Hi everybody,
I started drinking at 15 years old. My drinking was addictive right from the beginning and I "hit bottom" at the relatively young age of 20. I knew about AA because my mother (also an alcoholic) sobered up when I was 12, but I didn't think I could become an alcoholic because I knew too much about it.
The reason I went to my first AA meeting was actually because I was overseas and I couldn't find anyone who knew anything about ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), which is where I thought I belonged. So I went to an "open" AA meeting (meaning family and friends of alcoholics can go, too, not just alcoholics) to see if anyone there knew anything about ACOA. What happened instead is that I heard people talking about how I felt on the inside without ever having met me. That had never happened before and it just floored me.
For about a year I was in and out of AA, fighting the idea that I could be alcoholic, for various reasons (I'm too young, my drinking isn't that bad, etc.). But when I finally accepted that it was true, and decided that I was okay with it, I was able to work the steps with a terrific sponsor and it more or less changed the direction of my life. If I had not stopped drinking when I did, I'm quite sure I would not have become an old alcoholic. I would have died young because I drank really hard and did really stupid things when drunk. I put myself in harm's way many times and am very grateful that nothing terrible happened to me.
One of the most important principles that helped me to believe and accept that I am an alcoholic was finding out the difference between a "problem drinker" and an alcoholic. When a "problem drinker" stops drinking, the problem goes away. When an alcoholic stops drinking, it only makes the problem more painful. That's because the alcohol is the solution to an emotional, mental, physical, and ultimately spiritual problem. Eventually the alcohol "solution" doesn't work anymore, and itself begins to cause problems of its own, but those are secondary. The root cause really doesn't have anything to do with alcohol.
AG said this really well in one of her posts above:
quote:
Originally posted by Attachment Girl:
Addictive behaviors are addictive because at least at one time, they worked. So when we stop doing them, the problem we were originally trying to deal with re-emerges.
The sponsor I had when I got back to the states (I've referred to her in other posts as my "Spirit Mom") said it another way: If you stop drinking but don't treat the real problem, it just reappears as another addiction. You can try to clamp down on it, but eventually it just squirts out somewhere else.
I've seen my poor mother battle with this for years. When she got sober, she almost immediately divorced my dad and got into another relationship with another recovering alcoholic. But she was really dependent on him. He died in a car crash about 6.5 years later and she's never really recovered from it. And she also never really went back to AA, although she didn't start drinking again right away. First she started gambling. Then she started running up credit cards. Then she started gambling WITH the credit cards. Then she got hooked on pain pills...and in fall of 2005 she finally started drinking again. She went through treatment four times, and she appears to have been dry now for several months. But she's not in therapy or going to meetings, so I don't know how she's treating the actual problem.
The problem isn't drinking (or drugs, or food, or my latest addiction discovery, which is "love" addiction - how appropriate, on Valentine's Day!). It's how to live life without needing to cope with something that ultimately causes more problems. I went to meetings regularly for years until my second child was born. After that my attendance has dropped to almost nothing because my life felt too busy. And it's something my husband and kids can't really share in, so I feel "guilty" when I take time to go to meetings, even though I know they would ultimately benefit. It was okay for a while - I never thought about drinking - but being married and having kids has tested me in ways I never dreamed of when I was single. And as my kids get older, I am finding I need more help, not less! So recently I've started going again to a women's meeting on Saturday morning.
I really love AA meetings. There is an authenticity there that I've never found anywhere else (at least not until I found this message board!). It is a simple way of thinking and acting that keeps me from over-complicating everything. It teaches me how to live in such a way that I don't need to drink in order to cope. It keeps me grounded and centered. And I know that I'm understood before I even open my mouth. I always feel especially safe in AA meetings, and like I can breathe easier. Maybe that doesn't make sense but I don't know how else to describe it. And there is a lot of laughing. I love laughing (who doesn't?).
I started going to therapy because I wanted to talk about a specific problem that I couldn't discuss in meetings (resurfacing feelings for my first BF). It turned out to be a form of "love addiction" and I thought, great, another addiction. Conveniently enough, the "treatment" for it turns out to be the 12 steps of AA! That didn't surprise me, because I'd always known that somehow my work in AA was helping me keep the feelings for the old BF at bay. But I also knew it never really healed them, either.
Eventually I came across several seemingly related ideas in the love addiction stuff I was reading. One was that "longing isn't love" (my reaction: It isn't?
) - but that the longing was symbolic of what we didn't get as children. That being injured as children makes us more likely to develop addictive behaviors later on. That doing "inner child work" (a phrase that always made me roll my eyes in disgust) was the way to go back and heal those injuries. That until we did this, we would keep reenacting the same dysfunctional patterns in relationships because what we were really trying to do was unconsciously reenact the same situation from when we were kids, only we'd "get it right" this time. It was also there that I first learned about "transference" (In Session, etc.) and how it could be used to make the connection back to those injuries so that healing could happen.
So that is what I'm trying to do in therapy now. It is frustrating though and I still have so many questions. She is perfect, does just the right things. She listens beautifully, is genuine and real without letting her stuff get in the way. She frequently invites me to feel what I need to feel, gives me the space to do it. But nothing happens. Sometimes it feels like a brick wall, sometimes like empty space. Eventually I start to feel irritated and impatient and jump to another topic. I can't seem to connect to the feelings I had toward my parents at all.
Sometimes I wonder if it's this hard because I don't seem to have an intense emotional attachment to her. I had one almost immediately to my former T, but that didn't work out. So is it possible to connect with those old injuries without the "transference" to guide me?
Also, if the injuries are what predisposed me to love addiction in the first place, how could I ever work through the transference without becoming addicted? If I'm understanding what I'm reading, the solution itself triggers the problem so that I could never complete the solution. I would always get stuck.
Maybe that's why the 12-step approach works so well for me. It's a way "around" the catch-22. But then, how do I work through the "inner child" stuff? I can't do that in AA meetings.
Maybe I could work through transference feelings with a T, as long as I was working my 12 steps, and had a T who could help me without letting their stuff get mixed in. I really do think that's what happened with my former T. I knew I was getting "addicted", but also from my reading knew it was really not about him, it was about something not resolved within me and I was very willing to work through it in the context of the therapy.
But then, sometimes I wonder if he saw something coming that I didn't. Maybe he was afraid to keep going because he thought I might get stuck. He did say he could see my feelings possible getting worse if we discussed them.
Sorry this got so long...but these are things I've been thinking and wondering about for months. Thanks for letting me ramble on, and thanks especially if you read this far!
SG