A story of addiction: ‘You can’t hide it’
Firefighter Chris Howe had to first save himself, before he could save others
He hated his eyes. Cold, dead and brutally honest, revealing more than he wanted the world to see. They stared back at him, taunting, threatening to reveal a secret so dark and shameful, he couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. So one day, one by one, he took down every mirror in his St. Catharines house but one in the bathroom. He needed it to shave so he covered the top portion with a towel.
Anything that reflected the person he had become was gone.
His eyes mirrored everything he hated about himself, windows to a soul he wanted no one to see.
He saw a loser. A drug addict and alcoholic. A failure as a human being. Selfish, dishonest and self-serving. Manipulative. All his own carefully chosen words. Inside, he was emotionally naked and vulnerable in a world that demanded that he be tough and stoic.
He has attempted suicide three times.
At work, he felt like a charlatan in uniform, impersonating, disappointing, the weakest link in an honourable profession, failing yet again.
In his words: “I’m supposed to have a job saving people’s lives and I couldn’t save my own.”
Chris Howe, 40, is a recovered alcoholic and drug addict.
He’s also a firefighter.
He has served with the Niagara Falls Fire Department for 16 years and is now an acting captain. He is respected. Trusted. A leader and friend that fellow firefighters lean on and confide in. All words he has earned with hard work and humility.
He does not hide from his story.
His other life calling is to expose the soul he concealed for so long. He shares his story of addiction and recovery with matter-of-fact honesty so that others, especially other first responders, will feel comfortable enough to ask for help.
Vulnerability is now his biggest asset. He is honest with himself. Real. He makes amends and delivers honest answers to help others.
At his very worse, he injected cocaine and drank for days at a time. “At times, there were three to fourday benders without sleep,” he says.
A chronic relapser, he spent a decade in and out of recovery. He went to support groups, but never with the intent of quitting for the rest of his life. “I wanted to drink like a normal person and I’m not a normal person,” he says.
Desperate to belong, he found misguided acceptance in a community of other drinkers and users, as addiction destroyed his life. Caught in the deception of distorted thoughts, he denied he had a problem.
“I wanted to be perceived as a heavy drinker and a partier,” he says. “That guy is revered.”
His addictions started long before he became a firefighter, but struggling to live with the contradiction between his inner shame and the valiant person he was supposed to be, pushed him deeper into a world of self-medication.
On the day Chris joined Station 1 on Morrison Street in 2003, a senior firefighter offered this advice to the new recruits: “Never show your weaknesses around here,” he told them, “Because we prey on our weak.”
He never came to work drunk or high – although he often called in sick – but certainly there were times when he arrived unfit for duty. His recovery date is January 2, 2011.
These days, Chris is driven by a duty to give back.
In September, he spoke at a national conference of fire chiefs in Ottawa. He’s made a video, a raw mini-documentary, Unmasked, The Journey, that shows the destruction of addition and hope for recovery. He shares posts on social media and leads recovery meetings at the Niagara Detention Centre, helping inmates. And more recently, he’s being sponsored by EHN Canada, a chain of private hospitals and clinics that treat people with advanced mental health and addiction issues, to travel across Canada, speaking to firefighters, police officers and paramedics.
Some 1,000 clients a year are first responders, says Marie-Claude Ivens, director of business development for EHN Canada.
“He’s helping us break down the walls of stigma,” she says. “There’s a culture of being tough, being able to handle anything. Not showing weakness and vulnerability.”
A survey published last year in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry found that just over 44 per cent of first responders show signs of mental health issues, compared to 10 per cent of the civilian population.
His first audience was at home, when he asked Niagara Falls Fire Chief Jim Boutilier permission to share his story with the people closest to him. He hopes his words will break down a stigma that prevents firefighters and other emergency responders from asking for help.
Most of the department’s 230 staff has heard his presentation.
“I want everyone to go home whole at the end of the day,” says Boutilier.
Whole physically. And whole mentally.
The department is implementing the national program, Road to Mental Readiness, designed to reduce the stigma of mental illness and promote resiliency.
Simply put, Boutilier wants to break down the deeply ingrained, old school “suck it up buttercup” attitude pervasive in the culture of first responders. A culture that dictates: “If you have a problem, keep it to
yourself, keep it confidential. Don’t show weakness.”
He encouraged Chris to speak at the chief ’s conference and attended himself along with deputy chief Jo Zambito as a show of support.
“You can’t hide it. You have to get it out,” he says.
“Our entire department is better for it now.”
•••••
Riding back to the hall after a tough call, it’s common for firefighters to tell jokes to relieve stress. “At the time, that feels great,” says firefighter Justin Canestraro, one of Chris’ close friends.
“There’s four guys and you’re laughing and no matter what you just had to deal with, somehow now you’re laughing and everything’s going to be fine.”
Problem was, it ended when they arrived back at the station. No one talked about feelings. “It’s always the way it was. You just sucked it up. Suck it up and keep moving.”
Slowly, that culture is changing. “We do talk to each other. We do check in on each other. Are you OK after that, because I keep thinking about it? And if you’re thinking about it too, then why don’t we talk about it together?
“Probably everybody in the fire hall has got something in the back of their mind they can’t shake.”
He admires Chris for the risk he took coming clean with his story.
“I know people have gone to Chis to talk,” he says. “That was never done before.”
Years ago, Justin was part of a difficult call involving a child. “For a long time, I told family, ‘Yeah, I’m talking to people at work and, really, I was just bottling it all up’.”
One afternoon, over coffee and conversation with Chris, he shared his story. “I was probably just sick of keeping it in for so long and firefighters keep it in. That’s what we do.
“I had been holding it in for years. Other calls piled up.
“I just blurted it out, ‘I can’t stop thinking about this’ and just went into it.”
He remembers exactly how Chris explained it to him. Talking about trauma is like flushing a toilet. “Stuff builds up so much and if you don’t flush it, it starts to overflow.
“And then you’re sitting there, cleaning it up. And sometimes you can’t clean it up fast enough and it just keeps overflowing.
“Sometimes you just need to flush the toilet.”
The flush felt good.
“Sometimes, what a group of alpha males need, is a guy to take a leap. And then everybody else starts to follow suit.
“And sometimes, all you need to do is say the words out loud and it just takes the weight off your shoulders.
“If one firefighter – or anybody – decides to talk to somebody or share something, I think we’re on the right track.”
•••••
In a decade, there is better awareness, better resources and better treatment programs for first responders dealing with mental health issues, says Ivens.
“But people are still living under the fear of stigma,” she says. “And they are still suffering in silence.”
For years, asking for help was labelled weak. “They weren’t tough enough to do their jobs,” she says.
“People who do this job, it’s a calling. They have a very big sense of duty. And to be told you’re not good enough to do this, you’re not tough enough to do this job, not only are they losing their career but they’re losing their entire identity of themselves.
“A lot of them suffered significantly in the shadow.”
Untreated, exposure to traumatic events at work festers and infects their daily lives. Nightmares. Anxiety. Depression. Unrelenting hyper-vigilance and always on guard. Flashbacks. Insomnia.
Turning to alcohol is easy.
Drinks after work is a normal, even an encouraged, part of first responder culture. It’s a way to bond, strengthen camaraderie and relieve stress. “Because they are bonded by such traumatic and stressful events, they sometimes lose the ability to relate to people who don’t do what they do,” she says.
“They feel that no one will understand me except the people who went to calls with me, the people who fought fires with me, the people who went to Afghanistan with me.”
But social drinks can turn into drinks to self-medicate.
“Your entire universe supports this highway down to addiction,” she says. “And when it gets there, it ends in a hard wall. And that hard wall has been in place for a long time.”
•••••
The day that saved Chris’ life began as the day he planned to die. He sat in his garage and wrote out a list of ways to kill himself.
“I was done. I was completely done with life,” he says
He really can’t explain what happened next except to say that contemplating the finality of death made him think about life. He describes it as an emotional rush. A realization it wasn’t death he wanted, but a different way of living. All those years of support groups, a seed of hope had been planted, he says.
That night, he walked into the support group he had attended for years. “Everything looked and felt different,” he says. Someone shook his hand and held on. He cried. In circle, he opened his heart and talked about what he’d been contemplating that morning. And at the end of the meeting, he was surrounded by friends.
“What really struck me in that moment, was that all I had to do is say I needed help,” he says.
“It’s the only thing you have to do alone.”
There are many parts of his recovery. Suffice to say, one important piece is humility, facing his fear of rejection and atoning for past wrongs. Years recovered, it’s still the fabric of his life.
Given the opportunity, he will stop past acquaintances on the street: “Do you have five minutes to chat? I know you probably hate me …” And so it begins.
Some have become allies; others still hate him and walk away. Either way, he embraces the possibility of having opened a door.
At work, he began by asking for help, often learning from less senior firefighters. “I had to ask people to teach me how to do the job,” he says. Short on confidence, he second guessed every decision. In time, he built healthy relationships, engaged in life and became part of the team. He had the confidence to handle increased responsibility and pressure and earned the position of acting captain.
These days, his sense of belonging comes from something more powerful than any drug.
It comes from life.
He travels, connects with close friends and family, and has found purpose in helping others. He manages stress and finds excitement in muay thai, a form of kickboxing. And somewhere along the way, the mirrors returned. He likes what he sees, inside and out.
“I don’t have to be who I think you want me to be,” he says. “I’m comfortable in my own skin.
“I have something to offer the world.” Find Howe on Instagram at @_Chris_Howe_ and Facebook.