There's a better life, there's a better life.” This is exactly where I was in life during my drinking. I continued to walk the same path (in a drunken state), making poor decisions, waking up with regrets, waking up with hangovers, not remembering the night before, not living in the moment, not being there for my family, all the while allowing the bottle to whisper in my ear, “I am what you need, I am your pain reliever.” The bottle was a liar. The bottle claimed it would fill the holes inside, but it just created more. But I was stuck in the cycle, I was enslaved to repeating the same mistakes of generations. And my master was alcohol. But there was good news. As the lyrics of “Chain Breaker” say, “there’s a better life,” I just had to discover it… by breaking the cycle. While most of us have broken the cycle of our drinking, there are perhaps other cycles we desire to break as well. Some of these cycles will be broken as a bi-product of not drinking – lying, toxic relationships, unhealthy lifestyle… but others, we have to take action - face head-on in our sober state and make intentional changes. Dr. Ann-Louise Lockhart, a pediatric psychologist and parent coach, suggests five beginning steps in breaking cycles in her article Repeating Cycles and How to Break Them: 1. Make a record of patterns of behaviors. You can do this through video/voice recording, journaling, or sharing your journey with others (i.e, podcasts, blogging, social media). 2. Determine your triggers. These are things that really grind your gears and things that you have an exaggerated emotional or mental reaction to beyond what should be expected. You can ask: “What is this the reaction I’m having to this event? Is it really about just this event or all the events that look like this one?”
I grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive father. We have long-since reconciled and made mutual amends; but the scars will always remain. My father also abused alcohol before I was born. I was never a witness to his reckless and unlawful behavior when he was drinking, but the stories I have been told from him, my mother, other family members, and family friends, lead me to believe he was not the type of person you would want to be with when he was drinking. He was arrested numerous times, was caught in several bar fights and brawls, and had a violent streak with a temper that continued to reside in his hands and fists long after he gave up the bottle and had become a father. I often found myself on the receiving end of his temper growing up and recall cowering under his painful hits, all while telling me, you made me do this, I didn’t want to, or I am doing this because I love you. Some love. I vowed that if I ever had children, I would never raise my hand against them. And to this day, I do not discipline with any type of physical pain or contact. A family history of abuse and alcoholism is a familiar story among the readers of these pages. For some, it’s a story all too real and triggering. For others, it’s a story heard often in rooms of recovery and support meetings. Family abuse and alcoholism quickly become a cycle, passed from generation to generation, each child conforming to what they believed was a normal upbringing, adopting their childhood and adolescent environment as their own approach to life and the families they would one day have of their own. And the cycle continues, on and on and on. Until it doesn’t. Until the day, it is finally broken. Broken with resolve. Broken with honesty. And broken with an unyielding determination to reset the course of history. There is a song named “Chain Breaker” by Christian recording artist Zach Williams. In the opening verse, Zach sings, “If you've been walking the same old road for miles and miles... If you've been hearing the same old voice tell the same old lies… If you're trying to fill the same old holes inside…
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