Pearls of Wisdom

Members of the BDDG Families Group would like to share slogans and sayings which have helped with our understanding of addiction and enabled us to cope with our situation.

“If you keep pulling up a plant to check its roots, it can’t grow. you have to leave it to grow.”

My husband, M, was a cocaine addict and had just left a treatment centre. In the last few weeks before he went to treatment he had talked about realising he could not control his need for the drug and could not recover on his own – as he had previously thought he could do. He had also binged on drugs and been out all night in the days before I went with him on the train to the centre. For months I had been terrified that he might get found out, might die (as I had been told by his doctors that he might have only three months to live if he went on using) and despairing about the huge damage done to me and our family. He seemed fine in the days/ weeks after leaving the treatment centre and certainly looked much better – had put on weight and was calmer.

But I was still fearful and anxious. – pretty desperate that all should go well now. So, I looked for signs of him being well, compared the present with the past and did, understandably, a lot of fretting – a lot of ‘what if’…. I was lucky to find a therapist in London with a great deal of experience in addiction. I poured all this stuff out – about expectations and checking to see if things seemed right, was he OK? Was he OK?

After a while she gently stopped me as I paused for breath and said: ‘ if you keep pulling up a plant to check its roots, it can’t grow. You have to leave it to grow.’

I found this – perhaps because it was so graphic – very helpful. In just a few words it showed me what I had been doing and in a rather different way underlined that I could not control his addiction or his recovery.

(Wife of a drug addict now in good recovery)

“Forgiving is not forgetting, it’s letting go of the hurt.”

Reading this marked a turning point in my journey of recovery. I had been left angry and hurt and could not forget what had happened. The trouble was the feelings and the experience were inextricably tied up, leaving me caught up in a vicious circle where I continued to hurt myself and my relationship with my husband. I truly believed that the only way I could forgive my husband was to forget what had happened and how I had felt.

Somehow these simple words of wisdom came at the right moment, allowing me to separate the memories of the events from the feelings. They made such good sense. I began to accept that the experiences were a part of my story and in doing so for the first time ever I felt the feelings were no longer so overwhelming. I did not have to dwell on the pain any more nor did I have to deny my experience and feelings.

(Marie, partner of an alchoholic doctor)

“THE THREE C’S”

You didn’t Cause it.

You can’t Cure it.

You can’t Control it.

I’ve always had a fondness for this slogan, probably because it was the first thing I took away from first Sunday meeting at the treatment centre.

I like its simplicity, especially compared to the 12 steps. It tells me to stop blaming myself for my partner’s actions and that I am unable to do anything to stop her drinking.

It provided an easy to recognise starting point for me to start dealing with my partners disease, three concrete points to grasp in the whirlwind that was my life at the time.

(Barney, partner of an alchoholic doctor)