The Recovery Diaries: The Talking Dog

     

     The last time I saw Jean, she was about to celebrate her twelfth month of sobriety by auditioning for a part in a play. Before the audition, we went for coffee. 

      She told me a joke. Jean had never told me one before. I had no idea she had a sense of humor.

     "A guy sees an ad on-line about someone selling a talking dog for twenty bucks. So he shows up at the advertised address and knocks on the door. 

     The owner of the dog opens the door and the guy answering the ad says, "So, I hear you have a talking dog you're selling for twenty bucks?"

     The owner says, "That’s right."     
     The other guy says, "Can I see him?"     
     The owner says, "Sure, follow me."
     They go through the living room, up the stairs, and into a bedroom where a dog, is lying on the bed, reading a paper, and watching CNN. 
     The dog looks up and says, "Hi."
     The guy says, "Holy cow! You're a talking dog!"     
     The dog says, "Yeah, I guess."     
     The guy says, "Well . . . why are you just lying there in bed?"
     The dog says, "Well, I have been able to talk ever since I was a puppy. My first job was teaching other dogs how to be seeing-eye dogs for the blind which was rewarding but I needed different challenges so I trained to be a bomb sniffer and worked for the military for quite a while. Then l got a job helping the police sniff out drugs at airports. Found out I was  pretty good at tracking things but wanted a change so went into the theater and got some big parts on Broadway in New York. Then the whole World Trade Center 9-11 thing happened and I was recalled by the military to active duty and spent a lot of time retrieving bodies. At that point I figured as long as I was back in NY, I might as well help out the police again so I went back to work sniffing out drugs at airports. Then I realized I was just burnt out and needed some time off. So I moved to Chiang Mai. I just wanted to reflect on things, figure out what I want to do next, that kind of stuff. You know what I'm saying?"
     The guy says, "Uh, sure. I mean, Wow! That's amazing."
     The owner and the guy leave the room. 
     The guy says, "Why in the world are you selling that dog so cheap?"

     The owner says, "'Cause that dog is an incredible liar!" 
      I asked Jean how she was doing.

     "Well," she said. "Even though I went to a Twelve Step treatment program, the program and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings left me pretty cold.  AA works for a lot of people according to the testimony I heard in meetings. But for me, it was like joining a fundamentalist religion. AA is faith based despite what it says to the contrary and hasn't incorporated any of the new scientific evidence that's been gathered about addiction and recovery since the AA movement started back in the 1930s."
     "In treatment and in meetings, I heard that it was the "one" way to recover. If I didn't subscribe to "this simple program, I was constitutionally unable to be honest with myself." Whenever I brought up my concerns about lack of scientific evidence supporting AA's claims about how people recover, its rigidity, and its promotion of "recoveryism" as opposed to health, I was told that I was in denial or resisting."
     This one size fits all approach to treatment didn't sit well with me.  I started exploring other approaches to lose my drinking habit. To my surprise, there are quite a few. For example, science writer and author of Inside Rehab, Anne Fletcher, described a number of evidence based alternatives to AA."
     Truth be told, I was still wondering about the talking dog. But this seemed pretty important to Jean, so I listened.

        Jean showed me the following New York Times article written by science 

and nutrition writer, Jane Brodie, in February, 2013, about alternatives to Alcoholics 

Anonymous.

      "According to Anne Fletcher's recent examinations of treatment programs, 

most are rooted in outdated methods rather than newer approaches shown

 in scientific studies to be more effective in helping people achieve and maintain

addiction-free lives. People typically do more research when shopping for a new

car than when seeking treatment for addiction."

       The body of The New York Times article went on to say:

"A groundbreaking report published last year by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University 
concluded that “the vast majority of people in need of addiction 
treatment do not receive anything that approximates evidence-
based care.” The report added, “Only a small fraction of individuals 
receive interventions or treatment consistent with scientific 
knowledge about what works.”

"The Columbia report found that most addiction treatment providers are not medical professionals and are not equipped with the knowledge, skills or credentials needed to provide the full range of evidence-based services, including medication and psychosocial therapy. The authors suggested that such insufficient care could be considered “a form of medical malpractice.”

"The failings of many treatment programs — and the comprehensive therapies that have been scientifically validated but remain vastly underused — are described in an eye-opening new book, “Inside Rehab,” by Anne M. Fletcher, a science writer whose previous books include the highly acclaimed “Sober for Good.”

“There are exceptions, but of the many thousands of treatment programs out there, most use exactly the same kind of treatment you would have received in 1950, not modern scientific approaches,” A. Thomas McLellan, co-founder of the Treatment Research Institute in Philadelphia, told Ms. Fletcher."

"Ms. Fletcher’s book, replete with the experiences of treated addicts, offers myriad suggestions to help patients find addiction treatments with the highest probability of success."

     "I did my homework after 28 days of residential treatment and a lot of AA meetings,"
 Jean said.

Women for Sobriety: "Women for Sobriety (WFS) was founded in the
mid-1970sby Jean Kirkpatrick, a woman with a doctorate in sociology 
who had a severe alcohol problem that she ultimately overcame herself
by changing her thoughts when she was lonely or depressed. Kirkpatrick
felt that women with drinking problems require different approaches
than men and began this abstinence-based program for women, taking
the position that drinking begins as a way of dealing 
with emotional issues and then evolves into addiction.

"Designed to bolster women’s sense of self-value, the WFS philosophy
stands in contrast with AA’s focus on humility and limiting 
self-centeredness, working from a position of empowerment. Members
are encouraged to learn how to better manage their issues by sharing
with and encouraging one another. A major emphasis is on 
substituting negative, self-destructive thoughts with positive, 
self-affirming ones. WFS uses 13 statements or affirmations that
emphasize increased self-worth, 
emotional and spiritual growth, not focusing on the past, personal
responsibility, problem solving, and attending to physical health."
Latest stats: WFS averages 
100 U.S. groups and a dozen in Canada. womenforsobriety.org

SMART Recovery

     "SMART Recovery’s cornerstone is cognitive-behavioral approaches that help members recognize environmental and emotional factors for alcohol and other drug use (as well as other “addictive” behaviors) and then to respond to them in new, more productive ways. It also incorporates motivational interviewing concepts. Unlike some support groups whose principles remain static, SMART Recovery maintains a philosophy of evolving as scientific knowledge evolves."

     "SMART Recovery tools can help you regardless of whether or not you believe addiction is a disease. Working from empowerment, it encourages individuals to recover from addiction (as opposed to being “in recovery” or seeing themselves as having a lifelong “disease”) and is a recognized resource by multiple professional organizations, including the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the American Society of Addiction Medicine."

     "Although it is an abstinence-based program, SMART Recovery welcomes those who are ambivalent about quitting substance use. Its 4-point program guides participants in the following areas: (1) building and maintaining motivation; (2) coping with urges; (3) managing thoughts, feelings and behaviors; and (4) living a balanced life." 

Latest stats: 635 U.S. groups; 613 international groups. SMART Recovery also has a youth program and a Family & Friends program. smartrecovery.org

Refuge Recovery

     Refuge Recovery is a mindfulness meditation based community/program that practices Buddhist philosophy as the foundation of recovery. Refuge Recovery is an abstinence peer-led program that embraces people of all religious (or non), cultural, gender, socioeconomic, and mental health status. The core teachings are inspired by the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. Each RR meeting begins with mindfulness meditation, includes readings from Noah Levine's book Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovery and Meditation, and allows for personal sharing.

     From the Refuge Recovery perspective, the path of recovery begins with the first Noble Truth: addiction creates suffering. The second truth is that the cause of addiction is repetitive craving. Truth three states that recovery is possible. The fourth truth is that the end of addiction/suffering requires acknowledgement and full acceptance of the reality that there's no such thing as a life with no pain, and that recovering persons no longer need to harm themselves in response to it. All Four of the Noble Truths help recovering persons explore the root causes of their repetitive craving and to deal with those causes in a compassionate way.

     (The Refuge Recovery community program is not to be confused with treatment centers operating under the same name.)

Latest Stats: 600 meetings (U.S., Canada, and Chiang Mai, Thailand). Also on-line meetings. https://refugerecovery.org

     It was interesting stuff. Like most people, I had only known about AA. But what about the talking dog?
    "That story has nothing to do with my recovery," Jean said. "But it's a good laugh, don't you think?"

     

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And We Still Have a Long Way to Go

It’s been almost six years since my life partner of 30 years died. He died this time of year. This is the first holiday season since John has been gone that a fog of grief hasn’t enveloped me around Christmas. Partly, I’ve been too busy to hang onto grief—working and rehearsing for two plays have been pretty all consuming. (There was also a wonderful trip to Hong Kong in November.) Partly, the compassionate intelligence that runs the universe pushed me through a door to the other side of grief. It's pretty interesting on the other side if for no other reason than it requires me to be a lot less self-absorbed.

This month's blog is a little different: it's another excerpt from the novel I'm writing. It's a fiction/nonfiction blend like all novels-- not autobiographical in many respects-- yet it describes the foundation for why I live in Asia.... Oh, and one more thing...I have always loved libraries and The Brighton Park library was my first love. (To jog your memories, the main character of the novel is Kate, a sixth grader living in blue collar Chicago in the 1960s.)

Kate had once written a book report about Father Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who ventured from France to explore the Great Lakes region in the1600's. Her geography assignment had been to write something about a pioneer explorer with some connection to Chicago. Kate's favorite park was named after Marquette so she picked him.

Jacques Marquette spent a lot of time in what were now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois before canoeing down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas River. When he got to the Arkansas, he found out that the Spanish were already there. This spooked him. The French and Spanish were not getting along at the time. He feared being captured. So he and his friends turned around and paddled back up the Mississippi. They returned to the Illinois Territory in late 1674. The World Book Encyclopedia and various biographies said different things so Kate wasn't too sure how it happened, but somehow Marquette became one of the first Europeans to winter in what would become the city of Chicago.

Winters in Chicago were windy, damp, and often brutally cold. When she asked her best friend what Catholics knew about Father Marquette, Daiva said that the nuns at Immaculate Conception called him Pere Marquette and told students that the Jesuits were the smartest priests in the Catholic Church. Kate thought that even if he was adventuresome, and according to her research, very good at learning languages--something Kate envied--Marquette couldn't have been that bright if he had other choices but decided to winter in Chicago. Or leave the sparkling light of France for that matter. But smart or not, Marquette was a famous pioneer explorer and many places in the Midwest were named after him.

Kate considered herself to be a budding, although not yet famous, explorer. She could get to Marquette Park by taking the Archer Avenue bus, transferring at Kedzie, transferring again at the Kedzie/55th Street bus hub and then riding to 67th and Kedzie where the park was. It was a forty minute trip from home. Kate knew this wasn't as long or dangerous as canoeing around on the Mississippi, but it was not as easy as taking one bus to get downtown to where the museums were. As a result, Kate didn't get to the park much. But when she did, she was glad for the effort. For one thing, Marquette Park was green and alive. At three hundred acres, it was the biggest city park on the southwest side of Chicago. It had lots of huge trees, a sparkling lagoon, and a rose garden. There was also a stone field house that looked like a castle. Once inside the park, Kate forgot the factories and rough and tumble industrial neighborhoods that surrounded her. She could almost see the light of France.

In late July, her parents, much to her surprise, told her not to go there anymore because it wasn't safe. Dr. Martin Luther King was set to lead a march at the park on August 5. Everyone was expecting trouble they said. Kate was stunned. Not safe at her beautiful park? And even worse: who was the snitch who told her parents she went there?

Her dad was edgily excited the entire week before the march. He drank even more than usual and muttered things about how they'd show that King troublemaker he shoulda stayed down south where he belonged. He began singing the Oscar Maier Wiener song around the house which was strange since he rarely sang. Plus, he didn't actually sing the real words which were, "Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Maier winer. That is what I'd truly love to be. 'Cuz if I were an Oscar Maier wiener. Everyone would be in love with me." Instead he bellowed, "I'd love to be an Alabama trooper. That is what I'd truly love to be. 'Cuz if I were an Alabama trooper, I could hang a nigger legally." 

Kate was disgusted. This was a new low even for him.

The day before the march, Kate went to The Brighton Park Library. She'd been working her way through the library's most up to date collection of World Book Encyclopedia published in 1965. Her goal was to read all the volumes cover to cover. Although currently in volume 10, she decided to detour to eleven that covered J/K.

Maybe the encyclopedia would help her unravel the mystery of Dr. King. Why was he going to march in Chicago? What was this "open housing" that he kept talking about? Why did so many people have such strong opinions about him? She had watched him speak on TV. He talked a lot about peace and nonviolence. But what did that have to do with Marquette Park?

World Book wasn't much help. There was only a brief entry about Dr. King describing him as a Baptist minister who was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. He had attended a bunch of different colleges including one in Chicago called The Chicago Theological Seminary. In 1958, he had written a book called Stride to Freedom. The encyclopedia went on to say that he led a Negro movement to end racial segregation in the U.S. by organizing peaceful protest marches as part of his "passive resistance program". It didn't explain what passive resistance was. Dr. King took part in these marches and for some reason was jailed several times. In 1963, he also did something to end racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama but there was no mention of what it was.

She checked the date to make sure the volume was actually published in1965. It was.

Kate searched the shelves and card catalogue for books about him. There weren't any, including the one he had written, in the library. She even investigated the children's section where she rarely spent any time even though all she had was a juvenile card. Kate had devised a way to check out books from the adult collection which was where all the interesting books were. If questioned by the librarians who snarled when she tried to take out adult books, she said they were for her dad who worked long hours and wasn't able to get to the library when it was open. After all, this was partly true. Her dad--unlike her mom--loved to read even though his drinking prevented him from getting to the library often. He had taken Kate to the library when she was in second grade to get her first card. Because he especially enjoyed books about military history, he selected one for her about World War Two, but  because he was drunk, it was from the adult collection. She had struggled with it. Besides having a lot of big words, the story--something about a submarine--was pretty dull. However, she finished it and returned the book for a more interesting one about Paris. Kate had been hooked on the library ever since. 

But if this library didn't have books about Dr. King, what else didn't it have?

Robin Williams and My Friend Norm in What Dreams May Come

In memory of Robin Williams, last night I watched What Dreams May Come, one of my favorite movies. Williams, in the film, plays a man who descends into hell to rescue his wife after she ends her own life. Hell is portrayed as a surreal state of self-absorption and denial that results in a person's total isolation.

This lines up pretty closely with what I think hell is.

I've watched What Dreams May Come many times, but what struck me last night for the first time was how much Robin Williams--if you added a beard-- looked like Norm, a friend I made in Portland, Oregon's skid row back in the late seventies.

Norm had been a philosophy major at Santa Clara College and it showed. Whenever we got into political, theological, or otherwise "deep" conversations about anything, he would inevitably switch sides in the middle of the discussion and argue the opposite point of view. This drove me crazy until I realized that although he could argue any perspective passionately, he really didn't have a point of view. Rather, Norm had points of view. It wasn't the position that mattered to him. It was the discourse.

We were both in our twenties, fresh out of college, and still believed that positions, opinions, ideologies--whatever you want to call them--mattered. Four decades later I marvel at the energy we had then to expend on such heated exchanges.

But we weren't just debating in an ivory tower. Both of us worked in an agency that tried to help chronic alcoholics in Portland's skid row. For the uninitiated, skid rows can be found in any city. They are areas packed with dank single room occupancy hotels (also known as flophouses), convenience liquor stores, Gospel missions, and bars where you can get fleas with your beer. The residents are generally men, many of whom are disabled military veterans, who have chronic alcohol and substance abuse issues. My job--on paper--was to be a crime victims' advocate. However,  I did very little crime victims' assistance. The agency I worked for was pretty disorganized and rarely knew when cases were going to court. So mostly, I went around to the flophouses with a nurse and did health checks, delivered Meals on Wheels, and listened to the sad life stories of those who were sober for the moment.

It's an understatement to say that most chronic alcoholics living on skid row aren't especially concerned about hygiene. It took me a while to learn to control my gag reflex upon entering the foul smelling hotels. A lot of the guys told me they got mugged pretty regularly. Disabled and drunk, they were easy targets.  You'd think the acrid odor of urine, excrement, and vomit that emanated from the men would have provided some protection against crime by acting as a chemical barrier. But when they staggered out to buy booze or smokes, thieves apparently didn't mind the reek, and clubbed or knifed the guys to steal what little they had. Who knows? The thieves probably smelled pretty bad, too.

Having the stench and violence of skid row as the backdrop for our heated debates about the meaning of life, the value of religion, and the causes of poverty and other social evils, gave Norm's and my exchanges even greater intensity than they might have had under other circumstances. To top it off, Norm was a Catholic-he was raised in an arch conservative Irish Catholic family-- while I had grown up in a fundamentalist Protestant church and had had a bellyful of Christianity. Mercifully, Norm was not pedantic or proselytizing about his religion. Even about Catholicism, he had multiple points of view and could poke fun at the Church with the best of them. He, unlike me, didn't take himself too seriously. In the heat of debate, he would wink at me, stroke his unruly beard, and break into the goofiest grin I have ever seen on God's green earth.  The grin said, "Connie, you've been had." I saw that grin again and again as I attempted through arguing with Norm to make sense of skid row and to some extent of the larger world.

Norm was very popular on skid row. He was known for his kindness and integrity. The men who came into the agency always sought him out. Even when he had to put on a stern look to remove a client from the agency for being disorderly, he did it in a way that allowed the man to keep his dignity. I admired and respected that about him. Norm had a light touch with people. One of his favorite ways to get folks to ease up when they were getting too intense would be to say in a fakey hypnotic tone, "You are as light as a feather." And then grin. It usually got people to laugh. Even the drunk ones.

I haven't seen Norm for a long time. After a few years in Portland, he went back to California and became the director of a social service agency and I moved to Wisconsin to work as a counselor. What were the personal demons that attracted us to skid row in the first place? I don't think Norm had any but mine was that my father had died of liver disease due to alcoholism in a flophouse in Chicago. I never saw him when he lived on skid row but after he died, I guess some part of me wanted to see what that version of hell looked like. In Portland, I got to see the end game: the slow and excruciatingly painful suicide that uses alcohol as a weapon. My dad had definitely suffered as much or even more than those of us who had borne the brunt of his illness. After working on skid row, I hoped he wasn't suffering any more.

I can see and hear Norm in my mind's eye now. He's grinning. "Remember, Connie, you are as light as a feather." He's right, of course. In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams' character rescues his wife from hell by being willing to leave heaven and to go and stay with her in hell. This action breaks her out of her self-absorption. They both float up like feathers into a heaven of their own making.                                         

Wow. This would be a great discussion to have with Norm. I wonder what he's doing now?