Change rarely comes easily. Making significant change in any aspect of life is really hard, as well as frightening. The greater the change, the higher the degree of difficulty and fear associated with it. Similar to physical workouts, there is a general correlation between the discomfort we are willing to go through and the outcomes we get—“no pain, no gain.” The greatest growth comes from pushing ourselves to go beyond the boundaries of the boxes of familiarity and comfort that we have constructed.
A lot of people stay in situations that are painful and unhealthy because they are familiar with the pain of their specific situation. They are well acquainted with it and know exactly how it works and what the results will be. Their current circumstances provide an incongruous comfort based on familiarity, predictability, and certainty. Even if it is horrible, they know what to expect. Usually, this dynamic operates under the surface of conscious awareness such that, even when someone knows that change is necessary and wants to change, he or she seems unable to do so.
What we know is always much more comfortable than what we don’t know, despite the potential other options may have to be better and healthier. The attraction and power of familiarity and the comfort it provides is not to be underestimated. This is the essence of the emotional cement that keeps people stuck in circumstances that are unsatisfying, unhealthy, and sometimes even dangerous, such as living situations; jobs/career paths; relationships, including those that are abusive or violent; and active addiction.
The fear of the unknown and the uncertainty that goes hand-in-hand with it is natural, normal, and understandable. Sometimes, it can be debilitating. For many people—in this case, me—change occurs only when the pain of staying the same outweighs the fear of doing something different.
After using for over thirty-five years, and using one or more substances virtually every day for thirty years, I could no longer live with drugs. But, I couldn’t see how I could possibly live without them. I was terrified by the prospect of trying to negotiate life’s emotional and physical minefields without mind- and/or mood-altering chemicals. I felt like I was being dropped into a foreign and uncharted wilderness in the middle of the night, during a snowstorm, without GPS, a compass, or even a map. I had no idea how to navigate this completely unfamiliar territory. I just knew that I couldn’t do it alone.
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal
with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
you are the one who gets burned.”
THE BUDDHA
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Past experiences, especially those from childhood, are legacies that can leave lasting imprints upon us. The messages we receive growing up in our family of origin, neighborhood, and community cast long shadows over how we learned to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. As a result, my fundamental patterns of thinking, expressing emotion, decision-making, and behaving were established long before the onset of my active addiction.
The images are seared into my memory with crystal clarity, though everything floats in shades of gray. Even beyond the black-and-white television broadcast, the entire tableau was monochromatic like the all too common metropolitan New York day where the overcast is so thick you can feel the gloominess and the weight of the air on your skin. Although I was focused on the screen, I was also intently watching my mother watching and reacting in real time as the horse-drawn caisson bearing the body of the thirty-fifth president of the United States made its excruciatingly slow march as the centerpiece of the funeral procession.
The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the street surface seemed to echo off the walls of our living room. Although I could figure out from the overall aesthetic that this was a somber occasion, through observing my mother I began to sense how immense and tragic an event this was. Her sobbing filled the entire house, filling my small world. I hesitantly asked questions in an attempt to better understand what I was witnessing on TV and in the room, but even though she was there, she really wasn’t. Under her crying, she just kept repeating to no one in particular, “He was such a great man,” over and over like some sort of mantra. Indeed, as I would come to learn, John F. Kennedy (for all of the flaws and self-indulgences that would be revealed many years later) was a figure of remarkable promise and possibility.
My mother’s sadness engulfed me as my attention shifted back and forth between the pictures on the TV screen and her responses to them. I don’t know how long the television coverage of the funeral lasted, but it seemed to go on for days. Everything else faded away and I became so present-centered that I entered a state of trance, a state that would later become very familiar to me. If I listen closely, I can still hear the sound of horse hooves on concrete.
The assassination of JFK was a national trauma that became fused into the emotional DNA of America. His death would come to represent, not only a loss of national innocence, but also the death of a collective sense of unlimited potential. Of course I had no real sense of any of this at the time, but somehow, at least as far as the weight of the moment, I got it. Another aspect of my experience of that dreary yet mesmerizing day that would become familiar to me was that, emotionally, I was on my own.
It was late November 1963, and I was four-and-a-half years old. By this time, my younger brother was nearly three, and the older of my two younger sisters was almost eight months old. My youngest sister would be born four months later, just 360 days separating the two of them. Doing the math reveals that I am the oldest of four children born to my parents in less than six years. As my father would delight in saying to anyone who expressed interest in this peculiar form of family planning, “We held at two pair and yielded to a full house!”
My parents didn’t believe in wasting time. When they announced to their own families that they were getting married all of six weeks after they first met, my maternal grandmother asked the obvious question, “Do they have to?” As the family narrative has it, they weren’t pregnant, it was simply a love-at-first-sight whirlwind courtship that enveloped them in its inevitability: they knew. My parents have always insisted that all of their children were fully planned. Every family has its mythology.
The very first indication that I had a potential predisposition to using drugs came when I was two years old. When my father returned home from work each evening, his ritual included a glass of Scotch. As the story goes, according to both my parents, even at this tender age, I displayed an obvious attraction to the alcohol—reaching for his Scotch and wanting to taste it myself.
This occurred on a nightly basis for some time and became increasingly annoying. My father was impressed by my persistence, and ultimately determined that one taste would be aversive enough to cure me of my interest. So, with my mother’s reluctant consent, he allowed me a sip. To their complete astonishment, as they both report it (it has always been a rare occurrence—kind of like a solar eclipse—when the two of them remember the same incident exactly the same way), my verbatim response was as follows: “Hot . . . burn . . . good . . . more!” That might have been a clue.
My father was a workaholic who regularly got home long after the rest of the family had eaten dinner. As a manufacturer’s representative in the furniture industry, he worked on commission and was effectively self-employed. His work days were spent driving throughout the New