This is not a relapse

A quick heads up: this (fairly long) post explores addiction recovery and challenges some of the dominant ideas and ways of understanding addiction and recovery from twelve step fellowships and the ‘disease model’ of addiction. If you feel in any way that it would not be supportive for you to read this piece, then take care of yourself and skip this one. I have written this so that I can express my own experience, and not to threaten or attack anyone else’s approach to recovery.

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This is the post I have wanted to write since before I started this blog. I think about it every day. For months, the pulse of it has been beating away inside me. But I’m nervous, too – about the response to it, and about the possibility of a repeat of the Huffington Post situation from a few years ago (in six words: I got trolled. It was awful).

My intention with this piece is to stand inside my story and to own it, to tell the truth.

And the truth is this: after sixteen-and-a-half years of sobriety from drink and drugs, including many, many years of sobriety even after leaving 12 step fellowships, in September 2018 I started to drink alcohol again.

I now drink alcohol. I have smoked weed in the last eighteen months, too. And this is not a relapse.

Note: As I wrote this post, I found myself referring to a lot of language used in twelve step fellowships. I’ve indicated these phrases in inverted commas and italics, ‘like this.’

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‘Jails, institutions or death’. These, one of the core readings from Narcotics Anonymous state, are the three eventual destinations for using addicts. When you go to NA meetings regularly, you hear these words over and over (and over) again. It puts the fear of god into you, which is a good thing initially. After years – sometimes decades – of ‘getting, using and finding ways and means to get more’, many addicts and alcoholics do end up in prison, in rehab, in hospital, on a psychiatric ward, or dead. These words kind of haunt you in the rooms. Sometimes you’ll hear a story of someone who, after ten years ‘clean and sober,’ went ‘back out there’ – meaning that they ‘picked up’ drugs or alcohol and started using or drinking again. These stories never (ever) end well. People might be fine for a few months, or even for a couple of years, but eventually, they always end up back on the slippery slope towards one of those three terrible destinations.

The jails, institutions or death messaging in the rooms of twelve step fellowships means that no matter when I tell my story – one month after starting to drink, 18 months later, or five years down the road – someone hooked into the twelve step framework might find the following thought running through their head: “Well, if it hasn’t gotten bad yet, it’s only a matter of time.” I get it. The stories that make it back into the rooms about people who go ‘back out there’ are the ones that fit the mould. They have to be. The idea of a disease that can be cured to such an extent that the ‘drug of choice’ can actually re-enter a person’s life without destroying them is so fundamentally counter to the entire paradigm of this model of addiction and recovery that any outliers and exceptions simply cannot be metabolised. If I’m doing okay and I’m drinking again, then sooner or later I won’t be. If I continue to be okay, then the only other explanation is that I probably wasn’t an addict in the first place.

Yet I spent years and years sitting in meetings saying those famous words: My name is Elloa and I am an [addict/alcoholic/grateful recovering addict/overeater/anorexic/co-dependent/adult child of an alcoholic/under-earner]… I said them all, and more. I identified very heavily with what it meant to be an addict. People in the room talked about ‘people like us’ and I felt like one of them. Discovering the rooms was like entering a world where people spoke the same emotional language as me. ‘I always felt different. I feel broken. I don’t feel like normal people. There was a massive hole inside me that alcohol/drugs/food/sex/shopping/etc filled. I’m not normal.’ In addition, addiction ran in my family. I come from a long line of people with addictive tendencies, some more able to function than others.

But maybe I never really was an addict myself. Maybe I was, and I now no longer am. Maybe there are other people like me out there, struggling with the same doubts and questions about this approach to recovery as I was. I don’t have all the answers on this. But what I do know is that as the years rolled on, I found certain ideas difficult to accept. I saw a lot of people working through the steps over and over again, the ‘whack-a-mole’ nature of addiction constantly moving from one area to another. I saw a lot of people continuing to struggle. I saw people leave the rooms and be okay. I saw people never go to the rooms and be okay. And I personally felt, even as early as two years in, that there were massive areas that I needed to address that the fellowships wouldn’t be able to help me with. There was this pain that wasn’t being addressed regardless of how many meetings or service or chairs I did. The steps helped, but I firmly believe the twelve steps can only take us so far. I now understand this pain to be Complex PTSD and attachment trauma, for which specialist help is needed.

I went on to discover a lot of therapeutic approaches and ideas that kept shapeshifting my understanding of who I was and what I was living and dealing with. Working with a trauma-informed therapist, A Course in Miracles, the work of John Bradshaw, breathwork, body work, multi-generational transmission of trauma, attachment theory, movement meditation, Reiki, yoga, Gestalt, family systems theory, internal family systems theory, person-centred counselling, family constellations, psychodrama, and more. The fear and shame that had been the driving force of much of my self-destructive behaviour began to ebb away.

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Please don’t get me wrong: I think the twelve steps and the fellowships are amazing for supporting people who are in the grips of addiction. I think as a process of self-examination and personal accountability, they offer a powerful and important journey. I think it would be amazing for people everywhere to do the steps. My experience of the community of people who attend meetings is largely positive. People in the rooms understand that ‘We keep what we have only by giving it away’, and the friendship, support and solidarity in the community is amazing. But there is a lot of misinformation in the rooms, too. There is a dearth of understanding of the connection between trauma, including and perhaps especially complex trauma, and the need to numb, bind anxiety or self-medicate that is so often the genesis of a spiral into addictive behaviour. And I think there is, correspondingly, a lack of exploration of whether, once a certain amount of that trauma has been addressed, the problematic substances or behaviours can safely re-enter a person’s life. Because many of the people who find recovery have tried other approaches and found only this one to work, the idea is perpetuated that only a model of total abstinence really works – despite the success rate being pretty low (I think, without properly checking, it’s around 3%).

The sobriety/abstinence model of recovery is only one approach. New therapeutic modalities continue to stretch and push our understanding in new directions; some treatment centres are even using MDMA for addiction treatment, which I think is fascinating. But in the abstinence paradigm, where ‘one is too many, a thousand never enough,’ there is simply no room for approaches like these and experiences like mine. I’m not an example that provokes curiosity; instead, I’m a disaster waiting to happen. I know of at least two people who consider me to be in a relapse right now. Perhaps, because of this article, that number will be higher now.

I had a lot of difficulty with twelve step fellowships and the steps themselves over the years. It was important when I got sober for me to admit that I was powerless, but as the years rolled on, I needed to admit something far, far more terrifying – that I am actually powerful. Having spent my life feeling impotent, “pathetic” and struggling to take up the space in the world that is mine to take, telling myself over and over that I wasn’t normal and that I was powerless stopped being helpful and started becoming harmful.

I remember being about three years sober and buying a book called ‘Many Roads, One Journey: Moving beyond the 12 steps’. It presented the radical idea that the steps, having been written by men in the 1930s, were perhaps not entirely suitable to, say, young women living in the 2000s. It explored the idea that addiction has multiple antecedents, including internalised oppression. It presented an alternative 16 step process centred around empowerment and discovering your own voice. I already knew by this point that the steps weren’t sufficient for me and was in therapy, had attended a number of workshops and was exploring modalities such as family constellations. This book, although I didn’t read it cover to cover, showed me that there is not one right way to understand addiction, or recovery.

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As important as it was for me to admit that I couldn’t trust myself in early recovery – I was unable to have one drink, I was out of control around food and I couldn’t trust myself to have a bit of sugar without it turning into a sickening, self-disgust inducing binge – these days, I can and do trust myself with this. It is no longer helpful for me to believe that it is dangerous to trust myself. It is, in fact, one of the most important developmental tasks for me. When I don’t feel safe inside my body, I crave that safety from elsewhere, primarily in my relationship. Learning to trust myself is vital.

I trust myself with this even though I have gotten so drunk that I’ve been sick. That’s happened twice in the last year-and-a-half. It’s not pleasant, but it’s also just a moment in time and I’ve learned from it both times.

I trust myself with this even though I’ve gone through phases of drinking a glass of wine alone at home in the evenings with dinner.

I trust myself with this even though I actually blacked out once, about a month or so into drinking again, in October 2018. I went for a night out with a group of friends and hadn’t yet learned that it’s okay to go at my own pace and that I can actually pass on a round, switch to a soft drink, and that I don’t have to (and indeed can’t!) keep up with the people around me.

In June last year, at the end of my Masters, I got very drunk on an empty stomach, which was a stupid thing to do, and had to stop the Uber I was in so that I could be sick at the side of the road. A line of cars backed up behind my Uber, and even though I was very drunk and was being sick, I called out to the car behind, “I’m so sorry! I’ll just be a minute here!” There was no vitriolic poisonous hatred in me the way there had been when I was young. I was just a lovely, idiotic woman who’d gotten far too drunk and hadn’t eaten. That moment was fucking powerful. I realised then and there, in my alcohol-addled state, that I had changed since I was eighteen. I wasn’t my alcoholic mum. I wasn’t raging. I wasn’t being violent. I wasn’t who I used to be when I got drunk. I had overdone it, yes, but I could still hear that quiet voice within me telling me that I was okay.

I trust myself with this. Today is all we’ve got, and today I am okay.

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I didn’t have a lot of fun when I used to drink. It was extreme from the word go. The first time I drank, I was thirteen or fourteen, and I didn’t just have a couple – I got drunk. I remember the feeling of warmth in my throat, the confidence that seemed to arise from nowhere, the embarrassment of being an idiot and crouching for a wee literally right next to a girl called Rachel rather than going to find my own private spot. I was a reckless, escapist drinker. I wanted and needed to achieve oblivion, and I hurt a lot of people and put myself in a lot of sad, bad situations that I didn’t deserve to experience. Some of this was being a teenager. Some of it was having an addictive personality. It really wasn’t much fun.

Since I started drinking again, I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve joined in. I’ve been ‘normal’, a word I think is massively mis-used within twelve step fellowships, but for me, in this context, it’s meant just being ordinary, doing the everyday things that I never did and never got to do. I’ve done things I never did in my twenties – I’ve toasted birthdays, Christmas and now two New Years. I did Dry January this year and remembered how easy and pleasant it is not drinking. I’ve learned through trial and error that one drink is plenty and two is generally my limit. I’ve asked myself why I want a glass of wine. I’ve drunk when it wasn’t necessary. I’ve left parties early when I’ve had enough or because I’ve developed a headache. I’ve had wine with lunch. I’ve had a couple of rite of passage moments, sharing a drink with my siblings, for example (we never did that when I drank, because they were so young when I was drinking the first time round). I’ve been the slowest drinker at the table, and I think I’ve been the fastest, once or twice.

And I’ve struggled, too. Headaches are no fun. Proper hangovers are godawful (although I haven’t had one of those for ages). I broke my former landlady’s garden furniture one evening by falling over at the end of a very messy night out – that was a bad moment, although we’ve all had a laugh about it since. The next day I had vertigo so bad that I thought I was stuck with it for life. Scary, but a relief when I realised that it was just my body’s response to me essentially poisoning it. I’ve questioned my motives and what’s going on for me a LOT. Of course I have. I’ve had feedback that I’m “the worst supposed alcoholic” people have ever met, because I can drink half a glass of wine and leave the rest. I also know that some loved ones have been concerned, especially if they’ve seen me have a glass of wine a few days in a row.

This whole thing is an exploration. Life is, in some ways, more complicated with alcohol in it. When you totally cut something out of your life, it simplifies things. But if I follow that line of thinking to its conclusion, then any substance or behaviour I’ve ever struggled with – including, primarily, relationships – would end up being twelve stepped, and I don’t actually know how healthy that is for me. I think we can so often automatically conflate difficulty with these behaviours with needing to cut the behaviours out of our lives. It’s a very personal decision and I’m not suggesting anyone should do what I do, but I know from my experience in relationships, for example, that sticking around and trying to face what comes up in it is what helps me work through it. I probably wouldn’t do this with alcohol if I’d ever been physically addicted to the stuff, but the truth is that I drank for about 5 years in my adolescence. My body hasn’t known what it’s like to have this stuff in it for years and years. Every single one of my cells had regenerated more than twice over. I am not who I was when I hit rock bottom at eighteen.

It feels very risky sharing this stuff. Bits of my experience are messy and chaotic, and I imagine it’s easy for others to judge and be “concerned.” It feels hard to state that I am okay despite all of the above without coming across as defensive. I am reminded of Brené Brown’s powerful words:

“Loving ourselves through the process of owning our stories is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.”

Owning my story here, even in my own online space, feels hard. The weight of the messages I was conditioned with about recovery weigh heavily on me. In addition, my journey goes against the collective grain. There is a growing movement of people who, addiction aside, are choosing sobriety for a range of other reasons. Rebecca Weller’s “Sexy Sobriety”, “Girl Walks Out of a Bar,” and “Club Soda NYC” are three examples of groups, individuals, locations and whole sobriety movements that have cropped up in recent years. It’s become really trendy to be sober, and here I am, the heathen who is doing the opposite.

Entering recovery at eighteen meant a fundamental shift in identity. As much as I gained – and I wouldn’t change it – there was also a lot of loss that came with entering recovery. I didn’t have many friends for a good few years. I hung out with people fifteen to twenty years older than me, because hardly anyone my age was doing this. Hitting bottom looked like a psychotic episode. It wasn’t pretty. A lifetime of complex trauma surfaced and I spent a lot of years trying to deal with it – still am. I carved an entire sense of self out of being someone in recovery. The Narcotics Anonymous key rings accompanied my keys wherever I went, reminding me that I was thirty days clean, sixty days clean, ninety days, six months, nine months, twelve months, eighteen months, and then, finally, multiple years clean. I’m not going to write today about my entire journey through recovery, but the day came when the space that had saved my life and given me a life started to feel like it was constricting my life. And many years later, in the middle of one of the biggest, scariest changes I had made as an adult (leaving my marriage), I decided to see what it was like with alcohol back in my life.

Overall, I have very mixed feelings about alcohol. It’s a depressant, and often I don’t really like how it makes me feel. It’s also, sometimes, really nice just to have a beer or a gin or some Prosecco or a glass of wine. Yes, I know that’s a contradiction. But I’m okay with that. I can feel the tension within me as I continue navigating this territory and I’m okay with it.

Despite the tension, one thing does feel crystal clear: my life is not out of control. In the last year, I have had more comments about how vibrant and alive I seem than perhaps any other time in my life. I’ve had the most successful year of my career. I’ve fallen in love in a way that is very new to me. It’s terrifying and wonderful and life-changing. I’m renting my own flat, living on my own for the first time ever. As much as I still have a lot of anxieties and battle the echoes of a lot of old trauma, I also feel like myself. Perhaps more like myself than I ever have done.

My best friend Lian said to me a while ago, “Elloa, I think you have too much love in your life to just throw it all away.” That was another threshold moment for me. I think – no, I know – that she’s right.

Within twelve step community, I imagine that my story would not compute. It’s like when I used to sit in OA meetings (Overeaters Anonymous) and occasionally a woman would say she could eat sugar without bingeing, and I’d sit there thinking, “But surely it’s just a matter of time.” That’s partly why I am writing this. Not only so I can be in my life and be known for who and where I am, but also because I think it’s important for us to remember that there are multiple roads. There are many ways to understand addiction and many definitions of recovery from it.

I don’t subscribe to the disease model. I do believe, as Dr Gabor Mate says, that addiction is very much about pain and trauma. Having dealt with a backlog of mine and found some semblance of a solid self, some core of love and identity and self-compassion, I am no longer driven by the need to get off my face or get totally smashed. The desire is there, sometimes. But it was when I was sober, too – feeling is hard, being human is hard, and sometimes we want to soften or escape the pain. My rule of thumb, offered to me by a friend, is to generally avoid the stuff if I ever feel like I ‘need’ it.

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One night, a month or so into drinking again, I was in a pub in Brighton and a young guy and I started chatting. I had had a few drinks and was pretty drunk by this point. I had just started divorce proceedings, literally the day before, I think. The young man’s name was Isaac. He asked me how I was doing. “Well, Isaac,” I said, “I’m just getting divorced, so I’m GREAT!” That poor young man disappeared from my life quicker than the Roadrunner. I spent the rest of the night wandering around asking, “Where’s Isaac?! ISAAC!!!” I had thought my revelation might make him want to flirt with me even more. How naive my poor tipsy brain was! “Where’s Isaac?!” became something of a catchphrase between a friend and I. Sometimes I’d just text those two words to her randomly. A month or so later, she was in Brighton and walked past a rather nice restaurant called “Isaac.” She texted me a photograph of it, telling me she’d found him.

I loved this experience. I love it as a story. It reminds me that there’s more to life than just surrender and trying to do the work on yourself. We are silly, us humans. We’re dumb and foolish and we become even more idiotic and primitive when we have alcohol inside us. I feel like I’m less afraid of that these days. I’m less uptight – still pretty uptight, but less so. I missed out on so many stupid drunk experiences because I got sober so young and I’m grateful – yes, really – for the chance to have some thirty-something-year-old version of those experiences now. To just feel like an ordinary person.

One of the risks of long-term twelve step attendance, I have found, is control. Funny how we often become so incredibly controlling when the entire premise of recovery is surrender. Drinking has helped me relax and just chill the fork out. Not because of the alcohol itself – if anything I’m very vigilant nowadays about what’s happening when I am drinking – but because I’ve collected a bunch of experiences, some fun, some less fun, and I’ve seen myself come through them and out the other side. I’m drinking less, eighteen months in, not more. I sometimes challenge myself and think, yeah, but Elloa, you don’t want to give it up completely. No, right now, I don’t. I went through this before, with sugar: after a good few years of having quite solid and strict boundaries around food and my eating habits, including over two years of absolute abstinence from sugar and white flour, I’m now totally relaxed about food. I don’t have an eating disorder anymore. I can eat anything without being triggered into a binge. I don’t obsess over my weight. I don’t starve myself. I don’t count calories. I don’t weigh and measure food. I don’t ring a sponsor in the morning and commit what I’m going to eat. The worst thing that happens is that I still sometimes have body dysmorphia, just as I sometimes drink and find myself with a headache, I have just as much mental and emotional freedom as I ever had when I was in full on ‘recovery.’

Being sober didn’t stop me from being human. Having alcohol in my life hasn’t stopped me from being self-aware. I am bloody proud of myself and I reminded myself in January that I can go an extended number of days without alcohol and feel just fine.

I was once in recovery and now I’m not.

I was once totally sober and now I’m not.

I once identified as an addict and now I don’t.

And this is not a relapse. This is simply me, living my life.

(Photo by Kelsey Knight on Unsplash. Thank you, Kelsey)