The Angry Addict

I wrote an article for a website recently that focuses on the life and recovery of addicts. Rare is the person who doesn't have an addict of some kind in their life. Hopefully this material will be helpful to you.

Unresolved anger – much of it hidden and some expressed very destructively, stands as a Bigfoot blocking the door to an addict’s successful living. After working with alcoholics and drug addicts, many of them having tasted prison life, I can affirm the voices of Mike Waltermire of Nampa Lighthouse Mission and Daniel Gorman of Bakersfield Rescue Mission who say that alcoholics and addicts have as one of the greatest challenges the resolution of deep anger issues.

Gorman goes on to say that if one would peel back all the onion layers of disparaging living in search for the root causes of why people are homeless and on the streets, the cause is unforgiveness – the inability to forgive oneself or to forgive others. Again, issues of unresolved anger, because anger that “spends the night” becomes resentment and bitterness that manifests itself in an unforgiving spirit.

The trumpet is blaring, “Face the extent of the angry wounds you carrry. Plow up the entangled roots of resentment and begin to unravel the knots of frustation that are keeping you from living successfully. Until you do, your addiction will lie like a slumbering giant ogre to be awakened by a Jack and the Beanstock situation. Anger will seep out in the slightest form of irritation or erupt in a volcanic explosion of rage (even toward loved ones) or implode, expressing itself in some form of physical/mental/emotional/social dysfunction.

More tomorrow