After the first treatment, I began to have nightmares. After the second treatment, they got worse. By the third treatment, I began to have flashbacks of my father raping me as a child. I thought I was losing my mind. Why did I wake up every morning believing I was five years old and that my father was raping me?
Somehow or other, the treatments for my knee had freed up the memories. When I asked my acupuncturist about it, she said that it was quite normal for deep nerve trauma like mine to have some emotional trauma associated with it. She also advised I seek counseling as soon as possible to help me recover because that was beyond her capabilities.
She made one more suggestion — that I should consider stopping my use of street drugs, as they would only hinder my recovery. That was not advice I was prepared to listen to at the time. The drugs seemed to be one of the few things I could count on for a modicum of comfort. My comfort was the ability to escape the emotional pain and anguish. This made it all the more difficult to give up the habit.
The therapist I began seeing worked with helping survivors of abuse, and other Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome recoveries, to correct inappropriate coping mechanisms by teaching healthy alternatives: in other words, Behaviour Modification.
Our first sessions involved me just spilling out the traumas of the past week, flashbacks, memories, and other incidents that had left me reeling. As I gradually began to regain my footing in this, my new reality, we began to look at the variety of means I employed to keep myself from remembering what had happened in my past.
By this time, I had already begun to realize the negative impact drugs and booze were having on my life, and how, even though initially they might have seemed to be the ideal way of protecting myself from the horrors in my past, they had become the fount of many of my behavioural problems.
Resentment, anger, self-pity, and self-loathing were all lurking beneath the surface, ready to seep out like poison from a wound when the scab is torn away. It was a pretty ugly time, believe me — one I wouldn't want to go through again, but am glad I did.
When you begin to feel like you’re making it, when you begin to feel free of the chains that had been binding you for years, the feelings of relief and jubilation are extraordinary. This initial feeling of exultation can carry you quite a long way, but eventually it will wear off and you 're brought back to earth.
Article comments
1 - chantal stone
an amazing success story, thank you for sharing this Richard.
2 - JELIEL³
Very good article, but I have problems with this sentence.
People who work in the arts are hard drinkers and live hard anyway, so my behaviour didn't seem as outlandish as it would have in other circumstances
People in the arts who are hard drinkers and live hard have failed BEING in the arts and instead are BEING an artist. Sure I drank and partied a lot but a true artist lives more intensly than regular people, but not necessarily harder. But I never touched drugs and I live in Montreal, drug distribution center to North America.
3 - John Spivey
There are so many ways to stay numb and so many excuses. Powerful account of your life, Richard. I hope for continued healing of the wounds and for your personal success as a human being.
4 - Sister Ray
Do you feel like you were addicted to LSD?
5 - Richard Marcus
Sister Ray: I apologise for taking so long to reply to your comment. I think I was more adicted to getting high than any paticular means of achieving that aim. Certainly I would crave the high that I obtained from taking acid, and when I came down I would want to get it back, but the same could be send for any substance I use during the time.
I needed to not be in the world that I was in, and anything that would take me away was ideal, so I maybe wasn't technically adicted to acid, although, or any particular substance at all. It was the escape that the highs offered that I was adicted to.
Does that make sense? I think I know what you were curious about, whether acid is technically adictive, and I think perhaps we need to look at the question, and not just for acid but all substances, from another angle. People get addicted to the sensations caused by the drug, not the drug itself. I thank god I never did heroin because the high is supposed to be amazing and I might never have come back.
But coke is supposed to be this horribly addictive drug, but I never enjoyed it, so never became addicted to it.
It's the same with my pain medication. I take morphine on a regular basis, three times a day, but I hate the sensation of the high it induces (which makes me grateful that I know longer experience it) but that doesn't prevent it from working as pain medication. In times past when I have had to utilize morphine, I have never had any difficulty stopping because I don't like it. Perhaps because I'm using it for a specific purpose and not recreationaly that also changes my perspective of it.
Anyway, I guess that was a longer answer than what you expected, but it's the closest I can come to answereing. Again I apologise for my delay in responding.
cheers
Richard