One Mans One Step Program 

But I do believe that alcoholics who are managing to be sober, healthy, well-adjusted people can learn from each other when they share their philosophies, their “programs,” and their insights. For that reason, I’ve agreed to write this Web page for Norm to use on the SOS Canada site.

I’ve just recently had the experience of being told by my “addiction counselor” – a physician (that’s an M.D., not a psychologist or social worker) who specializes in the treatment of alcohol and drug dependencies – that he thinks I’m the healthiest alcoholic who ever walked through his office door (I had walked through it voluntarily), and that I should probably not continue “wasting [my] time” going to see him regularly. He recommended a schedule of half-an-hour once every three to six months, and I agreed to check in on the six-month schedule.

I fully intend to see him for that half-hour twice a year just to tell him that there is nothing to tell him: no slips, no temptation, no protracted withdrawal symptoms, no obsession, no compulsion, no urges. No issues. Miss drinking? Never. Do I miss having another heart attack, another ulcer, another DUI arrest, another grand mal seizure? Do I miss the uncontrollable morning shakes and the deep, dry heaves? Never. Once more for the West Coast audience: NEVER.

He: So, can you imagine a situation in which you would be tempted to drink? Suppose you found out that you had an acute, terminal disease, and that your drinking wouldn’t make any real difference?

Me: You think that if I found out I had an acute, terminal disease, I’d go out and have some arsenic for lunch? Why? What’s suddenly okay about killing yourself just because you’re dying? I don’t see myself responding to disaster by suddenly deciding to regard known poison as okay. Bad things happen. Are they reasons to drink? I don’t think so. Not when you’re an alcoholic, and alcohol is as poisonous to your body and mind as arsenic ever could be.

Drink because it’ll help me cope? Ha! Drinking makes it impossible to cope. Drink to dull the pain? Drinking makes ME a dull pain. Drink to steady my nerves? Drinking destroys my nervous system – slowly, surely, inevitably. Drink to calm the tremors? Well, now, that’s a really great one: using the poison as an antidote.

Ah, but suppose I were in Scotland, and went on the distillery tour. The aroma, the taste, the warm, lovely sensation of well-aged straight malt scotch going down my gullet: I remember it perfectly, and it was divine! One of the finest accomplishments in all of distilling history is straight malt scotch, and I adore it. So, if I were in Scotland, and I went on the distillery tour, I’d be tempted, wonderfully and terribly, to enjoy samples of that amazing liquid.

And before I knew it, there’d be a bottle of it under my arm, and before long, the bottle would be empty. And the next morning, I’d feel like hell warmed over.

Answer? Simple. When in Scotland, don’t go on the distillery tour. Big deal. I made a bigger sacrifice this morning when I didn’t have a third mug of coffee.

I am an alcoholic. That’s a pretty specific thing to me. I’m not a “heavy drinker.” I was an alcoholic even when I was still a light, occasional drinker, and even if I could ever once manage again to take a single drink and stop (and I never *will* be able to count on my ability to do that), I’d still be an alcoholic. I’ve never “abused” alcohol. Alcohol abuses ME, every time I drink. It makes me stupid, irresponsible, and sick. I don’t need lots of it to become that way. A few drinks will do the trick.

It wasn’t always that way. For years, I could drink everyone else in the room under the table, and still show no evidence of intoxication. Friends stood in awe of my capacity.

But then one day, that elevated tolerance disappeared. And then I became just as susceptible as everyone else to gross intoxication. Yeah, gross. A few drinks, and whammo! Hey, look, he’s drunk again. When will the guy learn that he can’t handle the stuff?

Right. My body (and that includes my brain) can’t handle the stuff at all, and that physical fact – that disease – is a reality I acknowledge (it’s part of me), accept (it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I certainly don’t waste time *resenting* it or wishing I didn’t have it), and respect (it’s got more power than I’ll ever have if I let it loose, so the trick is to deny it its freedom: isolate it, restrict it, and *survive* it). The joy of it all is that once I had learned to acknowledge, accept, and respect it, I could pretty much forget about it. It’s just not a big thing anymore. My abstinence is essential for the simple but sufficient reason that I am physically incapable of processing alcohol in a normal way.

“Drink responsibly” say the liquor-industry ads. Well, let me tell you: there’s nothing irresponsible about my swilling it down once I get started. It’s completely out of my control. The disease takes over, and I have no choice anymore. How can I be responsible for something over which I have no control whatsoever?

The things I’ve done when I was drunk! I even remember a few of them. Embarrassed? You bet! But guilty? Nope. Feeling shame about who and what I am? Nope. Those things were not me, and have nothing to do with me. Those things were the actions of alcohol in my system. I didn’t do it. Alcohol did it. Once I started (Ohhhh, YES: THAT was my fault! I could have refused to let the evil, powerful genie out of the bottle!), I had no control over any of it anymore. My drinking-alcoholic behavior was completely foreign to ME: it was behavior produced and governed by a poisoned brain.

I have no “glaring personality defects” or “serious character flaws” that led me to choose to drink excessively. I drank for the same reasons everyone else drinks for: pleasure, comfort, friendship, fun, ... the whole bag. But once I drank, my similarity to “everyone else” ended: I’m one of the ten (or so) percent who can’t deal with tetrahydroisoquinolines (sorry!). The “excessively” part is inevitable, and the excessive drinking produces the awful personality and the terrible character and the life problems, not the other way around.

I don’t have a problem. I DO NOT have a PROBLEM. Problems have solutions. Problems have cures. Problems can be dealt with, and they cease to be problems.

I have a physical disease. I’m an alcoholic person, not a bad person. I have an enzyme deficiency, not a moral deficiency. I suffer from defects of brain chemistry, not defects of character. No amount of psychoanalysis or counseling is going to turn me into a non-alcoholic, because the disease isn’t in my psychology, my mind, my behavior, my psycho-social adjustment to life or stress or what-have-you. It’s in my liver and my metabolism. I can’t handle alcohol the way ninety percent of the population of the planet can, and I have paid a terrible price for that inability.

When I’m not drinking, I still have the disease. It’s PRIMARY (which means that it’s not a symptom of another disorder or set of disorders: the other disorders, when I have them, are symptoms of my alcoholism), it’s CHRONIC (which means that it lasts and lasts and lasts), it’s GENETIC (there are alcoholic branches of the old family tree, but I never actually saw any of them falling-down drunk, and none of them had any *behavioral* effect on my life), it’s PROGRESSIVE (I’m not so sure about this one, but that physician I mentioned says it gets worse over time even when you’re not drinking at all; what I’m sure about is that it gets worse over time when you ARE drinking, and that’s what counts), and it’s FATAL (boy, have I ever gotten close to enjoying the full benefit of the stuff in the morgue) if it’s not acknowledged, accepted, and respected. I can’t “cure” it. I can’t even “recover” from it. But I CAN contain it, isolate it (that’s Jim Christopher’s “separate issue” thing, in case you don’t recognize it), and survive it. And all I have to do is follow my one-step “program”: don’t drink.

I’m not sure I have much to share in the way of “success stories,” but I do believe in the value of my three-step philosophy and my one-step program. The philosophy: I acknowledge my alcoholism, I accept my alcoholism, and I respect my alcoholism. The one step? I can’t handle alcohol in anything like a normal way, and never will be able to, so I don’t drink. It’s a matter of life and death. Drink, die. Want to live, and not just live, but LIVE, ENJOY, LOVE LIFE? Don’t drink.

Life has been good to me, by and large. Oh sure, some awful, terrible, ghastly things have happened to me, and I’ve been through some pretty dreadful times, but the bottom line is that I’m glad I came to this party, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Ah, but alcohol has been bad to me. Very, very, very bad. It has come within a whisker of costing me the whole shooting match, and not once, but several times. And when I’ve lucked out and gotten past the crisis (all but the last of those several times) each time, I’ve denied and rationalized and projected and self-deceived and gone back to drinking.

Holy mackerel! I’ve moved away from there now, and I’m never moving back there again. I’ve had it. Is there such a thing as “enough to drink”? Yep. I’ve had it. I just don’t want any more.

I love the POWER of sobriety! I don’t need to drink, I don’t want to drink, and I don’t drink. I have all of the power I need to NOT drink, ever again, after decades of hard-drinking, active alcoholism. But if I drink, I instantly, magically, horribly LOSE THE POWER. It isn’t hard to NOT drink. The problem isn’t not drinking. The problem is stopping drinking when you’ve started drinking.

But don’t you MISS it? I mean really, REALLY MISS IT? Nah. I don’t miss drinking prune juice, either, and I gave that up long before I gave up alcohol. Prune juice gives me diarrhea. I don’t care if I never see another glass of prune juice again. Alcohol gives me hangovers, seizures, blackouts, tremors, and a criminal record. Alcohol gives me really bad liver damage and really bad brain damage, and I’ve seen my blood work results when I’ve been on the bottle hard for a few months, and my blood says this one, clear, unambiguous thing: “Hey, YOU’RE ALMOST DEAD. Keep it up and you’ll get there soon.” Miss it? Nah.

I never once in living memory set out to get drunk. “Hey, let’s party until we can’t even talk anymore!” That’s Abuse. Done habitually, that’s Heavy Drinking. Not for me, boy. But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it ten thousand times: “I will NOT get drunk. I will NEVER get drunk again. I HATE being drunk. Drunk is somewhere I never, ever want to be again as long as I live.” But then I promptly got drunk again. Why? Because I started drinking. Not because I “had a drink.” The experience was never a *single*, a one-of-them-will-do-me-fine thing. It wasn’t something I did, but something I *started*. And it continued and continued and continued. And there was only one place for it to end. If you’re reading this, you’ve been there, and you know where that is.

Some people think it’s circular to say “I would never, ever drive drunk ... unless I’ve been drinking.” It’s not. I am a responsible, sane, reasonable individual when I’m sober, but put a drink in my stomach (and my liver and my brain) and what you get is none of those any more. I stop being ME. What you get is the alcohol, the whole alcohol, and nothing but the alcohol.

Most days – most weeks, even – I don’t even think about either alcohol or my alcoholism. I don’t work at maintaining a separate issue: alcoholism and alcoholic thoughts are NON-issues to me. I have too much living to do still, and too short a time left to do it in, to waste precious time wringing my hands (or my mind) over alcohol and my inability to use it normally.

I’m a happily sober alcoholic. I have a very supportive spouse, family, and friends. I have no bouts of depression, no anxiety – chronic or otherwise – no sleep disturbances (like a rock, complete with loud snoring!), no trouble concentrating, no “fog,” no loneliness, no social problems, no financial problems (well, actually, the lottery would be nice ...), no feelings of anger or resentment, no insecurity, and no fear about the future except the fear that I might, just possibly, one day get stupid enough to start drinking again, so I’m going to do everything in my power (that’s MY power, not any “higher” power!) to avoid being stupid. I’m optimistic, within realistic bounds, and I’m determined to SURVIVE this disease.

You can’t get out of this life alive, but, by George, when I go, I’m going sober!

Alex W.