lostnotfound

I've been reading the materials that I got from Al Anon. I'm having some trouble understanding some things.

I can't find the exact passage right now, but one of the pamphlets mentions treating the alcoholic with "love and understanding" . I don't know what this means. I'm really not trying to be sarcastic here, I am truly trying to understand .... When AH comes home drunk, or drinks at home and is in a stupor by 8:00pm, how does one treat them with love and understanding. Please give me an example of what the correct reponse to the situation would be.

All I can feel about it is resentment right now. I feel disgusted when he drinks, I don't feel "love and understanding". I'm trying to find a way to get beyond that, but I'm not sure how. It has built up for 8 years, so I don't expect it to go away overnight.

ASpouse

I think you are taking the term too literally. I had a hard time with that also especially when all I felt was anger, I was way beyond resentment.

How I took it was "it was his choice to be a drunk and I would do my best to love him and understand his illness". I would set boundaries for me, that showed him these things.

Love and understanding, in my opinion are gifts from God, gifts that we so rarely use in the spiritual way. I eventually came to believe that this was a form of spirituality, to help me grow, to help me love myself. I found it difficult to love myself if I was angry and resentful to others, especially my husband.

I'm sure Rita or Denny or others will be along shortly to give you their take on it.

lostnotfound

Thanks Judy. I just find it hard to understand how to approach a situation with love, when it's causing me such heartache, pain and fear.

lostnotfound

[QUOTE=ASpouse]
How I took it was "it was his choice to be a drunk and I would do my best to love him and understand his illness". QUOTE]

THis is another concept I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around. The literature stresses that alcoholism is a disease, and they have no control over it. If they had no control, no A would ever be in recovery, right? So they DO have control. They say it's like cancer or diabetes, but you can't just change a behavior and your cancer stops, right. You can change a behavior and stop being drunk. I know there is more to it than that, but I just can't picture the A as in innocent in the matter.

denny57

Hey there lost

Don't worry about feeling that right now. You're at a place where you're feeling lots of anger and resentment for what's been going on. It took many months after I started program for me to understand. Along with Al-Anon, I did an awful lot of reading on the disease in all its forms: physiological, mental, spiritual and emotional. I spoke with experts (including my doctor and therapist). I attended lectures. I go to open AA meetings when I can.

Here's how it worked for me - as I came to understand the dynamics of addiction, I could not help but feel love and compassion for the addict. The love I feel is not the same as the romantic love I had for my AH. It's a deeper, all abiding love. An understanding that we are all human, we are all in this together, and some of us are very fortunate to not have the problem of addiction. Don't get me wrong, I can still get angry when I think about some of my AH's behaviors, but the anger is short-lived now. It serves no purpose but to get in the way of the serene life I want for myself.

Give yourself time in all things related to recovery. It's one day at a time. In my experience it cannot be forced, it comes when you're ready.
Right now, you may not believe it is possible - but I think you will find that it is.

((()))

Minx1969

Lostnotfound:

The best things I did for myself is to start going to open AA meetings as well as getting a sponsor in Alanon and working the steps.

Until I went to open AA meetings, I didn't have much compassion or love for any alcoholic..Lots of resentment and thought they were all scum..

Here's the thing - it's a compulsion...or an obsession to drink..Like we are obsessed with our alcoholics (people, places and things)..that's how obsessed they are with alcohol..

Don't know if that helps..

When I started going to open AA meetings (speaker meetings are the best) I was able to see the person behind the disease..I was able to see these people struggle as they were in and out of the rooms..

That gave me compassion and love.

Also for me - reading the first 164 pages of the Big Book of Alcoholism helped as well...

It takes time to start to love and understand them...Try treating your husband with the respect that ANY human being deserves..whether or not he treats you the same way...

We can only focus on our actions and our behaviors..So today - you can walk away and not argue if he starts in on you..You can tell him "you maybe right" when he argues with you..etc..

These are the things I learned to do in Alanon.

DesertEyes

Hi there lost,

There's actually two _separate_ parts to that. One part is the "insanity" of alcoholism, the other part is the "disease". Here's the way it works.

An alcoholic gets drunk, smashes the car, loses the job, hurts the family. Having done all that while under the influence the alcoholic goes out to a bar the next weeked and picks up the first drink. That _first_ drink is the "insanity" of alcoholism. There is something fundamentaly wrong with the brain of an alcoholic that would lead them to pick up that first drink.

However, the alcoholic is not yet drunk. The alcoholics is stone cold sober _before_ the first drink. Up to this point the alcoholic has the _choice_ to not take the first drink, to instead call AA, or a doctor or a shrink or somehow reach out for help from anybody who can aid them in not picking up the first drink.

Suppose this alcoholic does not make that call and takes the first drink. At this point the disease takes over. The brain of the alcoholic is different in the way it metabolizes alcohol. Actually, any kind of "lipid-soluble" compound is metabolized differently, that includes all the mood altering drugs from valium to cocaine as well as caffeine and nicotine. A normal brain is capable of detecting the intoxication caused by the alcohol and stop consuming it. The alcoholic brain is impaired from the very first drink to the point that it cannot stop.

Once the alcoholic has the first drink, or the addict the first hit, they are physically incapable of stopping. That impairement, caused by the different metabolism, is the _disease_ of alcoholism.

The fact that the alcoholic _chooses_ to take the first drink while stone cold sober is the _insanity_ of alcoholism.

Am I making sense?

Mike

bahookie

Yip, I guess it takes some of us (me) a lot longer to grasp things!
That's the first time I've read something about the disease idea that kind of made sense

Thanks for that

J
Ps still feels like it's being made to "fit" the word disease though

Jazzman

Lost you don't know my history and some here do so I'll be brief. When I was 23 I developed a serious addiction to cocaine. Long story short, I quit when I realized I was running my life into the ground. Tough addiction to beat no doubt, very addictive drug.

That personal experience did wonders for my understanding of what M was going through when it became obvious to me that she had developed a chemical dependency to alcohol. Because of my experience with addiction I can fault no one for becoming chemically dependent on any drug and I can easily feel compassion for an individual struggling with such a battle. It just plain sucks.

However, that doesn't mean that I could well up with compassion when M was raging out on me in a drunken stupor blaming me for everything that was wrong with her life! All it really meant was I was pretty good at not fanning the flames and getting sucked in to an insane argument that she would probably not even remember....

I too struggled with the concept of considering her no different than a person with cancer because she had the power to NOT take that 1st drink, (mikes post above). Having once beaten a chemical dependency myself, all I could hope for was that she could find the strength to fight for her life the same way I did years ago.

Hope this helps some.

ASpouse

Ithink a big part of this concept would be detachment. BTW,I thinkthis is a great post and one that many people could benefit from, including myself.

lostnotfound

Thanks everyone. It's making a little more sense.

My AH has decided not to speak to me at all now, and has started sleeping in the guest room. I'm trying to accept that this is his reaction to me doing something to change myself, and I have no control over it.

Jazzman

You can still be civil to him, that would be "keeping my side of the street clean" in Al Anon terms. It's his choice how he reacts to your efforts to achieve a livable solution.

lostnotfound

I am trying to be very calm and civil to him. I'm not getting civil in return, but I can't control that. Thanks for the reminder though.

deax

lostnotfound- I can totally relate to your confusion. I feel the same way many times, not specifically the love and compassion thing but with other ways that are considered proper in dealing with an alcoholic/addict.

A lot of the information seems contradictory. I still don’t understand what detachment really means, for example. My therapist has a different definition of detachment than Al-Anon does. And some of the Al-Anon readings and books like Codependent No More sometimes seem to ask us to do the impossible, imo- or ask us to do things I think even “healthy” people do, just because we’re human. And something like DesertEyes’s post above- really helpful for me in processing the terminology, but at the same time, there are people in other sections of this board (Alcoholism, AA, even Substance Abuse and NA) or people like my bf who ARE alcoholics (or addicts), but who CAN manage to have only 1 beer on occasion, for example.

I was actually relieved at an Al-Anon meeting last Friday. A woman there who I have respect for and who has been attending for years was talking about her son, who is a recovering alcoholic with about 2 years sobriety. He recently decided to stop attending AA meetings, and she said OF COURSE this makes her worry he’ll relapse, of course she tells him what she thinks he should do for his own recovery before turning it over, etc. And it relieved me to hear this because sometimes it seems like to be sufficiently detached, healthy, not codependent—we’re not supposed to worry about the people we love, not supposed to get invested or involved at all with their recovery. But I tend to think in such a black and white way that sometimes hearing those shades of gray in people’s experiences is comforting to me...

I don’t know if my thinking is completely off base or not. I know more things make sense to me now than it used to, so maybe more clarity will come in time. Seems to have been the case for everyone else here when it comes to the feelings you're having too.

ASpouse

You know, my H who is recovering, hasn't gone to a meeting in 4 months and I am not worried about him relapsing. Why? I don't know, I guess maybe because he owns his own well-being and I cannot control what he does and what he does not do.

Now my husband stopped going because he works 7 days a week and M - F he leaves home at 6am and gets home at 9p. Sat & Sun he works from 9am til 8pm. He really has no time to go. He speaks to his sponsor daily and his AA friends probably weekly, I'm not sure about those folks though. Actually it's not my job to monitor who he speaks with.

What is important to me that my H, although not currently attending meetings because of his work schedule, is still working the program even without the meetings

You see, I can whip myself right back into that co-dependent state of mind and mode if you will if I CHOSE to worry about my husband .... but I won't do that to myself, I've too much to lose.

LaTeeDa

I think a lot of the confusion comes from learning to separate feelings from reactions. This is something it took me awhile to figure out. We all have feelings. Anger, sadness, worry, fear, etc. You cannot simply "turn off" feelings. Even if you could, it would do more harm than good.

I am still learning this, but feeling the feelings is okay. Let them be. Just feel them and don't DO anything about them right away. Then, when you have some clarity, try to identify where the feelings are coming from. Sometimes our mind plays tricks on us and we think someone or something is "making" us feel a certain way. When you really dig a little deeper, it is usually something within you that is causing the feeling.

Now here is the really hard part--what you do about it. Decide if you need to take action, and what that action should be. Enforce a boundary, set a new one, detach, do something for yourself, or maybe nothing. Some feelings just need to be felt and pass, with no action or reaction required. Some feelings are so strong and painful that we want to DO something about them. But many times, it's best to just weather the storm and let them pass.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I have a hard time explaining it.

L

ASpouse

I think you explained it perfectly L .... it's not an easy concept to understand.

deax

Hardest part for me to accept, by far.

Thanks for your post LaTeeDa, I think you explained it well too. Makes some sense to me. We're entitled to our feelings- whatever they may be!- the issue is what we do with them after we figure out where they're coming from. That's a helpful way to look at it....

Jazzman

Ah but once you get good at identifying the source of your feelings it's easier to appropriatly react. For instance... Someone says something that touches one of your hot buttons, you recogngize it as a hot button and your reaction could be based on fear or anger. A quick motive sanity check could prevent you from over reacting.

MsPINKAcres

Hey - I have been having trouble getting to the site this morning -so I am just now able to access this thread -

As far as compassion for the alcoholic/addict when the disease is active - most of the time I felt like "compassion my a**" and that I felt like take a baseball bat and beating the living crap out of them - but just because I felt it, I have learned in that I don't have to act on it.
So by compassion - for me, that means I don't have to get in their face screaming everytime they come home drunk or messed up. I can just avoid dealing with them until they are not under the influence. If they are passed out on the floor, instead of kicking them - I just step over them and leave them alone. If I'm in a really good mood - maybe I'll throw a blanket over them if it's cold - maybe. (lol)

I also learned that compassion and understanding is that alcoholics and addicts are smart, beautiful, loving, caring people that suffer from a disease that turns them into sorry pieces of (*&^$&(&($#&$#^^^%$ - And if they are not actively in recovery, they will do whatever, whenever to get their way. I can either accept them as they are or walk away from them - They probably won't change.

It is a fine line, for me - it is about what I can tolerate and what I choose to be around. If they are drinking - do I want to stay in the house or go stay with a friend? If they are going to drink at a party, do I want to go or stay at home?
Al-Anon gives me the right to make choices.

As you can see, this is a very loaded question, I could probably go on and on - even longer than what I have -

Hope this has given you a little insight to a wide range of the answers about compassion and understanding for alcoholics/addicts,

Keep coming back - Don't stop before the miracle happens in you - You deserve it,
Rita