Terminal uniqueness can be defined as the perpetual inclination to think your experience is uniquely different from your fellows. It brings about dangerous side effects—such as pride, isolation and denial. What follows are some reflections on these symptoms and my personal experience with them.
Pride
As humans, we all have the urge to carve out our individuality and to set ourselves apart from our family and peers. That is natural. What plagues the terminally unique is not just the urge to be original but the need to be utterly different from the rest of the world. For the sake of pride, the sufferer is incapable of relating to the experiences of others. In the rooms, I’ve heard it expressed as comparing out.
Sitting in my counselor’s office nine years ago, I certainly wasn’t thinking about terminal uniqueness. I just wanted out of the rehab facility altogether. We battled it out in his office on the reg.
“I don’t belong here.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Tell me, why don’t you belong here?”
“These guys have lost their wives, their children, their jobs. They have real problems.”
“And what makes you so different.”
“I only harmed myself.”
“Is that so?” He leaned back in his chair, having played this game of chess before, knowing I gave him the upper-hand. “When your parents got the phone call in the middle of the night that you were in the hospital, were they harmed?”
“Not physically.”
“So only physical harm is harm done?”
“This guy shared in group how he beat his wife, and she left him. I’ve never hit a woman.”
The conversation continued in this fashion for as long as the counselor was willing to hear my pesky defenses.
My pride could not bring me to admit that I was just like those other men in group. I was an alcoholic and an addict. Instead of looking for similarities, I was on the hunt for differences, for facts that kept me thinking I was different from rather than similar to.
Isolation
Another symptom of the terminally unique is the affinity for isolation. Not in the spiritual Buddha-under-a-tree brand of solitude, but a more insidious persistence to distance yourself from the people closest to you.
Let me paint a picture of sickly happiness for you—this happened in the murky depths of my bottom, a few months before I was in my counselor’s office:
My roommates were gone for the weekend—that was a good thing. That was a great thing.
It meant I no longer had to pretend like I cared about seeing the light of day. I could stay in the apartment, getting high and drunk how I wanted, with no one there to judge me.
I remember this day particularly well because I was shaking in the morning uncontrollably. I had the “thirst.” The thirst cannot be described in the common understanding of thirst—it is not the thirst at the end of a workout or the start of your day. It is not like your typical thirst because it cannot be quenched. It’s like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a water hose.
When the thirst kicks in, it is registering from some deep, unchartered place in your soul. The grand illusion is that you can quench it, but you can’t.
To keep from shaking, I drank a bottle of red wine in a matter of a few chugs. The bottle was empty and I didn’t feel the least bit drunk—not even tipsy. My hand stopped shaking. I drank that bottle of wine in less than a minute just to feel normal.
This was a uniqueness that I couldn’t show to my friends—that I had to hide from the world. It is that uniqueness that nearly killed me.
Denial
Terminal uniqueness feeds denial like a 24-hour buffet. The more unique I think myself to be, the more I deny the shared humanity I possess. I believe freedom from any addiction begins with the simple admission that we share the same crippling humanity. Healing can begin when we are neither better nor worse than our fellow human beings.
“I’m not as bad as that guy. He’s fresh out of jail.”
“If you lost your mother like I did, you’d drink like I drink.”
“The biggest problem in your life is alcohol? Pick up a needle and I’ll show you a real problem.”
“You think getting arrested is tough? Try losing custody of your kids.”
“You had a $100-a-day habit? Mine was $1,000.”
I’ve heard other variations of these statements and thought up a dozen more on my own. I am an addict, so denial is anything in my thought process that tries to convince me that I am not an addict, or that I am better or worse than an addict.
This is how the power of 12-step meetings crushes my terminal uniqueness. “My name is Mark, I am an alcoholic and an addict.” Others share their names and introduce themselves in the same way. It is a level playing field where denial cannot erode our sense of self.
Pride, isolation and denial are plagues of one illness. The illness that convinces me that I am different, better, worse or destined for greater or lesser things, that I deserve better or worse and that I should have more or less than another.
There is great power in being ordinary. You can begin to understand that it is common to strive for greatness, to have epiphanies, to be inspired, to love and to care for others. I’ve experienced these realizations the sharpest when I recognize that they come from the commonwealth of human experience—not from the narrow path I fight to carve, but the broad highway of shared humanity.
The great discoveries that have made the difference in my life all began when I was willing to listen. What unites us will always be stronger than what divides us, and t is the power of unity that I rely upon to stay clean and sober, one day at a time.
The post The Problem With Addicts Thinking They are Unique appeared first on Rehab Reviews.