The Fourth Element
Do you remember when you were born? Me neither. I imagine the first thing I wanted was air, probably so I could scream “what the hell is going on here?!” After that I most likely sought a more comfortable situation, like a good swaddling. Then something to latch onto, something to give me sustenance. And through all of this, I needed an attachment. I craved someone to bond with in my first experience with life.
Can a newborn baby know love? I’d say more completely than any other time in life. The newly forming mind has inherent instincts that know to find the parents, trust them unconditionally, and then survive and thrive under their lifelong care. That initial attachment has such a high level of trust that it will endure almost any degree of benefit or neglect without severing the bond.
Coming into this world, feeling the immediate effects of its discomforts, and seeking a source to provide relief from those discomforts requires trust without really knowing what trust is. Nature therefore creates a fourth element of need to tie up the first three, which is an emotional, chemical, physical and spiritual cocktail that is meant to last as long as it can be carried. It is love.
What happens from that point on is as varied and infinite as stars in the sky. Each of us as human beings live a genuinely unique life experience that begins with a common set of variables and endures with an ever-changing and different set of variables of experience.
As we grow from that newborn baby to an adolescent, a child, a teen, a young adult and so forth, we also develop an understanding of what love is about and what level of faith to put into it. This understanding is based primarily on how we develop under child-rearing.
My own formative years are dotted with mental bruises, some scars, and a lot of little iniquities that I found undesirable. And then again, I had all the elements of care necessary to keep me healthy, safe, and cared for. Looking back, there are many things I never considered to my benefit at the time, and despite my own tantrums, my parents held firm in many of their decisions that I found “unfair”. From today’s hindsight, my parents worked hard in many ways to get me to a point where I could be counted on to set out on my own, and any failures of that idea were as much my fault as theirs. It’s interesting to discover that they were immature and naïve parents raising immature and naïve children. It wasn’t until I helped raise my own children that I really grasped that. My wife and I learned a great deal with each child, and each child was unique in their needs and expectations of love. Despite the trappings and failings that occurred along the way, the understanding that we were absolutely in love with our children was something we resolved to maintain.
My personal recollection of love with my parents and within my family is unique to me. If there were a bell curve measuring the benefits of how love is applied between child and guardian, I would be closer to the middle. The extremes on either end would look something like the most cared for child in history on one end, with the most neglected child ever on the other. Children that grew up without trusted and continual guardianship (like an orphan or foster child) would be closer to the neglect end. Those that had a family unit working cooperatively would benefit in love. Those that had a fractured and incomplete family unit would perchance be hindered. Those that encountered love in a mutually beneficial sense would have a positive groundwork for the future. The point is, no two experiences with love are the same and the unique effects of love in my past dominate my attitude toward love in the now.
Our experiences as we age are distinctive. The formative years are what forms us, but there are tiny and large variables that we all encounter during those years. From a material object to relationships with animals to interactions within groups to fantasy and imagination to direct interpersonal relations between human beings as examples, we form our thoughts and beliefs about what love is and how it is beneficial and trustworthy. Through it all, the fourth element of love is required and needed to survive and thrive as a human being. When it is lacking, it will be sought out from other sources. When it is equated with painful circumstances, the known definitions will be carried forward into future encounters. When it is equated with positive experience, it will be improving, healing and trusted. Sometimes when it is experienced without reciprocation, it will be marked as selfish and parasitic.
Essentially there is no perfect life and no magic secret to raising a person with love. For the most part parents give it their best shot based on what they know and what level of care they are mentally, physically and spiritually capable of providing. What comes from that is a different person every time, and what that person does with their development is different every time.
Because love is such an important element to human existence, how it is experienced throughout a lifetime affects all of the other emotions of a person. When an encounter with love is negative, the other emotions become negative to any number of degrees. The opposite is also true. When love is experienced in the positive, a person’s emotions are affected positively. The power of love is a primary influencer of how we act and react to all the other things in our lives.
Like a lack of water, we can thirst for love. Like an absence of food, we can hunger. If love is sparse and life grows cold, we seek its comforts, and when it is too hot, we escape from its touch. A lack of love can be suffocating, and we scramble to breathe it or breathe away from it. If too much of it, we hyper-ventilate and must find relief. What can be sure is that love resembles the first three elements in its necessity and has just as much purpose in human survival as all three combined.
Love plays a significant part in alcoholism. It is held and abandoned, sought out and avoided, and claimed supreme then rejected. Alcohol and love are like oil and water. The more alcohol is consumed, the more the oil crowds out the purity of love. If a person starts drinking with limited experience with positive love or has been jaded by traumatic action under the guise of love, alcohol will fill and pollute the mental faculties. Alcohol can exacerbate previous circumstances and replace love with its effects of apathy. Alcohol can slowly develop from a playful anesthetic to a full-on barrier simply by chipping away at the necessity of love and replacing it with consumption.
Additionally, love is often feared. I know for myself that to this day I struggle with love. I limit myself when it comes to loving myself. This is paired with negative internal talk of not being worthy of love and poor self-characterization. What it really comes down to is fear of rejection, betrayal or neglect. These are encounters of my past that have taken a negative toll on my psyche and become ingrained into my ability to function with love. I therefore fear loving others and possibly receiving love from others. I think that at any point in life a person can become jaded by love and the consequences of trusting in love. There’s a vulnerability inherent in the trust that love requires, and it becomes more and more guarded as encounters with love enter and dissolve from our lives. Once the fear outweighs the need for love, it becomes perceived as threatening. Then, alcohol is used to dampen the fear and further enforce the un-belief in love.
There are some valuable questions that should be asked in relation to the value that love has in our lives. If I were to breathe in smoke to the point of being incapacitated and sick, after recovering would I decide to stop breathing air altogether? How about if I accidentally ate tainted food and had food poisoning. Once I healed would I be afraid to eat food and give up on it? How about if my house burned down and all of my belongings with it? Would I choose to never live in a sheltered place again? Even though each of these scenarios are extreme and obviously traumatic, each would not prevent me from pursuing the elemental necessity of breathing air, eating food and seeking comfort and shelter. The same attitude has to be applied to the element of love. Love produces trauma for every person on the planet in many ways throughout their lives. The understanding that love is a necessary part of life, that past love experience does not determine future love experiences, and that the benefits of love far outweigh the perceived detriments all go a long way to keeping alcohol from becoming a tool to negate love altogether.
When love is connected to fear and alcohol is used to quiet the fear, future and increasing consumption will become more and more commonplace. Reasons to hold onto the love that remains will change to reasons to abandon them. This is the addiction at its peak. A necessary element of human existence is abandoned. Alcohol makes it seem like it never was or is needed in the least. The only way out of that binding loop is realizing the control alcohol has, and then using as many facets of recovery as possible to break it.
This is why beginning the recovery process in earnest is so difficult. Think about it. It takes courage to take a chance on love. It takes effort and trust. One has to show that a reliance on it is necessary and possible, where alcohol lied that it was unnecessary. There has to be acceptance that love is necessary in life. Love has to be approached in a past that is riddled with love’s betrayal and abandonment. Throughout all of this, a powerful and addictive mind-altering and mind-controlling agent calls the alcoholic back to its dark existence.
Which is easier: Putting one’s exposed and barren self to an element of life that has become an object of fear, or drinking and covering up those feelings without a care or need of them? Obviously, the first choice takes effort, change in belief and continual courage. The second choice takes a few bucks and an open mouth.
The early stages of recovery are gotten through on teeth gritting, white knuckle willpower. It truly takes the support of people who know the struggle and can help with getting through the initial steps of moving away from the control of the bottle. From there, keeping sobriety in play while diminishing the temptations and triggers takes rebuilding of the alcoholics emotional mindset with love being the primary emotion to rebuild faith in. This is no easy process as most of the relationships that were relied upon before recovery were either trashed by the effects of alcoholism, or those relationships were the enablers of alcoholism. New lifestyles have to be committed to, new people with experience in sobriety brought forth, and a new belief system has to be formulated at a pace that is realistic but still challenging.
At the same time, a practical understanding that life is filled with unknowns, pitfalls and even betrayal must be accepted. A steadfast mindset can be formed by practicing any and all techniques that are required for a strong recovery. The first practice is the belief in self. To believe in ourselves first requires loving ourselves. To love ourselves means to trust and stay on the right path in all endeavors with the intent of minimizing the possibility of negative outcomes. Whether that happens or doesn’t happen to our liking, we learn from it and we teach it.
Through recovery we create an environment where taking another drink is the last of all decisions. The first approach is being able to do anything we can with the fourth element of love as a part of the process. Treating our lives with self-love, the branching out with treating others with love, and eventually moving forward with the development of relationships that have a basis in love and can be further built on love is a strong building design for continued sobriety. Through this continual building process, each layer of understanding, trust and experience is a further separator and insulator from the trappings of alcohol. The farther we place ourselves from alcohol, the better the chance that love will once again become a primary form of validation and fulfillment.