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What Addicts Know. Christopher Kennedy Lawford
Читать онлайн.Название What Addicts Know
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isbn 9781939529077
Автор произведения Christopher Kennedy Lawford
Жанр Журналы
Издательство Ingram
“You were right!” Nancy later blurted to Patty. “I understand the connection now. I feel it. I see that I react to my feelings by wanting to check out with sleep.”
Once addicts have that first revelatory glimpse of their true self hiding beneath all of the layers of drama and trauma, it’s as if they are coming out of a sleepwalking trance. Consequently, they should keep repeating this mantra: “Don’t go back to sleep! Never go back to sleep!” Without vigilance it’s easy to slip back into an unconscious state. In Nancy’s case, her revelation had a chain reaction that put into place all of the elements necessary for her sustained recovery.
Of course, many people who aren’t addicts also suffering from loneliness, isolation, grief, fear, or whatever else afflicts the human spirit. They lead lives of quiet desperation. Having someone they can be themselves with, someone who they can be honest and self-revealing without fear of judgment with is, in my experience, an essential therapeutic first step to achieving wellness and healing. In this sense we all have the capacity—and, indeed, the duty—to become one another’s sobriety and mental health coach, acting as mirrors reflecting one another’s souls.
Too many people are sleepwalking through life, with no self-awareness. One symptom of our collective narcolepsy may be the periodic violent outbursts of shootings and mayhem that characterize our society. I am convinced that the lessons we take from the collective addiction and recovery experience can also tell us a lot about the mental health origins of gun violence in the United States, especially showing the common link between childhood trauma and its impact on the developing brain.
Addicts can lose just about everything in their lives and still survive, “But people in broader society who experience real hardships don’t have the experience or life skills to cope very well,” said Patty Powers. “The intensity of the fear and grief and financial stress since 9/11 and the Great Recession are all adding up. During the late 1920s and early ’30s at the start of the Great Depression, guys jumped off buildings in response to losing everything in the stock market. They didn’t shoot up their families and groups of strangers. The level of violence and addiction going on today is indicative of the huge pressure of stress from trauma that has built up in all areas of life. Addicts try to cope by getting high because they are afraid of being overwhelmed by their feelings. Getting in touch with our feelings in a healthy way can help us to stop killing ourselves and each other.”
SELF-AWARENESS UNMASKS YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF
Like most people entering recovery from an addiction, I was in a state of confusion for at least the first six months to a year, feeling as if I had been trapped in a hazy bubble that made it difficult to engage in any kind of reality other than brushing my teeth and getting dressed every day. In recovery, the word “mocus” is used to describe that haze. Early recovery is a basic survivalist kind of head space. Although self-awareness can and often does develop over time, “normies” too often think of people in recovery as being stuck in that twilight zone head space.
“By the time I recognized that I had a problem with alcohol, I was very confused about who I was and where I was going,” Dan Duncan, the director of community services for the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in St. Louis, told me, echoing a common refrain. “Self-awareness is integral to recovery because you lose your authentic self in addiction. Alcohol and drugs have a warping effect. Finding your way out is a gradual self-examination process. The joy of recovery for me was the adventure of self-discovery. I really wanted to know who the heck I was. Am I the guy who lied so much when I was drinking, or am I the decent guy buried underneath all of the crap? When I finally found out and rediscovered myself, my mother said to me, ‘I finally have my son back.’” Today, Dan has more than three decades in recovery and works as director of community services in the St. Louis area for the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, dedicating his life to helping others on the recovery path.
Self-awareness is the necessary first step to taking personal responsibility for your life. Self-awareness triggers the process of finding out who you really are so you can deal honestly with yourself and others. Self-awareness is a foundation for 12-Step recovery programs because it’s an acknowledgment that whatever you have been doing hasn’t been working for you.
Not everybody is interested in becoming self-aware, yet I believe that all addicts and alcoholics are seekers looking for answers to life’s questions. Drug and alcohol abuse isn’t just their way of self-medicating; it’s also their attempt to attain some kind of greater consciousness. Unfortunately, using addictive substances to get there leads to a dead end.
Once in recovery, most people begin to explore who they really are, or who they really want to be, in order to solidify and sustain their recovery. You want to get rid of the triggers and the underlying causes and conditions that made you behave the way you did. That can be a thorny challenge for anyone, addict or not. “Most of what we do from childhood on is reacting to what happens to us,” author and magazine journalist David Sheff explained to me. “We develop coping mechanisms and that takes us further away from who we are.”
As you get deeper into recovery, you eventually feel compelled to ask, “What have I been doing with my life? I’ve lived a lie. I’ve lived in reaction my whole life. So who the hell am I?”
These questions are useful for non-addicts as well, of course. They are universal, but they take on a heightened sense of urgency among people dealing with recovery issues.
An important part of the Who Am I self-examination is reassessing the opinions and attitudes that underlay your decisionmaking. In my case, I had to ask myself questions like, What color couch do I like? I know this sounds trivial, but it’s an example of a question that ultimately becomes revealing. People would ask me, “Do you like this couch?” And I would answer, “I don’t know. Do you like it? Because if you like it, maybe I do, too.” I didn’t know enough about myself to even know what color couch I liked.
Developing self-awareness is about realizing something as basic as I don’t even know what color couch I like. Some people might just leave it up to a professional or a friend to tell them what kind of couch they should like. Developing self-awareness is about realizing you don’t even know something as basic about yourself as the colors you prefer.
Self-awareness is about a lot more than just having opinions. Opinions matter because you can latch onto them without necessarily having any visceral connections to them. An opinion is one thing, how you feel about something is entirely different. Addicts live in their heads most of the time. Recovery is about moving from your head to your heart. Self-awareness facilitates that.
If you like a couch because a parent liked it, or you saw it in a movie once, or the person you were dating at the time thought it was a cool couch, then you like that couch for superficial reasons. Recovery involves a deeper investigation into what really makes you tick. Do you like that couch just because you want to be a people pleaser? Once you get closer to your authentic self, you may realize you actually hate that damn couch and you aren’t afraid to say so.
There are many layers to penetrate during recovery, and that’s why it takes so much time. It’s not an easy exploration of “I just want to find out what I really like.” The trajectory of a person’s life often obscures very diabolically who they really are, making self-awareness even more difficult to attain.
I had been so intoxicated and brainwashed by where I came from in life that I accepted a lot of what I wouldn’t dream of accepting today. I came from a place where accomplishment and activity were highly valued, where just sitting around and connecting with someone was not. I came from a family where everything we did had to have a purpose, where there were strong convictions about giving back to society. Later in life, I came to realize much of that family behavior was really about getting recognition. Everybody was more or less out for themselves, as many human beings are, but it was especially magnified in my family.
Is that part of my authentic self? Yes, because that’s where I came from, although I denied that out-for-myself part of my upbringing for many years because it was uncomfortable