Support and Groups

Support and Groups

It was after the Ben Taub hospital night that I really needed even more support than ever before. Sober for years, I started to crumble. I started talking myself into drinking. I had been so young when I got sober. Couldn’t my drinking have been just a phase?

Yet at the same time I reached out and asked for help; told people what I was thinking. Thank God I never did drink, but I believe it was mostly because my best mentor did two key things: she told me that only an alcoholic believes that having a drink is the right response to deciding he/she is not an alcoholic, and she recommended I attend yet another support group.

It’s hard to explain the resistance I had to doing that, just as it is hard to explain how, once I allowed myself, my whole psyche changed.

Here was my state: underweight, not eating, not sleeping, smoking two packs a day, having constant PTSD/anxiety attacks, and wanting to drink. But I did not, for the life of me, want to go to another support group! I knew that the people just had to be full of self pity and they had to be real losers in life to have to accept that kind of help. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even need to be there, right?

Yet I did know that my way of doing things wasn’t working so hot at the moment, and I truly admired my mentor – who, by the way, was perfectly able to eat lunch like a regular woman whose stomach was not wrenched with worry and also to fall asleep without the use of narcotics. Oh, and she had been through some shit, too.

So, off I went. At least I could cross that deed off my list in case it didn’t work and go on to the next thing that would.

I listened to these people. Right away I did notice that they accepted the pain I was in. They dind’t reject it or me, or wish I would move on, or shut up, or snap out of it. They just accepted me. I decided that I could try some of their ways.

I think the psyche change really started with commiting to follow a simple suggestion. Here’s an exmple: let your mother live her life and you live yours. Realize that you did not cause alcoholism, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it.

Then I went along thinking how simple and easy that was, until I had to put it into practice. For instance, the urge to obsess in fear about my mother could overhwhelm me to the point that I would want to call people to track her down instead of going to the grocery store. I knew that my family needed groceries and that it was my agreed-upon role to get them. But to actually walk out that door to go shopping meant confronting the things I believed, which is why I was obsessing (to avoid them). Once I stopped spinning in my head about mom, I realized that I believed I didn’t deserve to go shop for groceries. How could I when Mom was out there like that? I believed I was selfish to go on with my life.

It would have been easy enough to stop there and decide that was correct, and to go back to obsessing and avoiding. Instead, by some miracle, I was able to follow even more suggestions such as calling someone who had already worked through issues like these and ask them to help me. I had to tell them what I was thinking, and then get to the truth. In this case, the truth would sound something like, “It is not selfish to be of service to one’s family by buying groceries. Your mother can choose help, or she can continue in her path. That is her right. But you will not be helping her, yourself, or your family, by worrying and not buying groceries.”

So, a simple task like buying the groceries took hours of talking and prayer, and then I would go to the store not at all feeling like I should go to the store, but I would go anyway. And I would cry. I would just have my kleenex with me at the store and cry the whole time. But I did it.

This was not a time of building a large ego. This was a hugely humbling time.

To be continued…