A Misspent Youth, My History in Therapy, & How I Came to Have Eleven Brassieres.

It's hard to ask for & accept help. Sometimes, the hardest part is just realizing I need help.

I have a blind spot when it comes to stress—I always think I'm handling things just fine...right up until my life becomes a three-car accident. Literally & figuratively. 

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A litany of inappropriate coping skills

Early sobriety can be exactly like the whack-a-mole game. You put smack down one behavior, one inappropriate coping skill, and up pops another. Over and over. I put down booze and drugs, I started sleeping around more, then spending money I didn’t have, then obsessively hitting the gym for hours and hours, eventually developing an eating disorder—the inability to swallow anything solid—and lived for a bit on ice cream and soup. I finally raised my hand in a 12-step meeting, asked for & accepted help, and started doing “the program” the way it was designed. It changed my life, but it took me seven years of “coping” poorly & ineffectively to be able to say, “I can’t do this by myself.”

TL; DR - I’ve wrecked two cars, own 11 bras, and I’m finally back in therapy

Cut to Today

Caring for my 94-year-old mother with dementia in my home, I’m severely sleep-deprived. Over two years ago I crashed my car, several times, and gave up driving for a while.

Typing that last sentence, I see how that mirrors my drinking behavior before I realized drinking was the problem. Rather that eliminate the source of the problem (drinking, or in this case, stress), I mitigated the symptom (adding cocaine to stave off the blackouts, or in this case, giving up the car).

Having just dropped sixty of the seventy pounds I’d gained through stress and emotional eating over the last six or so years, I’ve been seeing it creeping back. I’m doing that secret eating, where if you don’t see me, it didn’t happen. The chatter in my head has become relentless. My spending is starting to get out of control; buying things to buy things, for the dopamine rush of something new. I’ve been feeling isolated, even at the 12-step group I’ve been part of for more than 27 years, unable to remember how people speak to each other. Who do I sit with? What do I do during the break? Is there a bathroom I can hide in? I feel like I’m back in junior high, standing in the lunchroom with my tray of English muffin pizza and a container of milk, not sure what to do next, surveying the room and seeing nowhere safe or warm.

I’ve been here before. I know the solution is to ask for help. But I’m the helper not the helpee, the help giver, the care giver. Come on, I’ve been coaching and supporting people on their own caregiving journey for years. My first line is always, “You need to know up front, you can’t do this alone. You need help.” I’ve been saying this for so many years that most of them, their person has already passed on. I’ve been saying this for so many years I don’t hear myself say it anymore. A lifetime through-line of denial is why it took me seven years sitting in the rooms of recovery before I asked for help.

And here I am again, just now realizing it’s again. That the cracks have been showing for years: the car accidents, the eating—I’ve gained and lost seventy pounds like a roller coaster; the money—I own eleven practical everyday bras and didn’t even start buying “work” clothes until I stopped working. Why? Why? I’m coping man, don’t ask why, I’m coping. And the physical issues—the constant falling and breaking things (how many times can you break one wrist before it gets your attention?) because I’m not present, or well-rested. I’m in denial. Blowing out a knee doing something stupid, like, I don’t know, making my bed. Yes. It can happen. It happened.

eleven fancy bras

My brain and body are overly stressed. I’m sturdy and yet fragile, an old Volvo station wagon someone forgot to garage.

And the inappropriate and ineffective coping mechanisms: giving up the car, drinking so much coffee I should be peeing brown, looking into nicotine gum as an appetite suppressant, wondering which doctor would write which prescription for what drug, cancelling all my credit cards save one.

None of that has dealt with the source, the stress of caring for a parent.
I finally heard myself say it: “You can’t do this alone. You need help.”

I needed help. Again.
I needed what’s known in recovery lingo as “outside help,” aka therapy.

The History of (my)Therapy

I have a history with therapy. And with therapists. It’s not a good one, generally speaking, possibly because the first three were forced on me.

Growing up in my parents’ bad marriage I could blame my early teens and maybe even the Lost Years on that, but what’s the point? They did the best they could with what they had and they each got the short end of the stick growing up. I must’ve been around fourteen when we were all so unhappy, someone decided we needed family therapy. After one session at Meadowbrook Hospital Psychiatric Center as a family they realized we were all so individually fucked up we needed our own messes tended to before attempting any family issues. We were sent to neutral corners on different days, with our own therapists.

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I was an angry kid. Troubled. A runaway & probably a teenage alcoholic already, I didn’t want to be there.

My first, a bird-boned, timid & pregnant woman was no match for all that rage. She was a verbal punching bag who made the mistake of answering a call from her husband during one of our sessions. I remember leaping, Gollum-like,¹ from a crouching position on my chair to her desk, to tear that phone from her hand. I yelled into it, threatening to beat the child out of his wife if she made me keep coming.² That was our last session.

Me, age 14, in therapy

Next was an attempt at group therapy with kids my own age, all but two of us drug users. It was the era of “consciousness raising” and “rap groups” and we convinced our therapist to take a private client while we ran our own rap group, with him coming in at the end to sort of pull things together. While he was gone, we got high, played strip poker, and jumped out the window to have wheelchair races through the emergency room and visit the prison/psych floor of the hospital. That was pretty short-lived, but fun.

Therapist number three was the supervisor, a stout, solid woman with black hair lacquered into a impenetrable beehive. After one session, she suggested my parents submit a PINS petition, and make me a ward of the county.

I’m grateful they didn’t listen to her, but that was my introduction to the therapy process.

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At what was probably the height of my bottom as a drunk and addict, somewhere in my late 20s or early 30s, I sought help on my own. I went looking for someone cheap, because when you are an addict, all money goes to feed the habit. Or maybe I didn’t think I was worth more than what I found, the least expensive options—social work students. There were several. Possibly many. All of those sessions were in small rooms with no windows and I remember growing, like the Hulk, to twice the size of whomever had been assigned to me. My anger made me a giant, exactly like the Hulk. Pointing my finger in a face yelling that they couldn’t handle all the fuckedupness in my head. I was too complicated for their measly education.

Me, age 20-something, “working” with social work students

Note: Most of my fuckedupness and complication lifted when I started to get sober, but I couldn’t know that then. And wouldn’t know it until I somewhere around seven years after I put down the drink, but that is another tale entirely.

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In sobriety, I had several therapists. The first was maternal, kind and soft, which is what I needed. I was raw without the booze, as if someone had peeled off my skin. Even the air hurt.

Then, group therapy I vaguely remember. Followed by Nora, a therapist from VESID, another from EPRA.³ There was Lenore, who reminded me of my father—the source of a lot of the anger. I was very mean to her and complained she never used my name in the year or two I was with her. She pointed out she did, I just couldn’t hear it. I still think about that.

I thought I’d address my Daddy issues head on and got a male therapist whose office was so small we had to sit knee to knee. He told me the only reason men get married is for the guarantee of sex. That was the last time I saw him.

The early 2000s brought Dr. Joe. I felt like I had a real grown-up therapist, an actual doctor with an office on 5th Avenue off Central Park. He wouldn’t let me abuse him the way so many of the others had. He also wouldn’t let go of the fact that I had no interest in dating; he said it wasn’t normal. I wasn’t lonely and didn’t think he was supposed to say things like that. He was expensive at $400/hr, but I had good insurance. When the insurance coverage changed, he told me if I wanted to keep seeing him I’d better find a job that paid better. Bye, Dr. Joe. That was somewhere around 2010 or 2012?

So, it’s been over a decade since I’ve seen a therapist. Or wanted to. And not a great track record either.

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Cut to Today, Again

Secret eating, self-sabotage, spending, isolation. It was early sobriety all over again, at 34 years sober. I needed help.

This past Thursday, I met with a woman I’ll call Ruchel, not because that’s her name, but that’s what she feels like, a Ruchela.⁴ My defense system kicked right in:

• Her office was on a depressing street in a building with a slow elevator inside a yoga studio that had that day rented itself out to a bridal expo I had to walk through.

• Her waiting room, on the other side of a Japanese cherry blossom rice paper sliding door had a small swarm of fruit or drain flies flitting around the communal sink.

• Her actual office was small. Not knee-to-knee small, but still.

• These were all good reasons to run.

I stayed.
I stayed for a therapeutic hour, which we all know is actually 45 or 50 minutes, and I talked about me. I didn’t have to be nice and empathize with anyone else. For five years before Mom moved in I’d been in a caregiver support group that helped immensely. But Thursday, I didn’t have to give someone else a turn to talk. The focus was all me. I voiced things I didn’t realize I’d been feeling, like trapped—and some I was aware of that felt like they were killing me, we are so enmeshed sometimes I can’t breathe. I was on the verge of tears from the relief.

She took almost three pages of notes, in tiny handwriting.

Ruchela

Nothing has changed. Everything is different.

Back home, nothing has changed. I’m still caring for my 94-year-old mother. She still lives with me, still has dementia. I still have no help after 5pm, and my knee is killing me. But I can breathe a little more, there is some space in my chest, a weight lifted from my shoulders, room in my brain for a bit of quiet, a little less chatter. From just talking about it.

Sometimes, it takes me a while to hear myself.
You can’t do this alone.
I can’t, either.

1. I seriously doubt that part is accurate. I was not an athletic kid, spending a good deal of time drunk or stoned on barbiturates. More Rip Van Drunkle than Gollum.

2. This part is 100% true. Although I choose to believe I wouldn’t actually have done anything.

3. Originally an acronym for Employment Program for Recovering Alcoholics

4. A derivation of Rachel, Ruchel is Hebrew for ewe. Ruchela is the diminutive, the affectionate. With us, you stick -ela on the end of anything and it becomes diminutive and affectionate: mamala, ketzela, and so on.

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actual photo of me in therapy, double fisting coffees, leaving one hand free to gesture and wipe the tears