CHAPTER 3, MORE ABOUT ALCOHOLISM

 Chapter 3

MORE ABOUT ALCOHOLISM

You mean we haven’t been given enough information yet? In a sense we have, namely there are two problems, the inability to stop after the first drink and the inevitability of the first drink.

Why the extra chapter?

The alcoholic thick skull is really the fog of mesmerisation: alcoholism bewitches its captive into a false narrative that drinking is good and control is possible. It is neither. Years into recovery, I would still recall the ‘good’ days fondly. Much persistent delusion there. And control: I thought I could control my mind and my recovery with insight, understanding, cleverness, tricks, and management: I called these ‘the tools of the programme’. I even decided that ‘the tools’ were not working and decided to add more fellowships, more programmes, more books, more everything, and expensive professional help, to boot, until I was a sick as a dog.

There’s one solution: total surrender to God, in absolute silence, waiting.

Most of us have been unwilling to admit we were real alcoholics. No person likes to think he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts to prove we could drink like other people. The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into the gates of insanity or death.

Some facts:

• Alcoholism involves a bodily difference (compared to normal people)
• Alcoholism involves a mental difference (compared to normal people)
• [There is no reference to a spiritual difference]
• One resists these facts
• One acts as though they are not true
• One acts in a state of self-deception or delusion or—as the book has it—illusion
• The self-deception or delusion or illusion is so profound it is not ‘seen through’
• The two outcomes of the un-arrested alcoholic: insanity (i.e. wet brain) or death
• INTO the gates, not UP TO the gates: there is a point of no return with both outcomes

The obsession is essentially a thought.

The thought is:

• Untrue (that we can control and enjoy our drinking)
• Persistently recurring
• Powerful enough to bewitch the thinker
• Concomitant with a desire to drink
• Powerful enough to persuade the thinker to act on this desire

Preoccupation (the contemporary sense of ‘obsession’) is not a necessary feature.

Herein likes the deceptive safety of periods where the obsession is dormant.

Just because it is not raining now does not mean it will not rain.

Present weather is not a reliable predictive factor in future weather.

Weather changes.

The obsession comes and goes.

Just because it’s gone does not mean it will not return.

If it returns, I need to be armed.

We learned that we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics. This is the first step in recovery. The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed.

The ‘first step’ is the recognition that I am an alcoholic. Elsewhere, the first step is indicated to be an admission that I am powerless over alcohol and that my life has become unmanageable. This means that both elements are intrinsic to alcoholism. The ‘second part’ of Step One is not a general admission that life—for anyone—cannot be managed, or that self-will and self-reliance are a rotten way to live, or that we are individually incompetent. It is about alcoholism, not life. One consequence of alcoholism is that, because the alcoholism is in charge, I’m not.

The ‘innermost self’ is the decision-making faculty: the faculty that decides what is true and then decides what to do on the basis of what is true. Such a concession of alcoholism must be well considered, full, and permanent. Once the die is cast, that’s it. No leaving the back door open. No reconsideration.

‘Like other people’: able to moderate the quantity. We can’t. End of.

We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking. We know that no real alcoholic ever recovers control. All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals—usually brief—were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. We are convinced to a man that alcoholics of our type are in the grip of a progressive illness. Over any considerable period we get worse, never better.

To control drinking: to limit the quantity to levels that produce no negative consequences; to drink at all only when it is a good idea and never when it is a bad one.

Some never had control—I never did.

One measures whether one has control not by whether one feels as though one has control but firstly by whether there is impulsiveness—laying one plan but enacting another—and secondly by whether there are consequences. Either will suffice to fail the test.

Demoralisation—the state in which one can no longer rely on oneself to act in accordance with one’s own intentions or to act even in one’s own interests.

The point of it being an illness is that it is not subject directly to the will.

Willpower does not treat the illness directly but does activate the treatment.

Progression is masked, but there are ups and downs. One must look at the change over considerable time, not what happens on individual occasions, especially recent ones.

We are like men who have lost their legs; they never grow new ones. Neither does there appear to be any kind of treatment which will make alcoholics of our kind like other men. We have tried every imaginable remedy. In some instances there has been brief recovery, followed always by a still worse relapse. Physicians who are familiar with alcoholism agree there is no such thing as making a normal drinker out of an alcoholic. Science may one day accomplish this, but it hasn’t done so yet.

This passage covers three major features of alcoholism:

1. Its irreversibility (so even if one is sober for a long time, one still hasn’t gone back to the pre-drinking state)
2. Its incurability (so nothing works to eliminate it entirely)
3. Its progression (the gradual worsening over time)

Despite all we can say, many who are real alcoholics are not going to believe they are in that class. By every form of self-deception and experimentation, they will try to prove themselves exceptions to the rule, therefore non-alcoholic. If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right-about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him. Heaven knows, we have tried hard enough and long enough to drink like other people!

Real alcoholic—the two elements of the compulsion to drink and the compulsion to continue are present.

I’m not sure I wanted to control the drinking, but I did want to control the consequences.

I thought I could control the consequences without having to control the drinking.

I didn’t realise that the consequences were necessarily entailed by the drinking.

This is a good example of the extent of the self-deception.

Here are some of the methods we have tried: Drinking beer only, limiting the number of drinks, never drinking alone, never drinking in the morning, drinking only at home, never having it in the house, never drinking during business hours, drinking only at parties, switching from scotch to brandy, drinking only natural wines, agreeing to resign if ever drunk on the job, taking a trip, not taking a trip, swearing off forever (with and without a solemn oath), taking more physical exercise, reading inspirational books, going to health farms and sanatoriums, accepting voluntary commitment to asylums—we could increase the list ad infinitum.

Three types of control:

• Stopping altogether
• Reducing the frequency of bouts
• Reducing the quantity drunk on bouts

We do not like to pronounce any individual as alcoholic, but you can quickly diagnose yourself. Step over to the nearest barroom and try some controlled drinking. Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it more than once. It will not take long for you to decide, if you are honest with yourself about it. It may be worth a bad case of jitters if you get a full knowledge of your condition.

Either one can consistently stop at one or two or one cannot.

Interesting, the test for alcoholism involves reviewing just one element—the physical craving element.

The implication is that this test is sufficient, in other words the mental obsession around the first drink is concomitant with the physical craving—you don’t get one without the other.

Obviously, without the presence of the physical craving, there can be no mental obsession, as the question of the madness of the first drink arises only if the first drink really is mad, and it’s mad only if one has the physical craving.

In any case, this one test simplifies the diagnosis.

Though there is no way of proving it, we believe that early in our drinking careers most of us could have stopped drinking. But the difficulty is that few alcoholics have enough desire to stop while there is yet time. We have heard of a few instances where people, who showed definite signs of alcoholism, were able to stop for a long period because of an overpowering desire to do so. Here is one.

If one can control the quantity, one does not need to stop, so one continues.

If one cannot control the quantity, one has alcoholism, and only the exceptional will be able to avoid the first drink.

In anticipation of the story that follows, note that this did not do him any good whatsoever in the long run. He is going to die of drink anyway.

In any case, if you’re not out of control, you’ll carry on drinking.

If you’re out of control, you’ll carry on drinking.

This ensures that potential (i.e. future) alcoholics becomes real alcoholics, so where one is on the scale from potential to real or actual is irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if one is in the first or the last carriage, everyone is on the same train, and all of the carriages will stop at the station.

A man of thirty was doing a great deal of spree drinking. He was very nervous in the morning after these bouts and quieted himself with more liquor. He was ambitious to succeed in business, but saw that he would get nowhere if he drank at all. Once he started, he had no control whatever. He made up his mind that until he had been successful in business and had retired, he would not touch another drop. 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. Out came his carpet slippers and a bottle. In two months he was in a hospital, puzzled and humiliated. He tried to regulate his drinking for a while, making several trips to the hospital meantime. Then, gathering all his forces, he attempted to stop altogether and found he could not. Every means of solving his problem which money could buy was at his disposal. Every attempt failed. Though a robust man at retirement, he went to pieces quickly and was dead within four years.

Some lessons:

• Being in good condition physically, mentally, emotionally, and materially do not protect me from the first drink
• Not drinking for a long time does not constitute a defence against the first drink
• Not drinking for a long time does not cure me of alcoholism
• Even if I’m sane in every other way, I remain insane when it comes to alcohol and the desire to drink
• Just because I was able to stop and stay stopped last time does not mean I’ll be able to stop and stay stopped this time
• Even the availability of AA will not necessarily help: if I start drinking, I might not want to come back to AA, I might not be able to come back to AA, and, even if I come back to AA, I might not be able to stay sober, even with the aggregate efforts of those around me

The only solution is therefore something that will block the thought of a drink, which will recur, from converting into the action of taking a drink.

This case contains a powerful lesson. Most of us have believed that if we remained sober for a long stretch, we could thereafter drink normally. But here is a man who at fifty-five years found he was just where he had left off at thirty. We have seen the truth demonstrated again and again: “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.” Commencing to drink after a period of sobriety, we are in a short time as bad as ever. If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor any lurking notion that someday we will be immune to alcohol.

Some lessons:

• Sobriety, even extended sobriety, does not alter my body’s physiological reaction to alcohol
• Alcoholism is incurable

The paradox: I have to be committed to staying sober for ever, but I then have to do it one day at a time.

No immunity from alcohol is possible, but I acquire immunity against the thought of the first drink through God-reliance in the place of self-reliance, which creates a protective shield.

Young people may be encouraged by this man’s experience to think that they can stop, as he did, on their own will power. We doubt if many of them can do it, because none will really want to stop, and hardly one of them, because of the peculiar mental twist already acquired, will find he can win out. Several of our crowd, men of thirty or less, had been drinking only a few years, but they found themselves as helpless as those who had been drinking twenty years.

Some people can stop for years. But such people, having stopped for years, are not perpetually safe from starting again, and, if they start again, that might be curtains for them, so the ability to stop for years does not get such a person further ahead in the long run. They’re not blessed by this ability but suffer the same fate as a person who does not stop at all.

Most people cannot stop for years, or months, or weeks, or even days, however. These people cannot ‘win out’.

Such attempts are rare: most people don’t try, because they don’t want to.

Why does anyone stop? Well, not because they have to, because everyone who drinks problematically has to, but because they want to. Why do some people want to and most do not? Not circumstances: one does not discern any great difference between the circumstances of those who do and who do not want to stop and the circumstances of those who want to stop now but did not want to stop one week before they first wanted to stop.

The difference is a rock-bottom, and a rock-bottom is not the set of circumstances. You can have a rock-bottom without terrible circumstances, and you can have terrible circumstances without a rock-bottom. This is why lurid descriptions of rock-bottoms are occasionally entertaining but surplus to requirements. They do not explain a thing. Most AA talks—which focus on drinking and rock-bottoms—are more for entertainment than edification.

Hopelessness lies in the two simple facts of consistently drinking too much and being unable to stay away from alcohol. This need not be dramatic.

The rock-bottom is the realisation of these two facts combined with the common-sense inference that, if the juggernaut is not halted, it will progress to death.

To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink a long time nor take the quantities some of us have. This is particularly true of women. Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years. Certain drinkers, who would be greatly insulted if called alcoholics, are astonished at their inability to stop. We, who are familiar with the symptoms, see large numbers of potential alcoholics among young people everywhere. But try and get them to see it!

To be gravely affected means to have the two features: the compulsion to drink in the first place and the compulsion to overdo it when one does. Precisely how much one is drinking is distinct from whether one is compelled. And how long one has had the problem is also irrelevant. If one is sitting on a bomb, but one has been doing so for five minutes, the fact that it has been only five minutes does not protect one against its explosion. Someone who has been pregnant for five minutes is not protected against the progression of the pregnancy by virtue of its newness.

A potential something is not the thing itself, i.e. it does not fulfil the criteria to be the thing. A potential alcoholic would therefore be a person who is neither compelled to drink nor compelled to drink too much but in the future might develop these compulsions. A potential alcoholic is therefore not an alcoholic at all. There is no basis for predicting a non-alcoholic’s conversion into an alcoholic: there are many heavy drinkers, but Bill offers no criteria for detecting which will remain heavy drinkers, which will moderate or stop, and which will convert to alcoholism. The notion of potential alcoholic is therefore unfathomable, in the ordinary meaning of the two words. He cannot mean what he says.

He must mean something, however. When Bill says ‘potential alcoholic’, the most plausible sense is thus not an ordinary drinker in whom one can magically discern conversion to alcoholism but an actual alcoholic who is in the early stages.

The last carriage in the train is the last to tumble over the cliff but is just as doomed as the first.

The ‘potential’ and ‘real’ alcoholic therefore differ not in nature but timing.

As we look back, we feel we had gone on drinking many years beyond the point where we could quit on our will power. If anyone questions whether he has entered this dangerous area, let him try leaving liquor alone for one year. If he is a real alcoholic and very far advanced, there is scant chance of success. In the early days of our drinking we occasionally remained sober for a year or more, becoming serious drinkers again later. Though you may be able to stop for a considerable period, you may yet be a potential alcoholic. We think few, to whom this book will appeal, can stay dry anything like a year. Some will be drunk the day after making their resolutions; most of them within a few weeks.

A good test for alcoholism in someone whose drinking is problematic: stop. Either you can or you can’t. If you can’t, you’re alcoholic. If you can, you’re not, or, at least, you appear not to be, unless you do start again (cf. the man of thirty). This test is an odd one, therefore. Anyone who cannot stop is definitely an alcoholic. Anyone who can might or might not be. Passing the test, in the sense of being able to stop for a while, is inconclusive. The conclusion comes at the point that one starts again.

‘Though you may be able to stop for a considerable period, you may yet be a potential alcoholic.’

Someone who stops forever is not an alcoholic at all in any meaningful sense. Someone who stops yet starts again (defying the counsel of their experience) is absolutely an alcoholic. They’re not merely potentially an alcoholic: they already fulfil both criteria. Again, when Bill says ‘potential’ he means ‘early-stage’, meaning one fulfils the criteria but there might still be periods of sobriety or illusory periods of short-lived improvement. As indicated elsewhere, however, such periods, usually brief, are invariably followed by worse relapse.

Such cases of people stopping for a long time are rare: the test of stopping for a while will swiftly be resolved conclusively to prove the presence of alcoholism in most people who attempt the test.

For those who are unable to drink moderately the question is how to stop altogether. We are assuming, of course, that the reader desires to stop. Whether such a person can quit upon a nonspiritual basis depends upon the extent to which he has already lost the power to choose whether he will drink or not. Many of us felt that we had plenty of character. There was a tremendous urge to cease forever. Yet we found it impossible. This is the baffling feature of alcoholism as we know it—this utter inability to leave it alone, no matter how great the necessity or the wish.

And this is the logical sequence.

Question 1: Can I drink moderately?

The available answers are yes or no.

No ever means no.

A bucket that has holes in only a few places is useless as a bucket.

Question 2: Can I keep away from drink?

Question 2 becomes operative only if question is answered with ‘no’.

Someone who can drink moderately need not stay away from drink, so the question of stopping is moot.

The question of whether one insanely returns to the first drink can be asked only if to return to the first drink would indeed be insane because of the inability to drink moderately.

This is why someone who says they have the mental obsession but not the physical craving has understood neither.

To return to the overall arc: If one can’t moderate, one must stop.

‘Must’ (necessity) and desire must both be present.

Someone who must stop but doesn’t want to won’t.

Someone who must stop but wants to but doesn’t want the alternative (what sobriety has to offer) probably won’t, either.

In any case desire is involved, namely a twofold desire: the desire to not drink and the desire to stay sober. These are not the same thing.

This is the first point in the book where the spiritual solution is overtly linked to the mental obsession.

In other words, someone with the mental obsession by definition cannot stop on the non-spiritual basis.

The nature of the mental obsession is precisely that: non-spiritual (elsewhere: human) resources fail.

This entails that a spiritual (elsewhere: divine) solution is necessary.

One cannot get away from this.

Needing to stay sober is required for the desire to not drink and the desire stay sober to arise.

Then the desire to not drink and the desire to stay sober must arise.

And these must be without reservation.

But this need and this wish are insufficient.

Whenever you hear someone in a meeting say, “I know I won’t drink because I cannot” or “must not” or “do not want to”, know that their analysis is incorrect.

This is the whole point. Firstly, they can drink. If one couldn’t the problem would be solved. They should not drink, granted, they recognise that they need to stay sober and want to stay sober. But needing and wanting do not generate sobriety.

A bulwark is needed, and that bulwark is God.

How then shall we help our readers determine, to their own satisfaction, whether they are one of us? The experiment of quitting for a period of time will be helpful, but we think we can render an even greater service to alcoholic sufferers and perhaps to the medical fraternity. So we shall describe some of the mental states that precede a relapse into drinking, for obviously this is the crux of the problem.

The assumption (rightly) is that the readers are (a) (probably) alcoholic and (b) want to check that this is the case.

Two experiments:

(1) Try stopping altogether. An alcoholic will (likely) fail.
(2) Read about how alcoholics are led to the first drink—if one identifies, one is alcoholic.

The purpose of the description of the mental states is not to isolate a particular mental state that precedes the first drink in order to then construct one’s life such as to avoid that mental state.

To sum up, those mental states include:

• Wanting to drink
• Not wanting to drink
• Thinking about drinking
• Not thinking about drinking
• Not thinking at all
• Having parallel trains of thoughts
• Drinking casually
• Drinking deliberately
• Seeking a thrill
• Seeking relief from anger, worry, depression, or jealousy
• Having a routine day
• Having a particularly good day

As you can see, there is no particular mental state.

What all of these have in common is merely drinking against sound reason, and it is that that the writers hope the readers will identify with.

What sort of thinking dominates an alcoholic who repeats time after time the desperate experiment of the first drink? Friends who have reasoned with him after a spree which has brought him to the point of divorce or bankruptcy are mystified when he walks directly into a saloon. Why does he? Of what is he thinking?

There is the alcoholic and then there is the thinking.

The thinking is not what the alcoholic is doing.

The thinking is dominating the alcoholic.

There is a discourse that is bigger and more powerful than the alcoholic’s own thinking.

We need something bigger than the thinking.

The solution does not lie at the level of the thinking but at a higher level, at the level of spirit, which is the only thing that can pull rank over thinking.

Our first example is a friend we shall call Jim. This man has a charming wife and family. He inherited a lucrative automobile agency. He had a commendable World War record. He is a good salesman. Everybody likes him. He is an intelligent man, normal so far as we can see, except for a nervous disposition. He did no drinking until he was thirty-five. In a few years he became so violent when intoxicated that he had to be committed. On leaving the asylum he came into contact with us.

Jim is an alcoholic free of confusing ‘co-morbidities’ (other conditions), beyond the tendency towards nervousness, which is neither ‘standard-issue’ in AA nor confined to alcoholics.

One learns from the above list that the first drinking is not prevented by:

• Coming from a good family
• Presently having good reason to stay sober (charming wife and family)
• Presently having a good life
• Having friends
• Having a sound past
• Being intelligent
• Being essentially normal

If these are not sufficient, these do not constitute the aims of sobriety, whose purpose is to erect a barrier of sanity against the onslaught of the alcoholic impulse.

These did not work for him, so they won’t work for me.

I might get these, but only as a by-product.

They do not constitute the defence, and they do not need to be worked for.

How much more hopeless is the condition of someone who:

• Comes from a wrecked background
• Has alarming present circumstances
• Has an unenviable life
• Has no friends
• Has a distressing past
• Struggles with rational thinking
• Is several standard deviations away from ‘normal’.

I can see, now, that, if Jim needed God to stay sober, boy, did I need God to stay sober—and still do.

We told him what we knew of alcoholism and the answer we had found. He made a beginning. His family was re-assembled, and he began to work as a salesman for the business he had lost through drinking. All went well for a time, but he failed to enlarge his spiritual life. To his consternation, he found himself drunk half a dozen times in rapid succession. On each of these occasions we worked with him, reviewing carefully what had happened. He agreed he was a real alcoholic and in a serious condition. He knew he faced another trip to the asylum if he kept on. Moreover, he would lose his family for whom he had a deep affection.

Interestingly, it does not use the word relapse, which would entail having recovered.

Apparently he had not recovered, even though, externally, he appeared to have.

He lacks no knowledge yet gets drunk.

He has the answer yet gets drunk.

He has no good reason to get drunk yet gets drunk.

He has good reason to stay sober yet gets drunk.

He made a beginning, but a beginning alone does not prevent getting drunk.

He has sorted out his family and work life yet gets drunk.

There is one failure—to enlarge his spiritual life.

Elsewhere we’re told (pages 14 and 156) that the enlargement of one’s spiritual life entails work and self-sacrifice for others (i.e. not what one might think: the contemporary notion of spiritual practices).

In other words a spiritual life is a life not of contemplation but of work for God in His provision to others.

Knowledge, answers, reasons, starting, and sorting out do not prevent one from getting drunk.

Loss of self to help others does.

Yet he got drunk again. We asked him to tell us exactly how it happened. This is his story: “I came to work on Tuesday morning. I remember I felt irritated that I had to be a salesman for a concern I once owned. I had a few words with the boss, but nothing serious. Then I decided to drive into the country and see one of my prospects for a car. On the way I felt hungry so I stopped at a roadside place where they have a bar. I had no intention of drinking. I just thought I would get a sandwich. I also had the notion that I might find a customer for a car at this place, which was familiar for I had been going to it for years. I had eaten there many times during the months I was sober. I sat down at a table and ordered a sandwich and a glass of milk. Still no thought of drinking. I ordered another sandwich and decided to have another glass of milk.

He’s irritated, but who isn’t?

He has a few words with the boss, but who doesn’t?

He’s not bad. He’s not inordinately upset. But he is concerned with himself.

“I … I … I … I … I … I … I … my … I … I … I … I … I … I … I … I… I … I …”.

No mention of others’ welfare; no mention of others’ interests.

The problem is not the circumstances but the basis of his life.

”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. I vaguely sensed I was not being any too smart, but felt reassured as I was taking the whiskey on a full stomach. The experiment went so well that I ordered another whiskey and poured it into more milk. That didn’t seem to bother me so I tried another.”

Resumption of drinking is preceded by the thought of a drink.

The thought of a drink is preceded by … well, nothing. No trumpets. No warnings.

The thought of a drink is cloaked in a reassuring lie.

The truth is muffled (‘vaguely sense’).

Once the first drink has been had, the rest follow.

The alcoholism need induce one only to take the first drink.

Alcoholism is like Frank in ‘Frank’s Wild Years’.

“One night Frank was on his way home from work, stopped at the liquor store, picked up a couple Mickey's Big Mouths drank 'em in the car on his way to the Shell station, he got a gallon of gas in a can, drove home, doused everything in the house, torched it, parked across the street, laughing watching it burn, all Halloween orange and chimney red. Then Frank put on a top forty station, got on the Hollywood Freeway, headed north.”

One match is all it takes. Then the alcoholism is laughing.

Thus started one more journey to the asylum for Jim. Here was the threat of commitment, the loss of family and position, to say nothing of that intense mental and physical suffering which drinking always caused him. He had much knowledge about himself as an alcoholic. Yet all reasons for not drinking were easily pushed aside in favor of the foolish idea that he could take whiskey if only he mixed it with milk!

To reiterate:

Drinking happens despite:

• Good things that will be lost
• Bad things that will happen
• Knowledge

Alcoholism resumes through an impulse and through the dulling of the reason.

The impulse converts itself into action, with no effective resistance from me.

One is unable to bring reason to bear.

It is like having a dead limb.

One wishes to raise one’s hand in defence, but the hand refuses to respond.

Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity. How can such a lack of proportion, of the ability to think straight, be called anything else?

The insanity of drinking is not the insane things one does when drunk but the mere fact of having the first drink.

Proportion: the ability to see things in their true size.

Lack of proportion: what is near (pleasure) seems big; what is far (harm) seems small.

You may think this an extreme case. To us it is not far-fetched, for this kind of thinking has been characteristic of every single one of us. We have sometimes reflected more than Jim did upon the consequences. But there was always the curious mental phenomenon that parallel with our sound reasoning there inevitably ran some insanely trivial excuse for taking the first drink. Our sound reasoning failed to hold us in check. The insane idea won out. Next day we would ask ourselves, in all earnestness and sincerity, how it could have happened.

The precise detail, the notion of milk protecting against the whiskey, is irrelevant. The idea is simply that one does something that is not a good idea, even though the evidence has stacked up that it is not a good idea.

It is not a bad exercise to consider whether that pattern is alive in one’s life at all: does one do something that is not a good idea, even though the evidence has stacked up that it is not a good idea?

If so, relapse is possible.

The only defence is God, the decision to obey whom oddly makes it possible to do the right thing even though the thoughts are skewy.

There are two elements to relapse: firstly, the presence of the skewy idea (coated in a specious justification); secondly, the failure of reason to operate. Once reason fails, the skewy idea necessarily wins out.

The solution does not address either element but superimposes a different system for living, where one does the right thing regardless of what ideas are raging.

The mind’s engine is no longer connected to the transmission.

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.

Sometimes people—inside and outside AA—point to reasons for their alcoholism or to reasons for their continued drinking or reasons for a specific occasion of drinking.

None of these are logical and none of these are true.

The point of insanity is that the problem is the insanity not the content of the insane thinking.

This would cut out the bulk of the discourse in people’s pitches about their drinking.

Descriptions of childhood unhappiness—irrelevant.

Descriptions of not fitting in, being on the outside—irrelevant.

Descriptions of trauma—irrelevant.

Descriptions of not being given enough love—irrelevant.

Descriptions of other childhood or adolescent difficulties—irrelevant.

Descriptions of difficulties, setbacks, or tragedies in adulthood—irrelevant.

Descriptions of thoughts or feelings—irrelevant.

When I would slip, people would ask what happened, and I would recount the series of so-called circumstances and events that led up to the drink.

Really, the narrative should have been something like this:

“I had thoughts, and I approved of them. I had more thoughts, and I approved of those, as well. I asked for input, but I accepted only the input I approved of, and rejected the input I disapproved of. I thought of myself. I thought of myself all day long for decades. One day, I thought of a drink, and, because I was so full of myself, and certain that I was quite the wisest person I knew, I obeyed it. It could not have occurred to me to do otherwise. Plus, I had no alternative because I’d never done anything else but what I wanted. I was powerless because I had no power but my own, which was limited by its insularity. I was without defence against the first drink.”

And that’s essentially the narrative with every slip.

The problem lies in the will that is set to obey one’s mind and has no alternative available to it, let alone the power to shift the arrow on the dial to the alternative.

The only two possible answers would be to perfect the mind or re-direct the will.

The former will never happen.

The latter is possible, on a day-by-day basis.

Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say, for jaywalking. He gets a thrill out of skipping in front of fast-moving vehicles. He enjoys himself for a few years in spite of friendly warnings. Up to this point you would label him as a foolish chap having queer ideas of fun. Luck then deserts him and he is slightly injured several times in succession. You would expect him, if he were normal, to cut it out. Presently he is hit again and this time has a fractured skull. Within a week after leaving the hospital a fast-moving trolley car breaks his arm. He tells you he has decided to stop jaywalking for good, but in a few weeks he breaks both legs.

Similarly irrelevant are discussions of what drink does ‘for’ one. There’s almost no discussion of this in the Big Book (save for one line in the Doctor’s Opinion—written by a non-alcoholic, and referring to the relief of the discomfort caused directly by resistance to the onslaught of the mental obsession—I’ll leave you to find that passage). Descriptions of the marvellous feelings are irrelevant, because, even when they do not materialise and have not materialised for years, the drinking continues. They were never the reason for the drinking.

The point of the jaywalker is not the precise nature of the thrill but that the jaywalker is insane.

No thrill is genuinely valuable enough to justify mutilating oneself in traffic accidents.

No pleasure, relief, or whatever other yield of drinking is valuable enough to justifying mutilating one’s life with active addiction (whatever the addiction is).

On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by his continual promises to be careful or to keep off the streets altogether. Finally, he can no longer work, his wife gets a divorce and he is held up to ridicule. He tries every known means to get the jaywalking idea out of his head. He shuts himself up in an asylum, hoping to mend his ways. But the day he comes out he races in front of a fire engine, which breaks his back. Such a man would be crazy, wouldn’t he?

The insanity persists regardless of the severity of the consequences.

No one gets sober because of the consequences, or earlier consequences would have done the trick. The stopping occurs usually years after the evidence supports the stopping.

The stopping happens because there is a sudden waking-up to consequences that have been operative for years or sometimes decades.

The person does not wake up as an act of the will: the waking-up occurs via intervention.

And not from others—try to wake someone else up, and you’ll see that it’s impossible.

The waking-up is either idiopathic (occurring because of … whatever) or Divine.

It doesn’t matter which.

The point is, you have to wait for it to happen.

You can’t bring it about.

You may think our illustration is too ridiculous. But is it? We, who have been through the wringer, have to admit if we substituted alcoholism for jaywalking, the illustration would fit us exactly. However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved, we have been strangely insane. It’s strong language—but isn’t it true?

Sometimes people claim a sort of generalised insanity, although that’s rare. I can almost count the number of times I’ve had the eery feeling when someone is talking that they are not entirely ‘of this world’. Generally, however, what is at play is not insanity but stupidity, folly, recklessness, high dudgeon, low spirits, driving emotions, or other ordinary phenomena that cause people to act against their own or others’ best interests.

But the insanity of alcoholism is of a different order. Sometimes I used to drink in a perfectly quiet, calm, premeditated way, not driven by anything, but disconcertingly poised and deliberate in my action to have the first drink—yet wholly insane in the light of the consequences (on one occasion fifteen months’ worth of horror punctuated by violence, illness, breakdown, and encounters with the police).

In calling everything insane, one fails to see the nature of the insanity and trivialises it, as referring to celibacy as sexual anorexia trivialises the gravity of anorexia nervosa.

Folly, lack of self-control, etc., on one hand, and insanity, on the other, must be kept strictly apart.

The insanity in question is one that prevails solely in relation to alcohol (and, in a certain individual, a number of other grave compulsions), without parallel in other areas.

If someone’s drinking were in the same order as having a bit too much chocolate or over-spending on Amazon, it could be cured with a bit of growing up.

The general foolishness, shortsightedness, thoughtlessness, and rashness of most human being when faced with thrills, pleasures, or fearful circumstances has its price, but a life can usually sustain quite a lot of such sub-optimisation and might well be more lifelike than a life of perfect, porcelain poise. The foolishness, shortsightedness, thoughtlessness, and rashness of having the first drink is of a completely different nature: that single act could spell the end of the individual—it can be like the administration of a slow-acting, fatal poison with no antidote.

In everyday life, instances are legion of the mind bending.

It is only with alcoholism and equivalent disorders that the mind actually snaps.

Some of you are thinking: “Yes, what you tell us is true, but it doesn’t fully apply. We admit we have some of these symptoms, but we have not gone to the extremes you fellows did, nor are we likely to, for we understand ourselves so well after what you have told us that such things cannot happen again. We have not lost everything in life through drinking and we certainly do not intend to. Thanks for the information.”

Simply: information is not enough. ‘Seeing’ the calamity ahead is insufficient to put the brakes on.

There are no brakes.

That may be true of certain non-alcoholic people who, though drinking foolishly and heavily at the present time, are able to stop or moderate, because their brains and bodies have not been damaged as ours were. But the actual or potential alcoholic, with hardly an exception, will be absolutely unable to stop drinking on the basis of self-knowledge. This is a point we wish to emphasize and re-emphasize, to smash home upon our alcoholic readers as it has been revealed to us out of bitter experience.

Here we have the final nail in the coffin of the notion of the potential alcoholic. Potential alcoholics cannot stop or moderate any more than ‘actual’ ones. They are, therefore, ‘actual’ alcoholics. A further example that Bill is using the word ‘potential’ not to mean ‘not yet and may or may not become’ but to mean ‘definitely yes, but early stage’. This would be like saying someone who is a few weeks pregnant is potentially pregnant or someone who has a small tumour potentially has cancer or someone who has fallen out of a window but has fallen only a couple of feet has only potentially fallen out of the window. Once his misuse of the word ‘potential’ is understood, all of the passages on the ‘potential’ alcoholic start to make sense. The criterion for alcoholism—being unable to stop or moderate—is met in both categories of individual. The corollary of this is that ‘actual’ means ‘late stage’. There obviously is no such thing as a ‘non-actual alcoholic’: someone who is an alcoholic but is somehow not actually one. That would be Schrodinger’s alcoholic. The same applies to the term ‘real alcoholic’. Obviously, there is no category of non-real alcoholic, i.e. someone who is an alcoholic but whose alcoholism lacks the quality of reality. The two categories are therefore not alcoholics and not-yet-alcoholics (i.e. non-alcoholics) but late-stage alcoholics and early-stage alcoholics.

So the important test is the test of the ability to stop or moderate.

If one has tried and failed, the test is easy to administer.

But what if—as is often the case—the individual never attempted to stop or moderate. The test has never been administered, apparently.

Once the person is in AA, it would be foolish to suggest they leave and resume drinking in order to see if they can stop or moderate on their own.

Sometimes the person is able to administer the test as a thought experiment: looking back, they might have been so fully aware of the impossibility of stopping or moderating they never tried, or they might have thought about holding off or holding back but experienced such resistance they avoided the experiment altogether. That’s largely the case with me. The idea I could have stopped or moderated was laughable.

But some people lack the self-awareness or imagination to figure this out. This is not their fault—alcoholism is powerful and suppresses all sorts of ordinary faculties, so these deficits can actually be part of the alcoholism itself.

How does such a person determine whether they were able to stop or moderate, in principle, without ever having tried?

Well, it’s actually terribly easy. To stop or moderate requires (a) formulating the idea (b) committing to the idea (c) implementing the idea. The obvious way of failing is to fall at (c): one has formulated the idea and committed to it but failed to implement it. The other ways of failing are to fall at hurdles (b) or (a). If one’s drinking clearly suggests to a dispassionate bystander that one should stop or moderate—and the evidence for this extends across years—and yet one never even formulated the idea or committed to the idea of stopping or moderating, stopping or moderating are quite impossible, as they require formulation and commitment. The alcoholism has turned off the ordinary faculties of reason further upstream in such a person.

Such person did not fail in the race of stopping or moderating; they never got off the starting blocks.

Such a person is actually glued even more firmly to drinking than the person who keeps trying and failing.

Let us take another illustration: Fred is partner in a well-known accounting firm. His income is good, he has a fine home, is happily married and the father of promising children of college age. He has so attractive a personality that he makes friends with everyone. If ever there was a successful businessman, it is Fred. To all appearance he is a stable, well balanced individual. Yet, he is alcoholic.

Things that do not prevent or cure alcoholism:

• Material success
• High income
• Coming from a fine home
• Being happily married
• Having problem-free offspring
• Having a good personality
• Having friends
• Being stable
• Being well-balanced

Things that do not cause or prevent recovery from alcoholism:

• Material failure
• Low income
• Coming from a bad home
• Being unhappy, married or otherwise
• Having problems, offspring-related or not
• Having a stinking personality
• Having no friends
• Being unstable
• Being out of whack

We first saw Fred about a year ago in a hospital where he had gone to recover from a bad case of jitters. It was his first experience of this kind, and he was much ashamed of it. Far from admitting he was an alcoholic, he told himself he came to the hospital to rest his nerves. The doctor intimated strongly that he might be worse than he realized. For a few days he was depressed about his condition. He made up his mind to quit drinking altogether. It never occurred to him that perhaps he could not do so, in spite of his character and standing. Fred would not believe himself an alcoholic, much less accept a spiritual remedy for his problem.

The mark of the alcoholic is not the bad drinking but the inability to stay stopped having made up one’s mind to stop.

Only if this is admitted will a spiritual solution start to appear necessary, if not palatable.

We told him what we knew about alcoholism. He was interested and conceded that he had some of the symptoms, but he was a long way from admitting that he could do nothing about it himself. He was positive that this humiliating experience, plus the knowledge he had acquired, would keep him sober the rest of his life. Self-knowledge would fix it.

Self-knowledge is necessary but insufficient.

Ditto information.

A short-term bout of sobriety brought about by self-knowledge is a far cry from permanent sobriety.

More: humiliation might bring about a rock-bottom and prompt interest in sobriety.

What is required is humility, not embarrassment: a recognition of what one can and can’t do.

We heard no more of Fred for a while. One day we were told that he was back in the hospital. This time he was quite shaky. He soon indicated he was anxious to see us. The story he told is most instructive, for here was a chap absolutely convinced he had to stop drinking, who had no excuse for drinking, who exhibited splendid judgment and determination in all his other concerns, yet was flat on his back nevertheless.

As above:

• He has the knowledge
• He has no good reason to drink
• He has good reason to stay sober
• He has the mental prerequisites
• He has the character prerequisites

These are, to repeat, necessary but insufficient.

Let him tell you about it: “I was much impressed with what you fellows said about alcoholism, and I frankly did not believe it would be possible for me to drink again. I rather appreciated your ideas about the subtle insanity which precedes the first drink, but I was confident it could not happen to me after what I had learned. I reasoned I was not so far advanced as most of you fellows, that I had been usually successful in licking my other personal problems, and that I would therefore be successful where you men failed. I felt I had every right to be self-confident, that it would be only a matter of exercising my will power and keeping on guard.

Errors:

• The belief that knowledge provides a defence
• The belief that ‘catching it earlier’ makes its arrest easier or permanent
• That the above confer on the individual sufficient resoluteness in the face of the thought of a drink
• That the ability to stay sober is a ‘transferrable skill’ from other areas
• That there are different classes of alcoholics—some worse than others
• That will-power works
• That vigilance works

“In this frame of mind, I went about my business and for a time all was well.

Except it wasn’t. All appeared well but was not well at all.

Here, we have a precise delineation of the problem. He went about his own business. Not God’s. Suddenly his business will include drinking, so he will drink.

We are not told how long the ‘a time’ was.

I knew someone whose ‘a time’ was 30-odd years.

That didn’t save him, and that didn’t help him back.

He came back, alright, but all wrong, like shoes that have come back from the cobblers and are never themselves again.

He was no longer reachable.

He soon disappeared again.

The shot one has might be the only shot.

Just because one stays sober for a while does not mean that that state will persist in perpetuity.

I had no trouble refusing drinks, and began to wonder if I had not been making too hard work of a simple matter.

The fact that one either does not want to drink or is offered a drink and successfully says ‘no’ does not mean a permanent ability has been acquired.

There is, in fact, no permanence.

Each day we’re given the insurance premiums to pay, in the form of the surrender of self and the adoption of God’s will (and the doing thereof) as the only—quite literally—order of the day.

One day I went to Washington to present some accounting evidence to government bureau. I had been out of town before during this particular dry spell, so there was nothing new about that. 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.

Things that do not prevent a slip:

• Routine
• Physical wellness
• Mental wellness
• Emotional wellness
• Being pleased with oneself
• Others being pleased with one
• Good general circumstances
• Good particular circumstances
• The absence of immediate problems
• The absence of more distant problems

Things that do not cause a slip:

• Being out of routine
• Physical illness
• Mental unwellness
• Emotional unwellness
• Hating oneself
• Being hated
• Poor general circumstances
• Poor particular circumstances
• The presence of immediate problems
• The presence of more distant problems

What does?

Alcoholism + the lack of defence through surrender to God.

”I went to my hotel and leisurely dressed for dinner. As I crossed the threshold of the dining room, the thought came to mind …

Thoughts come to mind.

We don’t make them.

We don’t command them to appear.

We don’t shape them.

We receive them.

Recovery will not require the alteration of thought.

It will require a different response to the thoughts that occur.

What is the different response?

Rejection of the thought—like throwing a case out of court without hearing it.

Continuation of right action on behalf of God.

that it would be nice to have a couple of cocktails with dinner. That was all. Nothing more. I ordered a cocktail and my meal. Then I ordered another cocktail.

His alcoholism promises two cocktails with dinner.

This is what he has.

The alcoholism did not lie.

It merely told the truth on one matter (the two cocktails) and remained silent on others (the following drinks and mayhem).

Alcoholism might lie.

It might tell the truth.

It might say nothing.

This is why the answer does not lie in the mind.

One can trust neither truth, lies, nor silence.

After dinner I decided to take a walk. When I returned to the hotel it struck me a highball would be fine before going to bed, so I stepped into the bar and had one.

Who is deciding?

He is.

Not God.

There’s your problem, pal.

The previous thought came to him.

He’s had a couple of drinks.

This one strikes him.

More forceful.

He has the thought, and this is followed by ‘so’.

He is taking actions based on his own thoughts.

The precise nature of the problem: self-direction.

I remember having several more that night and plenty next morning. I have a shadowy recollection of being in an airplane bound for New York, and of finding a friendly taxicab driver at the landing field instead of my wife. The driver escorted me about for several days. I know little of where I went or what I said and did. Then came the hospital with unbearable mental and physical suffering.

He goes from active (I went, I crossed, I ordered, I ordered, I decided, I returned, I stepped, I had, I remember) to passive (escorted me).

If I drink, I go from the active agent of my life to the passive patient, with the alcoholism the new agent, in charge, with the taxi-driver the alcoholism’s proxy.

He goes from clear thought to shadowy recollection to an almost entire absence of mental process.

The sting is in the tail: unbearable mental and physical suffering.

The thought that crossed his mind about the two cocktails with dinner didn’t mention that.

“As soon as I regained my ability to think, I went carefully over that evening in Washington.

And this isolates the problem entirely: alcoholism is the periodic inability to think. One minute you can think, and the next you can’t. Yet action takes place, driven by something other than thought: the imperious urge, the impulse to drink.

This is precisely why the solution must be something other than thought.

It must be in the same order as the imperious urge but more powerful, namely the imperious urge (from God) to stay sober, come what may.

Not only had I been off guard, I had made no fight whatever against the first drink.

Attempts to stop drinking based on either vigilance or combat will not work: only if one is on guard can the combat be activated, and no one can be on guard twenty-four hours a day.

One must have a system that works in every human condition.

This time I had not thought of the consequences at all.

In other words, other times he had thought of the consequences. He’d been a good boy and played the tape forward, remembered the last drunk, and applied all of the other tricks in the book Living Sober, which, although published by AA, is written apparently by an alcoholic of a type who needed to learn and recall regularly that drinking is bad for him, of a type who, on being instructed, could improve his faculty of memory and thus consistently prevent relapse.

That doesn’t work with me. I’m not of that type. I’m of the Fred type. I’m of the type who becomes hopelessly demoralised at his inability to consistently avoid the first drink or whatever. I’m strong-willed 99% of the time, and a jellyfish, or out to lunch, the other 1%, and that 1% is exploited by alcoholism.

When the imperious urge strikes, it shuts down all faculties capable of reviving and reactivating the screenplay of the consequences. The court will not be in session. It’s no good having a great barrister (attorney) and great evidence in the bundle of papers; if there’s nowhere for the case to be held, that’s the end of it.

That’s why I can only be prevented from drinking by someone other than me, and the only ever-present, all-powerful Someone is God.

I had commenced to drink as carelessly as though the cocktails were ginger ale. I now remembered what my alcoholic friends had told me, how they prophesied that if I had an alcoholic mind, the time and place would come—I would drink again.

The drinking again, if one is alcoholic and without defence, is inevitable, hence the prophesy, which is specific as to content (drinking) but non-specific as to time and place. This is why periods of sobriety—even years—can be misleading. If I am doing anything ‘carelessly as though’, I’m in danger. Other impulsive and compulsive behaviours are therefore canaries in the mine (canaries in the mind) for a reactivation of alcoholism: if I am doing other things impulsively and compulsively, things that are harmful to me or others, and I am watching myself as though something else is in control, then I still have an alcoholic mind.

What does one do?

Well:

(1) I admit I can never, ever do X safely again (or anything adjacent to it).
(2) I recognise I will do X again, if left to my own devices.
(3) I recognise, if do X again, I am handing the keys to the devil.
(4) I recognise the devil may never surrender the keys back to me.
(5) I recognise the most important thing in my life is not to do X, today.
(6) I recognise I cannot do (5) on my own.
(7) I recognise only constant conscious contact with God can bring about (5).
(8) I ask God unreservedly to help me by placing myself in His hands.
(9) I ask God for what to belief, think, say, and do, today.
(10) I do it.

They had said that though I did raise a defense, it would one day give way before some trivial reason for having a drink. Well, just that did happen and more, for what I had learned of alcoholism did not occur to me at all. I knew from that moment that I had an alcoholic mind. I saw that will power and self-knowledge would not help in those strange mental blank spots. I had never been able to understand people who said that a problem had them hopelessly defeated. I knew then. It was a crushing blow.

Here are some trivial reasons—trivial in the light of the unstoppable juggernaut of alcoholism that can rumble on literally for decades dragging along literally scores of people with it as I decay to nothing—for having a drink:

• A terrible childhood
• Death or multiple death in the family
• Other disease
• Other tragedy
• Loss of career
• Loss of livelihood
• Major anxiety
• Major depression

You could increase that list. The notion of the trivial is relative, not absolute. One might appear to drink because of anxiety, depression, near-death experiences, etc., but, because of the phenomenon of craving, these are never sufficient reason for drinking. This is what tells you they are not causing the drinking: they might create the occasion but occasion and cause are different. Leave your phone on the table in a pavement café and someone will take it. The sine qua non for the theft is not the thief (for thieves are two-a-penny) but the leaving of the phone in plain sight. Without that, no theft. Likewise: the sine qua non for drinking is the impulse to drink. The occasion—the apparent ‘reason’—is not the cause. If one had no such ‘reason’, one would find one. What Nigel said. The pattern on the wallpaper. It being Tuesday. All of these are no better and no worse reasons for drinking than the death of a loved one.

When people say they made it through X bad experience or Y bad experience without drinking, so AA works, they’re betraying the belief that they drank rationally as a response to bad events or circumstances, so the purpose of AA is to give you a method of handling bad events or circumstances, and, because AA is great at that, that’s why they didn’t drink.

The event or circumstance that I responded to by drinking was being alive. The problem was not how I was handling being alive. My drinking had nothing to do with any event or circumstance.

On the subject of the strange mental blank spot, it is the point in the plot where the monologue is missing. Imagine the screenplay of a non-alcoholic person in the run-up to a drink. They might be someone that tends to drink a lot (although not insanely) when they drink. They might think, “Well, a cocktail or two with dinner would indeed be nice, but I know myself. Once I get it in me, I’ll want more, and I’ll have a rotten hangover tomorrow. I’m not sure I can face that on a working day, plus I have a flight. No. Better not have a drink tonight!” In the alcoholic, that bit of the monologue is missing.

On the rare occasions the monologue is fully present, one is aware with horror that the monologue is ineffective at preventing a drink.

One could think of it like this: one goes to press the brake, and there is no brake pedal. That’s the first potential location of the strange mental blank spot. Or you press and the brake, and the pedal is loose: the wire has been cut. That’s the second potential location of the strange mental blank spot.

Either way, there is a gap in the mind.

“Two of the members of Alcoholics Anonymous came to see me.

The usual practice, now, for twelfth-stepping. If one of the pair can’t get through to the prospect, the other should probably be able to, unless both are muppets. One has to be able to put oneself in the prospect’s shoes and imagine how one would like to be approached if the tables were turned. Many of us can at times be tone-deaf when it comes to this, hence two not one. The same goes for public information: one’s got to hit the right tone with the audience, read the room, and avoid stepping on toes or activating reasonable sensitivities. One has to be a chameleon: learn to speak their language, anticipate their questions, ally oneself with them, not broadcast at them. There are times one needs be quite tough and cut through error, and there are others where that will further alienate, hence the tag-team approach: if one person makes a mistake, the other will spot and course-correct.

There is also the question of safety. Alcoholics can be violent or weird, and occasionally twelfth-steppers have ‘joined in’ with the activity—drinking or drugs or worse.

They grinned, which I didn’t like so much, and then asked me if I thought myself alcoholic and if I were really licked this time. I had to concede both propositions. They piled on me heaps of evidence to the effect that an alcoholic mentality, such as I had exhibited in Washington, was a hopeless condition. They cited cases out of their own experience by the dozen. This process snuffed out the last flicker of conviction that I could do the job myself.

Note first of all they’re not pussy-footing around and solemnly sympathising with his predicament. This pisses him off royally. They didn’t have that professional glaze of slightly pained sympathy, the compassion for hidden wounds assumed to be lurking below the surface, driving his drinking. There’s no honouring of his feelings or encouraging him to sit with them. They went in for the kill: you want this, buddy, or not? Grinning as they did it.

They’re also not going to let his day spoil theirs: grinning. They’re insisting on being happy and enjoying life.

In the past I’ve been long-faced Lolly, droning on like the Norns about my traumatic childhood, survival, going deep, layers of the onion, authenticity, and other hallmarks of the introspective wild good chase. Eventually, I got so tired of myself I made the decision to enjoy my life come what may—I decided to grin (as opposed to bearing it).

The twelfth-steppers also do not enter onto the territory of the psychological: they focus solely on the real problem of alcoholism, namely the inability to stay away from a drink, with no attempt to find anything below, because there is nothing below. What does the peeled layer of the onion reveal? More onion. What does peeling onions achieve? Nothing but weeping (and a pile of onion).

What was the alcoholic mentality exhibited in Washington? Drinking. That was it. His experience had showed him that he shouldn’t drink, but he did. The alcoholic mentality is merely a mind that thinks of a drink then acts on that thought.

Where does the spiritual malady come in? It’s the blockage to God, with God the provider of a defence. Alcoholism doesn’t go away, but the spiritual solution provides a daily patch. The universal self-centredness of the human condition (the spiritual malady) is not part of alcoholism but the impediment to the solution. It’s not the disease but the roadblock on the way to the pharmacy.

“Then they outlined the spiritual answer and program of action which a hundred of them had followed successfully.

Once the first job of the twelfth-stepper is complete, namely getting the prospect to understand the hopelessness of alcoholism if left untreated, the twelfth-steppers proceed to the question of the solution.

With this question, too, there is no pussyfooting about. They get straight in there with God. This is in a twelfth-step call, the prospect has not even joined AA yet, and yet they are explaining the programme in some detail. In a lot of the AA fellowship, members are either embarrassed about the programme or hostile to it and suggest that one should not talk about God or the Steps or anything spiritual in case it scares the newcomer off. They imagine that the average newcomer is dim and will not in any case swiftly realise that the programme is about establishing a relationship with God, particularly as the meetings in which such protests are made typically read out the first two and a half pages of the chapter ‘How It Works’ and deck the walls with scrolls that present a summary of the Steps and Traditions, many of which reference God. The tide cannot be held back, so, rather than trying to conceal the programme’s nature (when it is in fact hiding in plain view), it is better to tackle the difficulty head-on, explain the programme, and then address such questions and reservations that the person has. Kicking the can down the road and hoping that the inevitable questions and reservations of the newcomer will resolve themselves if one only attempts for long enough to avoid them is an abdication of responsibility but also based on a false premise, namely that such questions typically or always resolve themselves naturally in due course. They do not. They tend to grow and become entrenched if simply left. They are typically resolved only by being addressed, by treating the newcomer as an adult and their questions and reservations as reasonable given their background and situation, and by discussing them until resolution is achieved.

Though I had been only a nominal churchman, their proposals were not, intellectually, hard to swallow. But the program of action, though entirely sensible, was pretty drastic.

The proposals indeed are Christian in origin, though share much in common with other religions and systems of ethics, hence the ease of accepting them in principle, and the observation that the programme is sensible.

But it is drastic. The actions are really contained in Five, Nine, Twelve. Everything else is preparation. The confession and revelation of Five and Nine are straightforward but largely unpleasant. One has to hold one’s nose and get on with it.

But it’s really in Twelve that the drastic nature comes through. Aside from the considerable amount of time required in perpetuity, carrying the message and performing other service to make that possible, there’s the fact that one’s mind, one’s beliefs, one’s thoughts, and one’s actions are no longer one’s own.

To turn one’s life over to God really means that ‘I want’, in the ordinary sense, ceases to have any meaning or significance. I’m not to permit any immorality. I’m not to permit any self-indulgence. Of course, I will be immoral and self-indulgent to some extent each day, but the commitment remains to the ideal of elimination, as impermanent as any elimination is. I’m on the clock, 24 hours a day. God’s a good employer, and there’s plenty of fun and peace, but the idea that I’m my own man has to go out of the window, and that changes everything. I’m not my own man: I’m God’s.

It meant I would have to throw several lifelong conceptions out of the window. That was not easy.

The list of such conceptions may vary from person to person, and it would be impossible to list such conceptions exhaustively. Here are a few:

• That when my body dies, I die.
• That I am a body.
• That there is no God.
• That the purpose of life is my pursuit of my own happiness.
• That I have any degree of real control over anything.
• That what I see is necessarily there.
• That what I feel is informative about reality.
• That others are capable of hurting me.
• That anyone has ever made me feel anything.
• That anything in my experience of life is anyone else’s fault.
• That the values of modern (Western) society are capable, if adopted and implemented, of producing equanimity, stability, happiness, or value.

I could go on.

It turns out the several conceptions might be several hundred. The man who is quoted in that passage was perhaps a couple of years sober, if that. Give it a bit, and the list extends.

It’s much safer to assume: I had to throw almost every lifelong conception out of the window, other than the basics, such as eating healthy food and feeding the cat are a good idea.

But the moment I made up my mind to go through with the process, I had the curious feeling that my alcoholic condition was relieved, as in fact it proved to be.

As soon as I surrendered to the programme, which meant accepting a sober life in perpetuity, accepting what life threw at me, having AA as the centre of my life, simply doing what it said, the ability to stay sober was granted and within days became the easiest thing in the world. This is granted at the beginning of the process, not as a result of the process. The process might cement it more firmly in place, but of course one has to stay sober to complete the process, so sobriety is granted in advance not in arrears.

As Dr Harry M. Tiebout said, surrender brings about relaxation. If I’m tense, I’ve not relaxed, and I’ve not surrendered.

“Quite as important was the discovery that spiritual principles would solve all my problems.”

Although the solving of a problem might involve a practical element or a psychological element (or a social, religious, philosophical, moral, or physical element), the spiritual element has to come first. Who is in charge? Me or God? Who is calling the shots? Do I think I’m going it alone? Or that God is my little helper? Or that I am His (His little helper, and His in absolute terms)?

Once this basic authority problem is resolved, and its resolution put into practical application (in other words I place the situation in God’s hands and simply ask for the right thought or action), everything else sorts itself out, usually in a remarkably economical and elegant way, with no waste, and also surprisingly quickly.

There is nothing that this will not solve admirably, in my experience.

I have since been brought into a way of living infinitely more satisfying and, I hope, more useful than the life I lived before. My old manner of life was by no means a bad one, but I would not exchange its best moments for the worst I have now. I would not go back to it even if I could.”

Satisfying to whom? To the individual, but also to God. For it is God’s satisfaction that counts, not mine, not man’s (i.e. not others’). My life does not need to fit a contemporary, Western template of what a satisfactory life looks like. I’m given the simple choice: do I want to live a life wherein my aim is to do God’s will and only God’s will? If I answer in the affirmative and proceed accordingly, I can be at peace. The practical results are not a factor in determining whether I made the right decision, whether or not my performance was ‘up to scratch’, and whether my life is or was worthwhile.

Usefulness is promised as an element in doing God’s will. It comes in both as a parameter for determining the rightness of action and also as an automatic corollary to God’s will, which is held axiomatically to be what will be in the best interests of all concerned.

Materialism is not necessarily immoral (although can be, just as the spiritual life, lived in accordance with the wrong precepts or with too much of an admixture of self, can be immoral). But the reading indicates that the improvement is not an improvement in the same order but an upgrade to an entirely different order.

When the material realm is the be-all and end-all of life, decision-making will be in accordance with this philosophy, with its natural physical and temporal limitations.

When the soul is recognised to be permanent and immortal, and the material realm is viewed as a means to God’s ends, the whole basis for making every decision is different. God is the means and the object.

Since it is God’s purposes that are sought, and the only element of those purposes discerned being those manifest good actions that come down the tubes through prayer and meditation, one cannot prove or know for certain that one’s life is more useful, particularly as one cannot run an alternative programme and compare the two—the counterfactual is beyond even reasonable speculation—hence the trust, the ‘hope’ that the life is more useful.

What is incontrovertible is the categorical better-ness of this new life.

This is for two reasons.

Firstly, the fundamentally higher purpose, which makes all ills and sufferings worth it in the larger context of the Great Plan.

Secondly, the direction of travel. Not dust to dust but spirit to heaven.

Fred’s story speaks for itself. We hope it strikes home to thousands like him. He had felt only the first nip of the wringer. Most alcoholics have to be pretty badly mangled before they really commence to solve their problems.

It is interesting that Fred’s story has been read not just by thousands like him but by millions like him. To many, it will have struck home, and to some it will have proved the turning point in the journey towards recovery, where they realised—as I did—that they were acting under compulsion not on the basis of reason.

When Fred’s penny dropped for me, all of the ‘I drank because’, ‘I drank on’, ‘I drank to’ discourses dropped away, and I was left face to face with the compulsion of alcoholism, impersonal and indifferent in fact but maleficent in consequence. It was me against the compulsion, and the compulsion had a trump up every sleeve. That’s when I realised I was defeated. Whilst I still thought that the cause of the first drink somehow lay in me, in my person, in my life, I could persist in the illusion that I could do something about that cause by learning different, thinking different, acting different. When I realised that the cause of the drink lay not inside me per se but in the parasite of alcoholism lodged like an alien presence, a foreign body in my mind and that I had no way of dislodging it or neutralising it, I was then willing to submit to God.

In some ways Fred’s story is mild; in other ways, extreme. That goes to show how many layers beneath Fred there are, how many underground storeys there are on the elevator ride to hell. The elevator stops at every floor, but to let people on, not off.

It is unclear why alcoholics (myself included) act on the evidence not once sufficient has been accumulated but when a hundred times that has been accumulated. This is useful to know, because, if I drank again and turned back to AA, it would be way after sufficient evidence to support such a return had been accumulated. It is an error to think one can simply reverse the decision the moment it proves wrong.

Many doctors and psychiatrists agree with our conclusions. One of these men, staff member of a world-renowned hospital, recently made this statement to some of us: “What you say about the general hopelessness of the average alcoholic’s plight is, in my opinion, correct. As to two of you men, whose stories I have heard, there is no doubt in my mind that you were 100% hopeless, apart from divine help. Had you offered yourselves as patients at this hospital, I would not have taken you, if I had been able to avoid it. People like you are too heartbreaking. Though not a religious person, I have profound respect for the spiritual approach in such cases as yours. For most cases, there is virtually no other solution.”

Bill is typically chary of making 100% statements—he typically hedges when making general pronouncements about alcoholism and recovery—because one can argue against a 100% statement in a way in which one cannot against a ‘probably’ statement, because counterexamples disprove a 100% statement but fall within the exception category provided for by the ‘probably’ statement. He does allow 100% statements in the mouths of bystanders, whose credentials he sets out. This doctor was apparently a doctor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (if my memory of the Schaberg book about the Big Book serves me correctly). Even he hedges twice (‘most’, ‘virtually’). But the message is clear: find God or … good luck to you.

Once more: 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. His defense must come from a Higher Power.

The defence provided is not mental, per se, although the mind might be activated as part of it. We’re told merely that it is a defence. The exact nature of the defence (altered thinking, altered behaviour, the thought of a drink being blocked before it even comes to consciousness, the inability to follow through on the desire to drink, even though one wants to, a visceral reaction of repulsion, finding oneself doing the right thing automatically even though one would far rather do the wrong thing) varies from person to person and from situation to situation, but its necessity and availability appears invariant across the body of alcoholics as a whole.