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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 1 of 1. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by Temmie on November 13, 2003, at 8:33:07
Well Temmie, you've challenged me to come up with a wise reply. No, your story is not challenging or "too much". It is all too familiar. I was able to get on the co-anon website today, so when you have time, try to join the E-Meeting and just read people's stories and advice to each other.
There is something about the glitter of cocaine that seems to be a little different than alcoholism. It works much faster than alcohol and has somewhat different symptoms. But the end results of addiction seem to be the same - that the substance or activity triggers the human survival mechanism and the user comes to believe that he or she can't live without it and nothing else matters. (The Big Book in AA is very wise on all of this as it is based on personal first hand experience of this process.)
I don't understand the "hit bottom" theory that people only "see the light" after some particularly dangerous experience that jolts them to their senses and I almost think it is a myth. Somehow, people who are addicted to cocaine have to realize that they are sealing their own premature death by using, even though it feels just the opposite to them. That's a pretty tough assignment. And then if or when the person sees this, he/she has to want to live more than use. That isn't true for many people. Many would rather die than live without it, I think. When life gets too much to live straight, people come to believe the crutch helps them live it. Even though, as the rest of us see, it actually makes living harder. Cocaine and alcohol give the promise to the addict of an easier life, even when there is none. It plays upon people's need to believe this could be so. This is what the chemical does to the body and then what the person makes out of that perceptual and physical and emotional change they experience when they first use. Addicts find the change a miracle, what they've been looking for, and they believe they have found a miracle substance.
I believe that the addict is particularly vulnerable to this hope/belief in an easier life than the one we are given. And they can be very seductive in getting those around them to believe in it too. They DESPERATELY want to believe it so they put everything they have into making it seem to be true and are so realistic when they convince others (us) because of this. You and I also want to believe in what the addict believes so we are relatively easily convinced by the stories he tells himself and us. But they are just stories, not reality, and they are often harmful because they cover over painful truths that we don't want to know and we become weak in our perception of reality by believing them. I suspect there is something hidden in our past (a lie we have told ourselves) that we continue to hide from and it shapes the way we have come to view and interact with the world. We become addicted to the "promise" that we can continue to see the world this way because to give up our pretense feels to us like a life not worth living. We come to need the addict's promises of what could be for our own reasons, and we start to invest more and more of ourselves in them until we, too, DESPERATELY want to believe.
The way out then, it seems to me, is to face the things we have hidden from ourselves, as the more we have hidden, the more it is fuel for our desperation to not know it and to believe something else, believe a lie. When we love an addict, this starts with our own facing the realities of addiction. I believe there is a direct connection between the lies we want to believe or aren't facing, and the intensity of our addiction to the addict and his lies. So if we throw more lies on our pile, we just become more addicted to the need to lie.
I have many lies. One of them is that I am superwoman - just like you said of yourself. I can feel that coming directly from a childhood experience of needing to believe I could do something about the situation in my family that I found painful. I had no help in accepting it as part of life. My parents lied about it, so I came to believe that my experience of it was intollerable and had to be gotten rid of. Well - the reality is that I could neither erase the situation nor erase how I experienced it. Both of them just were. They were part of life - neither good nor bad. Just part of life. But no one told me that back then or anytime since then. So I thought I had to deal with it all by myself and change what is. I came to believe that I HAD TO change what is. Well, that is being superwoman. I still don't feel okay about not being able to change what is. I still think I should change what we sometimes feel are "bad" things in the world - like poverty and war and hunger and neglected children and people abusing others.......etc.
The pain that I feel now I believe is a good cleansing pain. It is the pain of what I experienced seeping through. It is the pain that reality is not different, but it is what it is. And we have to accept it. There is nothing else to do with it. The intollerable pain comes when we think it is unacceptable and has to be changed. Yes, someone I love is in prison and has little hope of ever getting out in his lifetime (he has a 60 year sentence). Yes, I do love him even though he committed a violent act against a person. Those are facts that I want to make go away every day. Wanting them to go away means I don't accept them and that is painful. But look at all the painful facts that people all over the world have to accept every day. I am not alone in having to accept painful reality. And the cost of not accepting it, of denying the realities we all live with, is that we are made powerless by our denial. Denial makes us powerless. We can't fight or prepare for or prevent or accept or grieve what we cannot see. Most days it is still too much for me. That, I think, is why the group thing is so important. Life is too much for us to accept alone. But together we have a chance - if not to change it, just to accept it and grieve it and learn to live with it.
Look at the areas in your life where you are trying to be superwoman, trying to deal with something all by yourself. Those areas are feeding your addiction to his addiction, your addiction to the lies you tell yourself. And you are doing so in order to survive realities that are too much to face alone. So try to stop being alone with them and handling them all by yourself. It's not necessary to. It's harmful to. Find other people to share what you can't stand to face alone.
That's all I know for now. I have so much to do to take my own advice. I was gifted or burdened as a child by seeing too much and having parents who for some reason did not want to see or to have their children see what they didn't want to see. So I felt very alone in what I felt about what I saw. As an adult, I seem to create the same situation where I see things and then feel this hidden responsibility to do something about really difficult things. When I can't succeed as superwoman, I have to go back to either hiding what I know or creating fantasy about my failure. And...I will keep doing it over and over unless I can see what I am doing and do something different. It is not enough to see it. I must create a new way of being and dealing with life and give up the old one - just like the addict must do if he or she would rather live (without the drug) than experience premature death (with the drug). And if we "make a change" in people we are with, or places we live, or jobs we do, WITHOUT making this internal change, we will just repeat the same scenario over and over with new people, in a new town, and in a new job.
Thanks for listening. This was all very abstract. If you want to run things you've been told or choices you have by me to test them against my bull-sh*t detector :), ask away. Sometimes it's hard to know what's real in all this!!! And there are predictable things addicts say and do. And there is danger - harm is near! It should scare you! The addict will minimize the danger. You can also ask for this on the EMeeting website. I would recommend that you do. Many heads are better than one! There are tried and true ways that we can take care of ourselves in the middle of this.
J.
This is the end of the thread.
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Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
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