There are times when I get crazed at the over-flow of addictions or thoughts of addictions. There are those of us who, once they believe or know that they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, decide it is easy and right to believe that they suffer from an addiction to food, candy, ice cream, coffee, frappaccinos, oregano, pepper etc. Why? Because it is too easy to blame weakness on addiction as the only way to manage weakness. And the only way to manage weakness is to call it an addiction than to manage by any other fashion. And I am not referring to moral turpitude. Just laziness in both thought and action in the behavior of daily living.
Because we addicts have agreed that will power is misapplied when it comes to managing alcoholism. So we believe that will power, or the power over the will, had no place in life whatsoever. And, therefore, running from our responsibility to manage our will has become the past time of the alcoholic in AA.
Some of us would rather pin all of our shortcomings on addictions. We would rather do that than admit that not all of our problems are addictions, cross addictions, cross infatuations etc., and that not all approaches to solving them are by means of AA. It is easier to do that. Otherwise we have to expend more energy in ways that AA has not prepared for us to have us examine ourselves. Which is OK. We just should not expect AA to solve all our problems by means of the 12 steps, because as useful as they are, slavish adherence to those principles will not begin to approach those problems which do not have solutions within their purview.
This is not to say that AA principles cannot be utilized in these instances. I just don’t think that their blanket application should be mistaken for a blanket cure, nor thinking that the use of AA principles in their application has employed a finely honed wit in figuring the treatment of a difficult problem. Administering pablum to solve a difficult problem is as bad as looking to find difficult answers to justify explanations to simple problems.
I am reminded of my psychiatrist friends who often sit back in exasperation at their patients after believing they have provided them with tools for dealing with the vicissitudes of daily living only to find them as ill equipped as ever to deal with their teenager yelling at them for no good reason and then go into a meltdown wanting some grand answer to it all. To which my psychiatrist friends inevitably offer as a nostrum 'Get a life'!
What I am saying, in case this is not very clear is that that we alcoholics tend to over dramatize our shortcomings as addictions to explain why we have trouble handling life, rather than just admitting that we have trouble handling life because we are addicts. One is the fallout from the other, not the reason for everything else.
And yes, I spend too much money. Am I addicted to spending? I think not. Do I have problems in establishing boundaries for myself, yes. Not everything in my life is an addiction but many of my life’s problems have stemmed from me not tending to my alcoholism; and tending to that wreckage takes time. And the cleanup from all that fallout requires time not just another label to pin the mess on.
And the time required to attend to this cleanup may be as long as it took to create the wreckage in the first place. It may not be just a desire to solve the problem with the drunk’s earnest needs summed up by 'I want what I want when I want it', talking and not listening to the body, soul and mind’s need for the time to heal.
So today I don’t blame my physical and mental poverty on a spending addiction. I don’t blame my joblessness on the fates, and I don’t blame anyone about why this is all happening to me because I was the one who brought it on myself. And in acknowledging this I take the first step toward acceptance of my problem and the first steps on the road to my cure.
res 12/12/10
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