The "Crux" of the Problem

"The monkey's off our back but the circus is still in town". So goes' the the ole saying, one which brings an immediate identification for most alcoholics that have been dry for any period of time. It becomes apparent as we try to integrate back into the society that we had turned our backs on (or never felt a part of to begin with) that we have a host of contorted emotional conflict within us. We carried around a toxic soup of misappropriated feelings and ideas about life that obviously weren't working. As we related to others we were content one minute, wanna kill some son-bitch the next! The jobs ok, then we felt like an incompetent idiot, may as well die!!!!... naw, just drink-the next minute. Periodically we would suffer from a relapse into a debilitating low self concept. Some innocuous social event occurs. An embracement, an attempt at humor in a social setting backfires, common place rejection in romance or business, we recoil into "tunnel thinking". Suddenly our entire life is defined by that one disproportionally uncomfortable moment. We have no peripheral memory of ever having done ANYTHING RIGHT! We cannot escape the moment; we cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again. This "sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of the first drink".

Drinking alcohol is not what was wrong with the alcoholic before he ever took his first drink. Booze was a solution that we stumbled upon, back when we didn't know there was anything wrong with our approach to life. We were not even aware that drinking was a solution to anything, we just naturally followed the well worn path between our house and the 7 Eleven. For most of us the "discovery" of alcohol marked a place of arrested emotional development, deterioration. We seemed to grow more irresponsible, more immature while the non-alcoholic people around us were steady, as if they intuitively knew how to live.

Dr. Carl Young pegged it when he explained to Rowland that a radical personality change brought on by a spiritual awakening is what needed to take place if any chance of permanent sobriety was to follow. He explained: "Ideas, emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of these men are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of conceptions and motives begin to dominate them" The AA text explains that we have being trying to get "a new attitude" towards life by way of a new relationship with our creator.

As alcoholics, drinking became the only normal life, but while we may have recovered from drinking, now we have to recover from "the crux of the problem". If not then we become so uncomfortable in our own skin that a return to drinking or even the thought of suicide looks attractive.


Colter K.