I’m grateful for another Friday morning. I’m grateful for a busy week and a sunny morning. I’m grateful for knowing what’s next will be ok. I’m grateful for mistakes and learning new things. I’m grateful for where I am. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Mystery ?? Button
song of the week:
Well, the long version or the short version? I had another song picked and it was going to lead to this kind of sappy, romantic, sad story from the olden days and it would include an adorable picture of my beloved dog Moose and it would be one of those elegies to the things I lost on account of alcoholism. Then I spied this song on the playlist and here we are.
If this matters to you, we can say that the “She” in the song refers to drinking or using or whatever and how “she” has ruined our life. Making that substitution gives some recovery zoomph to the line:
“Trust, She F****** hates me.”
I very much appreciate the accelerated nature of the relationship being described in the song and the brevity of the relationship:
She was queen, for about an hour, after that, shit got sour
What does this have to do with recovery or really anything? Nothing. But this song consistently makes me smile when it plays, and that means quite a bit to me. Speaking of things that mean quite a bit to me:
My birthday/Thanksgiving train ride to Boston (on a rainy day, no less) unleashed a torrent of gratitude. A few years of doing this have hardened me to dispensing gratitude 140 characters at a time, so it felt good to let loose. Also, I will say this, developing a sense of gratitude is probably the single most important element of my recovery.
Recovery from addiction is a pretty complicated cake, with a ton of very finicky ingredients. While all of the ingredients are important, you can’t make the recovery cake without gratitude, lots of it. Why?
Developing a sense of gratitude literally turned my world upside down, the things that hurt me, that made me sad or lonely, actually turned into learning. Gratitude turned those little tragedies into springboards to the next chapter. You can try this at home: Think of something that really upset you, hurt you or angered you. Now, think of one reason to be grateful for whatever that was.
This isn’t about being a doormat to fate or being happy with whatever crumbs fall from the table. This is about seeing that there are specks of beauty and joy in every tragedy. When worlds break apart, they always come back together again. We know this because of the teachings of the wise Steely Dan. While one can be focused on the breaking apart of said world, it is the coming back together again that forms the purpose and maybe even the miracle of that event. Things can’t begin again without endings and endings require beginnings.
I maybe started with the most advanced form of gratitude: The appreciation of shit that we really didn’t want to happen. This is not some faux expression of thankfulness, like the kind one might reserve for a Christmas gift from an ex-wife. Hypothetically. This is actually about finding the nugget of gold in the pile of shit. Because there is one.
I don’t know that I believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe that it is possible to extract meaning and purpose from the things that happen to me. From the things I didn’t want to happen. I think that is how gratitude transformed me, it helped me find the meaning in my life and helped me see the path that was there for me, if I wanted to walk it.
My recovery has not been about stopping my drinking, it’s been about changing my thinking. Gratitude has been a critical element in that process. Self-understanding and self-acceptance have also been critical parts of the equation and are connected to gratitude. I’m coming to see that drinking/using is really just an adaptation that works way too well for some of us.
My nights are often spent dozing while a series of YouTube videos play. If lucid dreaming is being slightly cognizant of the fact that one is dreaming, then I’ve been lucid-dreaming for quite a while. Unfortunately, my lucid dreams often feature things like trips to the CVS or conversations about how expensive the diner is. Anyway, these videos play in the background and sometimes I wake up to great revelations. This is a video that I found revelatory:
Put aside the headline, the gist of this is that it appears that childhood trauma (and this doesn’t need to be extreme, remember it’s things that happened to a child, so things that seem small today weren’t so small back then) can alter brain development and the way and the amount of dopamine and other brain chemicals are produced. These people, who have deficient dopamine processes develop ADHD at staggering rates, also addictions.
I’m coming to believe that I’ve suffered from an undiagnosed case of ADHD for most of my life. When I look at the list of symptoms, I see myself. I look at my daily work routines and it’s basically an intricate series of dopamine pit stops, designed to produce enough stimulus, enough motivation, to put my head down and focus for another interval. These behaviors, and I think we all have our own, are like brain hacks, designed to produce the chemical reaction that helps us move from Point A to Point B.
I speak, not as a scientist or doctor, but as a recovering alcoholic who tried the very best of the available treatments for more than ten years and to no avail. Why those methods fail, and they largely do, is another topic for another day; long term sobriety rates coming out of rehab still hover around 5%. I think addiction is another example of a dopamine-deficient brain hack—the problem is that it is startlingly effective in people with a certain kind of brain chemistry.
I talk about my white light moment beside Deak Rummelhart’s trampoline in 1979, it was real. The explosion of brain chemicals in my head was revelatory. You non-alcoholics don’t get that, can’t get that, because that’s not how it works for you. Sure, everyone gets that euphoric effect, the folks who get addicted are the ones who have brains that don’t produce enough of the right mix of chemicals. We addicts learn to use our substances, even the anticipation of using them, as tools to manage our emotional states.
Like the saying goes, alcohol works for alcoholics.
We’re like chemists. We know the dosage and the intervals. I knew that third glass of Sauvignon Blanc was where the magic was hidden. I got panicky when I faced long stretches of activities that I couldn’t moderate with drinking. I didn’t drink because it was fun or enjoyable, I drank because that’s what kept the plates spinning. When things got really bad, like in 2018, I would literally slide into withdrawal after about four hours with no drinking.
Withdrawal is a hideous thing and it used to happen a couple of times a day for me. One of the worst feelings is the sense of just coming apart. I can’t really describe it, but it is a feeling of hopelessness and despair and dread and it just literally feels like I was going to break apart at the seams, like I couldn’t bear another second. I don’t even know what that means, just how it felt. I knew the early onset signs and took them seriously—I headed for a bar immediately to ward off the evil spirits with some of Kim Crawford’s.
Not an effective treatment. Also not effective: Pointing out the cost of my addiction, pointing out how I hurt my loved ones, telling me I need to make better choices, giving me cards that outline the relapse process, etc. I literally needed to change my thinking, and since our “thinking” is an electro-chemical process, that meant addressing the electro-chemical aspects of my addiction. Except no one does that.
Here’s my next leap (please remember, I have no actual scientific evidence of this), the Big Book’s self-improvement exercises (or you can call them “Steps”) somehow work to alter brain chemistry. I think this is how all self-improvement and therapy work, by finding new ways to “think” about things, we slowly discover new ways of managing the complex electro-chemical system that is our brain. “Thoughts” and “feelings” are bursts of matter that can be generated or altered. My 16 year-old brain hack became semi-permanent. The thing that made me feel so connected and so the person I wanted to be at that moment, was simply a very powerful burst of electro-chemical happiness. The problem is that it worked so well, I wore quite a deep trail in my brain to that spring of happiness. Soon, every emotion or feeling required management by alcohol. The more I drank, the more I needed to drink.
Interrupting that cycle is very, very, very difficult. I spent decades in that cycle, not always aware that there even was such a cycle. I’m a Big Book thumper for one reason:
It worked.
It worked when nothing else did. Is it the only thing that can work? Probably not. But it works and you can test this by going to a random AA meeting anywhere in the world. You will meet at least one person at that meeting for whom working the Steps outlined in the Big Book produced long-term sobriety. The first guy I met at rehab, in the detox center, was there for the sixth time and what he had to share with me was this:
They never search your socks, dude.
I believe that “changing one’s thinking” changes the mix of brain chemicals. That’s why long term changes in “thinking” can produce such deep satisfaction and even happiness, it’s a complete re-calibration of the brain. That’s also why there is so much personal upheaval, because literally everything is changing. The world feels like it is moving under your feet. That feels terrible for a while, but is actually the most beautiful thing. Trust me on this.
I don’t often make recommendations about things to watch, I have pretty specific and maybe off-beat tastes, but I started watching this show and loved it:
It’s basically the story of an older guy trying something new and kind of crazy and accidentally changing his life. For some reason that resonates very deeply with me. There’s a line in one of later episodes, where the Ted Danson character is talking to the director of the facility and expressing sadness and dislocation, thinks maybe things aren’t going to work out and she looks at him and says:
“Look at you, you lived almost a whole life and then you took a look around and decided to change——everything. It’s about the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I have one tiny quibble with that. It’s actually called courage. Courage is being true to yourself, accepting yourself and letting your heart guide you through life. It’s not a warlike mien, this kind of courage. It’s quiet and flows through me with the constant reminder that I am where I’m supposed to be, that I can do what I need to and that things will be okay in the end. It’s possible that goes by another name: Happiness. It’s also what we alcoholics and addicts pray for over and over again:
The courage to change the things we can.
Happy Friday.
