Some years ago, I went overseas to be there for someone dear to me.
They had been someone with alcoholism for about 35 years when just recent times it had gotten to the point where I called them at 11am in the morning, and they were still so drunk that could not remember we had talked the next day. And that happened like that throughout the year.
Alcohol is sadness; alcoholic is killing an enormous sadness in them, by killing their body…to check out from here, from this reality because it is unbearable. It doesn’t have to be physical reality, it could be more of they cannot live out who they really are, or they can’t see their way to it, they have to hide it because of making themselves wrong for wanting something different than everybody else chooses and yet cannot see it in this reality etc. Sometimes it grows into anger, once one drinks too much, they get aggressive. Anger is just the other side of the stick that is sadness.
Interesting point of view about alcohol:
‘What is alcohol? Alcohol is a lover. It’s a product of nature, therefore it’s spirituality, natural equalizer. It gives people what they need. Sad gets glad, fool gets smart, quiet gets loud, shy gets outgoing, ugly turns beautiful, old gets young again, slow gets fast, rusher gets slow. Who needs insanity, that gets that too. Determiner is a drinker not alcohol. In short alcohol relieves all accumulated problems for a minute, giving relieve to the drinker and opportunity to go forward in a judicious way.’ (L.Viilma “A Teaching of Survival” p. 240).
I was excessively concerned until I decided to go over there with no tools other than a big question mark in me: what can I do. What can I be to change that!?!
These days there were some awful ones and some better ones. You know how your heart breaks when someone important to you is destroying themselves under your own eyes.
I was in a tense question for all this time or you could say like in a prayer …
What if sometimes that is all you have to be? The space, the allowance, love. What if that is all that is required?
I left after 3 months. They got remarkably better. They didn’t become a total non-drinker; they can control their limit since then. That is even better as going from one extreme to another is sometimes a slippery way, although it very much depends on the personality, and what suits them best.
There wasn’t much to do, but to be.
So what if your body is healing?
What is the miracle that your body is that if you acknowledged it would create much more for you and for so many others?