Are you holding a grudge? About?
Loving an alcohol dependent person is a messy business particularly when you need to believe in the person who is thus dependent. Even now it feels terrible to point out those terrors because alcohol dependency too often makes the person misrepresent their reasons for starting and maintaining their dependency. This misrepresentation is like and perhaps is, lieing straight and simple.
This building of tissues of lies is sometimes because the alcohol dependent becomes so locked in with guilt about much that attaches itself to the dependency and its shortcuts to forgetting and self-soothing. They entrain people who love them to feel guilty too about even addressing the subject, suggesting that not to be so is interfering and inappropriately controlling because ‘they have it under control, are ‘adults’ and must be respected’ … And so on.
And it is thus sometimes that you can become controlling in your love and that is awful. Moreover, I believe in transactional analysis enough to know how often the helpless child role in alcohol dependency brings out the controlling parent role in oneself. On the other hand, relatives and friends who do not love but want the person for their own interests butter the person up, allow them to other the lover who tries to bring about change, hopelessly.
My grudge is not about the person for love is not given up thus easily and doesn’t go without expressing the selfishness of those who are feeling thus abandoned. Moreover, these dependencies act like illnesses and I am not immune to them in different forms, and once was alcohol dependent, myself.
Guilt is truly genuine in the loving co-dependent in this respect too, for the truth will always be that you could have acted less selfishly than you did because you yourself were hurting and feeling rejected. More often, in this position, you merely become part of what the alcohol dependent person feels hurts them most, a projection of their own self dislike and despair.
My grudge is about those who built up secret relationships with the alcohol dependent for reasons of their own. The relationships don’t often stay secret because alcohol dependents never really keep secrets and this needs to be better known – although they think they do so and can boast of it so practised are they at keeping things hidden – for they forget the lippiness of their drunk episodes. Those secret friendships bolster the drinking dependence by being ‘understanding’.
They themselves spill out ‘secrets’ and demand the person least able to keeps them does so, pretend that this is friendship where it is only the effect of shared shame in each other in fact. Twitter is a growing ground for these behaviours. There is my grudge. But like all grudges it is silly. Human behaviour was always thus. Forget grudges. Just learn from mistakes and the pain they cause. Instead grow as a person for the only alternative is despair and giving up.
All love
Steve
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