Infactorium

Yesterday I wrote about my early drinking, and my basic drinking behaviors: lying, hiding, vanishing, resentment and narcissism. Today, I want to write about what changed. How did I go from being a drinker to being a non drinker? What does it mean to stop? This is, essentially, the most vexing part of the problem for non-drinkers. For both those who love an alcoholic – or those who are stuck with one – and for alcohol researchers. What makes a person decide that they want to stop drinking?

The science of addiction is getting better. Alcoholics used to die, all the time, when they were deprived of alcohol or tried to quit suddenly and cold-turkey. Alcohol dependence is a physical condition. Withdrawal can include seizures, and cardiac arrest. Detoxification from chronic alcohol abuse is something that should be undertaken, generally, in the care of a physician. Additionally, there are various medications which are supposed to help with cravings once detoxification has been accomplished. We understand more and more about the alcoholic brain.

But there is no therapy that can make an alcoholic want to quit. No medicine that can make an alcoholic choose to enter treatment. Choose to seek out AA*. Courts often sentence drunk drivers and other sloshed defendants to AA. I see them in meetings a lot. Few and far between are the people who end up sticking around and getting sober. Though I do know a very few people who came into the program that way and stayed to develop long term sobriety (what the medical community calls “sustained remission”.).

*I do not pretend that Alcoholics Anonymous is the only way to achieve sustained sobriety. However, it is the way that has worked for me, and so most of my observations come from that perspective. When I am asked to help others achieve sobriety, that is the way I direct them. I can only report my own experience, which shows that the program of AA works for those willing to work for it. I have, in limited ways, interacted with other programs, and I have not found anything I would give credence to.

No. The only things that I have ever seen work consistently, that reliably (though certainly not universally) drive alcoholics into recovery are grinding humiliation and excoriating emotional agony. We talk about “hitting bottom”, which I mentioned yesterday was poorly understood by the world at large. Generally, a non-alcoholic asked to describe hitting bottom will talk about sleeping under bridges, being forced into prostitution, killing people, developing alarming facial hair, etc.. And I have met people who have done all of those things. In fact, I have friends who have most of those things. But that’s not what hitting a bottom is.

Hitting a bottom is an emotional condition. It is described in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous” as “pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization.” And that’s as accurate a description as I can give. We choose to seek sobriety, I chose to see sobriety, when I could no longer tolerate the life I was living. When anything at all would be preferable to the daily humiliation of extracting my hidden bottles of vodka, pouring out half of a 20 oz bottle of diet sprite and filling it back up with vodka and sitting in the bathtub with a crappy Da Vinci Code knock-off and wondering if today is the day I’m going to pass out in the water and not wake up. We can live a surprisingly long time like that. For me, the conversation with our marriage counselor finally cracked the shell on my ego. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t lying anymore. I hated what I was. I hated how I chose to live. I recognized it as a choice.

I saw that the thing so toxic to me was not the alcohol. It was the lying. This was the key for me. The cascading comprehension that alcohol was not my problem. My problem was that I didn’t want to confront myself. I didn’t want to live among my own thoughts and mind and self. And that alcohol had allowed me to do that. And it wasn’t working anymore.

And so, shortly after that conversation with our marriage counselor, I went to my wife, in our living room, and finally was honest. I simply said: “It’s every day.” The way she crumpled up was one of the most painful and horrible sights I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to write about.

She told me to leave. She told me to come back sober or not at all. I left. I went to a hotel. I went to see Wes, who had run the alcohol program that I attended when I was negotiating the judicial system in Illinois. I had passed that program with flying colors. When I stepped into Wes’s office, my hand was shaking. It was about 11 in the morning. I was wearing red sweatpants. I told him: “I’m not in trouble with the law. But I think I’m in trouble with alcohol.” And Wes said: “GREAT!” I don’t remember what else we talked about. I remember trying to make a crude joke comparing alcohol to sex.

I didn’t end up working with Wes. In fact, I’m not sure I talked to him again until a couple of years later. What I took from that conversation was that I was really and truly and alcoholic. That I had absolutely no ability to control my consumption once I put any alcohol into my body. And that I was truly and nobly fucked unless I did something drastic to change. So I went back to my hotel. And a googled “Alcohol recovery”. And I called the first phone number I saw.

The phone was answered by a really friendly guy named Jay. Jay talked to me for a long time. Jay had been sober 4 years himself, which was an incomprehensibly long time to me, who could not imagine a day. Based on that conversation, I made arrangements to go to that rehab, out in California. It was absurdly expensive. A few days later I drove to the airport several hours before my flight. I sat down at the bar. I had four 22 oz beers, followed by two double shots of Knob Creek bourbon. I told the bartender: “I just had my last drink.” She looked at me having heard this shit before, and said: “Mmmmhmmm.”

I got on the plane on the 15th of February, 2008. I immediately regretted that I didn’t have any cash and couldn’t get another drink. I got off the plane. I was picked up by a really friendly guy named Andy. He took me to the rehab in a Mercedes. We chain-smoked the whole way. We actually had to pass through a DUI checkpoint. I was taken in by a group of people. A really sweet and pretty young woman. An affable but competent physician. I was given an Ativan the size of a Tootsie Roll. And I went to sleep for three days. Apparently, at one point, I swam into the kitchen at 10 pm and asked for scrambled eggs. I got them. It was that kind of place.

When I unfogged from the benzodiazepines, two basic aspects of the rehabilitation became very clear. First, they were not kidding around. They recognized that this is a life and death struggle. But they also realized that a lot of people who go to rehab expect the rehab to fix them. There’s not a lot they can do for those people. Second, the rehab was based on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous (though it was not affiliated with AA… no rehabs, institutions, facilities, hospitals, etc., are.). They took us to AA meetings six days a week, and the day they didn’t, Wednesday, they hosted one.

We had six or so hours of group therapy, classes, and one-on-one counseling every day, and an AA meeting. It was a gorgeous facility, white sheets and billowy curtains, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I spent six weeks there. My wife and step-son came out and visited me in the middle. She was angry. He was sad. When my time was up, I went home. I was 42 days sober. Terrified. Confused. I had gotten my job offer while I was in rehab. But luckily, because of institutional vagaries, I couldn’t actually take the position for six months.

But I had a plan. I would go to ninety meetings in ninety days. I would reconcile with my wife. I would get a sponsor. I would work the 12 steps. I am a child of the ivory tower. I don’t need to reinvent things that I already know work. I knew that there were millions of people who had gotten sober by using the AA program. So I would do that. I got a sponsor. He never called me back. So I dumped him and got another sponsor. Mickey. Mickey is still my sponsor today. I picked him because he was the sincerest person I’d ever met. He very clearly, when he asked me how I was, wanted to know the real answer. A couple of years later, he told me that when I asked him to be my sponsor, he figured I’d be drunk in a month. We laughed about that.

And I did those things. I reconciled with my wife, and we had a pretty good year, year and a half after that. I went to my meetings. I did the steps, one by one, just how they are in the book. I’ll probably write more about them. I do specifically want to address the spirituality aspects of them at some point, for a couple of reasons. One, they’re very poorly understood outside AA (the third person ever in AA was an atheist, and there are many atheists and agnostics in AA today.), and two, spirituality is a stumbling block for many in early sobriety, and I don’t believe it needs to be.

But fundamentally, that’s what happened. I was able to address my alcoholism by realizing in a very fundamental way that alcohol was not my problem. I was my problem. I was trying to use alcohol to anaesthetize myself against confrontation with my real self, my own mind, my own thoughts and desires and understanding. And it worked for a long time. Until it didn’t work anymore.

And that realization, coupled with intensive work on understanding myself, why I drank, and what I was trying not to see, has led to the most amazing outcome: I have no desire for alcohol. I don’t miss it. I don’t crave it. I don’t need it. If you’re not an addict, I can basically promise you that you have never wanted anything, except perhaps oxygen, the way I’ve wanted alcohol. It is a fire in the pit of your heart, a feeling like a fruit-peeler is being raked along your bones. And I have not felt that since the twelfth day of my sobriety.

As I’ve said before, sometimes I miss the way I wish it could be. I wish, sometimes, that I could be one of those people who sophisticatedly has a glass of Shiraz at a dinner party and entertains everyone with my ‘most interesting man in the world’ gig. But I was never that guy, no matter how much I wish I were, or I prefer to remember it that way. I am a drunk. When I put alcohol in my body, I drink until I cannot drink anymore, and then I pass out. But today I have a choice.

I had come to the point in my life where I had no choices. I could not drink anymore. I knew that. But I could not fathom a life without drinking. And so I needed intercession. And I got that through the rehab I went to. Not everyone needs that. I don’t know if I truly needed it or not. But I’m glad I got it the way I did.

Today, life is a wide open plateau. Sometimes terrifyingly wide. But I think that in that way, I’m no different from normal people. And that’s just it. Today, I get to be ordinary. It’s such an astonishing privilege to be ordinarily sober. Ordinarily employed. Ordinarily alive. All this enormous space to live in. All this enormous life to live.

Everyone’s experience with alcohol is different. However, most alcoholics all recognize something in each other’s stories. That’s one of the reasons, I think, that AA works so well. We are a group of people who have no other thing in common. And no need for one. We are rich and poor and bright and dim and old and young and wise and foolish and members of every race and gender there is. We have only one thing that binds us together. We seek out others like us, to help us, because we have a desire to stop drinking. There’s no rule for “how far down” we go prior to entering recovery. In fact, the very concept of “hitting bottom” is poorly understood by the non-addicted world.

My story is unremarkable. I began life the child of a psychologist mother and unemployed father. I love my father dearly and he has many fine qualities, but as I have said many times, I am not inspired by his example of industry. My father has his own demons in life, possibly including alcoholism, I don’t know. I know he likes to get drunk. Mostly, he has always suffered from intractable depression. Because of these things, and others, my parents divorced when I was six. But I don’t want anyone to think that I blame my alcoholism on them, or on that. No, dear friends, I was already a drunk.

I took my first drink when I was five. I secreted a bottle of my parent’s creme de menthe, and got drunk one morning before church (At some point I’ll discuss all the complicated religious factors in my family. I want to keep this post under 40,000 words.). I threw up in Sunday school. I kept the bottle and hid it behind a spare mattress in the alcove in my room. I don’t remember what happened to it. I don’t remember getting drunk again until I was nine.

My mother remarried when I was nine and I got trashed at the wedding. That’s all I remember, really. I don’t have any strong memories associated with the event. My mother’s second husband was not a good man.

With onset of puberty came the onset of a ferocious sense of self-righteousness, and of right and wrong. Something in me decided that drinking was “wrong”, and I stayed away from it, almost entirely (I never became intoxicated, and was primarily a teetotaler), until my senior year of college. I’m incredibly grateful for that period of unwavering self-assurance and arrogance. Without it, I’d have descended into alcoholic despair during critical formative years of my life, and would have been unable, or at least much delayed, in pursuing the education that I now value so highly.

I began drinking in earnest around 21. I went with a friend to Great Britain, hitchhiking, staying in hostels, and getting drunk every night. I started graduate school. The next summer I went with another friend to Europe and Russia for three months, on a circumnavigation of the globe. Again, I drank, heavily, every day. And I had the best time of my life. My travel partner drank a lot too, though not as much as me. We met wonderful people, saw an enormous part of the world, and I learned more important things on that trip than I did in any other three months of my life.

The problem was, when I returned from that trip, I couldn’t leave the booze on vacation. I began drinking daily. I felt proud of myself that I never drank in the morning. It didn’t occur to me at the time that when you sleep until noon, and then start drinking at two, you’re drinking in the morning. But I went to my classes, and I did my homework. And my research. I had a couple of long-term relationships with women who deserved far better than I was capable of giving them.

There’s a stereotype of the raging alcoholic. A person who is ordinary and polite and socio-normative until they drink, whereupon they become angry and wrathful and violent. The stereotype is a stereotype because it is the most visible and impactful form of alcoholism. The drunk at the bar who starts a fight, or who hits his wife and children, or, just as common, who hits her husband and children. But it’s only selection bias that this image is so prevalent. I was not a raging alcoholic (for which I am very grateful).

I was a vanishing alcoholic. I liked nothing more than to pour myself a massive glass of bourbon and watch a movie I’d seen a dozen times. Or go to a bar and drink a dozen beers and watch the baseball game and then drive home drunk. I drove drunk many more times than I can count. And I’ve never met an alcoholic who didn’t. It’s one of the things we do.

I graduated. I nearly quit first, but my advisor, who treated me like a son, didn’t let me. He dragged me through the process, chapter by chapter, of writing my dissertation. It was excruciating and humiliating, to have spent so long working on something that I considered indefensible. But defend it I did. And then I was done. I had recently met the woman I would marry.

I got married a year after I graduated. To a lovely and deeply co-dependant woman who had a ten year old child. We had cohabited for a year. I had had to hide my bottles. She didn’t drink much. I concealed as best I could how much I did. I traded drinking and watching movies for drinking and reading books in the bathtub. I didn’t have a job. I tried to start a consulting company, but I was in no condition to make it a success. The sole contract I had a real chance at I mucked up rather spectacularly, giving a presentation with a raging hangover.

I was, by this point, deeply depressed, and drinking somewhere around a bottle of vodka a day. I had switched to vodka thinking the smell was harder to detect. You will hear a lot of alcoholics say this, if you go to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I don’t know why we think this. It’s patently absurd. My wife was planning to leave me. I felt useless, pitiable, and disgusting. And I felt that I saw my life stretching out in front of me.

I saw a life like my father’s. My father is a brilliant man. But he has never made a contribution to society. I didn’t want to live a life of poverty and charity. I thought highly of my own mind, and what I was capable of doing with it. I felt that I had been groomed from childhood to go on to academic success, to follow in my mother’s and her uncle’s (a National Medal of Science winner) footsteps. But I found that now that I had my doctorate, I didn’t know what to do. All I cared about doing was drinking.

We were seeing a marriage counselor. I was denying my drinking. Not that I drank, but that I had a problem. I remember saying: “I just want to be able to have one drink without being attacked.” I never had one drink. I never knew how many drinks I was going to have. Because I never counted them. I simply started drinking around three in the afternoon, and drank until I went to bed. The marriage counselor told us one day that there was no hope for us, because we weren’t really looking at our issues. She said that the only hope she saw, the only crack she felt she could exploit, was to address my drinking.

That hit me very hard. That with all the problems I saw in my marriage, that I imagined were my wife’s fault, and this professional counselor whom I respected was saying that none of that was addressable, because of how I drank. I knew I needed to do something then. And I knew of one person who could help me. Two years prior, I’d been arrested for drunk driving. I’d attended alcohol education classes, and passed with flying colors. But I knew that now, if I was willing to be honest, that instructor would know what to do.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about what happened then. Now, finally, I want to address how writing this makes me feel. Once again, I’m terrified. So many people I care about and respect do not know this story, and are learning it here. My family, my close friends, and the readers of my old blog who’ve made the transition with me, they know. I am torn between feelings of exposure and embarrassment, and feelings of weird pride at having survived it all and begun an entirely new life free from all that agony.

Fundamentally, I feel that it is critical to me to write and re-write and tell and re-tell this story from time to time. It can be too easy to forget the pain I felt, the pain I caused, the shame and the damage done. I need to keep those things close. Because they are part of my treatment. Without regular reminders of whom I am when I drink, what I do, the selfishness and narcissism, I know that I could drift back towards a drink. Because I’m an alcoholic. Drinking is what we do.

But I am an alcoholic in remission. And what we do is focus clearly, honestly, and without omission, on what we are, our inventory, and allow it to keep us squarely in center of recovery. These are the tools of my therapy. So that I can concern my daily life with moving forward. With the slow regular progress of a life lived with purpose.

Despite the fact that I’m a professional engineer/scientist working in health care, and even hopefully, in mental health care, I do not speak about alcoholism as a scientific authority. I haven’t studied it beyond as an interested participant. I generally do not have knowledge about the latest scientific theory. I don’t know the latest treatment methodologies. I’m not sure what the cognoscenti are writing about it. If you are interested in such things, drugmonkey is something of an authority on such matters.

What I know about alcoholism comes from the fact that I’m an alcoholic, that I meet regularly with lots of other alcoholics, and that I’ve worked very hard to be an alcoholic in recovery. I do that through Alcoholics Anonymous. I do not speak for Alcoholics Anonymous. I am only a member. Everything I say about alcoholism should be treated as opinion. My opinion will vary significantly at times from the official opinion of AA.  If you are interested in such things, you can find that information on their website.

When we discuss alcoholism and recovery in AA, we generally talk about “what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now.” I’ll be doing a full post on each of those things in the coming week. Today, I mostly want to write about what I consider to be a somewhat unfortunate choice of words in my Introductions post, with which I described myself as a member “in good standing” of Alcoholics Anonymous.

There’s no such thing. And that’s important. AA, like any organization, has a bunch of essential concepts. They start with the twelve steps, but less well-known outside of AA are the twelve traditions. The twelve traditions are the organizing principles, such as they are, given that one of them is a tradition of disorganization. The third tradition outlays the only requirement for who is allowed to be a member of AA. There is only one rule: you must have a desire to stop drinking alcohol. Nothing else matters. AA has no schedule. No by-laws. No dues. No required oaths. You don’t have to do the 12 steps. You don’t even have to succeed in not drinking. All you have to have is a desire to stop drinking.

So what did I mean when I said I’m a member in “good standing”? Well, part of it was ego. I want you all out there in cyberspace to think well of me. When I decided to integrate two different online identities, which would involve a large group of people I admire coming to learn that I’m an alcoholic, I was terribly, terribly afraid. Alcoholism is something that nearly everyone on earth has some experience with, or opinion about. I remain afraid that people I have come to care about will now see me in a negative light because they’ve learned this about me. There is a strong stigma still associated with alcoholism. So I wrote that I’m “in good standing”, I think, in part to try to shed as positive a light as possible on the state of my recovery.

The moment we become too secure, too confident, too comfortable in our sobriety, is often the moment that our disease kills us. But that’s not to say that we are always teetering on the edge of relapse, or that every day is a struggle. I don’t think too much about alcohol. I entered recovery precisely so that alcohol would not control my life. I know one criticism of AA leveled by those who seem not to have any experience with it (I’m looking at you, South Park – but I still laughed my ass off at that episode.), is that we still have lives that are all about alcohol, just in absentia, not as drinkers. Well, to some extent, yes, alcohol remains a part of my life through its absence. But I am liberated from it, not chained too it as I once was.

I also meant, in describing myself as in “good standing”, that I have done the twelve steps (and I’ll have a great deal to write about those), that I have a sponsor, and that I speak to my sponsor regularly. That I go to meetings. That I work a program of introspection. That I seek peace and serenity through service. That when I am troubled, I try to look inward first, see where and how I am contributing to my difficulties, and how I can change my own behavior. I consider most of my problems to be of my own making. And I consider most of the solutions to my problems will come from my own efforts. I try as hard as I can not to indict others, because I know that if others seek to indict me, I can easily be found wanting.

So, it was a mistake to describe myself as in “good standing”, because there is no such thing. There is no list of attributes by which we distinguish a member of AA as better or worse. There is only this:

I suffer from a chronic, progressive, incurable, terminal mental illness. However, I am in remission. My remission from alcoholism was achieved through two actions: cessation of consumption, and adoption of a lifestyle inimical to emotional anaesthesia. As a consequence of taking those steps, I stand free.