Dear Sugar,
I was raised in the very conservative, Christian “deep south,” where I’ve discovered that my life has been sheltered from the views and lifestyles in other areas of the country. Our town has a population of about six thousand. The whole county has less than thirty thousand. The Internet has been a real eye opener, to say the least. I accidentally found your column and was fascinated. I know that people are pretty much the same everywhere, but in the south people tend to keep things out of the public eye. Especially concerning sex and relationships. I have very much enjoyed reading your columns because they are honest, blunt and give me a new perspective on the lives of others that I normally wouldn’t see or hear. Yes, the “Southern Culture” you’ve always heard about is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
I am a professional in a real estate related field and I own my own business. I’ve been married for twenty-plus years and have four children. The first half of my marriage was what I considered utopia but we’ve grown apart over the last ten years or so. Now it seems that we simply cohabitate peacefully, similar to siblings. Neither of us is happy, but we stay together for the kids.
Several years ago, I was involved in an accident that damaged my spine. I was told by a neurosurgeon that operating wouldn’t help and he referred me to a pain management clinic. Now I am hopelessly addicted to the pain meds. In my youth, I experimented with drinking and drugs. Much of that was spurred on by the suicide of an older sibling. I never had a problem as far as addiction though. Now, I take a month’s supply of some very strong pain meds in about seven to ten days then I crash and have to beg or borrow from others to make it to the next appointment. I know that these drugs will end up turning my liver into a rock if I don’t accidentally overdose first. I know that I have a serious problem.
When the economy went bad, so did business and we ended up losing our health insurance. I no longer have employees, so if I don’t work every day, we don’t eat. Rehab is realistically impossible. I can’t depend on my wife for support and don’t have any other family anywhere close. I feel totally alone except for my children. I tried everything I could think of from prayer to “cold turkey.” I simply don’t have the discipline to follow through. I’ve come to depend on the drugs mentally as much or more than physically. I depend on the drugs to help me deal with the lack of work and income as well as dealing with a loveless marriage. Couple that with the loss of my dear mother a year and a half ago and soon thereafter, one of my best friends to cancer. Now I have begun to have problems with depression and suicidal thoughts that I’m sure are related to the meds as much as the economy or anything else. The choices I see are:
1. Continue like I have been, knowing that there is a good chance that it will kill me.
2. Find a way to go to rehab and lose the house and business (my wife doesn’t work).
3. Go to AA/NA meetings in this small town. This would almost surely ruin what’s left of my business.
I hope you can see some other options because I just don’t see any of the ones I’ve listed working out. Please be honest, blunt and give me a new perspective on my multifaceted problem.
Thank you,
Ruler of a Fallen Empire
Dear Ruler of a Fallen Empire,
I’m terribly sorry for your misfortune. You listed the three options you believe you have, but really they all say the same thing: that you believe you’re fucked before you begin. I understand why you feel this way, sweet pea. Your convergence of physical pain, drug addiction, financial woe, no health insurance, and an unhappy marriage is truly daunting. But you don’t have the luxury of despair. You can find a way to overcome these difficulties and you must. There aren’t three options. There is only one. As Rilke says, “You must change your life.”
You have the capacity to do that, Ruler. It seems impossible now, but you aren’t thinking clearly. The drugs and desperation and depression have muddled your head. If there is only one thought that you hold in your mind right now, please let it be that one. It was that thought that got me out of my own drug/money/love disaster several years ago. Someone I trusted told me what to do when I couldn’t think right for myself and listening to him saved my life.
You say that you don’t have the “discipline to follow through” when it comes to kicking your addiction, but you do. It’s that you can’t do it alone. You need to reach out for help. Here’s what I think you should do:
1. Talk to a medical doctor at your pain management clinic and tell him or her that you’ve become addicted to your pain medication and also that you’re depressed and broke. Tell the whole story. Don’t conceal anything. You aren’t alone. You have nothing to be ashamed of, hon. I know your first instinct is to lie to your doctor, lest he or she cut off your drug supply, but don’t trust that instinct. That’s the instinct that will ruin your life and possibly kill you. Trust the man inside you who you really are and if you can’t do that, trust me. Your doctor can help you safely taper off of the drug to which you’ve become addicted, prescribe an alternative, non-addictive drug, refer you to drug addiction treatment programs and/or psychological counseling, or all of the above.
2. Perhaps your doctor knows of a drug treatment program available to you at no cost, but if this isn’t an option, I implore you to attend an NA meeting (or an AA meeting, if that’s what’s available in your town). Of course you’re afraid of being judged and condemned. Some people will judge and condemn you, but most won’t. Our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another. You’re in a pickle. You did things you didn’t hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you’re like the rest of us. I’ve never been in a humiliating situation when I wasn’t shocked by all the “normal” people who were also in the very same humiliating position. Humans are beautifully imperfect and complex. We’re horny, ass-saving, ego-driven, drug fiends, among other, more noble things. I think you’ll be comforted when you go the AA/NA meeting and see how many have problems similar to yours—including people you assumed would not. Those people will help you heal yourself, darling. They’ll support you as you face this addiction. And they’ll do it for free. I know a lot of people who have transformed their lives thanks to those meetings. Not one of them thought they were the “AA/NA type” before they went. They knew that they were smarter or more sophisticated or less religious or more skeptical or less strung out or more independent than all those other hopeless freaks who went to AA or NA. They were all wrong. You worry that your business will be ruined if word gets around that you’re attending meetings. I think people are more generous than you’re imagining—yes, even in the “very conservative, Christian ‘deep south.’” But, Ruler, even if you’re right, what’s the alternative? Your addiction and depression will only deepen if you continue on this path. Would you rather have your business go down because you did or because you live among a community of punishing jackasses?
3. Talk to your wife and tell her about your addiction and your depression. This might be the first item on the list or the last—I can’t gauge from your letter. Will your wife be an important advocate for you as you make the initial reach for help or will she be more supportive if you tell her after you’ve made a few positive changes on your own? Either way, I imagine she’ll feel betrayed to learn that you’ve been concealing your addiction from her, and eventually relieved that she knows the truth. You say your marriage is “loveless” and perhaps you’re correct that your relationship has come to its natural end, but I’d like you to consider the notion that you aren’t the best judge of that right now. You’re a psychologically distressed drug addict with four kids, no health insurance, uncertain business prospects and a pile of bills. I wouldn’t expect your marriage to be thriving. I doubt you’ve been an excellent partner in recent years and it doesn’t sound like your wife has either. But that the two of you have managed—after your ten happy years together—to roll on for another ten “peaceably,” in spite of the enormous stress you’re under, is an accomplishment that you mustn’t fail to recognize. It may indicate that the love you once shared isn’t dead. Perhaps you can re-build your marriage. Perhaps you can’t. Either way, I encourage you to see.
4. Make a financial plan, even if that plan is an anatomy of a disaster. You cite money as the reason you can’t go into rehab, or even to AA/NA meetings, but surely you know that the financial repercussions will be far worse if you continue on your present course. Everything is at stake, Ruler. Your children. Your career. Your marriage. Your home. Your life. If you need to spend some money to cure yourself, so be it. The only way out of a hole is to climb out. After you consult with your doctor and see what options are available to you, and after you have a heart-to-heart with your wife about your situation, sit down with her and have a discussion about money in which everything is on the table. Perhaps you qualify for public assistance. Perhaps your wife can get a job, either temporarily or permanently. Perhaps you can get a loan from a friend or family member. Perhaps things won’t seem so dire once you make the first steps in the direction of healing and you’ll be able to maintain your job while you recover. I know you feel panicked about your financial standing because you have four children to support, but every choice you’re currently making is hurting your cause. The only way for you to support your family financially is to get yourself together.
Your letter appeared in my inbox a couple of days after my last column ran. It was so hard for me to stick to my word to take a break from being Sugar so I could write like a motherfucker on my book under my real name because I felt urgently that you needed advice. I thought of you every day. I sent you the inexplicable version of love I feel for those who write to me. I kept imagining your despair. Your words about there being no way out of your situation rang through my mind, especially as I worked and reworked a scene that I wasn’t sure I should keep in my book.
It was about the year I lived in Brooklyn when I was twenty-four. I shared an apartment with a man who was then my husband in a building that was mostly empty. Below us there was a bodega; above us a couple who got into raging fights in the middle of the night. The rest of the building—though full of apartments—was unoccupied for reasons that were never clear to me. I spent my days alone writing in the apartment while my husband worked his job as an assistant to someone who appeared to be in the mafia. In the evenings I worked as a waitress.
“Did you hear something strange?” my husband asked me one night when I got home from work.
“Hear something?” I asked.
“Behind the walls,” he said. “I heard something earlier and I wondered if you heard it too, while you were alone today.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.
But the next day I did. Something behind the walls, and then from the ceiling. Something close, then distant, then close again, then gone. I didn’t know what it was. It sounded awful. Like a baby who was extremely discreet. Its keen had the weight of a feather, the velocity of a dried leave falling from a tree. It could have been nothing. It could have been me. It was the exact expression of the sound my insides were making every time I thought of my life and how I needed to change it and how impossible that seemed.
“I heard something,” I told my husband that night.
He went to the wall and touched it. There was nothing there. It was silent. “I think we’re imagining things,” he said and I agreed.
But the sound kept coming and going, all through December, impossible to define or reach. Christmas came and we were all alone. The people who probably belonged to the mafia gave my husband a bonus. We spent it on tickets to the opera in way-back seats. It was Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
“I keep hearing it,” I said to my husband on the subway home. “The sound behind the walls.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
On New Year’s Day we woke at seven to a yowling. We jumped out of bed. The sound was the same one we’d been hearing for three weeks, but it wasn’t discreet anymore. It was coming very clearly from the ceiling of our bedroom closet. My husband immediately got a hammer and started pounding away at the plaster with the claw end, chipping it in great chalky chunks that fell over our clothes. Within ten minutes, he’d clawed almost the entire closet ceiling away. We didn’t care that we were ruining the place. We knew only that we had to get to the source of that sound, which had stopped during the pounding. Once there was no more closet ceiling to claw away, we went silent and stared up into the mysterious black innards of the building.
At first it seemed there was nothing—that the horrible sound-maker had again gone away or perhaps we really had imagined it—but a moment later two emaciated kittens appeared, coming to peer down at us from the jagged edge of the hole. They were the strangest things I’ve ever seen. So skeletal they should have been dead, visibly shaking with fear, caked in soot and spider webs and globs of black grease, their eyes enormous and blazing.
“Meow,” one of them said.
“Meow,” wailed the other.
My husband and I held up our palms and the kittens walked into them immediately. They were so light it was like holding air with the smallest possible thing in it. They were like two sparrows in our hands.
I worked and reworked this scene as I pondered you and your problems over these past weeks, Ruler, but after all that work, I decided to take it out of my book. It was nice, but I didn’t need it. It was an odd thing that happened to me during a sad and uncertain time in my life that I hoped would tell readers something deep about my ex-husband and me. About how in love we were and also how lost. About how we were like those kittens who’d been trapped and starving for weeks. Or maybe not about the kittens at all. Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice. I could’ve sanded it down. I could have fit it in.
But I took it out because of you, Ruler. I realized it was a story you needed to hear instead. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out—though surely there’s something there too—but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.
Yours,
Sugar
32 responses
Wow. I think you’ve given “Ruler” the options he needed. You can’t live in despair, you have to make a choice… a difficult, conscious choice to move. Moving can be scary but necessary.
I think this is wonderful Sugar.
Every Thursday I weep (happy hopeful tears). Today, especially. I want to say to Ruler…16 yrs ago I said, “I have to change my life or die.” I have been happy ever since. It was the scariest thing to decide to change, to take what I perceived a massive risk, and to change everything I’d known. I wanted to stay in the abusive and miserable known, rather than leap into the unknown–and one day, I became so miserable that I knew I would die if I continued on the path of the known, so I took the leap to change, and I decided to get help. It was a tough decision, and one I have never ever regretted. It was the road to my happiness.
I think Sugar’s answer is generally excellent, but she left out one important point. It is a myth that staying in a loveless, unhappy marriage is the best thing for the children. It’s actually one of the worst things you can do for the children. They grow up in a tense atmosphere, often having to side with one parent against the other, or even look after or protect one parent from the other. They acquire very poor relationship models, because you’re showing them that a “normal” relationship is unhappy, with poor communication and a lack of intimacy. If there is violence in the relationship, they learn that this is normal as well. If there is an addiction in the relationship, that too goes on their unconscious list of things that are normal. Why do you think that children of addicts are so likely to become addicts themselves? If no one is talking about the problems in the relationship, they won’t learn relationship communication skills either, and will be left thinking that they deserve no better than what they have been shown by their parents. The children end up having to take on responsibilities at far too young an age, especially if one or both parents are addicts.
My mother stuck with my father for about twenty years longer than she should have. The relationship was emotionally abusive, and finally physically abusive, but it was the decades of emotional abuse that were the most important. My father was depressed, disconnected, and decided that he was incapable of getting a job, forcing my mother to support him as well as me even though she was seriously ill after having cancer. Oddly enough, the minute they divorced he went out and got a high-paying job, but she never got a penny in maintenance (alimony to Americans). If they’d split up before things got so bad that he was kicking her down the stairs, I might not have severed all contact with him, but frankly he was a complete tosser and I have never regretted it for a moment. My mother was extremely damaged by the abuse, took it out on me, and even thirteen years after I left home our relationship is highly fraught.
I was first in a serious relationship when I was 21, and completely failed to realise that the charming young man I adored was abusing me just as much as my mother had been abused by my father. This is because I’d grown up in a household where self-esteem was stomped on, where bitterness was normal, where it was completely acceptable to scream abuse for hours or to criticise someone for the way they said “er” on the phone. The guy was even raping me for six months before it ended, and I just thought that something was wrong with me because that is how I’d been trained all my life. I am happy to report that my mother and I are both in happy, healthy relationships now, but it took a hell of a lot of unlearning.
So yes, I’d suggest that you go and find yourself somewhere else to stay, use it as the kick start to sorting yourself out. Divorces aren’t immediate anyway, if you find that the relationship miraculously improves (unlikely) then you can get back together, but don’t be fooled into thinking that this problem will be solved overnight. Meanwhile, there is no point in putting your wife and children through your struggle with addiction and your unhappiness. You may not think about the effects it has on them, but they are there and they are most likely profound.
I recently had a long talk with my therapist–whose specialty is child psychology–about whether or not to publish a story that would lay bare a very painful fact about my life. I was worried about my kids reading it, worried about what other people would think of me, worried about keeping up the successful achiever version of myself to the world. But my therapist told me that in her experience, and in the research as she has read it, it is always, always better to let secrets out than to keep them in. By letting our children see our flaws, and how we face them ourselves, cope with them, and why, it helps them learn to manage their own future problems (as they will surely face such challenges), helps them to be more authentic, and to love more authentically too. I truly believe that it is only when we expose our own vulnerability completely that we can connect completely, and for this reason I agree so much with Sugar that your honesty has the potential to deepen your relationship to your wife as well as your children–and possibly forge new connections with people in your network of recovery. I admire you already, and wish you the best!! And Sugar–dang–such beauty. Thanks for giving all of us that incredible story. xoxo
Dear Ruler & Sugar,
I recently heard of a drug called Ibogaine that can be incredibly effective in curing opioid and other dependencies. A neighbor tells me his friend’s wife, whose broken back years ago led to very heavy reliance on pain meds, attended a clinic in Mexico last year and has been drug-free since. It’s illegal in the US, but there are clinics north and south of our border. Yeah, getting to one might cost more than you think you can afford, but it’s probably a real deal in terms of mental and physical health.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine
Might be worth investigating. Were I in your situation, I definitely would.
I am sitting here at work with tears falling down my cheeks, wishing I could write Ruler directly. I don’t know if he will read the comments, but I have to speak up just in case.
I am the adult child of a mother who died from a narcotic addiction two years ago last August. She had been addicted to morphine and other pain meds for a few years (although she struggled with various addictions my entire life). She died from an accidental overdose. She likely lost track of how many pills she had taken in her drug-induced-sleep-haze.
Two years later I am still coming to terms with my mother’s life and death as an addict. The inherent narcissism that comes with addiction made her incapable of having a healthy relationship with me or being present to me as a mother. The resulting emotional issues impact all of my relationships, even though I am working damn hard to heal.
If Ruler can’t make the decision to change his life for himself right now, then I ask him to truly consider what it will feel like for his children if he dies in such a tragic way, to really sit with the enormity of grief they will experience. And know they will likely ask themselves why he didn’t love them enough to overcome the addiction and stay alive to be in their life.
I also ask him to consider the truth of what his children are living with right now. His children are being fathered by narcotics rather than by him. Narcotics alter your emotional state. They alter the way you think. They make you a different person and the changes are never good.
Children need their parents to be present and healthy in order to grow up into healthy adults. I had a similar choice to make 15 years ago when I became pregnant with my second child through an act of violence in an abusive relationship. I didn’t love myself enough to change my life, but I loved my children enough. I knew that I didn’t want to send them into the world broken the same way my mother had sent me into the world broken. They were my motivation to change until I understood that I needed to be healthy out of love for myself. If Ruler can’t change for himself right now, maybe he can do so out of love for his children.
I hope with all of my heart that Ruler listens to your advice, Sugar. And I thank you with all of my heart for being the open-hearted, nonjudgmental and amazingly insightful woman that you are.
Love to you both.
The hardest thing about Sugar being anonymous is that I’d really like to read a book that was as honest as these columns. Maybe one day I’ll be reading a a book and realize that it must be Sugar who wrote it. That day I would rejoice silently and fall asleep content. Then the next day I would buy the rest of her books.
So beautiful….
What Sugar and everybody else said, but definitely this right here:
I think Sugar’s answer is generally excellent, but she left out one important point. It is a myth that staying in a loveless, unhappy marriage is the best thing for the children.
I’ve been on both the child side of this and the parent side, and it is absolutely the truth.
HOW DO YOU DO THIS EVERY COLUMN?
So good, Sugar.
This person should also know about 211.org (which is the number 2-1-1 in many places0. Free help. Call suicide lines, even if not suicidal. Call one charity, and see if they know someone who can help. These organizations all know about each other, and they can help!
@John Brown Agreed.
Ruler,
Is there any chance that you might consider moving away from your small-town life in the South, and starting again in a different and broader community? You may find, as you reach out for support for your chronic pain and management of your narcotics addiction, that there is a larger network of help and friendship out there than you are aware of. In addition to in-person support from local groups, there are lots of people online who form supportive communities, chat rooms, forums, etc. The world might turn out to be a lot bigger than it’s ever been for you, and there may be a different place for you in it than you are currently aware of.
Additionally — your life is worth more than your home or your business. Does your wife not work because she can’t, or because she is a full-time caregiver for your kids? Is there any potential there for her as wage-earner? What would happen if you lost your house — could you rent an apartment? What would happen if you lost your business? Would those skills translate into another line of work, or do you have other skills or interests you might be able to draw on instead?
The one good thing about hitting rock bottom is that once you have nothing to lose, there are different possibilities than the facade of life you are so desperately clinging to. Maybe it’s time to let go of the skeleton of the American Dream … the house, the business, the dead marriage — and start again from the ground up. Of course you must do this in a way that keeps your children safe and housed and fed, but it may be that things seem different if you look at it from the perspective of what you want next, rather than keeping what you currently have; the anchor of what’s familiar may be pulling you under rather than keeping you grounded.
Thank you Sugar.
Your columns always fill me with hope, and that is a wonderful gift.
I hope that Ruler feels the same way, and is able to pick himself up and begin to move on.
Reach, reach, reach.
To help you unburden yourself from the trap of thinking you must be miserable for your children, first think of how your children are viewing your current relationship, not the idealized home a dual parent household is supposed to automatically provide. It’s true statistically that children from single parents have more struggles than children from highly functional, close-knit, dual-parent homes. However as many of us who grew up in the divorce backlash have learned the hard way, still more damage is done from viewing the dysfunctional relationship as a necessity for the child. Many of us are now only beginning to understand how failing to live up to such huge sacrifices supposedly done in our names to accommodate our very existence has wreaked havoc on our lives. The terrible guilt at never being enough to seal the rift between parents lingers on far into our own relationships, where we are forever trying to make up for all that we must have taken from our parents’ lives for them to have ended up so drained in trying to keep a household together for us. If you want to train your child to be sorry they ever lived and for anything they ever have to ask for, by all means, point to a loveless marriage and tell them “we put up with each other because you had to have it that way…”
I’m of course not suggesting you divorce someone who is obviously a good enough person to keep up appearances even while you are incapacitated. I have seen completely wrecked marriages renew that you would never believe possible. I actually believe your marriage is in a high probability of being salvaged. But I’m simply sending you a voice from the future to let you know your children will appreciate you not looking to them to replace the meaning in your life that you feel you have lost the ability to generate on your own. Offspring are not magic bullets, but I have yet to meet anyone who does not secretly love both their parents as desperately as they hate them for whatever said parents were sneaky enough to offload in their child’s name. It may well be the kindest thing you can do for your kids is not to be around them until you sort yourself out into someone who can be the parent.
My worst memories are not of my parents fighting or being angry at me or each other, they are of watching the pain “I” caused them by “making” them be together “for my sake.” The kidd gloves that taught me I was too fragile to be their child, or at least a successful child that made them happy, pain revisits whenever I remember the begging of one parent to the other to stay in my life because I “needed” their personal hell to continue as a supposed requirement of my existence. Without them saying a word, I knew I was the continued source of their problem.
That is the legacy of a parent who has not gained the strength to be on their own feet first before attempting to be a parent. Do not make your children feel like vampires for needing a functional parent. Do them the grace of realizing you are not one yet.
Instead, give them your absence, even if you feel guilty and it hurts them. I guarantee you, seeing you and their mother in a bad fix is causing them just as much silent harm as it is you. If you know how much pain you are in, realize that is the pain you are burdening on them until you find a way to stop it for all of you, starting with yourself.
The few proud memories I have of my father, also an addict, are the days when he did bother to rage and fight and struggle. Those were the days I called him my dad because I knew then he was working to come back to us, to make some decisions, and to be really there instead of making us pretend we didn’t need him and that there must be something wrong with us for feeling needs that went unmet while he was checked out.
Quit. Quit. Quit. Quit. Be broke and penniless before you give in to failing your kids another time. You cannot imagine how much they want you to come clean, even if they don’t understand how bad it is, know how good it actually feels to be scared to death and done with the withdrawal – that is the one and only decision you have left that you can make of your own free will – to go clean. Going clean and coming out the other end is the best feeling you will ever experience. It’s better than any other high simply because it’s one you will actually own and will make you feel that piece of yourself you desperately need to come back in order for everything else to work in your life. Don’t give in short-term. Don’t compromise. Find out how amazing it is to be powerful and in control again. Obviously it’s a power much more potent than you’ve ever felt before, or you wouldn’t be wallowing in the little fixes. Find the big hit. Be a father by standing up and facing the music of all the hell that has already gone wrong. Take your lumps and don’t let sniveling back-biters con you out of standing up and being a real father to your kids. You will come out of it on the other end with a rush you cannot believe. You will not need the approval of your kids, wife, or business clients once you are standing again, even if it’s a small job somewhere while you get your pain management worked out. And therein lies the irony. Once you are clean, the people you are afraid of failing now won’t matter.
Your kids will either love you, or they will make do with what you gave them before you turned into the child. But you will have back what you need to be a successful father and a powerful person regardless.
This is how I learned to let go of my fear and stop caring what my father felt about me. He had become the child in our relationship, and I had to learn to let go of what he thought so that I could grow up and find out who I was outside of his shadow. I am a better person now for learning how to respect myself and not need his approval to love myself.
I think you suffer from the same problem. The entire world can, in fact, be wrong. It happens quite a lot. Only you know who you are. Now you’ve just got to decide how to let yourself be that person without accepting that this setback defines you. It doesn’t.
You are an angel & a lifesaver all rolled into one!
You rock, Sugar!
xo 🙂
I write this comment with some measure of shock, as I generally agree with 98-100% of every word Sugar writes, but being that this is the topic area, well…I have to pipe up.
So full disclaimer: I am a psychologist currently working in the chemical dependence field, with a population suffering from serious mental health issues and/or chronic employment problems.
What my agency provides to folks, and what the current zeitgeist of the field is moving towards, is the marvelously respectful, ultimately empowering (in contrast to the traditional “powerlessness” concept) philosophy of harm reduction.
HR acknowledges that traditional, strict abstinence-only programs (such as 12-step groups) are truly successful (according to their definition of success) with only approximately 5% of the population, and advocate treatment based on, as they say “science, compassion, health and human rights.” (Go here for more definitions: http://www.drugpolicy.org/reducingharm/)
So, to YOU, Ruler: I could go on (and on and on!), but I’d rather direct you to this excellent (and cheap!) book, which walks a person through the often incredibly difficult change process, all the while acknowledging human ambivalence, and that one’s problems can be much more complex than just simply addiction:
http://www.amazon.com/Over-Influence-Reduction-Managing-Alcohol/dp/1572308001
Sugar is SO right, though, in this: you can’t do it alone. We are never broken in a vacuum, and neither will we heal in one. So start reaching out–though this was one HELL of a first step, huh?
GOOD LUCK!
(And Sugar? That kitten story, like so many of your others, hit me square between the shoulder blades. You are a true master. xoxoxoxo)
awwww sugar <3
These columns are so incredibly good. This is seriously one of the best things I read on the internet. I don’t have any of these problems, I have other problems, but the way you present your advice inspires a way of thinking that I can take into my own life. You also inspire compassion.
You know you’re going to have to take the mask off Sugar when you publish your book…. everyone is going to want to read it!
Oh, Sugar, what a gift you’ve given us by taking that scene out of your book and giving it to us here! Who hasn’t been one of those poor kittens at one point or another? I agree wholeheartedly with your advice to Ruler, especially the point about needing to stop seeing each choice as doomed before you even begin. Especially the part about needing to trust others in order to save your life. Maybe his community isn’t as small-minded and destructive as he imagines… maybe there are others out there, at their computers, reading your columns too.
@Susan – Ruler says he and his wife cohabitate peacefully. None of us knows anything about their level of intimacy or what the kids do or don’t pick up living under the same roof. Marriages go through all sorts of things over the years and to cohabitate peacefully during trying times doesn’t sound like like divorce court to me.
Sugar, I remain in awe. Thank you!
I’ve really missed you Sugar. As always, your column is beautiful.
Also it isn’t a given that going to NA/AA will “ruin” Ruler’s career. It is just as likely to provide plenty of important business networking opportunities.
Sugar – Wonderful letter, as always.
Ruler – I don’t know much about your situation, but one thing I do know about humans in general is that we are really, really bad at gauging the consequences of our actions. Right now you are on a path that will most assuredly cost you everything, yet you have taken every possible option that could save your life off the table because of what you THINK might happen.
Also, regarding NA/AA ruining your life – please don’t forget the most important word in the title of the groups: “Anonymous.” And also don’t forget that anyone who sees you at a meeting is likely to have issues of his or her own that she or he may not want divulged to others, and as a result is likely to keep your secret. I have never gone to AA/NA as a member, but I have many friends who have (including my husband, who is coming up on his tenth year of sobriety and who I have accompanied to open meetings in the past) and all of them take the entreaties to anonymity very, very seriously. The odds of finding some malevolent snake lurking the grass, waiting to throw you under the bus, are not nearly as high as finding someone who will be willing to guide you through this extremely difficult, painful process.
Best of luck to you.
I don’t know if you’ve considered writing a book of essays (or if you already have), but that kitten story, like many others that appear in your column, doesn’t need to be “worked in” anywhere. It’s beautiful, and I think it would stand up quite well on its own, even outside the advice column format.
Thanks for this.
I think your column might be saving my life, too.
Sugar, what happened to the kittens?
Sugar, you make my soul smile and sob and smile again. Bless you for being you and allowing us to be part of it.
Sugar, you have to let us know what happened to those poor kittens! My heart got all caught up for Ruler and then utterly yanked out with the kitten story… I imagine as thin and pitiful as they were they were probably very sick, but did they make it through? If not, were their last moments at least comfortable?
Dear readers,
Thank you for all the lovely comments. Yes, those kittens recovered from their ordeal. And thrived.
ox
Sugar
Dear Sugar,
Is it too much to say I love you?
Too bad. I do.
Thank you for writing.
Hi Sugar and Ruler,
Thank you for the column. I do not wish to disagree with anyone’s advice, except may I kindly disagree with Road2Ruin? Nothing personal, Road, but send a drug addict for experimental treatment with a non-approved by anyone drug which miraculously cures drug addiction? Goddamn, please. Join Scientology or the Tea Party before you do that shit, Ruler; or skip the middleman and kill yourself in Tijuana or just sign in to a Mexican prison now; why prolong the misery?
I really mean that, that I meant no harm or disrespect to Road2–at least he/she is at least offering something more than “pray to Jesus and go to AA” which, however you care to compose the wording, is, actually, America’s only answer, the AMA’s only treatment offering, really, the one inescapable 12-step dogma that you either accept or die, according to the Big Book of AA. (“Our only alternative…insanity or death…”) Well, Ruler, like any dogma, that isn’t true. You can continue to drink or use drugs, and another possible alternative would be to keep doing it for years and years and years, not die or go (completely) insane or be institutionalized. You could live another 50 years high–I know lots of people do that. Like Crazy Heart, Jeff Bridges just hurls out in the alley and goes back on stage afterward, feeling like shit.
I found it extremely difficult to comment on this thread, because the middle name of my life is: drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs, out of the womb, went to treatment at age 21, again sometime in 20s, again maybe at 30, worked the program with sponsors some of the five year spans, went to prison for stealing drugs, age 31 to 36. Well, let me stop the story there ‘ere I get too personal to myself.
I learned one more useful thing in this column, commenter Beth’s suggestion of websites and the book Over the Influence, about another approach dealing with Harm Reduction. I liked the book; since I’m skeptical about everything, I don’t give a testimonial here, but it’s worth the effort. More is needed than what is currently available to help you, Ruler. But it won’t hurt to try all the accepted methods–everything Sugar and Beth said are definitely logical courses of action–some just cure themselves or go to church and let Jesus heal them, or a psychiatrist, and some people are sober for 4 years and then kill themselves. All of the above.
It’s just me, it’s not for the faint of heart. Requiem for a Dream is the most realistic thing I’ve ever seen on the subject. This 5 minute music video sums up the movie accurately, and my thoughts about drug use. It’s so harsh to look at (except when YOU are doing it), but I love the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYZbTTOt1E
Good luck. Fuck what your neighbors say, we all die tomorrow, us and them; love those people you love, do your best, and I’ll meet you there, brother.
Shawn
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