The Elephant in My Head

     “The Elephant in My Head”

“Think like a queen.  A queen is not afraid to fail.  Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”
― Oprah Winfrey

I drank.

A little over seven months ago now I relapsed for a night.  Some will call that a slip, some will call it moral failure on my part, some will call it shameful; I have been calling it a relapse.

Whatever you or I want to call it, it has thrown me completely for a loop and I have not been myself since.  I haven’t been able to write about it until now and not writing about it has made me feel like I have had an elephant living in my head taking up too much space and all my energy.  Like the image attached I have spent an inordinate amount of time tending to the relapse; trying to figure out what happened and why I did what I did because I have to tell you it feels as though it came out of left field.  I would have, in the past, characterized myself as a former chronic relapser, but I thought those days behind me.  This relapse was not the same as the others though.  I did not start thinking about it days in advance.  I did not start planning on that first drink and fantasizing about how it would taste or how I would get away with it.  I simply got to an intersection on the way to class one night early and instead of turning right to go to campus I turned left and went to the liquor store as if on auto-pilot.

When I think back to why I started this blog in the first place it was to write about my journey in recovery and I promised myself I would write honestly about the good the bad and the ugly so I don’t feel as though I can stop now.  I had a lot of victories for a long time and now I have an “ugly” to write about and process with everyone.

The night I drank back in December I went to the liquor store and then to class.  I left class early because I was supposed to go to Wren’s choral concert.  I never made it because I started drinking.  I ended up getting a DUI.  That is something I will forever be ashamed of.  I was on the side of the road but the car was still running and in drive and I could have hurt someone, but mercifully I did not.  I let my daughter down, disappointed my family - scared them and frankly horrified myself.  Being arrested is no fun.

I had to and still have to face a lot of consequences from that one decision to turn left instead of right.  I built back a lot of trust over five plus years and now…   I also lost my self-respect and a lot of my confidence.  I had to face my children and Frank and the rest of my extended family.  Fortunately for me, my family is versed on the disease of addiction so they understand the ins and outs better than most and they are loving and understanding so, though they were not happy, they have been incredibly supportive and forgiving.  I immediately got back to working through my fourth step with my sponsor.  I contacted my sponsor daily while and made sure that my home group knew what was going on.

I went to both my internship and the counseling job at the methadone clinic the next week and informed them both about what had happened.  This was incredibly difficult to do as you might imagine.  But I could not in good conscience continue to counsel others as a substance abuse therapist without telling them and allowing them to let me go if that was their decision.  I had seen a TED talk a few weeks prior with some of the patients at the internship site.  The premise was that addicts in recovery have to do three things.  They must be authentic, they must do uncomfortable work and then they must surrender the outcome.  I kept thinking about those three tings when I explained about my relapse and subsequent DUI.  Both sites thanked me for my honesty and told me they would let me know in a few days.  They both decided to allow me to stay, though I was let go from the methadone clinic later for billing reasons after a state audit and ironically it was the agency’s error.  The one caveat they both gave me was that I could not let any of the patients know about the relapse and I could not write about it on the blog because some of the patients read the blog.  I have only now been given permission to divulge my relapse as I am no longer at either site and am no longer counseling anyone.

            So why did it happen?  Many people in and out of the recovery community have opinions as to why and some have not been shy to share what they think I was or was not doing.  I have been told I was not attending enough meetings.  I have been told I was holding onto too many resentments.  I have been told I was not praying often enough, or hard enough, or correctly.  I have been told I wasn’t helping enough other addicts or alcoholics.  I have been told I was doing too many things at once.  I have been told I should have been doing more things.  I have spent the past seven months going over and over what went wrong and the simple answer is I have no idea exactly why I drank.

            What I can tell you is that there is a lot of stigma about addiction.  This is something we all knew.  I can now tell you, there is a lot of stigma about relapse also.  I feel it, have felt it and just like I write about addiction because I want to break down the stigma surrounding it, I am writing about relapse in the same vein.  I don’t want people who relapse to be afraid to reach out for help because of shame.  I hesitated myself.  As much as I wanted to write this because I know it brings me back to my authentic self, I am also afraid because being this authentic and vulnerable can sometimes come with consequences.  I get it.  But if I can relapse and get help and get better again, then so can others.  If I can write about it and be vulnerable and normalize this very human experience than someone else may not feel so alone.  Relapse does not have to be a part of addiction and recovery but it often is and I am here to tell you that if it happens to you, you are not alone.  I am here and I understand your pain.

            Being a psychologist now I know that addiction is a biopsychosocial disease.  That means that genes play a part in my disease as do my emotions and hormones and so does stress, environment and trauma.  I have addiction in my family tree and I certainly have trauma in my past.  Those things were there before.  But this past fall three other things happened that I now believe played a part. 

I shifted into peri-menopause.  Hormonal shifts are important to speak about for people in recovery, especially women.  I read one article recently that women’s hormonal cycles have a role in their addiction and in their relapse rates.  I also read that when women relapse it is often during PMS.   

I got a new diagnosis in the bi-polar family (last post I mentioned I am bi-polar II – it has since been changed to cyclothymic) which came with a change in medication that I had a severe reaction to.  I was put on Effexor (an SNRI).  I started on the medication just before the relapse and I had such a severe reaction to it that I eventually started having tremors and began to have slight hallucinations where my vision shifted around the edges of my periphery.  It was a mild form of serotonin syndrome and I had to be titrated off of the medication.  It was horrifying.

I was also extremely busy with work and school and my schedule was packed with recovery activities and activities speaking, volunteering and promoting the book.  So throw that altogether and I was a hot mess.           

Does that excuse the action I took and the effect it had on my family?  No it does not, but does it help me explain some of the reasons behind it to myself?  Yes, I think it does.  It helps me understand that I can’t go at break-neck speed like I was going.  If you remember my post in November was even entitled “The Center Cannot Hold” so somewhere inside I knew it was too much.  It helps me to see that hormones and co-occurring mental health disorders are a part of my life as well and have to be managed. That is not something I can “pray away” as much as I and well-meaning others may want to be the case.  It helps me to be able to share that with other women who are on this journey with me now or will come along after me.

I have been wallowing for a long time since December.  I have not been myself.  I have been looking at this as a failure and to be sure it is nothing to be proud of.  However, today I am choosing to think like a queen and look at this as a stepping stone to greatness.  Getting a job in the current climate is far from easy for me and countless others.  Getting a job with a DUI on your record when you planned to work as a substance abuse counselor makes it even harder but I have gained a great deal of insight and empathy about relapse and what it does to your self-esteem and your confidence.  I see what it takes to dig yourself out of depression and shame and how hard it is to make amends again and again and again.  I know what it takes to embrace a brain that is both creative and fascinating but also capable of betrayal and torture.  I am slowly seeing my way forward to holding my head up high again and straightening my tiara.

Recognize the Opportunity

     “Recognize the Opportunity”

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”
― John F. Kennedy

I haven’t written in a long time.  A lot has happened in the past four months, personally, professionally and on the world stage.  I got up this morning with the urge to write that I haven’t felt in many weeks and decided it was time.

I’ll start with personally.  I have been off the radar for a while.  I have been struggling with severe depression.  It could be perimenopause that has me going through a hormonal shift of epic proportions with all that accompanies it, including the mood swings, hot flashes, night sweats and insomnia.  I also started on a new psychiatric medication that did not sit well with me and had some horrific side effects and took some time to wean off of.  The medication could have played a part in my current state of mind but I could also have a new mental health diagnosis that my psychiatrist is discussing with me at the moment.  It could be that I have bipolar II disorder.

When my doctor first mentioned putting me on yet another medication for women with bipolar my internal reaction was to reject it outright.  I thought, “I do NOT have bipolar disorder!”  I didn’t want to think that I have yet more problems, yet more to overcome and yet more to try and understand about myself.  I also had it in my mind that people with bipolar disorder had periods of manic elation and I didn’t see that in my life. 

But then I looked at my last blog post in November right before I crashed with some life consequences I will go into at a later date, and thought, “Oh wait”.  The title is “The Center Cannot Hold”.  In that blog post I talk about how many things I am doing (and there were a lot) and how I didn’t think I could handle it anymore.  It was like I was warning myself it couldn’t last.  I can’t tell you how many people have told me over the past few years, “I don’t know how you are doing it.  I don’t know how you fit that much into a day.  Etc…”  It could be that my manic episodes are not so much elation as they are hypo-productivity.

So here I am now a few months later and I went from hypo-productivity to finding it hard to get out of bed and shower.  So maybe there is something to what my doctor is saying.  So is it hard to consider the fact that I have yet another mental health diagnosis?  Yes.  But what would be harder would be to ignore it and not rise again above my problems and move forward in my life and be the best that I can be for myself and for Dermot and Wren.

Then let’s talk about professionally.  I had a job at a methadone clinic.  They hired me in October knowing I had a Bachelor’s degree in communications but that I was close to getting my Master’s in psychology.  In December the state came through and did an audit and they told the clinic they could not bill for my services because my Bachelor’s was not in behavioral health and I was told to not come back to the office just before Christmas. 

I am now in my last semester of graduate school and have been treating my internship as my full-time job.  I just completed the hours I needed before the Coronavirus had us all quarantined.  I am taking the rest of my classes remotely through my college and hoping I can get my degree in May as planned.  Job prospects are not looking great at the moment for me and countless others.  I worry I won’t find a job and that I won’t be able to pay for the things I value, like my house, or for the things I owe like my student loans. 

All that being said, lets now talk about COVID-19 and the opportunity it has brought to me and to my family – yes the opportunity.  The kids’ school initially closed for two weeks, now closed for a further two.  When that happened, Frank was also told to work remotely.  The kids opted by default to stay at his house.  They are there during the week anyway, there is more technology, more room and more to do.  It made sense on many levels for them to home school there and to quarantine there.  I stayed at my house for the first four days – alone.  By the fifth day I cracked. 

I came over to see the kids and I told Frank I didn’t think I could be alone anymore.  He invited me to stay over in the guest room if I wanted for the night.  I took him up on it and by the next morning the four of us collectively decided that I should stay for the duration of this “shelter-in-place” type directive.  It has been the best gift.  We are pooling our psychological resources.  We are together and it feels right.

We are cooking together.  We are eating together.  There are chess games and snuggles and there is laughter.  We talk about the news but not too much.  Wren’s thirteenth birthday is this Friday and Frank and Dermot and I are working together to find creative ways to make it special since she can’t have a party.  We might go geocaching that day.  We plan to make her favorite meal and dress up to eat it in the dining room by candle light.  Dermot has a projector rigged up in an upstairs room and we are going to watch a Broadway show and tell her we are taking her to the theatre…  Last night Dermot said to me, “Mom, what are you doing tonight?”  I replied that I had no plans (obviously).  He wanted to have a “date” and watch a movie just the two of us.  So we did.

In this time of crisis, with all the uncertainty around us and all the unknown in my future, there is opportunity today for me to heal with my family around me.  We have what matters right here and right now and that is what counts today, at this very moment in time.