Conditioning

Conditioning.  As with everything else, depending on how you use it determines whether it's going to be helpful or hurtful.  For me, conditioning has made me feel like Scrooge, stuck with his ghosts of Christmas pasts and present.  Conditioning is my third stage.  I am conditioned by certain smells, sounds, and sights, that can resurrect such gut retching feelings that I have to make a forced and conscious effort to drag my thinking away from the memory. 

At home, there are certain routines that, when I notice them either in progress or see that they have been done, the dread inside me begins to swirl: addiction is in the room, like a phantom, hovering in a corner manipulating her thinking and behaviors.  Some of these behaviors don't always signal its arrival, but most of them do.  Crazy as this sounds, there is a chowder that my daughter likes to cook.  On most of the occasions she's cooked it, she has been drinking.  So, when I come home, and the house smells like that delicious soup, my conditioning overrides that initial joy and the spirit of darkness  begins to shadow the room. 

There are various places around where I live that when I'm driving on roads that take me to places I love to go, those same roads are now a little darker for me with the ghosts of behaviors past looming and gawking at me as I drive by.  "There was where she was drunk, waiting for me to pick her up."  "Over there was where I saw her coming out of a liquor store before class."  "Here is where she almost jumped out of the car as I was driving."  I hear whispered in my head.  Even the college she attended, which is beautiful, holds spectres of drunken memories. I can feel myself grip the steering wheel harder.  My jaw tightens as these conditioned responses become so nauseating to me, that I have to force myself to look straight ahead while I drive, and concentrate on my destination rather than the drive because I can feel a whole new level of anger and resentment bubbling inside me like some witch's black cauldron. 

I do try to over come these conditioned responses.  I try to force myself to look at these places, smell the scents and listen to the sounds that, before the alcohol, where harmless and enjoyable.  I try to resurrect those memories or, if I can't, I try to lay the new ones to rest. Dead and buried memories that should never have been given  life in the first place.