In this episode, we revisit his quote about his mother’s alcoholism, “she taught me how to survive her”.
Kirkland shares about his life with addiction in numerous family members, and coming to internalize addiction as a no fault disease.
The reality of addiction being an equal opportunity disease that has an impact on ever family member in so many different and similar ways.
Kirkland clearly articulates the variety of emotions around his mother and her not having found recovery – from anger to “intense compassion” that have happened due to his commitment to his own recovery and dedication to his well being.
If you have not read the book, I highly encourage you to do so. Filthy Beasts is available on Amazon, and at your local bookstores. In the book Kirkland Hamill offers a perspective as the son of and sibling of people battling the disease of addiction. He uses humor, intelligence, humility, honesty, and great writing.
Find resources and the transcript of this episode on my webpage
embracefamilyrecovery.com
See full transcript of the episode below
Intro: You’re listening to The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. A place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host Margaret swift Thompson.
Margaret: Welcome back today Kirkland Hamill the author of Filthy Beasts and I continue our conversation about his story as a family member where the disease of addiction was ever present in more than one person. We start by revisiting Kirkland’s quote “you taught me how to survive you’ when sharing about how he navigated his mother’s addiction let’s get back to Kirkland.
Margaret: I want to go back to that ’cause that’s blown me away. I’ve read your book but of course you know it inside and out. She taught me how to survive you.
Kirkland: Yes. Yeah, she, that ferocity, that sort of, that, that commitment to being who she was and not caring what other people thought about her. In a different circumstance would have made her a very formidable person and a very impressive person. And you know I’m aware of a lot of the context around this she grew up at a time when as she said herself, she was raised to be married and have children. She was very smart, probably very capable of doing all sorts of things. She was also very beautiful, and which can be a trap within itself. Again, nobody is going to be crying over the poor beautiful person. But you could see how somebody who is desired, and she was married at 21 and married a very well, into a very wealthy family and you know. You tell that story and you think OK it’s like a fairy tale. Fairy tales are never real when it comes to situations like that. She just I think placed herself into a box that she didn’t belong in and then argued for the fact that she should stay in the box. Argued to herself, argued to the world, and when the box got too small, she tried to drink herself into being okay in it. And you know, that doesn’t work out for anybody.
Margaret: Being such a great equalizer, it affects everybody in very similar ways. But when there is a lot of means, there’s often a sicker outcome for the person with the illness because there’s so many people to cover, cleanup, hide. And by no means do I minimize someone who’s homeless and how painful the realities of those consequences are. But they end up in the same place potentially, death.
Kirkland: Yeah,
Margaret: The difference is one in the corner office with the whole team taking care of them despite them turning yellow, and the other one’s on the street right. It is painful to watch either way.
Kirkland: Yeah. I think my mother, her second husband was a world class enabler. I mean to the point whereby the time we finally had an intervention she was close to death, and that was the only time he sort of decided that OK I can. There’s nowhere else to go now. She wasn’t coming out of her room, I mean it was just sort of at the last, you know part of it and even after all that we put her into rehab, and she was only there for three days. Because when she gave him a call and said I don’t like it here, and I’m miserable, and they’re being mean to me. He picked her up and took her out, and they had enough money where she could have a fulltime nurse. That there was somebody there to take care of her. That the bank account wasn’t depleted by not having a job or drinking yourself into poverty. There were the means to continue doing what they were doing without consequences, besides the internal ones, and the physical ones, and the medical ones. The real consequences that mean you can’t actually get up and go to a store, you can’t physically get up and go to a store and you don’t have the money to do it. Those barriers never, they never happened so the outcome was, I think outcomes as you’re saying are probably better for people who at some point have to do something different because the world isn’t supporting what they are doing anymore. In my mother’s world was supported in what she was doing until the day she died.
Margaret: Do you ever feel angry at the disease for taking your mom?
Kirkland: Not anymore. I was angry. I had all sorts of conflicting emotions while I was going through it but, I really grieved her for a long time before she died. To the point where even before she died, I was moving into compassion and I, that wasn’t a slow, it wasn’t a slow process it was a long process, and it took a lot of work and a lot of you know just getting to the point where I could express it and purge it and all of those things. But I did get to the point where, we talk about alcoholism as a disease. but we don’t place it in the same category as cancer or something else that was thrown up on somebody and they then died of cancer. You don’t think “Oh well they brought it on themselves’. With alcoholism we still do. That they, and partially I understand that because an alcoholic can, there is treatment available, but part of the disease is that at some point people don’t think they
Margaret: It tricks you. It tricks you into you thinking you don’t have the problem.
Kirkland: Right, you don’t have the problem and you don’t, everybody else is the problem. I mean it does, that’s why it’s a multi layered disease. It isn’t just a physical disease it is a mental disease. So, when I had a lot of sadness over the fact that I didn’t have the mother that I wanted to have or that I thought I should have and all of those illusions we tell ourselves about. You know who we think our parents should actually be. I am aware that objectively speaking I was robbed of a certain quality of parent, but you know, I got to the point where I’m a full-grown human being and I’ve figured out other ways to parent myself, and to get support and do all of those things that a parent can do. I’ve got great friends and I invest a lot in my own mental health and wellbeing. And now my over-arching feeling about it is intense compassion. There’s no way my mother would have looked at herself as a 21 year old beautiful, vibrant person and mapped out dying at 61 years old looking like she was 85, in a bedroom by herself. That’s not how that’s not how she wanted to live her life and the disease of alcoholism is the reason that, you know that, that disease took her life.
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Margaret: As you share what came up for me was a quote from Brené Brown where she said about addiction “genetics loads the gun environment pulls the trigger”. The baffling nature of addiction, unlike any other disease twists the mind not only of the person with the disease but the loved ones also and makes it incredibly hard to see the true nature of the disease.
Margaret: If it were enough to watch your mother go through that, for any of you boys. There’s no way any of you boys would choose to drink.
Kirkland: Of course, yeah.
Margaret: Certainly, you wouldn’t choose to be an alcoholic.
Kirkland: Right.
Margaret: And yet that was part of the story.
Kirkland: Yes.
Margaret: That it’s not just been your mom.
Kirkland: No, no.
Margaret: And so, I think that’s one of the things that when people are going – but is it really a disease? That’s evidence that it is.
Kirkland: Right.
Margaret: If you were within our power. It wouldn’t happen.
Kirkland: Yeah. And I get the frustration around it because you would think, and a logical person would think, OK this is what happens when you drink too much, and it should be fairly evident to you pretty quickly if you’ve got a problem, and then you should start taking the steps to do something about it. But no, I mean obviously it’s a generational disease most of the people who are alcoholic have an alcoholic parent or have some alcoholic relative and that contributes to, you know them having the disease themselves. I feel very fortunate that, and I don’t place too, ’cause people have asked me you know, how did you, I’m not an alcoholic and you know both my brothers are, and my father, and my mother the entire family. My grandparents probably were, and they say well how did you come out OK, and the others really struggled. And there are two ways to look at that. There’s a way to look at it and go, well I’m just such an amazing human being that, I just you know I transcend whatever and you know yay for me. There is also the real possibility that I just didn’t have the gene that they do, and I was lucky to be spared it. And you know I give myself a lot of credit for working with what I have and to, and using what I’ve learned, and having the humility. And all of those things that I do give myself credit for. But the judgment of me as somebody who in some ways is you know, just did something better. I don’t know that I can answer that question definitively. It could just be that I got lucky.
Margaret: I absolutely agree with you the genetics piece and the fortune of not having the gene potentially, but I also would assume you would agree with me, those on the Al-Anon side of this coin suffer and struggle and are messy. And are master manipulators, sometimes even better at it than the addict. And even though the out of control behavior that one sees in an active addict is so glaring, I think the same happens for many of the family members. It’s just the mask wearing of covering it may look a little more intact until it actually falls apart.
Kirkland: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a kick in the teeth right. To be married to an alcoholic or have an alcoholic parent and then to eventually accept the fact that you are sick too, and there’s no longer this kind of you know I’m better than you are thing. I know you know this doing what you, do but a lot of the times you know if there’s an alcoholic parent, two parents and one of them is an alcoholic, a lot of times the children are hugging the alcoholic and like telling the non-alcoholic one to go screw themselves because the non-alcoholic one is acting like a raving lunatic because they are now sick with the disease of alcoholism. And you know, there’s overcompensation, there’s controlling, there’s all those things that happen to people who are in an alcoholic environment and don’t happen to be the addict. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. It’s all so, in the sense that I recognize that I was sick, and I got myself help.
Margaret: Absolutely!
Kirkland: Absolutely I give myself a ton of credit for that.
Margaret: I’m glad. And I hope that it gives people out there, permission to do the same. It’s miserable to be in that pain and not allow yourself that help.
Kirkland: Well and you know, pain like that is deceptive right, because you can get so used to it that you don’t even know that there’s another layer or a level that people are living on. And you have no concept that that’s even a possibility until you start doing the work to get out of the pain that you’re in and decide that you’re going to live more meaningful happy life. People can be very good at coping and I decided that that wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to just be a really good coper, I wanted to actually heal a lot of these wounds. So that you know there’s a pathway before me where I could proactively live as full of life as I could. And people tell themselves all sorts of stories about you know the longsuffering person who’s you know, the stiff upper lip and they’re never going to complain, and they’re going to be a Paragon of patience and virtue. And great if that’s the story that you want to tell yourself but there’s more out there than just surviving something like this. There’s actually thriving and, making all sorts of other choices outside of this environment if you choose to discover what that is.
Margaret: Yes, and that’s an example, thank you for sharing that, of the parallel experience which is the family disease. The justification, the denial, the rationalization, the tolerance that grows within both sides of the coin. The one who’s using gains a tolerance until it bottoms out ’cause they’re so far gone that they can’t achieve the same drunk or high with the amount, it’s just faster. I think the same tolerance happens for family members. It’s like the frog in the boiling water. You throw him in a boiling pot, there out
Kirkland: right
Margaret: You slowly raise that temperature they stay. And I that, in my humble opinion, is the family experience to a T.
Kirkland: Yeah, yeah. I think you know at some point people. I remember my mother used to say this all the time, you know, she’d say, you know I’m just so strong, and she was so invested in this idea of being strong and on the cosmetically she was strong. I mean you threw a cross word her way and she would come right back at you, and she was, you know, very good at protecting herself in all sorts of ways. And especially for a woman, she was at that time, she didn’t put up with a lot of, she wasn’t you know sitting back and just allowing things. She was she was reacting, and she had all that stuff going on. But I think there are a lot of people who are in difficult circumstances who think to themselves, well I’m strong and I can handle this and I’m going to be OK. Part of developing that narrative about yourself is also limiting yourself. Strength only takes you so far. In my, in my circumstance I had that same reaction for a while. That you know, I’ve got the, you know I’m so emotionally strong and intellectually adept at navigating all these things. And eventually I realized that, that was one aspect of myself that was sort of dominating the rest of it and I was missing out on a whole, you know delightful part of being a human being. Because I was so invested in that narrative about myself and I think that happens on both sides of the addiction equation, is that you know people create these narratives about how they’re just enduring these things and somehow the sake of enduring it is supposed to be enough and it’s not the. There’s so much more out there.
Margaret: Yeah, and I also, you know my heart hurts, I never knew your mom. A little back story for Kirkland and I. We both hailed from the island of Bermuda for a period together. We are at the same age, and you know in circles where I socially knew of you but had no idea of your story and your background. So, it’s been kind of amazing to get to know you now as grownups, having been through recovery, and the privilege of hearing your story and reading your story. I envision your mother and as you described her beautiful, and articulate, and intelligent, and tenacious you know, you know some of the stories are amazing. That she didn’t give a hoot about someone else, and that her strength was definitely some of her survival. And yet how so heartbreaking is it that, that possibly was the reason she could not surrender to get help.
Kirkland: Absolutely no doubt about it. Her stubbornness was the part of her that was ultimately the most destructive. And it’s again, it’s seems kind of counter intuitive because when we talk about strong people and we talk about that a lot in our societies and it’s a very admirable thing to say about somebody. I again and this is through Al-Anon. I don’t know if it was at a particular meeting but there was a way that somebody phrased the concept of strength through vulnerability. That really kind of hit me one day, and I recognized the difference between cosmetic strength and real strength and resilience.
Margaret: Please come back next Sunday when Kirkland will read an excerpt from his book Filthy Beasts. If you have not read the book, I highly encourage you to do so. Filthy Beasts is available on Amazon, and at your local bookstores. In the book Kirkland offers a perspective as the son of and sibling of people battling the disease of addiction. He uses humor, intelligence, humility, honesty, and great writing.
Outro: I want to thank my guest for their courage, and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story. Please find resource is on my website embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret Swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you.
