First Person Testimony

4 • THE PHOENIX SPIRIT • MAY | JUNE 2021

1st Person As Sick As Your Secret

by Patty Bamford

Itake the subway from Central Park West down to Brooklyn. I’m headed to a party that some old friends from college are having. These are my chique, New York friends who unintentionally make me feel like a country bumpkin. My winter coat didn’t look so boxy, and my boots didn’t seem that scuffed, until I arrived in NYC where style becomes more apparent. But I don’t care. I love the city at Christmas. I walk briskly from the subway toward my friends’ apartment, past the funeral home with the neon sign, past the Kennedy Fried Chicken. I am freezing, but I feel alive. I am in the middle of my first Christmas season without a drink.

I arrive at the party, ruddy cheeked and out of breath. I surprise myself by naturally joining in conversations. I have things to say! I confidently decline cocktails, wine, and beer, but at this point in my recovery (it is 2004), I have not yet put down the weed. I go ahead and smoke what is offered. I tell myself, “Why not? It’s a party!”, but within a half hour, a mental fog rolls in and covers me in silence.

I bow out of the kitchen and look for a place to have a quiet cigarette. An old friend turns to me and says, “I know you’re not drinking anymore, but I don’t know what your deal is with coke. They’re doing it in the bathroom if you want some,” and she walks away. This is a punch in the gut. I know that doing that would surely lead to a drink. I have nearly four months without one, and I won’t throw it away tonight. I scan the apartment and I feel inferior to all these fashionable hipsters, laughing, drinking, always finding things to say to each other.

Then I remember my plan is to sleep here tonight. I have nowhere else to stay, but I am done with this party. Now I realize why people in AA recommend always to have an exit plan at a party with alcohol. I curse myself for lacking a plan and I consider calling someone in the program. Since I’ve just smoked weed and have been keeping this a secret from people in AA, however, I decide not to use the phone. I recall a member saying, ‘You’re only as sick as your secrets,’ and I know that I am sick in my secrecy about marijuana. I enter my friends’ bedroom where the guests' coats are strewn across the bed. Closing the door behind me, I collapse face down on top of all the coats, ignoring the fact that many of them are wool which I am allergic to. The skin on my face and hands winces at the scratchy fabric, but I lay still and hear muffled sounds of the party from the other side of the door. I feel safe on the coats, where I don’t have to attempt conversation or beat myself up for having nothing to say. My only concern right now is the increasing irritation of the wool against my skin.

I feel a light pressure on my back, tiny footsteps, and a soft meow. Oh no, the cats are in here…all three of them! I am horribly allergic to cats and am now surrounded by them. Almost immediately, I am sneezing, my eyes are burning, and my throat is so itchy that I want to shove the hairbrush on my friend’s dresser down my throat just to give it a scratch. What a nightmare! I have a choice to make. I could head back into the party and risk the drink, the cocaine, the 1st conversation… or I could stay in here with the cats and the wool. Either way, I am trapped, but I choose the latter. It’s a more manageable, safer kind of pain. I toss some pillows onto the floor and lay on top of them. I allow the cats to strut and traipse on top of me; there’s no stopping them. When party guests come in to collect their coats, I pretend I’m asleep. Before too long, I actually do manage to sleep a little. Tomorrow will be a new day. * Tomorrow is, indeed, “I recall a always a new day. Almember though it took me two and half more years, an arsaying, rest for possession, and so much marijuana-induced

‘You’re social anxiety, I finally stopped smoking weed in only as sick 2007. I also have always atas your tended AA meetings since 2004. Once I admitted my secrets,’ and marijuana use to members, I felt a huge weight lifted. I know that The saying about being sick in my secrets rang true I am sick in for me. Once I could share my secrecy freely about my addiction to both alcohol and mariabout juana, I became ready to find real recovery by getmarijuana.” ting honest and working the steps. It was no longer necessary for me to hide or lie. I am lucky that my marijuana use did not lead me back to a drink or to other drugs, and one thing that helped was that I never stopped going to meetings. I am now nearly fourteen years clean and sober. I like my time alone and I like my time with people. I no longer freeze or shrink with social anxiety, and I’ve become comfortable in conversations, no longer needing to either dominate them or disappear in them. I can truly say I am comfortable in my own skin, especially when there are no cats or wool around! Patty Bamford advises recent high school graduates, helping them find their way in college and work. She lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two kids. Please send your 1st Person story to phoenix@thephoenixspirit.com. recovery • renewal • growth

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“That’s exactly how I was feeling at work, not respected.” It was the first of many times, Roczniak says, that the horse “reflected back to me where my problems were and where my strengths were. It was powerful work.”

Roczniak left behind her stressful job, but she still wanted to get over her fear of horses. Working with a horse trainer later, she learned to brush and groom horses and lead them through movements around the stable, including getting them to follow her.

“I was developing the trust,” she says. “I had to learn to be the leader, to get comfortable with that, to feel strong in myself.”

At times, she would take her favorite horse out to the pasture just to watch it graze. “The last time I was there,” she says, “the horse was out in the pasture, and then she just came to me. It felt so good.”

make friends with yourself first

Melissa Patterson is an addiction counselor and equine therapist who uses a trauma-based approach to treatment at Stable Living, a therapy-oriented horse farm in the Twin Cities suburb of Minnetrista. Key to her approach is getting clients comfortable in their own bodies. People with addiction, she says, “are used to using chemicals to feel something — or not feel something.” She has them slow down, notice what they are seeing, hearing, and smelling – and their emotional state.

“Before you can connect with someone else,” she says, “you have to be able to listen to your body and notice what’s going on in yourself.”

If her client is filled with stress or afraid of horses, Patterson may get the person to pay attention to their own breathing and use other relaxation practices to bring their stress level down. Then she asks them to watch how the horse reacts: Does it want to come over? That pattern of clients noticing their own bodies and then noticing the horse’s reactions keeps revealing how well the relationship is going between the person and the horse.

People going through addiction have burned some bridges and may struggle to connect with others, Patterson says. “They are unsure of all kinds of normal social behavioral things. Working with the horse, their brain learns a new pathway for making connections.

“I had a client who would yell, ‘Get over here. C’mon.’ And that horse did not want to have anything to do with him. He ended up getting so frustrated, and one day he just started to cry. He was able in that moment to feel all those uncomfortable feelings he had, and they were able to come out. When he did that, the horse came up behind him and touched him on the shoulder.

“People learn, if I can do this with this gigantic horse, if I can make this connection, I can go out and do it with others. They feel like: I’m not broken. I’m not damaged. I have value.”

care for a horse as a volunteer

Another option for those interested in horses is to spend time volunteering at one of the twelve This Old Horse sites in Minnesota. The barns there are home to horses no longer wanted by their owners.

As a child, Nancy Turner spent much of her free time in a neighbor’s barn caring for horses. In mid-life, wanting to be around horses again, she decided to create what she calls “a welcoming place for people to come and have a horse in their life.”

She has welcomed thousands of volunteers who show up because “they have a heart for horses and compassion,” says Turner. They can come anytime and have lots of choices about how to assist the horses, from grooming and feeding them to aiding other volunteers who offer massage, energy healing, and other services to the horses. Some volunteers accompany miniature horses on visits to nursing homes, libraries, and schools. Mostly the volunteers just like being with horses.

“Horses have so much personality. Invariably there is one horse that will resonate with them,” says Turner. “It becomes ‘their’ horse. It’s a relationship that develops, and it’s intimate. It’s like going to see a friend.”

Some people volunteer together – couples, families, parent-child pairs. People form community there too. They become friends, even travel together.

“One of our barn managers is getting married,” says Turner, “and all of her bridesmaids are people from the barn.” Last year a woman, who started as a volunteer and was later hired on as a stable hand, was married at the barn (to another volunteer turned stable hand), and one of the horses walked her down the aisle. The bride, who is blind, had created braille labels for the horse halters to make her work at the barn easier to do.

a horse community at home

Anne K. cares for her seven horses mostly on her own, with some backup from her husband and son. These horses are her community – her “church,” she says. “They are so soothing to me. It’s like a privilege to be accepted into their herd as their leader. Their heartbeat matches mine. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.”

Even when she gets tossed off their backs – which has happened more than once. Each time she’s had to remind herself to be more mindful, paying closer attention to what’s needed in the relationship. “If you’re not listening to them, things can go badly.”

Since some of her horses have a history of being mistreated, she is extra sensitive to their anxiety and what creates it. It’s a lot like her own, she says. So, she teaches the horse to relax and do yoga breathing alongside her. Standing next to Oz, a gypsy horse, she drops forward exhaling a huge breath of relief, and Oz follows suit. Working with the horse, [the client's] brain learns a new pathway for making connections. Pat Samples is a Twin Cities writer, writing coach, and champion of creative aging. Her website is patsamples.com. Photos courtesy of This Old Horse (from top to bottom): Volunteer with her adopted off track Thoroughbred racehorse named Moon; a woman who was receiving hospice who wanted to spend some time with horses as she had done in her youth; volunteer with a horse named George (since passed at age 34 - average horse lives to 25), volunteer with a blind horse named Dude; youth group volunteers (last two). purchase a subscription

relationships can be tricky

Her own fears mounted after each of her falls. For months she had to rebuild her courage and comfort with the horses. For a few weeks, she would just get up on the horse and get down again. But while on the horse, she paid attention to her breathing – and the horse’s breathing as well – to determine when they were both relaxed. Then she got down. It sometimes took months to gently rebuild the trust so she could ride again.

But riding is only a small part of what matters to Anne around her horses. She spends much of her time just being a friend and caregiver, putting soothing ointment on a sore joint, confiding in their ears, scratching

their itches, helping them with stretches, and giving care for one horse’s asthma and another’s impacted tooth. Sometimes she just watches them.

She swears that horses are quite humorous. She says with a big smile on her face that one horse may have even “intentionally dumped me” as a form of teasing. Friends play pranks on each other, she explains, laughing wholeheartedly.

Trotting with Oz around the circle in the large horse barn on her property, Anne and Oz raise up a fog of dust. The clicking sounds in her mouth, the wave of her arms, and her voice commands give direction, and Oz follows her faithfully. Well, not always. Like, in any relationship, you have to keep working on it.

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