My Involuntary Relapse

I quarantined myself from friends’ homes, restaurants, public festivals, business networking events, anywhere alcohol was seen or served. After nearly 4 years of abstinence from alcohol, I began to realize that I had had drinks with nearly every person I saw and in nearly every place I went in my small town.  My entire world triggered me. I became increasingly relegated to solitary confinement.

Anne having tea at Smithfield PlantationI am a person with alcohol use disorder with the very human need and longing to be with people. A holiday afternoon, alcohol-free party at a place I had rarely frequented seemed safe. The usual descriptive paper tents describing the food were missing, but I enjoyed the luscious main dishes and the conversation with my table companions.  I had carefully saved room for the steaming bread pudding on the back table. In front of the serving dish were two bowls of sauce. I’m right-handed so I ladled on sauce from the right-hand bowl. I sat down, took a small spoonful of pudding and sauce, then took another one. I felt the burn on my tongue and that shimmer in my mouth and that rise of heat into my nasal passages.

After nearly four years of fleeing it, alcohol had caught me.

. . . . .

The trouble with alcohol for me is that once I start, I can’t stop. I can’t stop drinking too much at one sitting, even though I set a personal limit, and I can’t stop drinking day after day, even when I commit to not drinking that day or the next. Drinking a lot of alcohol day after day is hard on the brain and the body but if I wanted to continue doing that, I would support my personal freedom and choice to do so – with one huge exception. If I say or do mean or dangerous things when I’m with you or others while I’m drinking, well, I’ve violated your right to be safe in my company.

Addiction is defined as persistence despite negative consequences. My drinking provided me great pleasure, great relief, and inexpressible benefits, small and large. In old school terms, I neither “abused” alcohol nor, in the new Surgeon General’s lingo, did I “misuse” it. We all know what alcohol’s purpose is and I used it intentionally for just that. But my drinking also resulted in negative consequences for others. Scaring people when I fell down staircases was one negative consequence I have shared publicly. I had to stop.

. . . . .

Nearly instantly, when I felt the alcohol in the bread pudding sauce take over my senses, an image of a lighted Christmas tree came to me, my father seated beside it wearing a shirt, tie and sweater vest and letting me, his little girl, have a sip of his holiday drink. My father smiled in a circle of green and red and blue Christmas tree lights lights. Oh, another taste of bread pudding would mean a bit more time with that treasured memory!

I looked up at the lady across the table from me and said, “This has alcohol in it.” I felt tears come into my eyes. The lady seemed confused, but looked at me kindly.

I stopped eating. I stood up. I walked across the room to the waitress and asked her to please take my plate away from my seat. I told her I couldn’t have alcohol. I filled a coffee cup with decaf. The waitress returned. She said, “Our bad. We usually have labels. The sauce on the right has bourbon. The one on the left doesn’t. So you could have the one on the left.”

I was able to stay a few more minutes, even to taste the plain sauce, very plain if I recall correctly. But shock was passing and panic starting. Once I start, I can’t stop. Was this the beginning of my end?

In the parking lot, four years of experience with what the Surgeon General terms recovery support services, or RSS, kicked in. I knew I needed to call someone with tough, long-term abstinence for help. As well-meaning as the lady across from me was, she had no idea – as I had no idea before I developed it myself  – of the ghastly rip in selfhood made by addiction to a substance. I needed to survive it so I needed to talk to someone who had.

The first person I called didn’t answer. The second person I called didn’t answer. I got in my car and tried to think. But neuroscience tells us what common sense does, too: emotionality and rationality can be inversely proportional. The more upset I get, the less I can think.

I felt bushwacked by the involuntary return of alcohol to my system. I felt tricked into relapse, defeated by my mightiest foe.

And then my phone rang. It was the first person returning my call. I was relieved but not surprised. When people who have what I have call each other, we know it’s urgent. We do our very best to call back.

Apparently, involuntary consumption of alcohol happens often. Alcohol is so pervasive that any food or beverage we didn’t make ourselves is suspect. Alcohol shows up in innocent-looking soft drinks and lemonade, poured into desserts and sauces. We’re advised to just spit it out and keep going.

“You’re all right,” the person said.

As the hours, then days have passed, and I have continued to be abstinent from alcohol, I have felt increasingly exultant. Alcohol has not made me return to it. I am not its captive, its slave, its gimp. I am not alcohol’s helpless, hopeless, powerless victim.

The next night, I attended a gathering at a restaurant. I invited someone who is abstinent to accompany me. Half sat at the bar and half sat at the table. I sat at the table. I may have some control over my use of alcohol, but I am not a fool. My newest RSS pal, the Surgeon General, says most people with alcohol use disorder aren’t in remission until 4 to 5 years of abstinence. With 3 and 11/12 years of abstinence, I accept 1 and 1/12 years more of constant vigilance to go.

While I was seated at the restaurant table, a woman stopped by to chat and stood with her glass of red wine right in my face. Involuntarily, I leaned towards her glass. Bourbon wasn’t my drink. Wine was.

Most of the past four years, I would have been sobbing in anguish as I wrote that. Today, I’m laughing. A near relapse one day, and the next day I’m sniffing someone else’s beverage? What a ridiculous disorder this is.

And then gravity returns. Addiction is despicable to the people who have it and to those who love them. And, for many, deadly.

This southern lady didn’t spit out her bourbon-laced bread pudding this time, but she will next time, albeit behind a napkin. I thought I had all the needed prepositions on the to-not list – don’t be “with,” “by,” or “around” alcohol. I will now watch out for alcohol getting “in” me – against my will, against my wishes.

I have felt bent double, waiting, wearing terror like layers of dark coats, trying to cushion myself from the wicked, arbitrary decision of alcoholism to drop its boot on me again. It dropped. With whatever shreds of self left after everything that’s gone down, I pushed myself out from under it. I stood up.

I feel free in a way I haven’t in nearly 4 years. For me – and my anecdotal experience cannot be generalized to others – a small amount of alcohol, involuntarily consumed, did not result in an involuntary return to active use. The next day, after I leaned into the wine, I felt a novel indifference. The disorder made made me lean in. But I had power over what I did next.

If I were sitting at a restaurant all by myself and the maître d’ sent me a complimentary glass of wine, perhaps chilled cabernet sauvignon, nose-tickling champagne, or merlot just cooler than room temperature, ooh, how I would ache to drink it! Days ago, I might have.

Not today. My little involuntary relapse took the edge off the mystery. Yep, that’s what alcohol tastes like. Yep, if I had more, as the Surgeon General reports on page 2-20, I’d feel that fantastic first “euphoria as well as the sedating, motor impairing, and anxiety reducing effects of alcohol intoxication.” Woo-hoo! Who cares about motorly impairment when I’m feeling this awesome?!

Yep, if I had a little more, I’d want a lot more. For days on end.

Nope, not today.

Today, as the person who has what I have assured me, I am fine.

In fact, I’m feeling the best I’ve felt in nearly four years.

Photo of me taken by a table companion during tea at Smithfield Plantation on 12/5/16, the day before my “relapse.”

A Grown Woman Might Need a Little Red Wagon

anne_2017

How to Care for Yourself After a Shock

If something happened that shocked you, you can help yourself with it.

First, assess whether or not you are currently at risk or may be at risk within the next few minutes. If your situation is unsafe, get yourself to safety as quickly and efficiently as you can.

If you are in a safe enough place for now, hug yourself. Hug yourself hard.

Now. When we’re upset, even for the most legitimate, justifiable reasons, we can’t think. So our job is to “un-upset” ourselves enough to be able to balance feeling and thought so we can use our full powers to discern what would be effective action – or what would be effective inaction – on behalf of ourselves and others.

Using my inner volume control to calm myself

So. Here we go.

  • Acknowledge to yourself that you have had a shock.
  • Pause to become aware of your inner experience of the shock. What are you feeling, what are you thinking, what physical sensations are you having?
  • Imagine a volume control knob representing the intensity of your inner experience, the totality of your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. On the “minimum” to “maximum” scale, note where the knob registers at this moment.
  • Become aware of your breath. Note anything that draws your attention to your breath. Is your breathing rapid or slow? Deep or shallow? Simply notice this.
  • Can you deepen, elongate or slow your breath? Even just a bit? If so, you are engaging in an already-in-place, mind-body hack that can begin the “un-upsetting.”
  • Now become aware of your thoughts. When you become aware of a thought, imagine the volume control knob and observe what happens when you think the thought.
  • If the thought increases the intensity of your inner experience, acknowledge it as a thought to consider later, but for now, for just a few moments, it is not helpful to you as you attempt to shift your inner volume. Disengage your attention from the unhelpful thought and engage your attention with the next thought.
  • Simply note the effect of a thought on your inner volume control. Avoid attaching goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness to thoughts. Simply note their effect on you and disengage attention from the unhelpful ones.
  • Continue to sort your thoughts, based on their impact on your inner volume control.
  • While you’re sorting your thoughts, also monitor your inner volume control.
  • Become intentional about using your mind to bring down the volume on your inner experience. There’s no particular how-to on this. How you do this will be unique to you.
  • Note that thoughts that are self-judging, other-judging, replay what happened, anticipate future trouble, result in a sense of helplessness, or result in a feeling of outrage or alarm tend to increase the volume on one’s inner experience.
  • Appreciate yourself for your fine mind and powerful thinking skills and then shift your attention from these thoughts back to sorting.
  • Note your breath. See if you can inhale on a count that works for you, then exhale on the same count.
  • Continue to sort thoughts and observe your inner volume control.

Become aware of when you experience the presence of your feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations falling within a manageable range. Then note when your inner volume is moving into an unhelpful range, whether too high or too low, and immediately shift your attention back to sorting unhelpful from helpful thoughts. Use your mind, in your own way, to shift your inner volume to a level that feels manageable to you.

The ability to manage your inner volume frees your inner wisdom – a wise, synergistic blend of both your rationality and emotionality – to help you decide what would be effective, helpful and beneficial for you to do in this moment and the next, no matter what has just happened – or what might or might not.

. . . . .

Maia Szalavitz introduced the idea of using the metaphor of a “volume knob” to represent regulating one’s inner experience in Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, published in April, 2016.

I, Actually, Am Not Tormented

. . . . .

Hee!

Thank you, Lynda Barry, for reminding me.

 

Looking Up After Nearly 4 Years of Abstinence from Alcohol

In a moment of vulnerability, just a few years before she died, I said to my mother, “I’ve tried my whole life to please you.”

“No you haven’t,” she replied.

Having alcoholism has felt like having an unpleasable parent.

Last Saturday, I woke up well-rested. I wrote excitedly and with growing confidence that my new discovery of recently published research on the neuroscience of addiction might be the eureka cure for addiction. I mixed and kneaded dough for bread, worked out with my trainer, had a nap, baked bread, bathed with lavender-scented bubble bath, then headed to a church event to which I had been invited by a friend. I arrived early and checked in with the church ladies. The one seated nearest the fellowship hall waved her arm invitingly toward the entrance, smiled warmly at me, and said, “The bar is open!”

Anne's Place, Blacksburg, VA

I don’t have words for how I felt or what I thought. But I shifted quickly to, “I’ve got this. Surely after everything I’ve done and learned, I can be present for the people and enjoy what’s here.”

In not quite an hour, I was nearly running to my car. In spite of the nice event, the nice people, the nice friends who arrived and with whom I talked, in spite of me undergoing nearly every single known addiction treatment, I could do nothing to stop the abject, terrible longing to join in drinking the wine with the nice people.

I can only use one word to describe the feeling I have when alcohol is present: pain. Mental, emotional, physical, existential pain. The pain of feeling stalked, hunted, targeted. The pain of feeling under dire threat. The pain of feeling unprotected.

I have never once not gotten out of bed. But on Sunday, I went back several times. I looked up what it feels like to be tazed. I looked up Achilles heel and kryptonite. I read over and over what happened to Ulysses when he was tied to the mast and heard the sirens’ songs.

I have done everything I can to make longing to drink go away and to make distress and weakness in the presence of alcohol go away.

There is nothing more I can do.

I think, like most uninformed people, I believed fundamentally that addiction resulted from having gone bad or having done bad and that being good and doing good would make it go away. The symptoms of addiction show up as words and actions so it makes sense to target the feelings and thoughts that create those words and actions. I have undertaken complete moral, characterological, psychological, behavioral, educational, social, and relational transformations. I have scrutinized every single aspect of my feeling, thinking, behaving, and relating that is within my power to identify and confront and address. Every wrongness I could find, I have tried to right.

I have abstained from alcohol for 3 years and 10 months.

And, one more time, alcoholism pinned me like an insect to a display board and had its way with me.

I cannot make longing to drink go away. And I cannot make go away the result of that longing: writhing in the bindings of my own intent when I am in the presence of alcohol.

What is this thing that’s got me?

I’ve been asked how addiction is different from mental illnesses like depression or anxiety or from chronic physical illnesses. The difference is there is a one-to-one correspondence between a “flare-up” of this “chronic illness” and 1) harm to myself and others because I lose partial or complete control of my words and actions, 2) contempt from others, and 3) punishment. If I relapse, I will not be brought casseroles. I will be pitied or pilloried. And I may be incarcerated, whether in rehab or jail.

What’s to be done with what can’t be done?

The first thing I need to do is make conscious my unconscious beliefs about addiction. Experts are right, society is wrong. Addiction is a brain disorder. Good feelings, good thoughts, and good behaviors will not make it go away. I have exhausted myself doing things that do not make alcoholism go away.

The second thing to do is accept that I might relapse. Most people with substance use issues get better on their own. They age out, have spontaneous remission, or successfully practice harm reduction, i.e. they use in ways that allow them to function. I don’t currently fall into any of those categories. So the odds are good I will return to use. My entire life is lived as a relapse prevention plan. I need to follow up on creating a relapse response plan.

The third thing to do is accept that bouts like I had on Saturday are going to happen, no matter how well I think I’m doing. Wine happens everywhere in my town. Those bouts don’t happen often. But I need a near-relapse recovery plan for when they do.

I need to continue to play the odds in my favor. None of these treatments or practices directly affects addiction. But a lot of them help me feel good. I’m guessing, but can’t know, that the better I feel, the less likely I am to relapse. I felt great on Saturday and was nearly felled. So it’s not a guarantee. But for myself and for the people I work with, I think it’s the way to go.

I need to continue to try to find people who can help me when I’m around alcohol. I was talking with my counselor about my near-demise on Saturday and an image of a bodyguard came to me. If I could take a bodyguard with me to every drinking event, present solely to protect me from alcohol, I think I would be okay, or okayer. She, of course, wisely coached me to become my own bodyguard. I hear her! But I’m so tired. I so wish I could have a little help! But the help I need is so specific that it’s almost impossible to find. It just seems like everyone I know can’t be around alcohol or wants to drink it, too. I do hope some day to have a partner with whom I can have a “You and me! We’re going in!” team. I think if I felt less alone with all this, I’d be doing better. It’s a tough one, though.

And the most important thing for me to do is to enjoy non-alcoholism moments. For me, most moments of most days are alcoholism-free. Alcohol’s power to destroy moments terrorizes me. I never know when it’s going to hit or how bad it’s going to be. For those who don’t experience addiction this way, I am shaky with gratitude and relief for you. For myself and those who have shared with me having similar feelings, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Ever.

Still. Right here, right now, I’m sipping my last cup of tea from the pot, my plump elder cat is resting on the footstool, and I’m typing away in an office painted pink from ceiling to floor. I’m going to go work out with my trainer, have an egg and cheese on flatbread from Subway, take a nap, go from there. I’m not going to spend any time, at least today, attempting to please the unpleasable parent of figuring out what addiction is and what treats it.

My painter cleans gutters and when I first moved into this house two years ago, he suggested we wait until all the leaves fell before we did the task. We were out in the yard and I started looking on the grass at the first fallen leaves for clues and asked how we would know when that was. He looked at me with surprise and kindness.

“Look up,” he said.