Twas a Week Before Christmas… Here it is, Christmas once again, with New Year’s hard on its heels, and Thanksgiving a fading memory, if a memory at all. And the same old question still lurking: “Is this the year I’m actually going to address the problem or am I just going to let it slide again?”
The Mosaic of Alcohol Abuse We talk a lot about all of the things you may be medicating with alcohol. The list can be nearly endless and will commonly include anxiety, loneliness, boredom, depression, trauma, physical pain, PTSD, alcohol induced bi-polar, unbalanced personal and/or professional relationships, loss of role, self-image, habit, and so on and on and on.
Unbalanced & Toxic Relationships It’s easy to see that our lives are out of balance when we’re drinking too much, but less obvious whether the drinking is the cause or the effect. Over time the answer usually becomes clear, it’s both. As we have noted in other articles, we typically self-medicate conditions including anxiety, loneliness, boredom, depression, trauma, unbalanced relationships, and lost roles. For the moment, I’d like to go into a bit more detail on the “unbalanced relationships” condition.
The “Magic” of 30 Days “Everyone knows that you have to go off to rehab for at least 30 days. That’s what works!” As usual, what “everyone knows” when it comes to giving up alcohol abuse is wrong. There is no magic in the 30-day regimen, quite the opposite. However, before going into that, we do note that there are a couple instances where it might help.
What Benefits Do You Get From Alcohol? Others may often ask why you don’t quit, or moderate, your drinking when doing so would have the benefits of improved health, relationships, freedom from financial and legal problems and so on. Or they will ask the mirror image question, “Can’t you see what your drinking is doing to…..?” These are obvious questions that you know the answers to and, therefore, are meaningless to your continued misuse of alcohol.
I appreciate the opportunity to give someone else this space to say what I believe to be true about the work Mary Ellen and I are doing, have done, and can do for you. Ed, I have been thinking about this for a while and it reminded me that I once heard that every drama has a villain, a victim, and a vindicator. In this drama the villain is alcohol and the personal choice is to be either the victim or vindicator.
Okay, Halloween and the World Series or over… …and the Super Bowl is a long ways away. In between we have Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and other assorted holidays. Do you suppose that for this year you might consider giving yourself, and everyone who cares about you, holidays unblemished by excessive alcohol use? Now there’s a novel idea.
Unbalanced Personal & Professional Relationships With numerous headlines reporting varying types and degrees of sexual assault, harassment, misconduct, and other crimes and misdemeanors, it’s not difficult to see that unbalanced relationships exist all over the place. What may be less obvious is that the sexual variety is only one variation on all of the power differentials that also underlay much of alcohol abuse. Because we work with individuals and couples we see the domestic side of the abuse of power more often than the professional side. We also see a lot of you after you have been victimized in AA or in AA based treatment programs.
First, a Thank You to All of You Who Saved Me From “Blank Page Disease”! I do appreciate that several of you wrote expressing your status regarding alcohol use, parts of what we do your found especially helpful, what you’d like more information on, and other suggestions. Sure beats writing in the dark. That said, I will start with the most commonly expressed “help” you took away from your work here: that the misuse of alcohol is a symptom, not an incurable progressive disease. I couldn’t agree more – it was certainly the foundation of my own escape from vodka swilling some 35 years ago, as well as my decision that I could safely return to modest drinking a dozen years ago.
What to Write? It’s early Monday morning which is when I usually sit down to write the next Newsletter. Frequently I don’t know what I’m going to write about until I follow Hemingway’s dictum, “Writing is a matter of application. Applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Having done that, something usually occurs to me. Not this morning. Sigh.