I am so grateful to have this platform to share conversations with you. Tom continues to teach me, and it was so great of him to share how he works his recovery and the benefits to all family members working their individual recovery programs. The parallel journey of recovery for family and the people with the disease is really clear.
I hope you are inspired to attend a meeting, read some recovery literature. You could also reach out to me via my website
https://embracefamilyrecovery.com
Where I have a page entitled Work With Margaret. https://embracefamilyrecovery.com/work-with-margaret/
If you fill that page out, we can have a discovery call to see if we would be a good fit moving forward.
The main thing I hope you take away from this episode and all these episodes is, we never have to be alone again in this disease as a loved one or a person with it, unless we choose to be. So, reach out. Let someone help.
See full transcript of episode below.
Intro. 00:01
You’re listening to The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. A place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now, here is your host, Margaret Swift Thompson.
Margaret 00:22
Welcome back. Today, Tom and I continue our conversation about the many parallels in the journey of substance use disorder that continually happened for both the addict and the family members.
Let’s get back to Tom
00:38
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast.
Margaret 01:05
I get emotional Tom; I think about you when you say you were in eight years of that cycle of not getting to the year. And I think about the profoundness of the people I have met. And I feel it’s a privilege to work with people with this disease, I’m, I’m guessing you do too, because you meet some of the most incredible human beings who have gifts and talents and skills in every area of their life and cannot comprehend why this is kicking their butt.
And I think of you, and I think of you know, what you offer people through your ability to find a way to share this, it gets me emotional, you know, if you hadn’t found recovery, we wouldn’t have the tiger talk. And your Tiger talk has helped hundreds, if not 1000s of people understand this in a different way. You know, and, and your vulnerability to share some of the parts of your story that aren’t pretty, but to help people see it for themselves and for family members to see and understand the power in a way they may not have without hearing your talk.
When you look at that eight-year pattern of not being able to get to a place where you could feel like life was better. Because I identify tremendously with that on the family side, too.
Tom: Yeah
Margaret: The family side that first year is living on eggshells trying to put in program for themselves, fearing the shoe dropping again, not feeling like you can trust and worrying about the next relapse killing the person you love. And they’re trying to keep going with their recovery tools when they’re not feeling much peace yet.
Tom: Right!
Margaret: When you look at the eight-year cycle, and then you look at when you actually were able to accomplish the year. What was different? What did you do different?
Tom 02:56
I did a number of things different. I went to a number of treatments and a lot of detoxes, lost jobs, etc. And essentially, before I even entered my last treatment, it’s you know, I’d seen behind the curtain enough times that it was never going to be a dog. Basically it was never going to work the way I wanted to again, and basically I ran an options, you know, every time I drank or use drugs, it ended up in some form of disaster, some worse than others. And it also occurred to me that the times that were “fun”, weren’t fun, it was just nothing bad happened, got to a point that if I didn’t end up hospitalized, I didn’t end up in jail, I didn’t end up whatever, then it was a great time, which is like ridiculous. Again, I couldn’t see it very clearly.
But essentially, one of the biggest things that we talked about is fellowship. And you know, the classic relapse story for everybody I’ve ever worked with ever, is, you know, when they’re talking to a counselor, they say things like, I stopped going to meetings, I stopped working the steps, blah, blah, blah. But what they all have in common is they stopped hanging out with anyone else with a tiger. And I forgot what it was actually like, because my brain goes back to this wonderful, joyous, romanticized version, whereas the reality is a lot of us are using every few hours or whatever, to stay out of withdrawal. Self-esteem, in the toilet, etc. And that comes crashing back pretty soon as soon as we let the tiger out of the cage, but by then it’s too late. It sets off this crazy obsessive thought process again. And so essentially, I became willing to ask for help, and that is one of the major lifestyle changes that I think a lot of us struggle with, because most of us are very self-sufficient, self-reliant, you know, we get these messages and outside society don’t show weakness, don’t ask for help, blah, blah, blah.
Which is also why NA and AA are considered a cult, you know, because by definition, it’s true.
You know, a cult by definition is a smaller group of individuals that believe something different than the mainstream. And the mainstream is saying don’t ask for help, you know, in the rooms were saying come on in, be part of, tell us, be vulnerable, which is the exact opposite message that a lot of people get. And you know, to kind of keep in mind that it’s the one thing we cannot solve on our own.
And so, basically that’s what it is, is really engaging in a recovery program, I did not. Something was beaten into my head in my last treatment, and I carried it with me was living a transparent lifestyle. Whether we do it on purpose or not in active addiction, lying and hiding, start becoming a natural part of it. And a lot of times we don’t even do it for malicious reasons. We just have to protect it because it comes first. And we carry that right into recovery. I know I did. I was so used to lying. It took me a while to break that cycle, because I would lie about anything. I’m eating a Snickers bar, you’d look at me and say, is that a Snickers bar? I say no, it’s the Milky Way. Like, you know, it took me a while to have to come back to people and go okay, I’m really sorry, I lied to you the other day, it was actually a Snickers bar, you know, like, no, no kidding. Um, but it takes a while to kind of break those kinds of things, because we’re so used to doing it. But you know, picking up a phone, asking for help, telling on myself, especially with cravings and obsessions. Because something that happens all the time is we crossed these mental lines, where it’s like, for instance, if I’m thinking of drinking tonight, now’s the time for me to open my mouth and say, it’s crossed my mind, Margaret. You know, could we chat about it? Because just by saying it out loud, I’m less likely to act on it. But what most of us again, we go with a self-reliance thing that you know, it’s just a thought, so I don’t want to bother you with that. So, I’ll keep to myself.
Margaret: Mmhm
Tom: And then I crossed the next mental line. Well, if I did drink tonight, what would I drink? Then the next one, where would I buy it? How much would I get? You know, the farther we go down these little lines, I’m less and less likely to say anything out loud until I literally, I’m going to drink tonight. I haven’t gone to the liquor store. I haven’t bought the bottle, but I’m going to drink. And that’s when people sometimes as a last-ditch effort, call their sponsor, but it’s way too late. And I did this for a long time. You know, so to answer your question again, you know, I started really prioritizing my recovery. You know, I started constantly telling on myself, just when the thought was, so didn’t get the traction, of craving. I spent a lot of time in public. Sometimes if I couldn’t get ahold of anybody, I was freaking out, I’d go to a coffee shop just because I felt less likely to do something stupid. Being alone in my own thoughts was extremely dangerous. And that’s something too that a lot of times, family and friends don’t understand that either living with a bunch of people that are using can be just as dangerous as living alone. Because if we don’t have some other people to literally tell us, that’s a bad idea. We will go along with our own justifications or rationalizations, because we’re used to doing that already. And so yeah, we can set ourselves up for failure in a lot of different ways. If I’m the only one I’m checking in with,
Margaret: 07:19
Well and it comes back to paralleling it to family. When I my term, monkey chatter starts and the person is obsessing and preoccupied with you, the person with the illness, to not keep that quiet. To shine a light on it by sharing it with someone else who understands the journey, a sponsor, a fellow, to not be alone with it. Because the thing with this disease, it’s so baffling on both sides of the coin is within our head, when the disease is nattering at us, screaming at us, swearing at us or when the monkey is doing it. We hear our own voice. We can’t discern what is our thinking and what is the disease thinking. And that’s when going around people who can say, hey whoa, Tom, Margaret, that doesn’t sound like healthy recover you, that sounds like a premeditated thought to use or control and manage. What do you want to do? Let me help you?
Tom: Yeah.
Margaret: I think the solution for both sides of the coin, I mean, the steps are the same. So, we know it’s the same. But it’s amazing to me, how much power we think we have using our brain against this disease. And we have none.
Tom 08:35
Well, I mean, as they say, in AA and stuff we’re trying to solve a brain disease with our own diseased brain. So yeah, it only goes so well.
08:42
Margaret: And in the family perspective too.
Tom: Exactly
Margaret: In our own brain, like you were saying so beautifully with your story, the dog, right? How many times have I shared with a parent or a family member out of care and concern, you’re not an addict, and even if you were and you were in recovery, 25 years, you cannot be that voice for your person.
And if you’ve never been in recovery with addiction, you’re using logic that works for you without the disease to try and influence the person who has a disease you don’t yet understand.
Tom: Yeah.
Margaret: And it’s all driven by love.
Tom 09:21
Absolutely. And that’s something that I think, you know, which I stole from a previous sponsor, but he basically said, you know, this thumbnail saved me more than once. But he said, if you’re afraid to tell somebody about a decision you’re making, it’s probably a bad decision. (laughter)
09:35
Margaret: True. Yeah. I love that. Tom. I love the idea of living transparently. Because, again, my term addictions symptoms include dishonesty. It’s a symptom. I mean, if I’m going to be using and that is what I feel I have to do to survive. I will do anything to keep the people that love me the most from knowing because they’re gonna be the first ones to jump in and try and stop me.
Tom: Right
Margaret: So, in order to survive in addiction, I have to do those things, in my rationale when I’m using. And I think living transparently is so great and being willing to be human and vulnerable in the fact that that dishonesty doesn’t go away overnight. It’s so conditioned by the disease for so long in our use, that it takes time to start feeling that sense of integrity, we so long for in recovery, to start feeling and going. Hey, I like that. I want more of that.
Tom 10:32
Absolutely. Yeah.
10:35
Margaret: And again, I think it’s on the family side too.
Tom 10:37
It’s definitely on the family side.
10:39
Margaret: I always say dishonesty, manipulation in addiction, check, check. Dishonesty and manipulation on the family side, Black Belt.
Tom: Mmhm
Margaret: But looks good doing it.
Tom: Right.
Margaret: Looks like they’ve got it together. And I don’t mean that disrespectfully. I mean that as a survival mechanism, because they’re the “ones that are healthy”. And I think it’s so imperative to realize that this disease, infiltrates everyone in the family system, and hurts all of them in different ways. And the best thing we can do is learning to separate the tiger from the person, the monkey from the person to understand that this is a no-fault disease, that love has driven it. And, and the desire to protect and save is not wrong.
Tom: Yeah.
Margaret: But in this model, the disease eats it up.
Tom 11:32
Yeah. And I mean, and that’s all thing, the importance of working separate recovery programs. And you know, we make a big difference between sober support and family support, because, frankly, to tell my family that I was thinking about drinking, or using drugs, again, was it all it did was drive their anxiety to the roof, freak them out, whatever, which wasn’t fair to them.
Whereas I can talk to other guys that are just gonna say, well, let’s have a cup of coffee and chat about it. It’s a different conversation. Same thing with the family side. And that’s where I think you have the same message literally, you know, if my family asked me, have you been to a meeting in the last week, it pissed me off and made me want to go use. Whereas one of my friends or whatever, dude you need to go to a meeting it didn’t, okay. And that’s something also that’s really hard with family systems is because this is the one problem that they cannot directly solve. And I know you’ve said this before, too, is essentially in a nutshell, I guess that’s my new catchphrase for today, in a nutshell, but, you know, essentially working separate recovery programs through NA or AA to be able to talk about cravings, triggers, you know, obsessive thought processes, all the ridiculous stuff that goes with this. on the family side, to be able to talk about what it’s like to walk on eggshells etc. so that when the family is together, we can have a relationship, as a family. So that we’re not constantly talking about this elephant in the room, or tiger or monkey or whatever, which unfortunately, that’s where it really starts to destroy relationships, you know, husband, wife, start becoming parent, child.
Margaret: 12:56
Not sexy, I always say that it’s like, you know, we want to healthy intimacy in the future, you don’t want to be with your parent, you want to be with your partner. So, from the family side, when I’m talking to my loved one, and I’m talking to them as a partner, as if they’re one of my children, I need to get to a meeting and talk to someone who understands that dynamic to help me find a different way to communicate. And to your point about, you know, if I talk to a person, about craving, if I go to my family, it sets off my anxiety, if I go to my, my recovery community, it’s different. It’s exact same thing on the family side.
Tom: Exactly
Margaret: The preoccupation and, obsession with the person. That person can’t solve for you.
Tom 13:38
I mean, that’s comes up frequently to you know, family with their best intentions, or they’ll track the person’s phone, they’ll take away their credit cards, they’ll take away the car keys, and that whole idea for any other logical problem, that would make sense, if you take away my means to get it, I will stop getting it. But what they don’t understand is this tiger runs the show. And I have to get this. And so, taking my car keys, take away my credit cards, whatever it looks like, I’m headshaking. Looks like I’m scrounging for cash looks like I’m pawning something because I have to get that. And that’s, you know, the great news, again. Once it goes to sleep, we can get back to logic. But again, it drives the family members just as crazy, if not crazier. You’re trying to control something they can’t control. You know, and I say that a lot in groups and stuff. In active addiction we can’t control the chemical. To our family, we are the chemical.
Margaret: Correct.
Tom: And it’s just not fair to anybody.
14:25
Margaret: A family members’ drug of no choice is the walking, talking human being who’s addicted. And we do everything around them, that the person who’s addicted does around the chemical. And so, to try and think we can fix each other on either side of that. It will never work.
14:43
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14:53
Margaret: I like Jerry’s term around um, he shared a story about a child who the father sent to Grandma’s house to protect them. Child, internalized, it’s my fault, I have to be away from my mom, so she won’t use. I make her stressed out, it’s my fault. Because there wasn’t a conversation using the language. But what he said was, I respect that you sent your child to be safe, and not have to witness the destructive dance between you, your wife and her disease. And I do love that analogy, like the dance of this disease is so well orchestrated by the tiger, by the monkey by the diseased thinking. That when we look at that timeline, you laid out so eloquently of a year giving us some freedom from it, we have to take that year to learn a new dance within our family. The old steps, the 123,123, whatever it was, we did do not work. And the good news is that if we both work, our new learning and the new dance steps, we’re having a healthy relationship,
Tom: Right.
Margaret: possibly healthier than it’s ever been. But the discomfort of all of us having to learn these new steps over that period of time, is overwhelming some days. And that’s where that support of a fellowship, of other people who have the same experience, similar experience is so invaluable to learning those new dance steps. And that’s what you did. That’s what you described. When you finally use those tools, you learn new dance steps. And you said, interestingly, that your family had been going to Al-Anon, so they were already trying to learn those steps before you surrendered?
Tom 16:48
Absolutely. I mean, I noticed that they started detaching, you know, they didn’t buy into my drama, they didn’t respond when I tried to throw things back at them. They just kind of well, you should talk to your sponsor about that, you should go to a meeting, you should whatever, you should get the hell out of our house, whatever.
17:04
Margaret: Yeah. So, they started implementing the new steps. And you and your disease thinking with a tiger pushed back, or blamed, or rationalized. Did whatever you did to survive that?
Tom 17:16
Oh yeah, I kept trying to drive it back into the old dance. And it’s funny to use dancing, because I use that a lot when I’m doing family conferences and stuff. Because in the beginning, a lot of times, you know, we’re learning to dance moves. And the mistake most of us make, and this happened in my family for a long time, too is I come back with these new dance moves, or they do, and we stumble over each other’s feet, we trip, we fall down. And instead of continuing to practice a new dance until that becomes the new rhythm, we flip back into the old behavior, because it’s more comfortable, even though it’s dysfunctional. And we get stuck there again.
17:45
Margaret: So, I agree, Tom, and I use the word familiar, because I don’t even think it’s comfortable? You said it so well.
Tom: Familiar is a much better word.
Margaret: It’s not even comfortable towards the end of a use addiction? Yeah, it’s not even comfortable towards the end of the family disease before they like the intervention or they finally surrender. It’s Gosh, darn painful and excruciating. But we know it.
Tom: Right. Yeah.
Margaret: And so, to go from a place of familiar and uncomfortable to downright uncomfortable and unfamiliar is like, wow, and it is a day at a time. I know, for me, the concept of living one day at a time was probably the thing I railed the most against when I started my journey. That has given me the best reprieve from the monkey chatter and the insanity of addiction. If I am willing to be uncomfortable today and learn a new step today, to the best of my ability, I’m going to be okay. And I get to do it again, tomorrow. And your story on the other side is the same, right? If I’m willing to be uncomfortable, to call my sponsor, and go to my fellows, go to that coffee shop, if I’m having a craving. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like it. But I can wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and be like, wow, I’m doing it.
Tom: Yeah.
Margaret: And choose to do it again.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely.
Margaret: You are amazing, my friend.
Tom 19:10
Oh, takes one to know, I know. I see. I feel so blessed that you asked me. I have the utmost respect for you. Margaret so this is a wonderful, it’s my privilege.
19:18
Margaret: Mutual. My friend. I think that, you know, they’re by the grace of our higher power, we make it into the rooms. And we have recovery gifted to us through hard work, but also the many people that are out there helping us and I think in order to leave this session, I just like to put out the hope of the enormous support that’s out there for people with this illness if we choose to engage in it.
Tom: Yeah.
Margaret: Which is a hard choice to make when the tiger looks like the cute cub. But it’s so invaluable, you know, and for families to. Get out there to the meetings. Find your community, your tribe, your fellowship, so that you don’t have to try and do this alone.
Tom 20:05
And that’s something just, you know, with, with family, I think a lot of times addicts, alcoholics, there’s the obvious signs where I’m throwing up, I’m shaking, I’m sweating this and that, so I have to take action. Whereas a lot of times family, I think it’s not as apparent to go to a meeting and stuff. Because once they get better, I should technically be better. And so, there’s not that urgency sometimes. And what you’re saying it’s so important that they do get some help, because frankly, most of them don’t even realize how sick they’ve gotten through the process.
20:33
Margaret: Right? No, I agree with you. And I think that’s a big piece of it is, if they get well, I’ll get well. Which was my thinking when I entered the rooms of Al-Anon. If I get him well, I’m good.
Tom: Exactly.
Margaret: I’m actually damn good, right. But the reality was, when he was no longer in the picture, my identified person who I ended up in the rooms with, I fell apart even harder, because my drug disappeared. And yet my crazy thinking stuck around, and my behaviors were so out of control. And I was sinking hard. And to your story, it took bumping along or digging a deeper hole before you surrendered. I think the truth is the same for family until we’re hurting bad enough, we don’t surrender to what is deserving of us to have. Our community, our therapy, our support our whatever it is that we deserve to have. We don’t put ourselves even on the plate of having the need. And then when we have the need, we resist allowing that care, because we’ve been the caregiver. And I think it’s really invaluable that everybody from the youngest to the oldest in the family, get the basic education of this disease, which you’ve offered them a really good insight to with your Tiger example. And also keep growing and looking for resources to help so it doesn’t have to be the same dance. I thank you. I thank you. I thank you. I’m so excited that you did this. Thank you very much. And I look forward to sharing it with all of the people who I know it’s going to help.
Tom 22:12
Cool. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
22:16
Outro: I am so grateful to have this platform to share conversations with you. Tom continues to teach me, and it was so great of him to share how he works, his recovery and the benefits to all family members working their individual recovery programs.
I hope you are inspired to attend a meeting, read some recovery literature. You could also reach out to me via my website
embracefamilyrecovery.com
Where I have a page entitled Work With Margaret. If you fill that page out, we can have a discovery call to see if we would be a good fit moving forward.
The main thing I hope you take away from this episode and all these episodes is, we never have to be alone again in this disease as a loved one or a person with it, unless we choose to be. So, reach out. Let someone help.
Margaret 23:15
I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website
embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret Swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you!
