Murderous Addictions Getting Them Before They Get Us By Don Beaudreau wbeaudreau@aol.com
A
ddictions can kill you. I know. I almost died. It was not until a mid-life event happened to me that I finally began to grasp the fact that I was raised in an alcoholic family. It was as if a jack-in-the-box had suddenly popped up and said: “Surprise!” “Surprise!” You’ve been living in denial. “Surprise!” You can’t hide from the shadow, because the shadow knows. “Surprise!” You’re hurting and you don’t even know it. “Surprise!” You’re not relating well to your wife and kids. “Surprise!” You’re continuing a dysfunctional family pattern going back generations and in doing so you are guaranteeing its perpetuation into the future. There was one particular event that focused me on this reality. A serendipitous, life-altering event. I had returned home late at night from a much-too-long board meeting. My wife and kids were already asleep. To unwind, I turned on the television merely as background noise, and then went to the refrigerator. Nosing around in there, I was not paying much attention to what was on the tube, other than to note that it was a talk show. But then, in the middle of deciding whether it was going to be beer and chips, or beer and brownies, I heard the phrase “dry drunk” coming from the television and my interest was aroused. I don’t remember the name of the person talking about Adult Children of Alcoholics, but I do know that what he said applied to me: that even though I thought I was not an alcoholic, the fact that I was raised in a family where alcohol was a problem meant that my behavior was affected by it. I was one of those “dry drunks.” At that point, I accepted the reality that my life was in a shambles, both professionally and personally; that my physical and mental health was in a downward spiral. And I began to wonder if maybe growing up in an alcoholic family had something to do with all this.
Well, even without the beer that I chugged that night, I would have cried. And cry I did! Torrents! This began the process of my wanting to know more about this addiction called “alcoholism” and its effect on me. Within a few days I attended my first Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, and continued in that program for nearly 5 years, missing only a few weekly sessions. This lead to further efforts to understand myself that included studying in various Clinical Pastoral Education situations with supervising therapists and attending various group sessions. In her book When Society Becomes an Addict Anne Wilson Schaef makes the point that an addiction is “any process over which we are powerless. It takes control of us, causing us to do and think things that are inconsistent with our personal values and leading us to become progressively more compulsive and obsessive.” Schaef’s major point is that addiction is not merely an individual’s tragic dilemma or the problem of those who associate with the addict, but also is society’s tragic flaw. Furthermore, as she and others point out, our problem is indicative of a deeper, systemic tragedy: of a society seeking purpose and meaning. Being addictive is a state of existence that proclaims a feeling of powerlessness. The horror is that addictive substances give the user/abuser the illusion of being powerful, sometimes brazenly so, whereas, in reality, the substance is merely a poor substitute for real power. The first of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous indicates this when it tells us: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable.” And according to AA, until one turns to the “Higher Power” as one might understand the concept, then one is not on the road to recovery. Or, if one is Humanist and a member of Rational Recovery, until one accepts Continued on page 28
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El Ojo del Lago / July 2022
