Our Family Struggles with Addiction.

 In some sense, my relationship with alcohol was a primary and recurring theme throughout my life. It began in my late 20s, stopped during the first couple of years of my marriage to Aisha, and lasted from the first time I used it until, finally, on February 5, 2018, when I hopefully achieved sobriety for good. There were long stretches of sobriety, including 18 years, between 1995, when I seriously undertook the AA Program, and 2013, when my second wife moved into a memory care unit.

Unfortunately, the unresolved conflicts in my marriage with Aisha, among other variables, led me to seek escape in various modalities whenever I was alone. Typically, this involved business trips to other areas in my territory, where I would purchase alcohol and get plastered the night before my intended marketing activities.

 As time went on, I found myself unable to wait until the end of the day to start drinking. On one memorable occasion, I waited outside the local 7-Eleven in Marin County, where we lived, until 6:00 AM arrived and I could buy beer. Later that day, on a long journey to Fresno, I stopped several times to purchase more.

 

At one point, I remember a cashier refusing to sell me any alcohol. I should have realized that I had had enough. I got back in the car and continued driving anyway, but I soon saw red lights in the rearview mirror.  

"We've been hearing about you from all over" the smiling cop said. as he got out of his car on the side of the freeway. 

I was given a roadside sobriety test, which I failed. 

 

The cop then drove me to the Merced County Jail and booked me for intoxication. I spent a relatively short night in a private cell. I don't think I stopped crying even once. They let me go in a relatively short time—maybe 6 hours—after which I had to retrace the route the cop had driven to find my car. Miraculously, I found it.

Engaging a lawyer at a considerable expense the next day, I could not escape the charges and eventually lost my license for six months. As my job involved daily driving, this was both an economic and a personal catastrophe.

I also had to go back to Merced for two days of incarceration. And though I postponed it until the last minute, I eventually had to admit to Aisha that I had a DUI. 

I think this might have contributed to her growing frustration with me, as she had always had a terror of alcohol, having been involved in babysitting children on the night their parents were killed by a drunk driver.

 

Looking back on this history, it is amazing that I never sought help. Ironically, it was not until Aisha divorced me and I was alone with the issue that I sought help. 

And even then, it was with a lot of encouragement from Marilyn, a woman I had met who later became my second wife.

 

Ironically, my son Ibrahim has also had a long and troubling history with drugs and alcohol. 

At one point, before he lived with me, he proudly showed off a HUGE plastic bag containing what must have been HUNDREDS of Norcos he had obtained, supposedly from a cash-strapped pharmacy employee—or so he claimed. 

Shamefully, at that point, all I could think about was obtaining some for my own consumption rather than considering the effect those pills would have on him.

 

Later, when he lived with me, we shared an interest in purchasing drugs by mail from Indian pharmacies. We also negotiated quantity discounts on concentrated kratom.

At one point, I even went out and bought him a case of nitrous whippets, which he had somehow convinced me was a medical necessity for him.

 

I can't believe how low I must have fallen to have endangered my own child by my own example. 

My only defense, if there is one, is that I still had not truly appreciated that sobriety and abstinence, while difficult, are entirely possible if one is willing to commit to it and take the same steps others have taken to establish and maintain it. 

It took a determined effort. However, recovery was possible for me with the help of others.

 

In my case, this approach involves a significant commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous but also a long-term involvement with personal therapy, spirituality, and group processing through my church home at the time, Glide Memorial Church in downtown San Francisco.

 

I followed any and all spiritual programs that seemed sincere, which is still true of Buddhism and AA and also the Unconditional Love approach that guided the members of Glide.

Buddhism grasped the problem of human suffering directly and offered a path to relieve that suffering that didn't depend on faith or spiritual leaders. Christianity was the religion of my birth and my culture, and it seemed to hold a place in my heart for the unconditional love it promised.

 

In fact, both religions offered a counter-intuitive explanation for why humans fail and are unhappy, which preoccupied my thoughts for much of my life. 

Ordinary human satisfactions were never ultimately enough to outweigh the inevitable suffering and painful events, including death, old age. disease, failed relationships, and addicted children, that inevitably pertain to we weak and barely-evolved hairless apes that we are. 

As Zorba the Greek named it, "the whole catastrophe!"

Ironically, it is by letting go that we can obtain the precious wisdom we seek. It is thru ADMITTING that we are, indeed, born to suffer that we have a shot at transcending the worst depredations of sufferring.

I love these words from the St. Francis Prayer...

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

And I understand that the 'dying' he mentions may also be a sort of 'ego death' after which there is a transcendent state of non-worry about apparent death.

Make It So!