MORE THAN WILL

MORE THAN WILL



When considering the treatment of alcoholism, the idea of willpower comes up repeatedly. And more often than not the distinction must be drawn between the application of willpower and the manipulation of the power of the will when engaging alcoholics in their desire to achieve some control over their relationship with alcohol.


It is certainly not difficult for me to remember when I was younger that as alcoholics and addicts, we were considered to be weak minded and weak willed; we may have been hooked by our drug of choice but also got there by some moral failing and the failure to get off of the drug was equally the fault of some moral turpitude on our part. Attitudes like this certainly pre-date my youth and were au courant at the time that Bill Wilson was in the throes of his disease trying to wrestle the tiger off his back.


Even today and certainly in the interval between the time that “Alcoholics Anonymous” was written and now, lay and professional attitudes have waxed both orthodox and liberal about whether addictions and in particular alcoholism, were to be considered a disease or a social/ethical/moral defect. Presumably the former might permit the sufferer “off the hook” for his suffering while the latter perchance stationed him to be eternally damned by society, his religious peers and himself.


It is instructive to go back to the early chapters of the Big Book and observe Bill W. argue the disease model of alcoholism. It seemed incomprehensible that a man could apparently make conscious choices to drink, and then drink some more and then even more until either conscious thought was obliterated or so impaired as to make him useless. Surely somewhere in this cycle one could apply principles of self restraint and control; and if a person could not apply one’s will toward this end, clearly that person lacked the character of a good and moral person!


But Bill W. states…


“The fact is that most alcoholics, for reasons yet obscure, have lost the power of choice in drink. Our so-called will power becomes practically nonexistent. We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink”[1]


Even today I read that paragraph and I find that there still are many audiences that do not understand that idea without a sense of perplexed wonderment. How can people be so self unaware? And when the disease model is used both in the rooms and out, the one that is used to best illustrate it is often the model of an allergy.


This model is used in the context of trying to help recovering alcoholics explain to normal drinkers why they cannot drink alcohol; that it reacts poorly with their physiologic systems, like any allergy to their body. So it is often compared to shell fish allergy which if consumed will cause anaphylaxis, (mucosal swelling of the airways and eyes, hives and generalized cardiovascular collapse). And if one is allergic in this manner, one does not eat shell fish anymore. So people truly understand that comparison as to why you would not drink if that is what alcohol did to you.


But that is not truly a valid illustration otherwise we would not find so many people asking why so many “allergic” people continue drinking alcohol despite their obvious inability to handle the substance.


The better comparison, and Bill W. does get this right, is that alcoholics do not think like other people so that when he considers this condition a disease, he thinks of it as a mental disorder (or as I like to refer to it as a disease of disordered thinking). Because, no matter what the actual danger, the alcoholic, after that first drink, cannot stop, has no control over his drinking and his thinking is so distorted that he will consider all kinds of machinations to seek out and find, store, hide and sneak drinks at any time, day or night, inclement weather or sunshine, under any type of social circumstance through the threat of and after divorce and bankruptcy and loss of job and position.


This is the true morbid illustration that sheer will power is often not enough to overcome. It might be like asking a schizophrenic to willfully stop hearing the voices in his head. What one can do is to have the alcoholic learn to ignore or put aside the cravings for alcohol as a means of coping with the disease urges. Just as Nobel Laureate (and schizophrenic), John Nash learned to “ignore” the voices he heard in his head, AA purports to ask us to ignore our urges for alcohol and replace them with other thoughts. John Nash replaced his thoughts with theoretical thinking as we replace ours with a development of a new spiritual self realization.


In this model, it then becomes clear, and AA acknowledges this, that the disease never goes away. It is present always, at best it lays dormant.


“While I’m in here getting spiritually fit, my disease is out in the parking lot doing pushups”, goes the common AA adage.


So after Bill W. successfully argues the case for the disease model for alcoholism, (with the full backing of the medical establishment for support), it is notable to see where he takes a peculiar twist in the steps program in order to help bring the sufferer the much needed relief of the burden of the disease.


What most of us consider to be an organic disease then, is not really what Bill W. is concerned about as he gets into the twelve steps. He is concerned about spiritual illness, soul sickness, character defects and how we can rid ourselves of these spiritual drag stones so that we will not be drowned in a sea of spiritual depravity and darkness.


In step four we made a fearless and searching moral inventory to discover our deepest and darkest secrets, our moral and character defects so that we can confess them to another human being and to God. In step five we admit to God, ourselves and another human the exact nature of our wrongs. In step six we became ready to have God remove these character defects and in step seven we ask God to remove these character defects (“our short comings”).


I go through this process to demonstrate Bill’s cure for the “disease” of alcoholism as he defines this disease state. And alcoholism by this definition then is a “moral” disease. And its cure can only be effectuated by the re-establishment of a moral center which only an acceptance of a higher power (which Bill W. in fact demands that we call God) can consummate.


So we come full circle to the Victorian notion that alcoholism and by extension, addictive disorders, is a disease of moral and character failure. (And this from the founder of the society that tried to promote the idea that drunks were not primarily moral failures. )


But, to come to the defense of the program, if not Bill Wilson himself, it should be recalled that a brain suffering from being soaked in a sea of ethyl alcohol for as long as most alcoholics have been soaking their brains, probably has leached out most moral and ethical imprinting, like the ink print would naturally dissolve off the printed page of a bible. And it is only after drying that brain out, reestablishing a conscious contact with moral and ethical principles again can one learn to live, once again, a moral and ethical life. Like reprinting the golden rule on once leached print paper.


One cannot be spiritually fit if one hasn’t been fit at all. And until fitness has been achieved, no body building, mentally, physically or spiritually can take place. In this case, the AA program seeks to first bring the alcoholic back physically, then mentally and then spiritually as one would hear almost daily in any meeting.


And while this may be an intellectually satisfying discussion, the true goal is to satisfy the need to remain sober by making sure that we all understand how we stay sober. Do we understand that we have a disease and are treated in some medical fashion and achieve some new medical equilibrium of recovery? Or, do we achieve a new spiritual reality that keeps us morally fit?


In the long run, AA is pretty laissez faire about the whole thing. Nobody except the most extreme dogmatists really cares about this, and most will defer to the slogan “live and let live. It works, if you work it”.




[1] P. 24, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4^th Ed. 2001


© res 5/22/2011