Thursday, August 4, 2011

My New Column in Witches & Pagans #23

Those who read this blog may have noticed that by and large I am a rather private person.  I am much more comfortable discussing my ideas than my feelings, and tend to be reticent about the details of my daily life. And so my latest "Rite Behavior" column in Witches and Pagans was a particular challenge for me: it speaks at some length and in uncomfortable detail about my ongoing struggles with substance abuse.

I went public with this for a few reasons.  One is because addiction thrives on shame and secrecy. It entangles its victims - substance abusers and innocent bystanders alike - in a web of lies and half-truths.  It isolates addicts from their friends, their families and ultimately from themselves.  Admitting to yourself and to others that your use is out of control is the first step toward breaking out of that web: until you acknowledge the damage which has been done, you will have little chance of repairing it.

Another is that I believe the current models of substance abuse treatment - more precisely, the almost exclusive use of the 12-Step/Abstinence-based and punitive/law enforcement models - are seriously flawed and based largely on our Puritan distrust of all things pleasurable.  In the name of fighting addiction we throw doctors in prison for prescribing pain medication to suffering patients: thanks largely to drug offenses 55% of African-American men in Chicago - and similarly high percentages in many other American cities - are convicted felons.  I acknowledge that substance abuse is a problem, and that I suffer from that problem: I recognize that we need to do something about it.  But I also see that our current efforts are not working, and that alternate approaches are desperately needed.  By talking about my experience and encouraging others to share theirs I hope we might save some addicts who might otherwise be lost, myself included.

I'm not interested in playing the Redeemed Sinner ala Robert Downey, Jr. and various other celebrity rehab graduates.  But neither am I interested in playing the Entertaining Party Animal ala Charlie Sheen or graduating to Tragic Drug Victim ala Amy Winehouse.  Since that article was written I've done a reasonably good to mediocre job of staying clean: there have been a couple of slip-ups but nothing that spiraled out of control.  And recent events in my personal life (more on that later) have kept me occupied enough to resist the worst temptations. Right now there is enough good stuff going on in my life to help me steer clear of the bad, but I also know how quickly things can change when dealing with addiction.  I hope to come out of this struggle as one comes out of any successful Ordeal: with hard-acquired wisdom and as few scars as possible.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

***hugs*** I'm glad you're getting treatment; in addition to therapy, have you looked into CBT-based treatment programs like SMART? Also, are you familiar with the Stages of Change?

I am not an addict myself, but I have learned in working with long-time addicts in my internship--there's a difference between a lapse and a relapse. A lapse is a single, isolated incident that doesn't necessarily put you back in the precontemplative stage that a relapse might. I feel that there's a lot of pressure in the recovery community to be "perfect", and if you lapse, you "lose" however many days, weeks, months or years of clean time you had before. It's never lost, though, IMO. The experience of clean time is still there.

Wishing you well, and please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Kenaz Filan said...

Lupa: thanks so much for the kind words and the support. They are greatly appreciated.

I can see both good and bad sides to the concept of "clean time." Once I got past a year of sobriety, I found it much easier to avoid alcohol. At the 3.5 year point I was at a difficult place after my then-girlfriend had left me: I was tempted to go into a bar and drown my sorrows but decided it wasn't worth putting the clock back again. (I had been trying to quit for years, but never was able to get a whole year in: this was the first time since I started drinking that I was sober for a multiyear period).
And so I didn't drink then, and hadn't had a drink since that time.

The longer you go without a drink, the more you get into the habit of not drinking. You learn other coping skills and you start associating alcohol not with good times but with the bad old days of binging. Those lessons aren't something you can get when you are constantly hopping on and off the wagon.

That being said, I agree that periodic abstinence is preferable to extended periods of heavy use. It's healthier (unless you're an opiate addict whose tolerance has gone down and you find yourself ODing from a fraction of your old dose) and it's something that can set the groundwork for more long-term sobriety later on.

I have not looked into SMART or Stages of Change but am Googling them as I speak. Thanks again for your support!

Anonymous said...

*nods* I most definitely agree that in some cases the not wanting to break a run of clean time thing can be a great motivator; it's all about the attitude one puts into it.

And I hope the alternatives to Twelve-Step stuff work for you! The program I intern at is based heavily on motivational interviewing and the Stages of Change, and we do a weekly SMART meeting.

magickal_realism said...

My question, that I hope you write about at some point is this: how can a loved on be supportive? I come from the phase of education in the 80s and 90s where drug users were just "badbadbad" and there's no frame of reference for when it's people you KNOW are decent but who have a genuine affliction and who need your support - but without the imposition of control, or even the implication of it.

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