“It is witless to greet the sodden, guilt-ridden homecomer with a barrage of angry words. The alcoholic’s reaction will be no more sane than ours at a time like that. Would I go to a foreign country and expect people to understand my language? We make just as little sense to the drinker in the acute phase. We can’t speak his language; the alcoholic can’t understand ours.” (ODAT, 4 April 2025)
True of the alcoholic.
True also within Al-Anon, within sponsorship: when I was new to the Al-Anon programme, emotionally sodden and guilt-ridden, there was no communication possible. In that condition, I could not hear. I could interact, but fruitlessly. I babbled with dramatic, usually figurative jargon (‘toxic’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘co-dependency’, ‘family of origin’, ‘trauma’, ‘abandonment’, ‘gaslighting’, ‘hostage’, ‘people-pleasing’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘space’, ‘stuffing’, ‘triggering’, ‘unsafe’, ‘vulnerable’) but had no coherent understanding of my real problem and / or what to do about it.
Before any real conversation could take place, I needed to ‘sober up’.
This meant:
Detoxing off my obsession with the alcoholic, with others, with the world, with the future, with the past.
Spending a few days, weeks, months keeping my eyes down, on my tasks, on the Al-Anon literature, on God.
Then, the emotional toxins leave the system, sobriety returns, and I can talk.
I realise:
Whilst the alcoholic, the disordered person in my life, the disordered situation, the disordered world is indeed disordered, my problem is not the alcoholic, the person, the situation, the world, but me.
When my problem is me, I can listen.
Until then, the constant thinking and talking about the alcoholic, the person, the situation, and the world is a maelstrom of empty words.
Do these things matter? Might something need to be done?
Yes and yes, but only once I’m well. Not while I’m as sick as the things I’m sick about. One problem can’t do anything about another, except make it worse.
“Many things must thou pass by with a deaf ear, and think rather of the things that are for thy peace. It is more profitable to turn away thine eyes from such things as displease thee than to be a slave to contention.” (Thomas à Kempis) (ODAT, 4 April 2025)
And this is how I sober up, as it were, in Al-Anon. Deaf ear to everything but God and the task in front of me. Deaf ear, particularly, to myself.