I was changing trains at Earl’s Court station when I bumped into a mate I knew from football. He asked where I was going, as people do when you bump into them at a station. I completely panicked and started babbling about a fictitious meeting. The truth was, I was en route to my first ever therapy session. The idea that I would admit that to anyone, let alone this passing acquaintance who knew me only as the loudmouth joker with whom he shared beers every other Saturday, was terrifying.
I was married to this identity of being carefree and fun to be around. I took nothing seriously, least of all myself. That was the way almost all the blokes I grew up with behaved. Seeking help from a therapist represented the antithesis of everything we stood for. So I muttered and mumbled a lie and he eyed me suspiciously, probably assuming that I was going to see a dominatrix and just didn’t want to admit it.
That first therapy session went OK but, to be honest, I wasn’t quite ready and we didn’t quite click. I was in my mid 30s and feeling overwhelmed by work, family, money worries and he continued maintenance of my ‘Jack the lad’ persona. I had started to suffer from sometimes debilitating anxiety and was losing sleep. I felt ashamed of, and alone in, my feelings, and a voice inside was constantly telling me that I was a pathetic whiner with no right to feel as miserable as I did.
I quit therapy and turned instead to alcohol as a form of self-medication. Eventually I started to use cocaine to supplement it. With 40 looming on the horizon I had become a secretive daytime drinker and drug user. I convinced myself that drink and drugs were the fuel I needed to keep going. I really thought that my bad habits allowed me to be a better father and husband because they provided the necessary anaesthetic to an overstretched and exhausting lifestyle. Eventually even I stopped believing that lie. I tried and failed to stop using on numerous occasions until deciding to give therapy another go.
In the clutches of addiction, I had developed a siege mentality; I thought everyone was against me. My wife, my friends, my colleagues, my relatives – I felt all of them were judging me and trying to control my life. I was angry. I was in pain and I resented the fact that nobody seemed to care.
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But in our first meeting my new therapist showed
me kindness and understanding. She was the first
person to suggest that I was justified in feeling the way I did. That I didn’t need to feel ashamed, but that I did have a problem that needed tackling. She helped me to understand that quitting drink and drugs would be just the first step in a longer journey. I would have to accept that the sadness I felt inside was legitimate and that, rather than drink and snort it away, I should investigate where it might come from. Only then would I be able to process it and move on. It sounded like a lot of hard work. But I was so desperate to stop the destructive cycle of wanton hedonism that I resolved almost instantly to give it a go.
That was almost eight years ago. Since my first meeting with my therapist, Lizann, in June 2015 I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol. It wasn’t easy. Giving up the soothing distraction of booze made me face a ton of thoughts and emotions I had been repressing since adolescence. Therapy gently took me through a personal audit of all the pain I had blithely ignored for so long. I started to get to know myself. I caught up on all the emotional development I had been deferring since I first started getting trashed on lager and weed with my pals when I was 12 years old.
The most important part of all this was the kindness and understanding that Lizann showed me. She helped me identify the little cuts and bruises that had helped to shape me. She made me feel less embarrassed about feeling the way I did. Most of all, she made me like myself. I’m not sure I ever had done before. Certainly, through the final years of my problem drinking and drug taking, I was constantly berating myself for being a lazy, pathetic, navel-gazing loser. But I wasn’t really any of those things. I was just a bloke who had failed to ever show himself much in the way of compassion and care. So I had burned myself out by the age of 39 and was heading towards oblivion. Lizann helped me step back from the edge. I still see her for my weekly session every Wednesday morning. And since 2015 each year has been better than the last.