“Have you ever had the compulsion to drink alcohol? The answer was ‘absolutely not’. One more way I’m not like those people in AA. I never had a compulsion to drink. I’m like two or three years sober and somebody in a meeting says, in order to have a compulsion to drink alcohol, you have to not drink it. He continued to explain that phrase, cos I’m like, I get the question-mark face. ‘What does he mean by that? This rings a bell.’ If every time you think, ‘Gee, I’d like a drink’, you take one ... or two, you will never experience a compulsion to drink. Long before you have a compulsion, it just sounds like a helluva good idea. Oh, we’re gonna mow the lawn, let’s have a couple of beers. OK!” (Grady O’H)
“I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk. Suddenly the thought crossed my mind that if I were to put an ounce of whiskey in my milk it couldn’t hurt me on a full stomach. I ordered a whiskey and poured it into the milk.” (Jim, reported in Chapter 3, Big Book)
“They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks—drinks which they see others taking with impunity.” (The Doctor’s Opinion, Big Book)
When I wanted a drink, I had one. Sure, I was unhappy. But when I was happy, I drank, too, and, when I was happy, I overshot, too. So happy, unhappy: not why I had the first drink; not why I had the subsequent ones; not why I overshot and got into trouble. Restless, irritable, discontent: then drank. Drinking followed this state, but this state did not cause the drinking. If B follows A, A does not necessarily cause B.
On a few occasions, I was prevented from having the first drink or prevented from continuing. You wanna talk restless, irritable, discontent? There could not be a better description of the condition of someone who is under the cosh of the mental obsession or the physical craving but is being prevented from yielding to these imperious urges. Dr Silkworth in the Doctor’s Opinion, who is, by virtue of his position, necessarily treating people who so badly want to stop drinking that they are paying the doctor eyewatering amounts of money to bring this about, sees precisely (and only) this category: the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment of the person who is resisting their desire for a drink.
Sometimes when A and B occur, they have a common cause.
The impulse to have the first drink, an impulse that, in alcoholic, cocks a snook at baleful experience and defies reason, will lead to a drink and, if resisted, will generate the discomfort of restlessness, irritability, and discontentment. The emotion does not give rise to the impulse to drink: it is the other way round.
This is why, when I was drinking, I arranged my life in such a way that I would never run out, in order specifically not to become restless, irritable, and discontent. Stop? HAHAHAHA. Never.