Category Archives: addiction

Rip Van Winkle

2 Replies

VINCE

India squad (that’s my squad) got to watch a graduation ceremony today.  It was pretty cool.  Every month, two squads graduate, and two squads that are two months away from the door get to watch.  So, now we know what to expect.

It’s a huge deal, being released from prison.  It’s literally the only day most prisoners look forward to.  The big difference for us is that we aren’t leaving through locked doors and razor-wire fences.  Going home for us means the beginning of a new challenge: Phase II.

“Mastery items”: that’s a synonym with hobbies.  You’re right Mom, agate hunting is a good diversion.  So will be running, weight lifting, cooking, and meetings.  All things I enjoy doing.  We’ve spent some time going over our mastery items in treatment and they will be on our daily/weekly schedule that I have to submit before I leave, and every week thereafter.  They don’t want us getting bored out there.

Another batch of new guys arrived less than an hour ago.  They are fun to watch.  They’re so scared, many of them shaking so hard they have trouble buttoning up their shirts.  Four months ago, I was the same.  We started out as squad number 12 of 12.  Today, we are 4 of 12.  And we (most of us) got our blue hats yesterday!  We are now a senior squad.

We can now teach what we have learned.  This is a very dangerous position to be in for some of us as we are held to the highest standards.  Mistakes are punished no longer with pushups, but with interventions (gigs) or L.E.s (Learning Experiences).  Most people that get kicked out of boot camp are blue hats.  I don’t think I will have any trouble.  I’ve been a good boy so far.  I’ve done all I can to show that I’m paying attention here.  I will most likely be the leader of our squad during graduation march.  Some of our squad still can’t call right on their right foot.  Officers will be paying more attention to them now.

[ANNE: A friend sent me a story from the New York Times Magazine: “You Just Got Out of Prison, Now What?”  It follows a couple of ex-cons who volunteer to pick up men being released, then spend a day trying to ease them into a world very different from the one they left when they were incarcerated.

They pick up a guy named Dale Hammock.  He had been pulled over for not wearing a seat belt and the cops found a bag of meth in his car.  Since it was his third offense, he was sent away for 21 years.

Twenty-one years.

It’s got to be overwhelming to walk out the gates.  The volunteers take him to Target to buy jeans.  Have you noticed how many choices there are for jeans?  In 1994 it was Levis, Lees, or Sears jeans.  Now there are dozens of brands and styles—boot cut, skinny, extra long, straight leg, relaxed, low rise, and on and on.  I haven’t been in prison but I feel overwhelmed by all the choices.  The same is true in chain restaurants, which now make you sift through five menus with hundreds of options, and in the grocery store.  A couple times I have walked out of a store without buying anything because I was too paralyzed by the choices to make a decision.

Then of course there is technology.  The volunteer showed Hammock something on his smart phone and Hammock asked, ‘‘Everything now, you just touch it, and it shows you things?’’  God help him.]

Empathy 101

Leave a reply

VINCE

Tired.  Sometimes I don’t even notice it until about this time of day because we’re so active then we eat a huge dinner then come to study hall or an AA meeting for an hour.  I’ve been sitting down for five minutes and it’s really kicking in.  Exhaustion.  But we are not only not allowed to sleep from 0520 to 2120, we are not allowed to have the appearance of sleeping.  We cannot have our eyes closed for more than a three count (the speed of which is determined by any correctional officer) or we get formal discipline.  Yesterday, they caught somebody with their eyes closed who was going to be graduating and leaving tomorrow.  Well, not now.  They added a week stay at boot camp.  That’s not something I want to do.  So, I tell myself over and over that I have plenty of energy, and find a task, like writing, to keep my brain going.

Over the past week, our squad has been working on victim impact letters.  Our job was to think of five people, places, or things that have been directly affected by our crimes, and write a letter from them, to us.  This is the first time in four months that I actually saw some real emotion.  A few guys chose society, a few their children.  I chose my Mother.  And my mother is a good writer.  🙂

I write a lot.  For every post you see out there, I write an equal amount in here.  Most of what I write in here will never be seen, most of which is mundane and would not provide anything entertaining.  Some of what I write I will eventually share with you, just not until I leave here.

I shared my letter in class today and it was very well received, especially by the people that care about things and can understand big words.

If I had written this a year ago, I think I would have felt like a piece of $@*t.  But I’ve become close with her and I’ve changed a lot of my behaviors and thinking patterns and am heading in a very good direction which I know is a huge part of making amends.  Am I just rambling on?  I really want a nap.

Long story short: I love you Mom.  I’m sorry I was a crappy son for so long.  I am fixing it now.  I’ll be home in 56 days!

[ANNE: I am dying to know what “I” wrote to Vince, but he hasn’t sent me a copy of the letter.  I have had a lot of ups and downs over the last 20 years of his addiction.  The worst was when he relapsed after nearly five years of sobriety.  During those five years, even though he wasn’t using, he still had some really big attitude problems and unproductive ways of thinking.  Now he seems changed.  I am really excited for him.  Our relationship feels transformed.  Whether it is real and lasting once he is released remains to be seen.]

Addiction: Disease or Habit?

Leave a reply

ANNE

I chanced upon this article, Addiction is Not a Disease, by Laura Miller in Salon.  It describes how addiction used to be considered a moral failing, then was reconsidered as a disease with the rise of 12 step programs, and now neuroscientists are thinking it’s more of an extreme habit.

Miller bases her article on the book Biology of Desire by Marc Lewis, a neuroscientist who is a former addict himself.  He posits that addicts have a “particular ‘emotional wound’ the substance helped them handle, but once they started using it, the habit itself eventually became self-perpetuating and in most cases ultimately served to deepen the wound.”

The disease model has been supported by the fact that addicts’ brains are different.

“The changes wrought by addiction are not, however, permanent, and while they are dangerous, they’re not abnormal. Through a combination of a difficult emotional history, bad luck and the ordinary operations of the brain itself, an addict is someone whose brain has been transformed ….

“More and more experiences and activities get looped into the addiction experience and trigger cravings and expectations like the bells that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate, from the walk home past a favorite bar to the rituals of shooting up. The world becomes a host of signs all pointing you in the same direction and activating powerful unconscious urges to follow them. At a certain point, the addictive behavior becomes compulsive, seemingly as irresistibly automatic as a reflex. You may not even want the drug anymore, but you’ve forgotten how to do anything else besides seek it out and take it.”

The good news is that habits can be unlearned.  AA and NA and other 12 step groups do work for a lot of people.  Others may need cognitive behavioral therapy, or meditation, or something else, or all of these things.  It’s kind of like how I fought long-term depression by trying everything, until something broke through.

I’m all for understanding the causes of things, in case that knowledge points to new solutions.  I’m also big on measuring success to discover what works.  This article in Scientific American basically concludes “we don’t know” whether AA works because (in my lay language) it’s too loosey goosey to study with the gold standard of the randomized clinical trial.  It works for some people and not for others, and there are probably as many reasons for both outcomes as there are members.

—

On a long drive a few evenings after reading the article about how addiction is not a disease, I caught this one-hour podcast about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I knew most of the story already, how two chronic inebriates, Dr. Bob and Bill W., found each other and developed the AA program based on something called the Oxford Group, which had gotten started in England and which was overtly religious.

The story is poignant.  Both Bill and Bob were headed for early graves.  Instead, they met each other.  Talking about their problem with someone who also had it worked some magic that no amount of nagging by their wives or warnings from doctors could.  Bill’s wife Lois and another recovering alcoholic’s wife, Anne, founded Alanon, to help them recover from their own insanity caused by living with alcoholics.

—

There are lots of “gurus” out there who will tell you that you have to go to AA or Alanon every week for the rest of your life, or that you have to give up every mood-altering substance—from heroin to caffeine to sugar—or that “real” meditation is only done in the early morning, for a minimum of 45 minutes, sitting in the lotus position.

I say, be open to trying a variety of solutions, and equally willing to stop using things that aren’t working.  Why would you want to limit your options when you’re up against something that could make your life miserable, kill you, or land you in prison?

Happy New Life

Leave a reply

ANNE

I am tempted to rebut each of Vince’s “clarifications” in his last post. But one of my favorite self-help slogans is: “How important is it?”

I’m glad to leave 2014 behind and hopeful that 2015 will better, or at least not worse.

I spent Christmas Eve in an emergency room with my poor sister, who has stage four colon cancer. She was feeling pressure in her chest. Apparently chemo can cause blood clots. They administered nitro by pill and patch, did an EKG to rule out a heart attack, and killed her pain with Dilaudid, which is seven times stronger than morphine.

Her worst fear is that she will die alone in the hospital. I stayed until they admitted her and she fell asleep, about seven hours later.

—

Three years ago, I hit bottom. I had lived with depression for as long as I could remember, but then….  I had to have a tooth pulled—boy, will that make you feel old! Then during a Christmas Day blizzard my car was towed and I spent four hours waiting in line outside at the impound lot to pay $300 to get it back. I then drove to Fountain to visit Vince. The trailer he shared with Seth was full of guns, beer cans, and smoke. I figured what the heck, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so after he assured me that none of the guns was loaded, we posed for photos that became my holiday cards to my friends in the UK, where they had a good laugh over us gun-crazy Americans.

Vince (7)Vince (11)

Due to the blizzard I spent the night in Seth’s 5-year-old daughter’s bedroom; she was at her mom’s. Here’s a tip for parents who smoke: Keeping your kid’s door closed doesn’t keep smoke out. I couldn’t open the window and after tossing and turning until 5am I slipped out and drove home. On the way I started itching. Great—now I had bedbugs!

—

I contemplated suicide. I leaned my forehead against the screen of my 20th floor window. I had turned 50 the year before. Thinking about being depressed every day for another 30-40 years wasn’t real appealing.

—

Here are the things I had tried to manage depression and anxiety:

Meditation

Medication

Prayer (including begging, pleading, and bargaining)

Acting normal

Abstaining from drinking

Cutting down on coffee

Self-help books

Alanon

Exercise

Getting outside every day

Appreciating beauty, be it fine art, nature, music, babies, or kittens

Gratitude lists

Avoiding negative people / avoiding unnaturally happy people

Running away to other countries

Denial

Journaling

Telling myself, “At least I’m not a refugee / amputee / blind / fill-in-the-blank.”

Psychotherapy

Retail therapy

Sleeping, drinking, and movie binges

Reaching out to friends, even when that was the last thing I wanted to do

—

I thought that jumping out of my window would be exhilarating, until I hit the ground. I had some leftover pain killers from the dentist, and my prescription for Restless Legs. I googled an overdose of the two and learned that they wouldn’t kill me, but that I would likely need a liver transplant. I decided to keep living.

—

That spring, I visited Vince again and this time, made a reservation at a B&B.  On the free-book-shelf there, I picked up a tattered copy of, “Feeling Good: the New Mood Therapy”, by David Burns, MD. I read it and did what it told me to do, and I stopped being depressed. For good.

The book was about Cognitive Therapy. I had been instructed to use it at least twice in the past, but I’d been too stressed out to do it. Basically, you write down your negative thoughts and then argue with them rationally until you’ve de-fanged them. Writing it down is important; if you try to do it in your head you’ll end up down a rabbit hole.

So was a lifetime of depression cured overnight by one book? No. I think it was all the other things I had tried over the years—the good things, anyway—and then I added this on top of them and together they all added up to a breakthrough.

I still feel sad sometimes–there’s plenty to feel sad about–but I’m not depressed and I’m committed to living.

Sorry for the long post but, if you’re struggling, I want to encourage you to keep an open mind, keep plugging away, and keep trying new things.

PS: I didn’t have bedbugs after all.  I think I was just itchy from the smoke and dry air.  Living with addiction can turn you into a drama addict.