So anyway, if you know someone that's an alcoholic or a drug addict refer 'em to this. It helped me to write it, hopefully it will help someone to read it.
This is for a psychology class and the topic was something like this: "Think about your hopes and plans for your future. State your hopes plans...yada, yada... then use our three part framework (Biological, Behavioral/Learning, Cognitive) to discuss the career demands in each area..."
I might not have completely followed the directions.
My Brilliant Future
I had originally gone to school, around 10 years ago, to become a business major, but dropped out and spent the next several years in an alcohol/drug induced stupor. Before I completely hit bottom, and subsequently checked myself into the hospital, I somehow managed to apply and get accepted to CSUSM. It was in rehab I got my first real experience with professional therapy and decided to switch my major and pursue a career as a drug/alcohol counselor. More recently I’ve decided not to stop at just “counselor”, and pursue my academia as far as possible.
Biological
I would have to say that my genetic make up needs to be looked at with a “glass is half-full” attitude. My father is an exceptional athlete who, at the age of 17, was drafted straight from high school to play professional baseball for the Cardinals (He never went pro). While I inherited much of his athletic ability, I also inherited asthma. I’ve since out grown the asthma, and even though I played sports throughout most of my childhood, I believe the asthma held me back from reaching my full athletic potential. From my father I also received a knack for art. However, we differ in the fact that my dad has the amazing ability to draw anything he sees, whereas I have the natural ability to paint a picture with words. I believe that my ability to articulate myself so well will be a major asset in the field of therapy.
With all narcissism aside, I am very intelligent. I’m not saying my pops isn’t smart, but I am pretty sure my intelligence has been passed down from my mother’s side of the family. My mom is a college graduate, a fact that sometimes eludes me because she has spent the past 30 plus years teaching kindergarteners. Because my mother’s father died when she was 12 I never met him, however both of my uncles are brilliant. One graduated from UCLA and went on to become a lawyer, and the other, well, he navigated a ship to Australia in the 60’s (having absolutely no knowledge of how to navigate a boat) and now works for the Australian magistrate. Like my uncles, I have a very analytic mind and have spent much of my new sober life analyzing the recovery process; perhaps a bit too much.
Unfortunately, I was also passed down the alcoholic gene from my father’s father. During much of my adult years alcoholism had full control of my life. However, now sober, and with a “glass half-full” (oh the irony) outlook on life, I see this as the greatest blessing ever. Not only has it given me the opportunity to see life from a whole new perspective, which I will discuss later, but it has given me the distinct advantage of knowing and feeling exactly what an alcoholic has suffered through.
Lastly, my temperament can simply be described as neurotic. I am very high in emotionality. Anyone that knows me would tell you the exact opposite though, which puts me somewhere in the vicinity of the shyest extrovert ever. I am extremely insecure, fearful, and introverted, yet once I feel comfortable I am the exact opposite. Being so polar opposite is probably one of the reasons I chose to numb myself to the world for so long. I feel this neuroticism, mixed with my intelligence, has made for a great cocktail. I am hypersensitive to my feelings now, yet am infatuated with the processes that lead up to those feelings. Knowing what makes me tick, what makes me feel better, and what keeps me sober and happy is my number one asset I can bring with me into the field of addiction.
Behaviorist
Throughout my struggles with alcoholism I developed a very dysfunctional system of rewards and punishments. When I would feel anxious, depressed or fearful I would “reward” myself with a drink because I knew it would make me feel better. Alcohol became my go to solution to fix any situation in my life. However, my system of “rewards” was horribly punishing me, and yet, I wasn’t making the association. I was associating alcohol with feeling good instead of the downward spiral of my life. At this stage of my life classical conditioning and operant conditioning were working hand-in-hand to shape my life, yet only in negative ways because of my inability to learn from the “punishments”.
I truly believe I am an alcoholic with all of my being, and alcoholism would have found its way into my life one way or another over the years, but no doubt my environment and the people I was associating with helped speed up the process. Working in the restaurant industry for the past ten years was probably not the best job for me. It’s analogous to a person that is allergic to bees working as a bee keeper; it’s only a matter of time. Working in a restaurant is like being a part of one big dysfunctional family, and everyone plays off everyone else’s dysfunctional behavior. This is a perfect example of Bandura’s social learning theory.
However, now that I am sober I have learned healthier ways of coping with life and have removed myself from the toxic environment I was in. Now the classical and operant theories are working together in only positive ways. I am slowly learning that I don’t have to be terrified of the world and the people in it. By placing myself in situations that I am fearful of, and having to actually feel that fear for the first time, all while being conscience of the fact that I come out the other side unscathed, I am learning there is never anything to fear in the first place. I am learning to make the association that situations I once felt were life threatening are actually enjoyable. It goes without saying that having to work through these problems myself will surely aid me in helping others work out their problems.
Cognitive
The single most important thing that has helped me thus far in this process of recovery is faith. I’m not necessarily referring to the religious or spiritual type of faith (although I see its importance), but just simply a belief that is not based on proof. My entire perception of this world from recent memory, as foggy as it is, is negative. In my mind all of the events of my past have ended in pain. Experience only tells me that all future events in my life will end in pain. Yet, I am cognizant enough of my mental situation to know this as a completely false belief. Thus, as much as my mind tries to tell me that something is going to end in disaster, I constantly have to take that leap of faith into the unknown relying on the fact that it won’t. The more I put myself in situations to experience positive results, the more I will come to believe the world is an incredible place.
The world is an incredible place, and so are the people in it. Unfortunately, for a large portion of my life, I thought I was the only one that mattered in it. I retained the core values and manners that my parents instilled in me to superficially interact with the people around me, however if a person’s presence didn’t immediately benefit me, I couldn’t have cared less about them. Thankfully, as the layers of the onion are starting to peel away my true self is starting to return. And, my true self is a grateful, humble and loving self that wants nothing more than to help others learn to find the freedom I have found.
Throughout this process I have felt, at times, like someone that has come out of coma only to find they have amnesia. I found I had absolutely no identity. Over the years I had developed the ability to play many different roles to fit many different situations without ever truly knowing who I was. Though it has only been a year I have discovered so much about myself that I never knew existed; or possibly never tried to find. When I was first entering the recovery process I was so afraid I was going to change and people weren’t going to like me anymore. I clung so tightly to this person I thought people wanted me to be, and yet I didn’t even know who I wanted to be. Thankfully I learned rather quickly that people actually didn’t like the person I had become, and the ultimate reality of it all was that person was killing me. Why wouldn’t I be willing to throw it all away and start over? And that’s exactly what I have done. I have built myself back up from the ground up (with copious amounts of help from family, friends and groups like AA), and as a result I have an amazing new outlook on life. I have goals for the first time ever, and they are centered on helping others learn to find a new love for life as well.
