Cheers for Venuscat Part Five
 

last part here:

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...t-four-21.html

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Support

:hug: to Suze & Nick - best thoughts for you both :)

Thinking of you guys!

Hugs and love to you both. X

Thank you so very much ♥

Continued love.

I hope it all works out for both of you!

Wishing nothing but the best for the both of you.

You both deserve no less.

More love to both.

Recovery is never easy. I was in "recovery" for thirty years. I have been there, all the places you have been, addiction wise and family wise. When people asked me why I drank I said it was because my sister was psychotic and took her own life, her son also. Or that my mother suffered dementia in her last seven years and told lies to others about me and about my dad, I drank and it was always "because". Denial. The reason I drank was that I was trying to "cope" with stress by self medication and my body and my AV wanted more and more of that "medicine". An old, old story. Why do I tell these things? Is it unfair and mean to my family to dredge up all of this? I say this because they are gone now and one way I can make up for those thirty years is to tell my story to others who seem to be in places I have known so well. And to those of my family who continue to live, I just want them to know that it happened to me and that it could happen to them. This terrible, demonic illness. And maybe what I say will help them as I might have been helped had someone said those things to me.
The mountain metaphor means a lot to me. One may trip and fall on the way up and yet, particularly if there are others on the rope (like you two are helping each other), you can pick up where you left off, continue climbing together. The slope gets easier with time. Don't look down. Look upwards, towards the sunlight.

Bill.

P.S. Suze, It occurred to me that something very important, special,and in its own way very hopeful is going on. You are now attending classes for a degree in counseling. At the same time you are having a great deal of stress. Stress is hard but climbing the mountain is hard. But when you succeed in your continuing recovery, as I am confident you will, you will have become the most effective of counselors, for you will have been where your patients will be. You will have struggled like they will be struggling, and you will tell them your story and how you recovered from the illness. And they will listen to you in ways that they would never listen to one who had not personally been afflicted as you have been. So when you ask whether what you are struggling with now has meaning, it has a great deal of meaning. You are mending yourself and you are increasing the power you will have to mend others. Learning both in the classroom and in your own life. And you will become one of the very best of counselors, helping so many others. Your life will have meaning. More meaning than you can ever imagine. And they will say, "Thank you, Suze!" Thanks for being the brave and determined person you are!

Bill

Lovely, Bill :)

Suze will be an amazing, competent and successful counsellor.

I completely agree with both of you.

thank you.... ♥

I am not sure what I can be right now.
These are tough days.....hard to get through.
To be honest, I spend a lot of the fighting the urge to run....

:grouphug:

Sending you love, sweet Suze.

Yes, the "urge to run". The famous "fight or flight" fear which all have encountered in the trenches, in the jungles. I was never in those trenches, jungles, but often sought escape, the well known "geographical solution". But wherever I went I could not escape myself, my illness. Eventually I had to come to terms with it with myself, not pretend that my spouse might somehow manage to protect me. Because, when she went off on a trip it all started up over again. And then on an afternoon when I was supposed to drive out to the airport to meet her I knew that either of us, and maybe someone else, might be killed in an accident. And I sat there with this weird growing toxic feeling realizing that there was a brick wall and nowhere to run. I felt that death was not far away. That has a way of focusing things. Four years ago I felt the same way in a critical care ward at midnight after a heart valve transplant. An hour more of this and i'll be gone I thought .I have not had a drink since the earlier experience and it has been nearly 29 years. Did something save me or did I realize that I had to save myself.? The flight of denial which had gone on for thirty years was over. Step one they call it. The famous "Hillary Step" comes a few meters short of the summit of Everest. Step One for alcoholics came for me at the very beginning. And I found more challenges later on. Did I save myself or did something save me! I am well into sobriety. That's all that matters.

Bill

P.P.S. Do try Ernie Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, Storytelling and Imperfection in Pursuit of Spirituality. Available at Amazon inexpensively. Also the Jane English and Gia Fu Feng translations of the Tao TeChing (there is also a more recently published commemorative volume with new illustrations).And they've also done the iChing composed 500 years later. As to grandfathers, is my much loved Grandpa who died at age 70 a Boddhisattva. What has been protecting me from disaster for 40 years?

How are you both Suze? Nick?
Sending love. X