Notes from A Cruel Healing

 

Discontented and Restless

So what do I mean by well being? I simply never experienced the ecstatic feelings that follow peak life achievements. By the age of fifteen I was expelled from school for smashing up a Home Economics classroom and allegedly assaulting Mr Brittan who taught Modern Studies. My achievements up to that time and afterwards were not the norm. While people have memories of achieving academic and sporting success during their school years, my memories include being the first among my mates to climb the tallest tree along the banks of the River Clyde, becoming a skilled slalom skateboarder, and being first in my street owning the latest Jam record. I could relate to these small achievements but didn’t derive any great feelings from them. My attitude also made it difficult for me to relate to the nature of the achievements attained by my classmates, and I couldn’t comprehend any of these providing me with a sense of intrinsic reward. Life events like successfully completing school, obtaining favoured employment, settling into your first home, getting married, having a family, achieving promotion are massively important in people’s lives and cause ecstatic emotions, igniting feelings of gratitude, excellence and happiness. I witnessed this excitement in other people however I could not relate to the feelings they expressed as I had never felt that way about any event or any achievement in my life. I could not muster genuine emotion regarding feeling great about myself or about anything I had achieved or nominally achieved. It was as if I was missing the necessary buttons that had to be pressed before these positive feelings could ignite. In other people this expressed exuberance appeared natural, their celebratory whooping and hollering and smiles seemed congruent with their enlivened body language. I had no sense of, and found it difficult to grasp the concept of reward as the catalyst providing these type of feelings that I saw other people intuitively react to and express. I felt like an impoverished being without the very feelings that were the enrichment of the human soul. I had been robbed of an integral part of the human experience and would wonder, stunned;

how come I am not completed, not whole, there are pieces of me missing, and there is a song in other people’s hearts I am deaf to and that my heart has never been able to learn, I had been overlooked by the heavens, the angels know nothing of my existence, the full mystic and majesty of human experience would never be mine, I would be without its warm brotherly embraces, hugs and handshakes, my form has not attained shape,  half made, half finished, abandoned.

Shielding my emotional limp and ugliness from everyone around me, fearful, angry, evasive and as profoundly yearning as the hunchback Quasimodo and like him imprisoned within the confines, not of Notre Dame Cathedral, but the clipped limitations of my emotional range, that were my very own Notre Dame, attached to me like the shell is to a snail, sloth and lumbering I plodded to keep up with other healthy vibrant beings who tasted the heights of joy and gratitude, the zenith of liberating humour and greatness, they tasted as one as there back slapping denoted harmony and togetherness, achievement, well being and reward. And each time with each pang I receded deeper into the tiny font of the yawning loneliness that had become my tone deaf and unmusical heart.

Instead of feeling a rich sense of well being on a par with my contemporaries the windswept barren ache I sensed was the ominous silence of a torn wound I carried whose origin was befogged from my inadequate emotional rummaging. The emotional pain I felt not only regarding my feeling alien to the richest life affirming feelings of being human, and my feelings of disconnectedness, but arose also from the human capacity for love and affection I perceived that were outside my ability to become engaged with or to develop. I viewed other people engage easily with each other; their interactions seemed poised, intuitive and relaxed. They appeared secure in each others’ company and glad to be there. Their conversations meandered unhindered through peaks and troughs of flirtation, fondness and tempered cheerfulness. The elements of their body language were suitable and appropriate to the particular occasion, whether at a children’s party, a wedding or just meeting on the street. Engaging with other people I always found awkward, perplexing and pained. I would look upon the relationship skills proficiency of others as a threat towards me, I felt belittled by my inability to match their aptitude. Their perfectly combed and honed competence towered over me, their flair and ease in accord with each other I found overbearing and anxiety provoking. The anxiety and the resultant feelings became too painful, far too difficult to manage and I withdrew from socialising, especially from social events. Included to be avoided also were every day chit chat, tittle tattle, and simple ‘how is your day’ community exchanges. I kept my interactions with other people to a bare minimum; I kept a distance between myself and others, I did not develop any type of intimacy with anyone where I could express the difficulties I had with being comfortable within myself and being comfortable among people. My perplexity at the ease of how people lived and get on with their lives was relentless, causing me to continually compare myself and conclude I was less than those who seemed to be naturally equipped to do life.

For me living with others and living with myself became unbearable. In the early spring evening just inside the entrance to a concrete pedestrian subway, that had became a hangout for the local youths, I found relief inside a stolen bottle of Bullmans cider. Just before becoming a teenager I had tasted my first alcoholic drink. My anxiety and the feelings that had been unbearable had become much easier to contend with, I felt the most at ease I had ever been, I felt part of the human race, and I felt like the other people who appeared to do life with such grace and poise. Alcohol was providing me with a sense of well being and positive connection I had never experienced, I looked at people with a camaraderie alien to me, there was a new enmity given to me that made it easier and painless to be around people. Alcohol seemed to provide the solution to my discomfort that I was not able to discover under my own resources or with another human being. The respite I felt became a release I hankered after, longed for, ached for.          

 

 

 

kevin c dooley (kevcdooley) on Twitter

kevin c dooley (kevcdooley) on Twitter

A CRUEL HEALING

Notes from A Cruel Healing

On becoming an addict

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 probably was. I quickly found that I could not do life 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 began to receive the first of many prison sentences, I became part of the jail culture. After that I became addicted to class A drugs and that lead me to London’s homeless culture. Out on wintry nights, stoned out my brains, looking for dry cardboard to cover me as I sleep. Living the dream huh?  

It was extremely difficult for me to change, by my twenties I believed I couldn't. From childhood I have been aware of an internal conflict that has preoccupied me. Among the prevailing choices of education and employment my classmates decided they were joining the factory workforce. I thought that I should be among the lads happily ambling up to the factory gates but I was overwhelmed by feelings of not being part of the group. My desires were impeded by this conflict of wanting to be part of the group but believing I was separate from it. This distressed me and I always felt discontented with no clarity pertaining to a sense of identity. I felt inadequate. I felt inept. I spent a lot of my time covering these feelings and presenting a facade of competence to my family, friends and every other relationship I entered into. When I tried to understand why I experienced consistent feelings of inadequacy the reflection accompanying this would reveal ideas that were unpalatable to me. I would swiftly batten down the hatches of my thought processes regarding the theories that surfaced during my melancholic introspection. I found it hard to accept that I may be different, or mentally ill, or need counselling, or that I may be weaker than my contemporaries, or not strong like my eleven older brothers. I became frustrated with being unable to act on any ideas that emerged during the periods I spent looking for some rationale to my toxic feelings. An extremely simple idea- and am sure people reading this are asking why I did not use this idea- is to quite simply speak to someone about the feelings that caused me great discomfort. I vaguely recognised during my teens that overwhelming anxiety was the obstacle to discussing my feelings with another person.  Fear of losing face, fear of being laughed at, ridiculed, of being seen as weak, of not being seen as part of the group, of being rejected. The shame I felt throughout my childhood that continued into my adulthood had, I later identified in therapy during my recovery, stemmed from harbouring feelings which though I could not fully define or understand I had come to believe were perverse, unclean and extremely immoral. I used these extreme terms to identify the unnatural state I became convinced my emotions were in, to express myself to an outsider, the therapist, and to principally after therapeutic exploration label the overwhelming sense of guilt I felt most of the time.  I had been aware of these feelings from an early age. Then however I had no inclination to even begin to consider a link between them and my addiction. From these feelings, stemming like branches from a tree trunk extended further feelings of awkwardness and discontentment. Altogether this made it difficult for me to relate easily to others; so much so that I never felt at one with anyone, not an equal nor connected fully in any way. This restricted my relationships with people from developing to an intimate level. This caused me to remain guarded and never really fully trust people. The feelings I have described I kept under wraps and I maintained an emotional distance that enabled me to function in a relationship without experiencing feelings of anxiety to any great measure.

However anxiety did not leave me completely and keeping it at bay was always a preoccupation of mine. I learned to trap my feelings of anxiety in my stomach, along with my feelings of shame, pushed and punched them down along the length of my intestine until they were deeply cored and held them there, like constantly holding a ball under water. I remained like this throughout my teenage years and into my adulthood without ever considering that I may have had other more extensive and varied emotional resources that could provide me with the capacity to alter my mental attitude. I believed I would always feel this way. After many years travelling with this emotional baggage; whenever I tried to make relationships more positive, feeling healthier and relaxed with another person, I always eventually came to the same place deep within me. This was the place of shame that in my adulthood had now developed into self-loathing.

The die was cast!

I concluded that at some time oblivious to me I had, emotionally, crossed the Rubicon. From that moment the civil war raging inside me had started and must, so convinced was I then, continue.

I cite the feelings I have described as being part of my inability to achieve a sense of well being and to feel any sense of achievement, to manage emotional pain and to achieve and realise the connection of intense affection.

This experience, I believe, is part of the tapestry that becomes woven into the illness of addiction. On becoming an addict these threads, relevant and significant, will always make up part of the picture.  

 

 

Notes from ‘A Cruel Healing’ Rattling

I made my way through London’s evening’s wintry mist to the grocers shop at the corner of Dean St and Old Compton St. I used this shop often and was known to all the members of the family who ran it. I pushed the door open. The shop was bright. By the number of beads of sweat on my forehead the shopkeeper could tell how many cans of lager I wanted. I was rattling, withdrawing. If ever the shopkeeper seen me physically shaking while entering his shop he already had 4 cans on the counter by the time I reached it. If the sweating and the shakes I displayed signified a worse state of wear then a 1 litre bottle of French cider was added by the shop assistant without any acknowledgment. Banter, tittle tattle, pithy exchanges, the nod of a head, a rye wink, a benign smile, signs of human communication that exude the warmth, compassion, and fellowship were absent completely. He knew I was not up for discussing the weather; I hadn’t been motivated by this type of social cohesion for many years. My money was in change clenched in both of my hands. I poured the money onto the counter. The coins swarmed like bees angrily around each other shaking fervently from them the sweaty filth they had collected from me. The shop assistant tidal waved the money with one hand into the open drawer beneath the counter. It was a big fat chunky dark wooden drawer, one of those Victoriana numbers with the big brass handles. The change thumped its way against each other down into the cavernous drawer. As the money was being incarcerated separated from the respectable money filling the till my whole body shook, cold shivers echoed around my face, my neck and my hands trembled as I opened the first can of lager.

Notes from ‘A Cruel Healing’ Homeless in West End

I slept rough in ‘bashes’, a term describing an area in the street put aside by homeless people to sleep in and kitted out with cardboard and blankets.

I saw homeless people fight viciously over a begging space on the street,

I saw the rent boys in Piccadilly being abused by punters,

I saw deaths from drugs and alcohol misuse,

I overdosed several times myself. One Time in the cubicle of the Tottenham Court Rd public toilets opposite Astoria theatre, I had had a good day grafting (shoplifting) and had a few quid, I set down on the floor my bags of stolen goods and had injected a lot of heroin. With me in the cubicle were another Glaswegian and an Italian guy. As I overdosed my eyes closing and my body slowly falling over, I heard an Italian voice saying ‘The money is in his sock’, and a jubilant Glaswegian shouting ‘Ya dancer’. So they got a result, were happy and left me to die.

I came round later, only by the skill of paramedics. I had no money, no stolen goods, no shoes or socks and my main concern was not my well being but where can I get my next hit.

The West End and Kings Cross were the stomping grounds of the homeless, prostitutes and drug dealers. I realised I was living in an unmerciful world. This period of time, 1998 to 2003, I assert being the most dangerous in the history of the city’s homeless.

In the whole time I was homeless I never met anyone who could offer me a house, a real sustainable accommodation. I met police a lot and met outreach workers 3 times in over 4 years. I had become suspicious of authorities giving up on them totally and not trusting them at all. This included hospitals, doctors, police and Social Security workers.   

My experience with agency workers was that there was a blatant power imbalance between us, lack of empathy and of simple respect, and no consistent follow up on proposals or agreements. So it was difficult for me to engage with hostel workers even when I had an opportunity to be among them, and by the time I had achieved the merest trust with any of them, I had been nicked, in prison or had moved on. 

My friend Dree developed cellulitis on both arms. He had a high fever, headaches, chills, sweats, very ill. The skin on his arms had hardened becoming flaming red and swollen, like lobsters claws. He bedded down under the arches on Remnant St off Kingsway leading into St Lincoln’s Inn Fields while I scoured among the Soho prostitutes for anti-biotics, I also shoplifted health remedies from a famous health shop on Oxford St. I returned to Dree with arms full of medication and after two days he fully recovered from that condition courtesy of Holland & Barret and the naked girls of Rupert Street.

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...