The Sober Truth (18 page)

Honestly, I think [the faith part of AA] could be done without. I don’t think it belongs there. It should be a support, and the support-group setting where anyone who has an addiction problem should feel free to come without feeling harassed about their religion. You know, I don’t think it’s very important. . . . I mean, I would have prayed regardless if I was in AA or not. And people who have that inclination are going to practice their religion or spirituality, anyway. People who don’t buy into that, or don’t believe in God, or are atheists, or whatever, I don’t think should be subjected to this as part of their treatment. They [atheists] do have a separate meeting, and I’m sure it works well for a lot of them. But God is in the Twelve Steps, or at least a Higher Power, so I don’t think you’ll ever really get away from that.

After twenty-five years of abstinence from alcohol, I returned drinking five years ago when I retired. The reasons are many and varied. I have never bought into the “disease model.” To me, the disease model is a lot of smoke and mirrors. I was abused by my mother and sexually molested by a high school “guidance” counselor. Did these incidents cause me to develop a disease?

I got drunk the first time I ever had my first drink when I was eighteen. This continued for twelve years. I finally quit in 1979 and did not touch liquor or drugs for twenty-five years. People who work in the field of addictions maintain that my addiction was caused by some malfunctioning gene or some other idiotic conundrum, or that I was predisposed to the disease of addiction. Really? How was it that I was able to quit for twenty-five years? Can a cancer patient quit having cancer? Can a diabetic suddenly decide not to be a diabetic any longer? My addiction was a direct result of severe emotional trauma, and my substance abuse was a reaction to blot out my serious mental torment.

During my drinking and drugging days, I had many experiences in “treatment” centers, private counselors and a host of other charlatans all claiming that I had a disease. Treatment centers are, by their very nature, heavily disposed to this convoluted thinking . . . [that] to maintain any type of stability I must get involved in a 12-step program, and it begins even while one is in the hospital.

To further elaborate on my hospital experiences, one instance stands out in particular. In this group, each person is given a large sheet of poster board and then is asked to cut out things from a stack of magazines and paste them on the board while soft relaxing music is playing in the background. At this point, I expected to find myself embroiled in Tinkertoy or Lincoln Log therapy. Then there were the usual group sessions. Each person had a sheet which was to be filled out and shared with the group. As a bit of an aside, the pencils were made of pliable plastic just in case someone in the group went berserk. The counselor would then ask: “How are we feeling today?” “Angry?” “Depressed?” “Happy?” “Sad?” etc. This would be followed by the usual rant session.

Hospitalizations are a total waste of time, and most of the people I spoke with in treatment held the same views. Most people went there to get “dried out” as I did, play the game, get out, and go back to doing what one was doing previously, i.e., drinking or drugging. I cannot imagine the therapists were so oblivious to all this that they really believed that all this nonsense was useful as a part of one’s “recovery.”

Speaking of recovery, the 12-steppers are always “in recovery”; even if the person has been off the stuff for years, they are still considered to be in recovery. No one ever recovers. Ultimately this leads to dependency on the group rather than on a healthy self-reliance. If I were to state that I used to have an addiction to alcohol, I would be met with hoots of derision from 12-steppers, since total recovery is impossible. Is it any wonder why there is such a lack of success in the treatment industry? One is essentially set up to fail. If one is never to recover, why bother? I believe that there is a method to this madness. It keeps the revolving door constantly revolving and the money keeps rolling in.

Most of the meetings I attended ranged from the mundane to the laughable, since I would often see several of these people walk into a bar immediately after attending a meeting. Some members who usually attended meetings and were suddenly absent were described as being “out there”—meaning, of course, that they went back to drinking or drugging. The comment was often made that his or her disease “got ’em.” The “old-timers”—those with the most abstinence, or who claimed to have the most—were treated with subservience boarding on awe. These people generally ran the meetings. They would often give shopworn speeches about the old days and how they beat demon rum with the help of their “Higher Power.” As I was to learn, a higher power could be anything. People said, “Well, it can be anything; you can make a doorknob your Higher Power if you wish as long as you stay clean and sober.” A doorknob? This is utter insanity.

After a few years of this nonsense I finally quit drinking because I came to understand the damage I was doing not only to myself but the emotional trauma to my wife, who never knew what she would find when she came home. She knew that I drove drunk and feared that I would either kill myself or some other poor unfortunate who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The really sad part of all the “treatment” business is that it is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Treatment centers are a scam. Individual treatment centers take in hundreds of thousands of dollars annually with little to show for their effort, since many who leave the centers often return to their addictions. But, they are always welcomed back no matter how often. There is one stipulation: one must have insurance or the available resources to pay out of pocket.

To detail my 12-step experience in proper context it is necessary for me to go back to before I ever began drinking alcohol. I am forty-eight years old and grew up in [a small town]. I remember suffering from anxiety problems at a very young age. My mother had me on some kind of tranquilizer the pediatrician prescribed when I was eleven because I would have emotional meltdowns. I recall my first very bad depression, which coincided with the onset of . . . OCD at age twelve (though it would be decades before I would have a name for these intrusive, horrific thoughts). I tried to just make it through these episodes throughout my adolescence. The severity of the obsessional thoughts and accompanying depression would ebb and flow. When the thinking would start, I would lose interest in everything I enjoyed and would reach a point of feeling nothing at all save misery. I made it through these periods and kept good grades and was a well-behaved girl to all who knew me.

My breaking point came at eighteen, when I had an episode so bad that I literally couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t stand the sunlight and had to force myself to eat. I asked my parents for psychiatric help and tried to describe my problems. They were ashamed and upset but got me an appointment with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist I saw didn’t seem to understand all my symptoms and gave me a tricyclic antidepressant and told me I shouldn’t feel this way, since I had a college scholarship waiting on me. The medication did very little to help me and I got no insight as to what the obsessional thoughts were and how to stop them. I found a way to make the thoughts stop for a short period of time on my own later that summer when I drank most of a fifth of vodka my Dad had bought months ago to mix some drinks for some occasion. Alcohol seemed like my answer. I proceeded to drink the bottle and take every pill I could find in the house, I just wanted as much relief from thinking as I could get. I was sent to the hospital with an overdose. I was sent on to college that fall.

My relationship with my parents became very bad because of my drinking. By the end of my senior year in college, I sought out a psychiatrist again after a breakup with a boyfriend. I entered graduate school in order to prolong my schooling, now I [realize] because I knew in my heart once I entered my chosen profession of teaching, my anxiety levels would skyrocket out of control.

My teaching career was a very short plummet into hell. My anxiety levels were insane, my depression was taking me down, and I was without contact with my previous doctor. I drank heavily to try to manage my out-of-control emotions, and it only took about a year and a half until I was out of a job and drinking hopelessly. I went in and out of psychiatric units for a year and was put on progressively more intense medications . . . though the doctors I saw knew I was drinking. It was a godsend when I finally fell into the hands of two social workers who sent me to detox and then got me an indigent bed in a twenty-one-day treatment center. My parents were through with me; I had nothing and no one.

I experienced AA for the first time in that treatment center. They would take us to meetings. I had never smoked but I wanted to fit into this group of people so badly I began buying cigarettes. My counselor at the treatment center was a very kind man who was a recovering alcoholic also. It was recommended that I go on to [a rehab] for long-term treatment of about a year. I was happy to do this, since I had nothing and people in the treatment and AA world were treating me humanely.

[At the rehab] there seemed to me to be a very hard push to get people to see sexual abuse in their backgrounds. At the time it seemed that the assumption was that a woman had to have been sexually abused to be an alcoholic. I always felt like they thought I was lying when I told them I was not.

When I left [there] after a year I was going to very many meetings per week. I had a job by then at a factory and all I did was work and go to AA meetings. In fact, I basically did that for years. I didn’t know what to do with myself for a very long time if I had spare time and wasn’t at a meeting; I felt very guilty because people said if you slacked off meetings you would get drunk.

It was about this time that I heard old-timers talk about people not really being sober if they were on psychiatric medications. I had been on Tegretol and Elavil at the [rehab], but had asked the psychiatrist . . . there if I could stop taking these. I didn’t want to feel like my sobriety could be called into question by anyone, and I also mistrusted psychiatric medication at this point and believed my only problem ever was that I had been an alcoholic (pre-alcoholic before I drank). The psychiatrist said that was fine. I only ever saw this lady [the psychiatrist] once when I entered the [rehab] and again just before I left. No one seemed to consider ongoing problems like depression, anxiety, or anything else unless these crept up in some way that disturbed the calm of the [rehab], then that person would go to a psych hospital for a week and get meds, or a change in meds.

I really worried quite a bit about someone questioning my [sober] “time.” I used to worry that a particular local AA matriarch would want me to say I had a year less “time” if she knew I had been on medication when I was in long-term treatment. I obsessed on this. She used to refer to women who were on antidepressants as “Prozac babies” and said that they couldn’t feel enough pain to work the steps properly on medication. I also was terribly afraid of being yelled at in a meeting. I didn’t like to share in meetings because I had seen old-timers yell at people and I had seen people use non-AA phrasing and be shot down and humiliated. One time, when I was a couple of years sober, I was at a meeting and a group of people from a local treatment center were brought to the meeting. One woman introduced herself as an “addict,” and all kinds of rage broke loose from the old-timers at the meeting. The person who brought the group left the meeting and the rest of the meeting was spent with people talking about how that was the only way to handle it. Those incidents were frightening. I lived in fear of being humiliated and getting drunk over it.

Looking back, I was rather lucky in one way when I got sober. I was overweight from the mix of meds I had been given over time and I was working a minimum-wage job. This did not make me attractive to men in the AA meetings I was attending. There were some women I lived with at the [rehab] who were very attractive though, and they were basically harassed by men as if they were merchandise to be obtained. They would get so many phone calls that they would stop coming to the phone. It was disgusting. [The rehab] did not like for any of us to date during our first year, but these ladies were chased by men. I had never seen grown men behave the way they did in AA.