Tag Archives: Drugs

My Family – part 2

Link to PART 1

Here, I’ll explore the next generation of my family, the kids of Big Nan and Big Grandad. In particular the people who had a pretty big influence on my dad, and by proxy, on me.

Big Nan and Big Grandad had four sons and a daughter, all of whom ended up leading very different lives. These are my great uncles and my Little Nan. The eldest, Paul, was in a Mersey Beat band in the sixties and has his band’s name on the wall of fame on Matthew Street. He ended up moving to France to become a well-known local radio DJ, where he met his wife, the love of his life. He moved back to Liverpool after many years in France. He was an alcoholic and wanted to try and sort his head out, get better, give himself a chance of living longer with his COPD – a pulmonary disorder that inevitably finishes you off at some point if you don’t stop smoking. It didn’t happen. Everybody desperately tried to help, most especially his wife. Even after he developed emphysema he continued to smoke and drink. I remember him always on the cadge for a spare ciggy or a couple of quid. He had the gift of the gab. He was a blagger, but the person he blagged the most was himself. He died too young, breathless and grey in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, surrounded by his family.

Little Nan is the second eldest, my dad’s mum. But more about her in the next post

The third eldest, George, is the great-uncle I know the least about. This is partly due to somewhat of a distance from the family as he got older, though he seems to have led a relatively normal life. He has a long term wife, grown children and grandchildren who make a loving family unit.

The fourth eldest, John, joined the Irish Guard, and served tea to the Queen Mother once. He tells the story of how the Queen Mother asked him to pour her tea whilst he was on guard, and at first he refused because they were not orders from his superior. On the second time of her asking he did pour her tea, and got a bollocking later for not pouring it the first time she asked as the Queen Mother apparently outranked his direct superior. He now lives in the countryside with his wife and children. He wears a Barbour coat and a farmer’s cap. He has a no-nonsense approach to life and language. John will tell you what he thinks in as few words as possible. His wife, Joan, is a breast cancer survivor. They’ve had to adopt their own grandchildren due to their daughter’s drug addiction and chaotic behaviour, which was stressful and traumatic for everyone involved, especially the kids.

And last but not least it Robert. Robert is the youngest of Big Nan and Big Grandad’s five children, and probably the most like his dad – aka Tommy the Safe. Robert made his living as a criminal. My dad has told me stories of boxes full of brand new leather boots, sheep skin coats, and electrical goods stacked in the rooms of dad’s childhood homes. Respected on the streets as Robert was, he had quite the impact on my dad.

Robert made a name for himself as a hard, savvy, professional criminal. He was sentenced to thirteen years jail in the 1980s for armed robbery. It wasn’t his first armed robbery, but it was the one he didn’t get away with. The place he held up, with a shotgun, was the fruit market on Edge Lane. It’s still there today. Robert and his associates waited until the end of the week when they knew the takings would be at their highest, and went in to grab them before they were banked. He served nine years of his sentence.

When he came home, Little Nan put specially made banners up in her pub. It was a big event. It was like the homecoming of some mythical character. Odysseus comes home to Ithaca, a changed man. He has been on his night sea journey, battled a giant, resisted the sweet music of the sirens, lived with a goddess. See how much he has changed, the strength he has gathered from his trials. Robert’s return wasn’t like that. His journey had changed him, but not for the better. The years in prison had turned him to drugs, which would be his Nemesis. There was no reformed character, only a person who had suffered nearly a decade behind bars, locked away from anything he ever really cared about.

Robert had a friend, Gav. Gav was a milkman. That isn’t some criminal code word for a get-away driver, or torturer or something. He was actually a straight forward, up and out at 4am milkman. Gav went to visit Robert in prison regularly, without fail, for nine years. Gav once drove me, my little brother Anthony, and my dad to see Robert in a countryside prison. It was a long drive for a fidgety kid like me. And the car was small. Affordable cars in the nineties were bad. When you see the cars we have now, it makes the cars of past decades seem like experiments in minimal comfort.

Prison visits are awkward. You’re going into a place which is normally painted a neutral, non-stimulant colour; beige, grey, cream. And there’s this person who you just want to go and have a drink with or take home. There’s all these other people around too, doing the same thing. Cheap plastic tables and chairs are planted around on a floor made of hard-wearing carpet tiles. Locked steel gates. Big metal doors that have little thick windows in them. Prison guards, who you hate and fear with an equal gut instinct, scrutinise any move in case it’s used to slip something to a prisoner.

In a prison visiting room there are mothers with new babies seeing fathers who can feel nothing but guilt, the sexual frustration of young lovers unable to touch, the hidden truths, the concealed emotions, the forced conversations.

Going to see Robert in prison was similar to visiting my mum in her mental hospitals. Or the visits my brothers and I would have with her when she’d be driven the four-hour journey to Liverpool from Kings Lynn just to spend a few hours with us, before she was driven back to the hospital again. We’d go to McDonalds, under the supervision of two mental health nurses she had with her, and were told we could order whatever we wanted. The McDonalds visits were just as plastic and dismal as any prison visit. These raw, private and desperate moments of connection between people who loved and cared for each other would shape my early emotional landscape.

It was weird to me that I was going to see someone I had only ever heard stories about. But as great as those stories were, or at least they felt like stories about a great man, there he was locked up like an animal. It was a poor end for this legend of the family. I watched him and I noticed how he didn’t look great at that moment. He could only look at the green and pleasant land that surrounded the prison through the dirty windows of the concrete complex he was locked up in.

At that point Robert had been in prison for about six years, and Elly, the mother of Robert’s two children, had started seeing somebody else. We all knew. Everyone on the outside knew, but Robert didn’t. Gav and my dad had been talking about this on the drive there. Gav was strongly considering telling Robert about it.

Not long after we’d sat down with uncle Robert and said our hellos, my brother Anthony, who was around six, blurted out, ‘Auntie Elly’s seeing someone else, you know.’ I think he thought he was doing everyone a favour. Me and Anthony were told to go to the naffy (tuck shop) to buy some hot chocolate and biscuits while Gav explained things to Robert.

After Robert got out of jail he went back to a life of crime. He would snatch cash boxes from security guards picking up money in their white armoured vans. He also had his fingers in other pies. The tops of the cupboards in Big Grandad’s bungalow were stacked with boxes of Valium. I was about fifteen at the time and I’d been smoking weed for over a year. I wondered what it was like to take one and came close to pocketing a box or two, but never did.

By this time Robert was smoking crack, and probably heroin, something he’d never done before he went to prison. I should have known there was something wrong with his head when I was sitting in Big Grandad’s shed using nail varnish remover to get rid of red dye from hundreds of twenty-pound notes. It didn’t work very well as it tarnished the little hologram, but he insisted I keep at it and salvage what I could.

He got caught when one of the guards he was robbing managed to grab the baseball cap he had on. They got his DNA from it, and he served another eight years in prison.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Detox Paradise: Being Seen and Listening to Sheep

It was 2011. I was about to enter what they call recovery. I had no idea it was called recovery. If someone had told me I was going into recovery, I might have asked, ‘What is it I’m meant to be recovering?’ I wasn’t recovering anything, I was finding things I’d never had. It was discovery. I packed everything I owned into a small suitcase and my trusty old, cider-stained rucksack. I said goodbye to the people in the hostel I lived in. Marcel, my wide-eyed and lost next door neighbour was very sincere in his goodbye. Even a little puzzled. The underpaid staff wished me luck. I handed in my keys and off I went, wearily pulling my material life behind me for the thirty minute walk to the Basement on Parr Street.

When I got to the Basement there was a white mini bus waiting, with a little steel trailer attached. Waiting next to the trailer were seven nervous men, all smiles and darting eyes, about to spend the next two weeks with each other. I tried to accept what I’d got myself into. I wasn’t going to fit in, I knew that. It was about getting somewhere other than the barrel full of shit I was in. And I looked like I’d been in barrel full of shit for a while. We all did. We loaded our stuff and were gone, a van full of Walking Dead extras. Guiding us through our sobering extravaganza was Donna the woman who ran the Basement detox and was a recovering addict, Sue a holistic therapist, Jimmy a support worker who was recovering addict, and Tommy a volunteer who was a recovering addict.

We drove to a big cottage near Berwyn, Llangollen, Wales. We were in the middle of nowhere not just because it was peaceful, but because there was nowhere to get any mind-altering goodies. Even the local pub, The Sun Inn, had been advised against serving any thirsty, desperate looking Scousers. Being on a detox didn’t mean we weren’t allowed to drink though. For the first few days we got pissed. It was a reduction detox, a method which weans alcoholics off the drink for the first few days so as not to shock their system. The liquid menu for the first full day was half a litre of sherry and a can of Skol Super four times a day – breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. The amount was reduced over the next three or four days depending on how much a person regularly drank, and how long they’d been drinking.

We were happy, the first couple of nights everyone was pissed. It was when the ale reduced to next to nothing that things got tough. The others were decent though, there were no real problems. Other than the obvious ones we were all carrying in our wounded bodies.

I was a quiet, trying-to-be-stern-looking, pasty, inward-facing loner with no social skills to speak of and a chest full of quivering earth. But I was determined that they were the first days of the rest of my life, and I was spending them with a mish-mash of people who’d all been through similar things in different ways. Many of us had lost people we’d loved in sad, tragic, even horrific ways. We’d all been taught that being hard was best. We all had skinheads, they were easy to look after, no combing or washing needed. Our haircuts were also better at making us appear as though we might snap if looked at in the wrong way.

Getting pissed the first couple of days gave me something to hide behind, but there was huge anticipation at what would come next. It was like knowing that imminently I’d be shot into space but first I was having a nice spa day with plenty of food and muscle relaxants. Jimmy, the gruff support worker, and Tommy the hyper-surrealist, keen fisher and volunteer, said that once the ale was taken away it was likely we’d feel the need to cry. Cry? Nah, mate. Not a crier me – the group oozed that sentiment. I think some of us were curious and scared about the magic of tears without a substance to bring them on. I know wanted it. I wanted tears. I wanted that feeling, the one I’d been trying and conjure by cutting or burning myself.

The day came, my last drink. Anxiety, racing brain, fear, mania. I hadn’t slept properly because sharing a room made me paranoid. I didn’t like the early mornings. Up at 7:30am, breakfast at 8am. To me that was practically army routine. Thank fuck the army knocked me back on the basis of mental health when I’d applied a few years before. I thought the army would be good for me, away from the world, away from drink and drugs. I now know it would have probably fucked me up more. When not being ordered around by a man who looks like a screaming, veiny penis, all there is to do in the army is drink, snort coke, and be uber-masculine (to the point where it all seems a bit violently homo-erotic). It would have made a mess of someone like me.

I wish I could say my last drink was a single malt aged twenty years. That I’d drunk it from a crystal glass, swirling it, inhaling the aroma of my near demise. Unfortunately, my last drink was a can of lukewarm Carlsberg I drank while I sat thankfully alone on top of a picnic table on a chilly early-afternoon whilst listening to the sheep bleat in the field next to me. It really did sound like they were talking to each other, or maybe me. What would their message be if they were talking to me? Maybe they were asking me to stay, to live in the relative safety of the towering Welsh hills. Or maybe they were telling me to fuck off with my shit lager. I hate Carlsberg, so inoffensive and unchallenging to the senses. It sickened me. I was used to drinking things that made me gag on the first swig, or set my belly on fire. Carlsberg was just shit lemonade. Totally non consequential. But I tried to make the most of it. And as I slowly sipped that can I became all philosophical and thought about the insignificance of a man drinking his last beer in a world that hustles and bustles and gets on with it regardless. I was insignificant in it all, didn’t matter to any of it. I only mattered insofar as I made myself matter, and if I wanted my future to be a better one I had to be the one willing myself through it. I was the part of the universe that would make my life better, the rest of existence didn’t give a shit. Maybe that was what the sheep were telling me.

I sensed time around me ticking away as normal, I tried to hold the moment close to me like I’d never done before. Moments that normally stuck with me were bad ones – moments that’d shocked me, embarrassed me, or traumatised me. Memories froze in time to haunt me at their will. But that moment, the last drink, I wanted to grab and pull in. Make it a setting to revisit in my mind’s eye. I started to think about what had brought me there. About the deep hate I had for the world, and how I couldn’t really hate what I didn’t know. I tried to think concretely about what the future might hold and drew nothing but fear and anxiety. I moved on. I was going to break the chain. The me I knew existed in there, the artist, the thinker, the friend, the lover. I wanted them to be real. An empty, green, lager can was the start. The sun was low, it was breezy, the hills made me feel safe. The city was waiting. That’d be the real test, but for the next ten days the green hills were there to hide me. I crushed the can in my hand, took one more look around me, and went inside.

A day or two after, we were all sober. That’s when the work began. There was no telly allowed, there was time for films in the evening, but daytimes were for workshops, cooking, going for walks, talking, getting the wood fires going. The workshops were normally based around dealing with emotions, how to help others, what our triggers for relapse might be. Eight men who could blag, fight, steal, and generally bungle our chaotic way through the miserable world were lost for words when it came to sharing how vulnerable we might really feel. Some were in downright denial. Two of them said there were no triggers, nothing made them the way they were, it is what it is. One of them in particular went as far to deny he ever felt sad, his conclusion was that he didn’t even have emotions. Another one clammed up for a long time, never going further than saying he was struggling. Then one day he burst into tears talking about how he was worried for his son, who was three or four at the time, and was unwell. All he wanted was to help his son through life and was scared he wouldn’t be able to. Two others were distant, but down to earth. They said anything they were feeling wasn’t going to be shared at the table. There was a small, skinny man who seemed quite confused. I knew he was scared to share much of what went on beneath the surface, because I felt the same. I saw a reflection of myself in his hunched, shifty, body language.

I couldn’t share my real feelings at first, it felt completely alien to share feelings without banter, ale, the safety net of being able to walk away. But after a day or two of workshops I did it. I told how I felt scared, vulnerable, like I didn’t know what the world had in store for me. I felt like someone or something was out to get me even though I was far away from any danger. I was probably the safest I’d been for a long time, but actually feeling safe wasn’t something my head would afford me.

As the days went on my panic and sense of impending doom, weakness, and utter despair had the top soil removed and roots were exposed. Sitting at the dinner table one evening I stared out of the windows, acting as if I was looking at something in the darkness. Really I was going over and over scary scenarios, confirming to myself that everyone hated me. I was worthless, all I’d ever done with my life was fuck it up. Fuck me! Fuck, why? Die, just die. Don’t even think. It hurt. Chest pains. Head gone. Messed up. No one else felt like me. Everyone was better than me. The little outcast, alien, hermit. Chewing through my skin. Sweating. I couldn’t run to the offy or to the dealer. I couldn’t stuff my face with cake and sweets and crisps. I was fucked.

Even when distracted by my constant fear I heard a lot when people thought I wasn’t listening. I saw a lot when people thought I wasn’t looking – it comes from a childhood of always being on high alert. And something happened which pulled me out of the window-staring act, I heard Donna whisper to Sue, the holistic therapist, ‘He’s trapped in his head.’ Hearing that was a revelation. Someone had seen me. Someone had done what very few people had ever done, they noticed. They saw inside, beyond the act. I didn’t flinch. Didn’t move a muscle. Had to stay in character.

The cottage we stayed in had something to do with the families of the Tate and Lyle sugar company. One day this foppish, handsome, Hugh Grant-but-a-farmer type came and planted apple trees with us. He brought the saplings, the manure, the feed. Those of us who were fit to do so went to work digging and planting these little fellas on the grass bank along the drive at the side of the cottage. We loved it. We had pick axes to break the soil, shovels to dig. We whacked in the support logs for the saplings to be tied to. It was hard work, but I found an abundance of physical energy for it. If I could go to the ends of the earth to get a drink or a weed, then planting some trees was a piece of piss. It was a transfer of motivation and reward. Mentally, it was hard. Every time I spoke to this lovely Hugh Grant guy I felt like he hated me. My perception was all askew, I’d interpret any body language or vocal communication that wasn’t explicitly positive as a sign of extreme dislike for me.

A few days later Hugh Grant man came back with a brass placard screwed to a big, grey rock. On it was engraved the name of the people who’d planted the trees, and the date they’d been planted. The trees are still there today. It was a lovely thing for Hugh Grant man to do off his own back.

The van ride home to the big city was surreal. I’d had an experience I’d never had before, with people I still didn’t really know. We’d shared our space, cooked for each other, smoked, laughed, and silently fumed together hidden amongst the sheep for two weeks. When I’d needed to I’d went and listened to the little brook by the cottage. I felt small and safe focusing on the sound of the trickling water amidst the vacant greenery. At night I’d stared at the magnificent stars and remembered that at the end of the day we’re all a bit miraculous, but never the less ultimately fucked, in the big soup. I didn’t want to leave. I could have lived out the rest of my days there, I thought.

As far as I know, four of the people from the residential have since died. Three detoxees died due to drug related illnesses or accidents. And Jimmy, the support worker, passed away due to a sudden cardiac arrest. Others relapsed but are now back in recovery and getting some time under their belts.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Beware Nostalgia

At this time of year nostalgia is strong. Nostalgia can often be a fantasy, a yearning for something we never actually had but feel we need in a very strong part of us. Something we might fool our selves into believing we nearly had. Yes we do deserve it, we just can’t get it from the past. As counter intuitive as it sounds, it can be really difficult staying away from a person who has/does hurt you. Especially at this time of year. Ultimately, I think, we can want an abusive person to accept and validate us. And in some cases the longer the hurt goes on, the more we want to fix it. For me, I struggle with the idea that the trauma was all for nothing. That I was hurt, abused, and scarred for life and that’s it. Done. Live with it. No do-overs, no backs, no nothing. The desire to go and fix it, make it better, make them see, is really strong. Especially as through the work I’ve done on myself I’ve come to understand so much more about my abusive parent and their own pain, trauma, and underlying motivation.

But it’s a fantasy really isn’t it? A desire for something that has gone. A wish to concentrate those good moments I might have had, or could still have, with my parent into some blurry, glowing nostalgia dream that leaves out all the mess and reality. I understand why I want it. I also understand that sadly it’s not mine to have. Yet somehow I feel I can never escape what could have been.

Maybe the nostalgic desire to go back is a desire to be hurt more, reminded of the pain in a very vivid way. It’s weird how trauma can find ways to keep reminding you it’s there. Or maybe it’s a desire to heal – if I heal this relationship, this thing that should have been safe for me, then maybe I can heal. Going back and trying to work with my parent, even though now, a decade after beginning my journey to move on, they have “mellowed with age” would itself be traumatic. Fortunately, for various reasons, it’s relatively easy for me to stay away physically. Staying away mentally is a whole different challenge, and this time of year particularly is triggering. At this point nostalgia around my childhood home is just traumatic in itself. Nostalgia and C-PTSD are kind of living in the same place – memory, emotion, sensory experience, loss.

For many there is no closure, or separation. Maybe you are having to see abusive people at this time of year and it isn’t as simple as just staying away. And added with all the pressure around fitting into a nice, tidy little Christmas narrative it can just become a horrible time of year all round. In that case, it’s just shit isn’t it? Just remember it’s not you, it’s them. 

A friend of mine recently shared with me their acceptance of Christmas as a turning on of the lights in the dark. A distraction from the bleakness of mid-winter. I thought that made sense, and it made me think about what turning the lights on in the dark means for me. What does it mean for you?

And if there is no light in the dark for you at this time of year, then I wish you the best in just getting through it and into the new year safely, intact, and prepared to move forward.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

How did I know I was ready for “recovery”?

It’s a cliché, “I hit my rock bottom”. The tired old phrase that can mean any number of things. But it carries with it an understanding, “I’ve reached a point where I’m so low I feel any lower is unimaginable”. It’s commonly accepted that hitting rock bottom is what causes people to want to seek “recovery”. But in fact, I don’t think it necessarily is.

12 Steps’ dominance over the world of recovery has planted many ideas into public consciousness and the addiction treatment industry. The saying “rock bottom” comes from them and is often heard in meetings. Rock bottoms are shared as instigating events or circumstances that lead a person into recovery. A rock bottom can be introduced into a peron’s narrative as being the moment the person new they were ready for recovery. But according to addiction researchers Cloud and Granfield, for the number of people who seek treatment for their addiction, there are just as many others who are motivated by things such as financial, romantic, or parental responsibilities. Or they just get bored and fed up of their addiction and move on in what is called “maturing out of addiction” or natural recovery. So, the idea of rock bottom isn’t always applicable.

Addiction is a complex subject with many tenets. I think understanding addiction needs an open mind and proper research, not a catalogue of outdated preconceptions, phrases and ideas. No matter how helpful they might have been in progressing theory on addiction in the past (I’m referring to 12 Steps, but a bit more on that in another post).

That being said, maybe I had hit my rock bottom when I decided to finally seek help at the age of 25. Or maybe it was a sandstone bottom, because I could have certainly gone lower I’m sure of it. At that time, I was living in a homeless hostel. One of several I’ve lived in. But this particular homeless hostel was somewhat different than any I’d lived in before. It was rougher, more desperate, closer to the streets than I’d ever felt. It had 30 tiny rooms squeezed inside its small stature. Blood on the bannisters, and soiled, sad men sitting on the stairs. From door to door were hungry eyed grafters and empty stomached beggars in pain. The place was bursting with sadness, hurt, and the remnants of so much violence. The staff were there to maintain some rules and to make sure no one died, and that was about it. There are good hostels, some are very good, this wasn’t either of them. We, the people who lived there, were kind of like the people in those little slime filled pods in The Matrix, just there to keep something bigger running. The hostel was making a lot of money from us.

For so long I’d dreamed of… something. Just something, anything other than the nothing but misery I felt all the time. There were things I wanted, not material things really, but a flat with some stuff in it would’ve been nice. Maybe even a friend or two? Perhaps a life of some sort? What I think really motivated me was understanding that I had to learn to deal with the feelings that kept me constantly locked up inside my head. It was paranoia, self-hatred, fear, anger, sadness, and the huge anxiety that weighed me down constantly that kept me going back to drink and drugs even when they’d stopped working. I realised that it was my mental health that was really the problem. That was all I understood at that time, it wouldn’t be until a couple of years later that I really began to comprehend the huge effects my childhood and adolescent trauma had on me.

There was a poster by the front door of the hostel. It advertised an open day at Addaction on Maryland Street. The idea was that you go along and different services come in and tell you all about what they do, by the end of the day you have an idea, possibly, of where you want to go to get help. It started at 9am, and that was early for me, really very early. So I was late, I shuffled into the tiny room quite dazed. I was hot, beads of sweat gathered on my forehead, neck and back. It was uncomfortable, disgusting even. I was repulsed by my own body’s reaction, even though it was a reaction that happened to me at the slightest of inconveniences or awkwardness. The guy from Addaction grabbed me a coffee and I spilled it all over myself almost as soon as he handed it to me. I could have walked out there and then, red faced, angry, sweating. But I didn’t. I wanted out so I had to stay in. The way I saw it, whatever I was feeling in that room, on that day, couldn’t be worse than what was waiting for me if I carried on the way I was going.

At the end of that day I’d picked where I was going for help, a detox in Wales with the Basement Centre. It sounded like what I needed, to be in the middle of nowhere for two weeks getting my head out of the habit of a lifetime. Fully feeling my mental health problems without the broken safety net of getting high or pissed. Remembering. It turned out it was the right choice.

Being ready can mean different things to different people. Rock bottom doesn’t equate to readiness. It can even be that some people are never ready and that the change doesn’t come because people who aren’t ready don’t have the support around them and the system generally only wants to help people on the system’s terms. I think the idea of being ready might not be useful. How do you get ready for being ready? How do you measure readiness to change? Readiness to deal with things you can’t even comprehend? Who gets to decide who’s ready?

Being ready might be a myth, an idea we put on a pedestal and believe ourselves or others have to work towards it. What’s more important than being ready is having support around you. Having means, and meaning. Being able to feel safe. Seeing a way out, or if not a way out then at least something a little better. We should think differently about readiness and look at what people really need to make a change wherever there at. Readiness can make it seem like progress towards change is linear, when in reality progress towards change is scattered across a map. There are no metaphoric trains, trams, or planes that take you to readiness. There’s only a landscape to explore. I’m sure that the idea of readiness is actually a hindrance to a lot of people who just can’t be measured using abstract ideas and traditional expectations.

I’ve lived my whole life not being ready. My complex-PTSD will always tell me I’m not ready, sometimes very strongly. Luckily there were services available to me at that time that suited me and got me past the threshold of detox and rehab. I can’t pinpoint what personally got me into, and kept me in, “recovery”, it just kind of happened and I consider myself very lucky. I was never ready but I had options and a willingness to explore. Right now there are many people who are never going to be ready in any traditional sense, and what they are waiting for is someone to show them options and goals that suit them. They need a map that makes sense to them, not a readiness hoop to jump through.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

The bio-psycho-social: Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté is a Doctor Medicine with expertise in addiction, the effects of stress on the body and mind, and ADHD. He is also a renowned speaker and bestselling author.

His book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, explores his over 20 years of experience working with the most severely addicted and mentally ill, predominantly homeless, people in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. Along with his experience of the people he has worked with, he provides scientific and social science evidence to support his, and others’, theories that addiction is a mostly a developmental and social issue.

Maté proports the idea that addiction is a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. He believes that addiction has its roots mostly in trauma and alienation, and that biology, psychology, and society all play their part in the development of addiction and interact with each other in inseparable ways.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is a fascinating read and was a real eye-opener for me. Learning how development and trauma effect your biology in very solid ways is supported with scientific research. There is also an element of the storytelling of experiences his clients have had over the years.

I would say it is on of the most comprehensive books on addiction theory and really captures how many different factors play a role in what a human life will become.

Below is a video of Maté talking about his book.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Dislocation Theory: Bruce Alexander

The dislocation theory focuses on social causes of addiction and supports the idea that alienation from nature, creativity, spiritual practices, and meaningful communication with the world creates an unfulfilled need in human life and the human then seeks to fill this need through activities that can be harmful and addicting (gambling, work, drugs, alcohol, porn, gaming etc.).

The person who coined the term dislocation theory was psychologist Bruce K Alexander. In 2008 Alexander published his book Globalisation of addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit. In this book Alexander argues that addiction, as a social phenomenon, is caused primarily by what he calls dislocation. A conclusion Alexander had come to after discovering that, historically, many indigenous peoples, once removed from their way of life through colonisation and the following trauma, see a steep rise in addiction to various things amongst their people.

Alexander discovered this by accident. He’d had enough of working in the field of addiction psychology and decided instead to write a book on the history of psychology. During his research, looking back over the history and origins of psychology in various forms amongst various peoples, he kept encountering the pattern of indigenous people being dislocated from their land and ways of life, and how many of those peoples then saw a rise in addiction for many generations. He further researched this tragic effect and began to explore whether this “dislocation theory” could explain the contemporary rise in addiction on a global scale.

The implication being, in my opinion, that dislocation, alienation, and isolation are all on the rise as market forces become ever more the focus of our existence. With this we see a rise in trauma and mental health issues, which leads to people seeking comfort in things which only offer momentary, temporary relief and lead to an addiction to finding that relief in whatever form the individual has found it.

Below is a presentation Alexander gave on the dislocation theory and what it is in his own words. It’s quite interesting stuff.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Environment: Rat Park

Rat Park was an addiction experiment done by a team of psychologists in the 1970s. One of the psychologists was Bruce K Alexander, the proponent of the Dislocation theory of addiction. Though this experiment was done quite some time before he wrote his book on addiction.

The Rat Park experiment came about because the team who were doing experiments on drug addiction with rat suddenly realised something. They realised that the rats they were doing experiments on were kept in pretty unnatural conditions. They were locked in small cages with nothing to do but exist and, if they were lucky, run around and around on a wheel. The team started to wonder if the conditions the rats were kept in had an effect on how often they took the various drugs freely available to them (morphine, cocaine, amphetamine – depending on the experiment).

What the team did was create an optimum environment for making the rats happy. They had freedom to roam in a huge cage, where they had plenty of access to food they liked, toys, other rats, and all the comforts and warmth they could want. While, of course, still having access to drugs whenever they wanted them. Would being in this optimal environment effect their drug intake?

A rat control group was set up too. The control group were set up like any drug addiction rat experiment – they were kept isolated in a small cage.

The results were kind of what you’d expect. The rats in Rat Park rarely developed addiction to the drugs that were available to them, whilst the rats in the cages became heavily addicted to the drugs. Pointing to environment as a main player in drug addiction.

Below is a video outlining the experiment, it’s variations, and its findings (it has a misleading title but is a good account of the experiment).

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Neurobiology: Marc Lewis

Neuroscientist and professor of developmental psychology Marc Lewis has written a couple of excellent books on addiction and neurobiology. One of them is called Memoirs of and Addicted Brain. In Memoirs of an Addicted Brain Lewis writes about his own journey into drug addiction, from his first drink in boarding school, to his first hit of heroin and everything in-between.

What’s fascinating is that he interrupts his memoir with details about what’s happening to his brain when he is taking the drugs. In my opinion it’s a really insightful and interesting way to learn about the technical aspect of the neurobiology of drug taking and drug addiction. You get to read someone’s well written, insightful addiction memoir, and be informed on the science of what his happening to him along the way. It certainly beats trudging through a more formal book on drug addiction and neurobiology. What else is great about the storytelling is that it is a good mix of addiction science and the emotional and social aspects of addiction.

Lewis’s other addiction book is The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease. In this book Lewis presents his reasoning on why addiction is not a disease. He explores this using the science of the brain, personal stories from 5 people all addicted to different drugs, and the social and emotional experiences of those people. It really builds on his memoir and is a really interesting, informal, and engaging look at what addiction really is according to him and others in the contemporary addiction field.

Below is Marc Lewis giving an informative talk on the neuroscience of addiction.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Reading List

Below is a list of books that you might find useful if you’re interested in reading about addiction and/or trauma.

Addiction Memoir 

Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs

Dry: A Memoir – Augusten Burroughs

Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast – Lorna Crozier

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain – Marc Lewis

How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z – Ann Marlowe

Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas de Quincy

Permanent Midnight – Jerry Stahl

Addiction Theory

The Globalisation of Addiction – Bruce K. Alexander

Recovery from Addiction – Robert Granfield & William Cloud

Chasing the Scream – Johann Hari

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease – Marc Lewis

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts – Gabor Mate

Drugs, Addiction, and Initiation: The Modern Search for Ritual – Luigi Zoja

Trauma

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the healing of trauma – Bessel van der Kolk

In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness – Peter Levine

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology – Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Expressive Writing: Words that Heal – James Pennebaker and John Frank

Fiction

The Mighty Angel – Jerzy Pilch

Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh

Other

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thomspon

Glue: The Extended Remix – Louise Wallwein

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.

Me, addiction, and recovery: an introduction

In 2011, when my drinking and drug taking had long ceased to offer me any comfort from emotional turmoil, I decided that I was going to stop once and for all. Actually, I’d decided to stop many times before, but it was 2011 when I would enter what they call recovery.

I didn’t know what recovery was. I still don’t I suppose, it means different things to different people. But the one thing that all those who are in recovery have in common is the desire to finally stop whatever damaging thing it is they’ve done for years.

For me, the damaging thing was drink and weed, for a few years it was cocaine too, but I kicked that when my supply, and my sanity, ran dry. I’d smoked weed since I was thirteen. Weed, when I first smoked it, was like some kind of magic ailment for all the anxiety and stress I felt. It was bliss, like suckling at the teat of the cosmic mother. That blissful high in the early days was a romance. Thing is, my relationship with weed soon went sour, a toxic partner I couldn’t escape.

As I aged my mental health worsened due to varying factors: the lasting effects of untreated trauma caused by a series of prolonged adverse childhood experiences, the continued effect of a toxic parent, repressed sexuality, and addiction. Added to that is the fact that I, like many of us, live in an environment that constantly alienates, belittles, and scares us. It is even said that anxiety, depression, and addiction are natural responses to the toxic and abusive systems around us ( for info on those ideas see links in Useful Stuff).

My ability to adapt to, and grow with, life as it happened was severely stunted. I was anxious, paranoid, angry, scared, and at times delusional. Socialising or building any type of connection with people was painfully impossible. I tried, but I never fit in, could never relax or be myself. And to my horror, weed, the only thing that had ever at least alleviated my pain, began to add to it. When I was eighteen, I met alcohol, which started a new escape-drive for me. A legal, but much more dangerous journey opened to me with the discovery of the pain relieving effects of alcohol.

But recovery, what is it really? The word recovery suggests that you can recover that which was lost through whatever damaging habit you formed, i.e. to recover what was lost you must quit the damaging, compulsive habit.

The first thing that really confused me about recovery was the word itself. Recovery? Recover what? There was absolutely nothing about my life up to that point that I wanted to recover. I didn’t have, had never had, anything. What was I expected to recover? I didn’t know, but people sure did want to tell me.

I’ve had infuriating, stifling, abusive experiences with the recovery community, particularly with professionals within the recovery community who champion a certain way of thinking. However, I’ve also had some inspirational, empowering, and life affirming experiences with others in the same circles.

What I had to do was find my own way, and I decided that it wasn’t recovery I wanted, I wanted discovery.

Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.