Walking with Hungry Ghosts and Jealous Gods - Writing about Addiction · 10:10pm Jul 17th, 2018
I love writing, as it’s frequently my preferred medium for not only enjoyment, but stress relief. In my job, I spend a lot of time in the darker places of the human mind, and while I am comfortable there, there are days I need to get out of hell for a while. In his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”, Dr. Gabor Maté (you’re going to get tired of hearing that name from me) writes that addiction is much like the Preta realm shown on the Madala in Buddhist cosmology. The realm of Hungry ghosts is one of the four realms that are considered to be ‘bad’ births, which also includes Nakara (the hell realm), Tiryagyoni (the animal realm), and Asura (the realm of Jealous Gods). Really, I think Maté missed the mark in that metaphor. Really, addiction covers all four realms with equal callousness toward the addict.
Normally I am all for using trauma informed language, but to be honest, it will get super tedious for me to write out “the person struggling with addiction”, just as tedious as it would be for you to constantly read it. Plus, having spent seven years working in the addictions field, most substance users will tell you that they’re addicts. Given the space, they’ll own it. Some wear it as a badge of honour. Others will deny deny deny, but that’s really just par for the course of how addiction works.
You’ll probably note that I go out of my way to not call addiction a disease. It’s not. Not really. It’s a complicated mess of biology, genetics, human development, mental health, physical health, politics, poverty, spirituality, and trauma that blends together into a complex problem that really shouldn’t be broken down as a ‘disease’ or ‘mental health condition’, because it is so rarely just that. It’s an extremely rare case for me to find an addict that didn’t have some sort of messed up home life as a kid. And if I didn’t get it out of them in the few months I worked with them, I usually spent a lot of time suspecting it.
This is the trigger warning, kids, for this post. I don’t like putting these places because I tend to assume most people are able to handle themselves and know when to walk away from stuff that may be psychologically painful, but addiction has a tendency to be fucking raw. Folks who struggle with it are everywhere, and while not everyone looks like the guy who begs for change at the end of the McDonald’s drive through to get just enough for his next hit, but often the stories are similar between him, the white collar worker who uses far too much of her six-figure salary on monthly cocaine binges, and may eventually end up standing next to him.
So why write about it? Because I see new authors trying to tackle addiction, and doing it badly. Hell, I see veteran authors writing about addiction and falling short. My most well known story happens to be in the Fallout Equestria universe, and to be honest, both Kkat and Somber are guilty of handling addiction badly. Part of that can be handwaved away by noting that addiction is not treated in a realistic manner in the game, but how Littlepip and Blackjack’s addictions were handled by both respective authors always bothered me just a little bit. It’s part of why I have it as such a focus in Speak. At least in Blackjack’s case, but I digress.
So in my typical weird fashion, let me pose a question to you: what do you think of when you hear the word addict? What do they look like? What do they use? How long have they been using? Where do they live? How do they make ends meet?
I ask these questions because I think we have this implicit bias against folks who struggle with addictions. You can have literally any other mental health condition, and once informed of it, most people will try to empathise with the person. But not addiction. We’re still stuck in this 1800s mentality that addiction is a choice. Stuck to the idea that when an addict uses, the only reason they relapse is because they are ‘weak’. We take what is a complex issue, and try to simplify it down to a simple matter of willpower and ‘weak spirit’. That maybe the addict is just like that R4 unit in Star Wars: A New Hope and has ‘a bad motivator.’
The trouble is that addiction is far more complicated than that. However, humans are very bad at changing their minds about stuff, and tend to stick to what they have learned or picked up as an implicit bias. The Oatmeal has an amazing article on the backfire effect: a type of confirmation bias that happens to strengthen beliefs when they are challenged. Ideally, we’d take in new information and be like “Wow! I was wrong about this thing all along! And now I know I was wrong and can see the world differently!” Unfortunately, what usually happens is that we’ll take what we hear, get angry, our emotions rise, and we will only continue to believe that what we think is true to be true. It’s the reason why we have unironic flat earthers in the 21st century.
So as you read this, if I say things that upset you, take a minute to breathe. Step away from the computer. Then come back to this. Our emotional arousal is what triggers the backfire effect, and in discussing things as serious as addiction, emotions can get pretty heated. It gets really easy to override empathy for others with disdain for what we perceive to be their ‘choices and lifestyle’.
But is it really choice and lifestyle? One of the addicts I worked with (I’m not giving names for HIPPA reasons, and any stories following this are going to be amalgamations of clients I’ve worked with because of those reasons, with pseudonyms given in lieu of names) summed it up best when he said “Happy people don’t do dope.” One of Dr. Maté’s clients said something similar: “I do drugs because then I don’t feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don’t do drugs.” To me, these folks are using drugs to run away from something. Something in their past that nips at their heels so readily that they are willing to inject a substance into their veins from goddess Luna knows where in order to feel a few minutes of piece. “When I’m on heroin, I feel normal,” Kari said to me in my tiny, cramped office one day.
Not better. Not “I love to get high.” Not it makes me feel awesome.
Normal.
This is the realm of hungry ghosts and the realm of angry gods. The world of the addict who spends all their time and effort and money and sanity and self to get that fix. To feel. Normal.
Preta
How does addiction get started? Well, that’s a complicated question with a complex answer. For writers, though, it’s important to note that addiction starts in childhood. In fact, it starts in utero. But it doesn’t start with the single egg and sperm cell. Researchers in the 90s erroneously reported that they had ‘discovered’ the alcoholism gene. What they discovered was a variation of the DRD2 gene - a dopamine receptor gene commonly found in the brains of alcoholics. Or so they thought. Really, what they discovered was a type of dopamine receptor variant that can exist in the brains of ‘healthy’ individuals and those with substance use disorders. So genetics is out as the true factor. We can see some vulnerability for folks who are predisposed to substance use disorders, but just because your dad and mom were both alcoholic doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will be. There’s a lot more complexity to it than that.
So what did I mean by it happens in utero? Well, stress from the mom is transferred to the baby in her womb. Several different studies from many different researchers show that maternal stress does impact fetal development. Stressed moms have stressed babies. What’s sad is that we screen moms more for gestational diabetes than we do for mental health symptoms, despite the incidence rate of mental health conditions being far, far higher than gestational diabetes. This prenatal stress tends to lead to children being born with hypersensitivity to stress.
In humans, as all animals, we have different ‘set points’ at which our environment will trigger a stress response. Babies born to stressed mothers tend to have biologically lower set points. They also tend to have lower numbers of dopamine receptors in the brain - another biological commonality that occurs frequently with those with addiction.
From a developmental standpoint, those first few months of life are critical to child development. By age 3, the brain has developed to 90% of its adult size, while our bodies are barely 20% of that. Part of that development involves the development of the dopamine and seretonin systems that exist within the brain. These systems are, on a general level (and I mean I am super over generalizing before the few of you with backgrounds in neurobiology start beating me with toasters), what help us as infants and young toddlers to regulate our emotions and anxiety. Part of this involves physical contact from mom and dad, as well as eye contact.
Infants are super sensitive to the emotions of their mothers. At such a young age, our vision kind of sucks, but we can tell when the tall person holding us has dilated pupils. Pupil dilation tends to be indicative of liking something, or finding pleasure in seeing something. Seeing that reflected back at us, our brains interpret that as a good thing, and we get a little boost of seretonin and dopamine. That’s how we form attachment relationships (see previous blog), and that’s what helps us learn to self-regulate so when mom can’t be there in 2 seconds when we are crying, we don’t completely fall apart.
But what if you don’t get that? What if mom is distracted? Mom doesn’t pick you up? Mom isn’t there at all? Well… that’s when we start seeing issues.
As I said above, children are hypersensitive to the emotions of their parents. Babies who were born to depressed mothers are so sensitive, in fact, that maternal depression can cause lasting brain structure issues in those children, making them more prone to depression and anxiety as adults. More recently, MRIs of depressed mothers show that their infants tend to mirror the areas of underactivation of the mother’s brains. So on an innate level, babies know mom is not doing well, and suffer as a consequence of it.
This isn’t to blame moms. Or dads. Or anyone, but to point out that addiction is complicated. But what if mom isn’t just depressed? Realistically, what humans need to develop well is physical contact and eye contact. Premature babies who have to be in incubators and are touched just 10 minutes per day see much greater brain development and growth than babies that aren’t touched at all. Babies need to be held. It’s part and parcel for what helps us build attachment bonds with our parents. Being held and being given eye contact is what activates the oxytocin system - often referred to as the ‘love’ or bonding hormone. Babies who aren’t held as much or who are not given as much eye contact or attention tend to go through life with lower serum levels of oxytocin in their system, and as a consequence tend to struggle in relationships with attachment.
At the far extreme end of that, it’s the reason why babies who are never held will eventually stop eating and die. They literally stress themselves to death. This… happened with alarming frequency in places like Romania during the USSR rule of the nation. It’s also why - as Dr. Maté said to us at the GOBHI conference this spring - children who are adopted often have a very difficult time unless the adoptive parents are especially diligent about trying to help the baby heal the attachment wound.
On a personal level, it’s likely one of the reasons I struggle in significant relationships. I was adopted by my parents at just 19 days old, but I only really spent a day with my biological mother before I was taken away by child services and spent just over 2 weeks with a foster family. One of the things that haunts me to this day as a therapist is something my mother said to me about my behaviour as a child. “You were always an easy baby, but you always wanted to see what everyone else was doing, even at three months old.” As someone who understands normal child development, that is not normal. That’s the sign of an avoidantly attached child. Typically, children will be very shy until they feel safe and secure with their caregiver upon meeting strangers. I was friendly with literally anyone who looked at me. Which, as an adult with my degree makes me sort of freak out if I think about it too long.
Now, I’m not an addict. I don’t happen to struggle with any particularly hard vices, save for maybe a rather powerful sweet tooth. But I do know how easily I could become one. With the demons that follow me around daily, it is only by some divine grace that I am not. But, like a particularly wise youtube commenter said on The Mountain Goat’s “Damn These Vampires” - a song about singer/songwriter John Darnielle’s struggles with methamphetamine and heroin use as an adolescent - “Some of us were not so much destined to fall, but leapt into oblivion with such reckless abandon simply because the precipice was there and we thought we could fly.” I am not an addict. I take pains to make sure I do not fall prey to the siren song of alcohol after a particularly rough week. But I carry around a coin with the serenity prayer - commonly used in Alcoholics Anonymous and other such Anonymous groups - as a reminder, that, but for the grace of whatever higher power is truly out there, I could be. I fucking could be.
Naraka
The link between substance use disorder and aversive childhood events is hardly unknown. I’m fairly certain that I’ve referenced it in just about every single goddamned psychology blog I’ve ever posted on here. The issue is that trauma and abuse are extremely common for addicts. And like most people, they are far from willing to talk about their trauma in detail. Largely because, like the quote earlier about wanting to be normal, the various chemical concoctions we can shove into our systems help make the dopamine receptors - what little addicts have of them - tingle and for a little while, numb the pain.
Childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are de-fucking-pressingly common. I cannot emphasise that enough. As a survivor myself, I spent most of my life hoping and praying that I was the only one, only to understand as an adult and a therapist that the horrifying reality is that it’s… common. One more of those moments where I have this deep seated loathing for and desire to understand humanity. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism all speak of Hell as a place that exists to punish sinners (or to atone for them, in Hinduism and Buddhism’s case), but realistically hell is here. It’s people. And it’s often the people we love and who should be caring for us.
To understand addiction, we have to walk through Naraka(Buddhist hell). For many, Naraka is still following them. I have worked with addicts that had no income, but still managed to get high. For a frighteningly high number of my female addicts, the answer to keep their high going is to go into the sex trade industry. Not the sex worker’s industry - I try to distinguish between the people who enter that service by choice and those who do out of sheer desperation. But it’s far easier sometimes when you are down on your luck to offer your body in exchange for a little more heroin than it is to wait for the next fix after working.
Which puts a lot of clients at risk of retraumatization. Working with homeless addicts, I know that they are likely to be stolen from, assaulted, beaten, and ostracized from the community. Which only further drives these folks away from supports and resources and from those social connections that can help mitigate the effects of having low serum levels of dopamine, seretonin, and oxytocin. Addiction is isolating. It is lonely. It is as close as we can get to hell on earth in many ways.
And the way we get there is by walking through hell in the first place. Many addicts I have worked with, and is common if you do any reading on the subject, started young. If it weren’t for the fact that I was a naive, shy kid in middle school, I probably would have joined them. I remember at 13 being invited to a party that I turned down, and later learned that two of the kids were drinking at it. I don’t know what drove me to say no, but it was probably a good thing.
So what the developing mind, wounded from a traumatic childhood learns, is that there are ways to ‘check out’ from reality. Humans do this naturally when in pain. There’s some developmentally interesting implications about this when it comes to ADHD kids, but what we’ve learned over the years is that people naturally tune out to the world when in pain. We call this dissociation, and the system is designed to help us keep going when the environment would kill us if we paid attention to the pain. But… we also see this show up in kids who have been abused. Another moment of ‘this should have been a sign mom and dad’ from my childhood was that I suddenly started checking out after age 3, but ‘normal’ people aren’t tuned in to these sorts of things. So I don’t blame them. It’s just something that… as a therapist, makes me more and more afraid of ever raising my own children.
Also, I apologise if these little anecdotes become tiresome. Sometimes I need to find a way to anchor myself while writing. Find a way to make sure that I’m not truly drifting off the deep end. Because so very precious little separates me from my clients that it threatens to blow me over and tear me asunder more often than I would like to admit. I have been through Naraka. I know what it’s like there. I’d rather not be the tour guide for someone else.
Asura
In Buddhism (and I’m not Buddhist, btw, I just love the metaphor), Asura is the realm of jealous or angry gods. These are people who tried to be good in life and end up committing bad acts as humans. They are reborn as asuras - angry beings who only exist as ego and force and end up sounding somewhat like Narcissus of greek myth. I think that this is the common perception that we have of addicts. That they think themselves angry gods, able to go about and do what they will in order to get their next fix.
But borrowing from the Asura metaphor, these angry gods are not happy. They do not enjoy their status as below godhood - in buddhism below the Devas (who, in fact, are not truly blessed either, as Devas are too comfortable to ever attempt to achieve Nirvana), but accept it as penance, often by becoming the epitome of the Seven Deadly Sins, and occasionally fucking with mortals, depending on your version of Buddhist cosmology you subscribe to. So, like the Asuras, addicts too, are not often happy. “Happy people don’t do heroin.”
One thing that is often overlooked when dealing with addiction is the fact that neural development in addicts and victims of child abuse is delayed. There is as much as a 20% reduction in grey and white matter development in the brain of individuals who are addicted to substances as there is compared to ‘normal’ subjects. Thus, the brain literally gets locked into specific patterns of thought, making it much more difficult to adapt to changing life circumstances. For a given addict, a TV dinner takes too long to prepare. Which is also why I have a lot of frustration with the systems that try to get people into treatment. If I have someone who is ready to make a change, I need to get them into residential treatment yesterday if they have any chance of succeeding. Because otherwise old habits set in, and I’ve lost the window of readiness to make a change.
I worked with Dave for at least a year, trying to get him to commit to residential treatment. He was commonly seen after being picked up for a probation violation - usually for testing positive for substances at a weekly meeting with his PO, but sometimes it was for petty crimes as well. He was a chronic methamphetamine user, and I had tried to get him into detox and residential many times before.
“I don’t get it, Heart. I am ready to go now! Why won’t they take me? I want to be clean! I don’t want to keep doing this fucking shit for the rest of my goddamn life!” He shouted at me from across my little 8x13 room when I informed him that there were no residential beds available for at least three weeks. I could get him into Hooper Detox, a detoxification and sobering center run by Central City Concern back in Portland, OR - 3 hours away from us - but I couldn’t guarantee than any of the ten residential substance use disorder facilities would have an opening by the time he was done with a week long stay at Hooper. I had no words for him, other than he would have to wait. “It’s always a fucking wait. They (referring to Oregon Health Plan, the medicaid for the state of Oregon where I live) don’t give a damn about addicts anyway. I already know I’m a piece of shit. It would be great if my goddamned health plan didn’t make me feel like one, too.”
Dave’s story is depressingly common. About the only time I have been able to get clients into residential placement quickly is if they are female and IV drug users. And I have worked with a few of those as well. Those girls made me nervous. For both them and for their babies.
Note how I referred to them as girls. Remember that thing I said earlier about how addicts have less brain tissue than ‘normal’ people? Well, it turns out from a brain development standpoint, they stop developing from the age where they first started using. If you have someone who becomes a user at aged 13, they pretty much become developmentally locked at a that age. It’s why often we’ll see addicts as ‘immature’, when really they are only able to deal with life at the level of the person they were when they first started using.
And if they started using at 13, I would like to know how many of you, readers, were smart at age 13? Because I sure as fuck wasn’t. I was a - to quote Red Foreman from That 70s Show - “a dumbass.” So while again, this doesn’t excuse an addict’s behaviours, it does go a long way toward explaining why they may behave in a certain manner or another.
Most addicts will tell you stories of things they have done to get a fix that they aren’t proud of. The time they robbed their own family in order to pawn something to sell it in order to buy meth. The time they held up a convenience store. The reason why they’re now banned from a local grocery for shoplifting and attempting to return the stolen goods in exchange for cash. While these antisocial behaviours are obviously not good for them nor the people around them, these folks are on fire, and everything around them will burn with them. Like jealous, angry gods, addicts do whatever they can to make ends meet, to get that fix, and to feel ‘normal’ just a few seconds longer.
Manussa
The thing is, things do get better for addicts. We work hard to help them grow beyond their trauma, and to make choices that are more and more pro-social. But ultimately, it is up to them to make that decision. People seem to love the idea of ‘scaring someone straight’. That… never works.
If you want to give yourself the kind of depression that makes you want to drink yourself into a coma, look up the episode listings and follow up for people who were seen on A&E’s Intervention. Intervention was a horrible show, with a horrible premise that, frankly, caused more trauma and didn’t work. The idea was to have an ‘intervention’ with an addict in order to get them to ‘change their ways and agree to treatment’. Most of those interventions failed. Many of those who were ‘intervened’ with ended up dying of overdoses or ended up committing suicide after the intervention. Why? Because interventions take away the one thing that an addict has left: a feeling that they have a choice in the matter.
Regardless of whether or not they really do have a choice in the matter is neither here nor there, but what most people want is the ability to feel they have a choice. I have had to explain and argue with probation officers and DHS caseworkers time and time again that I cannot put someone in the hospital or compel addictions treatment. It’s unethical, it’s immoral, and it doesn’t fucking work. I remember a particularly heated conversation I had with Katie, one of the local DHS caseworkers, about a client who continued to use after several pregnancies that resulted in the child being removed shortly after birth, wherein I angrily hung up on her after telling her that ‘If you have a problem with free will, you need to take that up with God.’ I’m not particularly religious, but humans have free will, and when it is blocked, we tend to respond badly.
But let’s assume we respond well to suggestions to get help with the things that we're addicted to. What happens?
Amazing things.
Addicts who get clean and stay clean and maintain sobriety often start quickly giving back to society. I have seen folks who were at the point where they were done with the life of drugs and hard work turn around, get well paying jobs, and start working on their trauma. One of my best success stories was a mom who, without my intervention, realised that the reason she kept turning to drugs was related to cycles of abuse by men that she would get into, and started actively working through the issues she had from being molested by her father. I didn’t do a goddamned thing but listen to this woman and give her unconditional positive regard and support.
There is a bit of evidence that shows that addicts (and non-addicts who have experienced trauma) tend to see neuronal development as they start to work through their trauma. People who have been developmentally locked are able to see growth in grey and white matter in areas of the brain that were previously atrophied. They start being able to see other possibilities, and see that they have more choices than just the old lifestyle they had. They are able to find new friend groups that aren’t as isolating as the drug using community, and are able to start working on healing those attachment and developmental wounds that they had lived with for so many years.
It’s not easy to do. It’s scary to look back into Naraka and Preta. It’s not fun to look at oneself and realise that you have become an Asura. But people who are able and willing to do so are capable of great things.
But it also takes a lot of patience on the part of those around them. And it takes a bit of an understanding that not everyone who becomes an addict recovers. I worked at an intensive outpatient clinic back in Michigan when I was a first year graduate student, and formed a close relationship with the twenty men and women in the IOP group. When I left to go back to school, they all unanimously voted to give me the serenity coin I carry around in my wallet. But… when I came home for my practicum, I checked in with my old supervisor with the IOP group, and he reported that most of the members were either doing well, or were still there, or were back.
All except for John. John was a long term alcoholic. When I met John, he asked me if I was there for group. I told him yes, and asked him about the braces on his arms. John said he was ‘a bit clumsy’. Turns out John had a habit of getting so drunk that he would fall down, and due to osteoporosis and chronic alcoholism, would frequently break his radius and ulna trying to catch himself. John was vibrant, at times angry, but a very interesting man to engage when sober. He had a bit of a bender right before I left, so naturally, I asked about him. John had died in December of the year I worked with the IOP from complications from another fall, as well as cirrhosis of the liver.
That’s not the only client I’ve lost in my short lifetime as a therapist, but most of them who have died have been related to complications from substance use. Overdose is becoming more and more commonplace, and I hear that it’s becoming worse back East, where it is common to mix heroin with fentanyl, an extremely potent narcotic painkiller.
Sometimes stories of addiction don’t have happy endings.
Writing about the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
I want to go back to those questions I posed earlier: what do you think of when you hear the word addict? What do they look like? What do they use? How long have they been using? Where do they live? How do they make ends meet?
Now I want to add a few more for you as a writer, now that I’ve just written up a good 5k worth of words on the topic. When writing about addiction, think about why you think this character is an addict. What drove them to the substance they are using? Was it a Preta issue? Some part of Naraka showing up in their past? Was there something that drew them to their substance of choice over another? Do they use anything that makes the dopamine receptors sing, or is there a specific reason they choose what they use?
What are their friends and family like? Do they have anyone they can turn to that isn’t a user? How are they getting supported? Are they getting supported at all, or are they alone? Are you planning on having them recover? If so, how? And if they are going to recover, ask yourself how many times they are going to fail and relapse. Because the average for most people is 7-9 relapses before they finally are able to maintain sobriety long term.
I don’t want to claim to be an expert on addiction, but I hope that this helps you grow a little bit in your empathy for people in your lives who struggle with addiction. I also hope the secondary effect is that you’re going to think of how to make your characters more dynamic. It is very easy to slip into stereotyping, when really, each addict is different.
I want to leave you with a poem from “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” that was written by an addict, as a way to end this. Addiction isn’t an easy issue to fix. It’s complicated. It’s messy, and it’s hard. But it is something that we can work with. Sometimes it just involves trying as hard as we can to understand where the person is on their Hellbound Train.
Went downtown - Hastings and Main
Looking for relief from the pain
All I did was find
A one-way ticket on a Hellbound Train
On a farm not far away
Several friends were taken away
Rest their souls from the pain
End their ride on the Hellbound Train
Give me peace before I die
The track is laid out so well
We all live our private hell
Just more tickets on the Hellbound Train
Hellbound Train
Hellbound Train
One-way ticket on a Hellbound train.
I blame capitalism.
Excellent article. I’m glad I followed you.
Also here’s a song I wrote about addiction called “Facsimile Friends”.
4902793
I am going to legit listen to this when I get home from work! I love seeing songs written about the topic. It's... probably about 80% of the reason why I love The Mountain Goats so much.
You know, usually I either follow people for their fiction or their blogs, not for both. These little insights into psychology are really fascinating, and I always appreciate the attempts to turn them into writing advice. Not to say that you aren't successful, but I know the two fields don't always line up neatly.
I'm curious, do you think that recovery stories are over-represented in fiction? Putting aside the hows and whys of recovery, do you think there's a place for more nuanced depictions of tragic or unresolved addiction?
And on the same general topic, what do you think about addiction that's present as a secondary or tertiary element? If a character with a drug addiction quietly suffers through it, and it never becomes attached to a plot or character arc, is that an appropriate depiction? Since you referenced Fallout: Equestria, what if Littlepip had continued abusing Mintals throughout the story, and beyond being used as a plot device to explain a defeat or something, they were never seriously addressed again? Would that be worse than the miraculous recovery Kkat settled on? Otherwise, does that mean that the second Kkat introduced drug abuse into the story, the only good exit she had was to write a story specifically about addiction and recovery?
Sorry for the barrage of questions, but you're asking for it by posting gems like these.
4902793
Holy crap, this amazing. Thank you so much for sharing!
4902941
Glad you enjoyed!
4902830
I think we see recovery stories in an attempt for people to see the 'hope' in addiction. The other side of it is, let's be real, people tend to want to read stories with happy endings. John's story above didn't have a happy ending. Neither did about 90% of the folks that Dr. Maté writes about in his book. People want to read those stories to be inspired, not brought down. However, I think that the reality is that not everyone can actually make it. All we can do is that remember that the person who is struggling is somebody's baby.
I think sometimes we can have works of fiction where a character's key trait is their addiction. I always think of Nate Ford from Leverage when I think of characters who struggle with addiction, but it rarely is an issue that comes to the forefront of their life. Nate's struggle with alcoholism does eventually come to a head at the end of the first season, but after that, it's a demon that sits on his shoulder throughout the series. I think that sometimes that's how we see of today. Addicts who suffer in silence without anyone ever knowing about it. In 2017, the county I live in started a needle exchange through public health. What we didn't expect was to exchange nearly 90k needles in the span of the first 8 months of the exchange's existence, nor did we expect to see the types of people exchanging needles. The public health nurses were floored when seemingly 'normal' people came up and would exchange several hundred sharps. It certainly changed their perspective on what an 'addict' looked like in their head.
I think, for Littlepip, what would have happened if she continued to use would have been something where she started getting distracted from the 'mission' she had. The further you go down the line in addiction, the more time and effort and energy you put into getting, finding, using, and recovering from using your substance of choice. Eventually, Pip would have dropped trying to fix the wasteland in lieu of trying to get more PTMs. Her life would start looking like PInkie's from the story, and she would have been just another one of those lost heroes.
Now, I'm not saying that Kkat was wrong to write addiction into the story. However, I think that her.... writing of Pip's miraculous recovery was very... idealised. Like someone watched one of those lifetime originals on addiction and the person pulls a complete 180 and never does it again. Kkat did a good job, as far as I can remember, writing Pip having times where she keened for the PTMs (or had a strong urge or desire for them), but I remember that becoming less and less and less of an influence throughout the story. Again, not that Kkat did anything wrong by it, just... well... I have opinions on it. Same with with the way Somber handled Blackjack's alcoholism. Realistically, he did a better job of writing P-21's struggles in the background with Med-X addiction than he did her alcoholism. Both characters had valid 'reasons' to start down the path toward addiction, but at the same time, how it was handled by the author was vastly different to a degree that still has me scratching my head whenever I'm having a conversation with Somber.
... I hope my inane ramblings actually answered your questions...
4902951
They definitely answered some! I hope you don't mind if I ask a few more.
In Fallout: Equestria, did the intervention itself bother you more than the way her overall recovery is handled? It's difficult to write about addiction properly without making the entire story about addiction, and maybe we can chalk up the recession of PTM references as one of many loose ends that were dropped in the rush toward the climax, but the intervention is forceful and completely unwanted, and it even leads directly to Monterrey Jack's death, which hangs heavily on Littlepip's conscience. Given your anecdote about that phone call, I imagine that scene rang especially false.
And Blackjack... I'm impressed and a little baffled that you can still see her as a person and a patient. I'm not disparaging her character, and you've done a fantastic job with her in Speak, but the sheer gauntlet that Somber put her through must have stacked pretty much every possible kind of physical and mental stress onto her, and that's not factoring in the weird mind magic, body switching (reincarnation? I forget), and other fantastical experiences. In the face of all that, it wasn't even clear to me that she had an alcohol addiction, but I suppose you would know the signs better than me. I guess this isn't a question so much as a paragraph-sized interrobang.
"But let’s assume we respond well suggestions to get help."
I'm not sure exactly what you meant here, I'm afraid; I think something probably went wrong in the wording, but I'm not sure what or what the desired meaning was.
An interesting post, though I'm afraid I'm not thinking of much more substantial to say at this time. Thank you for sharing these things, and doing the work you do.
4903030
ADHD happened. XD I fixed it. Thank you, Reese.
4903042
"ADHD happened. XD"
Ah. :)
"Thank you, Reese."
You're welcome. :)
The kid with pockmarked cheeks who sometimes shows up late to class. The person who just got on the bus with breath smelling like a skunk. The guy walking down the street who might have a beer gut. It's a difficult question for me to answer, because the only way in lieu of being told to guess that someone's an addict is to look at the signs, but at the same time I'm aware the people who are most visible are only those who've fallen the furthest and lost everything because of it or something else. The skinny person in a sleeping bag under a bridge with their hair falling out, trying to catch a nap in broad daylight? Yeah, them, but when I know that's not wholly representative...
I guess my real mental picture of addicts is invisibility, because it's something I never notice until it's gone far too far.
I was bright for my class, and had a few cool things I knew how to do, but... yeah. Not an emotional age to be stuck at for the rest of my life. On a side note, the prospect of a (likely single) mother having and trying to raise children while at an emotional age of thirteen is one of the most harrowing things in this blog. I just can't even imagine a single scenario in which that wouldn't work out for the worst.
It's interesting to hear your views on this. Reading through the original FO:E, I got the impression the decreasing influence of PTMs and Littlepip's lessened cravings for them as the story progressed were supposed to be intentional as part of her recovery arc (and I certainly didn't expect it to go that smoothly... but FO:E is a very optimistic and idealistic story, after all). With PH, P-21's whole "always there in the background but you never see it" thing lined up a lot with how I described seeing addicts irl above. However... his recovery was far more instantaneous and miraculous than Littlepip's. Blackjack, next to that, I never got the impression she truly had an alcohol addiction - in the first third of the story, she becomes extremely reliant on cocktails of other things, but alcohol didn't seem like something she actively went out of her way to look for. Treat it like treasure when she found it? Yes. Break into others' things for recipes or try to make refills while stuck alone in an abandoned chemistry lab? She never went remotely that far to get drunk, at least not in the original. So I'm very interested in hearing your perspective on how those three stack up.
They're cutting it with carfentanyl now, which is like 100x stronger. We're seeing some improvement with new laws stating that doctors can't hand out oxycontin like Skittles anymore.
Sometimes I wonder how different my life would be if my parents had taken me to a psychiatrist to take Surprise from me.
As you say, I was an Asura for a long time. Most of the time you've known me, actually. It just... clicked one day that I was a junkie, a fucking scumbag piece of shit. I suffered through detox and here I am today two years clean, surrounded by the ashes of burned bridges. But people don't understand that you're never "cured". You will always be 'in recovery'. A conversation about methamphetamine makes me drool. Talking about heroin makes me itch. I don't think I'll ever be free of the craving.
4903140
I want to thank you for your honesty, and... boy that does explain several of our 3am conversations in 2014. That said, I love your description of how that feels to talk about substances and how recovery is a process, not a 'cure'. I've had to explain to so many people that just because you haven't used in 10 years doesn't mean you won't want to.
I used to work with a social worker that was heavy into cocaine as part of her work in the sex worker industry. 15 years later, older, and theoretically wiser, she would still, occasionally, out of the blue say "I really miss cocaine." It was always a fascinating conversation to have with her about it.
Beyond the considerations for writing I am thoroughly enjoying these blogs purely for their educational value. I've come away from each one with one of those "huh" moments that drives me to sit and think about everything which I have just finished. Well done.
I wasn't addicted to anything you'd consider horrifically bad, but I did have a caffeine addiction, even so recently as last year. Thankfully I managed to kick it, but a lot of what's said here rings true, even to something so minor. I wanted to stop, but it was easier to keep going. If I tried to stop, within 2-3 days I would be a sick wreck. I never felt 'special', just 'normal' as long as I wasn't crashing. Even now I occasionally long for some of my favorite sodas (though thankfully since caffeine isn't horrifically bad, I can have the occasional soda, even if I try to avoid it like the plague). I can /feel/ how easy it would be to just go back to it like before (I spent a whole year once weaning to smaller and smaller amounts, then when I was having a particularly rough month I would say to myself, "Tonight's my night to feel good, one more won't hurt," and before I knew it, I had gone back to a whole 2-liter of soda a day from having cut down to 1/3 a day. It was the most awful feeling in the world to know I had let it happen to myself).
And the thing is, I know that addiction can be anything, even if it's not a physically addictive substance. You don't have to smoke, or do drugs, or drink alcohol to be an addict. You could gamble. You could be a compulsive collector. There are a /lot/ of things in this world that addiction can take the form of.
4903180
Yeah I was drunk or high for all of 2014, culminating in me nearly blowing my brains out in December. I will never not be completely honest. About my addictions, my schizophrenia, my DID.
Or that halfway between people not making accommodation for schizophrenia and me having zero contrl of myself I tanked my relationships, my friendships, made people afraid of me, ostracized myself from places I once enjoyed hanging out.
There was an inn at Langside that gave me shelter, whence in the morning equipped with purchases I set out to find their shepherd. And there he was on the edge of Mallington Moor standing motionless, gazing stupidly at his sheep; his hands trembled continually and his eyes had a blear look, but he was quite sober, wherein all Mallington had wronged him.
And then and there I asked him of the city, and he said he had never heard tell of any such place. And I said, "Come, come, you must pull yourself together." And he looked angrily at me, but when he saw me draw from amongst my purchases a full bottle of whiskey and a big glass he became more friendly. As I poured out the whiskey I asked him again about the marble city on Mallington Moor, but he seemed quite honestly to know nothing about it. The amount of whiskey he drank was quite incredible, but I seldom express surprise, and once more I asked him the way to the wonderful city. His hand was steadier now and his eyes more intelligent, and he said that he had heard something of some such city, but his memory was evidently blurred and he was unable to give me useful directions. I consequently gave him another tumbler, which he drank off like the first without any water, and almost at once he was a different man. The trembling in his hands stopped altogether, his eye became as quick as a younger man's, he answered my questions readily and frankly and, what was more important to me still, his old memory became alert and clear for even the minutest details.
--Lord Dunsany, "The City on Mallington Moor"
This is what I learned from TV as a kid:
i.pinimg.com/originals/8d/6c/a9/8d6ca9b5ab4757157f6ac542d3a68331.jpg
3.bp.blogspot.com/-DaXOwhc7y2I/U3zxwPyUpWI/AAAAAAAA3Sw/egfl5awa-o4/s1600/Foster+Brooks+-+Loveable+Lush+cassette+back.JPG
azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-you-re-not-drunk-if-you-can-lie-on-the-floor-without-holding-on-dean-martin-18-86-59.jpg
But that was in the bad old days when we thought drunks were cool and/or funny
i.imgflip.com/1yoi7k.jpg
Thank goodness we're above that now.
I wonder whether our everyday addictions are any different than the addictions that make one an "addict". I'm addicted to sex and chocolate, whether or not I get any of either. Going a year without sex (or chocolate) doesn't make me any less addicted to sex (or chocolate).
I added this blog post to my blog post index.
4917034
OH god I'm sorry...
I want to lie down on the floor and never get up again. :(
4917241
I uh... feel this compulsive need to apologize for this, but I also know that, at the same time, I'm kind of speaking the truth. It's... yeah. I'm sorry for causing pain with this statement, but... I also wanted to raise awareness of other people's realities. Bad Horse made a comment about needing to talk about things we keep in our metaphorical basements, and... this was one of those posts where I kinda... try to do that. Even if that means that it comes off as fucking raw.
4917309
You're not the one who needs to apologize...
4917381
Well... sometimes I feel like I do. I work in a field where I see the roughest things, and meet people on the worst day of their lives so far. Or at least a top 10 worst day, usually. So I kind of... realise that my perspective can be skewed and... while I hope that I'm not jaded, I realise that not everyone knows what I know, nor do they see what I see.
Nor should they need to. To be honest it's sometimes a difficult job. But... I like working with people. I like being able to help them through a rough spot and to move forward with their lives. They may never be 'better', but at least they are living more fully than they were before we met them.
4902951
4917034
Excellent essay.
I grew up with a large number of heroin addicts on my mother's side, so I got to see a pretty fair bit of that. Got one uncle who finally kicked, and now works as an addition counselor, and one cousin who last I heard was in prison on a possession charge. I have a little bit of a problem with alcohol, which fortunately isn't impacting my day to day life, just my wallet, and sex addiction which has gotten me into trouble in the past, and which I have had counseling for and gotten more or less under control.
My issue with alcohol is mostly self-medicating for various mental and physical health issues I cannot get adequate treatment for, mainly in order to allow me some sort of sleep at night (I'm also on prescription meds for that, but they don't work well enough). Which is probably a large part of the reason that so many of my family ended up going the junkie route, as mental health issues are rampant on both sides. And yeah, I have the past history of abuse as well (physical, emotional, sexual, the full hat-trick). Sex is, or rather was, a coping mechanism to dull the anxiety and depression and enable me to function. Since I no longer have that as a coping mechanism, I'm sort of stuck without anything right now. I was given a small prescription for diazepam to help with the worst of it, but I try to avoid using it except in the most severe anxiety attacks, since I know I could very easily get addicted to that stuff if I allowed myself to.
As an odd coincidence, I've been working for some time on a story that involves addiction, particularly but not exclusively heroin addiction, and its spread across Equestria as an epidemic after recreational drugs are introduced by humans (paralleling the way that alcoholism spread among First Nations peoples in North America when alcohol was introduced by white settlers). Inspired in part by Irving Walsh's Trainspotting and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (still one of my favorite books); but mostly as a way to deal with my own addiction problems and the crap in my head that causes them. It definitely has, well not really a "happy" ending as such, but definitely a hopeful one. Still sorting out a lot of the bits in-between, but I have a pretty good outline at least.
4919515
That sounds like an interesting story idea. I think it would be a fascinating, if painful exploration of how substances start to effect communities. That said, as far as the First Nations goes, I'd be interested to see if your story also mirrors the historical trauma that the First Nations endured. I think that's a huge piece of why we are seeing so many issues within native communities as it relates to trauma and alcoholism. Unfortunately, no one is wanting to address it, and in the states, Indian Health Services are often far, far too underfunded to manage the crisis in their own.
Also I imagine that hat trick has much to do with your desires to self medicate. As a survivor of sexual abuse myself, I've always found it interesting how dichotomous survivors are. Either they lean toward promiscuity and sexual addiction, like you disclosed for yourself, or my direction where I really try to avoid it all together. Well, at least in person. I had a period of my life were I could not get away from ERP, because it gave me the false sense of intimacy that allowed me to become at least comfortable with the idea of sex and sexual encounters. I've sort of gotten over that, but... IRL encounters still give me about as much anxiety as my MC for Speak.
Thank you for sharing, btw. I am not sure how you found this, but I'm glad it was an enjoyable read!
4919771
Not quite mirrored, as the societies and their relative relationships to each other are profoundly different, and Equestria is a far larger and more advanced culture than most of the First Nations peoples were at the time (on the order of Renaissance Europe) , and better able to resist the violent and militaristic colonial encroachment that the First Nations peoples suffered. But there is definitely cultural as well as individual trauma in the story, thanks to Equestrian society being substantially less resistant to cultural colonialism (something that American culture in particular has been very effective at engaging in). And not just Equestrian society, but others as well; changelings in particular (in a world such as ours, a changeling desperate for sustenance and survival can make a good if rather twisted living via certain forms of prostitution).
Yeah, I've noticed that dichotomy as well amongst the survivors that I've known personally. There are far too many of us out there.
Via Bad Horse's blog recommendations, which he linked a few posts earlier.
huh.
A lot to take in and process, but a brilliant read. I learned a lot about the subject with this, and I think I'm better for having read it. So thanks for that! Now I've learned more about addiction, and a bit more about myself in some sense I think? Though if things that I read could stop making me have fits of self-realization and introspection I think I'd appreciate it XD
I realized recently that the behaviour of a character I'm writing are in line with how I tend to deal with stress. It took me writing a bunch and having it in my face as I edited to notice the similarities. I write a bit of myself into these characters, but I never expected one of them to take on my coping mechanisms, or lack thereof. It's really interesting how stuff like that happens... Honestly, what self-improvement I've been able to do has all happened because I related to a character's internal struggles in some way, and that lead to the realization that there might be something wrong with how I do things.
One of the many things I love about reading