Don't Mask It, Deal With It Part 1

This weeks episode is a 2 part series. This first episode is for people who are addicts and can't get used to the idea of how to be open and honest with themselves about the real issue. Triggers are not the problem, it's the thing that triggers the real problem that you just have packed away and would rather not deal with. So you mask it instead. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Ray had 11 months. 11 months clean. A job back. A wife who'd started sleeping without one eye open. A solid guy by every measure I had. Then his foreman rode him in front of the whole crew one day. One comment. 30 seconds. Nothing you'd even remember by lunch. That night, Ray sat outside a liquor store with the engine running for 20 minutes. Didn't go in, drove home instead. Called me the next morning and said, Doc, I don't get it. That guy talks trash to everybody. Why did that wreck me? I told him what I'm about to tell you. It wasn't before me. Nine years before that parking limit, something happened to Ray, and he never said it out loud. Not to his wife. Not to his sponsor. Not to me. Not for the first year I knew him. A door in the back of his head, and he'd spent nine years making sure it stayed shut. The foreman didn't cause that many. He just said something to running what was behind that door. And the shame he's buried doesn't go quiet. It doesn't go underground. It just waits. And it will grab the nearest excuse to come up for an air. That's not the trigger's fault. That's the anchor. Nobody's hauled up. This is Doc Jacques, your addiction lifeguard. Stick around.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

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 longer than anybody tells you. I'm Dr. Joque Brucker, the licensed professional counselor and addiction specialist. This podcast exists for one reason. To walk that road with no sugarcoating, no magic pills, just the truth about what recovery really looks like. Quick note this show is for information and entertainment only, not professional treatment. A real human being is. Now let's get to it.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

You know, today's episode, Don't Mask It, Deal with It. It's really going to be a two-part episode. The first one's for people who have addiction issues and they're struggling. The second one's going to be for the loved ones of addicts and how they're struggling. Ray's story that I gave as an example is an example of how the trigger isn't the cause. It's just whatever rhymes with the thing that you buried. It's just close enough. It's kind of like a form of re-traumatization, sort of like people who have PTSD, they suffer from that too. So we're going to talk about that anchor that's at the bottom of the lake, the thing that's the obstacle. You can build all the swimming skills in the world, but if there's a wreck down there and you never marked it on a chart, it was never seen on a chart, you're going to keep running aground on it, and you won't even know why. So let's just start talking about it today, in this episode, from the point of somebody who's dealing with addiction. There's a difference between telling the truth and being truthful, and we talked about that in the last episode. However, the funny thing is, Ray never lied about the Foreman incident incident. He told the truth about what happened that night. He just wasn't being truthful about what was actually happened, what actually had happened nine years earlier. He wasn't truthful about that. And that gap, telling true things dishonestly by omission, is exactly where this problem lives. Shame tied to a buried event doesn't fade away in time. It just kind of sits there. It's like a it's like a smoldering ember. And small unrelated things, a tone, a look, a comment that wasn't even about you become the release vowel because they rhyme with the real thing. It's re-traumatization. You're fine until it gets too close to the original trauma, and then you're just being triggered. The drug was never the response to the small trigger, it was always a response to the door. Isolation, being addiction's best friend. It's the catchphrase that I use, and it's there for a reason. The buried event survives because it is never spoken. The minute it's said out loud in a room full of people who've lived that same truth, that same reality, it really starts to lose its power, it shrinks. In your head, it's loud. Out loud is just a story other people have heard before. And it becomes less disconnected from you, and you become more focused on the understanding about what in the world just happened when you got triggered, when you got that response that you got. I remember many years ago, uh, when I was in college, um I was getting ready to go to class. I w I lived by myself in an apartment. I think it was my second year in college, and uh there was this TV show on, it's a talk show in the morning back in the 80s, the Phil Donahue show. And it was kind of one of those like the Oprah Winfrey show or these others where they bring guests out and talk. And this gentleman on that show started talking about his um experience growing up, and there was a psychiatrist and a psychologist and somebody else with in on the panel, and this gentleman was talking about um his family history. Now, remember, this is back in the early 80s, so it was like 1980, well, mid eighties, 84, 85. And he, as he was talking, I was just kind of half listening as I was getting ready to go to class. I had to be there at 10, and this show came on at nine o'clock in the morning, and uh this guy started describing how much he had been going through kind of verbal abuse and at the hands of his of his father. And I was kind of as I was half listening, uh I was I was shocked because what he was describing was basically how I grew up, and the people on the show, the guests on the show who were the quote unquote experts, um, that at the time I didn't know anything about counseling or psychology or anything, um, they were calling it abuse. They were calling it emotional abuse and verbal abuse, and I had never thought of my childhood in those terms. And um it was shocking uh to me. I I actually skipped class that day and sat there and watched the entire show, and I was just stunned. Uh it was something that just stuck with me. And then, you know, later that day, that was the uh that was the thing that kind of r re-triggered some thinking I had about um, you know, my childhood and how it made me feel. And I re that's that was in my drinking day, so of course I drank. And so what was the trigger? Well, the trigger was my emotions and the reaction I had to it. It was something that I hadn't been living for at that point, you know, eight, six, seven, eight years, but it just opened that door. And it so that you would think the trigger was the show or the guest or whatever, and it really wasn't. So y we have those things happen, and they can be related, they can be completely unrelated, but you just it sounds familiar. The tone, like I said before, the tone, the word selection, the person's face, whatever. And that can do it. And then you're off to the races. So dealing with this is something that is a challenge because it's something that lives in your head, right? It doesn't live in reality, it's not it's just in your head, it's something you think of. It helps if you have um one safe person. Don't not the whole world, but one person. And that can be your sponsor or a therapist or somebody in the rooms that you see as a peer. But somebody you can talk to, and that's the that's the important thing, like I had referenced before. Speaking. Speaking takes the power away from it. What happens is when we're addicts, we just live with those words in our head and they just keep bouncing around like a ping-pong ball. Another thing that can help is going through the steps where most people, as I've said many times in my experience, most people will step out of recovery, and that's step four and step five. Because they don't want to go through their own personal stuff. They think that they don't want to rehash their own personal failings or whatever, right? And step four is the fearless searching moral inventory of your character defects. Step five is saying it them out loud to yourself, to another person of God, the nature and extent of those defects. That fearless moral inventory is a problem. You're saying out loud to yourself what the problem is, and you're writing it down. And a good sponsor will have you actually get the Hazleton uh step four workbook and make you go through it and pick out those words that are that you are liar, cheater, abuser, you know, manipulator, whatever, so you can identify those things. But also it's about you understanding uh how you got there. Bessel Bessel Vanderkohl's line, the body keeps the score, and your own physical outlet, whatever it is, that's what you gotta find. The buried thing lives in the body, not just in the head. So your vagus nerve, your parasympathetic system. You can you can I've seen people start um getting upset, and they actually have like uh like like a almost a convulsion type movement, just quickly, like like they're shivering, but extreme. They can start their hands can start shaking um as they're describing things, they're reliving that experience. And that's the body that's that's remembering hypervigilance, uh, reaction to things that are loud, intrusive. Um, if you were if you were beaten and you hear a bang or somebody takes their belt off really quick in your presence, that can be a uh a thing that has that same rhythm to it, that's saying it's rhyming with that fear that you had. It's very similar. And it's it's uh traumatizing. But you gotta have a physical outlet for that. You gotta be able to get rid of that body-retained stuff. So that body work, that physical work is really important. The other thing is being able to um experience it, but not full immersion into it, short doses. And by short, I mean, you know, maybe when you're talking to your therapist, that's an hour-long session, maybe an hour and a half. That's pretty short. Uh, for 168 hours in a week, that's one. But feeling it is part of it. Uh Dan Siegel uh says, name it, don't tame it. Five minutes, ten minutes, not forever, just five minutes sitting with it instead of running. And that's what I try to get my clients to practice in therapy when I'm working with them is I want you to spend a few minutes describing this to me, and they'll describe it to me, and I'll I'll sit with it with them. You know, they'll tell me something, I mean, and then at the end of a few minutes of it, I will reinforce the idea that what they experienced was terrible. I don't I don't focus on them and say, oh gosh, I'm that's that must have been hard for you. That that's I'm sorry that happened to you. I'm I my being sorry has nothing to do with their experience. So I'll just let them sit with it and feel it, and then I label it for what it really is because a lot of times what people do is they will mislabel it and say, Well, I survived it, so it's not that bad. I can't I won't let them go there. I'll keep them in that, but I'll give it the correct label. That was terrible. That was a that was abuse. I'll I'll give it those labels, and it's weird because they look at me like they're not sure what I'm saying, because they want to think that, but they've never actually allowed themselves to because it feels too too hard. But when you label it appropriately, it is what it really is. So being in it, like identifying it, understanding your physical reaction to it, um, being able to label it correctly, all very important things. And if you're a Christian, for the brothers and sisters listening out there, laying it at God's feet isn't passive, it's active. It's not a crutch, an anchor of a different kind. And you're not supposed to, when you lay it down, you're not supposed to keep a hand on it just in case you want to pick it back up. You gotta let it go. And that's that's difficult. So uh if you think about how in the world are you going to deal with the things that are affecting you, one of the primary things you can do is understand that this is your history. This is not some made-up story. And that dissociative kind of telling of the tale like you do if you're explaining to somebody that you really don't want them engaging in a lot of questions. It's your story and it's real. It exists, it's not ever going to be undone, but the traumatization portion of it is the part that makes you feel this baseline under the current, kind of like a riptide, it's you know, smooth on top and it's flowing like crazy underneath a direction you don't want to go, it's that undercurrent, it's that under toe. That it's you gotta stop that. And the only way to stop that is to get in calmer waters. And so if you're in those turbulent times, you're in that caught in that that rip tide, that rip current, trying to swim straight into the rip current is crazy. You're just gonna exhaust yourself, you're just gonna end up being washed out and drowning. So trying to face it in a way that you're ignoring it, that's that's what I kind of think of when I think of people dealing with these traumatic events and the as I said, like the rhyming. It's gotta, it's gotta be close enough, but it's not the exact same thing. It sounds sort of the same. And if you're in that place where you just can't seem to understand that that connection that you have to that problem, you just keep denying it, minimizing it, pretending like it didn't happen. It's gonna come back. The people that I really struggle with, the two groups of people I struggle with in trying to help counsel, one is the very older population. The people are in their 60s and 70s because they were raised with the children seen and not heard, and you probably didn't get a lot of connection or empathy from your parents. The silent generation, born in the 1920s and 30s, and so they are not good listeners. And even if they do listen, they're not good with the reactions that they get when they're hearing what they're hearing. Now, I'm not suggesting you go talk to the parent who's abusing you to get that. I'm just talking about um, and I'm putting myself in that group because I'm in that age group, the the people that um have gone through something and they're not really good at being able to hold in the moment to stay with it for even five minutes. They they're very dismissive about the labeling of like that was terrible. That's awful that you went through that. That is terrible. They they really because they don't know what to do with that. And then the question of, do I even want to engage in this? And then what do I do with it? And what they've done at that point is they've spent the last 50, 60, sometimes 70 years just kind of pushing it down. We're not, I'm not gonna talk about it. We don't talk about that. The other, and so when I'm suggesting to them, hey, we need to, I need I need you to tell me about this. Like, give me the full description, and they'll tell me, but it's very story-like and they leave out a whole lot of information because they don't want to emotionally connect to it because they've never received anything in return. And if you're that addict and you're that age, your your drug of choice most likely is alcohol. Um, it's very difficult for you to be in that moment. But the really, truly, the the freedom from your addiction at that point is to reframe and understand these traumatic events, especially if they're at the hands of your parents, you know, 50, 60 years later, uh, you're trying to go through this. That's it. And that's the key. The other group that I have uh a real problem with is the extreme other end of the spectrum of feelings. The the uh the generation that is between 16 and 25 or 28, because they were raised with it's all about your feelings, and so they get bombarded with these feelings that are um traumatizing, and they're not they can't put it into the same category that those people who have uh normal connection to feelings, they don't know what to do with it because they've been overwhelmed with a sense of feelings, and that's the focus, and you should have you should feel good about yourself. They also have been raised with the idea that the world is a terrible place, we're all gonna die, we have ten years left, and that's it. They've been looking at multiple uh attacks, wars, lots of uh social unrest, people getting shot, getting blown up, there's lots of attacks on people and deaths, and so they are so traumatized with the idea of fatality and fatalism that when I say, you know, if you're let's say it's a 20, 22-year-old I'm talking to, and they're no longer living with their abuser as a parent or somebody next door or whatever, they are so focused on this is terrible, and there is no answer. And they've already accepted that it was horrible, but they just don't know what to do about it, and so then they just internalize it in a way, instead of shutting it down, it just becomes this kind of echo chamber of resonance that they just keep re-experiencing it over and over and over again, and so talking about it with them is an interesting thing. I don't have to convince them that it was abuse, unfortunately, they've been told everything is abuse, so they've minimized it in that way. If I look at somebody and they don't like my expression, I have attacked them and that's violence. That's what they've been told. Even though it's not, um, but that's what they've been told. So they don't understand that being beaten with a belt or punched or having broken arms or putting cigarettes out on you, when when you use the term abuse, it's been so overused and abused in today's society and misused that uh me saying it to them creates a real problem for them because uh everything's abuse. So they minimize it because there's too much in their lives that they've understood as abuse, which is the opposite of the other generation that I was talking about. So uh it's a challenging thing to deal with, but I'm telling you that uh exposing it to light, exposing it to the light of day, exposing it to other people is the key. And the reactions that you have to things is also very telling, and that's what you need to pay attention to as well. Just like Ray, who actually didn't drink but he wanted to, he stood out there or he sat in there in his car waiting, and he and he waded through it, and that is how you get through these times. You get um exposed to something, your reaction to it is to feel the trauma. And maybe, like in Ray's case, Ray had been sober for quite a while, so he had much more armor on that would protect him from re-triggered into addiction. So it was easier for him to um to get away from it. However, if you have a situation where you you don't have that level of armor around you, it's gonna be much harder to uh to resist. Now, I'm not suggesting that it's okay that you use it's not, but at the same time, if you do, that's fine, because that's an old coping mechanism, and you gotta get away from the old to start the new. So even if you have a problem of relapse and that's something that keeps happening to you, or accidents, that's fine. That's part of the learning experience, that's part of the change that you gotta go through. And it's not something that I'm happy that people do, but at the same time, I know it's a very useful tool to learn how to cope differently. Ray almost fell into his old coping mechanism. He got as far as like the door, but he just never did it, and that's awesome. But at the same time, even if he did, you still you gotta get back to reality. So that's why we don't mask it, we deal with it. Well, that's this episode of Doc Jock Your Addiction Life Guard. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you have, please subscribe. Throw me a like. And if you've got questions, you can reach out to me on my website, docjock.com. And if you did like the show, I recommend it. I always enjoy the feedback and I appreciate the turning up into people. If you need help, you can reach out to me through that DocJock website and ask me questions. I want to, I need each and every one of you to answer. Um if you need help, what do we have for TikTok accounts or for the women to keep a sponsor? Start working because it's not worth owning the white to save your ticket. Until next time, this is DocTocks, and this will be there.