering addict. Either of them could be all the excuse I needed to run from the truth I have come to know for myself and that is that I can never ever have another drink or drug. Period. Combined, they could spell almost certain disaster if I wasn’t carful to take a moment to do some fundamental things that have carried me thus far.

I had to immediately connect with my Higher Power, because without the help that Power provides me I could not deal well with too great of a triumph or a tragedy. I’ve proven time and again incapable of dealing well with either. I also had to reach out to my closest friends and loved ones for help. Many a person finds a moment of great failure after being unwilling to seek help when they desperately need it. Most importantly, I allowed myself to feel what was happening. I lived in the feeling, even if it stung me to my very core. I don’t wish to run from my feelings ever again. This was the focus of my active addiction; I didn’t feel that I could deal with the curveballs life had thrown my way.

Next time we will focus on getting through the aftermath of tragedy, that period of time when all the people have gone back to the normalcy of their lives and aren’t checking on you hourly. This is the most difficult time, because you can feel isolated in your attempts to work through your emotions. If you think this is a lot to read, I must beg your patience as I continue to actually process it.

Rock bottom

People in and out of a program of recovery have heard of the concept of “hitting rock bottom.” Just as with the diagnosis of an addiction, no one is qualified to set the bottom for anyone else. While your observation may lead you to believe that a person is a hopeless addict or that their lives are at their worst, the fact is that your opinion doesn't matter a single bit.

However heartfelt your pleas or from which place of love and caring your point of view happens to come, a person has to accept the truth for themselves or it isn’t their reality. If it isn’t real, it certainly doesn’t have to be confronted. Most often your efforts to convince and addict that he or she has a problem will result in the behaviors becoming immediately worse. We are honestly grown-up petulant children and you are trying to take away our security blanket.

You hear it often and from a very early point in recovery that everyone’s bottom is different. This is an absolute, inarguable fact. The best way it’s ever been defined to me is the place you reach where you aren’t willing to lose anymore. You realize that the addiction has cost you more than it has or will ever give you in return and you are fed up with losing.

You see, an addict is drinking, using or acting out to hide from something. Normal, non-addicted people drink to relax or have fun. We, however, are avoiding having to deal with things that we feel as though we cannot handle. That might include stress, embarrassment, shame, guilt or anger or any number or combination of things that normal people may struggle to deal with, but deal with nonetheless.

Ours is a policy of avoidance. We avoid dealing with even simple problems and wonder why things get so bad as a result. At that terrible point, we pass the blame onto anyone or thing except ourselves. At some critical juncture in the addict’s life all the mess and turmoil becomes more than we can bear, drunk or high or stoned and we break down. We break down to the point of enough being enough, finally.

Once the addict has hit his or her own personal rock bottom, the options narrow and it boils down to deciding to live or deciding to die. You either come to want better for yourself and more from your life or you give up and end it all. Either choice ultimately means a necessary surrender, but the force to which you are surrendering is the thing that makes all the difference.

This time you must surrender your selfishness and self-centeredness, self-will and pride on the altar of the life of your dreams. That life doesn’t appear overnight, but every bit of struggle you must go through is more than worth that promise’s ultimate fulfillment. 

The blame game

I have heard in rooms of recovery the tendency to blame the disease of addiction, family members, supervisors, ex-whatevers, or even the government for bad personal decision-making or poor behaviors. This indicates an unwillingness to either admit to or accept responsibility for your wrongdoings. You must accept and embrace your role in the negative parts of your life, even if the part you play is simply a refusal to really deal with them.

The acknowledgement of addiction as a disease isn’t for the purpose of giving you a built in cop-out; it is to help you to understand that your particular method of acting out is but a symptom of a deeper mental and spiritual illness that must be addressed and treated aggressively.

Unflinchingly admitting your mistakes and being willing to be accountable for them is maybe the most difficult and crucial thing that I must strive to do on a regular basis. 12-step work helps you to realize the hand you play in every situation. There are but a few times in life wherein the blame for a negative event lies solely somewhere else. In my active addiction I was an absolute master at convincing myself that everything bad was anyone’s fault but my own and refusing to admit the severity of my mistakes in the rare instances I would actually own them.

No power in existence can force you to open a bottle and drink, or pack a bowl or cut out a line. No one can put a pill down your throat or force you to overeat (real life isn’t like the movie “Seven”). Porn doesn’t magically appear on your computer, nor does gossip force its’ way out of your mouth.

Until a person is willing to be accountable to themselves for the bad choices they have made or continue to make, no real progress can be made. The first step is absolutely to stop the behavior, but that’s just the beginning. Not drinking is not enough. You have to accept and understand that your real problem is you and your warped, twisted way of thinking. This problem must be addressed in order for you to have any real hope at true happiness.

Stop blaming others. Stop making excuses. Stop copping out. Stop doing everything the easy way. There’s no easy way out of this. You got yourself into this, and you must make significant changes to your daily mentality to even begin to get out. You will need to seek and accept help from mentors, friends and your higher power, but you must be ever vigilant over your mentality. You alone are responsible for your thoughts, words and actions and you will be the only one who must account for them.  

A few words of caution

Often, the newly recovering addict is riding on what is referred to as the “pink cloud,” spouting off the kitschy sayings and reciting word-for-word some of the things found in recovery literature. We are excited beyond belief about our new way of life and mistakenly expect that it is something everyone wants to know everything about, and by extension wants to take part in.

You quickly find that the support people may offer you is most often limited to cheering what you are doing and in no way is a cry for your help. In classic cart-before-horse fashion we attempt to evangelize the world before our own recovery has any real foundation, and this most often results in discouraging rejection and sometimes leads to a loss of belief in the recovery process and ultimately relapse.

You have to begin to surround yourself with the type of people who live the kind of lives for which you are striving. Don’t think for a second that you as a recovering addict are in any position to help anyone else with issues or baggage until you have laid down your own baggage and have begun to deal effectively with your own issues (with the help of your Higher Power). You can’t “fix” yourself and you cannot live under the illusion that you can fix anyone else. Keeping your side of the street clean is more than enough to keep you busy.

We must also understand that our sobriety does NOT necessitate anyone else’s, and other people sometimes have a harder time understanding that than the addict him or herself. Each person is different in this regard, but it really doesn’t affect me to occasionally be around people drinking.

Please understand that I don’t wish to make it a weekly thing, but I also won’t seize up at the sight of a beer bottle. I’m not going to relapse because anyone in my immediate vicinity consumes anything. Relapse takes place inside the mind of the addict and then manifests itself by an act, not the other way around. As long as I am doing the things I know to be necessary to my recovery, nothing in my environment should be a threat to it.

Now, sloppy-drunk people typically even annoyed the heck out of me when I was one of them and that certainly has not changed. However, the fact that I’m living a different lifestyle now doesn’t mean I would be upset with my wife for having a margarita night out with her friends. My sobriety necessarily doesn’t depend on anyone else’s, for if it was tied to anything human or humanly-influenced it would be set up to fail thanks to the fact that is human imperfection.

In short, I’m too busy today taking care of my own life and my own family to try and save the world because no amount of success in that endeavor is going to keep me clean and sober. Not taking a drink or drug and connecting with my Higher Power must be the mutual, symbiotic #1s on my daily To Do list every morning.

You ARE worth it.

Self-esteem is unfortunately one of the first things usually and mistakenly sacrificed by an addict who has made up his or her mind to get sober. You see, humility and low self-esteem are NOT the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. You don’t have to be humiliated to become humble, although that is often what it takes. A once-proud addict must humble him- or herself enough to be teachable because the process of recovery is one that involves lifelong learning and constant humble reflection and self-evaluation.

Addicts spend so much of their time beating themselves over the head about past or current wrongdoings that their self-worth is typically not where it needs to be in order to be mentally healthy. This causes us to allow ourselves to be treated poorly because we don’t feel like we deserve anything better, or that it is the penance we must pay for those years of mistreating others.

Often we have such a poor work record that we take and keep jobs that are very detrimental to our mental and spiritual well-being. The same thing goes for romantic relationships.  We unintentionally seek out these Jerry Springer scenarios because we don’t think we deserve better. We often stay in mentally or emotionally unhealthy situations while we mistakenly think we can fix them although we cannot even fix ourselves.

They are both situations where we allow all the bad for the occasional glimpses of the good, of the acceptance we so desperately crave and rarely find because we look in all the wrong places. This is a symptom left over from our active addiction; we subject ourselves to such unhealthy work and interpersonal relationships because we simply don’t know how to find the healthy ones without some help. We've never done it before, and if we somehow have we quickly found a way to screw it up. We are grasping for any shred of a glimmer of a sliver of positive feedback, so we settle for much less than what is acceptable because we think that it is the best we can do.

You must understand that in spite of your past transgressions, you don’t deserve to be treated poorly in your personal or professional life. Never accept less than being treated with the loyalty, love and respect you had better be giving to others. Do the next right thing every time you have the chance, but do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of. You are worth it, and you always have been. It is not just “okay” to be happy. That is simply how it is supposed to be.

You aren't alone

Reaching out for help is a vital and conversely difficult necessity. You cannot recover from addiction alone; if you could, you would have before the insanity of the disease took a complete hold on your life and probably almost cost you everything (or perhaps did). In life, you have to humble yourself enough to know that you will never know everything about anything (especially yourself).

It goes against an addict’s very nature to seek the help of others. We are loners and naturally isolate ourselves, in addition to being egocentrics with self-esteem issues (paradox intended). It isn’t uncommon for an addict (whether active or recovering) to feel completely alone and isolated in a room full of people. We feel like outcasts and certainly play the role, at least in our own minds.

Pride is a huge issue many people battle, but to the addict who has yet to find humility pride is both his or her best friend and our constant undoing. It drives us onward at breakneck pace towards a cliff whose existence we vehemently deny. “That can’t happen to me; maybe everyone else, but not me. I’ve got it all under control. I can stop any time I choose.” For the addict, this is the prime example of false bravado mixed with hubris. Control is an illusion, and the sooner anyone can see past that façade the better.

Oftentimes people talk about an addict hitting “rock bottom” and the fact that everyone’s bottom is different. While this is true, I submit to you that for most of us our bottom directly correlates to the point where our ego is smashed and humility introduces itself. The bottom is when you have simply had enough and are willing to go no lower, to lose no more. Our pride typically has been dashed against the rocks, along with our hopes, dreams and aspirations (at least for the time being). Only when you have laid all of this ego down, lost every bit of it without finding it again are you able to accept the path you must take without any reservations.

Is pride holding you back? Do you need to reach out to someone for help, addiction or not? What are you waiting for? Lay down your pride and your chains together, because they are one in the same.