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A Deadly Struggle; An Implacable Enemy
There was a young woman I would like to say I was close friends with once. I suppose we both might have wanted something more than just friendship, but at the time I lived in Oregon and she in Maine. In the nineties, though the internet was booming, getting closer online was still difficult. More ways to communicate would rise in the coming years, but there was something else that interfered in our friendship. Sara was an alcoholic.
I hear a lot of comments about addiction, but in my experience, it’s a brutal master. Addiction hates you and wants to destroy you. It tells you that you don’t deserve anything better because it doesn’t want you to leave. It tells you that you can’t deal with the pain, so here’s an option that you deserve. I’m personifying it, yes, but this is a summary from Sara’s own description of her struggles. She drank to dull the pain of past abuses. She drank to dull the pain of the world around her.
When she was sober, she was intelligent and had a great sense of humor. She had dreams: she wanted to counsel children who were victims of sexual abuse. She lived with her sister and niece and adored the latter. When she was drunk she was given to abject despair. Instead of taking the pain away, alcohol just replaced the pain with severe self-loathing. She wanted to stop, but couldn’t find a way out to pursue her dreams.
In the end, she died in an auto accident, wrapping her car around a tree. Though I never heard the details, it wasn’t hard to guess all that was involved.
I write this because recent news came out that Carrie Fisher’s autopsy revealed she had several drugs in her system when she died. I almost didn’t write this because of the preemptive scolding coming from many social media friends. The need to tell the story outweighs mild consternation, however. When I heard of Carrie Fisher I thought of Sara and the struggle she had – a struggle she lost. Addiction is brutal. Addiction is deadly.
For those of us who never dealt with substance addiction, it’s easy to pass judgment on those destroying their lives. Those who struggle daily with addiction need our compassion and understanding. God bless the family of Carrie Fisher. God bless Sara’s family. God bless those who struggle this day. May His grace shine through.
Published in Culture
Considering Carrie Fisher has written multiple books detailing her various addictions, I’m just surprised anyone was surprised. I can’t imagine it would be easy for a recovering addict to suddenly be thrust into the spotlight again after several years and expected to cope well with the pressure. I, myself, have a hard time not turning back to cigarettes when my stress level starts rising.
Didn’t she also have to lose a lot of weight to go back to the role? No stress there.
Amen.
I lost one of my fraternity brothers with whom I was particularly close. Three of us spent so much time with each other that we constituted The Three Musketeers. One of us — probably the smartest one, definitely the funniest one — developed drug problems which culminated in his suicide. It’s been thirty years and it still hurts.
I found it impossible to hit like here. “Weep with” and “empathize” weren’t options.
My husband and I are watching the original Star Wars series this week. She was so beautiful and vibrant.
Carrie Fisher’s life story seems as though it should be the sequel to A Beautiful Mind. A terrible tragedy.
One thing that no one is talking about, because no one ever does for some unknown reason, is the psychiatric care she had sporadically received throughout her adult life. Many of the psychiatric medications in common use are highly addictive. They do a good job, but they need to be very carefully managed over a long term. This long-term management is the area in which psychiatrists fail most spectacularly. Rather than monitoring their patients closely so that any adjustments in medication will be small, they let them go until they are in a downward spiral. In order to stabilize someone who has “decompensated,” the psychiatrists start off the new round of treatment with megadoses of the medications. The human psyche is not designed to go from zero to sixty miles an hour in an instant.
I had an interesting conversation with a psychiatrist once. I said I thought the physical care for psychiatric patients was more important than the talking therapy. I said I thought that the psychiatrists who treated my mom were failing to do that consistently–although the reason I knew to do that was because they themselves had instructed me to. I said that I couldn’t help wondering if people who went into the practice of psychiatry, although they started out as full medical doctors, were interested in the talking therapy part of the treatment, which is how most of the older psychiatrists had been trained, and they were not prepared to deal with the powerful drugs that the field came to rely on. He said, “You have really nailed this. You are exactly right.” This particular doctor was part of a new-at-that-time psychiatric treatment facility that was housed in a nine-story building, the first four floors being devoted to workout equipment.
If her doctors repeatedly misjudged her wellness and took her off her medications prematurely or arbitrarily and/or abruptly–and much of psychiatric medicine is arbitrary, based as it is on “clinical observations,” which amounts to conversations with the patients–it would have perhaps driven her to try to obtain other substances on her own. And in her Hollywood life, they were readily available.
Mental illness is just that–an illness.
Addiction is a tragic condition, and I do feel compassion for those who suffer–AND for those whose lives are damaged through the addicts’ choices. That is the paradox–to feel compassion for addicts and also hold them accountable. Maybe @addictionisachoice will chime in.
Hollywood and the rock music scene are drenched in booze and drugs. Celebrities and musicians are offered various drugs and alcohol all day every day, and it must be difficult to say NO. My guess is that people who grow up around that aren’t encouraged to refuse, since that would be socially awkward. That makes the straight-up actors like Gregory Peck and Shirley Temple who did refuse very unusual.
I am sorry you lost your friend, C.U.
My 39-yr-old daughter is an alcoholic (3 years sober) and my 28-yr-old son uses drugs. (Another son seems to have been spared these problems.) I have been very scared for them at times. Just about one year ago, one of my son’s good friends left my son’s house at 1am (allegedly on LSD) and was killed in a terrible auto accident. It turned us all inside-out-emotionally (my parents have been friends with the young man’s grandparents forever and I grew up very close to his mother and father).
Addicts are dealing with something physically that we non-addicts don’t have to deal with. As in Carrie Fisher’s case, there is often mental illness in the mix. My daughter has bipolar disorder, but not with the high manic swings that some people get. But she still has to cope with it. It appears that a regular, good diet, regular exercise and regular sleeping habits are a great help in these mood disorders. My daughter appears to be getting her “talk therapy” from attending around 5 AA meetings per week and meeting with her sponsor. I am very grateful to her fellow AAs and her sponsor. They have given her something that I can’t give her (experience overcoming addiction).
One of my lovely wife’s favorite comedians is Mark Lundholm. He is a recovering addict as well and he did a show in Portland, OR every year we would never miss while we lived near there. Monday he’d do a special show where no alcohol was served. He’s a funny guy, but it was clear to me that I couldn’t understand his experiences like other members of his audience. Those who have walked that path can do much to help others on it — much more than I could that’s for sure.
My eyes well with tears reading this post. My mother drank and was addicted to pills. My dad divorced her when I was a baby. Both my mother in law and father in law were alcoholics – they stopped but the Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome is present in my husband and his siblings. My mother-in-law’s father was an alcoholic. My brother in law is an alcoholic – his two children have been in and out of rehab – his ex-wife is an alcoholic.
My sister’s ex-husband is an alcoholic and has abused drugs. His dad was a neglectful alcoholic and left him and his mom at a young age to fend for themselves. My niece and nephew exhibit strong issues of ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics). The abuse and dysfunction spans many generations. All they ever wanted from a parent was to say they mattered and they are loved. But addicted parents are self-absorbed.
Legalizing marijuana in several states, and the terrible heroin and opioid epidemic nightly on the news, is taking it’s toll on families, communities and our beloved nation overall, along with alcoholism. It’s like the unspoken illness – I pray we come to terms with it – individually, within families and as a country. It has been the downfall of many and cannot continue. Thanks for your courageous post and God Bless your friend.
@frontseatcat, @hartmannvonaue‘s suggested “weep with” and “empathize” buttons are needed at the bottom of your comment too. I attend an Al-Anon group once a week. I am not an adult child of alcoholics, but many other attendees are and the meetings provide them with quite a bit of insight, wisdom and empathy.
My daughter likes comedians (particularly Brian Regan). I am going to ask if she’s heard of Mark Lundhom.
Very sorry for your loss, @C. U. Douglas.
Addiction is deadly. Unless the user stops – and no one can stop them, only they can stop themselves – there’s a very short list of likely outcomes in store. As time goes on, that list of outcomes becomes more and more unavoidable, like liver failure, brain damage, you name it – if they manage to avoid a catastrophic event like a car crash.
There’s no magic bullet that clears up the brain of an addict enough for them to self-correct. Usually something significant has to happen, and they decide for themselves to change. If they’re lucky, whatever the significant thing is does not kill them, and they can make a change.
Certainly, they can cause physical dependency. And antipsychotics can induce psychosis in someone who didn’t have psychosis to begin with – sort of a big deal now that throwing antipsychotics at people who aren’t psychotic just because they have refractory mood disorders has become fairly common. While withdrawal can be bad enough to get you fired and seriously mess up your life in other ways, the one good thing, I guess, is that people using these drugs because a doctor said so tend not to resort to crime when their supply threatens to run out.
This reminded me so powerfully of the predicament that some non-drug-addicted people find themselves in, too.
What can also be helpful for addicts or those inclined to addictive behavior is compassion for oneself. Perhaps the pain that people are trying to numb is the pain of self-hatred, since another way to interpret the paradox of drinking is this: one drinks to dull the memory of having drunk.
Compassion is not self-pity. Because self-pity is selfish, it draws in horizons, leading to solipsism and ultimately despair. By contrast, compassion is oriented outward, as a general recognition of suffering in the world.
There’s an important difference between compassion and forgiveness. Compassion requires less architecture than forgiveness, which entails the concepts of law and punishment. The conceptual simplicity of compassion can help the more driven people circumvent one difficulty of forgiveness: assuming that no entity exists that is powerful enough to forgive your particular sin (an assumption that is, of course, another manifestation of selfishness).
Compassion can succeed because when one sees the suffering behind the action, whether the action is drinking, angry outbursts, or despondency, one naturally seeks the action that brings the suffering to an end, instead of continuing the various palliatives of the suffering. It’s a little mysterious how this happens, but the role of intuition in one’s life is mysterious as well, and well-accepted.
I’ve never had substance abuse, but I don’t pass judgment. There but by the grace of God go I. I wish we could do more to stop the addictions, stop people from ever getting caught in this trap. I share your prayers.
Compassion for one’s self is critical to leading a happy and healthy life. Of course, if one is a perfectionist, it’s especially hard to be gentle with oneself. I’ve worked hard on both of these attributes. Once I learned to practice compassion for myself (and I still work on it), I was less perfectionistic. And it’s all very liberating.
Moderator Note:
That addicts are more likely to commit crime than other suicidal people was already mentioned more tactfully in a previous comment. There are many ways to make your point without resorting to coarse language.What a lot of [redacted] and heart break over self mutilating junkies. Carrie Fischer was crazy by her own admission. Big surprise she OD’d. Is anyone interested in the harm these dopers do to society? [Redacted] They lie, cheat, steal, and do violence for drugs they need to get high.
These comments cherry pick [redacted]. Sounds like a suburban funeral for a suicide death. So indulge yourselves with weepy compassion, and forgiveness for drunks and users.
You know, a good rule of thumb before speaking out is to consider whether or not what you’re about to say is helpful, kind, or necessary. I don’t see where any of these apply to what you have posted.
Those self-mutilating junkies have parents and siblings and uncles, aunts, and cousins. And yes, there is much heart break over them with their family members. There are children who can never speak of their addict parent, even when they grow up, marry, and the addict is long dead. That is part of the harm the addict does to society. Parents watching the downward spiral of their son or daughter and have to bury their child. That is part of the harm the addict does to society. Society, in this case, usually starts with those closest to them. Compassion does not have to be weepy to understand that many people are affected, that many reading your words have been through Hell because of some addict who just happens to be their brother. The compassion is not for the addict so much as those who have lived through the tornado of the addict’s life.
Speak softly, brother. You are in the presence of survivors.
Moderator Note:
Edited to remove GIF containing profanity.@mikescapes
Every single human being who suffers and, for such suffering, contributes less of himself to society – is unable to hold a job, struggles to form interpersonal relationships, commits crimes to get high, or blacks out to avoid the pain – is a tragedy. We all lose for that: we lose the person’s goodness, heart, warmth, and, at least economically, productivity.
The evil of addition, like many other means of coping with pain (alcohol, drugs, turning away from family and friends) is that it makes it harder for the person to overcome the underlying problem. Self-destructive behaviours trigger other self-destructive behaviours. That isn’t cause for condemnation: it’s a reason to help those who suffer and do our (CoC)est to help people avoid the problems that trigger such actions.
To the extent that you imply that addicts are all worthless criminals: many struggle and recover. Many are high-functioning addicts. Many are able to contribute meaningfully to their families, jobs, and communities when sober (or sober enough).
I do not have children, but deeply love people who have struggled with addiction, so allow me to give Molly Weasley the final word on your nastiness towards addicts:
Once, when I was living in Santa Rosa, I went to our church’s singles group. Much to my surprise, 38-year old C. U. Douglas was the youngest attending that day by five years at least. Also, there was a large number of attendees who also were with our church’s group for recovering addicts. Studying the Gospel with them that day, I learned that they understood the concept of God’s grace in a way that was far deeper and more intimate than I’d ever know.
It is Christ’s compassion for the fallen that we’re called to show. The gratitude those in that study had for that grace and compassion was humbling to tell the truth. We live in a fallen world and rather than judge the fallen, we should show them the same love that Christ who came to save the lost showed for us all.
I’m guessing you’ve had some pretty bad personal experiences with addicts. At least I hope that that’s what’s driving your comment.
If that’s so, I hope that somehow you can find your way to peace.