Who Am I, REALLY?

There is a great line in an old Paul Simon song ("The Boxer") that says "...a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

We codependents take that one or two steps further. We "do what we want to do and call it by what sounds best."

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Just A Little Willingness

Despair is the basic "affect" of the newcomer to recovery. Affect is what psychologists and psychiatrists call the basic emotion projected by a person. By the time we finally "hit our bottom" as a result of the ravages of addiction we have truly surrendered. We have given up on other people, on ourselves, and even on a God of any kind!

Recovery, from day one, becomes a matter of possibility. Possibility is just a glimmer of light flickering through the ink-like darkness of our soul. During our first meeting we experience other people demonstrating that they too walked through that door at some point in the past, that they stayed and began their own recovery process, and that IT WORKED!

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Nobody escapes paying the price for alcoholism, drug addiction, and codependency in society. Even if you are fortunate enough not to be a drinker at a level that is diseased (about 10% of our population drinks enough to hamper their daily performance) or one of the four adults who are in line daily enabling one who is (i.e., 48% of all adults over the age of 18 were either directly impacted by a diseased drinker as they grew up, or are being effected at the moment), then you are paying for the disease through higher taxes and insurance rates.

   The cost in dollars of alcoholism is almost incalculable. We have all read so many horror stories about deaths on the highway, fetal alcohol syndrome, the 88% of the incarcerated citizens who are there because they did something while under the influence, etc. that we have become numbed.

   But let's focus here on the costs to the trust and integrity within a society...something some believe is more important than even money.  Psychologists can actually measure trust within a society. Dr. Daniel Goleman, in his great books on emotional intelligence tells us that the technical term for the overall trust level in a society is its social capital.  Social capital is the sum of the goodwill and trust among the members of a society. Social capital takes in ethical values, charitable contributions, volunteerism, and such intangibles as looking out for the welfare of your neighbors, or caring for a sick friend. Interestingly enough, the three countries that have been the most successful economically on the earth (The U.S.A., Germany, and Japan) also have the highest levels of social capital.

   What is the impact of addiction on social capital? To people who attend 12-step programs such as AA, Al-Anon, Al-Atten, Nar-A-Non, or Adult Children of Alcoholics, personal honesty takes in a wide range of meaning. First, there is what everybody else calls honesty. In program parlance that is "cash register honesty." However, the sort of personal honesty involved in taking all twelve steps, or making direct amends to someone you have harmed in the past, goes well beyond what the "man on the street" calls honesty.

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As part of my continuing education as a pharmaceutical salesman covering the hospitals in a major medical center, my company had arranged for a kind of preceptor ship at a teaching hospital in downtown Chicago. I was to "shadow" a third year internal medicine resident for two solid weeks. We had three reps assigned to each resident, and that little group of four worked

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For various reasons, the members of addicted families suffer constant upheaval from frequent relocations. Moving may be related to other obvious symptoms of family instability: bankruptcy, divorce, frequent hospitalization, incarceration, deaths in the family, etc.

   But there may be other reasons. The hero-child dad is more likely than most dads to sacrifice family stability

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