ADDICTION
'Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places'
Like many of you I grew up with addicted parents. My father was an alcoholic and my mother a love addict. His obsession was drink, drugs and oblivion, and hers was trying to save him from it all. To make him ‘better’, so that he would love her better.
No surprises, but it didn’t end well.
Most of my childhood was littered with violence, smashed glass, chaos, drama and terror. My mum would regularly hide us kids in cupboards, to avoid my father’s inevitable drink fuelled rampages. He was of course like most addicts, in complete denial about the impact of his drinking upon us all. “You’ve got a roof over your head haven’t you?” He was a (semi) functioning alcoholic, in that most days, no matter how drunk he was the night before, he would get up and go to work the next day. To him this meant that he couldn’t possibly be an alcoholic. He just liked a good time….
However, my father remembers very little of those ‘good times’. In fact he once told me that the 1970’s and 1980’s were a complete blank to him. (If only they were to us, his family). Fast forward 40 odd years and sadly my father remembers very little at all these days, given that he suffers from alcohol related dementia.
A truly tragic waste of a life.
The apple never falls…?
As I look back at my own life, I am beyond grateful that this curse of alcoholism did not get passed down to me. It's nothing short of a miracle really, given that I am in so many ways, my father's daughter. Don’t get me wrong, before I seriously started my inner work of healing, I was definitely a binge drinker. I didn’t get out often as a single mother of two small children, but when I did….boy oh boy, was it messy. I felt like I couldn’t stop. It seemed for a while in my early 20’s that the apple had indeed fallen into my glass. However, here’s what happened…..I started working with a great therapist, and almost immediately my binge drinking episodes became more infrequent.
After some years of continuing to work on myself in therapy, I went on to complete a residential programme which focused on healing childhood wounding. I left that 7 day experience with a real sense of wholeness. That the gaping trauma wounds inside of me had finally begun to heal. And the reward/miracle that I was gifted, from all of this courageous work of grieving my past, was that I no longer blamed my parents for how my life had turned out, nor felt the need to drink my pain away. Perhaps there’s a link between those two…?
Now of course I’m not suggesting that it is as easy as this for everyone. Addiction is a painful and insidious condition. But I am simply sharing my truth here. As my broken heart began to defrost and heal, my need for alcohol and the oblivion it offered me, lessened. I have never binged on alcohol since.