State of Grace

Drunkalog

A couple of weeks ago, I went out to a bar where I had once had a couple of “epic” nights.  Except as I was sitting around the place, I started observing the other drinkers and parties at other tables and they were clearly not having an epic time.  They were having a lovely civilized pleasant somewhat classy time.  It made me wonder what if those epic nights in actuality were kind of lame (or nice and mild) and maybe what I mistook for “epic” was really my inability at that time to shut the fuck up.  I have noticed that drunk people tend to provide a verbal narrative when you are out with them (and I say this with much love as I am constantly entertained by that narrative).  However, I am almost a hundred percent positive that maybe my verbal narrative was somewhere along the lines of “this is such an epic night, wow, I can’t believe we are having an epic night”.  When in actuality, it never sort of was and I was kind of too gone to notice.  

Today, we had a fun discussion of how these drunken nights of glory get retold and exaggerated until the original event is completely lost under delusion and self-aggrandizing.  I will use an actual story from my personal history to illustrate.

For instance, the story as I used to tell it:

I went to a movie premiere after party at the four seasons and the owner let me dance around in the fountain while Richard Gere and Diane Lane sat in the corner.  I went up to him and asked for his autograph for my mother, he was very nice.  Then, we drank expensive wine and partied all night long.

What probably actually happened and the story I now tell (embellished for special effect): 

I was wasted, I drunkenly went on and on about the fountain and how much I wanted to splash around in it until finally the owner threw me in it to shut me up.  Then I proceeded to get completely black out, danced around wasted until our mutual friend threw me in a cab.  I vomited somewhere between midtown and the manhattan bridge in my bag and I called in sick the next day.

Man, I am really starting to forget this stuff.  Ah, good times.  Unfortunately, there are stories that I can not absolutely embellish because I was really that stupid and super happy good time fun party girl.  Sometimes I miss her, especially on days like today.  However, the scars of my former life run pretty deep, there are some wounds (done to myself by myself) that I am not sure any amount of time will heal.  A wise man forgives but never forgets.  

Summer of YES.

Being in recovery, one of the first things you learn is how to say No, not now, maybe, let me get back to you, and I will let you know how I feel on the day of.  I have become so adept at saying No that I have literally no’ed myself out of a social life.  But that was then and this is now.  In early recovery, you are forced to change everything.  There’s a reason they say no major changes in the first year, it’s to protect yourself from making extremely bad decisions especially as you learn how to navigate what can often seem like a cold and harsh world without your favorite security blanket of bourbon, vodka, or pinot noir.

My first summer in sobriety was pretty ridiculously awesome.  I had nightly coffee dates and long walks along the east side highway with random people in recovery.  I went to dances, made cupcakes with my sober roommate, and sat in Carl Schurz park meditating.   Last summer was probably the worst summer of my life.  There were whole days I couldn’t leave my apartment because I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually dead from all of the trauma therapy.  I spent most of my Sundays in bed recouping and crying over my broken childhood.  Everything was a trigger and the trauma was literally fighting its way out of my body.  I was extremely paranoid about everyone and everything as I worked through the worst of my PTSD symptoms.

But here I am, a whole year later, with less than half of my original memories and 6 months from my last PTSD meltdown living every moment as if it were the first and only moment.  It’s a pretty awesome place to be and when my ridiculously awesome sponsor told me in November during a crying jag that I would make it here, I didn’t believe her.  And now I am ready to rejoin life. 

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that no matter what I was invited to I was just going to say yes.  I am just going to show up to everything that I can and see what happens.  All of my anxiety is gone and I am ready to start building up my life a little bit more.  It’s really amazing to experience things sober, I get to observe this layer of life that most people can’t see.  I get to see what’s beneath the surface by just sitting and listening to everything and everyone.  It’s truly enlightening sometimes. 

Saying yes has been really hard.  Like most people in recovery, I seem to enjoy my own company more than others.  Sometimes I think you could lock me on a deserted island with a fully stocked library and Lola and I would happily live out the rest of my days in peace and contentment.  Sometimes, I am angry and resentful on my way to the place but happily a part of the minute I get there. Its been an interesting experience thus far and I have definitely felt a lot happier in the past month than I have in the past year.  I am taking it a day at a time and learning a lot about myself in the process. 

Here’s to a summer filled with adventure.

How EMDR has worked for me.

I get emailed this question a lot by different people and until now have not tried to write it down because it’s been extremely complicated to understand.  But the other day, as I was talking to my therapist, I started to realized how far I have actually come.  I am firmly planted in the present at all times, my mind is razor sharp and constantly focused on problem solving and dissecting information in front of me.  That’s not to say that I don’t have fun, but for the most part, it’s transformed the way that I think and process information.  

It’s a far cry from yester years when the past constantly consumed my thoughts and new information resembling past experiences would either cause me to go into a catatonic state, hysteria, or a hyperarousal state followed by a sort of psychotic breakdown. These episodes began to multiply in frequency when I was 14 and by the time I reached age 29, I was completely cracking up and could not function without alcohol.  All the great spiritual leaders say, we create our own reality with our thoughts, our words, and our actions.  What if those thoughts, words, and actions were from a different time, a traumatic episode where someone you loved and trusted told you, “No one loves you and you are going to die”?  What if you spent your entire life, every waking hour and minute, convinced that you were going to die?  Worst of all, what if you thought it was true…

To truly understand, I have to explain what it was like before.  Before I went into treatment for trauma, it was like my brain was split in half.  On one side, a constant projector show was playing every traumatic event from my past and on the other- I was frantically trying to stay in the present and interpret what was happening in my day to day life.  Often, the two would cross and reality would become fantasy and past would become present.  I would react to the information in front of me as if I were 4 years old.  Regression is a funny thing, I still can’t quite believe it until it happens and I have no control over it.  For years, the only defense I had was to disassociate or regress.  Because of the memory flashbacks and the catastrophic thinking, I couldn’t process anything that was happening in front of me, so to protect myself I would disassociate.  I had no control over any of this and it’s like my brain was literally broken.  The walled off traumatic memories made it nearly impossible for my brain to process new memories, therefore, I simply never forgot.  Anything.  In its misguided attempt to protect me by treating all new memories the same as the traumatic ones, my brain casually ruined my life.  

I didn’t realize my memories were different until I got sober and mentioned it to my therapist.  Around this time, I also resumed having intense memory flashbacks.  My first “conscious” full body memory flashback happened two years ago on the subway, I lost all concept of time and became fully immersed in a past state of mind.  It felt like I was entirely somewhere else.  While I have always had a razor sharp memory, I didn’t realize that it wasn’t normal that I can remember colors, sounds, textures, smells, and tastes.  At any time, I had the ability to pull up a past memory and replay it over and over again as if I were in that day, minute, hour, and time.  I was incapable of forgetting anything, even random mundane events.  Drinking was a great escape because blacking out enabled a form of escape.  I thought that everyone blacked out when they drank and that it was how we forgot. I still don’t remember any of my blackouts so “it worked.”  It was the only real coping mechanism I had to forget life and I didn’t start seriously drinking till age 23.  My teenage years were practically tragic, but that’s a whole other story I won’t go into at this time.

How EMDR worked:  Through right and left brain stimulation (I preferred the tonal/pulse method), EMDR helped my brain re-process the traumatic events that my younger self was unable to process.  I also altered a couple of the memories.  For instance, in one, my cat is now in the memory.  I can’t remember the event without my cat present.  It’s really crazy how this shit works; it was not easy and it took me over a year to work through one memory.  It’s hard, you have to be willing to put down everything in your life.  I slept a lot last year because the sessions were so draining and through the whole process, I never cried once.  I spent a year reliving my trauma and trying to access the feelings attached with it.  I couldn’t break through the disassociation for over 9 months, I had to get to a really safe place to allow myself to feel anything good or bad.    

Since I completed EMDR in January on my core trauma, my brain has begun reprocessing all of my memories.  Not only is my trauma now a fuzzy picture in my head but I can’t remember other memories as well.  It’s like they have all started fading and every day, I forget something new.  The past is being completely erased and I feel myself mentally sliding more and more into the present.  Another side effect, up until this point is that I haven’t been able to cry.  The trauma has literally been trapped inside my head for so long that it blocked me from feeling anything.  I am 32 years old and I can tell you how many times I cried up to age 29.  Since the beginning of April, I haven’t stopped crying.  It’s like a dam inside of me has broken and I can’t turn it off.  I am feeling every second of every day in a way that wasn’t possible for me before.  I am also sleeping a lot and taking a lot of time to heal my brain and body.

A lifetime of ptsd has taken a lot out of me, I am exhausted.  At the age of 23, I moved to the worst city in the world for a trauma survivor- just taking the subway to work puts me into a hyperarousal state.  Somedays, I want to go live in a cabin in the woods because I am so exhausted.  Now that my symptoms are slowly dissolving, I am beginning to realize how much of this really held me back all these years.  And it didn’t help that I seem to perpetuate my cycle of abuse by actively choosing people in my life who had the same characteristics of my abuser.  Today, I work really hard to break that cycle.  Right now, I am in the middle of a massive overhaul of this one area of my life that still persists.  Sometimes, in order for me to stop being a victim and to reclaim my life, I have to be willing to let go of everything.  And to let go, sometimes that involves getting into a knife fight with myself.  

I don’t think my symptoms are completely gone and from hearing from other survivors, they don’t completely go away.  I still find authority figures, drunk, and angry people to be extremely triggering.   I am getting better at detaching the minute I start to crack up, I know how to quietly remove myself.  I also have all these tools and an extremely strong spiritual life.  I can’t recommend it enough.  It’s not an easy treatment and you need to build a strong foundation with yourself, an hp of your understanding, and your therapist.  In order to believe I deserved recovery, I had to believe that there was a GOD that loved me and wanted me to be happy no matter what.  For a drunken atheist, that was not an easy path to find.  Healing from trauma is more painful than the trauma itself.  My trauma was very complex and it might take a lifetime to work through my attachment issues but it’s honestly better than how I felt before.  I was so tragically cut off from everything in my life, including myself.  I felt a little like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, mimicking my way through life.  I felt like an empty vessel desperately seeking anything outside of myself to be filled- men, friends, people, alcohol, running, etc.  Towards the end, I felt so consumed by the past that I had no future and I thought about suicide a lot those last couple of years.  

Today, I am beginning to understand a richer and fuller life.  I am totally not there yet but I take it one day at a time and try to live each day or every other day to the best of my ability.  If I want to get through this, I can’t be hard on myself.  I have to be willing to let go of all of my rigidity and for some of us, that is all we know.  But there is hope and there is recovery. I hope this was at least a little bit helpful and if I know you in real life and you bring up a funny thing from the past that I can’t recall.  Trust me, this is a very good thing.  It’s a beautiful miracle.  If you want to know more, please email me.

Life Lessons…

I just went back through my archives from 2008/2009 and I forgot how miserable, unhappy, and alone I felt.  I have to say, in the past 2 and change, I have had my fair share of hard days but I have never done them alone and/or tragically misunderstood and/or terminally unique.  Sometimes it feels like I have an army of friends propping me up on the bad days.  

Also, I had a lot of problems, my life was a constant mess, and a lot of solutions that involved wine (and ugh, self-centered grandiosity).  Every single day felt like groundhog day.  It’s nice to know that this tragic story has had a pretty decent and on some days happy new beginning.  You couldn’t pay me to go back but it’s nice that I have tumblr account as a reminder of what once was.  It keeps things very green for me.  

Or as they say, I had to go through the dark to find the light.  And what a light it is.

PS. I love that next week I am going to turn 32 and I am a fully functioning emotionally healthy adult that knows how to cry.  That’s progress.  

The Misinformation of Trauma and the Battle of Recovery.

I am posting about this in hopes that someone finds this helpful.  Yesterday, I had the honor of sitting in a room full of social workers who were having an honest and frank discussion of trauma recovery.  I went because I was curious how much of my own personal experience, my psychology background, and understanding of trauma matched up against today’s professionals. 

I should preface this by saying that I was a psychology major in college and pre-med for a number of years.  Like most majors, I was initially attracted to psychology because of my own issues.  Unfortunately, I went through 14 years of misdiagnosis because trauma and ptsd simply weren’t studied, taught, or taken that seriously when I was in college.  It was literally a paragraph in one of my textbooks and it was about combat soldiers.  We discussed early childhood development but not childhood trauma. 

In fact, that was one of the topics that came up yesterday- the belief that latent memories don’t form before the age of 5 and therefore early childhood trauma is often false memories.  As a survivor of severe and complex childhood trauma, I can say this is without a doubt, 100 percent not true. My memories were not only vivid but often played in the back of my head like a movie on repeat for years with no control.  I could remember tastes, smells, and textures.  It actually affected the way my brain processed other information and memories as well.  (to share a personal victory- recently I realized that I can’t remember how my first bf ever broke up with me. I used to be able to play it on repeat and today I can’t remember the sound of his voice!  It’s amazing!)

However, through a combination of psychotherapy, emdr, meditation,and cognitive behavioral therapy, I can say I have managed to not only reprocess my earlier trauma but to forget it as well.  What I have found in my own personal experience is that I have had to use several different treatment therapies, not one worked on its own.  My therapist is amazing, but there are so many quacks out there who honestly don’t know what they are doing and shouldn’t be allowed to fuck with someone’s mental health. 

It was amazing to sit in a room full of professionals who were actually questioning the existence of trauma and ptsd symptoms.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many times my hand shot up.  I didn’t disclose my trauma but I brought up effective treatment therapies and different successful cases. 

It’s very distressing that a room full of social workers would treat a serious mental disorder with such disdain and incredulity.  I work with other trauma survivors and while each of us have different stories and symptoms, our trauma was indeed very real.  Lately, I have been toying with the idea of going back to school and doing this for real.  When I started this path, I had to do it alone and it took me a lot of stumbling around to find my way.  I love passing on what took me years to find.

Half the battle is being taken seriously, but there is honest recovery from trauma.  I can’t pass this on enough.  I still struggle from time to time with symptoms, but today I can take a step back from them and use simple grounding techniques to bring myself back into the present.  A good start would be here, this book changed my life.

Concert-eve

After two months of three rehearsals a week on top of Sunday Service singing, our choir concert is tomorrow night.  I haven’t performed in over 12 years and I am somewhat nervous.  It’s been a rough month, I am going to be very happy when it’s all over.  Because I haven’t had a social life in over a month, I didn’t end up inviting any friends to the concert.  However, the amazing part is that I have made a lot of friends within my church as a result of my involvement in the choir.  People start to get to know your face and they randomly invite you to brunch, it’s the most amazing thing.  

Six months ago, I would never have been able to do something like this.  I could barely stand up on Sundays for longer than 15 minutes at a time.  It’s a testament to how far my recovery has come and for that I am extremely grateful.  There’s also something amazing about 900 people sharing this spiritual experience together.  You can almost feel the love when you are up on that stage.  Sometimes I like to pick an audience member and send them all of my love and good energy.  It helps me feel connected when I get nervous.  

In 24 hours, it will all be over.  I find that extremely comforting. 

the end of the ego and the death of a dream.

Last night, on an assignment from my sponsor, I picked up my 90 day journal to look for a list I had made 2 years ago when I decided to change my life.  I did not find that list, however, I found something infinitely greater- gratitude.  I ended up reading the whole thing, I literally documented every single thing that happened to me, including interactions with friends, in those first 6 months.  If you ever wondered how a person who has destroyed everything puts their life back together- it’s in that book.

It was also a clear reminder of how much I have forgotten, the little things we learn in early sobriety that make life easier.  It’s really easy to forget how hard life was when it gets easier.  Right now, my biggest worry has been getting a new job.  I want to put the word “Director” after my name before I turn 32.  I swear to fucking god that is what I have been obsessing about over the past month.  And it’s been a horrible fucking month.  All for that one little word that at the end of the day is probably just going to cause a lot of stress and not make me that happy.  

When you write an inventory, most of us write a fear list.  It’s a doomsday list, a what if for the impending apocalypse that our disease of perception is convinced is on its way. One of those things that I wrote down was to go crazy in public.  And would you believe it, I did that exact thing this week.  I fucking lost my mind.  It was like I had been drugged and my mind literally broke in half.  I couldn’t see black, white, grey- it was one big fog of pain.  I found out that when you go crazy in public and find yourself crying all over town, people are really nice to you.  Strangers are really nice to you.  Most just want to find out why you are upset and if there is anything they can do to help.  Friends, choir members, coworkers were extremely nice to me.  

My break was the result of the severing of my expectations from the reality of what was actually going on in my life.  It was so fucking painful.  It lasted for 5 days.  Starting Monday night till about yesterday.  I feel really raw today and like I want to shut the world out.  There are no walls right now to protect me from the outside world, I feel very vulnerable and exposed.  Everything feels different than it did 6 days ago and it feels like nothing will ever be the same again.  

The best part of this story is that last night a friend called me in the exact same state I had been in and she was hysterical.  If that’s not a power greater than myself at work, I have no idea what is.  I am so grateful I am not on this road alone because when I was at happy hour, I was always alone in a crowded room and it felt like a fate worse than death.

Books to Live by:

My two favorite things in recovery: getting my brains back and losing lots of weight.

Now that I am in year 3 and past some of the harder emotional work, I am beginning to really feel the benefits of living a clean lifestyle.  I am going to be 32 in May and while I quit drinking when I was 29, the people who helped me get sober the most were actually my high school friends.  In early recovery, they talked me down off the ledge every single day.  I am so grateful I had them to push me forward in the beginning.  After my first month, when I began changing, they would say to me, “Alice, you aren’t becoming a new person, you are sounding a lot more like the old you from high school.”  That helped me a lot, it’s scary to change your life but it’s even braver to change it back.  

It’s true, alcohol and drugs cover up who you really are, they distort your character and that wonderful ego.  The longer I am in this game, the more it feels like coming home.  The old me was fun and dorky.  In high school, I was an overachiever who spent afternoons reading my mother’s psychology textbooks at the coffee shop because I wanted to become a doctor.  There was a reason I had THREE majors in college and belonged to every high school club INCLUDING spell bowl.  I didn’t start drinking until I was 21; before that, I was a dorky academic who worked in a cognitive science lab as a research assistant.  In 1998, I built one of the very first online resource libraries on facial recognition by teaching myself html and javascript.  This was the shit that I used to be interested in before I discovered happy hour.  

And it’s back!  With a vengeance!  My mind, my wonderful, beautiful intellectual mind.  It never turns off.  I never turn off.  All those years of horrible hangovers, forgetting names, forgetting words, being so dehydrated and/or drunk that I couldn’t string together two fucking sentences- GONE.  I remember telling a friend I thought I had a brain disorder.  Yeah, it’s called dehydration and sleep deprivation brought on by alcoholic binges and late nights.  Now that clarity of mind is back, I can’t believe I ever wanted to turn this off.

I love it.  I love being wired and plugged in 18 hours a day. Getting up at 6 am.  Reading whole books in under 2 hours.  Writing development plans.  Working 2 jobs and freelancing.  Learning 18 songs in under two months.  Training for races.  Meeting with the CEO who complimented me on being one of the most intellectual people in our company.  Job interviews.  Last week, I read two books on Capital Campaigns and then wrote my own plan.  I am having the time of my life.  

Once you get past early recovery, your life starts to fill up and there’s a reason most people who stay sober go back to school.  It’s like winning the lottery of time.  While everyone else is out getting housed and sleeping through hangovers, we get drive, ambition, and most of all -our brains back.  All of this minus the “teenage angsty shit” that drove us to drink because we have all these wonderful tools now to deal with it.  

Second favorite thing:  Weight loss.  Who knew?  All I had to do was give up alcohol and sugar and instantly 25 pounds lighter.  I mean to even gain five, I would have to eat like 5 cakes this week on top of the 1700 calories I consume daily.  

The more I stay sober, the more life becomes possible.  Recovery is no longer all you think about, it becomes a life choice that opens the door to greater choices.  Life starts to flood back in and opportunities you never dreamed of appear all because you don’t drink one day at a time.  There’s a reason they say no major changes your first year, it keeps you from making extremely bad decisions with old information.  As I have changed and gone through the program, I have completely lost interest in all of the things that I used to obsess about in my 20’s under the influence- alcohol, parties, men, and drama.  And gradually, the old me, slightly improved, has begun to resurface.  

Recovery takes time, it takes one year to get all the drugs and alcohol out of your system, your mind and body need to re-regulate.  My point is it’s completely worth it.  Every minute.  My biggest fear these days is that I will someday lose myself again and right now, I would pretty much sacrifice anything that came in the way of this path I have found back to myself.

Easter is about…

I am catching up on tumblr and it’s making me laugh because no one seems to really get what Easter is about.  I had several people tell me “Happy Resurrection Day?!” and I was at church from 8am to 2pm today and your guess is as good as mine.  I am not a christian and I attend a unitarian-like church so I have no clue.  The service was about the stages of grief- they did a dramatic reenactment of loss and I pretty much spent 3 hours crying.  I actually cried more at the second service than the first, if you can believe that?!!?  

It was a strange motherfucking day.  I skipped brunch and shut off my phone because I needed to be alone to deal with the pandora’s box that opened this morning.  I never really understood the point of belonging to a spiritual community until today.  In my family, we didn’t talk about feelings and we certainly didn’t cry about things.  There was a lot of misplaced anger over spilled milk but when the real shit went down, I was taught to mind my p’s and q’s and to grow the fuck up.  It’s weird that I get from this community what I didn’t get as a kid- a safe space to feel my feelings and unconditional love.  

It’s weird, the whole service was basically designed to address the “loss” going on in your life, to feel the pain, come through the pain, and then the service ended with the choir singing “high and lifted up” essentially finding love and G-O-D.  (When I say G-O-D, I mean any number of things but not an angry and vengeful monodeity- Infinite love, good orderly direction, the great outdoors, all good manifested and unrealized, etc.)

It was so powerful and strange, very strange.  I used to brag that I only cried once a year because I didn’t realize that I was essentially broken and that not crying isn’t normal.  I still struggle with it.  It’s really hard for me to cry and I can’t cry for myself.  I can only cry for other people.  Today was like having a dam break and I thought I was going to have to get up and leave but then I got on stage, sang like I was fucking dying, and catharsis happened.  

And I got a little bit closer to opening that door within myself that was locked all those years ago out of self-preservation and self-protection.  

Relationships are spiritual homework.

This week was one of the most difficult weeks I have experienced in awhile.  I hit the ground hard and a couple of my days erupted into tears.  The amazing thing is I had this awesome fucking kick ass sponsor pushing me forward the whole way.  We talked every day this week and she even met up with me on Thursday morning for breakfast.  I don’t know how I functioned in my previous life without this unconditional love and support.  It’s not without it’s up and downs.  On Tuesday, I was SO ANGRY WITH HER.  She pushed me emotionally in a direction I wasn’t ready to go and I broke down on Broadway and 81st street for a good 20 minutes.  

Sponsorship is hard, it’s rough.  I did not feel like a sober woman of dignity when I lost my shit on Wednesday with a sponsee.  There are two things that I guard and I am constantly vigilant about.  One, no one fucks with my program.  I don’t accept criticism well at all.  I have worked really hard for my life and I don’t allow people to come in and tear down what I have built.  Twice this week, I had to set up boundaries and enforce them with two people- one a sponsee who I felt was manipulating me and the other a guy I don’t know all that well.

Which brings me to the second thing that I treasure with my entire being- my boundaries.  I don’t let people cross them, I believe in compromise as much as the next person but it’s really important for me to not only set boundaries with every person in my life but to also HONOR them.  I have gotten to this point in my recovery where I have absolutely no interest in “saving” anyone.  I don’t mind pointing them in the direction from where I came but I can’t function in these codependent unhealthy friendships. 

My favorite thing to do when drunk was to befriend hapless friends who needed saving and since I couldn’t save myself, I would throw all of my energy into that other person. That is no longer the case.  I have found that energy is often wasted in trying to change others and that it’s easier to find new friends who are on similar paths.  Some friendships are amazing because you get to grow together and those seem to be the ones I am attracted to the most.  

Honoring boundaries and detaching with love from a sponsee this week was a painful lesson.  I feel like she chewed me up and spit me out.  I was completely unprepared for the addict, I forgot how powerful someone’s lying and manipulation could be.  I felt drunk around this girl and it was extremely scary.  My life is very quiet and peaceful and I am long past the point of being attracted to other peoples’ chaos.  It’s crazy how quickly all that changed in the 7 days this person was in my life.  

I feel like I grew emotionally this week but it wasn’t easy.  I am taking tonight off and trying to get back on the beam.  One of the things I have learned in recovery is to not turn off the pain but to allow myself to feel it, accept it, and let it go.   And I have these other amazing sponsees who help me more than they will ever know.  They were my fucking rock this week and they have no idea.