Game-Planning Recovery

Article extracted from Getting Back Up Again by Craig Semple, Echo Publishing, RRP $39.99

I woke around 8 a.m., opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling as the events of the night before started to filter into my consciousness.

I remembered my panic the moment I realised I had made a grave mistake. I remembered Hughie, at eighteen years of age, having to drive me to the hospital and then sit by the bed holding my hand while he watched the numbers on the monitors. I remembered my declaration to him, and to myself, that I would never do anything like that again. I remembered the intensity of the fear of death I experienced, a fear that proved to me beyond doubt that I had something left in me. That my time was not up. That I still wanted to live.

I knew I had to get up and face the world. Face my family. Face myself. I got out of bed, a bed I no longer shared, and padded into the bathroom. The floor was still littered with upturned drawers, empty blister packs and toiletries. I tidied it all up and stood, shirtless, to face myself in the mirror. Hospital electrode patches were still stuck on my chest and I took a real good look at them, so I would never forget, before I slowly peeled them off my body. I had a warm, comforting shower, dressed, walked from my bedroom to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, then sat down in the lounge room.

I started to think about how I was going to explain all this to my family, to everyone. Eventually I realised there was nothing I could say that would accurately convey the depth of what had occurred. Of how it had become so bad that I could even contemplate the decision I made the night before. So I picked up my laptop, opened a blank document, and started typing. At the time, it seemed the only way I could explain it.

The Door

It is a door. It is in the back room of my mind. It doesn’t sell itself to me. It doesn’t open and wave me through. It doesn’t need to because it has a unique, tempting appeal.

I only confront it when I leave the front room, the room where I feel content, safe. From there I drift down a hall. Sometimes the journey down this hall is short. Sometimes it’s long. At the end of the hall is the back room. The back room has two doors, one to the left and one to the right.

The left door is the one I usually take. It’s the one that takes me the long way back to the front room. It is a hard journey that requires lots of effort. Every time I have taken the left door, I have made it back to the front room where I am safe again.

The door to the right is different. It is different from the left door for one reason. It doesn’t lead back to the front room. It requires little effort. It offers sure relief from pain and grief. Every time I have entered the back room, I have seen the right-side door.

I am always scared of it because I know what it offers. I don’t want to be tempted. I don’t want to open it. If I go through it the door will close behind me and never open again. I will be lost forever.

But now I have opened the right-side door. I walked through it. And it didn’t close behind me. It stayed open and I found my way back. I had a second chance.

The right-side door no longer exists in the back room of my mind. I turned my back on it and it has gone. I should never have entered that door.

I am so lucky.

* * *

That afternoon the mental health crisis team arrived at my house to make sure I was safe, and there was no shadow of doubt when I assured them that I was. I’d given myself a huge fright. It was a real wake-up call, and I declared to myself that it would never happen again. I wanted to live and live well. I felt it. It was real.

But a simple positive affirmation wasn’t going to fix things. To fix things, I needed to get well. I couldn’t rely on others to fix things for me. It was my responsibility. Not my doctor’s or my family’s or the insurance company’s – the responsibility was mine. I needed to find a way to turn things around. I was in a state of calm, and for the first time in a long while I had clarity of thought. For the next few days, I sat in my lounge room with a notepad and pen and quietly reflected on my situation and the events that had led me there. I wrote it all down, everything, so I could make sense of it all.

One of the first things I identified was that before I could move forward, I needed to find forgiveness for myself. I couldn’t change my past; I couldn’t change the mistakes I had made in my marriage or the hurt I had caused. I had to let go of the regret and guilt that had weighed me down for so long – I had punished myself enough. When I weighed up all the good I had done in my life with the not so good, the balance was well in favour of the good. So I decided to draw a line in the sand, accept my mistakes, commit to never making them again and forgive myself fully. Self-forgiveness allowed me to start looking forward rather than back. Then I moved to the next issue: my father.

I couldn’t change history. My father did what he did and there was nothing I could do to change that. I couldn’t alter the fact that throughout my life my dad had not been a good role model, so I needed to let go of the shame and anger and move on. I thought long and hard on it, and in the end I decided to make two promises to myself. The first was to never follow in my dad’s footsteps, which meant I would never betray and intentionally, or even carelessly, hurt anybody ever again. The second promise was that I would use the negative experience of my relationship with my father to forever motivate me to be the best dad I could be to my three boys. That might not make me the world’s best dad, but I would always be better than the one I had. And when the time came, my challenge to my three boys would be to try to be a better dad than the one they had. And if they chose to, they could pass the same challenge to their sons, and that way we will all keep trying. I made peace with that.

I then moved on to the next issue. I realised that something I had given up way back at the beginning of my retirement was control. On retirement from the police force I had fallen into the workers compensation system. I had a reliance on insurance companies for financial support and my clinicians for medical support. That dependency, and the need to constantly provide evidence of illness and injury, served to reinforce a negative victim mindset that others had control of my life, not me. I needed to find a way to reclaim that control and set my own direction. To do that, I needed to make a plan.

I think my professional experience may have helped. Whenever I was faced with a serious crime to investigate, I came up with a strategic investigation plan. Whenever I had a search warrant to execute, I prepared a plan. For every professional challenge I faced as a cop, I came up with a plan. During the previous three years I had faced the most significant personal challenges of my life, and not once did I think to sit down and write out a plan. I did now. I decided to prepare a strategic, written game plan for my recovery. The idea fired me up with enthusiasm and, for the first time in three years, a sense of hope.

My recovery game plan required strategies, and for those I went hunting. From my bedroom I pulled out all the bags and folders of resources and homework accumulated from over two hundred hours of clinical psychological appointments over the last three years. I took it out to the lounge room, sorted through and wrote down a list of all the strategies I had been taught during those sessions. They included exercise, mindfulness/meditation, writing memoir, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), yoga, planning pleasurable activities, and a few others. I took a good look at the list and conceded that for some of the strategies I had not given one hundred percent commitment, and for others I had given none. To some extent, depression robbed me of the required motivation and effort, but for some of the strategies, like CBT, I simply lacked belief. Maintaining motivation and commitment was going to be a significant challenge moving forward, so I knew I needed to set realistic goals and keep my plan achievable not just for when I was at my best but also for when I was at my worst. I made a decision.

I would set a small, achievable action to practise each strategy on my list every day from that day on. Just one for each. My idea was that setting small goals would encourage motivation, minimise the risk of surrender and give me something to build on over time. For each strategy I gave careful thought and customised an action to best fit me, my interests and my abilities. I didn’t rush it – in fact, there was one strategy that required a lot of work, so the development of my game plan took a few days. But even the process itself of working on my goal-focused plan gave me a sense of purpose. I will shortly share those strategies, how I used them and how they worked for me, but with the following qualification.

These strategies are all evidence-based and worked for me, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily be the best fit for others. Although I hope to inspire people to give these a go, it is important that individuals on a recovery journey try a variety of strategies and therapies then work with those that are best for them with consideration of their own challenges, abilities, support networks and opportunities. We are all different, and what worked for me may not necessarily work for others, but what I seek to demonstrate is that regardless of the strategies used, what is most important is the plan.