Getting well is tough.
Getting well emotionally is tough.
It can take years. III
We came to realize that we are profoundly emotional beings and that unless we understand our emotions we are very often powerless over our own actions and are powerless over the world.
For some time now I have been bothered by the phase you “have to do it for yourself.” As you have to stop using drugs for yourself you can’t do it for your wife or kids et.
It is not so simple. What motivates one person is different than the next.
We are social beings. It would seem that we are trying to get well under any circumstance in order to better fully enjoy the company of others. “I don’t want to lose my children.” “I want my family back.” “My wife left me.”
True enough we have to somehow come to understand how we got to where we are. How we came to this point of “losing everything.” Everyone has their own baggage and it is our baggage and we bring it into relationships and those around us do not need our baggage because they have their own. So we do ourselves and everyone a big favor if we work hard on understanding what hurt us in the past and how we have come to habitually respond now in our adult life to hurt by taking drugs or by whatever we are doing be it gambling or sex or beating our spouses or running up credit card bills.
So yes work on “the self” but it seems to me it all has to be done at once. Why on earth are we working on ourselves if it is not to connect with others?
There is a study about alcoholics and suicide that seemed to document that those that committed suicide were those that ended up with no connection at all. It was when the wife followed through on all the threats. That is the man would come home and the house would be empty, the car was gone. No note, no forwarding address. All efforts at contact would fail and he would have no one left in his life. Yes, there are, at times, seemingly no solutions but, obviously, inherent in that is the thought that there are no easy solutions. There is a tragedy. Not that people do not have to leave sometimes but it is also true that he cannot just “up and stop drinking.” He needs a community. How he or anyone does it is an ongoing project.
Brian Lynch
Shame and Humiliation
Tomkins, Silvan S.: Affect Imagery Consciousness NY: Springer Publishing Company, 1963.
Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self by Donald L. Nathanson Paperback (March 1994)
W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393311090
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