After One Year as an Addictions Counselor

After one year as an addictions counselor, for my own recovery from addiction to alcohol, I’ve learned that if I don’t handle upset, I’m doomed.

That’s the killer of abstinence that I’ve seen. Stress, frustration, anxiety, sadness, hurt, doubt – if they’re not dealt with as they happen, they accumulate like backpacks. The person topples, not from lack of willpower, lack of character, lack of desire, lack of making “good choices,” but from the weight of carrying too much for too long. To keep from feeling crushed by upset, to numb the pain, to escape the too-heavy load, the person drinks or uses.

As an addictions counselor, it’s inhumane for me to shout, “You can resist!” at the person face down in the dirt of distress, miserable beyond bearing, immobilized by heaviness. Why should they resist? What do they get for abstaining? More unrelenting imprisonment in anguish? Who would choose that?!

The work of someone trying to abstain or practice harm reduction is to not let the load of upset get that heavy. Once one’s down, it’s nearly impossible to get back up. It feels like self-mercy to use.

How do I keep from letting upsets pile up? It’s not life that I have to handle, but how I feel when life happens. How do I do that?

What I, and many people who struggle with addictions, feel when life happens is fear. Any life happening, from a broken dryer to a death in the family, feels pretty much the same. Paired with that feeling is the belief that fear threatens safety, even survival, and needs to be fixed. Immediately. Fear necessitates a reaction.

The first reaction is protective. I might react with more feelings such as anger or hurt, or with an action – hit or shout to stop whoever or whatever is perceived to be causing the fear. Then the reactions get more intricate, designed to control others and situations to stop the source of fear.

Fear, reactivity, control. That’s the raw inner experience of people trying not to use.

Add longing. Add longing for love, for connection, for acceptance.

That longing leads us to relationships. Fear, reactivity and control aren’t great tools for building relationships. A sense of confidence in my ability to be authentic, vulnerable and intimate? A sense of personal security, personal power, a desire to give and receive? Nah, I don’t have those. In relationships, I fear judgment, rejection, and abandonment.

Fear, fear, fear.

I was so used to feeling fear that I thought it was normal, even correct. Life is scary! React! I’m being a good girl when I protect!

But I was increasingly miserable, I was behaving miserably, and people in my life felt miserable because of my misery. I sought help.

What I was taught is so simple.

If I can pause to become aware of what I am feeling and thinking, I give myself a chance to make a choice about what I do, or don’t do, next. As someone recovering from addiction, I can assume fear is my primary feeling.

My first choice, then, needs to be to calm myself.

Why and how I calm myself are crucial. Why? I calm myself to keep myself from accumulating upset. That it’s. How? I use my own self as the calming tool – not external sources like substances, or processes (eating, working, gambling, shopping, porn, etc.), or other people or relationships. I become aware I’m feeling upset, I accept that I am upset, and I make a a matter-of-fact, neutral, strategic decision to calm myself.

I do not calm myself because I am bad and wrong for getting upset. I don’t judge myself. I may have every reason to get upset! I’m just going to calm myself first. Then I’ll deal with the reason. Scolding and scorning myself for getting upset upsets me further.

And telling myself to “stay positive” and “be grateful” and “stay in the moment” denies the reality of my experience. The experience may deserve negativity and ingratitude and departure. Again, I calm myself because it’s simply the first order of business for addictions recovery.

Once I calm myself from a flood of feeling – for me, primarily from fear – I rescue my brain from being soaked with emotion so now I can think.

I become aware of what I’m thinking. As dispassionately and objectively as I can, I examine the reality of my thoughts.

What I have discovered about my thoughts when I am upset is they are primarily negative beliefs about myself and about life. In sum, when something in life distresses me, I think, “This has happened because of me. I am ineffectual. That this could even happen at all negates everything I’ve ever believed in, stood for, and done in my life. I am helpless to make myself or anything better. I, therefore, deserve rejection, abandonment and shunning.”

Such battering thoughts! They bring me to my knees!

Who knew that my little pile of genuine, reasonable distress over life events was being heaped upon by my own thoughts?! No wonder distress accumulates so thickly and so quickly that, before I’m conscious of having a choice, I’m on the ground and want to drink.

Sometimes I can un-upset myself all by myself. Sometimes I can’t. What’s a person recovering from addictions to do when calming isn’t happening?! Calming has to happen.

If I find I can’t calm myself, I’ve got to reach out for help. Not for help with directly calming me – that perpetuates my lack of skill with self-calming. I need to reach out to someone who will help me calm myself.

When I began my work as an addictions counselor a year ago, I thought my job was to help people struggling with addiction to have insights. I was using that method myself, trying to figure out what I needed to understand to free myself. Surely I just needed to think harder and longer and addiction would yield to the force of my intent and intellect.

I accept and appreciate my novice counselor self. She was cute! I understand why she thought the way she did. And she wasn’t wrong, exactly. Face pinned to the ground below unremitting upset, I’m incapable of looking within. I’m looking for a way out. If I don’t calm myself and give myself even half a chance to choose differently, I know what feels blissfully like a way out…