Delayed Reactions

At some point in my early childhood, I became numb and by that I mean that I no longer experienced emotions.  I don't remember ever being happy or feeling loved and wanted, but there were things that delighted me, such as taking walks and riding my tricycle and later observing the natural world.  I remember clinging to my mother, even though I had no confidence in her constancy because she seemed so lost in the world.  What I felt for her was not "love" exactly, it was more like wearing a life jacket in a leaky boat adrift in an angry sea.  I learned the feeling of love the first time I touched and smelled a horse, but I had very little access to these magnificent creatures for most of my life.  Mostly, as a child, I remember people saying and doing unkind things to me and being incapable of responding because I would become paralyzed.   Rather than try to understand why I lived like a deer frozen in the headlights of oblivion, I distracted myself with obsessions and addictions.

My overarching problem was clinical depression, often quite severe.  When Prozac came into my life and put that beast in the dungeon, I then realized that I needed to face the emotions I had avoided by freezing away the pain.  After a couple of decades of acknowledging past hurts and learning to understand more recent feelings, I noticed that I was consuming a lot more alcohol than was appropriate for a woman of my size.  Problem or symptom?  Both, it turned out.

Until recently, if something made me feel angry or sad, I would "let it go" and look forward to happy hour.  Now that I have stopped drinking, I can no longer hide behind my evening buzz and this has given me the conscious choice of either speaking up about my feelings or allowing resentments to fester.  Hanging onto resentments is classic alcoholic behavior and so I am retraining myself, with increasing success, to let people know how their words and deeds make me feel.  The art is in not reacting negatively but rather in a way that assumes the other person did not intend to make me feel bad.  I remind myself daily to use this sentence, "When you said (or did) _________ it made me feel __________ because ____________."

Such a simple sentence and so powerful.  Try it, it works.

Insatiable

One of the hallmarks of an addictive personality is how there is never enough.  One drink isn't enough, neither is one cigarette or a single french fry.  It is interesting how many types of addiction there are besides alcohol and drugs.  Clothing, shoes, food, gambling, shopping, "collecting", etc.  The common element of all is the quest for more and the need for the chase.

I remember being called Little Miss Needy Greedy when I was a toddler because I constantly said "Seri wants..." and then proceeded to grab whatever it was from whoever happened to be holding it.  This led to many spankings but the neediness was stronger than any wish to avoid pain.  As long as I triumphed for a brief second over my sister or brother who possessed the object of my desire, I would accept the beating.

The only thing that slaked my thirst for what I wanted but couldn't have was beer.  My parents were particularly fond of Schlitz and I remember my first sip of that sharp, foamy and metallic wonder:  it was what I had been searching for all along.  I was three years old at the time and from then on, my parents would give me a sip here and there just to stop my whining and begging.  I didn't notice the buzz at the time but there was a qualitative difference between beer and soda pop which I found irresistible.

There is no way of knowing whether I would have turned into an alcoholic had I grown up in a different family.  Plenty of alcoholics and drug addicts come out of the straightest, most conservative families in the deepest most southern of the Baptist tradition (Pat Robertson's son, according to his classmates, was quite the party animal in his college and law school years).  I will say that my father celebrated alcohol and drunkenness in a way that made it seem culturally acceptable and therefore I never thought of inebriation as a bad thing.  He matter-of-factly told us of how his own father was passed out in a gutter the night he was born and in the same sentence condemned his mother for divorcing the bum.  He related fond memories of being a mean and ugly drunk himself, and had a charming photograph of one infamous incident in which he bragged that he was "the meanest man in the world."

I didn't start chasing alcohol until I was in high school and it was cool to get high and to drink.  Marijuana did nothing for me and the other drugs frightened me because I felt like my grip on reality was fragile at best.  Alcohol, on the other hand, gave me a warm and confident feeling which allowed me to pretend I wasn't a wallflower.  One drink was good, two were better, and after losing count nothing mattered anymore.

If ignorance is bliss, oblivion is better.