Communication is Key-The Rebuild Week 11

How being a poor communicator fed my addiction

Jul 05, 2023

I’ve been struggling a little bit lately. But it makes sense. I haven’t had the ability to exercise the way I usually would for the best part of the year due to a back injury. Work has been pretty crazy as we wrap up the season for winter. We have been trying to get all of our ducks in a row for tax time, which is much more nuanced this time around, given we now have an investment property and run an Airbnb out of our downstairs apartment.

Fortunately, over the last 14 and whatever months, I’ve implemented alternate coping mechanisms that seem to be doing the job for me, just.

But now that each of the above-mentioned things are almost done, I’m starting to experience some other negative thoughts and feelings. I’ve been so bloody busy that I haven’t had time to sit back and reflect as much as I would have liked to. So when things started to slow down for me, I had a bit of a realisation.

Sometimes I feel like I should rename my blog to something like “obvious shit I have realised in sobriety that I wish I had realised sooner” because these days, that seems to be the general nature of it.

I have come to realise that I feel like I have a bit of a void in my life when I’m not busy. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family to bits and have been doing all I can to spend as much time with them as I can. I think it’s important that as my son grows and develops so much each day/week, we experience as much of that a possible together.

We moved away from our home in Canberra almost 12 months ago, and life has been pretty full since. But now that we are finally starting to feel truly settled, after ten and a half months, are getting the hang of this parenting thing and with work slowing down for the winter, I’ve realised that when we left Canberra, not only did we move away from our families but we also left behind any community groups that we emersed ourselves in.

Because the last 12 months or so have been such a whirlwind, I’ve not truly had the opportunity to immerse myself in any form of community. And if I’m being brutally honest, I’ve probably avoided it or made excuses for not doing so.

My partner joined a mothers club shortly after our son was born and has made some good friends in doing so. Apart from when our son was sick, she has caught up with some, if not all, of them most weeks. I’m proud of her for being brave and putting herself out there. Being in a new town and lobbing up to a group catch-up with complete strangers sounds mortifying to me, but it does do wonders for my partner, and I’m grateful to the local council for running programs like this that help new mothers connect with other new mothers. It’s an opportunity for them to discuss the challenges and, equally, the amazing upsides of being a new mother. Importantly, it is an opportunity to realise that the challenges they face are no different from those of the other mothers. It’s also great for my son to have exposure to other kids of his age as he learns to navigate his first friendships.

My best mate lives here, and I have some family here too, but he is so busy with his business, three kids and partner that we don’t get to catch up nearly as often as we’d like. Of the small amount of family I have here, one of them is my boss. Spending 40 hours a week and five or more phone calls daily with one person is usually more than enough.

Being sober makes things harder again. I could regularly go to the pub with my cousin/boss and his mates if I drank. Sure, I could go and sit in the pub and drink water, but that would only feel isolating and incite questions I don’t have the energy to answer, and frankly, putting myself in that type of environment isn’t worth the risk for the reward I would get from it.

There are options, though. There is a very casual, social running club here on Wednesday evenings. Much like

Running for Resilience

, a running club I absolutely loved being a part of in Canberra. There are also regular AA meetings I could attend too. I mention this because I don’t want to come across as though I’m whinging and I am not looking for sympathy. this “problem” I am facing starts and ends with me.

My own fear of what others will think of me is holding me back from the one thing I desire. It’s something I have been working on a lot since I got sober, but this recent experience has given me the stark realisation that I still have a long way to go, and none of this work is going to be done on my behalf. It’s something I’m going to have to deal with and work on myself. No one can do anything for me in this regard other than offer gentle encouragement.

It’s currently Wednesday morning. This social running group is meeting tonight. I’m sitting here, telling myself that I will go along, but I know what I am like. I know that as the day wears on, I will slowly and more regularly come up with reasons why I can’t go along, and it’s all because I am too scared to break the ice with people. Much like starting a new job or joining a new sports team, I know that it will only be awkward for the first five minutes or so, but my fear of that five minutes is, at times, overwhelming and enough for me to convince myself of some made up reason why I should stay home.

From this most recent experience, I am starting to understand that I am not very good with in-person communication. I started to reflect on past events and find other examples of how poor communication has negatively impacted my life and why I am so bad at it. I’ve come up with a few ideas…

Firstly, I think there is a distinct difference between talking and communicating. Talking, I have sorted it. However, I think if you asked most people what I was like when they first met me, they would have said I was quiet. I even have some friends who tell me that when they first met me, they thought I was arrogant because I would talk to the people who I knew but not the new people I had just met. I’m far from arrogant, I’m just too nervous to talk to someone I don’t know. Once I know someone though and feel comfortable around them, I go from awkwardly quiet to talking to the point of being annoying and not shutting up.

I’m the annoying prick that finished other people’s sentences for them. In conversation, I’m the person who almost always feels the need to talk about myself, and the time I, too, had a similar experience to the person who is telling their story.

I don’t like that I am like this, but sometimes I can’t help it. It’s another thing that I am working on constantly. I think it comes from a lack of self-confidence. When I hear someone say something that resonates with me, I can’t help but chime in and say, “Hey, me too. You and I are the same”, because I am forever subconsciously seeking acceptance from others because I struggle to accept myself the way I am. I have this overpowering urge to feel like I am the same as everyone else, and I want people to think that.

It annoys me that I seek acceptance from other people that I value so highly. I want to be more accepting of my own quirks and imperfections. I think when I am able to do this, people will see more value in me. I struggle so much to stop and think before I react, especially when in a social setting that has me in a heightened state of anxiety.

I think this is why I gravitated towards social environments where I could drink. Drinking made it so much easier for me to let go of that angst and be who I am. As much as it is grossly unhealthy, drugs and alcohol allowed me to shed that layer of angst and fall back into being who I truly felt like I was.

I had a one-way view of the word communication for a long time. I always aligned communicating with talking. I always thought that a good communicator is someone who is good at talking and can get their message across. And whilst I believe that statement still rings true, I’ve learned that it is only half of what communicating is. In the same way, most ball sports are equal parts offence and defence, communication is equal parts talking and listening. Only it’s probably even more nuanced than that. I’m starting to see effective communication as a three-step process, and it’s probably best done in the opposite order of what I once believed.

I think the most effective way to communicate is to listen first. Listen intently. It’s difficult for me at times. If I’m not hugely interested in what’s being said, I’m prone to getting taken away by whatever thoughts are floating around in my own head. If what’s being said it’s confronting to me, I can feel a wall start lifting inside of me, and I start preparing my defensive response in my head before the other person has even finished talking, meaning I’m no longer listening intently, what the other person is saying which could lead to me misinterpreting the message they are trying to send.

Secondly, I need to be more considerate in my responses to what others say. When I’m having a conversation with someone, I have to fight that urge to not talk about myself and also fight the urge to try to fix everyone’s problems. Another trait of someone who is unsure of themselves. Fixing people’s problems is a good thing. They will like me if I do it, making me feel good. This, of course, is not what the other person wants and is easy to understand on reflection, but something I struggle with at that moment. It’s hard and takes extreme levels of consciousness for me, but I need to slow down and allow myself a gap between what someone has said and how I respond. Unless someone says, “Can you fix this for me” I need to stop assuming that that is what they want.

I think if I can nail these two things, the rest should take care of itself. But I think it’s only going to happen through stacking reps, meaning to keep practising, irrelevant of noticeable progress or lack thereof. Believing and trusting that you are doing the work and that the results will come organically.

Until I got sober, I was terrible at talking about the way I felt. While I’ve made much progress over the last 14-plus months, I’m still not as good or comfortable with it as I would like. I think talking about how we feel is vital to maintaining good mental health because when we talk about how we feel, we start to understand how we feel. I used to think understanding how we felt was only a small piece of the puzzle, but the more I understand about how I feel, the better I feel about it.

The more I understand my feelings and thoughts, the easier they are to navigate. When I first started seeing a psychologist, I questioned their value. I expected them to be able to fix things for me or at least tell me something tangible I could go away and do that would fix everything for me. Now I know that simply opening up about how I feel is probably the most effective thing I can do to help navigate and process those feelings. His understanding has given me far more value than my sessions with my psychologist.

The first time I had real drug issues, I was 23 years old, living in a shared house with three mates, and taking speed up to five days a week. You gotta sleep sometimes, right? At this stage, I didn’t know how to talk about how I felt. I didn’t know it would be helpful to do so. I didn’t even know how I felt. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it’s easy to see now that I was miserable at that time and through my actions, I was only digging a deeper hole for myself. I fixed this by moving away with my then-partner. The change of scenery helped enough for me to at least stop taking drugs, but the drinking continued. At that age, I didn’t consider for a second that my drinking was an issue. It’s what everyone did. So I just played it off as being a stage of my life that I had moved past.

16 months ago, after a couple of years of COVID and lockdown-related stress, when we started planning to move cities, buy a second house and have our first baby, all within the space of four weeks, my drinking and drug use started to spiral out of control. This time, I knew something was off. I knew I was stressed about that upcoming four-week period and all the work that needed to be done beforehand. But my ego wouldn’t let me be vulnerable enough to communicate how I felt to anyone.

After all, I am a man, and it would be weak of me to verbalise that the gravity of the situation was starting to weigh heavily on me. It was my problem, no one else’s. Why would I want to pass any of that weight onto anyone else? I made these decisions, I would have to figure it out. My partner was heavily pregnant, working full time and trying to pack the house up when she could. She was the last person I wanted to burden with how I felt because I didn’t want to place any unnecessary and extra stress on her, particularly while she was carrying our unborn baby.

So I drank and took drugs. I drank most days and took drugs every weekend. Instead of letting the way I was feeling be healthily communicated, I was squashing those feelings down with as much beer and cocaine as I could. At least this way, I was only harming myself, or so I thought.

Although I can’t go back in time and change anything that I have done, I would be a fucking idiot not to reflect on these times and take lessons from them. I’m not suggesting that I would never have had any of these issues had I just communicated how I was feeling. But I can say with certainty that had I been able to communicate how I was feeling, then the impact and severity of my struggles would have been much less, perhaps even significantly less.

So now, as I look forward and life seems the most settled it’s been since I first got sober, I understand that communication will play a vital role in maintaining my sobriety and maintaining a happy and healthy home environment. We have worked hard to get to this point where life can slow down a little, where we are not constantly thinking ahead of what comes next, where things, for the most part, seem under control, and we can let go a little and start to enjoy the benefits of all of our hard work.

The problem I have with not being busy, though, is I have more time where I have to sit with my thoughts. It’s a good thing, in a way. It will force me to confront the negative thoughts that enter my mind, which is where progress and growth come from. But there is an air of susceptibility that comes with that, and I have to make sure that I have open and healthy lines of communication so I don’t wind up internalising my feelings and risk slipping back into old habits.

But how do you practice communicating? My partner and I identified that we struggled to communicate effectively through the stressful period mentioned above. So, with the help of ChatGTP, we came up with a framework for a weekly conversation, almost like a welfare check-in. It’s an opportunity to air any grievances and things that are stressing us out and prioritise what’s important. It’s not all negative, though. Just as importantly, it’s an opportunity to talk about what we are grateful for and what went well the previous week. An opportunity to reflect and see that we have made progress on what e discussed the week prior and that this little plan is actually working.

This is what it looks like for anyone interested.

As it is currently, we can mentally and emotionally prepare for the conversation each week. We enter the conversation prepared to be a little more open and vulnerable than we usually are. Although sometimes things are said that are difficult to hear or navigate, the nature of the whole conversation is designed to be accepting of that.

However, the true intended purpose of these conversations is to practice having difficult conversations so we can arrive at a place where we no longer need a special weekly meeting to discuss these topics. So we can speak openly and honestly about how with a reduced risk of confrontation or someone’s feelings getting hurt.

We’ve been doing it for some time now, and I can tell you that it is already working. We are learning to trust that we are not trying to hurt each other and that these are just feelings and thoughts that we can’t help or control, and we need to air them and have them understood, not fixed or resolved. We are at a point now where most Wednesday afternoons, after we put the bins out, we sit down for this chat, and it doesn’t take nearly as long as sit used to because, organically, we are having more and more of these conversations throughout the week.

I don’t think we are ever finished working on any aspect of ourselves. I think that’s a dangerous goal as it flirts with complacency and, in time, regression. I do think, though, when we do enough repetitions of something, it just becomes commonplace and not something we have to be so overly conscious of, and I guess that is the goal here.

So from here, the Wednesday afternoon conversations will continue to happen. And if they keep getting shorter and easier, it’s a sign that we are on the right track. If I want to manage my sobriety moving forward, I feel like practising this kind of communication will be integral. As my partner and I get better and better at this, it’s time for me to try to implement similar strategies into my communication outside of the home. Maybe I should try something like going along to a casual weeknight running group and striking up a conversation with a stranger…

Cheers Wankers.

Communication is Key-The Rebuild Week 11

How being a poor communicator fed my addiction

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