Infactorium

The most basic aspect of AA is working with others. Some might find that surprising. Surely, the most basic aspect is abstaining from alcohol? No. Alcoholics drink all the time. It’s sort of in the title. Yes, that’s what we are seeking on an individual level, when we arrive. We are looking for a way to not drink, or to be free from the consequences of drinking. But what we very soon discover, if we are to remain sober, is that consuming alcohol is not the defining element of our condition. Consuming alcohol is what prevents us from addressing our condition.

Many, many more alcoholics succeed at the acute phase of alcohol withdrawal (in my experience, lasting about three days for serious risk of seizure, etc., and about two weeks for physical cravings) than develop and maintain long-term sobriety. Why? A few basic reasons spring to mind. After a short while without drinking, many of us begin to think that we have conquered our affliction. If we can stop for a few days, then surely we can stop after a few drinks! No. And, as our heads clear from their addled states, we begin to see all the majestic ruins we’ve made of our lives. We drink again to shut that out. To pretend it isn’t there.

And many alcoholics succeed at the acute phase of alcohol withdrawal with no help. They grip their fists, clench their teeth, and suffer for a few days until the booze works its way out of their systems. I did that a few times. It’s awful. Hell, it’s awful with help. Detox sucks. Those things can be done, though not with high success rates, and they almost never lead to lasting abstinence. Even when they do lead to some duration of abstinence, it is even more exceedingly rare that anything like happiness – like peace and serenity and comfort and utility – follows.

Because being sober takes help. It takes a community. It takes guidance. Because in order not to drink again, we need to be led through the process of dealing with the ruin of our lives, our psyches, our spirits. Expecting an alcoholic to find a way to be happy, and content, and productive is a bit like expecting a cancer patient to derive and administer their own course of chemotherapy. Are there a few who could do it? Probably. But it’s a totally unreasonable way to expect it to happen, and you certainly wouldn’t admonish such a patient for failing in those circumstances.

Yesterday I met my new sponsee before my men’s meeting. I bought him a cup of coffee and we talked for about 45 minutes. I asked him about his history, his drinking. He told me what felt like an honest and straightforward story. At one point, he apologized for being boring. I had to laugh. We tend to think of ourselves as either the worst in the world, or to excuse our horrific behavior. He did neither. He just talked about being a drunk. Going to rehab and trying to kill himself a bunch of times. It’s a pretty common story.

It is both ordinary and horrifying that so many of us have that same story. I have never been suicidal, but I can easily imagine it. I’d be lying if I said it isn’t an option for me, if I return to the depths of active alcoholism and despair I used to know. Knowing that about myself helps me stay sober. Putting it in writing, for other people to read and know keeps me accountable. When I drink, nothing is off the table. I am endlessly grateful that those feelings and fears are so remote for me now.

So I’m excited to work with my new sponsee. He’s bright. He’s depressed. He’s bewildered. He’s profoundly anxious. But he’s emerging. Now, it’s about honesty and willingness. He’s got the open mind. Or he wouldn’t be where he is. Now, he’ll either do the work, or he won’t. If he does, he’ll almost certainly get better. If he doesn’t, he’ll almost certainly end up dead. I told him yesterday that I’d lay even odds his next suicide attempt succeeds. We joked about there being a Vegas line.

Working with others, carrying the message of recovery from the seemingly hopeless state of active alcoholism, from pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization[1], is how we stay sober ourselves. By focusing outward, we recover internally. By working with my sponsee, I maintain my own sobriety. I deepen it. I stay rooted in the middle of the garden. Far from the tentacles of misery.

I am an alcoholic. Drinking is an option for me. It always will be. Drinking is what alcoholics do. So I work. And I commit myself to the program of action and accountability that has led so many before me out of blackness and into light. That is all the higher power that I need, really. This incredible community of people who know what it is to drown, so know what it is to swim.

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[1] These quotes are so common as not to need attribution among alcoholics. For the rest of you, they’re from the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”, pp xiii, and pp 30 respectively.

Many alcoholics attempt to control their drinking. In fact, it’s essentially a diagnostic symptom. If you find yourself needing to exert effort not to drink, or to diminish your consumption, you probably ought to take that as an enormous red flag regarding your alcohol consumption. Normal people, by and large, don’t need to think about how much they drink; nor do they struggle and fail to drink less. Normal people get drunk, sure. But they do so in safe, planned environments. They prepare ahead of time for their drinking. It’s generally a rare event. If they decide they want to drink less, it’s more likely to be about expense or calories than consequences of inebriation.

But when we alcoholics try to moderate our drinking, we fail. Maybe not every single day – there were days I had only one or two drinks, even near the end. But over any duration of time, we fail. We simply cannot control, once we have had any alcohol, how much we have. It is unpredictable when we’ll get drunk (until it progresses to essentially every time we drink). The consequences of getting drunk, like being unable to perform at work, or driving drunk, or neglecting our loved ones, will not prevent us from drinking more.

This period of trying, on our own, to stop or to moderate our drinking is invariably fraught with misery. Very early sobriety, the first few days or weeks, is always painful and difficult. Trying to do it alone, without help, without acknowledging it to people who can help us, is excruciating. Literally. Early sobriety is painful. Cravings hurt. At least, pain is the closest word I have to the sensation. Couple that with isolation – even among friends – and depression and anxiety and shame, and it’s insurmountable.

AA works because of the connections made from one alcoholic to another. And it does work. Through the telephone, and in person, we connect to support each other. To admonish each other. And to do the things we need to do to live better lives. So many people try to moderate on their own, and end up miserable, or in jail, or dead. We cannot defeat alcoholism on our own. In fact, we cannot defeat alcoholism at all. Together, as a group, one alcoholic helping another, we can accept our alcoholism and surrender. And when we surrender, we can trade drinking for freedom.

My men’s meeting last night was very good. Punctuated as usual with profanity and childish insults, we talked about the choices we have in sobriety. The speaker asked: “Why are you here? Why do we come back? What choices do we make in sobriety, and why?” All good questions. For me, they have some simple answers. I go there because I’m an alcoholic and I want to live a normal, healthy, productive life. I come back because I enjoy the camaraderie, the friendship, the connection, the wisdom, the male bonding. Choices is a bigger concept.

As an active alcoholic, I didn’t have any meaningful choices. No matter how much I wanted to, I could not stop or moderate my drinking. My thinking was deeply flawed. I have no control over how I drink when I drink. The few times I would stop after one or two drinks, I was miserable. The sensation is a bit like pain, but deep in bone and organ: longing and screaming. An agonizing appeal for more alcohol from every nerve. And so I did what I had to do to slake that thirst.

Today, I have choices. And each day, my most important choice is to refrain from returning to that misery. Now, that’s not so difficult a choice anymore. It’s not even a conscious choice the vast, vast majority of the time. I talked, when it was my turn, about having choices today, about not being just an alcohol-fueled automaton. And I spoke directly to two young men in the room, one with 30 days, and one with 60. I told them to get sponsors. Work the 12 steps. That’s what makes the difference between life and death for so many of us. And the difference between happy, productive lives of sobriety and miserable, angry, white-knuckle abstinence.

That kind of thing is not generally smiled upon in most AA meetings. You don’t talk directly to other people in the room. But this men’s meeting is a slightly different beast. It’s very old-school. We take each other’s sobriety personally. And so, when one of those young men approached me after the meeting and asked me to sponsor him, I said yes. I told him to call me every day, before 9pm, and then he did call me, that same night, before 9pm.

And we talked about step one, and what it means, and how he feels about it. We talked about his situation, and I told him a bit about how I drank. He’s clearly an angry young man. He’s been through this before, accrued 60 to 90 days of sobriety and then begun drinking again. But reaching out to get a sponsor is a good step, and a good sign. And I found a couple of interesting citations this morning which show that having a sponsor is associated with increased sobriety[1,2], though there remain problems with how the scientific community measures sobriety and remission in addiction.

So, it looks like I’ll be working with someone new. Hopefully, he’ll get it. We can work together to get his life back on track. He seems bright. But he makes some dumb decisions. Like watching the baseball game at a bar, when he’s 60 days sober. That’s pretty stupid. But he’s coming to meetings, and he’s taking positive steps. I hope I can help him. I hope he’s willing to do the work.

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1) Witbrodt et al, Addiction. 2012 Feb;107(2):301-11. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21752145

2) Kingree et al, Addict Behav. 2011 Aug;36(8):882-5 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21511400

So, I haven’t had a drink in 1,697 days. A bit more than four and a half years. Most days, alcohol is barely a thought other than the gratitude I feel to no longer be dependant on it. That gratitude is – as you’ll know if you read this regularly – enormous and in many ways life-defining. A huge part of my existence is centered around not drinking. I attend meetings regularly with other people who don’t drink. I write about not drinking. I read about not drinking. I help others to not drink, if they want help. It’s a core part of my self, at this point.

I’ve had limited success with that “helping others” part, at least from my own myopic perspective. I’ve had two sponsees. Both are drinking today. The first was a problem drinker and depressed and lonely and unemployed and didn’t know where to turn. He had a friend in the program. So he came to AA. He worked with me through the fifth step. Then he stopped calling. Later he got a job, moved to Italy, and the last I heard (Christmas time about 19 months ago) he was actually doing rather well, and moderating his drinking, or so he claimed. I haven’t heard from him since.

The other was a desperate mess. I presume he still is. He never got past step one. He came to meetings, a few times. But he simply obsessed over his ex-girlfriend. He drank constantly and smoked crack cocaine. He actually told me that he believed he would be able to drink normally if she would take him back. I asked if he’d drunk normally when he’d had her. Of course he hadn’t. He abandoned her and went on drunken, coke-fueled benders with his low-life friends. But this time would be different. He stopped calling. He’s alive, and working. But I have no reason to believe he’s happy. I will always carefully treasure the gift he gave me, which was perspective on the obliviousness of the active addict. His statement: “I am not even thinking about alcohol. I’m only thinking about [her]. So why shouldn’t I go get drunk?”

However, I have had the privilege of witnessing and being there with and for a large number of people as they negotiate the early stages of the program, and several of them are sober today. One dear friend who is almost six months sober is a point of particular joy. The amazing progress from alcoholic insanity to productive and happy through turmoil and trial is wonderful to watch. It’s inspiring. In many ways I’m jealous: the magic astonishment of early sobriety is past for me. Though, I do continue to discover new rewards.

But I have long been told, and continued to experience, that the old alcoholic impulses never truly fall away. This weekend I spent time with my “adopted” family in Indiana. As is common in family get-togethers, people drank a bit. There was one moment when someone asked me to hand a beer to someone else, a beer already open, and the impulse to take a swig as it passed was sudden and powerful. It lasted only a tenth of a second, and was not remotely compelling. But it was there. I’ve had that impulse many times.

There is only one defense against that impulse. Regular and careful maintenance of my sobriety. If I skip too many meetings, if I don’t keep up with my sponsor, if I don’t keep communicating with other drunks, if I don’t continuously apply the principles of sobriety to my life, then the day will come when I choose not to resist that impulse. Right now, resisting that is easy. There is an instant of longing. A flash of memory. A salivary response. And then almost as fast my mind flashes forward to what happens if I drink. Shame. Misery. Death. By the time I’d even consciously processed that there was an urge, the drink was out of my hand and in its recipient’s.

Vigilance is part of the recovered alcoholic’s world. Because while I have recovered from my state of hopeless inebriation and alcoholic insanity, I have in no way recovered from my status as an addict. When I put alcohol in my body, in any amount, I change. And for all of science’s new understanding of addiction and how my brain is different from normal people’s brains, there will never be a more meaningful definition of alcoholism for me than the one put forth some 80 years ago by Dr. Silkworth: it is an allergy of the body, and an obsession of the mind. Now, of course, “allergy” is not scientifically correct, we now know. But the fundamental point stands.

Alcoholism is a permanent condition consisting of two fundamental aspects, in the practical world of the alcoholic: we are affected differently by alcohol than normal people; when we are active in our addiction, we obsess about alcohol. That is the condition to which I can immediately return, if I choose. I am deeply and consistently grateful that today, I have the choice not to.