The Sober Truth (15 page)

All of the accounts that follow were either e-mailed or recorded from a telephone interview (each is marked accordingly). The participants gave their permission to use all or any part of their accounts in this book. Their stories have been edited for clarity; some portions were shortened, and material that was deemed repetitive or irrelevant was omitted. Where a person left off a part of his or her views about a topic, then returned to them later, the portions have generally been combined. Except for some minor grammatical fixes, words added for ease of reading have been placed in brackets.

I grew up in an alcoholic family. My parents were both pretty affluent and successful, but had their own problems. And of course they used alcohol, I think, to suppress themselves. I grew up in a pretty repressed—emotionally repressed—household. . . .

I ended up becoming a single parent by the time I was about twenty-three. By the time my son was about seven, I hadn’t been drinking, actually, for a number of years, trying to be a good parent. But I was smoking pot. And, you know, I smoked enough pot, and certainly all my friends were very heavy into drugs, alcohol, hard drugs, soft drugs, everything. So they thought even I was a bit of a lightweight.

But when my son was about seven, I started going to NA, just to try and explore my own drug use, to make sure I wasn’t being bad. I certainly wanted to be a good parent to my son, and didn’t want to be a bad daddy, doing drugs in front of him. About my first or second NA meeting—which is apparently, I guess, the rule—this guy recruited me to go to rehab—or solicited me. I went to this place in Toronto . . . that wanted to send me to a rehab. . . . They showed me all these lovely pictures of the cottages on the Pacific, so I said, “Sure, I’ll sign up for that,” because the Ontario health insurance program would pay for it. It was quite expensive, as I recall. Maybe like $30,000 for a twenty-eight-day stay. . . .

I felt entrapped when I got there, because the first thing they do is grab your wallet and say, “You’re not getting this back until after twenty-eight days.” And they very much threatened me, saying, “If you don’t complete the program, you can walk home, because we won’t give you a plane ticket back home.” I felt kind of coerced, absolutely. . . . But I thought, “It’s fine. It’s a crash course in psychology, and it’ll teach me something, whether it’s applicable to me or not” . . . because up to that point, I was four years without a drink.

But when I was there, they constantly hammered me with “You’re an alcoholic.” And I’m like, “Well, I haven’t had a drink in four years. I don’t even want a drink. I don’t know how you people think I’m an alky.” . . . They said it didn’t matter. Anybody who has any drug addiction is automatically also an alcoholic. . . . Insofar as I said my parents were alcoholics, they [the counselors] said, “Well, you’re automatically alcoholic then, too.” That was the extent of their advice. As soon as I said that I didn’t agree, they said, “Nope, the argument is this, and until you accept that fact, we have nothing else to talk about.” They weren’t willing to talk about anything else. . . .

Treatment there was mostly group. I complained long and loud that I wasn’t getting any individual therapy and I wanted to talk to someone. So they sent out a psychologist. I spoke to him about three times. He did some sort of a psychological profile on me, and then I had to speak to the psychiatrist who was resident in the facility. She looked at the report, and then—in a rather disgusted way—said to me, “You are anti-authoritarian and antisocial.” I thought, wow, that’s a hell of a judgment to throw at me. She seemed quite angry about it, and it was very confrontational. I was, like, I don’t think this is really helping anything. It may be partially true, but I’m here to work on that stuff, not to get beaten up about it.

Anyway, I did the twenty-eight days . . . and I really enjoyed meeting the people there. Even the nurses’ aides were awesome guys to talk to. So that was good. . . . But I could never really hook into the NA and AA philosophy. It seemed forced to me. Oh, and I’ll tell you the other thing. I mean, the doctors were always hammering us with a moral side to drug addiction. They seemed really obsessed with religion.

[When] I went back home, I laid off for a while. I didn’t smoke for at least thirty days, or sixty days, afterwards. [But] everybody I would meet and befriend in an NA meeting, or even in the odd AA meeting—turned out to be pretty hypocritical. That was kind of hard to take, because they talk a good talk, but they don’t walk it. I was grateful for the new friendships, but . . . I haven’t been able to retain any friendships in the long term out of any of those experiences, unfortunately. I mean, I wished it was otherwise.

I tried to look at the Twelve Steps and follow what they call a program, but even within the program, people have conflicting opinions. And submitting to a Higher Power seemed kind of illogical to me. It seemed like they were trying to force beliefs on me that I wasn’t willing or ready to accept—and kind of contrary to myself. I could see maybe . . . step 4, self-examination, is a good thing, but it seems so religious and dogmatic that it just wasn’t effective for me. I couldn’t see why they were trying to force beliefs on me that just seemed contrary to common sense, or my experience.

I stopped going to NA [and] AA. I just continued to read on my own about drug addiction and alcoholism, and tried to continue to want to learn from other sources what they were saying, because I really had to dismiss the 12-step dogma. I just couldn’t run with it.

I just wanted to be a good father. I wanted to be healthy. I thought, maybe I have to quit smoking in order to be a better person. [But] I was able to accept moderation.

Over the last couple of years I allowed myself to be a moderate drinker, a moderate smoker, without feeling any guilt or compunction about it. I’m a nail-biter. And I realized, every time I’m putting my nails in my mouth it’s an emotional reaction. It’s not a physical thing. I’m, like, “Your nails are in your face because you feel stressed.” I thought, “What’s bugging you?” And pretty soon I stopped chewing my nails, and then I stopped wanting to drink, and then the last thing—I guess, in the end—is the marijuana smoking. And I’m, like, “If every time you’re putting a drug to your face, you have to stuff your emotions, then why don’t you just deal with your emotions and not have to keep stuffing pot in your face?”

I’ll have to learn to deal with myself without anything to support me emotionally. . . . I’ve heard casually from a few psychologists, I guess, but as soon as I hear them espousing 12-step philosophy to me, I’m like, “That’s not going to work for me.” So I don’t even bother.

In my personal experience, I was put off immediately by self-demeaning statements that people in AA almost worshipped, statements such as “keep it simple, stupid.” Also the vague conflicted religious insinuations.

I was coming out of a difficult relationship, and because he joined AA, I did too. I just wanted to still fit into his life.

My first experience with AA was about ten years ago. A close friend of mine at the time asked me to go to a meeting with her shortly after her mother’s death. I went with her. The group consisted mostly of men in their sixties, I think, all of them very disheveled and lost. I don’t know if she went back to that particular meeting but she continued with her AA “training.”

Another woman I met later, when I was attending meetings myself, has been in the program for twenty-eight years now, I gave her her twenty-five-year chip. Toward the end of my presence in AA, she was feeling unworthy because she could not get out of bed for three weeks and did not attend meetings. The answer that everyone gave her at the meeting, including her sponsor, was that she did not do enough commitments. Commitments in AA mean showing up early and making a pot of coffee or something similar to that. I told her that she [needed] to see a psychiatrist, and she did.

I visited her about two months ago, and she was very different from the severely clinically depressed woman I knew before. She had clinical depression and was guilt-tripped by AA that she was not participating enough. For twenty-five years.

I was a homeless addict and drunk for many years, and I got off the streets to go to a community college. I tried AA for five years, and I feel it did more harm than good. AA convinced me that I couldn’t drink one drink, and that if I did, that my alcoholic disease would take control of me so that I couldn’t stop drinking and that I would die that way. I was scared into staying with AA for a long time. I eventually sought my own answers by majoring in psychology as an undergrad. I came to the conclusion that AA was doing more harm to me, so I left AA and I became ten times more fulfilled than I ever felt in AA. I gained longer sober time, and I eventually came to oppose the disease theory and AA in my life. I am now a very satisfied participant in moderate drinking.

I knew next to nothing when I began attending AA. After attending AA for over a year, I began to believe many of the things that were stated repeatedly at meetings. I came to believe that I had no willpower over a powerful disease and that the only thing that could save me was lifelong AA attendance along with extreme commitment and service to the AA program. At this point, I felt trapped by a cult that held a mysterious solution to alcohol addiction. I believed what AA told me and that was that I would die from alcoholism without AA or that I would be a bitter miserable dry drunk the rest of my life. I believed the idea, pushed by AA and the powers that be that push AA, that even one drink meant that I was not recovered or in a relapse. In retrospect, I realize that these beliefs pushed by AA were harmful to me because it caused me to seriously believe I had no willpower to stop drinking, which led to numerous drinking binges that lasted up to five days at a time every couple of weeks or so. The fear of harming others during a binge and terrible legal and financial consequences related to drinking were other factors that kept me fearful and dependent on the AA program.

After sixteen months of not being in AA, I now believe I have the internal locus of control to moderate my drinking. Since leaving AA, I have found numerous websites and stories of the things I felt [were] wrong in AA but that I had no words for at the time. . . . I continue to find people sympathetic to alternatives to the traditional 12-step disease model fixated on abstinence.

Going to AA for five years was not all for nothing . . . because those actions (cleaning up before and after meetings, making coffee, etc.) were my personal actions showing my personal commitment, energy, and discipline to living a healthier life. [But] AA socialization also prevented me from growing as much as I should have otherwise. Everything I did revolved around AA principles, so many important issues had been neglected and not discussed in my life during those five years.

While in AA, there was only room for complete bias in favor of AA. In fact, I had hoped that confessing about how great AA was and about how AA saved me would somehow help “the miracle” happen and that I was “faking it till I made it”—which are AA slogans. Well, the miracle never happened in AA, and I no longer depend on whatever mystery people claim exists in AA. I felt AA was veiled by mystery, which also kept me going for five years. The closest person to me, my mother, said that I have improved tremendously since leaving AA. My mother said that while in AA I seemed to be in a severe state of agitation. She says that now I am much more the person she has always known from even before I ever used drugs or alcohol. I even feel that I am more
me
rather than an alcoholic so and so from AA.