THE EGO HAS LANDED

THE EGO HAS LANDED

My wife once told me of a famous actress she knew who had a one woman cabaret show titled "Songs I learned at my mother's knee and other low places". I have always thought of this title as a metaphor for the serendipitous way challenging things placed in our life's paths  seem to work themselves out  if we are willing to get out of our own ways and allow things to develop  in the absence of our own intrusions.

This principle works well for teachers as well as for the student, and for doctors as well as for the patients. And it is nowhere more an active principle than in the rooms of AA and in the rooms of recovery centers of rehab facilities.

I had been asked to step in as a substitute to run an AA meeting at such a facility and the job was "simple" enough, just talk about how we stay sober once we start going to AA or when we just get discharged from  a rehab facility. And it isn't as if there is no literature on this subject. Modern recovery psychology has a whole discipline devoted to it which is called cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT was developed in the 1980's as a means of helping alcoholics and drug addicts to train themselves to mold behaviors from old patterns to new ones in order to prevent the older patterns from triggering desires into the use of drugs and/or alcohol. And either by avoidance and eventual  behavioral extinction this would allow behaviors to metamorphose into new and more acceptable behavioral pathways.

As neural plasticity became further understood, it was even better appreciated how effective this therapeutic model could be. However, I certainly do not claim to be an ace practitioner of CBT, but I do know another, similar technique which was developed from the experience of alcoholics and was "codified" in the book "Living Sober". This book, published in 1973, presaged CBT by about seven years and had the hallmarks of CBT before it had that psychiatric cache.

At this meeting we were talking about how to modify behaviors once we had stopped drinking and drugging and the model we were using was the chapter in "Living Sober" called  'Changing old routines'. This chapter specifically addresses modifying behaviors through changing our engagement of people, places and things that we interact with so that the mere experience of these interactions will not trigger automatic behaviors associated with these "environmental" familiarities.

However, the language of the chapter was particularly geared to the alcoholic and made pointed references to commuter drinking cars, country clubs, Tom Collins drinks, yacht clubs, pool clubs, summer drinking days by the beach etc.  Parlance not geared to the typical pot head or junkie.

And, in fact, one young man made this a bone of contention when he pointed out that the terminology was such that he felt that the chapter had very little to offer him by way of motivation and I felt I was watching a very poor rendition of a Marlon Brando imitation explicating the importance of "method acting" in order for him to have a really solid recovery, ("what's my motivation here").

"I really don't see how anything that an alcoholic goes through has any relation to what I have experienced as a dope addict.  I have no desire to drink and I doubt that I ever will. How is this information going to help me with getting sober? I know that I'm only a few weeks sober but please tell me how this is going to help?"

And with that comment an alcoholic of many years and several rounds of rehabs chimed in and added that he had little understanding of the lingo and shares of the drug addicts and could not understand how he could possibly glean  from them any value from their experience, strength and hope.

I tried to explain that if one took out the references to alcohol and tried reimagining the actual circumstances of people, places, things that one did in these places and under these conditions, the techniques would be equally applicable. So, for the admonition that one should not keep liquor in one's house  it would be equally applicable to suggest that one would similarly not keep "recreational pot" or "recreational cocaine" around in case some casual friends came around and just happened to want to have a hit.

 

That this was not a good idea was agreed upon by all to be equally applicable to both situations.

Or if one just would consider that the effects of drugs and alcohol were the same when they reached the reward centers of the brain and the results were the same after they acted on these centers.  The resulting behaviors, lying, cheating, drug seeking, drug searching, drug hiding, to the detriment and in place of all other behaviors, was similar whether you used drugs or alcohol.

Yet still there was resistance. So I practically lost my cool and had to growl at the drug addict to let him know in no uncertain terms that I had known dozens of "addicts" like him who had "licked, beaten and conquered" their addictions only to find themselves in extremis at some time in their lives and the most handy potion for them was a bottle of vodka and the next thing they knew they were off to the races and lo and behold they had become raging alcoholics.  What had happened? 

A drug was a drug was a drug.

But the treatment was the same. It was a spiritual path. And that path was through the steps of AA and finding a softer better way to live a sober, cleaner, normal life.

But what had I accomplished by losing my cool. After all, these guys were barely sober?  What did they know and how did it help by me getting angry?  It wasn't all about me.

My getting them to understand what I was talking about  should not have been about me, but about them. And my only purpose for my being there was to be of service. So I instantly had to make my amends and apologize and let them know that I was out of line.

The fact of the matter is that I used to do this kind of service every week for a whole year. I had been used to people in early recovery acting unsober. That's the way they are. They are barely just getting drugs out of their system; and to call them sober is to suggest birds just cleaned up from an oil spill, are clean and healthy and out of the woods as far as their viability is concerned.

But really, they are still highly at risk and perhaps may not make it. Similarly, maybe one tenth to one fifth of those coming out of detox will make it to a sober end. Not a very good statistic but real. So it is a delicate balance that we are dealing with and not a good place for touchy personalities. I cannot force understanding, sobriety, knowledge and desire for recovery on anyone. That is something that has to come from within.

For me, that acceptance came like a film being peeled away from my eyes. Suddenly the fog had been lifted from me and I understood, finally, that I was an alcoholic and I had to stop drinking or I would die.

So in recovery and in understanding my own recovery, I have to put my own self aside. I was being too self centered in worrying that my point was not getting across to these kids. I should have been more concerned that perhaps I was going too fast for the lesson to be absorbed.

The ego must be relinquished for the spirit to be saved.

 

 

© RES 11/13/2012