No More Letting Go The Spirituality of Taking Action Against Alcoholism And Drug Addiction

PART ONE Questioning Our Assumptions Hitting Bottom: A Family Affair When addiction begins causing serious problems, a family's greatest fears turn into reality. They watch with disbelief as the alcoholic continues drinking while their lives are falling apart. Unable to convince the alcoholic to stop drinking, families begin searching for answers. In my years of working with the relatives of alcoholics and addicts, I have found that families rarely reach out for help until the drinking and drugging hit a crisis point, and then they are often told: "There's nothing you can do until the alcoholic wants help. You'll just have to let him hit bottom." Hitting bottom is an old idea, still imposed upon families as if it were an absolute. Many families sadly believe that they must wait for alcoholics to hit bottom before there is any hope for recovery. They rarely stop to consider that this belief sentences them to years of unhappiness and devastation. No one ever mentions the fact that alcoholics and addicts don't take the trip to the bottom alonethe family goes with them. Families are never warned that the journey to the bottom takes even the smallest children. Hitting bottom should never be our first strategy; it is a strategy of last resort. Only when every reasonable intervention technique is exhausted should we let someone free-fall. Even then, there are ways to raise the bottom, to stretch out the safety net of treatment and recovery. Addiction always presents new opportunities. The trick is recognizing them and knowing how to take action. The premise of hitting bottom is that addicts hit one bottom and, when they get there, either are struck sober or go running for the nearest treatment center. But addicts are resilient. They find people to rescue them. They often bounce along the bottom for years without a flicker of recognition that they need help. When they find themselves in a tough spot, alcohol whispers reassurances: There's nothing to worry about as long as you have me. I was having dinner with some recovering alcoholics, and a particularly nice fellow in his late fifties was celebrating fifteen years of sobriety. He talked about living in a roach-infested one-room apartment above a bar for twelve years, drinking and doing drugs every single day. He said his life was miserable, but he just couldn't stop. He came close to dying several times before getting help. One of the people in our group said, "Well, you just weren't ready." Someone else piped up with, "It takes what it takes." Everyone's head nodded in agreement. Stunned that my dinner companions thought that this man had had to lose some of the best years of his life before he was ready to get sober, I asked, "Where was your family?" He said his wife divorced him and his kids never came around. "All for the better, really," he added. "I wasn't any kind of father worth having." I asked what might have happened if everyone in his family, along with his closest friends, had come to him with a solid plan for recovery and an outpouring of love. Might he have accepted their help? Could it have turned out differently for him and his kids? Would his marriage have survived? He looked at me for a moment and then said, "I never considered that before. Who knows, I might've taken them up on their help. Maybe we could've saved our family." Do alcoholics ever hit bottom and then climb their way up into sobriety? Of course they do. But we never know who'll be the lucky ones or what price they'll pay along the way. Three hundred and fifty people a day find a bottom wiJay, Debra is the author of 'No More Letting Go The Spirituality of Taking Action Against Alcoholism And Drug Addiction', published 2006 under ISBN 9780553383607 and ISBN 0553383604.