Addiction & Recovery
By Nick Shepley
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Addiction & Recovery - Nick Shepley
later.
My Story
All the best recovery meetings I have ever been to start with a story, so I will tell you mine. If you identify with it - good - but try to look for the similarities and not the differences.
I had a relatively normal childhood in suburban England and the Far East. I grew up in the 1980s and had loving parents, an affluent lifestyle and nothing particularly to complain about. From about the age of 13 though, I had what Lawrence Fishburne in the Matrix might describe as a ‘splinter in the mind’. There simply seemed to be something amiss in my world, something, that as a young boy I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I seemed to be constantly restless, bored, discontent, frustrated and lonely. Other kids wanted to talk about football, play tennis or look at magazines of fast cars. I just wanted to escape, always to escape. I was a fantasist, disappearing into my own worlds, occasionally bringing those worlds back with me by being an appalling liar and a fantasist.
Have you ever had an overwhelming feeling of being different? I think everyone has, it’s innate in all of us to some extent, but I think most people in the teens or early adulthood shake it off. Not so with me. As a young boy and a teenager I felt that I didn’t belong anywhere, every new town I lived in, every country that I visited seemed unable to be a home to me. I think perhaps I found alcohol in the end because I had a deep feeling of being adrift in the world, like a leaf on a pond, not anchored to anyone or anything. Where did all this come from? I don’t know, I’m no psychoanalyst and maybe the point isn’t about where it came from but what to do when it manifested itself in drinking.
Alcohol had held little interest for me the first few times I tried it. It was really waiting for its moment to arrive, waiting for the conditions to be just right and those conditions arrived when I was about 16.
After years of horrendous bullying at school, the fantasist was desperate for escape. I felt a perpetual and perennial shame at being myself and when I properly discovered alcohol, I knew it had an effect on me that it didn’t seem to have on any of my contemporaries. I recall getting drunk on cheap cider whilst I was with friends, they were content to have a drink and go home. I got extremely drunk on a small quantity of the stuff and quickly began to crave more. I was astounded when they simply decided to go home. I couldn’t believe they didn’t feel the way I did. I had found something extraordinary, a ‘magic door’ as I thought of it as.
This magic door took me to a place where nothing mattered, I was free to be and do anything I wanted, liberated from consequences and from the cacophony of fears, doubts and the ongoing sense of loneliness that never seemed to leave me. This place made me relax, made me feel, well, whole... For the first time I felt complete and I would constantly be trying to recapture that feeling for the next 15 years.
When I went to university the brakes came off my drinking. I knew from the outset that that was what I had gone away for. I purposely went to the far north of Scotland, 300 miles away from my family, to hide away and lose myself in alcohol. I was so full of fear and anxiety that I concluded (unconsciously) that at the age of 18 I would simply use drinking to construct a new identity for myself. I had vague rock and roll fantasies that alcohol would be an easy and accessible portal to some dimension of popularity, sexual abundance and kudos.
It was not to be alas. Unlike in the movies, where someone has half a sherry and next thing they’re drinking the bar dry, or a once good kid has a joint and winds up addicted to crack the next day, my illness played a long game and this is the skill of the illness, it creeps up on you so slowly you don’t know it is there until it is too late. The things that had not been acceptable a few years beforehand became commonplace when I became a regular drinker. Missing study, failing exams, ignoring essential tasks like tidying, cleaning my clothes and food shopping, all these things that would have been an anathema to me started to be regular features of my life.
When we change as individuals for good or ill, it’s always a gradual process; otherwise our sense of ‘who we are’ will not tolerate anything too drastic. However, when things happened to me that were dramatically out of character (I say happened to me, but it was normally me doing these things), I had moments where the drinking was threatened. By this I mean that the landscape of my drinking was illuminated from time to time by a great lightning flash, the places it was taking me to and the things that I was starting to do when drunk led to that fleeting moment of fear that everything was completely out of control.
I woke one morning after a university ball, still wearing the formal wear from the evening before, and my housemate came in and, trembling with anger, he asked do you remember hitting me last night?
I thought I had dreamt it. No, no, it was real. I had had a row with him over a can of cider, he had laughed in my face and I had punched him. It transpired I had also had a fight with another friend as well. In a flurry of mental activity I went into damage limitation mode. I knew and dreaded that at some point one of my friends would bring up my drinking, but I was canny enough to be ready with the ammunition that they were all drunk too…. At all costs the drinking must be protected.
A year later, I was alone in a bedsit in the arctic north-east Scots’ winter. No electricity, no food other than crisps and bread. My home was dark, dirty and decrepit and I had no idea how it had got that way at all. I had by this point almost been kicked off my degree and had to fight to get back on.
I seem to have spent my days at the Samaritans, head in hands, tears pouring on to the carpet, so lonely I wanted to die. In fact from the age of about 20 to 30 I wanted to die on many occasions. There in itself is a terrible legacy of alcoholism; that life becomes so utterly unbearable at such a young age that death is an attractive proposition. They really should put ‘potential to induce suicidal feelings’ on the labels of cans and bottles.
Anyway I digress. I fell hopelessly in love with a girl at the end of my degree. Of course, like a good alcoholic I totally misjudged the relationship and was terribly hurt when she left me for someone else. I was utterly devastated and I wisely checked myself into a mental health hospital for a few days so I could get away from the drink. Alcohol from then on in became my companion, if it hadn’t been already. It provided for all my emotional needs. I had been hurt and wanted only to retreat into the safety of alcohol. I was savvy enough by that time to realise that I was fighting a losing battle with alcohol, but I did not know how much longer I would have to go on fighting it for or how much more damage it would inflict upon me. Had I known that I could have ended the fight at any time by simply surrendering, would I have done? Probably not, because everything I was, everything I knew was crafted around alcohol and drinking. It was what I did, who I was.
I will complete this story bit by bit in the next few chapters. What I will say now is that yes, it did take me a long time to find recovery, and through trial and error I have been sober for nearly six years. If you want what I have, I am willing to share it with you. In this eBook and in daily updates on my blog, I will reveal to you exactly how I got sober and managed to turn my life around.
I will tell you exactly how I have managed to weather the most extraordinary storms in recovery, how I have found my perfect partner after years of alcoholic relationships and heartache, how I have managed to rebuild my finances, recreate my career and build the confidence to have new hobbies and activities. I have gone from drinking cider on a sofa in my dressing gown to writing a novel, a history book and learning kung fu!
I will guide you through the process of dealing with everyday situations that once seemed impossible to people like us. I want to do this because you, the newly-recovering addict, you are just like me. You are starting down the greatest journey, I believe, that anyone can embark upon and I would be greatly honoured to act as your friend and guide. If you want to take that journey, please, read this eBook from cover to cover, visit the blog and/or forum just two or three times a week. We can begin.
The strategy is simple; I am not going to tell you anything that I personally have ever thought up. There lies disaster. Recovery has taught me to have humility and accept that I know comparatively little. The way I got sober is simply by using the ‘12 Step Programme’ which I have simply translated from the heavily and overtly 1930’s U.S. evangelical Christian tone that many have found difficult to access.
Why do I think that I have the formula that will work for you? Well, not only has it worked for me but I understand exactly why, and in understanding why it works, I can help identify the chief culprit in your addiction; your Ego. Admittedly, this is not an AA idea, it’s drawn from many other texts such as a ‘Course In Miracles’ and ‘The Power of Now’ about which, more later.
I don’t claim to have a ‘better’ way of getting sober than any of the other ‘gurus’ out there, but I personally wouldn’t entertain a programme of recovery that did not include the 12 Steps. There are all sorts of ‘quick fix’ programmes offered. There is no quick fix for this problem; you must in your heart of hearts know that. This is a fatal illness that as they say in AA ‘will take your life, and then kill you’ and as such, a long-lasting, life-long recovery can’t be done with a tap of the knee and a few Ohm Shanties.
Similarly, I doubt very much whether a non-alcoholic or addict can help you, simply because in order to know about this illness you have to have lived it.
Every year, well-meaning doctors in the UK send alcoholics to their deaths by advising a ‘harm limitation strategy,’ suggesting they drink lower alcohol beers or maybe take a night off. This illness is no respecter of such folly, and it’s hardly the doctors’ fault. They are men of science who do not recognize that at the heart of addiction lies not a physical but a spiritual malaise.
Addiction is a disease of the soul. It is the search for meaning in life gone terribly wrong. Alcoholism and addiction have three essential parts.
There is a physical addiction – Your body craves the substance. This is the easy part to deal with.
There is a mental obsession – Your mind, or Ego tells you that you have to keep drinking and that really, nothing is wrong.
There is a spiritual malaise – A sense of aloneness and incompleteness deep within the very heart of you, deep within your soul.
So there can be no quick fixes, only gradual daily work but