“Some drinkers have excuses with which they are satisfied part of the time. But in their hearts they really do not know why they do it.” (Page 23, Big Book)
“1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” (Page 59, Big Book)
To be powerless means I am not the one making the decisions. I am acting under compulsion.
Imagine a passenger on a bus.
The bus turns left.
If the passenger says, “I turned left because …” he is delusional. He did not turn left. The bus driver did.
When I said, “I drank because of XYZ”, “I drank on feelings of …”, “I drank because I liked the effect”, “I drank to treat my …”, I was actually denying my powerlessness, but it took me ages to understand this.
Why was I denying powerlessness?
Such statements presuppose (a) effective reasoning and (b) agency. They say: I reasoned, and, on the basis of that reasoning, I acted.
Powerlessness, by contrast, means I do not have agency, because something else is driving my actions, and, if something else is driving my actions, the question of my reasoning becomes moot.
To take the bus analogy, the bus is turning left because of the bus driver’s reasoning, not the passenger’s reasoning, so any reasoning presented by the passenger is quite unconnected with the fact of turning left. Thus, when I said I drank to feel better, I might well have felt better, at least for an hour or so, and I might have believed this motivation was both present and operative, but that was not really why I was drinking.
This became quite clear when I reviewed my experience in a later phase of my alcoholism. Then, drinking no longer made me feel better, and I knew it, and yet I did it anyway. That is when my drinking became eery, uncanny, ‘unheimlich’ as the Germans say, and the truth started to dawn that I had been hypnotised, mesmerised, by my alcoholism into taking actions that seemed constructive but were destructive, systematically for years, without any suspicion that I was acting against my will.
This mesmerisation, this hypnotism, actually continued into my recovery. It took a long time to expunge the idea that drink did me any good at all, even in the short term, even in the moment. In other words, I continued to trot out alcoholism’s own ‘party line’, its rationalisation it would continually feed me to conceal its compulsion of my drinking, hence the ‘explanations’ I gave above. It seemed less frightening to think I had ‘reasons’ for drinking the way I did than to realise I was a puppet, a stooge, a sleeper agent.
The truth was that there was no justification, and the only valid explanatory statement for my alcoholism is this:
I was compelled; I had no defence against the compulsion.