“We now see that when we began to drink deliberately, instead of casually, there was little serious or effective thought during the period of premeditation of what the terrific consequences might be.” (Page 37, Big Book)
I heard someone who was giving a Big Book workshop say, “I drank because I liked the effect.” They were echoing the line in the Big Book, “Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one.”
Now, one effect of alcohol was euphoria. I liked that. What were the other effects? Darkness—didn’t like that. Incapacitation—didn’t like that. Violence—didn’t like that. Destruction of all things worthwhile in life—didn’t like that. Depression—didn’t like that. Anxiety—didn’t like that.
The effect is not individual—rather, there are numerous effects. One I liked. The rest I detested. The one that I liked was fleeting and brought about only by the first couple of drinks. The rest neither brought about the effect I liked nor perpetuated it. In fact, they destroyed it. The euphoria characterised the first half hour of drinking. On occasion, I was vomiting 31 minutes in. ‘The effect’ is really a composite of these indivisible parts.
It turns out, on balance, I didn’t like ‘the effect’.
So that’s the end of that assertion. The truth is, I liked one of the effects, but not the effect overall.
In the period of premeditation, I would sometimes recall that one and fail to recall the others. Once I had had a drink, though, there was no thought of drinking. There was no recollection. There was only the urgency for the more, with no thought of effect. ‘The effect’ is certainly not an explanation for drink numbers two, three, and four, and a very weak explanation for the first drink.
Let’s work further on ‘the effect’ as the (weak) explanation for the first drink:
To say, “I drank because I liked the effect,” implies I had a motivation—liking the effect—and I acted in accordance with it. This implies agency.
In other words, such an assertion suggests not that one was powerless at all but that one indeed had ordinary agency, and, exercising that agency, one decided to drink. This is the opposite of Step One.
The truth was that there was no agency. Agency, and its concomitant, rational decision making, would suggest that each drink was somehow thought through: I would weigh up my motivation, I would determine (albeit mistakenly or insanely) that I liked the effect of drink, so I drank one, and this would be repeated with each drink.
Was that my experience? I did sometimes think it through, but usually I had the first drink automatically. There was no serious or effective thought. There was certainly no thought with the rest. There was simply an animalistic focus on getting more, and getting it down me. This is not operation of reason and agency. This is the operation of automated processes that activate the first drink and draw down the rest.
If I am not acting with agency, what is causing the action?
The only options are external compulsion and internal compulsion. There was obviously no external compulsion.
The only remaining candidate is internal compulsion.
This means I was internally compelled to start and internally compelled to continue.
What is the reason for the compulsion? There isn’t one. That’s the point. It does not employ reason plus agency but impulse plus obedience.
The impulse does not originate in thought.
The impulse simply originates. It’s the fatal flaw of the alcoholic. Drinking alcohol (apparently, in my case, even once) set up the impulse. And then it is there forever. The little neural circuit simply sends a signal, and the signal, once decoded, reads, ‘Drink!’
That’s the impulse.
What about the obedience. Is that insanity? No, because, as noted before, even when I sanely recognised a drink would be a bad idea, I would drink it anyway. This is what ‘drinking against one’s will’ looks like. Since my reasoning is not involved at all, and non-obedience is not an option, we have a case of compulsion. The thinking in someone compelled is not relevant in explaining the action compelled.
So what we have is not drinking because I liked it but being compelled to drink even though I did not like it.
Step Two refers to insanity.
Is that wrong?
No, and in two ways.
Firstly, someone acting under compulsion will eventually rebel against the compulsion. The compulsion, to ensure its survival, in a Darwinian manner, secures its goal of survival by imposing on me a false view of reality (the inability to differentiate the true from the false, cf. The Doctor’s Opinion) in which drinking is a good idea, in which I like drinking, in which I love drinking, in which not drinking is not an option. In this way, although it’s compelling me all along, it gives me the impression I am acting with agency and supplies me with the ‘reasons’ I am drinking.
Amazingly, even when the compulsion is broken, the mental subroutine that generates this false image that I am drinking with agency and drinking because of this or in order to that continue to operate, sometimes forever. Whenever, in a meeting, one hears people explaining why they drank, one is listening to a mental subroutine of active alcoholism, still quite intact, still ticking over, with the host of this monstrous parasite quite unaware of what is going on, ready for the moment that the impulse awakens and compels the individual to drink, at which point the cover story—the good reasons for drinking—will be invoked to cover the tracks of the compulsion.
Secondly, insanity is how alcoholic drinking seems from the outside. It is not the reason for the drinking from the inside. Compulsion is the reason for the drinking inside. But its appearance is insane.