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Abstract

drinkers — I had already done the work of getting almost all the hard-core drinkers out of my life. All I had to do, I figured, was stop doing it, make a promise to myself not to, ride out the triggers, and I would eventually be a happy sober person.Of course I had read about the phenomenon of “dry drunk syndrome” and I recognized many of the symptoms in myself, but I figured those would eventually subside on their own as I progressed in my sobriety. Even as I gained new insight into the reasons why I started drinking in the first place, making it plain to me that I was never really about the booze in the first place, I still didn’t really take the idea of extended addiction recovery seriously. Rehab, I figured, was for the Amy Winehouses and Charlie Sheens of this world: expensive, overbearing, and only really necessary in the case of people who found it impossible to get off whatever substance was controlling their lives. I didn’t need rehab, did I?I have now been sober for one year and nine months, and yet at the same time I feel like I haven’t recovered at all. I am now seeking extended psychological support, and while I don’t yet know what that might look like, I am open to the idea that even after nearly two years of abstinence from alcohol I may need some form of, well, rehab. My angry ex-drunk post now stands as a monument to my barely one-month-old naivety, my groundless conviction at the time that I was somehow “recovered” when in fact I was nothing of the kind. I was simply keeping myself busy telling myself the story of my own recovery, all the while ignoring obvious signs that I was far from “recovered”.An addiction is akin to a really hideous piece of furniture in your house, like a nasty seventies-vintage couch that fills an entire room, forcing people to walk around it awkwardly while offering nothing of value to any of the house’s residents. Finally, its owners build up the strength and the wherewithal to maneuver this interior desecration out the door and to a thrift store or junk pile or some other appropriate destination.Mission accomplished, right? Nope. You then discover that the couch was hiding a massive burn mark on the floor and rotting floorboards, as well as a mouldering pile of old socks and children’s toys mixed up with food scraps left behind by your dog. That’s the dry drunk stuff in a nutshell, and while you may have been able to get rid of the couch yourself, you find you need to bring two teams of contractors in to deal with the ticking time bomb that lurked beneath it.Whoever coined the phrase “tip of the iceberg” was prescient in countless ways. It’s a cliché, yes, but a very apt one, particularly in this case. With an addiction, the visible part — the substance abuse itself — is invariably much smaller and less intimidating than the part beneath the waves — the psychological underpinnings of the addiction. The substance abuse itself can and will indeed kill you if left unresolved, but the stuff under the water will kill you just as surely as the above-water bit — albeit in less obvious ways. And the worst part is that you can go through much of your life completely

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oblivious to the fact that your addiction recovery is still unfinished.Addicts of all stripes are masters of self-delusion. We become expert liars who can successfully bowl our closest and dearest over because we’ve had years of practice on ourselves. And if you’re like me, a recovered addict trying to articulate the recovery process in a granular fashion via writing, you are liable to get jackknifed by your own self-bamboozlement, as I recently discovered. Never again will I write ridiculous self-deluding paragraphs like this:<blockquote id="fa15">And yes, the anger does subside. At the one-year-seven-months mark, I can honestly say I no longer feel the blinding rage I felt on a regular basis a year ago. My life has steadily improved in almost every way. All the “good stuff” about being sober still stands, and the nice thing about being a recovered alcoholic is that these things continue to seem novel for a long time thereafter.But the ugly side to recovery does have a time limit. It can indeed be weathered with the right set of mental habits and discipline. — Ben Freeland, July 10, 2018</blockquote>None of this was true when I wrote it, and it’s no less untrue now, and to think I believed I could reach a point in my life where this was the case without any regular therapy or other outside help now seems both ludicrous and the height of arrogance. I am now “fine”, and I in fact have no idea whether or not this “ugly side to recovery” has a time limit. I really hope it does, but I now realize that I haven’t put in even close to the kind of work needed to reach that threshold. Quitting drinking was akin to reaching the starting line of the race, not crossing the finish line. The pistol went off nearly two years ago and here I am, still technically “sober” but still standing dumbly at the starting line waiting for the race to begin.What will my recovery look like? That remains to be seen. I’m no less atheistic than I was when I wrote my angry ex-drunk article, and thereby no less antagonistic to the language of the 12-steposphere, but at this point I’m open to anything. But I am now convinced that nobody truly makes this journey alone, and to think I could somehow do it would be ridiculous. I plan to write more about my experience as “sober guy in rehab” or whatever this ends up being, with the hopes that you, my readership, can function as a sort of in-built accountability.To my readers, I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was essentially spewing nonsense. I’m now out of the blocks and running. I have no idea where this race will take me or how well I’ll do, but at least I’m moving now.Special thanks are due to those who left comments on my dry drunk piece, including <a href="undefined">Mary O'Donnell Meldrum</a>, <a href="undefined">Catherine Meyers</a>, <a href="undefined">Michael Mather</a>, <a href="undefined">Kellye Rowland</a>, and, especially, to <a href="undefined">Rachel K.</a> who was instrumental in calling me out on my own self-deception. Thank you for the healthy dose of perspective and provoking these recent epiphanies.</article></body>

When Your Addiction Recovery Stories Backfire

A recent Medium post of mine about “dry drunk syndrome” helped trigger a relapse.

Last month I wrote a story about my recovery from alcoholism and the subsequent mental health travails entitled “My Year As An Angry Ex-Drunk”. In my capacity as a writer and Medium contributor it was a smash success, garnering nearly 11,000 views as of today and over 3,400 claps.

As a human being, however, the article was an unqualified disaster for me, as it — either by way of correlation or causation — seemed to coincide with a renewed slide into debilitating anxiety, depression, and all manner of cerebral detritus that only month prior I was confident I had overcome.

At the very least, the experience taught me to be much more careful about what I commit to writing, or at the very least the way in which I go about it.

It should have been a dead giveaway for me that even within the first few days of posting the article I was getting multiple comments commending me on my sobriety and recovery, while at the same time noting that my tone in the piece “still sounded angry,” which in retrospect it most definitely did. It should also have set off alarm bells that my reaction to these comments was, well, full of rage. “What do you mean I still sound fucking angry??” was my go-to response to said commentary. Kind of a cliché really.

But the poop really hit the propellerhead in mid-July as I was getting ready to move. As the storm clouds of anxiety coalesced above my now-spinning head, the telltale signs of incipient dry drunk syndrome appeared in swift succession. Resentment toward friends or family? Check. Anger and negativity surrounding recovery? What recovery — I still feel bloody awful! Depression, anxiety, and fear of relapse? Yes, yes, and yes. Jealousy of friends who are not struggling with addiction? Make that jealousy of friends who are not struggling with being me full-stop. Romanticizing my drinking days? Who doesn’t romanticize times that were supposedly consequence free. Self-obsession? What depressed person isn’t self-obsessed?

How about that last one on the list, replacing the addiction with a new vice? How about procrastination, that sweet sweet procrastination that made my house move an absolute living hell for both my partner and myself? If that’s not a vice, I don’t know what is.

I would say I was now back in recovery except for the fact that I was never truly in recovery. I quit drinking completely solo, trusting in my own mental and physical fortitude and self-control to get me through. After all, how hard could quitting something like alcohol be? It’s not like I need alcohol to survive on any level, and at the time of my quit I was fortunate that very few of the people in my entourage were heavy drinkers — I had already done the work of getting almost all the hard-core drinkers out of my life. All I had to do, I figured, was stop doing it, make a promise to myself not to, ride out the triggers, and I would eventually be a happy sober person.

Of course I had read about the phenomenon of “dry drunk syndrome” and I recognized many of the symptoms in myself, but I figured those would eventually subside on their own as I progressed in my sobriety. Even as I gained new insight into the reasons why I started drinking in the first place, making it plain to me that I was never really about the booze in the first place, I still didn’t really take the idea of extended addiction recovery seriously. Rehab, I figured, was for the Amy Winehouses and Charlie Sheens of this world: expensive, overbearing, and only really necessary in the case of people who found it impossible to get off whatever substance was controlling their lives. I didn’t need rehab, did I?

I have now been sober for one year and nine months, and yet at the same time I feel like I haven’t recovered at all. I am now seeking extended psychological support, and while I don’t yet know what that might look like, I am open to the idea that even after nearly two years of abstinence from alcohol I may need some form of, well, rehab. My angry ex-drunk post now stands as a monument to my barely one-month-old naivety, my groundless conviction at the time that I was somehow “recovered” when in fact I was nothing of the kind. I was simply keeping myself busy telling myself the story of my own recovery, all the while ignoring obvious signs that I was far from “recovered”.

An addiction is akin to a really hideous piece of furniture in your house, like a nasty seventies-vintage couch that fills an entire room, forcing people to walk around it awkwardly while offering nothing of value to any of the house’s residents. Finally, its owners build up the strength and the wherewithal to maneuver this interior desecration out the door and to a thrift store or junk pile or some other appropriate destination.

Mission accomplished, right? Nope. You then discover that the couch was hiding a massive burn mark on the floor and rotting floorboards, as well as a mouldering pile of old socks and children’s toys mixed up with food scraps left behind by your dog. That’s the dry drunk stuff in a nutshell, and while you may have been able to get rid of the couch yourself, you find you need to bring two teams of contractors in to deal with the ticking time bomb that lurked beneath it.

Whoever coined the phrase “tip of the iceberg” was prescient in countless ways. It’s a cliché, yes, but a very apt one, particularly in this case. With an addiction, the visible part — the substance abuse itself — is invariably much smaller and less intimidating than the part beneath the waves — the psychological underpinnings of the addiction. The substance abuse itself can and will indeed kill you if left unresolved, but the stuff under the water will kill you just as surely as the above-water bit — albeit in less obvious ways. And the worst part is that you can go through much of your life completely oblivious to the fact that your addiction recovery is still unfinished.

Addicts of all stripes are masters of self-delusion. We become expert liars who can successfully bowl our closest and dearest over because we’ve had years of practice on ourselves. And if you’re like me, a recovered addict trying to articulate the recovery process in a granular fashion via writing, you are liable to get jackknifed by your own self-bamboozlement, as I recently discovered. Never again will I write ridiculous self-deluding paragraphs like this:

And yes, the anger does subside. At the one-year-seven-months mark, I can honestly say I no longer feel the blinding rage I felt on a regular basis a year ago. My life has steadily improved in almost every way. All the “good stuff” about being sober still stands, and the nice thing about being a recovered alcoholic is that these things continue to seem novel for a long time thereafter.But the ugly side to recovery does have a time limit. It can indeed be weathered with the right set of mental habits and discipline. — Ben Freeland, July 10, 2018

None of this was true when I wrote it, and it’s no less untrue now, and to think I believed I could reach a point in my life where this was the case without any regular therapy or other outside help now seems both ludicrous and the height of arrogance. I am now “fine”, and I in fact have no idea whether or not this “ugly side to recovery” has a time limit. I really hope it does, but I now realize that I haven’t put in even close to the kind of work needed to reach that threshold. Quitting drinking was akin to reaching the starting line of the race, not crossing the finish line. The pistol went off nearly two years ago and here I am, still technically “sober” but still standing dumbly at the starting line waiting for the race to begin.

What will my recovery look like? That remains to be seen. I’m no less atheistic than I was when I wrote my angry ex-drunk article, and thereby no less antagonistic to the language of the 12-steposphere, but at this point I’m open to anything. But I am now convinced that nobody truly makes this journey alone, and to think I could somehow do it would be ridiculous. I plan to write more about my experience as “sober guy in rehab” or whatever this ends up being, with the hopes that you, my readership, can function as a sort of in-built accountability.

To my readers, I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was essentially spewing nonsense. I’m now out of the blocks and running. I have no idea where this race will take me or how well I’ll do, but at least I’m moving now.

Special thanks are due to those who left comments on my dry drunk piece, including Mary O'Donnell Meldrum, Catherine Meyers, Michael Mather, Kellye Rowland, and, especially, to Rachel K. who was instrumental in calling me out on my own self-deception. Thank you for the healthy dose of perspective and provoking these recent epiphanies.