My Truth about Addiction

I spent a great deal of time in addictions. I spent a great deal of time in individual counseling and in group counseling. I have journaled, looking inside at my demons and cried with clients. I have seen many chemical dependencies, as they define them, and a few behavioral dependencies. But there is so much more than my expereince

One of the things I learned in this journey is that anything that alters how you feel, can become addicting. ANYTHING. It is said by many who are in an addiction pattern that they can stop anytime. Fair enough.

If you can stop anytime and are living a life of slow destruction, lies, abuse, stealing, hurting others and yourself, then by all means continue on but don’t be offended when others protect themselves by shutting you out. But don’t be that person and tell everyone you can stop anytime, but need help. Lies are a way of life in addiction, so start by stopping your lies. Your lies are not nearly as hidden and crafty as you think.

Your lies are the biggest symptom of your addiction and a first indication.

If you truly can stop anytime and you are hurting others, then you are choosing to hurt others, deliberately, to serve yourself.

I want to address something straight up. Others can see addiction and almost always do long before the person becoming addicted. They aren’t assholes. They aren’t ignorant. They aren’t always wrong and in fact, VERY likely right. Addiction does not enter your life with a marching band and fireworks, it is like fine dust settling on everything in your life, slowly coating it. It is unnoticeable at first, and easy to wipe away, if you even look. But eventually, anyone else can see the depth of it, everywhere, on everything. That is how addiction arrives. Those in addiction are the last to notice it and first and last to deny it.

I said in the beginning, a person can become addicted to anything that alters how they feel. Lets get something straight, addictions have a physical component but addiction is emotional, not just chemical. By altering how we feel, a behavior or chemical rewards us and helps us emotionally regulate. Emotional regulation is something most people struggle with.

When understanding addiction we start to understand that the behavior or chemical triggers a chemical change in our brain and we like it. How do I know we like it? Because we keep doing it. I know of no one who continually wants to stub their toe or be racked. I’m sure there are people who like it. Why? Because they trigger a chemical reaction and some, will like that chemical reaction. But no one I know likes it.

I am also going to hit a myth head-on. THC is addictive. I have heard it is not addictive because it is natural. So is cocaine. So is opium. If you want to say natural as in unaltered, no. Very few people who use THC eat the plant. Maybe in your fun brownies but that is not how you consume it 99.9% of the time, if ever.

You may say it is unrefined, fair enough, but cocoa leaves can also be chewed and used like chewing tobacco. Which leads me to chewing tobacco. It is also addictive yet it is hardly modified from natural form. THC is addictive, and to claim it is not may be your experience but is ignorant of the realities and makes you sound like you are making an excuse and thus weak.

You sound stupid making the claim. You really do.

Addiction is full of excuses. As I mentioned, addiction slowly enters your life and takes over. Excuses are a natural byproduct of the slow changes that come to accommodate addiction. You will spend more resources to meet the needs of your use. Time and money are the first casualties. Relationships follow. Property often follows. Health usually follows and then there is legal and life itself.

There is a really simple way to understand addiction. It is the greatest, most amazing, loving, kinky, down and dirty magical and elating lover you have ever dreamed of and all other people in your life will take a back seat to that lover, no matter how much you loved them before. You are always having an affair with your wife or husband when you are in an addiction because your only real love is that addiction. No one else amounts to a pile of shit compared to your drug.

NO ONE.

There are people who can spend a life in use or addiction and die at a statistically normal time. There are a few people who may also use a life long time and not seem to suffer any ill health or legal issues. I’d say it is possible, but very unlikely.

Here are the realities I have seen. Addiction will eventually kill you or contribute to your death unless you stop it soon enough. Addiction will always alter your life. I have watched people and been with them in their final hours of dying from addiction. But how and why someone dies is up to them; be it naturally or even though you can stop anytime.

Lets go back to that idea that idea that you can stop anytime. Lets assume that is true and you don’t. You know the addiction will likely kill you eventually. So if you die in your addiction, slouched over in a doorway downtown next to the old armory, shit in your pants and half naked … we should not care right? You chose that path. You chose that road with many exits and chose to not quit, anytime. You accepted that end. You knew that end even if you deny it. Your life would likely not be celebrated. Those who loved you once, and miss you still, may never even know you are dead. A pauper’s grave in a city cemetery is where it may end, anonymous.

You know that but can stop anytime, right? More power to ya.

I have touched on the usual addictions, cocaine, opiates, THC but also, meth, and benzos. And the king, alcohol. These are the common ones. Some can kill you in withdraw, others will make you wish for death.

Just because you have a prescription or your DoC is manufactured by a billion dollar conglomerate you can buy stock in does not make it safe. The excuse is hollow and easy for anyone else to see through.

But lets touch on other things that can be addictive that you may not see …

Smoking, Coffee, Chewing Tobacco, Caffeinated Drinks, Diet Drinks, Selfies, Sex, Masturbating, Video Games, TV, Tattoos, Piercings, Cutting, Burning, food-controling it and abusing it, Adrenalin activities, Exercise, Texting, Porn, Gambling, Work, Lip Balm, Plastic Surgery, Teeth Whitening, moisturizer, shopping, music, tanning, relationships, dating and dating apps, social media … now some really odd ones, all of which I have seen. Medical issues, eating non food products, picking and damaging your body in a non medical way and maybe the one most won’t accept but I have witnessed, over the counter drugs.

All of these things and many more alter how you feel or more dangerously, how you feel about yourself. If they do not introduce a chemical to your body, then how can they be addictive? Simple, the same way the ones that do, do it. Your body does not become addicted to a drug as much as how that drug alters the bodies functioning.

Your body responds to its own neurotransmitters. By altering how much and how often they are produced, you alter how you feel. Serotonin, dopamine and Norepinephrine are all made in your body, among many many others. These can be and usually are triggered by the things we become addicted to. In other words, we usually become addicted to chemicals we have in our own body already, that are artificially triggered by chemicals or activities not in our bodies.

Addiction is complex and what is said above, is a very simplistic definition.

The most damaging part of addiction is not the medical or financial or even legal issues. Time and time again I have heard from loved ones that it is the lies that hurt the most. Let me be very clear … addicts suck at lying. They are good at it for a time and to some people for a while, but you really fool no one. You may know what your loved ones want to hear but no, you are not as good at lies as you think. In most cases, you fucking suck at it.

It is the constant and very manipulative lies that eventually erode and shape even the truth. After enough lies to feed and defend an addiction, you cannot be trusted to tell the truth so even the truth sounds like a lie. It is the lies that are the true scars. Even after you die, it is those scars from lies that will still bleed.

I have watched and sat by as people within an addiction pattern have told the biggest whopping lies and yet they feel it will work and everyone will believe them. That addiction pattern can remain even while someone is clean and in recovery. The lies and manipulation become a way of life to an addict. The lies and manipulation become survival skills while in addiction, and few people can give up a survival skill.

This is also part of why many people may never trust an addict again. The lies often continue. This is also why the fractures within a social network that becomes shaped by addiction cannot be healed fully.

Abuse of something is not addiction, but they are close cousins. I have abused caffeine and it is amazing how easily I can go back it it, most often lying to myself that I had kicked that addiction and the new pattern was ok. We become masters at lying to and manipulating ourselves.

Now for the good news. Most people who become addicted to something can end it on their own. Most people may not even realize they were addicted, but simply become annoyed by the demands of the pattern and stop it. Many others cannot stop it without help.

I sat in a group therapy room and listened to people make excuses about their need for pain killers and others about how life is so anxiety inducing they couldn’t function without pot. I have heard alcohol is legal! And also that pot was legal and natural. I’ve heard that someone’s meth addiction is the fault of the Nazis who invented it. I’ve heard that a person’s wife was a fool because he was not a bad man, and his lies were the drug talking. And I have heard that the horrible things done to the client’s daughter were not their fault, since they were drunk …

I have known people who as a child were prostituted by their mother to feed the mother’s addiction. I have listened as someone told me they traded their child for a lid. I have known people who felt a gallon of Vodka a day is not too much. I listened as a man who was in treatment and sober for the longest time in the last 20 years, had no idea where his kids were. His wife had remarried and moved in his days of drinking. His kids by then woulda been in their 20s-30s. He felt he might be a grandfather, and may never know it. Or they him.

I write this because it strikes me how so many downplay addiction as an issue, or a problem … it is a force of absolute destruction like an F5 tornado that wipes the ground clean and removes all trace that there had once been life there.

Lie if you want, but your lies will leave deep scars that may not ever be recovered from. The damage you do is real and in the form of people. I have watched people destroy themselves and everything and every relationship they used to hold dear.

I have also watched men and women fight to come out the other side and thrive. That little girl that was prostituted by her mother, was later a client in my office as I worked in addictions. She fought for her life. She fought by working WITH her social worker and her probation officer for a better life, and they backed her. The head of probation backed her. The judge backed her. They didn’t do it because it was their job; it was because she worked hard for herself, so they supported her efforts.

When she left my treatment center, she moved on to out-patient and sober living. She attended a program to get her GED. Then her Associates Degree. Then her 5 year Master’s in Clinical Counseling. I attended the last two graduations. In the end of our journey together, I shook her hand as my peer, no longer my client.

If you choose to remain in your addiction, that is your choice and I respect it.

However:

Recovery is real, but it will be the hardest work you ever do.

No one can do it for you.

You have to work harder for your own recovery than anyone else.

You will not be able to repair all the damage you did.

Some people and relationships, in fact most, will be forever lost.

It will be worth it.

True American West

I have written on this before but I keep finding new truths that interest me so I am going to hit on it again.  I am often intrigued by the American West and it’s culture.  Part of the fascination is our own fascination with the west in our own time.  So much of it is not true.  So, so not true.  So much of it is mixed with fantasy and myth and of course some of it is true.

Some that is myth is due to penny novels and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.  Some was marketing.  Some was the simple fact that a story retold changes and grows usually in size and myth.  Still more of the untrue stories is a product of 20th century marketing based on books and movies that were successful and thus a pattern was cut and the public set expectations for the next version.

I’ll start this version of the true west writing with two major contributors to what we envision when we think of the wild west.  Louis L’Amour and John Wayne.  The second will require a little explanation but I’ll start with the first.

Louis L’Amour wrote almost exclusively about the American West.  After WWII, his work started to take off and in his life, he wrote over 100 books.  He didn’t establish the Wild West, that was already set in place but he popularized it for the 20th century and the era after WWII is an era I will write about extensively as an era where we set things in stone, even if wrong.  For L’Amour’s part, he set the American West in stone and established forever, the cowboy and the lawlessness we assume to be true.

John Wayne is not so much an active maker of the myth, but he brought that myth to life.  Keep in mind he did not write the screen plays, nor did he write the books they were often based on, but he sure made many of them famous.  For every myth, there is something or someone that brought it to life.  The Duke, was the personification of the myth.  He became iconic and thus the west we see in movies became iconic with him.

Lets dispense with some basic info.  The “Wild West” as we know it, or think we know it, was the American West, west of the Mississippi between the years 1865 and 1895.  Now these are not exact but they set the scene.  The west at that time was largely territory and there was little law or structure.  This meant it fostered independence, and lawlessness.  It also meant that it attracted a certain kinda people.  Men who were running from a past were drawn to the west.  Men who flourished outside those laws, also were drawn to the west. Many who came to America in search of their fortune or destiny saw the blank canvas of the American West as a place to carve out their portion of it.

Notice, I didn’t mention women in that description.  Unlike the novels and movies, there were very few women in the west most of this time.  There was little need for women other than the later stages when settling started.  The ‘taming’ of the west was mostly done by men.  Most women in the west, if not married to a living man, were prostitutes.  This is just simple reality.  The west was a VERY hard place to live.

Many of the traditional roles of the day for women were filled by men of lesser fortune.  Cooking and laundry were often done by Asian, mostly from China.  Cleaning was rarely done and there were few women so there were still few children to rear.  Women were present when the settling of the west started, my own great and great great grandmothers included.  But even when coming west for settling, they were stuck in usual roles or the aforementioned prostitution.

They were almost never mine owners, shop owners or bar owners like many movies portray.  They didn’t work in mines.  They didn’t ride herds of cattle.  They didn’t do most of the manual labor that is the core of living in an untamed land.  They also didn’t wear big colorful dresses like in so many ‘Wayne’ Westerns.  They did though raise families.  If they came west with a husband, they raised the children and ran the household which back then was far more than it is now.  They often were good shots, if they had guns which most did not.

Another element of the movies and books that was very inaccurate was Indians.  The tribes of the American West were mostly not violent.  They were largely farmers or hunters/gatherers.  They had very firm rules and laws to their communities and were helpful and friendly.  We simply pushed them out and some decided to fight back.  Most did not.  They were also very clean.

They became a standard in books and movies because in order to have hero’s, we must have an enemy.  If you are going to portray an enemy, they are usually clear as the bad guy.  In silent movies, Indians were easily seen differently than the cowboys and thus made for good visual enemies in a silent movie.  They got a raw deal in westerns, shocking.

Another thing we can dispense with is the general idea of the cowboy.  That is a 20th century term.  They were cattlemen.  Also, they were usually foreign or minorities working very hard jobs for little pay, as I have mentioned before.  Although many cattlemen were black, this is after the civil war remember, most were Mexican.  There were white cattlemen as well but they were not like we see in the movies.

First off, not many spoke mainstream English.  This was not because there were no laws and they were free to do anything they liked, it was because most were immigrants from Europe.  Many were German.  a significant number were Russian.  There were also Italians and Irish and a surprising number of Scandinavians.  In black and white photos, they look like modern American’s in old clothes but they were usually foreign born, spoke poor English, were illiterate, poor and FILTHY.

The life of a cattleman was transient in nature.  They moved from employer to employer when either opportunity presented, weather and fortune demanded or they got fired.  They lived on a narrow diet and lived far from any medical help so they had short painful lives.  No one brushed their teeth and they only bought new clothes when the old ones wore out.  They wore the same clothes everyday.  As you can imagine, they almost never bathed.

Val Kilmer’s teeth never would have appeared in Tombstone.

As I have mentioned, tune into any Clint Eastwood movie and you see his hats.  John Wayne was also famous for his.  Very very few wore cowboy hats in the American West.  They were very expensive and were only invented in the start of the wild west era.  Mexicans had smaller brimmed sombrero that was popular but the main hat warn in the west was a bowler.  Cattlemen of the west wore hats that either reflected their culture or the most effective hat for their occupation.

Another of the most common hats in the west was surplus hats from the Civil War.  There was some issue with these though as they also marked your standing in the war in regards to winning or losing side.  Many from the war headed west and old rivalries die hard.

No one really knows where the high noon shoot out got started as a myth but it is.  There is no record of any.  Ever.  Anywhere.  Most of the traits we know to be true about gun fighters of the west are movie myth.  Even holsters were not as common as movies would have you believe.  Most did not carry a gun and most guns owned, of which there were not as many as you’d believe, were rifles.  Those who did carry guns usually wore them in a belt or pocket.  Which is easy to see, would have been smaller guns.

Look at the photo above, of Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch gang.  That is an authentic photo.  No guns.  Not saying they didn’t own them, and this was obviously not what they wore all the time but they owned clothes that do not meet our expectations as set by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood or in fact, Newman and Redford.

Hollywood’s version of Butch and the Wild Bunch

The idea of a low slung holster tied to a man’s thigh ready for a fast draw was more a case of extreme exception.  Most gunman’s reputations were altered or exaggerated.  Bat Masterson was well known for his self promotion.  Wyatt Earp so inflated his exploits to build his brand, he could not escape his ‘past’ through his retirement years.  Many secondary characters in the history of the west such as Johnny Ringo built a reputation based on killing unarmed people.

True gunmen did exist though.  The ones with some of the biggest proven reputation were lawmen.  Dallas Stoudenmire was a sheriff was the protagonist in what became known as the 4 dead in 5 seconds fight.  This was also one of those rare cases of a gunman wearing dual guns.

Elfego Baca was a sheriff who got in a shootout with 80 men.  Supposedly there were more than 4,000 shots fired but that’s doubtful considering how much money this exchange would have cost in ammunition.  When that ammunition ran out, Sheriff Baca simply walked out of the house he had been hiding in.  This is also evidence that guns did exist in the wild west, even if concentrated in violent encounters.

Also, movies would have you believe that many gun fighters sought out one another to become king of the hill.  In reality, the cause of death of most noted gunmen was pretty benign.  Those who were killed by gun by another gunman, were usually ambushed with no shoot-out occurring.  Often, these were shots in the back.  Gunfights were just not that common.  Gunfights usually killed others, not one another, just like today.

From the era of The Great Train Robbery, Bronco Billy set a scene that may be able to one day be seen at the most enduring in movie history.  He invented the look and the tone of every western to follow.  If not for Bronco Billy, we would not have Clint or Wayne or the Magnificent Seven.  If not for Bronco Billy, would we have Han Solo?

John Wayne added a star and good-guy to the role of the cowboy, previously portrayed as an anti-hero.  The image became a symbol of America, even though so many movie westerns were actually Italian, including the most famous one for Clint.  Wayne became a strong male, masculine and American icon, no fault of his usually perpetuating more myth than fact.

There is a strong theory that the High Noon Shootout was a product of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, thus the Wild West Shootout.  This was a device used to show the prowess of gunmen, demonstrating the accuracy and fast draw skills that could be had.  This, and in fact none of his show, was meant as fact.  He was an entertainer, just like Hollywood.

I love the American West but having lived there and spent more time in a Cowboy hat, (designed in NYC, BTW) than most people, I also know like many things, it more myth than fact.  Pioneering the west was VERY hard work.  Living in the west will teach anyone that the environment is not an easy one to exist in.  It can be very dry, very hot, very cold and very hard to maintain consistent crop production or cattle alive.

My own relatives settled there in the 1860s, during the Wild West.  They owned one rifle.  The reason for owning it was to shoot small game to eat and defend their own animals.  The ladies were the gun wielders, not the men.  My grandmother was the shot in her family, not her many brothers.  They were not attacked by Indians but did see them.  The lawmen in the area primarily helped manage disputes among farmers, not hunt down gangs or outlaws.

The stereotypical western icon did exist, rarely.  There were many men who wore cowboy hats, after they were invented, leather chaps, spurs, and wore guns, both long and short.   My family also has spurs warn by my forefathers.  But these men were rare.  Hanging on the wall next to the spurs are branding irons.  There were many more spurs and branding irons than Colt Peacemakers.

Notice how the rifle limits the horse’s neck.  This would never work if the gentleman was herding cattle.  Perhaps he was a scout for a herd of cattle, leading through open range.

The Wild West myth is amazingly fun.  I love my hat.  But I have no illusions that in wearing it I am connecting with my relatives who settled a homestead by modern day Windsor, CO.  They worked their asses off and that was the true west.  It was settled by the plow and hard working people, not guns and threatened by Indians or outlaws.  So today, if you head west looking for a myth, save a lot of money and rent a nice western on TV.  I suggest Dances With Wolves.