Shortly after Mike’s death, Dr Callum came to see me at Sully Hospital, saying that he might have found a place for me at the Ley Community – a new rehabilitation centre in rural Oxfordshire that was using an approach to treat addicts that was quite different from anything on offer elsewhere. “I think that this might be the place for you, Steve,” Dr Callum said.
The Ley Community had been founded by a Dr Mandelbrote, who worked out of the Ashurst Clinic, where I would have to go for an interview to see if I was a suitable candidate for the programme.
I was accompanied to the Ashurst Clinic in Littlemore by one of the nurses, to attend an interview with Dr Mandelbrote, who was the only one who would decide whether or not I would be offered a place at the Ley. Travelling from Wales to Oxford, I remember thinking that this was a big opportunity. I wasn’t sure, however, of how successful I would be in fulfilling the admissions criteria. I had been labelled so often that I didn’t set my hopes too high. I did not want to be disappointed.
Dr Mandelbrote was a short, stocky, distinguished-looking gentleman with greying hair. He had been hugely influential in the field of mental healthcare, having been one of the first to start unlocking the doors of the mental institutions so that many of the mentally ill could be treated at home and in their communities. He had also done a lot of work with addiction.
I felt very intimidated when I went into the interview room and sat down. It was immediately obvious that there was no way anyone would be able to pull the wool over this man’s eyes. It was clear from his body language and posture that Dr Mandelbrote was a strong-willed man who would not let anyone push his boundaries. I was nervous and dying for a cigarette, but smoking during the interview was not allowed.
Dr Mandelbrote asked me a lot of questions about my drug use and life history, and explained a little about the Ley to me. The programme they offered had been developed in New York, and was used in various detox clinics around America. Dr Mandelbrote, in conjunction with Dr Peter Agulnik, had introduced the system to the UK, starting out at Littlemore Psychiatric Hospital before eventually moving to a new location in Yarnton, a small village a few miles outside Oxford, in 1971.
I felt that the interview went on for ages. I was a heavy smoker, and it was stressful not being allowed to smoke during my interview. My fingers kept twitching, and I craved a cigarette more than anything. Eventually, Dr Mandelbrote gave me a piercing look. “I think I’m going to give you a chance,” he said. “Go back to the hospital, and we’ll be in touch to let you know when your admission date is, and when you should report.”
As we made our way back to the hospital, I was really pleased that I had been accepted. I felt for the first time in my life that someone was prepared to take a real risk with me. I knew that this was probably my last chance. I had hit rock-bottom, and if I didn’t start to sort things out now, the only way out of the mess was in a coffin. On the other hand, I was very anxious and frightened at the thought of all the upheavals I was going to experience. I would be moving to a new location and meeting a lot of new people and I knew that I would have to make enormous changes. This was serious stuff. Could I really do it, especially as I would be leaving my two children behind? Only time would tell.
Not knowing what to think or expect, I returned to the hospital to wait. I left briefly to attend my court hearing where, of course, I was found guilty of the break-in, having been caught red-handed. The possibility of my going to rehab rather than prison was raised and, true to their word, the police officers who had arrested me put in a good word on my behalf, telling the judge that they felt I had the capacity to pull my life back together. Dr Callum gave the judge a report on me, as well as Dr Mandelbrote’s assessment, based on our interview.
It was decided that I would be given what was effectively a final chance to sort myself out. The judge determined that I would have to return to court after three and then six months so that he could read a progress report about how I was doing at rehab. If there were any major setbacks, or I refused to take part in treatment or didn’t cooperate, I would be sent to prison to serve my sentence. That was the last thing I wanted. I had decided that it was finally time for me to get my life in order and I hoped that I had it in me to do whatever it took.
After a couple of weeks, I received a letter giving me news of my admission date, the 6th July 1981. I was escorted to the Ley Community by a nurse, and we arrived late afternoon. I walked up the picturesque driveway and was blown away by the surroundings. I hadn’t expected a rehab centre to look like this. It was summer and there were lots of flowers in the gardens around the building, which was a large art-deco house that had once been a private home. There was an area for the domestic animals kept at the community, a swimming pool and lots of open space.
I said goodbye to my escort, and then I was on my own. As was Ley policy at the time, when I arrived I was asked to “sit on the bench” and wait to be told what to do. The “bench” is a significant tool at the Ley. It is a place where residents may be asked to sit when things have got out of hand, they are behaving bizarrely, or even thinking of leaving. It is a place to reflect. The bench is located in the centre of the residents’ administrative area. I had all my bags with me and I put them down and sat there quietly until I was received by the staff member on duty, Barry Roberts.
Barry took me into the staff office for a chat, explained what was going to happen and handed me over to two senior residents. I was then taken off to be searched, to see if I was carrying any drugs. They did not find anything; I didn’t have anything. This was not always the case, as many addicts arrived with drugs on their person, feeling that they were not ready to give them up just yet.
Following the search, I was taken downstairs into the lounge and introduced to all of the residents, who greeted me warmly. I was freaked out by their attitude. They were all exceedingly strange, I felt, despite the fact that they presented themselves so nicely. I had expected people to be angry or sullen, not kind and supportive. What were they playing at? Was this some sort of a joke?
I had thought that I knew a lot about institutions and rehab, but it didn’t take me long to realise that this was a completely different kettle of fish. I had been expecting the process to be difficult and challenging, but I had had no idea just how much that would be the case. From the first day, it felt as though I had, like Alice, gone through a looking-glass into a world in which the usual rules didn’t apply. Everything seemed to be crazy; far crazier than in the psychiatric institution that I had just left. I didn’t know what the hell was going on here.
The Ley Community was a completely different world, unlike anything that I had ever encountered before. There seemed to be innumerable rules and regulations, far more even than in a prison or hospital, and people were walking around using a vocabulary that was unfamiliar to me, talking about “boundaries” and “issues” and expecting me to calmly accept criticism without getting upset or hot under the collar. As if that was something that had ever happened before.
For the first few weeks, I was looked after constantly. I found out that I was going through what was known as the “safety net period” and that the Ley used a buddy system, which meant that I was never left on my own. During this period there were always a couple of people looking after me. There was one person for Littlemore, which was where I slept, and another for the Ley, where I spent the day. I was told that I could always go to these people for advice or support with anything that came up as I was settling into my new life.
People were friendly, but a little distant, as though I were a large and not necessarily even-tempered dog with which they were suddenly sharing quarters. A few weeks later, when it was apparently deemed that I had settled in and should be ready to socialise, they started to engage with me more, and while there were plenty of smiles, I soon found out that here, if I behaved like an arsehole, nobody was going to hesitate to let me know all about it in no uncertain terms.
I was used to situations in which people lashed out and shouted when they were annoyed, but here feedback was given in a calm and measured way, even when it wasn’t good. I was dubious about the whole arrangement, but I also felt that I’d had something of a breakthrough while I was at the psychiatric hospital, and that I had made up my mind to seize this chance with both hands. I was truly determined not to take drugs ever again and to stay firmly away from my old lifestyle.
As a junior resident, I shared sleeping quarters with other junior residents at a clinic in Littlemore, called the Ley Clinic. There were eight beds in the Ley Clinic, and I was in a room called the Eric Burden Ward with three other residents. It was a tiny room, but addicts travelled light (most of us had divested ourselves of almost all our possessions in the constant search for the next high) so we managed to squeeze in. We returned to the Ley Community during the day.
Our daily routine at the Clinic started with breakfast, which we had to prepare ourselves. Then we were picked up by hospital transport at 8.30 and taken to the Ley Community. A senior resident would drive the community van and return the junior residents to the Eric Burden Ward each night at about 8.30. Each day was intense and very busy and we were generally happy to turn in early.
The bulk of the day-to-day running of the community was coordinated by senior residents – people who had already been in rehab for some time and had made a lot of progress towards being able to achieve their goals. Of course, there were many practical issues that had to be considered, such as laundry, housekeeping, cooking and so forth. Everybody was given tasks to do, and the premises were kept in order by the residents themselves. But far more demanding than any physical work we were expected to engage in were the steps we were all asked to take towards our own rehabilitation.
In a lot of ways, being at the community was like returning to childhood. I was very much told what to do. One of the tasks I was given early on was that of keeping a diary. As I was still almost completely illiterate, someone helped me to write down my feelings. This made me feel very vulnerable. I couldn’t write in the diary for myself, so I had to share my thoughts and feelings with a stranger right from the word go. The first entry in my diary read, in someone else’s handwriting, “I don’t know what it is that I feel and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to stay here.”
In my first few weeks at the Ley, I was told that there was going to be a “GI party”. This was a misleading term, and I soon found out that it wasn’t a party at all, but that it meant that we were all going to have to clean the whole house from top to bottom. I found myself being ordered around, being told to do things at the double, and that the places I had cleaned were obviously not up to standard. I was certainly not inclined to accept this kind of treatment and told Jerry, the guy who was running the GI, “You’re having a fucking laugh, aren’t you? I’ve cleaned this once already are you taking the piss?” I started to square up to Jerry, outraged by his criticisms. Whatever I was, I had never been a slob. I had always taken pride in how tidy and clean my homes were.
I was told off for using bad language and was asked to sit on the bench. What an experience. Who the hell did Jerry think he was? But the amazing thing was, I did actually go and sulk on the bench. What was this place doing to me? Why wasn’t I standing up for myself?
Although I had undergone detox in the hospital, my mind had not been “detoxed”. My body was free of all drugs, but I still felt enormously tempted to use again, because nothing had ever made me feel as good as being high did. Despite this, I was also determined that I would finally do whatever it took to become a normal person, or what I imagined a normal person to be. I decided that if the people in charge asked me to jump, I would say “How high?” and just do it. I already felt completely out of control of my own life and as if I didn’t really exist as a person any more. I knew that this was my last chance to sort things out.
When I arrived, it was made clear to me that one of the first things anyone needs to do in order to get better is to surrender, to accept the fact that they have come to change the way they are and the person they have been, because their old way just isn’t working out any more. As for me, it was abundantly clear that I did not have the skills or abilities to deal with life in the real world. I was about as competent as a toddler. Why else had I been using drugs for years, if not to provide me with the confidence that I could not find anywhere else? Why else did I start to shout and react violently whenever things did not go my own way? I didn’t know when or how to accept others’ help, and I didn’t know how to recognise which things I might change with assistance from others and which on my own.
The one thing I did recognise was how very lucky I had been to be offered this opportunity rather than being sent away to spend some more miserable time behind bars. I knew that there was a lot of urgency in my situation. I was thirty years old and still behaving like an adolescent. But whereas an adolescent still has his whole adult life ahead of him to learn from his mistakes, I had already lived a chunk of my adult life and I hadn’t learned anything at all. I knew that if I didn’t change, I’d probably kill myself, either deliberately or through the stealth approach that is chronic drug-taking.
As it was, I had abandoned my children. By killing myself, I would be removing any possibility of a place in their lives in the future. I still hoped that one day I would be something like a proper father to my girls. As things stood, now that Anne and I were divorced, the only access I was allowed to the children was strictly supervised. Anne and I had parted on good terms, but because she too was an addict, she was not encouraged to visit. I had permission to see the children for two hours once every six weeks, and I had to travel all the way to Cardiff, a trip of about two hours, to attend these visits. I was driven down by a senior resident, met the girls and played with them, then turned around and came back. There was no question of stopping for a cup of tea or a bite to eat in Cardiff. Because that was where all my old drugusing pals lived, that was where I was at my most vulnerable.
It took me a long time to get my head around the culture of the Ley and how it worked, as it was completely unlike anything else I had ever experienced. I wasn’t used to being directly challenged about my behaviour without people getting angry and it all ending in shouting. At the Ley, if I had a smoke and left my dog-ends in the ashtray, someone would come along and ask me, pleasantly but firmly, “Can I make you aware that those are your dog-ends in the ashtray?” If I left my dirty cup on the table they would say, “Can I make you aware that you’ve left your dirty cup on the table?” The implication was that there was something unacceptable about my behaviour and that I would just have to do something about it, because it was my problem and not that of the person who was annoyed with me. I couldn’t, at first, figure out how the hell this was going to help me keep off drugs – I couldn’t see the connection and I sometimes just felt belittled by it.
Every second of every day, there was someone around to remind me that my job was to raise the standards of my behaviour to something approaching that of a normal, functional adult. Mostly, the staff involved in the work at the Ley were residents like myself – addicts trying to come clean and turn their lives around. It wasn’t at all like being in a prison or hospital where there is a clearly defined “them” and “us”. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, and I disliked the feeling of being at sea.
I had been at the Ley for about three weeks when it was announced that we would have what was called a marathon group. This was a forty-eight-hour therapy group session during which we would all have time to have everyone focus on us individually; on what we needed, on what we were doing, and on how we were getting along with everybody else. The whole building was blacked out, and lights were kept turned on in all the rooms, so there was no way to tell whether it was day or night. We could go to sleep if we were tired, but had no way of knowing what time it was. It was an immensely disorientating experience.
The purpose of the group was to create a feeling of closeness between residents and staff, and it was a time to openly share the experiences that each resident had been going through. At that particular moment in time, there were about thirty people in the programme, and large rooms had been converted to dormitories to accommodate us. The Community was housed in a large building, but that was still a lot of people living on top of each other with lots of potential for tensions to arise.
The marathon was a draining, exhausting process, involving all the residents and members of staff. When someone’s turn came up, all eyes were on them, which was an extremely intense experience. The focus lasted for about half an hour, during which the staff would give a tremendous amount of input in terms of talking to the person in question about where they were with respect to their development, where they were going, and so forth. It was very powerful, and both exhausting and exhilarating.
This was the moment when, for the first time, it was put to me in plain English that the way I presented myself as a father was very far from the truth. In my mind, I had tried to improve my children’s lives and had built a good home for them, while everything I actually did had had the opposite effect. I had made their lives much worse than they should have been and had been unreliable and useless.
Hearing this undeniable truth was like having a knife plunged into my heart and twisted around and around, despite the fact that I had come to similar conclusions at the hospital on my own. I remember breaking down in tears, and a number of residents in the marathon could not believe that my tears were heartfelt, as I presented myself as such a big hard bloke. Some of them believed they were crocodile tears and that I was putting on a display to gain some sympathy, which hurt me even more. I had made myself very vulnerable and I needed people to believe in me. But it was one thing just thinking something and another hearing it spoken aloud. It was awful.
But I knew that what they were saying about my experience of being a father was true, and on some level I realised that I had to acknowledge it in order to start moving forward with my life in a meaningful way. When the focus was off me, the staff put on some music and I was given a small memento to remind me of the whole experience. My gift was a little blue elephant that had a white patch on it with red stitches.
At the end of a marathon session, each resident had a record, a piece of music that the others had chosen for them because they felt that it reflected something about them. I remember that Peter’s song – Peter was one of my peers at the Community – was Nowhere Man by The Beatles. When Peter was told the name of his song he became quite emotional, because that was how he had always felt about himself. Mine was Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, which had been chosen for me because – while most of my life had been troubled – the Ley programme would allow me to be looked after in a way that I never had been before.
All residents received the same treatment. After about forty-eight hours, everyone was really tired, including the staff who had prepared food and refreshments throughout the whole session. At this stage, the staff explained that we had all gone through a period of bonding and we were allowed to reflect on the whole event. When the blackout was removed, we found out that it was late afternoon! I shall never forget this powerful experience.
I learned that there were also other therapeutic groups that I was expected to engage with. One of these was called the encounter group. Slip boxes were used. Before an encounter group, residents completed written slips about other residents. For example, someone might write something like: “John, I’m really pissed off with you because you make me feel small in the way you talk to me.” Staff and senior residents compiled a slip grid from the comments on all the slips. This determined which residents went into which encounter group and who was Top of the Pops – the person with the most slips.
One function of these encounter groups was to help flush out any of the inevitable problems that emerge when people are living in close proximity, but they also helped us all start to recognise how others live and feel and think, and what is important to them. It was about exchanging a range of different feelings. Hearing how others expressed what they were experiencing on an emotional level also helped to provide us with a new vocabulary for the things that were troubling us.
Sometimes, someone would turn to me and say, “Oh, so how long have you been reacting like that?” and I would reply, “Well, all my life, I suppose.” I realised that the origins of my drug-taking lay in my childhood, when I had failed to learn, for one reason or another, how to discuss my vulnerabilities without getting angry and lashing out. These were behavioural traits that I had never even recognised as problematic, or that weren’t problematic in the places and situations where I had lived before, but now were entirely unsuitable. If I wanted to stop being a drug addict, I would have to stop behaving in a way that facilitated that lifestyle and set of choices.
It was not easy, shaking off my old habits and attitudes. In the beginning, I attended group meetings, but I didn’t really participate or expect anyone to say anything to me. I dreaded the thought of people focusing on me and my problems. I didn’t want to know about them, or at least I thought that I didn’t. At first, very few residents dared to confront me. I had the knack of being able to look at people in such a way that made it clear they should not dare to speak to me. I was a master of the art of keeping others at a distance. When I did speak, I was abrupt, cold and off-putting. Over the years, I had developed the skill of being intimidating. On the outside, this skill had been intended to keep others at bay. At the Ley, I managed to keep everyone off my case for about sixteen weeks, after which a group session was called about my attitude and how extremely unhelpful I was being.
At this meeting, it was pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that by behaving the way I did, by coming across as aloof and unfriendly and threatening, I was actually robbing myself. By keeping people at distance and refusing to give them the chance to provide me with some potentially very useful insights, I was not allowing myself to grow. My habit of throwing people an intimidating look every now and again stopped them from being honest with me and telling me how I was behaving, and this tendency to put up my defences was getting in the way of my being properly treated.
My natural instinct, when such things were put to me, was to rebel against the rules, to kick against the reins, as I had always done as a child and teenager. My tendency was to distrust everyone’s motives and to assume that they could not possibly have a disinterested reason for wishing to engage with me. Often, when someone was telling me something about the way that I was behaving, I turned around and said, “Well, you can bloody well fuck off; if you don’t fucking like it, piss off, I don’t care about you; I’m not interested in what you think about me.” That usually shut them up. But while I thought that I was standing up for myself and my interests, these outbursts left me feeling empty and hollow; feeling like shit, really.
I was not unique in this behaviour. Few people can openly accept that everything or a lot of the things that they’ve done in their life are wrong, and that they are now supposed to change almost everything about themselves. Regardless of how depressed and dejected we may be, we all have an ego that is hurt when we hear that other people dislike something about us. We all had to learn how to be open enough to accept that kind of criticism.
This was especially true of those of us who had built our whole lives around a need to protect ourselves. We would have to learn how to take apart everything we did and how we did it. We would have to learn that each aspect of our personality and character was connected to every other one, and that in order to truly change, it is not enough to change just one thing. We all had to learn that what we were doing at the Ley was not about simply ceasing to take drugs, while holding onto all our former relationships, our lifestyles and our friends. It meant changing the very lifestyle that had caused us to start taking drugs in the first place. For some of us, this would mean accepting that we could no longer see certain family members and friends, perhaps for ever, and that we had to give up many elements of our lifestyle that we had previously enjoyed and even felt proud of. It meant taking a long, hard look at ourselves and realising that many of the qualities we believed to be essential to who and what we were just had to go.
Throughout the 1980s, AIDS was cutting a swathe through drug-users, and as so many of us had shot up our drugs, this was a big concern. Most of us had shared needles; at some point, we had seen a friend shooting up and said, “Any chance of me borrowing your spike?” We might have given it a rinse under the cold tap, but that was as far as safety precautions usually went.
The thought of having contracted AIDS was terrifying. As it was, lots of the residents had contracted hepatitis from sharing needles. At that time, there was no effective treatment, and most of the people who had contracted AIDS became sick and died very quickly. We were all obliged to be tested for hepatitis, but AIDS testing was optional. I didn’t want to know. If I was living under a death sentence, I preferred to remain in blissful ignorance.
As had been agreed by the authorities, I had to return to court in Cardiff for the formal review meeting of my case. I was taken by a couple of senior residents in the community van, and I took with me a written report prepared by my group worker, Barry. I was worried about going to court, but I was even more concerned about going back into the area that I had come from. I was afraid that acquaintances might try to entice me back into my old way of life and get me to start using drugs again. I felt vulnerable. I wondered whether I might have to go back to prison if I did not meet the judge’s expectations, and that worried me, too.
I appeared before the stipendiary magistrate who had sentenced me originally. He read the report prepared on me and pronounced himself very pleased with the progress I was making. He felt that it would be good for me to continue to work at the Ley Community and asked me to appear before him again in three months’ time. I was really happy with this outcome. I left the court and within minutes was back in the car and on my way to the Ley. I didn’t hang around.
In a lot of respects, being at the Ley was immensely hard work, but we also learned to play and experience wonder; for most of us this was something of a revelation. We kept pigs there, and part of my job was to look after them, feed them, clean them out, wash them and generally treat them like royalty. One time I sat up all night waiting for the sow to give birth to a litter of piglets. A couple of my peers and I were there to make sure that when Samantha (named for Sam Fox, the famous Page Three model) gave birth to Eric’s piglets (Eric was named after a famous motocross world champion), they would be safe. Samantha did not let us down. On my watch, and to everybody’s excitement, she produced fourteen little pink piglets. Eric was very proud, too!
Another responsibility I was given was to participate in a “yoghurt watch”. Someone was stealing yoghurts from the food shed that was situated in the grounds outside the main building. One of my peers and I were asked to sit up overnight with a lit fire to try and establish who the thief was. He or she never got caught and is still at large. In fact, I think that this is as good a place as any to confess that the yoghurt thief was actually yours truly and as such was never going to be apprehended on my watch.
Despite getting off to a poor start, once I started to engage with it, I realised that although the process offered by the Ley was very difficult, it was a tool that I could work with as I set about making things better. The group sessions and the other encounters helped me recognise that the ways I typically thought and behaved were adolescent and stupid. I even became able to laugh at myself, which is an important step towards healing. The therapy offered at the Ley was often quite playful.
Morning meetings are a good example. Every morning there was a meeting in which we were all brought together to greet each other at the start of the day. We went around the room doing “image breakers”. Imagine a big bloke standing in the middle of the room singing “My name is Shirley Temple…” and doing the actions for the curly hair and dancing! These performances were hilarious to those who were watching, but excruciatingly embarrassing to the person doing it. The reason for them was to help us break down our defences and image, and to be more real and be accepted for who we were.
These rituals were therapeutic, but they were also about having childish fun with each other – something a lot of us had never had as children. I remember, aged thirty, spending an afternoon playing commandoes. We all got into the spirit of the game and found ourselves reacting as the children we had once been. “Hey!” I remember saying. “I just shot you and you’re still running around. That’s not fair!” These games might sound silly, but they made it possible for us all to shed the years of cynicism that we had acquired and, being able to act like children, to start addressing the serious business of growing up properly at last.
My first Christmas at the Ley came around after I had been in the programme for five months. All of the residents were feeling vulnerable at the time; Christmas is a difficult period for anyone who is away from their family, and it’s that much worse when the separation is your own fault. I was thinking a lot about my children and what remained of my family. I had not been in touch with my family in London for a very long time.
Despite my trepidation, however, that was the best Christmas that I had ever had. It felt as though we really were just one big family, all looking after each other, exchanging small presents and having lots of fun. It was almost as if we were allowed to be children again. A group of residents cooked a fantastic Christmas dinner and there was more than enough to go around. The formal structure of the Ley was relaxed for a couple of days and most of us were allowed to make phone calls to our loved ones. When we went back to the dorm that night, all we could talk about was what a wonderful day we had had. It was really special.
While we were all learning how to follow rules, we broke them, too. As we residents were not allowed to play cards or be involved in gambling, this type of activity became very attractive and finding the opportunity to play cards was a major preoccupation. My peers and I obtained a pack of cards from Pete. Pete was a Stage Two resident, which meant that he had found a job and started the process of getting ready to move out. At night we played cards in the dorm, with a level of enthusiasm that bordered on obsession. As we were not allowed to carry any money on us whatsoever, our currency of choice was cigarettes and sweets! I wasn’t bad at cheating when we were playing poker, so I managed to relieve my peers of several roll-ups and bars of chocolate. The staff never found out, so this was one of the few things I got away with at the Ley.
As the business of therapy continued, another concept that I was introduced to was that of “act as if”. Act as if meant learning to behave in a responsible, adult fashion “as if” things were not bothering me, even when they were. This was not about deception, but about learning how to engage in normal, polite, adult conversation, and it is a skill that most people manage to acquire during childhood. The only people who should be able to get away with purely emotional responses to things are toddlers. The rest of us need to learn how to compromise and to express ourselves without screaming and having a tantrum.
There were times when I was angry or upset and wanted to respond to these negative feelings immediately and violently, as I had always done before. Instead, I had to learn to act as if things were OK and didn’t matter. I found “act as if” very difficult to come to terms with and it took me a long time to get my head around it. I was always spontaneous and quick to take offence. It was completely alien for me to contain my feelings and I struggled with this challenge.
Everything that I was being taught was about being given a different set of tools, a different way to live, a different way to look at things. It was about allowing people the opportunity to tell me about their feelings regarding what I did and how my actions impacted on the people around me.
As time passed, I gradually got used to my new situation and was able to see the residents coming in after me with fresh eyes. Even after a few months, I had started to change and could see a lot of my old self in the new arrivals. Not everybody who came had been through the process of being detoxed, and some had to come before they had quite finished, or even before they had started. As the Ley Community was about learning to be completely abstinent, they would go through cold turkey. All the residents knew what the newcomers were enduring, as they had been there before, and most offered a lot of comfort, support and encouragement to stick with it. Cold turkey can be awful, but it doesn’t last long.
Newcomers were often shocked by what a hard regime the community insisted upon. There was no opt-out clause and there was no medication to make cold turkey any easier. The idea was that it is difficult to make changes in one’s life and that anyone trying to start afresh needs to learn to deal with the problems and challenges in their lives in a mature manner and without any props or crutches to make the transition easier.
I remember supporting a male junior resident going through cold turkey at the beginning of his programme. I could relate to what he was going through, as I had been through a similar situation myself in prison, more than once. I reassured him that he could do it. I sat up with him through the night when he was shaking and feeling sick, and reassured him that his yearning to obtain more drugs would gradually diminish. I was positive about what the Ley could offer him and we got through it one day at a time. It was a tremendous feeling, being able to give back, and realising that I could help someone in pain was a major turning point in my own recovery. I felt good about myself on that particular day.
Although the addicts at the Ley were from a wide variety of backgrounds, there was one big thing that we all had in common: we were all grossly selfish. Something had happened in our pasts – different things for different people – that had caused us to grow up with this attitude and behaviour. In some cases, residents were people who had been forced by circumstances to grow up very early and take on adult responsibilities without ever having had an opportunity to be children. This had inevitably had consequences for their emotional development and levels of maturity as adults. Alongside their new responsibilities, they were given this opportunity now.
The Ley used concepts as learning tools. For example, the “onion concept” was at the heart of the programme. Emotional layers were stripped off people in order to reach the centre of the onion, or the real core of the human self. These layers were like the armour that each person had acquired throughout their lives; armour that they intended to protect them from the outside world, but that actually stopped them from ever showing anyone their real selves.
In my case, many of these layers had been formed by taking different drugs and substances that I had used over the years to keep people at a distance, and to get me through a life that I was finding almost impossibly difficult to navigate. Having them removed made me feel very exposed; I was being stripped down and I was made to feel more and more vulnerable. I felt like a turtle prised from its shell. I got all the support I needed, however, from my peers, some of whom had already been through this experience. They looked after me and made me feel safe.
Because of the experiences I’d had at the psychiatric hospital, I had already made some decisions about what I was going to do and had decided to do whatever it took. However, I was in no way prepared for how I would feel when it came to exposing the person I had been, how I felt about my shortcomings and how I had behaved in the past when things were difficult or challenging. I was hugely vulnerable around the issue of my role as a parent.
In my mind, I had always done my best to be a good father and a good partner, and when my relationships had ended, I had invariably been the innocent, wronged party. Exposing the truth of the matter made me feel awful, because it made me realise that I had been behaving fraudulently to myself all this time. The reality was that over and over again I had deserted relationships and abandoned my children. I had to admit, most of all to myself, that this was a real pattern in my life and that far from being a good father, I had consistently run away from my responsibilities and made selfish choices. The first time I had ever tried to be an adult and take care of someone else had actually been in the psychiatric hospital when I had started to care for the other patients.
The longer I stayed at the Ley, the more the programme seemed to be working for both me and the other residents. I could see that we were all making progress. We were a diverse bunch. Coming from a troubled family background was a common denominator for most of us, but not always the case. In some cases, as in mine, factors such as poverty and absent parents were there, but there were some residents who had come from middle-class, privileged backgrounds, but had never been able to live up to their parents’ aspirations for them.
Peter, who, I have already mentioned, had been to Eton; you don’t get much more privileged than that. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, and although Peter had tried his best to please his dad, he never felt good enough in his eyes and had ended up using drugs and acquiring a major addiction in an attempt to feel better about himself. It is interesting to note that Peter and I actually got on. At the beginning of the programme, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but as the layers were stripped down from both of us, we found common ground and became very supportive of each other. Perhaps the programme was working. I didn’t feel inferior to him and he didn’t feel intimidated by me.