alcoholism

Entitlement and the Special Worm

There is a story about the subtle snag of grandiosity in The Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketchum: A past president of the Hazledon Foundation, a leading treatment resource for alcohol and drug addiction, was approached by a young researcher asking, “Why is it that even intelligent alcoholics can get so trapped in denial of their alcoholism? Is it because of grandiosity—they think that they can do anything to their bodies and survive, they think that they are ‘too smart’ to be alcoholic? Or is it because of self-loathing—they despise themselves and feel they deserve to die, if they are alcoholics?” The past president sighed and replied, “The alcoholic’s problem is not that he thinks he is very special. Nor is the alcoholic’s problem that he thinks he is a worm. The alcoholic’s problem is that he is convinced “I am a very special worm!”

Entitlement is an overlooked component in the life of a recovering addict. Clearly, it is a major contribution to the demise and derail of many addicts dominated by their narcissistic wound. It can show up in recovery like a blind spot undetected or can be as obvious as a swollen black eye. It is fueled by deprivation, usually a deficit from emotional needs not being met. Most addicts have never learned how to meet their emotional needs in a healthy way.

Too impatient to learn, many addicts ignore deprivation and try to will their way into stopping the acting out. It is common for an addict to vacillate between feeling like a piece of shit for their behavior to overconfidence that they have this thing called recovery down! Whenever I do an autopsy on relapse, I always discover grandiose entitlement that traces back to underestimated deprivation. Twelve step shares around relapse are replete with addicts who share the mentality of thinking of themselves as a “special worm”. It’s a dynamic that all too often destroys sobriety and defeats attempts toward recovery.

The following recovery interventions should be understood in managing the “special worm” syndrome:

1. Condition yourself to recognize unmet emotional needs. Craving is a conditioned response to a legitimate emotional or physical need. The rut of response that leads to acting out must be redirected. It is helpful to slow things down and reflect about the emotional/physical need that can be met in a healthy way without acting out. As an addict, you can figure that you can blow right past your emotional needs and focus on whatever pursuit that is in front of you in the moment. That’s usually a fatal mistake and a contribution to chronic relapse. Recognition of emotional needs requires that you pay attention to what you feel. Sounds simple and it is. Yet, simple in recovery is difficult. Sitting with your feelings can be unbelievably uncomfortable. Yet, the secret is to recognize what you feel and to determine what need the emotion is identifying that must be met in a healthy way. Then it requires that you creatively brainstorm how you might meet that need in a non-destructive self-affirming way. This represents self-parenting. With addiction, the goal like so many other aspects in life is to emotionally grow yourself up. This strategy can all sound good and clear. Yet, these actions toward sobriety require step by step conditioning and daily practice. One day at a time is never more true than learning this skill set in recovery. In the presence of intense impatience and the temptation to yield to an “I don’t get it mentality”, slow your thoughts down in order to recognize unmet emotional needs and work toward meeting them in a healthy way. Don’t be harsh with yourself if you botch it up or find this strategy difficult and awkward.

2. Go the distance in recovery. I recall reading in M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled a metaphor described by Peck that the journey in life for many is likened to traveling through the desert. In their journey, many people make it to the first or second oasis and then stop rather than using the oasis for renewal of strength for the travel to the other side of the desert to lush green terrain of personal and relational intimacy. This can be true in recovery. For many addicts, the goal of achieved sobriety is enough. The remainder of life hovers around appreciation and celebration of overcoming being dominated by addiction. Twelve step meetings can become a kind of oasis in the desert where recovering addicts appreciate one another for their recovery. Many times their intimacy and recovery becomes confined to group members and experiences with other addicts who understand and walked through the desert with them to find the oasis of 12-step recovery. Yet, for many the journey stops at a 12-step meeting. Personal growth in relationship intimacy with partners, family, and other relationships is stymied because of the temptation to hover around the oasis at a 12-step meeting. Some addicts are more emotionally intimate with fellow addicts than they are with their romantic partners. It can be tempting to rest on the laurels of sobriety in the secure confines of a 12-step fellowship. It has been my experience that this dynamic is a subtle lure to a “special worm” mentality. The need to push forward and deepen relational intimacy in everyday relationships can be substituted by the acceptance and comfort of the cocoon found in 12-step fellowship. Yet, those who utilize the support from a 12-step fellowship as a launching pad to dive into the vulnerability of opening their heart and becoming emotionally naked in their relationship journey with their world will avoid the perils of becoming a “special worm”. In recovery, sobriety is establishing a ground zero for personal growth. Living with an open heart and pushing for relational intimacy will require moving beyond the oasis into the depths of vulnerability in order to make it through the desert to the other side.

3. Don’t forget C.S. Lewis who said “A good egg stays ripe for so long—it will either hatch or become rotten.” Life is brief. The opportunity for personal growth in any relationship presents itself with finite time constraints. Relationship recovery is a blend of highs and lows, bitter and sweet. Recovery life is a tapestry that presents opportunities for connection with self and others that you cherish. It doesn’t last forever. The opportunity is a dynamic that will hatch into the richness of relational intimacy or become rotten in neglect and missed chances for closeness. Being seduced into complacency in the present will fuel a “special worm” mentality. Seductively, you can adopt an “I’ve been there, done that, no need to do more” mentality about your recovery work. This is a subtle form of “stinking thinking”. You tell yourself “I’ve done enough time to rest on the laurels of recovery work”. You begin to feel entitled that you now deserve to avoid the “hot seat” of recovery scrutiny now that you are sober. Soon you become the good egg that becomes rotten. It is crucial that you embrace the relational growth opportunities in front of you. To do this you must become hungry for personal growth around the next challenge in relationship and life dynamic. “Rotten eggs” are discarded relationship opportunities that carry wistful thoughts about what might have been had we only overcome the “special worm” syndrome.

How Do You Know if You Have a Drinking Problem?

It’s not always easy to tell if you’re drinking too much or simply more than you want to be. After all, “normal” drinking behavior for one person isn’t necessarily the same for another. Casual drinking is someone who doesn’t have more than a few drinks with friends and family. Casual drinkers don’t obsess over their next drink. They don’t have a second thought of leaving glass of wine half-drunk at dinner table. So, how will you know if you have a drinking problem? If you feel that your drinking behavior exceeds the basic definition of “casual,” it’s probably time to take a hard look at what role alcohol currently plays in your life. If “casual drinking” is at one end of the spectrum, “excessive drinking” is at the opposite side. The two types of excessive drinking are heavy drinking and binge drinking.

For men under 65, the general rule of thumb is that if you regularly drink four (or more) drinks a day, or more than 14 drinks in any given week, you qualify as a heavy drinker. Over the age of 65, both men and women qualify as heavy drinkers if they have more than three drinks per day—or seven drinks in a week. Binge drinking is an entirely different beast, though. This is when someone consumes a large amount of alcohol in a very short period of time. Typically for men, it’s five or more drinks in under two hours. For women, it’s four or more drinks in that same period of time.

Indications of Alcoholism

Drinking ProblemIt is important to bear in mind that a drinking problem isn’t always measured in the number of drinks someone consumes. For some people, an occasional night of binge drinking doesn’t automatically mean they have a chronic alcohol problem. There are, however, other signs to keep an eye out for. A major indication that you might have an alcohol problem is if you’re starting to neglect all the basic responsibilities in your life, be it school commitments, work tasks, or family obligations. Another sign is engaging in risky behavior such as driving while under the influence of alcohol. Another risky behaviors are mixing booze with prescription pills, or engaging in inappropriate relationships.

Rewarding yourself with a drink after a difficult day at work, for example, can quickly turn into an unhealthy habit. There isn’t a fine line between someone with a “drinking problem” and alcoholism, the physical and mental dependence on alcohol.

After all, alcoholics oftentimes don’t look like they do in the movies. They aren’t always homeless, jobless, or carrying around a DUI on their legal record. If you find yourself craving alcohol, if you’re drinking alone or in secret, or if you’re unable to control how much you drink—these are all clear signs that you may have a problem with the bottle. Another huge sign that you might have a drinking problem is if you start losing interest in activities or hobbies that used to bring you pleasure. People with drinking problems can have a problem with the bottle and never even fully understand it. Pay close attention to your behavior. Chances are if you have drinking problem, your behavior isn’t just negatively affecting you—it’s affecting all people around you, too.

Meet the Sober-Grammers!

In the early years of Instagram, members were posting a steady stream of nature, food and travel photos. As the social media platform grew, it became known for carefully curated lifestyle accounts, duckface selfies and fitspo (or fitness inspiration).

Now with one billion accounts worldwide, Instagram has transcended its origins as a gallery of pretty pictures to emerge as an effective tool for networking, education and support.

Two years ago, I was looking for motivation to quit drinking and was surprised to discover a vibrant sober community on Instagram. Since then, accounts centered around recovery have multiplied dramatically.

The four Instagrammers below are known for sharing their own stories and extending a welcoming hand to those who are sober-curious, newly sober or looking to strengthen their ongoing recovery efforts.

Alison Evans (@TeetotallyFit)

When Alison Evans, who recently celebrated two years of sobriety, started using Instagram soon after the birth of her first child, her content initially focused on family and fitness. During her first period of sobriety, however, she began shifting her focus as she felt increasingly comfortable sharing her experiences.

“To me, Instagram serves as an open diary,” she says. “By sharing sober content, I feel like I’ve been able to hold myself more accountable, and I’m not hiding a dirty little secret. I’ve also been able to impact and inspire others, which in turn keeps me going.”

When she relapsed after eight months, however, she deleted much of what she’d shared about sobriety. As she explains, “I felt ashamed, plus I thought I was going to be a ‘normal drinker,’ so why keep the sober stuff on my feed?”

After a “final wake-up call” in January of 2017, Evans jumped back into both sobriety and posting about it because “I knew I’d be greeted with virtually-opened arms.”

“I don’t have the luxury of attending regular recovery meetings or meetups,” says Evans, who’s a military wife and the mother of three young children. “Instagram has served as a safe space to connect with like-minded, sober individuals from the comfort of anywhere.”

“Knowing that there is most likely another mother just like myself across the country, or even the world, cushions the idea that we are not alone in this walk,” she adds. “We may at times feel isolated, but then you just open up Instagram and quickly see that we are far from being ‘the only one.'”

Jocellyn Harvey (@SeltzerSobriety)

Three years sober this month and not quite 28 years old, Jocellyn Harvey has been on Instagram since she was 21. “My first account was all about things I bought, places I ate at, and how much I drank,” she says. “About six months after I got sober, I made that account private and stopped posting, though I did start talking about my sobriety within the first month.”

After almost a year away from Instagram, she started her @SeltzerSobriety account and has been writing about recovery and mental health ever since.

Harvey chose Instagram as her primary platform because of its simplicity and the ability to easily connect with people around the globe. “Instagram is a place where you can really create this life that isn’t you,” she says. “I think we’ve all done it. But now people are ready to be more ‘real’ on Instagram, and for some that means getting real about their drinking.”

Instagram hasn’t just offered Harvey a way to share her journey with the world but also introduced her to different recovery modalities. “If I wasn’t online, I’d really only know about recovery from my own program, and I think recovery needs to be well-rounded,” she explains.

While Harvey thinks “being open about your recovery is one of the best things you can do,” she also understands that shouting about recovery from the rooftops isn’t for everyone.

“If you’re more private, you can keep your account locked and follow along on other people’s journeys,” she notes.

Tracy Murphy (@MurphTheJerk)

Tracy Murphy, who’s three years sober and has been sharing about it on Instagram almost the entire time, had a very specific reason for wanting to be out and proud on IG. “It was important to me because, as a queer person, I wasn’t seeing many (or any) other queer people being visible about their sobriety in the recovery communities I was part of,” Murphy says. “It’s easier for people to do things if they see other people who are like them doing it too.”

“Being queer and sober means we’re a subculture within a subculture, so finding other folks with experiences that are similar to yours can prove challenging” Murphy notes. Murphy’s best recommendations?  Use hashtags to find other like-minded folks. (Popular sober queer hashtags, according to Murphy, are #soberqueer, #sobergay and #soberlesbian.)

While Murphy thrives off of being open on Instagram, they also know that “people need to assess to make sure it’s safe for them to do so. Some careers or family situations can become vulnerable or unsafe when folks are open about substance abuse, especially early in the recovery process.”

Still, Murphy knows the benefits of being open first-hand. “If it is safe for you to share your sobriety on Instagram, do it!” Murphy says. “The more people there are talking about it, the more people can see that sobriety comes in all different shapes and sizes and genders and sexualities and races.”

Alyson Premo (@Alys_WickedSober)

When soccer mom Alyson Premo quit drinking in November 2016, she immediately switched her Instagram handle to a recovery based one and started posting about sobriety. “I wanted to give hope to others who couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel—to show them that if I could do it, so could they,” she says.

Premo passes along motivation and hard truths, including the fact that addiction doesn’t discriminate. “I graduated from college, had a successful job and lived in middle-class suburbia, and here I was struggling with alcoholism,” she explains.

As her handle suggests, Premo’s posts show her sense of humor, and she wants people to know that “once you get sober it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. There are some hard days and emotions that we have to work through, but the blessings outweigh your hardest day.”

Now a recovery coach, Premo is a champion of the power of Instagram: “We’re all rooting for each other,” she says. “When someone has a bad day, we’re there to provide encouraging words and ways to get through the rough patch. Someone is guaranteed to get inspiration and hope from what is posted, and that’s what is needed in this world, considering the epidemic that we are currently witnessing.”

While Premo admits that while sometimes sober-grammers do get negative feedback, “being brave and owning our story is one of the greatest things we will ever do in our life.”

It’s no wonder Premo feels so strongly. While many rail against the negative impact social media has on our society, Premo notes, “From my struggle with alcoholism I finally found my purpose in life. Something that was lacking for a really long time. Without Instagram all of this wouldn’t have been made possible.”

September Recovery Reading Round-Up

Decades ago, I used to marvel at my Corporate America middle-managers and supervisors and executive directors who’d all stacked their office shelves with more books than they’d ever get to in a year, let alone a career. Still, I recall being blown away by the knowledge they’d must have amassed from reading everything on display, until I realized those books were mostly wallpaper and props and set dressing. One manager confided that he’d never read anything on the shelf behind him, which amounted to about 40 or 50 titles like Good to Great and True North and Competing for the Future, not to mention an endless assortment of books about leadership principles, usually written by retired soldiers. This is the kind of nonsense I’d pull in active alcoholism: everything was for show. I’d buy three Thomas Pynchon behemoths and prominently put them on my shelf—never to read them. I just wanted them there.

Anyway, in sobriety, I told myself that I wasn’t going to create a library of works I’d never read; I didn’t want my shelves filled with spines I’d never crack open. Every month here at Genius Recovery, I’ll share titles here that I’ve come across that say something meaningful about recovery. That said, these aren’t just books I’m collecting for the sake of collecting them—these are books that will likely travel with me for the journey of my sobriety. They’ve not only kept my interest but they’ve reminded me that sometimes when I’m lost in my recovery, I can often find myself again while reading pages like these.

Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano, Andrea Avery (Pegasus Books, 2017): Andrea Avery, an already ambitious and talented pianist by the age of 12, becomes diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA)—a diagnosis that’s nothing short of a death knell for her aspirations in both music and life. Staring down a bleak life Avery never imagined for herself, she instead turned her creativity to crafting the gorgeously delicate Sonata: a memoir that’s as powerful and affecting as any musical composition within her. The book has been described as “breathtaking” and “dazzling” (among other adjectives), but these words aren’t standard editorial-review hyperbole. Avery’s memoir is a poetic masterwork in how to translate darkness into light. She charts a course for readers to discover the nature of pain, the fallacy of fate, the struggle for motivation, what “success” truly means, and finding one’s place in a life that’s seemingly abandoned you.

Two Towns Over, Darren C. Demaree (Trio House Press, 2018): Don’t let its slight size fool you: this award-winning collection of delicate yet sharp poems is bursting with observations about the blighted streets and neighborhoods of Demaree’s opioid-ravaged Ohio. He doesn’t understand the addiction that’s taken hold of everything he’s always known, but that’s the point: it’s a series of poems constantly trying to make sense of something that’s almost infinitely out of reach. You don’t have to appreciate poetry to understand the gorgeous rot and ugly accuracy at the center of Two Towns Over.

Bottoms Up: A Recovery, Paul C. (Hotchkiss Publishing, 2016): While the chapter structure of Bottoms Up should be familiar to anyone who’s been to a 12-step meeting (“What it Was Like,” “What Happened” and “What it’s Like Now”), the memoir is anything but some color-by-numbers triptych about sobriety. It’s a unique, lively and (at its best) adventurous plunge into alcoholism—and the long, torturous road back. The writer paints such a vivid, detailed portrait of his disease that it’s hard not to breathe a little easier, feeling the white-knuckle release when he sits down in AA for the first time.

The vignettes are as brief as they are affecting: one- to two-page glimpses into a beautifully chaotic world, one glimpse colliding headlong into the next. A whirlwind that takes the reader from 1950s New York City, on booze-soaked vacations to Cape Cod, following a dizzying trail of months-old apologies and—finally—gussying up his alcoholism by actually becoming a respected sommelier…all before he arrives in AA. The impetus? He writes, “My wife presented me with a three-page handwritten list (by no means a complete one) highlighting some of the things I had done and failed to do in my drinking career and how she felt about them.” It’s that sort of stark black-and-white reality check that undercuts an otherwise crazy-colorful, sometimes queasy kaleidoscope of full-blown alcoholism.

Bottoms Up doesn’t romanticize AA so much as it spins dark poetry out of the writer’s experiences in the rooms. He’s not quick to pick up all the lingo or bumper-sticker logic, nor does he willingly embrace everything that’s thrown his way. And in many ways, it’s his initial skepticism about AA, especially the fact that he wrestles with whether he’s even an alcoholic to begin with, that’s the most endearing part. Paul C. simply sticks to what’s worked for him and, thanks to the sharpness of his truths, when the words cut, they bleed. For all its self-deprecation and humor, Bottoms Up is also at times jarring and terrifying. It’s a messy portrait of first sponsors, first struggles and first steps, though by the time Paul C. finds left himself unsupervised in an art gallery, trusted to be alone with priceless paintings by the likes of Degas and Picasso, it isn’t just an important emotional milestone for his sobriety—he’s also reached a highwater mark with recovery writing.

Just in Time, Joan Jackson (She Writes Press, 2017): Jackson’s novel is a deeply affecting chronicle of mental illness that’s both inexplicably funny and heartbreakingly true. Jackson’s writing is all at once delicate, barbed and beautiful—a style that lends itself perfectly to the story of Steve, a former college track star struggling with schizophrenia in adulthood. And while it’s a work of fiction, Jackson has clearly tapped into the first-hand experience of growing up with her similarly afflicted brother. Interestingly, while the novel doesn’t particularly set out to be a meditation on parenthood and addiction, Just in Time unflinchingly captures the difficulty of raising a child struggling with substance abuse. Even Jackson seems surprised by including her son’s real-life struggles, let alone just how effective their inclusion ends up being. “I didn’t plan on putting it in this book,” she admits, noting that her mother felt the same “despair” toward Steve as Jackson did with her own son. “[Dealing with addiction] is a learning curve and many people don’t know what it’s like to live with it,” she says. “My son has been clean and sober for 18 years, which is a miracle.” Still, she’s comfortable plunging the reader right in the center of the struggle. As she calls it in the novel, the book details “a series of yets,” wherein there’s a calm before the inevitable insanity of detox. Also, that Jackson’s son is only a subplot is remarkable, given how indelible his problems are. It also shows just how effortlessly commanding her writing is.

Crossing Finish Lines: Carrie Steinseifer Bates’s Road to Recovery

Road to RecoveryWhile alcoholic falls from grace are as common as they are tragic, there isn’t often an Olympic pedestal involved somewhere in the story. Unfortunately for three-time Olympic champion Carrie Steinseifer Bates, her story has one in it. Her decades-long plunge into alcoholism didn’t just devastate her family and destroy relationships—it almost erased her monumental athletic achievements from memory. “When you have somewhat of a public life, your problems aren’t any worse or more dramatic,” she says, “but everyone in my community knew. And let’s face it: when you’re being put in the back of a police car at three in the afternoon when the school bus is dropping off kids, the gig is kind of up.” Bates, who first competed in the 1983 Pan American Games, realized that none of her gold medals mattered much if she couldn’t escape the long shadow that alcoholism cast across her life and remarkable career.

At 15, Bates won gold medals in 4×100-meter freestyle and 4×100-meter relays, which she parlayed into Olympic wins the very next year. Beneath the brightness of her wins, though, something dark was percolating and about to rear its head. “I grew up in an alcoholic home, so swimming was my escape and my safe place—and I just happened to be good at it,” she noted. “That’s where I went to work out my fear and my anger. I took it all out in the pool and nobody can see you cry underwater, right?” Where that fear and anger informed her will, commitment, and singular drive to succeed in her competitive career, it later underscored a just-as-epic drinking career, too. “All the [sayings] that brought me my greatest accomplishments: ‘Don’t ask for help,’ ‘Barrel through it,’ ‘Bulldoze your way there,’ and ‘You’re strong’ became the same things that nearly killed me.”

Bates first tasted alcohol on a 14-hour flight from Tokyo, which sent her off to the races (pun intended): “I was on an airplane and I was one of the youngest traveling with the national team,” she remembers. “Nobody was monitoring what we were doing. Not only did the drinking feel good, but it was more of a feeling like, ‘Oh my God. I finally fit in.’ I’d always had a sense of not being comfortable in my own skin.” (She drank enough wine coolers to vomit on the plane and pass out.) Still, her competitive swimming career continued after her ’84 gold-medal wins and meeting then-President Reagan. She attended the University of Texas, where she was a member of three NCAA national championship relay teams, not to mention representing the US at the 1987 Pan American Games and the 1989 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. (She won gold medals for the latter two, as well.) And yet, alcoholism doggedly pursued her like a competitor in her own swim lane. “I don’t think I really crossed that proverbial line to alcoholic drinking until my late thirties,” she said. But when Bates finally crossed the line, everything came crashing down.

“You have to remember I lived in a world that was about excess. Everything that we did was entitled and of excess,” Bates observes. “As elite athletes, we have this mentality that we work really fucking hard, but we play really hard, too.” And just as she did in the pool, with alcohol, she pushed the boundaries of what she was capable of. And while she later managed to get through two pregnancies without drinking, she knew that she was an alcoholic. “As I got older and was raising kids, I could definitely start to see that my disease was starting to progress,” Bates says. “I started to hide [my drinking]. I started to drink more than my girlfriends and more often, too. Eventually, it wasn’t just the quantity but the frequency.” It’s a story that sounds familiar to most any alcoholic, but it’s a particularly unsettling one for a champion who’d trained her entire life to be the best, if not quasi-invincible. Alcohol just wasn’t something she’d factored in. “I’d become everything that I hated in life,” she remarks, “and I didn’t even see it coming.”

Soon enough, Bates found herself in AA rooms, even though she still struggled with hitting any honest stretches of sobriety. “Talk about driving the shame stake deeper into the ground,” she sighs, recalling the memory. “I was a complete fraud. I’d literally stand up and take coins when I knew I wasn’t sober. My life was so defined by my achievements that I was so afraid that people would find out my truth.” That truth was its own full-time job to conceal. Bates spent as much time drinking as she did maintaining the illusion that she had a perfectly manicured life as a wife, mother, and career woman. “If you could divide me into three [parts], there’s me as a sober, recovering, strong woman. There’s also the diseased alcoholic [who is] really sick and near dying. And then there is me as a successful athlete, great mom, and a good career. For a long time, I felt like they were three very different people and I couldn’t quite connect the dots, but in sobriety, I can.”

Sobriety remained more elusive to Bates than an Olympic gold medal was to an ordinary person, though. “Elite athletes aren’t easy people to get sober,” she admits. “We have pretty big egos, usually.” Still, Bates had hit a bottom where suicidal thoughts, destroyed friendships and divorce waited for her, so she turned to treatment. That trip, though, wasn’t successful. “I wasn’t fully honest in treatment. I told the staff and the counselors what they wanted to hear,” Bates says. “I only told them parts of my stories because if I told my truth, I’d have to stay. I have a life to get back to, don’t you know? But I didn’t see how much that hurt me and my ability to stay sober.” Needless to say, her time in treatment didn’t work. She returned to treatment in 2012 after sitting at a kitchen table with two girlfriends, drinking alcohol out of a coffee cup. It was that moment when she decided to quit cold turkey, arranging for 90 days of out-of-state treatment. “And then went into this really, epic, dangerous withdrawal,” she says with a disturbingly cold, matter-of-factness that belies just how horrifying the experience must have been. “It was full DT’s: voices; hearing TVs that weren’t on; no concept of night or day. I was lucky I didn’t die, but I’m not so sure I didn’t want to die.”

Years following treatment, however, Bates hasn’t just found sobriety—she’s found purpose. “I was sick of getting A’s in Treatment and F’s in Life,” she explains, looking back on decades of drinking with equal parts terror and awe. Now, she’s focused on being the best mother possible to her two daughters and making them “aware of what’s running through their veins.” She’s also taken a very vocal stance against the stigma of addiction, using her achievements as an Olympian for a greater purpose. While Bates respects the anonymity of others in 12-step programs, she’s dedicated to living out loud and helping others. “I talk about recovery openly,” she said. “It’s so much bigger than the medals. It’s about using this platform to help other struggling people who are ashamed to come out of their front door.” When Bates speaks about recovery, you can hear the passion in her voice: the electricity in between each syllable; the way she punctuates her sentences with confident periods. She doesn’t hit one inauthentic note. Bates is resolute when she describes being active with the California treatment center where she finally got sober—a place she visits frequently with her family. “I watch my girls tell other moms that their kids will forgive them, as they did me, if they stay sober. Those are my proudest moments,” she says.

It’s particularly interesting to listen to Bates describe her recovery because she begins to speak with pronouns like “we” and “our,” rather than describing it as some sort of sad solo act. “My daughters aren’t ashamed of me and they’re not ashamed of our journey. We all own our story out loud and my kids have no interest in hiding the truth.” As Bates reflects, it’s clear that she’s come a long way from not only her drinking days, but an early recovery that found her “paralyzed by fear” and afraid to leave her house out of shame. Now remarried, Bates credits her “fabulous” husband for helping her achieve sobriety, saying that “he would walk in front of me until I was brave enough to be seen, in back of me in case I slipped, and next to me with pride when I was strong enough.”

In many ways, Bates is as much a force of nature now as she was as an Olympic champion, if not more so. She recounts signing up for half-marathons, full marathons and Iron man competitions with enthusiasm and grace, not an unbridled ego ready to destroy other people. Bates isn’t broken by her past so much as she’s humbled by it. She’s keenly aware of the gulf between standing on the Olympic pedestal and lying on her kitchen floor. “I have the seen the world from a view that very few people will get to see in their lifetime: as an Olympian, a gold medalist, as someone who traveled the world,” she notes. “I have seen and done things a lot of people will never get to do in their lifetime. But I’ve also absolutely lived in hell on earth.” True champions never let the fire inside them die out, and Bates is no exception. For someone whose career was built on speed and endurance, it’s remarkable to see that Bates continues to outpace her demons, leaving them all far behind.

What are the Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism?

Health Problems Caused by Alcoholism

Given the increasing opioid epidemic that’s currently plaguing the millennial generation, it’s important to remember the negative consequences of alcoholism. While opioid use often manifests with visible physical symptoms even in its early stages, alcoholism is called the “silent killer” because its effects are less obvious right away. However, the health problems associated with excess alcohol consumption are nonetheless just as deadly as any other addiction.

One of the most widespread consequences of even moderate alcohol consumption is related to the body’s cardiovascular system. Even people who limit drinking to periods of celebration with friend and family suffer from something doctors call “holiday heart,” where increased alcohol intake triggers heart palpitations and tightness of breath, mimicking the signs of a heart attack. These episodes of holiday heart are not without risk: some types of abnormal heart rhythms can lead to stroke or heart failure, if not treated. In alcoholics who drink to excess regularly, the stress on the body’s cardiovascular system is even more damaging and can lead to early heart disease and other health problems related to a weakened cardiovascular system.

Health Consequences

Health ProblemsOf course, the health consequence most closely associated with alcoholism is cirrhosis of the liver. It is responsible with processing toxins in the blood stream. Any amount of alcohol consumed makes the liver work harder than normal. It creates conditions that often leave fatty deposits, cause liver inflammation, and create a build-up of scar tissue. So, liver becomes less capable of filtering out toxins in the blood, this failure can create stress on other organs.

The body breaks alcohol down into various components during the process of digestion. Some of those components, such as acetaldehyde, have been known to increase risks of cancer. Excessive drinking also leads an addict to use more tobacco products. The risks of cancer double to include those types of cancers inked to smoking, such as mouth and lung cancers.

The process of digesting alcohol can also cause issues in the stomach and intestinal tract. Alcoholics often avoid eating so that the high from drinking is more intense. But, drinking on an empty stomach can result in malnutrition and its many related health problems. Since alcohol dehydrates, drinkers often suffer from ulcers/hemorrhoids, which can be the source of internal bleeding, if left untreated.

Health Risks

One of the overlooked categories of health risks related to alcohol consumption are automobile accidents. Just one drink can dull a driver’s response time so that he or she is incapable of responding to changing traffic patterns in a timely fashion. Additional drinks can cause drivers to drive significantly over or under the speed limit and to swerve in his or her lane, increasing the chances for fatal accidents should they cross over into oncoming traffic. This is just one of the ways that drinking affects the brain negatively by interfering with motor coordination. Other ways is that it can cause sudden shifts in mood and behavior that damage interpersonal relationship, whether personally/professionally. Alcohol is a depressant and can exacerbate existing mental health issues.

Drinking temporarily affects motor coordination, but it can damage the alcoholic’s brain permanently. Heavy alcohol consumption causes memory loss and bring on other signs of dementia because it makes certain part brain atrophy.

While it’s true that the effects of alcohol on the body can vary due to a person’s weight, genetic makeup, gender, and level of fitness, the results of scientific findings are overwhelming in their consensus about the negative effects of alcohol on the body.

Is Alcoholism a Disability and Protected by Law?

The Disability Discrimination Act states that alcoholism is not included under its list of protected disabilities, however, courts in the U.S. and Canada have ruled on a case-by-case basis that alcoholism is a disability that is protected by law. This means that alcoholics maintain certain rights and privileges. For example, it would be legally questionable to fire an alcoholic employee for behavior related to their alcoholism. The government provides assistance to people suffering from alcoholism in the form of food stamps and subsidized housing. Certainly, there are generous interpretations to the law and even loopholes. For instance, even if a judge were to rule against protecting alcoholism as a disability, the conditions that result from this disease, such as depression or cirrhosis, may qualify for protection. But the bottom line is that major organizations, such as the ACLU and American Medical Association, view alcoholism as a disability.

There are two competing sets of recommendations at odds in laws regarding the workplace. At the same time that the Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers are responsible for making sure that a professional environment is devoid of illegal substances and their use, this same law states that workers who are recovering from addiction are entitled to protection. However, the process of recovery is almost never a straight line, and is often fraught with relapse. At what point is someone “recovering” versus a “user”?

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

DisabilityEmployers who might be considering firing an employee because of his or her excessive drinking need to take a few things into consideration, given that courts have returned rulings that view it as a protected disability. First, equal treatment for all employees. If a number of employees have drinking problems, then one or two cannot be selected for termination. This is difficult grey area because employers should document the difference between moderate to heavy drinking and an actual addiction. It’s extremely challenging in certain employment sectors, such as the restaurant industry, where alcohol consumption tends to be quite widespread. Second, the excessive drinking has to interfere with the performance of employee’s job and lessen the quality of their work. This can also prove to be challenging to distinguish and document.

Drug use is a bit more problematic of a category than alcoholism because of the illegal nature of those substances. It is clearly stated in the law that illegal drug use is not considered a disability, however, it is legal in the U.S. for anyone over the age of 21 to consume alcohol, so alcoholism, in not involving with illegal substances, is more readily treated as a disability in the workplace than any other addiction. Testing for illegal drug use is not a violation of protection for disabilities.

Recovering alcoholics who are not currently drinking are the clearest category protected under the disability act. Employers must provide reasonable accommodation of alcoholism as a disability. This means to offer the employee a special schedule in order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The official disability awards is based functional limitation caused by alcoholism.

The Disability Discrimination Act states that alcoholism is not included under its list of protected disabilities, however, courts in the U.S. and Canada have ruled on a case-by-case basis that alcoholism is a disability that is protected by law. This means that alcoholics maintain certain rights and privileges. For example, it would be legally questionable to fire an alcoholic employee for behavior related to their alcoholism. The government provides assistance to people suffering from alcoholism in the form of food stamps and subsidized housing. Certainly, there are generous interpretations to the law and even loopholes. For instance, even if a judge were to rule against protecting alcoholism as a disability, the conditions that result from this disease, such as depression or cirrhosis, may qualify for protection. But the bottom line is that major organizations, such as the ACLU and American Medical Association, view alcoholism as a disability.

There are two competing sets of recommendations at odds in laws regarding the workplace. At the same time that the Americans with Disabilities Act stipulates that employers are responsible for making sure that a professional environment is devoid of illegal substances and their use, this same law states that workers who are recovering from addiction are entitled to protection. However, the process of recovery is almost never a straight line, and is often fraught with relapse. At what point is someone “recovering” versus a “user”?

2 Things to Consider Before Firing an Employee

Disability

Employers who might be considering firing an employee because of his or her excessive drinking need to take a few things into consideration, given that courts have returned rulings that view it as a protected disability. First, equal treatment for all employees. If a number of employees have drinking problems, then one or two cannot be selected for termination. This is difficult grey area because employers should document the difference between moderate to heavy drinking and an actual addiction. It’s extremely challenging in certain employment sectors, such as the restaurant industry, where alcohol consumption tends to be quite widespread. Second, the excessive drinking has to interfere with the performance of employee’s job and lessen the quality of their work. This can also prove to be challenging to distinguish and document.

Drug use is a bit more problematic of a category than alcoholism because of the illegal nature of those substances. It is clearly stated in the law that illegal drug use is not considered a disability, however, it is legal in the U.S. for anyone over the age of 21 to consume alcohol, so alcoholism, in not involving with illegal substances, is more readily treated as a disability in the workplace than any other addiction. Testing for illegal drug use is not a violation of protection for disabilities.

Recovering alcoholics who are not currently drinking are the clearest category protected under the disability act. Employers must provide reasonable accommodation of alcoholism as a disability. This means to offer the employee a special schedule in order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The official disability awards is based functional limitation caused by alcoholism.