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I was thinking we needed a bit of culture on Wired In. I couldn’t come up with any, so here’s something else instead.
An ode to my drinking days, it reminds me why I don’t want to go back there.
Sing to the tune of “My Favourite Things” from the Sound of Music. Apologies to Julie Andrews and the entire Von Trapp family. In fact extend those apologies to anyone unfortunate enough to actually proceed beyond this point and read these lyrics…
My Least Favourite Things
Big strops, red noses, caseworkers who’ve written
Shite whopping fibbings with me sadly sitting
In brown crinkled chinos tied up with string
These are a few of my least favourite things
Cronies who’re phonies who all talk baloney
Doorbells and phone bells
It’s all acrimony
Libido diminished: a rusty old spring
These are a few of my least favourite things
Hurls down white porcelain in loos full of splashes
Carrots for Ralph
And some for my eyelashes
Staggering home, my bladder’s gone “ping”
These are a few of my least favourite things
When the head hurts
When the pee stinks
When I’m feeling sad
I simply untwist the white metal cap
And then I don’t feel so bad!
Glued to my screen like a twelve year old, with feet twitching and lips synching, I tune in faithfully every week to see a bunch of dysfunctional, disenfranchised misfits come together in a ramshackle community and overcome their difficulties through mutual support. It’s Glee.
Okay, mutual support, tap dancing and some amazing show tunes, but you get my point; the kids in Glee are from disadvantaged minorities, or have social, health or cognitive challenges. They find meaning in pooling their talents and experiences and through getting together for a purpose. Their whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts.
For me, this is a key feature of recovery communities like Wired In and the mutual aid groups. The “I can’t, but we can” mentality is at the heart of recovery. I’m not big on “courses” to overcome addiction. I don’t see education about addiction having much impact.
My goodness though, when I sit in a room full of other recovering people witnessing the miracle of recovery my heart sings and my soul does a little tap dance. (Okay, okay, cheesy, but I am into Glee mentality here).
Recovery is not all glee. In fact the gleeful moments can at times be few and far between, but for those of us emerging from the bleak place that is addiction into the the alien and often scary place that is recovery there is much comfort and the occasional dance to be had in coming together and taking strength, hope and courage from each other in our communities of recovery.
Off to look out my top hat and cane…
I have a confession to make, but if you as much as hint that it might make me a geek, I’ll have to hunt you down.
I love physics.
I think it had more to do with the charisma of my first year physics teacher than anything else. Passionate about his subject and a wonderful communicator, he drew us in and we were hooked. There’s something about the natural order of things that makes sense, which pleases that bit of my mind that looks for answers. And, being an addict, my mind ain’t easily pleased.
One of the laws of physics is that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton, in one of the moments he wasn’t lolling around orchards contemplating Cox’s orange pippins, is the chappie who came up with this. The hand that punches the jaw takes as much force and hurt as the jaw it’s punching, something Tarantino, for all his talents, doesn’t always make as clear as he might.
Now, if you are still with me, you’ll be wondering where I’m going with this. You might also be wondering: “did this guy hold back on his medication today?” or even “did I bring the cat back in this morning?”
I’m thinking about the recovery movement here. It’s been a week where I’ve noticed a tiny little bit of resistance to the recovery cause and movement and I don’t think it’s paranoia.
We read elsewhere on Wired In about the mysterious “Scottish commentator” in the DDN cover story who postulated that the perceived slow response of the Scottish government to the tragic anthrax outbreak was due to the focus of that administration on Recovery. The same article appeared to be dismissive of some of the elements of the recovery movement.
In the Guardian this week Jeremy Sare argued against the Conservative Party’s aim “to help addicts achieve full recovery”. For the record, I’m not a Tory (sorry granny, I know that’s the one thing we could never agree on) but I absolutely do sign up to this principle. Sare complains that this is against the views of “most practitioners”. I must have missed that poll.
Sare then makes the rather impressive jump that the focus on helping people recover means that offering abstinence instead of harm reduction “implies a preference for faith based solutions”. Apparently this is “very reminiscent of the religious based 12 step programmes popular in the US.” This does not satisfy the bit of my brain that looks for answers.
Now again for the record, I don’t consider myself at all religious (not guilty your honour), but it is hard to know where to start with this. The exclusive linking of recovery to a particular support system reflects a lack of understanding of what a broad church (yes I know… sorry) recovery is.
The other news for the journalist is that not only is 12 step popular in the US, it’s popular in the UK, with thousands of meetings every week and tens of thousands of members. Many would argue vociferously that it is not religious, but spiritual.
In any case, what’s wrong with faith? We all have faith; in ourselves, in others and for some in a power greater than themselves. The anonymous fellowships are the biggest mutual aid support in this country and have helped hundreds of thousands of people.
The resistance to full recovery is mirrored, says Sare, by the charity Release and by UKDPC. They want to stick with what works. Well, if anyone had bothered to do the research on what works in recovery we might be able to agree on this, but since it’s all been done on maintenance and harm reduction, we can’t actually say what works. And in any case, aren’t we forgetting something?
Addicts want to recover and many of us want abstinence. Does that not count?
I’ve overstayed my welcome on this blog and if you got this far, I’m impressed so I don’t have time to feed back to you comments I’ve heard at meetings and a conference this week where the resistance of clinicians to recovery would have curdled your blood, curled your toes and cauterised your cortex.
There’s absolutely nothing unpredictable about this of course. We’re back to Newton and his equal and opposite reaction. Despite the fact that recovery is good news and makes such good sense to those of us whose lives have been turned around, we will certainly find resistance as our voices grow louder.
Resistance to the concept that addicts can recover and resistance to the fact that treatment is only a small part of recovery for some people. There will be and is resistance to mutual aid and communities of recovery.
Those of us who are in positions of care who have never really worked out why we are there can be very reluctant to let go of control and let our clients recover. This will cause resistance to a grassroots recovery movement, but those resisting will not fully understand where their resistance comes from.
It will not matter. The momentum is too strong and we won’t be silenced. We do recover.
Resistance, at least to the wonderful phenomenon of recovery, is futile.
It’s said that treatment needs to be diverse as people’s needs are different. We need to have a choice and offer clients options. Lay out the options and the client makes an informed choice. All very reasonable.
My problem with this is that when I came for help, I was absolutely barking mad. Bewildered to the point where my frontal lobes were functioning at the level of a mollusc. A slightly bewildered mollusc. A slightly bewildered and still-quite-booze-and-drug-addled mollusc.
I had no idea whatsoever what was good for me. I floated around treatment like a dislocated whelk for a couple of years before I got to the sort of treatment that changed my life. In my case that was focussed on full abstinent recovery and run by people in recovery who already had a very useful road map that I could follow.
Who is to say what might have happened if I’d been referred to the treatment centre I ended up in when I first presented? The evidence of the staff in recovery convinced me that this might just work for me.
Back in those crazy days I was no more able to make sustained healthy choices than the aforementioned mollusc could debate string theory with a quantum physicist. I needed hand holding, role modelling and hope.
My mollusc-like brain did begin to recover, but it took many months before my thinking was back on track and a year or two for the anxiety and mood swings to really settle. I needed wise fellow travellers on the recovery road to point me in the right direction and to sustain me with support when the road was rocky. Healthy thinking and the ability to make self-caring choices reliably takes time.
My worry is that in a fuzzy, warm, tell-me-what-you-need-and-we’ll-provide-it sort of service, folk won’t get what they really need and what will work. I needed the equivalent of a plump golden Labrador, eager and sure, a guide dog not for the sight-impaired, but for the addiction-impaired, shellfish-brained wretch seeking recovery.
The bewildered need help and it needs to come from those less bewildered than we are in our early days.
Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
– Marin Co. California newspaper TV listing for “The Wizard of Oz”My judgement was so skewed in active addiction that I was living in some sort of fantasy world of my own creation and I had walled myself in so securely that it was very hard for those who cared to help me see things the way they were. I call that delusional.
I genuinely thought that life was harder for me than most people and that justified my continuing to use and drink. Not once did I think there might be a different way to see things other from the perspective of victimhood.
In recovery, how well I am doing is often related to how clearly I see things. I have an uncanny skill, an amazing ability, enough to curl your toes, to paint things in a negative light. Glass half empty is my speciality folks – which is a step up from glass completely empty which was my usual state both literally and metaphorically when drinking.
Now, The Wizard of Oz could be reframed as a Tarantino bloodfest in a jiffy, recasting Toto as a Baskervillian bloodhound, Aunty Em as the grey character who lives in the storm cellar sharpening knives and seeing the wizard as a Machiavellian despot who abducts a minor from her colourful life to transport her to the grim, black plains of the dustbowl.
Actually, that’s given me an idea for a screenplay, but I digress.
My point is that how I see the world determines how I manage life. The world and what it throws at me has less to do with how I am than how I view and deal with life on its own terms.
Victor Frankl, the concentration camp survivor puts it in a nutshell: “Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
It’s freeing to grasp this, for it gives me hope and the chance to live life in a way where I determine how I will feel and behave rather than constantly being in a reactive state.
As Dorothy will say in my soon to be produced movie, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in victim mode any more”. Try that on for size munchkins.
David Clark
desigol1979
Graham Woods
mark burns
oliver
Phil Hughes
Phillipa M
Sarah Davies
Tony A
Yenwarp