© 2005 Behavioral Health Research Institute of the Southwest
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Albuquerque Journal – Monday, October 3, 2005

Three Share Tales of Recovery; Essayists Overcame Addictions of Alcohol, Cigarettes
By Jackie Jadrnak, Journal Staff Writer

Addiction doesn't have to last a lifetime. It can be conquered. The Behavioral Health Research Center of the Southwest celebrated some personal victories last month with three winners of its essay contest, "Voices for Recovery."

"Each and every day, hundreds of Americans permanently quit smoking, drinking and using other drugs," said Dr. Sandra Lapham, director of the center.

Honored with a $100 honorarium and a celebration lunch were Roark Barron of Santa Fe, Suzanne Shaw of Nambé, and Rusty Uhl of Albuquerque. Here are their stories.

'Old hippie'

Roark Barron calls himself "kind of an old hippie."

When he was a youth, he thought "pot is good and alcohol is bad." Yet, in his early 40s, he found himself adding vodka to his grapefruit juice, trying to maintain a continuous buzz, until he was going through a liter a week.

He guesses he got started in an attempt to deal with stress. His mother was getting sick, and his drinking accelerated as her death approached. "Then it becomes habituated," he said.

"You're reaching for the thing you think will work, but then it stops working and becomes depressive. It gets you into more pain."

Barron said he thinks he was a "functional alcoholic." A musician in Santa Fe, he maintained his performance schedule with his electro-acoustic harp and the group Luscious Music. At the same time, though, his family broke up, but he married a Thai woman and had a baby more than a year ago.

Drinking combined with a midlife crisis might have led to the breakup, Barron said. The alcohol made him less energetic, more withdrawn, less involved with his family. "If you don't have yourself, you can't be there for others," he said.

Taking a look at his new family, though, he realized that his life really is good, Barron said. Some serious discussions with a friend, combined with some reading, convinced him finally "to stop and see what it feels like."

He went through about a week of painful headaches and feeling fuzzy, but now he finds that he likes how he feels without a drink better than he liked how he felt while he was drinking.

Years of meditation and reading "The Tao of Sobriety" led him to listen to his inner voices, paying more attention to the ones that encouraged him than to the ones that depleted him, he said. "The big thing in my recovery is letting my mind rest more," Barron said. "I do it through breathing and simple meditation."

Facing oneself

Passion was the key ingredient for Suzanne Shaw in quitting her lifelong addiction to cigarettes. "My passion for quitting was stronger than my passion to continue," the Nambé woman said simply.

She started smoking when she was 16 and stopped when she was 56—four years ago. "Everyone was smoking," Shaw said, making gentle fun of her younger self. "It was the fashionable thing to be doing as a mature 16-year-old."

She didn't realize it at the time, she said, but she probably got hooked to release emotional pressures she felt in taking on the role of parent to a sometimes-suicidal mother. "It was my escape, it was a way to soothe myself," Shaw said.

A writer and journal-keeper, she said she quit smoking at a time when she was examining regrets about her past. Looking at her current life, she found herself out of breath from years of smoking, unable to do everything she would like to do.

"I thought, 'I want to stop because I want to see if I can conquer it,' '' Shaw said. "It wasn't so much thinking about dying ... It was: 'I'm angry at whatever this is that has control over me ...' ''"

She stopped working after 30 years as a paralegal to take care of her husband, who was fading from Alzheimer's disease. She stopped smoking while she was devoting her days to his care, she said.

What astonished her, she said, was the depth of the anguish she felt after she quit. She felt, she said, as if she had lost her only friend. She substituted sweets for her cigarettes and gained 60 pounds in six months, Shaw said.

Eventually, she said, she realized that these addictions were a substitute for facing herself, her feelings, her pain. "I was crying all the time. It was horrible, this pain," she said. "But I was really getting in touch with me, and all the things that were causing me to hide."

Now, she's losing the weight and finding ways to comfort herself without substances to block her feelings, she said. "Working on healing my fears and experiencing less sadness and more joy are my goals," she wrote in her essay.

'Today I care'

Rusty Uhl vividly remembers the moment he knew he was going to quit drinking.

His wife had kicked him out of their home and he was sleeping on the floor in an empty house with his suitcase and golf clubs. After his third arrest for driving under the influence, his brother bailed him out of the drunk tank.

"I was out of the slammer, holding on to the sink and shaking," Uhl said. "I was crying and looked in the mirror, and I didn't like what I saw."

At the end of the rope, he asked for help, and the only one left to ask was God— a God whom he had blamed for a baby son born dead and a daughter dying three hours after she was born.

The next day, at the suggestion of an acquaintance, he went to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He was 44 then, and has been sober ever since— for 19 years now, said Uhl, who moved to Albuquerque from California a year ago.

Uhl said he was a professional golfer with a lot of promise, but he ended up teaching the game at country clubs and playing in the Rocky Mountain tour. Another town offered another new place to drink, he said, explaining that he was a barroom drinker, enjoying the camaraderie and interesting stories from the people who joined him there.

The roots of his drinking, though, probably came from abuse he suffered as a child and depression that often hit him, according to Uhl. Many people say they drink to kill their pain, he noted. "It never killed the pain. I took the pain to bed with me every night," he said. "What I was looking for was always in the next drink. I was just chasing it."

Uhl said he played the victim, but now he has learned to take responsibility for his own life. He has worked with others in his shoes through AA and has written a book, "Do You Want to Be a Recovered Alcoholic?" He has had four wives— "I like to say I'm on my last wife," he added.

Uhl describes the difference in his life this way: "I said, 'I have one addiction, and that's me. I want it when I want it and the way I want it and I don't care who gets hurt.'

"Today I care."