David Nieporent (now, with children) Posted: February 06, 2012 at 01:27 PM (#4054728)

I can see an argument that certain things are so dangerous to those people who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not use them responsibly, that they should be banned. (For example, I don't favor the position that private citizens should be permitted to own nuclear weapons.) I'm not convinced that drugs and alcohol represent that sort of threat that demand prohibition, but you could make an argument, I suppose.

The problem is that, while drugs might be dangerous to some people, prohibition is definitely dangerous to many more people.

- this
unfortunately


BAE,

i'm not bored. it's something to hear people i don't know at all say pretty much word for word what i've heard for years from people i DO know.

i hope i have got to where i can stop believing that "if they wanted to they could just stop". i don't think that i can get to where i stop needing to know - why do they start and why CAN'T they stop. God knows i've been trying not to be angry about it for years.

trouble is that i'm not sure the answer would give me the "closure" - jeezus i hate that word - there are some things you can't "close" - i imagine it would. any more than if you ask an ex-partner why they broke up with you, you would ever be really satisfied with the answer without asking a lot more whys and wouldn't none of those answers really answer what you are asking anyway...

when i was younger i thought that as you got older life would get easier because you would know more and things would make more sense. i'm finding out that as you get older you find out that you know less and less of what there is to know and that everything is complicated.

I am for freeing people from that enslavement by any available means. The damage to society is severe, pervasive, and too often tolerated because it happens out of our sight.

As a recovering alcoholic I'm also for freeing people "from that enslavement by any available means" with which they choose to avail themselves. The amount of governmental intrusion necessary to achieve the degree of general sobriety you're hoping for is enormous. That intrusion would make for a society, imo, far more damaged than the damage to society you see following from drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. What substances would you outlaw, or heavily regulate, and what penalties would you insist on in order to achieve the societal sobriety you seek?

If I may, it's not uncommon at meetings to hear, "drinking kept me alive until I got to AA". That was true for me as well.

When you say, "The damage to society", what do you mean? As precisely as you care to answer.

Nobody says "I'm agnostic on the idea that my mother loves me."

I might be in that situation.

Likewise. God only knows what she thought she meant when she said it. As BB King wrote,

Nobody loves me but my mother,
and she could be jiving, too.

In the words of Cool Hand Luke, I'm sure I'm a hard case. I remember choosing that I would not kiss my Mom good night when I was 7.

Huh. Same here, though that happened when I was 10 or so. We had just had sex ed in school and anyone who did that was off the goodnight kiss list

i hope i have got to where i can stop believing that "if they wanted to they could just stop". i don't think that i can get to where i stop needing to know - why do they start and why CAN'T they stop. God knows i've been trying not to be angry about it for years.

I suppose I should have a kinder attitude towards my mother in that regard, given what I've learned over the years about alcoholism. She was an alcoholic for over fifty years, and never gave any indication at all that 1) it was causing any problems 2) that she cared it was causing problems, and 3) that she was interested at all, ever, in getting sober. Her alcoholism served her well, in a way. It made her enough of a cripple that she couldn't leave my dad. And, he rarely challenged her on it, since he was desperate to not be alone. A strange, sad collaboration.

Her alcoholism is something I still hold against her (though the anger and resentment aren't crippling me, aren't feelings that come up all that often, and don't affect my relationships, AFAIK), even though she's been dead for several years. That may be mostly because the financial damage her drinking did is something I'm still dealing with and working past.

What's happening is that the market is now separating the sheep from the goats when it comes to "rare" books. And the outcome has been mirroring much of the rest of the economy, in that a handful of dealers are doing very well, and are positioned to do even better when the economy recovers, whereas most of the rest of them are dropping by the wayside. The internet has simply exposed too many of those "rare" books as being plentiful, and the prices have dropped accordingly.

I was wondering about even longer-term forces here. The book is heading towards obsolescence. (I don't know if it will ever get there, but it certainly might) Will this make the physical book as artifact more or less valuable?

It's hard to tell in "the long run", but for the foreseeable future it's not hard to project two current trends about the value of physical books: The great majority of them (95% - 98%) will lose their value due to decreased demand and the increased visibility of the backlog of existing supply; and the very small number of truly rare books will increase in price, because even with reduced demand there are never going to be enough copies to satisfy new collectors who come into the market. I can see that with the books in my own collection, where I've got thousands of books that formerly were $20 - $50 but are now under $10, and several hundred that used to be $100 - $200 and are now $500 to $1000 or more. What's happened is that the internet has driven all those bogus "rare" books out into the open, in quantities previously unsuspected, while at the same time certifying that the truly rare books aren't being replaced and are fast disappearing.

Or to put it another way, there's never been a better buyer's market for good but non-rare books**, but if you want to get truly scarce or rare books, the chances are that the prices are likely to go nowhere but up.

Of course the trick is knowing how to tell those two categories apart, but that's another story. (smile)

**For the most part, if you're willing to wait a year or so, almost any given hardback book will be cheaper than the e-book version. There are competing snobberies about "real" books vs. e-books, but strictly from a cost standpoint the great majority of hardback books will be cheaper to buy.

SO

amazing how many long lived marriages are a strange, sad collaboration. your parents are pretty classic alcoholic/enabler - codependent.

i dated a guy who i found had an alcohol problem and left him the second time i saw him drunk. i had been absolutely crazy in love with him and it was like someone threw a pail of ice water on me. he said he'd stop for me. i knew it wasn't true because it was what he said the first time. i could hear my auntie sayin about her husband - well, he's sober NOW but i know he means to drink again, just don't know when. and when he drank, shtt happened. i told my auntie if i could leave my boyfriend she could leave her husband. she told me i didn't love him enough. i told her he didn't love HER enough. she told me - you can't help who you love.

well, that sentence has 2 meanings, doesn't it?

@305--indeed it does.

I'm with you, in that if you have to go one route on things, it's vastly healthier if the route is "they're the ones that need to give up the addiction to x, y, or z" in order for the relationship to work (in a sane and healthy manner). The alternative, where you tolerate the addiction because you love them, is a recipe for lifelong misery.

I can't help thinking of the other thread, where some are of the opinion that p should forgive c, because c is p's dad. I've never understood why that belief isn't instead "c should never have been doing that to p in the first place" especially when c isn't showing remorse--and we all know what that means, that c is just going to do those things over and over and over again. In a lot of cases imo people lose track of the likely result of behavior. If only one of two people are going to give in, so that the result is either outcome A (alcoholic gets sober) or outcome B (sober person tolerates alcoholic's drinking), which outcome would we rather see?

You can be pretty sure of one thing and that is, while the alcoholic is drinking, he loves the booze more than he loves you. It sounds like you're at peace with the decision you made. Once in a while that question would come up at an Al-Anon meeting. I was always of the opinion that if the alcoholic loves you and wants to get sober, then he should go ahead and do that. It's rare indeed when one person can "keep" another person sober. In the program it's often said, "only I can keep me sober, and only I can get me drunk". It's a valid way to take responsibility for one's sobriety, and it's a nice reminder that it really doesn't matter what another person does: my actions and my sobriety don't have to depend--at all--on another person's behavior. It's a very freeing thing to realize especially if you were an alcoholic who often thought, so-and-so did that to me. Of course I'm going to get drunk over it. What other choice do I have?

I don't mean to be critical of your aunt, but I just don't think it really, finally has all that much to do with how much you love them. We can love someone enormously and know that being in a relationship with them is not a good idea, that it won't be healthy, or happy. Not to be too much of a mathematician about it, but if I had the choice between being in love with and in a relationship with a woman I was crazy in love with and she happened to be an active alcoholic, versus being in love with and in a relationship with a woman I was solidly in love with but didn't feel that zzzzip over (you know what I mean), with the difference that she wasn't an alcoholic, I wouldn't hesitate more than a couple of seconds before choosing the second relationship. I'm sure I'd very occasionally feel wistful for the first woman, but that's a small price to pay for avoiding a life of craziness, emotional violence or worse, the mood swings, the physical sickness, the fights... all that awful, awful stuff that's always a part of the party.

The problem is, for some people, it's like with alcohol and alcoholic: the relationship chooses you. Being an active alcoholic is like being ###### by an 800-pound gorilla; you're through when it's through.

Ouch.

One of the great things about AA is that it begat Al-Anon, and then Al-Ateen. I've known some people who had to work as hard at their addiction to the alcoholic as any alcholic has had to work at their addiction to alcohol.

Amen to 306-308.

I can't help thinking of the other thread, where some are of the opinion that p should forgive c, because c is p's dad. I've never understood why that belief isn't instead "c should never have been doing that to p in the first place" especially when c isn't showing remorse--and we all know what that means, that c is just going to do those things over and over and over again. In a lot of cases imo people lose track of the likely result of behavior. If only one of two people are going to give in, so that the result is either outcome A (alcoholic gets sober) or outcome B (sober person tolerates alcoholic's drinking), which outcome would we rather see?

I would never presume to tell someone else what to do without having a very good picture of the history. There are things that are unforgivable and everyone has a different line in a different place. That said, part of me feels like a healthy person has different obligations than a sick person, even if that's not entirely fair. You don't have to stay and watch someone self-destruct, but something as simple as letting them know that you're leaving the door open when they're ready to come back can make an incredible difference.

I used to be very close friends with this guy, and a few years into the friendship, he introduced me to his cousin. We started dating and really hit it off, and eventually she and I got engaged. I hit a point where I went into a terrible depressive slump and I wasn't really capable of doing much at all. I "resigned" from my firm, but it wasn't really a voluntary decision. For a while, I wasn't working at all, then I was working part-time at a retail store, then I became an assistant manager, then I was an assistant manager and a part-time instructor at my current company, then I was getting so many part-time hours that I left the retail place, and finally I was working full-time as an instructor. I was making an embarrassingly low salary for my qualifications, but I was moving in the right direction.

Then my ex left. I don't blame her for leaving at all. It had gotten to the point where she really was enabling my depression and even though things were trending up, I was still a lot closer to the worst places than the best places we had seen together. Of course, I called my good friend: who would know better than he what I was going through?

He took that opportunity to really beat on me emotionally. There was no "you'll get through this" or even "I'm sorry, you must really be hurting." Instead it was "you deserve this" and "you did this to yourself." Which was true, but particularly unhelpful, especially from someone that I had reached out to in a time of need. Over the next month or so, things decayed further, and finally I got a call from him that basically terminated our friendship. He accused me of misrepresenting myself and being a fake person, when the reality was that I never hid my depression from him. In fact, I had confided in him several times over the years. Also, he actively attempted to get other friends to end their friendship with me, and it worked. There's a whole group of people that I just don't speak to any more and it sort of just happened slowly. It didn't help that I was in a position where I couldn't defend myself; nobody had anything bad to say about me that I wasn't already saying to myself a thousand times over. I couldn't even fight to keep my friends because I had convinced myself that I didn't deserve to have friends.

It's fair to say that I hurt his cousin both emotionally and financially, and it's reasonable to distance yourself from drowning person who simply can't be pulled out of the water, lest you follow him in. I get that. But I was trying, and hell, I was making progress, even if it was very slow progress. I was in therapy and I was taking medication. I was working to help myself. It's fair to say "you hurt my family and I just can't get over that, so we have to be done." I get that too. But to go out of your way to make a person that is already clearly suffering more miserable? That has to be one of the worst things a person can do.

I had friends that distanced themselves but made it clear that it was based on what I was doing to myself, and not some fundamental defect as a human being. I had friends that said "you're not desperate enough to pull yourself up and nobody can do anything but you," and while that wasn't right (and actually set me back), I could understand that they were acting out of love. And over time, I've become friends with them again, but it will never be the same. I'll never really completely trust them again.

So it's two years later, and I've lifted myself up in ways that seemed impossible back in 2010. I'm not where I want to be, but the same good that always was in me is there, and I'm more capable of sharing it with other people. Nobody did the real heavy lifting for me, but that really wasn't ever what I needed. I didn't need someone to tell me that my form was off, or about all the weight that I didn't lift in the past. All I needed was a few people (and I was lucky enough to have some of those people) to say "hey, you may not be able to lift it today, but keep trying and eventually it will happen."

One of the great things about AA is that it begat Al-Anon

Wait, I'm confused. I thought AA was Al-Anon.

No, AA is Alcoholics Anonymous, while Al-Anon is a support group for family members of alcoholics.

crosby

i'm glad i'm one of the ones who said it and i'm glad you are taking your meds. and i'm glad you are doing so much better

lassus

AA is alcoholics anonymous

al-anon is for non-alcoholics who are involved with alcoholics

i'm glad i'm one of the ones who said it and i'm glad you are taking your meds. and i'm glad you are doing so much better

Thanks, Lisa. There was a time a few months ago that I was really struggling, and I never got to thank you for being one of those people that reminded me that there's a difference between difficult and hopeless.

The last round of meds didn't really do the job, but I just got a new script today, and I'm not giving up. Hell, I even sent out a couple of messages on the old online dating site today.

well hopefully these meds will work better and youneverknow, maybe the old ones changed your brain chemistry enough that the new ones will work better

for the light shone into the darkness and the darkness comprehendith it not

and the depression and the suffocating fog will lift and you will look round and realize how far up out of the valley of darkness you have come.

when i was younger i thought that as you got older life would get easier because you would know more and things would make more sense. i'm finding out that as you get older you find out that you know less and less of what there is to know and that everything is complicated.

I also find it kind of liberating, because I no longer expect things to make sense.

I would never presume to tell someone else what to do without having a very good picture of the history. There are things that are unforgivable and everyone has a different line in a different place. That said, part of me feels like a healthy person has different obligations than a sick person, even if that's not entirely fair. You don't have to stay and watch someone self-destruct, but something as simple as letting them know that you're leaving the door open when they're ready to come back can make an incredible difference.

I agree, generally. Rereading my post, though, I don't see any encouragement to callously abandon the troubled soul, for want of a better term, but in the case of active alcoholics, or the "p" and "c" case--where I think bbc and I are on the same page wrt someone who feels free to publicly castigate and belittle another person--those are examples where the nonoffending person will do well to ensure their own safety and well-being. It can also be the case where leaving the door open is absolutely the wrong thing to do. About twice a decade I've had to evict a destructive person from my life in no uncertain terms. I didn't like doing it, but to take less thorough action would have both risked continuing my involvement with someone who had no idea of their destructive effect on me and others, and also dishonestly left a door open when I had no intention of dealing with that person again.

The following may sound extremely callous, but I learned the hard way that AA has its share of emotional vampires; people who will simply take anything and everything you have to give, and come back for more. One woman in particular talked about feeling suicidal. She would have been happy to have spent every evening talking my ear off about her problems and how terrible her life was and how suicidal she felt. Of course I was terrified if I didn't take her calls she'd kill herself. It was two very unhappy months of my life. Eventually I learned with people like her that it was not uncompassionate to listen for a few minutes, then say something like, "Listen, Andrea, I'm not a professional. I'm not equipped to handle this. I'll be glad to come over and take you to the hospital where you can work through your suicidal feelings." She was deeply offended and the conversation ended pretty quickly. In short order she moved on to the next victim and held them prisoner with implied threats of self-harm until they too had had enough. I also found that after removing this woman from my life my energy returned and I was able to help people who genuinely wanted my help.

All of this is to say, people in bad shape are often very painful--even destructive--to deal with, are sometimes more than capable of victimizing the people who would like to help them, and in general are tough to be around. Sometimes all we can say is, "I can't help you any more. Here's where you can go to get help. I can't do it, and I can't have you in my life any longer. You need to respect that. Good luck. Good bye."

At the time I wrote I was thinking primarily, though, of the very specific case bbc was describing: A romantic relationship that didn't sound like a long-term or even a medium-term relationship, in which case the nonaddict often does well to get out, and get out fast, and close the door, hard. We are allowed to protect ourselves against destructive people, even ones who genuinely suffer and mean no harm. It's often the case when there hasn't been time for things to develop that there's nothing to leave a door open to.

One of the great things about AA is that it begat Al-Anon

Wait, I'm confused. I thought AA was Al-Anon.

No, AA is Alcoholics Anonymous, while Al-Anon is a support group for family members of alcoholics.

Yup. Here's the official website.

Of the organization, wiki sez:

Al-Anon/Alateen, known as Al-Anon Family Groups, is an international "fellowship of relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength, and hope in order to solve their common problems."[1] They "help families of alcoholics by practicing the Twelve Steps, by welcoming and giving comfort to families of alcoholics, and by giving understanding and encouragement to the alcoholic."[1] Alateen is part of Al-Anon and is their Twelve-step program of recovery for young people affected by another's drinking, generally aged 13 to 19 years (varies depending on each group). "Alateen groups are sponsored by Al-Anon members."[2]

Al-Anon was formed in 1951 by Lois Wilson, wife of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) co-founder Bill Wilson. She recognized the need for such an organization as family members living with AA members began to identify their own pathologies associated with their family members' alcoholism.

well, i guess all yall culd have just taken the keeley cure (from today's Dugout)

The Keeley Institute was an organization founded in 1880 by Leslie Enraught Keeley for the treatment of alcohol and drug addiction. Keeley's cure was allegedly made from "double chloride of gold," but it was actually a composition of atropine, strychnine, arsenic, cinchona, and glycerine. Patients at the institute, who were gradually weaned from their habits, received periodic injections and ingested a dram of the formula every two hours. They were also required to follow a regime of healthful diet, fresh air, exercise, and sleep. However, Keeley's treatment attracted little attention until 1891, when the Chicago Tribune published a number of articles praising his work and launching a wave of popularity for the treatment. Franchises using Keeley's name sprang up across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and England.

- i would guess that the sleep, exercise, resh air and healthful diet part did a lot more good than all those poisons...

319: um, thanks?

All of this is to say, people in bad shape are often very painful--even destructive--to deal with, are sometimes more than capable of victimizing the people who would like to help them, and in general are tough to be around. Sometimes all we can say is, "I can't help you any more. Here's where you can go to get help. I can't do it, and I can't have you in my life any longer. You need to respect that. Good luck. Good bye."

I can see that (especially when you're talking about a very short-term relationship), but I think a polite and small lie often does a suffering person better than a brutal truth. If you said "I can't have you in my life while you're in this condition," I think that makes it easier to accept; the problem isn't "you" so much as "you right now."

Besides, is it even a complete lie? If this "Andrea" came back to you five years from now (in fact, isn't she supposed to do that as one of the steps?) having sorted out things, being a much more stable and self-aware person, would you really slam the door? Would you deny her the opportunity to tell you that she recognized what she had been doing and that she felt remorse?

in fact, isn't she supposed to do that as one of the steps?

First, hang in the CrosbyBird. It can get better. I've got depression/anxiety to contend with along with the alcoholism, which is a common thing, but never as severe as you've described. I'm fortunate that I found the right meds relatively quickly.

Amends are a big part of the steps, and there is considerable debate regarding to whom, when, how and under what conditions one makes them. There's a school of thought that says the most important amend to yourself, and the rest can be living amends i.e. you're not an ####### from hereon in. There's another that says get in touch with everyone you harmed by your drinking. There's one that says make them to those in your life now. Those you've been out of touch with should be left alone to live their life without a reminder of how they once let a jerk run rampant through their life.

I keep a number of former addicts/junkies at arms' length. While they may be not using, they're still a nightmare.

My favorite dive bar has to be Bobby Lew's. It always reminds me of that one scene in the Simpsons' boardwalk episode where the two hipsters walk into Moe's and go "this isn't shabby chic, this is just shabby". BLs is a place where you can drink all night and get a bill for $22 at the end of it. Plus Duccinis is just across the street. You can't beat that.

I can see that (especially when you're talking about a very short-term relationship), but I think a polite and small lie often does a suffering person better than a brutal truth. If you said "I can't have you in my life while you're in this condition," I think that makes it easier to accept; the problem isn't "you" so much as "you right now."

Besides, is it even a complete lie? If this "Andrea" came back to you five years from now (in fact, isn't she supposed to do that as one of the steps?) having sorted out things, being a much more stable and self-aware person, would you really slam the door? Would you deny her the opportunity to tell you that she recognized what she had been doing and that she felt remorse?

Believe me, I don't want to come across (or actually be) a cold-hearted pr!ck; every situation is different and I'm all for easing someone else's pain where it's possible to do so, even if it causes me some difficulties. Perhaps I've had more than my share of people who it was nearly impossible to get rid of, and for whom a "maybe, some day" was taken as an open invitation to continue to run amok in my live. Actually, I'm sure being stalked and physically assaulted on a couple of occasions by someone who had repeatedly shown contrition has a lot to do with my desire to put certain things and people permanently behind me, and my inclination to not give much benefit of the doubt in some cases.

Slam the door, as in forever? I reread my post and don't think I said that--sure, if a preliminary phone call or accidental contact indicated a genuine desire to make an amend on her part, and it seemed like a meeting over coffee would be meaningful to her, I'd be fine with that. After all, it wasn't the case where she stole my stuff and beat up my girlfriend, and had I had more experience with people like her I could have avoided a lot of the dramatics--so in that sense I was responsible for my own difficulties with her.

Btw, amends, well done (as I understand them), are at the option of the offended party. I heard from time to time alcoholics saying they had harmed x, offered to make amends to x, and x wasn't interested, and didn't want to meet. The alcoholic then does well to respect the other person's wishes and leave them be. Once again I appreciate what BAE had to say on the subject. My AA sponsor used to say that amends were all well and good, and certainly had their place, but the important thing was to change the behavior that caused the harm--i.e. the "living amend" BAE refers to. Absent that an amend is pretty meaningless, and apologies without change are the daily bread of active alcoholics.

Sad, true story: a woman alcoholic causes a lot of damage to her then-husband's life. They divorce. Both remarry. She gets sober, goes to his house to make an amend for all she did to him. Nine months later she gives birth to his child. Divorces follow.

Amends have to be handled carefully. Sometimes over the phone is best.

First, hang in the CrosbyBird. It can get better. I've got depression/anxiety to contend with along with the alcoholism, which is a common thing, but never as severe as you've described. I'm fortunate that I found the right meds relatively quickly.

It's all relative, right? I've never contemplated suicide or checked into a hospital. Although my doctor did just mention a new procedure that involves magnetic realignment of the brain. It's not covered by insurance so it's not really an option for me right now, but I considered it. I even considered ECT, but one of the side-effects is memory loss and I need my mind to be sharp for work. Also, one of the side-effects of ECT is memory loss.

Slam the door, as in forever? I reread my post and don't think I said that--sure, if a preliminary phone call or accidental contact indicated a genuine desire to make an amend on her part, and it seemed like a meeting over coffee would be meaningful to her, I'd be fine with that. After all, it wasn't the case where she stole my stuff and beat up my girlfriend, and had I had more experience with people like her I could have avoided a lot of the dramatics--so in that sense I was responsible for my own difficulties with her.

Gotcha. I think it was metaphor disconnect. I hope you didn't think I was making you out to be cold-hearted at all.

When I think of "closing the door," there's a real sense of permanence. In other words, "you're out of my life forever, irrevocably." When I think of leaving the door open, I don't mean you can come in. I mean you ask to come in and there are some circumstances where I might say yes. And as you say, it might be limited to a phone call (or these days, email), or meeting in a public place.

Sad, true story: a woman alcoholic causes a lot of damage to her then-husband's life. They divorce. Both remarry. She gets sober, goes to his house to make an amend for all she did to him. Nine months later she gives birth to his child. Divorces follow.

Did they remarry each other?

@325: Huh--well that would have been a happy ending of sorts, now wouldn't it?

No, sadly it was carnage all around. Damaged lives, damaged kids, a real mess.

if 322 is a wrong thread post, its a doozy.

:)

@327: I laughed.

One of the unexpected things I found in AA was how freely people, especially people with some sobriety, talked about their drinking histories. For some it was a recitation bordering on the incantatory, of terrible times, of lost years, even decades--a reminder of what was waiting for them if they drank again. Others wielded it as evidence of manly hard livin'. Still others used it as comic fodder, and one of the most entertaining and sought after speakers on the AA circuit had audiences in stitches during his hourlong drunkalog. Black humor is big in the program. One reason, I came to understand, is that not shying away from one's past is a good part of getting sober.

I wasn't all that exciting a drinker when I started hitting it heavily. When I went out I got in trouble, so I tended to stay home. On one of my evenings out, though, someone said something I took umbrage with. Iirc some fellow's girlfriend was trying to teach me the appropriate form for whistling for a taxi in the big city, and after repeated flubbed attempts on my part she realized the only way I was going to really learn how was if she put my fingers in her mouth, in order to get the proper sense of finger placement in relation to tongue and teeth. The boyfriend objected, I objected to his objecting, and by the time we got things sorted out I was bleeding heavily from one side of my face and had been rudely ejected by a bouncer.

I made my way home, decided cleaning myself up could wait until morning, drank a couple of gin and tonics to knock myself out, and fell asleep (in bed, unusually enough for those days). When I woke the blood had effectively glued my face to the pillow, so I reached for the half empty water glass by the bed and made to use it as a solvent to loosen the dried blood and unstick my face by pouring it in the joint between face and pillow. Except, it was gin, and it took me some minutes to stop howling. I remember lying in the tub with the pillow still glued to my face, trying to get my face under the tap to dilute the gin that was boiling my nerves.

Just another morning in the Something Other household, in those days.

Just another morning in the Something Other household, in those days.

It's great that you're in a place where you can look back on that as a funny story from your past.

It's not a drinking or fight story, but I once cut myself pretty badly when I fell using crutches, and I accidentally used rubbing alcohol instead of peroxide to clean the cut. I can only imagine how much worse a much more liberal application of gin must have burned.

That HAD to have hurt. Rubbing alcohol's got a huge % of alcohol in it. Much higher than Beefeater's, iirc.

It does help, to be able to laugh. When I was drinking it was at least in some small part because my pain felt extraordinary, worse than what just about anyone else had gone through. Going to meetings and regularly hearing other peoples' stories, their histories, some of them ghastly--entire families wiped out in a split second of someone else's inattention, for instance--told with a sense of humor (black humor and gallows humor aren't unusual at meetings), helped me gain a useful perspective. No one told me that my struggles were insignificant, just that I wasn't alone, that other people had also been through terrible things and had found ways to understand tragedy and reasons not to drink. It truly helped.

By the way, this came up a few hundred posts ago:

I know it's a hard reality to accept that one loves gambling or drinking or doing drugs more than one loves one's girlfriend or wife or family or job or health, but that's really what this boils down to. And it's never what they'll tell you at AA or any of these various rehab stores. The problem is that being dishonest about it just hides the issue.

I encourage the poster to go to a meeting and learn what actually goes on there, rather than just... I'll call it "conjecturing".

'I loved drinking/drugs more than anything or anyone else, more than my wife, more than my children' is a common refrain, a very common refrain, at AA and NA meetings. It's not what this "really boils down to", but it's a stage many alcoholics/addicts go through, it's often part of alcoholism or addiction (or is one of the things many had to deal with--and inflicted on others) and, with luck, something that got worked through and past. I really do encourage the poster to learn more about the subject.