Q+A How Addiction Sneaks Up On You
How Addiction Sneaks Up On You
Join us for an insightful Q&A episode as we delve into the intriguing topic of how addiction creeps into our lives unnoticed and the crucial steps to overcome its grip. In this episode, we’ll shed light on the cunning ways addiction takes hold, and how to protect yourself from its snares.
Tune in to learn about:
Ignoring Your Initial Impressions: Explore the deceptive nature of addiction as we unravel why it often starts subtly, making it easy to dismiss. Discover the importance of recognizing the initial signs and how overlooking them can lead to a downward spiral.
Status as a Barrier to Seeking Help: Delve into the influence of societal status on seeking assistance for addiction. Learn how perceptions of status can hinder individuals from reaching out for support, and gain insights into breaking down these barriers.
The Power of Honesty: Explore why honesty, both with yourself and with others, is a fundamental component of tackling addiction. Understand how opening up about your struggles can pave the way for effective recovery and healing.
Navigating Relapses with Resilience: Discover strategies to cope with relapses without losing sight of your recovery goals. Gain valuable insights into understanding relapse triggers, managing setbacks, and using them as stepping stones toward lasting recovery.
Bulletproofing Your Mind against Addiction:Learn proactive measures to fortify your mental defenses against the allure of addiction. Explore techniques for building resilience, boosting self-control, and fostering a strong mindset that empowers you to resist addictive behaviors.
To find other similar episodes by topic, click here.
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The host, Ashley Loeb Blassingame has been clean and sober for 17 years, she’s a drug and alcohol counselor, interventionist, and the co-founder of a telehealth company called Lionrock Recovery that provides online substance use disorder treatment and Lionrock.life, a worldwide peer-support recovery community and experience connection with people who’ve been there.
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Episode Transcript
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
You are listening to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week, we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.
Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host. And today, I am here with the magnificent, the wonderful, the punctual, the consistently stable and mentally capable…
Scott Drochelman:
Capable, hey?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
… Capable, producer extraordinaire Scott Drochelman.
Scott Drochelman:
Capable, is that part of the Catholic Church in some way? Is that part of the…
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yes, yes.
Scott Drochelman:
Okay, yeah.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What color is the smoke coming from the stack?
Scott Drochelman:
It’s capable. Well, thanks, thanks for the welcome. I was just down in the dumps and you just picked me right up.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
It’s my job, I pick you up. Up you go. What are we doing here today?
Scott Drochelman:
What are we doing here today? Well, we got a Q&A. We got one of those.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh, a Q&A.
Scott Drochelman:
The Q&A we got for today. Are you ready? All right.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
What questions do you got, okay?
Scott Drochelman:
Five indicators that I should reevaluate my recovery. Five indicators that I should reevaluate my recovery. So, let’s say I’ve been doing this a little while, like present company, and maybe there’s some little things-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Okay. You saying I’m old?
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah, I am. Ancient, decrepit. You know the Crypt Keeper?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally do.
Scott Drochelman:
Remember that, back in the day? But the recovery has to change every once in a while, right? It can’t just remain the same. What’s going to work for you in the beginning isn’t necessarily the thing that’s going to work for you in the end. And what I’m hoping for is maybe you would be able to give the listeners some ideas of things that they might start to notice, things that might be indicators that it might be time to look under the hood, do some tinkering. You got anything like that?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I do, but I also want to tell you about the visual I had when you said, “Look under the hood.”
Scott Drochelman:
Great.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So I had the visual that my boobs were the hood and we lifted them up and put a stake under them.
Scott Drochelman:
Well, we said you were decrepit, so it seriously-
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
I know, I know, that’s what I was saying. I was like, “If my visual was in line with your…” And we’ll just take a look under the hood.
Scott Drochelman:
I think we all got a picture into your romantic life.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we’re taking look under the recovering hood. I took you down. I took you down, okay.
Scott Drochelman:
No, because now I’m going like, “Dac’s got grease all over his hands.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Oh God, ew. Okay, all right, all right. I’m taking it to the mechanic shop. I was just looking under the hood.
Scott Drochelman:
I just assumed that’s where this was going.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
No, no. This was literally just… It is a very clinical hood.
Scott Drochelman:
Right, sure, yep, very clinical.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Naturally, okay. And we’ve lost the plot. Okay, so we as people who struggle with some sort of addiction are compulsive relief seekers. We do not stop compulsively seeking relief because you removed our drug of no choice; however, we can design a life for ourselves that involves compulsive relief seeking in a way that isn’t harmful or as harmful.
I would say the first thing is a feeling of boredom in the sense that in your recovery you don’t feel like you’re uncovering anything. Boredom is different than serenity or peace. If you’ve been sober a while, it’ll be easier to have an idea of which is which, but I think there are some indicators I would pay attention to, one of which would be what you’re getting out of the recovery behaviors that you’re doing.
So for example, for me, some of the meetings that I was going to, I didn’t feel like I was getting the most out of that time. My ability to go to meetings has changed because I have a more full life. And so I used to go to maybe a couple mediocre meetings or meetings that were less powerful or didn’t have exactly what I needed at that time because I had more time to go to more of them. But if I only have time to go to a couple, I need those to be the types that I need in that chapter of my life.
If you feel like the meetings or the community support that you’re getting does not feel… You’re not leaving feeling consistently growing or better, because I can’t say better all the time, because growing doesn’t usually feel better, but you’re either growing or getting better, then that is something I would retool. I would think about whether or not those meetings are still the right ones and if a change needs to be made.
Scott Drochelman:
Do you have any other measuring stick for that particular piece? Because I have to imagine that if you’re somebody who’s wired for novelty and you want excitement and whatever, is there a secondary thing you can hold up to that so that you’re not just like, “Well, none of these meetings are doing what I want them to do, because this stuff’s not exciting to me or it’s not like it was at the beginning.”
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Right, right. Well, okay, so again, depending on where you are, this is just my experience, having been sober over a decade, right? At the point where I’m sober over a decade, I needed to be in meetings with people who were sober over a decade as well. The reason for that is not a status thing, it’s an experiential thing.
So they have newcomer meetings and people who are still in their first year. Your life is different in its first year, the problems. You’re trying to stay sober one day at a time. You’re repairing the damage. You’re thinking yourself into new ways. It is a very different road than 10 years down the line when the expectations are different, you’ve built a different life, you are a different person. There are many people out there who don’t even know that you existed before the person they know today.
What I found was that I needed to be in meetings with people who had the amount of time I had or longer who could walk me through and talk about lessons we were learning and things we were struggling with that didn’t directly relate to specific wreckage or difficulty not drinking. Because my life has changed so drastically since being a newcomer that, while it’s helpful to remember where I came from, and I definitely need that, and being there to help the newcomer and be an example is important, one of the things I also need is to listen to women who are sober mothers who are going through similar things and they’re saying, “I, too, felt jealous of the moms who were drinking wine at the park,” and, “I, too, struggle with how to be in a relationship and self-serving behaviors and so on and so forth.” That’s not what you’re concentrating on in the beginning.
And some people, their experience will be, “I need to interact with more newcomers because I’m not getting enough of a reminder of what this is like and what this feels like.” It’s not always the same direction. Sometimes it’s, “I’m just not in touch with who I was and the disease, the way it was for me, and I need to do that more.”
Scott Drochelman:
Okay. What about the second thing that might be an indicator that it’s time to reevaluate your recovery?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
If you find yourself in a lot of drama and a lot of toxic relationships and a lot of chaos, that may be a place where looking at either Adult Children of Alcoholics, if that was your experience, ACA, or Al-Anon, which both are amazing programs that guide people in learning how to have healthy, stable, happy relationships. That’s not necessarily what Alcoholics Anonymous or some of the 12-step programs are about, but certainly Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families and Al-Anon are places that I have gone when I need skills for managing relationships, and what my role in those relationships are, and what is pathology and what is healthy boundaries, and how much to give and how much to take. And most of us did not come in with the most fantastic relationship coping skills, so it’s not a weird thing that we need help with that, and I think that those programs are really, really valuable to upgrading your recovery and taking it to the next level.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah, I love that. So two would be, if you find the relationships you’re having are really chaotic and that’s kind of the standard place that you’ve landed, then maybe the next step is finding a group like ACA or perhaps like a codependent group of some kind, something like that, right?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Yep, yeah, codependent, yep. Any of those groups, if you land in one of them and it’s not the right one, many of those people can help you find the right one.
Scott Drochelman:
Perfect. What about number three?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Number three, if you’re really struggling with some sort of mental health issue, I think, whether that’s not being able to experience pleasure or joy, really high highs, really low lows, major, major anxiety, some sort of compulsive behaviors, depending on what modality you chose to get sober and if you are too heavily focused in one area, it’ll become unbalanced. And the goal is to always be attempting to balance. We’ll never get that perfectly.
A lot of us came to sobriety with untreated mental health struggles, and those things didn’t go away when we removed drugs and alcohol from our lives. It’s remarkable how much better your life can get if over a long period of time you remove the drugs and the alcohol, but then it can hit a stagnation where you can’t get better than where you are and the mental illness is really holding you back. Taking care metabolically, hormonally, some sort of psych evaluation, some of those things are really important pieces of the puzzle, and we need to be willing to seek help for those things in order to have the most robust recovery.
Scott Drochelman:
What were sort of the modalities and things that were most bang for the buck for you when you were working through some of the mental health stuff?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Different types of therapy, EMDR for trauma, cognitive behavioral therapy, narrative therapy. I had an amazing experience with narrative therapy, which I had never done, in 2021, where it was with a new therapist. Everybody who’s been in therapy for a long time knows the sheer dread of getting a new therapist because you have to tell them your whole story again, give them all the highlights, right? And so I was having that experience, and I was writing my story, and it was making me sad, and I brought it to her and I started telling it. She asked me something to the effect of, “Is that true,” about certain statements I would make. At first, I was like, “What the fuck? What kind of question is that, ‘Is that true?'”
It was so wild that what had happened was that I have been telling my story for so long, I had been speaking in engagements and whatever that I got into this groove of what it was. The story I was telling is not a lie, but interestingly enough, when she started to push me on, do I think that that’s true? The way I was telling my story was still in the version that was the most harsh lighting on everyone. And it’s not untrue. That most harsh lighting on everybody is not untrue, but the truth is I didn’t actually feel…
When we looked at the harsh lighting, did I feel that that was an accurate description, like when we went and got into it and into the narrative? I didn’t. I had a lot of compassion for them and, as an adult looking at it, I understood the scenarios much better. But my story was, quote, unquote, “written from the perspective of the child”, from the perspective of, “This is what happened to me. They made me do this. They had me do this. This is what they told me.” It didn’t include any of the context. But she asked me if I believed, if I felt that version of the story, and I was like, “Fuck, no, I don’t.” And it was such a wild experience and such a different feeling that came over me doing the narrative therapy and feeling like, “Yeah, these people really fucked up, no question, but I don’t think they did it maliciously. I just don’t.”
And just exploring different ways of growth, me personally, I redid my step work. I tried step work in different programs, which was very helpful and very cool. It’s a constant extraction process, but I do see a lot of people realize that what they thought was just nervousness is actually major OCD. And now that they’re 30 and have a normal job and a normal life, their peer support programs do not have enough to support them in their recovery from the OCD or from the whatever it is and they need more support than that. And I don’t know what that looks like for you, but it’s okay if those outside issues, as they say, are starting to grow and they need support. I think that’s normal.
Scott Drochelman:
Okay. What about number four?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
If you’ve had a relapse or a slip or something, I think you need to 100% reevaluate your recovery and what went wrong. A lot of people start drinking or using or whatever it is, and then they hop back with the same sponsor in the same situation and the same whatever. And I’m not saying you have to switch sponsors, but something went wrong, it deserves a real forensic analysis of what happened here.
And relapse is a process, not an event. Where did it start? What happened? What is my trigger? And, why didn’t I know? Or maybe I did know. Or maybe I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, why didn’t I think that? Why didn’t I tell anyone I was thinking that? So on and so forth. People have different paths to get to a relapse, but one should take a good hard look at what they were doing for their recovery if they find that they have a relapse and they’re coming back to it.
Scott Drochelman:
Do you find that there’s maybe a most common thread when doing that kind of analysis? Let’s say you’re a detective, Ashley, Sherlock Holmes, and you’re going to go to one spot where this whole thing started. Where would be the place that you’d start poking around first?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Our lives get big and busy and we get further and further away from the core of our group, or our support, or our belief, or whatever it is that keeps us anchored to this idea that we are alcoholic, or addicted, and that normal use is not in the realm of possibilities for us. As we slip further and further away from those anchors, we allow thoughts to slip in like, “Things are okay now. I’m a different person. I was so young. I was dating that guy. If you had my trauma, you would’ve drank the way I drank.”
There’s 10,000 things that we can come up with. Sometimes it’s just, “Fuck it.” But I would say the majority of the time, it’s just this, as you start to find yourself further and further away from the center of the pack, it’s easier for the predators to pick you off. And unfortunately, in our case, the predators are in our mind. And the predators consist of these phrases that turn into beliefs, that turn into actions. And it looks like, “It’ll be different this time. Just one. I deserve it. I deserve relief,” and those are the types of things that would be mine at least.
Scott Drochelman:
What about number five?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
Number five, if you’ve had children or some major life transition, it is time to reevaluate your recovery. And I say this because I wish I had known it more deeply when, for me, my major life transition was having my twins. I didn’t know that I was going to need to upgrade my re… I didn’t know how drastically. I mean, no parent really does. I knew that my life was going to change drastically. I did not know that my recovery was going to change drastically. I thought my recovery, the timing or the makeup of it, the schedule of it would look different, but I didn’t realize that my recovery was going to look different. And I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know why I thought that my whole life would change and that this one piece of it that’s really important and big wouldn’t change, but it didn’t occur to me, so it really blindsided me.
I’ve seen this happen with people who’ve retired, and they have entirely too much time on their hands, and they don’t have the identity, and they don’t have the schedule, and they don’t… Whatever the things are that were anchors in their life. Or people get a divorce or they move somewhere. Your recovery, if you pick up from a place you’ve lived for a while and you move to a new place where you don’t know that many people, you need to do your recovery differently. You can’t just willy-nilly it. You have to re-route, re-anchor. It is not optional. A lot of people, they’re like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable. I don’t want to go,” or it’s like, “I’ll get to it when I’m more settled, next week or whatever.” And so these life transitions are really slippery spots for people where I see a lot of relapses happen. And it’s a great time to upgrade your recovery, but if you can make it better, but more importantly, it’s an important place to note any necessary changes.
Scott Drochelman:
What’s one way that your recovery had to change after having kids? I know you got 15.
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
The tangible ways for me were, and are, as a working mother, managing the fact that my children experience it as more time away from them and that it’s a competition, an unspoken time competition. And even if I know I have to do it, and it’s the best thing for me, and it has to come first, and all of that stuff, when your kid is crying because they want you to put them to bed and you have your home group at night and you’ve been working all day and they don’t understand, or you’re exhausted and you don’t want to go, because you’re exhausted and you’ve already been doing shit all day, it can become another thing you have to do in such a visceral way.
When it started to compete with time with my children in a way that where I just… My time was so limited anyway and I was so exhausted, it really strained my commitment, or tested it, however you want to look at it. I make it work, but I just never had experienced the competition of time.
Scott Drochelman:
Yeah. No, I think that’s really fair and relatable. If folks are finding themselves in this place where they feel like they need to revamp their recovery and they’re not sure where to turn, where might they find helpful information?
Ashley Loeb Blassingame:
So if you are looking for ways to update your recovery, I am happy to field any resource questions. Email us at podcast@lionrock.life. We answer our email. Feel free to contact us if you have questions or if you have a Q&A that you’d like to recommend. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a diverse and supportive recovery community offering weekly over 70 online peer support meetings, useful recovery information, and entertaining content. Whether you’re newly sober, have many years in recovery, or you’re recovering from something other than drugs and alcohol, we have space for you. Visit www.lionrock.life today and enter promo code COURAGE for one month of unlimited peer support meetings free. Find the joy in recovery at Lionrock.life.
