Addiction – A Chronic Relapsing Condition

Somewhere in the DSM it describes addiction as a “…. chronic relapsing condition…” OH NO!!!!

Well, what does that mean to me? What does it mean to my clients?

Does this mean we are doomed to fall back into active addiction on a regular basis?

Is all this work and energy we put into recovery pointless? Should we just give up now?

Well, a word about me: Like most addicts I am a walking contradiction.

From the outside world I come from a highly privileged place, an affluent family, expensive education the works.

Also, people kept telling me that I am smart, intelligent, clever (so I did not feel it).

But on the inside, yuck. I am not going to go into it but, it was hell.

I scored about a nine on the ACE’s scale (Adverse Childhood Experiences, look it up, do your score, it might explain a lot to you if you struggle with life).

I felt lost in a world I could not understand. My analogy for this is;

If the world is a deeply sophisticated French new wave film, directed by Goddard, in black and white, everyone sitting around drinking black coffee and smoking French black tobacco (none of which I am sophisticated enough to like), having deeply intellectual conversations about existentialism and the like.

I am a miscast stumbling, mumbling, bumbling, Disney elephant in technicolor, knocking over the sets and getting my lines wrong.

But on that day, somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, when I first pulled a needle out of my arm, felt the rush of the opiate up the back my neck, it all came together.

I was suddenly the director! It was now my movie! I am writing the script now!

It was a day I will never forget. Life now seemed not only possible… but doable.

I now know that drugs were not the problem, I was. Drugs were a particularly workable solution…. Short term.

Long term, they were a bad solution. They would take me into the deepest darkest reaches of hell.

Places that still haunt me on some nights. Places I really, really want to forget.

Places I do not wish on my worst enemy… well… not for long anyway.

Anyway, you can guess what happened, I was caught in a struggle that would last decades.

I wanted to stop, God I wanted to stop so badly, but when I stopped all the feelings that I would experience previously came back.

This is what I now regard as my addiction. Being in this place of pain, with none of the events that inform my pain being resolved.

This for me is the dis-ease. The name “addiction” is a miss-noma.

The drugs are not the problem, they are a bad solution that soon become a bigger problem, a much bigger problem!

A word about drugs and drug use here. I would like to point out that for those of you who only used alcohol, to me this is one of the nastiest drugs to have a problem with and included when I mention drugs.

I would also like to point out here that about 80% of the world use drugs (from alcohol to opium) with no negative consequences, for most it enhances their life.

Or if they have negative consequences they just stop. (DSM also defines addiction as; continued use despite negative consequences) About 10% of people just do not indulge at all, and about 10% fall into the bracket of addicts, though this may be getting larger.

The newish thinking is that drugs do not cause addiction, brain development dose.

Now that is a whole other article and is up for debate.

If drugs are not the problem, (or a secondary problem), but a way to self-medicate this dis-ease (all be it a misguided way), then what is relapse?

Well, how about if I told you, it has been many years since I last took drugs, but in that time, I have often found myself in relapse.

What do you make of that?

For me, and this is how I work with my clients, the relapse is when I find myself back in that dis-ease of self.

When I find it unbearable to be in my skin, when I just feel wrong, when I want out of my life.

This is when I find myself craving, needing to medicate this relapse. Using is not the problem craving is.

If we did not crave, knowing what it does to ourselves, we would not use it, right?

Craving is horrible, nasty, and I know what it does to me, and I have seen it cause such pain and wrought destruction in others and those around them.

The problem is…..it creeps up slowly I hear it from clients all the time and I’ve probably said it myself, “there I was walking down the street and this needle came out of leftfield and hit me in the arm” or “I found this bottle of vodka….in my stomach” or “I just don’t know how it happened”.

It is like boiling frogs, the temperature can come up slowly, we do not notice till it is too late.

It took me a long time to get into long term recovery. I spent almost two decades in early recovery.

I’ve ended up self-medicating my emotional relapses on many occasions not thinking I had a choice.

I’m a slow learner, and I’m not so alone. I know a lot about active addiction relapses, it took me a long, long time to learn about emotional relapse.

Like a lot of things in my recovery it was not till I got sick of picking up white keyrings or spent a few years building up my life to destroy it yet again and, oh God, must start again.

It was not till I was fed up with the back teeth with this that I went looking for help.

Help comes in many forms, for me it was two-fold, first it involved sitting in lectures and then doing workshops with the like of Terance Gorsky and others.

They taught me how to spot my relapse signifiers. They taught me how to feel when the heat was going up before the water boiled, and what to do about it.

The signifiers…

There was a daytime TV show in the UK that was clearly designed for people on methadone, it was so mindless.

It came around midday. If I found myself lying in bed watching that, surrounded by coffee cups and overflowing ash trays, dirty sheets, and laundry on the floor, I was clearly miserable, it was a sure sign I was in trouble, this was right on the edge.

Antidote… get up and call someone, go to a meeting. Obvious right? But I had to learn this stuff.

I did not know I was miserable; I needed to spot the things around me. Other signifiers are more subtle.

The poor Me’s, being in the victim, the worlds against me.

It was so familiar I did not realize there was something wrong.

Seething resentment was the same, I would have no idea this was not normal. Antidote;

do a step 10, look at my part in it, take some ownership, reclaim my power, stop being a victim.

Now this is a big one; feeling lonely, looking through my phone for someone to connect with and thinking their all ****s, yet there are my friends!

So familiar. Antidote; just press call, who cares who it is, CONNECT!

Everyone will have different signifiers, it is not hard to spot them with help, some of them will be what we call “acting out”!!

Get to know yours. My antidotes are usually all the same, whatever the poison: Action, get up, connect, take my own inventory, meetings, call someone.

DON’T ISOLATE!!! Remember, an addict alone is in extremely bad company.

It is like driving; at first you must remember mirror, clutch, gear, but after a while it becomes second nature.

Do it, and trust me, it does.

The second part of this two-fold solution was healing the initial wounds, for some of us this is a lifetime of work, but if we start to resolve the pain then why would we need the pain killers?

I seriously did not want to look at my past. I mean why?

Why would I want to dig up that stuff, I had spent my life trying to forget it.

I had sought out the strongest anesthetics and painkillers on earth to get away from it, why would we want to go back?

Well because sadly it still informs and controls us. Often, we are not even aware of it, the power our past has over us.

Also, when I did my step 4 it started to come back, often in the form of nightmares.

But please for God’s sake do not do it alone. Find an informed professional to go there with you.

It is so worth it.

Incidentally, it is why I became an informed professional. When I experienced the effect it had on my life, I wanted to pass it on.

So, when people ask me how a filthy junky like me gets to travel round the world to work in international rehabs, well, see the above.