Dealing with shame
“It’s complete and utter madness to feel happy whilst destroying everything around you – where only another drink will satisfy the soul more than forgiveness ever could.”
My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic.
Alcoholism is a disease of hanging your head in shame. From my earliest drinking days, did I not do and say things that were stupid, hurtful and wrong? There can’t be one recovering alcoholic that doesn’t have a head full of experiences – experiences that are so shameful, it’s difficult to even talk about them.
For alcoholism is nothing if not the place where we drink until we hate ourselves.
Hurting others is not all that we give out as drinkers; we also hurt ourselves.
Being self-taught people, we are the best at sabotaging even our own feelings and emotions. The result being that the pain we direct at others invariably returns to hurt us even more. For are we not the masters of creating enough disharmony and grief to fill a football stadium? If I could count every time I felt ashamed of myself, I’d be here until the year end – for alcoholism is nothing but a machine that turns out negativity, whilst pretending to dish out happiness.
It’s complete and utter madness to feel happy whilst destroying everything around you – where only another drink will satisfy the soul more than forgiveness ever could.
For saying sorry is counterproductive when it’s been said so many times in the past, it becomes boring and monotonous.
And the crazy, unwritten rule of feeling ashamed is this – however terrible your antics and words have been, however much you promise ‘it’ll never happen again’, however many tears you see in your loved ones’ faces, there is absolutely no guarantee, that you won’t repeat it all again very soon. Where swearing on all that you hold dear is a falsehood. Because deep down you know the time will come, one day, where you’ll not only repeat your past performances, you’ll also, no doubt, repeat them with more hurt and cringeworthiness than ever before.
Recovery brings a lot home to deal with, and not even the best of 12-Step programs will keep shame from some people’s door; shame is a killer, for alcoholism is a shame-making factory on an industrial scale, where the alcoholic will feel it deeper and stronger than can ever be imagined.
Whether in recovery or still drinking, being ashamed is a double-edged sword. Where even though it’s blindingly obvious to the whole world what we did in our drinking, it is probably ranked as the most hurtful feeling imaginable.
There is one exception, and only one; it doesn’t make what we did any more palatable, but it does help the tiniest bit to put our past into some sort of perspective.
For without being utterly ashamed of my past, without shame hurting me to the core, my life today would be one of an alcoholic still drinking. But I am ashamed, and will always carry shame for my past. For without these most destructive of feelings, I’d probably not have got down low enough to call AA and ask for help, and today I’d not be sober – but I am.
I’m sharing this, the most personal of feelings, with you now, not out of sympathy for myself, but to tell you this.
Where if for nothing else, some good did come out of my drinking; where I know today that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake; where every drink I ever took was for a reason; where my Higher Power was so insistent I got sober, I was given exactly the right amount of shame that brought about a rock-bottom that was so heart-wrenchingly painful, that for once I admitted complete defeat, and reached out and asked from the bottom of my heart for help. For it was then, and only then, that I went along to my first AA meeting.
Amen .
Bill the shirt
Bristol
