I am continuously reminded that nothing is easy for Nic. My heart goes out to him. I want to do something to help, but there’s nothing to be done. I want him to acknowledge the traumatic past and promise that it will never happen again. He can’t. When we talk, in fact, I realize that Nic has discovered the bitterest irony of early sobriety. Your reward for your hard work in recovery is that you come headlong into the pain that you were trying to get away from with drugs.
As a society, we still have this idea that people use drugs for fun – they love being high and don’t care about anyone or anything else. It was a revelation for me when I learned that drug use and addiction aren’t ultimately about feeling good, they’re about escaping pain. It seems as if they’re about feeling more, but they’re about feeling less or not at all. It was so hard to watch this play out when Nic would get sober. Instead of feeling better, he’d feel worse, at least initially. He felt worse because he was flooded with the pain from which he was running from in the first place. It’s why treating a person for addiction can’t just be about getting sober. It also has to uncover and treat the reasons a person used. Were they running from depression? Anxiety? Those need to be identified and treated, too.
I’m obsessed with images from the Beautiful Boy movie since I just saw it. Nic (played by Timothee Chalamet) repeatedly relapses. When he’s in treatment, he does better. Like Nic did, when treatment ends, the Nic in the movie was committed to staying sober. HE DOESN’T WANT TO RELAPSE. But without drugs he’s hit with the pain he carried since he was a child.It’s not a surprise he relapsed. He continued to relapse until he began working with a psychiatrist who helped him figure out (and treat) the root of that pain, which included psychological problems like depression and bipolar disorder.
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