alcoholics in recovery.

Trust

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

In order to  fully  recover from alcoholism, addiction and addictive behaviours, we find we have to trust at least one other human being.

This might be easy for some, to trust, but for me it was very difficult.

Considering my upbringing, this was a big step but as I had little choice…

I am not talking about trusting my wife, loved ones, family etc.

I am talking about trusting someone in recovery. A practical  stranger. Someone who is the same boat as you. Who has been where you have been, felt how you have felt.

Like a sponsor for exammple.

Someone you are going to open up to and discuss intimate stuff with, someone who will ultimately know the shameful secrets that can keep a person spiritually and emotionally sick and will continue to do so until we share this stuff and let it all go.

It chains us to the past and endangers recovery because we drank on shame and guilt.

I certainly know I did?

Sorry for being so direct in this blog, it is a message of hope, there is a way to completely turn your life around.

Shameful secrets can fester in the dark recesses of our minds and inflame our hearts with recrimination and resentment.

They  can have constant conscious and unconscious effect on our behaviors, how we think and feel about ourselves and how we interact, or not, with others.

Due to the nature of frequent episodes of  powerlessness over our behavior,  attached to addiction and alcoholism, we often  acted in a way we would never act in sobriety. We had limited control over behaviour at times due to intoxication  and acted on occasion in a way that shames us today.

Most of us were determined to take these secrets, these “sins” to the grave.

We often take them to grave sooner rather than later unless we  decide to  be open and share our secrets with another person.

This has been my experience.

Everyone in recovery has secrets they would rather not disclose,  but there are not many “original” sins as one suspects and that haven’t been shared in 12 step recovery.

Almost disappointingly I found some of my sins were quite tame when compared to other people I have spoken to in recovery.

That is not to say I did not frequently hurt others, especially loved ones,  but under examination they were not as monstrous as my head made them out to be.

These secrets are the emotional and psychic scars of our alcoholic past and they need to be exposed in order for us to fully heal.

In steps 4 and 5 we listed wrongdoings to others and although initially petrified to share them with another, found that it wasn’t as  difficult as we thought it would be, once you wrote down the worst top ten. There was an immediate release in fact. A sense of cleansing almost.

Sharing them was obviously awkward but a good sponsor shares his at the same time.

It is therapeutic exchange and shame reducing to know someone else has committed similar sins or has acted for similar reasons; they were powerless over their behaviours.  Just like me, just like you.

Alcoholism erodes our self will and choice.

There is nothing so bad that cannot be shared.

The 12 steps were influenced  by the Oxford Group who said sins cut a person off from God, and that there was such a thing as sin disease.

This sin disease had very real psychological, emotional and physical and physiological effect on the mind and body. Sins were a contagion that mixed with the sins of others and the sins of  families, groups, societies, cultures and countries.

The sin disease  idea became the “spiritual malady” of AA.

We can also see this as years of not being able to regulate our negative emotions properly, if you wish to see them as sins.

I see these “sins” also, and perhaps alternatively, as hundreds of unprocessed negative emotions from the past which were never consigned to our long term memories, so they just swirl around our minds for decades shaping how we think about ourselves and the world around us.

Steps 4 -7 and the amends to those people wronged in steps of 8 and 9 allow us to be completely free and in a sense reborn.

It can be viewed as spiritual or an emotional rebirth.

Isn’t this rebirth, catharsis, renewal, a becoming free from the old self, which was kept us ill in our shame and guilt about the past?

We have the chance to be free from the sick version of our real self, the self that has been in bondage, in addiction.

It is almost miraculous, the sudden transformative effect it can have on us.  I have seen it many times with my own eyes.

By freeing ourselves from the past,  we become who we really are.

We have a sea change in how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us.

In fact we never become who we really are until we have examined our past and consigned it to the past.

We do fully recover until we do this I believe.

Otherwise we have not really completely treated our alcoholism.

We have simply got sober, sometimes stark raving sober.   

We are not bad people getting good but ill people getting well.

All this because we plucked up enough courage to ask someone we barely knew to be our  sponsor.

Because we trusted one person enough.

In reality we asked a fellow sinner to hear our sins and through God’s help have them taken off us, or if one prefers, have had the past finally   processed and consigned to long term memory where it will take only a special and quite frankly bizarre decision and effort to go rooting around and digging it up again.

I look at the past fleetingly sometimes to help others but I never stare at it too long.

It is a former self.

I have been reborn, I have become who God had intended me to be.

I have become me.

 

Filling that “Hole in the Soul”

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

When I first  arrived in AA I was told by a big scary looking man that in AA you will get better.

That “we will help you by loving you back to health”.

I was quite alarmed by this situation to be honest “loved back to health”? Was this guy some relic from the hippy era?

What he said, was very threatening to me. It suggested unconditional love, a concept that I was only partially familiar with.

I had always knew my father loved my unconditionally but this was less the case with my mother. I knew she loved me in her vague, through a  distant Valium haze but part of me was always reaching out, crying out for more. More love.

I found that love in liquid form in alcohol. Or so I felt. Alcohol was constant. It always delivered without fail, transported me to the person I would much rather be. Allowed me to escape the person I did not want to be.

I now accept my mother suffered from addiction just like me and I have immense compassion for her because of that, she did the best she could under the circumstances. I forgive her completely and love her completely.

She was not a bad person she as an ill person just like me.

Did this relationship with my primary care giver have any effect on my teenage drinking and later alcoholism?

Like many alcoholics I have spoken to over the years I too seemed to suffer from the  “hole in the soul” they spoke of.

That not feeling whole, like something in you, some part of you was missing.

Having a curious mind, I always wondered what it could be? It must be something that can be discovered? I wasn’t happy to leave it was a vague spiritual condition.

It felt too emotional just to be a spiritual thing, although it is also that.

It felt like I was lacking in something, something in my make up was not there or in diluted measure?

Later I found out that this relationship with my mother was called an insecure attachment and that lots of people in recovery had this insecure attachment with their mothers or whoever reared them.

This insecure attachment they said often resulted in novelty seeking and hunting out some “secure attachment” elsewhere, in a bottle, syringe, sex, a poker machine, food or other addictive behaviours.

It is lonely recently that I found there is a brain chemical linked to this insecure attachment called oxytocin, the “love chemical” which effects all the neurochemical said to be involved in addiction.

Oxytocin is badly affected by the stress reaction to insecure attachment, abuse trauma and a tough upbringing. The oxytocin is then reduced which reduces the other chemicals too and we search for these at the bottom of a glass.

Unfortunately alcohol seems to give us cocktail of these chemicals in liquid form. But never enough.

For a while anyway, it gives us the illusion of attachment, of that fleeting feeling of being part, of being loved.

Through the years all these chemicals start running dry and the drink stops working.

We are then left with the problems we had before we put a glass to our mouths.

So when the drink stopped working and I had to go to AA – not one wants to go  there, let’s face it, it’s because we have to!

So the big scary guy may have been right all along. I have found that he is right over the years of attending AA.

I have found a new, surrogate family  in AA, a “learnt attachment” within the fellowship of others in the same boat as me, who have felt the same as me. I have found this attachment to others, by being looked after and trying to help others – my oxytocin, the “love chemical” the “cuddle chemical” has gone up dramatically while my stress has plummeted as I have bonded with others in recovery.

This connectedness is my spiritual solution to a neurobiological problem.

I now feel part of for the first time, I have filled the hole in the soul with love given and received.

Who Wants to be an Alcoholic?

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

The social stigma of being an alcoholic prevents many from coming into recovery and treating their illness. And it is an illness but it takes time to realise that – a physiological, psychological, emotional, cognitive, behavioural and spiritual disease. It is as profound an illness as one can have.

It is the only illness that actively tells you that you do not have it!

How cunning, baffling and powerful is that!?  

In fact stigma, particular prevalent in the UK as compared to the US, helps kill alcoholics.

We all have ideas of tramp on park benches supping on bottles of alcohol when we think of alcoholics.

I know I did. When I went to my first meeting I thought I would be greeted by park tramps with strings holding their trousers up with food encrusted beards, no teeth and hygiene problems.

I wasn’t greeted by anyone like this.

I was greeted by a teacher, a lawyer, a counsellor, a business man, a builder, a nurse, an actress, among others.  Alcoholism effects every area of life, no strata of life is immune, there are recovering alcoholics everywhere.  The second man to have stepped on the moon is in recovery for alcoholism!

These shiny AA people were not drinking and some had not drank for decades!

Imagine not drinking for ten years and more? I could not imagine ten minutes…but now I am coming up to my tenth birthday in AA.

 

“Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows” (1)

Neuroscience has demonstrated repeatedly how the brain is taken over by the actions of alcohol and other substances which leave the brain severely restricted in it’s choice of behaviours. Self will has become so compromised we barely have any!?

We become so comprised in our own ability to make decisions that we are often “without mental defence against” drinking.

Alcohol via the alterations in stress and reward (survival) systems in the brain means our illness has literally taken over our brain and calls the shots, does the thinking which leads to the drinking.

We have a thinking disease as well as drinking one by the time we get into recovery.

It is the thinking of this illness, which we mistake for our own, quite understandably, as these thoughts are happening in our own head, that tells us we do not have an alcoholic problem, we do not need to go to an AA meeting, or when we have gone, that we do not need to stay, that we are different to the people at the meeting – that they need this recovery thing not me. I can work this out myself.

Why does it do this?

Why is it constantly chittering away between our ears. It has to be us, surely? Our thoughts can’t have been taken over like some 1960s episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk and crew are struck down by some thought virus??

If you are new to recovery don’t bend your head over this stuff!

All you have to do is twofold. Get to a meeting and see if your experience of drinking tallies with those there and two, watch out for that motivational voice of alcoholism trying to get you far away from these people.

This is my test to see if you are alcoholic.

This voice of the illness is similar to the voice of OCD and other anxiety disorders which talk to us in thoughts which are contrary to our well being and health. Why?

Because our survival networks in the brain have gone so haywire that these conditions think they are helping us survive by suggesting certain actions which we previously used to reduce distress, i.e.compulsive behaviours, but which take us increasingly into even greater emotional distress and unhealthy behaviours.

They are like an Olympic coach training us to get chronically unwell.

They persist because they have ingrained in our brains unfortunately, possible forever. They are the torturous whispers of our neural ghosts!

They refuse to die but in time these voices become more manageable, the volume on them can be turned down or ignored altogether.

Turning down the distress signal that feeds them is at the key.

You are not alone – “Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal  powerlessness.” (2)

This powerlessness led me to surrendering. Paradoxically to win this war we must first surrender.

Surrendering to the idea that I may, possibly, be an alcoholic.

Acceptance of this possibility is the first step.

 

References

 

  1.  Alcoholics Anonymous. (2001). Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition. New York: A.A. World Services.
  2. Twelve steps and twelve traditions. (1989). New York, NY: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services.

 

You are Not Alone!

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

In the final months of my active alcoholism I was living in the attic room of my house.

I drank about 6 bottles of cheap Spanish wine plus a dozen cans of strong German beer every day.

The alcohol had little effect on me by this stage. I only drank to dampen the delirium tremens, the violent shakes. I often could not control my hand enough to get alcohol into my mouth, holding my wrist steady with my other hand to raise the drink to my mouth.

Usually  cracking the bottle or tin can against my teeth.

I was no longer getting drunk anymore.

You know you are fully addicted to alcohol when it does nothing intoxicating any more.

I slept in 5-10 minute fits and busts. I did not eat for months. The television told me to kill myself and voices not belonging to me talked insistently in my head.

Alcohol-related Psychosis it is called.

No one told me this would happen when I bought my first alcoholic drink when I was fourteen years old. There was no health or warning label saying “Could lead to Psychosis and Premature Death!”

Maybe there should be.  Or at least alcohol can be addictive for some.

Anyway there is more to alcoholism than alcohol.

In the depths of this alcohol induced madness, I rarely saw my wife, who could not bring herself to look at me and what I had become.

If I could have got it together I might have killed myself.

But I couldn’t get it together. Psychosis is all involving, doesn’t leave much time for planning anything.

 

 

So I staggered on. When I say staggered, I could not actually walk more than a few yards or climb more than a few stairs.

By  the time I reached my first AA meeting

1. the alcohol had stopped “working”.

2. I had surrendered.

Regardless of these two factors, I could not admit I was alcoholic. My pride and it’s best friend shame were still talking away to me.

I was willing to admit I was addicted to alcohol and that I was about to die from it.

But alcoholic?

We often wonder why some people don’t accept their alcoholism?

How did I start my journey to acceptance?

My wife came to my first meeting of AA, she practically carried me in!

The Chair of the meeting was a person I had drank with before – I though how come he is here?

I spilled more drink than he ever drank?

Then it dawned on me that maybe I should have come here before?

Especially when he shared that he had been trying to get sober and recovered for ten years!?

I then listened to the other alcoholics sharing their stories.

The stories mentioned the progression of the alcoholism, which I obviously identified with.

They also mentioned how they, even now in recovery, struggled with their emotions and anxieties, how they found living life difficult.

They talked about issues which had bedevilled them and me since childhood, this  spiritual malady they talked of was like the emotional disease I had  suffered from all my life, whether it was depression, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, PTSD, etc.

They had used alcohol to self medicate these conditions, especially as alcohol for them had felt like an elixir for them as it had for me.  We all had all dealt with our negative emotions since adolescence in the same way.

Now a new way had to be found.

When we left the meeting my wife had a psychic change similar to the one I had.

She said these people are just like you. They can help you, I can’t.

A week before I had heard a voice in my heart, through the psychosis, saying  to go down stairs to my wife and ask her for help. I asked her for help in that round about alcoholic way of “do you think I look a bit jaundice (I actually looked like Homer Simpson with a heavy sun tan!)?

The help I asked for was not to come directly from my wife but she led me to where I could get it. In a room, full of people just like me, suffering the same illness as me.

I will be forever eternally grateful for it being there for me. For them being there.

We will be there for you too!

Why?

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

This blog is written for alcoholics and those who love and live with them, by alcoholics in recovery.

 

For those who know what it is like to live with alcoholism but would also like to know why alcoholism affects the alcoholic and those around him in the way it does.

 

We write this blog to help us and you understand how the alcoholic brain works and why they sometimes do the things they do, why they act the way they do?

 

Why is it sometimes that everything is going great and suddenly the alcoholic in your life overreacts and acts in an emotionally immature way, which can often cause hurt to others around them?

 

Why do they suddenly cut off their emotions so profoundly it leaves your emotions in limbo, confused and upset.?

We hope to explain this disease state and behavioral disorder, which alcoholics themselves call an “emotional disease” , a “parasite that feeds on the emotions” or quite simply “a fear based illness”.

It appears that alcoholics in recovery are aware to a large extent of what they suffer from so why do they do what they do sometimes if they know what is going on? Are there times when they cannot help themselves?

Why do alcoholics, even in recovery, sometimes engage in endless  self defeating resentments?

Why do they project into future scenarios and then get emotionally paralyzed by doing so, get stuck in a cycle of catastrophic thinking?

Why do we run through the list of cognitive distortions on a daily basis?

This is not to condemn but to understand. Knowledge we believe is power. It aids understanding and compassion of another person’s suffering.

We as recovering alcoholics still, after several years of recovery, can still engage in such behaviours. We do not wish to hurt anyone, especially not our loved ones, but sometimes do.

We sometimes get wrapped up in ourselves and act in a selfish, immature and inconsiderate manner.

We need help with this, at times, distressing condition. That is what it is.

Distressing, based on a emotion and stress dysregulation, even in recovery, hence we have to manage it.

On a daily basis. It does not return to normal. To balance. To equilibrium. We have to take certain actions to restore emotional equilibrium.

Hence it can be hard work, hence we sometimes we come up short and emotionally overreact.

We have a distress based condition which has to be managed.

We also have to give ourselves a break, don’t distress ourselves further with perfectionist ideas of “should” – just do your best! That is usually good enough for most people. Why not us?

We are not saints, progress not perfection!

Or as progress not perfectionist!

Recovery changes the brains of alcoholics for the better.

As we are personally well aware, self knowledge does not bring recovery – only action does.

This action could be helping others, praying, meditating, going to meetings, talking to someone who knows what you are going through etc. Connecting with others, in the same boat as you.

It does work, if you work it. It removes the distress that feeds alcoholism and addiction.

The distress that makes us catastrophic thinkers, to having intolerance of uncertainty about the future, struggle with our emotional natures, etc

Recovery helps us deal with negative emotions and anxiety in a rational manner via the help of others.

We become different people in recovery. More considerate of others, more emotionally mature and emotionally sober.

We learn to deal with situations which used to baffle us! In dealing with these we deal with our alcoholism because we solve the problems that used to make us drink or use in the first place.