Learning To Swim Without The Lifejacket

 Ever quit your drug of choice and realize it was the only tool in the box? Feelings you haven't met in years are fully caffeinated and ready to rumble. Doc Jacques breaks down real coping skills to replace the ones that were slowly killing you — because luck is not a recovery plan. 

Transcript

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She had 32 days clean. Thirty-two days. She'd written it on a sticky note on her bathroom mirror. She looked at it every morning like it was proof she was still alive. But tonight, sitting alone in her apartment, the walls started closing in. Her boss had said something at work. Nothing big, just a tone. Just a look. And something inside her cracked open. Not all the way, just enough. She sat on the edge of her bed and she waited for the feeling to pass. It didn't pass. She knew exactly what would make it stop. She'd known for 15 years what would make it stop. It was the only tool she'd ever had. The only one that worked. And her hands already knew where her keys were. Here's the thing nobody tells you when you walk out of rehab. They take away the thing that was killing you. But the thing it was managing, that's still there. Waiting. Louder than ever. She didn't pick up that night, but it wasn't because she had something better. It was because she got lucky. Today, we're going to talk about how to stop relying on luck and start building something real. This is Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. And if you're here, you already know that addiction is brutal, recovery is hard, and the road between them is harder than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Jock DeBrucker, licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason: to walk that road with you. No sugarcoating, no magic pills, just the truth of what recovery really looks like. Quick note, this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment, a real human being. Now let's get to it. You know when I was a lifeguard, I had people who refused to learn how to swim because the life jacket was working just fine. That's what they would tell me. Why learn the hard way when the easy way is right there? Well, that's what addiction is. The drug of choice floats you just enough to keep you from going under until it doesn't. Today we're going to talk about what happens when you take away the life jacket and haven't built any skills to learn how to swim yet. You know, let's let's just name it what it is. The drug wasn't just weakness or moral failure. It was a coping strategy that the brain found and locked on to. Because it worked. That's why it stuck. Alcohol quieted the hypervigilance. Opioids numbed the emotional pain that had nowhere else to go. Weeds silenced the trauma noise. Stimulants. They fought the depression and gave you energy. The problem is that those are just coping mechanisms. Those aren't the real feelings. Those aren't it. The serotonin antidepressant parallel that happens in the brain, it adapts around those substances. Compensatory changes happen. This is this is without shame that this is the starting point. This is not an excuse. That's the thing. This isn't just about justifying the use, it's about understanding why, so you can replace it with something that actually works. Shame spiral, shame cycling. That's I've heard that many times in the last two weeks from a lot of my clients. You know, the enemy used what you needed against you. That's how the enemy works. It finds that weak spot. When the drug goes away, the discomfort that it was managing doesn't leave with it. It stays. That's the gap. And most relapses live in that gap. The body and the brain are just screaming for the old life jacket because nothing has been built to replace it. You don't have a new coping mechanism. Clients come into my office, they have all kinds of problems, and I've had clients walk out of a 30-day rehab completely clean and without any problems, and then within two weeks, they're right back out. Sometimes less. Sometimes it's days. Not because they didn't want to, they didn't want sobriety. That's not the problem. It's because the thing that was managing their pain was gone, and now there was nothing there to catch them. This is kind of like being caught in a rip current. You stop swimming against it, but you haven't started swimming diagonally yet, which is how you get out of a rip current. You don't swim into it. You're just treading water and you're getting tired, and two things happen in that gap. The old coping reflex kicks back in and it kicks in hard. Obsessive thoughts about using, using dreams, preoccupation with using, they all hit really hard. The underlying discomfort, the trauma, the anxiety, the shame, that comes back louder than ever because it's no longer being muffled by your drug of choice. So the gap isn't a sign of failure. It's a natural part of recovery. It's the starting line. It's where the real work begins. And when you're out there and you're trying, you got to start somewhere. And that's why it looks like failure. Because you go back to it. Just understand the brain will try to fill that gap the fast way. That's what I try to warn my clients about. Replacement addictions. Um, transference addictions. This is the one where people they don't see it coming. Switching from alcohol to weed and calling it sobriety. I don't know how many times I've heard that. Everybody thinks weed because it's legal here and there, that that's somehow okay. It's kind of like smoking cigarettes, but it's not. That's just switching from one addiction to another. Pills to gambling, substance to chaos, crisis, and drama. That's another one that happens. We see that happening in rehabs because that's the only thing they can do is create chaos and and drama, creating situations that feel familiar. That makes them feel comfortable. The phone, the internet, pornography, food, gambling, shopping, those are the quiet substitutes. And I see those happen too. That's not a coping mechanism, that's redecoration. That's you changing something. It's the same house, it's just different paint, it's different furniture. Using something feels like doing something about the pain, and that's where people get kind of sucked into it. I remember distinctively in the worst of my drinking, I knew it wasn't going to fix it, but I felt like I was doing something about it. It was an action step that I could take, and I'm a guy, so I want to have action. But that's a false sense of power. That false sense of power is real, but it's destructive, and the brain will find that feeling somewhere else if you let it, unless you control that. Self-sabotage, red flags are things that you need to watch for, and they signal the gap is winning. Dropping meetings, you're not going to the rooms anymore, you're not calling your sponsor, you're not talking to anybody. Or maybe you're just going to the meeting and you're just kind of hanging out in the back row. That's why I call relapse row. You're skipping therapy. That happens. I soon as soon as somebody cancels a session, and I know I I've been hearing some hinky things, and then they say, Hey, I can't make it this week, and then the next week they cancel again. I know immediately I got a problem on my hands. That's an issue. Hanging around with the old people in the old places, people, places, things, you know, hanging on to that, going back to it, or just never letting it go completely. You still want to be connected. Your critical voice will probably be telling you, you don't deserve this, you're gonna fail, so why wait? Just go ahead and do it. Awareness is the first tool. You can't replace something that you haven't named. Name it. You're an addict, you have addiction. Just say it. Isolation is addiction's best friend. How many times have you heard me say that in these episodes? It's like every single episode. Because isolation is addiction's best friend. And connection is recovery's best friend. People are where we get clean and sober. We don't do it in isolation, we don't do it by ourselves, we don't just wake up one day and say, Oh, that's it, I'm not using anymore. That's a lie. You're not actually doing that. Reaching out when you're uncomfortable is a learnable skill, but not a natural one for addicts because we like to isolate. We are so full of shame about our usage that we just hide when we're doing it. I have so many stories of people who are alcoholics hiding bottles here, hiding them here there. It's it's a huge problem. That's isolation. So when you s when you speak it, it loses power. In your head, it's loud. Out loud in a room of people who get it, they've done it, they've seen it, they've lived it, it starts to shrink. When you say it in a meeting and you're looking and you're saying it, and you're looking around, and the people in the room are nodding their heads, or somebody pats you on the back as you're talking, you're no longer in isolation. So you can't wait until you're desperate. Although some people do. Building the numbers now, before that rip current starts hitting and takes you back out. That's the that's the tool. That's the one that really works. Physical outlets are also very helpful. Body holds the trauma. Bessel Vanderkoelk's whole book and the body keeps the score. That's what it's about. You have to get it out of your body. Um I used physical activity, whether it's with tools in my hands, working on my motorcycles, or when I was uh, I don't do it as much anymore because I'm getting older, but when I was doing uh martial arts and fighting and hitting hitting a heavy bag, sparring with somebody, that's a good one. Whenever what whatever your version is, running, lifting, yoga, walking, it doesn't really matter. It matters that it's yours, and it's matter it matters that you do it. This isn't just a healthy habit, it's it's not that, it's it's a genuine pressure valve, like it lets the steam off. Your body is so used to a chemical response, give it a physical one instead. Make it something that you feel that makes you feel different, exhausting yourself. There's another skill that you got to take on. It's kind of sitting with your discomfort in short doses. Let yourself feel your feelings. Dr. Siegel, Dan Siegel, talks about how we process feelings. We process meaning feel your feelings. The feelings come at you, you're knowing they're coming, they're coming, you feel them, and then they pass by. It is a skill. Like any skill, it gets built slowly over time. The practice of five minutes feeling the feeling, describing it if you can to maybe somebody or just writing it down, then come back from it. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Dr. Phil, but Dr. Phil has this habit of having people come on his show and then he rehashes everything, and then he goes to the commercial, and then he they never really come to any kind of conclusion. But just just this is just it. What am I feeling right now? Can I sit with it for five minutes? That's the skill. Sitting with it. Over weeks and months of that, the discomfort becomes less catastrophic. You understand you've learned how to feel your feelings without them overwhelming you. But the time limitation part of it is key. Addicts don't have a low tolerance for discomfort by accident. They were trained into it, usually by childhood trauma, by environment, by never being taught to self self-soothe. You're relearning that one. If you never learned how to be comforted or accept comfort, or it was attached with a lot of difficulty, struggle, feelings, strings from whoever it is that we're your caregivers, you learn to shut that down. Everyday misery tolerance goes up when you practice that skill. The flat tire, the canceled plans, the bad day, they stopped being triggers. It's called everyday misery. People should be able to survive that without being re-traumatized, but because they were conditioned to experience trauma and it was had no outlet, nowhere to go, just stuck on you. It lingers. You can you can try journaling, um, not long passages, maybe two lines. Just write down what you're feeling, what triggered it, how it felt, what the slip was, emotional slip, not necessarily use, but just the emotional slip. Pattern recognition is a coping tool. When you see your triggers on paper, you can prepare for them. If they're just kind of free-floating in your head, you're not. Hopefully, you're in therapy, so you bring that into therapy. Share it in a meeting. Find some way to get it out of your head. There's nothing more potent, I think, than when you go into a room of people that have lived the life you're living and they understand it and you say it out loud. As soon as you say it out loud, you realize you've just shared it. That means you're not carrying as much of it. It's spread out across the room. That's what the meeting's about. That's what it's for. So do that. For the Christian brothers and sisters out there, laying it at God's feet isn't passive. It's active. It's the most active coping tool available when you've got nothing left. Letting it go. Listen, the enemy wants you isolated, in your head, fighting alone. Faith says you're not alone. And that changes everything for you, as long as you understand that. This is about having this, I'm sorry, this isn't about having it all figured out. It's about carrying it by yourself. That's a problem. Don't carry it by yourself. Prayer, scripture, community faith, that's not that's not what crutches are. They're not crutches. Those are anchors. Creative expression. If you are artistic, you have an artistic mind, you have a sensitive mind, you're going to be prone towards all kinds of problems when it comes to your feelings. Writing, music, art. If you've always had a creative outlet and you cut it off because of your addiction, you cut off an emotional processing channel. That's bad. If you're a musician, pick your instrument back up. Start playing it. Even if you're just playing it by yourself, because that's creativity. If you're an artist, pick up that brush, pick up that pencil, put your hands on that clay. Don't stop making art in recovery. You've blocked a drain. Stuff gets backed up when you do that. This doesn't have to be good stuff you're creating. It just has to be yours. Probably the most helpful thing, and I know I'm prejudiced because I'm a therapist, so I'm going to say this. The most helpful thing really is about therapy. Because what you're dealing with is trauma, so we got to work on that. New coping mechanisms don't just appear, they get built in the presence of a good therapist, frankly, somebody who can be honest with you. The therapist isn't there to give you a list of healthy habits. That's not that's not what that's about. They're there to help you identify why the old coping mechanisms had such a grip on you. Trauma is something you deal with in therapy, and that's something you're not going to do by yourself. What you're actually replacing in therapy is that false sense of control that substances gave you, the numbness that protected you from trauma, and the isolation reflex. Many people that I work with will come in initially once a week, and they'll say, Hey, how often should I come in? And I'm like, Well, I what were you thinking? And they were thinking like once a month. And I'm like, I'm not even going to get to know you once a month. That's I'm going to see you 12 times in a year. How much do you think I'm going to learn about you? And they'll say, okay, and then they'll look at me and they'll say, Well, what do you think? And I say, At least once a week, maybe initially twice a week for a few weeks. Because you need to get used to therapy and be being safe with someone in a room and talking about your stuff. That takes a while. So that sense of control is something you end up giving up. So what good trauma-informed therapy looks like versus what it doesn't, it doesn't look, it doesn't just note the abuse and move on. And that's what a lot of therapists, a lot of my colleagues will do. They'll just kind of note it and they'll just move on. It doesn't just do harm reduction without digging into the root. And that's where you got to have the comfort with a therapist. So you really need to find a good trauma-informed therapist and a good therapist for you, whatever that therapist is, somebody you're connecting with. So a good therapist makes you feel the thing in the room, and you're allowing someone to bear witness to it, which is the therapist. You're this is what I tell my clients: your job in my office is to make me feel what you're feeling. But that's not cruelty, that's just how healing works. You've got to be fully present in your feelings, fully present in that emotion, and not be shamed by expressing it. And the therapist can't be there to try to rescue you in that feeling, but just kind of be there with you in that feeling and stay in it. And these stories that I hear are horrible stories a lot of times. They're pretty the trauma can be pretty intense and pretty awful. There's different ways of approaching EMDR, attachment work, exposure therapy in small doses. Those are some of the clinical tools that help rewrite that coping pattern. But the first year of recovery, your brain is literally changing, it's rewiring. New neural pathways are being built. Therapy helps lay them down in the right direction. So you can be distracted, and that's why hearing about the trauma and then just moving on is very ineffective. You have to be able to stay in that trauma. You can't build a new coping mechanism on top of an untreated wound. So therapy, in my opinion, isn't optional. It's the construction site where all the building and the rebuilding occurs. You know, one of the things that's so interesting is addicts, they want it, they want it now, they want it all right now. They don't want to wait. Patients, I hear each person say, Yeah, I've always been told I'm impatient. And I'm like, well, yeah, of course you're an addict. So of course you're impatient. Recovery, how long does that take? I have said this over and over in these podcasts. It's a year and a half to two years. And building coping skills is the work of that whole period. That's what you're working on. The early days of recovery, they look very uncomfortable almost all of the time. Wanting to reach for something familiar, pick up your drug of choice, moments of clarity, followed by moments of darkness and despair. That's what the early days look like. You might have some accidents, meaning you might use for a day or once, not for weeks, that's a relapse. But what you're building towards tolerating everyday misery. That's one of the things you're building towards in recovery. You got to be able to understand the triggers. And so when they come, you gotta feel that discomfort and not run away from it emotionally. Having people to call before it gets critical and not after, so that's the relationships you build in the the rooms in the community, so you have a bunch of numbers to call. Progress in this is not a straight line, it's a zigzaggy line. It's up and down, it's all over the place, and that's normal. So when I say an accident, that's what I call when somebody goes out and they pick up their drug of choice. They might then come in the next day and tell me, or later that week they used it one day. Sometimes they'll call me on the phone and say, I I'm in trouble, and I used. I'm like, okay, good. We can work with that. And so we work on trying to figure out what's going on in that moment. But it's it's it's takes a long time. The straight line is the lie that addiction sold you. And so if you didn't reach it in that straight line, you failed and then you go back to it. The enemy does not want you going into sobriety, wants to hang on to you. Your ADLs, your activities of daily living, that's a benchmark of the judging where you are, sleeping, eating, bathing, leaving the house. When those are happening, the new coping is starting to work. When you feel comfortable, that's what you're gonna do. So if we were to go full circle back to where I opened this show about the life jacket, a life jacket gets you to shore, but if you never learn to swim, you'll always need one. And the problem with that is the life jacket you've been using doesn't float, it sinks. The new coping mechan mechanisms aren't a replacement life jacket. They're like swimming lessons. They're awkward at first, you're swallowing some water in the process of trying to do it, you feel like you're doing it wrong, and then one day you look up and you're swimming, and you feel empowered and strong. The rip current of grief, trauma, discomfort, that doesn't go away. You're gonna be in those for the rest of your life, because we all are. It's called the human condition. But you learn to swim diagonally instead of straight into shore, because you're just gonna be doing nothing but fighting a force you can't overcome that way. You stop fighting it straight on, you go across it until you're out. I'm out here on the beach, I'm watching you, and I'm not gonna let you drown just because the life jacket failed you. But I need you to start kicking. So if you don't have a therapist, go get one, go find one. If you're not in meetings, go into the rooms. Stop being a coward, stop being afraid, just go. If you've been isolating, pick up the phone, connect with people in the recovery community. These aren't suggestions, they're swimming lessons. Come on, go out there and do it. Well, that's it for this episode of Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. Hey, if you want to reach out to me, you can do that through my website, docjock.com. You can email me, you can give me a message, I will answer you directly. If you like this episode, you like this podcast, please like, subscribe, and share it. If this hits home for you, somebody else needs to hear it too. Listen, it's not worth ending your life. Save your addiction. It's the enemy money. Save your life by ending the addiction. Go to rehab, get a cat book, go into the room, do something. This makes no sense if you're out there drowning, drowning out there, drowning out there on the beach, and there's a lifeguard on the beach. That's crazy. So until next time, this is Doc Jack, your addiction lifeguard saying, See ya.