An Allergy and An Obsession

"We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the actions of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy, that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker.  These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all, and once having formed the habit found they cannot break it, once having lost their self confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up  on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve."  Big Book - The Doctor's Opinion

There were two great Greek Tragedies in my life before I got sober - one educational and one professional.  I had achieved a lot in what the world values as achievements in a short time and in both cases totally lost all of it because of my drinking and drug use.  I'm not sure which is more confounding: that I did it twice before I was 28 years old or I did it once, suffering the shame and guilt and pain and humiliation the behavior caused, and then I did it again.  I had this sense that I was slowly leaning over the edge of a high cliff, safe as long as I didn't lean over any further, then leaning a little bit more, pondering the fact that it was getting more dangerous but relieved that I hadn't yet fallen, then leaning just a little further, etc. etc. etc. until I fell off the cliff.  It's like the information the brain sends out on the rare occasions when you take a spill - "Uh oh . . . I'm going down.  I can't stop this.  I can't make my body respond in a way that is going to stop this fall."

An allergy is the condition where a person's immune system reacts in a damaging and dangerous way to a substance in the environment that is harmless to most people.  An obsession broadly defined is an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something.  Doesn't this sound like you?  I take in alcohol and my body reacts in an unusual way, an abnormal way, and not only does this not convince me not to take in that substance any more I become obsessed with taking more of it in.

I get the shivers just thinking back on this part of my life.  My mother used to ask me: "Are you still going to those meetings?"  Yeah, ma, still going to those meetings.