Dreams, demons, reflections: the food addict as dry drunk

Oh, crap.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. —Carl Jung

A few months ago I began seriously reflecting on the fact that I have been having relentlessly recurring relapse dreams, and I’ve discovered a few things that feel pretty important.

I’ve always had relapse dreams, but they have always been relatively infrequent and follow a consistent pattern: I am going about my sober business and find myself tempted in a moment of weakness, and eventually give in, with great fear and trepidation, and immediately regret it. They are actually very similar to the “meatmares” I would have for the first years after going vegan. Or at least, they used to be. Now, however, they are very different, and have been for some time.

For the last year or two, the entire mood of the relapse dreams has shifted. They are now very frequent—sometimes several times a week. And they are more about getting caught drinking than the relapse itself. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that I’ve been drinking again for a while—a long while—and just have somehow forgotten that I’m supposed to be hiding that fact from everyone. Some dream-friend usually says something like “wait, are you drinking? When did that start?” and I realize oh fuck, the jig is up. So the dream is characterized by, predominantly, white hot shame. Not shame that I am doing the Bad Thing, but shame that other people can see The Bad Thing and that I’ve been caught. The feeling is that any bit of accomplishment and respect I accumulated with my years of sobriety has been utterly squandered and I am back to zero—actually, considerably worse than zero.

It wasn’t until I finally sat down to deliberately reflect on the tenor of these dreams—like, what the hell is actually going on here, what’s the message I’m missing?—that I realized, oh, obviously. I see now. This is exactly the same set of sensations and emotions that come with regaining some weight after losing a lot of it.

Unless you have had considerable weight fluctuations in your life, it is probably difficult if not impossible to truly grok the entirely different way in which people interact with you at different body sizes. It is actually completely insane to me that 20 pounds can absolutely mean the difference between walking into a wall of complete rejection and judgment versus basic respect and interest. Especially when I’ve lived life at times a great deal heavier, and there’s fundamentally no difference between being 20 pounds overweight and 120 compared to being “normal”-sized. You’re either viewed as a human or you’re viewed as bat guano, and there isn’t really a gray area. It’s just completely weird. The irony of this is, of course, that the judgment comes from a deep primal inference that there’s something wrong with that person, that they must be very sloppy and self-indulgent, that they somehow can’t be trusted. When, in reality, when my weight is up it’s usually because I have been drowning: something or something(s) have led me into a state of intolerance of and slightly-to-extremely panicked avoidance of reality. There’s a one-to-one relationship between “things feel out of control and I don’t know how to fix it” and an outward appearance of…being out of control and not being able to fix it. As the Church Lady would say, well, isn’t that convenient? The more weight, the more fear bubbling under the surface, the more self-hatred, the more self-punishing there is likely to be going on. Obviously there are exceptions and other factors. Obviously the modern food environment and widely available, highly palatable food is not irrelevant. But there is a general relationship here that is consistent and reliable. I have watched this in myself for enough years now to defend my case study of N=1 vigorously. You can actually see how much I’m lying to myself and other people about my reality at any given moment by the equal and opposite reaction it has on my weight. It’s like the somatization of the children’s moral failings in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You’re turning Violet, Violet! (Which is not to suggest that only people struggling with weight can hate themselves—far from it. In my experience, actually, pretty much everyone is hating themselves most of the time, they just display it differently. But that’s a whole other conversation.) 

There is, incidentally, a very bizarre resistance to this essential truth in the plant-based world. We get a lot of things right, but we have some real blinders on about the emotional dimensions of food addiction and weight gain and loss. I think it’s because the plant-based world has a permanent inferiority complex and has to constantly remind itself and everyone else how uber-rational and evidence-based it is, and therefore it is not permitted somehow to acknowledge the obvious, which is that anyone who is more than a few pounds overweight is not there because they’re adding 8 walnuts to their oatmeal instead of 4, or overdoing it a little on the avocado. That’s not the issue. And it is also not the issue that the pleasure trap food is just so darn irresistible that it’s just impossible to stay out of. Do you have any idea how irresistible I found a six-pack of west coast IPA a decade ago, only to never touch it again no matter what? The issue is that a person who “knows what to do but isn’t doing it” is, in most cases, eating emotionally and attempting to self-regulate. It’s drug-seeking behavior. State change is the primary goal. And yes, it is true that we could eat emotionally all we wanted in a proper food environment and would not be significantly overweight, and that ultimately “it’s the food” in the sense that we’re getting into things that 1) have more effective drug-like properties and also 2) are responsible for weight gain and other health issues. But the usual admonishment to therefore just control your environment and not touch the highly engineered food is a bit—let’s be charitable here—underbaked. The highly engineered and highly drug-like food is everywhere on demand at all times, even if it doesn’t happen to be in your kitchen right this second.

It is exactly the same as telling an alcoholic they can recover simply by just not keeping alcohol around. Controlling the environment as an alcoholic is certainly necessary, but by no means sufficient. When I was deep in alcoholic drinking, I could and would find, hide, steal, or otherwise manage to locate booze anywhere, anytime. There were countless nights I decided that’s it: I’m sober starting RIGHT NOW! And an hour later I’m running to the corner liquor store and drinking cheap wine in the basement so my roommate wouldn’t see me, or wandering into a bar so someone would buy me a drink (or twelve). With young women especially, there’s the addiction to alcohol itself, and there’s also an addiction to the attention, approval, and acceptance from the endless array of men who are more than happy to ply you with it. Indeed, in my case it was the latter that led to the former. One does not simply instantly transform into a gutter drunk with one’s first sip of rosé. It’s dose dependent. You have to drink yourself into the disease.

Of course, the high of attention, and of the drug itself, is reliably displaced by the shame train that hits you at 2 a.m. when you wake, sweaty and desperately dehydrated and unsure where exactly you are or how you got there. How many days followed drinking binges that were an exercise in pretending-I’m-getting-away-with-this? Just day after day—and then year after year—of lying to myself and to everyone else that this was fine, everything was fine, this is what I wanted life to be.

Food and weight shame and self-disgust are exactly like this. It’s the same exact feeling. You don’t get the same high from food, but you certainly get the same crash and despondency. You have to sustain a perpetual lie in the same stupid, self-defeating ways, and it creates the same dissonance and constellation of crappy feelings that demand more avoidance. And so you go, round and round. The thing that you are doing to medicate the bad feelings just exaggerates and complicates the original bad feelings, which triggers another escape impulse that necessitates doing more of the very thing that makes it all worse. It can and does feel incredibly hopeless, relentless, inescapable. 

I recognize now that it is no coincidence that this version of the relapse dream began when it did. Big relationship and friendship transitions, moving half a dozen times in three years, and various other shitstorms large and small have disrupted my routines and other self-regulation strategies in profound and and irreperable ways, as they have for many of us during the last few years. Sometime in the winter of 2020, feeling like a complete garbage human for a variety of reasons, I stood in a grocery store listening to the siren songs of every type of processed junk, and I pushed each craving away one by one until, very quietly but confidently, a different voice that I hadn’t heard in a long, long time whispered to me. “Maybe what you really need is a special drink. A little non-alcoholic wine. Wouldn’t that make you feel better? You know it would. Treat yourself. It’s just this once.” 

I dropped my groceries and fled the store, terrified that for the first time in seven years I was white-knuckling alcohol again, even for a fleeting moment. Before I got sober-for-real-sober, I tried non-alcoholic options and just found myself drinking it as fast as I could to try to extract some kind of high from the trace ABV. So I knew it was a trick, and I got through it. But, just like I had done seven years before, I suppressed those sudden and unexpected and very, very disturbing cravings for alcohol with other kinds of treats. And it doesn’t take very many little treats or very much time at all to regain the same weight that took about ten times as long to lose.

I’m posting this in Metaphysical Musings instead of the “regular” blog because—well, the whole Emotions Actually Matter thing, for one. But also because I have been reminded to pay closer attention to dreams. These dreams have been communicating essential truths that I obviously wasn’t ready to acknowledge—for a couple of years. They’ve just been repeating the message until I finally listened. And the message is namely: Jen, you’re a dry drunk. You’re actually still using. And you’re using for the same reason you’ve always used, which is to avoid reality. You’re feeling shitty and defective, inept and rejected, insert bad feeling of the day here. And you don’t want to experience those feelings (quite understandably) and you’re still using substances to detune and avoid them. And look, you’re also feeling shitty and defective about just trying to temporarily feel a little less shitty and defective. Do you think maybe that’s just a tiny bit self-defeating? Would you perhaps be willing to look at this situation from a slightly different perspective?

Those of us who medicate with food are so accustomed to the judgment it elicits from others—constant, subterranean, when-they-think-we-can’t-hear-them judgment—that rehearsing that judgment preemptively about ourselves becomes an esteem imperative. Having lived in both worlds, I can tell you it’s actually much, much harder to live in total denial as a food addict than it is in alcoholism. The consequences are visible, interpersonal, inescapable. We know other people see us as defective in a way that can be more easily brushed away or even transmuted into a sense of pride when you’re a drinker. And so just as we’re driven to use food in an attempt to feel less bad, we also, in some tortured upside down way, are driven to hate ourselves harder than anyone else does in an attempt to feel less bad. Or perhaps we are just attempting to grasp a little bit more control of all the badness we feel. If we can brace for badness impact, maybe it won’t be as rough. None of this, of course, works particularly well. But it’s all we’ve got.

As I suggested at the most recent True to Life, it’s especially tragic and unnecessary that so much of what we dislike and find unacceptable in ourselves—the things we view as failures, incompetencies, and deep flaws and therefore wish to avoid and escape—these are assumptions about what other people value about and want from us. And we have made those assumptions because at some point, they were true, and possibly continue to be true. But, for one thing, they might not be true! Have you even looked into that recently? And even they are true, or a little bit true: just because someone has offered a conditional relationship with you that obligates the expression of certain aspects of who you are and the neglect or outright suppression of other aspects—that does not require you to accept the relationship. And as long as we continue to accept the relationship on someone else’s terms anyway, and live the lie that we can unproblematically be a version of ourselves that someone else wants, we will find ourselves, invariably, “unable to live with ourselves.” Addiction is a reliable and unconditionally accepting friend in such an existence. Probably your only such friend.

I am very, very tired of feeling like a failure for simply trying to not feel like such a failure. Aren’t we all, at this point? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years now. I have not yet worked out the entire way out of the dark woods, but I at least know enough to stop walking in what is very obviously the wrong direction. And another, very important lesson, remembered and re-learned the hard way as it is in every myth ever written. There are helpers, guides, messengers—all along the path. But any guide who has any message other than “trust yourself” will always, always, always lead the seeker astray.