On 2004-11-20 06:50:00, Anonymous wrote:
I suffered from severe clinical depression, and the other staff would always say I must be being dishonest about something and that was guilt I felt. The emotional distress was unreal for me when they said that, because I genuinely wanted to be "straight",so being accused of falsehoods was fuel to my depressive fire. Terry was the name of the man who recognized my depression and who helped encourage me so I could get through my program.
What's this, Anon?! There was someone in Straight who actually recognized the
cause of your problem (depression) and not just a
symptom (using)?! Amazing!!
I too had a real bad
symptom (alcohol abuse) when I entered Straight at 16: I had wrecked a car, gotten arrested for B&E/DoP, ran away from home, and gotten physically sick many times, all directly related to alcohol abuse. I did not realize how bad my
symptom was until I copped out off of third phase "to prove I didn't have a problem" and wound up living on the streets of DC and Baltimore for several days: poor, cold, and miserable, and finding solace primarily in drink. I returned (kicking and screaming) and worked my way all the way up to 4th phase, only to be falsely accused of even more b.s., which eventually led to me leaving Straight for good... Thankfully I was never able to completely shake the feeling I'd had since before my day four cop-out attempt: that there was something very, very wrong about Straight.
What gets me even, and perhaps especially, to this day is that there were kids in there, kids even younger than my 16 years, who didn't have alcohol or drug problems whatsoever, who I
know made up or at least embellished tales of their alcohol and drug use so that they could move up through the phases. Some, I am sure, graduated despite (or perhaps rather
due to) their fabrications. Some even wound up believing that they were alcholics and addicts when they most certainly were not! What kind of a place rewards people for lying and punishes others for being honest? What kind of place makes people believe things that simply aren't true? A sick one!! I didn't realize how sick until, on one of my later cop-outs, I went to AA meetings for the first time ever and heard the phrase about sobriety being "dealing with life on life's terms". At the time, wanting desperately to be sober, and just as desperately not to go back to Straight, I clung to those words. Straight was about as far as you could get from "dealing with life on life's terms"! While it indirectly helped me find AA, which I needed and wanted at the time (things have changed since then :wink:), it did much more harm to me than good. The worst it did was prevent me from seeking treatment for my
cause (severe depression) for many years.
Anon, thank you for your post. It's nice to know that someone else understands the pain of being falsely accused.