Episode 257 -- January 26, 2023

Accepting Ourselves and our Addiction

The essence of the First Step in Twelve Step recovery is admission and acceptance. We have admitted and accepted that we have a substance use disorder and we have admitted and accepted that our lives have become unmanageable because of it. We can also take this time to admit who we are, even if it's not who we want to be, and learn accept ourselves with more grace and generosity.

In his book First Year Sobriety: When All That Changes is Everything, Guy Kettelhack draws on the voices of women and men who are navigating the unknown territory of their first twelve months of sobriety. It's a diverse group, but despite their differing experiences and unique personal stories, all are united in the process of giving themselves a chance at life without substance use.

In this excerpt we hear from Marcia and George, two people in recovery who still find themselves occasionally overwhelmed with rage. Their stories help us realize that the First Step is not only about accepting our powerlessness; we also can accept our feelings, fears, and flaws. We won't be perfect just because we're sober now, and we won't always have all the answers. In fact, we may discover new things to admit and accept about ourselves and the world each day.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

Now That I'm Sober, Why Am I So Mad?
"It was horrifying," Marcia said. "And, now that I've got some distance from it, I guess it's almost funny. The absurdity of it! Not that anybody was laughing at the time." Marcia was talking about an incident that had taken place the previous week with her boss. An incident fueled by feelings—including a rage—that seemed to spring out of nowhere and blast her sky-high. She's still not sure where she's landed.

The "explosion" occurred on a particularly hectic Monday morning. The switchboard flashed maniacally, and Marcia attempted to answer with her usual competence and to connect calls or take messages with her normal efficiency. But the messages, she said, "were longer than they usually were, so many people were impatient, and my boss kept trying to tell me something complicated while I was trying to answer eight calls at once...." Marcia says she "lost it. I mean really lost it. It was like I turned into someone totally foreign—some monster I had no idea was inside me. I cut off all the calls on the switchboard, stood up in front of my boss and bellowed at him that he was an insensitive ass, and who did he think he was anyway, and I had put up with about as much abuse as I was going to. I then stormed away from my desk and out of the office, slamming the door, and ran down the stairs to the street."

What happened to Marcia is something that happens to many, many other recovering addicts and alcoholics. A quest for perfectionism all too often plagues us too—an inner message we all too often give ourselves that if we're not perfect, we're failures. It's an assumption that usually leads to terrible frustration and anger, as we discover (once again!) that we can't live up to our own impossible standards.

Marcia said later that her anger shocked her: "I was never an angry person. Or maybe I never gave myself a chance to be." As Marcia thought more about how she'd dealt with feelings before she stopped drinking, she began to realize that what she did in response to any feeling was to drink, thereby cutting the feeling off. "I realize now that my main mission in life was to make everything 'fine.' Which really meant to make myself so out of it that nothing mattered. When nothing matters, you don't feel angry. You don't feel much of anything. I thought this was a state to aspire to. Not feeling anything. Then I couldn't be hurt. Then things wouldn't threaten me."

Marcia sums up the function of drinking and drugging for many of us: to blot out any possibility of pain or discomfort, emotional or otherwise. "Because my life in sobriety got so good so quickly," she says, "I guess I somehow thought I'd never have a bad feeling again. But what really was happening was, I was trying to cover my feelings with work, with my relationship, with making up to my kids for not having been there for them; I was looking for some new way to cover up my feelings now that I no longer had alcohol. I thought I was getting what I wanted—great job, new lover, new life—and in some ways I was. But I was still trying to escape something essential. Who I really was—who I really am.

More Roots of Rage
George, a sixty-year-old man whose forty-year drinking and drugging career has taken him in and out of jail numerous times, landed him on the Bowery for the past fifteen years, and finally given him the clear sense that he is, as the First Step says, "powerless" over drugs and alcohol, has a different history of anger than Marcia. However, he has come up with an insight about the roots of anger that Marcia finds fully applicable to her, and that many other recovering alcoholics and addicts also find applicable to themselves.

"I sure as hell got angry when I was out there," George says. "Booze, when it got inside of me, was like gasoline waiting for a match. I got into God knows how many fights, almost killed some people, nearly got killed myself, busted up stores, committed armed robbery—believe me, they didn't keep putting me in jail for nothing. But now I'm nine months sober and nobody's putting me in jail anymore, even though I still get angry. The main thing is, I'm not drunk. Which means, somehow, I stay this side of acting completely crazy. I'm not busting up stores anymore; I'm going to aa meetings instead! But I'm also starting to see that all the stuff I thought I was angry at—the fact that I'm a black man in a racist society, had no father to speak of, junkie mother, no food or money—all that was shit, no doubt about it, and I wouldn't wish it on most dogs, but it's really an excuse. It's not that people haven't done me wrong. They have. But what I'm really angry at is something in myself. I've gone back to my church now that I'm sober, and my pastor puts it this way. He says, 'George, nobody ever told you you were all right just as you were. That God loved you all the time. God didn't care that you weren't rich or educated. God accepts you just as you are. Problem is, you haven't accepted yourself."

George's sense of injustice—of having had no privileges as a poor black man in a racist society—hides a deeper sense of injustice, and a consequent rage: rage at the idea that he is somehow constitutionally unacceptable as a human being. Marcia now realizes that she felt something similar when she blew up at her boss. "It's like my rage was searching for an outlet—any outlet— to rail against the world. I am now starting to see that what I was really mad at was the feeling that I wasn't enough just being me, that I couldn't feel accepted or loved for who I was, that here I was bending over backward to be the perfect receptionist to my boss, perfect lover to Mark, perfect mother to my kids, perfectly healthy nondrinking, nonsmoking woman, and even this—this supreme effort of trying to do it all, be it all, somehow wasn't enough." Marcia pauses and says, "What I really need to do is accept myself. Know that I'm worth something even if I'm not perfect. If only I could make this so by saying it! And if only I could escape this terrible, terrible anger.... Other recovering people tell me it can happen, bit by bit. This awful feeling will lift, if I just keep on doing what I'm doing now."

About the Author:
Guy Kettelhack has written several books on recovery. A graduate of Middlebury College, Kettelhack has also done graduate work in English literature at Bread Loaf School of English at Oxford University. He lives in New York City.

© 1998 by Guy Kettelhack
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