by Susan Juby
The God Thing
If you have any familiarity at all with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, you have probably heard that they are “spiritual programs.” The twelve steps and the Big Book and NA’s literature mention “God” and a “higher power” many times. You may have also heard that “God” can be anyone or anything you like. You can have a Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist conception of god or you can use the fashions of Karl Lagerfeld or a newly sprouted daffodil if you like. The main idea is that you are not in charge of the world any longer. That doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility for your life. It means figuring out what you reasonably can and cannot change.
For some people this notion of a higher power can be a difficult one to absorb. However, it is possible to kick yourself quite a bit of room in this department, if you are willing to be flexible. I’ve met people in recovery whose belief in a higher power is about as vague as the softest wisp of fog and they do just fine. Others have a very strong and well-defined sense of their god and are not shy about talking about it. If you have an open mind, you’ll be fine. You had your ass handed to you by your addiction and you need help. If you remain open to what that help might be, you will find something. No one will demand a full accounting from you. “That shit is personal,” as one guy I spoke with put it. And it is possible to do the prayer and meditation part of the twelve steps with no clear conception of a higher power. Even the most skeptical person probably believes in nature or a life force that runs through all living creatures. It’s not much of a stretch to see that active addiction, with its nihilistic consequences, runs contrary to a life force.
There are plenty of people in recovery who don’t believe in a standard conception of a religious god. While doing interviews for this book, I met a Taoist, a Buddhist, a wikkan, and several agnostics. Others make the program itself their higher power.
AA is built on taking leaps of faith. Faith that the program will work, faith that if you get a sponsor, go to meetings, act like you have a higher power, don’t pick up a drink or a drug, your life will get better. The contrast between people who are dying of addiction and those same people living full lives after a few years in recovery should be evidence enough that some form of higher power exists.
NA and CA
Narcotics Anonymous is like Alcoholics Anonymous, only for drug addicts. I know, I just finished saying that AA is for drug addicts, too. The reality is that most people today who are trying to get sober have used drugs. Some people find the strict focus on alcohol in AA distracting and want to talk to other people who share their particular addiction experiences.
NA is a younger program than AA and, in some areas, is less well-established. It began in California in the early fifties and grew very slowly. According to the NA website, in 1978 there were “fewer than 200 registered groups in three countries.” Today, there are over 25,000 groups in 127 countries.
Like AA, NA emphasizes abstinence, including abstinence from alcohol.
Many cross-addicted people attend both programs because they get something out of each. NA’s self-titled “White Pamphlet” describes NA this way:
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We … meet regularly to help each other stay clean.... We are not interested in what or how much you used ... but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help.
Many of the same factors at work in AA, including sponsorship and so forth, are at play in NA as well. And as with AA, NA meetings vary from one to the next. To decide whether NA is for you, attend a few meetings in your area to see which ones you like.
CA refers to Cocaine Anonymous. It began in 1982 and by 1996 had over 30,000 members in twenty countries. Similar to NA, CA’s “primary purpose is to stay free from cocaine and all other mind-altering substances, and to help others achieve the same freedom.”* One woman I spoke with had an interesting take on the difference between AA, NA, and CA. She felt that one day there should be one big twelve-step program for all substance abusers. It’s an interesting idea but not one likely to be seen any time soon. In the meantime, people can choose whichever program or combination of programs works best for them.
* The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited, page 268.
* Ibid., page 268.
* Cocaine Anonymous website: http://www.ca.org/.
27
The Dirty Goldfish
WHEN I ASKED her what pseudonym she’d like to use, she had one ready.
“The Dirty Goldfish,” she said.
She said she and a friend had recently been speculating about their spirit animals. Her friend decided hers would be a golden retriever.
“I said I’d be a goldfish swimming around in a bowl filled with shit all day long.”
I asked what she meant. “When I was moving around all the time, I left my shit all over the place. Everywhere I went, I left something behind. Now it’s all coming back to me, one piece at a time. My whole room is filled with dirty, too-small clothing. And I’m going around and around in circles.”
The Dirty Goldfish, or DG, just turned twenty. I first met her when she was fourteen or so and her mom was just getting sober. My overall impression was of a quirky kid. Later, I heard that the DG wasn’t doing so well. She’d left school, changed her name (and not to Dirty Goldfish), and begun moving around a lot.
I was extremely pleased when she finally surfaced among some friends of mine. In fact, she’s put herself in the middle of a group of sober young women and, whether she sees it or not, her goldfish bowl is more like a sixty-gallon aquarium and she’s got all sorts of company in there. I knew I wanted to interview DG for this book.
We went to a local Starbucks. DG ordered an iced tea, and while we were waiting, the barista gigglingly offered her a Misto she’d made by mistake.
When we sat down at our table, barely shielded from the highway by a few straggly cedar shrubs, DG said, referring to the barista, “I made out with her once. In a bathroom at a party.”
This, I learn, is part of DG’s charm. Spending time with her is like hanging out with a gay, clean and sober, twenty-year-old girl version of Warren Beatty. She’s endlessly charming and has had a lot of girlfriends. We go over her history, and she tells me that she was left alone a lot as a kid. “I had an overactive imagination, just to keep myself busy. I used to drink fruit juice out of wine glasses and wear wigs around when I was by myself and pretend to get wasted.”
She started smoking at ten and didn’t like school much. It didn’t help that there was no one around to make her do her homework. DG felt hurt all the time by the lack of attention and felt left out because everyone else had a dad.
She says she always had a best friend whom she’d focus on when her mom wasn’t around.
“I got along with everyone in high school,” she says. “At least, no one concentrated on making my life bad.”
She started drinking at eleven and at first didn’t see it as a huge problem. There was a lot of drinking in her family at get-togethers and so on.
At fifteen, she decided she was gay. This is the phrasing she uses. She cut off her hair and came out to her mother. By this time, her mother had sobered up, and the two of them were living in Korea, where her mother was teaching English and saving to go to grad school. DG was also drinking every night, putting out cigarettes on her arms, and cutting herself.
She left Korea on her own after falling in love with a girl she met online. She moved to Vancouver where she started “snorting coke out of rolled-up twenty dollar bills, drinking Baby Duck and Colt 45s. I was living the dream,” she says, wryly.
She spent her time in Vancouver moving between friends’ and girlfriends’ houses. “I’d go to punk rock shows and parties in the park and pick out the person who’d be my saviour for the night,” she said. “I’d go to the parents and say, ‘I’m this sad-ass kid and I need some help.’ That whole time I only had to sleep outside three times.”
&n
bsp; She burned her bridges with her own family members who took her in. And she began spending more and more time with street kids, panhandling and, on one terrifying occasion, sleeping in a flophouse for meth addicts.
“I locked myself in a room. There were tons of drug addicts in there and mattresses everywhere: at the bottom of the stairs, in the bathroom and the kitchen. You wouldn’t believe the noises that night. I was afraid to come out to go to the bathroom.”
I asked if she saw any difference between her and the kids who lived on the streets full time.
“They didn’t have what I had. People cared about me. Like there was this one girl, Kelsey. And she had her own ideas about what freedom was. She used a sock for a pad. She got pissed on by drunk guys when she slept outside. She could have gotten counselling and help, but she didn’t want it.”
Another factor was her decision to stay away from crack and meth. She saw what those drugs did to some of the kids on the street and, later, people in treatment and didn’t want to know about it, at least not first-hand.
She continued to bounce from place to place. She’d go to Vancouver Island, stay with friends or relatives. When things got uncomfortable, she’d move on. She says there were always girlfriends to catch her.
“Online, I’d be like, ‘Hi, I’m DG, I’m a gypsy. I live to get shitfaced.’ And they’d invite me to their town.”
For a while she stayed with a friend of her mother’s and they moved to Mexico. There she drank, smoked weed, and did coke with a family friend who drove a Hummer and liked to have intellectual conversations. She later lived in Edmonton and then back in Vancouver. With every move, things got more out of control.
She talked about working in a restaurant on Robson Street. “Everyone there was on something,” she says. “The guy on my right was on ecstasy, the guy on my left had been drunk since two o’clock, and the boss was getting coke delivered to the back door.” Her whole life was working, partying, and sleeping.
Pretty soon, the working fell away and it was just using. She and her girlfriend would get up, take a handful of pills, go out and shoplift a Red Bull from Shoppers Drug Mart, and then go downtown to shoplift some liquor. It was during this time that she was jumped by several people after a party and badly beaten up.
“Good times,” she says.
She finally called her mother, and the next thing she remembers is finding herself dancing on a speaker at a nightclub in Poland, where her mother was studying. Poland was followed by London, Vancouver, Arizona, back to Mexico, and then Calgary. Finally, she was back on Vancouver Island. “I was an empty shell of a human being. My big joy was smoking weed in the woodshed out behind the place where I worked.” Her mother, who’d come to visit, offered her an ultimatum: You can keep going like this or let me get you some help. By this time, her mother had been clean and sober for six years.
When DG was finally admitted to a local detox centre, she was nineteen and had been sober for five days. From there she went to Athena House, a six-bed house for women in post-acute withdrawal. Here she really got a look at what lay in store for her if she didn’t get clean. “There was a murderer in the bunk bed at the end, and a woman who talked in two voices beside me.”
Although everyone at Athena was older, she says that pretty soon she started getting excited about life. “Everyone liked me and I was getting along with everyone. It was a safe place. I was there for a month. We did arts and crafts and made collages. I loved it. It was more like a psych ward than a treatment centre.”
Then she was transferred to Charlford House, and her recovery got more intense.
“There was the girl popping her blisters and people fighting in the kitchen and people flipping out in group.” She wasn’t allowed to coast. “I found myself bawling in the arms of a woman who’d lost her kids. I’d felt nothing for five years. I refused to talk about anything. I’d been stealing, lying, and deceiving. And now it was all coming out in front of strangers.”
She spent five months in treatment. I asked what was most useful about her stay in treatment, and she says it was a letter she wrote to herself at the age she was before she started using drugs and alcohol. She got to apologize to her younger self for putting her in situations where she got hurt, for having friends who weren’t really friends, and for the self-abuse and mutilation.
DG had been out of treatment for a month when we did our interview. She’s surrounded herself with women who are active in recovery, and her natural charms have not diminished. As we talk, we overhear two people at the next table. They are obviously discussing recovery. We hear the words “fifth” and “relapse” and we know. When they get up to leave, they come over to DG.
“Hey,” says the girl, who looks to be in her early twenties. “We couldn’t help but overhear some of what you said. We’re in recovery too.”
Her friend, a guy around the same age with a crazy haircut, nods. “I’ve been clean a year.”
“Two years,” said the girl, pointing to herself.
They shook DG’s hand after exchanging names. “It’s awesome to meet you. We’ll see you around.”
DG looks pleased.
I finish by asking if she has any advice for others. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Just suck it up and listen. And remember that you probably didn’t wake up one day and decide your life was perfect and that you should get into recovery.”
Oh, Dirty Goldfish, that water’s looking clearer every day.
28
Doing the Lone Ranger
SO YOU’RE GOING to do it on your own? Well, good luck with that.
Seriously though, some people do quit without help. They are rare.
Not long ago I read a book by a young woman who wrote about her excessive drinking. The book was beautifully written and did a great job of exploring the inner life of the high school and college drinker. This woman and her friends were serious enough drinkers to end up in hospital with alcohol poisoning and to experience frequent blackouts. No namby-pamby little tipplers, these girls. But the book went south for me when, near the end, the young woman decides that society’s attitudes toward women in general and advertising in particular had somehow led her into the drinking life. The theory seemed to be that her self-esteem and that of her binge-drinking friends had been so damaged by their cultural environment that they were nearly forced to drink. Her solution was to just say no. She quit cold turkey one fine day and never looked back.
Huh, I thought. How nice for her.
The dream that one day we’ll up and quit whatever addiction is eating our lives—booze, drugs, food—is a primary obsession of almost every alcoholic and addict, second only to “How do I get more?” For anyone who has turned a corner into genuine drug addiction or alcoholism, that dream of quitting on one’s own is unlikely to come true. We’ve all heard the stories: he just stopped one day. Just like that. We shake our heads, as we would upon hearing that he won the lottery. That lucky bastard!
But the chances of experiencing a spontaneous remission from serious alcoholism and drug addiction are low. If you are merely a heavy user or drinker, it might be possible. But if you’ve lost the power of choice in your using, you are in serious trouble.
In The Natural History of Alcoholism, George Vaillant found certain factors that worked for people who became abstinent on their own:
1 The people found an alternative to their addictive substance, such as alternative substances, compulsive work or hobbies, belief, prayer, or meditation.
2 They developed a serious medical problem that interfered with their using.
3 They got involved in a religious organization.
4 They acquired a new love relationship, either with a romantic partner or a mentor or close friend.
Many alcoholics and addicts reject offers of help and say they’d like to try doing it on their own. One can understand. It reminds me of that old saying, who wants to join a club that would have me as a member? Also, who wants to admit that addiction has you in a bear h
ug and is eating your face? No one.
The prospect of quietly (and bravely) quitting is so much more attractive. Some of the addiction memoirs that have really taken off in recent years have been those in which, through force of will, the afflicted person has quit without help. Just walked away. Of course, at least one of those memoirs turned out to be fictitious.
I suspect that in addition to the fact that such stories are often over-the-top good yarns, what excites people about them is the notion that addiction can be conquered without help. There are instances in which this happens. There are people in my own family who showed signs of having serious addiction and who, after treatment or a time in a self-help program, dropped out and stayed clean and sober. They now have stable family lives and have had for years. I’ve seen others cut back and maintain heavy but manageable substance intake. In other words, they are able to work and maintain relationships. They function.
But for those of us who have tried many times to cut down and to quit on our own, the notion that we will one day be able to do this is the dream that keeps us sick. I tried over and over to quit but the minute the opportunity to drink came up, I forgot. I could not remember not to drink. I’d be quit. A clean and sober young woman. An upstanding citizen. I’d go out with my friends and ten minutes later I’d be halfway through my third drink and remember: Damn! I was supposed to be quit! Oh well, I’ll get to it later.
After a period of recovery, I was given the choice again. Now, if I drink, it will be because I have made a decision to do so. That’s what time in a recovery program has given me. The ability to choose. It is the most humane and empowering choice I’ve ever had. I am allowed to have the dignity to direct my own life.
Getting clean and staying sober with the help of others often requires time in a treatment centre, an aftercare program, ongoing participation in a program such as AA or NA or SMART plus counselling, and a large dose of grace. Getting clean and staying sober using only one’s unaided will requires the equivalent of a three-minute submersion in an Olympic-sized miracle pool, a burning bush, and a permanent grace-dispensing IV. Good on you if you can clean up on your own, but if you find it’s too hard, the help is available.