perfectly. You see, I was also a people pleaser. I wanted to do everything right, which is impossible. Perfection, while a nice concept, is bullshit. There really isn’t anything perfect in this world, although the majority of us are still aiming at, trying for, and seeking it every minute of every day.
So I set out on my quest to find the perfect, Buddha-like sponsor who would usher me flawlessly into this recovery thing. In my first meeting, a woman named Tina spoke and her words struck me. She was in her late thirties with badly bleached, dirty blonde, frizzy hair and a horrible complexion. Her face seemed to be covered in acne scars, which I later learned actually came from her picking her face for hours in the mirror while sketching out in a heroin- and cocaine-induced haze.
I was immediately taken by her as she spoke of her own battle as a cokehead and alcoholic. She smoked a lot of crack, shot heroin, and got into a lot of trouble with the law. She seemed perfect for me! After the meeting, I walked up to her and asked her to be my sponsor and she said yes. To have a sponsor who had also done the drugs I had done and more was so exciting to me. Finally, someone who could relate to me!
I spoke to Tina daily and sought her guidance on everything I did. In rehab, I had learned painfully that my own thinking had gotten me addicted, so it was time to start taking suggestions. One key example they gave me in rehab group therapy was my faulty thinking and my behavior with Matt—my sneaking around and trying to hook up with a guy I knew nothing about. In my head, I thought nothing of what I was doing. Seeing Matt was a convenient distraction for me and something I felt justified in doing because I didn’t see the harm in it to myself or others. My counselors and peers in the group abruptly pointed out to me that I was engaging in what they call in recovery “stinking thinking.” This is any form of thinking that takes you away from your purpose—the purpose being to maintain recovery. It would take me a long time to start putting these pieces of new information into practice in my life. It was critical for me to have someone with more recovery experience in my life to constantly reinforce these principles in my malfunctioning brain. As with any behavioral change, recovery must be reinforced and practiced daily. In many ways that is what a sponsor is—a behavioral modifier.
The day Tina agreed to be my sponsor, I left the meeting and hopped into my little silver Toyota, one of my possessions that I still managed to have. Although it was falling apart at the seams, it got me from points A to B, which was good because Matthew lived in bumfuck turn left at Egypt, on the outskirts of State College. It took me twenty to thirty minutes to get into town for my meetings. Often I would go to a meeting that was in Center Hall, closer to our house. It was a great little meeting with people who were more rural than the professional types I encountered in State College. In State College everyone held degrees, and those in my meetings were often well-educated and established. They were lawyers, doctors, professors, or other professionals affiliated with the university. In Center Hall, I was among my own type of people—everyday workers with little educational background.
Although the recovery text, meetings, and my sponsor were great for keeping me on track in recovery, I needed more. Like most people with addiction, there were core emotional reasons I was addicted, the majority of which stemmed from my early confusion about my sexuality and my first sexual experience being an assault. Instead of addressing these things, I learned to escape and to hide everything in alcohol and drugs. And though recovery allowed me to look at these reasons and begin to heal, more in-depth counseling was necessary for me to really unearth the entire trauma I had experienced.
Often it is crucial to seek various types of treatment or medications to sustain recovery, and whatever is determined to be the best course of action is the best course of action, period. People in recovery sometimes offer a lot of judgment and misperceptions, including negative reactions toward medications, counseling, and people with a dual diagnosis. There are some who believe twelve-step recovery is the answer and the only answer, but I believe there are others who need more. I have watched people try to go off their meds because of others’ disdain for meds in the rooms of recovery, and all it did was drive them back to drink or to engage in other unhealthy behaviors. If people need medications or other treatments to sustain certain chemicals in their brains to obtain and maintain recovery, in my opinion they should listen to their doctors’ recommendations. Later on, they can always look for alternatives when they have some time in recovery under their belts.
My take on this was that it was up to me determine what worked for me, in consultation with a sponsor, therapist, doctor, or all three. The beauty of recovery was that it was mine and mine alone. I charted my path as it suited me. There were many road maps placed before me in the rooms of recovery, and many of them worked, so I was beginning to use what applied and let go of what didn’t apply for me.
Still on the pink cloud “high” of early recovery, I was ready to learn everything I could and beginning to feel things I had never felt or had refused to feel in the past. Counseling, I thought, would be a great way to help me process my emotions appropriately. In addition to my program of recovery, I needed counseling to dive deep into my past assaults, to take a closer look at my dysfunctional relationship with my mother and how that played into my own addiction, and to really understand why I drank and drugged.
I began to see a therapist who was located near St. Andrew’s church and was recommended to me by several others in the program. She was a middle-aged woman with whom I felt comfortable almost immediately. She had a wonderful way about her, wasn’t judgmental in any way, and put me at ease quickly. We began working together, twice a week at first. I had nothing but time on my hands, and my medical assistance was paying for my therapy, so I was taking advantage of it. We had to establish a time line, and I had to bring her up to speed on my life. That alone was exhausting. It is sometimes so much easier to talk with someone who knows you, but at that time, those people were few and far between in my life. So with every new encounter, I found myself telling my life story again. In hindsight, that was really a good thing because it made me talk about my past and expose my disease constantly and on many different levels. With my therapist this was on the most intimate of levels because she needed to know it all— the good, the bad, and the ugly—to fully understand how my mind worked and how she could begin to help me heal. She continually gave me homework assignments to do so I could see myself more clearly. We talked about everything. I found myself opening up to her easily, and before I knew it the hour was up and it was time for me to leave. She was helping me identify my patterns and understand my personality, both my assets and my flaws.
Between my therapist and my sponsor, I was beginning to have some nice checks and balances in my life that had never been there before. I had people I could confide in and go to for guidance.
BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE MUCH GOING ON DURING THE time between my meetings and my therapy sessions, I became obsessed with Oprah Winfrey. I had always loved her show, and it was one thing that had bonded my father and me in the past. For whatever reason, he always made sure he was home by 4:00 p.m. when I got home from school, and we would watch Oprah together. It was nice to have something that bonded my father and me, because we didn’t have a whole lot in common as I was growing up. I think I just confused and scared the shit out of him most of the time. He wasn’t equipped to deal with a teenage girl on his own. Since he and my mother divorced after my sexual assault and he stayed to raise me and my two older brothers, he was a little lost in the parenting department. He was used to the role of provider; but with my mother gone, he had to attempt to provide the more motherly, emotional type of support too. He had no clue how to do that, so instead we would sit and watch Oprah and try to connect through the topics on the show.
It wasn’t as though I missed the motherly stuff, because my mother was not your stereotypical mom.
