On the wagon

ON THE WAGON

(Written in 2006, but I went through all this again just a few weeks ago)

I’m back on the wagon after stepping off for a week. Notice I say ‘stepping’ off as opposed to ‘falling’. Falling makes it sound like an accident. “There I was wandering along, minding my own business when two cartons of cigarettes, several dozen beers and half an ounce of dope just forced themselves upon me and made me consume them.”

I’m in day three at the moment. DAY THREE! They talk about day three and week three as being the hardest. How about month three and year three, or decade three! My understanding is that on day three the withdrawal really takes hold and I begin to wonder what to do with my time. But I have the strategies from the last time I gave it all up: exercise, good food, express how you feel (like now), cognitive behavioural therapy, rewards.

My self-reward is to go down the beach with the dog and, after a long walk or a swim, have a coffee in a crowded cafe. I haven’t given up coffee, I simply can’t see myself saying, “decaf please”. In fact the whole concept of decaf is plain silly. Drinking decaf is like a mild form of schizophrenia – you’re treating one part of your self like it’s a child that has to be tricked. “Looks, smells and tastes like coffee, so it might as well be eh?” No! You still know that it’s not coffee! What’s the point? It’s like a heroin addict coming home and saying to his mate, “I got the gear man. It’s this new stuff, it costs the same amount but it doesn’t have any form of opiate. It’s called Desmack. But try it anyway, it looks and tastes like…”.

People who drink decaf are like people who wind their watch forward so they won’t be late. It’s stupid. Are they really going to look at their watch and be fooled by the “responsible” part of their personality, all the time forgetting that it was them, that self same person with the shocking reputation for being late, who wound their watch ten minutes fast?

I suppose a certain amount of schizoid behaviour is required just to survive. We often say, “Part of me wants to do such and such”. It’s a way of identifying desire or need, and at the same time realizing that responding to that need might not be in the best interests of the whole person. But surely it’s this schizoid behaviour that can get us into lousy situations in the first place. Like when we’re at an after-work party and part of us is saying, “Hey, you can cope with one little drink.” And the responsible part – the part that orders decaf and changes our watch – is gone. It’s like it’s been bound and gagged by the “naughty” bit.

Maybe it’d be better if we just began with, “All of me wants a fruit juice” instead of blaming it on the virtuous part. “All of me wants to shag the sexy woman I’m talking to.” But it’s not all of me that wants to do the actual shagging bit is it? No, I know enough about the body to realise it’s a very particular part of the brain that’s hankering for that. It’s the same bit of brain that screams out for a drink, a smoke, a hit, a suck on a tit. It’s that childish part that treats life like it’s a permanent smorgasbord, and there’s a stack of hungry people in the queue so you better pile up your plate with a bit of everything now! Quick, shovel it all in! Joy is rare so grab it while you can!

But maybe we can get the “parts” to work together. For example, while one part is saying, “I want to shag that woman I’m talking to”, another part’s saying, “I want to talk to her about films”, and another’s saying, “I want to drive her home safely” or “I want to wake up with her beside me and be able to do it again.” Or is that just too hopeful, too new age?

Perhaps it’s the whole idea of wanting and hoping that has knobs on it. If we spend so much time looking ahead – at all the great things we can ‘line up’ for ourselves – then it becomes harder and harder to enjoy what we’re doing now. Joy is not only rare but ephemeral; other things last longer, like being calm – just sitting in a moment regardless of it’s worth on the “enjoyment” scale.

Is this what meditation is about?

I used to think that Buddhism was just another excuse for not washing up. “No I can’t, I have to meditate, and after that there’s yoga and chanting.” This opinion is most likely based on my early experiences with hippy surfers for whom Buddhism was more a fashion statement than a refuge. Recently however, I’ve discovered a few books on meditation that fit with my sarcastic temperament. They’re silly and irreverent, they laugh at themselves.

But I suppose if one of your basic principles is to seek inner truth then you’ll always fail; who’s to say whether you’re fooling yourself or not? This is probably why Buddhists have a need to laugh at themselves, because there’s always a chance that they’re on the path to self-delusion, so just in case they are they can at least have a chuckle about it. My guess is that the only real way of knowing that we might have hit upon some important inner truth is to feel it, to trust our feelings.

Hmmmmmm…feelings. What a complicated mess they are. If day to day living is a complex thing just imagine the hideous process of untangling feelings as well! The counsellor I saw would often point to his chest and say, “Don, it’s here, you need to get inside here and find out what’s going on.” He also kept telling me that the anger I feel towards people, towards the world, is masking another feeling that’s lying beneath. And afterwards I’d leave the health centre thinking the world of emotions is like some kind of impenetrable puzzle, a labyrinth of feelings, and I’d rather not go there in case I fall in and disappear.

So I kept away. But now I see that he wanted me to name those feelings, to say the words vulnerable, disappointed, hurt. And to sit in that state and feel it all over again. To cry again. Or maybe to cry for the first time because when you’re a boy and you’re hurt, sometimes you don’t cry, you hold yourself up against it. You have to! I mean, hey, you could just collapse from the weight of all that. And who wants to sit in another man’s office blubbering like a baby, reaching for the tissues, convulsing? Yeah sure, they say that you should let these things out, “Don’t bottle it all up inside”. But isn’t that just a little too simplistic? Humans are not kettles. We don’t just let a bit of steam off and then suddenly feel blissful. Or do we? Isn’t that exactly what happens when you do cry! You feel miserable for a while, then you feel tired and sleepy and warm – the same way you feel when you’ve just had a really good laugh, or really good sex. Sober sex with someone you really love. Yeah, a good cry can leave you feeling like you’ve got something off your chest. It’s cathartic.

But what if I become addicted to catharsis? I could spend half my life pouring out my guts to anyone who’ll listen. And what a hideous bore those people are! You meet them at parties, or at some colleague’s house. It’s like they just pop out of the woodwork when you least expect, and chew your ear off about their “troubled” life. And all you think as you listen with feigned compassion and sympathy is “what life? This pathetic bastard’s got no life!” Then they suddenly blurt out some amazing and bizarre piece of brilliance, thus reminding you that – yes, this sycophantic, grovelling nobody with tattered clothes and broken speech was once heading for a glittering career in poetry or mathematics.

So what happens to these people?

In my experience – and I can tell you I’ve met a lot of them, for some reason I attract them – there’s two things common to these ex-genius zombies: drugs - they’re all substance abusers; and apology – they just keep saying sorry. Sorry for being late. Sorry for getting in the road. Sorry for losing that CD, I know it was your favourite. Sorry for existing. What gets into a person to make them want to do this? Yeah sure, drug addicts often end up having to apologise for lying and cheating, it’s all part of being addicted to an illegal drug. But I have a feeling that the compulsive need to apologise was somehow imprinted on some addict’s brains even before they found drugs. It’s almost like they’ve been spooked and then drained of self-confidence.  Spooked by a parent or a lover or an adult who touched them, or just plain spooked by life. And when you get that frightened it must be hard to avoid just wanting to drown yourself in booze or mull or smack, or all of them.

But drugs and booze don’t really help. It’s not like you can get rid of deep-seated fear like you can wipe out a headache with Panadol.

I drank to wipe out reality, to forget. Not so sure what I was forgetting though. No one abused me, no one let me down that bad. I had a blissful childhood, and most of my adult life has been charmed. But I can definitely say I was using grog and mull to draw a blind between me and the world, or what I thought was the world.

But that’s it. What I thought. Those damn thoughts again. No matter how enlightened you are you always have thoughts. I once saw an interview with Baghwan Shri Rajneesh, the eccentric Guru of the Sanyasans or Orange people, and he joked about those people who say things like, “I think I’m angry” or “I think I’m sad” or “I think I’m happy”. He scoffed at these people, mocked them as being hideously caught up in their minds. They should let themselves go and get back in contact with their bodies and their feelings he claimed. But what’s wrong with admitting that you aren’t entirely sure about what you feel? Ambivalence is part of us, it’s a sign that we aren’t sure or certain. People who claim to be certain are suffering from hubris, or just plain lying. Or they’re into religious fundamentalism. And that’s okay. Most of us have met at least one person who’s gone from drugs to God, and I’d much rather them alive and boring than interesting and dead. Just as long as they don’t hit me with their claims on certainty. It’s a sad thing to see a brilliant, funny, sceptical person transform into an unctuous toad with only one belief.

I heard a fellow on the radio say the following:

The charisma of certainty is that which entraps the child within us all.

How alarmingly true that is!  It explains why so many brilliant thinkers once followed dogmatic causes in a belligerent unequivocal manner, like Communism and Catholicism. Then later, when they began to mature, they found themselves questioning such fundamental beliefs. Some found their world began to crumble - the order once promised by those romantic notions vanished and they fell into self abuse: drugs, sex addiction, argument and domestic violence. And some killed themselves. Others just shifted across in a slow and almost seamless transition to adulthood - to a place where they could think and feel and live without harming themselves or anyone else.

So, maybe if we could isolate that thing, that component of a person that allows people to make big shifts without trauma, then we’d have the ultimate social tool.

Some doctors and scientists claim we already have it: antidepressants. And I have no problem with them; they’ve certainly helped me. I have no patience for people who demonise antidepressants as some kind of Orwellian nightmare. These are the same people who tell clinically diagnosed bipolar sufferers to throw away their Lithium. I can’t help thinking these people like attending funerals. Perhaps one day we’ll read the following obituary: Joe Bloggs, social reformer and activist. Rallied against western medicine, in particular psychiatry and mood altering drugs. Tragically shot dead by the relative of a manic depressive who committed suicide after ditching their medication.

But antidepressants are a stopgap. That thing that allows people to go through social and psychological upheaval without losing the plot is probably more than just a “thing”. It’s sure to be a lot of things: identifying and understanding feelings; genetic disposition; physical health; good support groups; and ultimately getting a handle on thoughts.

Yep, it’s those pesky thoughts again. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) really works. Even for someone like me who hears the word ‘Behavioural’ and reaches for the vomit bowl. When I first attended a CBT therapy group, I sat there like a grumpy teenager thinking, ‘They’re going to brainwash me. I’m going to end up with the personality of Tom Cruise’. But I was very lucky. The psychologist who ran the group was a smart and funny woman who really appreciated critical thinking. She also treated sarcasm as a normal glitch in personality rather than some evil and destructive trait to be banished from the world.

And the CBT process is easy to do. What it really comes down to is identifying the way we talk to ourselves – the voices in our heads that keep telling us things. Yep, the voices. You don’t have to be a derelict street person to have voices. How many times did I find myself calling myself a stupid, useless, idiotic good-for-nothing F%#8@!!! who deserves to be sat in the corner and teased mercilessly? Every time I made the tiniest mistake, like dropping my car keys on the ground or forgetting to buy milk or being late with a DVD. And each time I’d just lay into myself. If I was in public I’d do it silently, but at home I’d be screaming till I was hoarse! Till I hated myself enough to get smashed and forget again.

Through CBT I learnt that the voices are actually thoughts, and these thoughts are often based in belief systems that have been with me for years. And yeah, sure, it might be obvious that self abuse comes about from stupid thinking, but when I was in that hideous moment, that time of self torment, and just about to reach for a drink or the bong or the Valium, it was almost impossible to stop and think clearly. CBT gave me a structure, a pattern if you like, to sort out these thoughts; it allowed me to identify and even classify those thoughts AS THEY HAPPENED! Not later in the therapist’s office, but right then and there – in the car park, at a meeting or down the shops.

So, if CBT’s such a whiz-bang thing then how come I’ve been off the wagon again?

Well, nothing’s perfect.

But it’s now two and a half weeks since I started writing this. I’M IN WEEK THREE! And, at those times when I’ve wanted a drink or a smoke or a bong, there’s been an alternative: a walk, a swim, a meal, a bit of music, a friend! Or there’s writing about it…like this. It’s free and I don’t bother anyone.

Indulgent? Yes. Better than getting smashed? Bloody oath!