Jam Alker -Breaking Barriers

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Photo by Bill Whitemire courtesy Jam Alker

When musician Jam Alker entered treatment in 2014 he took his guitar with him and began writing songs about his struggles. He discovered the creative process allowed him to lean into his feelings instead of trying to numb them. Now Alker takes his message of music's healing powers across the country, playing concerts, speaking to students, and leading workshops. He also works with Recovery Unplugged. You can learn more at www.JamAlker.com.

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The feeling produced by heroin was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before.

It is not a high like smoking a joint or having a few glasses of wine.But it is a euphoria. At least in the beginning.

There is a rush of pleasure, warmth, contentedness. Everything feels like it's going to be all right. It feels like a mother's love.

That's how it starts. But it doesn't last

I grew up everywhere. I was born in England, moved to the States when I was three. A lot of violence, upheaval in my childhood. One of my first memories is my father walking towards me, sort of staggering, wide-eyed with blood gushing down his face, and my mom breaking a whiskey bottle over the top of his head to stop his violent advances.

Shortly after that, my mom picked me up on the way home from a friend's house one day when I was five years old. We got in the car. The next thing I knew we were in Las Vegas.

She then married another violent alcoholic. Spent a few years with him until he, in a violent rage, destroyed the house.

I thought my mom would grab me and my brother, put us in the car and take us somewhere else. Instead, she stayed with him, put us in a bus across the country to go live with my father.

Stayed with him for the next eight years, moving around the country. In that time I saw my mom two, maybe three times, till I was in 10th grade and my dad couldn't be violent towards me without me retaliating. So he sent me to go live with my mom who was in Chicago.

Moved in with her in 10th grade. Was on my own by 11th grade. Finished out high school and moved down into the big city, deciding that I was going to become a famous musician.

So I started playing in bands. Had some success. Did some touring, made some albums. And in that lifestyle there are certain things that are accepted, if not celebrated.

I'm talking about the distracting behaviors, the numbing behaviors, the desire to find comfort on the outside that I now know only comes from the inside.

My addictions were more my ego. Chasing after fame, after power, after prestige, after love, after relationships. Wanting people to love me to make me feel important because I didn't feel important inside.

I had that thing inside of me that so many addicts and alcoholics talk about: this hole in their soul, this hole inside of them that they've never been able to fill. This discomfort.

And we're taught that the answer to that hole inside, the way to fill it, the way to find that internal happiness is through external means.

And so I bought into that. I didn't know any different.

So then I thought it would be money. And I made a ton of money.

From the outside world looking in, you would think at that point that I had everything.

I was well on my way to becoming a millionaire. I owned a recording studio and a record label. I had toured the country, signed autographs, had music that had been played on the radio.

But I was miserable.

And then I was introduced to heroin, to opiates. And opiates are physical painkillers, but opiates are also emotional painkillers.

So that thing that I had been trying to fix, that hole I've been trying to fill it that I never been able to. I would not been able to fill that hole, but this at least numbed me to that pain.

It wasn't long before the money was gone. The property was gone. The recording studio was gone. The record label was gone. Many of my closest, dearest relationships were gone.

And I gave all of these things away, for heroin.

I didn’t lose half a million dollars on a couch cushion somewhere.

I didn't misplace that recording studio or that record label in the back of a cab in a hurry one day in downtown Chicago.

And I didn't misplace some of my dearest relationships.

I gave those things away.

In that 10-year period, I gave all of those things away because heroin, opioids, became all that mattered in my life.

So that's where I was.

And four years ago, I finally surrendered and checked into a treatment facility and I brought my guitar with me, honestly thinking it was just going to help me pass the time. I hadn't picked up my guitar almost at all over the decade in the deep dark hole.

I began writing again. I began writing about all of the experiences that I had been through, and all of the discomfort that I was going through there in early recovery.

I decided I wasn't going to get high anymore. That meant all of those things that I had been burying my whole life, all of the things that I had been numbing myself to, I was going to have to start to deal with those things. I was going to have to start to process those things.

Or I was in danger of going back out and I knew the next step for me was death. I had no doubt where I was headed.

So I picked up the guitar, and it's just my own form of therapy, I began writing. And I finally felt connected spiritually.

And things started to happen and I continued to cultivate that contact with the creative source -- whatever that thing is -- and I began to heal some of my deepest wounds.

I wrote a few songs. I started to share them with some of my peers in my unit, and some really significant, impactful moments started to happen.

You know, addiction is about isolation. Recovery is about community. And community can happen on a large scale coming together, but community can happen one-on-one as well.

It's empathy, when I feel what you feel, when you feel what I feel -- that connection, that is community. And that's what recovery is about.

And these guys in my unit with me started to come to me and say, "You're able to put into words some of the things that I'm feeling. Thank you.”

And I realized at that moment, that the only thing that ever truly filled that hole inside of me was helping others, being of service to others who had no way of repaying me.

I knew that this was my path.

I started a therapeutic music program using some of the music I had written in recovery where we do a lyrical analysis of one of my songs called Crows.

And the song, Crows, is a story-song about a broken man who's sitting outside of a church, sort of reviewing where his life went. He doesn't know how he ended up where he is.

But it's very open for interpretation. It's metaphorical rather than literal.

When I do the group, I'm trying to get the clients to start to touch on what their own traumas are, the reasons why they ended up there in treatment.

So I'll play the song, and I'll hand out the lyrics to the clients and we'll do a lyrical analysis.

So we'll read the first stanza, the first verse, which is In the front of the church on a concrete step, a low paid man rests his head. He sat down to catch his breath, can't quite figure where it went well.

And then I'll say, “Let's talk about that. Let's make up a narrative of what's going on. Why is he sitting on the step? What does the church represent? Why is he resting his head? Why is it a concrete step?”

And people will start to talk. And in order to create the story, to create the feelings, to create the images behind the story, they have to touch on their own experience.

They’ll say, “He's there because nobody loved him.” “He's there because he was kicked out of the house.” “He's outside of the church because of his resentments towards the church.”

Well, where are they getting these ideas from? They have to get it from their own experience.

“Why is he resting his head?” “He's tired.”

“Okay. It's a low paid man. Does that mean that he has to be poor monetarily? Okay, how else could he be low paid?”

“Spiritually?” “Nobody loves him.”

All of these things, and then people start coming out and they get excited about it and we create this entire narrative behind the song.

And at the end it's a very cathartic experience for these folks. And they love it and I let them know at the end that they just did their own form of therapy.

Now, if I were to have walked in and said, “Let's talk about when you were at your lowest and you were sitting there thinking, What is the point of life? Why am I doing this?”

Nine times out of 10, they're going to shut down and they're not gonna to want to talk about it.

But by doing it this way, it almost tricks their trauma into putting down its guard a little bit. It doesn't realize that it's what's coming out.

Oh, we're talking about that guy that poor broken man sitting outside the church. We're not talking about my experience.

And so it takes down the barriers.

And that's what you have to do in recovery.

You have to bring down those barriers and allow yourself to open up, be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Be comfortable being vulnerable and allowing these things out because these things, these traumas, are the things that we bury.

And that discomfort becomes unbearable.

And there's only so long -- particularly those of us who have substance use disorder, those of us who are sitting early in recovery, trying to figure out a way to manage all of this discomfort --there's only so long you can sit with that or try to bury it before that voice will come up: This is too much. We're just going to go out, just today. We can deal with it again tomorrow, but just for today, it is too much. I can't bear it. I need a drink. I need a hit. I need a shot.

And eventually that voice will convince you.

Or the other option is to learn how to process these things as they come up.

I'm Jam Alker and this is my story.

Maureen Cavanagh -Maternal Instincts

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Maureen Cavanagh is the founder of Magnolia New Beginnings, a non profit nationwide peer support group for those affected by substance use disorder. Her memoir, "If You Love Me: a Mother's Journey through her Daughter's Opioid Addiction" was published in September 2018.

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I think as mothers, we feel like it's our job to fix everything because that's what we do. From the time that they're born, we carry them in our bodies and we take care of them.

And fathers feel this way. But I'm a mother and I can only speak from my own experience.

I felt that everything that happens to them because they're vulnerable and they’re children-- it's our duty to make better.

You spend years and years of doing that, and then you come up against something that you can’t fix.

So even if you're trying to do that slow release that we all do when kids become young adults -- when it's something that can kill them?

Well, all bets are off! Then you jump back in there just like if they were two.

Katie always felt like she sort of didn't fit in. And I think a lot of kids feel like that. I believe that drugs made her feel like she fit someplace. That there were doubts and struggles that she had that she numbed with drugs. Before she knew it, some recreational use, some fitting in, turned into addiction. Then she could no longer control whether she wanted to use or not.

So many things happened that she felt like she wasn't worth saving her own life.

This is often how people feel. I work with a lot of people and try to get them help. And there’s this feeling that even if they get well, what's the point? It'll never be what it could have been. They'll never get their relationships back. They'll never get their life back. Sometimes there’s criminal records. Sometimes there's damage to their health. There's all these lost years and what's the point?

At my age now, I know that there was some really low times, and times when I couldn't picture things being any better. And then they were. But these are very often young people that haven’t had that experience yet.

So very often, and it certainly was Katie's case, that she never believed that she could ever have any kind of life worth living again. She got stuck in this cycle of trying desperately to recover. But going down the tubes again, over and over again.

This is something that I couldn't fix. It was not mine to fix.

Katie and I were both on a journey, and for a long time I thought we were on the same journey. And we weren't.

I was on mine and she was on hers.

Although I tried very hard to be on hers with her. And I acted in a variety of crazy ways. Some were helpful and some were not. But you do whatever you think you have to do in order to save your child.

I sectioned her, which is a civil commitment in Massachusetts, when I thought she was beyond getting help herself, and she was a danger to herself.

We once had her arrested in the lobby of a treatment center as she was leaving, so that she wouldn't be able to go back to the person that was putting drugs in her hand.

And I would still do those things again.

But it was hers to fix. And about the time that I realized that, she started to take control of her own recovery.

The thing that helped her is knowing I was there if she needed me. And I armed myself with an unbelievable education in everything I could possibly know about the disease model. So I wouldn't blame her. And it was hard in the beginning because everybody's angry.

I hear people say this, How could they do this to me?

Well, I learned very early on that she was not doing anything to me. She was doing it to herself and if she could stop, she would.

People would ask me, Is what you're doing helping?

And in the very beginning I would probably have said, Of course it's helping! Everything I do is helping because I'm trying to save my child.

And I have to be on high alert all the time.

And I have to answer my phone 24 hours a day because it could be her.

And I have to go through the streets in my car looking for her because that will make the difference -- if she just sees how much I love her. And maybe if she just sees how I'm making myself sick, she'll see how much I care, and then she'll get help.

And that was not true.

I was so consumed. All these thoughts were constantly swimming around in my head. But I know I wasn't doing anybody any good. I was making myself sick and I was ruining everything else in my own life. And I wasn't helping.

And it was really my boyfriend, Randy, who kept saying that to me -- that I'm just like a ghost walking around in my own life. And that’s exactly how I felt.

But I also felt like, this was a problem caused by drugs and I'm not solving it with drugs.

But I just couldn’t get it together. And finally, I gave in, and went and talked to a psychiatrist about medication.

She said to me something that I'll never forget. She said, "The things that have happened to you in the last years, the pressure you’ve been under, the pain that all this has caused -- these things cause chemical changes in your brain. So you may not have needed this before, but you may want to see if it would help now."

I wound up on a small dose of an antidepressant of Zoloft. And it didn't take long. It took a couple of days, and all of a sudden I was having clear thoughts. And I was able to finish a conversation. I was afraid it would make me different, but what it did, it returned me back to myself. And this is what medication is for.

I always tell parents three things: The first is to get educated. To learn everything you can, not only about the resources that are available, but to understand what's going on in your child's brain. And how drugs are keeping them from understanding that they can stop. And that's what happens in addiction is they don't think they can stop.

The next one is to connect with other people, people that can offer you support, and can offer you a direction.

But the third thing: always tell them that you love them. I made a point of every single day of my life somehow getting to her that I loved her. Whether it was a Facebook message or a text message or a phone call that she wouldn't answer and I left a message or what ever it was.

And I never left her without saying that, no matter how hurt I was, because I really never knew if I would get another opportunity. She overdosed over 13 times that I know of. And I knew that no matter how I felt about what was going on, I would never regret that being said.

There’s a hopelessness that comes with this disease. What did I do wrong? What could have been different? What could I change?

And all of those things that we have to learn to put aside, and start every day, as silly as this may sound, with hope that it could be different.

Because it can be different.

And I say that because I see it all the time.

I'm a little delusionally optimistic most of the time anyhow. And I think that's a fabulous quality for what I do. It's exactly what's needed.

You have to have hope that it can be different.

Because if one other person in the world has done it, you can do it too.

I’m Maureen Cavanagh and this is my story.

Yana Khashper -Filling the Void

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Photo by Luke LaPorta Photography, courtesy Yana Khashper

As a social worker, Yana Khashper knew how to connect people struggling with mental health and addiction issues with the resources they might need. But for many years, there was a disconnect when it came to helping herself. Now in long-term recovery, Yana and her partner run ROCovery Fitness in Rochester, New York.

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I came over from Russia with my family when I was 6 years old in 1992. I didn't speak the language. We were refugees so there was some hardship. And it took me a while to kind of adapt to American life.

We were living in New Jersey at first. And a couple years later we moved to Staten Island, New York. That was a challenge for me. I was about 10 years old. New school. I didn't dress like the other kids. There was some kind of bullying or I was made fun of. I just wasn't someone that really fit in. And I felt really awkward and kind of out of place. And just didn't know, you know --there's some nuances with language or humor that I didn't quite understand.

My parents didn't have much involvement in my kind of school life just because they didn't quite understand. They worked evenings. And so when I came home from school, I really was on my own, to do my homework, to, you know, do the right thing.

But it left me a lot of freedom. And I didn't do the right thing.

You know, I would go and hang out in the neighborhood when I wasn't supposed to leave the house. In my neighborhood there were folks that were older than me. And they saw this weirdo little kid, you know, kind of on her own walking around. So they sort of took me in. By twelve is when I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol with them, you know. And really from there my addiction kind of took off.

I did okay in school. I wasn’t a bad student. I sort of went under the radar, kind of unnoticed. I didn't get into trouble. I didn't excel. And I was able to really go through the motions, of going to school and continuing on to college, and then later grad school.

And there was a good period of my life where even though I wasn’t making great choices, I was really functioning, and I was doing well.

I went to school for social work. And I was really drawn to that field for a number of reasons. One of it was that I wanted to help people, and help people kind of find their voice, understand themselves, and, and heal. And the other part is I really wanted to understand human behavior and relations, and what makes people tick, how they function, how they adapt. And really it related to my experience in learning this new kind of the world and new culture.

In 2009, I got the opportunity to work for the New York City Fire Department in their Employee Assistance Program. And it was a program primarily working with World Trade Center survivors and those affected by the tragedy.

It was an amazing job. I felt purpose. I felt like I was really making a difference. And I, you know, met, you know, such incredible, courageous, strong individuals, men and women. You know, I’m left speechless by the folks that I met there.

You know, I didn't quite have the coping skills to deal with the things I was hearing on a daily basis. I was there for about 3 years, and it got harder. It got really hard to hear the stories and the experiences. And when I left work, and when I went home, I just didn't know what -- I don't know how to process it. And that's where alcohol and other drugs became really a huge part of my life.

You know, it was this double life. I went to work. And I do believe I was effective. But when I left work, I became this other person that needed to just numb what I was feeling, what I had heard.

There came a point where I couldn't contain it anymore. And I felt that I was no longer effective at my job.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't understand that addiction was taking over my life. You know, it’s something that I did in the professional world where I helped other people and I connected them with resources and helped them through their addiction. But it was such a huge disconnect, really a disconnect from reality of what was happening to me.

So really out of desperation, I decided to kind of start fresh, get away from my life – well, to get away from, from me.

So I decided to move. And in the process of one of the very first trips up to Western New York for a job interview, I got my first DWI.

And I remember the New York City Fire Department, they find out about these things. And I remember talking to my supervisor and then the supervisor for the clinic about it, and really trying to hide it, you know desperate to believe that it was a one-time experience.

I couldn't stop drinking. I couldn’t stop taking pills and using cocaine. I really became this really shell of a person, without coping skills.

So in the process of that move, I got another DWI, and I was facing legal consequences, you know, from the very first one. I was able to get out of it kind of unscathed. And so I relocated to Western New York in 2012.

I had gotten a job. I really thought I was going to be okay. Even right off the bat I really couldn't function. I wasn’t a functional human being really. I drank every day. And my alcoholism really kind of progressed because I wasn't using drugs but I was using alcohol in much, much larger quantities and much more frequent.

And within that first year I got another DWI. And with this 3rd DWI, I was facing really serious consequences. I was looking at prison time. And I was scared. I was really scared and I somewhere kind of understood that I wouldn't be able to drink anymore.

I didn't know how to live without alcohol. I didn't know how to even function. So that was such a scary thought for me. That took me to a place where I didn't want to live.

I attempted suicide. And I ended up in the emergency room in the hospital. And from there I-- really I advocated for rehab. It was 2013. I learned about recovery in a way that I could finally apply to myself.

I was able to abstain and I was able to start to have some hope. But there was still something missing, you know. I was in my late twenties, and I just couldn’t see my life being, you know, going to work, going home, going to a meeting, and that's it.

What do you do to fill that void? To fill the isolation? You know, when I got out of treatment, I looked at my phone and I had nothing but phone numbers of people that I drank and drugged with.

I didn't have hobbies. I didn't know how to socialize. Everything I knew revolved around alcohol.

So in recovery, I found exercise and fitness, and really the outdoors. And it really just changed my life. That was something I learned -- that when I was anxious or afraid or lonely, or I wanted to drink or I wanted to use, I could get outside. I could go for a run. I could go for a bike ride, and it would go away.

And then I met a person. I met my partner in recovery. An athlete through his whole life. A service member, he's coming up on 20 years in the service. And he really helped to introduce me to this world of health and wellness.

Right before I had about a year in recovery, he and I were -- it was a record-breaking cold winter up in Western New York, and he and I began to isolate. We weren't going outside. We weren't connecting with our recovery supports. And we were headed towards relapse. You know, we’d both been there before, and we just didn't want to go there again.

So we decided to go on a hike. And we posted this hike our personal Facebook page. And it was just a kind of open invite, you know – We’re going hiking on such-and-such date, at such-and-such time and Join us!
And people came. And we had a great time! We weren't thinking about our depression. We weren't thinking about using drugs or alcohol. We were just having, you know, pure fun.

And someone asked if we could do it again the following weekend. And we did!

It just, you know, blossomed from there-- from weekly hikes to park workouts to kayaking and bike rides, to peer-led retreats to the Adirondacks.

The possibilities felt endless.

And I knew we had something. You know, we tapped into something that had been missing in our lives, in the recovery community as a whole.

So we -- I did a little bit of research, and I came across an organization out of Colorado called The Phoenix. They are a peer-led, sober active community. And I reached out to their founder, Scott Strode. He's mentored us. He shared all his knowledge. They’ve developed an evidence-based and trauma-informed model for their program. And, and we mimic what they do.

We created ROCovery Fitness, here in Rochester, and we are a peer-led sober active community.

We now have a gym. We have a yoga studio. We do social gatherings for every holiday, times that can be really triggering for folks. And we've created this safe, supportive, nurturing community -- really a place where shame and stigma doesn't exist, where clean and sober is the norm.

You don't see folks relapsing when they're in an out patient group or when they're at church or when they're in a mutual aid meeting. It's that time in between.

So this is such an important place because it -- it gives people an outlet. It helps them build the confidence that they need to believe in themselves to obtain long-term sustained sobriety.

It's so important to have these outlets. And it's so important to not have shame, to not feel that they are somehow unworthy or fundamentally flawed.

You know, we’re, we’re incredible people. We’re mothers and fathers and friends and children. We’re productive members of society. We’re taxpayers. We hold government positions. We’re just everywhere.

We have a disease and our disease is substance use disorder. And recovery is our solution.

My name is Yana Khashper and this is my story.

Isabel Landrum -Working on Myself

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Photo courtesy Isabel Landrum

“This is what addiction does. It takes everything from us.” In recovery since, 2015, Isabel Landrum is working on getting her life back as she helps others at a detox and treatment center in Southern California.

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Being an addict is -- it’s just, it’s, it’s hard. Like people don't understand. Like, I wasn't born and I didn't grow up thinking, Oh, I’m going to grow up to be an addict --that’d be great!

No, it just -- it ruins lives, you know. It ruined my life. It took everything I loved from me. I didn't have a relationship with my family, with my mother, like I will go months without talking to my mom. And it, it was very hard for her. And it was sad.

I've been hospitalized three different times. I've been in a coma. I remember when I was taken to the hospital by the ambulance, one of the nurses there, I turned around and I looked at this person, and I grabbed this person, and I said, “Please don’t let me die. I have 3 kids and I don’t -- I don't want to die.”

And I remember when I woke up, he was there. And he said, “Oh, you’re still alive, I didn’t let you die. I didn’t let you die.”

I was tired. I was sick of doing drugs. I wanted a way out.

So back in 2015, I had somebody come to me and ask me if I wanted to go to treatment. I wasn't getting any younger. And I said, “I do. I need help. I want to go to treatment.”

So my clean date is October 10th, 2015. And that was it for me. I’ve, I’ve never looked back.

I wanted to have a life. I didn’t want to be in the hospital all the time. I wanted to have a relationship with my children again. Like, I wanted to have my kids in my life.

Now I talk to my mom every night. I have a wonderful relationship with my mom. I’m working on seeing my children again because my kids are the most important thing in my life, and I haven't been able to see them for a while now.

I have to work on myself, and I have to get myself better before I can have that chance again to be in my kid's lives. I am working towards that right now.

I never used around my kids, you know, like when they were there, I never used around my kids. But, like as soon as they would go with their dad, like I would get high just because there's so much pain there to just see my kids go. I’d just get high because it just numbs you, like you can’t feel anything. You just don’t want to feel anything with all the pain, you know.

I have a boy and two girls. And they are fun kids, you know. My girl, my oldest one, she looks just like me. And I look at their pictures and stuff, and I just, I so want to be part of their life again, you know.

I know I have to like take little steps to get there. But I am doing it. I'm doing it now. And if I was still out using and stuff, this would not be happening. I would not be on my way to see them again, you know.

It’s hard, and I know it’s going to take a while, but this is what addiction does. It takes everything from us.

So now, it's my turn to give back to people. I found what I like to do, and that's help others to recover from addiction. It’s such a good feeling when you know that you helped someone not pick up that drug, you know, like just if you can stay here with us, stay just one more day -- it's going to be okay, you know, just…

That’s what God put me on this Earth to do -- be a mom, of course --and help other people recover from addiction.

And my name is Isabel Landrum and this is my story.