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lunatic wielding pressure cooker Registered: 11/16/17 Posts: 697 Loc: Somewhere in the |
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Hello all. I am back in recovery after a three year period of non-stop senseless debauchery. Last time around able to maintain two continuous years of sobriety by working the 12 steps with my sponsor and going to weekly AA meetings. This period was proceeded by a full year of CBT based treatment which I was taken to against my will by hired goons (I was 15 at the time). I probably would have used in treatment given the chance, but in the two years following treatment I took it pretty seriously. I was living with my mom and finishing up high school at the time, and made a deal with myself that I would stay completely sober until I had gone off to college and was living on campus, mostly out of respect for my mom and everything I put her through when I was constantly doing drugs.
I did use caffeine during this period, and was prescribed methylphenidate which I didn't always take exactly as prescribed. I wasn't snorting it or binging on it like I started to when I left the program, just upping the dose when I had more to get done. I did obsess over expensive Chinese teas and gong fu brewing accessories during these two years to a degree that may have been financially irresponsible, but I didn't have other drugs to spend money on so whatever. I also treated exercise (long distance running, rowing crew, swimming, and calisthenics) as a bit of a crutch in that I spent upwards of 4-6 hours every day working out, 6/7 days a week. I did well in school but I was waking up at 3:30 am, going to bed by 8, and had no social life to speak of. I used exercise to avoid having to interact with people, or think about real shit, and I definitely get a sort of high when I run 10+ miles (similar to but better than opiates imo, definitely not as good as speed but that's just my preference). Although I was very functional while in AA, internally I wasn't much happier when I was sober than when I had been using, and I would even say I became marginally happier when I started using again. I am pretty sure that I used vigorous and constant exercise as a way to suppress negative feelings and thoughts of past trauma. There was a lot of psychological abuse, and some physical / sexual abuse at the programs I attended which I am sorta just now coming to grips with. I was never assaulted by a staff member, but I know people that where, and the hazing rituals among students--which staff certainly looked the other way for--where some of the more brutal things I've witnessed / been a part of. Maybe not as damaging as some of the gun violence I've witnessed on the street, but way worse than anything I saw in Greek life hazings later on (and kids literally got branded in greek life lmao). In regards to sexual abuse, I was never a victim, but my therapist in the first program was a sexual predator, and his predatory nature definitely was apparent in every aspect of how he operated. He was the first person I spoke to when I was delivered to Utah by the goons, and all my correspondences with the outside world for the next 11 weeks where mediated through him. He is known to have redacted, edited, or downright disposed of writing by students which might have risked exposing his abusive behavior. We had one visit from our parents during the program and I was pretty shocked to hear what he had been telling my mom. She still doesn't know the extent of it because I worry she'd feel unbearably guilty for sending me there in the first place. I don't blame her at all, she thought I was on the verge of a lethal overdose and acted out of love and fear. The really damaging stuff had more to do with how the programs used their control over every aspect of our lives to break us down psychologically. Like I mentioned, they manipulated our correspondences with our parents in order to convince them that we where more fucked up than we where, and that they needed to spend more money on the expensive treatment. They limited or withheld access to food under various circumstances and accused us of "drug seeking behavior" if we tried to save up certain food items or trade food among ourselves. On one occasion I was instructed to sleep in a snowbank with my sleeping bag and no tarp in subzero temperatures. I'm pretty tough when it comes to cold temperatures and extreme outdoors stuff, but this was a bit much. I did not sleep at all during the night and my bag was fully soaked within the first couple hours. I fortunately already had experience with extreme cold weather camping, and was trained on ways to resist hypothermia if you are trapped laying down. The trick as I learned is to stay fed and hydrated if possible, and to force yourself to stop shivering and instead to focus on tensing and releasing each of your muscles one at a time. By morning there was ice forming on my body and inside my bag and I was having a hard time moving my limbs. This was as punishment for leaving my tarp site to eat dinner with a fellow juvenile delinquent. I don't think this sort of thing happened regularly, and the staff on shift were new to the program, and very stressed out at the time because our group was on the verge of an uprising. It's a pretty serious oversight though, and the way Jason Calder handled the situation afterwards was downright conspiritorial. If it had been one of the younger/ smaller kids instead of me I doubt they'd have survived the night. When I say "uprising" I mean that we had stopped listening to what they told us to do, began sneaking off at night to hold meetings, and had even broken in to a hunting cabin out on some Mormon guys land and stolen weapons. We almost had an exit plan too because there was an ATV and an RV with gas and keys at the cabin, but a few students had reservations and decided to turn us in before we could spring the plan. I still don't know who snitched, but I don't hold much resentment towards them. The program was really good at gas-lighting us into thinking we where on the wrong side of everything, and you couldn't progress through the curriculum without adopting or at least faking a full on drug war mentality. I feel a lot of resentment towards Jason Calder though, and often lie awake at night thinking about the opportunities I had to murder him and how that would have saved numerous students from being forcibly sodomized and otherwise abused. I know survivors guilt isn't a fully rational impulse, but I do feel a great degree of shame for not doing what really needed to be done. The second program I went to was a "therapeutic boarding school". It wasn't nearly as bad in terms of straight up abuse and covering up said abuse, but it was still very totalitarian (merits, demerits, staff paid to watch you sleep, up at 7, make bed, wrinkles on covers? demerits which means shoveling gravel later that week), and the culture among the students lead to a lot of violence. There where two main contingencies that made up the student body, being the drug addicts / juvenile delinquents and the video game addicts / kids who couldn't make friends in school and became suicidal as a result. It was an extremely expensive program (100k per year) and I was one of about 3 students there from a working class background. I did get financial aid (bringing it to 50k), but I'm pretty sure my mom refinanced the house and drained my college to pay for it. We got to go skiing every weekend during the winter which was awesome, but the academics where a joke and all there was to do after class on weekdays was read, lift weights, or wait in line to play pool or ping pong. Magic the Gathering was a big thing too, but it's status in terms of being a permitable activity was constantly in flux. All this is to say, we where bored as hell most of the time, and took it out on each other. I went to a public high school in a large urban area, but I don't think I ever witnessed real bullying until rehab. The delinquents fucked with the gamers, the real drug users fucked with the filthy casual pot smokers, the rich kids fucked with the poor kids, and the poor kids fucked with everyone albeit in sneakier ways. I stole so many articles of designer clothing I could probably have opened up one of those high end thrift outlets like Buffalo Exchange when I came home. There where some celebrities kids there and one of my friends collected enough evidence to get a pretty decent payout from TMZ. I won't go into the violence too much. There is a scene in Full Metal Jacket which depicts what a lot of it was like. We did a lot of bare knuckle boxing type stuff as well which I didn't really mind, and a good deal of combat via feces and bodily fluids too which I wasn't as keen on. We couldn't leave bruises on peoples faces otherwise we risked getting caught, and although the night staff couldn't have cared less about this sort of thing, the therapists, administrators, and some residential counselors would probably have taken it very seriously. I was skinny enough when I came in that I did get my ass beat a few dozen times, but once I got really into lifting weights and learned to hold my own in a fight people stopped fucking with me. This turned into a kinda long blogpost which wasn't really my intention, but it feels good to get this stuff into words. The past three years I've been smoking pot daily, and drinking a great deal. I've been smoking crack most nights that I'm in my hometown since this summer. The past few months I started using meth every week or so. I've been taking every other drug I can get my hands on as well, but those four are the ones I use the most. My sister died of the flu last month and when I was in San Francisco for the funeral I overdosed on fentanyl laced cocaine, and passed out on the sidewalk on Mission. My family and friends have expressed concern about my meth and crack use so I'm trying to cut that out completely. This means not drinking either because when I go out drinking I always seem to end up scoring cocaine in some form or another. I'm still smoking pot daily but I plan to give that up as well. I feel like I need something to get me anxious and couch-locked when the meth cravings hit though, because I can't really seem to resist them on my own more than half the time. I've enrolled in Intensive Outpatient Rehab which is a lot more tolerable when I'm not being forced to go there. I've been going to some AA meetings as well, but I haven't started working the steps again. I never really overcame my objections to steps 2 & 3 despite trying to fake it. I was really good at learning all the AA talking points and used this to get lots of affirmation and attention from those in the program. It isn't that I don't believe in god, I do. I just think the moment of creation was his death and that the entirety of our world is his rotting body. This interpretation has made the most sense to me ever since I first heard it, and everything I read from the disciplines of metaphysics and cosmology seems to support it. I can't get down with the idea of a personal god. I'd love to talk to him if he's out there, but I haven't heard from him yet. I'm looking for a model of recovery that takes a scientific and non-stigmatizing approach to drugs. The CBT and 12 Models each have their charms, but I find their flaws to be a barrier. I started drafting my own program of recovery in my Shroomery journal as a way to clarify what I want out of a program, and it's been an interesting exercise. If I can't find a program that I'm satisfied with I suppose I might set out on a journey to build my own from the ground up. A friend told me to check out SMART which I am going to do. Any other suggestions are appreciated. Here is the link to my journal post. It's very much a work in progress but I think I'm on the right track. Feedback is appreciated. https://www.shroomery.org/forums -------------------- I love men, too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of my egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'. I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too.
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