many times. I’ve driven the 3,000 miles from Long Island to San Francisco (driving our van off the side of Interstate 80 and nearly down an embankment in western Pennsylvania in a pot-induced daze in 1980), and flown from Phoenix to Tel Aviv (fortified by two liters of wine and a pocket full of pills). Yet, the longest distance I have ever traveled is that from my head to my heart.
“The blessing lies close to the wound.”
AFRICAN PROVERB
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It was the third day of my medically managed detoxification when Allison, one of the counselors, came over and sat down next to me in the treatment center dining room. Speaking softly she said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but when you were Vice President of Counseling at Jewish Family & Children’s Service in Tucson, you accepted me for an MSW (Masters in Social Work) field placement.”
Taken aback, I struggled to bring my vision into sharper focus. I was a mess—negotiating the dense fog of a complex combination of medications while treading water in a stormy sea of self-recrimination and self-loathing. Massive waves of shame, embarrassment, remorse, and guilt buffeted me, knocking me around, turning me upside down and inside out. Although I had seen her around the facility and had even attended a group she facilitated, no bells of familiarity rang . . . until then. Looking at her intently, I suddenly recognized her. “Yes, of course I remember you.”
As the once-upon-a-time Vice President of Counseling, I had final approval on all field placements in the Counseling Services Department, and occasionally interviewed applicants directly. A little over three years prior to this “reunion,” I had interviewed Allison. She was a second year MSW student from the Arizona State University satellite program in Tucson who impressed me as possessing the intelligence, maturity, and personality prerequisites that are so important in a fast-paced, team-oriented behavioral health services environment. I had specifically recommended that Barbara, one of our two clinical supervisors, be assigned as her field instructor.
Allison spoke to me with kindness and compassion, never asking nor even implying, “What the hell happened to you?” while the voice inside my head revved up, not so much in distress, as in deep sadness and resignation: “Holy shit. I really can’t fucking believe just how far I’ve fallen.” If I didn’t already have enough evidence of how the consequences of my three decades of active addiction had finally caught up with me and kicked my ass every which way, here was another compelling brick in that wall.
In what I interpreted as an attempt to be respectful and sensitive to my dizzying descent from grace, Allison told me that she would not disclose to other staff, including my assigned counselor, that she knew me from such a different time and place. I thanked her for this extraordinary (and not altogether appropriate) consideration and let her know that the staff needed to know, and that I would tell my counselor about our shared history, as well as my fellow clients. At age forty-seven, I had at last reached the point where I could no longer continue to live a double life. It had been a long time coming.
The walls of active addiction had been closing in on me, gradually and progressively, for what seemed like forever. During the last few years, the more energy I invested in keeping those walls at bay, the more I lived in fear of being found out. Not only was I doing everything possible to keep others from discovering this truth, I was also going to great lengths to keep it at a safe distance from myself. This was an exhausting and grim cycle wherein the harder I labored to protect myself from the conscious awareness of what I had become, the more intrusive and unavoidable that awareness became. Eventually, all of my stratagems—external and internal—failed.
Throughout my life I had taken many serious risks, and there were times when the perpetual pursuit of the ways and means to procure and use drugs had placed me squarely in the path of great potential physical, legal, and in later years, professional harm. And yet, the very thought of admitting that I was an “addict” scared the shit out of me. There was abject dread intrinsic to admitting it to myself, much less to anyone else. This fear fueled, at times, a desperate need to defend myself psychologically against an increasingly inescapable reality.
Among the most challenging and painful experiences I’ve had was to find myself in a group setting in treatment as a patient in early November of 2006, and say aloud for the first time, “I’m Dan, and I’m an addict.” I felt so raw; it was as if my skin had been peeled off. I don’t ever remember feeling so completely exposed, so excruciatingly vulnerable (at least not as an adult). My voice shook and I don’t know if my body literally trembled, but it sure as hell felt like it did. I had consciously and unconsciously avoided that admission for decades—denying, minimizing, rationalizing, and intellectualizing to keep the reality of my addiction hidden behind a wall of steadfast self-protection.
My wife had long known what I was incapable of acknowledging. To her exasperation and enduring credit, she had tried intermittently since the early 1980s, even before we were married, to get me to seek help.
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I recently graduated from college with honors and a double major.” (Never mind that I never quite completed the second major because the required senior thesis went unfinished, and my addiction was instrumental in keeping it that way.)
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I can’t be a drug addict. I’ve been accepted to every master’s program I applied to, including Columbia University and NYU.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m definitely not a drug addict. I just completed one of the most prestigious MSW programs in the country.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“There’s no way I’m a drug addict. I was just promoted to clinical director of a substance abuse treatment program.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I’m an adjunct professor teaching undergraduate college courses on psychology and substance abuse.”
“You’re a drug addict, and you need to do something about it.”
“I’m not a drug addict. I help drug addicts.”
And that only takes me to 1997. I still had nine years of active addiction ahead, and my chronic pain condition had yet to make its appearance and further distort my sense of proportion. Deep down, in the remote recesses of my consciousness, a part of me had always known that she was right. But as much as I could, I kept this awareness buried in a box on the top shelf all the way in the back of my mind’s closet. Although occasionally this awareness would escape from its container to haunt me, it rarely saw the light of day. I wasn’t ready to do anything differently . . . until I was. Things had to get bad; and then they had to get worse—much worse—before I got to the point where I could no longer continue as I had been.
Prior to
