by Susan Juby
Part of the difficulty is the ongoing “living with yourself” piece. Most programs are aimed at helping people who have pre-existing issues or problems caused by drugs and alcohol to exist and function in regular society. This can be particularly challenging for those who start using substances early in life. Most of us didn’t hit our personal-development and life-skills milestones. They say people stop maturing when they begin using heavily. That leaves a lot of us emotionally twelve or thirteen years old when we sober up, trying to act like the twenty- or thirty- or forty-year-olds we actually are. Most of us have trouble handling disappointment, pain, discomfort, or any sort of delay in gratification. I had the social skills of a particularly awkward thirteen-year-old. Only time and generous support from other people who were or had been in the same boat helped me cope. I interviewed one beautiful, poised young woman who talked about having one year of sobriety and literally falling on the floor in anguish when she didn’t get a job she wanted.
If I’d been left alone with my paranoia, anger, fear, crippling shyness, and the rest, it would have been too hard. Many of the people I spoke with for this book talked about the difficulty of going it alone. One friend told me, “I was crazier sober than I was when I drank. It got to be too much. I couldn’t handle it.” She decided to join AA when she had already been abstinent for a year and a half.
If you are convinced you can do it alone, fly at it. Get all the knowledge you can and give it a shot. But if you find you can’t do it alone or your quality of life and mental state is too harrowing, consider getting some help.
29
Other Forms of Assistance
Rational Recovery
Rational Recovery is, according to its website, “the exclusive, worldwide source of counseling, guidance, and direct instruction on self-recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs through planned, permanent abstinence.” It was begun in 1986 by Jack Trimpey. Rational Recovery used to offer group meetings, but the program is now offered only via the Internet, books, videos, and lectures.
RR believes that recovery is an event rather than a process. It rejects the disease model of addiction and suggests that those who drink or use too much need to focus on their abilities and reject addictive thinking and thoughts. RR encourages people to follow their “own native beliefs and intuitions” and quit once and for all.
There is much that is interesting on the website, and the program looks as though it could be quite useful, if one can set aside the hostility aimed at other recovery programs, treatment centres, addiction counsellors, and the special loathing reserved for AA.
As noted in the previous chapter, people who sober up without ongoing support are often prone to paranoia and anger issues. At risk of sounding glib, I’d venture a guess that the founder of Rational Recovery could use a meeting. The website rails against “cultural recoveryism” as evidenced by a time when Google “banned” Rational Recovery for a month in 2008.
To join Rational Recovery, people are asked to subscribe to the website or to become a “patron subscriber.”
A splinter group called SMART Recovery formed from Rational Recovery when RR stopped holding group meetings. SMART Recovery is an international non-profit that provides help to addicts and alcoholics. It uses a secular, science-based approach, including techniques such as Motivational Enhancement Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. SMART offers a four-point approach to recovery: building motivation, coping with urges, problem-solving, and lifestyle balance. It is often listed as an alternative to twelve-step programs, but many people use it in conjunction with the twelve steps.
Counsellors, Doctors, Addiction Specialists
Many addicts and alcoholics use the services of counsellors, therapists, doctors, and addiction specialists. Among counsellors, therapists, and doctors, the degree of knowledge about addiction may vary, as may the preferred approach to dealing with substance abuse issues. In order to access subsidized rehab services, you will in many cases need to be referred by a drug and alcohol counsellor or a doctor.
Professional help can be particularly valuable once a person has achieved a period of sobriety. When people are still using, they tend to create the same problems over and over. People in recovery, on the other hand, have a shot at actually working through their issues, and professionals offer a wide range of supports that cannot be accessed through self-help programs alone.
Harm Reduction
Harm reduction is public health policy aimed at reducing the damage that results from high-risk behaviours, such as substance abuse, casual (unprotected) sex, and the sex trade. According to the International Harm Reduction Association, harm reduction includes “policies and programs that attempt primarily to reduce the adverse health, social and economic consequences of mood altering substances to individual drug users, their families and communities, without requiring a decrease in drug use.” The British Columbia Community Guide to Harm Reduction calls harm reduction “a set of non-judgmental policies and programs” and notes that “for some people, abstinence is the most feasible way to reduce harm. Interventions that aim for abstinence and for safer drug use both have a place within harm reduction.” On the spectrum of harm-reduction activities, you’ll find needle exchange programs, sex education, condoms in schools, methadone programs, and certain types of drug and alcohol counselling.
Harm reduction is controversial in certain quarters because it is seen as condoning unhealthy or immoral activities. Other people point to the evidence that shows that some harm-reduction strategies minimize the damage done to individuals who engage in potentially dangerous activities.
Perhaps the only thing even more insidious than the idea that one day addicts/alcoholics will finally be able to just say no is the idea that they will find that miracle technique that will allow them to start using or drinking “socially.” This is also the idea that underlies some harm-reduction programs, particularly those designed for adolescents and low-bottom (severely hard-up) addicts and alcoholics. The thinking seems to be that in the case of teens, they’ll grow out of it, and in the case of street people, they can’t get better.
One nineteen-year-old woman I spoke with who’d gotten sober at seventeen told me about sitting down with her high school counsellor. They worked out a program whereby she would smoke pot only three days a week rather than seven. She would confine her drinking to Fridays and Saturdays, and she would stop getting drunk on school nights. It was a good plan, but not a successful one. Her addiction proceeded unimpeded, and by grade eleven she was in a twelve-step program.
One counsellor I spoke with, who felt that abstinence is the only real solution for addiction, referred to harm reduction as “harm induction.” Another treatment expert I interviewed called it “palliative care,” and another suggested that harm reduction was promoted by “well-meaning people who do not understand the addicted mind.” Those who are skeptical of harm reduction point out that addicts and alcoholics are often obsessed with finding methods that will allow them to continue to use. Other people worry that harm-reduction policies shield the addict or alcoholic from the consequences of their using, which can prolong the disease or even make it impossible for the addict to clean up.
Harm reduction is practised and promoted by numerous in- and outpatient programs and promoted by all manner of counsellors. In Canada, many programs that receive government funding follow the harm-reduction model. When I asked addiction specialists why harm reduction is so popular, they pointed to measurable statistics. You can create statistics, for instance, to show how much crime is being prevented or how many fewer trips to jail a person experiences. Harm reduction certainly has its place.
If you are not ready to quit drinking or using, by all means try a harm-reduction program. If it doesn’t work, abstinence is a good thing to consider. Using clean needles may prevent the spread of AIDS, but it’s very unlikely to aid in a user’s rehabilitation.
30
Family Affair
EVEN FOR THOSE wh
o don’t know their story, the three of them intrigue people. A friend once spotted Shane in a coffee shop. Later she whispered, “Hey, is that guy in a band?”
Shane certainly looks like he’s in a band (a heavy one, named after a power tool) or at least like the professional motocross stunt rider he used to be. He’s got full-sleeve tattoos, is liberally pierced, and wears rolled-up ball caps, black shirts with jagged white lettering, and low riders.
His older brother, Tim, is also imposing, both in his street clothes with tattoos showing and in his business suit. Tim rides a Harley and often wears a slightly bemused “go ahead, try and surprise me” look.
Shane and Tim together are straight-up intimidating. At least, they are until you see them with Dara, Tim’s beautiful young wife, or until you hear them speak. They are raw and effective speakers.
Dara, Tim, and Shane are an example of a new kind of young family. They are all young, all clean and sober, and they’ve built lives and relationships based partly on a shared recovery from devastating addictions.
When I interviewed them for this book, I made the mistake of suggesting that Tim and Dara might be appealing figures to other young people concerned about the inherent uncoolness of sobriety, with all its surrendering and asking for help and so forth. Tim shook his head. He wants no part of that or of being half of “the ideal couple in recovery.”
“Too much pressure,” agreed Dara.
Tim and Shane grew up without a father, and Tim felt responsible for his younger brother. That didn’t stop him from disappearing down the rabbit hole of addiction. Tim is a huge guy, tall and wide-shouldered. He dwarfs Dara on the leather couch in their tidy living room. When the two enormous mastiffs he and Dara own stand near him, they look almost like normal dogs. It’s hard to believe that Tim was 130 pounds and covered in chemical sores when he showed up at treatment nine years ago. He was twenty-four years old and had been cycling between jail and the streets for years.
He and Shane started out the way most teens do. It was fun to smoke and drink and get high. In their circle, it was not only socially acceptable, it was socially desirable. Lurking beneath the surface were doubts, however. Both Tim and Shane had learning disabilities and hated school. They ended up on parallel fast tracks to personal destruction.
When Tim’s drug use got seriously out of hand, he started dealing and, as he puts it, “doing crime,” to get money.
“When did you know you had a problem?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, exactly.”
Shane jumps in. “How about when you were smoking crack in that security job you used to have—did you see that as a problem?”
Tim laughs ruefully.
Tim graduated from booze and pot to designer and hard drugs and wound up addicted to crystal meth. Rather than being dissuaded by his brother’s addiction, Shane also started using the drug on weekends. The brothers would run into each other only in what they called “using places.”
Finally, Tim went on a four-day run on crystal and ecstasy. All pretence of socializing was gone. He’d stolen from his mother and used his brother’s name after getting caught in a stolen vehicle. He was given a choice between another, much longer, trip to jail and treatment.
He chose treatment. For some reason, he finally saw that the freedom he’d always thought drugs gave him was, in reality, a prison.
Tim spent months in Edgewood, and when he got out, all he really wanted to do was rebuild his relationships with his mother and younger brother. Unfortunately, Shane was so far into his own addiction by this time that it was nearly impossible. Tim would go to see his brother, only to have his own brutal past reflected back at him. His younger brother was living in an unfinished guest house on their mother’s property. He had a mattress and not much else.
I asked Shane what, if anything, he noticed about Tim during Tim’s early recovery.
“He got big,” says Shane. “Then he met this girl with big pipes.”
He is referring to Dara. She and Tim met when Tim had been clean and sober for about two years. Dara is very fit (hence the reference to muscular arms) and she’s also strikingly beautiful. When Tim met her, she was working at the gym he attended. She was also drinking heavily and was a chronic weed smoker and frequent cocaine abuser. Once she realized that Tim was clean and sober, she hid her use from him, but he wasn’t fooled. After they’d been dating for a few months, he told her that his recovery came first and that he wasn’t going to endanger it for anyone. She didn’t want to lose the relationship so she quit drinking.
At first, Dara thought that getting clean and sober would be easy. She reluctantly went to meetings with Tim for the first year but remained unconvinced that she needed them. She did notice, however, that without alcohol and drugs she was “quite a bit more fucked up” than she’d expected. Dara started getting terribly depressed and even suicidal. After a year, Dara and Tim broke up. She slipped almost immediately. Getting loaded didn’t work for her any more, and she decided that she would try recovery for herself. She found her own friends and started attending a women’s meeting. Eventually she and Tim got back together.
When Tim had been sober for six years, Shane ended up in the same treatment centre Tim had gone through. Asked what led him to quit, Shane says, “I hated myself. I hated school. I hated work. All around me people were getting married, getting houses, getting things. I had nothing. I tried to commit suicide a couple of times. My family was done with me. Even my buddies I used with were telling me, ‘Dude, you’re pretty messed up.’ I was living in a car with my dog and doing crime for money. But even then I couldn’t see it. I’d go to the casino, win some money, get a nice hotel room, and have a party. After a certain situation I saw that I had to do something.”
“What situation?” I ask.
“Something I told myself I’d never do. I beat on my girlfriend. And she left me. That was it.”
The minute Shane said he was ready to go to treatment, Tim made it happen.
“Dara and I were in a boat in the middle of a lake, and I was working the phone, trying to get him into treatment,” he says.
I ask the three of them what it’s like being a young, sober family.
“I don’t have to be a father figure. Not a caregiver, just a friend,” says Tim. “And I had to figure out that what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for Dara or Shane.”
“We wouldn’t be married today if he still thought he had to take care of me,” says Dara.
Tim felt responsible for Shane, and when Dara first sobered up he felt responsible for her, too. Finally, he says, he had to “put down that whole bag. Everybody gets to be responsible for themselves.” “You can’t get away with anything in this family: no bullshit, no behavioural things,” says Shane.
Finally, I ask Tim and Shane about how they reconcile the public perception of them. Tim’s Harley and Shane’s overall look cause people to jump to conclusions. The first conclusion is often that they are drug dealers. Dara talks about the time they all got the stink eye from a group of cops when they pulled up to a local Tim Hortons. It should be noted that they were in Dara’s truck, which is enormous and black and looks like she either works for a TV FBI squad or is in a gang. She is also legendary for backing into things with said truck, but that’s another story.
Shane says it’s all the same to him. Three years of recovery have taught him that you never know who’s really suffering. “It could be the rich guy in the suit or the guy off the street.”
Tim, who has worked his way up in a local company to become a top manager, struggles with conflicting impulses. “Now I’m a suit and tie guy,” he says. “But I don’t feel like that’s really me.” It is the recovery version of an identity crisis.
Shane, who just graduated from college and is preparing to begin his trade as a welder, is closer to the street scene. He recently felt the effects of the gang violence that has been raging on the Lower Mainland. About six months before our interview, Shane and some childho
od friends were at a bar when a guy in a hoodie walked in with a gun. The gunman went into the bathroom and killed a young man. Then he turned the gun on a friend of Shane’s, who had the misfortune to be standing beside the target. Shane was the one who got to his friend first and held him in his arms as he died. Later, the police treated Shane and his friends like they were gang members, refusing to tell them what hospital their friend had been taken to. Of the group, Shane was the only sober one. He was the one who felt the full brunt.
In the aftermath, Shane has not numbed out with drugs or alcohol, even though he very much wants not to feel.
I ask him how the experience is affecting his recovery.
“I feel brand new,” he says. “Lost, lonely. I’m shut down. I don’t want to talk. I’m backing off again. I don’t want to feel it. But I won’t drink over it. That’s not the cure.”
As soon as Shane got home, he turned to Tim, who had also been friends with the young man who’d been murdered. When Shane talks about the horrifying experience, about his reluctance to feel his anger and helplessness, about the nightmares, and about not knowing how to respond, at the time of the shooting and now, in the aftermath, I see Tim get very still. He listens to his brother with an intensity that is almost palpable. Though they may not realize it, both he and Dara lean imperceptibly toward Shane, as though they can absorb some of the emotion coming off him. As Shane speaks, his pain is evident, but it’s also clear to me that he is not alone, and when he’s ready to feel, there will be people there to help him get through it, sober.
