One thing I promised myself after my first year of recovery was that I would never be ashamed of my story of addiction and recovery. I felt it was necessary to shed my own stigma and shame of this experience in order to move forward with my life. It felt so amazing to just be honest. "Yeah, I was drinking a lot. Yeah, life got hard. Yeah, I got sober. Here I am. Take it or leave it." Only on a rare occasion have I been rejected by other based solely on the fact that I struggled with active addiction for a lot of years. I found that rejection most prevalent in the dating world. A few people had really nasty experiences with addiction and did not want to even consider a person with addiction issues - in recovery or not. The other group being those who felt ashamed of their drinking and the thought that I would not be partaking in a drink on a date was just too much. Honestly. that never really bothered me all that much because my recovery is a part of who I am. If a person cannot accept that, they will never be able to accept me. Relationship killer.

As I became more vocal, more and more people started reaching out to me. (If you know me personally, by the way, never ever hesitate to ask me any questions about my experience or what your experience is like. I am beyond grateful to help whenever and wherever I possibly can.) In the beginning, I had a lot of people reach out to me and talk with me about their own recovery. People from high school, college, former employers - all people I had known for years and had no idea that they knew what I was going through. Then, the shift happened with the folks reaching out to me being those who were still struggling. If AA taught me anything, it's that I can share my spirit, strength and hope with anyone at any time. That is truly a gift of sobriety. The first thing I will usually say to people who reach out to me to talk about their struggles is: Thank you. For one, I know how damn hard it is to reach out to someone and talk about it. I am honored that this person trusted me enough to break the silence and take a chance that something different might exist. 

As the years of my recovery went on, a majority of people who reach out to me now are family and friends of someone who is struggling. Often it's a friend of a friend who got my number or email address. The family, too, has chosen to break their silence and start figuring out what needs to happen to get their loved one help. Each situation I have been contacted about is so very different. I talked to a mom whose 16 year old daughter was using opiates and might have been lured into sex trafficking. I talked with a husband whose wife was constantly in and out of the hospital at his wit's end. These contacts are in my personal sphere and not even my professional one. Professionally, the stories of concern and fears were reasonably similar although many of those cases were coming from professional referrals such as detox centers and hospitals.

When I started to hear from more family and friends, I had to pause for a minute. I know what it is like from my perspective of being the addict. I know that my decision making process was ridiculous and frightening at times. I know how I went about manipulating people to get my own needs met. I don't exactly know what it was like for my family to deal with me. As a family, we did do a family week while I was in my first treatment. My family went into their own rock-star level recovery from me right out of the gates. One of the reasons I didn't seek help for many years was that I knew if my family knew, the gig was up. They love me fiercely and they are not going to let me down with addiction. I wasn't ready to make that level of commitment to stopping for a long time. Even when I finally did reach out, I knew the cat was out of the bag and things were going to change. And the ways things changed within my family unit basically offered me consistent level of support as long as I was putting the effort into my sobriety. The more open I became about my struggles, I think the more proud of me they became. There was no more hiding. I came out on the other side and they are happy to celebrate with me.

I did a lot of thinking and research about what type of advice or resources I would want to offer to a family member or friend in the event I was contacted. There are different schools of thought on how to approach addiction. The question becomes: what needs to change in order to encourage a person to change? What if the person does not want to change? Do we really have to let go? I am going to bet that many of the people who read this blog would go to the ends of the earth to help a loved one. Most of us can think of something extreme that we did for a person we loved. (Quick insert here because I love this story: In college, I had the lead in play. I was talking to my mom the night before the play opened who was 850 miles away about how fun it would be to have her there. I understood though. She grabbed a friend that night and drove all those miles to see me in my theater debut. If that is not love......I don't know what is!) This is what we do for love. 

How do we love when addiction is in play. Pretty much all of the nice supportive things you would normally do for a person who is suffering is not going to be entirely successful with addiction. I just haven't really been in the drivers seat, so to speak, when it comes to the family's perspective on addiction. I can only try to imagine what my family dealt with in terms of my very liable presentation and trips to the psych ward. I can only imagine what my ex-husband would have to stay about the very active alcoholic wife he was married to. I can tell you what I didn't respond to. Never make a threat you won't follow through on. Addiction is one of those things that will take a mile if an inch is available. Addiction is amazingly creative at times and we become masters of manipulation to protect the drug we can't imagine living without. When I talk with families, I often think about all the ways I tried to avoid and weasel my way out of any situation that would change what I was doing.

I wouldn't dare write one catch-all advice column about how families should approach addiction. Honestly, this is not my area of expertise, although one I would consider myself competent in talking about. I am much more clinical oriented when I talk to family members. When someone is reaching out to me because s/he is still drinking, I am less clinical and just another alcoholic in the room looking to support another person find what s/he is looking for. When families come to me, they want answers and an action plan. I totally get that. Things are generally at a really scary place by the time I speak with them. I do have a wealth of information at my finger tips and will provide any and all information I can. I just can't quite promise you that I will be the exact person to provide the plan. Just be prepared that some of what I may suggest is going to feel very uncomfortable because it is the exact opposite of how we are wired to take care of our friends and family. Addiction does turn everything upside down.

What I will end with tonight was an experience I had when I attended the Family Program at Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. I attended as a graduate student. I was three years sober at that point and sat through as a "patient". I introduced myself as a patient but it became evident quickly that I was there as a student. I was accepted nonetheless. The way that HBF does there program is that the family members go through the program one week and the patient of that family attends a different week. My family week in my first treatment felt like a firing squad of the family confronting the patients in a large group setting. So I was intrigued about how this works when the patient and family go at different times. Anyway, during the week I attended, there was a mother of a 27 year old patient who was attending the following week. He was addicted to opiates and had overdose 3 times in her home and she found him passed out on the streets on numerous other occasions. She was broken and this situation was killing her. He was talking about coming back to live with her after his 21 days were up. This was his 14th treatment in 10 years. She was terrified. She, for some reason, really gravitated to me and almost had a motherly instinct toward me. 

We broke out into smaller groups at one point to have a more in-depth discussion about dealing with addiction. By not having the direct family members in the group while still having people who are experiencing addiction, the family members asked really interesting questions. "Why do you do [insert crazy behavior]?" This mother asked me "what did your mother do for you?" I thought for a second and responded: "She started to have an adult relationship with me. She will always love me like her baby; however, I was 33 when I got sober and it was time for me to stand on my own. It was the most loving thing she has ever done for me." I saw her light up, probably thinking for the first time about her own child being an adult that has adult decisions to make. She replied, "Oh my gosh, yes, I want an adult relationship with my son. How did she do it?" That question I could not exactly answer other than I know my mom listened very carefully during our family week and made some changes in her life to support my new life. I wish I could say by the end of the week she had decided to make that transition. Her son eloped from treatment on the last day of our week together. She completed the program and graduated. She announced after she received her medallion that we was going to start looking for her son because it would be dead in a matter of hours if she didn't. That's a mother's love that is hard to change in a 4 day period. The interaction, however, has stuck with me today, 7 years later. Despite how things played out, I suspect that she remembers our conversations too. I can only hope she found what she was looking for.

There was a blog entry that I started writing in the fall when I was still counseling full time. I titled it "I hate addiction". Honestly, I was so emotionally charged while writing it, I decided not to post it. The entry became more about my inability to accept certain things that were happening at the time. At the start of the entry, I thought I was hating addiction that day. I think I was more hating life at that point. I thought now might be a good time to circle back and think a bit more about my feelings toward addiction with hopefully a more even perspective.

I remember writing years ago about one of my first AA meetings after I enrolled in the monitoring program for my LPN license. It is important to know that I was in a very angry place when all of that went down. I wasn't grateful for much at that moment. I am sitting in a "now required by my stupid program to keep my nursing license" meeting and the guy next to me says, "Hi! I'm Tom and I am grateful alcoholic" during the round of introductions. What the hell is wrong with this guy? Who is grateful for being an alcoholic? Are you serious one because most of us hate being alcoholics? 

What took me some time to realize is that dear Tom was grateful for a couple of reasons. One, being an alcoholic is part of who he is and he has caged that beast for now and is living a good life. When addiction has dragged you into the depths of despair and sobriety starts to happen, a person starts to feel hope again. That's a powerful moment. He was grateful he survived and he was grateful for the lessons he learned in his recovery to take back his life and keep alcohol out of the picture. For a brief period in 2012 and 2013, I did feel like a grateful alcoholic. There was full acceptance that drinking was not the way to live my life anymore. I was learning SO much in recovery that everything was exciting and different. I was participating in DBT and using what I was taught on a weekly basis. Life was back. I was living and surviving it without my favorite and dangerous coping mechanism. So much to be optimistic about!

My views haven't inherently changed. I believe there is a lot to be grateful for in my personal recovery and the fact that I am an alcoholic. My recovery is now a huge part of who and what I am. I don't do it perfectly, but it's a heck of a lot better than what I would have done had my drinking continued. I have accepted that I am an alcoholic. I have accepted that long-term recovery is my life choice everyday. I have accepted what I lost because of addiction. I have accepted the changes that needed to happen to get to almost 10 years of sobriety. Acceptance is one of the key foundations of recovery whether you are in AA or not. At some point, we have to accept that we don't have all the answers and it might be time to get help. 

The struggle with acceptance is that one day I am fully accepting of most situations and things around me. There are other days that this acceptance fades and I have to make a conscious effort to get back to the place of acceptance. So, back to my previous blog post: Now that I am back in a great place with my job and still being connected the field, I feel like I can more authentically say that I still hate addiction. Let me tell you why. Addiction destroys lives. Addiction steals people's souls. Addiction almost killed me. Addiction still lives in my brain and eagerly waits for a time to shine again. Addiction wrecks families. Addiction kills. The road back from addiction is a long one and there are very few shortcuts to sobriety. Addiction exacerbates mental health issues. Addiction steals parents from their kids and kids from their parents. 23 million people are dealing with addiction on a daily basis (actively). 2 million of them have access to services. It feels like a losing battle. So many systemic issues. So much misunderstanding. So much misery. I hate that addiction is going to rise to #1 in the preventable death category soon. I hate watching my fellow brothers and sisters who are still suffering and knowing that there is only so much that I can do. 

Was this what made me leave counseling? How can I work with something I hate so much? That doesn't sound like the world's healthiest situation. There is perspective to be had here. If I view my job exclusively as fighting addiction, yeah, I am going to burn out. The outcomes of working with clients and addiction are low depending on how you define sobriety and recovery. The other perspective is looking at supporting clients to find recovery. That feels a little bit lighter and hopeful. Let me be real here, I lost that sense of hope for people in the last year I was working. The attitude was more "Oh now what?" versus "What happened and what will help you?" It's an odd thing to hate something so much and then immerse myself in addiction recovery services as a career and personal crusade. 

I hate addiction. I really do. I feel like my place in this world is to show compassion to the person. I think ALS is the most horrific disease I can think of; I would never stop loving the person who was diagnosed with it. The challenge is finding the "right way" (if there really is one) to love a person suffering from addiction. Part of that complex process is figuring out what it will take for the individual to push aside addiction for even a few moments to see the clarity of their own situation. I hated addiction in the beginning of my career and I hate it now. What I cannot tolerate from myself is losing the compassion for the person in front of me. I often felt like I was swing a sword in the dark trying to help people coming through emergency services. Watching people lie to my face about their use despite actively dying from addiction in front of me. In the beginning I didn't judge that behavior. Hell, I did it too! "Oh, I only have 2 drinks and evening." Which is true if 1 drink includes 1/3 of a liter of alcohol per drink. 

I started to judge. I made value judgments on people who were sick. I made moral judgments as well. Then, when I caught onto me doing that, I started judging the myself. What kind of clinician has such disdain for the condition she spent 2 years getting a masters degree to treat? Is all of this just making me lose my faith in humanity? Am I THAT burned out? What happened....I was so optimistic in the beginning. The great life of recovery is out there and I am going to help people see that! Yeah, well, only if they really want to. In the position that I was previously working, very few really wanted my help. I got manipulated from time to time. I got bullied by patients and family members. I got beat down. I may have been good at my job; however it came at great personal cost. 

So, tonight, I still hate addiction but love working in a treatment center with 34 individuals who are battling not only chemical dependency but also mental health issues. In my nursing role, I do not have to dive into every aspect of their lives and learn what makes them tick. I know the behaviors that come along with addiction. I still get played from time to time. I know some of my patient are full of it and have no desire to be sober. The big difference now is that their motivation and desires for recovery are not my concern. I can talk with them about either of those things, but I am not obligated to do so. I am there to assist with the health aspect of their recovery. I am there to educate about medications. I talk directly to them about addict thinking and behaviors. Most importantly, I ask every person, everyday, "How are you?" In this position I can care about the individual and show compassion without losing myself in the process. I can hate addiction and yet not be consumed by it. In a way, I am loving addiction from a distance. Addiction is going to do what it is going to do with my patients. It is not my battle to fight. I just want them to know at the end of the day that I really do care how they are doing. I can't change it - I accept that. I can only listen - I accept that. I can't make them change - I accept that. I will always have strong feelings about addiction and what is does - I need to accept that this viewpoint is not fixed, it has more fluidity as I engage, disengage and work around addiction.

I am grateful for many things now of days. I am so happy with my job. I am in my 5th month already. Time is flying by. School is plugging along. I decreased my credit load a bit which will push out my graduation date to 09/2021. My sanity is more important than overdoing a bunch of quarters to get it all done. I am in no rush to move on from where I am at. My own addiction has steadily calmed down since my change. What I am most grateful for is that I found the right connection to the field. I am still passionate. I still feel like there is something big out there for me. I hope someday I could speak professionally as public speaking is one of my favorite things to do. Or maybe teaching. Hope has been restored 100% now. I thank my previous coworkers for walking my journey with me as I sorted this out. I wasn't always the kindest or much fun to be around in those years. I miss those guys A LOT.  

Stay healthy and safe everyone!
​Jules