TRANSCRIPT
I would like to share about an experience that was the first time in my life that I realized I had the capacity for addiction. It happened when I was about 17 years old. I was still in high school, I was still living with my parents, and I was going through an incredibly stressful time in my life. The time was when I was getting ready to go to college. I was taking the SATs. I was taking a lot of very difficult classes in high school. I had a lot of pressure on me to get really good grades, and a lot of that pressure was coming from within me because I realized if I don’t get good grades, I’m not gonna get into a good college, I’m not gonna escape from my hometown, and I am NOT going to escape from my family.
I was also one of the captains of my track team, so I felt a lot of pressure on myself there. I felt a pressure to perform, to exercise, to work hard, to compete. I had an incredibly busy and stressful life, and the problem came for me that I was having difficulty sleeping. It had happened like three or four times, especially before really important things that I had to do, where I would get in bed at 10 o’clock. I would be tired. I would lie in bed, I would close my eyes, I would put my head on the pillow, and my thoughts would start to go. And they would go, and they would go, and they would go. Did I do enough preparation for math? Did I learn enough of that geometry? Or maybe I need to learn a little bit more for the SATs? I have to run in this big County track meet. I have to run the 400 meter hurdles. My thoughts could not stop. And then it’d be 11 o’clock, then it’d be 12 o’clock, then it’d be 1 o’clock. And a few times it happened that I didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 or 3:00, and it was horrible. And then I’d wake up in the morning, and I would be exhausted. I wouldn’t be able to function so well. I couldn’t think so well the next day. And then what would happen is I would start to get anxious that I wasn’t gonna be able to fall asleep again, and it was a horrible feeling.
Naturally, I had nobody really healthy in my life to talk about it with, so I talked about it with the person who I was closest with, my mom. And I said, “Mom, I’m so anxious, I can’t fall asleep, and I need to fall asleep.” She goes, “Don’t worry, Daniel, I’ll give you something for it.” She goes, “I have a prescription for Benadryl. I think it’s called diphenhydramine, and I’ll give you one. It’s prescription, but don’t worry, take it, it’ll help you fall asleep.” And I remember I looked at this little pill, and I was like, “Oh my god, if she’s right, she’ll save my life.” So I took it, took it with a little bit of water, went upstairs, lay down, and a half an hour later, I was asleep. And I slept through the whole night. I woke up the next day, and I was like, “Salvation!” It was amazing. I was able to function throughout the whole next day. It was great.
That night, I lay in bed, closed my eyes, noticed my thoughts started to go again, and then I thought, “I want that pill. I want that Benadryl.” So I went down and I told my mom, “Mom, I can’t sleep again.” She was, “Don’t worry, it’s just another one. Here, take it, try it.” So I took another one, took it with a little bit of water, went upstairs, went into my bed, put my head on my pillow, closed my eyes, and a half an hour later, I went to sleep again. And it was magic. Went through the whole next day, felt great, came home, lay in my bed that night getting ready to go to sleep. I had an important day the next day, let’s say I had the SATs or something like that. And as I’m lying down, closing my eyes, my thoughts started going, and what came into my mind immediately was, “I need that pill.” And then suddenly I took a step back and I said, “Daniel, this isn’t right.”
And I remember so clearly thinking that and feeling it, and feeling it with fear, also feeling it with disgust at myself. Like, “Wait a second, I was 17 years old. I’ve lived my whole life being able to go to sleep, and suddenly I need a pill to go to sleep.” And that was the first time when I realized this is an addiction. I have a propensity to have an addiction. I need something outside of me to make myself do something that’s normal. This is not healthy. My thoughts shouldn’t be going toward a pill. I should be able to fall asleep in a healthy way. And so what I did is I lay there for hours and hours and hours, tormented. I should go down and ask my mom for that pill? No! And I’m trying to calm myself down and counting sheep and trying to meditate on all sorts of stuff, and nothing worked. And finally, finally, after hours, I did fall asleep.
And then I went and I had my day, did whatever I needed to do, took the SATs or whatever it was, did my best, went through the whole next day, was exhausted, was ready to go to bed that night, and remember again, I want that pill. And thinking, “No, I don’t want that pill.” Now, according to my memory, I did take that pill again one, two more times, but I don’t think I took it more than three or four times in my life. But I remember pretty darn quickly I learned that lesson. There’s something wrong with my mother doing that. My mother is giving me something that is not solving the problem at all. It’s actually bypassing the problem entirely. The problem is not that I have a lack of Benadryl in my life. The problem that I have is I have too much damn stress in my life. I have too much pressure on myself. I’m not able to function in my life because I haven’t learned enough skills to allow me to function in my life.
I needed someone who could help me talk out my problems. I needed parents who could help me get perspective. I needed to figure out how to gain more calmness, more tranquility in my life. And eventually, over time, I did learn that. And it took a while, and still, still I have times when it crops up. I have difficulty sleeping, but I have all sorts of tools now that I’ve learned. I’ve also learned how to plan in a bigger way, for instance, how to plan my life so it’s not so stressful all at once, so I can actually manage the stress that I do have in a better way. But I don’t want pills to sleep.
And then it begs the question: why was my mom doing that to me? Was she so ignorant about what addictions were? Was she so ignorant about what would happen on a psychological level if she fed me pills and they helped me go to sleep? Was she unaware that this was going to create an addictive cycle in my life? Well, at the time, I didn’t think about my mom’s motives so much, but when I look at it in hindsight, a lot of hindsight, decades of hindsight, I realized her motives actually were pretty screwed up. First of all, my mom was an addict. First of all, she was taking Benadryl for herself to sleep often. She was taking other psychiatric medications to deal with her feelings, but she hadn’t figured out how to process. She was taking pills to deal with her sadness. She had been taking antidepressants on and off for many decades. She was taking other pills to deal with other feelings. I don’t think she was telling me the half of what she was taking. She was drinking a lot of alcohol to deal with her suffering. She wasn’t going to the root of her problems. She even later said that she was an alcoholic, and it’s true. When I look at her behavior, it was out of control. She was using substances all over the place to deal with the feelings that she was not able to take a step back and deal with. She wasn’t able to deal with her traumas. She wasn’t able to grieve. She wasn’t able to process.
What was really going on inside of herself? Anything that came up, anything that bubbled up, any suffering that came out of her dissociation, she had a pill for it. She had a substance that would help her deal with it. And so what she did is whenever she had feelings, she would cope with it by using outside substances.
And what I came to realize over time was that I myself was another one of the substances she was using. She was using her relationship with me to cope with her suffering. She was using her relationship with me to help herself stay numb, stay dissociated. And in fact, from the very beginning, she had had children to bypass her healing process. She wanted to have me as a child, as a distraction, as someone that she could put her feelings on. She was going to live her life through me. I, in a way, was an actual addiction for her. As a human being, I was a substance she was using.
And then ironically, she was turning it around and giving me some of the substances she was using to deal with my unresolved feelings and helping me not resolve my feelings, helping me resolve my feelings even less. And yet something in me knew it. That this was wrong. This isn’t how I wanted to live my life. I didn’t want to be someone who was addicted to pills to do something as healthy as being able to go to sleep.
Now, that’s not to say I’m a hundred percent against sleeping pills because ironically, I actually have a prescription for Valium. I have a prescription. I take ten pills a year. No, I don’t. I don’t take ten pills a year. I get a prescription for ten pills a year, but I use it in one very specific time when I travel internationally because I travel a lot. I sometimes fly ten time zones away, and I get into a position, especially when I’m flying on an airplane, especially how I’m going to speak at a conference the next day, that I know there is no way I’m going to sleep on this airplane.
So I will often take, not always, but often I will take one Valium to be able to sleep, and it helps me regulate my sleep cycle. But what I find is it is a very unnatural, artificial pill that fits into a very unnatural, artificial situation. The artificial situation being that I’m switching ten time zones in ten hours, and it’s impossible for the human mind, the human brain, to adjust quickly. So this actually helps me a little bit.
But in my normal day-to-day life, the normal stressors that I’m going through, I don’t want pills. And yet I think of another example of when things like sleeping pills, even benzodiazepines like Valium, can be useful. And I think about my film, my documentary, Open Dialogue, that I made where they talk about people who haven’t slept in five days. They’re going through a first psychotic episode, as it’s called. And part of their psychosis comes out of just not having slept for five days or not having slept for a week. Anyone who doesn’t sleep for five days or a week is going to become psychotic. That’s what happens to humans when we don’t sleep at all for long periods of time.
And they said sometimes they will just give someone very short term benzodiazepines, not more than three, four days in a row, maybe a week at most, as prescribed. And that these people, if they’re in that short period of time of taking a benzo, will learn to go back to sleep. It will reregulate their sleep cycle. Many of them will just come out of psychosis entirely. And because it’s given so short-term in this really extreme situation, they don’t become addicted.
The problem is when people take these pills long-term or they take them for situations where they really could or should be doing other things to get to sleep. That’s when addiction comes in, both physiological dependence or, in my case, a psychological addiction. That little thing saying, “Oh my god, I don’t have to take responsibility inside myself for learning how to change my life, learning how to regulate my stress.” Instead, I am going to use this outside pill, this outside substance, to bypass taking the responsibility for doing what I need to do.
And so for me, it really was a key noticing how my brain went toward that pill to deal with my stress, my suffering, my anxiety, and that that was the root of anxiety. And also that I think my mother wanted me to be an addict. And I really think that’s key. I think my mother wanted me to be an addict because if I was an addict, then I wasn’t going to challenge her whole style of being an addict. In a way, she was saying, “Tag, you’re it. You are going to be an addict now.” And if I had gone along with what she was doing to me, if I had been somehow troubled enough to not realize what was going on, I would have gone on the same path she was going on.
And then I think she would have had more of an ally for life because I think there’s another part of my mother that just didn’t want me to grow up, didn’t want me to figure out my problems, didn’t want me to become healthy. Because also, in a big way, if I had become healthy, if I had figured out my problems, then I was going to be a challenge to her, a challenge to her unhealthiness, a challenge to her denial. And she didn’t want her apple cart threatened.
In a big way, what I came to realize over time, she was much more comfortable being an addict than she was being real with herself, being honest with herself. Being an addict, as much as it screwed up all sorts of things in her life, screwed up her work, screwed up her relationships, screwed up her relationship with me, it was easier than facing those painful, painful traumas that she had in her life. And for me, I wanted to face them. I had to face them. And therefore, it wasn’t going to work for me to become an addict.
[Music]