SA's suffer from emotional blindness

I don't want to interfere with a good and heartfelt rant, especially in your own space, and I think there is a great deal of truth in the post, but may I suggest that from the perspective of this addict both the inner and the outer experience can be slightly different from what's conveyed here?  I'm not saying this to be self-defensive or to challenge; I hope I've established my willingness to accept the grievous nature of my own faults.  I'm just trying to reflect honestly on our experience and behavior, which are pretty incomprehensible both to us and to our partners.

I think the original poster is exactly right in saying that lack of emotional awareness is a huge part of an addict's life.  I remember my own early months in counseling, when my therapist would say, "OK, take a breath, close your eyes, and tell me what you're feeling."  My immediate reaction was always panic.  "How would I know what I'm feeling?  OK, I'm feeling frustrated because I can't do this stuff."

Very early in recovery, in my first week or two, my sponsor gave me a collection of affirmations on fear.  "It's OK for me to be afraid.  I can let fear teach me.  I feel normal when I feel afraid," etc.  I thought, "Well, that's sweet, but it doesn't really involve me.  I can't really think of anything I'm afraid of."  It took me about a week before I could come to the complete revelation that my whole life had been built around fear - fear of failure, fear of showing myself to others, fear of appearing weak, fear of my own emotions, fear of daring to look within, and the list goes on and on.  This was astonishing to me.  I literally had had no idea.

So I want to affirm the original poster's insight.

But I also think that at least for some addicts, there is a lot more going on under the surface than the post makes clear.  Yes, I was very much walled off from my own feelings, but what drove that detachment was not, at bottom, cruel, superior, perverted indifference (though all those things were consequences of my detachment).  Rather, the detachment grew out of crippling fear of what would happen if I allowed myself to feel and to see clearly, and out of deep and debilitating shame about who I was.  To allow myself to see and feel would have been to allow the collapse of the whole persona of intellectual accomplishment and rationality and distance that I had built up over a lifetime in order to keep safe the frightened child within.  It would have been to die.  And so I went along living on the surface, but underneath there was an ocean of feelings whose existence I darkly suspected, and which I spent huge effort, conscious and unconscious, to keep buried.  I was simultaneously unaware of my feelings and so hyper-aware that to allow myself to feel anything would, I thought, have destroyed me.

My blindness was also highly specific.  My wife talks about being baffled at the fact that in working with students and colleagues I could be quite empathetic and sensitive, while at the same time I was oblivious to the indifference and abuse with which I treated my own family.  I think this is right.  I don't think I'm blind to all emotion.  I think I'm really pretty good at putting myself in the place of another and of relating to them with care and understanding.  The only problem, and it's obviously a catastrophic problem, is that I can't do the same thing with myself, or, by extension, with people too close to me.

So that's how it appears to me, at least right now.  The blindness is real and profound, as are the the indifference and the abuse.  But all that is combined with and grows from perhaps excessive sensitivity that has led me to hide rather than to feel and that has made me pretty aware of what's happening inside others as long as they are not so close to me that feeling with them means feeling myself.  It's a pretty mixed up package, isn't it?

One thing that I think makes this condition difficult, certainly for spouses, but also for addicts, is that we behave in highly irrational ways.  Both we and the people around us want to understand, and those attempts to understand often take the form of narratives designed to tell a coherent, rational story making sense of our behavior.  But in fact, I don't believe there is or can be any sustained rational narrative that explains what we as addicts do.  We are people divided against ourselves, people who perceive ourselves as made up of different, warring selves.  We are also people desperately hiding not only from others, but from ourselves.  To look for a standpoint from which our actions make sense is perhaps irresistible, but unless that standpoint takes full account of the deeply fractured and contradictory nature of our existence, I don't think it's going to succeed.

Just how it looks to this addict today.

Peace, and my apologies if posts like this feel intrusive.  At a word, I would be perfectly content to hold my tongue on this forum.

Tim M.