Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

I wrote this journal entry a few years ago. I'm going over the steps again though, right back at the beginning after a slip. It was good re-reading this and seeing where I was, where I am and where I want to be. I'll probably be doing some rewriting of this now that I'm restarting Alanon and restarting journaling.

Step One

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

"You lose everything. Your friends, your self... you let this control you and the world goes away." -Buffy, Buffy The Vampire Slayer

When I was much younger, I used to keep a secret journal under my bed. I recorded the times when my mother drank, how much she drank, what was going on at home that might have caused her to drink, how long the binge lasted and what I could do better next time in order to keep her sober. I would celebrate the times when there were long breaks in between her drinking sessions and spend a lot of time trying to decipher why she slipped so much when she would drinking many nights in a row. I thought somehow this would help. It didn't.

I thought a lot of things that I did to “help” my qualifiers would work. I yelled at my sister when she drank, I argued with my parents when they did, I told my aunt that I didn't want her staying at our house because she was old enough to find a place of her own. The real reason for trying to kick my aunt out was because I thought if she wasn't around the house so much that she wouldn't drink so much and leave us to take care of her. 

There were many qualifiers in my house growing up, and the more that fell under the spell of alcohol, the more unmanageable I felt my life becoming. There were few people to turn to because I felt that they were all out of their minds. I thought I was the only sane one there, but I wasn't so sane myself to be honest. 

In the early years, I thought it was my fault, but somewhere in high school I realized that it wasn't and that the only person who could stop their drinking was them. At that point, I grew less guilty and grew more bitter. That bitterness never really went away, and it has caused a lot of destruction in my relationships with my family. I grew angrier, and angrier still. No one cared about me, I was sure, because if they did they would see what they were doing to the family, what they were doing to themselves and what they were doing to me. 

The guilt returned this year, when my sister died of cirrhosis, following my aunt who had died of cirrhosis five years earlier. I'd fought with my sister, pleaded with her, listened to her yell at us that it was her life and she would do what she wanted with herself and her body. I was there for her interventions, through the times she tried to stop and all the binges in between. And yet, when she died, I felt like I wasn't there for her enough. She was the hero of the family when my mother became an alcoholic and my family started to fall apart, she was the one who held it all together. My parents placed so much on her and she was dealing with her three young children, trying to keep her marriage together and drinking herself into an early grave to deal with everything. I wanted to save her the way that she'd saved me, mother her the way she'd been my substitute mother growing up. I couldn't manage her life though, because I could barely manage my own.

I was powerless to stop her from dying. I was powerless to stop my aunt from dying five years prior. I am still powerless to stop my mother from drinking, or my father. All I can do is watch and that is so hard to do when people you love are making what you feel are stupid choices, choices that you have to watch them die from eventually. Death is the final step of this disease. 

I still argue with those who are still alive and are still drinking. I am the scapegoat of my family. While my sister was the one who tried to fix everything, I am the one who often points out that there is an elephant in the living room. I've tried my hardest to stop doing this in the past few years since coming to Al-anon. When there's an elephant in the living room, and it is breaking stuff and you hear crashing noises and stuff breaking.. there comes a point when you realize that everyone knows that elephant is there. Only someone who is blind would not know that the elephant is there. And if they're blind, or in denial in this case, there is nothing you can do to make them see the elephant. That is when you have to admit that you are powerless. You can not make a blind person see, you can not make someone in denial realize what they are doing to themselves.

My family might be blind, they might be lost but I decided when I came to Alanon that I didn't want to be a part of the problem. I didn't want to get swallowed up with the rest and have my life destroyed through this disease. It has already been effected immensely. I've let it control my life to the point where I look back on several years of my life and know deep in my core that this was not a normal life. I did not get to have a normal life. I had one filled with fighting and disease and dysfunction instead.

Growing up, I felt completely isolated because of the disease. I couldn't get my parents to drive me anywhere, because they were often too drink to pick me up if I stayed at a friend's house late. I would not let anyone come over my house either, for fear that drinking or fighting would break out. I couldn't talk to anyone in the house either because they were often too drunk to hold a conversation. 

Family vacations and holidays were disrupted by the disease as well. I remember crying on vacation, while taking a walk and looking at a bunch of other happy families at the resort and wondering why I couldn't have one like that. I remembered the days before the disease hit my family and I was often nostalgic to go back to those days. I can barely remember those days now. It's very hard to remember what life was like when my family didn't all hate each other, when my parents didn't drink all the time.

I'm not sure I can put the pieces of my family or my relationships with them back together, but for now I am working on putting the pieces of myself back together. When I came to Alanon, I was so far from who I am today. Somewhere along the line, I'd lost myself and become someone cold, an orphan to the world and so frightened of speaking my mind-- unless it was to argue with someone and tell them they were an idiot. Slowly, I learned to open up and learn what my views on topics and concepts so that I can share my ideas with others. I learned to treat things gently, to love people again and trust that the world was bigger and stronger than what my family had shown me previously. I admitted that I was powerless over the people, places and things that had effected me and caused me to become so sick in the soul and heart. And I realized that my life had become unmanageable, but that it didn't have to stay that way. Through Alanon, I took the first step to recovering from this family disease and rediscovering the person I had lost so long ago-- myself.

FIRST STEP PRAYER

Dear Higher Power,
I admit that I am powerless over people, places and things.
I admit that my life is unmanageable when I try to control them.
Help me this day to understand the true meaning of powerlessness.
Remove from me all denial of my situation.