The Role of Patience in an Adult Child's Life

Patience, a delay, an endurance, a tolerance, a wait, and a resisted impulse between want, need, or desire and the realization of them, is the virtue that keeps the lid on emotion and action. It is the buffer between now and later. It tempers lack of fulfillment with the expectation that that state will someday be attained. It can serve as the indicator between early childhood, when its lack demands instant gratification, and adulthood, when desire simmers in a pot on the back burner of a person's mind. Coupled with hope, it allows the person to continue traveling toward his still-unachieved goals.

Patience is protraction. It is a temporary acceptance of what is and what has not yet been delivered, facilitating the steps needed to achieve what is hoped will be. It sometimes requires the acceptance of powerlessness, placing in perspective the single human being's limitations and sublimating them to his Higher Power, whose infinite ability to create and deliver may equally require that commodity known as patience before it is realized.

It may be something a person never knew he had or needed until he recalls the times he lost it-or those that led to lack of restraint, endurance, tolerance, and impulse, and whose impetuous emotions and actions led to negative outcomes. They may have actually pushed his goal further away rather than bringing it closer to him.

Like DNA, patience may mark the very makeup of an adult child's life, as he had to endure, tolerate, and sustain the wounds inflicted during a pure- or para-alcoholic upbringing, all without understanding, and then attempt to heal them through recovery, whose interval may be just as long as the childhood itself.

"Recovery is a process," according to Al-Anon's "Courage to Change" text (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 1992, p. 1). "It takes time to regain, reclaim, and recoup all that was lost while we tried on our own to cope with active drinking. Building trust takes time, change takes time, healing and wounds take time; there are no immediate, ready-made solutions."

Change is slow and sometimes laborious. It requires the understanding of what caused the distortions, the regaining of trust, the gradual dismantling of the once-necessary wall of defenses, the rewiring of the brain, the trial-and-error of new ways, and the reconnection with self, others, and his Higher Power, usually one at a time.

Patience is the sleep that separates the setting of the alarm clock from the time it actually rings. It enables the person to pursue the journey from origin (desire) to destination (delivery) and time is the track that connects the two.

"No problem lasts forever," continues "Courage to Change" (ibid, p. 77). "No matter how permanently fixed in the center of our lives it may seem, whatever we experience in this ever-changing life is soon to pass. Even pain."

Nevertheless, this sometimes-intolerable state grinds and refines the soul while it is compressed and contained in physical form.

"Difficult situations often bring out qualities in us that otherwise might not have risen to the surface, such as courage, faith, and our need for one another. All of our experiences can help us to grow," "Courage to Change" concludes (ibid, p. 77).

Patience, in the end, is the slow, silent power of perseverance.

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