Arrested Development

They say that when we start drinking and doing drugs (those of us who turn out to be addicts and alcoholics) that our emotional development is arrested. So when we stop we are essentially at the emotional age we were when we started. So if I started getting high at age 15 and I got clean at age 28 then at age 28 I had the emotional makeup of a 15 year old. I can personally vouch for this. Today I go to work with a new guy who is older than I am. He’s been in and out, struggling to get and stay sober. Most of us can get sober. for a day, a week, maybe even a few months or in some cases we can dry up for a few years. Without a long term solution for recovery we invariably wind up back in the bottle or the “bag” as the case may be.

So when I am working with someone new I am careful. I have to be honest with him and show him that if he is anything like I was, his situation is completely hopeless. Having come to that point we can begin to see that we need a solution in something bigger than ourselves in order to get long term sobriety. We need to have an experience in which we can see that once we started, no matter what good reasons we have to stop we cannot stop. We also have to see if there are somethings we COULD stop while there were other things we couldn’t stop. I was able to put some drugs down, but when it came to weed, I could only put that down when there was coke around. When it came to coke, I could not put it down. My stopping point was 2 weeks. If I was really determined I could stop for 2 weeks and then I had to have it at all costs. The costs were substantial too – not just financially – it cost me just about every relationship with every person I knew at that time. Most people gave up on me, including me.

When I recognize that my situation is hopeless without outside help then I begin to realize that I need help and the process has now just barely begun for me to become willing to rely on that help. Due to the fact that at this stage my emotional make-up is like that of a 15 year old, that foundation is highly unstable. One wrong experience, one wrong thing said can set a person off and make him or her want to use again. So I’m careful about showing the person I am working with their own experience while recognizing that they are in a super sensitive state of mind. We suffer from an incredibly huge ego coupled with an incredibly low self esteem. It’s the hole in between the two that we are desperate to fill with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, anything that can fix me for a minute. Then I can worry about the next minute after the first one. Now we need to turn that around 180 degrees and learn to live in the moment just the same, but without these very temporary “fixes”. I need a long term solution – a power greater than my own power.

I’ve learned that this power comes from within and we find it by searching fearlessly!

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