THE REALITY OF SOBRIETY

A cold and dank morning and getting up in this weather usually provokes a few twinges of regret about having to pull myself together to get to a meeting. With weather like this I wonder about the necessity of attending my daily sorties to the rooms because my lazier self would prefer that I just stay in bed at let the warmth envelope me until I return to sleep.

But whatever the urgency was that nudged me out of bed, into the shower and then impelled me through the door of my house to my daily 7:30 AM meeting, I felt that if I missed today's assembly I would feel sorry and empty for the remainder of the day. 

However, my typical feelings of welcome came over me as I entered the hall where more than thirty five alcoholics had gathered to enjoy each other's company. There is something warming, welcoming and exciting in coming to a meeting each day to a space that Ray Oldenburg calls a great "Third Place" which he describes as "neutral ground [that] provides the place, and leveling sets the stage for the cardinal and sustaining activity of third places everywhere. That activity is conversation."   (p. 26, The Great Good place (Third Places) by Ray Oldenburg.)

Conversation is the main activity in the rooms of AA and they are often held in community places, in this case the "Servery" of our local Episcopal Church.

Today's reading spoke about the "reality of sobriety", a phrase that struck me as particularly germane to my feeling about today and apposite to the events that happened to some members over the past several days. For over the weekend one of our members took his own life.  He took a gun and just shot himself!

How does that happen? Especially when one of our other members said that a few days before the two of them were musing over the uses and misuses of split infinitives! How indeed?

More than twenty years sober and despite how well some members knew him, they just were not up to speed on his most dire despondencies, dejection and desolation. How could we have known or helped?

No one knew the answer because no one knew whether he was sober or just so depressed that just sobriety was not enough. Because we do know that staying sober, doing the program is sometimes insufficient for those of us suffering from deep and untreated depression.

The reality of sobriety is that we cannot take for granted our lives. They need nourishment from sources beyond the satisfaction of not taking a drink today. The reality of sobriety is that we must attend to all of the environmental impingement upon our psyches; when that lays unattended for too long, much of the detritus of our lives can return to strike us as we wallow in a sea of despair.

The reality of sobriety made some of us thankful to be able to come to a meeting like this and share our amazement and disbelief at such an irretrievable act. And to be grateful that we are able to apportion our sorrow among other like minded individuals.  We mourn together, and with men, this is often not something that we usually permit ourselves to do in such a public place.

Nevertheless, we have learned, through bitter experience, that not sharing these feelings can lead to no good end. Here was our venue today to partake in distributing our collective grief.

Upon hearing that phrase, "reality of experience," I thought about a meeting yesterday that I had with a physician who had asked me to work in his office. His curiosity about my situation, the sanctions upon my license and the concurrent requirement by the state Department of Health to continually check up on my sobriety by regular drug and alcohol testing, made him query me about what I had done to deserve such a fate.

When I told him that the deterioration of my family life led me to volunteer for help in the professional medical society's physician's health plan, he was stunned that I should "turn myself in" to a  sanctioning regulatory authority. "Why would you do that to yourself? Surely you did not drink on the job. That would not be right, that's what I would call a doctor who had a problem with alcohol".

All I could answer was that indeed I had "turned myself in" but for the purpose of finding help. And maybe I hadn't considered the severity of the sanctions that would be laid upon me and my ability to practice but I acknowledged that I knowingly flouted my alcoholism even though I was well aware of the restraints upon me (I referred to the weekly drug and alcohol testing). If I could not remain "sober" in the face of all of that, regardless of whether I drank on the job or not, how could my sobriety be counted upon at any particular time?

"I have given up my right to drink", I said, "and I proved that to myself time and time again. I know now that if I have one drink, all bets are off for me to stop just there. Most likely I would follow that by three or five more drinks. Then where is that sobriety?"

"I don't know that I could give up my nightly whiskey," he said. "But, I countered, you could stop at that one drink?" Which he readily admitted was the case. "I cannot", I reminded him. And with that some recognition of the depth of the problem became evident.

Somehow, the discussion of the "reality of sobriety" moved to the sometimes equally difficult problem of trying to not get addicted to medication that our physicians, chiefly psychiatrists, prescribe in order to treat co-morbid conditions of bipolar disease, anxiety and depression. Many of us have found ourselves addicted to the class of drugs called benzodiazepines. Those were drugs which we felt, (early in my medical career), to be non addicting when they originally came out and became popular to prescribe as an alternative to barbiturates.

Little did we realize how devastatingly addictive they were. And Joe was telling us how upon weeks of investigating places that might take him where he could safely go for detoxification, he realized that there were no institutions where his insurance would pay, that would be able to admit him. They just don't do this anymore on an inpatient basis. The only place willing to take him on as a patient was a rehab facility and that was not covered by his insurance and he could not afford the eight weeks and eighty thousand dollars that it would cost him.

Jack admitted that many years ago he also had the same prescribed addiction to benzodiazepines and the only reason he was able to get into that same rehab institution was that his grandfather had been its founder and that he himself was somewhat of a celebrity in that hospital.

And so the discussion jumped about from one topic to another finally lingering on the subject of tobacco dependence. With that my first sponsor admitted that he was really trying to get off of nicotine which he had been sucking up like candy for the past twenty years in one form or another. Most lately he was popping nicotine gum and sucking tablets.

The withdrawal has been brutal which is why he came to today's meeting in order to share the experience and to get support.  A number of the members joined in the discussion to add their experiences in how they stopped smoking or how they used the AA program to achieve this result. Some ventured that doing a 90 and 90 was the best thing to do.  Others suggested other methods but all agreed that the process was long and difficult and harder than stopping alcohol.

Pete recalled that his wife had been after him to stop smoking since their kids were first born about twenty years ago.  He recalls saying in his inimitable way, "I told my wife that I would do it if every time that I had an urge to smoke we would have sex. The next day I found a carton of cigarettes on the kitchen counter. With that kind of encouragement it took me twenty more years to finally stop smoking one day at a time."

It is refreshing to hear how others have tried to deal with these problems. Had I listened to my inner, lazy, irritable morning self, I would have missed this and all of the other stimulating conversation that I find in this, my daily, " great third place".

© res 2/26/2013