jack wrote on 30 Aug 2011 20:25:
dear yossi - good question.here's the answer:
in my particular case, not speaking for anyone else, i never hit rock bottom.this means i was never caught.i used to dress in raincoats with a hood.i kept going and going, also never sinning with another human being - in other words, i DID have SOME fear - this little amount of fear that i had saved me from doing much worse.i attribute this to the traning i got at home - from my mother.she was a european woman with old-fashioned ideas.unfortunately, this was not enough for me to avoid the addiction - but it was something.
and by the way, thanks for listening to me - it means a LOT - a real lot.it is this 'friendship' that gives me the strength to keep on going.thank you r guard for providing us the opportunity!
and zemiros - thanks for the input-you dont know how much it means to me.
Dear Jack,
I gotta tell you part of my story and perhaps you will see a bit of a different perspective. Yes, I definitely see hitting bottom as the greatest brocha that has happenned in my lifetime, far more than getting married or having children - and so does my wife. She told me that she considers the day I started sobriety (I am still starting for a bunch of years now, never finishing) as the best day of her life - even better than our wedding.
I do not
at all define 'hitting bottom' as
getting caught. But not because it is my shittah or opinion, but because it is my experience.
I was caught by my wife in 1995. I agreed to go to a shrink to try and save our marriage, which we both assumed was doomed at that time. The sheer pain of having been fooled for so long was terrible for my wife. And I spent the years before really trying to stop, but figured I was hiding it all from her in ordeer to make it easier for me to really focus on quitting 'without being distracted by all the marriage issues being caught would bring up'. I am serious. And I have since discovered that I was far from from being alone in that exact same screwed up - but innocently stupid - thinking.
So getting caught did not stop me. I still acted out for that year and change, till I really hit bottom. I define hitting bottom as a personal - and only a personal, inner - and only inner - determination that I must stop. Not that I really, really should stop, not that Hashem really requires me to stop, not that acting out is terrible, or antything like that, but just knowing that I must stop.
And the other indescribably precious part of that very same hidden inner realization is: that I cannot b'shum oifen stop. I will not succeed no matter what.
That part comes from incontrovertible personal experience. The biggest fool is the one who cannot learn from his own personal experience. If I see myself having being
absolutely sure that I will quit - fifty times or more.... then my dedication to quitting is obviously useless. That is why the hakorah that I cannot
possibly succeed at
staying quit together with the clear recognition that I
absolutely must stop, is so very precious.
For the addicts I know, the sincere feeling that we must stop - that we will stop! - is
never enough. People like us have had that crystal clarity dozens of times, or more. Only when
simultaneously combined with the clarity that we
cannot do it - based not on naysayers but on our own repeated experience - does it open the door to long term sobriety.
This is not a shittah, not parroting a dogma, not a philosophy of life, and certainly not based on Torah. It is based on my own personal experience.
As I have made clear before, Jack, I am not doubting your experience an iota! Not all people are the same and not everybody defines addiction the same and not every addict gets better the same way. But when you define hitting bottom as an external thing like getting arrested, getting divorced, almost dying because falling asleep at the wheel due to acting out, getting arrested, etc...I just need to speak up. For I know more than a few guys who each of these things happenned to (some more than once) - and they continued to act out until they had a personal awakening.
My own personal awakening 14 years and six months ago, was only through one thing - the pain of
acting out. I credit the pain of acting out with bringing me to sobriety, and that concept forms the basis of my understanding that Hashem can even use evil - sin, or what have you - to bring a person close to Him. Ein ohd milvado - leis asar panui miney. Giving up on being freed from lust and ever having the good life, is just plain dumb, for He is really in control - not
me, but
Him. He, of course, can do what I cannot.
So
acting out is precisely what taught me that
1- I can't afford to keep acting out any more, the pain was too great
2- that I cannot manage to quit, and I reacted as many in foxholes have over history:
3- that I must need G-d, and
only G-d. But it's gotta hurt like crazy for some reason - and it will.
Tov v'yoshor Hashem, al kein yoreh - from a loshon of shooting down ("oh yaroh yiyareh" by har sinai) - chato'im baderech (chato'im means people who are
mistaken, and going down the wrong path). He puts us on the right path by throwing us, and letting us see the pain of our choices. That way we come to Him of our own volition - because we have no other option.
Kofoh aleihem hahar k'gigis all over again, in my own personal life.
I believe that for the addicts I know, the choice of sobriety is between nothing other than life, or death itself. Not between purity and teshuvah vs. more 'fun' and rish'us. We either need to, or we don't. And even needing to is not enough, as I said above.
It's about
needing G-d, not about
needing to quit. He knows that, see. He is very smart, you know...but the melech zokein (the Y"H) is always shown to be a
k'sil in the end.
