If you want love, give love

There is a particular and very frequent moment in groups of drinkers who gather at home or in clubs or pubs. It is when one of them decides to leave. Automatically, somebody else will try to prevent it, basically always with the same motivation: no one lives until we finish the bottle! Or no one leaves until the club closes! That's nice, I'd say. That's so sweet; When she was fighting the second time, whenever she would see angels, I would get mad and talk to God. Hey, get your angels out of here! You can't have her; Amanda was calm in these moments. Mom, Jesus is going to take me up to heaven; It's not okay! I'd say, but she was just so clear about everything. I knew she was going to heaven, and she knew, too. Death, as Mary Anna implied, poses a grave challenge to the ability to lead a meaningful life. If our lives will end anyway and we will soon be forgotten, what is the point of anything we do? This is the problem that led Will Durant to write that letter to his friends. In the absence of a definitive belief in an afterlife, the philosopher was in search of a meaning that cannot be annulled by death. Is there one? William Breitbart, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, specializes in end-of-life care for terminally ill cancer patients.

He has devoted the better part of his life to answering the challenge that death poses to meaning. His groundbreaking research shows that while the specter of death often leads people to conclude that their lives are meaningless, it can also be a catalyst for them to work out, as they have never done before, the meaning of their lives. Contemplating death can actually help us, if we have the proper mindset, to lead more meaningful lives and to be at peace when our final moment on earth arrives. Meaning and death, Breitbart believes, are two sides of the same coin--the two fundamental problems of the human condition. You don't need to walk to the edge of this cliff to test it. In order to stay safe, you would likely retreat. Similarly, if you notice a slightly slick surface in front you, once you have attempted to move on slick surfaces a time or two, you learn two basic lessons: first, to watch for slick surfaces, and secondly, to respect and be careful on them. The lessons we learn--either firsthand or through hearing others share their stories--are essentially about being aware, taking care, and having respect for yourself, other people (and sentient beings), things (including the elements), and situations. For example, if you have ever had a sunburn or experienced a burn from a flame, you likely learned a lesson about how to respect sunlight or fire. If a massive ocean wave has ever rolled you over, you likely learned to be respectful of the ocean's power. If you have ever been punched (literally or figuratively) by someone for saying something unloving or offensive, another lesson landed. If you have ever made a decision that you knew in your gut was wrong for you, you likely received a lesson about having reverence for the quiet promptings of your gut feeling. If you make a choice in which you've reacted out of fear, you are re-acting the fear. The result of reacting out of fear will most likely be some degree of unease, suffering, or pain (at least not an experience in a pure loving state. The last drink story. These are statements that betray the competition created between them quite explicitly, where the winner will be the one able to drink the most, the one able to stand more time and the one capable of beating alcohol. Another example that reveals how alcoholics compete on the extreme of strength is when they show their respect among themselves based on how much alcohol they can throw into the body before collapsing. The greater amount of alcohol that can be consumed, the greater the respect by others. This also occurs when an alcoholic person drinks alone. In that case, the competition is not with other people but with the bottle itself, with the difference that with other people you can win or lose (let's say that.

In any case, the part where codependency is most involved in alcoholism is when we are codependent and try to save a loved one from alcoholism. Since the alcoholic are persons in difficulty (and terribly dependent, not only on alcohol but also on codependents) it automatically becomes a situation from which the codependents will not be able to withdraw, we will feel the irrepressible need to intervene with the fantasy of being able to save the dependent/addict by leaving the tunnel or preventing them from entering. In fact, to be exact, as codependents we feel an imperious need to intervene even if the people in our radar are not in a real situation of drug addiction or alcoholism yet, but they give signals that we, as codependents, consider worrying. Regardless of addiction stage, if we are codependents, the dependent willingly or unwillingly must play the role of the person to be saved. She made it more real for me. I had always believed in heaven. I always believed Jesus died on the cross. God gave me peace in my heart. God is love, in whatever language you speak and wherever you are. If you seek Him out, and the pure love He has for you as His child, you will find it. I always tell people that God is a gentleman. He's not going to barge in on you unless you invite Him in. He may knock on the door, but unless you open it, you're not going to know Him. With this history deep in my heart, we headed for Rome. How should a human being live a finite life? How can we face death with dignity and not despair? What redeems the fact that we will die? These questions roll around Breitbart's mind every day as he works with patients facing life's final challenge. Breitbart was born in 1951 and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Jews from eastern Poland, narrowly avoided Hitler's death camps.

During the war, they hid from the Nazis in the woods, and his father fought in the underground resistance movement. After the war ended, the two of them found themselves in a displaced-persons camp, and it was there that they got married. When they moved to America, they carried their memories of the war years with them. Breitbart's childhood was steeped in that tragic past. There is fear that has not yet been converted back into love. LEARNING RESPECT An awareness of and respect for your intuition might be positively reinforced by a lack of physical pain. For example, if you respect your own gut feeling that you should rest when your body and/or mind are tired, you will wake up feeling more refreshed. Yet, ultimately, you learn from simple directives of love (upon noticing there is fatigue, you take care and rest). To care for the body that you inhabit supports the brain stem and mammalian brain. This respect is important to your physical survival and, at some level, it is instinctual. However, many people, quite innocently and accidentally, associate the lesson on respect for a thing to a lesson of fearing that thing. In other words, instead of learning respect, they innocently and mistakenly learn to fear that which can potentially cause pain. Similarly, they can learn to fear fear itself. Within the most common scenario, the codependent enter the scene as the strong hero: I am strong and save, you are dependent and alcoholic, so you are weak and I rescue you by giving you my strength. However, we have seen, that within the polarities this attitude is translated into a pure illusion destined for failure. When a strong person controls a weak person in a conduct so intimately linked with the strong-weak polarity, the only possible result is always the same: the closer the contact between the strong and the weaker, the more both positions become extreme: the strong one will be stronger, the weak one will be weaker. So, the alcohol addict will sink faster and deeper into the addiction. It will do so because it respects the law of polarity. In spite of all, we invented the polarities to create and consolidate our identity, this is what polarity can do, protect the identities of one and the other, the dependent will increasingly confirm his identity as weak and he will sink more and more into drug addiction while the codependent will confirm his identity as strong and will feel increasingly satisfied by this, even if he cannot recover the person to be saved.

The scenario does not change too much if both the codependent and the dependent/alcoholic reflect each other on weakness, so in this case, the situation is a competition between weak and weak. Being a competition, now we know what will happen: one will try to be weaker than the other. The dependent/alcoholic will try to do it by drinking more and more and the codependent will try to stop it, suffering more and more, and facing a dangerous risk: in the weak-weak competition, also the codependent will run the serious risk of chasing the dependent in the fight against the bottom, it means the codependent can become alcoholic. This gives us a clear idea of why in self-help groups for alcoholics, one of the main concerns is to limit contacts between the alcoholic persons and the codependent people of their family. Amanda knew God even better than I. It was just a part of her being, part of her essence. Our doctor collaborated with the pediatric hospital in Rome, so by the time we arrived they knew all about Amanda. We paid for insurance to fly her home, in case she passed away, because there was a very real possibility that she would die on our trip. We toured Rome in a wheelchair, and it was interesting. You don't see many wheelchairs in Italy. I don't know what they do with people who depend on them because they have cobblestone roads everywhere. People look at you like you're an idiot for bringing somebody in a wheelchair out in public. In fact, some people stared at us, as if we were doing something ridiculous to disturb them. It became comical. Every morning, his mother would ask him at the breakfast table, Why am I here? Why, she wondered, did she live when so many others had died? I grew up with a sense of responsibility to justify my parents' survival and to create something in the world that would be significant enough to make my life worthwhile. It's no coincidence, he laughed, that I ended up at Sloan Kettering, where the people wear striped gowns and are facing death. Breitbart came to Sloan Kettering in 1984 because he wanted to live at the edge of life and death. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and young men Breitbart's age were dying all around him.