Compulsion, Addiction and Agency

What I learned (and didn’t learn) growing up with an addict

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The baby who grew up to be my father, held by his own dad (the guy not dressed as Santa)

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They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

-       Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

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I lack discipline in critical areas of my life. It’s a quality I recognise in myself and always have. I don’t like it, but it’s there. A bit like the sturdy ankles I inherited from my grandmother (awful woman, ankles aside) or the deep sense of intergenerational shame that you inherit as a result of being Irish. It’s in the genes and also maybe the weather. If you give me a bag of those Marks and Spencer Cheese Tasters (I call them ‘cheesy pouffes’ – they’re a crisp-type affair made from corn, air, lactose, the platonic form of the colour orange and other things human beings are not strictly capable of digesting) I will eat the entire bag. I will eat the bag, and then I will feel sad.

So I don’t eat cheesy pouffes. Except at Christmas – last year I ate an entire bag (see above) in a hotel room bed while watching Dune but we won’t go into it. The point is that I can be disciplined with myself only through enforcement of strict rules. I’m not a ‘I’ll just have some’ kind of person, so I tend to entirely avoid things I anticipate being unable to engage with in a measured way. I don’t smoke (and never have). I don’t drink (yes yes –  your witticism about how I must be the only Irish teetotaller was excellent well done). I worry that alcohol would make agonising social situations much more comfortable, and once I know that comfort, I might reach for it. I don’t take recreational drugs (I nurse a legitimate concern that they’d make me a far more likeable version of myself and I just can’t allow that).   

Addiction has been one of the central themes of my life. Not my addiction, but someone else’s. It’s enjoying a brief window in media discourse since the death of actor Matthew Perry on Saturday. Perry’s issues with addiction were widely known about and discussed – he was sadly considered a somewhat tragic figure even while he lived, embodying modern conceptions of success while being unable – as so many addicts are – to live alone and unbuffered inside their own skin. Poorna Bell wrote yesterday about her experience of addiction through her late husband Rob and the familiar chill of terror and recognition the premature death of a public figure with substance abuse issues will generally evoke for those living around addiction. When you love someone with a serious addiction, you are in some sense always waiting for the knock on the door. The phone call.

My father took risks in his alcoholism that any well-adjusted person would interpret as objective insanity. He drove drunk countless times, ultimately losing his licence but not before driving off a bridge and landing in the river below it. He once drove the wrong way up the motorway with a blood alcohol level of four times the legal limit and a broken arm. He drank himself into liver failure. I saw him briefly during that time, when I was in my early twenties, after years of no contact. Emaciated in a way that you just don’t see outside the abject horrors of holocaust survivor footage or the very worst cases of anorexia. His skin was yellow from jaundice as his liver failed. He weighed significantly less than I did, staring out at me from eyes that were identical to my own but sunk irretrievably far into his skull. I looked down at his hands, the fingernails long and filthy.

In Ireland we have a tradition of displaying a body while we celebrate the life someone lived. My father reminded me of corpses I have seen but reanimated and moving. He asked me to buy him a bottle of vodka before realising who I was. It had been almost a decade since I’d seen him. When I told this stranger – fragile and vulnerable and monstrous, so far from the intimidating, resourceful man I remembered – that I was his daughter, he just asked me again. I ran to a nearby bathroom and threw up. It was the sort of vomiting that the body prompts when it’s convinced you’ve ingested poison. Loud, lasting, a painful clenching and roiling from your core. The sort of emptying that might be considered a factory reset. For nights afterwards, the image of my father lying in that bed, dirty and cadaverous, apathetic to his children and yearning only and completely for the very thing that was certain to kill him, filled my nightmares.

So you can see why I don’t like to overeat cheesy pouffes and worry about personal discipline. And, possibly, why I like to find humour in the darkness, strangeness and chaos of being alive in a world that really makes absolutely no sense except to complacent people. Those who live in comfort with the safety of reliable people around them tend to be offended by (for example) flippant cheesy pouffe jokes abutting a description of addiction, acute suffering, stomach-ablating vomiting and intergenerational trauma. The rest of us need the humour. Without it, consider what we’re left with.

My father’s choices, his personhood, his genetic legacy (whatever it may code for apart from being short – another injustice he wrought) is in me. He did not treat my family well. He left me with a biting sense of worthlessness and a maladjusted blueprint for relationships with men. He put himself first – always – and as a result left me at a disadvantage in a world I just didn’t understand and wasn’t ready for. He gave me a set of staring green-blue eyes that are his very own, and that I confront every time I look in the mirror. For years I hated them.

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The baby who grew up to be me. Blame my genetics for the ankles

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As part of a series answering reader letters here on Substack, I wrote about growing up around addiction in an attempt to help a mother who asked what her young adult children, whose father was an alcoholic, may need in the wake of their relationship breakup. It contains no quips about snacks – it’s a considered look at the psychology of growing up in the chaos of parental addiction. It explores the pitfalls and the worldview that can result, and the power in knowing about them as a young person who is trying to find their way, or a partner who is in despair. That’s worth a look if you are struggling with a loved one who has addiction issues.

Something I’ve noticed when you talk about addiction – especially in public fora – is that everyone loves to put forward a concrete theory. This is a habit we lean on when discussing nebulous and terrifying concepts. Addiction is a disease – nobody would choose to live like this, one theory goes. It is wholly genetic, goes another. It’s a consequence of systemic push and pull factors – a coping mechanism in an unfair or medically neglectful environment. It’s a choice or a lifestyle – these people just really like raves, or bars (or cheesy pouffes).

Amid them all, we have to leave space for agency. It’s complicated but we do have agency, or at least we have to act in the world as though this is the case. Every therapeutic methodology is based on the idea that we can change how we think and behave if we choose to. With help, sure. With support. But therapy has nothing to offer if we reject this premise. Every addiction counsellor you talk to will tell you that an addict won’t stop until they recognise they have a problem and make the choice themselves. Only then can they change. And of course, some can’t. Those people tend to fray away their ties to the world – families and relationships and jobs, and they tend to end up in prison, or dead. If we don’t operate on the belief that people can volitionally control their own behaviours, then every therapist in the world would be out of work. And not everyone can just ‘go into IT’. It would be a real mess.

I deny myself things because I worry about how deeply his legacy runs within me. I make firm choices to prove to myself that I can. That I’m steering the ship. That I can be present for the people who need me. That I am not a string of compulsions, but my own person. That I can just be uncomfortable, or suffer when it’s called for, without seeking escape. The truth is that it’s complicated. I am his daughter. I don’t have the luxury of forgetting. Some of his traits lie in me, both dormant and otherwise. He lived what felt like a careless life to everyone who needed him, so I have to be careful. The pits you can fall into are deep and dark. That’s as clear to me as the eyes in my head.