wpainterw

All during my 40 years of drinking I was obsessed with the fear that “What will happen if they find out”. What do you suppose I meant by “they”? My family? My employer? My fellow employees? Even my dog? “Oh I must do everything I can to keep ‘them’ from finding out!”
Often I would have an opportunity to go to an AA meeting, but I passed it up. Because, what might happen if I met someone I knew, perhaps a friend, someone from the church who might, despite AA anonimity, “spread the word”! Just one person, perhaps a disgruntled acquaintance, breaking the pledge of anonimity and gossip would take its course.
So I sought “counselors”, sat with them for expensive hours, trying to discover “why” I drank. Because, some of them told me, if I only knew why I drank, then as soon as I realized that my cravings would vanish. So I developed all sorts of reasons “why” and “because” and, despite thinking to know “why”, I continued to drink. And the drinking increased.
For forty years, there was something I never realized. It was this: THEY ALREADY KNEW. At times I suspected this, having heard a distant remark in a grocery store between two women who were looking in my direction: “.........bad habits.....” And once an old friend of my father’s invited me over for dinner and, despite the pretended geniality, his wife called me “feckless” when saying goodbye.
Yes, they knew. And I was “bad”, “feckless”, even a “failure”.
I didn’t really start to recover until things reached the point where I was able to say, “I don’t care if they “know”. If they don’t know already, I want them to “know”. I just want this to stop. I want to get rid of this. I don’t care what happens to me if I can somehow get free of this slavery. It’s better being a sober trash collector than a “famous” “success” enslaved to alcohol or some other mind altering substance.
Yes, they had “known” all along and, finally, I too “knew”. And from that point on my recovery began and for 25 years I haven’t had a drink.
Was it that way with you? When did you “find out”? And did “they” already “know”?

W.