Matthew’s Story: Part 8, “Take Two and the Future”

For a while, there was a period of transition after the closing of uchooseit. My financial situation wasn’t great and I needed to find paid work again as soon as possible.

I was offered a job coordinating the volunteer peer mentor scheme we had established as a partnership between uchooseit and probation. I currently fulfil this role as a full-time employee of the probation service.

At times, life feels strange. Less than five years ago, I was on a probation order as an offender and now I work for the probation service. I could have never imagined when the magistrate told me to make the most of the opportunity for a fresh start that I’d end up here.

It has been a long, long journey. I am still learning from my mistakes as I go along. I’m still trying to develop and better myself. But every now and then it’s good to just sit back and reflect on what I’ve managed to fit in to the last five years.

My next goals are more personal than professional. I’m working on my physical health and I’m currently exercising far more than I have done at any point since leaving school. I am beginning to feel the benefits.

I also want to tackle the self-doubt and social anxiety that I still suffer from, and then I want to learn to drive. It often feels like I have to fit ten or fifteen years of growing up in to five to try and compensate for my addiction.

I know it will all be worth it in the end. I’m just as determined as ever to reach my full potential, but now I feel that by reaching my personal goals the professional ones will fall in to place.

Living life and coping without resorting to addictive behaviour isn’t always easy; but I do manage independently now. Sometimes it feels as though there aren’t enough hours in the day.

I am connected to a network of people now which means I would find it hard to bury my head like an ostrich or isolate myself in the way that I used to. I won’t lie and pretend that sometimes I didn’t wish that I had a hiding place.

But you have to balance that with the flip side to this; when you isolate yourself it’s extremely difficult to get the support at the times you need it most. The feelings of loneliness and desperation I used to suffer have been minimised. I feel more comfortable in social situations. I have faith in myself to handle new situations.

A month or so ago I finally took the plunge and moved out of my mum’s house. I had been there ever since returning from my second failed attempt at university.

I had been talking about the need to move out and move on for a while, but I had reservations about my ability to cope, both financially and in terms of keeping on top of household tasks. At many other times in my life I would have crumbled under this added pressure, but now I’m ready for it.

Having a job that I enjoy is at times a double edged sword. When it goes well it is really satisfying, but it is also a job that is impossible just to switch off from. My work and personal life often become blurred and some days just never seem to end.

But on the whole I wouldn’t change it. I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the misery of working in the foundry or in the bookies.

My appetite for recovery is as strong as ever although sometimes I still get frustrated at not being able to change the world overnight.

What I now need to learn how to achieve is that precious 4th point of the SMART recovery programme, lifestyle balance. I need more hobbies, interests and friends outside of my work life.

I still put too much pressure on myself, but I know that I’ll get there in the long run. Maintaining my recovery hasn’t always been easy, but it’s definitely been worth it.

The End

Parts 1 and 2: Life Begins and Everything Changes

4 comments - First published on: 22/04/2012

Matthew’s Story: Part 7, “A Man With a Plan”

The six months finally passed and I was accepted on to the next Bridging the Gap course. I now had a clear plan in place in my mind, and by this stage I had gone from 60ml of methadone down to around 8mg of subutex. I’d told myself I’d done the hard work, I’d be out of services in a few months and could then look forward to a new career.

However, it soon became clear that it wouldn’t be that simple. Most places wanted you to be two years out of treatment services and at least two years drug free before you could even start any voluntary work.

On hearing this, I was starting to wonder whether my desire to work in the drug and alcohol field was worth persevering with.

In the past, these difficulties would have easily been enough to knock me off track, but this time around it was different. I was determined to get there somehow, even if it took another two years. I told myself I would see things through.

I remember for a while I must have started to sound like a broken record: “What do they expect us to do after this course? Go and sit and twiddle our thumbs for two years and then come back to volunteer?”

Whilst on this course, I met Michaela Jones and at the time she was very involved in the local service user forum. She convinced me to join, although I had mixed feelings about it. I was uncomfortable about being referred to as a service user or even ex-service user.

But I did get lots of social support from other group members, which was of great benefit. This was a real benefit for me; for the first time in many years I was starting to develop real friendships.

During this time, I managed to successfully exit drug and alcohol services by taking measured reductions in my subutex until I felt ready to stop taking the drug altogether.

I was now drug free and hadn’t gambled since around two months after losing my job in the bookies. I drank with family members on occasion, but rarely to excess and never more than for a night or two at a time.

Things began to change when Michaela launched a community interest company called uchooseit, which provided me with the vehicle to prove myself.

The early days at uchooseit were a massive transition for me; in many ways, it was the first real challenge for me since losing my job. Finally, I had an opportunity, although at that stage it was voluntary work rather than paid employment.

With voluntary work came some responsibility and an opportunity to develop and progress. I struggled a lot at that time with feelings of pressure and fear of getting it wrong. At the time I didn’t realise that 95% of the pressure came from myself. The people who provided my social support now had also suddenly became my colleagues and this was something that took lots of getting used to for me.

My emotions and my mood were up and down a lot during the early days of my recovery. At times, I felt like I was having a breakdown. My emotions were becoming increasingly powerful and hard to deal with.

At times I still felt very lonely, at times I felt really frustrated at the way my life was turning out. I might have been fast approaching my thirtieth birthday, but I was still learning how to cope with adult life for the first time.

Fortunately, around this time I found two great sources of support in the form of Wired In and SMART Recovery. Both of these really helped me through the transition in to a responsible adult life without drugs and gambling.

We first started using the web community Wired In To Recovery after attending a recovery conference in Stockport; there was an advert on the back of a magazine we were given at the conference with the web address. I remember being very impressed by the number of supportive comments I got after writing my first blog and was immediately hooked.

SMART stands for self-management and recovery training and it is an alternative peer support group to twelve step based groups. SMART uses tools and techniques to help you identify and challenge any irrational beliefs you have which may lead to urges or thoughts and feelings about substance use.

What impressed me about SMART was the balance that was struck between being a relaxed and informal meeting, yet serious enough for you to being able to work through whatever issues were bothering you that week.

We found setting up a SMART group to be relatively easy; all the literature is available to download online. On the whole, it is all easy enough to understand and anyone can learn to use the tools in a group with a bit of practice.

We also made the use of SMART recovery champion and Wired In advocate Carl Cundall, who visited our first meetings in Tameside and provided facilitator training for us. Following this, it was just a case of practicing and learning as we went along.

I have attended virtually every SMART group in Tameside since we established it around two years ago and still use some of the tools and worksheets on myself when I find myself feeling low. SMART hasn’t freed me of all my irrational beliefs, but it has helped me recognise them and challenge myself when I find myself thinking that way.

At this time, it didn’t take me long to realise that I didn’t actually want to be a drugs worker or a counsellor; my real interest was in learning and development. I had done some mentoring on the next Bridging the Gap course and had really enjoyed helping the students with some of the activities.

The mentor role on Bridging the Gap mainly involved befriending the students and helping them with any problems they might be having with any aspect of the course. Those problems could be in relation to the group work or more with the academic side of things. Some students had difficulty reading and writing.

After a huge leap of faith, and a bit of a push from Michaela, I enrolled on a two-year foundation degree course. This was a University of Sunderland course which was being delivered at Tameside college in training and work-based learning.

This has proved to be one of the best decisions I have ever made and successfully completing that course is one of my proudest achievements. I am currently converting the foundation degree in to an honours degree in education and development.

As soon as the training and the professional development of the volunteers became my main focus at uchooseit, I started to really enjoy my work. I started to design my own volunteering training programmes, as well as supporting volunteers through their NVQ’s in advice and guidance and providing both group and individual supervision.

For a while, we were all happy and Michaela and I remained very much aligned with the national recovery movement, getting involved with Wired In, the Recovery Academy and several other recovery focussed groups and forums.

Unfortunately for us, current funding structures didn’t really suit us, as we weren’t eligible to apply for most streams of funding for a variety of reasons.

One major obstacle was that many funding streams require companies to have two years trading accounts before you are eligible to receive funding. After five months of working full time whilst struggling to make ends meet, we made a collective decision to discontinue uchooseit.

Part 8: Take Two and the Future
Parts 1 and 2: Life Begins and Everything Changes

1 comments - First published on: 21/04/2012

Matthew’s Story: Part 6, “A Fresh Start”

After the immediate crises in my life were resolved, my motivation to make lasting changes grew. I had gambled a few times since losing my job, but I was now determined to knock it on the head once and for all.

What’s more, I was going to diet and exercise more and finally look to tackle the 60ml of methadone per day that acted as my comfort blanket.

At this point, I was still seeing the drugs team once a fortnight, but was visiting the pharmacists on a daily basis to pick up my methadone. I hated the latter – you can’t deny you’re still an addict when your morning routine revolves around obtaining your substance. Legal or illegal, more harmful or less harmful, it’s still an addiction.

I spent around a year working on myself and tackling my demons. I shed two stone, found myself a dentist, and got my remaining teeth fixed and dentures to replace the ones I had lost.

I completed my probation order and community service successfully and started to reduce on my methadone. The reductions in my methadone were of my own doing. I had to ask to be reduced and was sometimes even discouraged from doing so.

I really wanted a better life for myself, but at times I did get a little de-motivated by my employment prospects. It seemed unlikely to me that I would ever get a job with any real level of responsibility again and every advisor I spoke to seemed to agree with me.

I had a two week work trial at a foundry and I absolutely hated it. I left realising just how difficult it would be for me to work in a job like that for any length of time.

Towards the end of my time on my probation order, I was referred to an abstinence-based treatment service. For the first time in my life, my “treatment” for my addiction problems amounted to more than the same old questions about whether I was using on top of my script and whether or not I’d committed any crime.

I wouldn’t say any of it was life-changing, but it definitely helped having hour-long key work sessions as well as support groups with others in recovery.

I did start to wonder whether being a drink and drugs worker could be something I could do as a career in the future. I was told about a training course called “Bridging the Gap” for people who wanted to pursue a career in the drug and alcohol field.

When I applied, a course had just started and I had to wait six months for the next one. I was devastated for a while, as I’d started to pin all my hopes on being able to do this course.

I enrolled on an ECDL (European Computer Driving Licence) course through learndirect and this helped pass the time and made me much more confident using computers.

On the whole, I started to feel much more relaxed and much more in charge of my life; I had felt like a broken man in the first few months after losing my job.

The one thing that really bothered me was the fear I had that I’d never get a job that I enjoyed. It was beginning to feel like I’d either spend the rest of my life on benefits or in a job I couldn’t stand. I continued to pin all my hopes on working in the drug and alcohol field, since I just couldn’t see any other options.

Something else I was struggling with was making new friends. I was still very isolated. This meant I spent too much time on my own worrying about what direction my life was heading in and not enough time with people I could talk to about these worries.

I didn’t like to burden my family all the time. I didn’t want them to think I was struggling and to start worrying that I might relapse.

I managed to deal with these problems and insecurities because it was always clear in my mind that I couldn’t go back to addiction again. I always felt that if I did, it would ruin the rest of my life.

Another thing I did whilst I was waiting was to change my name by deed poll. I had considered this many times since turning eighteen but decided it was time to finally get round to it.

A true fresh start required a new name and I took the name of my maternal grandfather – I became Matthew Kidd.

Part 7: A Man With a Plan
Part 1 and 2: Life Begins and Everything Changes

2 comments - First published on: 20/04/2012

Matthew’s Story: Part 5, “My Rock Bottom”

I had started by betting on machines in other shops before I turned to using the machines in my own shop and eventually borrowing the shop’s money to use the machines. I got away with this for a good while, possibly four or five months, although I often had to use most of my wages to pay back the money I had borrowed.

On the occasions I did win big, it made me feel like a success. I loved having hundreds of pounds in my pocket. It made me feel better about myself; the only problem was that it never stayed there for long.

One morning, I had a particularly bad losing streak and when I was down £2500 I realised enough was enough. I phoned my employer to confess everything. I was charged with theft from my employer. I could now be facing a custodial sentence, I was over eighteen stone in weight, my teeth were rotting and I hated myself.

It was finally time to make some lasting changes.

It was a long, long road back from that point, but right from the start I had motivation and determination like never before. It was just like all of a sudden I had woken up to what the rest of my life could end up like if I didn’t tackle my addiction problems.

It felt like the last chance saloon. I’d kind of got by somehow up until this point, but now I felt like I was on the verge of losing everything. My life was certainly going to change one way or the other, and I was determined that it was going to be for the better.

For the first couple of months, my focus was on getting my finances sorted out and getting the court case out of the way.

Getting back on benefits was a struggle at first. I had to keep going through the circumstances of me losing my job and my employers were slow in providing the letters I needed to prove my employment had been terminated.

I had to get help from Tameside council in writing letters to my creditors with offers to pay £1 a month so they would stop phoning me every day.

Until my claim for benefits had been processed, I wasn’t eligible for legal aid and for this reason the court case kept getting adjourned. It felt like I wasn’t being allowed to get on with the rest of my life.

However, this didn’t affect my motivation around my substance use too much. I was managing to stick to my script, with no heroin, gambling, tablets or alcohol on top. Not having any money possibly even helped at this stage in terms of curbing my addictive behaviours.

My claim was finally processed and I had my pre-sentence probation report written, recommending a six-month community order.

The magistrates went with the recommendation and I still remember what they said to me just before I left the court room: “Mr Trumper, make the most of this opportunity to make a fresh start.” I had every intention of following this advice, although I didn’t know what direction to take.

By this stage, I had been suffering from addiction problems of one form or another for just over a decade. The main problem had been opiates, starting a few months after my first experience with heroin aged seventeen.

Over the next ten years, I would also turn to alcohol, gambling and benzos in a misguided attempt to deal with my problems and insecurities. It had taken more or less all of my adult life away from me.

I was now twenty-eight years old. It was time for a new chapter in my life before I reached my thirties.

Part 6: A Fresh Start
Parts 1 and 2: Life Begins and Everything Changes

3 comments - First published on: 18/04/2012