From Active Addiction to Active Recovery

It’s my birthday soon. 5 years clean and serene. Or at least, 5 years clean and sober. I could never have imagined that when I couldn’t go even 5 minutes without drinking towards the end. Good beyond words to be off the treadmill of addiction, the constant obsession, your mental and physical energy directed purely into securing the next drink or the next drug. The gradual isolation as people drift away, seeing your problem.

Waking up at 4am like clockwork every morning (if you're lucky enough to sleep at all after coming round from blacking out), shaking and sweating, heart beat erratic, liver pains, stomach pains, kidney pains, knowing you’re killing yourself and making promises – if I make it through the night, I won’t drink or use tomorrow, I’ll stop tomorrow. The grey arrival of dawn and the inevitable scramble to find a bit of booze, a hidden bottle. The self-loathing and fear as you pour the first drink: the mixture of relief and brief respite followed by despair and hopelessness as the alcohol takes its effect. Sometimes in a moment of strength the night before pouring the drink away, or flushing the drugs down the toilet and thinking: thank God, a fresh start tomorrow. The cursing and disbelief the morning after: the why? What was I thinking?

The passing out, the throwing up, the dizziness, the blackouts where people tell you you didn’t seem drunk at all, seemed absolutely fine. The blackouts when they don’t and you struggle to put together some picture of what actually happened, your only guide the disgust and judgment in the faces of others as they turn away. Prescription drugs are no harder to let go of, the drinks vary and the drugs vary but the results in the end are the same: pain and chaos. That feeling of betrayal, the ultimate betrayal when the thing that helped you to start with, the thing that seemed to be your friend, the only thing you could trust, turns against you, becomes the problem rather than the solution.

I didn’t drink the way I drank, or use the way I used, because I was happy. Neither was I under the illusion that to do so would be without problem. But it helped, to start with. I couldn't foresee quite how problematic it was to become. It pulled me through when life was unbearable, when what was going on around me, what was happening to me, was too much. I always felt pain acutely, and finding something that helped take the edge off that was a real eureka moment. When I lost a parent, it helped. When the violence meted out by my partner and friends overwhelmed me, it helped. Numbed out through the alcohol, with drugs, it became easier to say it doesn’t matter, what they do to me doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to be present for it, didn’t want to remember it. And sometimes I was lucky and I didn’t.

But the solution becomes the problem. The inevitable overdoses, the constant illness, mental and physical. The hallucinations, the paranoia, the black tide of depression. The horrifying realisation that came for me quite close to the end that I actually couldn’t stop. Until then I’d told myself that I just chose not to. Knowing I couldn’t was a different proposition entirely, the stuff of nightmares.

I am incredibly, incredibly fortunate to be in recovery. The obsession to drink and use left me fairly early on, once I’d come off it. I have a programme of recovery which I work and good people around me, because recovery is not something I can do on my own. All the energy I put into my addiction I now put into my recovery, a necessity to stay clean and sober. The ability to talk, to articulate my feelings and emotions, even to identify them, has taken time. To put a narrative to my past. Fucking tough, feeling, re-living, seeing it unclouded by chemicals, processing. But now I have my words back, and I have the right people to help me build a life, rather than just scraping through, surviving. I have a chance. For that and each day sober, I am so grateful. I never want to go back to the hell of active addiction, and I don't have to.

Is it Him or Is it Me?

I've been around a lot of anger of late. A lot. It's a tricky one. A very large part of me holds myself responsible when people treat me badly. I know somewhere, on some logical level, that that's not true, that when people act badly or abusively towards me, that's their stuff, their responsibility. But I don't feel it. I know it but I don't feel it.

Problem is, what's going on now gets confused by all the past shit it triggers off for me. My PTSD's in overdrive at the moment. Having been with someone who used to beat the shit out of me, and sold me to other men, and encountering more violence as I did when I prostituted myself, I find that anger - shouting, stony silences, aggressive body language, even sarcasm - all trigger that stuff off. I rapidly detach, or get faint and sick. It becomes unclear to me whether the raised voice I'm hearing belongs to the person in front of me, my ex or myself (yeah, I found in the end that his voice became my voice. Bastard.)

I went to IDAS (Independent Domestic Abuse Services) for a while since getting sober, and they really drummed it into me that no matter what, you can't make someone hit you. They are in control of their own fist. I know from my own experience of when I get really angry that I could be violent if I wanted: I just choose not to be. I passionately argue against those who tell victims of domestic violence, of rape, it was their fault. When I think about anyone else on the receiving end of such violence, I can see that idea for what it is: BS.

Yet when it comes to me, I'm uncertain. I guess it goes to show how much I internalised what my abusers told me: that I deserved it, I made it happen, that I should count myself lucky they were so generous towards me (some generosity, huh). Yet in with all the self loathing and the self destruction and the self harming, it stuck. It stuck in my head that I am the problem. I am a big fat fucking problem. I attract trouble, I cause trouble, I make bad decisions, boy do I make some bad fucking decisions. I give out the wrong signals and I make people hit me. I do it to myself.

The judgment I encountered from professionals in the course of the violence has stuck too. My fault! I should just leave him. I don't count anyway, I'm just a drunk. After another talk with the policewoman, I remember saying do you really think I want to go and stand in court and be ripped to shreds by his counsel because with my substance abuse issues, my mental health history and with the way our system deals with victims of rape and domestic violence, I don't stand a hope in hell out there. Even if he went down, at what cost? My shame and my weakness hung out for everyone to see and judge. They would've destroyed me.

And I remember the policewoman saying, what if he does it to someone else? And thinking there's no point even trying to respond to that crap. If he does it to someone else, that'll be his fault, not mine. I'm not some kind of co-abuser, jointly responsible for him somehow. Fuck, I can't stop what he does to me let alone try and step in to save someone else.

I thought then, as I think now, what a broken system. And what a damaging misperception. Yet here I am, four and a half years sober, and trying to work on self care, on not hating myself, trying to put my shattered person back together, and I find a voice in my head telling me that if this person here and now in 2011 abuses me, its my fault! A large part of me still despises myself, still blames myself. Slow progress. My different fragments, the fallout from splitting, detaching through trauma, tell me different things. The voice that happens to be there, the person I happen to be when the triggers occur, dictate my response. My fault - not my fault. He's the dick - I'm the dick. His stuff - my stuff. I deserve to be loved - I deserve to be hurt.

I'm not sleeping which never helps. I feel trapped in the past. And confused, so confused with the jumble of thoughts, with the fragments. Still, I remain clean and sober, so I guess that's progress. The mind / body shit's taking a little longer to shift.