Follow
Donate
  • MIRACLE MORNING BOOK
  • OPEN LETTER
  • RESOURCES
  • STORIES & VIDEOS
  • DONATE
  • STAY CONNECTED
Overcome Addiction

Facing Fear Sober

October 22, 2017Anna DavidStories

I used to hoover cocaine and drown myself in alcohol. Plus, I was so ruled by terror I couldn’t even admit I was scared. Sobriety has changed most of that.

The reason I got sober isn’t that I thought sobriety sounded like a great idea. It was actually something I thought that only a complete loser would embrace. It was the act, I was certain, of a person with absolutely no other options.

RehabThe problem was that I was that person with no other options. And I was so depressed by my cocaine-cigarette-vodka-Ambien diet—and the cycle of trying to quit it and not being able to—that I figured anything, even sobriety, had to be better. So one morning I called my mom and told her that I was a coke addict and that I was in serious trouble. I don’t know what was different about that morning. Maybe nothing was different but I just had a moment where I wasn’t able to talk myself into continuing on the path I was on. My mom knew that something was wrong with me but something had been wrong with me for a long time. Still, the previous year, when we’d been on vacation, she happened to see how many Ambien I shook from the pill bottle into my open palm and so she tried to talk to me—in that terrified Mom voice—about what I was doing. I’d told her to stop overreacting and changed the subject.

Now, my mom is one of those mothers who would love to get both of her children back into her womb, if possible. But barring that, she’ll settle for living back in the house we grew up in. Barring that, she’ll take living in Northern California. I was living in LA. So that morning I called her, she said, “LA’s been terrible for you. Go get in your car and drive home.”

I rarely think the sentence, “I’m scared” because I internalized long ago that only weak people thought like that.

I drove there, completely despondent. If there was anything that sounded more depressing than being sober in LA, it was being sober in my hometown. But like I said, I didn’t have any options. I ended up talking to my parents and my step-dad and a therapist about what I’d been doing—telling them the whole story and not just the edited version I’d been giving them for years. I admitted that I spent entire weeks doing cocaine alone, that I didn’t have any friends anymore, that I sometimes took so much Ambien after getting wired that I worried one morning I just wouldn’t wake up. They were rightfully alarmed and agreed to help pay for rehab. Somehow I talked them into helping to pay for a rehab in LA and not in Northern California. And somehow I talked that rehab, an inpatient program, into letting me do outpatient since I didn’t want to have to quit the job I was barely hanging onto.

But this rehab, and sobriety, turned out to be nothing like I expected. The people there weren’t shuffling around in grey sweaters, lamenting their lives. They were vibrant and hilarious and very much engaged in life in a way that none of the drug addicts I’d been around had been. And they were talking about things I not only related to but had long felt and never said out loud because I’d assumed no one would understand. They talked about their negative thinking—about how they’d wake up and think life was so dismal that they couldn’t do anything but try to escape their thoughts through drugs. They talked about desperately trying to quit—about wanting to stop with everything in them—and not being able to, that decision to pick up again happening so quickly that they never even realized it was a decision. And they talked about ways of improving how they felt that had never occurred to me: about how trying to help other people gave them relief, about how it was their chronic self obsession that kept them feeling so bad. They talked about how even though they thought obsessively about themselves, they also never felt like they were enough; I learned the expression that had summarized the previous three decades of my life: “I’m the piece of crap in the center of the universe.”

If they’d been sober a while, they talked about finding happiness—and not through getting “cash and prizes,” like the job or relationship they wanted, which is what I’d always called happiness. They talked instead about not needing to get the job or relationship they wanted in order to feel good. And my ears really perked up when they talked about resentments; I had a long list of people that had wronged me and I was always eager to extract vengeance somehow. But again they said surprising things: they talked about how it was in seeing the large part they’d played in their problems with other people that they were able to forgive those other people. I did what they suggested and, really quickly, realized the strangest thing of all: I didn’t want to drink anymore. I didn’t even want to do cocaine. By just doing what these people suggested I do—which happened to radically alter my perception of every aspect of my life—it was like the part of me that craved alcohol and drugs, that had to leave town in order to escape the lure of cocaine and even then scrounged up coke wherever I was, had been removed in the same way that my tonsils had. And it was a good thing, too, because I had essentially been sleepwalking through my life—walking and talking but emotionally and spiritually and intellectually frozen in time—so I had a lot of catching up to do. Finally I could actually figure out how to live.

The first element to learning how to live, I quickly learned, was facing my fears.

As far as I understand things now, I’ve struggled with three main fears my whole life—the fear that I’m stupid, the fear that I’m doing everything wrong and the fear that I’ll lose everything I have and fail to get everything I want. But I didn’t always know that.

When I first got sober, I was told by people who’d been sober longer that I lived with “a hundred forms of fear.” I was told that fear ruled my every thought, feeling and action. I thought these people were a little dramatic; sure, I felt scared sometimes but not all that much. In many ways, I protested, I was fearless.

This was before I realized that I had a voice ruling everything I did and told me terrible things. I’m not crazy, I don’t hear voices, I just heard one and its running commentary was a brutal combination of every negative thing anyone had ever said to me my whole life. It would tell me that I was stupid, that I was doing everything wrong, that everyone who mattered to me would leave me and that I didn’t deserve what I had. It was only when I’d been sober at least five years that I even realized I was ruled by this voice—that I’d actually taken my fears and, too fearful to admit that I was scared, turned them against me. Rather than comforting myself through what scared me, I was taunting myself with these fears as if they were real and therefore not even giving myself a fighting chance.

So I started to think about the things I told myself and then present myself with this scenario: if I had a small, precious child I was caring for, would I tell her that she was an idiot and that no one would ever love her? Of course not! And if I wouldn’t do that to a fictional child, why would I do it to myself? I began to write down the incredibly cruel things I told myself and learned to differentiate between what was a real thought and what was one of my fears turned against me. The process sucked; it took years to undo. But at a certain point, that horrible voice—the voice of my fears—disappeared. It still comes back sometimes. Something will scare me—usually information that another person has something I think I should have—and the voice will turn on. But I’ve learned to recognize it and know it’s not real. I’ve also learned that my fear can take all sorts of other forms. I rarely think the sentence, “I’m scared” because I internalized long ago that only weak people thought like that. So my psyche devised an entirely counter-productive system that makes fear register as all sorts of other feelings: tired, for example. Or nauseous. Indifferent. “I just don’t feel like doing that” may, from me, mean “I’m scared to do that.”

The fact that I now know this about myself, and can therefore move through it, has changed everything for me. I feel these days like I get to walk around with someone else’s brain—the brain of someone who really, genuinely likes herself. And while I’m grateful to be rid of the obsessions I used to have to drink and do cocaine, I think I’m even happier to have shut the fear voice down.

Related

: addiction, alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, cravings, depress, pain, rehab, therapy, treatment, withdraws
Previous Post Why You Don’t Really Hate AA Next Post How I Kicked the Smokes Out of My Sobriety

Related Posts

Caught Alcoholism

How I Caught Alcoholism

July 12, 2017Anna David
Least Expected

Making Amends Was Everything I Least Expected

September 7, 2017Anna David
Alcoholics Anonymous

Why You Don’t Really Hate AA

September 30, 2017Anna David

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Are You Making The Most Of Your Recovery?

Take our short quiz and find out if you are making the most of your recovery.

 

Take The Quiz!
Sign up for the newsletter
Connect with us on Facebook

We respect your privacy and never rent, sell or trade your information.
© 2018 Genius Recovery® All Rights Reserved.

An Open Letter to Anyone Struggling with Addiction
By Joe Polish
First I want to say how sorry I am that you or someone you love is struggling with addiction. I know firsthand how painful it is. Addiction nearly killed me when I was 18 years old.
What I’ve learned since then is that almost all addiction stems from trauma. This can be difficult for some people to understand; they assume trauma has to mean a person was beaten, molested or in a life-threatening accident. But we all have different levels of sensitivity.
Addiction is something you are driven to do—anything you crave that gives you temporary pleasure or relief but then causes negative consequences. Addiction is something you are unable to give up, despite the suffering it causes.
The challenging thing for people that don’t have this to understand is how someone could have that craving in the first place. They wonder why the addict can’t just make a better choice.
I’m of the belief that addiction is not a choice. Once the addict goes into a craving state, it’s beyond willpower or intelligence. Intelligence can actually be a detriment because the smarter people are, the more they believe they can think their way out of the problem.
What many don’t understand is that addiction isn’t a problem—it’s actually a solution. If you’re in pain, angst, anxiety, fear, rage, depression, sadness, loneliness or experiencing any other form of suffering, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be out of that pain. It’s how we go about scratching the itch that causes the issue.
Ultimately, addiction is a connection disorder. It’s feeling incredibly disconnected and uncomfortable in your own skin. You just want to numb out, or escape. You want to feel something—anything except the dread that comes with that craving state…a state that always has compulsivity or impulsivity attached to it.
Looking at addiction from a state of compassion, as opposed to judgment, is critical. We cannot punish or beat addiction out of somebody. Sure, we can throw people in prison, scold them or run away from them, but that doesn’t help make the cravings go away. Love and compassion are critical—though, of course, those can be difficult emotions to embrace when dealing with addicts. The symptoms of addiction can be ugly; they often involve activities like cheating, disrupting, lying, stealing and other egregious acts. That’s because addicts will do anything to get out of the pain they are in. The addict brain has an appetite for destruction and is fueled more by chaos than harmony. In other words, it’s hard for addicts to feel okay. And it’s not easy to feel compassion for someone who’s leaving shrapnel in their wake. But the more you can understand that the addict is in pain and just trying to get out of it, the easier it can be to deal with the recklessness and chaos that comes with it.
Addiction is also biochemical. You are dealing with serotonin and dopamine. Once you quit the drug or behavior, you may have to fix and repair the gut. You have to get the body back to a state where it produces “feel good” chemicals in order to cope with the uncomfortable feelings. This means exercise, yoga, meditation, float pods, the right nutrition, and more. The issues are in the tissues, and if you can incorporate movement and communities, it can help heal. Building a rapport by being around other addicts is critical. It doesn’t have to be a 12-step meeting; you just need a community—an ongoing, consistent community.
It’s a lot of work—but not nearly as much work as active addiction. And if you’re willing to do the work, there’s freedom on the other side that most addicts and their families probably haven’t ever experienced before. The bottom line: help is available. There are many people and resources available at little or no cost.