Category Archives: alcoholism

Trust Your Gut

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There is nothing mystical about hunches, intuition, and trusting your gut. We are all the sum total of millions–billions–of experiences, and we remember most of them on some level. We are well-equipped to let our subconscious minds help us out with problems, armed as they are with that wealth of experience.

But we often–if not usually–force ourselves to ignore those gut feelings, the feeling that something is just sort of “icky.” We want to do something, say something, buy something, to fill that empty place inside, and we think up all sorts of ways to justify our wants to ourselves and ignore the message that our subconscious mind is sending loud and clear, if we choose to hear it. Then we go on with the self-deception and make up ways to justify whatever it is to others–our partner, our business associates, our sponsors, our friends but, ultimately, to ourselves.

Good, healthy ideas seldom need justification. Feeling a need to explain, to justify, should tell us that something’s wrong somewhere. It may simply be a neurotic need on our part to assure ourselves and everyone else that we’re really OK, but there’s also an excellent possibility that we’re about to venture where we ought to fear to tread, guided by the child inside who is telling us it’s OK because I Want, I Want, I Want. In either case, there are two possible clues: the urge to hide whatever it is, or the urge to justify it. Both should set off our alarms.

About Me

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I was born at an early age, drank alcoholically from the first beer, used recreational drugs (and some not so recreational), eventually reaching the point where none of that stuff was fun any more. It was just work: work to stay supplied, work to juggle my reality and everyone else’s, work to keep people from finding out (I thought), work to simply live — and life sucked. Somewhere along the line I married another addict, and for several years that sucked too. There was no question in my mind that I had a problem, I just didn’t know the problem had a solution.

Finally, I was unable to keep all the balls in the air, and the world came tumbling down in the form of foreclosures, evictions, pawn shops, beat up old cars with all sorts of garbage on the dashboard, and eventually professional disgrace and the threat of losing my job.

Like many men, the job thing was the last straw for me. I knew that my wife and I would be living behind the dumpster at the Golden Arches within days, and I agreed to go into a residential treatment program. Two weeks later, my wife entered treatment at the same facility. The rest is not history, it’s more of a miracle.

Now, thirty-odd years later, I’ve had the opportunity to make most of the mistakes that folks can make in recovery, apart from actually picking up a drink or a drug.* Among other things, I’ve learned that relapse occurs before we pick up — that actually using just makes it official. I’ve worked in the recovery field. I’ve had the good sense to realize that it wasn’t for me, and got out of it. I’ve hit a lot of meetings, talked to a lot of alcoholics and addicts, and learned some of what they had to teach me.

And my wife? She got her degree in Social Work, Magna Cum Laude, at age 50, and her C.A.P. (Certified Addiction Professional — with international endorsement) a few years later. She’s also a Certified Mental Health Professional. She has worked in the field for many thousands of contact hours, and specializes in addiction (of course) and grief therapy.

We should both be dead, but we made it out the other side.

Please hang around. If you feel like reading my stuff, fine, but whatever you do, keep coming back. Don’t die. Please!

Yours in recovery,
Bill

*I use alcoholism, addiction, alcoholic and addict interchangeably. They’re the same disease, and we’re all just bozos on the same bus. That’s the first thing you need to learn.

Here Comes The Judge

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no-finger-pointingHow judgmental am I?  Plenty.  It’s a character defect that I’ve worked hard to change, with only limited success, ever since I’ve been sober.

It runs in the family. My granny was one of those old French women who could never give a compliment without modifying it with a matching put down.  “She’s pretty, her, but look at that dress!”  My mom was the same way.  She’d drive down the road commenting on every fool that came across her path.  An otherwise quiet, gentle soul, she never missed a chance to point out a shortcoming.  Thankfully, that didn’t carry over to her kids, but any relative beyond her own siblings, or other passersby, was fair game.

So I came by it honestly, and I reveled in it.  There’s nothing like the ability to look at others and see their faults to perk up the spirits of a kid with chronically low self-esteem.  We won’t go into detail.  Suffice it to say that by the time I was a full-blown alcoholic, I was also skilled in letting you know that I knew — as Rush Limbaugh titled his book — “The Way Things Ought To Be.”

In all fairness to me, I was as hard on myself as I was on others.  For many years (sixty or so) I never measured up to my own standards.  An uncommonly handsome young man, I always thought I was skinny and gawky, with a big nose.  It wasn’t until 15 years into recovery when I saw a yearbook photo of myself that I was able to get my head around the fact that I had been a good looking kid.

As a writer, for decades I stayed away from anything that wasn’t cut and dried.  I wrote technical articles and manuals, and eventually edited the work of others, because I believed that — even though I had a passion for writing — I wasn’t good enough to do “that other stuff.”  Those ideas and feelings carried over into the rest of my life in ways too many to count.

Yet I was always ready to point out where you were wrong, where he had screwed up, where she could have done better — anything that would let you know that I was on top of things, knew how it was, and that you’d better work hard if you wanted to measure up.  I was the guy who damned you with faint praise; who, when offered by a wife a choice of a special meal, would say “Yeah, that would be OK,” instead of, “Oh, wow honey!  What a great idea!”  Who would tell a child, “Nice job on the picture, honey, but wouldn’t it have been better if you had….”  (I still get tears in my eyes when I think of that stuff, and believe me I’ve made amends to both my daughters.  But it didn’t fix all those years.)

And why did I do those things?  Simply because my own opinion of myself was so low that I couldn’t let anyone else excel. Pointing out people’s so-called defects made me able to feel better about those I imagined were mine.

As a drunk, it got worse.  I was a bombastic pain in the ass.  I alienated people right and left.  Simply didn’t know how to act — and didn’t care.  I was the smart guy.  I was the cop.  I was the martial artist.  I was the Mensa guy (another shot at proving I was as good or better than you).  I was the one who knew The Way Things Ought To Be.  I was the asshole.

Anyone relate?  A lot of you should….

Years in recovery have helped.  Meditation has helped.  Therapy has helped.  Living with a woman who tells me when I need to pay attention to my thinking has helped.  But I still have the days, especially when I’m driving (of course, I used to be a driving instructor, chauffeur, blah, blah, blah…) when there are far greater numbers of jackasses out there with me than one would reasonably expect.

I’m not, by any means, the guy I’d like to be.  But I’ll tell you this: every time I catch myself doing the judgment thing, it reminds me of how much worse it used to be, and that I can move onward, become more skillful, and that the program I’ve been trying to live by all these years really does work.

Sometimes I have to ask myself, “Just how big a jerk do you want to be today?”  That, and the fact that I’ve come to realize that it makes me look really bad, keeps me trying.