EndGameNYC

Take a look at that which and with whom we surround ourselves.

Screaming From The Golden Cage: Heal Anxiety, Depression And Addiction By Embracing The Truth | The Huffington Post

nova84

Interesting article...thanks for posting x

Behappy1

Wow - describes me VERY accurately!!! Thank you!

zerothehero

This article is true in my life. I drank without it being a problem for decades. It was only after I felt trapped by a mortgage on a house I couldn't sell and a job I didn't want that drinking and drugging became problematic. Now that I've been sober for a few years and I'm working toward a new career I'm having no problem staying sober. In the meantime, meditation, self-compassion, acceptance, and tonglen practices have made all the difference.

PhoenixJ

Yes- a good article. The sleeper MUST awaken. (Apologies to Dune).

EndGameNYC

Yeah, I needed to learn to have compassion for people who basically stop drinking but do little else to change or make improvements in their lives. It's so difficult to see people suffering when we know that we took a different road in order to get to a better place in our own lives. I've discussed it before, and won't go into it now, but this is where faith plays such an important part in living a good life. And I'm not talking about God or religion. It's not something you just decide, but a way of being.

My sponsor, who passed away this past summer, was a lot like this. He'd never once stopped drinking until he was in his early fifties. He was living in community housing in a sketchy, high-crime neighborhood for his eight years of sobriety. He never attempted to get a job, explaining that he would only qualify for minimum-wage work which would place him near the amount he was getting from public assistance. Which he told me was a little less than a couple of hundred bucks a month, Medicaid, and two hundred bucks each month on his EBT/food stamps card. He wasn't a lazy person, and he had a good heart, but I came to learn that just not drinking took most of his energy, and that he was afraid to stray too far from AA or the volunteer work that he was doing. There's more to it than that, but I don't care to get into the details of it all. My impression was that he was essentially paying a debt that no one was interested in collecting.

He had a couple of pensions and other financial resources that he didn't know about until late into his life, but did not use any of these things to better his living situation or to enjoy the freedom that financial stability has to offer. He just didn't believe that he deserved good things in his life, and was always concerned about putting out other people and institutions in order to live better, or at least more comfortably.

I cried, not because he died, but because he never seemed able to live more fully without alcohol.

MythOfSisyphus

What a powerful post, EndGame! Life can be hard and no one gets out alive. Being an alcoholic is like being on fire or drowning; it's the most critical issue you face. But just getting out of the water or putting out the fire doesn't fix every problem in life. It takes a lot of work, even for people who've never had a drink. It's very difficult to get through to some folks that have a lot of issues in addition to drinking. Obviously you can kick your addiction and get run over a bus. There are no guarantees in life, all you can do is your best and "move the needle" in your direction.

Part of growing up and getting older is mourning the life you hoped to have. I'm getting closer to 50 and it's pretty obvious that I'm not going to cure cancer or write the Great American Novel. It's hard to let go of dreams that have meant a lot to me but I remind myself that the blueprint I had for my life was written by a 15 year old. That kid didn't have much life experience.

It would be great if doing the right things earned you prizes but often it doesn't. I'm not a twelve step guy but the Serenity Prayer always stuck me as exceptionally wise.

EndGameNYC

It often takes a dramatic event, especially those that bring us unbearable pain, to change things for the better. Over time, it can then become a way of being. Even then, many of us choose to continue banging around in the dark, so fearful of a reality that we've created in our imagination. Fear isn't even a thing. But when we live in it, and then don't do anything about it, we make a choice that has definite consequences, both in the short-term, and in the long run. Love is the opposite of fear; it's what makes life worth living. It brings out the best in us, and affects those around us. It makes suffering both meaningful and bearable.

I suffered my first episode of major depression more than twenty years ago following two devastating losses, one right after the other. I had no desire to drink, and I believe the depression was more than what the losses meant to me. There was something else going on with me that I could not or would not attend to before I was brought to my knees. With a couple of remarkable exceptions, the experience didn't make things better at the time, and made a few things worse, but it certainly shook things up for me.

After working through that prolonged episode of depression in psychotherapy for more than a year, I hit a very obvious wall, and I finally had to yield to taking medication, which did work and continues to work in ways that don't leave me feeling that I've compromised my personality in any way. It's essentially opened up more possibilities for me in my head and in my heart which, in turn, have helped me to expand my perceptions. It's not a super power, just a minor but necessary adjustment. It was only about fifteen years later, following my three-year relapse that ended in 2011, that things started to come together for me. Not in my mind, but in my heart. I'd run my course with pain and suffering of a certain kind, and something new was happening. I wasn't the same as I was before, and I would never be that way again. There wasn't even a good reason or a good way to question it.

I can be pretty direct here, but my intention has always been to help people accelerate the process of starting to live their lives. And, sometimes, and in part due to my training in existentialism and existential psychotherapy, to persuade people of their delusions. And I'd become an expert at confusing my own fantasies with reality. It's not my job, or even my business to do these things. It's just something I do. I left something on another thread about the sorrow of life being not that it's so short, but that we take so long to start living it. So, maybe life seems so short because so many of us live only a small part of it. Something to think about.

Something that's helped me along the way is to both accept and look forward to the reality that things rarely work out the way I'd like them to, and that what's in store for me instead is potentially better than what I may have imagined. I've even gone as far as to believe that things aren't supposed to go the way I plan them to go. The outcome is never more important than the risk, the doing, the effort.

I learned to settle for less while I was drinking, but I eventually did not allow that to spill over into my sobriety. I believe that my mind, my thinking, is so limited, that the plans I make for myself don't allow for the possibility that things could be much different for me in my life. Why settle for less now that I'm sober? There are better things available to us than we know. I don't believe that when we find ourselves in the "right" place in life that this happens by accident. Nor was it ever an accident when I placed myself in danger or in situations that could only end in despair.

There are many more things at play in the Universe than the mind can comprehend. And that's a matter or faith.

bemyself

Excellent thread, EG.

'I can be pretty direct...'. Certainement pas ?!

Fear isn't really a thing? Yes, for many of us, you know it is. I say this with an intellectual sense of where you're coming from, and from my own existential history, which I work with every day - including with medication, multiple therapeutic modalities, journalling over about 35 years, investigating and re-learning over and over again about my own addictions and workable styles of recovery.

I value your posts, EG. Just as I do concerning some of the others on SR, some of whom are no longer alive (e.g. Robby) and some who are (e.g. wpainter), I feel very fortunate to have access to this community. Most of us will never meet f2f. But we have this space.

HelenofTroy

Interesting article - thanks for sharing. It reminds me of Dr Gabor Matte's work (his books are recommended reading for those interested in addiction - he runs a safe injection facility in Vancouver). I've heard him lecture and he has talked about the Vietnam War vets situation with heroin and them not staying addicted.

EndGameNYC

Thank you for your kind words, bemyself. As I wrote in a previous post, many of our experiences have a delayed effect, an effect that we're unable to appreciate until we're in a better place to "hear" it and take it in. I was in psychoanalysis for several years when I was in my twenties. I didn't understand or take in a lot of what he was talking about. Years later, and not all at once, some of those things started to make sense. We see it often here. People who come back from a relapse, often for years, comment that, and frequently as a result of how they've lived while they were "away," they finally understood what people here were telling them. Thankfully, there is no "I-told-you-so" feature on this site.

I've had a few people here over the years scream and curse at me in PMs, sometimes publicly, things like I have "no right" to make the comments I've made, or that I'm a "terrible person" or a "POS" for what I wrote.. Maybe some of them were right. There are times when I might have taken a lighter touch in my comments. Or said nothing at all. I'm not proud of the fact, nor does it grant me any measure of validation, that all most of these people disappeared and most of them have been gone for a very long time. When I was drinking, I cannot recall a single instance when I gracefully accepted anyone's observations about my behavior. I know that at least part of the reason for this was that they were telling the truth, a truth that I desperately didn't want to hear or acknowledge. We/I often get the message, but don't always act on it.

With that said, I'm just another person here, another voice that speaks from his personal experience. I'm not important enough for anyone to get all spiked up by my comments. I never intend to make things worse for anyone, though there are times when my comments carry some of the frustration I experience. When that happens, I need to put my hands in the air and step away from the keyboard. I stay here because I value the experience of people struggling. That is, for me, an act or a process of being fully human, not ever something to avoid, and one -- perhaps the most direct way -- that can change things forever. All the nice things that people talk about after getting sober...jobs, new cars, extra money...all that stuff is great, but those things can never sustain us as much as or in the same way as does being-in-the-world in ways that provide meaning and purpose in life and that also helps other people find their way.

Yeah, the "fear is not a thing" comment wasn't about the subjective experience of fear and anxiety. It was partly an unfortunate choice of words on my part, or at least merits further explanation. Fear is obviously part of the human condition, and not being afraid can have devastating consequences, like when those of us continue drinking despite the unimaginable destruction we've caused for ourselves and others. We just stop caring, so much so that almost nothing inspires us to be afraid enough to do something about it.

Unwanted feelings are very real for those of us who experience them. We do, though, at some point have a choice to either continue indulging them or to make serious attempts at managing them. I strongly caution against "fighting"them since, by virtue of their very being, they've already "won" whatever fight we may imagine is taking place. Just like the presence of alcoholism, the imaginary "fight" has already been lost. And there is no way to "just get rid of" either one of them. It's about making radical changes in our lives. Most people I've known would characterize themselves as having an "open mind." In terms of both fear and alcoholism, and of course a range of other experiences, thinking isn't and never will be enough and, in fact, often makes things worse.

Fear doesn't have to be the immovable force or the irresistible object that we make it out to be. Redemption or a sense of well-being never happens all at once, but takes place incrementally. The demands of such a process include patience and self-awareness, among much else. Both are available to everyone, though not everyone believes that we can "achieve" either. On the other side, we often tend to mistakenly believe that we are patient or self-aware, settling for a level of awareness that provides a false sense of security, and explaining our troubles with the infamous and often self-defeating "It is what it is." Another version of not caring or just giving up. Very often, things are not at all what they are, or what they seem to be. We are the ones who give our experiences meaning; not some external force that controls us. Another version of the Serenity Prayer goes like this: "God grant me the courage to not accept those things that are unacceptable."

Dozens of people here have demonstrated an ability to manage their fears and anxiety by working towards a remedy until they experience fear and anxiety in a different way, most often by getting outside help, and then sticking with it. I'm not pretending that this is an easy task; but I also wouldn't ever describe it as impossible, no matter how much energy we exert in convincing ourselves that it is. Nor am I trivializing those who've worked hard to get to a better place without success. The motivation to "just give up" is a sign that it's time to start doing something to heal. And sometimes we just have to try doing something different than what we've already done.

Think about the Golden Cage article again. The rats in the experiment had no choice. In my case, I only believed that this was true. And that was more than enough to live too many years in misery.

bemyself

Thank you, EG, for your well-considered and well-felt response . I, and surely quite a few others, return to SR for exactly this kind of rapport. We don't always have access to it, in 'real life' (whatever that is - don't get me started, given my proclivities for reading, which many these days don't consider 'useful'. For myself, and quite a number of others over the centuries, it's literally hearing what others have to say, in text, or nowadays in video as it were, which gives us the chance to hear and reflect.)

I'm a bit un-diagnosed Aspergers or something and the other. And at my age, it's not such a big deal, except when I can't talk about my way of thinking and being to others (like family or a couple of old friends). Fortunately, I've acquired - after quite some years, and quite some effort via my GP - a fairly ok lady clinical psych with whom I'm starting on some actual work with schema therapy. Ho hum. I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. More that I have also learned, via years of experience, that well, sometimes various modalities are 'right' at certain times in one's life and other times, they just aren't.

With that in mind, I've recently realised that it's OK to spend regular time with some professionals who CLEARLY state they don't quite 'get' addiction, in the sense of its lived experience. Myself, I'd love to be able to spend some therapeutic time with people such as yourself, or say, Marc Lewis, Gabor Mate, etc etc. Having said that, and given your thread theme, I like to remind myself that we're all just human beings , and that our addictive tendencies (whatever they are) need not imprison us nor those whom we love. Or, for that matter, the people we meet at SR, the 'rooms', or any other place where any individual is trying to simply heal. For today, for a few weeks, a few months or for years. Healing is a process, often a very long one as you know, such that it's almost without a definitive End, as it were. Getting a bit (either) Sartrean and or Buddhist here, forgive me.

Anyway, thanks so much for your posts. Many of us do appreciate them.

ThomPom

You might want to listen to a TED Talk with Johann Hari, which is exactly about that topic, he is quoting Alexanders's experiment.

Just google

Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong | Johann Hari

on youtube / TED channel

Merigold

I particularly liked this:

Alcohol or drug dependence is the consequence of not bearing being present in your own life

I do think there is an element in that with me. My life is better then it has ever been. I have a good job, a loving husband, live in a great country, and overcome a pretty crap life to be here now. So why the hell am I hell bent on destroying it?

I think maybe I feel guilty about that. Guilty that others I love and care for are still stuck. Or dead. That I couldn't bring them with me into this new life. Guilt for for being an alcoholic depressive, guilt for not being able to overcome addiction, guilt for abandoning my mum when she needs me, guilt for not helping my sister enough, guilt that she died...I don't feel guilty when I'm drunk.

Solarion

EndGame and all, thank you for the interesting discussion elicited by that article in the OP. TBH, I found more useful content in your posts than in the article itself, although it was good to be reminded of the vets and heroin, and the rat park experiments.

(In fact I bookmarked this thread the other day so I could come back and read the longer posts at leisure instead of skimming.)

It's certainly something for me to consider: what cage(s) or bleak park or insufficient playground do I imagine myself to be stuck in, and why don't I do something about that (whether that means dismantling the imaginary cage or looking for practical exits or decorating my life a little better somehow)?

I'm glad you mentioned that acceptance is not always the best option.

And for balance, I like what MOS wrote about acceptance coming with maturity in some areas, for instance regarding youthful notions that are just not going to get accomplished given what we know now.

Dissatisfaction leading to efforts toward improvement, taking responsibility for some portion of one's circumstances -- good to remember and practice.



[As for the article itself, it seemed rather "convenient" that the lower half led to the author's own program as an option for healing one's life. Hmm. Adverticle?]

MissPerfumado

This really helped me crystallise my thoughts around my sobriety journey.

I had an "existentialist crisis" about 8 years ago and started a deep search for the meaning of life. I read literally hundreds of books of a philosophical, religious, spiritual and metaphysical bent. It culminated in me leaving the "golden cage" of my well-paying but soul-sucking job in the corporate world.

I took time out and believed I found my answers - in large part, I still do believe that. After over a year, I returned to the workforce with a different perspective. I now enjoy my job. I have had a few big promotions since returning, largely I believe because of my new perspective. It is not a cage to me now but a source of magnificent opportunities - personal, professional and financial.

But here's the thing - I KEPT DRINKING through it all. I started drinking to deal with the anxieties of the stifling corporate life, but even after I no longer found it stifling, I continued to drink! Drinking was a way of relaxing, having a good time, etc. And because I was happier overall in my life, I thought that drinking was a vital part of this new good life.

It's like after all of that work I did years ago to unlock the door to the golden cage, I was too stupid to see I was still in another cage, the cage of alcoholism. In fact, I was using my new found sense of freedom to prolong and enable the alcoholism.

So in my case I think I did it the opposite way around. But now that I have finally removed the drink, it seems like all the pieces have come together. No doubt I'll keep growing, exploring and changing my mind (stasis is not a good thing). Nevertheless, the place I have found is highly satisfactory to me.

Merigold

@MissPerfumado

In some ways it also started my issues.


My problem is that I often feel closest to the answer when i'm drunk....


What is the point?..........

When I'm sober I have no idea....

When I'm drunk I get a clue....

Dee74

It seems to me you've come to equate drinking with a respite from your guilt and associated angst.

But you'll never assuage that guilt while you're drinking because drinking isn't about dealing with the problems, just the symptoms.

Sober up and the problem;s still there.

Have you thought about speaking to a professional about the guilt weighing you down Merigold?

D