Dual Diagnosis--Kindling a Relapse

NEW YEAR, 2008

Another symbolic reminder that, along with sobriety, we continue to find uncomfortable remnants from our past--kindling perhaps for a relapse?

"We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it." Alcoholics Anonymous, pp. 83,84

These are the days, aren't they? ...the troublesome days, holidays which beckon the revelry of old times.

Join with friends. Have a few cold beers. Snort some coke. Light a doob. Suck it up and race to the next bar or the next party. Throw some kindling on the fire.

"Laissez les bons temps rouler!"

Let the good times roll...! But the "good times" are romantic illusions of things that really never happened, aren't they? We really never quite "got there", did we? We were always one dollar, one day, and one dream too short of our goal, and we continue to imagine "one more good time", don't we?

One more frantic effort to bury the pain of being me--one more frenzied attempt to do what I have always done, to seek what I have always sought, to "HAVE IT ALL" without the pain and misery which always seem to follow me.... With bitter sweetness and stubborn resolve, I want to drag the OLD life forward into the new--afraid, as always, to leave the illusion behind.

These are the times, difficult to ignore, when the whole world around us seems to go crazy--crazy the way our minds want to go crazy.

We want to join in with the party. It's everywhere.

We can't fight the feeling that we are on the outside-looking-in.

However, we sit in our chairs watching TV, disengaged from the world around us and focused with the obsession that we have somehow been deprived of life, because we made a choice to change. We have thus focused so much on what we seem to have "lost" in our recovery, that we forget WHY we wanted to change and what we had REALLY lost before we made that decision to change.

We let ourselves imagine that food we have prepared is not quite as succulent as the food of "old times," though, in old times we had rarely partaken of food with any appreciation for its goodness. We let ourselves imagine that a quiet day with a grateful family or with sober friends is boring, although, in days past, we spent time with friends or family--time when we got drunk or high and when we were so self-absorbed that their presence really meant nothing to us.

We are "hard-wired" to forget the pain of the past, to immortalize our so-called pleasant indulgence of the past, because we want an excuse--a reason to try again to find that illusive fantasy of euphoria-without-regret--the endless self centered romance of our craving.

We have not learned the important truth, though, have we? For all of our delusions, we had, in our wasted past, dealt with our pain in a way which proved that pain relief of the sort we had chosen was more painful than the pain we sought to escape. We proved the truth when we lost our jobs, our families, our friends, our homes, and some of us our lives. We have forgotten the times when, without those dear friendships, we truly WERE on the outside-looking-in. We forgot the unbearable guilt and remorse which came ultimately to follow every binge and every debacle. We forgot how we had nurtured our diseases by hiding and isolating to avoid critical eyes and to avoid accounting for what our instinct told us was wrong--yet what our anxious minds craved again and again. We forgot the agony and the unbearable fear that accompanied our downward spiral to final defeat and desperation. We felt that we had lost our very souls, but we did not lament, for we knew no hell could be greater than the hell in which we have lived.

Lessons....

Today some of us will forget the lessons of the past, for our alcoholic and addicted minds are programmed to forget. We will try vainly once again to rise beyond our vulnerability and to sail among the clouds, or we will allow ourselves to sink to the dispair borne on all that which we see is "wrong" with our lives.

Lessons...

If I have described you as you feel today, I encourage you to find something for which you are grateful; for gratitude is the best insurance against relapse. Perhaps you may leave the house and sit on the beach, by the fireplace, in the bedroom next to your sleeping child, under your favorite shade tree, or just any pleasant and comfortable place. Start with a silent prayer to thank God that you are sober and rational. Give thanks for new friends, new job, new family, new horizons. Give thanks for being alive and in the moment.

If all other expressions of gratitude fail to lift you, then offer a helping hand to someone. Perform an unspoken act of kindness to make someon's day a little better.

And, if it's any comfort, remember that millions of us have felt the way you do, and we have survived. We have learned from the lessons of our own histories that "this too shall pass."

Life gets so much better, my friend, when I begin by surrendering to the truth.

Keep your kindling dry, and use it to light a fire in the hearts of others.

My name is Jim, I am a bipolar alcoholic, and I want to get better!

James Rist SD 09/13/02

Post edited by: JR1, at: 05/07/2008 10:45