How do you deal with triggers? (Part 1 of 2)

Triggers are the ninja-like rivals of recovery.

And for some reason, as I finally finished “Nurse Jackie”, I found myself thinking about them a bit.

It began with me being a bit vexed with Jacqueline the junkbag.

(I’m assuming “Jacqueline” is her full name, but too lazy to look and confirm.)

She’d gotten clean more than once – only to relapse time and again. Like some druggie juggernaut, she steamrolled over her job, her family, and even the subsequent romantic partners who followed in the aftermath of her divorce. And why, you might ask, did I let myself get so wrapped up in a ridiculous television series filled with people who aren’t even real but born out of someone’s brain?

Firstly: I don’t know. Good Point.

Secondly: I suppose it’s because it’s so close to the truth of addiction in general.

And thirdly, because it’s so close to my story of addiction – not the whole relapse part, mind you, but the active addiction element. Terribly familiar. I’m so lucky to be done with that life. In fact, just yesterday, I celebrated two years clean from all chemicals. But whenever I watch a drama like this one, aptly depicting the vicissitudes of dependency – from the blissful calm of a first hit (remember that soft filtered montage with her and her dealer?) to the agonal sweats and skin crawls of withdrawal – the door to my dungeon tummy rumbles as the demons I’ve trapped in there demand release. They may never relent. No matter how many years clean I have, it will remain. I’ll always remember the positive Pavlovian response I adopted to the bitter benzo stuck on my tongue. I’ll never not have cravings for the wrong answer. I’ll always be able to identify with those still suffering and feel helpless knowing I can’t make them better.

Relapse, as I’ve come to understand, is only ever one wrong turn away. But the good news is that for all of us addicts – for every trigger-sign we have along our path, directing us to doom, we can disregard them. We can handle it. We can recover.

And how?

Well, you know how when you get bit by a mystery creature in the woods? And then catch a really bad reaction to it? And, as you sit there in the ER with a softball sized wound festering and fountaining out milky sanguine effluvia, the doc asks you “what’d the thing that bit you look like?” But by then it’s too late? ‘cause you didn’t even see it coming? Well, much like finding out the appropriate cure to counteract an actual bite, the best way to develop an appropriate trigger antidote… is by knowing the poison that’s awaiting you. Lucky for us, though, there’ve been plenty of addicts “stung” by some common triggers in the past to pave the way for us. And according to what I’ve felt, heard, and read during my (addiction to the internet induced) browsings of Google, some’a the top reasons for relapse indeed resonated with my inner fiend. So, please feel free to peruse a few specific typical triggers that lead to relapse here… as well as some intrinsic tools you can possibly employ to counteract the poison before it morphs into an irreversible infection of the staph-relapse genre. After you gander through, I’d be interested to hear some of your own truculent triggers picking at the corners of your consciousness and trying to take you down on the daily. Leave a comment, if you like. Sometimes it only takes a single string of English language put together just the right way to induce an addict’s moment of clarity.

And you never know who you might be furtively reading yours.

Which means you never know who you might be helping by sharing your pain.