There is no special group for us! Bill W., founding the AA has no answer for a fellow like me…AA is for alcoholics,I am a drunk! Okay…this is bound to raise some eye-brows!!
I get asked the question almost every time I visit a doctor!… “Do you drink?” …I answer (honestly) “No,I am a drunk!”
“Oh,so you do drink!”
“No, I just told you I was a drunk!”
“Then…you drink!!”
“Well no…I do not drink,I am not a drinker!! Huh? I AM A DRUNK!!”
I usually explain it this way…I do not like to drink alcohol, as a matter of fact-I don’t even like the way it tastes! It has to be confusing , I am sure! A drinker , in my opinion, is a person who steady has a (since I never drink booze…we are talking about beer here) beer in their hands…every day,day after day! Sure…this may also fall into the category of being an alcoholic, but the fact is by being a drinker the difference comes in that I am not a drinker because I do not feel like having my body feel the agony of being hung over day after day. My body is not requiring me to do that to it! I suffer it on my own inflicting the miserable feeling I have the day after my drunk!
It begins without premeditation! I have no agenda to go and get a six or twelve pack of beer. I might pick up beers at the grocery and they may sit on my kitchen floor collecting dust with no interest from me. I do not drink every day and sometimes go for weeks or longer,no thought of drinking. If I have a beer in my hand then it is sure getting in a drunken state is on my mind-wanting to get life off of my mind.
But something triggers it! My opening my first…
I guess you could say a drinker is also someone who can stop and take a break during the heat of the day and pop open a cold beer for refreshment. And that’s it! Or maybe go to a restaurant for a nice steak dinner and have a beer to wash it down…and that’s it! I do not fit that category either!
Most likely for certain if you see me with a beer you can bet there are ten or more to back that one up! I am in the mode of wanting escape…the beer is the legal drug and fastest concentration of ‘medicine’ that can push the shit out of life and bring out the hap-hazard,I could give a shit attitude…the power and the strength of escape! I know I have escaped when the day after comes and my morning begins but calculating what all is askew and locating the empties and learning how far I went.
I don’t want to do this! I hate it! I hate it all the following day…the greatest curse of it is the feeling so badly lasts longer then the feeling of escape. I just want to escape! To forget! To kill it! To get it away from me!
Why? That is what I try to answer every time, why? I know what it is that I want to get away from. I also know that it does not free me….no matter what kind of support or personal supervisor or meetings will ever fix this! Of course…I know what it is I want to be free from.
Talking about this has been on my mind for a few weeks. I have been seeing a therapist that treats sexual trauma injured folks like us who deals (so it seems so far) in helping us…helping me to determine the joy of love in separation from sexual contact,being that individuals profess ‘love’ to us but we can’t comprehend it because of the distorting way the other half of ‘love’ was presented to us. I have to say I am not sure of how much longer the relationship with the therapist is going to go…I went in the beginning to try to stop myself from being self abusive (self-abuse is not always from drugs or drinking) and the fact that I turn 60 years old in one more week and have been absolutely alone for the past 12 years scares me!
I want to find love. I want to believe in love. But fuck all if it comes to me. I am afraid of it. And yet, I want to feel it for sure for once.
No one is ever going to understand me. And if it is the same for the other many thousands of sexual trauma survivors that we have this same problem,what a state of confusion.
It has always been suggested that when a person dies their whole life replays in the last seconds of life. That is what getting drunk does to me!
I cry so much about what it all has been!….and the confusion it all has created!
I am just telling you the truth about me! I am not a tower of strength as many say I am. It is why I write this…the truth about me! To show the damage of post traumatic stress and from the view of sexual trauma causing it.
A few years ago I attended a conference (I wrote about it here) and heard a woman speak about her own rape. Her experience was something that was so horrid I think about it often! She too has a lifetime of memories, her attacks left her blind. I am not going into the worse of what she endured. I want to find the strength that woman has found to stand up. I am perplexed in how it is managed! How can one rise up and another keep falling?
I apologize…there is not much encouragement here.
Peace…and ending with a poem I wrote in 1981:
Quitting again,
open another farewell beer,
and tell this one goodbye
how many is this? this year?
another farewell lie!
you drunken waste!
give me one more drink and lots of time to think!
Think of what? you’ve thought it all, you are trying to forget!
You’ve drunk a bottle miles tall , and have’nt finished yet.
Tags: drunk, PTSD, sexual trauma
a males life after rape 
July 20, 2011 at 3:05 pm |
I think you pegged it right here, Jay,
“No one is ever going to understand me. And if it is the same for the other many thousands of sexual trauma survivors that we have this same problem,what a state of confusion.”
There is a community that knows what you know. There are many of us who, like you, are working to stop this from happening to others.
Also, when you wrote, “to determine the joy of love in separation from sexual contact,being that individuals profess ‘love’ to us but we can’t comprehend it because of the distorting way the other half of ‘love’ was presented to us,” you opened a door of insight for me and my love.
Thank you,
n.
July 20, 2011 at 3:18 pm |
I am always blessed to hear from you N,and am very blessed when something I say is validated in the way you just did! THANK YOU
August 15, 2011 at 11:19 pm |
Very interesting Jay,
Thank you so much for this. This is very true for men and women and no, no one will understand unless they have been through this kind of trauma.