I remember as a twelve year old, sitting alone in our living
room after one of our by then typical family meltdowns …….trying to make
sense of the pain and general devastation of our once very happy family……trying
to understand how kind, decent and loving people could cause each other such
unrelenting pain, how we could say the things we were saying, hurl insults, act
out in anger and rage……I recall saying to myself “wars do these things to
people, separate loved ones, wound hearts, tear families apart. But somehow
we’re doing this to ourselves.”
Just as in a war people are forced to witness the dark side
of humanity...those of us who live with addiction come up against it as well.
It was my beloved Father, the man who loved and nurtured me, who gave me café
au lait from his spoon, held my hand when we walked and took such pleasure in
sitting me up on the kitchen counter to watch while he squeezed fresh orange
juice for me. My Darling Dad who worked hard to give me a life with so much
more than had ever been given to him. It was exactly this father who would sit
with a glass of scotch in his hand and slowly, glass by glass, descend into
becoming a monster. Who would become cruel and terrifying, tearing down what he
had worked so hard to build; devastating those he loved the most, making the
house shake with his rage and doing to us with his own hand, those very things
that he had spent his life protecting us from.
And eventually the gravity of his illness sucked us all in,
we all at one point or another shared his private hell with him until all of us
lost our grip on normal.
Living with the roller coaster ride of addiction, the
unpredictability, and bending of reality, the broken promises, the dashed
hopes…the disillusionment and disappointment, the secrets and lies...is a
traumatizing experience. As the French say it “marks” us.
When I was young there was no such thing as family
disease or family healing; we thought that if the addict sobered up the family
would get better by itself. We didn’t realize how sick family members became
through living with addiction.
My Father never found recovery.
I entered recovery not from addiction but the fallout of
living with addiction. Because I watched the Father I adored drift slowly into
a bottle of scotch that took him far away from himself, from us and from each
other, I need healing.
Once I discovered them, just sitting in alonon meetings was
for me deeply transformative. Saying what was in my heart and having no one
jump up, accuse me of being out of line, slam doors or rage or simply quietly
slip out of the room, changed me in profound ways. When people would come up to
me after meetings and say they identified with me, I was dumbfounded. For so
many years I had barely let myself know how different I felt. Now I wasn’t
alone after all. There was a room full of us, at least.
I don’t know if this experience has made me a better person,
but it’s made me deeper, funnier, wider…..and more importantly, it has taught
me the value of life, it has taken me to the edge of inner experience where I
had to make a choice to choose a lifestyle or a death style; because addiction
is a slow suicide.
And I chose life.
I’d like to borrow a quote from Vaclav Havel, who helped to
carry the Czech Republic to freedom and was also a prolific author and
playwright…..
“Either we have hope within us, or
we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul, and it is not essentially dependent on
some particular observation of the heart. It transcends the world that is
immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in
this deep sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or the
willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early
success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not
just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same
thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
It is hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try
new things”.
Vaclav Havel
This kind of hope is a great gift of recovery.
I have come to discover through both personal and professional experience that
those of us who live with addiction have a disease that is chronic and
progressive, a disease that has its tentacles wrapped around our personality
development because we grew up with it; a disease that requires aggressive
treatment. It is up to us to recognize this in ourselves and to get the help we
need to become well again so that we don’t pass the effects of living with
trauma onto the next generation.In finding my own strength and resilience, I
have had to learn to stretch and deepen my mind and heart to include all sides
of our humanity; to integrate love and hate, to learn to accept people and
myself in our full range of both beauty and ugliness, to find understanding and
forgiveness not just to be nice to another person, but to become whole again
myself. Recovery reflects the kind of hope that Havel talks about. We enter it
because it makes sense because
it is better than the alternative. We embrace it because we have hope and that
hope gives us, strength to live
and try new things. That hope leads us to expand the dimensions of
our own souls.
Recovery deepens us because it forces us to look at both
sides of life, the good and the bad and somehow hold both. It makes us more
aware of the dark side of life, but paradoxically better able to love the
light.
Written by: Tian Dayton, PH.D. and Senior Fellow at
the Meadows
