Addiction

Addiction. Don’t let me get started but at this moment I can’t stop myself. I’ve been watching someone loved dearly by parents, sometimes more than life itself, gradually over the years get sucked into the vortex of drugs. If you have an addictive personality, suffer enough unaddressed losses in your life and are depressed, you’re gonna latch onto something with huge distracting and pleasurable properties.

STREET CRED

As a recovering alcoholic myself I know all about the mental con job one gives themselves to rationalize more use on a daily basis to justify the habit. Years ago after I first got sober I used to joke about my own vulnerability commenting “I could be addicted to paper clips if it distracted, soothed and quieted the raging torturous thoughts racing through my brain.” Suffice it to say, I know of which I speak! I have “street cred” you might say.

Anyway, watching a loved one slowly-but-surely get sucked down into the same patterns is unbelievably painful. Of course I know they have to “hit bottom” before they’ll stop. But as someone very close, who is precious beyond imagining, for any parent it’s like watching a child play with matches or a razor that you cannot stop; you’re prevented from rescuing them, held back by the knowledge they can only save themselves by admitting what they’re doing.

DENIAL

Sadly, denial has its own addictive properties. It fuels “powerlessness”, and I swear, the hole often just gets deeper. The first step in addiction recovery principles is “I admitted I was powerless over X (insert drug of choice here) and my life had become unmanageable,” and I submit, it is the very hardest one. But with the first whisper of it, even if you don’t entirely believe it initially, it brings the prospect of hope, a shard of greater oxygen fueling life.

IS IT DEPRESSION?

Much has been written about mental health acknowledgement and treatment options fueled and exposed by the Pandemic, an odd and beneficial outcome in America. That’s the macro perspective. The micro is trickier when it’s a person’s individual life. Shedding light on someone’s problem is touchy at best, alienating at worst. The denial and “digging in” process often intensifies. That’s what I did. That’s what we all do, no matter the drug of choice. Bizarrely, one gets “hooked” on the denial and rationalization itself. Turning to a legal “drug” like alcohol, pot or pills to treat one’s depression, becomes the avoidance of choice to mask the deeper unaddressed grief and sense of alienation.

GRIEF

Tears are streaming down my face as I write this, resurrecting personal sorrow and loss from traumatic events in my personal life. I swear, acknowledgment of “going there” releases residual pain even now. And that is a good thing as purging residuals releases more things stubbornly held. Bizarrely, grief can be a gateway to acknowledgement even though grief at its extremes can be destructive when resisted. But here’s the thing: grief when authentically expressed innervates a gateway to liberation.

Sadly, the most dangerous aspect of the addiction spiral has its own addictive properties as you gradually seek the bottom, accelerating towards it to stop it all. Oddly, you’ll do anything to hit that bottom, like driving hideously fast on a country road knowing the danger to life and limb as you accelerate. You rationalize reasons for the use as well as the escalation. But there is something somewhere inside incredibly deep that slowly suggests you really cannot continue this way.

LIBERATION

The lying and massive self-deception (not to mention, the pain) suggests a crash without being entirely conscious of it. For some that results in mortal death. For most, it’s an in-your-face-come-to-Jesus moment that forces self-honesty because you really can’t stand what you’re doing to yourself, let alone the relationships left damaged on the side of the road of those you love.

Since no one can stop a particular loved one’s process from playing out, there comes a time when the only course of action is to exit stage left since a parents’ confrontation has little to no positive impact in the initial owning of the addicted’s denial stage. Yet it is not all dire. We must all take responsibility for our life’s choices and actions. Watching a loved one released to the only powers that can save them initially—themselves—God’s speed to anyone marching to their ultimate salvation.

Bird #1 (excerpt from book manuscript)

Carol. She was a tall woman, possessing a kind of gleam to herself, an energy with twinkly eyes and no small amount of innocence, oddly enough. In a self-possessing sort of way she carried her naïveté on her sleeve at times, right along with her highly intelligent mind in command of American literature.

THE FIRST UNFOLDING

Our friendship began in the early 1970’s. She was my Modern American Lit teacher in college. I was in my early 20s and Carol at the other end of them, yet in a uniquely American turn, we matured into adulthood together. So strange. As things would have it, the magnetic pole of a potential friendship began quickly after an office visit to discuss a book she was teaching in the class.

As friendships go, ours was a meant-to-be sort of thing, quickly obliterating the barriers of student and teacher roles. Our uncanny need for an emotional and psychological connection was profound, eventually driving it to a deep and lifelong friendship—rare indeed in the modern age.

It would take volumes to describe all the nuances of our enduring friendship. Suffice it to say, it was a connection that was wide and deep and one of ongoing discovery. Besides each of our ravenous aptitudes for learning all kinds of things in the world, we each had a substantial hunger for self-learning as well, for making sense of what we were all about that encircled us individually and together.

THE WIDER WORLD

We also foraged and dissected American culture and all of its nuances thereof, particularly political culture. Ours was a time beginning between the Vietnam war, Watergate, the Womens’ movement, black and white culture issues, and to a lesser extent even the drug culture; we processed all of it. When I say processed, I really mean we jawed on and on about it endlessly, picking apart what each category might mean to the society and to our individual participation in it.

But mostly over the years we processed human relationships — friendships, marriages, breakdown of marriages, and of course Iran. We also processed what turned out to be a personal scandal of earthquake proportions in her life — that of learning her father was not her biological father, that discovery coming later in her life.

A TURNING

There are so many times that I think of her, wishing she were here. Processing our lives was our greatest growth-enhancing activity, therapy, and — I’ll be frank — entertainment. We could spend hours crying and laughing about all manner of issues, large and small. I’m not sure I would have made it through the rough patches had we not believed in the others’ power, talent and worth when we didn’t believe in our own. We were a buoy for one another. Until a slow but subtle shift began to occur.

It was decades later, she in the latter years of her forties and I in my late thirties, that two critical confessions occurred born out of an inability to keep the pain of our shared but disparate addictions hidden from one another any longer. While we had both turned our chins off kilter, these confessions turned out to be both a solace and an odd juncture emotionally. Our confessions opened up a chasm that had slowly been developing for years. As luck would have it, our revelations to one another were the very acts that drew us back together.

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