America: One Big Alcoholic Family

I’ve written before how America is like an alcoholic family.

Tell-tale Signs of an Addicted Society

In alcoholic family or society, instability reigns.

The addiction warps everyone’s thinking, emoting, and relationships.

The result is that the world is divided into villains and victims.

And punishing villains and pampering victims is the mission.

So the big arguments are about who is the villain and who is the victim.

We become consumed with a fight over who deserves to be blamed and shamed, and who needs the protection and championing.

Narcissism and co-dependency thus increasingly mark us as individuals and as groups.

We are left with a choice between a calloused disregard and the punitive opposite of compassion, or an obsessive indulgence and a sick protection from deserved consequences.

Nobody will take personal responsibility and everyone blames somebody else for all their misfortunes.

Sound familiar?

As addictions escalate in intensity and number through the aid of technology, the politics and social interactions of more and more people are addition-fueled.

As their addiction “age-of-onset” begins earlier in life and reaches a hard-core phase earlier in life, the intensity level of our conflicts grows exponentially.

Our emotions rage at higher levels, are less often resolved with greater difficulty, and catharsis becomes our new normal–which fuels even deeper addiction and sets off the next round of conflicts.

It takes less and less offense, irritation, and surprise to knock us off our stride, to get an intense reaction out of us, and to see us erupt into relationship-destroying outbursts.

We become both helpless and far more harmful.

We leave a wake of wounded spirits, broken relationships, and dead communities behind us.

We keep beating the drum of our cause, our outrage, our victimhood, until the room clears and nobody is listening to us anymore but the self-justifying echo chamber of our own mind.

Not Even Hiding Helps

There’s also a third group:  the hiders and runners.

They are forced to listen and feel trapped in the “hell-on-earth” family.

They just want to escape the toxic family and leave it in the rear view mirror.

These hiders withdraw and retreat into studied apathy and isolation, biding their time until they can make good their physical escape.

But they, too, are scarred by the intractable, abusive conflicts of their alcoholic family of origin.

Escape and escapism that numbs the soul and withdraws them from positive society mark their lives.

The Way Forward

Although the Recovery movement isn’t perfect, and has strayed somewhat from it’s theocentric roots, there are some little slogans that counter-act the toxicity of alcoholic thinking and feeling.

The trio of short sayings are easy to memorize and capture the surrender of control necessary to maintain sobriety in the face of life’s upsets.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.”

“One day at a time.”

“Let go, let God.”

In the Serenity prayer, we are taught to differentiate between what we can do something about, and what we are powerless over.

We humbly ask God for daily wisdom to show us the things we cannot fix that are outside of our control, and those we can take responsibility to improve, heal, and redeem.

In releasing control over the things we never had control over, we have energy to address those things about our selves that sorely need our attention.

We give up on blaming and accusing, and we begin to take responsibility for our own choices and to make amends for our wrongs.

We let go of the uncontrollable stuff, and let God handle it because He, not we, is God.

We get off of the throne, and yield the chair to Him.

And we do this every single day, one day at a time, moment-by-moment.

The Payoff

If we practice this trio of daily habits, we’ll find increasing peace on the inside, avoid embroiling ourselves in resentments and impossible fights, and enjoy new positive outcomes and healthy relating.

We’ll avoid relapses into our idolatries, and will be less able to be triggered and, hence, controlled by events and other people.

We’ll become part of the building crew, and get off of the wrecking crew, in our groups and relationships.

We’ll become resilient and are able to suffer more and sacrifice more for worthy goals that take self-denial and perseverance to fully realize.

These slogans are restatements of time-honored truths taught in the Bible:  daily surrender of one’s will to God, taking each day as it comes under His care, and resting in the peace of His good reign so we can focus on our own responsibilities under God.

Is this not what we need most as individuals, and as a society, right now?

There is a solution.