Dancinglady, I've read many of your posts and I'm wondering if you're misinterpreting what was said to you. I've read your posts about laying in bed drunk and alone, about drinking being your only solace, and I have felt deep sorrow for you. I watched others trying to cheer you up, but there's really no way to cheer up someone who's drinking themselves to sleep.
When Ts are worried about someone's drinking they often use language that says you've been defeated by alcohol, it's time to accept it and to surrender to defeat, your will-power and efforts to be a good person will not help as long as you drink yourself to sleep every night.
They're not telling you to give up. But they are, indeed, telling you to accept defeat. Alcohol has beaten you. And if your other threads and posts are any indication, it sounds like you've been living a nightmare with the bottle as your only friend.
Last night I was rearranging bookshelves and a folded piece of paper fell out of a mystery novel I'd purchased at a second hand store. I thought, "Huh?" I didn't throw it out. It was The Promises of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I've been wanting to respond to your other thread, but didn't have anything to say that sounded supportive because what I wanted to say was that it was time to haul yourself up off your bed and get your tail to AA or to a treatment program because life offers much more than drinking oneself to sleep every night. Even to people who are living a waking nightmare. When alcohol is our only friend, it's time to admit we're defeated.
Jung would call these three events -- me wanting to say something to you about your drinking, that piece of paper falling out of a second-hand book last night and your thread today --"synchronicity." I kinda like that. If you hadn't posted today, using the language of defeat, and if I didn't have The Promises in my hand, I would never have responded to any of your posts about drinking. I didn't know what to say. Now, I do.
I wish you the best, Dancylady and I hope you'll come to understand that sometimes the only way to rise from the ashes is to surrender to defeat. I hope you have it in you.
Quote:
|
THE PROMISES
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.
No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.
|