[QUOTE=Kalhoun]
My SIL had booze…and only booze…in her life. She went to AA a number of times, got her marker coins, was in and out of rehab a dozen times (each time she was told to go to AA). While she was sitting in her house trying to “hand it over to god”, she should have been seeing a shrink, learning how to leave the house, learning a hobby or skill. The one thing she was getting was medical attention, but that didn’t help as she had NOTHING else in her life but drinking to obliterate the emptiness of her existence. She truly believed in god, but had no self-esteem. She was identified as an alcoholic in her early teens, and as an adult drank 1/2 gallon of vodka a day for 15 years. She didn’t get dressed, she didn’t knit, she didn’t read, she didn’t work. She drank. Period.
Now…I’m the first to admit that some people are lost causes with regard to achieving sobriety. If being drunk is all you know, walking away from it would be frightening, indeed. In retrospect I believe that she was probably one of those people. There was no way AA and its non-professional members could fix this. She needed to rebuild her life from it’s very foundation. But something more concrete makes more sense to me than trying to navigate some vague principles. What seems perfectly sensible to one person may look like a foreign language to another.
Her detox people really had no idea who she was or what she needed. The pat answer was “go to AA.” What she needed was rehabilitation in the same way a brain-damaged person needs to start from Square One. But they told her to “keep coming back.” Of course, being non-professionals, and having varying degrees of success within the group, this is what they thought would be the best thing for her. In reality, it was the last thing she needed.
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Kalhoun I have seen such unfortunates as your SIL, people searching for that ever elusive entry point into their own personal future without alcohol. Many people enter the gates of socriety trying in vain to change their futures without learning to accept what the future is presenting…fighting the whole way until they eventually give up and accept the DT’s, the depression, the haunting memories from the past they they blissfully drank away. When sobriety hits the flood gates open and in comes all the emotion that some people are not ready for, many people are not ready for. People spent years pouring booze on their feelings, and when they finally get sober all those feelings come back like some unwanted phantom. They come back when you are standing in line at the Grocery store, or late at night when you are sleep alone in your bed…Frightening? no, no, thats too nice a word, pathetically catestrophic is a better phrase for when this happens.
Your SIL was and is not alone, she is a sad fact of this horrible thing called alcoholism. Whether you want to admit it or not, your SIL represents the very reason AA exists, yet, as you painfuly know, AA does not work for everyone. There is a paradox there, no? I know, and I often wonder why AA helps some and not others…I know what the old timers say, and I know what people like Q t M say…find what works. This is closer to the truth than doing nothing at all right?
I have no idea where your SIL fell into the scheme of rehabs and professionals, where she fell through the cracks, or why she couldn’t stay sober. I don’t know why, as I don’t know why the husband or father continues to beat and lie to their loved ones when he’s drunk…In the end the child who is being harmed or the wife who is being beaten then told she is loved wonders when will they stop - Oh God please do something - comes out of some peoples mouths because the have reached the end of their line and don’t know what else to do or say. Anything is better than nothing…if it makes them stop.
MANY can stop in AA. Others cannot. You choose to knock the whole system because of your individual experience, where I gather you are not an alcoholic, you can find the time to crusade against the organization that has helped hundreds of people STOP their alcoholic ways and stop the violence, the neglect, the torture. You know all too well people die in AA, well people die in alone in their rooms with a bottle too, and on the street, and in high society and the ghetto. Whats your point? You cry for your SIL who died. I feel your pain, but I cry for my loved ones who entered AA and made it. Saved their life. Everyday we go to an AA meeting, it starts with a moment of silence - you tell me what we are doing in the moment? And I hope you don’t mention GOD.
