Often it is crucial to seek various types of treatment or medications to sustain recovery, and whatever is determined to be the best course of action is the best course of action, period. People in recovery sometimes offer a lot of judgment and misperceptions, including negative reactions toward medications, counseling, and people with a dual diagnosis. There are some who believe twelve-step recovery is the answer and the only answer, but I believe there are others who need more. I have watched people try to go off their meds because of others’ disdain for meds in the rooms of recovery, and all it did was drive them back to drink or to engage in other unhealthy behaviors. If people need medications or other treatments to sustain certain chemicals in their brains to obtain and maintain recovery, in my opinion they should listen to their doctors’ recommendations. Later on, they can always look for alternatives when they have some time in recovery under their belts.
My take on this was that it was up to me determine what worked for me, in consultation with a sponsor, therapist, doctor, or all three. The beauty of recovery was that it was mine and mine alone. I charted my path as it suited me. There were many road maps placed before me in the rooms of recovery, and many of them worked, so I was beginning to use what applied and let go of what didn’t apply for me.
Still on the pink cloud “high” of early recovery, I was ready to learn everything I could and beginning to feel things I had never felt or had refused to feel in the past. Counseling, I thought, would be a great way to help me process my emotions appropriately. In addition to my program of recovery, I needed counseling to dive deep into my past assaults, to take a closer look at my dysfunctional relationship with my mother and how that played into my own addiction, and to really understand why I drank and drugged.
I began to see a therapist who was located near St. Andrew’s church and was recommended to me by several others in the program. She was a middle-aged woman with whom I felt comfortable almost immediately. She had a wonderful way about her, wasn’t judgmental in any way, and put me at ease quickly. We began working together, twice a week at first. I had nothing but time on my hands, and my medical assistance was paying for my therapy, so I was taking advantage of it. We had to establish a time line, and I had to bring her up to speed on my life. That alone was exhausting. It is sometimes so much easier to talk with someone who knows you, but at that time, those people were few and far between in my life. So with every new encounter, I found myself telling my life story again. In hindsight, that was really a good thing because it made me talk about my past and expose my disease constantly and on many different levels. With my therapist this was on the most intimate of levels because she needed to know it all— the good, the bad, and the ugly—to fully understand how my mind worked and how she could begin to help me heal. She continually gave me homework assignments to do so I could see myself more clearly. We talked about everything. I found myself opening up to her easily, and before I knew it the hour was up and it was time for me to leave. She was helping me identify my patterns and understand my personality, both my assets and my flaws.
Between my therapist and my sponsor, I was beginning to have some nice checks and balances in my life that had never been there before. I had people I could confide in and go to for guidance.
BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH GOING ON DURING THE time between my meetings and my therapy sessions, I became obsessed with Oprah Winfrey. I had always loved her show, and it was one thing that had bonded my father and me in the past. For whatever reason, he always made sure he was home by 4:00 p.m. when I got home from school, and we would watch Oprah together. It was nice to have something that bonded my father and me, because we didn’t have a whole lot in common as I was growing up. I think I just confused and scared the shit out of him most of the time. He wasn’t equipped to deal with a teenage girl on his own. Since he and my mother divorced after my sexual assault and he stayed to raise me and my two older brothers, he was a little lost in the parenting department. He was used to the role of provider; but with my mother gone, he had to attempt to provide the more motherly, emotional type of support too. He had no clue how to do that, so instead we would sit and watch Oprah and try to connect through the topics on the show.
It wasn’t as though I missed the motherly stuff, because my mother was not your stereotypical mom. She had been verbally abusive and emotionally absent all my life, so to have her physically absent as well didn’t seem like that much of a difference to me. When I would act out, as I had become accustomed to doing, my father would tiptoe around me as though I might scream or shatter at any time. In many ways, that was pretty accurate. Back then I was a walking live wire at all times, so no one could ever predict my emotional outbursts or severe mood swings.
So now here I was years later, glued to the TV at 4:00 p.m. each day like an obsessed evangelist watching The 700 Club, waiting for my daily dose of scripture. In early recovery, people are like sponges; we soak up everything around us. I would go to my daily meeting and share my newfound Oprah enlightenment, which would always rouse a chuckle out of everyone. In fact, it earned me the nickname “Oprah Jen” for my first year at meetings in Center Hall.
Instead of laughing at me, though, those people understood what I was saying and going through. They understood how new to all this I was and how, in early recovery, everything is a deep and new revelation.
I was starting to go stir-crazy being in the house and not working, so I went to the local hobby store and looked around. Being alone for eight hours or more was too much for me, and I needed something to occupy my mind and my time. I looked around the shop at various art projects, stitch work, needlepoint, and paint-by-number kits. I had tried all these activities at different points of my life, but never finished any of them. I learned in rehab and in therapy that I had an issue with finishing things. I am inherently a perfectionist, and in therapy I discovered that once I had started using, I stopped tasks completely. I was afraid they wouldn’t live up to the enormous expectations I had in my mind, so it was easier to make excuses as to why I never finished them.
That fear of imperfection kept me from finishing various things in my life. I barely graduated high school because I skipped so many classes and so many days that the administrators said I was too delinquent to attend graduation. The ceremony was seen as a privilege, and I didn’t quite earn mine. After that I attempted to take some college-level classes, but stopped attending the classes midway through the semester because I just didn’t feel like going. I was only twenty-two years old, but during my time in the workforce I’d had more than thirty-six jobs in almost as many fields: waitress, hostess, bartender, insurance claims adjuster, travel agent, receptionist, shampoo girl, medical assistant. You name it, and I had tried it—but never finished it. I would decide one day that I wanted to go to college and would start filling out applications, and then toss them aside to collect dust on my desk. Another day I would decide I wanted to be a flight attendant, call the agency, get the application, and tell everyone I was going to pursue this career, only to find the application months later sitting on top of the unfinished college applications. I was never committed to anything, so it was easy to abandon things. As I left for rehab, my former counselor looked at me and said, “Well, you are going to rehab for thirty days. Finish that.” I did finish rehab, so that was my first completed task to date.
My new therapist was also big on getting me to finish at least one simple task. So as I stood in front of this wall of crafts, my eyes were drawn to a paint-by-number kit that showed two wolves and beautiful moonlit scenery. I picked it up and looked it over. It seemed easy enough; it came with the canvas labeled with numbers to show you where to paint each color, a plastic row of paints with coinciding numbers on them, and a cheap paintbrush with hard, plastic bristles. I decided if I was going to do this paint-by-number thing, I was going to take this work of art seriously, so I moved over to the paintbrush aisle to pick out a real paintbrush. I found a nice brush and went to the counter to pay for