Denial, Chronic Addiction. Healing Family Grief. Chronic, Addiction, Denial, Grief, Healing, Family,

"Chronic, Addiction, Denial, Grief, Healing, Family" Chronic, Addiction, Denial, Grief, Healing, Family,

It has been one of my saddest life experiences to watch beautiful people with addictions drink and drug themselves to death, work themselves to death, cut themselves to death, or eat or starve themselves to death and many gamblers have committed suicide to help save their family only to have the insurance company deny the families claim.

I have watched hundreds, maybe even thousands slowly walk the path of addiction in its many forms… come in, go out, come back in, and then just disappear into the ether.

My Professional and Recovery Lifestyle construct protective barriers to dam in the pain I feel when I remember an old friend, client or family member who died from this

dis-ease. We say you can carry the message but not the addict, it can be a pretty

soul-destroying vocation at times.

My father had a great run at it, he fully enjoyed his life, his drinking, and being one of the boys. His Cronies as my mother would call them were envious of his many exploits, but the same can not be said of his 42-year-old son, my brother, who was found by our family, buried in a Cemetery in Portsmouth.

We were all children of a very dysfunctional family, culture, country and time period. Yes, our Parents did the best they could with the information and education that was available to them. They experienced many life challenges as opposed to life chances… And alcohol and Pot were available as anaesthetics and consumed by the bucket load in our community. I have always felt that I would not trade my mother's life for all the tea in China.

We did not know, what we did not know.

My baby brother died at 42 in a studio flat ( a fancy name for a room to sleep, eat and live in, and a toilet), in Portsmouth,

We think he died at Christmas, but nobody knows. My mother asked me near St Patrick's Day to go visit my brother as she had a dream that he had died. We visited him all the time but he would never answer the door, he often pretended that he was not home, and we would leave messages and money, but he would never get back to us.

Padraig was James Dean reincarnated, a real Rebel Without a Cause, an absolutely stunningly beautiful individual, but deeply damaged and traumatized by our childhood.

Padraig lived for the Craic, the Pub, the horse racing, the pull, the game, and no official partner or children he was living the life of James Dean. In a studio flat in Portsmouth after being rescued from a Slum in Camden Town, in London.

He came to Portsmouth where I was working as a Substance Misuse Practitioner and he thought he might like to give recovery a try. He excelled, Recovery was a new identity he could live with and within.

He did several years sober but often had a smoke of cannabis or Skunk as it had developed into by that time. He felt most at home in NA a self-help recovery movement born out of the 12-step fellowship of AA. He looked younger, and was alive with those first waves of recovery, often called the Pink Fluffy Cloud. He was back at work a thing he had not touched in many a day. And on the outside, it looked ok.

One of the problems with recovery though is there is no anaesthetics allowed, we must abstain from all drugs in order to recover, and alcohol is most certainly a drug… and why do we still need anaesthetics if we have no longer got a physical addiction,...

That's a long story, but the essence of it is that sobriety, clears the air, and stuff settles, like a lake after a storm on a clear day you can see the bottom of the lake. Well, that's the same with feelings and emotions and trauma, it rises to the top, and we have no anaesthetic for the pain, and not really a deep understanding of what the pain is or where it is coming from ..

And we are beset by No Talk Rules, you don't disrespect the family, let sleeping dogs lie, and don't drag up the past, for me, these early feelings and experiences resulted in medication, and the feeling got for me to the point that I felt that there might be rats in my stomach as the knawing in my stomach was so intense.

I had worked the steps and continued with maintaining and sustaining my recovery, but medication was suggested and part of Recovery is to hand your will and your life over to a power greater than yourself and for me, that was a psychiatrist..

Padraig would not see a psychiatrist, he wanted to self-medicate, he enjoyed a smoke, and a drink and he really missed the Craic, he had no ties or children and James Dean was calling, Denial the absolute loop of infinity was escorting Padraig back into the insanity of addiction, and self-medicating.

His death would have been very lonely, from what we gather he was found dead in his chair. The autopsy said a heart attack, no mention of alcohol or drugs, but the body was too decomposed to really tell anything more.

When I went to his flat around St Patrick's Day, his Studio Flat had been boarded up, and an A4 piece of paper requesting that relatives of the deceased residents please contact Portsmouth City Council.

As I said he had been buried in a paupers grave in a protestant Cemetery in Portsmouth. This was crippling for my mum, we weren't great Catholics, and she had buried many men, women and children due to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but this was one of her own, her baby boy 42. The tears have never stopped falling for this little man, he was exhumed, cremated and returned in an urn to Ireland to be buried in our local cemetery.

My dad was making the arrangements, buying a plot as no one in the immediate family had been buried before. A few weeks before Padraig's body was exhumed my father dropped dead at the gates of the cemetery in Ireland from a heart attack, he was in the plot before his son was exhumed.

A few months later my sister-in-law fell down the stairs on Mother's Day, on her way out to celebrate with my nephew and niece, and 2 years later her partner my eldest brother, Harry died at 56, he resembled a park bench drunk when he died. And the tears are still falling.

So denial and the Chronic Alcoholic have many faces and stories, this is a true account of the cost of addiction to a few. Carrying the Message is part of the reason I go on, to help carry the message of recovery, especially to those that can not listen, because I never know the day when they might say, yes I'll give it a go.