QUESTION: Dear Kim,
I am grateful for your presence with us and for your accessibility.
My father was drinking: 2 glasses of wine at lunch, then another after work, and another at dinner. It affected his emotions and sometimes he would lose control and threaten to leave us. Wine is ever present in the French culture where I was born and raised. It is connected to the joy of spending time with others sharing good wine and food, enjoying the fruits and abundance of the land. My father also smoked and I picked up the habit from him and the culture. I smoked for twenty years and it took me about a decade to let go of it. Then I found ascended master teachings and learned with the Summit Lighthouse about the aggressive entities connected to addictions.
I now find myself having a close friend who drinks. Each time he is having a drinking episode, I feel destabilized and I retreat from the relationship. I feel angry at having to deal with the presence of alcohol in my life through my friend and everywhere around me in the culture. I know that a reactive spirit is at work here but I can’t seem to let go especially seeing my friend’s health being compromised. I also realize that accepting free will and the right of others to have the experiences they want to have is part of the equation. My friend was raised in a communist family and is not attracted to spirituality yet he senses the darkness connected to alcohol and wants to explore it despite the obvious effects on his health.
Please comment
1 Comment
Good vid, thank you. This is an issue for me and my family as well. I get what you're saying about having to decide if you can continue in relationship with an alcoholic, but this is greatly complicated when the person is an immediate family member. It's much harder to dissolve a relationship with them, but still might be needful in extreme cases. In my family (immediate family, plus a few close relatives), alcohol has always been an issue (for me personally as well) but not severe enough to cut off contact from them. At some moments I think my own addiction struggle has made me stronger, and at others I wonder if everything would have been better without this struggle, it's hard to know for sure.
The idea that there are entities behind addiction is something that makes complete sense to me now (I looked into it in some depth several years ago, and a lot of it has stuck with me even as I've moved more into non duality). Predictably, experts in addiction – operating in the usual scientific/materialist paradigm – would just laugh at the suggestion of energy-feeding thought forms, and this just adds another layer of difficulty for addiction sufferers who DO view it this way. AA does acknowledge a spiritual component to addiction, but more in the sense of calling on a higher power to assist in healing, which can be of value, but there's nothing in it about entities that are behind addiction.