Hitting Bottom . . . Or not

This morning I was presented with another opportunity to "be of service" while simultaneously staring "what might have been" square in the face.  The mother of the woman who nearly died of an alcoholic seizure was at the meeting, the woman who tearfully confessed to me a few days ago that she had finally "hit rock bottom" and then promptly disappeared from my meeting room.  Out of kindness to her I refrained from saying that for many people rock bottom is six feet under so pardom me if I withhold judgment for a while.  Eh, maybe I should have said it?  Who knows.  Tough love V an expression of kindness usually means a light touch with me.  I leave the  straightforward honesty to men and women better suited temperamentally to deliver it.

Mom asked me to walk with her to the daughter's apartment to say hello.  I was hesitant, not entirely sure if the daughter wanted company - actually completely certain that she didn't want any company -  but decided to go to support the mother.  The scene was not entirely unfamiliar: studio apartment, bed unmade, TV tuned to reruns of The Carol Burnett Show from like 1896, pajamas the attire du jour, and a cup of instant ramen noodles on the breakfast menu.  The young woman rarely raised her eyes above parallel.  The mother . . .  well .  . . mothering away in a fairly heavy-handed manner, very loving but trying mightily to steer her daughter into treatmen ideally but onto a healthier path at a minimum.  I didn't add much to the encounter.  To me the woman was, on this particular day, not worth my effort.  I was glad I could say hello and tell her I loved her but she clearly had no interest in any solution-based stuff.  She didn't appear to be drunk but she might have been on something and she was so, so deep into self-pity and immature defiance that any hopeful message was beyond her ability to absorb.  All I could tell mom on the walk back to her car was that it's really, really hard to get sober if you really, really want to get sober.  If you don't want to work at it then it's going to be nigh impossible.

In this case it's a lot easier for me - 36 years in and not a relation - to take this cold-sounding approach.  I'm happy to help in any way I can but I'm not going to pound my head on a rock talking to someone who isn't listening.  

This is another case that has given me a good shaking up.  It's like finding a badly injured bunny by the side of the road and watching it suffer.

Step One

Step One: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable."

Guys, it says our lives had become unmanageable - not our wives.

The first time I drank alcohol was one Miller High Life in those clear bottles where the golden amber fluid glowed with a heavenly light.  It didn't make me feel good - it made me feel normal.  The reaction was so much more than a sense of ease and relaxation - the clouds parted, a beam of sunshine hit me and me only, and the angels sang.  I was afraid and anxious and then I was not.  I knew I had found The Answer.  When I tell this story to an alcoholic I get a knowing nod.   When I tell it to a non-alcoholic (I learned long ago not to do this) they back away as if I was Dracula.

The first time I got drunk was at a party where I spent an hour or two lying in the dark on a cement basement floor.  It was not an uncomfortable experience.  I didn't feel embarrassed or have the need to do something else.  I was drunk and lying on a cool, cool cement floor.  It made sense to me.  It seemed like a reasonable thing to do.  I had alcohol in my system so I was pretty comfortable doing what I was doing.

"Alcohol: the solution to and the cause of all of my problems."  Homer J. Simpson

The unmanageable life was quite clear quite quickly but as long as I could numb myself with alcohol I was sure I was just about to solve everything.  I didn't have the sense that things were spinning totally out of control in a way that I couldn't eventually fix.  I was driving too fast on black ice while laboring under the illusion that if I just tapped the brakes and steered into the spin I wouldn't go off that thousand foot cliff.  "Tomorrow!" I'd shout.  "Tomorrow is the day when I get my shit together!"

Man, I didn't even know where my shit was anymore.

Think! Think! Think!

There are times when it pays to take a second look - to really pay attention to those things that cross our paths.  We may have already missed a wonderful experience by hasty judgment.  When quick judgments are made from a limited point of view, the good qualities of anything are hidden.  The gifts that we receive from our Higher Power are useless if we are dull of spirit and incapacitated by our own smart minds.  In our "expert" attitudes, we sometimes allow the very things that would make us peaceful and happy pass us by without lifting a hand.

"I'm a guy who is prone to anxiety."  Sincity John-John

I'm too smart for my own good.

I'm not as smart as I think I am.

My own best thinking brought me to the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, a thoroughly broken man-child.

Nobody is too dumb to recover but there are plenty of people who are too smart - or who think they are.

Think, Think, Think!

"How are things going for you, Seaweed?  What do you have going for you?  Kids and a happy spouse?  A big house and plenty of money in the bank and two cars in the garage?  No legal woes?  Excellent, vibrant health?  A thriving career that brings in lots of cash and the respect of all of your  coworkers and supervisors?  No?  A big whiff?  Maybe you're not a high bottom drunk."  An obnoxious as shit sponsor in Chicago.

I thought because I wasn't homeless or in prison that I was a high-bottom drunk.  Sigh.  Callow youth!

Five Suckers Tomorrow

I enjoy reading articles by psychologist types who devise all these clever puzzles that help reveal how tricky our own minds can be all on their own.  My attempts at meditation show me just how rambunctious my brain is, how unwilling to cede any control whatsoever.  I was listening to a podcast by a prominent researcher who was studying hidden biases in our thinking and how innate they can be.  He spoke with a number of children under the age of ten about nothing in particular before asking them this: I'll give you one sucker now or five suckers tomorrow.  Most of the kids went for immediate gratification even though the future reward was going to be larger.  Gimme gimme gimme.

We tell new people that if they don't drink and try haltingly to practice spiritual principles they'll end up in a place where the world makes sense, where fear and anxiety aren't driving their every thought, where they will love and be loved . . . or they can say - fuck it - and drink to make the uncomfortable feelings go away immediately.  How often we take the quick fix, eschewing the long-term solution.  Over and over for most of us.

Here's the Cherokee wisdom: "Our choices have brought us to this place, right here, today.  Other people affected us to some degree, but never so much as what we choose to do and how we choose to react.  The hardest part is to stop thinking dilemma and start thinking solutions.  There is no room in problem solving for self-pity, not even revenge.  Past events may have been wrong, but now we have to see it as change, not always our doing, but we have to handle it anyway."

Quit whining, in other words.  Stop drinking.  You're drinking all by yourself and no one is making you do it.

And now the Buddhists: "Meditators are generally found to be pretty jovial people.  They possess a real sense of humor.  They can laugh at their own human failures.  They can chuckle at personal disasters."

How many of us are drawn to Alcoholics Anonymous by the laughter and good-will that we find in church basements?  How many church basements have I sat in!  Church basements are not fancy places.

Reminders

"There is stuff inside us.  Some of it information that we neither remember nor even know we have recorded.  Like old files, it needs to be cleaned out.  But how can we clean out what we don't know we have?  By self-monitoring, by plumbing the depths in writing, drawing out our own thoughts."

"Restlessness is often a cover-up for some deeper experience taking place in the unconscious.  Rather than confronting some unpleasant thought we experience, we try to bury it so we won't have to deal with the issue.  The result is that sense of unease which we call agitation or restlessness.  There is nothing you can put your finger on.  But you don't feel at ease.  You can't relax.  When this uncomfortable state arises, just observe it.  Don't let it rule you.  Don't jump up and run off.  And don't struggle with it and try to make it go away."

As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous I believe wholeheartedly that I've been involved in the greatest social experiment of the 20th Century.  I believe that - despite all of its flaws and shortcomings - that A.A. has helped more people recover from substance abuse than anything else that has been tried.  But to ensure that I don't drift into a smug, arrogant satisfaction I keep reading and studying philosophical and religious thought and I often see that A.A. is simply a re-packaging of theories and practices that have been around for a long time.  One of the above quotes comes from Native American heritage and the other from a far Eastern Buddhist tradition.  Can you tell which is which?  See the common threads with our Steps?  Restlessness, irritation, and discontentedness can't be dealt with by wishing it away or using alcohol to blunt its effects.  We have to sit with it, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us feel.  No more running away.  And how about the reminder we need to constantly self-examine and that writing is one of the most effective channels to this freedom?  Something happens, I dunno what, when I write.  Stuff comes up and comes out, stuff I wasn't able to hork up consciously.  I can't tell you how many times I'll sit down to write with nothing specific in mind only to find my pen way off in the weeds, hashing out something I was repressing or forgetting.

Old ideas.   Old, old ideas are the best ideas.  There's a reason they've survived for centuries.

Fear Based Animals

A guy in the meeting today calls himself a "fear-based animal."  I like that phrase.  He also talks about the efficacy of alcohol to a fear-based alcoholic.  Man, that shit worked like a charm for the longest time . . . until it didn't.  But it took off that edge of fear so that I could feel relaxed.  I couldn't understand how to do that all on my own.  I had no spiritual solution and I had no community of like-minded folks and I had nothing but the most superficial concept of alcoholism.  I was doomed to failure.

The wonderful phrase a "gift of desperation" was mentioned.  What a searing turn of a phrase.  At our lowest, at our most helpless stage, we were given a gift.  We were so desperate to stop and get off the hellish merry-go-round, spinning faster and faster, that we were blessed with desperation.  As I say so often: there are no good things and there are no bad things - there are just things.  We gotta go through what we gotta go through and usually it's the nastiest pain that is our greatest salvation.

I'm constantly amazed that I can talk to people whose lives are completely out of control as they maintain that things aren't unmanageable.  Your first shot was in the rough!  You put your second shot in the sand trap!  You whiffed twice and then lined four golf balls into the lake!!!  Quit being so cheerful!  This is what it's like for most of us.  This total oblivian, willful oblivian, to the destruction  we're causing.  We're vaguely aware, deep down inside, that the whole train is off the tracks but we can't or we won't do anything about it.

Cherokee Shaman

From my Cherokee shaman: "We cannot take for granted that any other human can have accurate perception and spell things out for us.  The miracles are not all in other heads, other hands, other methods.  There must be a burst of inner fire that sparks a miracle, that opens a door to a greater life, a greater calm."

I like this thinking.  Probably because it aligns so closely to my thinking.  There's a certain amount of truth to the idea that we all need to get off our asses and quit complaining about everything that isn't going the way we want it to go.  After all: It's not them - it's you.  Whatever you did yesterday is probably what you're going to do today so it's going to take effort, it's going to take work, if you want to change things.  It's all up to you.  I'm appreciative for the help and advice I've gotten in The Fellowship but ultimately it comes down to me doing the work.

Then there's this: "Be strong, be of good courage - so much that we worry about will never happen.  Put things in order, change what needs to be changed, but begin at once to count the blessings that must be told again so we will not forget."

I recall the years where I made a Worry List.  Every time I felt anxiety I would write down the feeling that I was feeling and then try to decide whether the fear came from my inaction on something that needed my attention or whether I had taken all the appropriate action and just needed to wait for events to unfold.  At the end of each year I would review this list and each year I would be astounded and disgusted to rediscover that almost nothing I worried about ever came true and the things that did come true were almost always outside of my sphere of influence - they were going to happen despite my best efforts to stop them.

I also mention my daily Gratitude List where I go over and over and over all of my blessings, really trying to pay attention to the words I'm saying.  I'm blessed.  And I'm not a naturally grateful guy.  I see the possible problems and focus in on them, like the trouble-shooting technical guy that I am.  I'm survived and thrived by being wary of what could go wrong.  A good survival strategy but not always conducive to peace of mind.