If You Want What We Have

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From the Book

If You Want What We Have:
Sponsorship Meditations
By Joan Larkin
©1998 Joan Larkin


---- 36 ----
They are dead even while they are alive.
LAWRENCE KUSHNER

Newcomer
What exactly is a blackout? I can’t figure out whether I’ve had them or not.

Sponsor
The term “blackout” usually refers to a period of time when we acted under the influence of an addictive substance, but later couldn’t remember or account for what we did. Many recovering alcoholics, for example, whether their drinking was daily or periodic, speak of having had to make phone calls “the morning after” to find out what they said or did the previous night. Blacking out as a result of drinking is one of the warning signs of alcoholism; it can last a few minutes or several days. Some have found themselves in strange beds, or even in foreign countries, with no memory of how they got there. Some people have killed during blackouts.

We don’t have to be using alcohol, drugs, or other substances to experience the blackout phenomenon. Some of us use the term more loosely to name a state in which, demoralized or compelled by our addiction, we behaved as if we weren’t “all there”—took unnecessary sexual risks, for example, or spent money we didn’t have, lied, forgot commitments, or acted in other ways we were later ashamed of. We say of such moments, “I was in an emotional blackout” or “I behaved as if I were in a blackout.”


Today, I look at places my addiction took me without my full consent. I’m grateful for my ability to make conscious choices in recovery.