Filling in the Blank

How do you know when you need recovery?

Photo by Yutacar on Unsplash

On my mother’s birthday many years ago, when she turned the age I am now, I sat in the living room of our house watching a scene unfold. I was, as always, on the outside looking in. My many younger brothers were all well under 25 years old, still in that phase of life where they were spending every weekend going out and stirring up trouble, exorcising the emotions that accompanied a childhood constrained by religion and parents who opted out at some point. My mother was doing the same in her own way.

She’d had a breathalyzer installed on the ignition of her car by court order, following more than one appearance for driving while drunk. It was hard for her to take her burgeoning criminal record seriously – after all, no family gathering had been dry since my parents had left the church and my brothers were often the most raucous drinkers in any room. If others could party, why couldn't she?

As the noise intensified and judgments grew increasingly impaired, my brothers encouraged her to measure her blood-alcohol content. So she did, walking back and forth to the garage, the number of her future court appointments multiplying with each breath that registered. A sort of drinking game began. “Blow, blow, blow,” my brothers chanted, then cheered as the meter read two, three, four times the legal limit for driving.

I knew my parents’ behaviour was problematic. I knew my brothers needed parental guidance and because they hadn’t received it, they turned on my parents instead, daring someone, anyone, to keep them in line. But I saw the underlying issue as more one of circumstance – of bad luck, of tough times, of poor decision-making – instead of addiction. And if you don’t see yourself as affected by someone else’s addiction, how can you know that you, too, need recovery?

I’m not sure why I didn’t associate my family dynamics with addiction. Maybe it was the fact that our parents had been entirely sober throughout our childhood, only caving to temptation and old behaviours when we eldest siblings were in our early 20s.

Maybe it was because we lived in a 4,400 square foot house covered in wallpaper hand painted to match the upholstery and the drapes. The carpet in the formal living room was so lush, your toes would sink until you almost couldn’t see them anymore. The manicured garden was bisected by a brook that swelled in the rain and an undeveloped, forested lot sat between us and the next-door neighbour. While there was chaos, our idyllic environs contradicted the stereotypes of addiction.

Maybe it was because my parents were professionals in their respective fields and didn’t abuse substances on a daily basis (that would come later).

Whatever the case, I never saw my parents as addicts. I wanted to get far away from my family, from the drama. There were too many bankruptcies and DUIs and bill collectors and threats of foreclosure and credit cards with 0% APR for the next six months. There were endless court dates and anger management classes and garnished wages and predictably unpleasant encounters with police. There was conflict at every turn. There was at least one sibling with increasingly severe mental illness, the kind that commits you behind a thick, locked door without your shoelaces when you should be in high school.

What I didn’t know, what I didn’t see, was that all those things were related – not necessarily directly, as in one being the exclusive cause for another, but all tied up in a knot of behaviours that were ultimately shaped by alcoholism.

The fourth step of Al-Anon involves taking a moral inventory of one’s self in a sort of self-discovery process. You’re supposed to identify your failures and how you may have contributed to them, your resentments and why they might linger, or your greatest strengths, talents, and abilities.

For me, the exercise is easy enough when it comes to what I bring to a job position. But when it comes to characterizing myself outside of work, that is where I draw a blank. And I always have: I’ve never had a strong sense of my personal characteristics. Would I consider myself a forgiving person or do I nurture a grudge? Am I fragile or resilient, ordinary or strange? What are my values beyond work and parenting? What might my life look like – how do I want it to look – if I wasn’t always alternating between survival and gathering resources for my next job transition?

(The best I could do in recent years was to classify myself as a zombie killer in the inevitable Zombie Apocalypse that divides humanity into three essential types: the hunters of game, the killers of zombies, and the cultivators of crops).

Why was I so blank when it came to understanding myself? I suspect a poor sense of self is the hallmark effect of someone else’s addiction. This is because the classic relationship pattern for someone living with an addict is one of co-dependence. The person without the addiction (the co-dependent) becomes obsessed with the behaviour, thoughts, and moods of the person with the addiction (the addict).

Al-Anon characterizes the co-dependent as trying to control others, but I see it the other way around. To me, co-dependents are controlled by everything outside of themselves. Their attention is focused outwards, on someone or something else. Their own behaviour, thoughts, and moods are being shaped by those of someone else. They’re not focused on themselves at all. They don’t look within or get to know who they are as a person because they’re being buffeted here and there by external forces. They’re simply trying to survive whatever situation they land in.

The solution to this impasse, then, is turning your focus away from what’s happening around you and getting to know yourself.¹

If you make it to mid-life without a strong sense of self (at the very least, you should probably know whether you’d be a zombie killer, game hunter, or crop cultivator), you might consider whether you, too, have been affected by addiction. Sometimes, the effects are indirect; you may not have grown up with parents who were addicts, but perhaps they did. They would’ve been affected by addiction and unless they’d made an active effort to recover from its effects, those effects would’ve shaped their behaviour as well. That would’ve had an impact on you, in turn.

So, recovery starts with identifying that addiction existed and therefore affected you. The process of recovery is about becoming aware of its effects and addressing them, one by one. This could involve listing stressors and your responses or identifying various things that happened in your life and assessing your contribution to those outcomes. Much of the work is internal, directed entirely at yourself in order to reconfigure how you relate to other people and situations. It is emancipatory in nature: by doing the internal work, you inch ever closer to freeing yourself from the control that everything external to you exerts over your mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional wellbeing.

This is quite a promise, but one well worth the effort because the effects of addiction are insidious. A fear of being trapped, a sense of always being on edge or the way you might find yourself crumbling under certain pressures, emotions that have always emerged under certain conditions, or something as seemingly unrelated as an inability to manage finances – these can all be part of the complex effects of addiction. The thing that drives you, that motivates you to pursue this goal or behave in that way, can be 100% linked to simply being around addiction during your formative years or at key transition points in your life.

It can take what feels like forever to make that connection. Yet once you see it, you can’t unsee it. All of a sudden, puzzle pieces click into place and it hits you like a ton of bricks: that’s what I’ve felt for so long. That’s where it all started. That’s why I keep finding myself here, in this mental or emotional or physical state, over and over again.

And that’s where recovery begins.

For more thoughts on recovery, see:

Adventure, the Antidote

I Have No Idea What I Want

Alone Again

1. When I write ‘you’, I really mean me.