Perception is the key

Alcohol, so ordinary, a part of our culture.  Easily obtained and a social acceptance in its legitimacy. We celebrate life’s successes, transitions and holidays with our liquid spirits and we mourn our losses in the same fashion.  We experience liberation, companionship and connection. A truth serum, we believe, and so we think its effects reveal character and we adopt the persona.  This lovely mead, simply magical in its power to lift our spirits as well as calm our soul. Our tolerance for inebriation is extreme. We embrace its comforts as it cures all that ails us…until it doesn’t.  
   
Progressive and fatal, it inflicts mayhem on emotional life. Intense impulses and insatiable cravings create the phenomenon in which, the initial exposure sets off a sequence, ending in acute intoxication.  Emotions are inaccurate, dulled and embellished. Our morale becomes diseased.  We are resigned to process life through a mind that is chemically afflicted. The incoming data itself is malformed.  
   
We are filled with self-doubt and insecurity.  We hide pain, shame loneliness and fear right beside our addiction. With deception, we aim to present a calm exterior while masking a tempestuous soul. Our personalities become structured around guilt and shame. It serves our fear; assuring us, we think, there is something so wrong in us that if the façade were to collapse, the exposure would destroy us.  
   
Addiction’s damage is cumulative and whole. It destroys the soul and diminishes hope. It renders us, we believe, unloved and unworthy of it.  We become barren of our emotion and our deadened spirit is on its knees in despair.  
   
It is compulsory to shine a light on this malady and define it as a triptych disease of the mind, body and spirit. As such, it validates our anguish and desolation but also offers a footpath to recovery. The solution necessitates medical provisions to facilitate physical restoration but the spirit must heal as well as the mind. Such a recovery requires emotional guidance powerful enough to overcome years of shame, reconcile the awful sense of unworthiness, replace the sentiment of loss with true and honest belonging, promote healing of resentments and calm an unquiet restless soul. It may seem unmanageable or at minimum, profoundly difficult but we must believe it is possible to persevere and be well through resilience.  Grace is accessible if we reach to obtain it.