Right now I’m working with a “new” man, who knows too much. He has the potential to be counseling in any rehab and even his couselor has told him that he’s almost ready to be a peer couselor. Yet he’s just coming back from one of his many “slips”. He must have slipped past the important stuff.
This would have been my pattern, except that I must have come in at a time, when they were driving home the concept of keeping it simple. I must have heard something, because it worked for me.
In talking to him, I learned that he grew up in an alcoholic family. There was a lot of fighting between the parents. He expressed his fears of that time by saying that he had a lot of guilt growing up, since he was unable to bring peace and failed to fix what was wrong between them. I remember working with and talking to a psychiatrist, who told me that this was a classic model. The child, driven by fear, desperately wants to end the warfare in the home. He knows he is powerless to do anything, which makes him crazy with fear, so he fabricates the idea that if he had the power to fix the situation he would. But, if he had that power and didn’t use it, he would be guilty. So he assumes he is guilty, thereby giving him a sense of not being powerless. This sense of being guilty and worthless, because he failed to do anything, becomes built into him, long after he is an adult. Worse, he feels he had done something totally unforgiveable. By now he has no idea where this has come from. It has become a block to a relationship with a Higher Power, whom he now fears. He has done the worst thing in the world. He believes in his unconcious that he had a power, which he failed to use.
This may sound like a lot of psychological gobbledygook, but I have met and worked with a lot of these men over a lot of years. I have one now. Here is a man, who knows all there is to know about recovery. He can probably recite the BB, he has been through a number of facilities, sometimes up to six months. He has been to halfway houses for longer periods, he has been in a couple of mental instituions due to his alcoholism, and he has been to a number of jails for periods of time. He has had bottoms, but has gone right through them. He has sought religious relief and read psychology and spiritual books. But he can’t grasp the simplest of concepts.
I know the group is the solution. I know that prayer is the solution. HIs relationship with the group and his prayers are the most important things he’ll ever do.
This morning my sister asked me to help her apply flea protection to our two dogs. I did. Some dogs don’t like having this kind of medication applied to them, because it obviously irritates their skin. But it also reminded me of what we must do on a daily basis; apply protection against our disease, no matter how we feel.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning and feel so irrritable that I’m not in the mood to ask for the help I need. So, I feel like putting it off. Sometimes I do. No matter that I have been given a great gift, I lack gratitude for what has been given to me. But there is a solution. I can go to a meeting and place myself in the environment of others like myself and find a healing for the mood. I can meet and sit with my new friend and talk to him and once again renew myself by working with another alcoholic. The mood lifts and I am once again restored to gratitude.
How important this gift, the love of one alcoholic for another, is. I pray I may never forget it. How much another alcoholic can teach us. I can only hope that he will find his way, just as I did.
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