WHO IS THE ALCOHOLIC?

Who is the Alcoholic?

INTRODUCTION

It is almost strange to see how many people who have come, gone, and are still to be born of this world who can drink merrily, happily and be free of the afflictions of alcoholism. Why is it that not everyone who drinks liquor becomes an alcoholic? Why do some people almost immediately become alcoholics? Taking away science and all the biological research on this topic; there are many characteristics that make up the potential alcoholic; for aren’t all alcoholics selfish, broody, and full of woe? The personality of an alcoholic starts from long before he picks up his first drink, in fact, the 12 Step Program points out to alcoholics that alcohol is only part of the problem. The major issue for the alcoholic is who he is or who seems to think he is. So it must be logical that some people are either born or at least more prone to alcoholism then other folk. The alcoholic personality has a disease and this is the dis-ease of the spirit because even from the earliest years, the alcoholic is never at ease with who or what he is. Every child imagines himself to play out a role but the potential alcoholic child is the only one who actually believes him to be the role or wants to be the character for anything in the world. The saddest part is that the alcoholic child can’t even make up his mind on what that role is. Yesterday he wanted to be the power player of the group, today he wants to be known as the artist, and yet tomorrow he believes his gift is to be an inventor or a writer or even maybe a nobody.

How can a person be so inadequate with how the Creator has made him? Many recovering alcoholics suggest that this is because the other problem with the alcoholic is that he is not impressed with the Creator and is quite convinced that he can do a finer job. The alcoholic has issues with spirituality and those who stringently believe in the Creator still somehow lack faith and trust in Him. This makes for a dispirited person who is one of the loneliest persons in the world. They go about making friends with passing strangers, found in the largest group at parties and social events, and may even possibly have a lot of lovers to chose from but the alcoholic still does not know the meaning of contentment. He may have experienced brief sparks of bliss, euphoria, and sheer happiness but the alcoholic does not know what it feels like to be content with people, places, and things. People intimidate the alcoholic as he has put to much belief in his superiority-inferiority complex that he cannot conceive of the concept of ‘all men are equal’. So it must be that people are smarter and richer than him or he is shrewder and more dynamic than them. This way of thinking is easier for the alcoholic to carry his pseudo-confidence with him simply so he can measure up to those around him. Places confound the alcoholic leaving him claustrophobic and fearful. So the alcoholic attempts to control his environment and if he can’t he is frustrated and falls down with anxiety. Things confuse the alcoholic seemingly always different and forever-changing almost as if to mock the alcoholic’s sense of intelligence. He blows up and throws tantrums when things don’t work the way the alcoholic feels they should, deems the world incompetent when they do not work, and scoffs at things that make him feel inefficient.

The alcoholic resists the concept that he could be powerless to anything especially his own emotions – for the Creator gave him a mind more intelligent then any other mind, didn’t He? - surely then he must be the Master of His Universe. These strange feelings of happiness, anxiety, sadness, bitterness, frustration, and grief are too intense for the alcoholic and since he hasn’t quite figured out a way to run away from his feelings; he knows that alcohol will numb them even if it is just momentarily. Alcohol is the all-cure for these maddening emotions the alcoholic concludes and he feels that he can use alcohol as a pacifier if all else fails. The insanity part is that it does not only work and can often just make him feel the emotions at a more intensified level which angers the alcoholic only more but it doesn’t deter the alcoholic into trying again over and over dispelling him into such uncontrollable emotions. The alcoholic is envious of others who can feel their own emotions without such torment but he will never make the attempt to try this without some crutch be it wine, beer, vodka, gin, or some kind of spirit.

THE PERSONA BEHIND THE ALCOHOLC

Charles Bukwoski (German-American poet, short story, and author) admits that ‘I was drawn to all the wrong things. I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a God, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness, a kind of non-human being and I accepted it. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in and be left alone. On the other hand, I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn’t fit the other. I didn’t care’. This feeling of ‘non-humanness’ can be said for what it feels like for the average alcoholic. As a child, the potential alcoholic convinces himself that he doesn’t belong in his family or the rest of society. It’s almost worse then feeling like the black sheep of the family because even that requires some kind of label a person can connect himself with.

There are different kinds of potential alcoholic children. There’s the overachiever who has a neurotic sense of personal achievement mostly to get the respect that he doesn’t feel that he gets from his parents. As he grows up, he tries everything in his ability to desensitize himself to his emotions and this normally takes in the need to wear a mask all day to the point where he doesn’t even remember who he is anymore. There’s the other potential alcoholic child who is most the rebel and makes a point of drawing attention to himself, usually in a negative light. He’s the one who is most likely to start drinking at an early age and maintains this lifestyle until he becomes the chronic alcoholic that everyone avoids or just pretends doesn’t exist. There’s the comedic potential alcoholic who represses his emotions always in a comical way raging from morbid to the self-degrading kind of humor. He is the character that usually has the most friends in his youth but is neglectful towards them and never feels like he’s part of the crowd no matter how hard people try to make him feel accepted and appreciated. There’s also the loner potential alcoholic child how doesn’t have friends usually by choice. It’s not that he does anything to alienate people as much as he prefers to be by himself and he also doesn’t feel the need to have friends anyway deeming this behavior to be profoundly egotistical. There’s the controlling, know-it-all, narcissistic potential alcoholic who is a handful to put it mildly and presents himself to the world as the legend whose stories have little authenticity. There actually are a lot of potential alcoholic characters but these five are transient of the classic types who become horrible drunks and even worse dry-drunks.

One thing they have in common is not being able to deal with the skin they are in and ever so making them feel self-conscious and lacking in any self-esteem. This is what starts the selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-involving lives. Everything they to either be about them or evolve around them and it doesn’t make them the most congenial people on earth. They also live in a world of fantasy where they play the lead roles and every other person barely makes it into the act. The overachievers only surrounds himself with other overachievers like himself which doesn’t make for the most meaningful relationships. No one ever measures up to the overachiever potential alcohol and added to his self-inflicted stress and anxiety; sometimes in life he turns to alcohol.

Usually it starts off with one or two drinks just so it can relax him a little and takes away the stress but as his ambitions rise and he finds himself becoming a workaholic, which many overachievers succeed so well at, alcohol begins to become a refuge. His tolerance for alcohol becomes stronger and before he knows it; the overachiever becomes dependent on alcohol emotionally and psychologically. It makes life bearable for him and even starts to become his only source of leisure activity whereas the comedic and rebellious potential alcoholic child decides that the only way to perpetuate his neurotic need for self-importance is by showing off, becoming a nuisance, and seeking attention or the spotlight by any means necessary. Eventually when the comedic and rebellious potential alcoholic child finds alcohol; they do their inhibitions die and their morals and integrity go away with it. This creates a character who is now insensitive and injudicious. Life becomes only about pleasure and high-risk adventures. By the time alcohol is introduced into the mix; self-will has already run riot and now he lives for the alcohol to assist in the devil’s mercy. The comedic and rebellious potential alcoholic child already has no self-defense mechanisms which is why they use humor or defiance to disguise his lack of self-confidence and when they find themselves in trouble (which is all too frequent) its too late. They get tackled and kicked around by people who they should not have been messing around in the first place or found in places where they are in merciless yet avoidable situations.

THE DEFECTS OF CHARACTER

Outside of the obvious – self-pity, anger, resentment, and selfishness – that the alcoholic has acquired; his other defects of character are: dishonesty; jealousy/envy; self-entitlement; pride; and stubbornness. These are the only self-defense mechanism tools that the alcoholic uses and it always puts himself in bad situations, confronted with his own guilt, and leaves him wanting to kick himself in the head when he finally realizes the help that he refused. These defects of characters start coming into play around the adolescence during and after the adolescent ages as he kind of gets the idea that he is not the only one person in the world. Responsibilities and chores are now thrown at him from both home and school that he feels he is too ill-equipped to succeed in and he badly seeks some kind of escapism and if his imagination cannot help, he will use these defects of character.

Dishonesty

Lying stars becoming easier now that the potential alcoholic has adapted into his daily life when he pretends to have done something he was supposed to do, feigning spiels to avoid punishment, and telling grandiose tales to fascinate his friends to make him look as cool as he wants to appear. After awhile, his lies start getting out of hand where he begins to find himself telling useless and unnecessary lies out of habit. Eventually his lies start becoming a little bit more sophisticated too. When he is asked if he was with someone or had done something that he should or should not be doing; he manipulates the questioner by changing the subject which may distract the entire conversation to the potential alcoholic’s advantage. If that fails, he starts lying by omission which is just a fancy way of telling half the truth or keeping the important details out the story so he cannot be implicated in anyway. When the potential alcoholic is not busy lying; he cheats his way into what he wants. Usually it is old school version of items from taking items from stores, home, or friend’s houses. There are two kinds of cheats: the every day cheat and the pathological one. The pathological cheat usually gets a high from acquiring whatever he has taken or find the easy-way into success. This act becomes a habit that turns into second nature or the person has no conscience or voluntarily ignores it. The every day cheat, which many alcoholics are, does these acts mainly due to self-entitlement purposes or he is simply too lazy to work for his own. It is a sick form of self-manipulation that the alcoholic’s mind has convinced himself into purely because he feels he deserves something and must have it now. The other case of cheating, comes from his neurotic need for instant gratification and possibly that high he gets from the high-risk situation.

Jealousy/Envy

The potential alcoholic suffers from an inferior-superiority complex because he cannot deal with the reality of feeling so inadequate in his skin, with his body, his intelligence, his family background, and everything that has made him who he is. This is one of the reasons why he needs to feel better than everyone else since he refuses to deal with the fact he actually feels so less than. “Jealousy is a complicated and common emotion experienced by humans which varies in forms and multitudes across relationships and cultures. The definition indicates that the perception of a rival is essential for the emotion to exist. Jealousy is an innate emotion which is guided by a specific set of neurons in response to a perceived threat. This emotion stems from profound insecurities, feelings of being unloved, and an anxious state of needing to be in control and to feel safe.” (Mario R., Pathological Jealousy: It’s Symptoms and Definition, 2012). The potential alcoholic never feels loved or at least loved enough from people or the world around him and so it becomes quite easy for him to pin-point the rest of the world as he rivals which any amplifies, his inferiority-superiority complex more than it already is. The alcoholic is envious of others deciding that they have it better than he does. Even if the potential alcoholic has acquired the girls of his dreams, he still envies other guys or couples for making love seems so easy. His grades could be straight As and he might even be the top student of his class but he may still envy others who don’t have to try so hard as well as those underachievers who don’t seem to take academics so seriously. Either way, the potential alcoholic has decided that he doesn’t have what it takes and is always in an uncomfortable position of being jealous because he is envious of others that don’t seem to demand so much from life.

Self-Entitlement

All babies have that wonderful feeling of being the most important, precious being on earth. Everyone stoops down to him and the world beckons to his every call. Most babies grow up but this is not the case for the alcoholic. He suffers from a profound emotional immaturity and wants to be respected as an adult yet honored like a baby. He doesn’t quite understand why he can’t have the best of both worlds and gets upset about it. Instead of focusing his anger, the alcoholic develops a self-entitlement character to deal with this proposed injustice of life. Self-entitlement is a characteristic reserved for spoiled children who are so used to getting their way from their parents and caretakers. Some of them never outgrow this immature state of being and with the recovering alcoholic the less he is paid attention to, been giving the top dollar, or treated like a self-declared royalty; the worse he can become. The alcoholics offers temper tantrums, manipulative actions, and nefarious ploys to make things ‘right’. In recovery, this may be one of the most difficult defects of characters to have removed both because it is so subconsciously imbedded and secondly because the alcoholic is often not even aware of his own self-entitlement even when he’s being told that his attitude and behavior reeks of it. The excuses that have been given by some alcoholics is that they feel that they are self-entitled because they got their first, they worked for it, they deserve it because of who they are, or they feel it’s simply fair.

Pride

The potential alcoholic is exceptionally proud and it is what makes him so arrogant as well as aloof. He is the kind of guy who would rather drown in a pool then to take a hand from someone who is trying to save his life. Pride is perhaps one of his biggest downfalls of alcoholics and it leads them to easily cross the invisible line from being a heavy drinker to the real alcoholic. The potential alcoholic needs to feel that he has what it takes to survive despite his inadequacies and will never admit to making a mistake or taking fault for something that has gone wrong particularly if the error reflects his misgivings. The recovering alcoholic believes that his pride is what will make him strong and suffering actually can make stronger since it builds character. When life begins to become difficult and hard times fall on him; he is quick to turn a blind eye and tell everyone around him that he is just in a temporary fix or it isn’t as bad as it looks. Should someone step up and try to assist the alcoholic out of his low-time; he will get angry and sometimes express hostility feeling that he is being accused of being inefficient or incompetent to handle his problems. Pride is what stops the potential alcoholic to admit that his life is unmanageable and it is what causes him to struggle to admit that he has a drinking problem at all. In recovery, if the alcoholic never finds the humility to admit that he is an alcoholic for fear of shaming himself in front of others; he will forever be one. He will also never be able to surrender to Power greater then himself or receive any kind of 12 Stepping.

Stubbornness

The potential alcoholic is the most stubborn creature known to man and his favorite motto is ‘NO’. He uses this mantra anytime someone attempts to tell him what to do or how he should do. In his mind, the alcoholic seeks to be the grand leader and likes to think of himself as having a great mind that can influence all people. When he finds himself in the grips of alcoholism, his stubborn behavior becomes even worse as he lashes out at anyone who thinks he can tell him he shouldn’t drink or should quit altogether. The insanity of alcoholism is the idea of doing the same thing that has a guarantee success in leading to trouble over and over again yet having the audacity to think that next time will be different. This is similar to the stubborn mind being unwilling to recognize that he has been defeated by his self-directed behavior based on unreasonable stubbornness.

CONCLUSION

When the potential alcoholic has finally crossed the invisible line from heavy drinking to being the prime alcoholic; all of these childhood behaviors and defects of character come into play and may interfere with a recovering alcoholic causing a relapse. When the going gets tough; the alcoholic drinks. When the going gets soft; the alcoholic drinks. When its time to celebrate, the alcoholic drinks. When its time to grieve; the alcoholic drinks. When situations ask for responsibility and dedication; the alcoholic drinks. When the situation asks for rest and respite; the alcoholic drinks. In fact, there’s no reason why an alcohol can‘t find a good reason not to drink.

This is one man’s version of his alcoholic days: “With alcohol, I had boundless confidence. I became loud, jovial, and found everything great…I spiraled further and further into misery and fear to the point where alcohol dulled the panic but not the pain and the shame. I remember the last party I went to as a drunk. I sat in a corner acutely self-conscious and uptight. I felt everyone was sneering at me. So to make me feel a little less bad, I mentally sneered at them. ‘Look at that idiot’, I thought, ‘what a phony he’d have to be and get a load of that silly woman. Who’d wear a dress like that?’ And this was with a roomful of my best friends…And then one day I was sitting in a group session run by a psychologist at detox centre. I said something along the lines of ‘When it comes to alcohol, I’m hopelessly weak. But the psychologist corrected me. ‘No’, he said, ‘you’re not weak when it comes to alcohol. You’re incredibly strong. When you want a drink nothing gets in your way; not your wife; not your kids; not your job; not even a lack of money. When you want a drink, you’ll get one. No matter what’. And this is true for any alcoholic.