Narcotics Anonymous as the man who never used a drug; the support workers who actually showed up; and the online therapists who were out of their depth.
I was talking to a man who tried to encourage me in one of the Israeli post-7/10 peer-support chats - a loose WhatsApp group, mostly Israelis, no real leader, just people holding each other up. I have talked there a bit about what I was going through. He was in active reserve service, having his own difficulties there. He contacted me privately and suggested I go to NA - Narcotics Anonymous. I'm not an addict, I'm someone who was prescribed badly, and I explained this to him. He said I should try it anyway. He said there are online meetings as well as in person ones, and so I found the website that shows the online ones (all over the world!). I was hoping maybe a few people there were going through the same thing I was, but honestly, my reason for going was the same as my reason for being in those chats at all - to not be alone.
* While I had my benzo friends video chat, it was limited to whenever they were online (mostly not when I was due to the timezone differences). Benzo Warriors, where my spreadsheet was still published as the official tapering tool, had a Zoom meeting twice a week, but it was always at the 'wrong time' for people in my region (asia-pacific) - i.e. 2-5AM or so, and they didn't agree to move it to any other time.
There's an irony I keep coming back to: I had never used a recreational drug in my life. And here I was in Narcotics Anonymous, because a doctor handed me a jar of a hundred pills, and I lost my Israeli cynicism enough to believe him that I'd be OK.
One of the only groups I found that ran daily was the Sunshine Coast online group - there's a whole list of online groups, some daily, some weekly. Funnily enough, around 90% of the people in the "Sunshine Coast" meeting were American; it landed conveniently in their evening. So it was quite funny to hear people with American accents opening with 'welcome to the Sunshine Coast Queensland group' every morning, but I liked it because I find Americans more open and 'out there' than Aussies and I met some really nice people there - it was mostly the same faces each day, which was nice and created a sense of community. One or two were also coming off benzodiazepines, but NA has this strange rule that you don't name your "substance," so it stays unspoken most of the time and it took me a while to figure it out. I said upfront that I might not really belong there - explaining my situation in the first 5 minutes of sharing I received, and they don't judge you, they just tell you to join anyway. Afterwards, a kind American woman - a teacher - told me privately that she was tapering too, and doing terribly; it was taking a horrible toll on her, and we'd talk after the meetings, and encourage each other.
There's a dark comedy in it: you're supposed to be "clean" to sit in the room, but none of us were taking anything "dirty" - we were being made to come off a medicine, slowly, by milligrams. We WERE doing the right thing. I also resisted saying 'I'm an addict'. I didn't consider myself as such, as this was a medical situation more than a psychological one, and in the benzo community we were very much against using this word, replacing it with 'dependent' which was more accurate.
One day one of the zoom callers was a 'recovery house' that was literally a few kms from me. One of the guys there, a young handsome blonde man, shared, and he was just beautiful in my eyes, and I have talked to him privately and he was really glad to meet me and offered me to come over to the house and meet him and the others after. So I drove there (luckily it was pretty close as I didn't feel that well) and said hello - they all lived in a suburban house and even had a pool! I craved a pool so much, and he said I can come anytime to swim. The thing that really bothered me is that most of them were smoking, I always found it odd on how people in NA can say they are 'clean' from drugs when nicotine IS an addictive drug. But then an older lady called me into the house - she was sort of the 'mama' of the house - it belonged to her, and she had a kind of 'half office' in the living room. She started to lecture me (I can't call it talking - it was a lecture) about being an addict and her FULL history and also told me that the guy I was talking to had Autism and a recovering addict (I asked him from what, he said 'everything that's available - I would take') and that she gave them a place to stay and heal, but her energy was very dominating and she kept lecturing me for what seemed like an hour telling me her turbulent life story as an addict herself, and it left me very depleted of energy. It also pissed me off royally because I was really there for this guy, not to get 'recruited' (it felt like a sales pitch even though it wasn't) but I felt uncomfortable to leave the room with my new friend. When she did ask me what was happening with me and I explained, she started to show me all sorts of vitamins she takes etc, that could be good for me. But again - no one there was really going with what I was going through. I also didn't appreciate the smoke as they were also going through the house smoking sometimes.
At some point I just said that I really have to go as I don't feel so well. I said goodbye and the young man asked me if I'll come again. I thought I would, and said yes. But I didn't... that lady really stressed me out and the smokers too and I was in no condition to have conflict.. I was weak and didn't have any self esteem as it was. I still hope I'll meet him again one day.
A bit after, I also found in the list of NA groups a men-only meeting near me. One day I gathered my courage and went there in person, despite it starting at 7PM - the time I usually start my 'sleep ceremony'. Because it was men-only it had a wonderfully odd composition - roughly half of the participants were gay men, and the other half rough-around-the-edges, macho-looking addicts. (It reminded me of the men's pond at Hampstead Heath when I lived in England: half gay men, half ultra-orthodox Jews. Life keeps serving up these contrasting combinations when you segregate by sex!) Now I didn't mention this in the previous section, but I never quite understood the logic of the format - in NA each person (if time allows, and mostly randomly selected) is invited to share for five minutes while everyone else stays silent, no cross-talk, then the next person. It has its logic, but I kept wishing there was room for an actual conversation, at least at the end. Still, I went because I needed company of any kind, and I did talk to people before and after - although, to my disappointment, most people just left after the meeting quite quickly most of the time (they do meet for dinner sometimes beforehand). I mentioned what had happened to my friend at The Currumbin Clinic, and some of them mentioned they actually work in detoxes. They were really nice, and I'm still fond of the people I met there. One of them caught my eye, and was very cute. By then every afternoon I would go to a beach area or along the river, to swim in the cold water, as it would help my chest anxiety quite a lot. One day he and his boyfriend walked along there with their dog, maybe a week after my first meeting. He was wearing his sunglasses so I didn't recognise him at first when he came to say hi, and I think I just didn't expect to see him there! but he talked to me and it was really nice. He had also been in the 'benzo trap' a few times but he did detox. I don't know how he was OK after - those things are dangerous and like I said in previous parts should really be illegal for psychiatric drug withdrawal. He told me they got a new house very close to me, and I really wanted him to invite me over one day, I felt very alone. I would have invited him to my place, but my place was messy and embarrasing to be honest back then. In any case, that never happened. But it was nice seeing them every Tuesday, and again - really really nice guys, although I was sitting there always with a mask, as COVID was still very much a serious issue even after the vaccines and I could NOT have afforded to get sick with anything.
One of the things that I felt most, sitting there, was envy - of a whole world I didn't have access to. These people had sponsors, free, available any time. They had the steps. There was scaffolding under them. For benzodiazepine withdrawal, or indeed any psychiatric-drug withdrawal, none of that exists. The people were warm to me, curious, glad to chat, and I appreciated that warmth more than I can easily say when I was so alone. Being a gay person around other gay people (and straight people who were very accepting), in a non-judgemental way, was also nice.
Not everything failed - though even the good came wrapped in the same dysfunction. Life Lived Well, Wesley Mission and PCCS (Primary & Community Care Services) are NGOs: non-government organisations paid by the government to deliver the support the government really ought to provide itself. So it's free - but you wait. Even though I already visited PCCS before, as mentioned in previous parts, it was Maree, at Life Lived Well, who convinced me to join their programs (the whole referral thing). The PCCS program I wanted - the one that also helps you navigate the NDIS, Australia's disability scheme - had a waitlist of months. So while I waited, they put me into Wesley Mission's program that was available in the meantime for 3 months.
At Wesley I saw two people, alternating week to week. One week it was Tim, in a wellbeing role; the next, Mina, a social worker with some psychology training. There were "activities" too - walks around the lake, a drumming group, an art group. On the lake walks it was usually just me, sometimes one other person, with Tim and another worker, a Brazilian man I genuinely got along with - very warm, and a big hugger, which I loved (being one myself!). Sadly, toward the end I got cross with him, complaining that the 'outings' were always far away from me, and he explained they were trying to coax a woman who was housebound with agoraphobia to come along, because she lived close by - but I was still unhappy, as in reality it was usually JUST ME (there were very few participants, if any), and maybe one other person sometimes. The agoraphobic lady - she never did come - and I felt penalised for having the courage to DO come out - it was not easy for me either to leave the house, especially in the morning - that was my worst time of the day and the activities were almost always at 9AM or 10AM. In fact, the first time I did the walk activity with them was in Burleigh Heads, a good 20kms away from me (40 minutes drive) and while there were maybe 8 of us, I quickly realised they were all, except me and another lady, working for Wesley.
Mina - the social worker - I liked especially. She was Korean and - at my own request - far more direct than the carefully "polite" Australians around her, and that bluntness was good for me. Because here's a pattern I came to see clearly: so many of the people who didn't really fight for me were, I think, held back by a peculiarly Australian over-politeness - a kind of cowardice about confrontation, even when confrontation is exactly what a moment needs. Mina, while still kind, could be a bit more direct, and had the same lived experience of being from a diverse background; when I named the 'fake-politeness' problem out loud, she agreed it bothered her too. So we got along just fine. That doesn't mean I think she was perfect - I do think sometimes, especially with the OCD part, she was a bit too strict in pushing boundaries, and I am not sure if it was for her benefit or mine. Also, she - like all the other people never gave me PROPER advice on what to do technically during the taper, and the advice was never really about SPECIFICALLY the benzo taper. They weren't allowed I assume by the organisations - there are liability boundaries, I was taught in the Peer Support course that I am (as a peer support person) to refer all 'medical' issues to clinicians. I don't think any of the NGO support people I had ever really tried to help me with that, instead assuming that I did 'my own research'. But it was the clinicians who didn't know what they were doing and caused this issue to start with, and never took responsibility! Maree DID try to refer me to GP she said helped her clients quite a lot, but I was already jaded by them and didn't want another disappointment. With Mina - at least our communication was more natural and less 'posed', and it was good 'talk therapy' sessions.
Something that only struck me later: I'd assumed all these workers were simply "normal" people who'd studied mental health. They carried grand, fake-sounding titles (Aussie institutions love that - imagine a babysitter being called an 'early childhood home-based support worker') that, in my view, were confusing and concealed something instead of celebrating it - because at least some of them had lived through versions of what I was going through. Liam (in the PCCS section below), it turned out, was a peer support worker who'd studied what I later did, with real lived experience - but his title was 'Peer Navigator'. The big-language title confused me. And when I finally understood it - when he explained what he'd studied and encouraged me to do the same - it made a lot of sense, and made me understand why I felt much closer to him.
I tried, at these groups, to make actual friends - including some of the LGBTIQ people who came along. We'd be warm during the sessions, I'd hand over my contact details, and then it would simply never go further. Tim gently warned me not to pin my hopes on friendships there; he warned that many of them had a lot of their own going on.
During an art session, while I was telling my story including the night terrors, a couple of people mentioned they were on Seroquel too, and talked about the "Seroquel dreams" it gave them. Weirdly though, it was all in high spirits, and didn't seem to bother them, like a completely normal thing 'that happens' when taking it. I didn't grasp the significance then - that it carries the same risks as what I was on (I was in fact offered it, as I mentioned in Part 1, and rejected it). Seroquel is an antipsychotic - and yet, exactly like mirtazapine, it gets handed out casually, just for sleep. Those people were in the same boat as me - I just didn't know it, and they didn't either, because it doesn't carry the same Schedule 8 government big-brother rules. I just didn't yet know that every class of psychiatric drug can be as brutal to come off as a benzodiazepine; that benzos are simply the designated "bad boys," the scapegoats, for no better reason than that the label stuck to them first.
I actually went to see PCCS before I even met Maree, to see if they could help. Their offices are at their centre on the Gold Coast Highway in Mermaid Beach - an area I never warmed to: very busy and tacky, and an area I always felt was a bit 'sour'. The receptionist looked like someone had just startled her when she spoke to me, and she sent me to an 'interview room' that had nice colours and a very modern vibe, where a young man (probably 20 or so) walked me through all their programs, none of them specific to anything like my situation. I was actually thinking there would be just 'organic' one on one help instead of 'programs' and it was genuinely confusing - the programs were near-identical, except one ran for a year and one for six months, with different big 'cheerful' names that were confusing. I left and sort of forgot about it. As I mentioned that was before Life Lived Well. However, when I talked to Maree she did put me on a waiting list for one of those programs; Wesley Mission was sort of the 'filler' until a slot became available, and I joined one of the one year programs right after my program in Wesley Mission ended.
I was handed to Alice - who also had a bombastic title, 'Service Specialist' (social worker). I was waiting in the park behind my house - I could usually choose where these visits happened, and it usually wasn't my home - expecting to meet only Alice. Not too far from me, maybe 6 metres away, facing the creek that ran through the park, sat a weird, hippie-looking bloke meditating with his eyes shut, and I remember worrying: there's only one bench, I'm in distress, I don't want a stranger overhearing what I tell Alice. Then Alice arrived and called the hippie over to join us. That was Liam!
This was before Christmas - I was frightened to start tapering again, hadn't sorted the root canal, wasn't yet on the Humacology oils. I told Liam about the night-time hallucinations, and he told me he'd been through something similar himself, and that he'd send me the meditation that had helped him. Just knowing, for the first time, that someone who cared for me had had the same experience and knew how to overcome it made such a big difference. That was the moment I realised he was one of my people - and it let me trust him in a way I couldn't trust the others.
After Christmas we alternated - one week Alice, one week Liam - but it was obvious I connected far more with Liam, so Alice suggested I see only him permanently, and for about a year I saw him almost every Friday (we sometimes changed the day). We'd meet around the 2pm Brisbane Israeli radio show I liked to listen to. He was only ever meant to give me an hour; in reality it was often far more - sometimes three hours, at my place or in the Broadwater Parklands, just talking. By then the oils had me improving fast, so our meetings became less crisis-support and more just two people having genuinely good conversations. This was when AI music was first appearing, and I was floored by how good it was - far beyond AI images or video, indistinguishable from radio hits - and he was as amazed as I was, so we'd talk about that, or do cool things on my computer, or just meet at the Broadwater and talk philosophy, or about our families. My OCD still flared sometimes, and he simply contained it, kindly. After a year of services that referred and waited and backed away, Liam was a person who just kept showing up.
One exchange with Maree from Life Lived Well still frustrates me. She mentioned that they send some clients to The Currumbin Clinic or other detoxes - organisations that mostly handle alcohol and other drugs. I asked her, in frustration, why there was no real help for people like me. She said some of her clients had gone to those detoxes. And did they get better? I asked. Most, she admitted, "relapsed." So why on earth keep sending people there? How is it still not common knowledge that coming off psychiatric drugs takes far longer than a detox program allows - and not only for benzodiazepines, but for every class of them?
Alongside the rooms and the peer workers, I kept trying actual therapy - the thing you're supposed to reach for. The psychologist I saw most through this was Dean Hartley - the one my health-fund referral eventually landed me with, through Lysn. I went to him many times. He tried EMDR with me, which didn't really help, and the talking - pleasant enough as it was - never touched the thing that was actually destroying me. Looking back across all of it, I'd say almost every psychologist I've paid for over the years was a waste of money, and a few were worse than that: a long way from the high ethical standards the profession likes to claim for itself.
One moment with Dean has stuck with me. I had mental OCD at the time, and he knew that I'd occasionally need to perform a reassurance "ceremony" with him. He understood this - and yet one day he snapped, in real frustration: "Oh my God, I don't know if I can go on if you ask me for that ONE more time." It took me completely aback. To his credit, he apologised when I raised it at the next meeting - but I'd been very worried about even raising it; my self-esteem was below ground level and I was scared he'd attack me back or gaslight me. I think he genuinely realised he'd acted unprofessionally. But it tells you how thin the support was, even from the people whose entire job is patience.
I also tried BetterHelp, the big paid online platform, in December 2023; the psychologist it matched me with also worked with addiction and was kinder - someone I could confide in - but that was the ceiling of it: a good word and a sympathetic ear, nothing beyond. Not one of them had anything to offer the medical emergency I was actually living through.
Two of the things that helped weren't people or programs at all - they were objects, and the plain, almost childlike comfort of feeling physically held.
Julie - the healer who'd worked with my sister (from an earlier part) - had told me to take my shoes off and stand on the grass. I didn't really understand why until I watched a documentary about "grounding" (or "earthing") - the idea that direct contact with the earth has a settling effect on the body. I'm not going to make medical claims I can't back up. But it made enough intuitive sense to me that I bought a grounding sheet - and not one of the cheap ones with a single thin strand of conductive thread, the proper heavy-duty kind. I never warmed to it as a sheet; the texture was tough and I didn't like lying directly on it. So instead I sleep holding it, like keeping a hand on something solid. I honestly can't tell you whether it changed anything in my body. What I can tell you is how it made me feel: connected to the earth, quietly plugged back into the whole living network of other people, and - more than anything - a little more secure. When you've spent months feeling unplugged from your own body, that is not nothing.
The other thing was Maree's suggestion: a weighted blanket. So I bought one - and, being me, I went big and got the nine-kilo version. It turned simply getting out of bed into a genuine event - hauling yourself out from under nine kilos is its own small daily comedy. But the weight itself was wonderful - it genuinely feels like being hugged. That's exactly why Maree recommended it: she said it was great for the anxiety while you're lying in bed, and that several of her other clients used one too. When you're going through this largely alone, that steady, hugging weight at night helped more than I'd expected.