Alcoholism – an illness

Today we are willing to accept the idea that, as far as we are concerned, alcoholism is an illness, a progressive illness which can never be “cured”, but which, like some other illnesses, can be arrested.  We agree that there is nothing shameful about having an illness, provided we face the problem honestly and try to do something about it.  We are perfectly willing to admit that we are allergic to alcohol and that it is simply common sense to stay away from the source of our allergy.

We understand now that once a person has crossed the invisible borderline from heavy drinking to compulsive alcoholic drinking, that person will always remain an alcoholic.  So far as we know, there can never be any turning back to “normal” social drinking.  “Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic” is a simple fact we have to live with.  We have also learned that there are few alternatives for alcoholics.  If they continue to drink, their problem will become progressively worse; they seem assuredly on the path to skid row, to hospitals, to jails or other institutions, or to early graves.  The only alternative is to stop drinking completely, to abstain from even the smallest quantity of alcohol in any form.  If they are willing to follow this course, and to take advantage of the help available to them, a whole new life can open up for alcoholics.

There were times in our drinking careers when we were convinced that all we had to do to control our drinking was to quit after the second drink, the fifth, or some other number.  Only gradually did we come to appreciate that it was not the fifth or the tenth or the twentieth drink that got us drunk; it was the first!  The first drink was the one that did the damage.  The first drink was the one that started us on our merry-go-rounds.  The first drink was the one that set up a chain reaction of alcoholic thinking that led to our uncontrolled drinking.

A.A. has a way of expressing this; “For an alcoholic, one drink is too many and a thousand are not enough.”

Another thing that many of us learned during our drinking days was that enforced sobriety was generally not a very pleasant experience.  Some of us were able to stay sober, occasionally, for periods of days, weeks, and even years.  But we did not enjoy our sobriety.  We felt like martyrs.  We became irritable, difficult to live and work with.  We persisted in looking forward to the time when we might be able to drink again.

Now that we are in A.A., we have a new outlook on sobriety.  We enjoy a sense of release, a feeling of freedom from even the desire to drink.  Since we cannot expect to drink normally at any time in the future, we concentrate on living a full life without alcohol today.  There is not a thing we can do about yesterday.  And tomorrow never comes.  Today is the only day we have to worry about.  And we know from experience that even the “worst” drunks can go twenty-four hours without a drink.  They may need to postpone that next drink to the next hour, even the next minute – but they learn that it can be put off for a period of time.  When we first heard about A.A., it seemed miraculous that anyone who had really been an uncontrolled drinker could ever achieve and maintain the kind of sobriety that older A.A. members talked about.  Some of us were inclined to think that ours was a special kind of drinking, that our experiences had been “different,” that A.A. might work for others, but that it could do nothing for us.  Others among us, who had not yet been hurt seriously by our drinking, reasoned that A.A. might be fine for the skid row drunks, but that we could probably handle the problem by ourselves.

Our experience in A.A. has taught us two important things.  First, all alcoholics face the same basic problems, whether they are panhandling for the price of short beer or holding down an executive position in a big corporation.  Second, we now appreciate that the A.A. recovery program works for almost any alcoholic who honestly wants it to work, no matter what the individual’s background or particular drinking pattern may have been.