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