Warped lives, fierce resentmant

An illness of this sort - and we have come to believe it an illness - involves those about us in a way no other human sickness can. If a person has cancer all are sorry for him and no one is angry or hurt. But not so with the alcoholic illness, for with it there goes annihilation of all the things worth while [sic] in life. It engulfs all whose lives touch the sufferer's. It brings misunderstanding, fierce resentment, financial insecurity, disgusted friends and employers, warped lives of blameless children, sad wives and parents - anyone can increase the list. 

- Alcoholics Anonymous, p.18

In those days, the Fellowship was very leery of using the term "disease." There are a number of euphemisms employed (illness, malady, sickness, etc.) but it is used only one time in the first 164 pages. (page 64) I'm not sure about their trepidation, but I suspect that society at large would find it just another excuse for alkies to absolve themselves of any moral culpability.

That it differed in a substantial way is the rationale for this paragraph. Cancer is used as the epitome of a physical ailment quite beyond the moral control of the victim.  But alcoholism (as a "disease"") seems to be of a totally different genre. It is undoubtedly in the class in the class of mental illness.Yet, to the outside world, it was in to way involuntary. Schizophrenia and other psychoses are illnesses over which the sufferer has no control. But the consensus was that alcoholism was a matter of mind over body, a matter of will power.

And there was no sense in which the alcoholic could not fail to engulf (great word) the lives of those around him. The alcoholic engulfed everyone who touched his life Of all the effects listed, "fierce resentment" tops the list because it is the final result of all the other things iterated. Anyone guilty of these misdeeds knows that the bottled up anger of those we loved was the most heartbreaking of all, and it was the one thing for which we could never make right. I would only add to that the "warped lives of blameless children" since resentment was something that children would only learn later.

God, what a cheerful passage!. But aren't we all aware of it? Doesn't it lurk in the back of out minds? When we glibly say that we "had to make amends to ourselves first," aren't we aware of just how much havoc we caused in the lives of those we touched? Is there any guilt stalking us?