What, me addicted?

   Addictive behaviors work. They provide temporary relief for intense physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual agony. We co-dependents have our own favorite addictions.

   To most of us, the word addiction brings to mind images of down and out souls whose lives are lost to drugs and alcohol. But that group actually represents only a fraction of the population whose lives are hampered by addiction. If we must do the numbers, it is generally accepted that about 10% of the U.S. population is addicted to alcohol alone, throw in other substances, and you get to about 15%.

Please consider this startling figure, however.

   Beyond the 10%, for every individual addicted to alcohol alone, there are four others who are intimately close to that person who are addicted to them!

   Because of the sick payoffs from rescuing alcoholics (see addictive agents #2, #4, #7, #8, #9, #11, #14, #15, #16, and #17 listed below), and because an alcoholic cannot survive without being propped up by those four other people (some call them co-dependents, some call them co-alcoholics), alcohol being swallowed by only one person soon creates a sick system where everybody pays a monumental personal price. Everybody in this system has to live in a state of powerful denial. In other words, as I write this, I am describing over half of the U. S. population!

The following excellent definition and listing of addictive agents is taken from Serenity, A Companion for Twelve Step Recovery. 

"Addictive agents are those persons or things on which we form an excessive dependency."

    1. Alcohol or drugs

    2. Work, achievement, and success

    3. Money addictions, such as overspending, gambling, hoarding.

    4. Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, family, and business relationships

    5. Food addictions

    6. Sexual addictions

    7. Approval dependency (the need to please people)

    8. Rescuing patterns toward other persons

    9. Dependency on toxic relationships (relationships that are damaging and hurtful).

   10. Physical illness (hypochondria)

   11. Exercise and physical conditioning

   12. Cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic surgery, trying to look good on the outside

   13. Academic pursuits and excessive intellectualizing

   14. Religiosity or religious legalism (preoccupation with the form and the rules and regulations of religion, rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message).

   15. General perfectionism

   16. Cleaning and avoiding contamination and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms.

   17. Organizing, structuring (the need to always have everything in its place).

   18. Materialism.

    How did you do? If you are a relatively healthy person, physically, emotionally, and mentally, you will list about eight of these. If you are a co-dependent, you might suffer from some or all of them!

If you read something here that gave you one of those life-changing awarenesses, PLEASE...go for help. It it readily available right near you in your community. Just call 1-888-4-AL-ANON to learn about finding a meeting, or visit www.al-anon.alateen.org

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By Rev. Ned Wicker,

http://Drug-Addiction-Support.org 

The group session on spirituality was just wrapping up when one of the staffers opened the door and asked "Are you almost finished?" For Janice, one of four women in the group, it was time to go home. She had finished a five-day stay at the residential drug and alcohol treatment center, and this day, as she put it, was "graduation day."

It was a strange, almost surreal moment. After a stay in the hospital or treatment center, it should be good to go home and be with your. People, given they are medically stable and out of danger, heel better at home. Going home should be a good move. But was it?

Out in the lobby, her husband and pre-teen son waited. Now if my wife had been in treatment and was getting to go back home, I'd be excited. A big part of my life would have been missing, but in his case, the expression on his face told the whole story. Words can't express the look. "OK, it's time to take the addict home." The son sat in a chair, head down, and when his mother came out, he didn't seem at all enthusiastic about seeing her. In a moment, the family situation became very clear.

Drug addiction tears up families, as those watching their loved one struggle with the disease will bear the emotional scars long after the addiction is under control. What might have been concern for the addict at one point in time sadly can turn to anger and resentment. It's a kind of "Look what you've done to us" mentality and nobody has to say anything. You can read it immediately. The family goes down the addiction path too, playing their roles. Organizations like Nar-Anon and Al-Anon/Alateen are there just for families. Just as the 12-Steps were created by addicts for addicts, those principles were the basis for family groups. And just like the addict, the family member is not alone. There is help and support.

Janice gathered up her things. There was a short re-uniting in the lobby as she signed out. The moment was not joyous, no kisses, no "I love you" and it was like the husband was picking her up from work. His look told the whole story. She was leaving the structure and security of the treatment center and going back into the environment she was in while using. "Graduation Day" should be celebratory, but something was missing.

In treatment, Janice received compassion and understanding from the other patients. In group it is obvious that they all can relate to each other. There is human connection on a surprisingly deep level, even though the people in treatment may only see each other for a few days. That was going to be missing. Perhaps she had resources lined up and could call on them at a moment's notice. My sense was she did not. Graduation day didn't look so good.

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Yes, it all fits. He is spending time away from both his family and his work during evenings, and when she learns that these meetings are mostly attended by lonely women, there is this gigantic "aha."

If there are no men-only meetings in the area, then a desperate Al-Anon man is forced to attend meetings made up mostly of women.

Somewhere deep inside she knows that neither she nor her husband have been capable of providing either the emotional or physical intimacy that they had before the disease progressed. He must be getting that elsewhere.

I remember one of those early-in-my-recovery Friday night meetings that ended in one of the worst battles we ever had over "my program."

After the meeting there was a tradition that those who didn't want the meeting to end would drive across the freeway to a Denny's for coffee. I had never attended one of these social meetings, but on this particular night I was invited.

I remember standing right outside the door of the meeting room in the parking lot talking to a small group of ladies the moment I was invited to join them. I gladly accepted, much preferring to continue interacting with healthy sober people...women or not, to what I knew by 9:15 would be a wife with four or five hours of cheap wine under her belt.

Unfortunately, the ladies all piled into their cars and left me alone with this newcomer. This lady proceeded to tell me that her alcoholic husband was not only violent, but insanely jealous! I remember imagining him sitting in the darkness across the street looking through a high-powered rife scope sight at the area just between my shoulder blades.

I still had those serious doubts about my masculinity that every male Al-Anon has in the early days of recovery, and I was wondering to myself what James Bond would do in this situation?  I decided that James Bond would calmly invite the newcomer to ride with him to Denny's. So that is exactly what I did.

But the eyes that I felt between my shoulder blades were not those of a jealous husband. They were those of two women. One was my wife, the other our neighbor, Evelyn Meyer, whom Deb had asked for a ride to the hospital. She had told Evelyn the whole sad tale. She suspected that her husband was having an affair with another woman, and that they had been meeting on Friday nights at a nearby hospital.

To make matters worse, I remember the newcomer doing some crying.

When I finally came home that night I walked in the front door to the words "...I SAW YOU! I SAW YOU drive away with that woman, and Evelyn is my witness! This went on, again, deep into the night. I remember thinking myself really clever at one point when I told her "...yes, yes, I am in love with that woman. I'm in love with her and with every other woman in there!

I'm in love with Betty, and Mary, and Gladys, and Pat. I love them all!

This "affair," which almost every alcoholic wife imagines, allows her to shift the shame from her disease to her husband. Tragically, sometimes what she suspects is true, but often, as it was in this situation, her accusations are just another flavor of her bluster. The most tragic outcome happens when she manages to threaten and bully him into abandoning his recovery process. That outcome perpetuates the disease in the family and dooms them all to continue downward in their elevator.

If this sounds familiar, call to find a meeting where you can start your own recovery process. Al-Anon people will help at 1-888-4-Al-ANON or check out www.al-anon.alateen.org

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But still, there has to be another, successful way to be in recovery without the religion or the 12-step.  There are addiction treatment centers that offer treatment methods as an alternative to the 12-step, so there's got to be aftercare adopting a similar philosophy.  I think any way that paves the path to recovery is awsome and should be embraced, but it's curious to me why I never hear about any alternative measures to recovery.

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   Al-Anon is so absolutely the opposite of our upbringing, that it is TERRIBLY difficult for some men to unlearn their early training.

   Because of this early conditioning, after all of the "John Wayne" modeling, a man over fifty taking the first step has to have reached a bottom that has ripped all personal self esteem from him. The first step says;

"We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable."

   I have sponsored many men during the years, and I can tell you that these men tried everything imaginable to "manage" an alcoholic wife. They spent sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on treatment centers, begged and pleaded, sought out countless counselors, called the police, and hauled their wives to the offices of one physician after another as their wives' bodies deteriorated from the inexorably slow physical and mental decline caused by swallowing alcohol.

If you are such a man, or know one, just direct them to Al-Anon. There this "john Wayne" man will learn to listen, contemplate, accept help, grow, and overcome his early conditioning. We guarantee that he will not become less manly!

Call: 1-888-4AL-ANON or access: www.al-anon.alateen.org

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