The Siren's Song

Everything in Moderation, I have been told since I was a small child. You can have too much of a good thing which can become a bad thing.

Recently from different corners of my life I have been hearing about addiction and a lack of moderation and control. The most vivid is that a good friend’s ex-husband is currently in the ICU and things aren’t doing to well. They drank themselves into that state. They have been given a million chances to turn things around but made the choice that the bottle is more important to them than the rest of the world.

I have another friend who is separated from his wife because she can’t stop playing games of chance on the Internet. It was affecting their life in so many ways. He tried all kinds of ways to get her to stop and take a step back but she would be right back at it when he turned his back. He cares for her greatly but he can’t take the lies and cheating with the computer. She is now accusing him of all kinds of things that he can prove he didn’t do.

We hear stories of people who can’t stop watching porn or drinking or doing drugs or even watching a TV show which has become their world and they don’t see that they have a problem or it is problem they can control or it is the other person’s problem.

We talk about people having to hit bottom so they can see what they have done. Some people manage to pull themselves back from the brink and others just jump over. There is a ton of research on addiction but no one can say why one person can over come it so easily and why another person can’t. They talk about addictive personalities and the like.

It is hard to know what to do for someone who is screwing up their life through their actions. The only person that you are truly responsible is yourself. You are responsible for your children until they are of adult age according to the law. One can feel responsible for other people and that is a legitimate feeling but in the end there is you and only you.

I can only make choices for me. I can choose to drink or not drink alcohol. I can choose what I put in my body and in front of my eyeballs. Some times these choices are very hard but I have to make them one way or the other. And I don’t always choice correctly and I pay for that one way or another.

I feel sorry for my friends who are dealing with people with addictions of all kinds and I feel sorrow for those who are addicted. I hope that they can get their lives straighten out and I will be happy for them if they do.

Addiction to anything is when a possible good thing becomes a bad thing and that’s not good for the addict and those around them.

One thing I have learned is that what works for one person might not work for another. We are individuals and respond to stimuli differently. This one size fits all treatment for addiction doesn’t work no matter what the commercials say. I know people who have sorted out their lives because of AA. I know people who just stopped and haven’t even gone back to their addiction. If asked how they did it, they say that they just did. I know some people who straighten themselves for others and stayed that way because they found that their life was more important than their addiction. I figure whatever works and gets the person beyond their addiction is a good thing as long as they aren’t swapping one addiction for another.

I am grateful for those people I know how have faced their addictions and made the choice to not let it win.