When to Abandon a Paper.
A paper I’ve been resubmitting to various journals has now been revised and rejected so many times that I no longer even really remember what it’s about. Ok that’s not true. But it’s a very small result, not particularly novel, and apparently not well written. I think it’s safe to say that the paper, in anything like its current form, is garbage. It’s been rejected from good journals, and mediocre journals, and brand new journals. I’m unwilling to send it to a straight-up bad journal.
I had hoped to get this put out there as a starting piece to a bigger set of papers. But the fact is, it’s not publishable in anything like a good traditional journal. I have no doubt that I could get it into PLOS One (the methods are sound). But I’d have to put up my own money for the OA fees, because it was done as part of a consulting gig and the institution I did it for isn’t going to pay (but certainly doesn’t qualify for a need-based exemption). But the truth is, I’m not sure I really care.
This isn’t a novel result that people need to see in order to do good work. It’s just a thing we did. Not every thing I do needs to be published. That’s just ego, right? Now, I have a co-author who would definitely benefit from it, and so if he is interested in putting it out there again, I certainly won’t object. But I don’t think that this is worth the couple of hours it’ll take for me to reformat and resubmit. It’s just not very good.
Not everything I do has to be great. I did a job. The people paying me were very happy with the job. Maybe that’s good enough. Maybe I don’t need to choke the pages of another journal with my junk. Make room for someone who did something good, instead of resubmitting again and hoping I get lazy or credulous reviewers. When do you decide that something you did just isn’t interesting? For me, it’s now. I wrote a boring, unimportant paper. If you reviewed it, I’m sorry.
Precious Perspective.
The last couple of days have seen me a bit out of sorts. Depressing news from communities I care about. The Cardinals lost. The general stress of looking for a house in ECC. And it’s easy to be frustrated and depressed. I have incredible support in my life, from a bunch of people who really love me. But there’s another source that can ground me in a way that no other source can, for me.
Last night I dropped in on a good old-fashioned church-basement AA meeting. I usually go to my men’s meeting on Wednesdays, but I’d skipped this week to watch the Dodgers stay alive. Feeling angry and resentful and generally full of angst and self-pity, I knew that I needed to pick up a meeting, and not just wait until my next regular meeting came around (which is not often enough, these days).
So I bought a cup of coffee and hit a 7pm meeting near my house. The topic was the seventh chapter of Living Sober, which is about the Serenity Prayer. Now, I don’t pray, really, except at the end of AA meetings. But I believe that the act of prayer, or of mindful meditation, can have a powerful effect on the person praying or meditating. And that thoughtful silence and listening can be among the most powerful tools I have for approaching the world.
So I shut up, and listened to other people talk. The woman who, at 7 years of sobriety, checked herself into a “mental hospital” because she thought she was going to drink. The kid who is just starting, realizing for the first time, “That prayer is talking about me. I have to accept my addiction, but I can change my using.” The middle-aged man saying, “I can’t rely on a higher power. I can only rely on myself. And it keeps leading me back to prison. The last time I went in at 34 and came out at 43. That hurt. But I can’t rely on nobody but me. Maybe if I keep coming back, it’ll change.”
It was a deeply arresting meeting, like so many I’ve been to in the past 2072 days. Deeply calming. Providing perspective on the things in my life that I can’t control. The things I can. The life I want and the relationships that matter. The deep calm and profound gratitude that comes from having survived, through grace and effort, my own otherwise irresistible impulse toward inebriation and death.
I have found the long deep waters of serenity. My only struggle is with myself, to keep from willfully abandoning them.
Step Zero.
The twelve steps are great for recovery. Those who thoroughly follow them rarely fail, the book says. That’s my experience as well. There is a very high correlation – it seems, without doing any actual math – between those who relapse and those who don’t do the steps. As always, I’ll say, AA is certainly not the only way to recover. But it is a way that works for me, and for millions of people who drink like me. And it seems to be the way that works when everything else has failed. For the cohort of drunks for whom none of the easier, softer ways work, the steps are the way that does work, if you follow them.
Step one isn’t quite exactly the first step. It’s the first step on the way to recovery, yes. But before we can admit that we are powerless over alcohol, they have to decide that recovery is for us. We have to decide that we want recovery, and that we’ll go to any length to get it. Step zero is the realization, essentially, that alcohol is interfering with our lives, and that another way exists, and is attractive.
Step one is a relief. It was for me, anyway. It was: I don’t have to fight anymore. I’m powerless. I can’t manage this on my own. I can’t keep trying to battle my addiction. I’ve lost. Step zero is terrifying. Step zero is saying: I think I might need to give up this thing which has become my only reason for living, and the only thing I truly care about.
I think a lot of people don’t recover because they never take step zero. The idea of giving up their drug of choice is so starkly terrifying that they will do anything to avoid looking at it. Vilify friends, abandon children, betray lovers. There is nothing we won’t do to satisfy an addiction when we cannot face that it is the addiction that drives the behavior. It is, among people we know, all too easy to recognize. It’s painfully obvious. I mean that literally. It is painful to see people we care about struggling to accept that they really do have a problem. Especially when they’re lashing out at us personally.
But of course, it’s not personal. Personal attacks are almost never really personal. They’re about the sickness within. And I lament it. I had a sponsee who would constantly say: “I’m not even thinking about alcohol, so why shouldn’t I get a drink. I’m not like you.” I think he’s out there now. Driving high on crack and cursing those who told him he is a danger to himself and others. I’ve seen many people ask for help, think about it, and then decide they’d rather drink than recover.
But we’re all on our own journeys. I’m on mine. And I’m happy with where I am today. Life is good. I’m happy. I’m sober. And I’m moving forward. I’m not alone. None of us have to be.
What we Teach Men.
After a few weeks of pondering this post, and given the sexual harassment scandals that have come to light in the past week, I thought I’d comment a bit on my own experience and process. I had a reflexively defensive reaction to the post at Tenure She Wrote. I think that came from the sense that, even though all those points are essentially good points and would be well heeded, it still came across to me as a lecture. That’s my problem, of course, not the author’s. But I know that it’s not only my problem, based on the comments there. And many, many men have difficulty accepting instructions on how to behave from women. But it is important not to let that small internal reaction prevent us from recognizing and acting on good advice.
But I also believe that we men need to clean our own house. And it starts with what we teach each other. When I was a grad student, I was an assistant in an engineering laboratory. The professor was a famous engineer who’d worked with NASA and other agencies. He was kind and humble and friendly. He always took his students out, as a group, for lunch once per semester.
Once semester there was a woman in the class that I was very attracted to. She was a 3/2 masters student, I was a 2nd or 3rd year grad student. She was actually older than me by a year. We had interacted a lot socially prior to her being in “my” class (I assisted, but didn’t teach or grade.). We flirted a lot. One day in class as she was having trouble with an assignment I rubbed her shoulders.
Now, there’s no question that was out of line. Our prior flirting doesn’t excuse it. We were in a scholastic situation and I had (a tiny bit of) authority. The professor took me aside after class. He was very gentle. He told me: “You can’t rub a woman’s shoulders in the classroom environment.” I told him, “Well, we’re friends outside of class, I wasn’t just hitting on a random student.” He said: “That doesn’t matter. You don’t know what she might say about it, or what someone else might think. You could get in trouble.”
I took his words to heart. And to my knowledge, I’ve never behaved inappropriately in a professional setting again. And while it was good that my professor said something, and it was important for me to change my behavior, I’m not sure that he actually said the right thing. Because, the important thing in these situations is not that we men “avoid trouble”. It’s that we do the right thing, and treat women as autonomous people.
My mother taught at the University of Washington for a while in the 70’s. But she never got offered tenure track even though many of her male colleagues were. I asked her about it recently and she said, “I didn’t have the right equipment.” Apparently, to be faculty back then required testes. She’s not bitter about it. An academic career wasn’t really what she wanted, I think. And she did incredibly well for herself as a practicing psychologist.
But whenever she saw me acting badly (which was fairly often), her refrain was always, “You can’t treat people like that.” I think that’s the better way to frame our behavior. The better way for men to teach other men how to behave around women. Yes, the self-interest and the fear of getting in trouble may be effective at putting boundaries on some men’s actions. But far more important is to effect the cultural change of getting men to understand that women are people. And it’s not OK to treat people like that.
We men have a responsibility to each other. But it isn’t the responsibility to close ranks and protect other men who are accused, as is so often the first instinct. The responsibility is for men to use the natural hierarchy that we understand to improve how younger men understand women in the workplace – and women in the world – and mentor them into recognizing women as colleagues and collaborators.
Because I think that one problem many men have is that we don’t see the behavior as harassment. We can convince ourselves it’s chivalry. Telling a woman she’s beautiful or nicely dressed is intended to be elevating. It takes education to see it as degrading. To understand that a compliment in one venue is a slur in another. And when we are corrected in this by women, even women we respect, too often we are simply confused and defensive as a first impulse; too often that first impulse is the last impulse.
We men need to listen to women on these topics. I don’t want anything in this post to be misconstrued that I am saying we don’t. But we also need men in positions of authority to start mentoring younger men in a new way. The goal of understanding male-female relations in the workplace should not be to “stay out of trouble.” It should be to see each other as fully human, fully autonomous, and important collaborators and assets to do the work we’re assembled to do.
It’s not about rules. It’s about empathy. It is, at the end of it, about humanity.
Intimate Partner Addiction and Coping Strategies.
I was contacted by a friend from my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, who has a friend doing her PhD at the Brown School of Social Work at Wash U. The PhD candidate’s name is Megan Petra, and she studies intimate partner violence*. She is currently looking for women to participate in survey research for her PhD dissertation. A quick search on Google Scholar for her reveals that she’s done some really interesting work relating to child victims of violence and their subsequent risk for becoming abusers of intimate partners[1].
In this case, she’s looking for women who are, or have recently been, in relationships with persons who have alcohol, drug, or gambling addiction issues. According to the note she sent me, she’s seeking women aged 24-65 to participate in an online survey about coping strategies in such relationships. Among the requirements for eligibility are that the relationship must be current, or have ended less than six months ago.
The informational blurb I was given is:
Washington University in St. Louis is seeking volunteers for a research study that explores how women cope with a current (or recent) partner’s alcohol, drug or gambling problem. You may qualify if you are 24-65. Participation includes an online survey (no study visits). A gift card is provided. For details go to
And the Amazon gift card you can receive is worth $10 (though I believe it’s actually a gift code received by email, rather than a physical card received through the mail). There’s no geographical requirement for participation, but you must be able to complete the survey in one sitting (it can’t be saved and returned to). It should take less than an hour. While the study does not intend to confer any direct benefit to the participants, you may be helping women confronted with the same situation in the future have access to better help.
And if you’re anything like me, you may feel a lot of satisfaction from knowing you’re helping advance science. Science with the direct intention of making people who confront addiction in their partners have better resources. I know my readership has many, many people in this situation. I hope some will be able to participate.
______________________
* Please note: other than the quoted blurb, everything in this post should be considered to be my words, not those of the researcher, Wash U, or any other body. I don’t want to put any words in her mouth, or make any claims that are incorrect. I think I have her position correct, but I’ve been wrong before, and will be wrong again. Only information that comes from Megan Petra, or from the Wash U- hosted website is official information for this project. This post is intended as a pointer to her survey, and not a separate source of information. I receive no compensation of any kind, monetary or otherwise. I have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
[1] Millet, Kohl, Jonson-Reid, Drake, Petra, (2013) “Child Maltreatment Victimization and Subsequent Perpetration of Young Adult Intimate Partner Violence: An Exploration of Mediating Factors” Child Maltreatment 18(2):71-84
Really, Scientific American?
If you’re part of the online science community and haven’t been under a rock for the past 48 hours, you already know about the Scientific American scandal that has erupted. Here are the bare facts as I understand them: A webpage called biology online asked a biologist and postdoc named DN Lee to do a guest blogging stint. When she inquired (among other things) about the remuneration, she was told there was none, but that there might be indirect benefits. She then declined the offer. She was then called an “Urban Whore” by the contact at biology online. She posted about this on her blog at Scientific American, where she has been a professional blogger for about two years. The editors at Scientific American – who have a business relationship with biology online – deleted her blogpost, giving this as an explanation. The blogpost that Dr. Lee wrote has been mirrored in many places, including here.
Those are the facts as I understand them. You may recall that Dr. Lee was a participant in the open access debate that I also participated in for pub style science. I don’t know her personally except in that interaction and from a few exchanges on twitter.
I think we can dispense with the precipitating incident in very short order. Professionals asked to do work have the right to expect to be paid for that work. And there is no excuse for calling anyone a whore because they won’t work for you for free. Especially in the context of modern academic science – where women and minority scientists have fought and triumphed over incredible systemic obstacles, and yet continue to face discrimination, marginalization, and suffer abuse – the response of the [recruiter? editor?] at biology online stinks of sexism, racism, and unchecked entitlement. They were wrong, egregiously and unambiguously.
It’s one thing to be egregiously and unambiguously wrong. People can come back from that by apologizing and making amends. Everyone who reads my blog knows that I am big on liberating redemption. I would hope that the people at biology online could recognize their astonishing mistake and attempt to rectify it. But it is in an entirely different category for Scientific American to attempt to whitewash the incident by deleting Dr. Lee’s blogpost, and giving such an absurd, flimsy excuse for it. Their reasoning – that her post was not about scientific discovery and therefore inappropriate – is absurdly risible. They publish such posts daily.
Instead, the only conclusion I can come to is that they were hoping to minimize the incident while protecting the venture of a business partner that they presumably have some investment in or receive some revenue from (or expect to). I admit this is speculation, but no alternative explanation is immediately plausible. What this means is that Scientific American’s editors would rather attempt to defend and protect their own interests and reputation than admit they’ve associated with a business which employs someone who behaves so intolerably.
I’m baffled. If Scientific American really wanted to defend and protect their reputation, they could have said the following: “We will not tolerate this kind of behavior in our partner institutions, and are exploring how the situation can be rectified.” Now, it’s possible they took the post down because of some legal fear that hosting it could result in expensive litigation. Even then, they could easily have said: “Due to legal agreements and at the advice of our legal counsel, we reluctantly must temporarily remove this content until such time as we can ascertain our liability. This notwithstanding, we condemn in the strongest terms anyone’s use of invective or insensitive language, and stand behind our bloggers’ integrity and rights.” It would still have caused a big ruckus, but Scientific American would at least have had a leg to stand on. Maybe.
They didn’t do that. They deleted content of their own blogger and gave a laughable excuse that seems to protect misogyny and racism while abandoning Dr. Lee. It is shameful. It is disgraceful. And it is inexcusable.
Want a way back, Scientific American? Don’t try to excuse it again. Admit you made a mistake. You hung Dr. Lee out to dry while attempting to cover your own asses. Restore her content. Apologize. And then say what you will do to rectify the situation from here forward. I might start with severing ties to biology online unless they clear the rottenness from their own house.
Ups and Downs in Publishing.
Well, on Sunday I received notice of rejection from a very good journal in the medical informatics field regarding my first research paper here at MECMC. It’s the second rejection for that paper, but we got decent and constructive comments and I feel like I can revise the paper accordingly and resubmit (One reviewer recommended we resubmit the piece to the same journal as a case report instead of a research article; I’m considering it. It’s a strange world I live in, where there is a good case to be made for either designation.). So that was disappointing. I feel like the reviews were constructive enough that a revise and resubmit might have been warranted. Oh well.
But then, today, I received notice that another paper was accepted! This is the paper I wrote about here. Essentially, it’s an administrative piece, a little how-to guide to employing people like me in hospitals, and how to engage in simulation-led improvement work. I’m proud of this piece for a couple of reasons. First, I think it might help administrators make evidence-based decisions in quality and performance improvement, by embracing a new tool for the production of useful evidence. Second, it’s my first ever piece as senior author. I worked with a co-worker here who had never had any academic ambitions, but who is very interested in making a mark in administration and improvement. Even though I wrote most of the first draft, we worked closely together and so I offered him the position of first author, and took last for myself. A few managers and another colleague fill out the middle.
It’s being published in a very respectable specialty journal, in health services quality. Having been accepted today, I anticipate I’ll have proofs in a month or so, and it’ll be online a month after that. Print? Who knows how long. This is not open access. I don’t have the funds for that. But it will hopefully find its way to the right eyes in any case. And of course, if I’m ever trying to convince some hospital other than MECMC to hire me, I’ll be able to show them that I have cogent ideas about how to use the services I offer, rather than simply saying: “I’m really smart and you should hire me and I can make your hospital GO better.”
So it’s exciting and fun. Hopefully I’m helping advance the career of the colleague here who had never thought about this kind of work. Hopefully I’m demonstrating utility to my department. Hopefully they’ll see the value of academic work through this kind of minor success. And hopefully the other paper will get picked up on the next submission. And after all the failures I’ve had with papers recently, the words: “It is our pleasure to accept…” really hit the spot.
I Haven’t Learned Anything.
When I was a kid, the thing I wanted most in the world was to be popular. I wasn’t. I was a strange kid. Smart, defensive, depressed. And I was tiny. I was in the 3rd percentile of height and weight until I was about 14. Scrawny as a child, I never passed through a fit stage. I went straight from tiny to pudgy. Physically, I still think of myself as short. I’m not short. I’m right about 5’10”. But I feel short. I vacillate between feeling pathetically small and stringy, like I was as a child, and ponderously fat and bloated, the way I was from puberty to 35. As a kid, though, I always used to think: “If I were a bigger guy, I’d be popular.”
I was aware somehow that I had a “big” personality. I take up space. In part that’s because I’m loud. My eardrums ruptured a lot as a child. I needed tubes but never got them. As a result, my eardrums are scarred and I don’t hear very well. So I talk too loud. I try to pay attention to it, but it gets exhausting. My sisters know to remind me: “Dr24, you’re shouting.” Or my older sister will make a pinching motion with her hands to remind me to lower my volume.
But it’s not just that. At the dinner table, when I was a child, I stood up whenever I was talking. I’ve always needed to be heard. Needed people to acknowledge me. I talk loudly because I’m afraid people aren’t listening. I rarely stop to wonder if I have anything worth saying.
And so I was an unpopular child. Unsurprising. I tried to learn to fit in. I found places I fit. But there were never that many people in the groups I fit in with. We weren’t in the middle of the gym at the homecoming dance. The grownups always liked me. I was a good kid. Almost never got in trouble. Always did my homework. Never quite lived up to my potential. Showed up early to school. Sat alone on the playground. I watched the kids playing and I wondered how it worked. I didn’t know the rules to the games. I couldn’t stand anyone knowing that I didn’t how it worked.
As time went on I found a few more groups I fit into. I fell in with the “smart kids” in college. I was the dumbest of my group, by a wide margin, but I basically belonged there. Having a bunch of friends that were smarter than me drove me to work harder to be smart. But I wasn’t as advanced as they were. I was a year (at least) behind in math and physics compared to the full-ride scholarship kids. I ended up making a lot of friends with the freshmen when I was a sophomore.
Alcohol helped me let go of the anxiety and relate to people. I didn’t notice as I began to relate only to people who drank like I did. Then no one drank like I did. One might expect that I didn’t fare so well with romantic relationships. One would be right. When I got sober, I discovered that there were a lot of drunks in AA that I related to pretty well. Shipwreck survivors always find things in common.
Then I found twitter. Finally, finally, here was a group of people that I felt like I fit in to. Where I was a popular kid. But I still have that “big” personality. I still talk too much while feeling isolated. I still need acknowledgement. I’ve tried to run with the popular kids on twitter. But I can’t do it. I’m not smart enough. I’m not cynical enough. My jokes don’t work. I’m not clever. And I’m not willing to be anyone’s punching bag anymore, just to fit in.
Cynicism and meanness are funny. Often. Sarcasm can be an excellent way to connect to people. But too much viciousness becomes a snake eating its own tail, to me. I feel sad at the same time as I feel wounded. I wonder why people are so hurtful to each other. And then I catch myself doing the same thing.
I’ll never be one of the cool kids. I haven’t learned a thing about fitting in. I don’t understand the rules. I just wish I didn’t care. Because I think not caring about fitting in is one of the ways people fit in. But I don’t have that nonchalance. I’m pretty sure I never will. I’ve been told, over and over, that it’s better to have a few good friends than to be popular among many casual acquaintances. And I have my few good friends. It’s time I learned that people who become popular by being cynical and mean aren’t going to accept me when I try to approach them with sincerity. And everyone has the right to decide that I don’t have assets that they value.
It’s time I took to heart my own oft-repeated advice: what other people think of me is none of my business.
Getting What We Want.
At my men’s meeting last night, the topic of discussion was “not getting what we want.” Alcoholics in general (though not universally), and me included, are great big giant babies. We want what we want when we want it and we throw tantrums when we don’t get it. We manipulate, lie, cheat, steal, and most importantly we rationalize in order to get the things we want. We can find almost any self-serving reason that justifies taking what we desire, with little or no thought to how that impacts other people. Or worse, despite having thought very carefully, and having a thorough understanding, about how it hurts other people.
I have myriad examples of this in my own past, of course. From taking the last piece of pizza to deplorably unchivalrous behavior towards women to neglect of my family to finally being willing to let everything burn down as long as it meant I could have one more glass of bourbon. We alcoholics are wretchedly selfish. And it’s a chicken-egg problem to determine, for most of us, if the selfishness preceded the alcohol, or the alcohol drives the selfishness.
Not me. My first words were: “NO! MINE!”*
And so I spent most of my life, especially my 20s and early 30s, being an entitled, privileged, drunken little shit. On the outside. On the inside, I was ashamed, depressed, and took degrading pleasure in hating myself. That was my internal schism: vacillating from disgrace to vainglory. Nowhere was there anything like humility; I had no sense of where I belonged and what my place in the world was, where I could contribute and also be happy with the things I received from others.
When I sobered up, I slowly and painfully learned, with plenty of mis-steps and deliberate asides, to accept that sometimes I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, and that that’s ok. Not everyone is going to like me. People who disagree with me are not necessarily stupid or uneducated. Just as I am not required to adopt anyone else’s agenda, nor are they required to adopt mine. I might want people to agree with me and see the world as I do. I’m not always (hell, not often) going to get it. That’s ok.
And so, for us alcoholics, not getting what we want can feel dangerous, and we can use it as an excuse to drink. That’s why in early sobriety, we spend so much time talking about surrendering our will to a higher power. Our will tends to get us drunk and evicted and imprisoned and dead. But when we learn to surrender our will either to a concept of God, or to some other higher power, or whatever (I’ve heard many times: “The only thing you really need to know about God is: you ain’t it.”), we find that we don’t need to drink over things that don’t go our way. Because that’s just life. And acceptance of life as it is, in all its baffling majesty, is the first step toward the kind of serenity that finally quells the riot of shame and ego driving us to destruction.
But lurking on the other side of this is a different danger. In sobriety, for so many of us, things start to go really well. When we work on our emotions, our behaviors, and our relationships, we start to find that good things happen for us. We get good jobs. We find romance. We earn the respect of our peers. We become, in short, useful and productive members of society.
Because we are who we are, at our cores, we can be very tempted to take credit for this. I look around at my life: great position with a renowned institution; brilliant and beautiful girlfriend; community of people who (mostly seem to) respect me. Haven’t I worked hard for these things? Haven’t I invested time and effort and energy and sweat in achieving the things in this life that I’ve wanted? Of course I have. But have I earned these things? Maybe. Do I deserve them? I don’t know.
Am I entitled to them? Absolutely not.
But there is the deadly end of the logic. Even in sobriety, where years of evidence has taught me that I am entitled to nothing, where I have watched better men than I am assume title to their desires and stumble and burn and drink and die, where I know that my entitlement only leads me to desolate bar stools and bleeding in bathtubs, even here I am tempted by my ego to claim right to my whim. And it is a small set of steps from “I worked for this” to “I earned this” to “I deserve this” to “I’m entitled to this”. And that’s where I lose it.
More dangerous still is that I am occasionally tempted to apply that same progression to my sobriety. To see it as something that I did, that I earned, and that I’m in control of. Stepping down that path leads pretty inevitably to misery, likely to drunkenness. I am not sober because I won the battle with alcohol. I am sober because I lost it. I didn’t earn sobriety. I have worked hard, yes. But all I have achieved is a reprieve for today.
Today, I don’t drink. Today, I am comfortable and happy in my sobriety. Today, I must do the things to maintain the condition I’ve cultivated, that allows me to face today without intoxication. I must reject my sense of entitlement, recognize my many fortunes, and embrace the uncertainty in the world. All I can do is try to give the best I have today. And if I do that, then I probably won’t feel the need to drink tomorrow either.
______________________
*This, sadly, is true. If you believe my mother.
Understanding Powerlessness.
I read a piece recently about the mental calculus of the alcoholic. The author makes the assertion that, in the mind of the alcoholic, drinking to obliteration is a rational act, as it is the fastest, easiest, and most sure way of “making the emotional devastation go away.” Essentially, he says, “It is not irrational to take a drink when taking a drink is the best available option.” He asserts that powerlessness and irrationality are interchangeable terms, and that therefore – while he doesn’t argue against AA, explicitly praising the organization – the first step* may be badly formed. If powerlessness equals irrationality, and it is rational for an alcoholic to drink, then that alcoholic is not powerless.
First of all, I would dispute that taking the fastest means to an end (especially if that end is destructive) is necessarily rational. But I think that’s irrelevant. I don’t believe the premise that powerlessness and irrationality are meant to be synonymous. I’m not at all sure they’re related. Whether my relationship with alcohol is that I drink it because I think it is my best option, or despite that I think it is my worst – i.e., that my actions are internally rational or irrational – the problem is that my relationship with alcohol is controlling my desires.
In the first case – I drink because I believe it is my best option – I may be behaving in an internally rational manner, but I am clearly out of step with the real world. Sure, inebriation blunts emotional pain, but it doesn’t address emotional discomfiture. In fact, for we alcoholics, in inevitably exacerbates it. So, I am drinking because my thinking, technically rational though it may be to me, is distorted. I am turning to alcohol to treat a condition which alcohol makes worse. And I am doing so because I have convinced myself of something untrue.
In the second case – I am internally irrational – I am compelled to drink despite knowing that it is not good for me. This type of powerlessness may be more obvious to a non-alcoholic that the previous sort, where I am drinking because I am in denial of alcohol’s effects or powers. In this case, I don’t want to drink, but I am drinking anyway. This is the sort of powerlessness that those outside the program seem to understand.
But the first type is the more insidious type. There it is the powerlessness of being unable to see for the truth that my need for alcohol has changed the way I think. So that it becomes the rational solution. Just because my actions are internally rational, that does not mean I have any more power over the alcohol than a person in the second case. In fact, I may have less. The person in the second case may at least have the option of attempting to abstain because they know the alcohol is harmful. In the first case, I am utterly powerless, because I have convinced myself that the alcohol is beneficial.
So, being powerless over alcohol is not, to me, related to rationality at all, because it is easy to construct two scenarios – one where I behave according to what seems rational, and one where I behave seemingly irrationally – and am powerless (and drunk!) in both scenarios.
Here’s the real truth of it for me: the powerlessness referred to in step one is not really about the alcohol. As we grow in sobriety, we discover this to be deeply true, I’ve found. In fact, very little about being an alcoholic is about alcohol. It’s about needing to drown my emotions and agony and despair and discomfort. It’s about needing to anesthetize myself against living. It’s about preferring a state of intoxication to a state of unencumbered reality.
And it doesn’t matter if I choose that state despite wanting not to, or if I choose that state because I believe it’s my best available option. In either case – and in all the cases on the spectrum between – I am choosing alcohol over anything else. Because I’m an alcoholic. And because alcohol gives me what I cannot find anywhere else: obliteration of self.
It is only when we recover, and face our emotions, that we can see what the powerlessness means. That I am powerless over my relationship with alcohol. Because I am powerless over my own mind. When I drink, my thinking changes. And I will convince myself of whatever I need to to get the next drink. I will even convince myself that alcohol is the best option. I’ll believe it. Because I am an alcoholic. I have a disease which makes me believe I don’t have a disease.
I have not gained, in five and a half years of sobriety, any power over alcohol. What I have gained is the ability to compare my internal world to the real world. And I can recognize that the way I think when I am active in my drinking doesn’t jibe with the way the real world functions. By abandoning my attempts to control the alcohol, the world, and even my thinking. I have become (more) able to accept life on its own terms.
And to accept that I cannot maintain a relationship with alcohol. Not if I also want to do anything else. And that acceptance is the breaking of the lock.
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* “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Infactorium 