A Cruel Healing - Chapter 3 - REHAB

Things don't change; we change.
Henry David Thoreau

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Charles DuBois

I am presenting in chapters, snapshots and scars, a journey I experienced that profoundly changed me. Against the odds I changed the man I was and became the man, I much later agreed, reluctantly, that I desperately needed to become to survive. It has been daunting going through personal changes, changes in my attitude, my thinking, and my views of life, the world, and of people. My attitude of keeping people at a distance I viewed as helping me survive the treacherous lifestyles I was part of. Amazingly, this actually worked and helped me survive while I was in the madness of addiction.  However in recovery this attitude threatened my growth, well being and happiness and could actually contribute to my death through relapse. I became aware that my attitude was objectionable and had to be replaced with a new set of ideas.

While I was in rehab It was explained to me in therapy speak that my attitude derived from my belief systems, rigid thought patterns, schema, and all this informed my negative behaviour. The therapeutic deconstruction and reconstruction involved in developing a new, more positive, healthier attitude is long and complicated. I found it as overwhelming, perplexing and frightening as being sober and drug free.

Jim, who was a trainee counsellor at Broadway Lodge Rehabilitation Centre kept it concise when he was explaining to me the 12 Step Programme, the model of treatment the centre has as its ethos.  A burly broad Scotsman with unruly hair Jim summed it up like this  -it’s a simple programme, you just got to change everything!

I was a resident for 6 months in Broadway Lodge rehab in the South West of England. Based in Weston Super Mare, North Somerset, Broadway Lodge is a large house set in its own grounds that has been treating people like me since it was established in 1974. For the first two weeks there I was reticent around the staff and other residents. I felt, mentally, emotionally, seriously car crashed and walked around cautiously stunned in the silent wreck of my emotions. A constant emptiness hung within me, I had absolutely no emotional materials to help me build bridges with anyone. When I did begin to speak to people I got to know Jim. He appeared brusque but he spoke enthusiastically and was talented at explaining recovery concepts simply. For these reasons I would look out for him to grab a chat. Jim let me know that the attitude I had that kept me alive in the madness of criminality and drug abuse would kill me in recovery. It was imperative I change it. I must let people in; become emotionally genuine. Any opportunity I had I would ask Jim about addiction, change, recovery, therapy, and this 12 step Programme I heard all the clients and counsellors talk about. ‘She’s off the programme’, ‘You’re not on the programme’, and ‘You gotta trust the Programme’.   -How does it work, I asked Jim.  –Just fine Kevin, he answered, and walked off. Not yet used to smiling too often, I smiled cautiously. In reflection I realised that his answer, though facetious, was what I needed to hear.

A Cruel Healing-Chapter 2 - WORKING CLASS ADDICT

I have experienced life from an offbeat, tragic and often dangerous arena. For years I careered through life, always frustrated, perplexed and ready to hate. I was envious of TV commercials and Situation Comedies that depicted perfectly healthy people living in perfectly healthy worlds. The Media don’t present aspects of life that is not the main-stream to the greater society. People should have the opportunity to access worlds that are not in view. I imagine there may be people reading this who will debate about how free society actually is and how every aspect of society is freely accessible to the public. However there are entertainments and TV shows, clinical in their construction, which grasp the focus of people and hooks them in for weeks, months, years. This process inhibits them focusing elsewhere. Not unlike addiction.
Also censorship exists in the form of ridiculing and demonising ideas and people that do not support the current political climate. Absolutely, deprivation occurs in many forms throughout society. However these are hidden from view due to cultural attitudes particular to a particular group. Keeping up with the Jones’s for example distracts people from addressing the many deficiencies existing within the family unit and communities.  These deficiencies could be lack of shelter, food, warmth, cash, trust, thinking skills, emotional intelligence, sense of belonging, identity. I use the word deprivation in the sense of lacking opportunities that could aid growth. Gandhi reflected a similar sense of this when he said that poverty is the worst violence. In this sense poverty permeates the world over.
I have heard that the truth, like poverty, is also universal. However my experience has shown me that truth manifests in ways only pertaining to a particular group of people. I have found that the truth is different from group to group. For example I have still to meet the opposing gangs of drug dealers who share the same truth. Maybe if they did they would stop shooting each other. Politicians telling the truth about the communities they don’t even live in, is different from the truth coming from those who actually live within these communities. These groups have different beliefs, and believe differently. For example look at the two Glasgow children, one a catholic and the other one a protestant. Both of them are born in the same city a back court away from each other. Yet one child grows up believing the sky is green. The other one believing the grass is blue. Incidentally, there is a common saying among those people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction that states that religion is for those who do not want to go to Hell and spirituality is for those who have been there. My experience has indicated that being part of a religious order does not require you to be spiritual.
This incongruity applies from street gangs to governments to work environments. There is a belief among gang members of any city that if ever one member of their team is outnumbered by the members of an opposing gang, then that person should be willing to go ahead and face a beaten rather than retreat.  The physical pain resulting from a beaten, or being stabbed, is no greater than the shame of being called a coward. There are safer and healthier ways to achieve prestige and raise ones esteem. How are these gang members to learn the truth that it does not have to be this way? Bereft of new ideas the prevailing ideas no matter how harsh will perpetuate.
Governments believe only any truth that will keep them in power. They have become so clever at this, that they will also let you believe anything that will keep them in power.
Middle Britain is populated by people who consider that they are well educated; fair minded and possessing a moral compass that forever points the correct direction.  The truth to them is that other members of their group do not lie, bully, or have the capacity to be cruel. If evidence is presented of a middle class manager being a racist bully the social group that he/she is part of will be absolutely outraged denying this. The mind set of this group, their beliefs, and their truth is so narrow that the realities of life can’t possibly squeeze in there. Facts upset the illusory order that has become real to them.
What people believe prevails over the truth. Sophocles said that.
The truth causes chaos. I said that.
Subjective experience I have found to be linked to and shaped by small and bigger cultural influences.  For example certain life events like divorce, breakup of the family unit and the erosion of significant relationships, bereavement, losing a job, mental health problems, being arrested; these could all contribute to a person to become withdrawn from the greater community  and to become part of a sub-culture, all the while losing positive resources, societal, emotional and otherwise.  This would more likely occur among poor people living in deprived communities than rich people living in affluent communities. It would also be more difficult for the poor person to resource the support required for their recovery and integration back into the mainstream community.
I am not citing Sociological study and research here. If anything, it is anecdotal evidence I present. It is my own subjective experience. I have spent my time living in and being part of sub-cultures. These sub-cultures have been crime, prison, addiction and homelessness.  That brings me back to - Where do I start?
I would like to believe that I lived in and was part of the mainstream society. However I was brought up in a predominantly Catholic area by the River Clyde on the South Side of Glasgow that was blighted by poverty, sectarianism and ugly architecture. During this time and from an early age I felt a sense of being imprisoned.  I lived in a tenement row on a short street. The road, the buildings, the weather and the water of the Clyde were grey. I felt hemmed in and felt that even the dirty brown clouds and the grey clouds conspired to press me down and force me to stay forever in this stage set of a street.  I found it difficult to make contact with my surroundings. I did not feel that I came from here; that this was not my home. My family worked in the local industries; I read poetry secretly and fought square-go’s at school. By 12 years old I had been slashed in a gang fight.
As the years passed I have spent some time reflecting on this period of my life and today I view Glasgow as being squat, broad shouldered and carrying a book of poems by Edwin Morgan. The second City of the Empire wears a donkey jacket and the whisky stained brogues of the Celtic poet.  It is a metropolis of playwrights and chibmen, or both, of journalists and neds, their worlds become blurred and are only partially manifested to be unpicked and separated via the television, newspapers, books and YouTube. 
Maybe that’s what I am doing with this story also. Unpicking the knotted sub-cultures of my tousled life, separating strands and maybe freeing people and places to exist in their own time and place and to no longer be represented in my imagination, which is distorted by my own time. Maybe it is to let go? Perhaps there is no start? Perhaps there is only this, a representation of my own life experience being presented as a piece of art?
Art is as revolutionary as love and violence, and moves people as passionately!  Art may transcend any beginnings and endings and present new ways of looking at life by the use of a portrait, a short story, poetry, graffiti, and a song. What we lose and what we find in art are similar to the losses and discoveries that are revealed to us in violence, love, cowardice and falsehoods. Losses and discoveries require bravery. What we discover about ourselves and become aware of, no matter the pain, frustration or embarrassment we experience, is more precious and relevant than what we discover about others. For the more we know ourselves the more we will know others.
George Bernard Shaw said that life isn’t about finding your self – life is about creating yourself!  At a certain age in my childhood I felt that I was unfinished and abandoned. Like Art. My then feelings prompted an image of myself. I saw myself as a portrait torn and distressed, its slim wooden frame pierced and splintered by the hot lead and angry rubble that battered against it during the wars. I wearied through my childhood watchful as a ghost. Ceiling plaster white and stone dust grey cascading freely around me wherever I went. I was unable to connect with the living, and the Gods they taught me of were dead ones. Solitary sky gazing became my console. I realised that the Sun and the stars were shining because they were dying, not because they were living. Dying, without God or Man, they shone. I envied the courage of the Sun and the stars until I became conscious that we are made of the same stuff. During my last experience of withdrawals from heroin I heard a garbled whispering from deep within me. The words, mangled, sounded like ‘you do not have to live the way you are living any longer.’ This was me beginning, ever so tentatively, to recover. In the extreme pain of spasmodic withdrawals, dying, without God or Man, I began to recover...

A Cruel Healing -Chapter 1 - START

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen

We must embrace pain and use it as fuel for our journey.
Kenji Miyazawa

It was at St Bonaventure's Roman Catholic Primary School I realised how difficult it could be to start a story. Miss Gallagher asked the class, which was I, and anyone else listening, to pick up our HB pencils. She told us to be quiet and to get our heads down to write a short story.She made it sound dead easy. However, most of the pupils looked stunned. Stewart Madden asked -What about Miss? Our teacher slowly walked away from her desk. She gazed out of the big windows which ran along one side of the classroom. Her voice any lower would have been a whisper -Quiet, I said didn't I?
If your name was Brian Dooley, Kevin Dooley, Paul Feeney, Mick Cull or Stewart Madden; teacher's never answered your questions. It was the Sean Carlin's and the Michael McCafferty's of this world whose questions the teachers were eager to answer. Michael McCafferty raised his hand; -Miss, would you like us to write with a specific subject in mind. Most of the pupils had never heard their own parents use words as subject and specific. Miss Gallagher answered Michael amiably -Michael, you enjoy running, your very good at it, use that as your subject matter. She then told the rest of us to write about a subject we excelled at. Everyone suddenly was thinking about what they were good at.Miss Gallagher addressed the class -Your favourite hobbies that you enjoy and are very good at, like football, swimming. She looked at me. -And kick the can.
Silence seeped into the classroom; it seeped into the wooden desks and chairs, into the red carbolic soap on the edge of the sink, into the blackboard duster, the hard white chalk, the teacher's strap.
The strap was used by teachers to punish children. The strap was a half inch thick leather belt 2 feet long.Children were forced before the class to raise their arms shoulder height and put their palms on display. The teacher would then swing the strap high and come down hitting the palms of the children. This could be repeated, one after another, up to 6 times.
The jotters were open; twenty nine heads on the desks chewing pencils to bits, guys staring at their black and white Adidas Samba. My head was full of start, start, start! Willing my pencil to vroom and write a story about something am good at.
Across the silence Mary Scott half smiled, her hand holding the pencil motionless. Pauline Wilson and Roselyn Devaney were quietly giggling. Laura Clark and Francis Mcillvaney joined them.This was a coping skill shared with primary pupils all around the World, to help them deal with the silence. In the silence I felt uncomfortable and anxious. I felt stupid. I could not start a story. Years later, after spending extended periods incarcerated in solitary confinement, in various prison cells, I became used to the presence of silence. I found silence to be comfortable more so than the company of friends

My first post introducing me

I was born in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. From an early age I became involved in alcohol, drugs, crime and violence. I am not sure if it was in this order, it may have been the violence first, considering the sectarianism that divided my community and the entrenched gang culture, it probaly was. I quickly found that I could not do llife unless I was under the influence of some mood altering substance. ...So for most of my life I was on everything but rollerskates. I was always part of a sub-culture, gang culture, criminal culture. Then I went down for a long one in prison, jail culture. After that I became addicted to class A drugs and that lead me to Londons homeless culture. Out on wintry nights, stoned out my brains, looking for dry cardboard to cover me as I sleep. Living the dream uh? I realised how difficult it was for me to change, I believed I couldn't. Since then I have discovered that anyone of us can change our beliefs, no matter how deep they may be ingrained. In the summer 2003 I walked out of a rehab clean and sober. I had no money and few clothes. From that day I have been given the opportunity to be in a position where I can help other people change themselves and the life they are living. To help them be comfortable, to help them be okay, to help them be right. I have my own Addiction Recovery Consultancy and I offer Bespoke Coaching specialising in helping people recover from drugs, alcohol and an offending lifestyle. My book A Cruel Healing depicts my recovery out of addiction and crime. Described is the adversity I faced and also the social stigma and negative attitudes around addiction that were, I see in retrospect, limiting my development towards positive change. These attitudes still prevail and contribute towards people not getting recovery. If we could change this attitude and rid addiction of the stigma attached to it there would be more people recovering and contributing to society. One person healed has the power to contribute, mend communities, build futures. I hope you reflect on my writing, I hope it inspires you, moves you, and wherever you are in life I hope it is revealed to you that you are greater than you ever dared think you were!  Feel free to leave a comment or if you prefer e-mail me.