Author’s Update
I wanted to note that I originally wrote this article almost 8 years ago. Since then, I have conquered my demons and have learned what my personal mental health issues are, and how to cope with them on a daily basis. I have my lovely wife Michelle and my close friends and family to thank for where I am today. I couldn’t have gotten here without them. I’m doing very well now, so I wanted to repost this article to this new iteration of my blog as I feel that it is some of my best work. I really do hope that maybe I can help someone out there with their current struggles.
For the past 16yrs or so I have struggled with alcoholism and addiction. Some of you may know what I’m talking about and others may not. Living with an addiction is like living with a monster inside of you. A creature that is constantly hungry for more of everything. A connoisseur of excess if you will. He scratches and claws at every part of your being trying to make your focus only one thing…making him stop.
This fight is a daily battle that every addict faces. It is a constant struggle within oneself of trying to keep your mind quiet and focus on making the good decision, to keep the monster at bay. We all fight the good fight, but from time to time, the monster wins. It is what we call a Relapse.
What is a Relapse?
According to drugabuse.com: “In its simplest terms, a relapse is when you start drinking again after a period of abstinence. Heavy cravings or obsessive thoughts about drinking can feel impossible to ignore in the early days of recovery, especially if you are experiencing stress or feel unhappy in your day-to-day life. Despite your best efforts to stay clean and sober, you may turn to drinking as a familiar coping mechanism and relapse.” Because those of us suffering from addiction have been, in most cases, self-medicating for years, when the stressors appear it is much easier for us to turn to something that we know will quiet our mind versus seeking out something new that we aren’t even sure will work.
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism states that evidence exists to show that 90% of people in treatment for alcoholism will relapse at least once in a 4 year period of recovery. 90%. So, for people in recovery, it is a high statistical probability that you will relapse at least once in the early years of your recovery process. Many believe that relapse is actually an important part of the recovery process. Given that people with this disorder are powerless over alcohol, relapse becomes a mechanism for them to gauge exactly what a person needs to sustain recovery. According to the book Relapse and Recovery in Addictions, given the above belief, it is expected that a person may have to attend treatment multiple times before being able to sustain sobriety for an extended period of time.
So what science is telling us here is that Relapse is a part of the recovery process. No one person is perfect and we definitely are not saints, so failure can happen. The key is to understand the failure, make adjustments and try again. So why is relapse, or for that matter addiction, looked at with such disdain by current societal standards?
The Drunk
For as long as I can remember, addiction has been portrayed as the old homeless man, asking for a few dollars just to get that bottle of cheap wine in a bag to keep him going for a short while longer. Alcoholics are always portrayed as these people that are at the end of their rope. Everything is gone, but the booze. They have lost everything. Now while this is accurate in some cases, the truth is that there are many different stages of alcoholism, and this “filthy, bearded man on the street” is just one of those stages.
You may be someone that goes to have a drink and says, I’ll only have a couple of drinks, a few times a week. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but by definition that is considered alcoholism. There are a total of 5 stages of Alcoholism. I just want to touch on them lightly, but you can read more about each stage here.
Stage 1: Occasional Abuse & Binge Drinking
The first stage revolves around mainly Binge Drinking. Anyone out there that has had their “fun” with alcohol has experienced at least one occasion where they had that one too many. There are many of us, that experience that a bit more than others, and we are qualified as Binge Drinkers. A binge drinker can be described as someone who doesn’t drink regularly, but when they do, they drink in excess. With more frequent occurrences, the user will start to “enjoy” the feeling they get, or the “fun” they have, and start to do this with more and more frequency. This tumbles down the rabbit hole directly to the next stage.
Stage 2: Increased Drinking
So let’s say that you work very hard at your job. You put in 50–60hrs a week, bust your ass, and are very good at what you do. The weeks are long and the work is hard. You decide that “man it’s Friday, this week of hell is over, I’m going to go have a drink”. There is actually nothing wrong with that at all. In most cases though, that becomes a regularly scheduled event. It’s Friday, I’m going to go have 3 or 4 cocktails with friends. Then Saturday you may go out with your significant other and have a few more drinks with a few more friends. Then you take Sunday off to relax and get ready for the work week ahead. Seems normal right? No way, you are an alcoholic. Sorry to say so, but this is another stage of alcoholism. You see, you have moved past the “party” stage and now you have created a habit out of your behavior. Even though you are only having a couple of drinks, you are doing this on a set schedule. This means now instead of binge drinking with friends once a month, you are now hitting the bars on a regular schedule, and now you have tied this behavior to a Pavlovian-type response. You work very hard all week and now you “reward” yourself by going out to the bar with friends and blowing the week off with a few drinks. Although you may be drinking less each time you go out, you are drinking with increased frequency and have now tied it to an emotional response. Once this connection happens, the next stage is an easy step to make.
Stage 3: Problem Drinking
When I first heard the term Problem Drinking, I thought it meant people who have a problem with drinking. They needed help. That wasn’t me, I was fine. My bills were paid and there was food in the fridge. I’m a responsible person, so therefore there is no “Problem Drinking” here. Well, this is the stage I found myself in for the last 10 years of my life. www.healthline.com states that “the term “problem drinker” refers to someone who starts experiencing the impacts of their habit.” Now mind you, I had no idea this was happening to me. I blamed the world around me for giving me the short end of the stick. Why was I so broke all the time? Gas prices are too high. The economy sucks. Income inequality is keeping me in this place where I can barely afford to live. Never once did I take a look at the hundreds of dollars a week I was spending out at the bar thinking maybe that was the cause of some of my financial troubles. Why can’t I meet new people or even find a way to have a decent conversation with someone I’m interested in? If you were out and about, would you want to have a conversation with the guy whose been sitting at the end of the bar for 3 hours, is best friends with the bartenders, and has a penchant for falling asleep on the bar? No of course not. But in my mind, none of this was because of alcohol, it was because of “people these days”. I had zero realization as to the effect alcohol was having on my life, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have cared. I had created such a habit at this point that every good feeling I had came from being at the bar and drinking. I definitely was a problem drinker but was just completely unwilling to see it.
Stage 4: Dependence
I’m thankful that I never fully reached this stage of alcoholism, but I came very, very close. Dependence happens when alcohol has completely taken over your routine. You understand and are aware of the effects on your life, but you no longer have control over your consumption. In my personal experience, I have not reached this point, but damn I was close to the edge. It took some serious cosmic intervention to get me to where I was ready to stop and leave this shit behind. Unfortunately, I did have the “pleasure” of knowing a few people that were in this stage. They would wake up in the morning and have a few drinks. Drank on the way to the doctor and drank before every moment of “life” they had to deal with. I’ve seen the withdrawal symptoms. Nausea, shakes, sweating, irritability, all of it. It’s not a pretty sight, and I have the utmost compassion for those that are in this stage. At this stage, it is very hard to turn around and come back. It’s not impossible, but it is not by any means a matter of “just stopping”.
Stage 5: Alcoholism
This stage is where we find our filthy, bearded man from earlier. At this point, alcohol has completely and totally taken over your life. You are governed by a strict need, physically and psychologically, to drink. People in this stage drink on every occasion they possibly can. They can no longer hold down a job, or home life. The monster has taken complete and total control of their lives. Unfortunately, at this stage, most don’t make it back. Usually, the physical and psychological toll has been taken and their body gives out before they can find their way to recovery.
O.k., I’ve taught you something. Now what?
Well, the purpose of this was not to be another article that talks about how bad alcohol is and the symptoms of alcoholism. You can find dozens of those online. What I want to talk about is the struggle that each of us deals with in how society looks at us. Anyone with an IQ larger than a box of shoes, can read the above definitions and see that this is a psychological disorder that progresses to a physical one. Now I know there are many people out there that refute this statement. They believe that Addiction and Alcoholism is not a disease, and it’s just people making bad choices. Take this guy for instance.
Now, if I ever saw this man in life, it would take quite a bit for me not to just simply slap the douche right out of him. To claim addiction is a choice is just moronic, demeaning, and does nothing to help promote awareness about this problem. This is an extremely one-sided view and to approach it with this “Drill Sergeant” attitude will only hurt the ones around you that are addicts.
Now that being said, he is right in some of what he says. I, personally, do not think that Alcohol is a disease. Even though it can be traced to a genetic predisposition to compulsive behavior and is directly related to a problem in the chemical structure of the brain, I still don’t consider it a disease. I consider it a symptom. I think addiction is a physical symptom of a psychological disorder. When we are in pain, mentally, and can find no way out, we begin to find ways to “self-medicate”. If you are suffering from severe depression and cannot afford to get the help you need, and you find that drinking alcohol or using drugs, makes those feelings of depression go away, well then of course you are going to continue to use. There is a choice. Live in complete hell, or have that one fix that gives you happiness, if even for a short time. We need to treat the cause of addiction, not the addiction itself. Addiction is a compulsion, and compulsion can be treated with proper psychological therapy. Our approach is just all wrong.
What should we do then?
Well in the US, we have this belief that people with addiction should be shamed and made to suffer harsh consequences to hopefully give them an incentive not to use. We punish those people with problems, and segregate them from the rest of us, smearing this stigma of “weak” or “loser” across their faces. I have a DUI in the state of Florida. Now mind you, the penalties for this are the same as Reckless Driving, which is what a person is charged with for Texting and Driving. Both garner a short probation term, with some fines, and some community service. The difference is that the Reckless Driving charge will fall off your record in 5 years. The DUI will fall off mine in 75 years. So unless I get my first DUI at age 4, and learn my lesson from it, it will follow me around for the rest of my life. It is the modern-day version of the Scarlet Letter.
As I mentioned above, 90% of addicts in recovery will experience at least one relapse within the first 4 years of recovery. So you take someone that has been charged with a DUI and possession of cocaine. Now the DUI is pretty mild and is basically just a HUGE financial strain on the person. The Possession charge on the other hand is a class 3 felony and carries with it a possible prison sentence of up to 5 years. So you take that person and you put them on Probation for 3 years. So now you are asking an addict, to be clean for 3 years, or they could face serious jail time. In this instance, you are setting this person up for failure, given the statistic I mentioned earlier. So this person then relapses during their recovery, and the answer is to put them in Jail, segregating them more from their support system and possibly causing them to lose their place to live or their employment. Now we have been taught what an important part of recovery the support of family, friends, and others in recovery can be for an addict. So our answer is to further remove these people from these necessary items and place them in jail. Lock them up with criminals and drug dealers, and expect that to wake them up and make them realize that they need to stop. From what I can tell, none of this actually addresses the cause of the addiction at all. It’s like stitching up the cuts on someone’s arm who suffers from one of the many self-Injury mental disorders but never sending them to see a psychologist. We are treating the symptom, not the actual cause of the problem.
During my research, I came across the amazing Ted Talk from Johann Hari, author of the book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War On Drugs. He gives a poignant talk about the new information we have gained about addiction and a different approach to how we treat those afflicted with this disorder.
As you can see in the video above, our approach to this matter is completely wrong. He actually states in the video that Canadian doctor, Dr. Gabor Martin, said “That if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system”. That system is our current system for dealing with addiction. He suggests that addiction is a psychological issue related to the current state of isolation we have created societally. That more connection, more intervention, showing addicts a way out. Those are the things we need to be doing to fight this epidemic. We need to make psychological counseling more attainable for people. We need to show these people that you can be a productive member of society and have strong connections. You don’t need this substance to feel good, you have all the good in the world around you. You just need to connect with it.
