FOR SOME, PAIN OF SOBRIETY WORSE THAN THE PAIN OF ADDICTION

"Do you want to die?" I once asked an alcoholic client at a Vancouver
Island addictions recovery facility at which I worked until recently as
both a counsellor and director of operations.

"How many more chances do you think you have?"

He had just arrived, shaking, sick and despondent. He came through the door
to make use of one of our two social detox beds.

I looked at this man, middle-aged, sprawled out on the single bed in his
room. He had just been dragged out of a bad bender, and any connection he'd
had with human dignity as most of us understand it, had evaporated.

We'd met before. This was his third or fourth kick at the detox can in this
place, and he looked progressively worse each time he came around. He had
no answers for my questions.

Much of the point of the 'recovery game' is getting the addict to embrace
an alternate way of thinking to the one that got him or her to a place of
physical, emotional and spiritual distress.

I call it a game because it is something of a contest of wills.

This change of attitude is not accomplished by telling him or her what they
'must do', but by getting them to believe that sobriety is what they want
more than any of the alternatives. It's not a game with much of a success
tally for the service provider. This leaves the counsellor with a question
that cannot be readily answered. Why would some addicts 'choose' to
continue a life of squalor, degradation, ill-health, and physical and
psychological risk? Who wouldn't want to get better? It makes no sense to
most of us.

My experience with alcohol abuse, and subsequent recovery, left me with a
problem understanding somebody who balked at making the same choice.

I chose to get well, and did. Why wouldn't another want to? A cliche in the
recovery business is that somebody will get clean and sober once he is
hurting enough. But maybe for some the pain associated with sobriety is
worse than the pain of addiction.

Here I think of the Charles Bukowski-penned character in the book and film
Barfly -- a character based on Bukowski -- who, as impossible as it might
seem, liked his squalid and self-destructive life. He liked the drama, the
adventure, and he liked the numbed sensibilities.

Some addicts and alcoholics see a kind of romanticism in it. They've said
so. There is a fascination with the debaucheries of the suffering artist
and the walk on the wild side.

If that's the case, then a recognition of this reality for a certain group
of addicts and alcoholics, renders some current approaches to addiction
false, fatuous.

No 12-Step program will ever make these people comfortable in a room filled
with individuals they see as unimaginative losers. No safe-injection
facility will do any more than get them off the mean streets for a time. It
won't make them choose to get better.

We should devote time, money and effort to helping the addicts and
alcoholics who want to succeed, but maybe we should accept the fact that
there exists a group that embraces the life because they like it.

Freelance writer Ian Lidster counsels addicts at Comox Valley Recovery
Centre . He is former assistant editor of the Comox District Free Press