Alcoholism's Antidote: Self-Discovery Introduction

INTRODUCTION

SO YOU KNOW I KNOW

The ideas in this book are for those looking for alternatives to the support commonly offered to individuals who seek relief from their addictions. I went searching for answers in AA, and through the group counseling that the traffic court ordered me to attend. I’m happy for anyone who finds success through these channels, or any others for that matter. They just didn’t work for me.

It is my experience that a daily mantram of “I am an alcoholic, circumscribes a person’s potential for growth, and encourages his or her dependency on the organization supporting such repetition. Don’t you want to get through the rest of your life without having to think about alcohol every day? Don’t you want to leave it completely behind you? Why bring up, every day, that for a period of your life, you were physically and psychologically diseased by alcohol? We don’t keep bringing up other diseases we may have had in our past such as measles, chicken pox and whooping cough, or the broken arm or leg we suffered. Why should anyone refer to him- or herself as an alcoholic when they don’t drink anymore? I can’t think of even one good reason to, and I can think of several reasons not to, so when appropriate––i.e. for this book––I refer to myself as an alcoholism survivor; just as people who have lived through cancer attacking their bodies are said to be “cancer survivors.” Yet, I don’t cling to that either. Let’s drop the alcohol completely and keep moving forward.

Reasons not to refer to yourself as an alcoholic after you quit drinking include the two I mentioned above: restriction of your potential and dependency on others for your sobriety. Another reason to avoid labeling yourself alcoholic after leaving alcohol behind has to do with taking on the prejudices and preconceived notions––about who and what a drunk is––of every individual you happen to tell. Introduce yourself and represent yourself as who you are today. After you get to know someone, and after they get to know enough about who you really are to take it into perspective, then you can relate your victory over alcohol to them.

Remember you are not alone. Alcohol overwhelms people of all economic classes, all temperaments, all sizes, all religions, all political parties. There’s a joke I heard when I was in the wine industry that speaks to this. “What’s the difference between a wino and a connoisseur? Only the price of the bottle of wine.” What’s not a joke is that most people don’t shake alcohol for good. You are not most people, are you.

To leave our addiction behind for good we need to get to the reasons behind it. “I drink because I like the way it tastes,” just doesn’t cut it anymore. It wasn’t until I began to explore my own inner life (instead of blaming what was going on outside of me) that I ultimately discovered my own way out of the depths to which I had descended.

In these pages I gratefully share the methods I used. Apply whatever works for you to find your own way out. I have experienced success with everything I am recommending, though some ideas and exercises have helped me more than others. Different methods work better for different individuals, so explore the approaches suggested and use what works best for you to stop drinking for good and start living again. Or, maybe, start truly living for the first time.

This is an opportunity to discover just how really strong you are. Leaving alcohol behind may be the most profound accomplishment of your life to this point. It can be the first of even greater achievements in your future.

I stopped drinking, and my own suislide, on September 24, 1988 after well over a decade of inebriation, degradation and humiliation. I drank in the morning to get moving. I drank at my place of employment. I got drunker after work and stayed drunkest on my days off. I know very well how it feels to be dependent on alcohol. I know what it’s like to try and deny it, and what it is like to try to hide it from others.

We all have our little secrets, though they are not as safe as we might like to think, even if we try to keep them to ourselves; even if we try to keep them from ourselves. Your secrets will get out too––if they’re not already in the public domain without you knowing it––because the seed for its disclosure lies in the very heart of every secret. Something in its nature––an impulse to sing out loud and clear––makes a secret betray what it is trying to hide.

You don’t even have to share your secrets with anyone for them to become widely available. Your deepest, darkest secrets are intimately embodied in the way you live your life. Your actions, from your subtlest body language to your grossest addictive behavior and unbalanced conduct, broadcast elaborate signals that ultimately give your secrets away. I thought I was hiding my dependency. To my ultimate humiliation, and stomach-churning chagrin, it turned out that the extent of alcohol’s control over me had been invisible only to me.

Although the telling signs of our secrets are apparent enough to anyone paying attention to them, most people are so focused on trying to disguise their own indiscretions and perceived inadequacies, that few notice the less-than-outrageous displays of anyone else. So we “may fool all of the people some of the time.” However, they are not all fooled at the same time and inevitably our secret is recognized. Over time it becomes apparent to anyone looking.

I tried to keep secret––and even denied it when pressed––that I was married to Ethyl Alcohol (C2H5OH)––colorless, pungent, volatile, intoxicating––for thirteen years. From the spring of 1975 through the summer of 1988 the most important priority in my life was maintaining my relationship with Ethyl, a most demanding spouse. She summoned me first thing upon rising and her sustained supply was my last concern while slipping into a stupor; in between, she occupied my every moment. If I wasn’t picking her up at the liquor store, I was disguising my breath from having drawn her to my lips, or I was cursing her because I got so sick when she wasn’t there. I may have cheated on Ethyl and had affairs with women, even going so far as to marry a couple of them, but I couldn’t stay away.

I drank often. I drank deep. I drank consciously. I drank until I had no conscience. I drank to unconsciousness. When I awoke I drank in more, hoping to satisfy my insatiable craving, to fill the vast emptiness in my life. My drinking only made my hell-hole deeper, and my getting out of it less likely.

Things got even more miserable when I hit bottom and found myself slogging in the muck down there. It was as if all of the joy that I had ever experienced or witnessed was exposed as nothing but illusion and imagination. Any happiness that appeared in the world around me seemed forced and artificial. I continued to drink.

I know it’s extremely difficult not to remain in habit, addicted to the old ways of doing things, even though we’ve proven to ourselves over and over that the old ways don’t work. The truth is: you can leave your old patterns of thought and unhealthy patterns of behavior behind. I am living proof and so are legions of others.

During the years of my entanglement with Ethyl I was so ashamed of myself. Before I had reached the age of five my mother had extracted a promise from me that I wouldn’t grow up to become a drunk like my father. Except for weekend parties during my first couple years in college, I stayed away from alcohol until my mid-twenties, by then I could no longer contain what I didn’t even know I had in me: the pressure of my unreleased rage and emotional pain (don’t get nervous; that’s for a whole other book). I succumbed to the seductions of the bottle for reasons that I was totally unconscious of at the time. My willful nature dove right in, in spite of the promise I had made as a child.

I don’t know how many unsuccessful attempts I made to simply reduce my drinking. Finally, I realized that I had to quit completely, and not just dry out for a while, but forever.

How many times had I put off my recovery? How many times had I put off wrestling with my alcohol demon and facing the knowledge that what had looked like recreation at one time had become the biggest problem I had?

For years I said, “If only it wasn’t for the holidays. With Thanksgiving approaching and all of the Christmas parties coming, followed by the New Year’s Eve parties, how can I quit drinking now?” I had rationalizations for other times of the year too. “Nothing like a cold beer (or two or six) as a reward for getting the lawn mowed in the hot summer sun. Nothing cuts thirst like a cold one.”

My most serious excuse for not quitting, my most basic “logic” for continuing to drink, was that I needed some free time to be sick while detoxifying myself and I could never see any available space any time soon or later. I thought, “How can I keep my job if I’m going through the cravings, the sweating, the palpitations, the puking? God, I’m scared of getting the DTs. I’ll have to take time off. How will I explain that?”

I had myself convinced that it was just simpler and easier to keep drinking until my next vacation. Then, I promised myself, I would go off somewhere alone and face my addiction. That, of course, was before my vacation rolled around. By then I was telling myself, “Vacations come so rarely and fly by so quickly, I want and deserve a good time away from the pressures of my job. I can’t do that if I try to quit drinking now.”

I avoided the inevitable confrontation for years.

Finally though, I got fed up. As the saying goes, “I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It was that and more: sick and tired of ruining relationships, sick and tired of getting fired, sick and tired of having to find a new job, sick and tired of blacking out, sick and tired of driving drunk and getting caught driving drunk...

Your drinking may have led you to where you have no where else to turn, a point where you are desperate to know what your role in this world is and how you fit into the grand scheme of things. However, your obsessive drinking and consequent alcohol-induced actions have created a momentum pulling you away from the answers to those questions, the answers that will lead to your understanding. Without a substantial opposite reaction on your part, there is nothing to stop you from sinking more deeply into darkness.

Who or what can you call upon to help you create a momentum toward your recovery? You may have more options than you first think. I believe that you have lived before, and that one of the missions of your current lifetime is to work through your addiction, so that you can attend to your higher purposes this turn around the wheel of life. This is huge! After innumerable lifetimes, you may have reached the point where you can make more of a conscious connection––than you ever thought possible––to That which created you.

When I first quit drinking I didn’t think I would ever admit to something that brought me so much embarrassment, shame and self-loathing. I most certainly didn’t expect to write a book about it. It was years after quitting before I could talk openly about having been addicted to alcohol. Who wants to be labeled a “drunk”? Ultimately, I got to the point where I could respond to a host offering me a drink by saying, “Thanks, I’ve already had my share. Let’s save some for the others.”

Over the years friends and relatives of mine––some of whom thought I would never recover my physical and mental health and other’s who were curious because of their concerns about their own drinking––have asked me, “How did you quit?” After one particularly plaintive appeal, I decided to write this book and share the most helpful physical, psychological and spiritual remedies I used to quit drinking alcohol. I have also included some ideas that I have incorporated into my life since my recovery that have helped me advance my personal journey of self-discovery.

The simple ideas in this little book’s few pages have led me up the path to freedom from alcohol and have kept me divorced from Ethyl for the last twenty-four years. They have helped me recognize more of who I really am and what I am here to do. May they do the same for you.

September 24, 2012

Rockaway Beach, Oregon

Twenty-four Years Alcohol Free