I’m grateful it’s Friday morning. I’m grateful for taking steps. I’m grateful for people who get me. I’m grateful for encouragement. I’m grateful for needing help. I’m grateful for being able to see why some things were. I’m grateful for discovery. I’m grateful to be sober today.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
―Sun Tzu,The Art of War
I think the reason my own great civil war went on so long is that I didn’t understand who I was fighting. For a long, long time, I was engaged in pretty brutal, house-to-house combat with drinking. The front line for most of this battle was 14 Street, N.W., just north and west of Logan Circle.1 My dug-out was at 13th and R Street. The area east of 14th Street was sort of “sober-controlled.” West of 14th Street was where all of the fortified positions of my enemy were—-The Logan Tavern, Red Light, The Commissary, Stoney’s were their codenames.
I struggled mightily against the near-constant desire to go and conduct reconnaissance missions. I mustered resources and conducted pretty significant offensive operations when I could. Like Robert E. Lee, I mounted an invasion against drinking in 2016, that ended in defeat in Pennsylvania. In retrospect, the results weren’t surprising. I was using tools and weapons that were designed based on flawed presumptions and mis-employed to fight the wrong enemy. The enemy wasn’t drinking. The enemy was my ego, my self-centeredness.
The reason the Big Book and Alcoholics Anonymous are such effective treatments for alcoholism is they address the correct enemy: the self-centered world view of alcoholics. We didn’t go out and acquire this trait, we didn’t decide one day that life would just be more interesting as a selfish alcoholic. But getting rid of that trait is the very, very difficult chore at the center of recovery; it is the battle that has to be fought, has to be won. Bill W., super smart guy that he was, saw this pretty quickly:
Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant destruction of self-centeredness.
Big Book, p. 14
My own alcoholic worldview, the equation I constructed to represent my life, had good and bad in it. But it had me at the center, busy directing things, manipulating people, getting outcomes that I wanted in service of no great cause or principle. Fighting battles that no one understood and that never brought the end of the war any closer. I think one of the reasons that alcoholism is such an intractable battle is that we alcoholics are pretty stubborn, inventive and fierce in the defense of the old world order. Even when Bill was pinned down to the mattress in the basement of his Brooklyn home, he still mustered enough resistance to keep a bottle in the toilet tank.
Seriously, some of the greatest military strategists in history were alcoholics. Winston Churchill, Ulysses Grant, even Alexander the Great! But as long as we are attacking the wrong enemy with the wrong weapons in service of the wrong objectives, victory seems unlikely. I think people coming in to the Program are often refugees from battles lost because they didn’t know the enemy and didn’t yet know themselves. After some treatment, some time spent trying to understand oneself and the disease of alcoholism, that important self-knowledge helps start winning some battles, but they are not enough to prevail in the war.
The enemy isn’t really ourselves, it is our misplaced belief that we can bend the Universe to our will. That a whole bunch of conquering will fill that hole we’ve felt in the middle for a long, long time. That we can actually control things and events and outcomes and other people. Trust me, I fought a long and pretty bloody rearguard action in defense of those beliefs. We hold on to that conviction, often until it’s pried out our cold hands. No one talks about this really, but it’s a real war and people really die. 100,000 of us die every year. That’s like four battles at Antietam Creek every year.
I think the problem is that in early sobriety, people are often issued only one weapon: Self-Knowledge. They are mustered out of the training centers, with a list of potential resistance contacts in your hometown (alumni) and some gathering places (AA Meetings). Adding two phone calls a week to help keep that stiff upper lip, keep us fighting on the beaches and in the streets, doesn’t actually move the needle very much. The newly mobilized get returned to the old battlefields to fight a fight they’ve already lost a number of times. People scratch their heads and wonder why the casualty figures are monstrous, exceeding 50%!
Damn relapsing alcoholics. Poor unfortunates.
Ulysses Grant thrashed the supposedly brilliant Robert E. Lee, got Lincoln re-elected in 1864 and saved this glorious republic—all while being a huge alcoholic! He knew the real enemy, understood the real objectives that needed to be taken and knew the price that would have to be paid. Until I re-calibrated my strategy, my understanding of the war I was fighting, I was doomed to keep sending everything I could muster against my own Cold Harbor, a place where no victory was possible, but the cost of fighting was immense and horrifying.
No, God didn’t win this war either. The flaw in this metaphor is that we can achieve anything by fighting. We all know the right answer, it’s just kind of hard to stomach and very, very, very hard to do. You have to stack the arms up outside the courthouse. You have to surrender. But before hostilities cease, you do need to make sure there is one very important casualty: My self-centered ego needed to make the ultimate sacrifice before we could sign the peace treaty.
I loved the movie “Patton” when I was a kid. I loved that opening monologue where George C. Scott says “No one ever won a war by dying for their country. You win a war by making the other poor, dumb bastard, die for his.” The thing that had to die to secure my freedom was not some “poor, dumb, bastard” version of me. It was a me I cherished and loved. A me that actually accomplished a lot of good things. But it was a “me” that wasn’t sustainable, a “me” that inflicted a lot of collateral damage and the fight to preserve that “me” was just a long, wasteful, costly conflict that would result in victory for exactly no one.2
Maybe it’s kind of ironic that Bill W’s last relapse, his last charge into battle under the proud alcoholic flag, was on Armistice Day. Maybe when Bill took that fateful first drink again, the one he had no defense against, there was that “fuck it” thought that we alcoholics love so much. Maybe Bill thought he was Pickett or Custer or one of the 300 Spartans—roaring into a courageous, glorious, immortal sacrifice in defense of the thing he thought he loved most. He probably didn’t imagine the campaign would actually end with four warm beers on the way to sign the instruments of surrender at Towns Hospital.
Here’s the real truth about war: There is no victory until the fighting ends. I was fighting a syllogistic war that could logically never be won by anyone. I look back and wish the war didn’t have to happen, there were some pretty ghastly losses, but those sacrifices are the things that helped me get sober and the remembrance of those losses, of the horrible, un-winnable nature of that war, helps keep me sober.
It wasn’t peace through victory, it was peace through surrender.
Formerly known as “Iowa Circle,” but renamed in honor of one of Ulysses Grant’s favorite generals. Grant built a gorgeous house for his son that still stands on the Circle.
Yes, this is kind of how I see the Sixth and Seventh Steps.
Victory in this war is not possible.
At first there are major battles everyday. But if you keep training and resupplying by going to AA, following and tweaking your program, there will be a downward trend in the intensity of the battles, until they become skirmishes. eventually there will be an armistice with the Reptilian and Mammalian brain systems staring malevolently at each other across no man's land.
ĎIn my case I had several intense battles suddenly erupt for no discernible reason, but I won those battles in a few hours and the Armistice resumed. No man's land includes not only the old playgrounds, play things and Playmates, but also all the behaviors, thoughts, feelings and attitudes that enabled and defended the rebellious reptile brain as it attempted to usurp control over the mammalian and executive functions of this incredibly complex and interconnected brain that ultimately determines who we are as a person.
Father Martin said
" you say you keep getting in the ring with the heavyweight champ and he keeps knocking you out? The solution is simple: don't get in the ring!"
I have been dictating this in Google Keep notes. I need to move to an actual keyboard and Merlin's newsletter to address some of the many thoughts that are fighting for my attention.
I have been following you for about a year and am noticing that your format and writing have both evolved. I am grateful for the work you do to support others and I know that doing so is supporting your own battle against this disease that has ruined so many lives.
By the way, I see that our nemesis has a book whose title starts out with "the unbroken brain:. " another example of her skill at twisting the narrative. I never took " the hijacked brain" to imply that our brains are "broken." They have merely been diverted from their primary task of ensuring our physical survival and sent down a road that first leads away from the survival of our hopes and dreams and eventually to our Graves. Perhaps after a eulogy that include sentiments like " he was a good man and a bad boy" and other indications of potential squandered.
Also--I grew up saying uff da, too