Editor’s Note: Periodically the Spy decides it must protect the identity of a subject and/or their families when discussing difficult issues like addiction. That is the case here in Jim Dissette’s second interview with “John,” who asked that he remain anonymous in order to be as candid as possible. We have respected his wishes.
Q: We left off with the question about your path to addiction. Care to pick up there?
A: I’m sorry to digress a bit more, but I looked at a few things I said about “where we come from” being integral to the disease of addiction. I know a bunch of recovering addicts, alcoholics and drug addicts who had perfectly healthy childhoods. 88,000 people die each year from alcohol use. Car-alcohol related deaths are something like 30 a day. There is something inherently wrong about writing this off as a collection of people making “bad choices”, or having no will. I’m sick of hearing that. Choices, it appears to me, only start to appear in recovery.
Addiction comes at you from anywhere; it seems as though some people have a metabolic set-up for it and that others “train” their metabolism and brains for it as they obsess more and more for it. I knew a great guy who didn’t start drinking until his 70s. He was on fire right out of the gate and could not stop. It killed him in 4 years. I’ve seen 17 year-olds in AA. I’ve accepted the disease concept as a working model for addiction. The medical field addresses it this way. Maybe it’s their best guess, but it feels right. Certainly today, treating is as a health problem of the first order we are at least making inroads into destigmatizing addiction, and that’s good because there’s nothing like feeling like an outcast to feed the beast. No matter how you got that needle in your arm or that bottle to your mouth.
Q: You sound a little dismissive about your own background?
A: It gets tricky. The rising number of opioid addicts come from poverty, urban duress, and from middle-class and well-off. I think the average age for heroin use has dropped to something like 22, meaning that it takes all comers from every demographic, socially, financially or otherwise. But maybe I can connect some of the dots in my personal deconstruction. So, how I “got there” is only one way, and there are certainly many who have come out of abusive who became addicts. Others didn’t.
I was raised in a middle-class family in Washington. My father was a decorated combat officer in WW2. My mother was from Virginia, I’d say the old South, with all its mannerisms and pride of pedigree. I had an older brother by eleven years, so the age difference made it seem like we were both an ‘only child.’ He would appear in my life suddenly, and I couldn’t figure out how to relate to him until much later when we started talking about our shared experience. We could talk in shorthand about it. Later on in life people would back away from us when were talking because they couldn’t understand a word. We had a shared survivorship language.
My earliest memory of alcohol was one Christmas when, as a kind of joke I guess, I was given a small glass of tawny port no less. I remember it distinctly. I guess I was about 7 or 8. It was as though I’d swallowed warm light. Fun is not the word. I felt like “me” as though I knew who I was. I went back to the kitchen and got another. It seemed magical.
Of course, I didn’t start drinking then. That would wait for another 13 years. But I think I triggered something because later I would chase that feeling, to get it again. But in the meantime, as a child, I was learning survival skills to cope with the violence in my childhood. Both parents were alcoholics. They drank together, with each other and at each other. A symbiotic illness. And… they tried to kill each other. I spent more than a few mornings cleaning blood off the floors and making sure there weren’t splatter marks on the curtains in case they had visitors. That was part of keeping the family secret and the part where you learn to lie. One of the first lies is “sure; everything is fine” when asked how things are going, by friends or teachers. I didn’t want everything to unravel. I didn’t want people to know that, for instance, the night before I had to take a gun out of my mother’s hand after shooting at my father?
Q: How did this feel to you. Not looking back and interpreting, but then?
A: I was very calm. You take care walking through a mine-field. I knew it was a matter of time. I’d seen both of them unconscious before, sometimes from beatings, sometimes from blackouts, so I figured the day would come. I expected to see one of them dead on the floor. But my mother missed. I actually felt like I’d failed my job because I’d hidden parts of the guns in different places so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen. My mother was not dexterous, but somehow she found the slide for the automatic, a target pistol, and got one bullet in the chamber. This kind of thing went on up through my 20s. Eventually, he beat her one time too many and she never got back up.
So, to tell you how I felt is complex. I felt it was partially my fault for not “doing my job” and to be honest, on some level, I’m sorry she missed. That’s a crushing thing to say, isn’t it? In a world of limited options that was the best, I could come up with to have the damn thing over with. Also, I didn’t have time to fall apart. I had to be vigilant. Then I would sleep in school. In those day teachers didn’t have a handle on the symptoms of abuse. I became used to an altered reality. In a way, the violent world becomes easier to endure because you don’t have to dread it coming along. It’s there.
Q: How do you mean?
Well, you take a smoking gun out of your mother’s hand one night and having scrambled eggs in the morning as you get ready for school. You have to live in two worlds, neither of which felt very real. But in one of them, someone is more likely to get hurt.
Q: So how do you feel all this played into your addiction?
A: I remember saying I’d never be like them. I’d lived their alcoholic life and seen the results. After my mother’s death, something happened. I didn’t have to worry anymore about their well-being, or be vigilant. It was the first time I could exhale after 20 years. Right after I got out of college, I started drinking. There was no buildup. I drank hard and fast right out for the gate. It wasn’t a social thing. I felt like medicine. At the same time, you knew the medicine was killing you. It’s madness.
Q: Did you know something was wrong?
A: Honestly, yes. From the get-go. I was a binge drinker. I could go for some weeks, later it was months at a time, but when I had the first drink, I couldn’t stop. And I knew early on where the first drink would go, but it still didn’t feel like an optional thing no matter how hard I struggled with it.
That’s’ when the old skills were handy. I lied easily, to myself and others, because, for me, they were almost of equal value. I say “almost” because I still had a conscience and on some level knew things were very wrong. That adds to the fuel: shame, guilt. So in a way I was continuing the duplicitous life I learned as a kid. Plus, I sought chaos, because it was a familiar terrain, not that I was self-aware of that then, but I was a huge risk taker, burned many personal bridges, ruined relationships, each event adding to the guilt and shame, enough so that suicide looked like a possibility. The one day I thought about suicide I didn’t know what to wear. I know that sound ridiculous, but it dawned on me that if I cared about how I looked, then maybe I had a shred of care about myself.
Q: Do you think your addiction and recovery lend a different kind of vantage point?
A: I’m not sure. In some ways, I feel like I’m just breaking even and have the point pf view that somewhat healthy have toward life. On the other hand, I come from two worlds, and that lends a kind of sensitivity to those who still endure abuse and compassion for those struggling to live. Not only with addiction, but I also guess. Most recovering addicts I know have a larger context of experience to feel something for anyone going through hell—may it be addiction or awful life experiences like war, starvation, spouse abuse. I’m not being grandiose here. I think most cancer survivors have more compassion for those ill with that disease.
Q: In the broader picture. What’s your take on US policies, treatment, etc.
A: Oh boy. Maybe I can talk about it only within the framework of recovery. Next time.
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