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2007-08-07 issue:

Addictions

Filling the spaces where God belongs

by Christian Piatt Piatt

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More than a year ago, I had the unenviable task of telling a close friend of mine that if he did not stop drinking he would die. I agonized over the decision for months, worried it would end our relationship or that it would send him on a bender that would fulfill my prediction sooner than expected.

What happened was both encouraging and distressing.

A couple of weeks later, I got an email from him, thanking me for my concern and love for him. While not acknowledging the fatal course of his addiction, he did recognize the excessiveness of his behavior. The fact that he would still speak with me after I confronted him gave me hope, but he also indicated in his letter that he didn’t have intentions of stopping.

I’ve had other, more personal experiences with addiction in my extended family, as have most people I know. Without exception, the addictive behavior in question brings pain with it, both for the one living with the addiction and for those who love them.

Sometimes the pain comes from watching the deterioration of someone you love in the grip of something they cannot control. It also comes from when the addiction drives a wedge between all involved.

There are two things you can almost always count on when someone is an addict: It will generally get worse before it gets better, and everyone involved suffers.

My first reaction to loved ones struggling with addiction is anger. I’m not an angry person by nature, but the helplessness we feel when grappling with addiction—ours or someone else’s—seems to drain us of power. It even can steal our hope.

Without hope, we sink into despair, left with an emptiness where God should be. Instead of opening ourselves to grace we feel we don’t deserve, we numb out the self-criticizing voices, the contemptible impulses and the pain that comes in their wake. The pain may subside momentarily, but then the guilt follows, which leads to more numbing.

Writer Frederick Buechner talks about despair in his book Wishful Thinking. He says, “Despair has been called the unforgivable sin—not presumably because God refuses to forgive it but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.”

We’ve all been in a situation where we’re so embarrassed or ashamed about something we’ve done that we don’t want to ask to be forgiven. Perhaps we’ll feel weak or vulnerable in admitting our screwups. Maybe we just don’t think we deserve the forgiveness that might follow. So despair sets in instead.

Thinking about addiction in this way, I’m taking baby steps toward getting over my anger. It does me no good anyway, only offering a false sense of power. After some months of encouragement, I finally agreed last week to attend a support group for people who are struggling with the effects of a loved one’s addiction. I didn’t really plan to talk during my first encounter, but by the end I had spilled my guts, tears and all.

Watching someone we love slowly sink into a self-destructive pattern from which they may or may not ever emerge is enough to put us off loving all together. We can always choose to walk away, or we can stick around and love anyway, in spite of the risks. What we can’t do is wait around, expecting the person we love to change.

All we have is love for the sake of itself and the opportunity to move on with our lives. Whether the person mired in addiction chooses to seek the help they need to join us in hope is completely up to them. It’s a fact with which I’m still coming to terms, but the alternative of binding myself to another person’s despair is too much, even for the people I love the most.

Christian Piatt lives in Pueblo, Colo.

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