DIY Addictions Recovery: How I’m Going to Do This

September 10, 2016 by

I declared a citizen’s state of emergency about addictions treatment and suggested those with addictions take matters into our own hands and engage in do-it-yourself – DIY addictions recovery. At the end of this post, I will include the disclaimer that this post is for informational purposes only and to seek the care of health care professionals. The irony is that’s the very problem: help for addictions is not available, or not adequately available, for those trying to handle addictions right now. Our needs are urgent. We’ve simply got to roll up our sleeves and do this ourselves.

Time for do-it-yourself addictions recovery

Here’s how I’m writing about do-it-yourself addictions recovery:

  • I’m using this guide I wrote for people who have loved ones with addiction for us, as if we, people with addiction, are our own loved ones.
  • I’m excerpting sections from that guide, elaborating upon them in individual blog posts, and placing them in the category DIY Addictions Recovery on this, my personal blog, annegiles.com.
  • We are doing literature reviews of the research and writing reports on what the current science says about addictions and addictions treatment and posting them on my company’s blog. For example, our most recent report is on the trauma-addiction connection. I am linking from the DIY posts on this blog to those reports, to articles by the learned, and to new research to cite sources for my DIY recommendations.
  • I’ll include anecdotes from my own recovery story if I think they might be useful. I’ll try to differentiate my personal story and my personal opinion from the what the evidence says.
  • I’m sharing these posts on Facebook and Twitter with this hashtag: #DIYaddictionsrecovery.
  • I’ll update this post as the project evolves.
  • I’m keeping a table of contents here.

If I get sucked up by an alien ship (I used to say, “If I get hit by a bus…” but I started to see the winces so have bowdlerized) before I finish this, here are my fundamental do-it-yourself addictions recovery recommendations:

Image: iStock

Last updated 9/11/16

Disclosure and disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the positions of my employers, co-workers, family members or friends.  This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or professional advice. Consult a qualified health care professional for personalized medical and professional advice.

Filed Under: DIY Addictions Recovery

Post-Apocalyptic, Do-It-Yourself Addictions Recovery

September 9, 2016 by

In a surreal, post-apocalyptic scenario where I exist in a wilderness while living in the richest country on the planet, I have a feverish child in my arms. A loudspeaker intones criticisms of the choices I’ve made in my life, about my lack of readiness for change, about my lack of willpower and spiritual connection. The voice gaslights me with hints that I have a perverse need for selfish self-pleasuring. I’m allowed to use the Internet to consult WebMD and learn that, to safely bring the child’s fever down, I need ibuprofen or acetaminophen. I am not allowed to take the child to a doctor or to access the medicine.

How in the world this happened is irrelevant: the child mewls with distress. Because I am human, I have humanity. I cannot let this child suffer. WedMD says do-it-yourselfers use a lukewarm bath. I find I’m near a creek and I’m allowed a fire and a pan. I start warming the icy water.

rocks

After nearly 3.75 years of attempting to recover from addiction to alcohol – of being my own feverish child in my own arms – and of attempting to get and provide help to others in misery, of discovering the wilderness of limited knowledge of addiction and what effectively treats it, and of becoming thunderstruck by limits to access and resources, many of them artificial – such that it takes a 3,000-word document to describe how to even begin to get help with addictions in my locale – I am done.

I am done attempting to organize tame events like this one, this one, and this one, trying to gently bring understanding of addiction to my town. While the conversation continues, the 16,000+ people with alcohol and other drug problems in my locale are tormented needlessly in their homes, on the streets, in the emergency room, in jail. And the many I’ve encountered who truly want to help – family members, medical personnel, pharmacists, police officers – don’t know what to do or are restricted from doing what’s helpful. I’ve done my best to work within the system, to try to build consensus, to be patient. I’ve seen too much needless suffering too often. Enough.

We have not derived a standard of care – a best practices protocol – for treating addiction. Worse, the addictions treatment profession does not agree on what addiction is or what effectively treats it. That means each person requires a one-on-one assessment and gets trial-and-error treatment. This results in gross inefficiencies, under-treatment, maltreatment, and massive, prolonged, tragic heartbreak for the people with addiction and the people who love them.

I declare a citizen’s state of emergency. I see nothing else to do but for people with addictions to take matters into their own hands and engage in do-it-yourself treatment.

Disclosure and disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the positions of my employers, co-workers, family members or friends.  This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for medical or professional advice. Consult a qualified health care professional for personalized medical and professional advice.

The current state of understanding of, and public policy about, addictions keeps us in the Stone Age of addictions treatment. If we’re only going to be allowed rocks and sticks for tools, how shall we best use them?

Here’s how I’ll try to use my skills as a scholar, writer, teacher and counselor to contribute to answering that question:

  • Study what the research says effectively treats addiction and express that in straightforward, brief terms with minimal jargon, prioritizing what seems to help most people, most of the time, most efficiently.
  • Study what the research says defines addiction and try to explain that in simple terms – being excruciatingly careful to not simplify to the point of inaccuracy – to give all willing minds an evidence-based vs. belief-based starting place for seeing new possibilities for all of us.
  • Answer as many phone calls, emails, texts and in-person requests for help and explanation as I can.
  • Try to explain in one-on-one conversations, in small gatherings, or in addresses to larger groups what it is really like to have this condition but to be thwarted at every turn when seeking help.

What I cannot do is lead a cause. Fighting to recover from addiction to alcohol – and having to fight against barricades and stigma and bull-headedness on behalf of myself and others to get help – takes everything I have.

And being an addictions recovery advocate and activist is lonely. I only know one other person in my locale who is publicly “out” about being in recovery from addiction. I don’t fault anyone for choosing silence. Stigma is profoundly real. But if I feel called to march in protest on the Main Street roundabout in my hometown, I’ll likely be the only one there. I’m open to doing it. It’s hard, though.

If you want to help, however privately and secretly, I have one request:

Speak of addictions with knowledge, not belief.

If you can’t cite evidence for what you’re about to say – and, no, your personal opinions and your personal experience do not qualify as evidence – please, I beg of you. Do not say it.

. . . . .

Twenty years from now, when I am 77, not 57, I expect addiction to be a non-topic, or, at maximum, a sub-topic on health and medical sites like WebMD – no advocacy needed, no community events to organize, no Recovery Month to schedule for September, no individual blogs dedicated to the subject. Just a medical problem for which one sees a physician to begin a standard, evidence-based treatment protocol.

In the meantime, while a guide to do-it-yourself addictions recovery should be a book that exists right now, I’m going to have to write it as we go. This is what I’ve got to offer so far:

UPDATE 9/14/16: The table of contents for my series of posts on do-it-yourself addictions recovery is here:

DIY Addictions Recovery

Filed Under: Addictions Treatment, DIY Addictions Recovery

Falling in Love with My Life

August 14, 2016 by

During the 36 hours Maia Szalavitz was in town, between meetings with 6 different community groups, Maia made time to come to my little house and talk with me.

I wrote for The Fix and for my personal blog here, then here, what reading Maia Szalavitz’s Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction meant to me. Her personal story of addiction and recovery, her reporting on the science of addiction, and her call to action to change belief-based practices to evidence-based addictions treatment first stunned, then transformed me. To be able to talk personally with this catalytic woman moved me beyond words!

Anne and Maia in Blacksburg, VA

I first made contact with Maia Szalavitz on May 11 and we first met on August 2. For the weeks in between, I noodled on this: If I could ask Maia one – and only one – question, what would it be? I opened an email and started making my list. I kept refining, agonizing, re-prioritizing. Let me check… Yep, the email I finally sent her when I knew we had time to meet was almost 1800 words long, containing multiple questions with multiple parts.

Recovery from addiction to alcohol has been very, very hard for me. My challenges have been complex and I could not simplify my list further.  But the first question on the list never changed:

I love my thin cat and my thick cat“Can you empathize? Developing addiction to alcohol at 50?! Really?
WTF?! What would *you* do to help yourself?!”

With the brilliant, beautiful-brained Maia Szalavitz, the conversation went extraordinary places. Advice in the form of “you-statements” usually feels like “tough love” to me, i.e. meanness gaslit as love, but I know Maia is a fan of “love love” over “tough love.” So when she answered my question with a you-statement, I was able to hear it with my full brain and my whole heart: “You need to fall in love with your life.”

Given that one of the metaphors Maia uses to explain the science of addiction in an accessible way is “falling in love,” her advice makes perfect sense.

Jeff Proco painting pastel colorsI think Maia’s Unbroken Brain ended in flames my life-constricting belief that I was bad and wrong for having developed alcoholism. I think Maia’s advice to me to fall in love with my life has begun wrapping a warm blanket around my sore little self.

I am a person with intense feelings and high energy. While I treasure practicing self-love, of being present in the moment, of accepting what is, it feels so motionless. I have given my all to not doing the drinking thing. To be assigned something to do is balm to my entire being!

“You need to fall in love with your life.”
– Maia Szalavitz, private conversation, 8/3/16

These are the questions I’m asking myself:

  1. What do I love in my life right now?
  2. What did I used to love in my life that I might be able to bring forward to love again?
  3. What’s in the way of me loving my life?
  4. What might I love about my future life that I can get started on now?

In the 11 days since Maia gave me the advice to fall in love with my life, here are some of the answers I’ve discovered:

  1. In my life right now, I love having a thin cat and a thick one; living upstairs with walls painted in pastel colors; walking over to my dad’s house and being greeted at the door by him in his suit and tie.
  2. What did I used to love? Basketball! We don’t have a women’s league in our town, but I am working on finding women who might like to form one. And I’ll be heading over to the gym to start learning to dribble and shoot with a woman-sized basketball which they didn’t have when I last played in 1977.
  3. What’s in the way? This post-55 thickening at the waist feels like a barrier between me and my enjoyment of my physical existence. I’ve upped my activity and downed my calories to see if I can reduce it. If it won’t budge then, yay, I’ll get more practice with my acceptance skills.
  4. What might I love? I need to re-fall in love with my town. I was raised here, left, and came back in 2006 just in time to get tempest-tost with our entire community on April 16, 2007. Remarkably, This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving Where You Live, by Melody Warnick, was just published. She uses Blacksburg as her case study for how to fall in love with a place! She talks about place attachment, which is related to human attachment – the lack of which results in emotional dysregulation, considered the primordial soup of addiction – which is, of course, related to falling in love. Ahh… Melody, like Maia, cites data. I’ve finished chapter 2 and learned that I need to walk and bike to begin to “date” my town. My bike’s been on a hook in the shed for 2 years. I dusted it off, pumped up the tires, and took a get-reacquainted spin last night.

I’ll keep writing about recovery from addiction. I’ll need to as my story evolves and I want to share what it’s like for others who cannot.  But what if I can write “falling in love with my life” reports, too?! Writing helps me love my life through thick and thin.

So Melody Warnick says there’s a Civil War cemetery in Blacksburg. How could I have lived here since 1968 and not known that?!

You know what I’d love to do right now? Go get on my bike and see if I can find it. So I think I will.

. . . . .

Jeff Proco expertly and matter-of-factly has painted my walls in three different residences a range of colors from metallic silver, to grass green, to pastel pink, to pearl white. His number is 540-357-4880 and here are more photos of his work. Jeff’s in high demand and, sorry, you’ll have to get in line behind him painting my dad’s porch. 🙂

Filed Under: Recovery Story

Why I Seek Group Counseling for Addiction

August 13, 2016 by

So often in my conversations with others, I get upset or the other person gets upset and I don’t know why it’s happening or, in spite of my or the other person’s best intentions, how to address what’s going on well enough to reconnect in a way that feels reassuring and meaningful.

For me, having alcoholism, I have to be really, really careful about feeling upset. If I don’t find a way to ease my distress, I may again raise the glass of wine to my lips to re-experience the greatest source of solace I have ever known.

Not my favorite part of being me at 57, but as they say, it is what it is.

I made huge progress in addressing distress when I was in weekly group therapy in Tampa. I was a member of two therapy groups, first one for women, and then one for both men and women, each for several years.

Group therapy asks each person to bring his or her truest self to the process. Because we met weekly and got to know each other, group members began to recognize in me patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving that I had trouble seeing in myself – and I could do the same for them. Sometimes those patterns would emerge during group itself and the group facilitator helped us navigate interactions in ways that helped us grow in compassion and understanding. We could then use those same ways outside of group.

Group therapy calls forth our truest selves

Before I moved from Tampa back to my hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia in 2006, I made sure to have two appointments set with two professionals: an individual counselor and a personal trainer. When my first marriage ended in 2000, I developed an anxiety-based sleep disorder for which multiple treatments, including individual and group therapy, had been prescribed. In the previous year, I injured my back and had only found extreme exercise able to ease what became chronic pain. At my first individual session, I eagerly asked my counselor if I could join one of her therapy groups. She replied, “We don’t have group therapy in Blacksburg.”

How could that be possible?! Yet, every counselor in private practice I have worked with or met in Blacksburg has told me the same: they’ve tried to form groups but enough people didn’t sign up. The theory is that Blacksburg has been too small of a town. Neighbors didn’t want to do group therapy with neighbors.

Here’s a series of ironies: I finished training as an addictions counselor in Tampa, literally days before I moved back to Blacksburg in 2006. I began to develop addiction to alcohol myself in 2007, have been attempting abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism since 2012, was hired in 2014 by our community agency as a substance use disorder (SUD) counselor and, with colleagues at my agency, provide SUD group therapy, a treatment which I would welcome for myself!

If my situation became urgent, what’s a small town to do but take care of its people? I would be admitted to a therapy group at my agency but how weird would that be to have a co-worker as a counselor?! No weirder than working out at one’s gym with one’s gynecologist. But still.

With 3.5 years in recovery from addiction, I welcome group therapy with others, who, like I am, are semi-stable with regard to substance use but can find other issues troubling them. O, how I long to run by my fellow group members my desire for equanimity but my loss of it in spite of my best efforts!

Given that our town is not exempt from the challenges facing our country, and given, thanks to Facebook, we know each other’s expression of feelings and thoughts in pretty much any kind of setting or situation, surely now is the time when a group for people with substance use disorder would be embraced in Blacksburg!

This was just announced on Friday!

Group therapy for people in recovery from addictions will be offered in Blacksburg, Virginia. Dr. Stephanie Fearer of Associates in Brief Therapy, Inc. will be offering cognitive behavior group therapy for adults with substance use disorders who are in recovery. The group is semi-structured and will include education, discussion, and interaction. The group will meet for 8 weeks on Wednesdays, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM, beginning on August 31, 2016. Members are welcome to bring their lunches if this is their lunch hour. The fee is $300, payable by check or credit card at the first session. Clients pay directly for services and ABT does not bill insurance. To reserve a place in the group, please leave a voice mail message with your name and phone number for Dr. Stephanie Fearer, 540-951-2227 (press 5). She will return your call with further information on how to register for the group.

I can’t believe this is finally happening after 10 years…

I’ve signed up! The group is capped at 6 people!

I’m so looking forward to meeting my fellow group members on August 31!

Image: iStock

Filed Under: Addictions Treatment

What You Can Do to Help Fight Addiction

July 18, 2016 by

“Love, evidence & respect.”
– Maia Szalavitz’s answer via Twitter to the question, “What fights addiction?”

The post has been moved and updated here.

Filed Under: Addictions Treatment
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