GOODBYE DRUGS, I LOVE YOU

Writing Farewell Letter Helps Addicts, Therapist Finds

When I first met 14 year old Miranda, she had pink hair and a cooler
than thou persona. She also had symptoms of alcoholism found in adults
twice her age: stomach ulcers, a fatty liver, early signs of nerve
damage.

Miranda's parents had divorced when she was 6. Her stepfather battered
her mother and made sexual remarks to Miranda when he drank.

By age 11, Miranda had started nipping from her stepdad's bourbon
bottles. Now she was putting away a pint of hard liquor a day,
accompanied by joints.

"I gotta quit," she told me.

I threw myself into helping her get sober.

Miranda tried but she couldn't wrest free of alcohol or pot.

One afternoon, she whispered, "I'm such a loser." It was then that I
asked her to write a goodbye letter to alcohol and drugs.

I had recently begun to experiment with this approach with people who
were having a hard time letting go of their addictions.

Though I didn't fully understand its power at the time, I noticed that
letter writing sometimes helps my clients and me move beyond an all or
nothing focus on quitting to a more liberating understanding of the
passionate dance between clients and their chosen substance.

"What I'd like you to consider," I told Miranda now, "is writing a
letter in which you imagine yourself saying goodbye to alcohol and
drugs. You don't have to actually give them up right now. But let's see
what comes up."

At our next group session, Miranda handed me her letter:

Dear Narcotics, Pot (Acid, Alcohol) etc.,

Thanks for all you've done for me. You've helped me forget my problems.
You've made me feel good, you've made me see the world in a whole new
perspective. You've made me fail out of my freshman year, you've made
me ruin the lining of my esophagus and stomach. You've made the
relationship with my parents go downhill. You've given me a "who gives
a s t" attitude. I've gotten f ed up emotionally and physically
(relationship wise also). I've gotten used by abusing you. Even after
all those complaints, I don't want to give you up. Because I'll be
alone.

Miranda

I asked Miranda if she would share her letter with the group. Within a
few sentences, her voice began to wobble. The other kids listened with
rapt attention.

When Miranda sat down again, she said quietly, "I can't believe how
much s - - t I've taken from this stuff. It really blows me away,
especially the booze. It's like a rotten boyfriend."

I, too, was blown away by the letter. For the first time, I understood
the depth of her attachment to alcohol.

I realized that for the past six months, I had been trying to take away
the one thing in this girl's life that gave her any solace, any relief
from her sense of utter isolation.

Miranda's letter marked a turning point in her therapy.

She began to understand how desperately she relied on alcohol to
assuage her loneliness.

By the time she left therapy at 16, she had begun to make links to AA
and to develop a closer relationship to her mother, an ally in her
recovery.

When I ran into Miranda at age 19, she proudly told me that she
enrolled at the local college and had been sober for three years.

Therapy with addicted people is soul trying work. Fewer than 50 per
cent of alcoholics are still sober one year after treatment; 90 per
cent experience at least one relapse during the first four years
following treatment.

Efforts to help clients are made harder by the emphasis on getting
sober as the first and foremost goal of treatment.

In the process, the feelings of the addict the loss, yearning and
terrible loneliness that course through his or her soul and continue to
drive the addiction can easily get pushed underground.

It is this profoundly emotional and relational world that writing a
"goodbye letter" can coax into the light.

When I began experimenting with letter writing, I saw letters as a way
to help people feel less identified with their alcohol or drug use.

I hoped that writing to Alcohol or Drugs might allow a client to feel
enough separation from the addiction to begin to move beyond it.

But as I mulled over letters my clients wrote, I began to see that
letter writing also seemed to unmask the client's chosen drug as a
partner in a genuine relationship: fierce, seductive, at once
breathtakingly destructive and profoundly comforting.

I have found that honouring this relationship, especially its positive,
self preserving elements, radically changes the terms of therapy.

Rather than engaging in confrontations over quitting, I find it far
more effective and more rewarding to facilitate a peaceable breakup.

Writing letters allows clients to find their own words for what's
important to them. Letter writing often helps a client rapidly uncover
buried feelings and insights that might otherwise take months to
unearth.

When I met Gwen, a 16 year old in patient at the hospital based drug
rehabilitation program where I worked, she was deeply depressed and
furious at being forced to participate in a program for "druggies."

Between Gwen's depression and her denial, it was hard to find a
foothold for our work together.

I asked Gwen to write a goodbye letter to marijuana, which she thought
was a stupid idea because she felt she had nothing to say goodbye to.

"Whatever kind of relationship you feel you do have with pot," I told
her, "write about that."

The next morning, she gave me this letter:

Dear Ganja,

Hello old friend, what's up? It's been a long time since we last saw
each other. I miss you. I want you back in my arms. Everyone here wants
me to forget about you but I won't. I miss hanging out with you and the
familiar way you made me laugh. I miss the way you cheered me up
brightening even the darkest day and the way you made me feel so
accepted all the time.

As a result of being locked up in this program, I will be unable to see
you and smile at your great jokes. Hopefully I will be out soon and we
will be able to party with each other again. I can't wait to get home
to see you. You bring me a kind of happiness no one else can and I
can't find anywhere else.

When I get out we'll spend every minute of our day together. I will be
yours and yours only, all day and all night.

Love always, Gwen

Gwen's letter was a dramatic example of the power of letter writing to
excavate unconscious material.

Meanwhile, I got the critical information that it would have taken a
crowbar to separate this girl from pot.

Therapists who work with addicted people find themselves walking a
knife edge of despair and it is essential to try not to fall off.

I believe that therapists are most able to experience open hearted
acceptance when they become conscious of personal encounters with
powerlessness that have served as a prelude to liberation in their own
lives.

In my case, my mother continues to suffer from alcoholism, as she has
throughout most of my life. When I decided to marry, I became very
anxious about my mother's drinking. Unsure of how to handle the
presence of alcohol at our wedding and apprehensive about how she might
behave, I sought advice from a colleague.

After listening patiently, he asked me to entertain the following
scenario: "Imagine, Jon, if tomorrow morning you went out to your
mailbox and discovered a telegram. You opened it and read: 'Dear
Jonathan, I am sorry, it is not in the stars for your mother to get
better. Love, God.' "

As he spoke, I fought back tears. I got, in that moment, that my mother
and I were equally powerless over her drinking and that I could not,
and never would be able to, "fix" her. I often recall this moment as I
work with addicted clients. It keeps me connected to my client and
restrains me from engaging in futile rescue missions.

Gwen and I made little real progress together. Her reunion with
marijuana was painful for me.

But her "goodbye" letter made the difference between my feeling sad and
plunging into paralyzing self doubt and discouragement. At some level I
knew it wasn't about me.

The reality is that there are some people for whom you could put a
million dollars on one side of a table and a wad of drugs on the other
and ask them to choose, and they would take the drugs every time.

For many addicts, drugs serve as stand ins for human relationships they
haven't yet dared to create. For others, substances provide a distorted
connection with a critically important person who is already in their
lives.

Either way, writing a letter can create a generous, fruitful opening
for therapy.

Jonathan Diamond, Ph.D., practises in Northampton, Mass.
Reprinted with permission from Family Therapy Networker.