She was a little over a month shy of her 42nd birthday when she passed away from complications due to alcohol abuse. We were a classic example of co-enablers. We both drank to excess pretty much every day over several years, although Amy's heavy alcohol use began a few years earlier than mine. She went to the hospital at least five times for pancreatitis, which is inflammation of the pancreas due to excessive alcohol consumption. After her death in late November 2006, I was despondent over her death, and I used that sadness as an excuse to continue abusing alcohol.
Then on Christmas Day of that year, something inside of me swam its way up from the depths of my addiction to alcohol and avoidance of reality and got my attention. It said simply, YOU HAVE TO STOP DRINKING OR YOU'LL DIE LIKE AMY. But that voice only emerged after I'd scoured every inch of our town home in search of booze and I'd found the liquor stores and bars closed for the holiday. I drove from our Eagan town home south to Red Wing to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my parents.
That night, I attended my first AA meeting. I told the story of how Amy lost her life to alcohol, I lost two jobs because of alcohol and we were on the verge of losing the town home to foreclosure (due mainly to loss of income from jobs due to alcohol abuse). I got a sponsor, a wonderful man named Chuck who turned out to be needed sooner than he'd probably thought he would be.
The catharsis of spilling my guts and the satisfaction I derived from taking the first step toward healing didn't last long. My body was so used to having copious doses of alcohol that it reacted poorly when it was deprived of it. I went two straight nights without sleeping, mostly because I was hearing voices. My dad took me to the local ER.
The doctor on call gave me a medication to combat the symptoms from Delirium Tremors (i.e. - DT's), which probably saved my life. My mind was so messed up that I actually thought I'd died. In my head, I thought I heard my dad Lavern yelling at the doctor for not seeing me sooner. If he had seen me sooner, they might have saved me. That's not what was said but my confused brain thought it was.
I bolted up to a sitting position on the examination-room table and yelled, "I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die."
My good friend Jim Welsch, who my dad called, sat in a chair next to the examination table. He assured me I wasn't dead. I had to admit he was right. The staff gave me medication to help me sleep. The next morning, with my sponsor's assistance, I got into a 21-day inpatient treatment program at Fountain Center (Albert Lea, MN).
I completed the three-week program, sobered up, and moved into the Cochran House, a halfway house in Hastings, MN (25 miles from my parents' home in Red Wing). After being forced into sobriety for the next month (residents couldn't leave the facility for first 30 days), I secretly drank on weekends at our old town home and then returned to Cochran House before the curfew.
I never completely quit drinking until early October 2010. But before I quit, I went to the Hastings detox unit four or five times and also lost another job, this one at Treasure Island Resort & Casino, because of drinking. My dad passed away in February 2010 after cancer spread throughout most of his frail body. That was a convenient excuse to get loaded and I took it.
But finally, as the saying goes, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I abstained from using alcohol from October 2010 to May 2012. I was inspired in equal parts by Amy's premature death and the writings of Eckhart Tolle, especially "A New Earth", which was featured in Oprah's Book Club. Tolle. I connected the dots between Tolle's insights about the ego, Amy's death and my frequent relapses.
The ego is the voice inside your head that declares you're different, and separate, from everyone else in the universe. You're special, and better, than everyone else simply because you're you. That's diametrically opposed to Eckhart Tolle's One Life, which states we're all one spiritual body, so intimately connected by a mystical but very real and powerful energy force that has no end or limits that there's really no me vs. you. Your ego seeks a static definition of self and to form that limited definition of self, the ego looks to the past for clues. In the case of a practicing alcoholic, he or she keeps drinking mainly because they believe that's who they are. They drink, therefore they are. It doesn't matter if the consequences of their drinking have been bad or even tragic, people who don't understand who they really are fall back on past behaviors because it's safe and known.
But if you believe we're all one spiritual, free-flowing, changing body, you free yourself from the prison of habitual, obsessive behaviors based on the past. You can be anyone you want to instead trying to squeeze yourself into the clunky, clingy squares of misguided behaviors (mental and physical) that defined your previous time on this planet.
When you let the One Life flow through you, you're in step with the cosmos. It's not you against the world. It's you with the world. I've heard so many pundits talk about "finding your true self" like there's certain combination of traits and beliefs that's the real you floating out in the ether and all you have to do is find the combination that's the real you. That's such a rigid, unenlightened approach. I think you should do whatever your heart/spirit/soul tells you to do at any given moment. Why limit yourself to doing the same things you've always done in the same manner?
The ego is the source of every kind of conflict from yelling at your spouse or kids to mass murder and war. That's because the ego deceives people into believing they are fundamentally different from everyone else, that they have a certain set of traits and beliefs that makes them who they are. For the alcoholic, one of the traits that defines them is their profuse level of drinking and drunkenness. The flip side of that, the good news, is that if you really thought about it, you'd feel and see and experience the truth of the One Life. The ego's lies about rigidity, static nature of the self and spiritual separation are not easily detected but if you have an open mind and honest heart, I believe you will see the fundamental reality of oneness.
http://www.leeaeide-writer.com/overcome_any_personal_obstacle_including_alcoholism_by_understanding_your_ego
