Finding Inspiration in Every Turn
I keep looking back to the story of my addiction and recovery.
I was a successful businessman, 40 years old, when I was introduced to cocaine. My business was taking off, earning so much, having an easy reach to profitable contracts, broadening my connections, and dining and winning my clients. I developed a heavy penchant for women and alcohol.
Before I realized it, a bad influence got me snorting the white powder with magic power endowing me with a superhuman recuperating feeling. I needed extra energy for the nightly drinking sprees with client friends. Aside from the alcohol binges and increasing dosage of drugs, I acquired a taste for high-end leisure gentlemen's clubs, which I visited with increasing frequency.
The early onset of habit-forming substance abuse was justified because it was motivated by business interests. Over time, such behavior took a unique hue, and I was enjoying the increasing dosage I was getting and doing it with shadier characters.
Worse, the wrong and bad company got me to experiment on other habit-forming drugs like ecstasy and ketamine, and dreadfully the worse that I should have avoided, methamphetamine, also known as "Shabu." After seven years of destruction, addiction slowly chipped away my moral core, and the principles that anchored me rusted out.
I drifted to the far end of paranoia. Ultimately, my mental balance proved shaky, which got me committed to a treatment facility, where it took me three years to find my bearings finally. The addiction was a nightmare, and the treatment is not without its challenges. The most important and interesting part of this journey is the aftercare, the things you need to wiggle through once you clear the gates of the center.
At age 50, exactly ten years, I began dope. I am to restart my life, embracing the hope that I could regain my footing on finance, family, and friends. The surest way to fail in anything you aspire for in recovery is to be clueless. One goes through a lengthy treatment period not to while the time away. It is to absorb learnings that would help you in recovery.
I was always told in rehab that "habits developed over the period," such as mine, could not be undone overnight and that there was no pill I could take to make my addiction and cravings vanish quickly. To shake off addiction means being ready and strong, prepared and equipped as if to do combat because that is really what it is—a lifetime of struggle.
Over the years, I am frequently asked how I easily overcome recovery challenges others find daunting and where I see the light when others find darkness. Somehow this is what I always end up telling them. At its very core, addiction recovery is about change.
It is the process of letting go of the use of all substances and self-destructive patterns, but that is only the beginning. To have a clue about what successful recovery is requires understanding, managing, and improving key factors that impact your daily life.
They say addiction is isolation, and the opposite is connection. In my three-year therapy, I developed friendships and relationships with others on the same journey.
1. Creating and engaging with addiction recovery support groups to help cope with life's challenges: Just months out of rehab, returning to work, recreating family relationships, and connecting with good friends were the first steps to my recovery. I part of founding a rehab facility ( www.totalcarehealingplace.com ), now A DOH accredited 1-hectare, an 80-bed treatment center in Amadeo Cavite. These became my major recovery support group that provides coping mechanisms when I am inevitably challenged with my sobriety. The other one is www.anewdayvillage.com, located at Binan, Laguna, a 250-bed capacity treatment center.
2. Developing healthy habits, including good nutrition and exercise. I am not athletic, but I made myself run on the slight urging of a friend. I ran 10k, 21k, then a full marathon. I made it a daily thing. Exercise settles my nerves. Drove away my cravings.
3. Finding a safe and nurturing living environment. I relocated my residence, far from the dense cement jungle of Parañaque, with easy access to drugs. I went south of Metro Manila, where I am less prone to contact my source.
4. Identifying and changing harmful thinking patterns like denial, rationalization, and justification. I heeded the counsel of my recovery mentor ( Jun Tan )despite my ambivalence to psychiatric care, going along with the consultation, interview, diagnosis, and treatment. What I deemed a monthly scheduled torment proved to greatly help in treating my co-occurring bipolar and adult ADHD disorder.
5. Building healthy coping and living skills to manage stress and conflict. Unlike before, I turned to and embraced my spirituality. A daily dose of serene prayer proved to mitigate stress. Reading books sets me up mentally and allows me mental exercise. Writing in a recovery journal alleviates stress and anticipates conflict leading to a more straightforward resolution.
6. Understanding your triggers and how to address them. The one I fear the most is getting lost in my emotions. Controlling it is easier said than done. But it must be done as the consequence of failure is dreary. Triggers are emotion-driven. It is a want, a need, a desire that is always perishable, and they do not last long. One must develop the strength to resist it and, more importantly, the patience to wither out the craving. Intelligence is knowing the varying emotions that drive your triggers, and wisdom is the ability not to get lost in them.
7. Recognizing your strengths and building upon them. Lead when you can. Refrain from wavering in your confidence because the lack of it is your downfall in recovery. Connect with others and help when you can; never stop, even when it hurts.
8. Improving your functioning in primary life domains like relationships, work, and finance.
The very foundation of recovery you can not do without. Money to bear you out, family to support you, work to sustain you. Keeping busy is essential in recovery. It fills away dead time, the devil's playground.
Loneliness is a killer, and it is a deadly trigger most relapse emanates from, which often love of family effectively neutralizes. Sustaining material needs are finance sourced. The lack of it depletes pride, manhood, and a sense of value and contribution. You must be able to find a way to be financially sound.
I'm 59 years old now and almost ten years drug-free.
I have survived and continue to do so daily. Recovery is a fight one can prevail over only when one is sure how to overcome it. The moment you waver on any front is the day you can relapse. This is my recovery. This is my story. And today is my Birthday, and ten years sober!!!!
