Addicted Like Me Read online

  I always had a sixth sense for seeking out the people who were addicts. I went on church retreats and had plenty of opportunities to make friends that were clean, or to stop using, but it never worked because I found users that kept me focused on my addictions. While on the retreats I would roll joints on the bus with other users, and we would spend our time in the woods getting high. The retreats gave me plenty of time to think about the way my life was going, which at the time seemed like it was going fine. It thrilled my mom that I was willing to try the retreats. She thought that maybe these would save me. The retreats did help me to realize that I was heading down the wrong path. I wanted something more in my life than the empty and hollow feeling I had inside. When I came home and told my mom I had decided to give up drugs, I did think I could do it. Once I got back to my regular routine, I couldn’t. I went right back to hanging out with my old friends and lost any of that hope for a better way. That kind of cycle became a repetitive one until I got that first glimmer of hope at the parking lot of the twelve-step center. The kids I saw there were sober because they had surrounded themselves with sober people. That was the change I hadn’t tried.

  I was easily influenced all my life. I would do anything to feel part of a group or get an opportunity to lead. It connected with me when my counselors kept telling me that if I was going to continue to hang around with people who got loaded, then I was most likely going to end up loaded, too. To me being accepted by people was just like getting high, except on an emotional level, so my counselors were right. I was willing to go to any lengths to gain acceptance, whether that meant doing drugs or stealing money or telling lies. I felt good when I was accepted by a group of people and bad when I was not. All of it was to try to fill this void inside of me that was caused by an absent father. My effort to feel whole became its own addiction, and so I was scared to let go of the nonsober people I depended on to make me feel okay. I was also okay when I could go to safe places where I knew I would be welcomed, but my counselors said I had to stop.

  One of my favorite places to go to was a pool hall, where I spent countless nights drunk with friends trying to shoot pool. Bars had been out of the question because I was too young to get in, so the pool hall was the one place that was open late that we could smoke in. I can’t recall a time that I ever made it to the pool hall sober or left without a high. In my reality, everyplace I went was related to my using, and this included the pool hall, church, and school. I hooked up in those places with people who could get me high. I went to school only to score dope. My friends would leave me lines on the toilet lid, and we would take turns going to the restroom to get high. I had friends who would bring me chaser beers for my hangover cure in the mornings, and I would plan my day according to who had the dope and what house I could go to smoke out and spend the rest of my day. I had even memorized the bus schedules to my dealer’s house.

  Living at the residential house pushed me to learn about feelings I had not allowed myself to experience. I was an angry, guilty, unfulfilled, drug-abusing, alcoholic teen. I had thought that there was no other avenue left for me to take by a certain point and that no possibility existed for happiness or a good quality of life without drugs and alcohol. I had no idea how to cope with all the new feelings that were coming out when I admitted these things. After I stopped self-medicating with my addictions, feeling real pain transformed me. My spirit was broken, I realized, in addition to the physical and emotional parts of me. At the residential house, all of these dimensions came into focus through the twelve steps, which was a different system from other approaches I had tried. When I would throw myself into church, leaders there dealt only with the soul. At the hospital or in rehab it was mostly about getting physically clean. When I put my faith in the power of personal transformation that the twelve-step program teaches is possible, I experienced honesty about all three dimensions.

  In group counseling, I got honest about my need for acceptance. I understood that I would resist making changes to my friends and to the places that I went because I had built up a life that put me in the center of all these things, where I had always wanted to be. My counselors respected my need for acceptance and recognition and fed that need in a positive way. That’s why I had been drawn in closer to them each time I tried to quit the program or run away. I was being given a lot of attention and positive feedback because the way to stop me from using drugs was to give me something better than the drugs. Treating people positively was designed into the program. It gradually changed my definition of happiness. For example, seeing all those kids having a great time without drugs and alcohol was unbelievable. It brought me to the realization that before, I didn’t have a clue how to even choose friends that encouraged me to be happy. I had to be taught a lot of things over again about living a normal life, so I threw myself into the recommendations of the program.

  Every day of the week I went to meetings, hung out at the coffee shop at the twelve-step center, and went to sober dances and functions. I got to know people but also let them get to know me. It was a time of self-discovery because along with allowing others to get to know me, I was also getting to know myself. It became apparent to me that I didn’t have a clue about my likes or dislikes. Choosing to write letters to cut ties or to think about the places I needed to stop hanging out caused me to consider who or what I might like to fill those spaces in my life. For so long the drugs were the only thing in my life that decided whether I liked or disliked something. Addiction totally consumed me to the point that I walked around in a fog for years; therefore, I never had the time for growth and discovery. I wasn’t able to tell you my favorite color, my favorite activities, or even the type of movies I enjoyed the most.

  There came a time to put all of the tools that I learned in the residential house to use. To help me understand how, I got a sponsor. A sponsor is a mentor for people who are trying out sobriety, and the sponsor is able to counsel about problems that always come up in everyday life during recovery. Sponsors have previously worked through the steps themselves. Eventually I was going to head back home, and my sponsor was the one who would be there to help me work through the twelve steps. It was an accountability system that I had never tried before when I started this next phase. An addict’s thinking is broken by the time recovery begins, I learned, so even addicts with many years of recovery still can’t rely on their own thinking to run their lives. Sponsors even have sponsors. Everything the sponsor says is a suggestion, but the suggestions help to get thinking and decision making redirected toward a more positive direction. I once heard someone with thirty years of sobriety say, “I know I can help you and you can help me, but because my thinking is broken, I know I can’t help myself.”

  With my sponsor on board, after six weeks at the residential house I was discharged to the recovery’s outpatient program. It was four hours a day for another six weeks. Thank goodness for the continued contact with the people I knew from the residential house, because it helped make the transition feel safe, and along with my sponsor, the shift gave me a support system for returning to my home life outside of the constant watch of counselors. I had a new circle of friends that were all sober and that wanted to see me succeed.

  The house was now a totally sober environment to return to. My mom had experienced her own personal power to keep changing. She gave up the glasses of wine she had been drinking before that time. It just seemed that life was waiting for us, though. Immediately my past came tearing at me, and I had to deal with life on life’s terms. It didn’t take long for Robert to find us, and by then he was very angry about where I was spending my time. He showed up at the twelve-step center looking for me. I had no clue he had even surfaced. My mom came home one night and told me she needed to talk to me about something. I instantly knew something was wrong. I was actually kind of scared when she told me that Robert had found out where I was and where I was receiving treatment. But my nervousness instantly turned to anger when I realized that everyone but me had known wh
at was going on and had kept the news from me. I approached my outpatient counselor about the fact and was furious. I demanded to know why he didn’t tell me what was going on the whole time. “Why didn’t anyone tell me that he had shown up?” Standing in the middle of the coffee shop, the counselor looked at me with the most honest face that I had ever seen and said, “You are safe here.” What he meant was that these people had my back. The fear and nervousness that had been pumping through my veins instantly subsided, and I was overcome by a sense of calm and trust. It was then that I knew what he had been talking about when he said that the love of the group is a power greater than myself and could do me no wrong.

  I was beginning to learn how to trust something other than drugs for the first time in my life. This felt so good. Not long after my family had a protective order served against Robert, he showed up at our house, banging on the windows, trying to get me to come out. I hid while my mom called the police. I knew in my gut that this would not be good. He was an angry person as it was, and I had lied to him about where I had been when I lived at the residential house. Then I had sent him a letter by mail telling him I never wanted to see him again. It was a recipe for disaster. I knew that my leaving him in this fashion was probably going to enrage him when I mailed his letter, but I was not willing to be controlled by him anymore. I knew that if I went out and talked when he showed up at my house and banged on the window, it would have been a backward step that probably wouldn’t have ended peacefully. I let the cops handle it instead. By the time they got there, Robert was already gone. A search of the neighborhood turned up nothing.

  He didn’t give up and then filed suit to get the order of protection that my mom had filed against him taken off. I was petrified when I found out this suit meant I would have to testify against Robert in court to make the order stick. I thought there was no way that I could face him. I had been working so hard in outpatient to learn a better way of life, and I felt like all of this was holding me back and was just making it that much harder to believe in my glimmer of hope. I imagined that most addicts got to disappear after deciding to get sober and got to recover away from everything and everybody else. If that was true, it sure wasn’t true for me. I couldn’t escape my old life, it seemed like, no matter what I did. I felt a little better knowing that a counselor from my twelve-step program was going to be with me in court. It gave me a sense of security and trust that I had done the right things. I also knew that going to court was the only way I was truly going to walk away from this part of my life, and Robert, forever. Things always had to go to the extreme for me before they could change, so I went to court to testify, and with my counselor and my mother by my side, we won. The judge upheld the ruling. With that behind me, I was able to get back to dealing with my recovery and myself. I really felt like I could never turn back after that point.

  I had been given a chance by dealing with Robert to really put to use all the tools that I had learned. The knowledge was there before that, and the support was there. The experience had just been the first time it was up to me to apply the tools where and when I needed to. I never could have figured that out before, how to deal with a situation like Robert on my own and still stay sober. I would have hurried to a high that turned the emotions all off. I wasn’t going to choose to live that way anymore. I was told that as I worked at my recovery, I was going to feel pain as a sober person and that the pain was going to hurt like hell. But nothing was painful enough in that transformation that made it worth taking a drink or using. Absolutely nothing was as good as the feeling that came after the pain, either. We never had Robert problems again.

  Feelings of success are important, but I was cautious because I worried that left to my own willpower and thoughts, I could probably talk myself into using again. This was why my transformation relied so much on trust. I wouldn’t be able to talk my sponsor into letting me use no matter how bad things got. I was building a trust in my sponsor and knew she had the best intentions in mind for me. I can see now that my sponsor will always have more years of sobriety, has overcome more pitfalls than me, knows how to avoid missteps, and has more confidence in who I am than I could ever have for myself. She is the one who helped me when I began to clean up the wreckage of my past. As I dug in and cleaned out the so-called “trash” in my life and my mind, I realized that underneath there was a person whom I had hidden behind drugs and walls of anger. It is as if my transformation had to begin by peeling away the layers of an onion to reach that girl, and with each new layer I was learning how to make myself a little more humble and free. Doing that brought major self-discovery and realizations with it. I had to learn that I did not have much of a coping system. I had no accountability to anything except the drugs. I pushed away anyone who really loved me, and I saw first to the fact that I was okay and that my life was filled with people who kept enabling me.

  A family addiction is a legacy because it is a story that keeps repeating itself. For an addict, the legacy ends only when these repetitions are uncovered. If they are, the family story then becomes an open book, and the beast of addiction is left powerless because the story isn’t feeding on itself. I needed to peel back enough layers to make myself transparent enough to know my recovery process was working, or else I was setting myself up for dishonest behavior, which would probably lead to another relapse into the only story I had known. I knew that I might not have many chances left to get my life right that day I tore off with Steve, when I had it thrown in my face that I was about to walk away from something good. To recover or to die are intense options, and they are the only options at the bottom, yet it is so hard for addicts to see the extent of their disease from down there. It was for me. I had to sit on Steve’s floor thinking about dying until it hit me. That’s the kind of moment in life that makes it clear that it is a better idea to trust people that believe that you have the power to change than it is to trust yourself to evaluate life at that point. I eventually became an open book by making that choice, so now somebody will be sure to catch me before I fall back into the legacy of my family’s disease.

  I participated in many activities to help me learn to trust others this much, become more open-minded, and help to change my way of thinking. For so long I had such terrible self-esteem. I hated myself so much that I believed if everyone else really knew me, they would hate me as much as I hated myself. That was another reason not to trust people, and it was why it was difficult for me to open my life up like a book at first. I was very wary of letting people in for fear that they would hate what they saw. To help me come to a new way of thinking about this, a counselor had me do an activity in which all the people in the room with me were able to say one asset that they saw in me. Some of the things that I heard I felt were pretty right on, and yet there were some things said about me that I had never even noticed before. This activity helped me to start rebuilding my identity and gave me the confidence that I would need to become rigorously honest. I am grateful that my counselor wrote down all the beautiful things people noticed about me that day. I still carry them with me to this day.

  I had tackled the confrontation with Robert. I knew how to draw from the strength of my family, and I was making a daily choice to live as an open book. I wanted to dive into programs at the twelve-step center to help the newcomers at this point, because I was feeling better than I ever had in my entire life.

  CHAPTER 12

  CHALLENGES ON THE SOBER PATH

  IN SOBRIETY, I learned it was important to choose the type of people I surrounded myself with, the places I would go, and how to spend my time in activities that feed the needs inside of me that my addictions had filled before. This plan made me responsible for a different set of choices at each place on the sober path, so I chose to spend my time attending meetings and helping the newcomers that walked through the door at the twelve-step center. Those of us interested in the newcomers would meet them every day to socialize. It was important to me that everyone had fun, or someone to talk to and
connect with, for the rest of the day. A commitment to transformation was the thing I had in common with people around me. It was a choice but also a need. People understood me and could tell when there was something not right with me. Spending time with people focused on recovery was a strategy I chose to set myself up to win at life, because outside of the twelve-step center my life was continuing to evolve, which set up a series of challenges for me.

  Five or six months into my sobriety I was promoted to the position of group leader when I was placed on the group’s twelve-step steering committee. It was a huge accomplishment for me, and it felt as if I was instantly part of the popular crowd. This was old territory as far as my need for recognition. Everyone around me wanted my advice and friendship, and I reveled in my glory, walking around with my head a little higher at that time. I felt important for once in my life, because the people who wanted to hear what I had to say didn’t want to just use me for the drugs I could give them. I sponsored several people working the group at the time and gave of myself to them endlessly. I felt like I was finally making my parents proud and proving to them, and to myself, that I could accomplish things nobody thought I ever could.

  While on the steering committee, I began to become really close to those people. It was our own little clique, and we all held each other accountable. In particular I became very close to John. I had started to develop feelings for him that I had not felt in a long time, if ever. Being sober, I was able to sense the emotions of a budding relationship with every fiber of my body pumping full of euphoria. Each time that I was around John, I was overwhelmed. He put butterflies in my stomach, and there was chemistry between us neither of us could deny. He was silly and charming and energetic, and he made me want to feel that way all the time. I constantly laughed when I was around him, and eventually I fell madly in love. I was completely smitten in the beginning of the relationship. Only after seeing a different side of John did I begin to worry that this part of my sober path was one of the greatest challenges.