Addiction Counselors as Mentors
Part Two: Leonard
Leonard
Leonard was not flashy. He was tall, thin, and dressed neatly in white, brown, and gray business casual. Leonard was a quiet and unassuming leader who did not get much attention. Instead, he gave attention.
One evening Leonard had been running a group counseling session and one of the clients had made a physical threat toward me. I heard later that Leonard had kicked the client out of the program, there and then. Violence or the threat of violence was unacceptable, and Leonard had unambiguously taken a stand.
I am reluctant to include this story as the reader may wonder what I had done to aggravate the client enough to evoke threats of violence.
I still don’t know. What had I done? Was the fault mine?
My resistance to including this story is an example of “shadow.” A theme in much of my writing. My ego wants to control the face it shows the world. That is my persona. I have the fear that you, the reader, will think less of me. When I share the story, I think less of me. It reminds me of a time when I often felt incompetent. It reminds me of bad outcomes that I worry may have been my fault.
Resistance to shadow work is understandable as it is like pulling on the extruding thread of a sweater and fearing that the whole garment might unravel.
If I stop being sarcastic (fill in the blank), will I have any personality left?
I was amazed and appreciative that Leonard had stuck up for me. I didn’t have the ego strength at the time to make that type of decision and I couldn’t comprehend how he had done it.
Leonard, like Carl, also liked to tell stories. He told of the first time he drank alcohol. As best I recall, he was by himself at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, high atop a skyscraper, overlooking the city. A young, urban business stud, the world . . . his oyster. He drank a martini. The feeling. Perfection. His night ended thirty martinis later. Thirty! And at San Francisco hotel prices, that must have been quite a bill. It seems that the bill kept coming because if we fast forward a few years, Leonard is a skid row bum; all he owns is a sleeping bag, tattered and stained from sleeping in parks and on the sides of roads.
Fast forward again and Leonard is in the hospital with pancreatitis. The most painful thing you can imagine, like a knife in the gut, was how he described it. He could hardly move. His long-term alcoholism had finally caught up.
The doctors told him that drinking again would kill him. Yet a drink was the single thing he craved. Drinking was killing him; not drinking was killing him. Impossible to change, impossible not to.
Leonard loved to tell the story of the guy, an alcoholic, who removed the windshield wiper reservoir from under the hood of his car and dumped out the contents. He refilled the rigid plastic vessel with scotch or whiskey or rum or gin or vodka and then rerouted the plastic tubing away from the windshield and into the interior of his car. A glass held surreptitiously underneath the one-way catheter and a half dozen flicks of the windshield wiper lever, and he was in business. I always imagined the car to be a weathered but finely tuned Delta 88, the entrepreneurial spirit mixed with resourcefulness and style. Truth is, the vehicle was more likely a Ford Pinto or a Datsun B 210, a vehicle held together by the ever-present anticipation of another drink.
I imagined that Leonard enjoyed telling that story because he had been impressed by the humor, ingenuity, and desperation of the fixated mind, a mind he knew all too well. Leonard’s story is funny, and it is not so funny, for the reasons we all know.
In reminiscing to myself about Leonard, I wondered what the turning point was for him, the transformation, and now I remember . . . sort of. While Leonard was being treated for his pancreatitis, he somehow ended up down in the basement of the hospital he was in. Then he sees this guy at the end of a hallway, a guy he knows. This freaks Leonard out. There’s some reason that that is not possible. He did not talk to the guy as the guy disappeared around the corner. I wish I could tell you more. Did he think he’d had a hallucination or brain malfunction? Maybe, but I don’t think so. He was spooked. It was more like he’d gotten a sign or a “big” message that he needed to turn things around.
Leonard had been an executive in the oil industry, he was no countercultural flower child, and seeing that guy made an impression. Leonard got and stayed sober.
