IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD

IF THE TRUTH BE TOLD




Sometimes, I forget how familiar the stories in the Big Book have become, to the point where I am blasé about their lessons or messages. I have heard them so many times and their truths are so ingrained that I have forgotten the time when I thought that they did not apply to me, that they must be speaking about some folks who were really far gone, way down the road to self destruction, way beyond the pale and pretty much unsalvageable souls. They were not my stories; I could not see myself in them nor did I know anyone like them.


But that was denial on the road sign up ahead of me telling me that what these stories represented were about someone else. And it took me years to knock down those signs; they were surely leading me in the wrong direction. But those stories were telling me the truth, they were actually mirrors of my true daily existence and it was only my darker self that did not want to shine a light so that I could actually see my reflection in them.


These simple stories, and I forget at times just how cleverly simple they are, plainly tell us alcoholics just how we are alike. And conversely, for those who believe that they are not alcoholic, they make clear where they stand apart from those afflicted by the disease. The true alcoholic, once he has read these stories a few times cannot fail to see the congruence of them with his own experience. Which is one of the main ways we come to understand how we are in fact alcoholic. We feel it, we have lived it and we see it in those who have admitted it in themselves and who have found a treatment, and thus we must have the disease ourselves.


Could we be wrong? Yes, and the suggestion found in the stories is if we are wrong and want to test that, try going out and doing some controlled drinking or stop drinking all together and see if that works for a specified period of time. See if you can do it. Can you just take one drink? Or, can you stay away from alcohol altogether? We try not to make these suggestions dangerous but to make them dramatic enough to prove that in the true drunk these are typically impossible tasks.


In trying to explain this behavior to people who are not afflicted with this painful disease or who have not had the horrible experience of having a family member with it, it is practically impossible to tell a believable story about this problem. It’s intractability sounds too fantastical. When telling the experiences of people who cannot stop drinking it almost sounds as if people are being willful about not being able to put down a drink.


So there are oft repeated stories of people who are baffled by their inability to stop drinking once having started, swearing off the drink only to find that at some crucial point in their sobriety being challenged with some irritation, anxiety or emotional situation. That reason can be anxiety about a birth, a death, the purchase of a house, a car, a marriage. We can want to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary, a new job, having had a great day or feeling bad about a trying day.


You name the emotion, the trigger is there, the solution so to speak is to reach for some alcohol to quell the jitters. But you will only have one, so you say to yourself. Just to smooth over the anxiety of the fear, or the fear of the anxiety; or the celebratory mood, the happy feeling or … you name it but one drink is never enough and all that time that you had sworn off that drink has gone for naught because the next thing you know is that you don’t know anything, since you have been in a blackout for four days. How does one make sense of a senseless act? And you desperately hope that if anyone has been hurt, that it only involved you! But often enough, and to our extreme mortification and horror, it involves too many others without us getting a damnable scratch! Try to explain that to a civilian.


It’s hard to do but the Big Book does a masterful job of presenting this absolutely senseless situation by the parable of the jaywalker who is a young guy who just gets a kick out of crossing the street in the middle of the block. And for a while he gets away with it with no consequences but one day he gets hit by a bicycle and sprains his arm. He is treated by the doctor and warned to stop that behavior, and although he says he will, he steps out of the office right into traffic and is knocked over by a passing car and hurts his back.


Looking up at the doctor a half hour later he sheepishly says that this time he won’t be so foolish. And he is wheeled out of the office in a wheelchair. But after recuperating and no longer bound to the wheel chair he resumes his risky behavior and starts to dash across the street and is struck by a car and breaks his arm. This time in a cast he promises he will not walk in traffic anymore and for the next six months lives a model existence. And he goes back to his doctor and finally gets the cast taken off and tells the doctor that he is finished running in traffic.


But when he leaves the office something attracts him on the other side of the street and he dashes into the street and he is struck by a truck and his back is broken. He can no longer walk and is confined to bed for the rest of his life.


I have paraphrased this story from the Big Book but it is masterful in its absurd simplicity how it describes the absolute compulsion that drives a human being to do what an ordinary human would consider to be crazy behavior. The amazing thing about reading this parable is that if you are a drunk you immediately understand the story in your gut. You see yourself running into the traffic, day in day out except all we have to do is substitute running into traffic for running into a liquor store and drinking liquor or alcohol, and getting struck by a vehicle for getting drunk, and winding up in a hospital or at the doctors for waking up from a blackout or with a hangover, and our remorse and pledge never to do it again for the remorse to never to do it again the way we always do that never to drink. This is us, this is our lives. And we see ourselves ever so clearly that we cannot run away from its simple truth.


And I go on at length about this because I would like to use these stories as examples, absurd and silly as they may seem, for civilians to try to understand the boring repetitively dangerous behavior that precedes our ultimate hells if we do not die first. These are not willful descents into purgatory. We are not testing our collective manhoods or womanhoods. These are programmed behaviors keyed in by drink like butterflies attracted to fire. There is a compulsion to seek more alcohol and until that is satisfied that seeking behavior will not stop.


The stories are stunning in their simplicity. And if I appear to have become casual about these stories, it is that they are so familiar that I have forgotten just how true they are and how in full recognition of their truth we alcoholics come to understand our affliction in these “Campbellian myths”. I use that term advisedly since they are really histories rather than myths that take on mythic proportions in the context of the “group” as a living entity that exists through time and as an historical organism. And as a totality they are the group’s Talmud, the history, constitution, moral and ethical codification and parables of the AA program.


There are times when I feel foolish and pretentious to even think that I can explain alcoholism any better than it already has been by those preeminent “barefoot philosophers” Bill W. and the original Dr. Bob. But the truth of it is that if the disease were that easy to talk about and understand, I probably would not find myself with a need to be writing about it at this point in time at all. As good as they were, the public remains as ignorant about alcoholism now as they were seventy years ago when “Alcoholics Anonymous” was first published. And with every iteration of re-explication, perhaps we will asymptotically approach an understanding of the subject.


So I humbly submit one more piece of information about alcoholism to the tome that has gone before this , maybe approaching it more as a Golden Book version level of difficulty this time. Not everyone gets this stuff the first time around, and it is hard enough a subject for the willing to get, let alone those whose understanding must be dragged kicking and scratching from the nineteenth into the twenty first centuries.


© res 5/11/2011