The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
I've said this countless times. I look around me - all around me - all around everyone for that matter - and where there's alcohol, there's a miserable story somewhere. Everyone has a miserable alcohol story. I drink socially - and even I wonder what's the point sometimes. Nothing better comes when alcohol is mixed.
And yet it is made with fruits of the earth. It shows that all in moderation is the way to go. Anything abused becomes a destroyer, a negative force.
This is where I find that animals are so much more intelligent, they eat to keep hunger at bay, they drink to quench thirst and they do NOT kill or torture one another the way we humans do. And we are the only life form that drinks another life forms milk.
Makes you wonder how we can call humankind intelligent?
Heartbroken.
__________________
"The highest form of wisdom is kindness." The Talmund
I'm not sure about that. One of my good friends, Kristen, is a cooking aficianado, who just happens to have a liquor cabinet. she also happens to have one of the more severe variants of CP. One of the more bizarre, yet true, treatments for severe spasms, as in those that are so bad Kristen falls out of her chair because she can't control her body, is to have a beer--I kid you not. She actually is told by her doctor to have someone crack a beer and pour it down her throat. I kid you not. Then, as the budweiser takes effect, Kristen can get to an ER where they can strap her down and take appropriate action; otherwise, she will spasm so traumatically she will injure other staff and they can't interviene on her behalf. Another thing, if you watch enough food network, is that there are a sizeable number of ways to use alcholc that suggest things to enhance the taste of food. There's whiskey snapped pot roast; tiramisu; the various chicken recipies from Italy, all cooked in wine; and don't forget how many french desserts use creme de _______. the problem, really, is alcholism. people who can't use alchol responsibly and thus drink to such an excess that they cause dysfunction in their own life, and that of others. I've also come to see that even alcholism has an use. It did bring me to recovery
I don't believe the either or, but of all things to make legal. I wish it was not and there are dry towns to be found. Maybe we oughta all move there!!
Geez talk about heaven.
We all know that pot at least does not make a persons mean and abusiveness come out. shuts the disease up and puts it to sleep.
I know when my A was on a medicinal amount of pain piills and so many xanax that I doled out, he did so well. He is a viet nam war vet, has mult personality syndrome, post tramatic stess, abused horrible as a child, then gets on a program of recovery. does well for many years, then the brain damage and medical relapse took him away.
Alcohol, to me has its place. It is not what causes the problem. Ya take it away, the addict will fill that void with something else. HOpefully that will be a program of recovery. My husband did that and worked almost constantly. When we married we came to a compromise that he be home by six, if not call. NO working week ends. but he then would work building me stuff for the animals.
He quit smoking too.
Dang how did I get blabbering????sigh, he was such a cool,good lookin man.
but to me he is beautiful now all wrinkly and sick. love,debilyn
Gee, I LOVE the taste of a wonderful bottle of wine with a great meal with friends. But aside from that- I am a happy camper with tea and water...
whenever I just go to a bar to drink (maybe twice a year with friends) its hard to find something I want to actually drink. I don't drink soda pop so those mixers are out. I am not a big fan of juice either although I usually end up with a bloody mary (because of all the olives, celery, pickles, etc. you get to eat with it). I like saki martini's, too but again you get good snacks with 'em!
Hope you're well beyond your post. The person at the meeting who said that is very akamai (wise) and what she said should be investigated often. Alcohol is the most cunning powerful and baffling chemical and practice known to man. Did you know that after the twin towers bombing tragedy the only stock on the stock exchange that showed an increase in value were the alcohol stocks? Consider the marketing process for alcohol and the numbers of dollars spent to forward the sales of a chemical that is related to the majority of human health tragedies in America. Look at it's history and what happened to the effort to bring it to temperance and how hard people fought to keep it legal. Look at the Point Barrows Alaska Inuit Experience where the Eskimo natives got rid of it because it was destroying them and the Congress of the United States over ran their decision. Look at your own life and history. How powerful is this chemical. It truely doesn't have any redeeming values even as an anticeptic, liguid depressant, or anesthetic. I have experience on both sides of the chemical as an Al-Anon and recovering alcoholic and because in early recovery I didn't trust what the people in Al-Anon were telling me about the chemical and the disease I decided to "show them" and went to college on it. When I graduated I had to gratefully admit they were right...no redeeming value.
My alcoholic wife once suffered a concussion from a fall while drunk. During the recovery process physical therapy was prescribed and on her first visit when I went with her I told the therapist not to "wash" her down after the treatment with alcohol. He shined me on and then after the treatment came into the waiting room and two of them excitedly called me into the treatment room. "Your wife is in seizure and calling for you" they told me. I asked them if they "washed" her down after treatment with alcohol. "We always do that it is a part of our practice." I knew that from my own experience but what they didn't do was listen because when I asked them not to I told them why and now my wife was paralyzed on one side and seizing on the other begging for help. She and I took care of the situation and then were issued out the back door of the clinic and she was discharged fully. Alcohol has the ability to penetrate what ever barrier it comes against that is permeable in the human body. It can penetrate the blood brain barrier and that is why it's first effect in on the CNS...or central nervous system. Yep we got all kinds of people who cook with it, sell it, professionally assure us that our hearts would do better with so many ounces per day or week or whenever. They all have "their" point to sell and not the entire point to sell. There is huge money in it...HUGE MONEY just as huge as the earliest affect it has on the drinker...like a Disneyland explosion with rockets bursting in air, flashing lights and elated Wows! If you can witness that WOW and then tell yourself this is gotta be some powerful stuff I better be cautious then it hasn't swept you completely off your feet and you have a boundary to set. If it takes you off your feet to the point that you just gotta have more of this great stuff and you continue to try to regain that very first explosion the disallusion and confusion will set in and your mind, body, spirit and emotions will start to slip away. Alcoholism is a fatal disease...unless arrested by total abstinence; as it is incureable, the alcoholic will progress to insanity or death. Alcoholism also kills non-drinking victims.
Are there not enough of us here and in meetings all over the planet to erase all doubt and discounting regarding this chemical? The answer to that is sadly NO. We have learned about denial and often times that, along with the booze will be are demise.
There are so many parameters leading up to death. For me it was Chemical Tolerance. I could drink tons of the stuff and never seemed to go down or appear drunk. My family use to marvel at that while I use to marvel at the color of my skin...a lingering hue of green/yellow. I never knew what that was about and use to secretly thing that my mother had an affair with an oriential before I was born. I never put that together with my drinking or the fact that when I drank I rarely felt the urge to urinate (anesthesia remember?). I have been in toxic shock several times; down with only involutary functions remaining...heartbeat and breath. In drug addiction it's also called overdosing and because I was able after a period of time to stand and walk off I wasn't a drunk...I was immortal (that is one of those silent partners that keeps an alcoholic and addict drinking and using. We keep getting up from it all and that is where the doubt is born I keep remembering all the times I escaped and not the times I was enslaved. Cunning Powerful and Baffling.
If anyone attempts to convince you it is all benign quietly walk away in conversation with your HP.
I don't know any more seductive way to bringing a person to their knees and then to their death than to make they feel warm and secure and trusting like alcohol does. It use to take away my fears before I recognized that it was taking away my mind and ability to protect myself. After that I drank with fear and anger and that was the worse drinking I ever did. That was also the worse drinking my wife ever did and still we drank. I am grateful to my HP, God as I understand God that when I finally stopped I could not take one drinking without reaching a hangover and if I want my second sip and everyone thereafter I would have to drink with pain that alcohol caused and could not put out. I am grateful.
Redeeming qualities? I agree with the person and the people who say that booze led them to the doors of recovery.
Keep coming back and listen, listen, listen then practice, practice practice.
Not very often these days, as I tend to think of it when I am in company, and I usually will have to drive. Since I drink so little now, even one will put me over my personal limit for hours and hours, as I'm not used to it anymore. So, I think "Wouldn't it be nice to have a glass of wine" but don't have one. When I do, though, I enjoy it very much. Tastes nice, has a nice effect. I haven't been drunk for years, and don't really anticipate ever being drunk again - I don't like it, it's easy to avoid, why do it.
Not every one is an alcoholic. It's not the alcohol that causes the problems, it's its misuse.
I remember very vividly something that happened quite early in my marriage. I was 9 weeks pregnant when I had a miscarriage. My husband was working out of town, I was new in town and didn't know anyone. I called the hospital and they were very unsympathetic and blunt, so I just stayed home alone and lost the baby. In the morning when I knew it was all over, I called my husband and told him. He jumped into a truck and got home about four hours later. The first thing he did, after holding me for a minute, was to pour me a big drink of whatever hard liquor we had in the house. I just looked at it, and he said "It doesn't matter now, you're not pregnant anymore, you can drink it. It will make you feel a lot better." I did drink it, and as I did I thought "How odd, that's the first time I've ever taken a drink in order to make something bad go away". He, of course, knew all about it - if I had only known, that moment had a lot to tell me about what was to come. He was an old hand at drinking to kill the pain, years before any observer would have pegged him as an alcoholic.
Oh Jerry - what an amazing, telling post. I thank you for that.
As I said in my first post, I whole-heartedly agree that alcohol has no redeeming value. It offers no nutritional value or sustenance to the body - instead, I feel it attacks the body and creates a dependency in those who are sensitive to it - and face it, there are a LOT of people out there who are sensitive to it - MILLIONS!
I've also seen the nasty side of marijuana, so I don't even think that substance is somehow less destructive. My ex was a habitual pot-smoker. He stopped for a short while when I knew him, and he was a decent man to be around. But then he started up with it and the paranoia was just unbearable for me. I lived in isolation (very literally!) with that man, and yet he STILL convinced himself that I was cheating on him. And if he wasn't worrying about me trying to stab him in the back, he was accusing his closest friends and family of trying to do things to hurt him, too. Yeah. In my book, that's no better than the insanity alcohol brings on.
We're all different people with different walks of life, though. And although I've managed to get away scott-free with being able to drink and being able to turn a drink down or even leave a drink only half-drank at the table and go, I still don't see much value in it. It's only purpose, from what I can tell, is to disrupt a person's senses. For me, I used it to "loosen up" and party a little harder. That was it. Again - it had no nutirtional value for me, was just a tool to mess with my brain.
I just thank my HP that I never got to the point of developing a dependency on it like my AH. I'm lucky - VERY lucky - because my own family has a history of alcoholism. My mother's an A, but she's been sober since I was a baby, so I never experienced what it was like to live with an active A... but she certainly had her own issues, though, as a recovering A, and the daughter of an A - an abusive A. So it runs in my family, and sometimes I could just kick myself thinking that I thought I could control myself around it. I'm lucky I didn't lose in my little game of Russian roulette - I could be right there beside my AH right now, my life out of control and in the grips of alcoholism.
All the more reason, too, for me to be more than willing to be supportive of my AH in the realm of not having alcohol in the house. It's better for BOTH of us if it stays out of our home.
Okay, chattering again. Thanks again for listening.
Off topic - Jerry - is it cold over there on your side? Because holy smokes, it's chilly where I am tonight!
Didn't you hear? Its going to save us from the oil barons around the world. If they can use it to get me to meetings, thats the only use I ever needed. I don't care if they have to pour it down my throat, someone else's throat or into my gas tank. Perhaps it has no redeeming qualities as far as an alcoholic or their families go but it has many redeeming uses among non-alcoholics.
The first one I think of is a solvent that can be used in food processing. We wouldn't have things like flavor extracts to bake with. Many medicines use it dissolve the active ingredient into solution, leaving behind the inert waste products. Strain the solution out and then when the alcohol is evaporated, it leaves behind the drug. Another thing is its use as an antidote for antifreeze. The patient is kept drunk and burns the ethanol instead of the antifreeze while the body eliminates the antifreeze through other processes. This works for methanol too. Can one life saved redeem it for the millions it takes? Not really but what do you expect out of yeast poop?
I experienced what Jerry's wife went through too. I sprayed camphophenigue 40% on open poisin ivy. I didn't get seizures but it can penetrate the skin.
As far as future fuel goes, yes it is a poor fuel compared to diesel but it burns clean and is a bit safer than gasoline and controversy or not, they are going to be making it by the gazillion barrels a week soon enough. Better living through chemistry I guess. Got to do something with our refineries and factories.
Personally I don't have any use for it, don't keep even extracts in the house though I have bought them of course. If I want a new fuel it will be bio diesel made from recycling the McDonald's grease pit. Now there is something with no redeeming value. Do you know Modern beef is fed anything with protein in it that is sterile. Can you say chicken manure?
You might say if I won't touch it, why would I stick up for it? Well I don't like things that aren't true. It redeems itself poorly perhaps but to say it has no redeeming qualities or uses at its best is an exaggeration. More so I don't like where it leads. It leads us into engaging in controversy and having opinions about outside issues. These go against the traditions. It could also lead us into affiliations with anti alcohol organizations. Why is this bad?
Is it because I worry about the 12 steps survival? Not today.
Cause every law they passed punished our family for my Dad's alcohol use. When they take a drivers license, that breadwinners earning completely disappears but the booze still gets paid for. When the Lawyers need paid, who do you think goes without? Who's wearing shoes with newspaper stuffed into the holes? What do you think gets sold for the next drink? Anything that not tied down. Those laws all hurt the family, Maybe they save a life just like ethanol but they destroy or heave additional pain on tens of thousands in the process of saving one. Is this redemption?
These laws must be based on the insane belief that you can control a problem drinkers behavior by putting financial pressure on his family. Can they not see who suffers the consequences of treating a disease like a criminal act or do they only see what pulls in the money or the vote?
Alcohol has never been a positive thing in my life. That is why I don't drink. Infact, everything bad that has happened in my life is connected to alcohol.
