the bonds of betrayal

~ O serpent heart with a flowering face
Shakespeare (Romeo & Juliet)

With the drama of addiction, flying and crashing get progressively intertwined. Like the flower and the weed, the highs and lows start coming up together. You can no longer pull up one without the other but you keep trying, beyond your drug's ability to satisfy because it has become wired to pleasure in your brain even if, when you get a hit, now it delivers mostly pain.

This is the bond of betrayal: an insidious and progressive slavery to poisoned love.

What a phenomenal act of will to walk away! I've heard it takes months, or years, or never- it takes death- to finally break the cycle of addiction.

Even when you do walk away, they say the hand that delivers is not your own but the hand of God, a Higher Power, something greater than me, because- free to choose- I am yet powerless over my own desires. I choose only to give them up. And I mean UP.

Only then, in time (and I'm not there yet), will the hiccups of my heart stop threatening life, and my blood once again run clean.

* I have picked the caduceus as symbol for this blog post because, although it is ironically used as a symbol by physicians, it is actually a symbol of Hermes's staff, mediator between the upper and under worlds, having the power to make people fall asleep or wake them up; it was also carried by the messenger Mercury, guide of the dead and protector of merchants, liars and thieves!

running on fire

If you're going through hell, keep going
~Winston Churchill

Walk; don't run
~ common sense

I'm all about identifying triggers.  If I know what sets me off, I can avoid it.  That is half the battle.  Prevention.  Sometimes that is the whole battle, if it stops there.

But many times it doesn't.  I can stumble into situations that set me off like a meteor hitting the atmosphere.  It's like a chemical reaction.  Suddenly, I'm on fire!

That's not a fun place to be.  Loss of self-control.  Very damaging.  Potentially very embarrassing too.

I dare say I'm not alone.  I think it is quite human.

The only antidote I've found is self-awareness.  If you have an addiction, name it.  If you have a weakness, claim it.  If you have done wrong, own it.  Own it.  Own it.  Own it.

Humility.

It's not a one-time deal either.  It's an ongoing practice. (Funny how we have to get small to grow up).  That's tough because we're wired to protect our egos. Running on fire instead of getting to know the enemy within, and putting it out.

But so worth it.

rise up, go deeper

Be anchored in the bay where all men ride
~ Shakespeare

A client sexting multiple partners, sometimes meeting them for casual sex, told me that he felt compelled to get a response, a reaction, some form of recognition or connection, in order to feel relevant, like he was alive.  He never let his ex-girlfriends go for very long because he feared disconnection from them and, ultimately, feared disappearing.

By keeping in touch, periodically waking up the connections to old and new girlfriends, he confessed an immediate sense of gratification but, he said, it left him with a feeling of profound emptiness.

Multiplying the number of (sexual or other) encounters with others, we may have the illusion of being more personally relevant, of existing more tangibly in their eyes and in our own.  But because we do this superficially, along the shallow horizontal axis, we are inevitably left with a deep unmet hunger to be known.  We lack intimacy (from the Latin intimatus: to be made known)

The only way to fill this hunger is by rotating right so to speak, so that we fill up with deeper, more meaningful connections.  Rising up by going deeper.  Anchored in intimacy.

ambivalence and recovery

A lot of people think addiction has to do with choice.  A lot of people think it's a matter of will. That has not been my experience.  I don't find it has anything to do with strength.
~Matthew Perry

I was relieved on the weekend to be at a conference that made room for ambivalence in recovery.  The conference was on eating disorders but what the speaker said could just as easily have applied to addictions. In fact, he used an addiction treatment model to present the stages of preparedness for recovery, and relapse was part of that model.

You see, recovery is not a straight line.  It's not a matter of will and people do not decide to get better.  They may hit a "rock bottom" where they say "enough" and decide to do something about it, and this is surely a defining moment in their lives; but getting better (recovery) progresses in stages over time, often two steps forward one step back, hand-in-hand with... ambivalence.

I know when I quit smoking I was a totally unwilling candidate.  I not only didn't want to quit, I didn't believe I could.  If it hadn't been for the support of my children on day two (!), urging me to keep going, I would have thrown in the towel.  I did not quit for me, like all the books say you're supposed to.  I quit for them.  Only later, much later in fact, when I had got enough distance from the self-defeating patterns of my addiction, did I stay quit for me.

So what does this have to do with ambivalence?

I think that we need something outside of ourselves to hold us to our path, kind of like the cable holding a streetcar to a power line.  I don't mean an external authority or judge forcing us against our wills ("failure is the enemy of success"!), but something stronger than my runaway urges.  And that something stronger, I think, is compassion, the very compassion I am lacking for myself when in the grips of my addiction or other self-defeating behaviour.

There is a scene I love from Nashville where Rayna sings a song to her alcoholic lover on his birthday.  Various other people in the show are struggling with runaway addictions.  Here is the song.  The lyrics are amazing:

love, love me do

Abandon hope, ye who enter here
~Dante, Inferno

The other day an old friend broke down while talking about his alcoholic parents. They'd been dead for several years but the grieving, he said, was bad today.

He had loved them faithfully despite their wretched characters and abusive behaviours, over many years, in fact his whole life.  He never stopped loving them or hoping they would get sober.  He felt compassion for the good people he knew they had been behind the disease consuming them, and he forgave them.

But today he grieved.  Deep, gut-wrenching grief.  He had waited his whole life for his love to be reciprocated.  It never was.  His parents couldn't.  They were under the influence of a substance they loved more than him.

As the loved ones of addicts, we can be patient and wait in love but, if we attach to recovery, or expect our love to be returned one day, we may end up living a life of hope that ends in bitter disappointment.  Better not to hope and just accept things as they are, with a guarded heart, investing more only when our loved ones are available to love us back.

Here is a famous passage from T.S. Eliot's East Coker that says it well:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Eliot's poem points to the light in the darkness of a waiting heart.  Eric Berne would second that, for he claims that, in unrequited love, the person who loves is the lucky one, even if she gets nothing in return.  I'm not sure how lucky she is but, yes, there is certainly a light shining in every loving heart, and warmth and promise in that.  Not so the unloving heart that expires without reciprocating!  Tragic as my friend's loss may be, that his parents' love was unavailable because of their addiction is, by far, worse.

choices

Many of us whose loved ones struggle with an addiction get so caught up in what's going on for them that we forget about ourselves.  We put their needs first, and think and talk obsessively about them, what they may be doing, thinking or feeling...

As our own needs are progressively eclipsed by our loved ones' addiction, we find ourselves riding the emotional roller coaster with them, becoming just as unstable as they are.

Talk about folie à deux!

When we come to therapy, to Alanon-- or to our senses-- we are urged to "get a life!" and take care of ourselves.  We start thinking and talking about ourselves.  We learn to identify and respect our own needs.  We draw some long-overdue boundaries.  We start to recover our sanity.

But here's the thing:

The disease of addiction is so insidious and our involvement with the addict so irresistible that, even when we begin to make new choices, we may still weigh the pros and cons in terms of how it will impact our loved one's addiction!

How many times are the changes we make in recovery really motivated by the desire to influence the addict?  Are we secretly hoping to force him to "hit rock bottom" so he or she will seek help and get fixed?  That is not making choices for ourselves.

Addiction is a sneaky devil.  What a pity it would be, after all our work to extricate ourselves from the insanity of the disease, to let it slip in the back door...

addicted to negative emotions?!

Question:

I remember reading something according to which negative emotions, as a whole, can be addictive, probably on a chemical level.  Apparently many therapists are agreeing and it seems to be the general consensus.  All the new age woo woo stuff aside, is that true? 

Answer:

Thanks for tickling my brain!

Human beings generate all kinds of theories based on correlations instead of explanations!  The "addictive to negative emotions" theory may be one of those theories. 

I think that we can get addicted because of negative emotions but not TO them.  Think about it: how addictive would getting an electrical shock be? Smelling shit?  Getting screamed at?  Or ignored?  We may get addicted to what happens right after the negative emotion, like relief, a rush of warmth, silence, connection, etc...  Endorphins?  This might also explain why some people like to jog :)  As one runner friend of mine put it once: I am addicted to jogging because stopping feels so bloody good!

Negative emotions might get paired with positive ones, but that is another thing.  This might be the case in masochism.  Or it might be the case that someone needs to hurt in order to feel anything at all :( 

addiction and biology

Question:

What do you think, from a professional standpoint, of the suggestion that alcoholism is not a biological proclivity (as it is popularly portrayed) but rather a character flaw? If it were a biological matter, how would anyone be able to stop?

Answer:

What a timely question.  I have quite a few clients struggling with addiction right now (not that we aren't all struggling addicts to some degree).  They have different proclivities (food, gambling, alcohol, work) but they what they all have in common is that they are in search of a fix for hard-to-deal-with feelings and get hooked on what works for them. 

You need two things, as far as I can tell, for an addiction to develop: a problem and a short-term solution that fixes it.  We are all prone to the former (some more prone than others, depending on biology, psychology, up-bringing and, of course, stress).  The solution depends on all of the above, but there is certainly a strong link to biology.  Chemistry regulates our emotions, and vice versa.  Some chemicals even regulate our choice of addiction.  Did you know that people who take L-DOPA, i.e. for Parkinson's, tend to develop gambling addictions?

How is anyone able to stop?  Some stop and it’s no big deal.  Some have to struggle like hell against their “proclivity”. 

I think this too is largely determined by biology.  Some people are born addicted to their mother’s habits.  That is no “character flaw”.  It seems to me that the only way to quit an addiction is to go against the grain of what you want to do on a more impulsive level, for whatever reason you’re doing it, and stop and do something else instead, even if this initially means, as I think it does for many people, doing nothing at all, feeling the urge and letting it pass.

The key, for many, is to have a goal, something that motivates you to look beyond the immediate and short-term fix, sometimes it's a matter of one biological urge dominating another.

Is a successful quit the result of strength of character, timing, luck or biology, divine intervention or allowing the Divine to intervene on our behalf, or a chicken-egg thing?  I would have to say "yes" to all of the above :)

point of no return

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
~ Rumi

I once met a person recovering from a cocaine addiction.  He’d come to a place where he said he just knew he had to stop.  He said that, if he had passed that point, he might never have been able to get his life back. 

I asked him why he thought that was.  Why would it have been so difficult to stop beyond that point?

He said that it was like drinking.  That your system could only absorb so much until you started to puke.  He wasn’t talking about the illegal substance; he was talking about the lies that were poisoning his life.  

He explained how it began with one small lie to his wife, saying he’d lent five hundred bucks to a friend when he’d actually blown it on a fix.  The next time he lied to her, he said, it was easier, and the time after that even easier than the time before.  It got to the point where he knew that his whole life was about to get sucked into a vortex of deceit and that, beyond that point, he’d have lost himself.

Lots of things are like that, I thought.  Lies, yelling, theft, abuse, murder.   Hurting others and losing yourself.  You cross the line once, twice...  But once you pass that point of no return, it’s too hard to take it in and, instead, it starts to take you in.  You either keep the blinders on and keep going.   Or take them off and puke.