When my sister and I were distressed as children, my father would call us Shoogy Shoogy in his quiet, strong voice. I heard such capacious acknowledgement of our woes and reassurance that we could handle them. My little back bowed in frustration, fists tight with anguish, I would hear Shoogy Shoogy and be unbent. I would straighten, unclench, and fall back with relief into the downy mattress of his acceptance.

I never knew what a Shoogy Shoogy was until I realized as an adult that he was shortening and making even sweeter the endearment “Sugar.”

When we were children, my mother’s term of endearment for us was Little Toad. I don’t know much else to say about that. I could hear affection in her voice, yet the picture of the toad for the letter T in our alphabet book was ugly. I remember one time when I was sick, she must have gotten dressed and gone out because she came into my bedroom as beautiful as a Barbie doll, dressed in a grey winter coat with big buttons, her full lips smiling with bright red lipstick. She handed me colorful folders of paper dolls and sticker books from the dime store.

So here’s how I begin my letter to myself after three years of abstinence from alcohol:

Dear Shoogy Shoogy Little Toad,

Oh my poor dear one, if I knew three years ago – when you first realized you had a problem with alcohol – what I know now, I would have grabbed a down comforter, taken you in my arms, sat you in my lap, wrapped you up in warm softness, and rocked and rocked you.

What a horrible thing to have happened! You’re just going along doing your best, trying to do things right, trying to be good – trying to do good – and then this! Oh my dear I am so so sorry.

I know you want to get up and start trying to do something, anything to make this not so. Just rest a minute. Just stay here a minute and let me hold you a little longer.

Let your head keep resting against my heart and, as our friend Karan would say, let’s think a minute.

This year – 2016 – is the best year in the history of humankind to become aware of addiction to a substance and to get help for it. What you are thinking is wrong with you is simply not true.

You are thinking that your inability to stop drinking is the result of the deep flaw you’ve always suspected was there. You worked so hard to try to create evidence that it wasn’t true – such excellent work you do! But you believe that the truth about the core of you has finally shown itself. Your mother told you that you were “characterologically” flawed and incapable of loving correctly – yes, even using that word when you were such a small child. You got a master’s degree in counseling to help others, yes, but also to try to figure out how to dig deep enough to find and excise that flaw like a brown spot in a peach. And such a bitter irony that you specialized in addictions and here you are with one. You are reprimanding yourself mercilessly. You think you should have known better, worked harder, done better. You are thinking you should have been better.

Honey, honey, it’s okay. I know you’re feeling such deep remorse and shame and guilt. But that’s a result of what you’re thinking. And what you’re thinking isn’t correct.

Yes, when you drank Red Ripple wine in eighth grade, that was your choice. You were under age, you knew it was against your parents’ rules, but you did it anyway. I’m hugging you and laughing at how you became such a self-righteous non-drinker after that. You are so cute.

When you started drinking socially and occasionally in your mid-20s and continued that through your late-40s, you had too much a few times but, eh, no big deal.

The problem was when the kid pushed you in your classroom and you started having bad dreams after that, then the Virginia Tech shootings happened in your home town and you were in lock down with the same class that witnessed that push and your humiliation, then a kid in your classroom threatened to shoot you – well, you didn’t stand a chance. Such a lot happened in such a short time.

It’s a whole brain thing that I can explain to you later, but for now just know that trauma hurt your thinking, your occasional drinking interacted in a new way with that thinking, your thinking got additionally hurt, and alcohol got twisted in and before you knew it, drinking wine felt like hearing Shoogy Shoogy Little Toad.

And then alcohol became an unchoosable thing unto itself.

Here’s some good news. You are one of the many people who has learned to handle hardship with compliance or defiance. While each is an extreme coping strategy and has troubling components, your particular pattern of compliance is dumb luck when it comes to recovery from addiction. Addiction is an all-day, every-day condition that requires all-day, every-day care. The compliant have an easier time than the defiant.

Ah, but with what will I help you comply?

Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get you help – evidence-based, science-based treatment for addiction. At the same time, I’m going to be protecting you. We’re going to run into a whole lot of well-intentioned people with a whole lot of opinions about addiction. Some of those people will end up being just plain mean. I won’t have it. No shaming, no humiliation, no “tough love,” no “breaking you down to build you up,” no “calling you on your shit.” Ridiculous. You don’t deserve it. Those ways are hurtful, not helpful. This is an illness and I’m going to get you genuine, authentic help for it.

That said, addiction is a complex illness with great uncertainty about what helps most people, most of the time, over the long-term. We’re going to have to take charge of this and be our own treatment coordinator – even our own treatment provider sometimes – and do some experimenting.

Get this, though. In conjunction with work done with physicians, counselors, treatment providers, and conscientious, supportive survivors – adding the acceptance of your father, the paradox of your mother, the knowledge that calming words calm you, plus the awareness that doing engaging things helps you feel better – that’s pretty much the formula for what a person can do on his or her own to support early recovery from addiction.

Unfortunately, we didn’t know this three years ago. Sorry beyond words for that three years of hell. Truly.

I know paper dolls and sticker books aren’t your cup of tea at 57 years old. But all that effort you put into attempting to be perfect and excise imperfection? We can shift your wonderful willingness and work ethic into learning who you really are as a human woman, embracing, yes, your flawed self, but with acknowledgement, acceptance, and reassurance. We can learn what you, as an adult woman, find interesting and engaging. It will be fun. I know you are fun-challenged. But, to quote your mother, we can give this a go.

After three years without even a drop of the neurotoxin alcohol further damaging our brain and central nervous system, we’re beginning to heal nicely. (Remember when we were told in high school health class the now-refuted, “Alcohol kills brain cells”? Of our billions of brain cells, we knew we had plenty to spare. But alcohol is a neurotoxin? Like arsenic and cyanide?! Might have been useful to mention.)

The automation of alcohol as go-to is getting clackety.

One of the greatest gifts we’ve received from fellow survivors is this commandment: “Don’t drink.” That’s your job, babe. No matter what. No matter what you feel, no matter what happens. It’s an absolute, unequivocal no.

My job – as your veteran-of-three-years sobriety companion and coach – is to reassure and calm you and to keep learning constantly about addiction and recovery so we give you the most advanced, state-of-the-science treatment we can find.

I will do the best I can. I am human. I will err. I will break your heart, I will break the hearts of those you love, I will sicken, I will tire, I will sometimes not know what do to do and sometimes I will simply do wrong. I wish I could promise I would always be there for you but we still have those nightmare things and I’ve worked diligently but still haven’t found a way to enter like Superwoman and save the day. Not yet, anyway. And I also have those weird dissociation things, you know those spells when I’m present and absent at the same time?

But Shoogy Shoogy Little Toad, I mean well, I try hard, and I care like crazy. I’m hoping, I’m thinking – I’m counting on – good enough most of the time actually being enough to save our day.

And remember just every once in awhile your mother would say, “You’re so funny”? And it wasn’t affection. It was love.

You are funny. And you’re cute.

Here, let me hold you just a little bit longer. Then we’ll keep giving this thing a go.

Love,
Anne

Photo: Selfie taken in shirt created to wear at home watching live coverage of the Unite to Face Addiction rally in Washington, D.C., October 4, 2015

Podcast of “Letter to Myself at Three Years Sober”:

More from Anne Giles’s Podcast Channel

Phoenix Rising (written at just over 2 years sober)
Letter to Myself at Two Years Sober
18 Months Sober and Still Not Happy?
Something I’ve Wanted to Tell You (16 months sober)

After pre-dinner wine, dinner wine, and dishes clean-up wine, I took another glass of wine upstairs to find summer clothes for our November vacation to Florida. I discovered my divine black and turquoise sleeveless dress and darling black, strappy sandals to match and changed into them to show my husband a preview of vacation delights to come. I stepped onto the top stair and toppled head over heels, over and over, hitting the cornered walls of the landing, heaped like a rag doll, head snapping back for the final crack of my trajectory down the stairs.

“Are you okay?” I heard my husband’s anguished voice from the next room.

“Don’t come, don’t come,” I called. I hadn’t moved. I was all pain, terrified of what I had done to myself. I didn’t want him to see me broken and vulnerable, divine dress pulled to my waist, single-sandaled.

When I drink, I fall. Therefore, I should stop drinking.

That would be a logical, rational, reasonable conclusion for anyone to draw, especially a former teacher, new business owner, and bright, well-educated, well-meaning person. In fact, to continue to drink would be illogical, irrational, unreasonable. It would also be heartless. Injuries hurt others, too.

I had bruises, no breaks. I didn’t stop drinking until over a year later. On our Florida vacation, I drank martinis as well as wine. That was not my first fall while drinking, nor would it be my last.

. . . . .

I wasn’t able to have a child, but I adopted a little black cat washed up at the Tampa Humane Society after a hurricane. I loved her with all my child’s and childless woman’s heart. I would lean my face to her face and she would so delicately and tenderly touch her nose to my nose. When I was drinking, she broke my heart when she turned away from the alcohol on my breath, sometimes even bolting from me.

But I didn’t stop drinking. She would die before I stopped.

. . . . .

Since I became abstinent from alcohol three years ago and became a member of the recovery community, people I love have returned to active use of alcohol as well as other drugs.

Beyond the terror of them hurting themselves irreparably – as I almost did, fall after fall – I experienced the devastating feeling of not mattering. I reached out to people I cared about with my whole self, my whole heart, my whole mind, trying to bring them back. I cried piteously in front of them, begged them with prayerful hands, calmly reasoned with them, avidly argued.

Nothing. I got nothing. I was nothing. They continued – some continue – to drink and use. I was a pencil mark on endless white paper, erased.

. . . . .

To stop drinking, I would need to recognize the cause-and-effect relationship between my drinking and my falling, to feel motivated, to make a decision, to initiate action, to follow through, and to not melt into a sobbing heap or fire into a furniture-throwing rage by perceiving Mt. Everest in the path rather than a pebble. According to the latest findings from addictions science research, the abilities I need to stop are the very abilities impaired by  prolonged exposure to alcohol and other drugs.

No wonder 8 in 10 people with alcohol use disorder relapse in the first year, and 40-60 % of people with other drug addictions relapse in the first year. I’ve never seen a beheaded chicken still run, but I’ve heard they do it. That’s what addiction to alcohol feels like to me. No head, all instinct.

“Fig. 4. Model of addiction as a disease of the brain characterized by perturbed interactions among the distributed networks that orchestrate balanced goal directed behaviors. From a behavioral economics perspective, addiction can be construed as the drug-induced consequence of a perturbed balance (in favor of system 1) between the proposed system 1 [visceral] and system 2 [cognitive]-centered processes that enable adaptive (efficient + flexible) decision making and goal-directed behaviors by mounting a proper situation-specific combination of automatic and cognitive responses…The balanced (or lack thereof) output of this distributed network is established, maintained, and expressed by the emergent relationships among the morphological, architectural, connectivity and functional levels of the brain. These are, in turn, determined by the combined pressures and influences exerted by genetic (e.g., affecting temperament, drug metabolism), epigenetic (e.g., drug exposure, parental style), developmental (e.g., fetal, brain, adolescent), and environmental (e.g., economic, social, built) variables.”
– Excerpt from a brilliant, succinct synthesis of the current state of knowledge about addiction, a caption under a figure in a 15-page research paper, 5 pages of which are hundreds of references in tiny print, by N. Volkow, R. D. Baler, Addiction science: uncovering neurobiological complexity, Neuropharmacology, 2014

What we believe we all have – that we are people and people can decide what’s right for them and get it done – isn’t true for people struggling with addiction. It’s altered, broken, even absent.

When I drank and breathed into my cat’s face, and her brain’s executive functioning – unlike mine – was still intact and she instinctively recoiled from a known neurotoxin, my heart ached agonizingly. But my head could not fathom that my hurt heart was a problem, that problems have solutions, that I could or should solve the problem, or that I had the ability to solve problems. I just hurt.

I think of all the little girls and little boys looking up into the eyes of their mothers and fathers who just won’t stop drinking or using and I can barely stand it. My parent looks like a person. People can make choices, can’t they? Then why are they choosing to drink and use and to keep hurting and neglecting me? If I were truly lovable, they would stop. I must be very, very bad. I must not matter at all.

. . . . .

It’s hard not to take persons personally. When “the turn” happened in me, when I shifted from someone who chose to drink to someone who couldn’t not drink, I was beyond any person’s – any being’s – reach. Even my own.

. . . . .

My darling, my darling, I would have done anything for you. The “I” in that sentence is no longer what it was. So much has been shifted, altered and damaged. And so many influences like so many sleeping dragons have been awakened by my use. I can barely hear myself think for their roaring.

I remember sitting on the edge of the examining table in a white paper gown. Dr. Henry Hyatt was in shirt sleeves, just having left his own dying mother’s bedside to attempt to correctly time a once-a-month chance for a fertility treatment for me. At the next office visit, as I sat in another white paper gown, another failed attempt behind me, shoulders bent, I sobbed, “I can’t do it anymore.” I remember him standing in front of me, now motherless in his white coat, with such compassion and regret on his face. “You don’t have to do it anymore,” he said.

My late twenties self worked so hard, months stretching into years, doing everything right, following all of the directions, using the full expanse of my free will and the full strength of my willpower to do everything I possibly could to have a baby. And I could not.

. . . . .

My late fifties self is just back from another trauma episode. The last one before that was four months ago and I thought I had this.

To the best of my ability to understand, I’ve had an above baseline, chronic whine of anxiety my entire life, probably from attachment issues. I’ll describe those simply as always wishing to receive, sometimes receiving, more often anti-receiving for who I was, for what I was doing, for wanting to receive, for not being able to give correctly. That’s as specific as I want to be about that for now.

I think not being able to have a baby shifted my whine to a moan. Soon after my first marriage ended, I would be awakened at night by the bed shaking, wondering what heavy truck had passed to cause tremors in the foundation. Later, when I woke up with Edvard Munch screams, I learned I was the one shaking and took medication and used my free will and willpower to work hard in individual and group therapy. By 2006, I could sleep through the night.

Then, in 2007, a kid in my classroom pushed me, the Virginia Tech shootings happened, then a kid in my classroom threatened to shoot me.

“Exposure to a trauma trigger subsequently results in a solely involuntarily retrieved memory trace (intrusion), that is very hard to verbalize, often fragmented in time, and consisting for the most part of primary sensory information (images, smell, sounds) that is linked to physiological fear symptoms. Due to the lack of autobiographical context, the memory is relived as happening in the present. Thus a failure to properly consolidate and thus emotionally depotentiate potentially traumatic memories may form the neural basis of key PTSD symptoms like unwanted memories, intrusive flashbacks, nightmares, hyperarousal, and dissociation. Reduction of PTSD symptoms is accomplished by successful transfer to pre-existent, cortical memory circuits.”
– Hein van Marle, PTSD as a memory disorder, 2015

I had nightmares again, I could not calm myself (hyperarousal) and I would lose my self (dissociation).

O, wine, blessed wine at 5:00 PM, how you calmed me and brought me back to myself!

I used the full expanse of my free will and the full strength of my willpower to drink less wine, less often. I could not.

“People suffering from addictions are not morally weak; they suffer a disease that has compromised something that the rest of us take for granted: the ability to exert will and follow through with it.”
– Nora D. Volkow, M.D, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), quoted in What We Take for Granted

If I could do it over again, I would do it entirely differently. But I drove myself to a support group meeting and I have been abstinent from alcohol for 3 years.

What happened when I became abstinent? Obvious in hindsight: I had nightmares again, I could not calm myself (hyperarousal) and I would lose my self (dissociation).

I have been using the full expanse of my free will and the full strength of my willpower to engage in all the methods known to treat trauma: medication, individual counseling, dialectical behavior therapy – an aggressive form of cognitive behavior therapy – meditation, exercise and nutrition. I’ve followed research-backed guidance to learn skills to move forward rather than to engage in the increasingly research-backed anti-treatment – desensitization – which can re-traumatize and re-wound while the person retells his or her particular horror.

Having this latest trauma episode just undid me. My last post was published over a month ago. I have had nothing to say.

Today I ask: Are you kidding me?? Is this my life? My best will never, ever be good enough?

That’s a hard one for this American girl – champion of autonomy and self-determination, eldest child of two eldest children, ruggedly individualistic – to take! Born to activist 1960s parents, educated in the can-do 1970s, teaching the philosophy of can-do in the 1980s and 1990s, burned to ash by childlessness and divorce, phoenix-ish by 2006? Come on! Surely it’s my turn for free will and willpower to work!

 “[T]hink of addiction as a disease of multiple networks being disrupted…But these networks that are disrupted by drugs do not belong uniquely to addiction….they contribute to the psychopathology of multiple psychiatric diseases…Shizophrenia, ADHD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, among others. Which of course gives us an explanation about why these individuals with mental illness are more vulnerable to taking drugs. Because the dopamine enhances the effects of drugs, this will temporarily relieve some of the symptoms. The problem is that with repeated administration it will downregulate their function, exacerbating the clinical presentations of the patients.”
– – Nora D. Volkow, M.D, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Addiction: A Disease of Free Will

My iconoclastic mother had a uniquely dialectical way of saying, “Oh, hell,” both rejecting and accepting broken eggshells having fallen into the cake batter or a button missing from a winter coat on the way out the front door to an appointment. She didn’t want the thing to be, but she wasn’t going to get upset about it. I haven’t heard her voice in over four years, but I hear her…

To having to keep doing it, to trauma disorders, to substance use disorders, and to the frailty of free will and willpower, I utter a hearty version of my mother’s, “Oh, hell.” This is a whole lot of broken eggshells, buttons missing, and white paper gowns.

If I relapsed today it would be because my terrorizing, brutalizing inner narrative, red hot like a stove burner, made me reflexively jerk my tender inner self away from even another moment of searing pain from that demonic eye.

Those who’ve had a glass of wine after a long day know warmth spreads down the throat and through the tight shoulders, then into the knotted stomach, easing, easing, easing.

Wine doesn’t ease me. It takes me to a special place just for the two of us and joins with me in oneness. My fragile little inner self is enfolded and encircled and protected in perfect safety. I can’t be hurt when I am drinking.

As I child, I watched on TV as the monks self-immolated in Vietnam. I saw people can be quietly present even when they are on fire. But one has to train against the human reflex to rescue the self from pain.

Three times since I have been abstinent from alcohol, I entered what I am seeing as the moment-before-the-moment of taking a drink. In those seconds before I might have put the wine to my lips, I was unconscious, without thought. I was in a state of complete, acute, overwhelming, excruciating despair, of such helpless, hopeless, inconsolable desolation. And then, without warning, I was shifted to a state of no-self, all-reflex.  Another second and I would have done what instinct, what being human makes me do – rescue myself from pain.

I aspire to being fully present for all of life, and I exercise relentlessly to be fit for life’s pain, especially now I see its potentially ruthless power over me. But I have no holy, sacred, saintly powers. I am plain, earthy Anne. If I’m on fire, I’ll be drinking.

So that’s my job in recovery from addiction. I have to keep myself from getting to that moment-before-the-moment. At the first hint of even a warm ash of discomfort, I’ve got to take action. I need to hold still if I can, run if I have to, even lash myself to the dining room table, anything not to get even one step closer to that kitchen of emotional pain with its hot stove where choice is absent and reflex becomes predictable and inevitable.

Life happens. Pain happens. Three years ago, when I realized I had become addicted to alcohol and began to abstain from it, I wasn’t aware that an inner narrative begins automatically when I feel even the tiniest firing of human distress. “What’s the matter with me that I’m feeling anything whatsoever?! I should be perfectly able to do everything perfectly and handle all situations perfectly without having any needs or wants or emotions at all. I’ve failed! I’m bad, I’m wrong, I should be abandoned by the side of the road, unloved, deservedly dejected! It’s going to happen any moment now! I’ll be banned from all love and all human connection forever! What can I do?! There’s nothing I can do! How could I have let it come to this?!”

Chokes me up to just write that. And this is the tame version, bowdlerized for blogdom. Life happens. Pain happens. Add these sentences that batter me, alarm me, panic me? With my thoughts, I set myself on fire.

It’s not what would happen that would make me drink again. It is what I would tell myself about myself in relation to what happened that would bring me to the point of such suffering that I would have to drink out of mercy for myself.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment
on my life.
– David Ignatow

I believe I haven’t relapsed yet because:

1) I got lucky those three times I separated from my self in that moment-before-the-moment dissociated state because someone or something interrupted me.

2) With the professional help of Dr. H., I became able to a) identify the recurrent dark spells of trauma episodes – when they were happening – that took not just my hand but my face, my very identity, to that terrible burner of self-immolation, and b) learn ways to free myself from the trauma spell, however much the effort left me spent and shaking.

3) With the help of professional counselors, teachers such as Kristen Lenz and Lynn Theodose, and writers such as Matthew McKay et al., I have practiced becoming more quielty present for more of life more of the time.

4) With the help of thousands* I have learned to a) become aware of the earliest, tiniest self-talk that is any way unkind to me, b) pause to catch the thought like a hard ball in a catcher’s mitt, c) examine that captured thought and deliberate upon what to do with it, ranging from beating it with a 2′ x 4′ to holding it to my heart as I did fierce Viva, my second husband’s cat, who cowered and panted during thunderstorms, and d) execute. Do it. Do whatever it takes to wrestle, embrace, release the thought – whatever will quench its flames – so that it doesn’t scorch me.

I no longer let any thought in, not a one, that hurts me. I never let down my guard. I scramble, I scrabble, I scrape, I leap, I push, I square off and wait. Never, ever again.

A woman at The Weight Club asked me wistfully the other day, “So, are you at the gym every day?” I think she wanted to know if fitness were an arbitrary gift from arbitrary gods. I said yeah, pretty much every day, except for the days I swim.

“Oh,” she said with relief. “You work at it.”

Oh, my dear. You have no idea.

I do not intend to relapse today.

*I was unable to stop drinking on my own and am supported in staying stopped by thousands in the recovery community, physicians, psychologists, counselors, personal trainers, nutrition consultants, friends, family, colleagues and random strangers, including the Kroger employee who held me like a child when I began to sob uncontrollably from my inability to find the aisle with the recovery-supporting oatmeal.

Photo credit: Tabitha Brown