Jul 17 2008
Live And Let Live - Coping With People Who Drive Us To Drink
This is a useful phrase when it pertains to how we deal with the frustration in our lives created by others. Most of us can remember a time, probably many times, when we drank because of someone else “driving us to drink”. Some may even say it was as good an excuse as any for drinking too much. Problem drinkers and alcoholics have an egocentric personality and do not usually take well to other strong personalities confronting them.
Though we spent much time alone and preferred it that way when we drank, other people had a huge impact on why we drank. Others seemed to be behind our drinking for many reasons. We may have been rubbed the wrong way by a co-worker; our own families knew what buttons to push. It may have been as simple as someone saying the wrong thing at a party. The angrier we got, the more we drank and this served to precipitate our withdrawal from people in general.
Now that we are sober and working through recovery, how long will it take for those people we seem to tolerate, family friends and coworkers, to finally accept the fact we have stopped drinking? Many may have their doubts about our sincerity to finally quit the bottle and therefore make easy targets for our frustration if we allow their actions and questions to irritate us. Better to remain quiet and think, “live and let live”.
Other people will always be a source of discomfort for a recovering alcoholic and how we deal with these people is essential to our long-term recovery. In the past, we tended to react poorly when people rubbed us the wrong way. Confrontation may have been our only way of coping when someone got us angry. A large part of our recovery process is learning how to cope with our behavior that in the past drove us to resort to drinking in order to quell our frustration.
When we used to go to extreme lengths to make people understand our way of thinking, now we can see that it is more important to seek to understand rather than to try and be understood. Understanding other people and what they are all about is the beginning of our commitment to our sobriety. This is a huge step because it is the beginning of the “calm” in our lives and one of the steps to personal well being. It is more important to identify with others than to convince to our own way of thinking. Our recovery depends on this.
It is so much easier to just separate ourselves from people who irritate us than to challenge them or work on changing them. The new sober you no longer needs to charge those windmills. This sort of thinking used to get us in trouble, drinking was easy when others ticked us off. It gave us the excuse we were looking for. Now it is just so much easier and mature just to tell ourselves “live and let live”.
It was far too easy to let our reaction to other people act as a reason for us to pick up a drink. Learning to understand this and to accept other people for who they are is a step in the right direction. You can be sure that people’s attitudes won’t change just because you’ve decided to stop drinking. This being the case, you have to change yourself since your behavior is all you can control. An easy way to do this [proven by thousands of recovering alcoholics worldwide] is to simply say live and let live then simply separate yourself from the aggravation. Just walk away.
Once we conquer our own lives and willful selves, we find it easier to allow others to live their lives the way they choose. Everyone has opinions and all have a right to state these thoughts, and not necessarily only what should be of concern to them. They offer up thoughts on subjects they have nothing to do with. When previously you would have butted heads, now you strategically withdraw. This is better for everyone more specifically you.
The chemical reaction to anger in our brain takes about 90 seconds to complete. Next time someone presses your buttons and you begin to react like your old drinking days, count to 90 instead of getting defensive and see what happens! During that one minute and thirty seconds, you could be walking away from the situation and getting on with your life, leaving your antagonist to live their life the way they choose. This is truly “Live And Let Live”.
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