My wife, Sheri, tells me often that I walk around like I’m carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. In fairness to me, I spend most of my time writing about some pretty weighty topics and communicating with people who are trying to keep their heads above water in the deep end of the pool. The work I do is incredibly rewarding and totally fulfilling. But my wife is right, it’s not very jovial nor lighthearted.
Untoxicated Podcast
His cough made a hollow, painful, barking sound, and his breathing was labored. Her infant son’s struggles to breath and the sudden onset of it all was beyond terrifying. It was the middle of the night, and she scooped him from his crib to rush him to the hospital. Her confident actions were betrayed by the look of panic on her face and the trembling she felt through her entire body.
Her husband seemed half coherent as she tried to wake him and explain the urgency of the moment. She worried for the safety of her young daughter as she raced her baby son out the door and into the car. Her husband had been drinking that evening. He had drank until he passed out, and now she was leaving her daughter in his disoriented and semiconscious care.
We all know that alcohol abuse wrecks relationships and destroys families. But getting sober doesn’t fix anything. Just like recovery from addiction requires hard work, when alcohol leaves a relationship, the couple must be prepared to address the damage the addiction caused.
Sometimes, hard work isn’t enough to save the marriage.
“Go to Dairy Queen and get your favorite flavor of Blizzard,” says my good friend and Untoxicated Podcast partner, Jason Polk. Jason is an addiction therapist who has for his entire career offered this advice to clients when they are dealing with cravings to drink alcohol or use. It is basic, fundamental advice given not just by Jason, but by most addiction recovery professionals and on every social media platform in early sobriety communities. The idea is that a sugar-filled treat will take the edge off the craving and be an alcohol or drug substitute. The associated phrase is, “harm reduction.” It makes sense, and it works in the short-run. The problem with this advice is it’s dead wrong and actually provides oxygen to the very addiction the sufferer is trying so desperately to suffocate.
New on the Untoxicated Podcast – Jason and I talk about my dance with addiction.
It started with sips from my dad’s beer when I was young, grew to experimentation in high school, graduated to constant binge drinking in college, developed into a daily habit in young adulthood, and metastasized into alcoholism as I plummeted into the pit of debilitating alcohol-induced depression.
Writing thousands and thousands of words about my experiences with alcoholism and recovery is rewarding, but it doesn’t fully scratch my itch to explore the astonishingly stigmatized and misunderstood topics related to addiction. Blathering on in writing is not enough for me. Now I’ve got to talk about it, too.
Introducing: