Who Would Not Ordinarily Mix

There's a guy I know who has been sober forever and is adamant about calling himself "recovered."  I ponder this a lot.  I respect this guy, generally, and understand his reliance on the passage in the introduction from The Big Book that talks about there being one hundred or so people who have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. In fact, the word "recovered"occurs far more often in the literature than you'd think - certainly more often than "recovering." But I also get very wary when someone takes a passage out of a book and blows it into an impossibly large cornerstone.  To me it's a useless matter of semantics - recover, recovering, recovered, whatever.  He thinks that it's a terrible message to send to a new person to say "I'm an alcoholic."  I think it's a dicey message to send to a new person to imply that I'm recovered and will never drink again.  I do believe, if I keep doing what I'm doing, that I'll never have to pick up a drink again (Dr. Bob's words, not mine) but I've seen way too many people cock-sure about their recovery relapse and never get sober. Personally, I believe that I'm still an alcoholic but that I'm no longer a drunk.

So . . . am I assured of never drinking again or is it a possibility?  Mental masturbation.  I fully expect to die sober but there are a lot of people who thought the same thing and ended up expiring in a shower of alcohol.

I do agree with his premise that alcoholism isn't an illness that can be cured by simply removing alcohol from the subject.  If that were true then treatment centers would be turning out winners by the millions.  "Alcohol is but a symptom."  If we don't get down to the root causes and conditions then our recovery is tenuous.  I think it's important to state unequivocally that if we don't figure out why we drink then just not drinking is going to be painful and ultimately unsatisfying.  Most of us have lived through the occasional dry drunk.  My record of drug/alcohol abstinence before I found Alcoholics Anonymous was eight days and a more miserable eight days I cannot imagine.

One of the facets of this guy that bugs me is that he's so cocksure about his opinion.  I try never to state anything as an A.A. fact.  I try to tell people what worked for me and then let them find their own path.  That being said I do believe that there is an important place in A.A. for these incredibly strong-willed, confident people.  Some of us are recalcitrant children who need to be told what to do.  I talked to a dude the other day who asked a hard ass to be his sponsor only to be told: "I come to a seven A.M. meeting every day.  If you can't commit to doing that, too, then you need to find someone else."  Jesus, there is absolutely no one in the world that I'd want to see every day.  But maybe this new guy is just fucking around with his recovery and needs some firm direction.

We are people who would not ordinarily mix.