Many addicts find kicking addiction just first step in recovery

Your description of addicts seems to perfectly fit people with personality disorders? Yes? If so, what am I observing? - T.H., Las Vegas (T.H. is responding to my May 29 column in View, which you can reference at this link: lvrj.com/view/families-should-overcome-fear-of-forcing-addicts-to-face-reality-155252265.html.)

In one form or another, I've been doing what I do on this planet for nearly 28 years. And when I step back and observe the "pie graph" of chemical dependents/addicts/alcoholics I've encountered, two concurrent observations happen with great regularity.

The first is no surprise: depression. Addicts/alcoholics are often - and I mean preponderantly so - suffering from significant to severe depression. This population is often "self-medicating." Ironically, depressed patients become addicts/alcoholics often because they are trying to feel better! In some cases, the patient's strategy to feel better is not to feel at all. To sedate all feelings and emotions. Alcohol is a depressant, of course, and treating depression with a depressant is a really bad idea.

T.H., you, however, have your finger on another concurrent observation about addicts/alcoholics, both in the research and in my own anecdotal experience: a diagnosable personality disorder. I did not say that all addicts have diagnosable personality disorders. I said that personality disorders are overly represented in the population of patients who are addict/alcoholic.

I think Alcoholics Anonymous put an unwitting finger on this when it coined the jargon "dry drunk." A dry drunk is an alcoholic who has stopped drinking yet continues to exhibit problematic interpersonal and social behavior typically identified with a practicing alcoholic. Said another way: For many or most addicts/alcoholics, ceasing the drug/alcohol use is just the beginning of the work of recovery.

I always smile when I remember sitting with my newly in-recovery addicted niece at a newcomers meeting. The speaker ended his presentation by giving the audience this warning: "I'm a recovering alcoholic. But when I stopped drinking, I immediately saw the bigger problem. I am also a recovering (far end of the alimentary canal)."

I counted this admission as both dear and courageous. Here was a man whose recovery necessitated digging deep into issues of personality and psychological maturity, all of which he'd been avoiding with drinking.

The APA's Diagnostic Statisticians Manual identifies 14 types of personality disorders divided into four clusters. But I thought the late M. Scott Peck did the best job of providing a simple understanding. He said that personality disorders (of whatever type) could be understood as a person who chronically assumed too little responsibility for events and circumstances around him or her.

Because they can't? Or because they won't? The only thing we know for sure is that they don't.

I see it over and over again. Listen to addicts/alcoholics not in recovery; they are the unluckiest people I know. They have the most car trouble, are delayed in more traffic jams, possess the most poorly manufactured cellphones and alarm clocks, meet more mean people who don't like them, suffer more unfairness ... than any part of the population I know. They seem the last to recognize any relationship between their misery and their own choices.

I wrote a song about it once: "Sober Consequence." The story is told from the perspective of an addict alcoholic man, getting (finally) dumped by his wife:

"Who is the woman who stands at the stairway and watches the tirade of lies/ And who is the lady whose stone-faced Gibraltar belies the deep wound in her eyes/ Who is this lover who martyred her spirit in hopes you'd remove your disguise/ She's one and the same with the woman whose pain has prepared her to tell you goodbye.

"You're so surprised at the sight of a suitcase mocking you there by the door/ And your bag of tricks stuffed with sincere persuasions, it never failed you before/ Oh, lessons learned, all those victories you earned, looks like they cost you the war/ Strange as it might seem in your self-centered dreams, she just doesn't care any more.

"You might someday admit that she was right/ Could be the start of a change/ Then you'll be ready to hold a woman dear/ But you won't be holding her.

When will you get it, you don't comprehend, what's occurring means something's gone wrong/ If you look away from yourself for a moment, you'll see where your ego belongs/ The emptiness in you was meant for your soul, you can't fill it up with some blonde/ The consequence of your addicted self-love is the silence that tells you she's gone."

Maybe the guy in this song will decide to confront himself, grow and change. Or maybe not. Maybe the guy in this song will go pour himself a scotch and nurture his outrage because that bitchy, mean wife of his just doesn't understand.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.