The women in there called it camp. I thought that was gallows humour until I understood why, and then I called it camp too.
I went in as somebody who had been a professional. I had the vocabulary. I had read things. I had also been fighting alcohol since long before any of it, and none of the vocabulary had ever once helped at four in the afternoon.
The women I met had no vocabulary for it at all, and between them they had more working knowledge of how to get through a bad hour than anything I had paid for.
They were carrying more than I was
This is the first thing and it reorganised everything else.
Most of them had come in from further down than I had, with less to go back out to. Some had children they were not going to see for a long time. And the practical, hour-by-hour business of staying steady was something they had worked out anyway, without a programme, without a counsellor, without anybody checking.
It is very hard to hold on to the idea that your situation is uniquely impossible while watching somebody in a worse one handle theirs.
The actual technique, which took about a minute to explain
Sweet works better than salty. Candy works better than chocolate.
That is it. That is the thing none of the expensive programmes had ever told me.
The reasoning behind it is not sophisticated, and I think that is why it never made it into anything official. Chocolate is finished in four bites and leaves you exactly where you started. A hard candy you cannot rush. It occupies your mouth for fifteen or twenty minutes, which is longer than the wave lasts, and it does it without asking anything of your willpower — which, at that point in the day, you do not have.
Something small. Something immediate. Something that outlasts the craving.
Small, immediate, and repeatable beats big and correct
Everything I had tried before was big. Decide to be different. Address the root cause. Understand why.
Nothing in there was big. It was one night, and then the next one. Nobody was working on a version of themselves that would exist in a year. They were getting to the morning, and then doing it again.
I have come to think that is not a lesser version of recovery. For a long stretch it is the only version that is actually available, and pretending otherwise is how people conclude they have failed at something they were never given the tools for.
Nobody there was doing it alone
They talked. Constantly, and not in a structured way — while queuing, while waiting, in the middle of something else. The talking was not the therapy. The talking was that you were not the only person in the room who knew what this was like.
That is the part I have found hardest to reproduce since. It is most of why I am trying to start a group.
Why I am careful about how I tell this
I am wary of turning thirteen months into a redemption story, because the women who taught me this are mostly still carrying what they were carrying, and a tidy arc would be me taking the useful part and leaving them in the anecdote.
So: this is not my method. I did not invent it. I was handed it by people who had worked it out because they had to, and the reason there is a website is that my son said I should build something out of it. One of the women I am still in touch with swears by cinnamon jawbreakers. Cinnamon, for whatever reason, works when nothing else does.
That is where this came from. Not from a programme, and not from me.
