Questions via Email: AA is letting me down, and if I go to the party I'm almost positive I'll drink

 

 

Hello,

With almost a year of sobriety, I am starting to hate AA and want to drink casually again. 

I have been unable to find employment this whole year (I've been a bartender forever and was scared to go back to it) so I've really immersed myself in meetings and the program. My year of "no major changes" included a parent passing away, problems with an ex, living with an active addict and finally moving to a safe new sober home in a smaller neighborhood with an AA community that I do not like. Their brand of sobriety seems less than sober.

I know I can't blame AA as a whole for what I am experiencing in this cross section of sobriety, BUT I am broke as a joke so I can't afford a metrocard to get to the meetings I do feel alive in... and my sponsor is giving me advice based on their experiences with drinking, which are different from my experiences.... so therefore sort of granting me excuses to think the program doesn't work, I'm not actually alcoholic, all I really need are Al Anon meetings, etc.

Bottom line is I am probably an alcoholic. I'm up to step 8 and I am so thankful I get to go somewhere that people share so openly and honestly about their life struggles. I love being able to connect with people and feel the beauty of what it means to understand. I love the gift of spirituality AA has given me and pray to my higher power constantly for direction and strength. However, my self esteem is at an all time low, I hate myself for not being able to "fit in" with the community here and I have no local sober friends that fulfill me.

What I do have is lots of old drinking buddies in this hood, and a birthday party next weekend. I am almost positive I will drink, I want to drink because I feel like AA is failing me. I have watched this program work in my life and give me small bits of hope, but I am just so miserable right now and I don't know what to do. They always say "I drank to feel good but then it stopped working", and right now I feel like AA is not working.

I always enjoy your advice, and I am feeling pretty desperate right now, so I figued it was worth a shot.

Thanks,

K

Dear K,

We're going to work backwards through the things you bring up in your email.

But first, I need your help with a little sketch I've put together, mmkay?

I will be playing the part of Mr. SponsorPants, a charming if quirky middle-aged recovering alcoholic, with a nice smile and a few crinkly laugh lines around the eyes but with very poor impulse control, a failing short term memory and a weakness for the theatrical gesture.

You will be playing the role of K, a down-on-their luck but plucky newcomer walking the finest of tightropes across the chasm of active alcoholism -- a chasm so deep and so dark that to compare it to the gaping maw of a sly, ravening beast would really not be too far off the mark.

Just read your lines, it's cool if the scene runs a little rough.  Ready?  Action!

Mr. SP:  Hey K.

K:  Oh, hi Mr. SP.  Where are you going?

Mr. SP:  I'm going to a birthday party.

K:  A birthday party you say?

Mr. SP:  Yes. A birthday party.

K:  Why that sounds like fun, Mr. SponsorPants!

Mr. SP:  Yeah, I suppose... but...

K:  But what?

Mr. SP:  Well, I am almost positive that if I go to the birthday party I am going to get shot in the head.

K:  WHAT?  Seriously?

Mr. SP:  Yeah. 

K: If you go to the birthday party you're going to get shot in the head.

Mr. SP:  Yeah.

K:  You are "almost positive" that if you go to this party...

Mr. SP:  Birthday Party.

K:  Ok, Birthday Party, that someone will pull out a gun and shoot you in the head.

Mr. SP:  Yeah.

K:  At the party you're going to get shot in the head.  Are you nucking futz?  Don't go to the party!

Mr. SP:  But I have to!  [insert long list of very important reasons why I have to go to the party here, woven through with a lot of absolutes and road-block thinking in which I mention every solution before you can and then shoot it down with hypothetical scenarios, finishing with a detailed description of how everyone will feel and what everyone will think if I don't go.]

K:  But you could die!  You're almost positive you'll die!

Mr. SP:  Yeah but [repeat above long list here, with only slight variations, the very repetition of it making it more real to me].

K:  Mr. SponsorPants.

Mr. SP:  What?

K:  I don't like to give advice, but... DON'T GO TO THE PARTY.

The End

I know, I know, it needs some work.  A little rough around the edges, and I think both our characters need more development.  And it's almost unbelievable to most people in the audience that my character would actually, really and truly be planning on going to the ...

you get it, right K? 

Your choice.  But the choice is not "go to the party or not."

The choice is what it always is when it comes to sobriety and alcoholism:

Choose to live or choose to die.

Part of the problem with the mental fog which engulfs an alcoholic's mind is that we convince ourselves that we deserve to drink because it will at least "make us feel better" for a little while, and we deserve to feel better because things are so bad. 

This is like saying "I'm overdrawn at the bank, and that makes me feel terrible.  To feel better I'm going to buy something really expensive, because I deserve to feel better."

Let me be blunt:  You feel shitty in part because your life looks shitty to you.  You have successfully devalued one of the most important esteem-building things you have going for you -- your sobriety -- and begun to tell yourself that you are able to drink socially.  I have no idea if you can or you can't.  Did you before?  Did you have a great track record of being able to both control and enjoy your drinking?  In other words, when you drink you are able to hold the line at "only three" and/or stop abruptly (that means leave half a glass) on the bar without batting an eye?  Let me tell you, I can leave half a glass of chocolate milk sitting on the counter and walk away with virtually no twinge.  Vodka?  Once I've had half a glass?  Not a chance.  If, trying to hold the line because of some promise to myself or someone else, I did walk away, it would be an act of incredible will, and I would not rest easy, and my mind would be chattering away, spitting out rationalizations and justifications at light speed.

(It would start with "You know, if you look at the glass just right, that's really a little bit more than half still left in the glass.  You can have another sip anyway."  And then going on to something like "Oh, damn.  That's less than half a glass now.  Tell you what, finish this one and we'll stop at exactly half on the next one."  Or some other ridiculous rationalization which written out here sounds patently nuts but in my head is perfectly logical.  Because I'm an alcoholic.)

I am not here to convince you that you are an alcoholic.  But I'd like to point out that you seem to be putting a fair amount of energy into convincing yourself that you're NOT one -- and that's ... kind of alcoholic.

And isn't it interesting that coming up on a year for you the desire to drink keeps getting stronger?  It's almost as if some part of you is actively trying to sabotage you making it to a year sober.  Hmmm...

Now, as for your sponsor giving you advice that is "different from my experiences drinking..."  (which is a neat loophole you've whittled out for not trying the advice very much, yes?  When your sponsor makes a suggestion, does it look something like this in your head?  "Since they don't really 'get' me or how I drank, this advice won't really work for me..." or "Well, I tried it once but not much really happened... I knew that wouldn't work."  If it does look like that in your head then, good job!  You've found the two most common mental quirks for justifying not really taking action on sponsor suggestions!  Well done!)

I don't know how you drank, or if we drank the same or vastly differently, but I'm going to make some suggestons for you based on my experience with alcoholism and trying to stay sober -- which means that it doesn't really matter whether we drank alike or not.

Tell your sponsor what's going on in your head.  If you've done that, keep doing it.

When you feel like a suggestion doesn't fit you, say this (write it down if you have to):

"I'm having a hard time seeing how that will help, can you please explain a little more?"

Then, after they do, you can say one of either of the two following things:

"It still doesn't make complete sense, but I commit to really trying to do that consistently."

Or

"That makes more sense.  I commit to really trying to do that consistently." 

If none of that seems like a fit, try to find another sponsor.  Fast.  But I bet you anything the problem is far less that you didn't drink the same (whatever that really means) and far more about consistent action.

Now, as for the rest of your email... it kind of boils down to the following:

• I'm broke and I don't feel good about myself and I can't find a job not bartending so I should drink.
• The only job I could really do is bartending, so I should drink.
• Even though AA has given me some unbelievable, incredible experiences I should do the very thing which will make me feel more distant from it and make my head noisier and give me a lot of reasons to pull away -- from believing people are judging me to feeling guilty and/or embarrassed.
• I don't like anyone here -- there is absolutely no one around who measures up to my standards of how they should behave, so I'm going to drink.
• There are people around that I used to drink with, so I'm going to drink.
  
• I have problems, so what I'm going to do is try to forget them for a little while by creating another problem -- I'm going to drink.

I have to say, K, I think that's a pretty fair distillation of some of your logic, and candidly, that's... pretty troubling.

You are on the razor's edge. 49.51% of you wants to be sober.  And it's not that 49.49% of you wants to drink -- it's that 49.49% of you has already decided to.   In that infinitesimally tiny sliver between those two places there is something you need to find.

And that something is a Power Greater than yourself.

You "pray constantly for direction and strength." I believe you.  My experience though, when I am in Real Trouble (and you, my friend are in Real Trouble) is that I have a picture in my head of what the help I need is supposed to look like, and I reject any other help.  And anything I can do to help me be stronger I pull away from, because it's not what I want to do.  Basically, I only want to do things I want to do; and what I am actually praying for -- and I don't even know it -- is for God to "send me" things that I want to do that will also help me in the way I want to be helped.

One of the most dangerous times in my first year sober was when I started slacking off on some of the most basic things I had done at the beginning:  Meetings, writing, praying, calling my sponsor, calling other alcoholics, being of service... I'd already done them, so I didn't really feel very motivated to keep doing them.  K, take a tough look at what you are doing -- not what you think you are doing, not what you talk about doing, not what you promise to do, not what you used to do -- what are you doing today to stay sober.  And against the challenges you face, is what you are doing enough?  When the shit hits the fan, I need to do more, not less -- which is pretty much the opposite of what I want to do.  (Whether you're metaphorically standing there throwing shit at the fan is a whole other question).

K, you were high on AA, and now that you're not high on AA and you feel shitty about your life you feel like AA doesn't work anymore. 

But AA isn't about feeling great about your life all the time.  I understand why you sort of unconsciously made that leap -- a lot of people do.  I did.  AA is about how to deal with a mind which wants you to drink and uses shitty times as a good reason to (of course it will also use great times as a good reason to drink, but let's get you to those great times first before we wrestle that one to the ground).  AA is about developing habits which keep the noise in my head to a minimum volume.  It's about checking my perspective so that I don't convince myself that things which actually have nothing to do with me have something to do with me.

And at it's most basic level, I do that by doing things I don't want to do -- following AA's simple suggestions and a sponsor's direction, mostly -- instead of coming up with reasons not to.

It's about being of service to other people in AA (and out) whether I like them or not and whether I feel like it or not.  And whether I get acknowledged for doing so in the way I think I should or not.  (I know.  Blech, right?)

When I do those things, that infinitesimally tiny sliver between the part of me that wants to stay sober and the part of me which has already decided to drink is somehow transformed into an impenetrable alloy made of equal parts Something Else and me, and I can hold the line till the percentages change.

If you were sober in AA and if you had a child and (God forbid) something terrible happened to your child, you would be out of your mind with rage or grief or sorrow.  But that wouldn't mean AA had let you down.  Of course you would feel that way in response to such a thing.

What AA does for people is help us cope with terrible and hard things, not protect us from them.

AA isn't letting you down.

Life is hard now, that's all.

 

At the heart of many newcomers' problems with Alcoholics Anonymous is this:

"I'm 'doing' AA, why aren't things going my way?"

I'm afraid that's not exactly how it works.

If I'm on a 12th Step call and I park illegally I will still get a parking ticket.  "Doing AA" does not shield me from the consequences of my decisions or the ways of the world.

You are scared and broke and frustrated and with a little less than a year sober the "shiny new" has worn off of meetings and people and the program, and you want to feel better again.  

And you will.  This too shall pass.

But as you know, there's the two kinds of feeling better...

The one that lasts for about ninety minutes after the first bunch of drinks, or the one in sobriety -- the one which is a lot slower and more subtle, but reaches deep and keeps growing. 

Keep praying.  Lean into contrary action.  Keep listening and looking for help from your Higher Power -- and open up to the idea that it's not gonna look like you might want it to.

And don't go to that god damned birthday party.  Even if it's for you.

Sure it's dramatic to say, but if you drink it might be the last one you go to.

Maybe not -- but I'm pretty sure that every single person I've ever known who died drunk or OD'd didn't think they'd die that time either.

If you've stayed sober for almost a year, you have almost a year's worth of staying sober One Day at a Time.  All you have to do is stay sober today.  That's it.

Piece of cake.

Just not birthday cake.

Love,

Mr. SponsorPants

Comments

[Peggy]

So glad you are here.

[Jackie]

I think the most important thing I learned in the first year of sobriety (I have 14 months), is the joy of being able to sit in discomfort and pain.
Not that I enjoy the discomfort and pain - I hate it. It's uncomfortable and painful.
I like knowing that I have the stength and the ability to be in that pain and discomfort and that at the end of it, there will be a message for me. A possibility for growth.
My 10 year marriage just ended. There was pain and there were tears from both of us. There was grace and dignity and heartache. What there wasn't any of was me saying "I should drink. This is a great reason to drink". First time in my life that I didn't use a really bad situation as a reason to drink.
That was by far the most painful thing that I have done sober. And, I am so proud that I could be sober. I honored those 10 years and my partner and myself. I walked through the pain and I learned a lot. And I didn't throw up or kill anyone in my car and I didn't die and no one, including me, questioned my behaviors.
I don't want to be a cliche but I don't think there was a single thing I could have found in a bottle that would have made the situation better.

[wil]

I so needed to read that today.

[Kris]

I so needed to read this today, too. I don't think I've ever read/heard the little mental twists I take described so well. It helps, a LOT.