Willing

A sober friend said recently that he tried to quit drinking for years, but if he was being honest, he wasn't trying that hard. This struck me as significant.

A lot of us tried for years, or are still trying, and think we were/are trying hard. Were we? Are we? It sure feels like it when you're struggling to stay sober and keep backsliding and drinking.

Another friend, who has been struggling to quit for years, and is still struggling, told me that a woman at AA told her she didn't really want to be sober or she would be. At the time, that comment struck me as incredibly, horribly, unforgivably mean. I still think it's mean. But underneath the meanness, something significant lurks.

A few people in my online group recently have commented with impressive honesty about how they are not really sure they want to stop drinking. I've been thinking about that for the past few days, and my friend's comment about in truth not trying all that hard made all the thoughts come together.

Between the time I first had the thought "I drink too much" and the time I quit for good, I didn't really want to stop. What I wanted was to be a social drinker. I wanted to be able to moderate. I wanted to be able to go out and have drinks with everyone else and feel like an ordinary person and not someone who had this label. I wanted to come home after a hard days work and pour a glass of wine or three and numb my feelings. I wanted to run a hot bath and soak in it while drinking a glass of wine and chilling out. I did not want to go to 12 step meetings and be preached at. I did not want to drink club soda when everyone else was drinking wine and either make up some bullshit excuse about why I wasn't or tell people I had a problem. I did not want to be The Other.

I wanted to stop having hangovers and making an ass of myself, but I did not want to stop drinking. I wanted – and this is one of the three things that Buddhists say cause pain – things to be other than as they were. I wanted to be the kind of person who had two glasses of wine and no consequences. I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to be that person again.

At some point, something shifted. I turned a corner. I wanted the madness to end more than I wanted to be able to have a long hot soak in the bath with a ginormous glass of Pinot in my hand.

Wanting to do the work of recovery came later. And it was only after I did the work, and received the gift of having done it, that I started really wanting to be sober instead of wanting to be able to drink moderately.

So no. At the beginning. I didn't really want stop drinking. I was angry that I had to stop drinking. Resentful that I didn't get to drink anymore. It was doing the work of recovery that allowed me to transcend that resentment, to be grateful for sobriety and recovery.

At some point, I stopped fighting against the resentment that I couldn't be a moderate drinker. At some point I became willing to try something new and see what happened.

Became willing. That's Step 2. Almost everyone here has done Step 1, admitting that their lives have become unmanageable. But Step 2? That's a hard one. Becoming WILLING to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

For me, that power wasn't God. I've had issues with the higher power thing. For me, that power was the program itself. I saw my father and all these other people living happy, fulfilling lives in sobriety after following the program, and I became willing to try and see if it would work for me, too.

That was the key for me. Not willpower, but willingness.

The Dysfunctional Debate Team in My Head

That's what a fellow denizen of an online sobriety group called that exhausting, maddening mental dialogue that goes something like this:

I think I drink too much.
But you don't get falling down drunk and end up in bed with strange men.
Yeah, but I don't stop at one glass when I say I'm going to.
Yeah, but you don't drink the whole bottle.  Not every time, anyway.
Often enough.
But sometimes you just have two and it's cool.
But sometimes not.
Alcoholics can NEVER stop at two. They drink till they pass out or run out.
Aren't there gradations of alcoholic?
You're not that bad. Really.
Really?
Really. You're a gainfully employed professional who gets to work on time, with make-up on, gets the kids to school on time, pays her bills and her taxes on time.
Maybe I'm what they call a "high functioning" alcoholic?
But you don't always finish the bottle.  Alcoholics always finish the bottle.
But I'm tired of thinking about whether to finish the bottle...

And on and on it goes.  There are some in that online group who never take the first drink without finishing every drop of alcohol within reach. There are others like me who had a "high bottom" and stopped because they found trying to moderate too exhausting, and worried about the problem getting worse.

Allie writes of this on her blog, And Everything Afterwards, which I just discovered, happily. She quotes an email she sent to a friend nine years ago:

And when there’s wine in the fridge I have a glass or two of an evening just generally…
And sometimes it’s not a glass or two. It’s the best part of a bottle. Every now and then, it’s a bottle….I have a problem, don’t I?...[but] I’m functional. I don’t miss work, I don’t damage relationships, I don’t spend money I don’t have, I don’t do any of the things that scream ‘alcoholic’.

That was me, all right. I can relate to so much of what she writes, like this piece on AA, about how people make these dire predictions about how no one can get and stay sober on their own. I am also with her on this one, about the one day at a time vs never drinking thing: I want to make the decision once, never to drink again, rather than every day. But, as she writes, maybe that is because it isn't hard for me to get through each day without drinking. Most days I don't think about it, except when I'm reading sobriety stuff, which only makes me grateful not to be drinking. Fancy restaurants and Fridays right after work are the only times I think a little wistfully about having a drink, but it's not a big struggle not to.

Mrs D has written often, as here, about being resolved never ever to drink again.  In addition to the "one day at a time" rule, she hits another AA hot button in this post: surrender. She writes:

I choose sober over drunk.
 I choose it. I do. Me. This is my life and if I choose not to touch alcohol ever again then I won't touch alcohol ever again. I have no-one to fear but myself. I don't fear myself. I trust myself.
 Call this determination. Call it grim reality. Call it sad and boring, call it brave and amazing. Call it what you like. I don't mind. I'll just be over here staying sober for the rest of the days of my life.

Throughout her blog, she emphasizes her determination, her resolve, her choice not to drink. She, like Allie and me, was a high functioning alcoholic with a "high bottom" who stopped herself before things got really scary. AA says alcoholics can only get sober by admitting their powerlessness and surrendering, and devotees of AA call people who try to "white knuckle" it to sobriety "dry drunks".

There is something to this. I think if you "white knuckle" it, force yourself to keep away from alcohol by sheer willpower without doing any of the serious emotional work that AA promotes, then you probably will exhaust your willpower or, if you stay sober, you'll stay miserable as well.  But I think it's possible to do the emotional work outside the context of AA. Blogging is how Mrs D (and presumably Allie, whose blog I am just beginning to explore) did it.

I am not opposed to AA. I go to AA meetings when I can, but a busy schedule makes this irregular. I don't have a sponsor (which horrifies people at meetings when they find out) and have not systematically worked the steps, in part because I'm having so much trouble with the early ones. But more about that in a future post.

For now, I will just say a heartfelt thank you to Allie for her blog, and head back there to explore a bit more.