Managing Emotions.

Some of the signature conditions of the alcoholic are defensiveness, self-righteousness, deflection and projection. Obviously, it’s not only alcoholics who feel and behave this way, and equally obviously, each alcoholic is an individual, and expresses things a bit differently. However, my experience is tha nearly every alcoholic exhibits those behaviors in ways that are troubling to themselves and the people around them. Troubling is a vast understatement. These behaviors, while present in every person to small degrees, rise to truly toxic and destructive levels in alcoholics.

And, like most of the difficulties we alcoholics get ourselves into, they don’t go away just because we stop drinking. Our relationships don’t get magically repaired. Our debts don’t get magically paid. Our bodies don’t magically recover from the abuse we inflicted upon them. Each of these things takes time, patience, perseverance, and slow, deliberate toil. The sort of thing that humans everywhere do to negotiate their way through the world. The hardest of these things, for me, has been to learn how to manage my emotions in a new way. A manner that is of service to me, still honors the emotions themselves, and the circumstances that gave rise to them, and doesn’t alienate people I care about.

Yesterday was one of those days. I went and spent the afternoon in the hospital with my cousins, my aunt and uncle, and the two-day-old corpse of their infant son. Gabriel is a tiny, blue ragdoll. They were making casts of his hands and feet. Everyone was numb. My cousin held this tiny corpse to her body like a living child. A nurse was there. This is a new method of grieving, I was informed. It’s supposed to alleviate trauma in the parents, I suppose. I found it deeply unsettling.

I spoke to my sponsor, and to another friend. I cried. I shuddered. I took a walk and then a bath. I ate. All things appropriate for the circumstance. Then I got into a stupid debate about flirting on twitter. A debate I had no business being in. No one was looking for my opinion. No one asked for it. I was the only man in a conversation with several women. I was polite, but frustrated. After about a half an hour, I gave up. I apologized for making any comments at all.

Not because I have nothing to say on the matter. Not because I have no right to talk there. I do, and I do. But yesterday wasn’t the time. I wasn’t ably separating the spheres of my emotions. Normally, I can. I have learned to. Frustrations from work do not get taken out on people in my personal life. Personal difficulties don’t get dragged to work. Learning to appropriately manage my emotions was complicated and difficult, but for the most part I learned to do it pretty well.

I stop and think before I speak, most of the time. I don’t make blanket assertions that I don’t have evidence for, unless they’re plainly opinion. And when I am upset, I look inward rather than outward. One of the things you will hear, if you sit around the tables of Alcoholics Anonymous long enough, is, “When I am upset about something, there is something wrong with me.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also something wrong outside of me. All too often there is. Like a dead infant. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong that is. But what it does mean, which I think normal people learned a long time ago, is that I am, in a very important way, responsible for my emotions. I’ve been told many times “you can’t help how you feel.” But I don’t think that’s true. I can, through careful reflection, help how I feel. And I can certainly manage how I react to my feelings. I can examine the disquiet within me and slow and settle myself and look for the good in every situation.

In that conversation I had with my friend, the person so new to sobriety, I was asked a critical question. “Aren’t you glad you get to be present for all this?” I’ve made that point myself, and it’s one that my sponsor often makes. And it’s one of the core principles that good sobriety is based on: being useful to others. Being of service. Even when that is uncomfortable and confusing.

I’m grateful today. Grateful that I have a shoulder for people who are in mourning. Grateful that I can feel sick with grief. That I am not numb to the experience of living, because I am inebriated and altered. I am grateful that I can be circumspect in sadness. That while I am often distressed, I am rarely distraught. That when I do find my defensiveness, self-righteousness, deflection and projection welling up within me, I can look at it honestly, and recognize that these are emotions designed to prevent me from taking responsibility. Emotions that will lead me to selfishness and fear and isolation.

And I can forestall them. Apologize to those I’ve inflicted them upon. Correct my actions. Explore my motivation. And find the core of it.

I am incredibly sad. I am angry. I feel a sense of injustice. I am grieving.

And I am so grateful that I can be present in these feelings. That I can sensate and persist among the sloughs of this human burden. Because I am. And I am sober. And that is good.