I’m grateful for keeping going. I’m grateful for a quiet morning. I’m grateful for a trip to see my parents. I’m grateful for chances to make things right. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Yesterday, I was talking about the importance of changing the narrative of my life. I’m not sure what this says about me, but one of the great realizations I’ve had is how very differently people view the same exact things. I’m struck in work settings at how often people are actually angrily agreeing, not seeing the double negative is the same as the positive. Not to sound superior, that’s how I was, and for a long time.
When I was drinking, and considering my lily-pad progression from barstool to barstool, I could pretty easily trace how I ended up here. How this thing had pushed me onto this lily pad and from there, this person tricked me onto this lily pad, and then this terrible thing happened to put me on this other lily pad. The story of my drinking, mostly as told by me in those days, was that it was a pretty understandable, and very regrettable consequence of all of the stuff I had been put through.
And look, some of that is true, there is an undeniable connection between trauma and addiction, and one thing that’s easy to forget is the bar for being traumatized is much lower when you’re eight or nine. It’s easy to make the mistake of looking back on those events with only adult eyes. Those events may seem trivial now, they weren’t then. But here’s the problem with this line of rumination:
It’s based on determining fault.
It’s no one’s fault that I’m an alcoholic. I’ve got some genetic pre-dispositions (high tolerance to alcohol, superfast metabolism, faulty dopamine receptors, over-developed Limbic system, etc), I’ve got an emotional framework transmitted by family and developed over time in response to a semi-random series of events. I was and am deeply insecure, and ashamed of those feelings. I always saw myself as apart from the rest of the pack, not able to understand the things that everyone else seemed to get naturally. I felt awkward and unsure and was very afraid a lot of the time.
The other two magic ingredients? I am capable of tremendous self-dishonesty, and worse, I’m tremendously persuasive. And last, alcohol worked for me. When I was younger, I tried lots of different things that altered my mood, but none of them accomplished for me what alcohol did. Also, to me, alcohol was a more sustainable addiction. There is a fascinating bit of functionality in the way addictions develop, they are not simply uncontrolled frolics, they serve a purpose. In a very maladjusted, dysfunctional way to be sure, but they start out serving a purpose.
I write often about how I view my life as an equation sometimes, or a big tower of Jenga blocks, both to make the point that simply trying to pull a very central element of life out of the middle just doesn’t work out very often. At the Anyone Anywhere meeting last night, one of the stories from the back of the book that we read was “Twice Gifted.” If you want to understand the completely bewildering centrality of alcohol to the alcoholic, consider this passage. To set the stage, the alcoholic has been diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis and is forced to confront the spectre of not drinking owing to the fact that she is literally dying of liver failure:
With that realization came fear and so many questions. How will I live? What will I do with my life?
Big Book, p. 472
An alcoholic confronting death by alcohol wonders how they can possibly live without alcohol.
That is madness. That is the insanity referred to so pithily in the Second Step. Civilians are bewildered by this kind of thinking and I think it underscores the extreme difficulty involved in simply excising alcohol from one’s life. For me it was impossible. What needed to happen was that I had to move upstream, change the way I thought about myself and the world, revise the narrative that drove the resentments that drove the drinking, and wait for the results to propagate downstream.
I’ve come to understand my world and my personal history in a very different way. I spent years and years in therapy carefully detailing how the events of my life somehow dictated the spot I presently occupied, which was a chair set so that I couldn’t make eye contact with the therapist. What came out of me in those days was simply page after page of the story I was writing everyday in my head. That’s why I find ChatGPT so fascinating and compelling—it shows the power of changing the prompts, the questions we ask ourselves, the way we interrogate ourselves. The way changing the questions unleashes incredibly creative and unexpected answers.
The genius of the Steps is on display as one begins to see how they work together to allow the alcoholic to create a new narrative for their lives, to see things in a way that does not lead to a desire to drink. There is an acknowledgement that things aren’t right, that the current system is failing, there is a stock-taking, where am I right now exercise. There is a “what do I want to change, what can I really change” component. Once changes are underway, we honestly consider who we hurt, what we did wrong and we do what we can to make amends—often just acknowledging the damage we did is enough. And then it’s on to the new life.
There was nothing culty about the process. The questions I was asking might have been suggestions from other alcoholics, but the answers were mine and the life they have led me to develop is also mine. That is the point, after all, recovering the life I was meant to lead, the life I lost sight of a long time ago.
Something important I realized: This is not a process of blame assessment or guilt allocation. This is about understanding why, honestly appraising what happened and then what happened after that. That helped me see the whole story I had built, the life I had built, was a castle in the sand. I think someone said once
The wise man builds his house upon the rocks.
So you dig down to the bedrock, re-lay the foundation and then you are building something that will last. That’s an exciting and terrifying process, but even at its scariest, what this life no longer produces? A desire to drink. Maybe if you catch this early enough, you can erase the alcohol part in the already-written pages and you have enough room to change the story and live differently. For me, it was all ingrained enough that I really had to start the story over from page one. Of course, I’m not writing on a clean slate, there is 60 years of life that’s already happened, but the story I’m telling is drastically different.
That’s why, for me, writing my story in the style of Bill W’s was such a critical exercise. It’s what helped me see my story more accurately, and more importantly, to see that my story was very similar to someone else’s, because that’s how you begin to see there might be a path out of the darkness. And there is. I think every day is an exercise in writing a new chapter in my life and every day, that story illuminates a little bit more of that path in front of me.
I’m currently re-writing my story (in the style of Bill W) and will be sharing that soon. The very talented
and will be sharing theirs, and that leaves you. You don’t have to share it here (although we would love that), but I really think it’s an exercise everyone should try—that’s how strongly I feel about it.Sobriety has been about recognizing the flaws in my old narrative and then having the opportunity to re-write it. This time, I’m writing a story about peace and contentment, purpose and joy, love and understanding and what I’m finding out is that if those are the words coming out of my mouth (actually keyboard), then I’m kind of stuck with a life of peace, contentment, purpose, joy, love and understanding.
Oh wait, that’s not actually a bad thing, is it?
Great stuff as always...😎
So much to learn and to love here. Thank you for another great post, TBD!