Drug and Alcohol Recovery

Elizabeth explores the value and power of cultivating an attitude of gratitude as a cornerstone of recovery from addiction. Addiction, among other things is a form of "Soul Sickness" and spiritual practice opens us up to a spiritual experience that can help us heal. Gratitude is the most sincere form of prayer and teaches us to: Look for the Gift - Look for the Good – and it teaches us to ask better questions What could be good about this?

It was suggested to me that I start with gratitude, start acknowledging the things I felt grateful about on a daily basis. I started a daily practice of listing ten things I was grateful for and why. Up until then I had spent a lot of time thinking of everything that had gone wrong, how wrong others had treated me and how hard my life seemed to be. People who acknowledge gifts and blessings tend to experience more of the good things in life.

I’m my companies top sales person, I have to drink with my clients, it is practically required and besides, I deserve a drink after all that hard work, and I don’t drink nearly as much as Bob, so I must not be that bad. I am a big fan of the 12 step groups that address codependent patterns as It is often the case that when the co-dependent starts to see reality and starts to make healthy changes within themselves that is when the addict/alcoholic’s denial shatters and they will want real help. A coping skill that most people develop when they live with a person with untreated alcoholism or drug addiction, is the heightened sense of “reading a room” and/or reading peoples emotional states. When dealing with someone I care about in the throes of addiction I have to remind myself that they are a sick person not a bad person and that this is about chemistry not character.

If it’s always someone else’s fault and you don’t feel great about your life you might want to consider the following ideas. So if I blame my boss for my problems at work, or my partner for the problems in our relationship or my friends for any conflict or my parents for my life problems etc. This limiting belief created an ongoing dialogue of the self-pity that  kept me stuck in what I now know to be “learned helplessness”. Life and especially love is a contact sport, we all hurt and get hurt at some point.

However, as I moved along in life as a sober person, I found emotions became harder to control and my resistance to feeling my feelings seemed like a losing battle. Here are the top ten feelings many people want to avoid and messages these feelings are trying to give us: Uncomfortable, nagging sensation, bothered, you just don’t feel right. Evaluate what you need to do to prepare for the situation Do all you can do to prepare and then practice faith that you have done all can to deal with the situation – Let them know what you want and don’t want to have in your life.

DBT skills for overcoming addictions are included in the distress tolerance section of training (featured in last weeks blog post) and include, as displayed above, an overview of behavior patterns that indicate when one is in “addict mind” or “clear mind,” skills to plan for dialectical abstinence such as adaptive denial, the community reinforcement model, and more. These skills are intended to help people reinforce nonaddictive behaviors and end addiction-linked behaviours

When travelling across time zones, I’d force myself to stay up late or wake up early, resetting my internal clock to local standard time. It was our first vacation in a year’s time. It was on our last night in Colorado that she fell asleep at the dinner table. It was six o’clock, Colorado time, which meant bed time back home.

DBT stands for dialetical behaviour therapy and here is the Wiki definition: Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based[1] psychotherapy designed to help people suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD). This approach is designed to help people increase their emotional and cognitive regulation by learning about the triggers that lead to reactive states and helping to assess which coping skills to apply in the sequence of events, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to help avoid undesired reactions. A modified form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), DBT was developed in the late 1980s by Marsha M. Linehan,[3] a psychology researcher at the University of Washington, to treat people with borderline personality disorder and chronically suicidal individuals. This means that the therapist helps the person in therapy to do everything possible to achieve abstinence, while also supporting a harm-reduction approach when relapse happens.

Following on from last week’s post from Dr Gabor Mate looking at trauma and addiction we now continue the MedCircle series with this 3rd post looking also at trauma – or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to be accurate. In this series Dr Cheryl Arutt, Clinical and Forensic Psychologist explores PTSD prevalence, signs, symptoms and treatment options. but I also recognise that many of us that end with substance dependence and addiction issues have trauma, PTSD or even complex PTSD (C-PTSD) in our lived experience history and memories. If any of the discussed material causes you distress please seek support and advice from your primary health care medical team or local mental health service.

A decade or so ago, when I was still caught in a cycle of hustling for worthiness all day and numbing my discomfort with wine, my then-eleven-year-old delivered a truth bomb that I am still unpacking to this day. There were a lot of emphasized words and faces and gestures accompanying the story, a lot of so I saids and then he saids and seriouslys. It would take years, but eventually I’d start unpacking that and other nuggets I had gathered over time and wonder if they could be put to better use. After eight years alcohol-free and reading a million books and listening to others and thinking thinking thinking and filling multiple journals, I am undoing the hairball of mixed-up ideas I believed were true.