When the clothes dryer broke, I thought, “I deserve bad things happening to me because I am bad.”

When the newly installed air conditioner broke, I thought, “That’s what I get for being too big for my britches and thinking I deserve better than I have.”

When the handyman tightened only half the kitchen sink after replacing the counter top and stopped returning my calls, I thought, “I deserve bad treatment. I’m not worthy of better.”

Ah-ha! I caught those thoughts in the thickly padded catcher’s mitt of my increasingly muscular and acute self-awareness. Those thoughts hurt! They don’t help!

Thinking that I am bad, wrong, inadequate, undeserving – these self-judgmental thoughts are as automatic and unconscious as my blink when a bug beelines for my eye. That bad things happen to me because I am at fault and faulty? My secret shame and pain. That good things might happen only if I work and strain and extend myself? Over-doing seems a logical antidote to under-deserving.

I writhed in agony and sobbed in anguish during most of the first year and half of my abstinence from alcohol after about seven years of increasingly problematic drinking. I beat myself with a baseball bat of self-judgment. What was the matter with me that I couldn’t stop myself from drinking? What was the matter with me that I couldn’t feel better after stopping? I knew the answer: justice was being served to my disgraceful, disgusting self.

I don’t know when and why the turn came – I attended support groups, I was in counseling, I was self-administering every evidence-based addictions treatment I and people helping me could discover – but I began to see that I was getting frighteningly worse, not better. I realized what I was thinking wasn’t helping me.

I had a simple realization. I felt better when I was kind to myself. I felt worse when I scorned myself. When I felt good, I had few thoughts of drinking. When I felt bad, I badly wanted to drink.

The center of my self-administered addictions treatment plan became radical self-kindness.

Why radical? In year 1 of abstinence, I had an 80% chance of relapse. At 2.5 years sober, I still have a 40% chance. Last month when I was driving to the grocery store just to look at the wine, I had a 99% chance. Please, no.

Becoming a practitioner of radical kindness does not result from an act of will. Like abstinence, it takes sustained effort over time with the support of others.

For me, the practice of self-kindness had to be preceded by the practice of self-care followed by the practice of self-calming.

self-care > self-calming > self-kindness

When I began my internship as an addictions counselor in 2005, my supervisor, Cary Hopkins-Eyles, handed me my job description and the first line read, “Self-care first.”  That was a world view shift from my primary mode of operation: other-focus, other-care. 

Deficits in self-care are common with people in recovery from addictions. I was lucky. “Self-care first” kicked in when I became abstinent and I knew I must become my own addictions recovery caregiver.

In the context of administering self-care to myself, I could then begin to understand how self-calming is a part of self-care. If I am flooded with feeling, I can’t think kind thoughts. I can’t think much of any kind of thought – I am all instinct, ready for fight, fight, flee or freeze. I have to calm myself first. Then I can become aware of what I’m thinking. And I can decide if I want to keep thinking that. Or I can choose to think something else.

I can choose to think something kind.

Instead of giving myself a talking to, I now speak with myself. Here’s an example of a radically kind conversation with myself:

“Oh, Anne, I’m aware you’re thinking self-scolding thoughts and feeling distressed! Hang on! You believe the way to be a very good girl – maybe worthy of, if not love, then approval – is to accept the judgment and blame of others and and to judge and blame yourself. That doesn’t feel very good at all, does it? It’s okay to want to feel better, to feel good. You’ve lived 56 years harshly judged. You’ve done your time with that way. Let’s try something different. So, self-care for you right now would begin with self-calming. Deep breaths and shoulder shrugs work for you. Let’s do those. Good. Now, what would be self-kindness for you? How ’bout we talk through that clothes dryer thinking? And then get you on the clothes dryer problem-solving team, okay? Wow, can you make things happen when you see the problem to solve!”

When I open my catcher’s mitt of awareness, those misery-making, unhelpful hard ball thoughts have transformed to dandelion seeds and I blow them, kindly, away.

. . . . .

Photo: I looked in the yard for a dandelion but couldn’t find one so took a picture of a bunch of black raspberries transformed by me eating every last one of the ripe ones.

By some definitions, I have had one relapse.

Addictions treatment in my rural town consists of counseling and support group attendance. I was in counseling. I attended a support group meeting. One could argue I had “entered addictions recovery.” Then I drove home and drank all the wine left in my house. Some might term that a “planned drunk.” It was. Before I started, I inventoried the partial bottles of wine left to see if enough remained to sustain my drinking pattern. Barely, but I worked with it.

The next day, I attended the support group meeting again. And I began the process of learning the 1000 decisions I have to make each day to not take a drink. I haven’t had a relapse, i.e. a drink, in 890 days.

For years, we’ve heard in addictions treatment that “relapse is part of the process.” I’ve seen the “process” at varying distances, from a newspaper obituary to the inside of a vomit bucket. Agony. For everyone.

Just over a week ago, I had, to paraphrase Janeson Keeley, a near relapse experience.

In my opinion – and I consider it a determinedly and agonizingly informed one – whether addiction is a disease or not, a relapse is the presence of illness.

What illness requires is care. A few times in my life, and I know I’m lucky that it’s been only a few, I’ve been overcome by illness and been unable to help myself, blacking out when I attempted to rise. If people who loved me had waited for me to hit bottom – to see the error of my ways and reach out for help – I’d be dead.

A person was standing, then dropped to the ground. I knew the person had diabetes. I knew the person was unlikely to have practiced the self-care and self-management required to maintain her health. Should I have shouted at her, “Hit bottom! That’s the only way you’ll learn to do what you’re supposed to do! Look what you’re putting me through! You should be ashamed of yourself! Change! Now!” At that moment, she had no ability to undo what she had done or not done. She was heading towards coma and death.

If I have a full relapse experience, I’ve become ill.

But here’s the difficulty in caring for me. Once I take the first drink, I will have a soul thirst that must be quenched.

It’s the enraging, inexplicable part of addiction that can demoralize all who have it or try to help those who have it: once the addiction kicks in, it is my allness. I can’t see you. You are no longer dealing with me but with a self overcome by addiction.

In an ideal world, if I take the first drink, and then the inevitable second, you would transport my body – with me, my self, barely conscious – to a relapse facility where I would be given drinks and monitored by medical personnel, all the while coached and counseled to thwart the hostile takeover of addiction vs. my self. I would be helped to get my self back as my 51% majority stockholder.

Since that facility doesn’t exist, if I relapse in my rural town, please, just take me to the hospital. I’m ill. I have health insurance. It’ll be okay. When I’m released, please hire 24-7 home health care workers to stay with me. Deplete my savings. It’s worth it. Arrange as many visits from as many support people as you can. Try to cobble together a recovery facility for me.

Please, for the love of all that’s humane, please don’t reprimand me. You know not what you do.

Relapses usually are the result of accumulation of pain, with the last pain being the catalyst. Scold me and you add to my pain. I have to use my energy to protect myself against you instead of for strengthening my self. I know you have the best of intentions. We are all taught that shame is a motivator. It’s not. Telling me I’m bad and wrong curls me into a despairing heap. I am worthless, helpless and hopeless. Shame is a destroyer. Please, please don’t kick me when I’m down.

When the person with diabetes fell ill, I felt afraid, hurt, angry, betrayed, and hugely inconvenienced. She acknowledged later that she had not done what it takes to, essentially, prevent a diabetic relapse.

It’s human nature to want to hurt back.

But I didn’t dump my upset on her. I cared for her.

If I relapse, please hug me. Then ask me these questions:

• What have been sources of pain that have been accumulating for you over the past few weeks and months?
• We might wish for more or other, but we have two components of addictions treatment in our town: support group attendance and counseling. If you were doing both, what about them wasn’t working for you? If you weren’t doing either or both, what were your reasons? What would need to change for support groups and counseling to work for you?
• What do you need that you don’t have? Let’s see if we can get it.

I think answering these questions would help me feel better. Because to feel better is what I most need if I’ve relapsed. That I struggle to help myself feel better is my core problem, the primary origin of my vulnerability to addiction, and the primary reason for my relapse.

When I’m stable again, when I am running Anne, Inc. again, oh, my, yes, please, I am so open to talking with you about how you felt during my relapse. I want to be close with you. In the presence of your honesty and mine, addiction’s stock drops. Ours rises.

For me, Friday at 5:00 PM is my most vulnerable time to drink. From a long week of 24-7 recovery work, from business work, paperwork, housework and cat care, I am depleted. Last Friday, much life happened and, in my vulnerable state, I was flooded with unremitting anguish. I thought to myself, “I want to talk to my mom.”

I now know that if I ache to talk to my deceased mother whom I loved helplessly and devotedly but with whom I had a troubled relationship, I need to call someone immediately. But I did not do that.

I thought I would just drive to Kroger and look at the wine. Not buy it. Just look at it.

I got in the car.

. . . . .

Since addiction is life-long and life lasts and happens as it does, something will always happen that will trigger the need to drink or drug or do.

In my on-going struggle to understand the relationship between the self and addiction, I think a being begins life at 100% self, however one wants to define “self.” I think once addicted, a being can only max out at 80% self. Addiction will always control the other 20%.

I think in the moment the need to drink or drug or do happens, the self’s power drops to three possible levels: 49% or 50% or 51%.

. . . . .

I work around the clock determinedly, sometimes desperately, to max my self out at 80% against the power of addiction to make me drink again. I can’t truly know this number but I’ll estimate I make probably 1000 decisions each day about what I think and what I do to prevent relapse.

Last Friday the percentage of my being that is self began to drop and headed towards those three possible levels: 49% or 50% or 51%.

If my self had dropped to 49%, I would have bought the wine, sauvignon blanc from New Zealand with a starfish on the green label, and opened it in my car in the parking lot. I would have experienced the mother love of wine.

If my self had dropped to 50%, whether I drank or not would simply be chance. Anne would be lucky or unlucky.

If my self dropped to 51%, I would have enough self, however much the need of addiction screamed to me of its caged longing, to look and walk away.

. . . . .

Addiction robs me of so much of the being I used to be. It robs me of caring about consequences. That I would break my 82 year-old father’s heart if I relapsed – which I did think of, which breaks my heart to say – meant nothing to me. It robs me of memory. I remember very little of my trip to Kroger.

I remember getting a small cart, not a big one. I think I thought to give myself at least some kind of chance and to start at the milk side of the store instead of the wine side. And I saw the sour cream. And thought I would like some potato chips and dip. And then I thought I would like spinach to go in the sour cream. And from the spinach, I turned back to the potato chip aisle. And somewhere near the fish counter I thought to myself that I forgot to look at the wine. And I thought about going back. And I didn’t.

. . . . .

This is so hard for people who don’t have an addiction to understand: drinking would have been an act of mercy. I was suffering beyond bearing. A good, kind, ethical person would have given me a drink. The Good Samaritan, whom I revere, would have given me a drink. I was fighting my own principles and values not to take a drink.

My self dropped to 51%. Looking back, I think if I had been to one less support group meeting, called one less person in recovery, texted once less, read one less piece of recovery literature in print, online, via email, been to one less counseling session, practiced one less moment of self-care – one less workout, one less f*king spinach smoothie, one less nap – I would have had a drink. It was that close. It required 28 months of accumulation of action to protect me against the first drink.

Because once I have the first, I can’t not have the second. That’s what addiction is.

How tragic! How exhausting! No wonder hardly anyone makes it through this!

Image: “Woman Rising” by Jackie Harder

I was so lonely when I adopted my soft, fluffy, little black cat. I had never had a cat and that first night when I got in bed and began my nightly struggle with sleep, I felt a tiny movement, then a tiny weight on my chest. I put my arms around her, then let go quickly, not trusting the miracle of being wanted.

Such a few short years later, she became ill and began to suffer. I put my face in her face when she was on the vet’s table and said I love you I love you I love you because I didn’t want her to have a single moment when she was going down without any possible comfort my love and presence could give her.

I sobbed when I wrote that. I put my cat down almost five years ago. I have never gotten over it.

I have never before written the sentence, “I have never gotten over it,” but it’s true. I’m guessing others might say I took it too hard, I shouldn’t dwell on the past, and I should get on with my life.

You just don’t understand.

Let me try to explain.

When I was driving my mother to one of her radiation treatments about six months before she died, she looked out the window and said, “I was never really a very maternal mother.”

So that’s my mother. I was unable to have a child. I was divorced. And I adopted a cat.

I felt like I had a hole in my heart the shape of a cat-sized puzzle piece. And there she was.

Can you understand a bit better what that cat meant to me? And having to decide to end her life? When I discovered she was ill, I took her to the vet, was told of treatment options that would be miserable for her, found her not sleeping on my chest but watchful on a blanket in her own urine –  which she would have hated if she had been well – and that was it.

Some might argue I ended her life too early. My poor little cat, not getting to be her whole and true self? No.

I’m an alcoholic.

You just don’t understand.

Let me try to explain.

When I gave up alcohol, I killed my solace. Always, always I will live with the emptiness and desolation and finality of never again.

Regardless of why and how I became addicted to alcohol, whether I quit too early or not early enough, whether I’m to blame or not, what it did to me, my mind, my body, my brain, whatever terms or explanations one wants to use for the phenomenon of my unstopped drinking, when I gave up alcohol 28 months ago, I entered a state of perpetual grief.

Whether my mother was maternal or not, I loved her with my whole, however perforated, heart. I would do a deal with the devil just to see her again. I’m not greedy. I just want to see her. And my cat, my darling cat. I wouldn’t want her to see me because I think it would distress her to have glimpse and no more but, oh, to see her beautiful, perfect self again.

I have to do stuff all day, every day not to make a deal with the devil to drink again.

“Just stop,” alcoholics and addicts are told by loved ones, by neighbors, by bosses and co-workers, by society.

Maybe you understand a little bit better what that asks of me, of people like I am.

It’s lonely out here with my holely little heart and you not understanding.