Author: Andrew Arthur Dawson

I spent some time with a few friends on Saturday for a nice barbecue. While I was there, I was informed that one of the women I know in recovery is trying so very hard to save a few people from their addictions. I inquired further on how she was attempting to do this and was informed that she was essentially dragging people that are still active addicts to AA meetings. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years in my own recovery it’s the fact that the only person I can save from any addiction is myself.

Al-Anon was founded on this very principle. A very long time ago there was a woman named Lois Wilson who discovered that even with a lot of love and compassion, she couldn’t prevent her husband Bill from drinking. When Bill began the program of Alcoholics Anonymous with Dr. Bob Smith, she began organizing her own meetings with the wives of the husbands that Bill was trying to get sober with. It was during those meetings that the principles of Al-Anon were established.

Even though I had heard long before I ever went to my first Al-Anon meeting that I could only save myself from an addiction, it took me years of still trying to do so with active alcoholics and addicts to figure that out. The first person I was presented this lesson with was with my mother. No matter how hard I tried to love her, educate her, take her to a meeting, or get her to therapy, she refused all my attempts to helping her. She eventually died from her addiction. My sister did the same behaviors with my father to no avail as well. He too died from the disease. Over the years that passed once I found sobriety, I got into relationships with many people, all of whom suffered from some form of an addiction. With each, I did my best to try to save them from their living hell. Some of them I repeated the same behaviors that I did with my mother. Like my mother, none of them ever got better either. Some of them I even tried to pay off much of their debts thinking that would help. Within a short amount of time they were back in debt again and just as sick from their addictions, if not worse. The list goes on of the amount of people I exerted tons and tons of effort on to try to get them on a path of recovery from their own addictions. I was never successful with any of them.

The sad reality for anyone that suffers from an addiction is that their only hope for recovery from their disease comes from when they are truly ready and willing to do the work to heal. Many people back in my college days tried their best to show me how much of an alcoholic and addict I really was. I just scoffed at them and continued on my tragic ways. During many of my sobriety years I was also severely addicted and codependent on most of the men I chased after and got into relationships with. So many tried to get me to see this as well. I only ignored those people’s attempts and continued to do what I felt was best for me, which at the time was to stay in those addictions.

It took me hitting rock bottom with every addiction I ever suffered from to seek the path of recovery from it. I had a rock bottom with alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, sex, love, caffeine, chocolate, and a bunch of other things too. For all those people that tried to intervene and save me from any one of them, the only thing they were successful in doing was prolonging the inevitable. Sometimes the best thing for someone to do that is trying to help an active addict is to walk out of their lives and detach with love so that they can spiral downward and hit their rock bottom all on their own. Trying to fix an addict’s messes or pamper them with a lot of love and compassion even when they are terribly mean does nothing other than keep them thinking what their doing is ok.

After too many years of ups and downs, vast amounts of dollars lost, and a lot of headaches and heartaches, I finally realized I couldn’t save anyone except myself. The best thing I do today for those still suffering from any addiction is to keep myself open to helping them if they may ever approach me for it. And until they do, I know the only other thing I can do is pray to God that they may hit their rock bottom without dying from their addictions like my parent’s did. It is only at rock bottom where anyone can truly begin to find their way to recovery, just like I and so many others have already done.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

In the Boston area where I currently reside, heroin has rapidly become the next Grim Reaper. Even worse, Death is having a field day claiming souls around the country for those who have picked this drug up and succumbed to its awful addictive properties. The latest well known tragedy that heroin has taken down was with Cory Monteif, who was one of the stars of the hit television show Glee.

Cory was only 31 years old and had such a potentially successful acting career ahead of him with having also just completed two movies that were soon to be released. Sadly, he now becomes one of the many deaths that heroin has caused over the past few years. In the Boston area, it seems as if lately at least one person I know in my recovery circles is dying each week. Most of them are as young if not younger than Cory was at the time of his death.

For those that may not understand why someone might get addicted to something like heroin, it’s quite simple to get actually. Like so many other drugs, it’s essentially a painkiller and a mind number. While I never actively tried heroin during my drinking and drug days, I did enough of the other illegal substances to understand why someone might fall prey to any of them.

The bottom line for most people who take illegal drugs or ingest high quantities of alcohol is that the problem is not the actual substances being consumed, it’s what’s going on underneath. I can’t speak for Cory because I wasn’t him nor is there any information really out there on the Internet to say what his inner demons were all about. But in the world that I grew up in, I chose alcohol and drugs to numb the pain that came from my dysfunctional childhood. With both my parents having had mental imbalances and addiction issues, and also having been molested at a very young age, alcohol and drugs proved to be a great way to suppress all my emotions surrounding those issues. It’s really a blessing from God that I didn’t die during all those moments that I was pumping so many toxic substances into my body simply to hide from that pain.

The sad reality is that one’s inner demons can only be suppressed for a certain length of time by any numbing agent like heroin or alcohol. Eventually, one needs to consume more and more of whatever it is just to create the same numbing effect. The lucky alcoholics and addicts are those who hit a rock bottom with their disease that’s strong enough to show them it’s better to face the pain rather than hide from it. The unlucky ones never get there and usually end up dying from an overdose like Cory did.

Too many people who don’t understand addiction and never really suffered from it often blame these deaths on the drugs or the drinks. They don’t realize that most alcoholics and addicts are great concealers of what’s really going on inside of them. I wish Cory had done more to face his demons. He was becoming a superstar slowly and surely and while I never watched Glee religiously like so many others did, a few times I did tune in and saw just how talented the guy really was. I have great sadness over his loss and for all the other souls who have also parted from this planet in the same tragic way that he did.

I admit that it’s not that easy when one chooses to face their inner demons. Even after 18 years of being clean and sober, there are times that the pain I’m still dealing with tries to drive me to wanting to take something, anything, to calm the nerves. But I don’t, because I believe that God is healing me every day that I choose to walk through my healing process without numbing myself.

While none of us will ever know where Cory’s career could have headed if he had successfully found his own healing and recovery from addiction, he will still be remembered as a gifted person. Cory joins other famous people now that went down similar paths like he did including Kurt Cobain, Jim Belushi, and River Phoenix to name just a few. Each of them had promising lives ahead of them but they too never found the healing and recovery that could have saved their lives. The same holds true even for all of those people in this world, like for some of my friends and acquaintances, who weren’t famous but died nonetheless from alcohol and heroin, or any other overdose for that matter.

I’m grateful to God that I haven’t followed in any of those tragic footsteps as well as for the fact that I’m still working on facing my pain head on without trying to use anything to numb myself. It’s not easy but I live with the hope that one day, my healing and experiences will somehow be able to help prevent deaths like Cory’s or any of the other people who needlessly died from alcohol or drugs. I pray that Cory and all those who have ever died from overdoses are in God’s hands now and at peace. And for those who still have life breathed into them and are choosing alcohol or drugs to deal with life, I pray you face your inner demons and find the healing from them before Death or the Grim Reaper comes for you.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson