Simone Barclay would be the first to say there is no good reason for her to be an alcoholic. There was no childhood marked by neglect or deprivation, and no trauma needing constant anaesthesia. Yet at 28 years of age, Simone found herself at the end of a long hard battle with the bottle (and numerous other drugs) and facing what she feared would be a lonely and joyless future.
Although Simone came from a loving and privileged home, she describes feeling like something was always missing, a sense that she somehow forgot to collect her copy when the instruction manual for life was being handed out. After her first experience of getting drunk, age 14, this feeling completely disappeared. “I felt invincible,” Simone recalls. “I was funny, outgoing, the life of the party. Best of all I felt unselfconscious, at ease in my own skin. I remember thinking, ‘This is the answer to everything.’”
It took some years before her regular drinking crossed the line into problematic, and in a culture where excess consumption is the norm, where drinking is a marker for every life event and occasion – big or small – she was largely able to blend in amongst her peers.
“What I didn’t realise,” says Simone, “is that the years between age 14 and say, 25 are enormously important for the development of life skills. We act, we make mistakes, we learn, and we do things different or better next time. But when your only problem-solving strategy is to drink, it leaves you with a pretty limited repertoire of life skills. If I was angry, I drank. If I had something to celebrate, I drank. If I was hurt, afraid, guilty, depressed or elated, I drank. And when I drank, all bets were off. On a good day I lost my handbag, on a bad – well let’s just say it wasn’t pretty” she laughs.
It was only when, virtually unemployable and drinking day and night, largely alone that Simone tried to stop and frighteningly, found she couldn’t.
Fortunately, she reached out and after finding a community of like-minded people who had faced – and overcome – similar challenges, she was finally able to put the actions in place which have led to her now being able to say with some pride that she hasn’t had a drink in more than 22 years.
“It was a revelation to discover,” says Simone, “that drinking wasn’t my problem, it was my solution. And stopping drinking was about developing better solutions which improved my life, rather than just allowing me to anaesthetise myself to the realities.” Ironically, Simone now says that sobriety has brought into her life everything she once drank to achieve: a sense of being okay in herself, of being equipped to deal with whatever life brings.
And as for her fears about being lonely and joyless, Simone has found the opposite to be the reality. “It’s true some drinking acquaintances fell away. But I would say I now have better, more authentic friendships and a much clearer knowledge of what I enjoy doing. If I need to be drinking to find someone or something enjoyable, it’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of its value in my life.”
A decision to retrain in psychology just a few years into sobriety was not intended to lead to a career helping others, but a brief internship as part of her training opened her eyes to how much she values assisting in other people’s healing. Since graduating with a master’s in psychology, Simone has worked in a variety of public and private settings. She now works in private practice, as well as serving on two charitable trust boards within the alcohol and other drug (AOD) sector.
“My training has helped me to join the dots between how I learned to stay sober and what science is now discovering about why people drink or take drugs, why some people do it to excess and what needs to be in place for people to achieve lasting, fulfilling recovery. I learn something every day, and I never fail to be amazed by the resilience of the human spirit.”