This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Trauma

Chapter 1

My Sobering Story

My name is Seamas (James on my birth certificate) and I am an alcoholic!

I am also recovering from Complex PTSD.

I grew in a dysfunctional Catholic family in a dysfunctional Protestant town in Derry, Northern Ireland during the so-called “Troubles”, the military conflict that raged for 30 years in the north of Ireland. 

The “Troubles” did not cause my alcoholism and addiction but it didn’t help them either.

 It did cause, however, my Complex PTSD; the C-PTSD that underpins and influences the severity and complexity of my addicton and alcoholism.

Recovery taught me not only that I am a chronic alcoholic but also that I have suffered trauma throughout my life, even in my active addiction, even in my recovery.

It also taught me that I needed treatment for this just like I had for my addictive behaviour.

I am not sure if I was born with an addicted brain or not!?

Or whether I was born with trauma or into trauma.

It is still unclear whether my Valium-dependent mother was on the Valium when she was pregnant with me or not, or whether she went on them just after I was born.

She confessed to me once that she had a nervous breakdown around my birth and the doctor prescribed the Valium, whether the GP had just upped the dose I wouldn’t know for sure.

All I know from talking to my mother is that she went to see him with a mental health problem and came back with a drug whose side effects that dwarfed those initial problems, by creating a whole host of other, even more profound mental health problems such as agrophobia, depression, social and generalized anxiety, suicidal thoughts, blurred vision, tingingly in her limbs, tremours, loss of feeling in her right side and so on.

She hadn’t gone to her local doctor asking for her problems to be magnified and multiplied but this is what she got. Doctors handed them out like they were smarties, increasingly so during “The Troubles”  as mothers, in particular, struggled to cope with the increasingly dangers to their children and themselves as the result of the conflict in the north of Ireland.

Any attempts at giving up this medication seemed to increase these problems and the dosage of the medication to “deal” with them. 

I suppose it was not well known at the time that any type of benzodiazepine, of which Valium was one, was so addictive.

This was because any research into the effects of it where based on studies covering short periods of usage. Many doctors knew and know they are highly addictive but still prescribed them, even today, when there is alot more known about their potential to become addictive.

It is difficult decades later and having witnessed “Big Pharma” manufacture so many mediactions such as tranquillisers, painkillers and antidepressants not to think they are often manufacturing addiction and creating vast profits from the subsequent human misery. 

They certainly created much misery from my mother and for her family. And for millions of other familes too. Addiction to Valium also seemed different to sticking a heroin needle in your arm or drinking bottles of whisky, it was surrepticious, a wee rummage in her hand bag, by the side of her chair, for her medication, which left us all wondering what the hell was wrong with our mummy?

It wasn’t really an addicton to us but it’s effects on us were profound, as profound as any family living with addiction in a parent.

The denial that comes with addicton was almost increased in relation to mother’s medication perhaps even more so than if she was addicted to heroin or alcohol. It was not a drug to our young eyes but mother’s helper to quote the song title by the Rolling Stones.

We accepted it almost as an ally when it was the greatest enemy you could imagine.  

My mother struggled to understand what was going on with her and why it kept getting worse and not better, she struggled to explain the many deleterious effects of Valium and readily accepted a diagnosis Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in later life as they symptoms of Valium addiction where very similar to that of MS.

It is common within Valium addiction and many Valium addicts end up with an MS diagnosis. We knew nothing of this at the time. We were glad she had been properly diagnosed and her suffering had been validated.

Years after receiving mobility allowance to help her buy a new car for my father to drive her around in (the only addiction that does!) and access to disability car parking spots closest to shops, another Doctor said she didn’t have MS but ME. Anything other than Valium addicton it appeared.

Medicine often manufactures profound problems it then spends decades misdiagnosing and mistreating.

While not taking responsibility for either!

So I grew up in a home where my mother went from a nervous breakdown to Valium to a myriad of Valium-related mental health problems, which to my young mind weren’t because of this drug but because she didn’t love us enough rather than her simply struggling to cope, to MS, which all it’s extra “medication” to Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and in between a range of misprescribed drugs for MS that made her hallucinate!

These new MS drugs would never have worked, mainly because my mother didn’t have MS. Or ME.

She was addicted to Valium plus all the added opioid addiction in the form of solapadine addiction and other opoid dependence as a combination of tranquilliser and opoid medication was prescribed for MS too.

So this misdiagnosis brought an extra susbtance addiction to go with the Valium prescription and addiction.

Other opioid medication was also freely available in local pharmacies too if and when required, simply purchased by me over the counter as it didn’t require prescription.

 I was mummy’s unwitting supplier from young age.

“Attachment” – Image by James Henry Johnston – available here – https://www.artfinder.com/product/attachment-8dfc/