Sarah Hiscox On Addiction, Self-Esteem & Learning To Silence Her Inner Critic

Looking back, do you believe addiction was the problem or was it a symptom of something deeper?

“Definitely a symptom. It’s only from having suffered addiction and come out the other side that I can look back with any certainty and think about the reasons it happened. When I look back at my earliest memories as a child, I was making up stories about myself to tell other people. My first drug was fantasy, as it were. I told people at school that my father was Björn Borg because I thought that would make them like me. Obviously, it was attention-seeking but there was a reason for that. I didn’t think I was enough just to come in as Sarah – I had to have this huge story that would come in with me and then you’d like me. Then I would be enough.

“I think that feeling of not being enough, which definitely led to the various addictions I had, came from a difficult childhood. I’m very careful not to blame my parents because then I think you become a victim. My belief is that victims don’t recover or get any better because, if you believe you’re a victim, it’s always somebody else’s fault, which means you never really have to look at yourself.

“My parents did the best they could with what they had, but they were neglectful. My mother was an alcoholic and my father wasn’t around. If you start with that as a parent, you’re unable to give your children what they need – that security and love – because you can’t give it to yourself.

Obviously, I’m not a doctor but that’s my belief. From speaking to other people who have issues with addiction or low self-esteem, it seems to be a similar story.

“What’s interesting about women our age, who were parented in the 1970s, is that it seems quite common for them to have had parents who were neglectful and put themselves first. They were the children of parents who had gone through the Second World War, so they had their own trauma. I think my addiction definitely came from my childhood. It was a symptom.”

You’ve spoken about struggling with low self-esteem for much of your life and a negative voice in your head. What did that voice sound like?

“It was always there, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to voice it or understand what it was. It was going to rehab and having therapy that I really started to recognise it. It’s almost like an unwanted companion living rent-free in your head. Through looking at my addictions and where they took me, I started recognising that voice.

“I know very clearly what it is now and it is an unwanted visitor. If I spoke to my children the way I used to speak to myself, they would have been taken away from me. It was so abusive and aggressive. I don’t know where it came from, but I know it’s there and it’s louder at some times than at others. Since I’ve been in recovery, worked on it and recognised it, it’s much quieter than it was.

“But there was a time when it was my whole being. That was the voice I listened to. It was saying, ‘You’re not enough. You’re not pretty enough. You’re not funny enough. You’re not clever enough. You’re just not enough in any area.’ I would constantly compare myself to others. I recognise that voice now, and I know what to do with it and how to cope with it, whereas I didn’t before.”

Are there any specific techniques you’ve learnt to help you deal with it?

“First and foremost, I recognise the voice. I know there is a difference between my well voice – that’s me, that’s Sarah – and the voice of my low self-esteem, which is almost like a separate entity. I know when it invades. I can hear it starting. For instance, I put on a skirt the other day. I don’t wear skirts often, but it was very hot, so I was pushed into it! I looked at my legs and didn’t like the skin. I could hear that voice saying, ‘Oh my God, your legs are hideous. The skin on them is ageing.’ I knew that voice, and I said, ‘No, I’m not going to listen to it.’ Sometimes I will say out loud, ‘I’m not listening to this.’ For some reason, when you voice it, it quietens it. It makes me feel a little taller and prouder because I’m not listening to it.

“A couple of years ago, I read a piece by a psychologist about the destructive inner voice. It said a brilliant technique was to voice it and say to yourself, ‘I’m not listening to you. I’m not doing that today.’ It’s not about being aggressive with yourself. If your little girl came to you and said, ‘Mummy, I hate the skin on my legs. It’s ugly’, what would you say to her? You wouldn’t say, ‘You’re right. You need to put on a pair of trousers.’ You’d say, ‘my darling, you’ve got beautiful legs. You’re a beautiful girl.’ You need to treat yourself as you would treat your daughter or your son. That’s a brilliant technique because you almost step away from yourself and look at how you’re treating yourself. You think, ‘What am I doing? Why am I telling myself this? How is this going to help?’

“A few years ago, a friend of mine who is a psychotherapist was asking me about addiction and self-esteem. She asked why I thought I had been an addict. I said, ‘I think it’s because the core of who I am feels as though I’m not good enough. I’m not enough. But that’s okay. I’ve learnt to live alongside it and not do destructive things with it. I used to be very self-destructive, and now I’m not.’ She said, ‘Who told you that? I replied, ‘Who told me what?’ She said, ‘Who told you you weren’t good enough?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. It’s just something I know.’ She said, ‘What if it’s not true? What if you’ve been telling yourself a lie your whole life?’ It was like a little light bulb going off in my head. I’m sure I’d heard it before but, for some reason, at that moment, it made so much sense. I thought, ‘My God, what a waste of time.’ I’m 58 and I’ve spent most of those years telling myself and believing something that just isn’t true.”

Do you think that belief came from how other people treated you?

“Absolutely. Somebody, at some point in your past, has given you that belief or you have given yourself that belief because of how others have treated you or spoken to you. But it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. It’s about what you’re going to do with it now. Maybe it was my mother when I was four telling me I wasn’t pretty enough or thin enough. That’s irrelevant now. It’s about what I do today to combat it. I don’t want to waste any more time thinking about it. I want to be liberated from it.

“Now, it’s much clearer to me what is true and what is not. I can make that decision every day, every ten minutes or every half an hour: I am good enough. You have to tell yourself that. It isn’t rocket science but, for some reason, people really struggle with it. They don’t like to talk about self-esteem because I want you to think I’m this capable, intelligent, a wonderful woman. I want you to think I’m in charge of my own faculties and I know who I am, so that’s the image I’m going to give out. I was very good at that, but it wasn’t true. I think it’s helpful to shine a light on it and say, ‘Yes, I really struggle with this stuff’.”

Do you think women in their 40s, 50s and 60s were sold the idea that they should be able to have it all? How has that affected women’s self-esteem?

“It hugely impacts your self-esteem and I absolutely believe that. I had my first two children very young in my mid-20s. None of my friends were married or had children at that time and they were all on these career trajectories. I had stopped working to bring up my boys. That was probably the worst time of all. I felt like such an underachiever. I felt invisible.

“I remember going to people’s houses or parties and people would ask, ‘What do you do?’ Panic and fear would envelop me. I’d think, ‘Oh my God, what do I do? I don’t do anything.’ I was doing something. I was looking after two boys, and anyone who has had two small boys knows how exhausting that is. You don’t stop at six o’clock and come home. I would go into an absolute panic about it and that definitely impacted my self-esteem. When friends started to have children and most of them were still working, it made me feel even worse. I felt incapable. I struggled with the isolation of being a mother of two children alone while my husband went out to work. I had a part-time job with a friend, but I just felt it wasn’t enough. Nothing I did was enough. Having those feelings of low self-esteem was probably the worst time in my life.”

Was that also when your heroin addiction was at its worst?

“That was when my heroin addiction really took off, because the terrible thing about heroin is that it kills all those feelings. That huge, gaping void I’d had my entire life – the feeling of not being enough – was something I’d tried to fill with fantasy, pills and food. I was bulimic for a long time. Eventually, with heroin, that void just filled up. I felt enough. I felt normal. I thought, ‘Oh, this is how everybody else feels.’

“I could look you in the eye and have a conversation without this committee in my head telling me I was rubbish at this and rubbish at that, and that you weren’t interested. It just went. When you’ve lived your life with those voices, having them taken away is the most extraordinary, liberating feeling. Of course, you’re destroying everything around you. By the time I started to realise that, it was too late. I was addicted.

“It’s very difficult for people who haven’t suffered addiction to understand what a monster addiction is. Women lose their children all the time because of addiction, but it isn’t because they don’t love their children. It’s because this monster is so much bigger than them and everything around them.

“I work in prisons now. When I first got clean, I worked in Holloway, which was a women’s prison. It has closed down now, but it was the only women’s prison in London. Around 90% of the women there were in prison because of drugs. They weren’t bad people. They were good people who wanted to be better people, but addiction was robbing them of everything. It’s a huge monster that needs to be constantly fed, and it’s very difficult to escape its clutches.”

At what point did you realise the harshest relationship you had was with yourself?

“It was definitely when I started going into treatment centres and having therapy. I realised there was this outside noise that I had to deal with, and it is like a battle. It’s a constant battle. You wake up and the voices start: you’re not this, you’re not that or you’re too much of this and too much of that. It’s exhausting. When you discover something that takes those voices away, it’s such a relief. When I first started going into treatment and having therapy, that was when I recognised this horror that was dictating everything to me.”

How do you move from self-hatred to self-compassion?

“It’s a slow process. It isn’t a pill you can take and then feel better. It sounds boring, but it is about putting the work in. For me, it’s staying clean and sober, trying to live in the present and having a routine to my day. Doing an exercise class in the morning makes me feel better about myself.

It’s like a dripping tap, but then you get these moments of realisation when you think, ‘Oh my God, I feel good about myself.’ Not better than anybody else and not like a megalomaniac, but as good as. Those are wonderful moments of serenity, when you think, ‘I’m okay as I am. I don’t want or need to be anything more.’

“It doesn’t mean you don’t have ambition or strive for things but, within yourself, you feel okay. It’s a constant process, and you realise you get better at it. It’s like anything with practice. If you are continually compassionate and accepting of yourself, then you will become more compassionate and accepting of yourself. If you continually berate yourself, you will constantly berate yourself and you won’t feel good about yourself.

“Negative thoughts are so familiar. It’s like getting into a warm bath. Someone who was a lot more scientific than me described it by saying that you create these synapses in your brain. You’ve been going down the same pathways for so long that it becomes automatic. You have to create new inroads and new synapses to develop different ways of thinking. You have to keep going over it and over it: ‘I am good enough.’ It sounds silly, but it works for me.”

How did becoming sober change the way you viewed yourself? Was there a particular turning point?

“I didn’t have an epiphany. I didn’t fall to my knees one day with a shaft of light enveloping me and think, ‘I get it. I’m healed. Hallelujah!’ I’ve heard that happen to people but, sadly, it didn’t happen to me. Again, it happened over time. For me, I can only connect with myself and who I really am if I’m clean and sober. There’s nothing in the way. It’s almost like turning up for yourself. I can only turn up for myself if I’m clean and sober. I can’t just have a drink. It isn’t possible. I am an addict through and through. The only way I can be my true self is by being clean and sober.

“After about three months clean, my life had changed. When you put down something that has been destroying you and everything around you for so long, and then move away from it, things change very quickly. They changed very quickly for me. I was allowed to see my children again. I started reconnecting with friends and family. I saw a change in my life quite quickly and, when you see a change for the good, you want to do more of it.”

Having rebuilt your life and your family, what has that taught you about forgiveness?

“I had to earn forgiveness from other people, including my husband and my children. That taught me that forgiveness and trust aren’t things you simply get. They’re earned. My husband divorced me after eight years of marriage. Although I had been skirting around and playing with addiction before that, it really took off when he took the children away. That went on for four years.

“When I got properly clean, we got back together after six months. It was tentative, but he could see a difference. There had been so many times before when I’d said I was clean and I was lying. This time, he could see that I was different.

“Usually, when couples divorce, it’s because somebody has had an affair or they’ve fallen out of love. That wasn’t the case with us. He had to divorce me to protect himself and the children. When he saw me well again, he thought there was a chance we could recreate our family, which, luckily, we did.

“Self-forgiveness definitely took time because I would torture myself. I mean literally torture myself with the things I had done. I would lie awake at night going through times when I had overdosed or the awful situations I’d found myself in. I would really torture myself with them. It took time before that stopped. Eventually, I realised I didn’t feel guilty anymore. I felt sad and I still feel sad about what happened. It was sad and that is an appropriate feeling. But I don’t feel guilty anymore and I don’t feel that I need to forgive myself anymore. I have forgiven myself.

“It was nearly 25 years ago. There is a fair distance between the person I was when I was using and the person I am today. Having said that, when I recorded the audiobook, it all felt very close again. When I was writing the book, I felt somewhat disconnected from what had happened. But when I had to go into the studio and read it aloud, it felt as though it was right on my shoulder. There were times when I broke down and couldn’t finish a sentence. Reading about the time I had to go to court and the children were taken away was heartbreaking. The difference now is that I had compassion for myself, rather than thinking, ‘You’re a terrible, terrible person. How could you have let that happen?’ I felt sorry for myself. I thought, ‘God, it was awful.’ I had compassion. But it definitely took time.”

For a woman who recognises that relentless inner critic, what is the first step she can take to challenge it?

“The first step is to recognise it. Because it’s so familiar, we don’t even know we’re doing it half the time. Learn to recognise it and say, ‘There it is. I can hear it now. I’m not listening to you.’ Once you start recognising it, you can see how often you do it. Then you can do something about it. You can think, ‘Okay, it’s here. I know what it is. I can hear it, but I’m not going to listen to it.’ You can make that choice. We are the controllers of our own minds. It isn’t you who is making me think like this about myself. It’s me. If I’m able to make myself think negatively about myself, then I’m also able to let myself think positively about myself. It’s a choice. But recognising it is the first step, for sure.”  

Finally, if you could go back and speak to the girl who believed she wasn’t enough, what would you tell her?

“I feel so much compassion for that little girl. Without sounding really cheesy, I would go and give her a hug and tell her she was loveable and that she was loved, because I don’t think I felt that.

"When I imagine myself as a little girl, I’m always on my own. I would go and give her a hug and say, ‘You are loved.’ It’s really important to love yourself. We can dress it up in confusing and clever-sounding ways, but it is about kindness. There’s nothing out there that is going to make you feel better. It’s all in here. It’s about making that decision, sometimes every five or ten minutes at the beginning: ‘I’m not going to listen to it. I’m not going to listen to it.’ The voice is still there, but now I check it.” 

Follow @SarahHiscox23 and buy Sarah’s book here