FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS

FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS

For the past three months I have been moderating an evening AA meeting at a substance abuse rehab facility. I had approached this commitment with some trepidation because of some pretty unsophisticated fears.

First was the fact that I was going into a rehab facility and they were all addicts of one kind or another. What was I to expect? Drunks, addicts of every stripe and color (figuratively speaking), and maybe even a crazy or two; people in for a psyche tune up whose decompensation happened to become manifest through an alcohol or drug overdose when they really were just depressed or bipolar or both. (Not to mention the occasional schizophrenic or two clapped in for hearing people or seeing voices).

And there were days at the beginning when I would feel that I was approaching the campus as if it was some far flung gulag where the chances of my return were problematic at best, not to mention those of the poor inmates.

Yet I was assured, by said ‘inmates’, that this ‘gulag’ took good care of them, it rated high on the internal exile scale when compared to other facilities that accepted state insurance. And to tell the truth, it was small, clean, comfortable and to all appearances well run. So when tonight there was some stirring of grumblings about the inattentiveness of the staff, it came as somewhat of a surprise as the first hint of disappointment during my tenure as this group’s leader.

But I had to place matters of “comparative desiccation facilities” on hold in pursuit of my mission to run my weekly meeting which had as its launching point Steps One and Two, Admitting that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable, and that as a result of the unmanageability, we Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. I try to stress for the newcomers who have landed here that some higher power must have placed them here; either the guiding hand of a friend, a physician, a relative, or their own desperation. And most people appreciate that I do not go off on a God jag but stress a gentle approach to spirituality grounded in necessity and the happenstance of their presence at the meeting in this facility, this night for reasons of substance abuse.

They realize that they were not invited to a cotillion and that they gladly accepted the invitation. They had been that desperate.
So the first two steps are discussed because it is the failure of those two steps that brought them to this room and this facility in the first place, and it will only be by reasserting the dominance of these principles that they will survive outside the four walls of this institution. So we talk about their journey of how they got here and how they are going to use the tools of AA differently in order to avoid returning to this predicament again.

Nick said that he had always been an alcoholic and although he had been to AA, it had been under duress, court ordered in fact and he could not remember much about it except the fact that he recalled that most times he was there he had a buzz on. He admitted that that wasn’t the best learning experience but no one was going to teach him anything at age twenty. And now at forty he was brought here by his best friend as an act of almost hopeless faith since he had not known what else to do. But Nick says, it was just what he needed but was too frightened to ask for anyone’s help. Now five days sober, he thanks God and his friend for dragging him in, in the depths of his despair, not knowing where to turn nor what to do, frozen like a frightened deer in the headlights, not knowing whether to turn this way or that but knowing that if he did not get out of the way he surely was going to get run down by his own folly.

And this story kept repeating itself with Dawn trying to escape an abusive relationship and drinking herself into a blackout, finding herself in the emergency department and then being given the option of returning home or finally tackling her addiction in a rehabilitation facility where she would not be exposed to the constant parade of people flopping into her apartment bringing in booze and drugs, stalking her and her escaping by drinking to oblivion. No way to live and a sure way to die.

The shares rounded to Anne who had admitted herself because she was ashamed that after more than twenty years of sobriety, she was coming to understand that she had been under the influence of prescription medications, which she had not wanted to face up to for years, because it had been prescribed for pain. But after running recovery groups for years she finally felt a bit hypocritical after listening to case after case that sounded like hers, but hers she would try to rationalize since she was in pain and thus had reasons for taking medication.

But the more she examined her story, and the more honestly she looked at herself, the more she understood that she was manipulating her physicians and prescriptions and maybe, just maybe the pain was not as bad as she had made it out to be. But that honesty had been honed by the grindstone of addiction; when she realized the degree to which she was manipulating her “medication” she spiraled into greater and greater addiction until she feared for her life and her sanity. So she took the brave and honest step toward detox and rehabilitation.

And finally at the end of the hour we came to Delia who sat in her chair, knees to chest, face buried in her legs blurting out “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to believe that I am alcoholic. I love to drink! I love the atmosphere of drinking, I love the cachet, the wine with the meal, the wine on the boat, the wine with the friends, the wine on the beach, the wine before bed, the wine…”

As the litany petered out she began to catch herself up and said “I know! It all sounds so stupid. I AM an alcoholic, I just don’t want to admit it. There I said it, I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT!

“But how am I ever going to be able to stop. I don’t want to stop I love it so much. I love the bars, I love their smell I love the people, all my friends drink. How am I going to find new friends? I like my friends!” And she could have gone on waxing poetic about the marvels, wonders and magic of alcohol even after describing the horrible hangovers she would have. Even after she was the last one still at the party, the one who needed to be taken home, and the one who was already counting the number of liter bottles she would drink in a week.

This sad but revealing affair would have gone on but we had to close our meeting since our time had expired. So we ended with a group prayer and I caught her before she left the room to discuss this life changing quandary she had.


I wanted to see if she could finally see reality and it to bear in her current situation. We went over her story just to make clear to her that she had made her own diagnosis that she was an alcoholic, she had admitted step one pretty much unequivocally and after two DWI’s it was absolutely clear that her life was unmanageable. I urged her to take some time to look at this a bit more objectively putting the great things about drinking in one column and then all the negative things and consequences that she had related to us in the other. And she readily admitted that there was no contest; that the negative aspects of drinking at least for her, outweighed any positives for her and that continued drinking would only lead down some dark defile, and some much deeper and darker and harder bottoms than we had heard about earlier in the meeting.

So the only question now was, how much effort was she willing to put into her sobriety? How great a fall was necessary for her to scream uncle? Had she hurt herself enough or had she burnt enough bridges behind her?

I told her that I once wondered how I was ever going to be able to live without drinking. It seemed unnatural and unlikely that the sober life and fellowship provided in the rooms was going to be a reasonable substitute for a fine pinot noir, particularly with a rare rack of lamb. But I finally learned that I could eat that lamb and savor it without the false enhancement of that wine, and with my mood being “unenhanced” I could in fact remember that flavor in the morning.

It wasn’t going to be easy for her either. But if she liked lamb as much as I, she would soon be looking forward to more fond memories of meals unenhanced and therefore not missed because of the grape.

She looked skeptical as I left the meeting. And it was good that she had paid for her stay till the end of the week. She was going to be in for a bumpy ride.

© res 4/13/11