Pearl Five

Grieving

Grieving is a big part of life for people.  Anytime we have a loss of something we care about, there is grief.

Grieving most notably occurs around the death of a loved one.  Recovery from that loss takes time, healing, emotional release and rebuilding.  It involves communing with others even when we feel that being alone is better.  One is never really over the loss, but the sadness and despair of it can be more easily understood and dealt with over time.

Relationships that are lost involve grieving too.  Friendships, marriages, family, jobs, and reputation are all examples of losses that can have a larger grieving affect on any of us.

People have connections to all sorts of things and there are many types of loss.  Some of them are material items.  Some attachments are immaterial like sports teams or a favorite artist.  When those things are lost or we experience loss through them, there is grieving on a different scale for each of us.  For each of us, the emotional effect of loss takes time and effort to recover from.

Alcohol delays grieving but never eliminates it.

Alcohol is strongly connected to grieving.  Alcohol acts as a barrier against the hurtful feelings of the loss of someone or something dear.  Alcohol keeps those feelings from having the effect that a sober person might feel.  The feelings are still there, but numbed, pushed away, and the healing that is natural is delayed.  By drinking, constantly, the alcoholic numbs the pain. To stop drinking means to face those feelings, work through the difficulty of grief and then deal with all the negative consequences of alcohol that occurred after it. 

I would argue that the grieving that would naturally be painful and take time to heal is not only delayed but amplified by any attempt to cover it up with alcohol.  Sure, alcohol numbs emotions and causes temporary amnesia, but the life of the alcoholic is uncontrolled, dangerous, harmful to self and others, and without purpose. 

In addition, the support systems that would help us to heal and cope with our loss are chipped away at and broken with every drunken action of the addict.  If an alcoholic decides to make a turnaround toward recovery, the support they would have had for their grief are wary at best or have abandoned them altogether.   Recovery is not a matter of being all better and sober because the drinking stopped, it’s the rock bottom impact of a disease that has had control for a long time.  There are layers of regret and grief that aren’t going to wait to be noticed, and without prolonged support in addressing a mountain of issues, and working through the battle of recovery, the bottle will call the alcoholic back to its comfort zone.

Getting sober is grieving.

In regard to grieving, the sober person equates it with experiencing loss in real life.  Alcoholism is a life of dis-reality that has had a long-term impact on the development of a person.  Even though the affects of alcohol are primarily negative, the experience of it is real and integrated into the mind. 

With sobriety comes a change in a great many things.  The first thing that must be addressed are the emotions and feelings that have been ignored, covered up and avoided.  This is the greatest challenge of all.  It’s never just one thing, or one thing at a time.  It’s an avalanche, a dam burst of issues from before, during, and now after the decision to stop drinking.  Combine that with the loss of alcohol as a crutch.  For a trusted confidant and guide to be ripped from a person’s life, even something as absurd as alcohol, has an incredible loss effect in the mind of the addict.  For a person that hasn’t experienced it, it is much more significant than they would expect.  It carries the emotional detachment and release of a life spent doing something the alcoholic very much believed in.  It sounds crazy that alcohol should be treated like a loved and living entity, but alcohol becomes that for a prolonged time in the mind of the user.  Take it away and it’s like taking away a part of their soul they have held dear for a long time.

One thing I took to heart from the outset of my recovery is that it would be a minimum of 1 year before I could truly claim I was sober.  It wasn’t the date I was cured, as ultimately there is no cure, only recovery; for me it was my grieving period.  It was the amount of time it would take me to develop a genuine platform for moving forward with my life absent of alcohol, and gain control of the cravings for it.  Once I reached that year mark, there were many more convincing reasons why alcohol was no longer an option, a number of personal issues had been addressed and I had a solid base to work forward with.

One caveat about the initial stages of recovery is how vulnerable an alcoholic is.  Despite having weeks or even months of sobriety under their belt, the alcoholic can just as easily go back to what they loved because it’s a loss that can be regained instantly.  The sober people around them may see it as a mistake and relapse, but the alcoholic will identify with the need to not feel like hell.  It’s been proven to them that the bottle can provide relief.  This is one reason recovery is a great challenge and has its setbacks along the way.

There are a limitless number of psychological conditions that pair with alcoholism, sustain it and hold back its recovery.  Grieving is one of those conditions.  Identifying grief as a critical piece of the complexity of alcoholism is paramount, and recovery needs as much reveal as possible.