Alcoholics Anonymous

Two Selves

Addiction

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.

Chapter 11

In early recovery, it is like you have two selves fighting it out.

I went to my first meeting a couple of days after becoming sober.

I went to my first meeting sober and it was hellish.

I spotted a couple of guys from the first meeting and they said hello. They were glad to see me which was nice. I tried to talk to them for a bit but felt too self conscious and scampered inside. I sat as far away from the Chair as possible.

I was still partly in psychosis, everyone was trying not to stare at me and my jaundice and the green discolouration snaking around my neck.

 I sat beside the most fidgeting man who I was convinced was pulling faces scary faces and making menacing gestures towards me from out of the corner of my eye.

I couldn’t believe how slowly time was passing. Through my gauze-like eyes I was shocked how it always only 5 minutes later than the last time I looked.

It was tough being out in the world without the drink as a crutch.

 It was like I was wearing my nervous sytem inside out.

I was so full of self pity, it threatened to drown me. Thoughts were like poisoned darts piercing my heart with terror, thousands of them, relentlessly.

It was the same format as before. I liked how they read out the solution, the 12 programme of recovery.

It was reassuring this programme had helped all these guys and might me as well. Although it was difficult to see how it would. It did mention being restored to sanity which gave me some hope. Although it said we came to believe we could be restored to sanity and I was some way off that.

I tried to listen to proceedings. It was a bigger meeting than the previous one.

Some people addressed me when they started sharing, saying “welcome to the newcomer” whereby everyone smiled weakly at the jaundiced guy. The most alcoholic guy they had ever seen.

I started to wish they would stop doing it, okay I’m here no need to keep going on about it.

Ther were so many times when I just wanted to get up and get out of there but to where?

There was literally no where to go. To the treatment centre were they paraded me around like a jaundiced freak?

Back to drinking?

The attic?

Where?

Nowhere is where. There was nowhere but here.

I tried to listen but stuggled to at times.

The voice of lies was constantly chirping away in my head. It was saying I didn’t need to be here, with these losers. Stay off the drink for a bit, sure, until the liver got back into shape. Give the booze a rest. Hit those pills for a day or two.

That alcoholism, does it even exist? Do these people know what they are talking about? The book they read from was from the 1930 s and since then nothing?

It is a cult.

Why didn’t the doctor recommend them, nobody did? None of the medical professionals.

Is this the best they can do. Really?

Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

That last lie took some digesting. I noticed my lying voice had no shame whatsoever.

If you let it rant for a while it would often shoot itself in the foot by saying something ludicrous.

Also when I asked it did it want me to drink, it would go quiet?

It never really said wouldn’t you like a nice cool drink, it was more sneaky?

I had been spiked with ecstasy eleven months earlier so maybe that was the reason why I ended up in psychosis, it suggested?

Similar maybe to the way I ended up in psychosis due to too much cocaine. Maybe I was just subsceptible to it?

Maybe it wasn’t the drink at all. Maybe I was tipped into it via being spiked? It had changed something in my chemistry, my nervous system. I wasn’t this mad before the spiking, the last time I gave up drinking?

Just go back to that, get daily exercise, that sort of thing.

But this, what is it? Religious do gooders. Better going to the Pioneers. This lot seem Protestant!?

And middle class?

Is this the right place for you?

Maybe it was the cummulative effect of too many drugs, maybe it wasn’t the drink at all? Lots of people drunk more than you? For much longer.

And these peope in AA talking about being out of control drunks, you weren’t really, like you rarely were fall down drunk, only on special occasions when friends dropped by unexpectedly, you were never arrested or ended up in hospitals. You are not even like these people?

These guys are amateur drinkers they just couldn’t hold their liquor?

And this spiritual malady, that’s just sinning and that solution is just confession and repentance.

Sin doesn’t drive you insane. Spiking does, not knowing the effect it had on your brain?

And on and on.

Look for the similarities they said, but where are they?

Thee are sinners who couldn’t hold their drink.

These are do gooders. Religous zealots.

All these thoughts rumbled on in this first meeting.

Why?

If I wasn’t alcoholic then why was I juandiced from alcohol addiction

I knew one thing for sure, I had become addicted. SO even if I wasn’t alcoholic, whatever that was, I had become addicted. I was an addict at least?

I had also once tried a spiritual solution to my problems years ago, so I did have problems going way back. Over many years, mental health problems. But that solution, the Buddhism, led to psychosis too?

Or did it just unearth it? Was it really there waiting to erupt to the surface?

Maybe that is what I have and drunk to calm it down but couldn’t in the end?

That isn’t a sin disease like this?

This arguing went round and round on in my head relentlessly.

The other way to explain it was that my alcoholism was using my own voice to talk to me. That it wasn’t me but my addiction using my inner voice?

This thought nearly made be ill, I put this insight down to my lingering psychosis…

I stopped briefly to learn my calming heart was still with me, strangely smiling at me, unconcerned about the madness in my head.

The thought came to me, non alcoholics don’t have a constant chirping in their heads about being alcholic or not. I would ask Emma this question later.

Then as if by co-incidence one guy shared about his head telling him lies all the time and he had been in recovery some time. Years.

My attention was pricked. He said that on a very good day his illness talks and he doesn’t Iisten and on a good day the illness talks and he listens and on a very bad day he listens and then talks back until his brain gets completely mangled and he doesn’t know one thing from another!

A few men and women laughed out loud or nodded their heads at this point in recognition.

They related to what he was saying so might have had the same problem too?

This guy was talking of something more than a sin disease, to my mind anyway, however reliable that was!?

He was talking about a mental health problem which was similar to mine. This mental health problem, this thinking disorder, made me drink, and drink and…

I listened for my illness to retort and it was quiet. For the first time I acknowledged a possibility that honest answers seemed to be an antidote to this lying voice. This would prove to be the case in Treatment also in the weeks and months to come.

If possible I would try to ignore it all together.

So for the first time this pithy adage gave me my first insight into this illness. It was my first experience of “hearing what you needed to hear” in an AA meeting.

It was a great way of putting it. I felt this guy was like me and me, him. I had real identification with another AA.

What he said didn’t come from the Big Book, however, it came from Treatment. Where there new things to learn there? Did they look at things differently ?

It was more an experiential wisdom, the cumulative knowledge gained from recovery, from the rooms of AA over the seventy years since the BB was written. It was from the lived in experience of AA members rather than from a book that seemed to be, in part, “frozen in time”.

I found this intriguing. It spoke my language.

I shared that I was glad to be there and was glad to get some response.

After the meeting people were friendly to me and all had an inner glow about them. They all told me to keep coming back.

It left nice to hear, to be asked to come back as if they wanted me too.

I had so little self esteem and l felt so worthless that any human kindness was welcomed. I felt like a freak, a monstrosity.

Any human kindenss melted that image a little.

I was so glad to see Emma when she arrived to take me home in what seemed like days later.

I would wait a few days before going back to AA

Maybe when I was less jaundiced and less crazy. ,

In my next meeting I called out during someone’s share “what do you mean by a spiritual awakening?” and was told he would tell me after the meeting. So much for less crazy?

He didn’t.

Probably took one look at me and thought it wasn’t worth the effort. I’d be gone soon enough.

I was none the wiser about this spirtual malady that was at heart of all my troubles and somehow made me this mentally ill.

People looked at me half in sympathy, half in pity, another half incongruity. How the hell do you get to be that alcoholic? Was it a World record?

I was the Steppenwolf of the AA meeting.

I have never seen any one in the rooms who looked as bad as me since?

I have never heard of anyome have alcoholic pyschosis for more than a few weeks and that was a tiny tiny percentage of alcoholics, less than .05%

They usually die before then.

At least, the early AA founders were like me. Maybe I wouldn’t have looked out of place then?

I asked someone to sponsor me, a guy I thought I could push around but who I later learnt had been inside twice for two separate attempted murders!

He didn’t look or act like a potential killer now, so he must be doing something right.

He must have had some sort of psychic change to go from that to the cuddly office worker he looked now!

He asked me how I got to meetings and I said Emma drove me.

He said get a bus to meetings from now on.

Maybe he wasn’t the right choice?

I did too, for the next meeting where I met a guy called Tony who offered to drive me there in future.

Although 5 days sober, the illness, the alcoholism, vocally active in my mind, somehow remained. It had somehow been embedded in my brain and still talked to me.

I was still troubled by these thoughts and more so, by the fact they wouldn’t go away. I had stopped drinking so why hadn’t my mind quietened down around thoughts of drinking?

Why was it still chirping way, day in day out? Although not always about drinking. Sometimes it just put me down, character assassinated me.

When I had stopped smoking, after twenty years of smoking, I didn’t have this incessant inner dialogue.

Or when I ceased my twenty year and daily cannibus use.

Why was the internal dialogue was incessant?

Life was too difficult without such questions to torture me. The illness centres in the mind as the Big Book says. Could we trust our own thoughts even. There was a lot more to this alcoholism, addiction than met the eye.

Anyway, I had my other voice, the one that was even harder to believe in, coming like a warm smile across my troubled heart with warm tidings that all will be well.

Day by day this voice coaxed me out into the world and guided my through it, however gingerly.

The doctor had said I needed to be outside in the sun light to reduce the jaundice. I went for more blood tests at the local hospital Pathology lab and people stopped to point at me and laugh.

It was fairly humiliating but fortunately I have experienced worse so put it into my “it’s all relative” filing system in my mind.

What if I’d had liver cancer!?

Ignorant people are never in short supply.

It struck me that much of early recovery was about memory and different memory systems in the brain.

My addiction would arise at times implicity from habit memory and almost compell me to do certain things, sometimes it would use explicit memories to provide an imagenery scene about drinking and sometimes my brain would just freeze and I couldn’t shake it off. It was a locked in attention to drinking that happened again without my volition.

Was there anyway I could change these realities? The only way was to change my memories somehow?

To look back at these memories and reappraise them. I had started doing this already with my sponsor. He told be Step one work in Treatment would be looking at this for a few months.

We would discuss something and reappraise the past to show how it was really. It illustrated my memories were unreliable and gave false readouts on the past.

My memory couldn’t be relied on either it seemed. My thoughts and emotions and memories and sometimes even my perception of things all seemed a bit faulty.

He assured me the memory problem would be fixed via the steps 1 then 4 and 5 especially. Other problems could be ironed via sponsorship. I was to ring him whenever I needed to. It was surprising how often this was as I kept getting the wrong end of the stick over so many things in life. I didn’t seem to have a clue about living life on life’s terms. It was as if I would have to learn again from stratch. I could see why they call newcomers “babies” in US AA.

Another route, via memory, by which this illness trapped me was via my very negative self schema, which is a collection of memories and conditoning from the past which added to a condensed summary of how we feel about ourselves.

My self schema was very poor, full of shame and self loathing.

My illness fed on this, saying I wasn’t worthy of recovery.

This would have to be worked on too.

A possible clue to a solution was via an AA’s share, at this meeting, when he said his shame at being an alcoholic was relieved day by day by being proud of being an alcoholic in recovery, gradually through time, his shame lessened and his pride of being in recovery increased. His sense of self and his self schema and his esteem increased. He became more worth it. His self schema gradually changed and the illness had less to feed on.

It was a message of hope to think that changing how we felt about ourselves would help with recovery, that our twisted view of our past could be ironed out and that the habitual nature of addictive behaviour could be met with the habitual nature of recovery.

He was down the line from me, a beacon of how I could become, of how recovery could work for me too .

If I could only stay in recovery?

None of this was explicitly stated it the BB but it is there implicity in AA recovery and by product of it, if nothing else.

I would start working on my memories, they are what make us how we are, starting with my self schema with myself as an alcholic in recovery.

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 9 The First Step Is The Hardest

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.

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable” ,

Addiction Aftermath

Emma was bowled over by the AA meeting too. She was as shocked how the experiences of the other men there chimed perfectly with mine, how they all seemed to be like slightly different versions of me.  That we were all in the same boat. The meeting was already some portal in the universe that we didn’t realise existed. Now it was offering an understanding of my problems so profound we could scarely believe our ears. It was way beyond what we could have hoped for. These ideas seemed to have been around for at least 70 years (if not alot longer). We thought we were going there to hear tips on how to control my drinking or maybe we hadn’t got a clue why we were going there. We went there, like many do, in utter desperation. Not sure what we were looking for other that a way out of our hellish predicament. We had nowhere esle to turn.

I left the meeting a changed new man in many respects. A bit of hope now competed with overwhelming fear in my heart. How I felt about myself as an alcoholic, about to be in recovery, for however long, had utterly changed. Part of me worried it was a little too late. I must confess. I looked at Emma, at the fleeting relief in her face and resolved to try my best for her, to stay sober as long as I could for her. I was no longer sure I was worth it, but she was.

They told us you have recover for yourself otherwise you will not recover. I wasn’t completely of this view. I preferred to hang in there for Emma. I didn’t love me enough to stay sober, I didn’t even like me that much. I had felt so worthless for so long that maybe this is what happens to worthless people, they drink themsleves to death. Paradoxically I was willing to fight to my last breath to stay in the game. Something was going on here that I hadn’t expressly asked for. Something was happening to me against my wishes and had been doing so for decades, like some enemy intelligence.

I remembered being 27 and leaving a good job in Cardiff City Council to follow Emma to London. Before we came to Swansea. I was somebody then? Wasn’t I? I was popular, had many friends, the life and soul of the party. I did good things, worked in a Trade Union and helped my fellow worker. Where the hell had he gone? Where was that guy, he had gradually disintegrated. Falling apart, gone mad.

That guy had problems too mind, panic attacks and depression , a period of pyschoisis after a ten day Buddhist meditation course. I had seen a few counsellors and therapists. There was somethig going on then? In fact, when I first went to University in Cardiff, I was frightened by how my thoughts kept surging around my brain, and I couldn’t slow them down, turn them down, turn them off. They seemed uncontrollable? Was this a problem that I silenced with alcohol, and drugs, and sex, but that isn’t the spiritual malady? Questions furtively scurrying round my mind? My past was my past and although I was treated for it, my present kept getting worse. Why?

They said it was a progressive illness, it even progressed in sobriety and recovery? What did? What progressed? The drinking and the addiction yes but what else? Maybe these thoughts might dissipate along with the lingering psychosis? Nothing made complete sense and thoughts about it made me want to vomit. Maybe this was my madness talking away, gibbering away in my mind.

They said the illnes centred in your mind, was I mentally ill? They also said don’t ask why I am alcoholic or how? That will lead you straight back to drinking? They said the only how worth seeking is how to recovery? Thoughts were continually darting through my mind, piercing my heart with their posionous intent. Why was I having so many thoughts too. Much worse than when I first went to Cardiff, twenty years earlier. Did my obsessive thinking progress alongside my compulsive drinking? It might have been the slight reduction in my drinking, and watered down drinking too, that gave more clarity and less blurring the edges.

Anyway I was prepared to go down fighting. I had somehow survived months and months of alcoholic psychosis which was like having a bad trip for half a year, day in, day out, only interrupted intermittently by vomiting. Why I hadn’t killed myself I don’t know? It seemed almost a humane decision given the state I was in. Put me out of my misery.

I had obviously discussed the prospect with Emma as she would come back for her teaching job every day wondering if this was the day I had finally decided to kill myself. I was so indignant that I had gotten into this situation and it wasn’t my fault. I raged at this thought. Somehow I didn’t will this deletarious situation on myself. Something in the past had happened to me to help cause it. Although that only partly explained things? There must be more to this than I realised.

I related to the not being able to stay off the drink even when I tried and I also know somewhere deep inside of me that I never could stop taking drink, and drugs, when I had started. Any drinking would mean that a day would be written off and drinking and drugging would be what I would be doing that day, for the rest of that day and following night. I used drugs so that I didn’t get drunk, too drunk, as I didn’t actually like getting drunk. When I was drunk, I was out of control drunk and didn’t like it, didn’t like being that vulnerable to the intentions of others. Didn’t like not being able to defend myself. This never stopped me getting drunk but the drugs put brakes on the drunkneness, combined it with stonedness.

I always marvelled at people who had a drink at midday or in the afternoon and then went home afterwards to have a cup of tea! I tried that once or twice and felt like I was having withdrawals, like there were scampering spiders in my blood and veins, like there wasn’t enough skin to properly cover my skull, my tongue an arid desert. I sometimes felt a mini withdrawal just waiting for my drink to be poured. Already planning the next drink to deal with the effects of the first one? A pathological wanting. If that isn’t an abnormal (if not allergic) reaction to alcohol, then what is? Wanting a second drink when you have not had the first, the drink creating a thirst for drinking not quelling it? How is this not abnormal?

I remember one man saying that an alcoholic would prefer not to drink rather than have a couple and have to stop, that this was more painful than not drinking at all. I related to that. The psychic pain that went with stopping after drinking was much worse than not drinking at all.

Emma had bought the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of the AA meeting and other books and reading these would help with silencing my torturously obsessive thinking. Recovery seemed like it would be a tortouous route but at least we had a direction now, rather than going round and round in circles. She had been somehow transformed too.  She glowed a little with an inner conviction. Although, like me, she was too scared to be hopeful.

I had wine in the car waiting for me but didn’t drink it until I got home, out of respect. The wine felt different to before, and not because it had water in it. It no longer felt like the only solution to my problems.  It felt strangely redundant, previous. It was something I had to do now, to get somewhere else later. It was strange sensation not having the same utter dependence on it as before. Before it was everything, all I had. Now it was a mortal enemy, I couldn’t wait to be shot off. It was no longer the end and be all, it was a medication of sorts. Something I had relied on in the absence of what I really needed, a solution to my problems, to my alcoholism, a condition that was more than just about drinking.

One AA member even thanked alcohol for stopping him going completely mad, for keeping him alive long enough to get to AA! Another man said his alcoholism was more of a thinking problem than a drinking one. I remembered it was also about emotions and not being able to control them. Where these somehow linked, fear based thinking and out fo control emotions? There was much food for thought. And it all made me ill thinking about it?

It was tough thinking about these things, I thought hope would drown me. Or fear. Any future sense of reality somehow made me ill. Any future proejection or even past recrimination had the same nauseating effect on me. It was as if I could only handle this moment, this second and that any instrusions from the past or the future tenses would overwhelm me. All I could deal with and rely on was the now, this moment. Anything else was overwhelming, even the hope and the excitement of a new approach to this alcoholism.

Thinking and it’s rippling emotions were the enemy from now but not in the now. I clung to the now like a life boat on a turbulent sea. It was a life boat I didn’t know of the day before. This would be almost intolerably difficult. Would l be up to it, in a way I never had been before? What where my odds, they must have been slim. How the hell was this possible, doable?

Projection and bring back to the now, to this moment, that is how. This was my new mantra, get back to the safety of the now. This was how it went for the first few days in recovery. Constantly clambering back into the lifeboat before my thoughts and negative emotions threatened to drown me. The next day, Christmas day there was a social event for recovering alcoholics in the community hall just beside our house in Brynmill Swansea. Emma and I went along. I picked up alot of tips on how to survive the first dreadful days of sobriety from other recovering alcoholics there. Mike, my former drinking pal and chair for the previous evening’s meeting was there and was very helpful. I really appreciated his early help, as did Emma. There were quite alot of people there, some of whom had not been at the previous evening’s meeting. They looked visibly shocked by my appearance.

I think they gave me a lot of their time knowing that the chances of me recovering and staying sober were probably fairly slim. I think mainly they felt sorry for Emma, and all the effort she was putting in to trying to keep me alive! I had resolved to drink water diluted wine for two days while reading the so-called Big Book of Alcoholc Anonymous. I couldn’t work out why they called it the Big Book. I would then water down the wine even more the third day and would use the medication to taper off, only if I felt I needed too. I didn’t want to become an addict too! I had been given useful tips on how to taper off and then stop. I was told to have cranberry juice and drink this along with the watered down wine, and then to just drink this when I had actually stopped drinking. I drank the cranberry juice for weeks and weeks afterwards. It was still feeding my other addiction, sugar. In fact other AAs said it was important not to come off sugar as well as booze. So I was told to continually have bars of chocolate etc in my pockets. I was advised to carry bottles of water in my pockets too when going to meetings. All of which I would do religiously, habitually.

So the first days were reducing the drinking. I read AA literature as I did. I was still suffering from poor eyesight and the lines of black typed words floated and squiggled about a bit but that too would get better on a daily basis. I found the irst 164 pages of the Big Book difficult to take in. So I read the personal stories at the back of the book about other alcoholics from the 1930s, their stories and I greatly indentified with them. Many of them were what we called “last gaspers”, chronic alcoholics like myself, close to death or permanent madness. Although, the first edition of the BB has stories of AAs even more similar to me; those who had similar profound mental issues as me when they arrived to AA recovery. I was later to realise that the majority of AAs now were not last gaspers like them or me and this has often made me feel more of an oddity at meetings. I also wondered where all the last gaspers were now? Had AA changed so much it that time?

I felt it was strange, and it added to the general weirdness of my introduction to recovery, that the solution to the problem of alcholism was wtritten in 1935! It hadn’t really been updated on since, the first 164 pages have remained the same, only the personal stories changed. I wondered why there hadn’t been anything added since or that it hadn’t been updated, surely we had found out some more about alcoholism and addiction in the intervening seventy years? In my mind, it was like I was being transported back in time to the 1930s to get the solution, the solution wasn’t just retrieved via an unknown portal in the universe but that the portal sent you back in time too.

I imagine men in shirts and ties and hats and suits and sepia, with Model Ford T cars. Smoke filled rooms and Phillp Marlow type characters. It was all very peculiar. AA recovery came from a different era and a time when religion was much more common. Saying that the solution was God , if he were sought, would take some digesting, especially to a man who grew up in the religious and ethnic conflict of Northern Ireland where there was too much religion and not enough Christianity. It might be too bitter a pill to swallow to now accept God as the solution, after all He had done back there? Or around the world? I had the Buddhism to fall back on. It had worked before and that was when I did not know what the problem was , that I was an alcoholic.

One personal story of alcoholism stood out more for me that others as it dealt with drugs as well as alcohol. Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict: Like me he didn’t think he was an alcoholic as, he just had problems.

“If you had my problems you’d drink too.” It was the section on acceptance of things that normally disturb me that disturbed me most, “Until I could accept my  alcoholism I could not stay sober; Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much. On what needs to be changed in the world As on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.” 

This was revelatary and quite nauseating. It suggested giving up not only alcohol but a life long obsession with blaming others for my feelings and attitudes to the world. I didn’t like this at all. This personal accountabilty when it was their fault! In fact, it was terrible to even consider that it was my reaction to life that caused my problems . Then I remembered that this is what Buddhism taught me. Before it prompted my first period of Psychosis (I also left London after a period of Cocaine induced psychosis but that is a story for later). It too had said that we suffered because of how we reacted to fear and craving. It was our reactions to the world that caused our suffering and we had a choice over this. I resolved to now use the meditation to help me deal with the addiction that drove me to do too much meditating of the last time out! It was not perfect but it was better than having to rely, like some suckers, on a God of your understanding!

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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Acceptance is Always the Key!

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Glad to see other people have the same markings on their Big Book too! I have the same fluorescent yellow marker pen scrolls and deep pen lines across the page and under the words.

I was so desperate not to let a word go by, and to understand everything the Big Book of AA has to teach about alcoholism and the solution to it that I tied my developing understanding to the pages with yellow and black ink lines. Often returning to also add these #s and to note well, NB!

Every time I read it I got new understanding. The longer I have gone on in recovery the more I have seen and understood.

Reading the BB over the years help me see how my brain is recovering as I see things more clearly with every passing years. It reminds me of previous times when I have read it, gives me a memory snapshot of where I was at in previous periods of recovery. What I used to think and feel compared to what i think and feel now. What I agreed with then and what I disagree with now.

How I have healed.

It is strange how I see other things, not underlined, as gaining more in importance as recovery goes on.

This excerpt above is from a “share” or a personal story at the back of the Big Book. The story is known by two names, “Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict” or “Acceptance was the Answer” depending on which edition you bought.

It is referred to so often in meetings that it is almost a supplement to the first 164 pages.  It has common sense words of wisdom which can greatly help with your recovery – I keep returning to it over and over again.

Here is a link to it, have a read and hopefully it will help you in the same profound way it helped me and millions of others!

It is the last story in this section – http://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/en_bigbook_personalstories_partII.pdf

Here he is speaking at an AA convention. I have found these “shares” crucial to my own recovery in terms of  identifying with other other recovering alcoholics.

It is in listening to their shares that I could see that I am like these people and they act in a way I do, feel in a way I do, think and make decisions in a way I do and even have had experiences throughout their lives and drinking careers which are also so like mine so I guess I figured that  I must be a sort of alcoholic like all these people.

Maybe I was an alcoholic too!?

Eureka!

The journey in recovery often starts with identifying with others, their problems and how they have solved their problems.

I hope it does for you too!

My very first meeting I identified with the AAs talking about how difficult they found living life on life’s terms, their emotional disease etc. It was this that convinced me I was like them. Not the drinking or drugging, but the internal spiritual malady, the ISM that goes with the alcohol to create alcoholism.

Identifying with others like me, saved my life and is the reason I have been recovery ten years.

You are not alone.

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.

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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!

 

 

Helping Others Helps Us.

In AA they say people who engage in service, i.e. helping out at meetings, sharing, making the tea and coffee, sponsoring others, helping on A A telephone helplines, inter group etc  have a much greater chance of staying sober and in recovery  long term than those who do not.

Although I was scared of my own shadow when I came into recovery and my brain was still incredibly scrambled and disorientated, I believe doing service in AA is one of the main reasons for me still being in recovery nearly 10 years later.

It helped me become part of AA not just someone who turned up and hung around on the periphery. 12 step recovery is a program of action not self absorbed introspection. The spiritual and therapeutic aspect of 12 step recovery is connectedness with others who have the same condition and share the same common purpose of wanting to remain sober and in recovery.

Doing service is an outward sign of one taking responsibility for their own recovery and declaring it too others in the meetings via service. When I see a newcomer to recovery start to do service it gladdens my heart as I know they have dramatically increased their chances of remaining sober and in recovery long term.

This has been my experience.

A reality, however, seems to be that most people are very anxious, lacking in confidence and fearful when they reach the rooms of AA.

When you have spent a long time drinking in increasing isolation, suddenly being at a meeting among strangers can have it’s problems.

When we go to meetings, to begin with, we are often unaware that we are actually in the company of people just like us, sensitive souls. Most have at some time at issues around social anxiety.

It is often said that this social anxiety is linked to the not belonging” feeling that many alcoholics experience throughout their lives prior to drinking.

Some have said it can be traced to insecure attachment to a primary care givers or to trauma or abuse in childhood.

Equally I have known many alcoholics who had idyllic childhoods who also have this feeling on not belonging socially, not fitting in, so I suggest that this social anxiety or not fitting in may be the result of some genetic inheritance which gets worse via the adverse effects of abuse or insecure attachment.

The vast majority of alcoholics I have met over the years have this sense of not belonging, having a “hole in the soul”.

I believe it is some neurochemical deficit, such as oxytocin deficit that has a knock-on effect on other brain chemicals, that decreases our feelings of belonging,  which  we all inherit and which can be made more severe via stressful adversive childhoods.

It often leads to isolation, being a loner, not only in adolescence but sometimes in recovery too. We seem to often like our own company but equally it is something to be wary of.

I have often heard of people relapsing after becoming isolated from 12 step fellowships. They stopped doing service, then reduced meetings and then disappeared off the scene, locked away in isolation.

So we seem to have a tendency to isolate and this may be due to many of us having social anxiety issues. Social events often seem like too much effort and this can be a dangerous thought.

So who do we cope with a room full of people?

I just came a cross a study recently which addressed how AA is almost perfect for dealing with this issue of social anxiety.

I will use some excerpts from it. It relates to youths in recovery but is applicable to all people in recovery or seeking recovery.

“In treatment, youths with social anxiety  disorder (SAD) may avoid participating in therapeutic activities with risk of negative peer appraisal.

Peer-helping is a low-intensity, social activity in the 12-step program associated with greater abstinence among treatment-seeking adults.

The benefits from helping others appear to be greatest for individuals who are socially isolated.

Helping others may benefit the helper because it distracts one from one’s own troubles, enhances a sense of value in one’s life, improves self-evaluations, increases positive moods, and causes social integration.

The myriad of existing service activities in AA are readily available inside and outside of meetings; are low intensity; and do not require special skills, prior experience, time sober, long-term commitment, transportation, insurance, or parental permission.

Peer-helping in AA, such as having the responsibility  of making coffee at a meeting, empathetic listening to others, reading inspirational meditations to others, or sharing personal experiences in learning to live sober, may have the effect of greater engagement in treatment and improved outcomes due to patients’ active contributions.

Learning to live sober with social anxiety is a challenge in society where people can be quick to judge others

Coping with a persistent fear of being scrutinized in social situations often requires learning to tolerate the opinions of others, feeling different, appropriate boundary setting, and enduring short term discomfort for long-term gain—skills that are in short supply among adolescents and those in early recovery.

The low-intensity service activities in AA offer youths—and those with  social anxiety in particular—a nonjudgmental, task-focused venue for social connectedness, reduce self-preoccupation and feeling like a misfit, and transform a troubled past to usefulness with others.

AA should be encouraged for socially anxious youths in particular.

As stated by a young adult, “I wanted to be at peace with myself and comfortable with other people. The belonging I always wanted I have found in AA. I got into service work right away and really enjoyed it”

References

1. Pagano, M. E., Wang, A. R., Rowles, B. M., Lee, M. T., & Johnson, B. R. (2015). Social Anxiety and Peer Helping in Adolescent Addiction Treatment. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 39(5), 887-895.

 

 

Trust

In order to  fully  recover from alcoholism, addiction and addictive behaviours, we find we have to trust at least one other human being.

This might be easy for some, to trust, but for me it was very difficult.

Considering my upbringing, this was a big step but as I had little choice…

I am not talking about trusting my wife, loved ones, family etc.

I am talking about trusting someone in recovery. A practical  stranger. Someone who is the same boat as you. Who has been where you have been, felt how you have felt.

Like a sponsor for exammple.

Someone you are going to open up to and discuss intimate stuff with, someone who will ultimately know the shameful secrets that can keep a person spiritually and emotionally sick and will continue to do so until we share this stuff and let it all go.

It chains us to the past and endangers recovery because we drank on shame and guilt.

I certainly know I did?

Sorry for being so direct in this blog, it is a message of hope, there is a way to completely turn your life around.

Shameful secrets can fester in the dark recesses of our minds and inflame our hearts with recrimination and resentment.

They  can have constant conscious and unconscious effect on our behaviors, how we think and feel about ourselves and how we interact, or not, with others.

Due to the nature of frequent episodes of  powerlessness over our behavior,  attached to addiction and alcoholism, we often  acted in a way we would never act in sobriety. We had limited control over behaviour at times due to intoxication  and acted on occasion in a way that shames us today.

Most of us were determined to take these secrets, these “sins” to the grave.

We often take them to grave sooner rather than later unless we  decide to  be open and share our secrets with another person.

This has been my experience.

Everyone in recovery has secrets they would rather not disclose,  but there are not many “original” sins as one suspects and that haven’t been shared in 12 step recovery.

Almost disappointingly I found some of my sins were quite tame when compared to other people I have spoken to in recovery.

That is not to say I did not frequently hurt others, especially loved ones,  but under examination they were not as monstrous as my head made them out to be.

These secrets are the emotional and psychic scars of our alcoholic past and they need to be exposed in order for us to fully heal.

In steps 4 and 5 we listed wrongdoings to others and although initially petrified to share them with another, found that it wasn’t as  difficult as we thought it would be, once you wrote down the worst top ten. There was an immediate release in fact. A sense of cleansing almost.

Sharing them was obviously awkward but a good sponsor shares his at the same time.

It is therapeutic exchange and shame reducing to know someone else has committed similar sins or has acted for similar reasons; they were powerless over their behaviours.  Just like me, just like you.

Alcoholism erodes our self will and choice.

There is nothing so bad that cannot be shared.

The 12 steps were influenced  by the Oxford Group who said sins cut a person off from God, and that there was such a thing as sin disease.

This sin disease had very real psychological, emotional and physical and physiological effect on the mind and body. Sins were a contagion that mixed with the sins of others and the sins of  families, groups, societies, cultures and countries.

The sin disease  idea became the “spiritual malady” of AA.

We can also see this as years of not being able to regulate our negative emotions properly, if you wish to see them as sins.

I see these “sins” also, and perhaps alternatively, as hundreds of unprocessed negative emotions from the past which were never consigned to our long term memories, so they just swirl around our minds for decades shaping how we think about ourselves and the world around us.

Steps 4 -7 and the amends to those people wronged in steps of 8 and 9 allow us to be completely free and in a sense reborn.

It can be viewed as spiritual or an emotional rebirth.

Isn’t this rebirth, catharsis, renewal, a becoming free from the old self, which was kept us ill in our shame and guilt about the past?

We have the chance to be free from the sick version of our real self, the self that has been in bondage, in addiction.

It is almost miraculous, the sudden transformative effect it can have on us.  I have seen it many times with my own eyes.

By freeing ourselves from the past,  we become who we really are.

We have a sea change in how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us.

In fact we never become who we really are until we have examined our past and consigned it to the past.

We do fully recover until we do this I believe.

Otherwise we have not really completely treated our alcoholism.

We have simply got sober, sometimes stark raving sober.   

We are not bad people getting good but ill people getting well.

All this because we plucked up enough courage to ask someone we barely knew to be our  sponsor.

Because we trusted one person enough.

In reality we asked a fellow sinner to hear our sins and through God’s help have them taken off us, or if one prefers, have had the past finally   processed and consigned to long term memory where it will take only a special and quite frankly bizarre decision and effort to go rooting around and digging it up again.

I look at the past fleetingly sometimes to help others but I never stare at it too long.

It is a former self.

I have been reborn, I have become who God had intended me to be.

I have become me.