Hi, my name is Pete, and I’m a carbon-based life form!
That greeting won’t earn you many points at an AA or NA meeting, but it will give you a pretty good idea of what this book is all about. We addicts are no different from anyone else; we have simply learned to see the world from a somewhat different perspective than most other people. That’s right, I said learned! We have learned to be addicts. We were not born with our addictions, although genetics do play a role; nor did we acquire them due to some moral flaw or shortcoming, although almost everyone in society and the treatment industry believe that we did. The good news is that 75% of us overcome our addictions on our own without the use of treatment centers, formal programs, pills, or patches. Not only are we capable of unlearning what we learned to become addicts, we can, as millions have, learn new skills that allow us to cope with the normal, and abnormal stresses in life that drove many of us to dependency in the first place.
We became addicts by using certain substances in sufficient quantities, and for sufficient periods of time to bring about changes in our brains, affecting both our physiology and our perceptions of reality. By “using,” I mean the ingestion of any addictive drug, from nicotine to heroin, and everything in between. Although there are differences between the affects different drugs have upon our brain chemistry, they are unimportant from the standpoint of how we learn to be addicts.
At first, we use because we receive positive feedback from the use of the substance – it makes us feel good! It makes us feel like “one of the crowd,” some of us for the first time. It makes us feel better about ourselves, improves our self-image, and makes that “not-quite-good-enough” feeling disappear – at least for a little while. As “social” drug users, we feel as though we finally have a handle on life, and what’s going on around us. Using helps us deal with the stresses we occasionally face, especially when dealing with others. For some of us, it makes us feel ten-feet-tall and bulletproof; for others, it seems to add that “layer of insulation” that was somehow left-off when we were going through the assembly-line. In other words, for some of us, it does too much!
As we learn to like the way the drug makes us feel, we might notice that after a while, it takes more and more of the substance to reach the level where we’re comfortable with the world around us. At this point, we may be using more, but we are still able to choose whether to have a glass of wine or help a child with their homework, or to stop after the proverbial “one or two,” because we have an important meeting at work the next day, or have to drive our family somewhere for an outing. We may be occasionally “binging,” but although our drug-seeking habits are becoming more ingrained, we are still making socially-appropriate conscious choices.
If we continue on this path long enough, we ultimately lose the ability to make conscious choices about our using behavior. Even after a period of abstinence, various environmental cues or stressors trigger drug use almost automatically, hijacking our basic survival instincts, triggering a response we seem to have little or no control over. Social concerns have little meaning any longer at this stage, no matter how pressing they might seem. We have learned that we must have the drug, no matter what the cost, even to those we hold most dear, because our basic survival is at stake. Neither family, jobs, possessions, or even personal safety are important now, the drug is all that matters!
Sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? Well, if it were truly hopeless, then the 75% of addicts we will learn about in Chapter three wouldn’t have been able to overcome their problem, and believe me, I wouldn’t have survived to write this book. If you’re reading this and you place yourself in one of the last two categories I just described, something has driven you to the point where you at least suspect you might “have a problem,” and perhaps you are wondering what to do about it. Helping you decide “what to do about it” is the purpose of this effort, and the reason for writing “Powerless No Longer.” I was once in the very same, or at least a similar position to that in which you find yourself, and I would like to begin this journey with you by relating how my own personal journey out of the darkness began. Further on, this chapter will discuss why we are not powerless over addiction, and go into more detail about how we learn to become addicts, and give some recommendations as to how you might use this book.
I had a twenty-six-year drinking career that began on my eighteenth birthday, and ended in August of 1990. The last year or two were undeniably the worst. I was failing at work, my personal life was a mess, and I kept getting into one scrape after another. Not legal scrapes, but I was doing the kinds of things that hurt other people, destroy your reputation, and cause a great deal of personal pain. Of course there was one thing that would kill the pain, but unfortunately it was also the thing that caused more pain. And so on, and so on…, until you reach the point where alcohol no longer kills the pain, but you continue to drink anyway because at least it brings the relief of oblivion!
I convinced myself that the pain I was in, and all of my problems were due to my wife, my family, my job, and in fact, just about everything in my life, except, of course, myself. I made plans to escape to another part of the country, where I could “get myself together,” free from all these people and things that, in my mind, were causing these problems I was having.
One night, about a week before I was due to leave, on my one-way trip to self-destruction, I was sitting in the living room of our garrison colonial, continuing a normal evening of drinking scotch, after the mosquitoes finally drove me off of the deck in back of the house. I was making-up stories in my head about my upcoming adventure, and wondering what my new life would be like, when I was interrupted by the unexpected presence of my fifteen-year-old daughter, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, standing about ten feet in front of where I was sitting, nervously holding a piece of paper with some writing on it in her hand.
“Dad,” she said with a slight tremor in her voice, “what did you think of the poem I read for you before, on the porch? You said you wanted to think about it for a while.”
Before I could stop them, the words came out: “What poem?” I couldn’t remember even seeing her earlier, let alone her reading any poem.
She held out the paper in her hand, “This poem, I’ve been working on it for days.”
I shifted my gaze down towards the floor, pretending to remember, and muttered something that I hoped was appropriate; frankly, I can’t remember what I said. When I met her eyes again, even through the alcoholic haze, I could tell she was hurt, and then I began to see something else, I saw myself, and what I had become reflected in her eyes. As her expression changed from hurt to anger and from anger to disgust, we both realized, at the same instant, that I was a complete and absolute fraud!
She crumpled the paper into a ball, and disdainfully tossed it onto the rug between us, like Gary Cooper flipping his badge into the dust in “High Noon.” I can still remember how her long hair swung as she wordlessly spun on her heel, ran from the room, and up the stairs, the first of her wracking sobs cutting through me like a knife.
I had seen myself through her young eyes, and I was devastated by the vision of deceitful hollowness and self-loathing I saw reflected there. I looked around the room, and realized that this was all coming to an end, and soon! We were living off sales I had made two and three years ago, selling into the defense establishment was like that, the procurement cycle took forever. There was nothing in the pipeline, as I hadn’t made a major sale in almost two years. I saw things that night that I had never admitted, or faced before. Not only was I a liar, a cheat, and a phony, I realized that I was one of the few people I knew who didn’t already know it!
I wanted the world to just stop! If it would do that, for just a little while, I could get myself together, I thought, and begin to make all these things right. I wanted not to continue drinking scotch that night, I really tried hard not to drink, but somehow the glass continued to fill itself, seemingly without any conscious effort on my part. I drank until the pendulum clock on the wall bonged one o’clock, then I stumbled up the stairs, undressed in the dark and fell into bed. As the room began to spin, my last conscious thoughts were filled with indescribable fear – I couldn’t even comprehend facing life without alcohol to kill the pain, and yet I knew, I mean I was totally certain that I would die if I continued to drink. I was absolutely terrified of whatever I might decide to do when morning came.
Obviously, I didn’t put a gun to my head, nor did I continue to drink beyond the next day. I found another solution, and discovered that there was, indeed, a life out there that didn’t require constant alteration of my perceptions of reality. This book is about how anyone can discover that life, and actually how most addicts discover it either completely on their own, or with minimal help.
