An Angrrrry Walk in the Park

I was a couple of weeks into treatment, coming out of the brain-fog and starting to see the outlines of my life take shape. It looked a lot better when it was “Obscured by Clouds” (Floyd, P). I was still groping for a way that I could somehow have my life and drink it too, but I was also starting to see that it was going to be a “yes or no” proposition  (Meatloaf “Paradise by the Dashboard Light). As a client neatly encapsulated the notion of admitting the problem, “Some can and some can’t.” Expanded a mite, that means, “Some can use without problems and some can’t use without problems.” Slick was watching with dismay as he felt his control slipping away, when he was presented with a perfect opportunity to "rescue” me from this “treatment cult.”

One afternoon in group, I was confronted, felt embarrassed, and became very angry.

I left for my usual post-session walk around the one-mile perimeter of the campus, seething with rage. As I stomped along, egged on by Slick, I was thinking, “They can’t talk to me like that! I’m out of here! I’ll get Curly to come pick me up and we’ll be blasted by the time I get home!” After I ran that tape for a few blocks, the exercise drained off some adrenalin and infused some endorphins, our natural, feel-good chemicals that morphine is based on. A brief interlude of rational thoughts intruded, allowing the “90-Second Rule” (A Stroke of Insight Bolte Taylor, J) to kick in and metabolize the rest of the painful, brain-fogging anger chemistry.

These chemicals will run through their circuit in 90 seconds, be broken down and flushed out. Unless, in our mind’s trip through the left brain for analysis, it hears a good story supporting the need to run the circuit again. And again and again, ad nauseam. One can feed that feedback loop or starve it. It depends on how much misery I want to put myself through.

A new tape began to play: “If you are so smart and you don’t need to be here, why did you decide you needed treatment in the first place? You’ve been saying that you aren’t ready to make it on your own, out in the wild. Can you afford to bail on treatment because your feelings were hurt? When you were using, you wanted to quit. How can using be the solution to anything?”

I continued striding along, with this tape playing for a couple of minutes, until Slick managed to wrest control of my brain and get it back into that dangerous groove, “They can’t talk to me like that! I don’t have to put up with this! I’ll just call Curly…”

I fell into a rhythm. Fifty feet of “they can’t talk to me like that…,” fifty feet of “if you’re so smart…” Around and around the campus I went, raging, questioning, raging, questioning…Slowly, like carelessly painted dotted lines on the highway, the “they can’t talk to me…” eruptions diminished, the “if you’re so smart…” lines lengthened.

By supper time, my legs were losing strength and so were the “can’t talk to me like that…” messages. I don’t mean to say that I never had to work through another emotional storm or never had another urge to use, but that was the beginning of my realization that anger was now my biggest active enemy and the end of my willingness to set aside my new life during an angry outburst.

What started with an embarrassment turned out to be one of the most useful experiences I had while in treatment.* It had taken me years of misery to enter the month of negotiations that led me to treatment and here I was ready to forget all the valid reasons I had to make that commitment and I was about to abandon it, just because my feelings were hurt.

More generally, it was brought home to me that I don’t have to stick with my initial reaction. I could be wrong! For someone with vast stores of trivial knowledge that few could challenge me on, that was difficult to wrap my mind around. Even today, thirty years later, my being in error isn’t the first possibility that occurs to me.

One might think that a 42-year-old person possessing even a smidgen of intelligence would have figured that out, but that would be confusing intelligence and knowledge with wisdom. More on that in another post.

For now, enough to say that it is a commonly held belief that maturing slows to a crawl once we begin to seek refuge from uncomfortable feelings in behaviors known to turn into addictions. Substituting massive amounts of externally provided feel-good chemicals for the painful process of facing reality is not a recipe for personal growth.

*Don’t get me wrong. As a counselor I never bought into the confrontational approach, but luckily I had reached a point in my ultra-early recovery where I was able to work through this particular incident.