It’s My Responsibility
I experience things. I see them. I know them. They happen to me and I have to make space for them in my psyche. For some reason they determine the space. And yet I still don’t understand them. Why did this happen to me? What did I say or do? Do I deserve this? Am I responsible for this?
The realization that I ultimately must come to terms with, is that I am responsible for everything that has happened in my life. Whether I was in the right or horribly wronged, I am bearing the responsibility for my life, right now and forever, because no one else is.
My past wasn’t always dictated by me. There are countless times when I expected an outcome and was delivered the unexpected. There are countless times when I wasn’t expecting any outcome at all and was delivered a surprise of benefit or neglect. There were long term plans of mine that were decimated and I had little control over it. Then there are those times that I had complete control and I played coin-toss with the outcome.
All of this adds up to what was. What was has happened and that it happened can’t be changed. Sometimes the results can be though. But my issue at hand is how my actions in the right now are working with my actions back then. And “back then” could be five minutes ago or fifty years ago.
It is my choice to choose what bounces around in my head. I throw around the feelings and memories that I choose to define. How fast, long and hard they echo in my mind is one of the ultimate things I have under my control. It’s not always easy to stop something negative from bouncing around continuously, or to turn the volume down on it. But it’s important to take inventory of what makes up the elements of our past so that each may be properly understood, valued, categorized and shelved. Then, a control over them can be reached. Keeping my pantry organized keeps the stale and spoiled from rotting out the space.
Alcohol can drown out the thoughts that cause me pain by anesthetizing my mind. It can make it so I don’t feel anything for the thoughts I want to cover up, drown out and forget. But alcohol doesn’t discriminate. Its effects will just as readily crush thoughts of joy, happiness and trust under its heel. Alcohol can just as easily disconnect us from the past we treasure as the past we resent and regret. The bad thoughts require more and more drinks to keep them down, and the thoughts that bring benefit to our lives suffer equally. Sooner than later, the trusted and important relationships in our lives will suffer damage to the degree of abandonment, and then be added to the pile of muck that require more alcohol. This will all reach a point of diminishing returns, and full blown alcoholism embroiled in a life without substance or purpose will be what is left.
When this happens, and the alcoholic is under the influence of an emotional, spiritual, mental and physical anesthetic, a breaking point must be realized followed by an admission that life has become uncontrollable and unmanageable. At this point, as an alcoholic, all of those things I was hiding from and not being responsible for have to be laid bare. This sucks, and it feels like a bunch of bullshit. That’s because all of those feelings and memories are a giant pile of burdens now, and work needs to happen to dismantle that pile and dissect the contents therein.
No matter how far I run from my responsibilities, I still have to carry them. Nothing actually leaves my psyche with addiction; it is only covered and masked and delayed. In recovery, absent the addictive substance that I had fallen prey too, I can find tools and support to take on this monumental task. For most others and me, finding a method to turn responsibilities from burdens to manageable experiences is not an exercise to be taken on lightly or alone. This is where support groups and trusted mentors, sponsors and therapists can help us to get our burdens we’ve been carrying out into the light. Using patience and dedication, what has happened in our lives can now be examined impartially and carried with control.
This takes time, and it is in and of itself a burden. Yet the necessity of it is a cornerstone of lasting and permanent sobriety. Unmanaged responsibilities become triggers moving forward, as each is part of a connection to a current event. When that connection occurs, it’s essential that past experience is translated as a learning experience and lessened as a painful one. The painful memories that have been covered and hidden can spring into our psyche, and are perfect excuses for the temporary but quick relief of alcohol.
In light of this, accepting responsibility for my past is just as important as accepting that I am an alcoholic and cannot control my life while under its influence. The ultimate goal is to end the cycle of addiction, and the ultimate method is to bring ease to the underlying circumstances. When we bring ease to the causes of the dis-ease, we can form a firm and growing means to temper and then end the addiction altogether.
Like most words in the English language, the word responsibility takes on many forms. For example, most commonly the word responsibility is in reference to a task that needs to be completed. If the laundry needs to be done, I accept it as one of my responsibilities. A similar definition would be, something that I am accountable for; such as, the laundry did not get done and I am responsible for that. A third reference to the word, and one that I would like to get closer to in recovery, is defining responsibility as acting independently to make decisions without authorization. Under this third definition, we have a greater arena of control and analysis over our feelings. Here, I find it easier to recognize my responsibilities as things I cannot change, yet I can control how my responsibilities change me.
One of the mainstays of my recovery is to dig into any level of my past to try to find the things that exist there, and that are holding me in a state of mind that finds alcohol attractive. This is a job that never really ends. But once we dig out some of the biggest problem areas in our past at the beginning of recovery, moving forward it should become easier to recognize new issues that we have not addressed yet by how they make us feel when we think about them, encountering them, or by a craving or triggering event with alcohol.
Moving forward in recovery, the triggering or ‘red flag’ events should lessen as time goes on. These events are usually something we’ve already directly tied to alcoholism while we were drinking. But it could also be a series of events that lead to a traumatic change in life that was and still could be very hard to deal with. For instance, thoughts of a divorce may be a primary trigger event that I seek to relieve. Over time the effect of my feelings about the actual divorce and how drinking plays out from that can be identified and lessened. But there are many other events that played into the situation before the end of the relationship. Examples would be a fear of abandonment, anger control, undeveloped communication abilities, attachment needs, and addiction. Then consider the influences, good or bad, that formed the dynamics of the relationship. Friends, relatives, employment, finances, children, living conditions, infidelity, and health are examples. Each of these things are just as influential as thinking about the peak trauma, the divorce settlement and after effects of the severing of the relationship. Each one is still a responsibility, so as each connection in the broad array of events crops up, each is still connected to the main triggering event. This is why the work in recovery to identify our responsibilities is ongoing and necessary. The more links in a chain that can be addressed, the lower the chance that these developmental events will have power over sobriety. And as each of these linking elements is addressed, other experiences that are triggering could be uncovered.
The goal here isn’t to make myself miserable by uncovering all of the crappy things in my life. It’s to keep searching for and analyzing what has occurred to try to get as close to the root causes as possible. Along the way of this journey, a goal should be to take each piece of our history, good, bad and mundane, and approach them as learning experiences. With each learning experience comes a teaching opportunity.
When addressing our responsibility in the now, it’s obviously moment to moment. Here’s where the work of identifying our past comes in tune with determining our current course of action. Instead of moving towards destructive action (such as drinking) the moment the past and present is anywhere from uncomfortable to painful, a mindset can be created to address things as they come, compare them to what we know, and then act on them properly and safely in the future. I personally want that quick-click of zero to going to the liquor store to be buried so many layers deep through the work I’ve done in recovery that it is a non-event. That cannot happen without taking responsibility.
The interesting thing about all of this is that even this posting has to be taken by me as my responsibility. There may be people out there gritting their teeth at the first sentence, then writing a scathing comment in response, recognizing my pretentiousness. What I choose to do with that is my responsibility. I could laugh at it. I could ignore it. I could rewrite the whole thing hoping to appease everyone. I could also toss my laptop against the wall, scream at it’s broken remains, and head out for a couple of boilermakers. The more I work on what my responsibilities are, the fewer extreme alternatives are available, and the greater peace of mind I can maintain. If my message is true, taking responsibility then acting responsibly are the keys to my success in that.