Addiction: the Dark Night of the Soul/ Nad+: the Light of Hope

by Paula Norris Mestayer, Leslee Goodman (With)

Overview

In the pages of this book, Paula Norris Mestayer shares her remarkable story of 18 years of work treating the brain disease of addiction. By delivering intravenous infusions of NAD+—a natural coenzyme of niacin—her treatment enables patients to kick opiates, alcohol, benzodiazepines, methamphetamines, and more, in 10 short days—with minimal withdrawal symptoms or cravings. She explains—in laymen's terms—what is known thus far about why NAD+ is effective, and shares the inspirational stories of people who have journeyed through addiction's "dark night of the soul" and found their way to health, wholeness, and freedom once again.
What others say about this book

"When we fully understand the role of NAD+ in overcoming oxidative stress, which is a leading cause of illness and death in developed countries, it will be obvious why it works to treat addiction."
— Dr. Ross Grant, University of Sydney, Australia

"I think this is going to be the beginning of something big, especially if Paula has anything to do with it."
— James P. Watson, MD, Clinical Faculty, UCLA School of Medicine

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982218140
Publisher:	Balboa Press
Publication date:	01/17/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Paula Norris Mestayer, M.Ed., LPC, FAPA, is the groundbreaking therapist who pioneered the development of American protocols for utilizing NAD+ to effectively treat addiction—with minimal withdrawal symptoms and without substituting another narcotic. The founder of Springfield Wellness Center, she has helped thousands of people successfully break the rehab/relapse cycle.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Southern Dumb Belle

As I know from personal experience, the dark night of the soul is the painful and terrifying dissolution of all that one believes in, lives by, lives for, considers one's purpose, and defines oneself as. It is a sense of meaninglessness so vast it feels like floating in a dark space without gravity to indicate up or down. ALONE! No beginning and no end, just suspended in the word "why," hoping for an answer, which doesn't come until at last it is over and you are no longer floating. It is an existential crisis of the ultimate betrayal. At least that is how I defined mine. Where was the God I believed in? Why would He allow me to feel this terror when I had kept my covenant? Was this a punishment for sins I didn't even know I'd committed? Why me? I'd always strived to be "good." Does God really exist after all? If He doesn't, what can I hold on to? Nothingness? Is this really all there is? Are all my concepts of self and other and meaning and faith just products of my conditioning?

The dark night of the soul often follows some tragic event for which there is no satisfactory explanation. So far, my life has given me two dark nights. The first, which I will share now, began in 1975. The second, which I will hold for another time, began in 1992. The first was the death of my father and the death of my marriage within a few months of each other. While I was reeling from the narcissistic wound of my husband leaving me for another woman, my father, my hero, died suddenly, leaving my mother and me to grieve separately but together in our own personal darkness. We each eventually found our way out, but not without significant personal effort. Now that the two men I loved and admired most were no longer in my life, I began my odyssey to redefine myself by searching for the answer to the question, "Why?"

The length of time a dark night lasts varies from person to person, as does the number of dark-night episodes one might have. My work with those who suffer from the scourge of addiction reveals that dark nights can last for years, or even for a lifetime.

St. John of the Cross believed that the dark night of the soul was God's way of perfecting us. A Spanish poet and mystic born in 1542 and canonized in 1726, St. John of the Cross was a Carmelite priest who worked with St. Teresa of Avila to reform the Order. He suffered greatly at the hands of his brother Carmelites when they imprisoned and tortured him for his attempts at reformation. Nine months later he escaped from prison, where he wrote his famous poem, Dark Night of the Soul, detailing the excruciating despair of his ego-death when he nearly lost his faith.

"Being perfected through suffering" was not the kind of belief I held before going through my own dark night, but I can confess now that these anguished periods were the best things that ever happened to me. It is during these times that we are the most egoless. Our pain is so deep that we barely exist, wandering around in disbelief trying to redefine who we are. From that, wisdom is born.

Several memorable events took place during my time of searching. One, in particular, is the reason I am even writing this book about NAD+ and why I risked so much to bring it back to the United States.

I began to come out of this dark night by returning to school for a second graduate degree, this time in psychotherapy. I had neatly identified this as the perfect way to find the answers I was searching for, without having to expose my vulnerabilities to a therapist. I'd study the psyche in general, rather than having to reveal mine or so I thought.

I was accepted to a unique program through Tulane University in which I did most of my coursework on campus, but the specialty courses I wanted to take were offered in the summer at Connecticut College and Duke University. These were followed by a six-month internship in New York at the Manhattan Children's Psychiatric Hospital.

My excitement at being accepted overshadowed my responsibilities at the time. I was in the middle of renovating my first house and had two weeks to shut down the renovation, ship my three dogs to my mother, and pack for a summer in New London, Connecticut. Those two weeks sped by, and before I knew it, I was off the plane and in a taxi on my way to Connecticut College. Wow, what a whirlwind.

The taxi driver, interestingly, was going through a divorce, too, so I was very capable of empathizing and "sharing his pain," as my own divorce was less than a year old.

I got out of the taxi and carried my luggage to the dorm, when it hit me. Out of nowhere came a surge of anxiety that stopped me in my tracks. My joy and excitement had successfully hidden my fear of academia. Here I was in a strange town, alone, about to face a summer of learning in an Ivy League environment, when all I knew were LSU and Tulane — both schools in the Deep South. My fear of being "found out," that I might not be smart enough to compete academically, came crashing down on me. I was certain I would be out of place and looked upon negatively because of the unfair perceptions of the South that are held by some in the East. In fact, a verse from a Randy Newman song about LSU, "where they go in dumb and come out dumb, too," kept skipping like a scratched record in my mind. I had always felt insecure academically, but I hid it very well — or so I thought. Even though the "smart kids" always wanted to play or hang out with me and my teachers gave me good grades, I thought I had merely fooled them all into thinking I was smart.

So here I was standing at the front desk of the dorm, receiving my key and room number while thoughts of running home and getting my money back swirled in my head. I walked timidly down the long hall, scanning each door for my number, and taking deep breaths as I inserted the key into the door that was mine. I opened the door, walked in, dropped my luggage, and leaned back against the door as it closed. I was terrified. How was I going to be able to get through this semester? I started crying. I was on my own; utterly alone. My fear and sadness were indistinguishable; both emotions were swirling so fast they became one. I just cried, leaning against the door, which I can feel again merely by writing this.

What happened next is hard to believe, but it is the unadulterated truth.

I told myself to straighten up, get a grip, and then I prayed something like, "Please, God, oh please, please let me know I am doing the right thing. Please, I know it is silly, but give me a sign that I am where I am supposed to be and doing what I am supposed to do." I paused for a moment, not really expecting a response, before deciding that I would open the beautiful draperies covering the large window and check out the view. I crossed the room, drew back the draperies, and saw a magnificent blue spruce perfectly framed by the window. My thought was a question: Is this my sign? It didn't feel like a sign, so I shrugged it off and, just as I began to walk away, looked down and saw a single word carved into the window frame. "PAULA," my name, in all capital letters. Yes, I was meant to be here.

So, what does a stunned young woman from the South do when something like this happens? She starts laughing gratefully, accepting the answered prayer as a gift and a sign that she is on the right path. That path has led me to help many others experiencing their dark nights of the soul, wrestling with the plague of addiction, depression, anxiety or bereavement. Having "walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death" with so many of them, I can tell you for certain there is light on the other side.

CHAPTER 2

Wrestling with Addiction: Our Collective Dark Night

The United States is in the grip of a lethal epidemic. It's an outbreak that affects virtually every American family and that claims more lives each year than traffic accidents, homicides, and suicides combined. It often takes adults in the prime of their lives, or even younger, and turns them into desperate skeletons, cruel caricatures of their former selves. Before it kills them, it typically destroys them in other ways: stripping them of dignity and self-respect; taking their hopes, their jobs, their families, their friends. It often results in the loss of their houses, their cars, their savings, if they have any. If their disease causes them to run afoul of law enforcement, rather than the medical establishment, it also takes their freedom. Perhaps worst of all, it takes their future. With few effective treatment options — and no cures — its victims believe they are locked in a hopeless battle with this disease for the rest of their lives.

The epidemic, of course, is addiction, and experts say there is virtually no family in America that isn't dealing with it — or the tragic aftermath of it, because all too often family members find out about this illness when it has killed someone they love.

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 21.5 million American adults (aged 12 and older) battled a substance use disorder in 2014.1 The NSDUH is the primary source for statistical information on illicit drug use, alcohol use, substance use disorders (SUDs), mental health issues, and co-occurring SUDs and mental health issues for the civilian, noninstitutionalized population of the United States. Its results are, therefore, probably low, as they exclude members of the military, as well as people in hospitals, rehab facilities, prisons, and other institutions.

Adults with "alcohol use disorder" (AUD) topped the charts at 17.0 million civilians. Adolescents 12-17 with AUD added another 679,000. The addiction that is getting all the media attention, however, is to prescription opiates, which claimed an astonishing 2.1 million adults in 2012, while an additional 467,000 Americans were addicted to the street opiate, heroin. Third on the list — and in some ways far more frightening because of the speed at which it kills — was the number of "regular" methamphetamine users: 1.5 million. Another frightening figure: 1.1 million kids aged 12-17 had used inhalants at least once in the past 12 months, and a whopping 59% of them had at least one friend who "was using an inhalant on a regular basis."

Although the study didn't include estimates for the number of adults abusing benzodiazepines (central nervous system depressants like Valium and Xanax), researchers can tell us that more than 33,000 Americans were hospitalized for benzodiazepine overdose in 2012 and that more than 50 million prescriptions for these sedatives are written in the U.S. each year.

Compounding addiction's tragic effects are that it's an illness for which people are ashamed to seek treatment. A 2015 study by Columbia University found that "Only one in 10 people with addiction to alcohol and/or drugs report receiving any treatment at all. Compare this to the fact that about 70 percent of people with hypertension or diabetes do receive treatment. Can you imagine accepting that degree of neglect if that were the case for heart or lung disease, cancer, asthma, diabetes, tuberculosis, stroke and other diseases of the brain?"

There are various reasons for individuals' reluctance to seek medical care, most related in some way to the issue of shame: shame to admit they're addicted and need help; fear they won't be able to beat the addiction, thereby increasing their feelings of failure and inadequacy. They're also fearful of the cost of treatment and worried that their health insurance won't cover it — because it's a character defect, a lifestyle choice, not an illness. Then, too, in the case of opiates and benzodiazepines, it was the medical establishment that got them addicted in the first place — and, as they grew increasingly tolerant, and then addicted, cut them off. Finally, addicts have little hope that treatment will work. They've heard too many stories of treatment being just another revolving door: in a matter of months, the patients relapse; addiction wins again.

Why is America facing this epidemic? Why are millions of people seeking the relief of addictive narcotics to function in our world?

Pain is a significant factor. According to a recent Institute of Medicine report, some 100 million Americans live with chronic pain including low back pain (28.1% of chronic pain sufferers), severe headache or migraine (16.1%), neck pain (15.1%), knee pain (19.5%), shoulder pain (9.0%), finger pain (7.6%), and hip pain (7.1%). Because everything in the body is connected, most pain sufferers experience pain at multiple sites: low back pain leads to pain in the hips and legs; neck pain leads to headaches or migraines, etc. (ibid) Other common causes of chronic pain include cancer, arthritis, and neurogenic pain, which is pain resulting from damage to the peripheral nerves or to the central nervous system itself. This type of pain alone is at epidemic proportions according to Tina Tockarshewsky, of the Neuropathy Association, who said "More than 6 million Americans have unrelenting nerve pain. Now it will increase tremendously because of the epidemic of diabetes." (ibid)

Large as these numbers are, they continue to understate the level of pain we are collectively experiencing as a people. They don't include pain in children, for example, or pain-related conditions such as lupus, sickle-cell disease, anky-losing spondylitis, and others. Also, both the NHIS and the NHANES studies "use samples of civilian, noninstitutionalized populations. They do not include people with chronic pain who are in the military or live in corrections facilities, nursing homes, or other chronic care facilities." (ibid)

As a healthcare provider treating people with addiction, acute and chronic pain, as well as post-traumatic stress, I can confirm that our veterans are returning from combat overseas with very high levels of pain — physical, psychic, and emotional. If millions of civilians are experiencing chronic pain, undoubtedly a high percentage of members of our military is also suffering — in VA hospitals and while still on active duty.

And the incidence of chronic pain is likely only to get worse. First, we're getting older, which means that more Americans will experience diseases associated with chronic pain — diabetes, cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, and cancer, among others. (ibid, Cherry et al., 2010)

Second, we're getting fatter, and obesity leads to chronic conditions with painful symptoms, such as diabetes-associated neuropathy, and orthopedic problems, including cartilage degradation. (ibid, Richettel et al., 2011) As a result, more Americans will have joint replacement surgeries and at younger ages. (ibid, Harms et al., 2007; Changulani et al., 2008) These surgeries themselves can sometimes cause persistent pain that interferes with a full recovery and a resumed quality of life. Obesity also is associated with higher rates of other types of pain, notably migraine. (ibid, Peterlin et al., 2009)

Third, as the Committee on Advancing Pain Research, Care, and Education points out, progress in saving the lives of people with catastrophic injuries related to work, sports, car accidents, or military combat who would have died in decades past, creates growing numbers of relatively young people at high risk of lifelong chronic pain. Similarly, modern medicine can help many people with serious illnesses survive longer, but the cost of survival may be debilitating pain. Cancer chemotherapy, for example, can save a life but result in neuropathic pain.

Fourth, all surgical patients are at risk of both acute and chronic pain as a result of their surgery. Currently, about 60% of surgical procedures in the U.S. are performed on an outpatient basis, where persistent problems with adequate pain control after ambulatory surgery are well documented. The most significant risk of undermanaged acute postsurgical pain is that it may develop into chronic pain. (ibid, Rawal, 2007; Schug and Chong, 2009)

Back pain is the leading cause of disability in Americans under 45 years old. More than 26 million Americans between the ages of 20-64 experience frequent back pain.

A study of chronic low back pain conducted in North Carolina found "an alarming increase in the prevalence of chronic [low back pain] from 1992 to 2006 ... across all population subgroups." The prevalence for the total population studied more than doubled over the period, from about 4% to more than 10%, and for women (all ages) and men aged 45-54, prevalence nearly tripled. Although these data are from a single state, a similar growth pattern has been seen in national data for users of the Department of Veterans Affairs health system, which show an annualized increase in the prevalence of low back pain of about 5% per year, more substantial than increases in three other conditions studied (depression, diabetes, and hypertension).

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Addiction the Dark Night of the Soul NAD+ the Light of Hope"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Paula Norris Mestayer.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword, xi,
Preface, xiii,
Acknowledgements, xv,
Chapter 1 Southern Dumb Belle, 1,
Chapter 2 Wrestling with Addiction: Our Collective Dark Night, 7,
Chapter 3 Opiate Addiction: A Lethal Side-Effect of Pain Relief, 17,
Chapter 4 Synthetic Opioids: More Potent, More Deadly, 23,
Chapter 5 Methamphetamines, Cocaine, Benzos, and Alcohol: A Fleeting Sense Of Well-Being And Control, 29,
Chapter 6 The Cultural Becomes Personal, 49,
Chapter 7 What's So Special About NAD+?, 57,
Chapter 8 Today Is Veterans Day, 77,
Chapter 9 The Qi Runs Through It, 85,
Chapter 10 Accidental Discoveries, 103,
Chapter 11 Why Isn't This Everywhere?, 115,
Chapter 12 On The Hunt for Empirical Evidence, 137,
Chapter 13 Resources for Spreading the Health, 175,
Chapter 14 There Are Angels Among Us, 179,
Paula Norris Mestayer, M.Ed., LPC, FAPA, 189,