What To Do When Tragedy Strikes

What are you supposed to do when tragedy strikes and you feel depressed or angry about a severe loss when you are in recovery?

Transcript

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I'm again for Dr. Addiction Life Guard Moddown. I'm Dr. Doctor Burger Psychologist, Licensed Professional Health Forum and Addiction Special. You are suffering from addiction, injury, trauma, whatever it is. I'm here to help. You're in search of help to try to get your life back together. Join me here at Dr. Addiction Life Guard, the Addiction Recovery Podcast. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. What do you do when you're in recovery and life hits you with a devastating loss? Death, divorce, some type of tragedy. What do you do? Well, the urge to use many times is what hits people when that happens. I've had a number of clients over the last month who have had severe tragedies occur to them, and I I can see them spinning around in circles and really struggling. And it's a it's a tough thing when people are going through tough times. And your old coping mechanism of usage of chemicals kicks back in. So that that's a dangerous um that's a dangerous thing to encounter, frankly. Um we you know, human beings can be exposed to all kinds of things. It could be large amounts of tragedy or just maybe a single one. But um we're living our life and and things happen. So the the loss plus the old coping mechanism as a reflex, that puts you in a relapse risk category. And that's that's why it's really dangerous for us if we're in recovery. So what do we what what are you supposed to do? Um you're going through your life, everything's fine, and boom, something happens. Sometimes it's out of the blue, you know, that's the way it is with death a lot of times. Um somebody dies unexpectedly. Maybe there's a car accident or maybe a suicide that you weren't, you know, aware that somebody was really in a tough spot, but it can happen. So the the process that goes on is you get you know, it it's it's essentially grief um that happens. You know, if you lose a relationship, divorce, that's that's grieving. If you lose somebody loses their life, that's grieving. If um, you know, there's a lot of people losing jobs uh now, and that's grieving. So this grief can trigger those feelings of shock and anger, numbness, despair. Uh there's a helplessness to it, right? And so a lot of times when people are suffering these kinds of losses, they're they're just they don't know what to do. There's a sometimes they shut down, sometimes you don't. But what the addict feels is panic and run, you know, a lot of it's run. They want to get away from that feeling. So in in terms of of what you're experiencing, it's a loss of control, and it's a it's it's a terrible tragedy. There's no question. Um, you know, I've used this metaphor many times in my podcast about, you know, what what is grief? Grief is a feeling that's you don't have control, so it's being stuck in a rip current. And if anybody's ever been in the ocean and they've been in a rip current, you you know you're f you panic. You're moving, usually you're moving either across the shore, sometimes it's out uh and across, and sometimes it's just straight out. And what everybody does when they get caught in a rip current is they want to swim against the current to get out of it, and that's the exact wrong way to do it. You know, if you're fighting a rip current, the worst thing you could do is start swimming against the current, straight into the the current that's pulling you out. That's the wrong way to do it, because you're gonna end up getting exhausted, and that's how people drowned uh when they don't need to. And so you you've got to figure out what what to do about this grief, what to do about this tragedy. And that's the thing that usually is uh the thing that hangs people up, is they really don't know what to do. So they start doing the wrong thing. So if you're using, that's the wrong thing. You're going right back to the problems of the past uh that you encountered with your usage, and you're in, you know, you've relapsed. So the way to get through a rip current is to go across the current. So you're going diagonal, not perpendicular to it. You're not trying to go straight into it uh because you're gonna get washed out and you'll drown. So you go across the current, you go sideways, and you swim and swim and swim until finally you're back at shore. But you do it sideways. That's how you get out of it. And the two the two ways that rip currents happen is they're constant or it's in a narrow channel within the beach. And if it's in a narrow channel, as soon as you're going across the rip current, you're gonna swim out of the rip current and you can go right back to shore. If the entire water is moving and there is no channel, so to speak, going straight straight out, you're eventually gonna get there. It's gonna take longer. So the fight is a good fight when you're doing it the right way. Um so there's uh the experience of the loss happens and you're feeling it, and there are immediate survival steps as as addicts. Um we we've got to do what is what is addiction's primary methodology is to isolate. Isolation is addiction's best friend, so don't isolate. That's what addicts do. We like to isolate. We want to suffer in silence, we want to suffer quietly by ourselves, and and we just get enraged. And it just becomes your your brain becomes your mind becomes an echo chamber. So don't isolate. You gotta reach out to people. The the the things that work for you, you know, if it's been a while since you've been to meetings, maybe you got disconnected from it, you don't really know anybody in the meetings anymore. You don't have that circle of the recovery community within meetings, A-A-N-A-S-A-O-A, whatever. And and they're not, you know, you they're not there because you haven't been in accessing that for, you know, I know people who have not gone to meetings for 20, 30 years, so they don't know anybody in the meeting community. So, but reaching out to the the community. Maybe you need to go back to meetings, go back into the rooms. Maybe you haven't used yet, but you're just suffering this grief. So get back in the rooms and you can stand up, you know, and and say, I'm suffering because I suffered this loss. My my husband just died, my wife just died, my child just died. Um, I lost my job because my career, you know, got pulled out from under me, or my house burned out, whatever, whatever it is. Just you can stand up in that room. You know this. You can stand up in that room and you can say it. And if you've never been to a meeting, that's the opportunity to go. Get introduced to the no crosstalk safe space where you can feel felt amongst your peers, right? Um, maybe it's time to go to a therapist. If you have a therapist and you haven't been to the therapist for a while, it's time to go back. This is what we're for. Break glass in case of emergency. That's how I always approach it with my clients. You know, they I I tell my clients, listen, there's nothing you can do that's going to get you kicked out. I don't care how bad you act because you know you're half crazy or completely crazy because you're an addict, and I know that, and you know that. So you can come back and also keep my number if you need me. And, you know, if you have a good relationship with a therapist and it hasn't been so long that they've retired or moved and you know they're there, do you pick up the phone and call the therapist? Uh maybe a safe friend, somebody that is somebody you know, a friend, somebody that you can trust, that you can say things to, and you can just be in that moment and that grief and that trauma that you're experiencing in the moment. You can be with that person. Somebody who's not gonna give you advice, okay? That's what I mean by say friend. Somebody who's just gonna be there with you. They're gonna talk about it, they're gonna listen, they're gonna you're you're feeling felt with a friend. Somebody who's constantly giving you advice is not what you need. You do not need advice. You just need somebody to be there. You need to feel human presence, somebody to bear witness with your suffering. Um, things that that can throw you off if you are actually uh doing things normally, when trauma hits, when things, tragedy hits, isolation requires shutting down. So you you you quit your routines. People will come in and they will regularly tell me, yeah, I used I was working like three times working out three times a week, or I was going to uh you know, church regularly, like every weekend I would go. Every Sunday I go, or I'd go to conferences at my church. Um, there's a men's group or women's group I would go to. Um maybe it's not a church group, maybe it's some other type of meeting, and you just kind of withdraw. Um you stop doing that, you stop exercising, you stop sleeping very well, you you cut off people, you just kind of hide. Now, I'm not saying that you can't take time by yourself. Of course you should, but when you're cutting off your routine, that's a problem. So the immediate survival step of don't change your routine, stick to them. They're what's familiar for you, it's what's comfortable. Avoid high-risk environments, you know. Don't don't start hanging out with people that because you know you're feeling bad. So you start hanging out with people that are gonna make you feel better. So the party people, that's bad. Um, those high-risk environments, don't don't go where there are substances, don't be tempted because you're you're weak at that moment, like you, you're feeling this weakness, right? So don't go into those high-risk uh environments. Give yourself permission to feel. This is one that really, man, people just don't do this. They they just want to put it aside. Like, I'm not gonna think about it. The old uh like the turn turn of the 18th to the to the 20th century Victorian era of things, of like, give yourself, you know, we'll just keep a stip off stip stiff upper lip. We're not going to engage in the thoughts of that, you know. That's that's stuff my parents would do. Um, you gotta give yourself a chance to feel your feelings. I talk about this with my clients all the time. Feel your feelings. That's what we do as human beings. When we do not feel our feelings, they're going to leak out in other ways, and they're gonna come out and grab us when we don't want them to. So, you know, whatever you're feeling, the the anger, the confusion, the the tears, the sadness, the loneliness, the you know, whatever comes up, that's part of grief. And so in in clinical experiences, that's what we call um feeling your feelings. That's processing. That's what we then we when we say processing, that's what we mean. I'm processing my feelings. I'm feeling my feelings. You gotta do that, and that's why it's important for you to be in uh a community where people can bear witness to your suffering. You're sharing it with them. In other words, you're sharing the load, and that's what we must do. We must share the load. And people who are in recovery and they see somebody suffering who's in in recovery, but you we can see them suffering. We to we're we're happy to help you take that on, you know. I I'm not gonna sit next to somebody in a a meeting who's really just kind of losing it, and I can see I can feel their sadness or their they're upset there because they've been traumatized. That's when the wagons get circled. And the more wagons you have, the bigger the circle, the more you're protected. So as somebody in recovery, you're not gonna sit there and watch somebody suffer and and not respond to that. So get in those, get in that uh that environment where you can feel your feelings. The permission to do that is important. So healthy coping skills. How you know, what do we do to to create something? Talk openly. Therapy, grief groups, recovery circles, you know, your church, your pastor, um something, anything is better than just nothing, right? So but talk openly. Get in a place where you can do that. If you're practicing faith and you're a believer, prayer, reading the scriptures, meditation, um spirituality, faith, engage in that. Okay? It's comforting, it's guiding, and if you're a Christian, you you understand that you're not alone. And that's the that's the thing, right? We're not alone. Um there's a higher power that's that's there with us. Listen, life happens and stuff happens. People can act out using their free will, they can cause damage, they can kill people, they can hurt people. We've we see it like all the time now. We're seeing it in this country, in the United States, we're seeing it all the time. Other parts of the world we're seeing it. Stuff happens. Uh, last I think it was earlier this week, some guy in England drove into uh his vehicle try into a uh synagogue um and uh on Yom Kippur, and he decided he was going to try to kill some people, and he did. He ended up stabbing two people. He tried to get into the synagogue, but it was the doors were barricaded shut. I don't know why the guy did that, but this is a part of life. Physical, physical violence happens, emotional violence happens, all kinds of things happen. People can do that. So lean on lean on your faith. That's what I'm asking you to do. Like go talk to your pastor, go talk to to somebody of faith and let their words kind of wash over you. Physical outlets. You're you know, if your mind is suffering, your brain is suffering, your spirit is suffering, physical fitness, physical activity can really help. Go run, go walk, go to the gym, lift weights. You know, I I myself, I I know this sounds kind of counterintuitive, but I like fighting. And so I will um I will try to find a way that I can just start punching, you know, a heavy bag, go to a uh boxing gym, something that that works for me. Um, I have a friend who's very much into yoga, and she would not find going and punching a bag healthy or helpful to her, but do engaging in yoga or doing breath work. That would be really helpful for her. For me, that would drive me crazy. So I wouldn't do that. Um, creative outlets, give yourself give your mind something else to do, right? So be creative, write music, uh write um just doing writing, art, you know. If you if you are a person who is an artist, I was just putting the broad category, that is part of an emotional processing that you do. And when, and and if those of you who are listening to this and are artists, you understand what I'm talking about. If you get cut off from that, your your inability to feel starts cropping, cropping up, right? Because you're not engaging in the thing that is your expressive outlet. Um if if grief is happening, it's got to pass through without defining you. Let grief pass through without defining you. I am sadness versus I'm feeling sad. I I am depression versus I am feeling depressed. So it when you're observed when you absorb things, it's you become that problem, right? So I I I I hear people all the time, they describe, you know, they say I'm depressed, and what they're actually saying to me is I am depression. It's the old um uh saying of you know, you don't you you become the emotion versus I'm experiencing the emotion, and so um don't become the emotion, just observe it, but don't absorb it. And so you're not becoming the thing that you're feeling, you're just feeling it. So, well, how do you know how how do you know when it's gotten too too bad? It's too far. When do you get professional help? I'm a professional, and people come to me as a clinician and they seek help, they come in, and when they walk in the door, especially if I haven't seen them, I know that whatever in the world is going on with them, whatever they're experiencing, it has become a huge problem. Like it's a mess. That's why they're in my office. I know that the people don't come and see me because they're happy and everything's great and they're stable. They come to me because there has been something really incredibly wrong. So the the thing is, like, how do you how do you know when that's happening? So here are some indicators. Okay, if you notice yourself not being able to function at work or at home, so in clinical terms, we would refer to the ADLs, the activities of daily living. Bathing, you know, shaving, bathing, eating, sleeping, um go being able to go outside the house and do something, getting out of bed. If you're not able to do those things, you're not exp experiencing the activities of daily living. That's one thing. You're not functioning at work, you're just going to work, but you're not doing anything. You're not getting anything done. Maybe you're normally like hopefully, like everybody's, you know, pretty clean in their house, hopefully. Um, and you're just not cleaning your house. You're just not even, it's it's I don't even want to do it. There's a sign of of problems, right? Inability to function, depression. When you're feeling depressed, and it and I mean depression, like it's crushing depression, depression, and it's lasting more than a couple of weeks. That's that's that's when you need some help. You need to go seek professional help. Obsessive thoughts about using. Oh man. I the only answer is to get high or to drink and get drunk, and you start obsessing on it, and you're fighting to not do it. It's just you're struggling and fighting to not do it. But that's when you need professional help. That's when you need to be seeing a counselor, a good counselor who understands addiction and trauma. So those obsessive thoughts about using um the using dreams, the preoccupation, like you're just really struggling and trying not to go to the liquor store, the ABC store, or something like that. If you are feeling really, really strong feelings of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts, you know, I this would be better. I I can't handle this anymore. I'm just checked, I want to check out, I want to do I want to kill myself. Please get professional help. Don't tell that to a friend and expect that to help. You're just putting that burden upon your friend, but you're not gonna get help from that. Get professional help. And when it's offered to you, when you go seek it, don't reject it. And that's what people do sometimes, they'll reject that professional help. Um therapy, grief counseling, psychiatry consultation, inpatient treatment, intensive outpatient programming, partial hospitalization programming, PHP, IOP, residential. These are things that are helpful to you. They'll keep you alive. You know, don't be so proud that you you won't go get help because you think you know you can just muscle through it when you really are feeling these things that are really, really severe. They've got you uh shutting down. So um calling 911, it's a physical emergency, it's survival, it's not weakness. You know, nobody wants to experience your death. Um nobody wants to see you suffering severely, and so they're good, you know, people around you will probably try to spring into action. Help them by getting help yourself. So if you're feeling uh, you know, if you're a family member and you're seeing somebody go through this, don't try to fix it. Just be present. They're experiencing loss, you know. I people who have families, they try to do the right thing, they're always trying to do some fix it thing. What should I do? I gotta call, you know. You don't need to do anything, you just need to be present for your for your loved one who's there. And if you're a friend of somebody who's an addict who's going through this, same thing, man. Just be present. You don't need to fix anything. The presence is something that's there. The platitudes are not gonna help anything. So you just encourage healthy routines, you know, suggest maybe they talk to a counselor. There are there are no shortcuts to to the grief process, there's no shortcuts to experiencing trauma. You're gonna experience it, it's gonna feel bad. And if you're watching somebody go through it, there's just no shortcut to it. It's like just walk it off, get over it. No, that's not happening. But you if you're a loved one and you're seeing somebody go through this, look for the isolation, look for that withdrawal. Uh anger. Anger many times comes popping out. Um, avoiding discussing it, avoiding anything to do with that loss. You just lost your spouse two weeks ago, and you're just back at work, like everything's fine. I I immediately know everything's not fine. It's not that's not fine. So, avoidance of dealing with it, that's another one. So, grief and uh from trauma and recovery are both very long journeys. Grief and recovery, long journeys. Recovery, as you've heard me say many times, recovery from addiction is about a year and a half to two years. Grief, yeah, it's gonna take a while, it could take you months, sometimes a year. Um, that's normal. But you can survive the tragedy without the relapse because man, if you relapse, now you got two problems you're dealing with, and that's not helpful. So hold on to that hope and that faith and that connection and engage in that. Let people help shoulder your burden. Don't just white knuckle it. You're not alone, you don't need to be alone. Isolation needs to not be part of your life. You know this if you have gotten into recovery, you know that when you're isolating, that's a problem. Leave me alone. I don't want to talk. I just want to go home. I just want to be left alone. You know, as a recovered addict, that is a problem. If you if you're new to recovery, you probably maybe don't know that. Maybe nobody's ever told you that. And hopefully, if I'm giving the message of like, well, what contributes to addiction? Isolation. That's the first word that comes out of my mouth, isolation. That's what contributes to it. Your addiction is fueled by isolation, that's where it can run wild. So reach out, get some help, and and find ways to feel your feelings. Allow yourself to feel your feelings. There's no shame in it, and it's actually very healthy. You know, I just can't help myself. I know that I'm being watched over. I've been watched over all my adult life, even though I didn't want to admit it, and I know God's got a place in my life. He's just working like crazy, trying to keep this pagan sinner alive and healthy. That's kind of how I felt when I was younger. Um, but you know what? That's part of the plan. And your suffering has not gone unnoticed, and it can be supported if you just lay it at his feet. And just let people lift you up, okay? You don't need to suffer in silence. Well, I hope you got something from this podcast. Listen, if you need help, go get it. Wherever you are, whatever country you're in, there is some form of help, and so go get it. If you are suffering from addiction, some of your loved one is suffering from addiction around you. Don't get help. Go to a rehab, go to a counselor, go to a meeting, be part of the recovery community. Don't try to stay in your addiction or ending your life if you're stuck, but eating. Go out and actually get free tomorrow. And if you are suffering, you can also reach out to me. I'll help you. You can reach me at my website, bossfindmindbody.com. Send me an email, give me a call, I'll make you. Oh, until then, this is dark chart saying see ya.