Tonight at a meeting the topic was step one and it got me thinking about my own challenges with step one.
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcoholthat our lives had become unmanageable.
I struggled with this one for a couple reasons. One reason is I cant remember a time when I would describe my life as Manageable. As a kid I was the quintessential latch-key kid. Undiagnosed teenage alcoholism, undiagnosed A.D.D., mom drank quite a bit, raised by my older sisters who (god love em) were pretty merciless to the youngest kid in the house and left me questioning my self worth.
So the unmanageable part proved challenging if for nothing else than for having nothing manageable to compare to- but beyond that they also factored into a challenge with being powerless. When youre adolescents and teenagers raising each other you come up with methods and strategies to make things work. As a kid I became very adept at working around my handicaps- both the alcoholism and the A.D.D. I had rules that kept me safe and methods that helped me function so that people wouldnt know I was operating a little differently than most everyone around me. When you operate like that for any length of time you create this circular pattern of reinforcement all on your own- you operate in a certain fashion and you are rewarded by the success of that modus operandi. But as you grow (in my case anyhow) you have to do everything yourself for fear that someone will figure out that youve been flying by the seat of your pants the whole time, and it becomes a huge workload to get stuff done.
Anyhow- you get used to controlling everything in your life and making stuff work. It wasnt until I got into steps two and three that I recognized how flawed my thinking was about step one.
In the end my drinking progressed to the point where my life was less manageable than ever, and that made it easier to understand step one. But still- I can see how people might have even more trouble than I did given the chaotic nature of some people's lives even without alcohol.
-- Edited by StPeteDean on Friday 1st of May 2009 05:02:11 AM
