a program of action

Chapter 10 – Rebirth

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction, Trauma and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

First Day Sober!

One day I woke up but didn’t go downstairs.

I had a very odd experience while lying in bed.

Odd, it was more like a phantasmagoria.

To be honest I wasn’t sure what it was, didn’t have any way of describing it or explaining it. It was just so profoundly weird but it left me strangely altered, different to before.

I lay in bed and time seemed to slow up and then speed up, images from the past blending into each other and being rearranged, defragged somehow. A celestial resculpting of my brain seemed to occur.

The heavens seems to move across my mind. Stormy black clouds raced to lighten and new sunny realisations illuminated my heart.

Something was changing in me.

My roots were grasping new soil.

I wasn’t going to mention this bit.

It is so difficult to explain! I didn’t even want to mention it.

This book is mainly based on scientific research and reason and here I am talking about a experience that I couldn’t explain.

Please bear with me and don’t stop reading here.

It may have been the psychosis or lingering hallucinations or the residual product of a still feverish brain but it wasn’t, I don’t think. Looking back it was like I was somehow being prepared to become sober. That my brain was somewhow was preparing itself for a momentous change in my behaviour. For a momentous change in me.

Hours seem to pass but it was two hours only. I don’t know what happened to me but something profound happened to me. My wife checked on me, worried about my absence.

I said I was okay.

I followed her downstairs feeling somehow different. Full of some unfamiliar conviction.

I didn’t say anything to her.

Couldn’t’ as I didn’t have the words, still don’t, really.

I was too ill and so weak to even try a crude approximation of what happened.

I didn’t know how to explain something I couldn’t fully understand myself.

Did admitting I was an alcoholic have such a profound effect?

I gingerly sat down on the living room sofa and started drinking my cranberry juice and asked Emma for some vegetable and fruit smoothies. I had decided these smoothies would help replace my much needed vitamins and nutrients, help my brain recovery. How did I know these things?

Emma seemed a bit surprised by my requests too but not completely.

She reminded me I had also used White Thistle during my drinking to protect my liver from the excessive alcohol consumption .

My liver was fatty and led to my partial eyesight but it seemed to lag behind the psychological effects and brain damage involved with months of alcoholic psychosis so it may have worked to an extent? It is difficult to say for sure.  

I just sat there chewing on carrots and other fresh vegetables, this is a guy who hadn’t eaten any good for months.

I probably hadn’t eaten properly for over a year. Or more. Much more?

I was greatly perturbed and nauseated that every time I moved my head from side to side there seemed to be liquid, blood maybe, swooshing around my head, giving me the sensation of being on a ocean liner.

Or rather my head felt like an ocean liner.

Or both.

My head was all wooshy.

I still today do not know why I had this liquid swooshing round my brain or what the liquid was, or if it was a liquid?

It was all very confusing, practically everything didn’t make complete sense.

Thinking about it in detail on my first day sober was not the time.

I thought it must be brain damage but it was sickening to dwell on this type of thought.   

Thoughts were painful enough without giving them fearful gravity and the only thought I needed to deal with was the thought of staying sober for another five minutes. That is all I could cope with. I had some resolve this day, an unfamilar conviction.

However, I had terrible difficulties trying to get through those first arduous minutes and hours of sobriety. 

I hadn’t told Emma I was trying to stay sober which was ununusal as the few times I had tried before were all heralded with a fanfare of good intentions, unrealistic confidence and false bravado.

Not this time, it all proceeded with patient and humble determination.

I had this fear I would drink at some stage but no urge as such.

It was not like craving but the distress of my fear made the image of drinking come into my head.

I hadn’t put it there, it had been poked into mind by fear.

I considered this “craving” to be more like a haunting. The whispers of a ghost not keen to leave my mind. They scared the life out of me for sure, but they would come and go I learnt.

Come and go, hoping to spook me enough to react in some way.

It wasn’t I wanted a drink (or did I?), it was more I wanted to be relieved of feeling so terrible, in so much emotional pain. To be relieved of these constant torturous thoughts. I wanted something to take any the pain away but l also knew this was an unrealistic expectation so brought my mind continually to what could be done now, in this moment.

What could I do now to recover, if only to recovery some of my health and even my brain function. The vegetable smoothies  Emma started to make me that day, and for weeks later, would improve my liver function and reduce my jaundice. They would make me feel better and stronger however fleetingly.

It was start, a good start. A recognition I needed a good start. Based on an unfamiliar humility and realism.

It all helped.

It was similar to the the vitamin-rich injection recovering people get in Mental Health instititutionns when they are drying out/rehabilitating. A rehabilitatory boost.

Liver damage was affecting my eyes and this really perturbed me. I wanted to improve my eyesight as soon as I could.

I was getting real about a life threatening problem. Although to think such thoughts would have made me ill. I just proceeded with positive behavior, one thing at a time. I took actions with little deliberation.

I could act, do things to help me now.

The first hatching of a behavioural strategy was occurring without me realising.

Recovery was according to one AA, not what we think or feel but what we do, the actions we take to feel better. I was taking an action, when I could, wth Emma’s help.

So called cravings would crash in waves through my mind throughout the day and five mintues seemed to be like an hour but I waited until the waves crashed and enjoyed the momentary calm after that. I observed more and more this phenomenon.

It was similar to hallucinating on “magic mushrooms” (Psilocybin) when the waves of ecstatic feelings followed frightening, sometimes terrifying, moments or even like when in deep Buddhist meditation when past traumas or deep seated anxieties linked to previous memories arose in the mind, before moving past like images on a movie screen of the mind. The only dfference was these images and thoughts were not as life threatening as the ones I was having on my first sober day.

The only way to survive was to surf the waves of these images and related emotions.

I was trying not to attach to these fear based thoughts involving the possibility of alcohol.

As if they weren’t doing, my creation, my volition. They were happening to me because of actions in the past not the present.

Sometimes the thoughts and images were so real, as if I was there drinking in the bar, chatting to a gorgeous buxom barmaid with the golden sunlight steaming though the windows to illuminate my heart with glad tidings in a momentary toxication and I would fight to suppress these thoughts which would only make the thought come back even more prolifically.

More thoughts and memories would rebound into my mind and consciousness and further attempts to submerge them would lead to a Hydra effect of many memories sprouting heads and creating an imaginery relish and inquisite torture in my psyche, all completely unsanctioned, uncalled for and not expressly given permission by me to illuminate my mind.

I hadn’t ask for any of them. It was so confusing, did I want to drink?

If not, why the hell were all these images swirling around my mind?

Also, why such rosie thoughts when my last experience of drinking was hellish, vomiting and DTs and hallucinations. The TV weather girl would tell me to kill myself on a daily basis, apart when I looked down at the carpet and it stopped!?

Why wasn’t my memory bank throwing up these later memories of alcohol drinking? Why was it choosing from another completely unrealistic brochure, based more on wish fulfillment rather than reality?

Cunning, baffling powerful.

These strangely appetititive memories were more powerful at times than the scary thoughts that drinking was simply inevitable. At least I could cower from these until they went quiet. The other craving that tricked you into craving via other desires such as lust were more difficult not to get sucked into.

Other negative emotions could be utilisied too. Self pity was a constant threat.

Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.

False pride another and the ever present shame.

Shame was the conductor of much of this orchestrated attack of my fragile, fledging sobriety.

Aided and abetted by self loathing too.

Practially all these contributed to emotional pain and obsessive thoughts about drinking.

All negative emotions could be explosive.

Instrusive thoughts fed off them, the worse the distress the more the thoughts. My emotions seemed to want to get me back to drinking but that wasn’t me, was it?

It seemed like me but strangely not me. I wanted to go a different direction and quite frankly my thoughts and errant emotions weren’t helping, they were making things much worse. If they weren’t helping me they would have to be ignored as much as possible. So practically everything in my head, in between my ears, was ignored, if at all possible. Life was less painful without them rattling away in the attic, however briefly.

They weren’t even on my side I felt. They were against me and what I wanted to do. They were now contrary to me even surviving!

Where they my warped spirtual malady, my emotion disease?

No wonder I drank so much if there was this constant cacophony in my head and heart.

.

These were all the lessons I learnt in the first few days after my first meeting. All painful lessons learnt in a very short time, or rather in a short time that felt like forever.

So I tried to do what an AA had suggested “giving in to win”, “don’t fight anyone or anything” and they would have less to bite into and get a hold off.

Letting them come and go was the key, however incredibly difficult this could be.

Emma punctuating these mental struggles with offers of green tea, water, vegetable smoothies etc which helped so much too.

Fear is the greatest enemy I found not craving; looking back I was not craving, I was fearful of not staying sober and this was automatically eliciting thoughts of drinking.

I felt so ill, desperate, struggling to get from one sober moment to the next. It was like jumping from one life boat to the next on a stormy sea.

Just when I despaired of getting through the next five minutes of sobriety I would often get this reassuring presence in my heart. I wasn’t sure what it was. A nice hallucination for a change!?

It had a voice and a warm soothing reassuring feeling that would spread out from heart to my chest and calm me for a moment or too. If it was a movie it would be “how to get a heart in recovery.”

“Everthing is going to be okay” it would reassuringly say.

It was like a big brother or something, it is hard to describe. I was glad of it suddenly appearing I have to say. Whatever it was? I could do with all the help I could get!

So one interminable minute bled into the next.

Emma continued to make me the most vile looking but highly nutritional smoothies and I ate carrots slowly while trying not to move my head, so that the liquid would not swoosh around my head and make me nauseous, while being comforted by this reassuring presence emanating in my heart to calm me, reassuring me that all would be well.

For the first day I had a really crazy head offset at times by a very strange calming heart.

This is how it went for a few days.

My physical strength very slowly improved too and I could walk half a staircase now, in one go, instead of a few steps.

In my early days of sobriety I would always think of a drink when the pub closed for half an hour in th afternoon or at last orders at eleven in the evening and ring my sponsor, to get me through this period then I was safe for the day.

The fear of going to the pub at last orders was a compulsive and terrifying feeling like I had no choice but go there, somehow being dragged there like via magnetism. It was no use I would scupper by sober day. Speaking to my sponsor got me through this compulsion.

It showed how much addiction is embedded in the memory banks of the brain.

How habitual it was.

Recovery actions would have to be habitual too. I had been told to get to ninety AA mettings in ninety days as in order to make recovery more automatic. This would start a process of embedding recovery in my memory, my habitual memory eventually.

Hopefully, in time, recovery would become as habitual as the habitual working of my addiction.

Already I had an idea that fear prompted thoughts of drinking. How to become less fearful in my thinking and emotional reactions seemed part of all this.

Keeping one’s serenity was key one AA shared on Saturday nght.

Ths was all new but vaguely familar too.

It wasn’t a million miles away from Buddhist thought and action.

The missing bit was knowing why I needed to be serene, or equanimous, in the moment. My need to be peaceful in the moment was now urgent. Needed to be applied continually to keep my addiction and it’s many lying whispers at bay. For however long I could at least, until I remembered how to act to quieten it down again.

Using a behaviour strategy to deal with emotions and thoughts which were the terrifying catalyst for the distress that prompted automatic thoughts and images of possible relapse.

Looking back the getting through the first day sober still goes down as my greatest achievement of all time!!

The odds against if were huge, It brought amazing relief and sense of satisfaction and belief.

The start of the day and the end were worlds apart.

28th December 2005.

Although I strangely think my recovery started on the 24th December following my first meeting and psychic change and although I drank for three days while tapering off the drink. The drink wasn’t as before and meant little to me. I had found the answer, the solution on the 24th December.

Thanks to Emma, vegetables and fruit, the voice in my heart and the BB I had made it through a day of not drinking.

I told myself that today would probably be the worst day of it and that tomorrow might even a bit easier. The next two days were still hellish but I now knew it could be done if I did what I did before and this gave me confidence. The voice in my heart was still helping me through too.

Recovery would be a constant journey from a crazy head to a serene heart.

I had rarely used the medication – I think I used 2 tablets (used in 1/3s)  in the 3 days of home detox.

There were 3 and ½ left in the packet. I would keep them in case I knew another alcoholic who couldn’t get essential medication for detoxification from alcohol from their local doctor.

Chapter 4 – When All Else Fails

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

When all else fails

 My first AA meeting was on Christmas Eve, 2005 in a local Church Hall. Emma accompanied me there. Drove me and then walked me to the hall.  I was so weak I couldn’t  walk so needed her arm to lean on. I needed her moral support too. There were references to my jaundice waiting for me on the front door step, when one of the AAs sarcastically, in racist tomes, asked me if I had “just gotten off the boat?”His understanding and compassionate nature later went on the serve multiple years for child abuse.

Anyway, I was too weak to punch him and ventured indoors. I was surprised to see that a guy I had drank with, from time to time in my local bar, was there and seemed to be in charge of the meeting. I was surprised to see him as I didn’t think he drank that much! He had drunk about the same amount I had spilled off my chin. This made me feel stupid and ashamed, why hadn’t I come here before? Looking at him, I should have come to AA years ago, before, it was too late.

I felt at more at home, as someone with psychosis could do, with him being there. It helped me. It wasn’t just me in this boat. We joined a dozen men sitting in a circle around a large table. I felt like a freak with my glowing skin. We were told, perhaps for my benefit, that in the meeting people would share their stories and the rest of us would just listen, with interrupting, and try to identify with their testimonies. I was relieved that I didn’t have to speak and could get away with just listening, which, given my psychosis, was difficult enough.

There were sparkling multi-coloured Christmas lights hung everywhere, with a Nativity scene beside us. The Catholic feel to proceedings helped me feel at home for a moment too.  Then it made me feel ashamed. How far I had fallen, from the hopes and dreams of my parents for me. First of my family to go to University and now sat here? How the hell had I got here? My stomach flipped with emotion, anxiety and self pity. Maybe this was a waste of time, I was too far gone? Thoughts had long since become my enemy, creating tsunamis of emotions that overwhelmed me. They were unceasing in my mind. The meeting began and we listened to a preamble and a man reading from a book. The thoughts eventually quietened enough for me to listen to other people speaking.  

Right from the start, two things struck me. Firstly, there wasn’t much talk about alcohol, most of the sharing was about what they called alcoholism. Secondly, instead of dwelling on drinking and how to stop drinking, or even cut down, they talked about what made them return to drinking; a thing they kept referring to as a spiritual malady, which someone described as an inabilty to live life on life’s terms and another called being maladjusted to life.

They seemed to be saying that something, inside them, made them drink and return to drinking, even when they didn’t want to. It was that, that was their alcoholism, not the symptom, the drinking of alcohol. It was revelatory. There could be something done about this without simply whiteknuckling it! There was a reason for drinking that wasn’t just craving? In fact, in some cases, the craving must have been caused by something other than wanting to drink. Some said their craving dispapeared after coming into recovery. This was absolutely astonishing. I thought to myself, they can’t have drunk much? One person said they had been on 3 bottles of brandy a day and had the obsession to drink lifted after coming into AA. How? By admitting they were alcoholic! . My addled brain struggled to fathom this. How was this all possible? How could admitting you are alcoholic have such a profound result?

Until now, I had thought my upbringing in the “Troubles” in Northern Ieland in a dysfunctional family had been the cause of my drinking and mental health problems. They seemed to be saying it was my reaction to my life that caused my difficulties with alcohol, and other substances. Not everyone who lived there became alcoholic! Two of my three sisters weren’t alcoholic. Two out of four siblings weren’t alcoholic. They maybe reacting differently to life that me and my alcoholic sister? The reason I suffered from alcoholism was because I was an alcoholic. It was disease; I was not weak or bad but ill and suffering from a chronic condition from which there was no cure, but could to be managed, one day at a time.

Everything in the “shares”; testamonies to what it was like drinking, what happened for them to stop and what it was like now, in that first meeting would crop up again years later in my neuroscience research – the spiritual malady, emotion disease, hole in the soul, not belonging anywhere. The men saying they were not sure what they were feeling half the time, how they could be emotionally immature or grandiose, in the gutter looking down on the world. How they never fitted in. Felt less than, defective. How they were never given a manual on how to live. Their struggle to contain their emotions, their fear based thinking.

My paranoia gripped me at various times, made me wonder if these people had somehow been planted here by someone, to make me realise I was like them..an alcoholic! Emma must have played some part in it?How else would they know enough about me to share things which were practically about me? It was too uncanny, the similarities with their life stories and mine. It was difficult to explain otherwise. Other than, there were some peope in this world that are like me, and these people are alcoholics. They are like me for reasons to do with them being alcoholic but also in how they react to the world. There were people who had a combination of what someone called an emotion disease and problem drinking and this seemed somehow linked. I later found out that in meetings where there is a newcomer, in this case me, the shares are with the newcomer in mind. I really think all the people sharing pulled out all the stops, probably thinking if I didn’t get it soon, there would’nt be much time to get it later. They all probably felt sorry for Emma too and her desperation for me to get help.

It was life or death now. All the shares started with how it was impossible to stop drinking after starting or staying stopped after giving up drinking for a while. They were always led back to the drink, often against their will. They then shared on what brought them back, this spiritual malady, this emotion disease. In dealing with this malady, one day at a time, they stayed sober. They dealt with it by living a spiritual life.

There was alot to take in but it all sounded like me. Not only the malady and the alcoholism but the solution. I had long been interested in Buddhism and had practised it for a number of years, and for months had been sober doing so. In fact, Buddhist practise coincided with my longest period of sobriety, 6 months. So there had ben some connection there, I hadn’t fully understood. The piece of the puzzle I had missed was my alcoholism, whch had been there from the very start of my binge drinking at the age of 15. In fact, from the age of 27, I knew I couldn’t stop drinking when I started and the very few attempts to stay stopped were for pathetically short periods of time. I remember thinking this insight was too more to bear at the time so I buried it away from my consciousness. I didn’t want my crutch to be taken away. I couldn’t face life at that time, and afterwards, without it. How was this not a problem?

Denial of reality. But the drink was seeing me through these tough times, wasn’t it? It was my friend, my best friend. My lover. My everything. Seems like it was creating most of the tough times without me realising, making the bad worse. Progressively worse. It is a progressive illness one man stated. It never gets better, only worse. AA is where you come when you have been everywhere else, pyschiatrists, therapists, mental health institutions, prisons. It is the last step before the grave for many.

It is sobering, in the sense of creating a sane perspective, to realise, that alcohol is addictive and results in full blown addiction. It is strange it is rarely spoken about in these terms, in the same terms as other drugs. I could admit I was addicted to alcohol, it was admitting I was also stricken by this most ugly named condition, alcoholism. That would require me to say I was more than addicted somehow, that it was more than my tough upbringing. That there was something fundamentally wrong with me? That I had to be accountable. That alcohol had been a most addictive medication for my, as yet, undiagnosed condition. Admitting I was powerless over alcohol was what it came down to, that my life had become unmanageable. That was all I had to do now, today.

When the meeting was drawing to a close, my old drinking pal, and Chair of the meeting, asked if anyone else wanted to share? I was so so nervous but plucked up enough courage, to say,

“My name is Seamas, and I’m an alcoholic!”

“Hi Seamas!” was the warm heart-felt chorus back at me. I felt instantly accepted. I instantly belonged.

“Just wanted to say thank you for being here, I’m glad to be here”.

“Thank you Seamas”

I was where I should be. The relief of saying I am an alcoholic was immense, like a bottle had been corked and a spirit released. Like I had been released from my imprisonment, from my bondage, from my binding addiction. A catharsis! For the first time, I was out of the bottle, looking back at it, knowing there were now two possible versions of me. The drinking alcoholic and the fledging recovering alcoholic. For the first time in a couple of decades the prospect of being free to choose appeared. I had an option, other than the problem. There was a solution.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous suggests that a “psychic change”, a massive alteration in how a person thinks and feels about the world, is required for an alcoholic to recover for alcoholism. I left that meeting after having had a “psychic change”. I was different leaving as to when I was coming in. Transformed. Someone mentioned to me as I left, that at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope. I had a morsel of hope, enough to sustain the start of recovery.

Read my Blog from 2015 about Psychic Change and Stories of Transformation here

More on Acceptance here

Chapter 3 – The First Step

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Chapter 3

The First Step

Admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable

So the doctor proclaimed me an alcoholic, God Bless him! However, he also refused to give me any medication like diazepam to taper off alcohol and become sober enough to start recovery. He said he didn’t want me to get addicted to them! He did, however, suggest that I drink water with my wine. Like,  I was going to do that! I was the most chronically addicted to alcohol person who was going to start drinking water with it, a person who hadn’t gone near water in months. This is the typical insight of medical professionals to alcoholism. I could have done this, in a parallel univesrse, and still had DTs due to the drop in alcohol drunk, and those could have resulted seizures that might have killed me. Did he know this?

When we arrived home we realised that I had seen another doctor, a locum during the summer, filling in for another doctor, who suggested week’s course of diazepam, to help with withdrawing from alcohol as I had considered quitting then, before the severity of my alcoholic psychosis increased and I never left the house after that. He also seemed concerned that I would become addicted to this type of medication. Were both of these doctors just conceding that I was an addicted type of person? If so, why weren’t they suggesting treatment? They seemed more bothered about the potential to become addicted to medication but not as worried about the fact I was already completely and utterly addicted to alcohol. I think I had less than a week’s supply and that would have to do! I counted the pills, there were four and a half pills left. Would that be enough?

Emma booked me an appointment at a local addiction treatment centre and I was to contact Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I was to phone the AA helpline where I would talk to an AA member, that was the plan.I hadn’t really thought that there was any AA in the UK. I had heard of AA in American movies but had not realised that there were meetings nearby. In Swansea, Wales! It was like there was some strange portal in the Universe, previously undetected. I spoke to a guy from Cardiff called Jack, who was a recovering alcoholic. He seemed strangely familiar to me, I’m not sure why? He convinced me that I was not only an alcoholic but a chronic alcoholic and the craziest cat he had spoken to in quite some time.

Somehow in my damaged brain it was helpful to be classified as a chronic alcoholic as that meant I was really way over the line of alcoholism and that it was beyond discussion or debate. I took his diagnosis of my craziness in good faith too. Months of psychosis says it all really. It was strangely comforting to realise the alcohol had created most of this madness and there was a hope abstinence from alcohol would bring back some sanity. The strangest thing was I felt he knew me and I knew him, that I was a madder version of him in some way. There was some undefinable connection. Maybe it was the psychosis but it felt like we weren’t in the normal dimension of life but in some parallel or slightly separate dimension. In a quiet room, to the side of the staged production fo life. It felt really weird to have connected with another human being in a way that didn’t make me feel freakish and full of shame.

He wasn’t looking down on me, he was identifying with my plight in a way the others had not. He knew me, where I was coming from. He had been there, where I was now. Just maybe not a crazy! He was offering a solution to what had seemed an insurmountable problem, he had suggested the hope that all was not lost. He was offering a solution, which no one else had, the so-called professionals. He had this insight, this lived experience, which was compelling. He urged me to go to an AA meeting. It was urgent that I did. I would probably die without sobriety. It was what he had done and it ahd worked for him. He had been in recovery nearly twenty years.

He said that if I did what he die, I would get what he had. Freedom from alcohol and a sober life barely conceivable to me. It would all be one day at a time. That was the way it was for him. Life, one day at a time, was bearable and manageable. he urged me to do the same. I liked his straightforwardness, candour and plain speaking, even if it scared the life out of me. I resolved to go the following night, Christmas Eve, 2005.

Read more about the Twelve Steps here (Links to Resources)

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The Final Destination Arrives At You

 

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One month ago I was hoping to start EMDR therapy for my PTSD.

Unfortunately it has not happened as yet. I spent the whole summer preparing myself to start therapy but it is yet to start.

Why?

My wife also suffers from PTSD and anxiety disorder. Due to this and that, I have been looking after her for the last few weeks, supporting her, and getting her back to work as she had been off with acute stress. This was exhausting given my current emotional state.

Then someone tried to kicked my front basement door in – unsuccessfully I am glad to say.

It was however a bit traumatic and upsetting, this invasion of our privacy, this violation of our home.

So I had to fix the door. Unfortunately it also rained and rained the night of the attempted break in and the basement room got flooded which cost nearly £2000 to fix.

Fortunately the Insurance will cover it but it is still distressing and stressful. I have spent days installing cctv and security lights.

So I had to get my wife back to work followed by this break in followed by having to work with builders for the last four-five weeks (a long story in itself!).

The basement door was replaced and then the laminate floor was taken up as it was ruined by the flood. Then we realised  we may have rising damp so we had to get that fixed.

The floor was treated and the walls painted with a tar. The basements steps are had to be re-cemented and the front windows and doors resealed to prevent further problems with damp.

We then laid tiles which took forever and re-plastered the ceiling which has been damaged, strangely by the flooding also as the roof is below ground level, i.e. in the basement.

It has been stressful and exhausting. I could lie down on the floor and sleep, if they weren’t full of dirt and plaster. I have done all this while in a stew of trauma which is like a puss capsule waiting to burst.

All my life I have been a person who fixes stuff, helps people out in an emergency. A go to guy.

As a child I tried to be a caregiver, caretaker to my Valium dependent mother. I parented her as she struggled to parent me. I also took all my father’ anxieties about his troubled wife and his general woes.

I grew up in role reversal.

I am primed to help in emergencies.

I never had anyone to share my concerns with.  My sisters would ask me how are you? Then not wait for the reply.

It was a prelude to me having to listen to how they were. I have been a receptacle for other’s to deposit their anxieties. Often without offering this service.

Who listened to me? I have always felt like a “poorly drawn boy” tiny, lacking definition in my mind’s eye when I look back at my childhood.

There is little substance to my self schema

I somehow need to get better drawn, coloured in, made more full, more me. Take back the pieces of me strewn across the wreckage of my past. Piece them together to see what I end up with, end up as.

At the moment I feel I am in danger of disappearing.

Is this a bad thing? This feeling of evaporating. Is the old me disappearing, am I shedding skin, a turtle-like replacing a shell with another?

Hopefully a lighter shell!

I do not fear emotions like before, however negative or troublesome. I think something is coming to the surface, like a vapour on my stew.

Impurities  being cleansed just by my decision to look at my trauma therapeutically, professionally.

This may have started a stampede of squashed emotions, trampling their way to the surface of my mind to get recognition, to finally be heard.

All I know is that if I don’t deal with my trauma it will deal with me. It is the most pressing concern for me not only in terms of general mental well being but in terms of relapse risk. It is by far the greatest risk to relapse.

I find AA meetings are good for sharing about certain things,   to a certain extent, for sharing what is going on with me but no longer fully. AA does not really deal with shame, trauma or the other issues that propelled my addictions to near death and psychosis.

It deals with shame of addiction for sure but The Big Book was written at a time when even psychotherapy did not consider shame, instead concentrating on guilt.

The steps deal effectively with guilt and the shame around what we have done to other people, sins of commission,  but they do little in my opinion for the sins of omission, the sins sinned against us. What do we do with this stuff?

The stuff that often propelled our addictions in the first place? Haven’t some of us been just dealing with the cart and not the horse?

Just some observations.

Roughly 65% of AAs have outside help, with what? The causes of their addictions?

Or certainly development childhood aspects which later contributed to the severity of their addictions?

This is where I am at, looking out for others while fit to burst myself. I am bottling up a primal yell, and request to be heard, at last.

As the youngest in my family I had no one in whom to deposit my anxiety and distress. To offload on.

AA has been instrumental in helping me share tonnes of stuff about my alcoholism. My trauma and neglect form childhood has often met with fairly closed ears. Some things people don’t want to talk about in depth. Some things they don’t want to touch for fear of making worse. I can relate to this. I have done this myself for years in recovery. But now it is inevitable that I deal with this stuff.

The damn is about to burst as I have said and will do…eventually.

I will hopefully keep you posted.

I am also very hopeful that it will have a chrysalis effect too.

I have  faith that God goes deep!

You are Enough, We are Enough!

“The wounded healer” refers to us, who suffer greatly from shame, helping others via love, tolerance and understanding who also suffer greatly from shame.

We can help others and be helped because we all know what it is like to feel the chronic, toxic shame the drives addictive behaviours.

Our understanding of shame is not out of a book it is real, lived experience. We know how it can drive one into chronic addiction and we know how to recovery from the persistent effects of this shame.

The main thing that struck me when I first went to AA was a lack of judgement which was amazing considering I was very jaundiced at the time.

I was accepted in the group without  reservation. This greatly helped my damaged sense of belonging, my not feeling part of.

It made me feel that this is the place I need to be. Have always needed to be?

The “shares” or testimonies of other recovering people made we realise they suffered the same shame as me and had worked to overcome it via the steps, via having fellowships, people in their lives who understood and who helped them. They told me of their triumphs over their emotional difficulties, over their chronic lack of self esteem, over not feeling good enough, of feeling less than.

A failure –  they talked about me and how I felt about me. How I had always felt about me!?

I had never been in a group of people who had talked so openly about their intimate feelings which was amazing. In doing so they were talking about my intimate feelings too. This gave me a sense of not being alone anymore. They seemed to be shining a light of hope into the dark recesses of of my shameful psyche.

It addressed my sense of isolation right away.

I had spent my life feeling not good enough, bad, l had that knawing feeling of less than, that hole in the sole.

I was like these people. They were like me.

I felt and continue to feel more like these people than I do my own family.

They became my surrogate family, my newly learnt attachment.

They were like me. They had not learnt this stuff out of a book, by professional observation but by having been through this stuff themselves. This was real not learnt.

They had been there. They were here now for me.

They knew what they were talking about.

This was the beginning of my psychic change. A person who was to become by therapist at the local treatment  was at my first meeting and he later said that he felt I had a psychic change at that my first meeting.

I had come in utterly beaten, at  death’s door and had left with hope.

The journey started with hope.

I had found a portal in the universe – it was Alcoholics Anonymous but from the shares it might have been called Shame sufferers Anonymous.

Shame ran through every share. They say fear is the corrosive thread which ran through our lives but it is equally the case that shame does too and causes just as much distress and damage.

It is difficult to live life when you do not have your own back, believe in yourself as  worthy of the good, healthy, things  in life. That you are not worthy them. That these things happen to others. Not you as you do not deserve them.

Why recover at all when you are not worth it?

This is how many of us feel? We are not worth it, this recovery.

The truth is the opposite, we are worth it. We do deserve it.

We are heroes who suffered so much and come through so much. We deserve happiness more than most! As a result we have  so have so much to offer others. We are all wounded healers.

We are here to help others like ourselves, in a way that only we can!

It was via others, like parents that we have this shame and these negative self schemas.

It is through human relationships that these start to heal. Shame is a social emotion which needs a social treatment.

We need to reconnect to overcome the isolating force of shame.

You are enough! We are enough!

The psychic change as continual behavioural change?

When I came into AA I remember hearing the words “the need for a psychic change” which was the product of a spiritual awakening (as the result of doing the 12 steps) and that the 12 steps are a program of action!

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous clearly states this need “The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences* which have revolutionised our whole attitude toward life, towards our fellows and toward God’s universe.”

The question is whether this spiritual change is the result of behavioural change?

As I was told when I came into recovery that if I did not change my actions, and how I acted in this world, my actions would take me back to where my actions had taken me before – back to drinking.

This is the cornerstone of AA recovery; thinking, feeling differently about the world as the result of acting differently in the world, as to when we were active drinkers.

Otherwise one does the same things and ends up in the same places, doing the same things, namely drinking. It is a behavioural revolution; a sea change in how we act.

In line with this thinking, it is we that need to change, not the world.

According to one study (1) which examined whether personality traits were modified during prolonged abstinence in recovering alcoholics, two groups of both recovering and recently detoxified alcoholics were asked via questionnaire to  see if they differed significantly from each other in three personality domains: neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The recovering alcoholics were pooled from self help groups and treatment centres and the other group, the recently detoxified drinkers were pooled from various clinics throughout France.

Patients with alcohol problems obtained a high “neuroticism” score (emotions, stress), associated with a low “agreeableness” score (relationship to others).

In the same vein, low “conscientiousness” scores (determination) were reported in patients who had abstained from alcohol for short periods (6 months to 1 year).

In this study, recently detoxified drinkers scored high on neuroticism. They experienced difficulty in adjusting to events, a dimension which is associated with emotional instability (stress, uncontrolled impulses, irrational ideas, negative affect). Socially, they tend to isolate themselves and to withdraw from social relationships.

This also ties in with what the Big book also says “We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people.“

In contrast, regarding neuroticism, they found that recovering persons did not necessarily focus on negative issues. They were not shy in the presence of others and remained in control of their emotions, thus handling frustrations better (thereby enhancing their ability to remain abstinent).

Regarding agreeableness (which ties back into social relationships), the researchers also found that recovering persons cared for, and were interested in, others (altruism). Instead, recently detoxified drinkers’ low self-esteem and narcissism prevented them from enjoying interpersonal exchanges, and led them to withdraw from social relationships.

Finally, regarding conscientiousness, they observed that, over time, recovering persons became more social, enjoyed higher self-esteem (Costa, McCrae, & Dye, 1991), cared for and were interested in others, and wished to help them.

They were able to perform tasks without being distracted, and carefully considered their actions before carrying them out; their determination remained strong regardless of the level of challenge, and their actions are guided by ethical values. Instead, recently detoxified drinkers lacked confidence, rushed into action, proved unreliable and unstable. As a result, lacking sufficient motivation, they experienced difficulty in achieving their objectives.

Recovering persons seemed less nervous, less angry, less depressed, less impulsive and less vulnerable than recently detoxified drinkers. Their level of competence, sense of duty, self-discipline and ability to think before acting increased with time.

 

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The authors of the study concluded that “these results are quite encouraging for alcoholic patients, who may aspire to greater quality of life through long-term abstinence”.

However, in spite of marked differences between groups, their results did not provide clear evidence of personality changes.

While significant behaviour differences between the two groups were revealed, they were more akin to long-term improvements in behavourial adequacy to events than to actual personality changes.

This fits in with the self help group ethos of a change in perception and in “taking action” to resolve issues. In fact, 12 steps groups such as AA are often referred to as utilising a “program of action” in recovering from alcoholism and addiction and in altering attitudes to the world and how they act in it.

The authors also noted the potential for stabilization over time by overcoming previous behaviour weaknesses, i.e. in responding to the world.  Hence, this process is ”one of better adequacy of behaviour responses to reality and its changing parameters.”

In fact, treatment-induced behaviour changes showed a decrease in neuroticism and an increase in traits related to responsibility and conscientiousness.

In line with our various blogs which have explained alcoholism in terms of an emotional regulation and processing disorder, as the Big Book says ““We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures”  the authors here concluded that  “rational management of emotions appears to be the single key factor of lasting abstinence”

If we want to to recover from addiction we have to change how we behave.  We have to start by following a recovery program of action. 

No by thinking about it, or emoting about it but by doing it!

Action is the magic word.

References

Boulze, I., Launay, M., & Nalpas, B. (2014). Prolonged Abstinence and Changes in Alcoholic Personality: A NEO PI-R Study. Psychology, 2014.

Alcoholics Anonymous. (2001). Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition. New York: A.A. World Services.

 

One from the Heart

I have started a page on my other blog on the role of trauma and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in addictive behaviours. This is a condition very close to my heart, literally.

 http://insidethealcoholicbrain.com/ptsd/

For me PTSD is one “co-occurring” condition which has greatly contributed to  my overall alcoholism and the severity of my alcoholism.

It greatly contributed to my initial drinking especially via the effect alcohol had on me.

My traumatic incidents in early to middle childhood mixed with my insecure attachment to my mother meant I was always wary of people. I always left distinct from other people, even my immediate family.

I was wary and anxious, paranoid that people were thinking and talking about me. I never felt I could be myself around others even my best friends from childhood.

I was always holding something back, always left like I was protecting some invisible wound. I now believe that invisible wound was an emotional wound oozing shame.

Then I found alcohol. I felt I had come across the elixir of life.

It made me more me, a better me, a friendlier, warmer, less dismissive, less fearful me.

A me that got on great with others, effortlessly, even others I had not particularly liked before.

I became the life and soul of the party. I never classed alcohol as a drug because I thought drugs took you away from yourself whereas alcohol almost brought me home to myself.

I fitted my skin better and felt more comfortable in it after drinking alcohol. I loved that warm golden glow, the liquid bliss.

It made me go “phew!” and allowed me to escape myself.

A lot of this I believe was trauma mixed with insecure attachment mixed with an abnormal reaction to alcohol.

Trauma and insecure attachment alters the stress parts of the brain which heightens the effects of alcohol. It allowed me to connect with people. Gave me that “comfort and ease” which was illusive in everyday life.

In recovery this connection with people is essential too. We recover with the help of others, we learn the program via others.

We have to trust another person. So what happens when we lose that trust or never gained that trust. And don’t we have to trust in a God of our understanding?  Faith seems to  be about trust too?

The reality folks, is I don’t have a lot of trust period.

I love and trust my wife absolutely. After that…?

I have a lot of trust for various others such as some members of my family a few friends but generally my childhood has left me fearful  and mistrusting. All my immediate family and beyond love me but there is expressing love and there is demonstrating love, they are very different I find.

The worse thing is I also take over from God in many ways because I am not trusting enough to let Him get on with running the show.

This weekend proved to me I need additional help with trust, with my PTSD.

I mean I have come to the realisation I need outside help, professional help, EMDR help for my trauma – the two major issues I have in recovery and which act as my most likely relapse triggers scenarios are both to do with trauma.

This weekend I convinced myself that my unintentional actions had indirectly upset someone in recovery.

I had not real proof of this. I was kinda paranoid about it more than anything.

My head eventually went into a tail spin as a result of thinking I may inadvertently have caused harm in another recovering person. I was full of shame and anguish as my head immediately went into catastrophic thinking, thinking the worse, that his person might take it so bad that they may even relapse, and might even die!!

My thinking was constantly trying to convince me the worse case scenario was about to happen and it would be my fault. This is called PTSD thinking.

When I as a child something terrible happened and someone caused me trauma via a life threatening situation.

I blamed myself for this trauma, convinced myself that it was somehow my fault that this had happened. This was me dealing with my helpfulness and hopelessness in the face of extreme trauma. Trying to somehow control the uncontrollable.

Somehow I could have adverted this if I had acted differently? This is trauma in a nutshell, thinking one is guilty for something beyond one’s control.

In retrospect this seems insane to think I as a child could have any control over this incident. It had nothing to do with me.

Years later this incident (and others) had burnt into my brain and my heart. When I unintentionally hurt  (or otherwise think I have) who is vulnerable like someone in recovery I have this terrible reaction that they may relapse or die.

It is irrational but it is there and it has to be treated professionally.

Someone else’s adult life is not in my control, only my adult life is in my control (and I get a lot of help with that)!

In order to be in more in charge of this adult life I have to deal with that traumatised child, and via professional means.

The problem has become clear, it has become a broken record in my head. The scales have fallen from my eyes.

Action is required.

Recovery is about taking action, not thinking about taking action.

My PTSD and alcoholism got fused into one condition, although they each have different voices in my head.

There is other voices too – the trauma voice, the OCD voices, the insecure attachment voice/ the less than voice/ the not good enough voice – mostly voices of shame provoked by childhood trauma.

There is also the addict voice of the chronic malcontent, nothing is good enough and too much is never enough.

So there you have it, one definitely  from the heart.

That is where recovery has to happen ultimately.

This is where I hope the still voice of recovery will eventually reside.

Progress not Perfection

When I need a spiritual “tune up” I go back to basics. I up my meditation, go to more AA meetings and go to chapel more regularly.

I have over the last few years drifted away from what I used to do in terms of my recovery.

I took time out from AA to further my ideas into the neurobiology and neuromechanisms of addiction and I have now come up with theories of addiction which satisfy my understanding of addiction.  I have done with that in many ways.

These theories of addiction can be found here   please read as they may strike a chord with you too and hopefully contribute to your understanding of addictive behaviour.

But this research and time away from AA has had some cost or so may be the case. It depends on how one appraises this and how one appraises the role of mistakes in life, if this was a mistake even?

Are mistakes things to be learnt from, are mistakes also integral to learning a better way of doing things?

In these last few years only going to AA intermittently and nothing like as much as I used to, I have found I have increasingly been living in my head and less in my heart.  I have found it difficult to moderate my research. I have become quite obsessive if not addicted to researching addiction, however ironic this may sound.

Now I have taken time out as I want to change course in my life. I have decided I want to work more closely with my fellow alcoholics, I want to use what I have researched along with what I have learnt in AA in a more practical therapeutic way for myself and for others.

To do so requires me getting more spiritually and emotionally fit.

Today I have meditated after waking and then went to chapel then followed by a AA meeting. I have just  returned and after this will shop, cook tea, walk my dogs, do the clothes washing etc. All mundane compared to high flying research?

High flying research has it’s place but the spiritual programme I want to live has to come first and has to put others first.

I haven’t been doing that as much in reality as I should.

Throughout my research I have not been living in AA and visiting the world from there, I have been living in the world and barely giving AA any time. The reason I have done what I have in recovery and got what I got in recovery is solely down to AA.

AA does not need to be improved or updated. I do!

I went to this meeting today thinking I will be of help to others to be gobsmacked of how much help these other people are to me.

For an egomaniac self proclaimed genius this was such a humbling experience it was painful.

I have drifted off beam, gotten spiritually flabby.

All the shares I heard today where nuggets of genius on how to stay sober, they were living demonstrations of recovery, living demonstrations of living a spiritual life in a way I am not! It was like sitting around a table of spiritual  gurus.

How could I have been so wrong about these people before?

You know why? Because I was too busy being so right about what I thought.

I need to put more work in to get more out of this spiritual way of life.

When I was last in AA in this area I would pronounce that meeting as a sick meeting or that meeting is not doing it properly or that is not AA, or why are they always talking about outside agencies like treatment centres etc…..a controlling madman was what I was looking back.

Today I was completely teachable.

A first!

Everyone who shared was a teacher, everyone is a teacher period. Everyone has something to say, something I can learn from. Everyone!

This is where I am at.

A bit tired, fragile and dealing with the bitter pill of swallowing my false pride and admitting I have been so wrong about so many things.

I really hate to admit it. But there you have it.

There is not a problem out there – it is usually a problem in here, in between my ears, in my head and heart.

Perhaps I needed to step out  and then go back?

Who knows? All I know is that I now have a different attitude to when I was last there.

The worse thing which is also the best thing is that after all this research I can really state  that I can’t be sure I know anything much.

And that is definitely progress!

 

 

How Stories Transform Lives

When I first came to AA, I wondered how the hell sitting around in a circle listening to one person talking, and the next person talking and …. could have anything to do with my stopping drinking?

It didn’t seem very medical or scientific? Did not seem like any sort of treatment?  How could I get sober this way, listening to other people talking?

It didn’t make any sense. Any time I tried to ask a question I was told that we do not ask questions, we simply listen to other recovering alcoholics share what they called their “experience, strength and hope”?

How does this help you recover from one of the most profound disorders known, from chronic alcoholism?

I did not realise  that this “experience, strength and hope” in AA parlance, is fundamental in shifting an alcoholic’s self schema from a schema that did not accept one’s own alcoholism, to a self schema that did, a schema that shifts via the content of these shared stories from a addicted self schema to recovering person self schema.

Over the weeks, months and years I have grown to marvel at the transformative power of this story format and watched people change in front of my very eyes over a short period of time via this process of sharing one’s story of alcoholic damage to recovery from alcoholism.

I have seen people transformed from dark despair to the  lustre of hope and health.

One of the greatest stories you are ever likely to hear and one I never ever tire of hearing.

Through another person sharing their story they seem to be telling your story at the same time. The power of identification is amplified via this sharing.

If one views A.A. as a spiritually-based community, one quickly observe s that A.A. is brimming with stories.

The majority of A.A.’s primary text (putatively entitled Alcoholics Anonymous but referred to almost universally as “The Big Book,” A.A., 1976) is made up of the stories of its members.

During meetings, successful affiliates tell the story of their recovery. In the course of helping new members through difficult times, sponsors frequently tell parts of their own or others’ stories to make the points they feel a neophyte A.A. member needs to hear. Stories are also circulated in A.A. through the organization’s magazine, Grapevine.

But the most important story form in Alcoholics Anonymous describes  personal accounts of descent into alcoholism and recovery through A.A. In the words of A.A. members, explains “what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now.”

Members typically begin telling their story by describing their initial involvement with alcohol, sometimes including a comment about alcoholic parents.

Members often describe early experiences with alcohol positively, and frequently mention that they got a special charge out of drinking that others do not experience. As the story progresses, more mention is made of initial problems with alcohol, such as job loss, marital conflict, or friends expressing concern over the speaker’s drinking.

Members will typically describe having seen such problems as insignificant and may label themselves as having been grandiose or in denial about the alcohol problem. As problems continue to mount, the story often details attempts to control the drinking problem, such as by avoid-ing drinking buddies, moving, drinking only wine or beer, and attempting to stay abstinent for set periods of time.

sharing 82a62c4e060569b3dedb0dc7e4c6c438

 

The climax of the story occurs when the problems become too severe to deny any longer. A.A. members call this experience “hitting bottom.”

Some examples of hitting bottom that have been related to me include having a psychotic breakdown, being arrested and incarcerated, getting divorced, having convulsions or delirium tremens, attempting suicide, being publicly humiliated due to drinking, having a drinking buddy die, going bankrupt, and being hospitalized for substance abuse or depression.

After members relate this traumatic experience, they will then describe how they came into contact with A.A. or an A.A.-oriented treatment facility…storytellers incorporate aspects of the A.A. world view into their own identity and approach to living.

Composing and sharing one’s story is a form of self-teaching—a way of incorporating the A.A. world view (Cain, 1991). This incorporation is gradual for some members and dramatic for others, but it is almost always experienced as a personal transformation.

So before we do the 12 steps we start by accepting step one  – We admitted we were powerless over alcohol——that out lives had become unmanageable –  and by listening to and sharing stories which give many expamples of this loss of control or powerlessness over drinking. .

Sharing our stories also allows us to stat comprehending the insanity or out of contolness (unmanageability)  of our drinking and steps us up for considering step 2 –  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity – through  to step three, so the storeies not only help us change self schema they set us on the way to treating our alcoholism via the 12 steps.

In these stories we accept our alcoholsimm and the need for persoanl, emotional and spirtual transformation. The need to be born anew, as a person in recovery.

Reference

1. Humphreys, K. (2000). Community narratives and personal stories in Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of community psychology, 28(5), 495-506.

 

 

WE

This week saw Alcoholics Anonymous celebrate it’s 80th Birthday.

Many media outlets have stated that AA was founded 80 years ago but this is not correct.

AA was co-founded 80 years ago when Bill Wilson passed on a message of hope to Dr Bob, or Dr Robert Smith to give his full name.

Dr Bob like Bill Wilson had intermittently stayed sober via involvement with the Oxford Group but they had always relapsed back to drinking.

When Bill Wilson first met Dr Bob he convinced him that he had a spiritual malady coupled with a abnormal reaction to alcohol, which meant he could not control the amount he would drink and could not control when he was going to drink, he had, in effect,  become powerless over alcohol and only help from a power greater than himself could help him.

The original power greater than himself, as for millions of alcoholics  over the last 80 years (and for some it stays this way) is another alcoholic. One recovering alcoholic or a group of recovering alcoholics is a power greater than oneself.

The message of recovery is usually from someone who has recovered from alcoholism, this is a power greater than yourself as he/she has used certain tools to recover and this is now being passed on to you, as they were passed onto him or her. The solution to your alcoholism is the same as the solution to their alcoholism.

There are no individualistic programs or people simply doing their own thing, it is a collective program of action.

Thus at the heart of AA is one alcoholic helping another get sober. It is a reciprocal relationship. Helping other get sober helps us stay sober too.

It is the most perfect win-win situation.

The wounded healer principle personified.

Bill Wilson had got this idea of abnormal, or allergic reaction to alcohol, from a physician, Dr Silkworth,  who had treated him at Towns Hospital.  It seemed to account for his uncontrolled drinking.

Dr Bob did however relapse again soon after receiving the message from Bill Wilson, briefly, and this only served to reinforce his view that Bill Wilson was correct about this abnormal reaction to alcohol and his inability  to continue not drinking  under his own steam.

Today this would be termed “despite negative consequences”.

Hence his first day of sobriety is taken as the first day of AA, although the AA organisation as we know it today took longer to come in to being.

It symbolizes that this was the day when one alcoholic helped another alcoholic achieve lasting sobriety.

Dr Bob, it is aid, went on to help over 5,000 alcoholics achieve sobriety and died sober.

The basic tenet of this, is that it takes one alcoholic to help another alcoholic achieve sobriety. This has been borne out in millions of cases around the world.

Millions of lives have been saved not to mention the lasting benefits it has brought to families, and societies once harmed by alcoholism.

When asked what he thought was the greatest accomplishment of the 20th century, Henry Kissenger replied, “Alcoholics Anonymous.”

AA saved my life and I can never put into words the gratitude I have for AA. I cannot express how happy it has allowed my wife, family and friends to become.

I can never properly describe the chrysalis effect it has had on me and on everyone close to me.

The age of miracles is still my us, our recoveries prove that. It is a gift that keeps giving, freely.

Thus my original point is not semantic, AA was not founded by one person, it was co-founded as we alcoholics achieve sobriety with the help of other alcoholics.

It is “we” of Alcoholics  Anonymous, as the very first line of the Big Book of AA states.

In the twelve-step groups the focus is not on the individual self, but on the group or the community. Mutual aid and equality are the core principles of the twelve-step groups. Each member of AA help themselves by helping others who are in the same situation.

Essentially as one academic put it, The «power»
referred to in several of the twelve steps is therefore unrelated to religion; it refers to the potentially healing power inherent in interpersonal relationships based on reciprocity and equality.

Most active ingredients accounting for AA’s benefit are social in nature, such as attending meetings, and the 12 steps mention “we” 6 times but not “I” once.

AA’s 12 steps are a spiritual program of recovery but at the heart of that spirituality is the role of sponsoring.

Sponsorship embodies the fellowship’s  altruistic orientation, reflecting a “helping and helper  therapy principle” . Sponsorship plays an important role in the recovery process.

High sponsor involvement over time has been found to predict longer recovery .

Although social support is key to early engagement in the Twelve-Step membership, over time, spiritual issues emerge as increasingly important and helping others achieve recovery is at the heart of this.

The spirituality of AA is exemplified in helping others, it creates a feeling of wholeness and connectedness with others.

This is why we celebrate this great anniversary, this co-founding of AA, as it is the start of this therapeutic and spiritual connectedenss with other alcoholics needing help and giving help and with the wider world.

Thank God For AA!