“How did you do it?”

I have been asked this question increasingly often since my name and phone number were published in the local newspaper and online as a contact for a local community addictions recovery support group. I am thrilled that people I know and don’t know are calling and emailing and asking about addictions recovery. The specific question about how I have remained abstinent from alcohol for three years surprised me. As did my answer, which I wrote about in this post: “I don’t know.”

It is imperative to me that I figure out the answer. For myself, I need to know how to duplicate today what worked yesterday to stay sober. For the sake of others, as an addictions recovery counselor, I need to know how to help people get abstinent, stay abstinent, or practice what’s termed harm reduction.

While individuals are welcome to be fans of particular treatments or methods that worked for them, for large numbers of people, i.e. most of the people most of the time, no consensus exists on what effectively treats addiction. Add the common presence of mental illnesses with addiction and what any of us does with this wicked problem is guesswork, pure and simple. I am a relentless student of addictions research and attempt for my guesses to be as educated as possible.

I can start answering, “How did you do it?” with how I didn’t do it:

I didn’t rest.

I didn’t take a single break from round-the-clock vigilance. I didn’t let up doing the 1000 things I tried each day, day after day, to find something, anything that would keep me from drinking.

How in the world is “Expend energy, all day, every day, on unproven methods with unknown outcomes,”a formula for abstinence? It’s ridiculous.

And it barely worked for me. In spite of my exhaustive efforts, three times in the past three years, I entered that place of no-self – perhaps a dissociative fugue state – known well by people with addictions where there is no choice because no conscious identity exists to make it. That’s why relapse rates are so high.

Addiction is an illness of incomparable cruelty. It costs me what separates me as a human from an animal. Sometimes with warning, sometimes without, I am unable to engage reason over instinct. All three times I was inches away from a drink, I was simply interrupted. While I appreciate my determination, my will power, my can-do, I can’t attribute not drinking to anything admirable about me. I got lucky.

I know behind the question, “How did you do it?” is the question, “How can I do it?” I would ask the same. What in me and about me can I use to help myself get over this?

I have no namby-pamby answer to that. “You can do it if you want it enough.” “You can do it if you choose to.” “If you’re desperate enough, you can do this.” “If sobriety is your top priority, you can make this happen.”

I dunno. None of those rallies me, motivates me, and, more importantly, is causal. None of those beliefs, by itself, makes me not drink.

I have shared elsewhere that I believe I was born electric, that the presence of nicotine, caffeine, cortisol and adrenalin while my nervous system was forming expelled me into the universe pulsing. If a primary requirement for addictions recovery is energy, then of course I would do okay at it. To quote Lady Gaga, I was born this way.

I currently have no conscious awareness of wanting to drink. I also have no conscious awareness that I will never drink again. I don’t want to drink again and I will continue with the 1000 things I do that may or may not be keeping me from drinking. But I can sense no certitude. I am certain I will never choose to train to do an Ironman. I am certain I will never choose to travel to see the Pyramids. My preferences give me a sense of certainty and the power to choose.

Given the odds that at three years sober I have about a 40% chance of relapsing, and given the possibility that there’s the 1001th way that I have missed and I get into such a state of distress that I become a no-self, or given the wrongly right circumstances, i.e. a glass of wine poured right here, right now, while I’m alone – I will drink.

O, alcohol. I wish I had never met you.

In rural Southwest Virginia in December of 2012, the only addictions treatment for the likes of me – someone who had not had addictions-related contact with emergency medical services or the criminal justice system – was shame.

Shame was a fair and just treatment, I thought, for what I believed I had done and allowed to have happen. No matter how hard I tried, I could not stop drinking wine. By December of 2012, I was drinking a bottle of wine a night, hugely past recommended limits of any country.

Near the end of December that year, I vowed surely for the last time never to drink again and found myself, on the third day of attempted abstinence, driving home from Kroger with two bottles of wine in my car, not remembering having bought them. I can pen no metaphor for the terror, anguish and grief I felt. I had lost my very self.

I was in counseling at the time and saw my physician for regular check-ups but no way I was telling them I was an alcoholic. Confess that the time and care they were giving to my mind and body were wasted because the person inside was corrupt and depraved?! What kind of a person can’t stop herself from taking an action that’s a choice? Only the sick-souled. If they knew, they would tell me to never come back.

That’s how shame talks. It tells us we are bad and wrong and deserve to be cut off and cut out.

So, in 2012, I went cold turkey and took myself to a support group.

I think there are, to my knowledge, no addiction recovery memoirs published from the early years of sobriety because a) most writers relapse while they’re writing them, and b) the story is one of woe. If you’ve read my blog or my Kindle book since I acknowledged addiction to alcohol at 16 months abstinent, there’s no plot line but, instead, a flat line of lament.

I have been abstinent 3 years, but I unknowingly opened myself to a world of hurt when I treated addiction – a known medical illness – by simply stopping drinking and turning for treatment to volunteer survivors, no matter how resolute and well-meaning they might be.

Ah, but that was 2012. This is 2016!

If I recognized today that I had a drinking or drugging problem, this is what I would do:

I would make an appointment to see my primary care physician before I stopped.

I would read the 12-page Medication for the Treatment of Alcohol Use Disorder: Pocket Guide (link to .pdf) or SAMHSA’s medication-assisted treatment guides and print out the related copy to take with me to my doctor. Most primary care physicians are jam-packed seeing patients, scramble to keep current, and may not have seen the latest on medication-assisted treatment (MAT). The Pocket Guide, for example, was just released in October, 2015. For some, starting medication before stopping can significantly increase the likelihood of maintaining abstinence.

Before I began Googling – as most of us will do to ease anxiety about health conditions – I would read this article published on 12/31/15. I would discover the flabbergastingly tragic truth that while “2015 may well be remembered as a turning point in our country’s approach to addiction,” there is no consensus on what addiction is, what treats it, and how to measure progress. I will be both horrified and comforted to learn that I don’t know what went wrong with me and how to fix it, and nobody else does either. I will be one of the test subjects in humankind’s eons-old experiments to halt themselves and loved ones from drinking and using. Ah, well.

Given that no one really knows what they’re doing, I’d still read this 76-page booklet, Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment: A Research-Based Guide, (link to .pdf), a 2012 publication from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s one of the most brief, expert, up-to-date, humane overviews of addictions treatment I’ve read. Through exhaustive and exhausting literature reviews to try to help myself and others, I’ve compiled a one-pager on addictions treatment options (.pdf – opens in new tab) that might be of service.

My eyes would pop learning that not only do I, personally, have to shoulder the challenges of treatment, but I will be my primary treatment provider and coordinator as well. It’s too much, but it’s the way it is – even in 2016 – and knowing from the outset is better than finding out when I am vulnerably undergoing treatment.

I would learn that the top treatments considered effective for addiction are medication-assisted treatment, individual counseling, group counseling, and support group attendance.

• In my small town, medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is available. MAT may or may not be a fit and requires consultation with a physician. Because of the shame thing and lack of access, some people buy medications off the street and dose themselves. Dangerous, dangerous.
• In my small town, no counselors specialize in addiction so I would take the recommendation of my physician and ask friends and start calling to see which counselors are open to taking clients with addiction issues. Waiting lists for individual counseling are long in my town. Of those, I’d ask to be put in their queues.
• In my small town, group counseling is available through agencies, but not through private practitioners. It’s the shame thing. Everyone in my small town knows each other and no wants to be known as someone who’s struggling. Group therapy is the piece of my addictions recovery treatment plan that is still missing. I keep seeking and hopefully 2016 will be the year for me that this much-needed help arrives.
• Support groups meet daily in my town. Here’s a list of support groups in the New River Valley, here’s why to attend them, and here are suggestions on how to make 12-step meetings work for you.
• Once I had consulted with my physician and had the rudiments of a harm reduction or abstinence plan, if I could do this all over again, I would have paused a moment, and made a list – not of the people who loved me or cared for me most, although these people may be one and the same – but of the people in my life who are the absolute best strategists, live within a few miles, that I could trust and wanted the best for me. Recovery from addiction is a problem to solve, not a tragedy to grieve or a shame to hide. It is a dire problem, however, and it takes a team. I would start with the top 3 people on the list. I would email them a link to this post with this message: “Would you fucking help me with this fucking thing?!”

That’s what I would do today if today were the day I realized I had a drinking or drug problem. My email message might have different content. But I have cataloged 3 years of misery and just here as year 4 of abstinence begins, I’ve had a turn for the better. And looking back? Oh, my, it so did not have to be that hard. In my personal and professional opinion, I was under-treated, even mal-treated. But given the state of addictions treatment in general? We all did the best we could. Still, I consider my 6 years of drinking and my 3 years of suffering in abstinence a lost decade. I write this in hopes that others have a faster turn for the better. And in the history of addictions recovery, absolutely no better year for that to happen has existed than this one.

Image by Laurel Sindewald

The content of this post 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.