the real key

Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that drinking is but a symptom of my alcoholism -- that the real problem is in my mind -- in how I think -- in the mechanism which blunts the memory of what happens when I start drinking, allowing (often ridiculous) justifications to take root and make drinking/using look like the right/deserved thing to do.  Simply put it's either that I can't remember clearly enough what happens or I somehow think I deserve to pick up a drink.

My personal experience is that (for me) this is fact not theory.  I can now, with some fluency in using the tools AA offers and the perspective gained from one-day-at-a-timing myself a bit of distance from my last drunk, see how truly slippery (pun intended) my thinking can be.

Further, as is often the case with addicts of all stripes, how I really feel about something can be muddled, obscured, denied, buried or dismissed by my "ism" -- the mental process gets so twisted on the way to justifying the drink that the emotional one is either suppressed into a numb void or cranked up to out-of-proportion hysteria.  How I really feel is lost in the way my thinking uses/edits/fuels/distorts my emotions to justify self destruction -- hell, it makes self destruction look like something else entirely.  (The words seem hyperbolic, but I reach for dramatic phrases only so I can try to convey in writing the wild internal pendulum alcoholism can feel like.  Plus, I can be a big drama queen sometimes.)

So, I was thinking today, that maybe the key to some recovery is to listen less to the brain and more to the heart -- listen less to what I think and more to what I feel.

And then I had to laugh, because it hit me so strongly that, even with the good intention of trying to sort recovery from the "ism", this was perhaps a bit too much poetic, philosophical navel-gazing.

Sure, there's some useful truths in the observations above, but the real key to stringing together some one-day-at-a-times sober, the real key to recovery, is to listen a lot less to yourself and a lot more to others.

 

Comments

[Dave]

LOL
Before I read your last line, I was thinking that I agree with everything you were saying and that I need to just listen to what others say.
LOL

(great minds ...)

[Syd]

How true. If I get out of my own head, then I'm in a much better place.

[Steve E]

Well, I have been listening to others all my life--and I guess that's OK.

But I didn't begin to HEAR what I was listening to, until spending quite a few years sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.

My listening was probably of the "pretending" type.