Let me paint you a picture. Ben wants help to stop drinking. Despite honest efforts on his part to quit, the urge to use is always too strong. After two weeks or an occasional month of without a drink, Ben gives in a buys just a six-pack of beer. He starts back drinking a six-pack or two a week. Then, he picks up a bottle of liquor to save money, and soon he is buying two or three a week. Frustrated and confused, Ben realizes he is drinking more than he was before he tried to stay dry.
Can you see him?
What about this person?
Christie started popping pills with friends in college. Although her friends quit when careers and family took over, every time Christie has a couple of Margaritas on girls’ night out, she finds herself craving pills. Inevitably, she calls up a friend who can help her out. Within a week, she has blown several hundred dollars and doesn’t remember several conversations or texts she sent bashing her friends and family members for not caring about her. Resolute in the idea that this time is the last time, she deletes the number of her friend who supplies pills, vowing to drink only occasionally. A month later, Christie is calling her drug dealer after just two glasses of wine at a family cookout.
Can you see this picture?
Searching for Help
Anyone can see that Ben and Christie have a substance abuse issue. Both Ben and Christie know they have a substance abuse issues. Both desperately want someone, anyone, to rescue them, but neither know how to ask. They will continue the battle of trying to control their addictions until something forces change or they die.
One morning, one of Ben’s co-workers stop by his apartment to check on Ben. Ben has missed two days of work and the coworker is truly concerned. Ben answers the door wearing shorts and no shirt. He hasn’t bathed and reeks of booze. Empty bottles are in view all around his apartment. The coworker, who is in recovery, offers to help get Ben into a treatment center. He even offers to drive him today.
Christie goes to visit her parents for Thursday-night dinner, a weekly ritual. She notices an extra car or two in the driveway when she pulls up. She wonders who was invited over for dinner. She pops an extra pill before getting out of the car, just in case she hates these people. She walks into the living room and there is no scent of her mom’s cooking wafting in the air. Instead, there are stern looks on her parents’ faces and several of her drinking buddies are sitting in a semi-circle of chairs in the room. Her dad offers a seat to her on the couch and adds the phrase, “We need to talk.”
Ben, despite protesting that he needed to clean up the apartment, and he had to work to pay bills, finally agrees to let his co-worker take him to rehab. Christie, embarrassed by the intervention, tries to storm out of the house; after her friends guide her back to the conversation, she agrees to accept help.
Picture Perfect Ending?
Ben’s coworker and Christie’s family and friends are resolved that they will not take “no” for an answer. Racked with fear, embarrassment that often turns to anger, people like Ben and Christie may flatly refuse help or promise to get help another day knowing they have no plans to follow through. In no case are Ben and Christie happy. An unexpected change rarely leads to happiness.
Still, in rehab, Ben realizes he is an alcoholic. He fully appreciates the coworker who “saved him from his life.” Christie moves in with her parents. After painful withdrawals and more than a few arguments, the worst is over, and she begins to see a better life and even decides to put alcohol away for good, too.
As the 30-day mark approaches, they both feel physically better than they have in a long time. Beaming, they step out of the door into the sunlight of a brand new life without drugs and alcohol. The credits role and the audience feels this person will live happily ever after.
The Real Picture
The problem with this picture is that nothing and I mean nothing, about recovery works this way. The Hollywood-fictionalized, Lifetime-movie-version of addiction and recovery is a complete fantasy. Where we leave Ben and Christie is where the real work of recovery begins, and it will be a struggle, even with support.
The disconnect between what addiction looks like, how we as addicts and alcoholics find a way out, and the true picture of recovery, lead more alcoholics and addicts to struggle a lot longer than they should.
Life is messy. Full Stop.
The reason we love movies and television shows is that everything wraps up into a nice neat package. The good people are rewarded, the bad people face justice, and EVERYONE gets a happy ending. While I have lived in recovery for almost nine years, and I know that is not how any of this works, I still fall into the happily-ever-after-trap.
What I discovered in early recovery is there is one very hard truth. No one is going to, or can, save me from my addiction. I had to put in the work. If I wanted to stay sober, I had to make changes in my life.
A Better Picture of Recovery
Hoping to stay sober while hanging out with the same people from my drinking days, going to the same places, and facing the same stressors can’t work. Removing the chemicals I used, as a crutch to get me through life did not make me walk again. There was no faith healing. No bright light that removed my demons. There was no one to rescue me from my disease. There was simply a daily choice to face fear and move forward or to return to being an active alcoholic.
I still make that choice each day after more than 8 years in recovery. While today it is an easier choice than it was 8 years ago, it is a DAILY choice. Along with that choice comes others that I don’t always like.
I don’t hang out in bars, even ones with big screen TVs that show football games I want to watch. There won’t be a champagne toast on a ship crossing the Arctic Circle. I don’t get to try a wine that is a perfect pairing for a meal I ordered at a fancy restaurant. I don’t get to drink a pint of Guinness in a rustic Irish Pub. I will never get to smoke a blunt with Snoop Dogg or Willie Nelson. At the end of a long day, I crack open a nice glass of sweet tea instead of a beer.
If I want to, I can fixate on the things I don’t get to do. I can wonder what my life would be like, if I could enjoy those little things like EVERYONE else can. I can feel like I am missing out or left behind. Those are perfectly normal feelings. I can wonder how a nice guy like me ended up an alcoholic, and I can sit in my feelings fixated about why I can’t be normal like everyone else. On the other hand, I can get to work.
Handling Feelings
The work that lies ahead for Ben and Christie is the same for all alcoholics and addicts after we get chemical free. We have to accept, completely, that drinking and drugging will no longer be an option in our lives. Then, we have to work to find ways to feel better about it. It is a simple process, but it is not easy and it is continuous.
Each day, to ward off these feelings of being left out or the uneasiness of living life without a mood altering substance, I practice simple rituals. I focus on the things that are good about being in recovery. I never wake up with a hangover, for instance. I never have to worry that my breath smells like alcohol when I talk to someone. I don’t have to fear a DUI when I drive home late at night from visiting with friends. I get to spend time with people and remember conversations.
Another trick is that I talk to someone in recovery. The conversation does not have to be recovery based. We can talk about the approaching college football season or the status of peanut crops. No matter what the conversation, I can hear and feel recovery woven in to the words and phrases. Just like we can spot others in active addiction, spotting others in recovery is just as simple. They are our people and they sound like it. Just the conversations remind me I am not alone.
I also spend time reframing my thoughts. I drop the “never” and “always” from my sentences, especially the ones about myself. For example, “I never get to drink again,” becomes “I can choose not to drink today.” The fact is nothing is a never or an always in almost any case. I remind myself that I can only do the best I can, I can’t be perfect. I don’t get to be happy, ALWAYS. (There’s that word again.) I can give myself a break if I don’t handle a situation well, especially if I get through it without drinking, because I am still learning.
Recovery is Not A Selfie
With lots of daily practice in early recovery, slowly my thought process changed. Instead of being frustrated that I couldn’t drink when something bad happened, it no longer occurred to me that drinking was an option. I no longer felt like something was missing when I had to make an uncomfortable decision. Months and months of small victories in staying sober, made bigger challenges easier to manage. I did not do it alone, though.
The best support I found for muddling through life in recovery comes from hanging out and talking to people who are doing the same thing. I found Alcoholics Anonymous, and I found people who understood where I had been. Simply by talking to other people with the same disease, I began to trust myself to make better decisions. I saw evidence of how staying sober could benefit me. No one I met had a perfect life. The wreckage of alcoholics and addicts tends to show up or follow along for years in recovery. Still, they got out of bed each morning and did the best they could to be better people.
Are there Happy Endings?
If Ben and Christie follow the same path I did, they are guaranteed to have a happy ending or at least not relapse, right? I wish. The thing I have learned is much like life, recovery comes without a single guarantee. Ben and Christie can follow my exact path, and still face a challenge that sends them back to a drug of choice. Life is still life. Bad things happen to good people for no reason.
Much like a person can drive the same path to work every day, obey the speed limit and get to work on time. Then, one day, the person spills coffee on their shirt, has to change, rushes to work and gets pulled over for speeding. The person shows up 20 minutes late. Life happened. A series of small events led to an unhappy ending. How unhappy the ending all rests on what happens next, and what actions this person makes.
Picture one more example. Andrew started drinking and smoking weed at 13. He has been in 10 rehabs in the last 20 years. He has been in jail three times. He has two failed suicide attempts. His parents and siblings won’t speak to him. Andrew works a low-wage job and apartment hops because he can’t afford a place of his own when he is not in jail or rehab. He is really not sure that we wants to or even can get sober. Out of money and fired from his last job, Andrew tries rehab again.
Can you see him?
Who do you think will stay sober Andrew, Ben or Christie?
The simple answer. The ones who want to work for it one day at a time.
