Life After Drug Abuse

It only took one drunken episode for Nicole to realize she had found a new way to finally feel comfortable in her life. She wasn’t any longer worried or anxious, she was giggly and unconcerned about the trouble she got into with her parents. She felt that being drunk was fun and perhaps a little dangerous.

She continued to drink, even going as far as stealing a car and wrecking it when she was fifteen. As long as she was drunk, she thought she was happy.

Drinking progressed to smoking marijuana. Pretty soon, she was drinking every day and smoking pot a few times a week. But when she abused these drugs, she wasn’t content with just getting a little high. She would abuse these substances until she was completely messed up.

Somehow, Nicole continued to do well in school, keeping her grades up, being co-captain of the debate team, playing baseball, basketball and being on the swim team and in the theatre club. Her success in these activities convinced her that she could do all these things better when she was using alcohol or marijuana.

Pretty soon, her list of drugs started to include cocaine. When her family moved to Austin, there were lots more drugs available and she began to use lots more cocaine. She also started tripping on LSD. The alcohol and weed use got heavier.

Finally, her schoolwork began to fall apart. She quit her extra activities and started skipping classes. She began to be chronically depressed and when she drank, the depression didn’t go away - she just felt more comfortable while she was depressed. Doctors started her on antidepressants. For the next fifteen years, doctors would switch her from one antidepressant to another, stating each time that this next new drug would provide the real solution.

But that didn’t mean that she stopped drinking. She’d go through phases—too much weed—then too much cocaine—then too much LSD. By the time she was 24, she’d gotten married, had a baby and had three DWIs.

As her marriage deteriorated from all the substance abuse, she made an intense effort to get clean through AA and the Twelve Step Program. She worked hard at it, sometimes going to six meetings in a single day. She was trying to get clean but she neglected her family. When her husband filed for divorce, she didn’t see any reason to stay clean and went on a drinking binge. Finally, she went through a number of rehabs based on different philosophies but she never felt good. Getting up in the morning seemed like a terrible worthless effort.

“I never found one redeeming quality to being sober,” Nicole said. “I was going to meetings where people who had been sober for ten years would stand up and talk about how they had managed to get through the day being sober. Nobody was happy being sober that I could see. I didn’t see what the big attraction was.”

Nicole returned to her substance abuse after that. She was arrested for public drunkenness three times in one week. She started drinking alone, too.

When she was 25, she got herself together enough to go to college for awhile. She got straight As through her first semester but unfortunately, she got a job tending bar. The staff and patrons shared their cocaine and Nicole’s college dream was over. Soon after, a roommate introduced her to crack cocaine and that led to Ecstasy use. She was soon abusing multiple drugs all the time.

“There was a point in time that I was shooting cocaine and heroin and meth all at the same time. It was like feeding a monster…”

“There was a point in time that I was shooting cocaine and heroin and meth all at the same time. It was like feeding a monster,” she described. “I was just ferocious about not ever being sober.”

From time to time, she tried to get her habits under control. “I got off heroin by shooting methamphetamine. I was really proud of myself but I was shooting meth day and night. Then I’d get off meth but my alcoholism really shot up.”

It all came to an end while Nicole was back living at her parents’ house. She was 30 years old and she had nothing. She would go months without seeing her son and not even realize how long it had been. She hated waking up each morning, she just simply didn’t even want to breathe anymore. She’d start drinking as soon as her parents left for work in the morning, and when they came home at night, she would leave the house and go use cocaine with friends.

In a last-ditch effort to get sober, she began to look on the internet for a different kind of rehab program than she had been to before. If it didn’t work, she would have at least given it a try and she could drink herself to death afterwards—that was her twisted logic at the time.

Her search took her to Narconon. She talked to a woman who had been through several rehabs herself before she found Narconon. Nicole commented, “I knew that woman had been like me and she wasn’t anymore and she said I could have that too. These people knew what I was going through. I just knew I had to go to this place.” With her parents’ help, she soon arrived at Narconon.

She spent several days going through withdrawal and then got into the program itself. When she was in the phase of the program called the Narconon New Life Detoxification, she started to feel better. “I stopped having upsets and I started sleeping normally. I had not done that since I was little. I started getting up without an alarm, working out and going about my day. That was just insane, I had not lived that way in so long. I started laughing - at first, I stopped myself but finally, I realized I was starting to have fun. I made the decision that I would really do this program for everything I could get out of it.”

Nicole realized that most of the Narconon staff around her had once been people like her—addicts and alcoholics. But they were having fun, they were witty and they were enjoying their lives. She wanted what they had—in fact, that was what she had been looking for when she began to get wasted on drugs.

She learned how to face the misdeeds from the past that haunted her, and she began to repair her damaged relationships. During the life skills portion of the Narconon program, she learned that she didn’t have to keep doing the same destructive actions over and over again. She could live life on her own terms.

“I decided to stay here and work at Narconon Louisiana because I can understand these people that come here for help,” she added. “There’s nothing they have done that I haven’t done. I can help them find the best high in the world when they get to live an amazing sober life. That’s what we do here.”