What the drunk learns.
Here is what the drunk learns. The drunk learns that when she or he feels
something unpleasant - fear, frustration, anger, sadness, loneliness, boredom,
guilt, shame, whatever - that getting drunk provides an all purpose solution to
"the problem" of those feelings. Here is what the person from a healthy family
has learned. When unpleasant feelings happen - and they happen to all of us -
that she or he can turn to other people, to their spiritual connection, to
creativity, to their own inner resources - to soothe and resolve those
unpleasant feelings.
Drunks often come from families where they experienced more than average
emotional pain and shaming at the hands and voices of immature caregivers who
did not know how to nurture healthy children. That makes the problem worse. As
adults, drunks feel more intense negative feelings that happen more often and
last longer. Drunks - all addicts - have more unpleasant emotional experiences
and fewer healthy and productive tools for dealing with those feelings than do
people from healthy families. That sucks but it is true.
What the drunk learns to do to cope with icky feeling also prevents her or
him from learning what people from healthy families learn. Each time you feel
afraid or sad or whatever, you have the opportunity to use healthy coping. Each
time you resort to drinking or masturbation or shopping to cope with that
feeling you miss the opportunity to learn to cope differently in healthy and
productive ways.
So, addicts remain immature in the way they cope with their feelings. They
practice the same lesson of escape and avoidance again and again. They repeat
the same set of actions that lead to some immediate relief (perhaps blended with
some icky junk like shame and degradation) again and again. That essential
immature pattern recites a childish monologue. It says, "I feel bad - I can't
stand it - I must do something and do it now - I will do this sexual thing - I
feel relieved. Now I feel like crap again."
When you get sober, you begin to have feelings that you have been avoiding or
escaping for years. You may first think that you can't stand the feelings. This
is why people slip - they slip into coping in the old way. But each time you
allow yourself to be in your feelings without needing to change the feeling you
grow more mature. Each time you talk honestly with another person about your
feelings, you grow more mature. Each time to focus on your connection with your
higher power, your grow more mature. Each time to look down and the truth and
creativity and beauty within you, you grow more mature. A little bit at a time
you come to realize that your unpleasant feelings will not kill you - that you
can stand them - that you need not do anything at all except experience your
feelings with compassion and empathy for yourself. As you do that, you recover
just a bit more, become mature just a bit more, and heal, just a bit more.
I guess the graduality of that process is why we call it the path of
recovery.
