Men Leave Treatment Because of Their Codependency!

     I am writing to propose some level of cooperation between professionals writing about and treating codependency and the professionals staffs of treatment centers in order to improve retention and ultimately long-term recovery for clients by providing some missing pieces for families whose lives are being ravaged by the co morbid diseases of addiction and codependency. Here is a quote taken directly from the back cover of our book written by Dr. Joseph Moons, C.P., Retreat Director, Holy Name Retreat Center , Houston, Texas;

“There is a need for this book for codependent men. In my association with the many men and women who attend 12-step retreats at Holy Name Passionist Retreat Center, the codependent men have the greatest fear and the least knowledge or understanding of their relationship with the addicted person in their life.  As the man in the family, they are supposed to have the answers and they don’t. This book begins to give some answers.”

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The Greatest Loss is Personal Freedom

By Ken P.

"So you we want to change the world," says the now old Beatles song.

The original revolutionaries were people like Thomas Paine, the radical ne'er do well who failed everything he tried in England, fled to The Colonies to find his fortune, and was swept up in the cause for liberty. Thomas Paine wrote what proved to be the precursor to the Declaration of Independence in a little pamphlet he called "Common Sense." He personally printed copies of this revolutionary idea that The Colonies should declare their independence from England on a hand-press, then sold 100,000 copies of it on the street, starting with his neighbors for customers! Don't scoff; if you project the 100,000 copies he sold upon today's population relative to the population of the colonies, Thomas Paine would have sold 20,000,000 copies through today's outlets like book stores and Amazon.com!

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Stuffing Is For Turkeys

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Delerium Tremens

This is what I witnessed.

   The scene is a frenetic one in an inner-city hospital ER. It is a Saturday night and I am one of three hospital reps from my pharmaceutical company participating in a training program. We have been strapped to a third-year internal medicine resident for a week now, day and night, and it is his weekend to work the ER.

   He gently guides a prostitute by her left arm towards me, hands me her big black purse, and says "...take her into that office, go through her purse, find her pills, and look them up in that PDR on the shelf behind the desk. We have to find out what she has taken before we can do anything." In less than a second he is gone and she is standing there staring at me, pupils like big black pools of water.

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Cirrhosis...The Final Days.

   In our last post we described the battle being fought by the liver for survival in the face of continuous heavy drinking by an individual. After using up the limited supply of enzyme to break down alcohol, the liver resorts to tucking the alcohol into little Baggies called vacuoles within itself in a delaying action. Unfortunately, with continued drinking, even when the liver "catches up" and breaks down the stored alcohol, zipping up the Baggie leaves a tiny line of scar tissue. After years of creating and zipping up these Baggies the liver is rendered a shriveled knot of pale scar tissue which cannot function, even if it could receive blood. However, as we shall see here, the blood supply issue becomes the final battle. When the liver loses that battle for life, so does the individual.

   A healthy liver is like a healthy city. In a healthy city, traffic moves into and out of the city. It flows smoothly and rapidly. Imagine this liver-city with two major freeways entering from above and below. The one from the intestines with its blood loaded with nutrients brings in all the raw materials the liver uses in its various manufacturing plant to create just about everything the rest of the body needs to survive: the blood itself, complex proteins to build and repair cells, and, most important to this story, what physicians term "clotting factors." Clotting factors are a complicated range of cells and organic chemicals that basically plug up any holes that appear in the body.

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All of us know about the lawsuit happy public. Suppose you are a police officer, and you are making the decision to arrest or not to arrest a clearly drunk woman you have just stopped. You might imagine the confrontation between yourself  and this "sweet young thing" sitting in court with a capable DUI attorney. The attorney is droning on in front of the jury with something canned like this; 

..."studies show that her lung volume is smaller than that of a man, and the breathalyzer machines in use today don't even take this factor into account...why the machine's results are as unreliable as the chauvinist attitude of the officer!"

Maybe this is why 85 out of 100 arrests for DUI are against men. There are lots of reasons, but the final devastating effect of our system is to compromise an important safety net designed to protect us all from alcoholism. If the suspect looks and smells good like our wives, moms, and daughters, then she really has to work hard to get a police officer to put the cuffs on her in the first place!

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Heard at a meeting: 

When I first came to a meeting I was here to check you out. I had it all together. I was so far into denial that no matter how chaotic the situation was I would just re-fashion the truth to make it work for me!

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        I am aware that these words will only reach a select few. I am writing to anybody who has reached their true "bottom" and given up on the whole life process. If you are like me, you were brought to this point by the impact of the two diseases of addiction and codependency. If you have just started reaching out for help through one of the 12-step programs, then continue reading. If you are just miserably despondent right now due to these diseases you might want to seriously consider asking for help. 

   When we 12-steppers begin to attend meetings we bring our bodies to some point in time and space where other people have gathered who are struggling with problems similar to our own. There is a great deal of hope for us as we walk through that meeting room door for the first time because when our body goes there our mind goes with it. In my case, when I stayed for a period of time with an open mind I was forced to accept the fact that there were people there whose problems were at least as great as mine, and that they were handling them with dignity.

   I learned eventually that it was impossible to hold two totally opposite beliefs in my mind at the same time. For example, I could not continue indulging in childish self pity while being grateful that my problems were not as great as those of another. In open discussions during meetings I heard others sharing squarely where they were emotionally, relationally, mentally, maybe even spiritually at that moment. Sometimes I heard somebody who was demonstrating the self pity right in front of me. Instead of passing judgment I saw suddenly how those words could just as easily have come right out of my mouth!

   That "A-HAAAA!" moment reduced me to the proper perspective. I had a moment of humility where I made a conscious decision to change my thinking. That was the moment when real change happened. In time, after practice, my new "attitude of gratitude" became such a deeply engrained part of my thinking that I became what I was thinking...grateful!

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Men are confused. We are taught early in the game a basic lie. We are taught as little boys that emotions (yes, I'm goanna talk about the "F" word here guys, feelings), are bad and WRONG. We therefore confuse emotions with faults (short-comings if you are a 12-stepper, sins if you are many Christians).

As a man in al-Anon, a 12-step program for people who are being adversely effected by somebody else's drinking, I have listened to men speak during meetings about how hard they are working to overcome such feelings as fear, guilt, and...heaven forbid...ANGER!

‘Ya think that they will ever really eliminate those feelings's...is that gonna happen? Is that even desirable?

Here are some questions to ponder; if feelings are sins, why did God make them a part of us? If we had no feelings, what kind of beings would we be? If anger is a short-coming, then how could the only perfect man who walked the earth (Jesus) show it so obviously and so often?

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   Here are some thoughts I had relative to a recent announcement that our church was putting together programs to help families with cancer in the family. Yes, cancer is a devastating set of ailments, but in total they pale by comparison with another cluster of diseases centered on alcoholism. Before I go any further, I must point out that the two diseases are directly related in that alcoholism leads to cancer.

   There are eight cancers directly caused by alcohol (mouth, throat, esophagus, stomach, liver, breast, rectum, and colon) (3, 4, 5), and, while the chemical ethyl alcohol itself is not carcinogenic, the first metabolite of the breakdown by the liver of alcohol...acetaldehyde, is HIGHLY carcinogenic. This is why people who regularly swallow alcohol multiply their overall chances of contracting all forms of cancer many times (5).  But let's set aside the medical dangers, and just focus on the relative net effect of the two diseases in terms of human misery.

   Please, consider this. As many as 10.5 million Americans show signs of alcoholism or alcohol dependence alone, and another 7.2 million show persistent heavy drinking patterns associated with impaired health and or social functioning. (1) An alcohol-related family problem strikes one of every FOUR American homes. (2)

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