Finding Peace With Addiction

It was really hard for me to reconcile the fact that my husband loved the bottle more than he loved me. Had you seen our romance in the beginning, you would have understood. It was truly a story-book romance- love at first sight, and I can remember the exact pose of his body as he stood leaning on the stairs in the art gallery where we met. I can remember his self-confident smile, the easy grace of his stance, the light tan khaki pants he wore, and his shining head of blond hair.

I can remember it, and rekindle the kind of love-struck awe that I felt. Neither of us had said a word. We hadn't even met. But it seemed from that moment a silent pact was made. Soon we had gone on a date and before we knew it, it was just he and I. We never made a conscious choice. We never spoke the words. But we just knew that this was it. He with me and me with him.

I can remember particularly one night, lying in the summer dusk on the grass in a park nearby. We were gazing at the sky, talking comfortable nonsense that lovers talk- how we saw the world, how we saw life, how we saw each other. And David leaned over and picked up a rock. It was not a very interesting rock- of ordinary shape and color. "This is our love rock" he said. "It means that we are together, forever, through everything." In that instant he transformed a simple rock into a precious thing. And I brought the rock home and kept it. I did not know until he told me many years later that the rock was actually and truly his covenant. He knew right then and there that he would marry me- even though I did not.

Dave was a supreme sentimentalist. Under his tough, right-wing, republican exterior was a man who would light up an entire porch with candles or no real reason except to surprise me. He would scour the grounds in the wee hours of the morning for flowers to make a bouquet. He would cut out a thousand little words and phrases from the newspaper and laboriously paste them onto a box as a birthday present. He would make sure every word had meaning for our life together.

And when I began to grapple with the reality of his alcoholism, and the different, and frankly miserable, Dave that was beginning to show up, I was 100% sure that Dave loved me more than life itself. I was sure, like I was sure of the moon in the sky, that Dave would eventually choose me over the bottle, and stop his drinking.

I was wrong.

It took me a lot of years, and a lot of learning to realize that Dave did not choose me over the bottle. He did not, so to speak, love the bottle more than me, as so many of us like to believe. In order to see this I had to look at the concept of choice. Choice means you have options. Choice means the ability to have ore than one option. At some point I had to question, would anyone in their right mind choose to be able to see their own bones through their skin? Would they choose throw up every time they smelled fast food? Would anyone choose to wake up, hands shaking and quivering, and down another drink of the very same thing that got them there? Would anyone choose to be kept from their children, and lose their house, and the woman that they adored? It had to finally become clear that no-one would choose the life of an alcoholic or addict- unless they had no other choice.

So we who love the addict live in our particular hell, wondering where we went wrong and where our love was not enough. Or worse yet, we begin to hate the addict viciously for not loving us enough to stop. And our hate is of course only the flip-side of the coin of our even more ferocious love. We hate that we can't have our love. We hate that the people we loved are gone. And when we look at the person who inhabits their bodies, we don't even know who he or she is.

And if we could only see that in the extreme addict's world, there is no choice. Or to put it more clearly the choice is... a) bottle or b)bottle. Period, end of story.

Now of course we know that this is not true. We know there is a hand attached to that bottle or that drug. And the hand moves and puts it in the mouth. We know there is choice. We know there is accountability. We can see that. Anyone could see that.

But we neglect to remember that there is also a mind behind the hand. And the mind is not thinking straight. The mind has not been thinking straight for years. And that addicted mind believes, contrary to all evidence, that there is no other way to survive but to have the drug. And there are cells behind that mind. Trillions of cells in a body that have been physically transformed to accept the drug. And there are receptor sites in the brain behind the mind. These sites have been grown due to an overload of the drug. They have been grown specifically and only for the purpose of accepting the overflow of the drug. And once grown, they will never go away. These screaming sites tell the mind it has to have the drug. They tell the mind, as they shriek with craving, that the body won't survive if it doesn't move the hand. These receptor sites tell the mind the exact opposite of what the rest of the world and the evidence says. And the mind, superb adapter and justifier that it is, listens to the evidence- not the outer evidence but the inner evidence. And the mind finds a way to believe. The mind finds a way to justify.

So the mind moves the hand.

The mind moves the hand through loss, and loneliness. It moves the hand through throwing up and shakes. It moves the hand through children taken away, wives hating, and mothers crying. The mind moves the had through sisters pleading, books and therapists talking, loss of jobs, houses, and income. The mind moves the hand through the loss of every shred of self-esteem that the addict ever had. The mind moves the hand over and over again.

And when we finally get this concept- that the addict has no choice- we can have compassion. We can have compassion for the addicts, whose minds are their worst enemies. We can have compassion for ourselves- whose minds are equally adept at making up how terrible we are. We can love ourselves and others, when our minds tell us we are duped, unloved, and made a mockery of. We can love ourselves and others because it's not the person doing all of this, it's just the sickness of addiction. And when we know this, in our hearts and minds and souls, we can finally find peace...

And some measure of happiness.