REVERSALS OF FORTUNE

REVERSALS OF FORTUNE

It is said in AA that there are no coincidences. You think that life deals you blows from which you can never recover and yet luck then hands you a plum; an opportunity to reverse your fortune. How does that happen?...

I was at a meeting of medical professionals in recovery and since many of us hadn’t seen each other in quite a while we brought one another up to date on our lives in the interim since our past meetings.  Of course, some of us had crossed paths during that interregnum but many of us had not met before as  time and distance had prevented us since we hailed from all corners of the state.

One or two had the pleasure of announcing that their consent orders were up and they were no longer beholden to the state department of health and would be free from continued surveillance which can be so intrusive in one’s life. 

Interestingly, no one complained about that.  By far the most common subject for discussion was the peace and serenity that most had achieved through the AA program after having finally accepted our addictions.  Nobody blamed the state for taking action, nobody complained that they were abused by any authorities. To a man we took responsibility for our actions as we took hold of our lives and turned them around.

One person after another recounted how he came from an existence of not so quiet desperation, to  occupations with  living in the moment, not for tomorrow, not yesterday, not for the things in life that we thought we wanted or for those other things that we fooled ourselves into believing that we required.  

We changed our needs in life from the spurious to the spiritual; from the gauche to the graceful and from the thankless to the thankful.  We stopped rushing around as if speed by itself would get us to arrive at the desired destination.  And we finally learned that if we took our time to observe where we were going we might actually recognize the destination when we arrived at it.

And helping to get us to this emotional tableland is the serenity prayer.  That prayer that reminds us that we may reach for the stars, but we always have to settle for what we can get;  that we should not over think the things that we have no power to alter and that we should know when we can effect the outcome of a situation and when we must just let things go. For that then is the beginning of wisdom.

So I shared that with twenty-two months of sobriety my life had been bent toward the less goal oriented, less driven day to day existence. I had learned that I no longer was exhausted by my quotidian quest for money, how much was going out and how I was going to make up the difference. Because there was no way that through daily exhibitions of my anxieties was I going to improve my troubled mental state. I had to let go and just accept that the situation was as it was. 

Worrying was not and did not change the course of the situation.  Yet out of nowhere, I got a short job for which, I might add, I was not well suited but which tided me over to help pay the bills and lower my fretfulness to a manageable roar. It gave me a respite from the daily mental difficulties so early in my sobriety that it helped me learn to be more serene in order to face more trying times ahead.  And that served me well since  I have not had another job since that one thirteen months ago.

But the calmness that I learned then got me out of thinking so much about myself so that I could pass on what I knew about addiction to others and was invited to host a seminar on alcoholism and began a weekly “Living Sober” meeting at a drug rehab facility.

And with that B., an acquaintance I had not seen in almost a year and a half, spoke up shaking his head saying, “you know I never thought you would ever get the program.  You were fighting it all the way. I would have bet anything that you wouldn’t make it! And here you are, running a “Living Sober” meeting for the past 10 months at a rehab facility no less.  You sure proved me wrong; but then you never know who is finally going to get it and why or how.  Although, acceptance is the key for sure and clearly you finally accepted your addiction!”

And I grinned at his statement. Because I recalled those days and it is amazing how we see each other. And my recollection was that I thought that B. was faking his “spiritual” experience and that his “sobriety” sounded better than could possibly be true. 

But that just tells you how far I had to go. Because I just did not understand spirituality yet. He had something that I didn’t have and at that point I was too green to even know that it was something that I should even want to have. 

It is easy to scoff at those things you don’t understand, but when you do, boy do you feel embarrassed and foolish. But that is all part of the program and if that is the worst that you feel, I can live with that.

So when A returned from New Mexico after a training trip he had not expected to have been evicted from the room that he had been letting from a woman for the past six months but with whom he had been having trouble keeping up the rent.  Out the door, things out, lock, stock and computer, placed into his car up to the brim and locks changed on the house.  

So not only was A. homeless, but he still had furniture that was too big to move out into the street locked in the room.  And in desperation he called his sponsor who tried to negotiate a compromise with the landlady rather than involve the police in reinstating A.’s room. 

And after an exhausting morning they decided to attend the second half of an AA daily prayer meeting at which J. was talking about there being “no coincidences” in life; and he recounted for the group how I had helped him with his lymphoma and at another time when he was kicked out of his home by his family and  he was taken in by this sober woman in town who took in stray “drunks” and gave him a room and fed him for minimal payback.

I wish I could say that this was all just circumstantial, dumb luck, or the proverbial “if you give enough monkeys typewriters, they’re bound to type out Shakespeare”. But I have seen this too many times in the rooms. 

And I won’t go as far as to credit these circumstances  to the higher power that many in the rooms call God. But I will attribute it to the condition that the rooms create which I will call ‘grace’. 

People get thrown together daily to share their hopes, their darknesses, their needs and their requirements.  Many times there is nothing to be done. But, as is said, people share “experience, strength and hope” and it is through that  that these coincidences happen. 

And if you come often enough you will not be surprised to find good fortune happening just as surely as you would find someone tossing a heads twenty-five times in a row.

For we could live life as if it depended upon blind luck, or  in living life with hope we will surely experience a life lived with incidents that come as a matter of grace.

© res 10/28/11

COMING HOME

Coming Home

At last, or finally it happened. And what was I expecting to happen? Something magic?

After two years of false hope and false expectation and false starts and then false hopes again you then pretty much sort of just give up and let go. And that is a good thing. It teaches forbearance and patience and decreases levels of expectations and  makes gratitude all the more precious when it becomes apparent.

If my return had happened on my terms, it would not have been successful. I was not ready. I had to be  mellowed. At that time, I had too much edge, too much edge for easy and early acceptance. Acceptance on my schedule was a recipe for failure.

But I feared that if too much time passed, passions might die. Not just the passions fed by anger, frustration and fear. But the passion fed by love, fondness and caring. I was unhappily fond of saying that absence would make the heart grow absent. Passion would, if not die,  certainly become so dulled as to be bland and without care. Maybe boredom would set in. But just because passion has been curbed does not mean that one is left without contentment.

You could not have told me that, then! Time. I needed time. My fury needed time to marinate in the knowledge of who I was; I needed to fully apprehend what being an alcoholic is. And then of course it would not do to tell her how healed I had become , I needed the time to demonstrate that I had become healed; but only at a distance, not something to be paraded in front of her but to be observed out of the side of the eye, at a glancing view. It cannot be seen by looking at it straight on. For like that feint star that one sees out at the periphery of the field of vision on a bright night, it gets lost as soon as one looks directly at it. Tenuous truth can rarely bare direct scrutiny without withering.

The histories of the lives of alcoholics are littered with false starts, harrowing careering rides of trying to capture “lost” time and the consequent crashes that attend when exceeding the speed limit of attempted recovery. It is a common malady and oft repeated fate that the rush of optimism at the too early return to the family redounds to the rack and ruination of relationships. The fallout is often worse than when the initial separation was caused by just the alcoholism itself. Raw feelings stripped of the veneer of alcoholic booziness,  are just disasters in waiting for the unprepared spouse and family against a raging dry drunk.

So when I left High Watch, I truly thought that I had my problem licked. I ‘understood’ what was wrong with me! Really I did! No, really!

You don’t seem convinced. And surely you should not be. Because that is only the “pink cloud thinking” speaking. When we first realize that we are drunks, we are so relieved to understand first that we don’t have to lie anymore, to ourselves, to our families, (as if we could really), to the world at large, that we want to shout it to the world. We want to first apologize to everyone we hurt as a substitute for true amends to those we have done dirt to. And by the latter I mean, lied to, cheated on, about, stole from or otherwise acted poorly to.

But amends are not apologies. Apologies we gave by the gross to all those who trusted us the most. We promised time and again to stop drinking, lying, stealing or whatever and of course, we broke those vows over and again.  Pledges meant nothing. So what were and are we to do to make it better?

An amend is an affirmation that one is ashamed and sorry about one’s behavior and that there was and is no excuse for it. That you cannot promise that your behavior will not be repeated because you understand that your word does not mean very much. But to the extent that you have done material harm, you will try to make it up. As to the rest, you can only let your sincerity be judged by your actions not your words. 

An amend is not an apology.  You have to make it known that you understand that your word is worthless and that you understand that if your word is to gain any currency in the future here is the plan that you have set out that will improve the value of your reputation; by deeds, actions and not words.

But that doesn’t necessarily get you back home.  And it did not get me back home. And in fact those fine words about amends I could not just sit down and say. It had to develop out of actions, actions that arose out of isolation, anxiety, rejection and almost repudiation. I was practically persona non grata at the house. Not invited to family functions, to holiday functions, pretty much cut off.  I had no optimistic expectation that my marriage would be saved.  

Early on with this type of rejection, I got so angry that I just removed my marriage band to show the level of my depression and disgust. The only glimmer that I understood that there was some hope was that the wife continued to wear hers. My assumption was that it was out of habit. But as it continued for more than fourteen of those twenty-four months of exile, I took this as a vague but positive message of hope.

Time, as I have written before, has a way of making the cloudy sediment settle. And as the silt from all that muddied water from that turbulent life finally settled with the passing months and your new calmer selves have finally floated to the top, old resentments could be washed away so that new clear thinking could bring new resolution to bear upon this old relationship. And if those calmer selves are what you want to live with, then opinions can be changed and reconciliation can begin.

But that’s where things just begin to begin. Because time, remember that old goat time? hasn’t been standing still for either of you. You have been individually changing. You have learned to live apart and independently. And two once co-dependent lives are now independent and they now have new habits and skills.

Making that work in this new relationship, now that’s the new deal. How that will work out for the two of you on this homecoming, that will be the trick.

For she has no longer depended upon you for so much, not the least of which is the day to day handout of money. She had to make do by her own wits without that for which she was most reliant upon you. How handily she did may be beside the point because she is no longer afraid of doing it without you. She knows that she can do it by herself and doesn’t really need you around.

And you, you have learned that you can get moral support from other people in this world.  When she was no longer around for you, seemingly not caring what was going on in your head, you had to do for yourself and find others to commiserate with you and guide you.  And you did.

You finally learned to become independent of her good opinion.  You learned not to need to wake up in the morning with her beside you and you learned to not have to turn to her when something was keenly painful that you needed her knowing comfort to help resolve. She wasn’t there. And that was by design. She chose to absent herself from your life and you made do. And you did.

So she finally did ask you to return to the home, she from a position of emotional and financial independence and you from a position of  emotional strength. 

But you finally decided that if you were going to move back and make this marriage work you would symbolically acknowledge it by putting your wedding band back on.  And you did. 

But six weeks  after your return you find that she seems to have forgotten about her wedding band, it was taken off at some point and it fails to make a reappearance on the hand. Ennui? Or a symbol?.... Time…..

It takes time to destroy a marriage as it does to reintegrate one. But as I have described the “facts on the ground” as it were, I can understand that I may see the seeds of dissolution of this union having been sown by the act of the separation and the need to survive that separation with personalities intact.  And that very need to keep body and mostly soul intact may spell the end to the union.

It will do that because, simply put, the separation has made us individually stronger people, less codependent, freer and more single minded thinkers.  Therefore the bonds of codependency that may have been indeed pathologic initially,  may have been permanently undermined by this whole past two or more years.

And who is to say that that, in the long run, it is such a bad thing?

© res 10/26/11

STAYING ALIVE

STAYING ALIVE

How we react to news, good or bad is often how we measure the man, as it were.  So the leader who is generous to his enemies he has defeated is lauded as kind and a peacemaker.  He is looked upon as, if not saintly, at least wise, in that the best way to win the hearts and minds of your old enemies is not to grind them into the dust but to lift them to your level, look them in the eye and ask them to help you heal the rift that so recently separated you as enemies.

Abraham Lincoln was such a person and I always wonder what this nation might have looked like had he lived out his second term and brought his gentle hand to steer the ship of state during reconstruction. 

We can also react to bad news too. The news can involve nations, as that bad news surely struck the South when Lincoln was shot and they realized that their best hope for the future was crushed.

The news can be deadly and personal as when we are struck by illness or personal tragedy, such as a disease, a death, or injury or some particularly devastating news that can affect individuals and families for years to come.  We are not always good actors under these circumstances; sometimes we behave bravely and at other times we are very bad. Sometimes we are heroic and at other times our actions belie fears and cowardly behaviors that speak very ill of us.

As alcoholics we are not typically on the side of making the best of decisions for many reasons. When we drink, our full faculties cannot be brought to bear on any situation with clarity and precision to summon keen thinking. But even after the haze of alcohol is removed, alcohol maintains a gauze over our discriminative faculties and we often cannot make fine, or even gross decisions, particularly well.

When we drink, in our desperation we may finally cry out and acknowledge that we need help. But when the symptoms of withdrawal creep upon us we lose all the courage that we had summoned when we were at our most self disgusted and determined and vulnerable to that clarity of that thought to stop.  But in the throes of the shakes, the sweats, the vomiting and even hallucinations perhaps, we may find this determination sorely taxed and waning.  We then reach for the bottle to alleviate the symptoms of withdrawal and when finally they recede, in our despair we find we no longer have the resolve to complete the task and goal of stopping the drink.  We find that we are confused, we don’t know who to turn to for help.

Often enough professionals do not know what to do to help us although by now more physicians and psychiatrists have become aware of the utility of Alcoholics Anonymous even if they do not understand just why it is that the fellowship works. 

So we make bad decisions when under the influence and that continues for a long time after we get sober. And one of the benefits of being in the fellowship is that we recognize that alcoholism is a disease that is 10% drinking and 90% thinking.  So that when we finally put the drink down, the real work of getting our lives in order has to begin. After all, it is only Step One of the Twelve Steps that actually mentions alcohol. The remainder deal with the idea of getting on with job of living a good and decent and happy and fulfilling life.

But we can never forget along the way that as alcoholics, we have a disease of thinking and that does not get as easily treated as stopping the drinking.  And as amazing as that last statement may seem to the newly sober alcoholic, it is essentially true.  Because in order to maintain a sober life, one must begin to live a happy and orderly and meaningful life.

A life of fulfillment, a life with a spiritual payback.  Otherwise we will never be able to face those trials that life throws at us which when drinking or when not soberly thinking, we will throw the opportunity away to solve those problems in a sober manner.

Take my friend J. who just received the diagnosis of lymphoma. There are many differences between the way that anyone, any normal person and an alcoholic might react. 

A normal person would step back and look at the situation “soberly”, find the treatment alternatives, perhaps find the best outlets or centers of excellence for those treatment alternatives and then seek out their best practitioners for their help. The last thing on a normal person’s mind is seeking refuge in a drink or a drug. Oblivion is not an option if he wants to live.

But the latter is always an alternative for the alcoholic if he lets down his guard, not keeping his mind and his path clear of those thoughts that are absolute poison to his wellbeing.  For in the alcoholic, oblivion is always an option and a choice in that direction must always be defended against.

But with J., once presented with the reality of the severity of his medical problem, he finally sought out the help. He could have walked out of the hospital and bought a bottle of booze or enough cocaine to have a real run to find his choice of oblivion.  But his choice was to live. And so nullity was not an option today. 

He now had friends who were pulling for him. He saw them every day in the rooms where they greeted him each morning.  He made coffee for them. They helped him out.  When he came North  five months ago, he knew no one. But today twenty five people signed a get well card.

So did he owe them something?

They would be the first to reply that all that he owed them was his own peace of mind in order for him to stay sober today so that he could help another alcoholic stay sober tomorrow. And yes, that had a requirement that he give some value to his life and live soberly.

…so he could give back, what he so freely partook of yesterday.

© res 10/20/11

NO REASON TO GET EXCITED

No Reason to Get Excited

The sky was, to these color blinded eyes, a powdered baby blue; the air was nippy and J. was remarking that for all of the Fall-like weather there were hardly any colors in the leaves.  “They’re either green or on the ground brown and crackling. I think it was because of all that rain.”  “Is it that,” I asked, “or was it the lack of a lot of heat this summer?” I hoped my  ignorance of meteorological affairs was not too obvious.

“Either or, it’s not important except that we hardly had any time to enjoy a high fall filled with the reds and oranges of the season. Usually by this time there is a tree in the back of my mom’s house that has blazing red leaves but today there is nothing but a skeleton against the sky and a heap of leaves needing to be raked”.

“Yeah, one of the things I did not have to do for the past two years was rake the leaves. One of the advantages of apartment living.  Last week I found myself blowing leaves all afternoon until my arthritic thumb started to ache.  Sobriety awarded me my return home, but sometimes you have be careful about what you wish for,” I mused.

And as an afterthought J. mentioned that he could not obtain a hard copy of the CT. CDL Driver’s handbook and asked at the DMV for one. They told him that he could download it from the internet. J was flummoxed when he asked them, rhetorically apparently, “what do you do if you haven’t got a computer and internet access?”  They were not amused!

So I volunteered to let him download and burn a copy of the handbook for him to get printed at Staples or Kinko’s or someplace like that.  Which he was terribly grateful for and when he arrived I realized that he might need a CDL physical exam and I volunteered as a gesture to give one to him.

In the rooms you always will meet people who come from circumstances that are worse than yours and  J.’s was certainly like that.  Crazy girlfriend, difficult family, hard to find work in this economy, not a great skill set that I’m aware of except that he is willing, and clever and a hard worker and from what I can tell a nice guy. He first dropped into the rooms ninety plus days ago having just returned to the area from being out of state. He said that he finally wanted to get sober. Again. For the umpteenth time. But this time he was the most serious.

And unlike many chronic recidivists whom I’ve met in the rooms, I believed him. And to this date I had no reason not to continue that belief. For he immediately took on one, two maybe three commitments and he never slacked. What he said he would do he did. He came early and left late.  

And he would help you out if you needed it… And I did when the time came for me to move back home. He was there willing and able to help with the furniture and the packing of the truck.  And I swear, that without his genius of placing each chair and table and each lamp and bed stand just in the right place, I am sure that I would not have been able to fit my small apartment of things into the grossly underestimated size of the truck that I rented.  “I’ve done this more times than I care to count, so I’ve become quite the expert at this,” J. said with no hint of gloating.  Just that sound of sure confidence that experience brings when you know what you are doing.

So I don’t know what I was expecting when I finally got home to living in a large house and had to start sharing a life again with another person.  Because I have been thinking that my wife has been finding any circumstance to pick a fight with me over the most picayune  reason.  Whose knives are we going to use in the kitchen.  Can we settle on the pots and pans. “I don’t know if I want you to put your TV in the living room”. 

How can I tell her that the bedspread that she has been using for the past four or five years is the most hideous thing I have ever seen and I would rather we burn it before I have to sleep under it….  And today I find my ginger taken out of the refrigerator and placed in a cupboard. And I am practically gritting my teeth thinking how this will dry out the ginger as I count to one hundred.

And I am reading this litany and thinking of the scene from the “Fantastiks” between the two fathers and the upshot is “You’re -  standing – in – my - kumquats!!!!”

Meaning, I am complaining about such frivolous things when there are so many issues of greater import to concentrate on why am I wasting gigabytes of memory on this junk?

Or the AA equivalent which is why do I allow such idiotic stuff take up space in my head rent free? For it is now becoming clear that my feelings of discomfort at home have nothing to do with my wife and everything to do with me and how I am perceiving my adaptation to my move back home.  What, after all, am I complaining about?

It’s only been a month. I took years to screw the relationship up. It’s going to take awhile to mend some of the rents I tore in the fabric of our marriage.  And after all, don’t other people have things that are by far worse off than I have them?

I mean things have not been so happy on my wife’s side of the family of late with two contemporary cousins, one dying of sudden mysterious causes and another whose husband suddenly died.  There are things in this life I need to step back to reconsider  in the greater scheme of things.

Like that CDL physical that I so freely gave to J. It happened to be serendipitous.

It won’t get him his driver’s license but I did find a suspicious mass in his groin. Which along with the nodes in his neck made me send him to the hospital for a further evaluation.

Against the sure diagnosis of lymphoma, my problems are high class and surely forgettable or at least postpone able.  For in the greater scheme of things, life, so far, has not dealt me the worst hand in the deck.  There is plenty of time for me to reconsider my life and how I react to it.

Then I can begin to see the true colors of the day, soak them in, breathe them and thank my higher power that I am alive to appreciate the blues, the yellows and the reds and not dwell upon the notion that my colorblindness reveals those colors differently to me than they appear to the rest of the world.

© res 10/17/2011

TESTING THE WATERS

TESTING THE WATERS
(BEFORE DROWNING)

Nothing gives me the sense of having cold water thrown in my face as someone telling me that either someone else has ‘gone out’ or that they themselves have ‘gone out’. It is not so much that sense of refreshment, as rather that sense of sang-froid that you get when you hear of the determined effort of some doomed fate because of the misguided thinking that leads the alcoholic to think that he can just try to see what it was like when he used to drink, just to remember; as if that effort would have no consequence.

No one who has regaled me with an escapade such as this got away with it. Nobody was able to just have one drink and then stop. Sure. We could have one drink and then stop for that one instance. But that would then inevitably give us the courage to think that we could then ‘control’ our drinking and then try our ability to control it again. And again.

And then again until we were back on that not-so-merry-go-round of drinking, hiding the drink, planning to drink, thinking about the drink and drinking again; only to start the cycle all over again the next day, next week, next month.

And no matter how long I come to meetings and sit in the rooms, someone with tons of sobriety will relate with the candor of a new recruit that for some reason they had recently felt out of sorts and found themselves in a situation where they were dangerously close to a drink. And these situations can sound incredibly dramatic, like S. who said at today’s Living Sober meeting that last week, because she was having a bad day starting out with an argument with her husband, her emotional defenses started to crumble as the day wore on.

“And as the day proceeded, and my chest cold started to get worse, not only did my physical immunity break down, but with that my emotional immunity started to decompose. I found myself seeking solace at a women’s meeting, which for all the support that it usually provides, only served to undermine my feelings of inadequacy and I left that meeting determined not to go home and wanting to isolate. And I thought that being isolated at a bar with a club soda would be a good idea.”

“A good idea! Who was I kidding. A club soda would have been an invitation to a club soda and scotch and then just a scotch – neat! And had I not been considering this at the side of the road, I might not have picked up the phone when some woman from that meeting called to try to tell me that she felt that the meeting hadn’t gone particularly well and we then sat and talked for a while I headed the car away from the bar and back home.”

“I frighten myself because I have nineteen years, six months, seven days and eight hours of sobriety and I was on the verge of losing it all.”

We talked about how ‘time’ in the program only gives one the time to acquire tools to help you stay sober. But if you don’t actually use those tools, then, sobriety is just a hit and miss thing.  For having one year or ten years in the day count bank doesn’t guarantee sobriety. The program is truly a “day at a time”.  You only have today to stay sober and that is the only day you have to worry about and, maybe, perhaps, tomorrow.

And in a sense, perhaps, that is a good thing. Knowing that an old-timer is as vulnerable as the newcomer, gives the newcomer the sense that everyone’s sobriety is as tenuous or as solid as the next.  We all have the same tools to use. We can use them wisely or not at all.  The good news is, is that if at anytime we think we are having a bad day and we feel we are close to a drink, we can start our day over again and act as if that unsober day never came.

This whole discussion came about because we were having a discussion centered upon the fourth chapter in the Living Sober book “Remembering that alcoholism is an incurable, progressive and fatal disease”.  Because I need to remember that I treated alcoholics who recovered from severe effects of their alcoholism, collections of fluid in their abdomen as a result of liver failure, or intestinal bleeding, or congestive heart failure.

And as I told the group about these cases I had to admit the level of denial that I had even while I was treating these poor people.  Here was the evidence of the worst that the disease could do without killing me in front of my eyes. Yet while I refused to believe that I was drinking alcoholically too, it did give me pause.

But I quickly let those thoughts pass. It was they who had the problem, not I. Best not to dwell.

And even as I pulled a sheet, like a shroud, over each patient who died as a result of this disease, I would look away at my own involvement with the grape. Best not to dwell.

Through the grapevine I heard that P. had decided to do some more investigative reporting.  Just last month she proudly received her one year coin and said that she was not sure that she could have done it. That she had thought that she would break down long before the year had passed but found that the support in the rooms was what really helped her. That it was when she neglected to go to meetings and attend to her spiritual upkeep that it became difficult to stay away from drinking and then she became ‘curious’ again about that ‘phenomenon’ of the drinking, the ceremony, the glamour, the mystique.

But apparently her experimental reporting found that she really couldn’t have just one drink.  No matter that she had just met at least two hundred fellow drunks in the rooms during the past year who told her just that, she had to be convinced by her own hand, I guess she guessed.

This disease is 10% drinking 90% thinking, so the adage goes. And like most AA aphorisms, they tend to dwell on the gnarled thinking part of the disease of alcoholism. For I like to remind myself that alcoholism is as much a thought disorder (disease of disordered thinking) as it is a disease of disordered drinking.  And it is only a fraction of that thinking that is involved in the act of imbibing. The rest involves the effort to stay away from a drink. The how to deal with yourself in this world.

If you can understand yourself in this world, and that is  all to the good, then trying to understand how you deal with others will become your lifelong task for a successful and fruitful and compassionate life. And if you cannot actually understand how to actually deal with others initially, then having to train yourself to deal with others until you actually do understand how becomes your goal until you develop those  techniques by which you actually do understand and appreciate them.

AA’s call that faking it until you make it. Because if we don’t deal with the disorder of our thinking, then we get tripped up on just the simplest of notions of how to stay sober and what will and won’t hurt us. Like J. who, when presented with the idea that some friends were drinking “home-made” wine, thought “wouldn’t it be nice to try some?” Was that a rational, prudent or even competent thought?

Don’t we have a strange way of thinking?

© res 10/7/11

TO KNOW YOURSELF IS TO LOSE YOURSELF

TO KNOW YOURSELF IS TO LOSE YOURSELF

Alice said it plainly but it was so clearly true that believing that she could conquer her alcoholism by sheer force of will was impossible .  Self knowledge or will power is of little value.  Compulsion will get her (or me) in the end.

The notion that I could possibly solve the problem of drinking through understanding its root cause further pushed me away from acceptance of the condition; but that through understanding the nature of the alcoholism in me was the only way of trying to tame it was just a distraction and really just another means to deny its hold on me.

The more I accept my condition, the more I allow the spirit of the world , the power of the universe to  heal me – to permit me to accept the suggestions that help me to stay away from the next drink. The more I try to understand my drinking, the more I vainly try to wrest control of my disease from the aid offered by my higher power and it increases my resistance to giving up my will to that power greater than myself.

It may seem paradoxical that in trying to comprehend the disease, I merely demonstrate a willfulness to reject the help that surrender can give. But by surrendering the willful need to understand, I stop refusing and resisting to get better.  I allow myself the freedom to heal. The resistance leaves and although understanding may not come now, or later, peace and contentment and freedom from the obsession to drink may finally be granted- without necessarily understanding why.

And then I become able to achieve a level of serenity that sheer knowledge never permits. Facts are cold and hard. I can know all the facts that there are but they won’t necessarily release me from the anxiety and obsession to drink.  They just illuminate the obsession and amplify the anxiety so that I can bear witness to both in an unbearably intense light.

But acceptance, unequivocal, unvarnished and unhesitatingly given, releases me from the fear of understanding. Knowledge does not grant release. Understanding does not thrust freedom from fear upon the soul.  Acceptance unfetters fear and anxiety and frees me from the incessant preoccupation and compulsion to drink.

And finally, having accepted that I cannot know why I drink, really, but can nevertheless give it up, this then sets the stage for permitting me to let go of the many other outrageous behaviors that foul up my relations with other people. It allows me to begin to understand that I hold onto  my hates , resentments, jealousies, and fears at my own risk and for no other purpose than to perpetuate the behavior itself;  just to support a spurious scaffolding of personality that thrives on needing to put others down in order to prop myself up.

But to break the cycle of anger, irritability, fear and lashing out, only to repeat it again, is only the beginning to living the rest of my life in a self sustaining way; one that can daily be replenished by remembering to stop harboring and self feeding negative thoughts.  The cycle stops here – apologies or amends are made so that negative behaviors do not have a chance to fester into gangrenous wounds until tissue death sets in.  The wound can then be debrided and I can let the healing begin.

                                                               -----

I originally started this essay two months ago, but it was only today when I heard C. speak that I began to appreciate the verity of what I was just saying.  Because I have said to myself and others that understanding takes time. Healing takes time. Time takes time. But C. was talking about his journey and one element was clear about his sojourn, time.

He did not impress himself with his alcoholism until he found himself in front of his boss and his clients at a meeting at which he was the main event and he just appeared in his clothes that he dragged himself out of bed with after having  been drinking pretty much all night.

He was fortunate enough to be given the chance at rehabilitation and as luck would have it when he was discharged he was told to attend AA to achieve lasting sobriety.

But like many self made men (people), he just couldn’t identify with others in the rooms. He wasn’t like them! He still had his family, his fortune, his fancy car -  his mistress. He could stay sober on his own!

Not exactly the frame of mind to achieve any level of humility and self knowledge and understanding of his condition. Peace and contentment? He thought he could find it but it proved to be as elusive as his tenuous sobriety.

As elusive as a marriage based upon a lie.

I have heard many stories in the rooms and there are none yet that I’ve heard that have achieved a modicum of sober success without a bottom being hit. And that may entail the loss of job, home, fortune or family.

Or all of the above. Why? Because pride is bane of us all and it gets in the way of us beginning to see who we really are, let alone admit that we are truly the alcoholics that we have been telling ourselves that we are not! And then the loss of all of those things in life that formerly meant so much to us becomes a humiliating experience – a humbling experience.  And until we experience humbling, or becoming smaller in ego size, we cannot begin to fully appreciate the concept of humility.

It is not a process of becoming small, it is just a process of our egos becoming right sized.  And then we can begin to learn. Learn first that we are alcoholic, and really believe it.  Learn kindness and calmness. Learn to be still, rather than being constantly in motion.  Learn to understand rather than insisting on being understood. Learn to listen rather than being heard. To calm others rather than worry them.

These are not my concepts. I borrowed them from St. Francis. But they are words that I have to live by if I want to remain sober. Likewise, if he wants to achieve sobriety  I believe that every alcoholic must learn to live by these principles too.  

They are so elegant in their simplicity, so difficult in their mastery.

© res 10/6/11

The Pleasure Principle

The Pleasure Principle

When you get right down to it you have to look at alcoholism as pleasure gone berserk. All addictions for that matter fall into this category when you consider the biological basis of addictions.  Because in alcoholics and addicts it is the reward – pleasure circuits in the brain that are the focal point for the disease of addictions.

It is this reward system gone awry that has lead so many people down the path of misery, ill health, maladaptive behavior and death. It is because of alcohol and drugs that, we have learned, the brain is as plastic as it is, i.e. it can be reprogrammed from its primary functions as a watchdog for danger and guardian of our personal safety.  Yes it is plastic, not the immutable, hard wired organ that it was imagined to be not twenty years ago.  And this has come as a great awakening for the medical community, and lifted great a weight off the shoulders of the addicted population freeing them (us?) from the long pointed finger of condemnation for being will-less souls.

But how does addiction occur and why is it so hard to break away from? First off we have to realize that the brain is a much more pliable and mutable organ than we ever imagined.  Yet how truly remarkable it seems that could it have been conceived in any other way? How could we have acquired memories, learned right from wrong, stored smells and sights and sounds without something changing, something translating, something metamorphosing at the cellular/molecular level?

And within the past ten years this has been amply demonstrated at the glucose metabolic level or the blood flow level as moment by moment neural traffic flow is measured  as it  traverses the highways of the neural pathways shown in PET and MRA scanning  permitting us to see humans as they are actually thinking, feeling and reacting emotionally. And we can see how a brain changes over time and we can even see how a brain stores the memories of a story from one person to the next. 

We can see first how a mind has a baseline of information; then more of some as a story is absorbed. Then we can see how it is learned and we can compare the quality of that learning as it is stored by the quantity of the memory of the energy stored. So we have come a long way in our understanding of physiologic processes of the brain. But how does this help us understand addiction?

Addictions act at the most primitive level of human emotional response, at the survival level. Alcohol and cocaine and all addictions for that matter act on the pleasure centers, a learning area called the meso- accumbens and the nucleus accumbens  where good and bad experiences are learned so that they can be recalled quickly.

So if we were to place a finger on a hot stove, and we were naïve to that experience, the memory would be stored and we would become very wary in the future when approaching another stove.  Similarly if we find that we like honey, this will also be stored, but as a positive memory for the future. This is part of the survival - pleasure – pain response system, the fight or flight system (in very simplified form). 

The major neurotransmitter of this system is dopamine and it serves as the transmitter responsible for positive feeling sensed in these nuclei. What happens when people take cocaine is that it inhibits the release of another neurotransmitter (GABA) which prevents the release of dopamine. So the result is the accumulation of dopamine and the result is a rush of overwhelming positive good feelings. Sometimes these feelings overlap and are sensed as food or sex.

This sensation is so intense that the psychological effect (positive reinforcement) is to want to repeat the experience, which is usually done. And when this is repeated over and over again (as in cocaine addiction), the cocaine short circuits the usually inhibited circuitry and potentiates the dopamine for even more of a high.  What is so addicting is that the ‘high’ thus triggered is so far beyond what the body can remotely normally experience that the memory gets tricked into desiring this drug, (cocaine), more and more, (for the dopamine ‘high’ that it can produce).

But the normal body tends to move toward an equilibrium which is called homeostasis or balance. The out of balance response to excessive dopamine calls upon the brain to react to decrease the efficacy of that dopamine in one way or another. In this case, the dopamine receptors become “less efficient” and it takes more and more cocaine (or alcohol) to mount the same high. So when the cocaine binge or alcohol binge is over there is a relative dearth of dopamine with a resulting suppressed mood, resulting in feelings of  depression, unhappiness and drug/alcohol craving.  Let the interval last long enough in the alcoholic and symptoms of withdrawal will take place.

This accounts for the phenomenon of ‘drug tolerance’, the need for increasing the dose of the drug to produce the same or greater effect.  This also accounts for the reinforcing effect that the drug will have on the addict to feel better when the cravings are relieved after resuming the dose. Once again this reinforces the behavior.

This behavioral reinforcement carries over into the triggering of cravings when people or places or paraphernalia find the recovering addict in situations that they cannot avoid. This is the emotional residue and it may last for years. Smokers know how real this is when years after giving up smoking they may have had a particularly satisfying meal and suddenly feel the urge to have a smoke at the end of the meal. This is the result of a sense memory of the satisfaction of smoking in the past after the end of a satisfying meal.

This can be called emotional or contextual memory and this type of recall may never go away.  And these  conditioned responses to environmental stimuli that set off feelings or desires to have a drink or desire to use are the stimuli that surrounded the environment when we were using. So alcoholics may find urges to drink in bars, at parties, at ballgames and at weddings and social events where the main point of the evening was to drink and get high or drunk. At least for the alcoholic. The alcohol sets up the chemical “reward” in the conditioned response.

With time, when the conditioned response is no longer rewarded with the expected reward (that is when the situation does not present the alcohol) the behavior of craving usually gets ‘extinguished’.  And this happens in the higher functioning longer term thinking memory of the mind. But the short term more primitive and reactive memory of the fight or flight mind still, from time to time will be caught unaware and find itself craving the expected reward of the alcohol induced dopamine release which then goes on to release endogenous endorphins which promote the high of alcohol consumption.

It is this long term unconscious memory that is the most difficult to fight and most often is what catches alcoholics and addicts off guard and which they have to be most wary of.  When we understand the origin of these feelings and that they are just primitive rattlings of the primitive ‘crocodile’  mind we may be able to get a better handle on our cravings.

The techniques that are introduced through the book “Living Sober” are about  learning new behaviors so that they automatically become the instant default practices in any set of circumstances in which our original habit would be to pick up a drink or walk into a bar, a liquor store or to act in a non sober manner. In this way we substitute higher level thinking over the more primitive brain thinking functions.  We are trying to get away from those conditioned, Pavlovian responses.

Modern psychosocial psychotherapies of alcohol sufferers are treated with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. This centers on the alcoholic identifying specific thoughts, feelings and behaviors in and around the use of alcohol. The therapy is meant to develop skills to identify and manage the thoughts and feelings and outcomes of behaviors that arise out of the behaviors thus identified. 

The “Living Sober” book identifies for the alcoholic all the major events common to most alcoholics that he no doubt will run into and suggests generic remedies to help modify these behaviors.  So for family get togethers it suggests “go late and leave early.” “Eat something before you go even if food is going to be served”.  “Always bring your own car with you so that you can drive yourself home, and make sure that you park well away from all the other cars at the party so that nobody who has been drinking has to move his car out of the way for you.”

During your first year of recovery: “Avoid major life changes in the first year of your sobriety”.  This is not an unreasonable challenge since at best our thinking is marginal and clouded during the first six months of becoming sober and it is hardly the time to be making complex and life defining decisions if possible.

So what modern psychiatric practice has adopted as standard practice today has been used since 1978 in Alcoholics Anonymous as suggested ways to get and remain sober. We understand a bit better why the technique works but the technique has been working for the past thirty years even without an official label to it. And we can bend that part of our mind that serves to protect us by informing us subliminally what is inherently good and  pleasurable and safe from that which is bad or painful and dangerous. We just have to relearn how to recognize what those things were and not mistake the false pleasures that turn out to be the real dangers.

© res 10/5/11