Freedom From Shame

I’m grateful for a bright, sunny Friday morning. I’m grateful for a twilight walk in the park. I’m grateful for feeling free. I’m grateful for an incredibly adorable grandson. I’m grateful for what is. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

You may not know the song of the week well enough for its selection to instill alarm in you. Also, since the vast majority of you never even listen to the song of the week, this part must be like the intercom and Charlie Brown, blah, blah, blah.¹ But before we untangle that semi-interesting weave, I’d like to bid a polite farewell to February:

F*** you and the horse you rode in on. See you next year.

Why February Sucks

Just needed to say that. So, back to the song of the week, this is a cover of a Spice Girls song. I have a daughter of that vintage, so I’m pretty familiar with the ouevre. There was a lot of Spice Girls, SClub7, the Cheetah Girls and, of course, a young Britney Spears in the car on the way to school and birthday parties and soccer games.² There was a really unfortunate joke I made one time, where people in the car were wondering what their Spice Girls name would be, like Sporty Spice, or Posh Spice or Scary Spice? I think someone in the car might have suggested “old spice” for another passenger to whom I was married at the time.

What I have been wanting to write about for awhile is shame and its role in addiction and recovery, at least from the standpoint of this alcoholic. When I do my gratitude list every day, I try to let it be a free-form exercise and let the things that crowd to the front of my head out first. This means there is a lot of appreciation expressed for things like the beautiful sunrise or the very excellent quality of my coffee. Of course, it doesn’t take too much digging to get to other very excellent things to be grateful for, like my very adorable grandson, the safe return of my son from deployment, things like that.

Anyway, the word that popped into my head this morning was “free.” Now, “free” could mean a lot of different things. I definitely move through the world according to my own beat these days, and that for sure is an excellent form of freedom. I’m not obsessed with finding another drink or catastrophizing about the next shoe to drop, and that is an excellent form of freedom, too. But as I thought about what I meant when I wrote the word “free” down, I realized it was freedom from shame.

I think that shame and fear are two very potent forces in addiction. I think most of the things that get written down in 4th Step inventories are really expressions of fear and shame. I know a lot of what I did was motivated by those two demons and I know the feeling I have these days, the feeling of being free from shame, is quite palpable. But I’m not sure exactly what it is.

I guess one needs to start with defining shame:

“A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.”

Oxford English Dictionary

I know a bit about “wrong or foolish behavior,” in fact, I could be considered something of an expert, but I don’t think this definition really gets at it. I started drinking when I was 15 and knew I was an alcoholic by the time I was 18—other than the drinking and the marijuana, there really wasn’t that much for me to be ashamed of. So, I don’t think it was that kind of shame that was at work inside my head.³

For me, the thing I was ashamed of, the thing I had to hide, the thing I knew would make people laugh or point or whatever, was me. I’m far from the only person who feels this way; I think roughly everyone has feelings like this at times in their lives and of course, these feelings don’t turn everyone into an alcoholic. I’m not sure why some of us pull the golden ticket, but part of it, for me, was that I instantly saw alcohol as a solution, as a tool. I was trying to fix a problem: I never felt like I fit in with other people, I never felt like I really understood other people and I know I missed a lot of signals and signs. My default state is feeling kind of disconnected from other people.

I assumed this was because I was defective, had been produced with some switched-up wiring or the soldering was crappy or it just had all of these rogue ideas and thoughts—all of which was my own fault. Somehow, by the time I was 15, I had convinced myself that I needed to be ashamed of myself. When I really pull those memories apart, that’s one of the things at the bottom and it’s very closely connected to fear. Maybe they’re even Siamese Twins or Minnesota Twins.⁴

I’m here to tell you that alcohol is a very excellent way of dealing with internal feelings of shame—at least early on. The problem is that the way alcohol works actually ends up producing lots of legitimate reasons to feel very, very ashamed later on. It’s kind of ironic that way, I guess. But that was the problem; by the time I was really trying to get sober, to stay sober for longer than 60 days, the big ball of shame I carried around, well, let’s just say it was really big. You know how it takes more water to cover larger things in a pot? That was shame for me, a huge thing that took a lot of Sauvignon Blanc to cover.

A big part of the problem was my mental construct. I had this idea that recovery was about admitting defeat and then “trudging” some happy road of destiny and having to go to AA meetings forever. It meant carrying around those horrible memories as talismans forever. It meant walking around imagining everyone whispering, “you know he was a terrible alcoholic,” and agreeing in my head. It felt like that glass of sparkling water in front of me was more like a scarlet letter.⁵ Recovery was more about all of the things I wasn’t going to do, the people, places and things I was supposed to avoid.

The problem was, that was my life.

I remember coming back from sleep-away rehab, I had already relapsed within a few hours of leaving, but no one knew that. Well, it might be more accurate to say no one knew that for sure. It had taken a fair amount of deception, because when I showed up at A’s house later that afternoon to begin the celebration of my release from captivity, she definitely suspected that I had been drinking. She asked me to do a “test.” I had been issued a SoberLink testing device as a means of guaranteeing my sobriety, but in what was obviously a bit of cagey fore-planning, I had not “activated,” the device, a process that involved authenticating face photos and took 24 hours. And this was a Saturday, too.

Sorry, I can start the testing tomorrow! Or Monday at the latest.

Ok, that’s something to be ashamed of and I am. And I will continue to feel those feelings of shame when I recall memories like that, because recalling those memories involves consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior—-and this was very, very, very wrong.

The next weekend, I was alone in DC and trying very, very, very hard to not relapse again.⁶ I remember walking around the neighborhood aimlessly, it was a really pretty October day and a lot of people were out and there were dogs and just a lot of happy feelings all around. I felt like I was walking through a post-apocalyptic landscape where everything associated with what had been my life was now lost or banished. Even though a lot of dirty laundry had come out in rehab, and things were pretty dicey on the relationship front, I knew we had only really begun to explore the tip of the iceberg.

There was no ship that would survive that iceberg. Especially not a relationship.

That gigantic ball of shame was one of the things that made it very hard for me to stay sober, it’s a big part of the reason it took me ten years of trying to get my first year of sobriety. It’s why I wasted so much of my life and hurt so many other people. But the problem was, the only proven method (that I knew of) of dealing with that horrible black cloud of shame produced even more shame.

At this point, you might be wondering what the magic bullet is, perhaps you’d like me to pull a rabbit out of my hat. If I do that, it will likely turn out like this:

Here’s the thing, there’s no magic bullet. There’s acceptance and doing the steps, but it takes time to let the shame seep away. I think other people often forgave me way before I began to forgive myself. The way the Program worked for me, the way writing about this has helped me is by letting me see more of the “why” around what happened. I think the disease-model of addiction gets a fair amount of skepticism because it seems like a cheap, responsibility-avoiding device.

I’m sorry, I have a disease!

But it’s way more complicated than that because of the behavioral and volitional aspects to addiction. I was for sure addicted to alcohol. But no one held a gun to my head as I tied my shoes to head to the Logan Tavern. I spend a lot of time contemplating my navel in these missives, not because I think I have a really good one or anything, it’s because understanding how things happened, helps me let some of the terrible consequences go. It helps me put the shame in little paper boats and set them out to sea.⁷

The maybe-excessive ruminating actually gives me confidence, proves to me that things are different. Understanding how I felt way back then, and how alcohol changed that for me, lets me see how far I’ve come.

Also, how lost I was.

But like I said at the beginning, my career as an alcoholic didn’t take off because I had a long list of things I had done to be ashamed of, things that needed to be drunk away. I think I became an alcoholic because I was ashamed of me. I was afraid to be me. The twin horsepeople of the alcoholic apocalypse, fear and shame, were nice enough to stop and give me a ride and that’s how I got here.

I was drinking my excellent coffee and smiling as the world brightened around me earlier this morning. I was thinking about how free I felt. I mean, I have a ton of pressure and deadlines and targets and all sorts of stuff that keeps me up at night. But the way I live my life no longer produces feelings of shame in me. The way I think of myself no longer produces shame. I can see where I lost the trail and I understand why it took me so long to find my way back.

I always end up asking, “What happened?” Why did it finally work? Why did it take so long? Why did I miss the obvious for so long? I don’t have definitive answers for most of those questions, but what really changed was the way I thought about recovery and the way I thought about myself. I stopped seeing recovery as a consequence, a compelled way of living to make up for all of the nonsense and bad stuff. I was so wrong about that. You know what I’m going to say next.

Recovery was finding myself and the life I was meant to lead.

Maybe it took me a while, but there’s not an ounce of shame in that.

Happy Friday.

1. And this would stop me, why?

2. I took my daughter and her friend to a Britney Spears concert in the late ‘90s. Wow is all I can say, I still can’t hear anything in a lot of the higher registers owing to all of the screaming from the audience that night.

3. Also, was pretty proud of most of the pranks we pulled that might have induced “shame” in others. Sorry, not sorry.

4. It’s spring and I needed to say that.

5. Also, to restauranteurs, please don’t feel it’s necessary to put a straw in my sparking water.

6. I had to submit SoberLink tests twice a day.

7. I would love to do Viking funerals for some of them.