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and there was more
liquor in that house than anyone could keep track of. The warm,
fuzzy feeling I got from alcohol made my pain go away for a little
while.
    By the time I enrolled in high school, I was
an every-day drinker. I would take a flask of hard liquor to
school, hide it in my locker, and sip it throughout the day. At 15,
I tried my first cigarette and experienced a dizzy, heady feeling.
That first cigarette tasted terrible, but I liked the way it made
me feel.
    Like most addicts, I have a family history of
addiction. Alcoholism runs on my father’s side. Science is
discovering that there is a large genetic component to
addiction.
    My substance abuse was an attempt to escape
from the pain of sexual abuse and to escape from reality. I believe
we use addictions to avoid negative feelings, and as a survivor of
sexual abuse, there were many feelings I wanted to avoid. Anger,
fear, depression, anxiety, and the feeling that I had no control
over my life.
    As a therapist, I have learned that avoidance
doesn’t work. It’s pointless to try and avoid our feelings. Every
time we drink or use, we pay the price, and the further our
addictions progress, the higher that price becomes. Eventually, we
have to sacrifice our jobs, significant others, families,
self-esteem, self-respect, or even our freedom to continue to drink
and use.
    I remember drinking a sixteen-gallon keg of beer
with a couple of friends on the day of a big, college football
game. That evening we drove to another party and I smoked marijuana
with a stranger I met there.
    At some point during my drive back to the
dormitories, I found myself staring up at a stoplight with no
recollection of how I had gotten there. I realized that I was going
to kill myself or someone else, so I pulled off to the side of the
road and passed out. I awoke the next morning face down in a pool
of vomit.
    I was never arrested for DUI, even after
sleeping the entire night passed out along the side of a busy
street. But at that point, I finally began to realize what I was
doing to myself. I finally began to realize how dangerous I had
become.
    For a long time, I drank whiskey and smoked a
pack of cigarettes a day. Eventually I developed bleeding ulcers
and began to vomit blood on a daily basis. I realized that if I
didn’t change my habits, I was going to kill myself, so I decided
to cut back on drinking and even quit smoking for a few months.
    For the longest time, I couldn’t understand
why I always used alcohol to medicate feelings of depression. After
all, alcohol is a depressant.
    Yet eventually, I figure out why alcohol
“worked” for me. When I was drunk, I felt relaxed. And the more
relaxed I felt, both physically and mentally, the more I was able
to let go of whatever was making me depressed. The end result? I
was a happy drunk.
    People with depression often turn to alcohol
to try and forget their worries. Unfortunately, alcohol just gives
us one more thing to worry about. Depressed alcoholics go into a
self-destructive tailspin that ends in jail, institutions, and
death. All addictions are a trap.
    My true drug of choice, even more than
alcohol or marijuana, was nicotine. People laugh when I tell them
this, because cigarettes are legal and so common. What many people
fail to realize is that nicotine has powerful anti-anxiety
properties. I remember how peaceful, safe, and carefree I felt
after smoking. It took away so much of the anxiety I was
feeling.
    Smokers reach for a cigarette whenever they
feel stressed, nervous, anxious, or angry. And nicotine works
incredibly well at reducing those feelings for a short period of
time. Unfortunately, the chemicals in cigarettes eventually shrink
a man’s testicles and make him infertile. Smoking can lead to
impotence in men which results from a decrease in blood
circulation. Women who smoke during pregnancy may give birth to low
birth weight babies. Smoking contributes to ulcers, lung cancer,
and heart disease.
    But most smokers