I passed 12 years of continuous sobriety from drugs and alcohol last month. Going to rehab and dropping the drink and party poppers has given me an amazing life. I’ve got married, had children, and trained as a psychotherapist. Friendships and relationships with family have been restored. I can sit in my own skin, and whereas a lot of my using was around being too scared to go to bed on my own – I now adore that quiet time of the night. There has been a total metamorphosis in my life – you could say that the miracle has happened and all the good stuff has come true.
An outsider, or someone who doesn’t have experience of mental health, may have commented that when our twins were born in July 2019 after six years of fertility problems, all my ducks were finally in a row.
In fact, IVF, hormone changes, having children late in life and the stress of twins cascaded me into a spiral of mental health oblivion. My sobriety birthday this year was the biggest one yet for me. Life has been harder these past twelve months than it ever has been – ever. Way harder than anything I ever experienced when I was drinking.
Betty Ford once said that the first drink gets you drunk, and I was told if I don’t take the first drink/pill or whatever it is, everything will be OK. Although I struggled to believe that in the darkness of last year, it is actually true. My recovery from OCD and ADHD this past twelve months has been possible due to sobriety, and the work I do to stay sober has enhanced all areas of my life, including the other two mental health disorders that I have.
It is a huge privilege to work in mental health, something I have done for well over a decade. I wrote in a previous article for Grapevine about jockeys and mental health which you can read here, that I was a poacher turned gamekeeper when it came to suffering with a drink problem, and then turning my professional life towards helping others with that struggle.
What happened to me last year with an eruption of OCD has meant I have learned the tools and techniques to help my clients come out of the darkness.
© Jessica Drake
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 