I’m grateful for quiet. I’m grateful for not always having to run away. I’m grateful for what’s in front of me. I’m grateful for what brought me here. I’m grateful for a pen and notebook reloading trip. I’m grateful to be sober today.
This is yet another of the approximately 239 installments that I like to call: “How it Works.” I will say this is not conference-approved nor peer-reviewed.1 It does reflect my own experience and what I’ve heard around town at meetings and such. I’m saying it this way so that you don’t get put off by the title and have it seem like this is a set of instructions.
I see this as more of an Acme-designed sobriety kit, but if you had put Wile E. Coyote, his regal self, in charge of product design. I know what you’re thinking, are we really doing this again?
Ummm, yes. We are. But here’s what I was about to say. This is an Acme Home Sobriety Kit designed by someone who put in a lot of time falling off cliffs and getting hit by falling boulders and being run over by trucks that he had painted on the sides of walls. You get the idea.
Today’s installment is “Self-Honesty.” That’s different than plain old honesty. The actual “How it Works” part of the Big Book says it about as plainly as possible in the very first paragraph:
Those who do not recover are people…who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.Big Book, p. 58.
I thought this was one of many preposterous concepts in the Big Book, this idea that my inability to stop drinking was a consequence of not being honest with myself. I scoffed at that because I knew what I was doing, I told myself. Maybe I lied to everyone else in my life about my drinking, especially the people who tried to help me. But, I said to myself, we know the truth about our drinking. Right? I mean I’m right there the whole time. I really thought the problem was will power—that I just didn’t want to get sober yet, things hadn’t gotten bad enough yet.
I’m going to digress here for a moment. I’m going to calculate what I think is my baseline amount of self-delusion. I have developed this idea that a stop at a certain favored coffee shop is “on the way” to the subway. When I set off for the subway, I often don’t even think about the fact that said coffee shop is actually very much not “on the way” to the subway. In fact, it’s several blocks out of the way. There is no universe where a stop on 84th street is on the way to the subway at 86th street from where I live on 87th street. Here’s a visual aid:
By this, I mean the amount of almost undetectable baseline delusion that is running in my head all of the time. This particular lie doesn’t seem at all like a lie. This is why, I believe, it is so hard to change behavior, any kind of behavior. You are constantly running upstream against that cognitive current. Ceaselessly beating upstream or something like that? Or at least I was.
That’s what I think happens at the “bottom.” I think it’s that moment when you realize just how far away you’ve drifted; that horrid realization making it impossible to continue the steady patter of self-lies. The lies like this is ok, this is what needs to happen, I can stop when I need to, etc. Here’s another illustrative story about my baseline level of delusion.
When things were getting pretty dark a few years ago, I decided to try the Sinclair Method. The idea here is that the obsession with drinking is driven, by well, thinking about drinking too much. So, the answer is to take a naltrexone, wait a bit, go and drink as much as you want, on the sole condition that you log the drinks honestly and accurately. The theory is that you will soon lose interest in drinking, the obsession with stopping turns out to be what continued to drive the drinking. No, it doesn’t make a ton of sense.
Here’s why: It presumes alcoholics will be honest about their drinking with themselves. That’s the thing. I was doing the Sinclair Method in secret because roughly everyone in my life knew what a problem this was and was trying to help me stop. I had a better idea: I would drink my way sober.
My favorite haunt was a favorite haunt because they served me a “glass-and-a-half” of Sauvignon Blanc at a time. A nice big pour and then a cute little carafe with a bit more on the side. What’s not to love? Guess how those drinks got recorded in my very honest Sinclair Method drinking log? Did they go down as 1.5 or 1? In a log that only I would ever see. That only I knew existed. That I could have deleted at any point. Was even the first entry on that log honest?
You know the answers to all of those questions. That pesky self-delusion.
Marty Mann’s fabulous “New Primer on Alcoholism” (1950) describes a set of symptoms to help diagnose alcoholics and distinguish them from “heavy drinkers.” Symptoms Number One and Two are “making excuses about drinking” and lying about drinking. She saw that alcoholics in the early stages had already developed the recognition that their drinking required concealment, especially from themselves.
Quite simply and naturally, as he comes to believe his little lies himself, he extends them to cover his growing “difference” from other drinkers.”
New Primer on Alcoholism, p. 21.
But here’s the real kicker:
What most people fail to understand is that his need is to conceal this difference from himself, far more than from other people.
Id.
I think that’s dead-on. The lies I told were primarily designed to conceal the extent and nature of my alcoholism from myself. Everyone else was kind of collateral damage as I blanketed that objective with cluster munitions of lies. What’s interesting is that this idea that my drinking was abnormal came to me pretty early and I saw that it was something shameful that needed to be concealed from everybody, most of all me.
It’s that infusion of shame that I think is interesting. When I was 18 and sitting in that vinyl booth, I didn’t think, I have a problem, I wonder where I can get help? I was already completely ashamed of where I was—how could I possibly ask for help? Maybe it was like the moment when Adam and Eve realized they didn’t have clothes. They told some pretty obvious lies, too.
The bigger mystery is what finally does cause the scales to fall from the eyes, for the self-delusion to end? I don’t know. Sadly, I think the weight of the delusion is what finally causes the collapse, it becomes impossible to sustain and everything comes crashing down. Counting the losses becomes impossible to avoid at that point and the lies are like vampires at dawn.
Like so much else, it’s about awareness and balance, not brute-force willpower. I like to convince myself of some pretty silly things. Many of them relate to candy and/or signs from the universe. The difference is, I recognize the baseline. When I go much further than two blocks to get somewhere that I say is on the way—well, that deserves a question or two. When I try to sell myself on some proposition a little too hard, well, that feels the same and gets the same treatment
That two block zone of delusion isn’t so bad. I usually have some pretty groovy music going and the folks at the coffee shop generally seem glad to see me.2 I know what I’m doing and riding with the reins a little loose feels right these days. The thing that’s missing is the shame—that’s how self-delusion stopped being self-destruction. It’s a little out of the way, but I’ll get there.
That almost has a freestyle-feel to it.
They have actually expressed concern about my sleeping habits.
Although you absolutely had me at 'pen and notebook reloading trip', the rest of this post was something I really appreciated reading. Thanks, TBD!