Why Codependency and Alcoholism Share the Same Root – Bill M.

And I want, in these three columns, I want to list addiction or addict. And this middle column, I want to list codependency and adult children. And in the third column, I want to put the society. So, what I want to hear from the audience is, what is it that you know that characterizes what an addiction or an addict is? What words would you use to describe an addict, an alcoholic? Come on. Loss of control. Powerlessness, just briefly. Compulsivity. Speak loudly. Craving. Self-centered. Insanity. Spiritually starved. Loneliness. Persistence. Compulsivity. Overly compulsivity. Isolation. Adam anywhere in there, Norma? Destructive. Pleasure seeking. Avoiding pain. Escape. Denial. Well, how about guilt? Shame. Morose. Anger. Resentment. Withdrawal. Rejection. Okay. I'd like to add self-preserving too. Yeah. As everybody has pointed out it's a fantastic survival system, right? I'm looking at descriptions and symptoms and that sort of thing. Okay, I think we could engage in that a good bit. You know, all the things that you know about who you are, what you see as an addict, what you say as an alcoholic. Now what I want us to do is kind of shift our thinking because I say that there's nobody in this room that doesn't kind of relate to adult-children issues or codependency issues. So now what I want to do is look at what are the symptoms of adult children? What are the characteristics, the behavior, the symptoms, the characteristics of adult-children and codependence? Okay, let's hear it. Okay. All right, let's just say them, you know. Now what else? So you're just going to say ditto? Okay, see, I say that's a breakthrough. I say that's a breakthrough. Yes. from all aspects of this disease which i have i find i can get in touch with because of the program it's my own self-centeredness and what i found in doing my fourth The character defects I use in order to preserve whatever my current addiction is, whether it's my codependency and my other people, or whether it is my music that I'm protecting. It's just a matter of what I'm practicing at the time, whatever my addiction is at the same time. I've worked through some issues that were related to my alcoholism as a young woman in my 30s, and I didn't know if that's what it was. Thank goodness for the self-help books at one time, because the thing that I had to get in touch with and break down was my denial. I couldn't see myself as an alcoholic when I got to the program because I was just a crazy mother who had an addicted child for treatment. And for me, to get into recovery, it took a lot of toughness on the part of the people in the treatment center to get through my dishonesty and my lack of touch with who I am as a human being because that's something I didn't want to see. And when I look at my character defects, they're all the things I nurtured and developed to protect what was going on with me that I couldn't see. And so when we look at all of this, as far as I can see, it's just a matter of what other differences there are. Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. My name is Christian, and I am a daughter, wife, and a now-involved author. Can I do this under the table? Hi. This week, I think I have about 7 million years of employment. I work the best I can on the program of what way is anonymous. And I agree with that. all those guys. That's right in the second column there. I started now and on, but I don't think you are ready to hear later about a great big spiritual discovery like that. And then going about children and better people into the diseases physical, emotional, spiritual, whatever. And the solution is also physical, emotional spiritual recovery but i know that now and i'm getting more and more certain of that if i do not work with spiritual thoughts in my program i will do the same thing and i didn't know i think it was well instead of the spirit spirituality was one of the big answers thank you hi my name is jim i'm grateful for covering up I think we all agree that the two columns are all shared, but then I think you also have to think about what's different between two columns. And what's difference between two column starts where I come from is the drug or food or whatever. Food or whatever And I think this gives me some insight into what addict or addiction or addicting is and what it equals. Disease will be left out of very important adjectives, and those who are primary spiritual disease with secondary emotional, mental, physical symptoms. We're all taught that we get sick spiritually, mentally, and physically. When we get into the biological mode, and physicians especially, we all think of disease equals biology and biochemistry, but we don't equate it with spiritual disease. I think what they share is that they are both primary surgical diseases and what separates the groups out though is the biological basis to some extent which is that the drug does something to help heal with and preserve or allay the spiritual problems primarily for some of us. And for some others, it doesn't. Maybe they get sick or it just doesn't make them feel good. It doesn't quiet the problems out. And so they have to find a moment in which they cope with it. Thank you. And they do that coping with activities because you can change your brain chemistry just as well with sexual addictions as you can with alcohol or cocaine. Or with running. My name is Ed Yilding and I am an alcoholic. Hi. I find that these three topics are probably all the same. I think that basically my basic problem with self-centeredness, as the big book says, as Wayne said last night, the root of our problems is how we take it to self-sufficiency and self-centredness. Self-will will run wild, which Bill has been describing, and that was certainly me. And I found that to be with people who are adult children, I found it in co-defendancy, I found in society in general, when they have a problem in this area, they usually self-will. And the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is, that we use in Alcoholics Anonymous and which can be used in all the other programs has been effective, been effective in my life and where people have been able to incorporate it it's been effective in their life and i i have worked the program with alcoholism for my own life from my own recovery and i continue to recover to recover i i'm in a recovery process every day as i look at which means more and more freedom instead of being treated we begin to know a new freedom going to do the whole and i have been able to every day look at it and i try to look for more freedom i don't i don' t cut myself out say this is great this is the best and i hope i never want to get anything worse than this i wanted to never want to go down i want to cut myself off there i want to get better and better uh so by doing that the only way to do that is working at the continuation of the steps. I was talking to, probably last night we talked about, I was brought up, like probably many of us, because of our parenting that I had to say to myself as a child, I can't and I have to. And God through my disease I did that. I can and I haven't. I said that time to time. Today, as a result of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in my life, I can say I can and I don't have to. I didn't become the child that is now free. I've gained some freedom, and I've got to keep on working at that exact time. So I allow myself more freedom. I can't and I won't have it. Thank you. Thank you, Ed, very much. I want to give everybody a chance to share, but could we just go ahead and complete this a little bit too because I think this is very, very important. aspect of what we're dealing with here. I want you just to shift once more now and just start looking at this society in North America that we are living in today. How would you start describing the society, the environment that each one of us is functioning in, that each One of Us got born into? And how would you start looking at the principles and, if you will, the symptoms of the society that we're living in today? Go ahead. never drank or used drugs in their life. I share many of the same aspects as an adult child, and I don't think that the description of an adult child is something that only applies to people who tend to alcoholics. But I think that many of us who, whose parents were not alcoholics, whether it's from heredity or whether it's from other factors that we have come to the same conclusion. What I think about society is that society puts different values on different people, which means that I have a better chance of recovery than someone else. I had a friend who was killed about five months ago. She worked in a bar, and there's not much value placed on someone in that type of work as far as recovery is concerned. Whereas if someone's a physician or they're an airline pilot, society puts a great deal of value on seeing them. That we recover puts a lot of pressure on us from a lot different ways. And actually, I would not have gotten into recovery if I had not ended up in prison. Once I got in prison, I started looking at how I could get myself out. And one way to get out was to get into a program for treatment of addiction. And I went from there through various steps. But the reason I got in prison was because of my co-dependency, really because I was trying to help other people. But my judgment was all there because of my use of drugs and alcohol, so that it all fits together, but if society would put value on everyone, that's where I found that I was feeling a lot of responsibility when people were talking about this. The discussion was off the track because they were, I started talking about slavery and I didn't come into the specifics about myself, about my friend that was killed. Other things people wanted something specific and concrete rather than generalized so it's not really my responsibility to look further up to everyone else And I think that's probably hit the mind of my codependency and adult power issues of having a billion responsibility for other people. And that's why I ended up prescribing narcotics for addicts and ended up in prison. But I think if society would look at everyone and place value on everyone, then we could reach a lot of these people that we're not reaching. And I think if we write them off, I think that they're not really motivated. But a lot of us weren't motivated, we were forced to be. Thank you very much. So let's look a little bit more in depth then at what Jack has brought up with this... Is it Jack? Clarence. ClarenCE, I'm sorry. ClarenCe has brought about the force of society. Yeah, it would be great if society were something than it is. but you see we are the society. We're in an absolute hologram with the society, in fact we have within us every bit of the society is within each one of us and that's that's what I want to get here. How would you describe the society? You've already mentioned that it's selective some people are more important than others so we could say maybe Maybe it's selective or rigid, judgmental, demanding, complex, self-centered, right, Impatient. Dishonest. How about that? The society is dishonest. Frightened, full of fear, full of fear. That's how the masses are moved is by fear. Materialistic. How about denial? How about denial? Shame. How about crisis-orientated? How about confusion? How about dependency? How about feelings of lack? How about the feelings of the great promise, tomorrow it's going to be better? Different. This ain't it. Tomorrow it's going to be better. This isn't it." Spiritually starved. Okay, I think you get the point. Now I apologize that I missed some of Sharon's presentation yesterday but I have been a very devout student of hers for a number of years. And I know that Sharon uses this process of the mobile to kind of show some of this. But what I want us to look at this afternoon also is that there is the self, these others, and the society or the environment. And I'm saying that that is always, always in a perfect fit. It only exists as a perfect fit. It's like you looked at these as a set of gears and they are always turning in harmony. Now the harmony may be total chaos, but they are all in harmony and they're always in total fit with each other. And if this is the addict and this is the child or the codependent and this is the society or this is the one who uses uses the chemicals to change their brain chemistry or if this is the one who uses the food to change their chemical brain chemistry, or this is one that uses the excitement of sexual addiction to change there brain chemistry. I say that the whole three gears are in a perfect fit always. They exist as a mobile, as a hologram of each other, always in a perfect alignment and a perfect fit with each other. Always the perfect fit. Now, what happens to those gears when something there changes? What? Oh, do they? Well, look at that now. Let's just say that this self is the one who goes to AA, who has the religious experience and who begins to have that transformational experience. What's going to happen to these gears? Out of sync. We were over there looking at the boiled crabs this afternoon. How many of you have ever caught a basket of live crabs and dumped them into a pot of boiling water? Okay, a few of you. You can attest then that when you take a colony of crabs and dump them into boiling water and one of the crabs starts to try to crawl out of the boiling water. The other crabs come up there and pull it back in. What happens when this individual is, say, goes through the recovery experience? what happens to these gears. See, I say they come out tremendously out of sync and it's like we take an individual out of this perfect fit and we go through the process as we know it today of, you know, working with them and then put them back into that situation and I say that's one of the major problems that we're dealing with. What I really feel here is that all of this, like the whole situation, means that everything is a heredity, Drew, like it's a being born into, like it is we inherit this situation of being helpless. Being powerless. And I am saying also that there is only one solution for being powerless and that's to look for some power outside of yourself. Absolutely. What I want us to look at is what more power did we have by calling this a disease? And what we wanted to really kind of look at this evening, this afternoon, was is this just like being human? Is this whole situation that we're dealing with that we've been talking about this afternoon, just being human. Because everyone who is shared has talked about how they fit into this system with a multiplicity of different, say substances or activities, you know, that enmesh them into this society, others, self type gears. being in imperfection, being in an imperfect world, creates the inner urge for search for that balance without perfection and that's what the spirituality is to seek God, to seek His perfect balance that creates the need for that, and that need is govenetation And I'm going back a little more to what you were saying yesterday. Is power addictive? Yes. Is science addictive? Yes. Is sex addictive? Yes. And I don't know what to talk about the drugs or alcohol or cocaine that could give physical addiction a chemistry, changing your chemistry a lot faster or something we can measure in some other way. He is a physicist addicted to this world. Yes, and he is going to create an imbalanced family, probably as bad as an alcoholic. He's a very religious person, addicted. He's very spiritual, addicted like a snake, addicted All of them were looking for and searching for something. The alcohol, it just created an addiction that was more common or a physical addiction that we can measure, we can touch, we see in an easier way than any other dystopic addiction. When I stopped to drink, and I was very happy with that, and I went to visit one of my brothers, who I respect very much, and he said, that's great. And his next question is, what are you going to do about replacing the alcohol? What are you talking about? He said, if you do not replace the alcohol with something else, How can you cope with it? You use the alcohol in order to look for this balance or to balance yourself somewhere somehow. You have to replace it with something else, you know you will drink again. I had to create another addiction. Something that wasn't society approved. Society approved religion. Society approved philosophy. Society approved etc., etc. But it's an addiction. But the moment that I did not find this so-called high that alcohol gave me at the beginning though, I don't mean till the end, it didn't work. And I relaxed. I picked up the drink again and I found out that that high in the beginning was lost already. I went through all these stages and he said human personality, once you go through, you cannot retain. You cannot go back. You always see the constant process of change. And I couldn't understand that. How come I cannot, as a matter of fact I was just sharing with somebody before the lunch, I was jealous of the guy who comes to me and says, oh I went back out and it took me 1, 2, 3, 4 years to come back to AA. Wow, that's great. I envy that because I went out, it took me an hour to go to Bark House and 12 hours I went back to the beginner's meeting. That's what we have to do. What happened? How did I went so fast? Because in my mind I created, I went to somebody in addiction before looking for this answer. I went out and I, to express what I did, I said I went through the four corners of the world looking for God. I went to the oriental philosophy, to the western philosophies, to Buddhism, to Chinese progress, to Sanskrit, to Hebrew, to Christianity, etc., etc. And I didn't realize that while I was doing that, it was another addiction. I need something to stay with me. And when we say what can we do for to balance that? The answer has been there for thousands of years as we know. We have to change everything. We cannot just change the self because, like you said, the other one and if the others are more powerful than the changing the self out again with some other kind of addiction. Society is a byproduct of the self and the other. If there's no self or other, there's not society. So our tendency to blame on society, but as you say we are society. If we take humans away, nothing is left. We'll put it back together two of them and come to society working. The original philosophers at least taught me a little bit more to interpret what Christianity was going to tell me for many years I would race of roman catholics love yourself after you love your neighbor your influence when i read about to say because your neighbors eat yourself and only when you identify with your neighbors as being part of you one you can do something about it because then if i change myself i can help the neighborhood to change too because he's me if he doesn't change he's going to to destroy me again. So, put them both together and say this codependency of adult or children, I don't have alcoholic parents that I know, or brothers or sisters, or nobody in my family that I knew, but they had addictions. Tremendous or powerful addictions that acted upon me me and for me it was easy to drink i found alcohol and i didn't do cocaine because i didn't want to go there you see for that but nobody offered to me when i was in the process of becoming totally addicted to alcohol so what to do for i say addiction is part of being human as far as being imperfect in an imperfect world, in an imperfect society and only when we reach the level of another level of devaluation or perfection probably we have a chance what's the chances of my children are being addicted very very high because even I brought them to an a lot addicted society in general maybe they would be an alcoholic Maybe there will be a scientist for this innovation. Maybe we'll do it as archivists. Thank you. Yes, that was a very excellent summing up. Thank you, and I would say that we don't really have to change everything, but it's like when we began to shift our own consciousness, our own conversation, we do shift this pattern. And what makes it stay shifted is our consistency. And I'm saying our consistency can be through like the program of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is five o'clock and Dr. Cornelius has to leave. And I wanted to see if he had anything that he wanted to sum up. And I will stay and talk with anybody who's interested in continuing this conversation. So anyone who has to leave, you're certainly excused. And I want to tell you all that this has been extremely stimulating to me. And I really appreciate your attention because I feel that this has been a very powerful inquiry into what we're dealing with. And I say thank you to each one who's contributed. And I thank you.