A cluster of ideas one encounters in AA meetings and
recordings, even from most Big Book speakers:
Alcoholism is not really about drinking. It’s a
maladjustment to life, a disease of emotions, a disease of relationships, a
disease of lack of connection. Alcoholics, when it comes to living, are in a
class apart, necessarily unhappy, incompetent, and unable to cope. We never
fitted in and never had the rulebook for life, so we drank. When we stop drinking, ‘we
find out why we drank’. Sober, we feel so bad we drink again, because alcohol
was a solution. We are not really powerless but are really drinking on purpose,
motivated by negative emotion we are trying to escape. That is why we drink and
drink so much. Our drinking can be explained by how we feel. Therefore, we
have to get rid of negative emotions sober, or we will decide to drink. We can
explain our drinking with reference to the past, to present circumstances, and
to mental and emotional states.
This idea appears to contrast with what the book Alcoholics Anonymous says:
“It did not satisfy us to be told that we could not control our drinking just because we were maladjusted to life, that we were in full flight from reality, or were outright mental defectives.” (Doctor’ Opinion)
“These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control.” (Doctor’s Opinion)
“Then there are types entirely normal in every respect except in the effect alcohol has upon them. They are often able, intelligent, friendly people.” (Doctor’s Opinion)
“I was to share generously in the profits. Then I went on a prodigious bender, and that chance vanished.” (Page 5)
“I saw I could not take so much as one drink. I was through forever. Before then, I had written lots of sweet promises, but my wife happily observed that this time I meant business. And so I did. Shortly afterward I came home drunk. There had been no fight. Where had been my high resolve? I simply didn’t know. It hadn’t even come to mind. Someone had pushed a drink my way, and I had taken it.” (Page 5)
“I could laugh at the gin mills. Now I had what it takes! One day I walked into a café to telephone. In no time I was beating on the bar asking myself how it happened. As the whisky rose to my head I told myself I would manage better next time, but I might as well get good and drunk then. And I did.” (Page 6)
“For three or four months the goose hung high. I went to town regularly and even made a little money. Surely this was the answer—self-knowledge. But it was not, for the frightful day came when I drank once more.” (Page 7)
“If you ask him why he started on that last bender, the chances are he will offer you any one of a hundred alibis. Sometimes these excuses have a certain plausibility, but none of them really makes sense in the light of the havoc an alcoholic’s drinking bout creates. … the truth, strange to say, is usually that he has no more idea why he took that first drink than you have. 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)
“Or perhaps he doesn’t think at all. How often have some of us begun to drink in this nonchalant way” (Page 24)
“Though experience had made him skeptical, he finished his treatment with unusual confidence. His physical and mental condition were unusually good. Above all, he believed he had acquired such a profound knowledge of the inner workings of his mind and its hidden springs that relapse was unthinkable. Nevertheless, he was drunk in a short time. More baffling still, he could give himself no satisfactory explanation for his fall.” (Page 26)
“An exceptional man, he remained bone dry for twenty-five years and retired at the age of fifty-five, after a successful and happy business career. Then he fell victim to a belief which practically every alcoholic has—that his long period of sobriety and self-discipline had qualified him to drink as other men.” (Page 32)
“In some circumstances we have gone out deliberately to get drunk, feeling ourselves justified by nervousness, anger, worry, depression, jealousy or the like. But even in this type of beginning we are obliged to admit that our justification for a spree was insanely insufficient in the light of what always happened. 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)
“Physically, I felt fine. Neither did I have any pressing problems or worries. My business came off well, I was pleased and knew my partners would be too. It was the end of a perfect day, not a cloud on the horizon. … I ordered a cocktail and my meal. Then I ordered another cocktail.“ (Page 41)
And
“There is a complete failure of the kind of defense that keeps one from putting his hand on a hot stove.” (Page 24)
“The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defense against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defense.” (Page 43)
The message of the book is clear:
As an alcoholic, I do not have the first drink because it is
a solution, because it appears to be a good idea, because I am generally
dysfunctional, because I am generally unhappy, or because I am unhappy in the
moment. Ditto the remaining drinks.
The reason for the first drink does not lie in my thinking
or motivations. Ditto the remaining drinks.
Even if I think I am driven by motivations and they seem
plausible, they are not, because the harm is disproportionate to the purported
benefit.
As an alcoholic, I have the first drink because I am
compelled to by my alcoholism and have no defence against the compulsion. Ditto the remaining drinks.
A defence is required only against an aggressor from the
outside. My alcoholism lies, as it were, outside me, outside my personality,
outside my life.
If I want to understand my alcoholism, I do not look at me,
I look at it, the alcoholism: the overwhelming impulse.
Why is it there? Who knows!
Does it remain even when every twisted belief, thought, emotion, and circumstance is untwisted and set straight?
Yes.
I will always need a defence against it, regardless of my
attitudinal, mental, emotional, and practical condition.
This is powerlessness.
Before I got sober, lacking power, I would drink, and, being drunk, I could not manage my own affairs. This is Step One.