Shame Training

In exchange for skipping out on 9 days in Tent City, I endured 36 hours of alcohol counseling. Faster and easier, but I’m hard-pressed to declare it is better. Tent City was boring, Stalag 17 meets Breakfast Club, and humiliating in a very impersonal way. Counseling is phantasmagorical like some of Ken Kesey’s trippiest passages from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Its intimately offensive.

Counseling is not there to help you, or understand you, or talk through the whole experience of DUI. The counselors aren’t MDs or licensed psychiatrists. If they were, you would talk about all aspects of the experience to help you find any valid concept to grow from and avoid the mistake again in the future.    They would not throw you under a blanket set of determinations, and diagnose you all with the same set of scales. In reality, the counselors are all ex-alcoholics or Mormons, who are there only to proselytize a religion that is entrenched in their oligarchy: you drank, therefore, you have a problem.

The untenable position of objectively defining a problem that can only be seen by its negative results, and attempting to project negative results when only the one DUI is there to form a pattern, thwarts them.   Yes, I made a bad mistake. And yes, it was not the first time. That makes me a lawbreaker lacking respect for alcohol and a car, it does not make me an addict.   They say how if you’ve done it once you’ve gotten away with it many times, and there are hidden perils beneath your surface.   But without results to back up these theories, its a question looking for an answer, defined by counselors. Their job is an inherent conflict of interest, since they both assign and clear you from the program, and get paid by the class.   They   follow guidelines in assigning you sessions,   written by these same experts.

Each session they prattle the exact same phrases and symptoms, and I go through their checklist not finding any positives other than the one instance.

  • You are more likely to become an addict if you have parents who are addicts, suffered childhood trauma, or are fundamentally narcissistic.   Nope, unless blogging qualifies as narcissism.
  • You close down the bars and go looking for an after-bar party. I never go out with kids, though I do own a Mexican beach house.
  • You call up your day-drinking buddies to fill the time.   Day drinking? Its behind day reading, and day biking.   When I drink during the day, I’m doing chores, at the beach reading or biking, or watching football along with 100M other Americans.
  • You drink more than 2 drinks at a time (for men), or 1 for women.   Apparently just about everyone is a high-level functioning alcoholic.
  • You’ve shut down emotionally. I could never conceive of the depths and complexities of emotion I have felt as a result of my children, and my 2.5 years writing about them is a better history of me than the counselor’s stupid 20 minute intake interview. Oh wait, see the part about narcissism.

Apparently I am in denial.

The D word has come up with each of the 6 dipshits I have talked to.   It takes 12-16 minutes before they bust it out, dropping it like f-bombs in a Three Six Mafia lyric.     Angry about the draconian AZ laws?   You are in denial about your problem.   Bored with the class?   You are in denial about your problem.   Feel your punishment was excessive for its impact?   Denial denial denial. Its a deus ex machina the counselors parade out whenever logic fails them. Controlling the definitions makes their definers beyond reproach. One of my responses to this whole ordeal has been to study the law and understand the aspects that are unfair, to cathartically communicate, engage the political process, and send angry notes to my State Senator. I emailed a college Professor   who moved me so much 20 years earlier with his trailblazing work on drug legalization, and 20 years later having no recollection of me his lesson blew my mind again.   It helped me stand up to one Nurse Ratched who recited all is denial, because I should really be focusing my energy on improving myself.   I could see the circular logic, but I feared she might still be a little right, and I wanted her out of my head. That is one powerful universal remote.

The counselors are not interested in your opinions or debating; they are coming for your mind.   Session after session, week after week, they are trying to drill into you that you are a bad person.   Shame Training.   The classes take 1 full weekend, and 5 weeks with 2 sessions a week.   If you just sit there and nod and fade into the background, they are easy to get through and generally let out early.   And I have tried to shut my mouth and display a convert’s facade. Its my little self-improvement project for the time I am wasting in these sessions.   But docility is not my mindset and never has been, and since my mind is what they are attacking, the classes have been a bitter struggle.

The contradictions in counseling stink like cat piss in a carpet. They talk about projection and thinking errors, how throughout our lives everything we are told and embrace is the subjective opinions of others that may lead us to devalue ourselves and become addicts, yet, they do not see   their projecting a truth about us having problems with substance abuse. One obese counselor talked about her food addiction replacing her drug habit while trying to humiliate us for our arrests. No one ever wrecked a car because of too much Chipotle. Another councilor talked about her difficulty maintaining control of her car texting while driving,   yet flew into a rage, table-pounding barking, when people were speaking out against AZ’s DUI law that can send you to jail for being 50 feet from your car if you’ve been drinking.   We saw a video about a lifetime whino and his 500 arrests, and how the system failed him, how he needed help. I guess first time offenders get punished and shamed, and only when you’ve fucked your life up so irretrievably do you get their sympathy. They mention how only 10% of the people who go through 12 step programs are successful, how opiates and meth recidivism rates are upwards of 95%, they say 60% of the people who get DUIs in AZ will get another and the median time is only 3.5 years!   Handsome folding-chair throne, Coach, and great talk!

These people live for rehashing your misery, they are utterly invested in wallowing in your problem, and it speaks more about their addictions than yours.   They are in denial about their own codependencies, but they get very very defensive when you turn the scalpel of analysis back on them.     They don’t often encounter someone with my degree in philosophy, lively mind, and ability to push buttons just like them.   One of them stopped calling on me for a week, another threatened to kick me out and send me to Tent City.   The most saccharine scene was when we went   around the room and spoke about a trait of an addict we felt we displayed, and the counselor creamed herself with elation after each person’s breakthrough. Then she let you leave early as a reward for their soul-bearing.   After the first guy was cut loose, 20 people shot their hands in the air, dislocating shoulders, spilling Red Bulls. Outside the class, a guy who had just revealed his empowered feeling in having not smoked weed for several weeks offered to sell me weed.

The sessions are not all bad.   There is some useful information to be learned about the laws, how to avoid getting caught and mistakes not to make, coping strategies so you don’t do it again, and the realization that you are not a pariah and you are not the worst person out there.   The guy next to you is. If you don’t think he is yet, you will after he is forced to talk.

They insist you don’t drink or smoke during the ~6 weeks the sessions have taken me, and in cutting out pot and cutting down beer I have reinforced good habits and mindset about habits.   There are people in there who do feel they have problems and are looking for help.   I feel sorry   that they are forced to be in classes with me, and that I am forced to be in classes with them.   Another flaw in   the system.

Unfortunately, the positives in the class are just the bait-and-switch for the counselors’ reproach and ignominy that fill you with self-doubt.   Most of us are affected enough by the awful experience of a DUI arrest that we are genuinely trying to find a lesson and some meaning in it all, and the counselors drive a prybar into that crack. They prey on your vulnerabilities and your moments of weakness while you are their captive audience, forced to gush out in front of the room.   In the workplace this is called harassment, at home its called abuse, in public its called cult brainwashing.   In Arizona its called treatment.   It gaslights you, it makes you see yourself as their addiction statistic when you are trapped and can not raise your own voice for your own affirmation.   But on their side they have the inarguable fact that if you don’t drink, you are not in this miserable class. If they packaged the message in a way that was supportive and positive, rather than confrontational and humiliating, it would be such a better use of the 36 wasted hours.   If I could have the time back to pick up trash at the park, to talk to other adults about the consequences, to talk to the class about how we all ended up here, without the parasitic counselors in the room, it would be time better spent.

When I was a freshman in high school we put on 1-act plays in the drama club during the late spring spring.   The idea was you got to try something different in theater. I got to be the tech director on a play called “The Insanity of Mary Girard” which was kinda cheesy and probably easy for a high school to pull off. It was abstract, attempting to anthropomorphize the “forces of society” in declaring a woman insane when she was not.   I liked it, and not just cause I got to hang out with the seniors and go to their parties.   Even at a young age it always resonated with me – those in power create the definitions, how the disempowered are disenfranchised, the inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, history and victors. I’ve always had this clarity. When I was about 4 my parents brought me to a psychiatrist because I had a natural aversion to authority. I need to ask my mother about this before she dies.

Every day after Shame Training I have come home and plinked away at this post as a means of catharsis and cleansing, and now with just 3 sessions and 8 days from finishing, my anger is gone and replaced by amused boredom.   The education is not about me anymore, its about the blunt tools those in power use to try to define you, and how fighting them is not about logic but about misdirection.   When the last class ends, as the counselor is printing my certificate, I am going to wake from this horrible dream like Chief Bromden, throw a sink through the window, place a takeout order for the Blue Nile Cafe, eat it while I have my first party hat in 6 weeks, and get stoked for the Crazy 88 race that weekend.

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