I knew that double life intimately well. My father was an alcoholic and drank himself to death when I was 19. While we were growing up, the order of the day was lying and hiding, and those behaviors followed me into adulthood.
I barely drank in my teens and twenties, but I exhibited the trademarks of a drinking alcoholic: stealing, cheating, subterfuge, etc. Once I started drinking heavily in my thirties, the problems just escalated. I was 47 by the time everything crashed and burned into a heap of smouldering ashes and I entered the rooms of AA.
What a lot of newcomers don't understand is that the momentum of the double life continues even though one has stopped drinking. That's what the Steps address. Intensive step-work is what frees us not only of the obsession to drink, but it also enables us to shed the subterfuge: the lying, hiding, and stealing. It doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen to complete perfection, but it happens enough to completely transform our lives into a striving for rigorous honesty and transparency.
-- Edited by Q on Saturday 22nd of June 2013 08:26:43 PM
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The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. ---William James
Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it. --Archibald. MacLeish
Many of us have lived double lives. There were public selves whom others knew, and private selves whom no one met. It was a compulsive world, and both sides were false. Many of us grew up in addicted families and learned this double life early by hiding from outsiders what life was really like at home.
In this program we learn to live our truth before we can speak it. It is more in our actions than in what we say. We may never know the words for this truth because we do not consciously invent it. It comes to us quietly over time and slowly merges all our parts. Gradually we begin to feel whole again as we surrender our double lives for single, truthful ones.
Let me have the trust to give myself to the work of recovery and follow it where it takes me.
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'Those who leave everything in God's hand will eventually see God's hand in everything.'
