Читать книгу Some Assembly Required - Dan Mager - Страница 11
Оглавление“The blessing lies close to the wound.”
AFRICAN PROVERB
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It was the third day of my medically managed detoxification when Allison, one of the counselors, came over and sat down next to me in the treatment center dining room. Speaking softly she said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but when you were Vice President of Counseling at Jewish Family & Children’s Service in Tucson, you accepted me for an MSW (Masters in Social Work) field placement.”
Taken aback, I struggled to bring my vision into sharper focus. I was a mess—negotiating the dense fog of a complex combination of medications while treading water in a stormy sea of self-recrimination and self-loathing. Massive waves of shame, embarrassment, remorse, and guilt buffeted me, knocking me around, turning me upside down and inside out. Although I had seen her around the facility and had even attended a group she facilitated, no bells of familiarity rang . . . until then. Looking at her intently, I suddenly recognized her. “Yes, of course I remember you.”
As the once-upon-a-time Vice President of Counseling, I had final approval on all field placements in the Counseling Services Department, and occasionally interviewed applicants directly. A little over three years prior to this “reunion,” I had interviewed Allison. She was a second year MSW student from the Arizona State University satellite program in Tucson who impressed me as possessing the intelligence, maturity, and personality prerequisites that are so important in a fast-paced, team-oriented behavioral health services environment. I had specifically recommended that Barbara, one of our two clinical supervisors, be assigned as her field instructor.
Allison spoke to me with kindness and compassion, never asking nor even implying, “What the hell happened to you?” while the voice inside my head revved up, not so much in distress, as in deep sadness and resignation: “Holy shit. I really can’t fucking believe just how far I’ve fallen.” If I didn’t already have enough evidence of how the consequences of my three decades of active addiction had finally caught up with me and kicked my ass every which way, here was another compelling brick in that wall.
In what I interpreted as an attempt to be respectful and sensitive to my dizzying descent from grace, Allison told me that she would not disclose to other staff, including my assigned counselor, that she knew me from such a different time and place. I thanked her for this extraordinary (and not altogether appropriate) consideration and let her know that the staff needed to know, and that I would tell my counselor about our shared history, as well as my fellow clients. At age forty-seven, I had at last reached the point where I could no longer continue to live a double life. It had been a long time coming.
The walls of active addiction had been closing in on me, gradually and progressively, for what seemed like forever. During the last few years, the more energy I invested in keeping those walls at bay, the more I lived in fear of being found out. Not only was I doing everything possible to keep others from discovering this truth, I was also going to great lengths to keep it at a safe distance from myself. This was an exhausting and grim cycle wherein the harder I labored to protect myself from the conscious awareness of what I had become, the more intrusive and unavoidable that awareness became. Eventually, all of my stratagems—external and internal—failed.
Throughout my life I had taken many serious risks, and there were times when the perpetual pursuit of the ways and means to procure and use drugs had placed me squarely in the path of great potential physical, legal, and in later years, professional harm. And yet, the very thought of admitting that I was an “addict” scared the shit out of me. There was abject dread intrinsic to admitting it to myself, much less to anyone else. This fear fueled, at times, a desperate need to defend myself psychologically against an increasingly inescapable reality.
Among the most challenging and painful experiences I’ve had was to find myself in a group setting in treatment as a patient in early November of 2006, and say aloud for the first time, “I’m Dan, and I’m an addict.” I felt so raw; it was as if my skin had been peeled off. I don’t ever remember feeling so completely exposed, so excruciatingly vulnerable (at least not as an adult). My voice shook and I don’t know if my body literally trembled, but it sure as hell felt like it did. I had consciously and unconsciously avoided that admission for decades—denying, minimizing, rationalizing, and intellectualizing to keep the reality of my addiction hidden behind a wall of steadfast self-protection.
My wife had long known what I was incapable of acknowledging. To her exasperation and enduring credit, she had tried intermittently since the early 1980s, even before we were married, to get me to seek help.
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I recently graduated from college with honors and a double major.” (Never mind that I never quite completed the second major because the required senior thesis went unfinished, and my addiction was instrumental in keeping it that way.)
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I can’t be a drug addict. I’ve been accepted to every master’s program I applied to, including Columbia University and NYU.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m definitely not a drug addict. I just completed one of the most prestigious MSW programs in the country.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“There’s no way I’m a drug addict. I was just promoted to clinical director of a substance abuse treatment program.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I’m an adjunct professor teaching undergraduate college courses on psychology and substance abuse.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I help drug addicts.”
And that only takes me to 1997. I still had nine years of active addiction ahead, and my chronic pain condition had yet to make its appearance and further distort my sense of proportion. Deep down, in the remote recesses of my consciousness, a part of me had always known that she was right. But as much as I could, I kept this awareness buried in a box on the top shelf all the way in the back of my mind’s closet. Although occasionally this awareness would escape from its container to haunt me, it rarely saw the light of day. I wasn’t ready to do anything differently . . . until I was. Things had to get bad; and then they had to get worse—much worse—before I got to the point where I could no longer continue as I had been.
Prior to the culmination of my devolution from treatment provider to treatment patient, my active addiction went through many phases. Some were higher risk, more intense, and sped up the disease’s progression; others were less overtly hazardous and precipitated a slower pace of progression. I had been in one of those latter “safer” phases for about fifteen years when the onset of a chronic pain condition set me on a slippery slope that turbo-charged my acceleration toward self-demolition.
In the years prior to the onset of my chronic pain, the state of my addiction was analogous to riding a Flexible Flyer sled down a gently sloping snow-covered hill (as I did during winters as a kid growing up on Long Island, NY). There was always the slight possibility of running into a tree or the sled overturning, but the chances of serious injury were minimal. By contrast, the medically prescribed treatment for my chronic pain put me in the front seat of a bobsled speeding over an icy track.
My experience during the more perilous phases of my addiction was like that of an Olympic bobsled driver—intimately acquainted with whipping around sharp turns at dangerously high speeds while fighting to control the vehicle and maintain its balance in order to keep it from flipping over or going off the track and crashing. It’s an exhilarating and often anxiety-inducing rush unto itself, separate from, though related to the neurochemical detonation of mind-and mood-altering drugs in the brain. Each time on the track risks potential disaster, and the more runs even elite-level bobsledders attempt, the more likely it is that they will, at some point, crash.
Such crashes can be devastating, often resulting in serious injury or death. No matter how experienced and skilled we are (or believe ourselves to be), no matter how well we have our shit together (or think we do), the odds have a way of eventually catching up with us.
I found resourcefully manipulative and creatively dishonest ways of keeping that bobsled on the track past the point where it was beyond my capacity to control it. The grossly disparate parts of my life that I had worked so hard to keep isolated from one another—successful behavioral health professional, committed, loving, responsible husband and parent, and dissembling, practicing addict—increasingly began to collide. Ultimately, the walls that separated them crumbled and fell, leaving my sense of self, my family, and my career buried in an avalanche of rubble.
As the shitstorm blew up, it splattered me with the consequences of my choices and actions and my defenses started to fall apart. The psychological bulwarks that had protected me from too much conscious contact with the reality of my addiction and allowed it to continue came undone. The awareness that I was an addict could no longer be suppressed. It refused to stay put in the designated compartments of my cognitive closet and was now in my face, unleashing a torrent of mental, emotional, and spiritual anguish and demanding acknowledgment.
Nearly twenty years of post-master’s experience in counseling, many of which were in addiction treatment settings, was a double-edged sword. Being familiar with the formal criteria for “substance dependence”—drug addiction, in the parlance of the fourth edition of the bible of diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (the fifth edition, due for release in May of 2013, will include a diagnostic category for “addiction”)—intellectually, I knew that I qualified. At the same time, my expertise continued to seduce me into believing that I was different because I was a “professional,” who, until the bitter end of my using, as impaired as I often was, still received stellar performance evaluations and demonstrated an ability to be effective with both staff and clients.
Change rarely comes easily. Making significant change in any aspect of life is really hard, as well as frightening. The greater the change, the higher the degree of difficulty and fear associated with it. Similar to physical workouts, there is a general correlation between the discomfort we are willing to go through and the outcomes we get—“no pain, no gain.” The greatest growth comes from pushing ourselves to go beyond the boundaries of the boxes of familiarity and comfort that we have constructed.
A lot of people stay in situations that are painful and unhealthy because they are familiar with the pain of their specific situation. They are well acquainted with it and know exactly how it works and what the results will be. Their current circumstances provide an incongruous comfort based on familiarity, predictability, and certainty. Even if it is horrible, they know what to expect. Usually, this dynamic operates under the surface of conscious awareness such that, even when someone knows that change is necessary and wants to change, he or she seems unable to do so.
What we know is always much more comfortable than what we don’t know, despite the potential other options may have to be better and healthier. The attraction and power of familiarity and the comfort it provides is not to be underestimated. This is the essence of the emotional cement that keeps people stuck in circumstances that are unsatisfying, unhealthy, and sometimes even dangerous, such as living situations; jobs/career paths; relationships, including those that are abusive or violent; and active addiction.
The fear of the unknown and the uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with it is natural, normal, and understandable. Sometimes, it can be debilitating. For many people—in this case, me—change occurs only when the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of doing something different.
After using for over thirty-five years, and using one or more substances virtually every day for thirty years, I could no longer live with drugs. But, I couldn’t see how I could possibly live without them. I was terrified by the prospect of trying to negotiate life’s emotional and physical minefields without mind- and/or mood-altering chemicals. I felt like I was being dropped into a foreign and uncharted wilderness in the middle of the night, during a snowstorm, without GPS, a compass, or even a map. I had no idea how to navigate this completely unfamiliar territory. I just knew that I couldn’t do it alone.
