Monday, July 9, 2012
Vacations, Family Get Togethers & Staying Sober & Clean
Summer vacations and family get togethers are great times to be had by all. Or are they? We all look forward to them and build them up in our minds to be something really special. The problem comes when we have a little too much family time or the expectations of the summer vacation were set too high.
So, let's start with the," Too much family time." Sitting in a car for long periods of time causes stress for everyone feeling trapped inside. The same is true for long plane rides with children. Planning ahead helps but doesn't always solve the problem. You can go through all of your games, toys, snacks and videos quickly with some children. Then what? Getting children involved in the solution seems to work well. As a parent we don't always have to have the solution for our children. They appreciate being apart of the process of solving a problem. Getting to meetings once we arrive to our destination is vital. It may seem a little strange at first. Why in the world would I go to an AA meeting or a NA meeting when I am on vacation? Well, because we all go a little stir crazy when we are out of our element and our routine. Some of the best meetings I have been to are ones we attend while on vacation. For starters, it's nice to walk into a room full of strangers and instantly feel that they automatically "know" you. They know how you are feeling, they know your stress, and they have a simple solution on how to get back on track. It's a comforting feeling of readjusting your attitude. After the meeting, we usually feel balanced and refreshed. If you find an "open meeting", which you can find on our Powell website under the topic "Support", then you can even bring your spouse and children to the meeting. I never felt comfortable leaving my children in a motel room alone so they always went with us. It was just another experience that we all had together and could talk about in the future. As my children reached their teenage years, people at meetings thought they were the alcoholics and we were their support team. We got lots of laughs out of those experiences. It never hurts a child to learn first hand what goes on in a meeting. When a child is at a meeting, most members try to use appropriate language and tell appropriate stories. Children will make up in their heads what an AA meeting is all about if they do not have the opportunity to experience it first hand and it could be frightening to them. Telling the children ahead of time what all is covered in a meeting helps them understand the process. Remember genetics are apart of this disease so the chances of them becoming alcoholic or involved in drugs are high if one of their parents are diagnosed with the disease. Wouldn't you rather they grow up with the information they need in order for them to know where to turn when they are adults?
I am the only sibling out of 5 that admits to being an alcoholic; therefore when we all get together liquor is overflowing and wild times are to be had. I can plan on it. It happens year after year. In some ways it is sad to me. I wish they had the life I have without drugs or alcohol. What I have learned is that they all have their own journey. They'll get it or they won't. I simply have to take care of myself and my sobriety when I am around them. I've been told by my older brother that I am no longer any fun. I've been told that I am really not an alcoholic. I've watched huge family get together's turn into fun parties for the first half of the night and then turn ugly. But isn't that how most alcohol fueled evenings go? They are good to a point and then it's downhill from that point on. That is when I need to leave and not be apart of the chaos. My husband and I usually attend an AA meeting before the big drunk... that way we are armed with AA tools to bring to the family party. With this foundation under us, we know we can only participate for a period of time and then we must go and take care of ourselves and our sobriety. Nothing is wrong with this and most of the family doesn't even know that we have left the party.
So, in the end, it all works out. It takes planning and forethought. I am always proud of myself when my vacations are over. I made it through yet another vacation without a drink and I am proud of my behavior. I took one step at a time and handled what came my way. I know you can as well. Take a little AA with you and prepare and plan ahead. Happy trails to you!
So, let's start with the," Too much family time." Sitting in a car for long periods of time causes stress for everyone feeling trapped inside. The same is true for long plane rides with children. Planning ahead helps but doesn't always solve the problem. You can go through all of your games, toys, snacks and videos quickly with some children. Then what? Getting children involved in the solution seems to work well. As a parent we don't always have to have the solution for our children. They appreciate being apart of the process of solving a problem. Getting to meetings once we arrive to our destination is vital. It may seem a little strange at first. Why in the world would I go to an AA meeting or a NA meeting when I am on vacation? Well, because we all go a little stir crazy when we are out of our element and our routine. Some of the best meetings I have been to are ones we attend while on vacation. For starters, it's nice to walk into a room full of strangers and instantly feel that they automatically "know" you. They know how you are feeling, they know your stress, and they have a simple solution on how to get back on track. It's a comforting feeling of readjusting your attitude. After the meeting, we usually feel balanced and refreshed. If you find an "open meeting", which you can find on our Powell website under the topic "Support", then you can even bring your spouse and children to the meeting. I never felt comfortable leaving my children in a motel room alone so they always went with us. It was just another experience that we all had together and could talk about in the future. As my children reached their teenage years, people at meetings thought they were the alcoholics and we were their support team. We got lots of laughs out of those experiences. It never hurts a child to learn first hand what goes on in a meeting. When a child is at a meeting, most members try to use appropriate language and tell appropriate stories. Children will make up in their heads what an AA meeting is all about if they do not have the opportunity to experience it first hand and it could be frightening to them. Telling the children ahead of time what all is covered in a meeting helps them understand the process. Remember genetics are apart of this disease so the chances of them becoming alcoholic or involved in drugs are high if one of their parents are diagnosed with the disease. Wouldn't you rather they grow up with the information they need in order for them to know where to turn when they are adults?
I am the only sibling out of 5 that admits to being an alcoholic; therefore when we all get together liquor is overflowing and wild times are to be had. I can plan on it. It happens year after year. In some ways it is sad to me. I wish they had the life I have without drugs or alcohol. What I have learned is that they all have their own journey. They'll get it or they won't. I simply have to take care of myself and my sobriety when I am around them. I've been told by my older brother that I am no longer any fun. I've been told that I am really not an alcoholic. I've watched huge family get together's turn into fun parties for the first half of the night and then turn ugly. But isn't that how most alcohol fueled evenings go? They are good to a point and then it's downhill from that point on. That is when I need to leave and not be apart of the chaos. My husband and I usually attend an AA meeting before the big drunk... that way we are armed with AA tools to bring to the family party. With this foundation under us, we know we can only participate for a period of time and then we must go and take care of ourselves and our sobriety. Nothing is wrong with this and most of the family doesn't even know that we have left the party.
So, in the end, it all works out. It takes planning and forethought. I am always proud of myself when my vacations are over. I made it through yet another vacation without a drink and I am proud of my behavior. I took one step at a time and handled what came my way. I know you can as well. Take a little AA with you and prepare and plan ahead. Happy trails to you!
The following blog was written by Greg Kayko. This is posted with his permission. He writes a daily blog on sobriety. You can find his blog at: http://www.reneweveryday.com/blogs/sobriety-junkie/relapse-a-means-to-one-end-or-another-part-ii/
For a time, we get clean and sober. Some of us even like it. Some of us love being sober so much we stay sober from the very start until the day they bury us (the sober minority). Some of us like it a whole lot, love it really, but after a while, for reasons beyond reason, we decide that — even though we feel so much better and our lives have gotten so much better and our loved ones love us so much more (or, at least, become much more willing to tolerate us) and we experience all these plusses and very few minuses — we decide that maybe we've overcorrected and we should test the waters that have bathed us in pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization just one more time. Why? Because maybe, just maybe (and especially given the volumes of brilliant knowledge we have gleaned nearly overnight about our condition and ourselves), maybe things will be different this time. Now that, to be sure, is the epitome of irrational thinking.
For those of us who make it back, one day the insanity of our relapse may present itself as a source of humor. I often laugh at the comic irony of my last relapse (which resulted in a 90-day drunk). I had been bouncing in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous for 18 months after once having stayed sober nearly three years. One morning, with about three months of sobriety under my belt and nearly two full weeks without a meeting (I planned to go later that day, I told myself), I went out to the pool at the apartment complex where I lived to enjoy my coffee and the morning paper. I was the first to arrive and grab a chaise lounge. Around 10 a.m. a young woman arrived with an inflatable raft and one of those ever-so-quaint 6-pack coolers. She parked her raft at the other end of the pool and slipped a bright silver can out of the cooler before jumping onto her raft. A Coors Light, the Silver Bullet, to be sure.
Now, I want to clarify before going on that I'm a guy's guy and A Coors Light holds about as much appeal for me as a glass of ice tea. Actually, I'd prefer an ice tea, and I'd be most appreciative of a Long Island Ice Tea before all else. (Let's get all the white liquors on the bar into one glass; that, my friends, is a touch of class.) But something in my mind told me that a Coors Light might not be a bad idea. If this woman could handle a Coors Light at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, then why on earth couldn't I? It really didn't make any sense. She couldn't have been a day over 25 and probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet in a winter parka. I was a three-letter high school jock and a man who, at one time, could easily handle a fifth of the finest booze in the bar one night and still make it to work on time the next morning. Surely, I had not tried hard enough to make this drinking thing work.
And so, without another thought, and certainly without even a passing nod to my sponsor's phone number, I rose from the chaise (leaving my coffee cup, my towel and my newspaper behind because I'd be right back) and drove as quickly and directly as possible to the nearest convenience store where they sold beer, wine and spirits, and stocked up on all three, including a six-pack of my least favorite beer on the face of the earth: Coors Light. Less than 20 minutes after returning to the apartment, I had four of the watery beers down and two left to take out to the pool. No sooner had I repositioned my now mildly-buzzed ass in my previously reserved chaise lounge with the two remaining Coors Lights still in their plastic rings than my little inspiration came floating by on her inflatable pod of heavenliness holding, you guessed it, a bright silver can of Diet Coke.
Irrational minds see things irrationally, too.
I tell that story often at meetings mainly to establish that my Higher Power, for one, has a deliciously twisted sense of humor when it comes to playing tricks on an untreated alcoholic. And at that time, I was truly untreated and resisting everything about my sober life. Luckily, that relapse would lead to what I hope will remain my last surrender.
I wish all my stories of relapse could be so comic and ironic. Unfortunately they are not. About three months after that sunny summer morning by the pool in 1998, I returned to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. At the same time, two friends with whom I had both drunk and been sober for varying lengths of time, and who had also relapsed, returned to meetings. During the first six months of my sobriety, I drove one of them to a meeting nearly every day because his alcohol and meth habits had left him without a wife, without a job, without a car and living at his mother's house. The other, a woman whom I'd actually known in treatment five years earlier and drunk with on only one occasion because her drinking frightened me, refused to return to the same meetings we went to because she didn't wish to "be judged." I share these facts because, although all three of us made some effort to return to a sober life, only one of us survived more than six months.
The young man, not yet 30, would eventually shoot himself in the chest in the front doorway of his mother's house. A few days later I was a pallbearer at his funeral. A week or so after his funeral, the young woman, not yet 40, would drink a bottle of windshield wiper fluid after being released from detox and never return from the coma it drove her into. I served as a pallbearer at her funeral as well. For reasons that made absolutely no sense, both had lost the one thing I was and am still able to find in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: HOPE.
It was at the young man's funeral that my sponsor (who also sponsored the now deceased younger man) first said to me, after I asked the questions why and what could we have done differently: "Don't try to understand an irrational act with a rational mind, Greg. If you stick around long enough, you'll see that some of us have to die so the rest of us can stay sober."
Another one of those disheartening clichés that is so true as to become axiomatic. Some have to die so others can stay sober. If you stick around long enough you do begin to see it. And you become convinced that relapse is a means to one end or another.
Relapse — A Means To One End Or Another
Jun 01, 2012
Whenever I have the honor of telling my story to a large group of people in recovery —after I've expressed my gratitude and announced my sobriety date — I usually open with something like this: "I took my first drink at 11, I came to my first meeting at 31, I'm 52 now and 13 years sober. Do the math and you’ll see, I'm an AA retread."
For the sake of the uninitiated in the room, I'm usually quick to clarify that it isn't necessary to relapse. In fact, I'm sponsored by a man who has been sober more than 30 years and never taken a drink since the day he walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, whoopee for him, I say. That hasn't been my experience. I spent nearly eight years stalking sobriety before I finally surrendered to it. During those eight years, I put together as few as three days of sobriety and, surprisingly enough, as many as three years. The only good thing that happened during those eight years is that I kept coming back, again and again and again. Mainly because all of you planted the seed deeper and deeper each time I left and returned.
This year, where I live, we had an unseasonably warm March and with it a seeming rash of relapses. I don’t think we had any more relapses than usual, and I certainly don’t think the weather had anything to do with it. (Real alcoholics don’t drink because the weather is good or bad; real alcoholics drink because the weather is what it is.) Nonetheless, in a tight-knit recovery community like the one I live in, news of a relapse (too commonly minimized as a "slip") and speculation about the causes travels fast and prompts community consternation.
Where my experience comes in handy is when someone relatively new decides to drink or use again. Usually, within days of the news that they've "left the program," someone will ask me, "What should we do?" This is not flattery. They don't ask me that question because I'm so wise in the ways of recovery. They ask me because they know I've been there. The underlying question is, "Hey, you got drunk a lot when you first came around. What could people have done that would've made a difference?"
The sad but true answer is "nothing." I'm a real alcoholic. In the absence of a well-maintained spiritual defense, there's little that can stand between me and the insanity of the first drink. When an alcoholic decides to drink (and the decision to drink is a conscious, if not always premeditated, choice), those left behind, especially those who are also relatively new to sobriety, often forget or dismiss the most primal fact of recovery: That we are powerless over alcohol ... our own addiction to it as well as that of others.
By the same token, I do remember the lasting impression of the calls and visits I would receive in the early stages of my lapses. Phone calls or visits in those first few days from those who truly cared sometimes brought me right back to a meeting — and if not immediately, then usually within days. It’s been my experience, however, that if the alcoholic doesn’t come back within the first week, he or she probably won’t come back for a good long while.
All we can do at the outset of a relapse is extend our hand and love up our brothers and sisters in recovery. If the still-suffering alcoholic refuses the hand, all we can do is hope we’ve planted a seed that will grow into a burning desire to live a sober life and move on to the millions of other still-suffering alcoholics who do meet the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous: a desire to stop drinking.
In her May 19, 2012, RenewEveryDay.com blog post, “Baby Chicks — Carry the Message, Not the Alcoholic,” Ashley Dane (Follow Your Bliss) opens with this stupendously apt analogy:
"I was thinking the other day of something I heard about years ago. It was a story about how important it is for a baby chick to fight its way out of the egg. It is quite a struggle, and the impulse for any kind-hearted person would be to help the little guy out. So someone did that, and the baby chick died shortly thereafter. Apparently, the struggle to emerge activated necessary muscles that the chick would need for survival outside the egg. It needed to strengthen its neck muscles with the pecking and squirming, its little legs with the kicking and scratching. It is the same for us. We develop muscles and skills in our emerging process in recovery that are critical to our survival in sobriety. That is why they say to carry the message, and not the alcoholic - if we carry the alcoholic, they may not gain the musculature they need for the future. It isn’t always easy to know the dividing line between being of service, and being an enabler for other negative behaviors."
Ashley Dane goes on to talk about the errant desire to chase after the unwilling. It’s a post well worth reading.
So, when someone I know or, even more painfully, when one of the men I sponsor and genuinely care about leaves the program to drink, I call (once, twice, maybe three times) to remind them my door is open. And then I remind myself (again and again) that I’m as powerless over their drinking as I am over my own in the absence of a solution.
I remind myself that the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is a desire to stop drinking. I remind myself that I can’t instill the desperation that awakens that desire, only alcohol can. I remind myself that far more people need help than want it, yet we can only reach the wannabes. I remind myself, finally, that they will either drink their way back when the pain is great enough, or drink themselves to the gates of insanity and death. Ultimately, relapse is a means to one end or the other, but it is always a means to an end.
For the sake of the uninitiated in the room, I'm usually quick to clarify that it isn't necessary to relapse. In fact, I'm sponsored by a man who has been sober more than 30 years and never taken a drink since the day he walked through the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, whoopee for him, I say. That hasn't been my experience. I spent nearly eight years stalking sobriety before I finally surrendered to it. During those eight years, I put together as few as three days of sobriety and, surprisingly enough, as many as three years. The only good thing that happened during those eight years is that I kept coming back, again and again and again. Mainly because all of you planted the seed deeper and deeper each time I left and returned.
This year, where I live, we had an unseasonably warm March and with it a seeming rash of relapses. I don’t think we had any more relapses than usual, and I certainly don’t think the weather had anything to do with it. (Real alcoholics don’t drink because the weather is good or bad; real alcoholics drink because the weather is what it is.) Nonetheless, in a tight-knit recovery community like the one I live in, news of a relapse (too commonly minimized as a "slip") and speculation about the causes travels fast and prompts community consternation.
Where my experience comes in handy is when someone relatively new decides to drink or use again. Usually, within days of the news that they've "left the program," someone will ask me, "What should we do?" This is not flattery. They don't ask me that question because I'm so wise in the ways of recovery. They ask me because they know I've been there. The underlying question is, "Hey, you got drunk a lot when you first came around. What could people have done that would've made a difference?"
The sad but true answer is "nothing." I'm a real alcoholic. In the absence of a well-maintained spiritual defense, there's little that can stand between me and the insanity of the first drink. When an alcoholic decides to drink (and the decision to drink is a conscious, if not always premeditated, choice), those left behind, especially those who are also relatively new to sobriety, often forget or dismiss the most primal fact of recovery: That we are powerless over alcohol ... our own addiction to it as well as that of others.
By the same token, I do remember the lasting impression of the calls and visits I would receive in the early stages of my lapses. Phone calls or visits in those first few days from those who truly cared sometimes brought me right back to a meeting — and if not immediately, then usually within days. It’s been my experience, however, that if the alcoholic doesn’t come back within the first week, he or she probably won’t come back for a good long while.All we can do at the outset of a relapse is extend our hand and love up our brothers and sisters in recovery. If the still-suffering alcoholic refuses the hand, all we can do is hope we’ve planted a seed that will grow into a burning desire to live a sober life and move on to the millions of other still-suffering alcoholics who do meet the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous: a desire to stop drinking.
In her May 19, 2012, RenewEveryDay.com blog post, “Baby Chicks — Carry the Message, Not the Alcoholic,” Ashley Dane (Follow Your Bliss) opens with this stupendously apt analogy:
"I was thinking the other day of something I heard about years ago. It was a story about how important it is for a baby chick to fight its way out of the egg. It is quite a struggle, and the impulse for any kind-hearted person would be to help the little guy out. So someone did that, and the baby chick died shortly thereafter. Apparently, the struggle to emerge activated necessary muscles that the chick would need for survival outside the egg. It needed to strengthen its neck muscles with the pecking and squirming, its little legs with the kicking and scratching. It is the same for us. We develop muscles and skills in our emerging process in recovery that are critical to our survival in sobriety. That is why they say to carry the message, and not the alcoholic - if we carry the alcoholic, they may not gain the musculature they need for the future. It isn’t always easy to know the dividing line between being of service, and being an enabler for other negative behaviors."
Ashley Dane goes on to talk about the errant desire to chase after the unwilling. It’s a post well worth reading.
So, when someone I know or, even more painfully, when one of the men I sponsor and genuinely care about leaves the program to drink, I call (once, twice, maybe three times) to remind them my door is open. And then I remind myself (again and again) that I’m as powerless over their drinking as I am over my own in the absence of a solution.
I remind myself that the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is a desire to stop drinking. I remind myself that I can’t instill the desperation that awakens that desire, only alcohol can. I remind myself that far more people need help than want it, yet we can only reach the wannabes. I remind myself, finally, that they will either drink their way back when the pain is great enough, or drink themselves to the gates of insanity and death. Ultimately, relapse is a means to one end or the other, but it is always a means to an end.
Relapse — A Means to One End or Another, Part II
Jun 15, 2012
My sponsor loves to remind me that trying to understand irrational behavior with a rational mind is futile. Relapse, by definition, is irrational (and when repeated often enough presents itself as certifiably insane). Think about it: Most of us do arrive at treatment or the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous kicking and screaming. It's the last place we want to be. It's also usually our last hope. The pain has become too great (or the law too persuasive), and we say, "Uncle." We admit defeat. We admit the problem is bad enough that, despite our pride and prejudice (we are not like those people in there, right?), we do the unthinkable: We ask for help.For a time, we get clean and sober. Some of us even like it. Some of us love being sober so much we stay sober from the very start until the day they bury us (the sober minority). Some of us like it a whole lot, love it really, but after a while, for reasons beyond reason, we decide that — even though we feel so much better and our lives have gotten so much better and our loved ones love us so much more (or, at least, become much more willing to tolerate us) and we experience all these plusses and very few minuses — we decide that maybe we've overcorrected and we should test the waters that have bathed us in pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization just one more time. Why? Because maybe, just maybe (and especially given the volumes of brilliant knowledge we have gleaned nearly overnight about our condition and ourselves), maybe things will be different this time. Now that, to be sure, is the epitome of irrational thinking.
For those of us who make it back, one day the insanity of our relapse may present itself as a source of humor. I often laugh at the comic irony of my last relapse (which resulted in a 90-day drunk). I had been bouncing in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous for 18 months after once having stayed sober nearly three years. One morning, with about three months of sobriety under my belt and nearly two full weeks without a meeting (I planned to go later that day, I told myself), I went out to the pool at the apartment complex where I lived to enjoy my coffee and the morning paper. I was the first to arrive and grab a chaise lounge. Around 10 a.m. a young woman arrived with an inflatable raft and one of those ever-so-quaint 6-pack coolers. She parked her raft at the other end of the pool and slipped a bright silver can out of the cooler before jumping onto her raft. A Coors Light, the Silver Bullet, to be sure.
Now, I want to clarify before going on that I'm a guy's guy and A Coors Light holds about as much appeal for me as a glass of ice tea. Actually, I'd prefer an ice tea, and I'd be most appreciative of a Long Island Ice Tea before all else. (Let's get all the white liquors on the bar into one glass; that, my friends, is a touch of class.) But something in my mind told me that a Coors Light might not be a bad idea. If this woman could handle a Coors Light at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning, then why on earth couldn't I? It really didn't make any sense. She couldn't have been a day over 25 and probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet in a winter parka. I was a three-letter high school jock and a man who, at one time, could easily handle a fifth of the finest booze in the bar one night and still make it to work on time the next morning. Surely, I had not tried hard enough to make this drinking thing work.
And so, without another thought, and certainly without even a passing nod to my sponsor's phone number, I rose from the chaise (leaving my coffee cup, my towel and my newspaper behind because I'd be right back) and drove as quickly and directly as possible to the nearest convenience store where they sold beer, wine and spirits, and stocked up on all three, including a six-pack of my least favorite beer on the face of the earth: Coors Light. Less than 20 minutes after returning to the apartment, I had four of the watery beers down and two left to take out to the pool. No sooner had I repositioned my now mildly-buzzed ass in my previously reserved chaise lounge with the two remaining Coors Lights still in their plastic rings than my little inspiration came floating by on her inflatable pod of heavenliness holding, you guessed it, a bright silver can of Diet Coke.
Irrational minds see things irrationally, too.
I tell that story often at meetings mainly to establish that my Higher Power, for one, has a deliciously twisted sense of humor when it comes to playing tricks on an untreated alcoholic. And at that time, I was truly untreated and resisting everything about my sober life. Luckily, that relapse would lead to what I hope will remain my last surrender.
I wish all my stories of relapse could be so comic and ironic. Unfortunately they are not. About three months after that sunny summer morning by the pool in 1998, I returned to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. At the same time, two friends with whom I had both drunk and been sober for varying lengths of time, and who had also relapsed, returned to meetings. During the first six months of my sobriety, I drove one of them to a meeting nearly every day because his alcohol and meth habits had left him without a wife, without a job, without a car and living at his mother's house. The other, a woman whom I'd actually known in treatment five years earlier and drunk with on only one occasion because her drinking frightened me, refused to return to the same meetings we went to because she didn't wish to "be judged." I share these facts because, although all three of us made some effort to return to a sober life, only one of us survived more than six months.
The young man, not yet 30, would eventually shoot himself in the chest in the front doorway of his mother's house. A few days later I was a pallbearer at his funeral. A week or so after his funeral, the young woman, not yet 40, would drink a bottle of windshield wiper fluid after being released from detox and never return from the coma it drove her into. I served as a pallbearer at her funeral as well. For reasons that made absolutely no sense, both had lost the one thing I was and am still able to find in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous: HOPE.
It was at the young man's funeral that my sponsor (who also sponsored the now deceased younger man) first said to me, after I asked the questions why and what could we have done differently: "Don't try to understand an irrational act with a rational mind, Greg. If you stick around long enough, you'll see that some of us have to die so the rest of us can stay sober."
Another one of those disheartening clichés that is so true as to become axiomatic. Some have to die so others can stay sober. If you stick around long enough you do begin to see it. And you become convinced that relapse is a means to one end or another.
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