Dealing with Sadness in Addiction — Learning to Feel Without Drowning

How do you survive sadness in recovery? Let's find out

Transcript

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Time again for Doc Jack Your Addiction Lifeguard Podcast. I am Dr. Jockey Burke, a psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and addiction specialist. You are suffering from addiction, misery, trauma, whatever it is, I'm here to help. If you're in search of help, try to get your life back together. Join me here at Doc Shock for Addiction Lifeguard, 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. It's probably your least favorite emotion, but it's probably the one that uh, in fact, is the one that most of you are running from. Uh we used, we drank, you get distracted by it, uh, because sadness felt like a rip current, you know, it's just pulling at you. And it's something that it feels like it you can't really get rid of it. You can't escape it. And if you've if you suffered from any kind of traumas, you know, the sadness is just permeating your soul. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. What sadness really is, why it feels so dangerous, and how to experience it without letting it take you under, take you over, control you. It's a tough emotion to deal with, and it's one that every addict I've ever worked with has struggled. So let's talk about sadness and addiction. Um addiction, you know, it often starts as an emotional way to, you know, it's an emotional management of your pain using it, doesn't matter what it is, drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, uh, the internet, you know, binge watching television shows. I mean, it could be anything, right? You're just trying to manage your your pain. And you didn't wake up one day and say, Hey, I'd like to destroy my life. We're just we were just feeling so bad that you just would didn't didn't want to take it anymore. So sadness is is an undercurrent. It's it's the thing that kind of feeds the addiction. It it drives it. It's the thing you're feeling and you don't want it. It's the hidden grief. Guilt and shame and loneliness are all part of it too. Um it's kind of a process. They all kind of go together. So when sadness shows up, it kind of reminds you of what you've lost. Um, it's a reminder of that loss. It's it's re-experiencing that loss. And those losses, you know, relationships, um trust, time, uh, your job, maybe even some pieces of yourself that you lost. And we each we each reach that point where something has to make it stop. That's what we want. I mean, that's that's where I was. I certainly was feeling that way when I was using um that phrase, like, you know, you don't understand. That's that's a phrase that anybody would try to figure out what's going on with me. It's like, well, you don't really understand. And so after a while you get to the point where you're just kind of shutting down, you're not even really trying to explain it anymore. So it's understand that when you're feeling sad, it's a it's a normal reaction to situations. It's not a defect, it's it's information. You're you're experiencing the the information that you went through. It's the emotional warning light, if you will, you know, on your dashboard, just like that little wrench comes up or a little exclamation point. There's something wrong, there's something going on here. So why does it feel so unsafe? For a lot of people in addiction, sadness just wasn't allowed when you were growing up. Or maybe the person who was supposed to be comforting you is the person who was also abusing you. So you had nowhere to turn. I see a lot of kids in that situation. Uh, maybe you were told, you know, that you needed to toughen up. If you're a guy, it was, you know, you're just being a baby. And your friends kind of chime in with that too. It's not just your parents or your guardians that do that. You know, we do that to each other as men. You might have grown up in chaos where sadness was a liability, you know, it's a weakness. So your your body learned early that sadness equals danger, you know. So you kind of put the two together, sadness and danger. They go together. And, you know, it's the idea that somehow this trauma logic of, you know, it it sadness is danger. So then your different part of your brain starts activating. It's not the emotional brain, it's the survival brain. The the uh the hippocampus um is the feeling portion, but the the amygdala is the part of the brain that's the fight, flight, or freeze, and so that gets activated. So it's it's not the truth. You you know, the other thing is if you feel sad, you're never gonna stop. I can't stop feeling sad. So I just want to push it away. This is this is where we learn as as uh particularly children of alcoholics, children who grew up with mentally unstable parents or addict parents. We learn that um, you know, our way of of dealing with it is to shut down or compartmentalize. And so you get to where you you don't know how to process through. So you feel like you can it's gonna happen and you're never gonna stop. You start crying and it's never gonna end. Then there's the shame layer, you know, sadness gets twisted into self-blame and and shame. So you sort of asking yourself, well, what's wrong with me? Why why can't why can't I feel sadness? And then when I feel sadness, I feel like I've just gone off a cliff. And so what's wrong with me instead of what happened to me? You know, many times when I'm in in sessions with people, they'll tell me their story, and it, you know, sometimes they'll come right out and tell me, like they're reading it from a biography page or two of themselves. Um when I was in living in LA, people would have these one sheets where it would be the front would be the the photograph of the you know, the the good looking picture of them's their headshot, and you turn it around and there's their there's their biography of who and what they are. I and I kind of feel like sometimes clients should probably come in with those. Um, because then they could they could explain it real easily. And sometimes it feels like they're reading from something like that. They just tell me just matter-of-factly, this is where I this is what I grew up with. And you know, it's I almost think sometimes it's because they're trying to figure out if you know what they're gonna say to me is gonna push me away and say, oh, I can't handle that. You know, this person's really got some deep-seated pathological issues, probably from all this. But uh, that doesn't happen. But it's the question of like what happened to me. So I'll ask them as they're telling me their story, sometimes that they're you know, telling me all these circumstantial things uh about their life that have nothing to do with anything. Um, because they're just kind of skirting around the issue of what's going on, and after a while I just kind of look at them and I'm like, Well, what happened to you? And they they many times don't know how to answer that question because the idea of something happening to them never occurred to them, they just survived it. So they just you know, they might tell me about their parents not being there or being an addict or the, you know, some something they moved around a lot or whatever, but I'm like, what happened to you instead of you know, what's wrong with you? Because they're telling me what's wrong with them. But it's not weakness to feel, it's it's being a human. We have a need to feel. We use that term in therapy. We talk about processing your feelings. And when you're processing your feelings, really what that means is you're just feeling your feelings. But when you've been numb for years, feeling anything can feel like getting hit by a wave that you didn't see coming, you know, person standing on the beach and they're facing they're facing the beach, the ocean is behind them, and this big huge wave comes and smacks them down, and they weren't expecting it. That's kind of what happens when you haven't been feeling anything for so long. And and that's why I prepare people when they come into therapy and I say, listen, it's gonna get worse, you're gonna feel worse before you feel better, because this process is opening up older wounds that didn't heal right. We're getting at the infection, if you will, and trying to get it out. So you're just understand, you're gonna feel worse. And that's why it's important also to put the structure around you, where you're not just seeing a therapist once or twice a week for an hour at a time, but you're around other people. So you that's why it's important to go to meetings, get into recovery community, get into recovery groups, have a network around you. Because when you're feeling things, you need to be able to express it, right? That's part of the feeling your feelings, process your feelings. And the worst way to process your feelings is in complete isolation. Although that's probably what you're gonna want to do because that's what you're conditioned to do is to isolate. So how do you safely feel? How do you do it so you don't feel like you're drowning in sorrow? So um fighting against it. You you're gonna panic, you're gonna, you're gonna, it's gonna get worse. Um the emotions can feel much stronger when you're really, you know, when somebody's somebody's in that in that uh in that pres in that present space with you, and um they're bearing witness to your pain. Maybe they're validating it for you, like simple things, it's things that I'll look at somebody and go, that was really wrong, what they did. You know, when somebody's telling me about, oh, my parent did this, my cousin did that, my sibling did this, and I say to them, wow, that's that was really that was really bad and wrong. Perhaps that is the first time they've ever actually heard somebody say that to them. And it's quite interesting the reaction that I get when I say that. It stops them many times, and they just like look at me, they're stunned. Um and and it's it's uh it's a tough thing to experience. Um but at the same time, when somebody validates that they confirm it, yeah, that was wrong. Um but understand at the basis of this that sadness is something that is survivable. If you stop trying to run away from it, it's it's going to chase you. You know, the faster you go, the more it's staying with you. It's gonna stay with you. Uh you can't outrun it, you can't ignore it. Doing that is kind of what's led you to the addiction in the first place, isn't it? So here's some let me give you some tips. Okay. Um sadness is sadness. Now, for men, I'm gonna say to the men, sadness is not something that we uh do very well. We are typically allowed to express two emotional responses to almost everything anger and and funny humor. That's it. We're not allowed to be sad or feel down. Even feeling anxious can be considered a weakness. Um, but you make a joke about it, you laugh it off, you'll deflect, and you know, but stand-up comedian style. That's most stand-up comedians had horrible, tragic lives, uh trauma-filled. Um you're you're allowed to do that, or you're allowed to get angry. So you might get explosive and yell at people and whatever, and really what you're feeling is sad. You're just trying to shove it into humor or anger, and it doesn't really fit. So just call it what it is: sadness, grief, loneliness. The worst thing you can do, and this applies to the ladies as well as men. How are you? I'm fine. Okay, call it what it is. Don't call it I'm fine. It's you're not fine. That's the that's the opposite of what you are. Um, don't absorb your sadness. You can feel sadness without becoming sadness. Uh, Eckhart Tolley wrote a book called Uh A New Earth, and what he talked about was um depression. And his explanation in the book uh was basically that he woke up one day and realized that he was feeling depressed first thing when he woke up. So what he had become is depression. He became depression, and he took a different approach to dealing with it after that. Sadness is kind of the same thing. You you can become sadness. So you don't absorb it, but you can you can observe it. And that's again, you do that in the presence of another person. A therapist is a good place to do that. Um so talk to your therapist, sponsor, you know, your community group, your your community recovery community, talk to God, but get it out of your get it out of your head, and it's gonna stay there, and it's a horrible trap. But you've got to let, you know, to to to let something else in, you have to take something out of your head, because there's only so much room for emotional responses. So you have to let the comfort in. And in order to do that, you have to let the sadness out of your head. You don't have to isolate to heal. Actually, it's the worst thing you could possibly do is try to isolate because that's what we do when we're drinking, and that's what we do when we're getting high. We isolate, bunker down in the basement, and uh start drinking. So you gotta to let the comfort in, you have to to let people in. So the other thing is avoiding emotional shortcut. Drugs, drama, shopping, sex, internet, alcohol. Those are all emotional fast food. You know, that's the shortcut. I don't know if you have this experience, whenever I'm eating fast food, I'll eat it. And literally, like an hour, hour and a half, two hours at the most later, I'm I'm hungry again. That's because it's so full of sugar and nothing. It's just uh just there's nothing in there. So there's no shortcut. But you're not broken for feeling sad, you're healing. Again, it's probably gonna get worse before it gets better. Um for those of you who are just starting recovery, um there's these emotional shock waves that hit you. When like if you had surgery um and you had anesthesia, when it wears off, you're gonna feel pain. It's part of the process. And when you're using drugs and alcohol or anything else to to kind of make the emotion go away, the emotions come flooding back. That's part of early recovery. Um, there's a thing called um when when you're through the early part of recovery, you you that lasts longer, it's called pause, post-acute withdrawal syndrome. And um that can make you feel super sad, like ten times as sad. It's ten times bigger because your brain chemistry is starting to um uh recover. And so it's trying to rebalance. So you get this feeling of like, gosh, I just you know, it's been like nine months, I can't believe how bad I feel. Well, that's pause. And that post-acute withdrawal syndrome can last for a year. Maybe, maybe sometimes I've seen it sometimes longer when the reality of kind of what has been going on and what you've been dealing with depends on the circumstance, but I've had people that have had really, really you know, major big T traumas happen, and it takes them longer to recover from that. Um, so the pause might last longer than that. But um don't don't mistake that for failure. Okay, it's your it's your system rebooting, it's your system starting over again, and it's trying to learn how to process emotion. And again, I can't emphasize this enough. You can't really do it by yourself. Please don't try that. When you're feeling emotion, you have to share it, you have to speak it. Um putting putting it to words many times makes the power of it just disappear, especially if the person you're talking to is trained in trauma recovery, but also the ability to um empathize with you. So um there's uh there's a flood of emotion that can happen. So get hopefully you've been able to work with somebody and late, you know, in your recovery, hopefully early enough. I if you went to rehab, if you had a good rehab experience, you you probably would have understood this part, but the grounding tools, um movement, breath work, journaling, these are things that you're doing within yourself. This is within your body. And when you're doing those things within your body, what you're doing is you're you're retraining your body to experience the emotion, but do it in a in a healthier way. Um dealing with the emotional flood, all right. Call somebody who gets it. Get on the phone. This is why you know sponsors are so important, and people in the recovery community are so important. You have to have numbers to call when you're feeling bad. And trust me, don't feel bad about calling them because they've called people as well. So they understand it. People get it if they're in recovery. It's like I feel bad, and uh, so you got a list of names of people that can really help you out. Um but you know, white knuckling it. I'll get through this. Oh gosh, that's terrible. Remember, you know, just like in the ocean, a wave comes and then it passes by. It always passes by. No feeling is permanent. I'm not gonna be permanently sad, permanently lonely. Um it comes and goes. That's it's normal. People feel up, then they feel down, but they're you're gonna aim towards the middle eventually in recovery. So turning sadness into strength. Let's let's talk about that for a few minutes here. Sadness softens you, right? It makes you feel vulnerable, but it reconnects you with the idea of compassion for others and for yourself. And that's what I do as a therapist is I'm working with the person, I'm I'm getting them to accept the truth. Like, what is the truth? And from a Christian perspective, understanding that truth, there's freedom in that. Like, you know, you you things have happened to you and they were bad. Like I said before, it's like when I say to somebody, that was really wrong, that's a truth. Uh mislabeling trauma as something that wasn't trauma, and then getting told in a therapy process, hey, that was really traumatic what you went through. That's terrible. That's that's the softening part, right? So it reconnects you with compassion. So you can have compassion for yourself. If you let the sadness teach you instead of torture you, you'll discover empathy and gratitude on the other side. So let sadness be the teacher. Um when we isolate, we're in our own head. How are you feeling? I'm fine, and I'm drinking, drinking, drinking, nobody gets it, you don't understand, all that other nonsense that we say when we're in our worst of our addiction. You're not learning anything. You're just learning that you're disconnected and different from other people. The other part of what's interesting about when people go to rehab or when they go into um recovery groups, they start hearing stories that are just like theirs. Um, and I'll tell you, I'm gonna do a podcast in the future about my experience with that, which was it's kind of it's too long for this individual podcast that I'm doing right now. But um, I had this eye-opening experience when I realized I I really had suffered childhood trauma, but I just didn't understand that. Um it was torturing me. And when I started, it was a relief. That was the really the beginnings of my recovery from from that. Um, you know, what we teach children, little little children, when they're first learning how to swim, we teach them to float. That's the first thing we teach them. We want to we want to make sure that they can float. And by float, because babies are, you know, there's a lot of body fat on a baby, so they're gonna float anyway. But, you know, you teach them that there's safety in the water here, that you're not out of control. You're not gonna sink to the bottom. And that's that's what people don't understand at first when they're trying to learn how to swim, they think they're gonna just sink to the bottom. And, you know, you're in a different environment. I put a child who is two or three or four years old in water where they can't touch the, they can't put their feet on the bottom, that's a completely unfamiliar, different environment for them. And they they're of course, they're at first they're very panicked because they're unsure of what's going on. The more they're in the water, the more comfortable they are. So if you're if you're trying to learn how to how to trust um and and not fight the water, you're gonna be held up by the water. And that's what they learn. And so it becomes a safer environment for them. Now, could they uh could they drown? Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's no question at that point, yeah, they they could, because they don't know how to swim. But you're not gonna learn how to swim if you're fighting the water all the time and you're panicked thinking that it's gonna kill you, so you just keep trying to avoid it. So the same emotion that once, you know, made you made you drink and get high can can help you deepen your recovery and that emotion of sadness. If you understand the truth, the truth will set you free. God didn't put you on this planet to suffer. That's not his intention or his purpose. People can cause you to suffer because they're exercising free will around you, but that doesn't that that doesn't mean that that's what that has to be for the rest of your life. But you can't heal what you refuse to feel. If you are allowing yourself to feel it, then you can recover. So sadness is not your enemy, it's your messenger. Listen to it and learn from it and let it move you move through you. Let it move through you. It's not it it is the the way to learn. It's or it's torture. Your choice. Um, what do you do when it shows up? Well, don't don't run. Sit with it. You know, like I feel s oh, I'm feeling sad. Like get that I'm fine message out of your brain. Just experience it. You know, Dan Siegel uh is a uh psychiatrist uh that um does a great job of explaining. He said, you know, when a when an emotion comes to you, it comes to you, you feel it, and then it passes past you, it goes through you. He sees emotions as those things that come to you and they go through you. Just like a wind. The wind, it hits you and then it's past you. And that's part of what you you need to be able to do. Sit with it and let it pass you like a wave or the wind, and you'll be surprised at how strong you really are when you withstand it. The running and the hiding is the weakness, it's not the strength, and you're not alone. And there are lifelines all around you, all you have to do is just take one. So you're not by yourself, so don't isolate. And when you want to get into recovery, you can do it. Stay safe, stay grounded, and always don't drown in someone else's chaos either, including your own. Keep your eyes on the shore. Like, I want to be in that place, I want to be in that safety of that ground because I don't want to die. Well, that's it for this episode of Doc Chuck Your Addiction Life Guard. If you need help, please go to rehab, go to a hospital, get into the A rooms, the A A, N A, S A, O A, whatever A. But don't kill yourself trying to save your addiction. That's just insanity. If you do want to reach out to me for some uh extra help, I can help you. Um, I can help guide you from a distance. But whatever it is, just go out and get the help. And I I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please like and subscribe and listen to the next episode. And in the meantime, this is Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard, saying see ya.