“I think I might have a drinking problem…”
“I think I might have a gambling problem…”
“I think I might have an overeating problem…”
“I think I might have a drug problem…”
“I think I might have a _______ problem…”
Have you ever had someone say any of these words to you? Better yet, have you ever said any of these words yourself?
Recently, I attended an AA meeting where this very topic came up solely because someone’s significant other had told them they thought they might have a drinking problem after realizing they soiled themselves in the middle of the night. This fellow AA attendee then asked the rest of us how they should handle it?
As much as it’s hard to say this, just because someone states they might have some type of an addiction problem doesn’t mean they’re ready to do anything about it. Bill Wilson spoke to this extremely well on page 5 in Bill’s Story of the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
“Then I went on a prodigious bender, and that chance vanished. I woke up. This had to be stopped. I saw I could not take so much as one drink. I was through forever. Before then, I had written lots of sweet promises, but my wife happily observed that this time I meant business. And so I did. Shortly afterward I came home drunk. There had been no fight. Where had been my high resolve? I simply didn’t know. It hadn’t even come to mind.”
The sad truth is that too many people suffering from an addiction to anything will often make lots of false promises to themselves and to others, but never keep them. Instead, they constantly relapse back into it once the painful moment or moments from their last fix have passed.
So as much as I wanted to tell this fellow AA meeting attender that I had high hopes for their significant other, I couldn’t. I’ve watched too many people like my mother, my father, and plenty of fellow recovery-based friends and sponsees relapse over and over and over again, with some eventually even dying from it.
So how did I answer this person’s question that day?
I said you can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make them drink it. The fact is all my fellow AA attendee can truly do for their partner is invite them to go a meeting, suggest they keep coming back, and advise they find a sponsor as quick as possible. Beyond that, in all honesty, it’s in their partner’s hands to do the rest of the work.
The ultimate truth for pretty much most of us recovering from an addiction is that we had to be pretty badly mangled and filled with constant pain to finally wake up and do something about it. So will soiling oneself be enough for this person’s partner to find recovery and stick around for good? Maybe or maybe not, but that’s really not for me to say. Instead, I leave you with this.
If you or someone else thinks you might be struggling with an addiction problem, know the only person who can do anything about it, is the one who has the problem and no one else…And may God bless you and help you come to that inner truth before too much of your life has passed or it becomes too late…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
I’ve found that “I might need to go to treatment” is often the only answer people have for “I might have a problem.” The desperate hope is that once a person has identified a problem, he or she can get someone else to fix it, like a spiritual auto mechanic. It rarely works that way. And you’re absolutely right – knowing I have a problem doesn’t mean I’m ready to change what I’m doing to work on that problem.