The Addicted Selfie

“Know thyself.”
– inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

Who am I now?

This question has plagued me since I first entered recovery from addiction to alcohol 16 months ago. For half a century prior, I taught and shared and lived and loved my belief in the value of the self: self-awareness, autonomy, insights, enlightenment. I thought the self was the center of power by which choices could be made, from the extremes of using Coleridge’s “the best words in the best order” to select a word for a poem, to opting to die so another might live.

No matter what anyone said or did, I had my self for good company. I felt safe with my self and could trust my self.

From 2007 to 2012, I moved, without consciousness, from choosing to drink a glass of wine to being unable to not choose to not drink an entire bottle. As I enter this second year of sobriety and begin to get my mind back (apparently my dopamine receptors might be healed enough for me to experience full joy next year), I have realized that the inability of my self to save me from alcoholism has been the most devastating betrayal of my life. How could the entity I trusted so completely betray me so profoundly and fundamentally? My self must have gotten damaged, burned, maimed, somehow no longer with arms to reach out and save me.

I used to say that I hoped to live a long life, then to lie in my death bed and die awake, aware until the end. I wanted Thoreau’s “live deep.” I want the “whole and genuine meanness” of it. To the end.

What good is a self if it can’t protect you?

Who wants to be in the company of, in life or unto death, a ruined self?

That’s been my thinking.

My poor mind. In addition to healing from the effects of too much alcohol for too long, maintaining the constant vigilance required to not take the first drink that will lead to the many, attending the recovery meetings that attend my sobriety, assisting my aging father, running startups, grieving the end of a marriage, orchestrating the set-up of a new household and maintaining it, and caring for one cat and one kitten, I get to hate my self, too.

Awesome.

I can’t think like this and want to keep getting up in the morning. I can’t think like this and enter or maintain a new love relationship. I can’t think like this and be of any value to other suffering addicts and alcoholics. How can I help others with their suffering if I haven’t figured out how to mitigate my own?

I do what feels like a billion things to help myself, including seeing a counselor, Dr. H. Yesterday, Dr. H. helped me name what’s creating that self-hatred: shame.

Where does shame come from? Some will argue this is too simplistic but feel free to offer a better version in the comments: sometime during infancy, toddlerhood, childhood or adolescence when the self is still forming: 1) a person wasn’t loved “right” and/or 2) what should have happened didn’t, and what shouldn’t have happened did.

What the person learns from 1 and/or 2 is that they are not lovable and they don’t do things right. The very “being” and “doing” of the self is wounded. And we think the wound is our fault.

“…shame becomes inevitably bound up with the process of identity formation which underlies man’s striving for self, for valuing, and for meaning. The experience of shame is a fundamental sense of being defective as a person, accompanied by fear of exposure and self-protective rage. The shame-inducing process involves one significant person breaking the interpersonal bridge with another. Original shame inducement occurs prior to language development; it is precipitated by parental failure to respond appropriately to a child’s needs and by parental anger toward the child. The process of restoring the severed interpersonal bridge enables one to transcend shame and begin to develop a self-affirming identity.”
– excerpt from abstract of The meaning of shame: Toward a self-affirming identity by Gershen Kaufman

When I’m living life, and more life happens, if I can’t be “doing” something to lessen that more pretty immediately, an interior state of “being” begins as distress and becomes shame. I say to myself,”I am bad and wrong and don’t deserve to exist.”

For me, two glasses of wine relieves that unbearable state of shame. Three glasses makes the relief last a little longer. Another glass keeps the relief going just a bit more, but unbearableness begins to return. One more glass helps keep it a little distant still. And so it goes.

The addict’s task in abstinence is to handle a self in an unbearable state. See why I might drink again? See why someone addicted to a substance might use again? We’re just saving our selves from agony.

I told my hairdresser yesterday that I thought my self was damaged by alcoholism. Why was I getting my hair done to attend an event? It would be good hair on a bad self. A teetotaler, she would have thrown up her hands in outrage if she hadn’t held barber shears in them.

“You have a body chemistry that can’t handle social drinking,” she said. “Your body chemistry takes it too far. The choice of whether you drink again or not is yours. You’re still a person. And you have a life to live.”

What is the antidote to shame? For me, I have to tell. I must tell my counselor and my hairdresser and my mentors and friends that something’s bothering me. Shame says I don’t deserve to have any problems, much less to ask for help with them. Asking for help feels like skinning myself. But I must muscle through this terror of vulnerability.

And, today, it seems I need to believe that addiction might have happened to my body, mind, heart and spirit, but that my self might still be intact, might still be whole, might not have betrayed me after all but simply have been overpowered. Maybe it is my self writing this, calling to me – whoever or whatever I am now – to keep my arms outstretched, to keep reaching, to live my one and only little life as beautifully and fully and truthfully as I can.