Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Angry is Plan A

Watch an episode of Intervention or read a codependent’s blog and you can be rest assured that half the content will relate to yelling, screaming, and fighting. Why? Is it the overpowering angst of the struggling alcoholic or addict desperately trying to stay straight? Is it the transference of anger from a problem they cannot handle or understand to a more concrete subject (victim)? Is it just understandable result from living in a dysfunctional environment?


Well sure, it could be any of these. But before this old alcoholic yells surprise and throws a pity party for those poor suffering souls let me tell you that some of the time it might just be “Angry is Plan A”.


As a practicing alcoholic I often found that I had woven a web of deceit so complex that with my degraded mental capacity I just couldn’t keep my stories straight. Always intoxicated, I would also have a hard time performing simple tasks under close scrutiny by those who knew me without it becoming obvious I was drinking again. The answer to these dilemmas was to make sure that things got so hot around me that drinking was the last thing anyone thought of. Yelling, screaming, and just generally burning down the house assured that whatever I had set on fire garnered all the attention… not my drinking.


The angry Plan A had an added benefit that if I played the part to the hilt and began believing that my originally feigned pain and indignation was justified, that it often served as the rationalization to continue drinking. After all, nobody cared nor could even understand how I felt.


In fact, I was going to make sure they never had the chance!

3 comments:

joy said...

Damn you! Everything you say is always so true and awful!

Every word.

I hear this often at meetings, too, and I respond with the codependent's standard, "YES BUT..."

Anonymous said...

Yes but, what about when we stop using/drinking, and can no longer use anger as a distraction? After all several of us addicts that aren't in recovery, like me are left without my drug of choice and all this ANGER. What gives? Where's the outlet other than our poor loved ones?

The Discovering Alcoholic said...

I would add TJW that if there never was a "Yes but..." for me that I would be a dead man now instead of in recovery. My father said "Yes but... he is my son" and offered his hand regardless of the many past failures. So there is always hope.

And ej, I speak only for myself but I can honestly say that I did not stop thinking like an alcoholic for at least a year into my sobriety. And when I say this I mean that everything that occurred in my life I related it to what had been my priority for so many years, drinking. Drinking was how I dealt with all instances of life, and most definitely how I dealt with fear and anger.

As tough and mean as I thought I was, it turned out that most of my anger occurred because I was scared about facing life without the haze and forgivance of alcohol. I had become the master of my own destiny and was left with no excuses, and this scared me silly. It wasn't an outlet I needed for my anger so much as I had to find the courage and the self confidence to tackle those things that scared me and made me angry.

The physical addiction and withdrawals are easy when compared to facing life without our chemical shield.