Alcoholism Support Group
Alcoholism is the continued consumption of alcoholic beverages, even when it is negatively affecting your health, work, relationships and life. If you think alcohol is causing you to lose control, it's time to seek help. Our group is a safe place to vent, check in, get back up if you fall, and reach sobriety.
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What a caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.
by Richard Bach.
What a caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.
by Richard Bach.
Saw Karate Kid yesterday and they had a keeper too..."When life knocks us down, we have a choice whether to get up or not"
I just hope some exercise the choice to get up, and follow through with action. There's some beautiful butterflies that can fly, they just don't see it yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEWX9RDdcpE
Watch the whole clip to see what I mean.
However, I had to see that people weren't going to throw rotten tomatoes at me before I could even begin to be honest about my alcoholism and become open to a solution.
That doesn't mean that I give slaps on the backs of those that relapse repeatedly. I think that keeps them sick. JMO.
Oh heavens no! I'm saying that your average DS sob story isn't one tenth as good as Puccini's "Tosca" and not one one in a million can sing it like Pavarotti.
Nothing brings a tragic end to a mediocre acting career like sobriety. It's the death of the false self we've built on our appetite for applause, really, and the beginning of what Joseph Campbell called the real hero journey.
But the transition IS painful, and those who refuse that pain have nothing to fall back on except their old identities. Putting down the booze is the easy part. Becoming the person of our dreams takes heroic courage.
The real courage is in facing the pain to let go of our false self and really live authentically. Saying goodbye to that self is hard, but I agree that it is so much more heroic than simply putting down the bottle. And I tell you what is even harder, is renaming those dreams of the person you would like to become. Because what I always dreamt of I am finding is an illusion.
What is real? What is real to dream of becoming? Now that is important.
great stuff. xo
To trivialize what it was like and what happened, by calling those experiences sob stories, is, IMO, dishonoring a good deal of our journey.
All of our experiences matter and they are very important to our sobriety.
I think what is being referred to is getting stuck there. To wallow. Ah and to see through this misery some day, as an illusion. What a gift, what growth that would be.
The facts of my own story haven't changed over the years, but the literary style in which I tell it has gone through some drastic revisions. There's a interesting paradox here, and I say that because when I first got sober I was a legend in my own mind, the fallen hero in the last act of a three-hankie tragedy. I mean, it was the Second-Greatest Crucifixion Story Ever Told, don'tcha know, a cautionary tale with a moral lesson in it that I damned well expected other people to heed. That, as I dimly understood it at the time, was what AA meant by sharing experience, strength & hope.
I call it a paradox because the people who helped me the most turned out to be those who didn't buy that story the way I was telling it for a minute, but who instead gently but very firmly pried my sweaty hands loose from it.
The first time I told it at a meeting was the day I got my 9 month chip. Everyone applauded on cue, and when the break came and most of us went outside, I expected my new fans to ask me for more of the juicy and gruesome details.
But, alas, the only person who had any comment at all was a skinny old lady named Cynthia who had buck teeth and talked like Katharine Hepburn, and who'd been sober since Lyndon Johnson was President.
"You were very good, actually," she chirped, with upper lip ever so slightly crinkled. "But you said 'compulsion' when you should have said 'obsession.'"
"Lady, I just told you my whole life story," I protested. "Is that all you have to say about it?"
"That was the only part I haven't heard a hundred times before," she said dryly.
That knocked me right off my post-dramatic protagomit's pedestal, and that was the last time I've ever fancied that I'm special just because I'm scummier than thou.
"Putting down the booze is the easy part. Becoming the person of our dreams takes heroic courage." That is my new favorite. Can I use that??
- Anonymous
I have to deal with that fake plastic side of me. I have to take off my masks. Now my goal is to keep them off. If I start ego tripping, I might as well go to the Liqour store and believe what the shelf tells me when it says, "Your drink only costs $4.25. There are plenty of days where I have to rip myself from the pedestal -- in the last 24 hours I have been doing that a lot. Sometimes I can make my own self sick with all of my sheet.
That is basically what it is. Sheet. Same old games that you play that keep you drunk. I am riding with the winners today. I don't have to know everything -- all I have to know is where the winners are. I sit my butt down around them, and I listen.
Darrell
What I have trouble with is when something, that is very personal and very painful to someone, is made light of.
I initially tried to get sober in a group in LA called The Pacific Group. That group prides themselves on booing at people when they are telling the sad part of their story from the podium - and making fun of someone who may be in tears. I turned right around and went back out to drink for another 4 years.
I have now been sober for over 30 years - because I found a group that was full of compassion. So maybe this is a personal thing to me. But I, for one, have always felt that empathy and compassion always win out over ridicule.