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Made a Decision

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                      Alcoholism Never Goes Away

There's no vaccine, no pill, no medical treatment to permanently cure our illness of alcoholism. There may be one in the future, but there's never been one throughout history and there's not one now.

We alcoholics have a chronic, progressive, terminal illness for which there is no cure! We can have a daily reprieve from our illness by not drinking during that 24 hour period, but that's not a cure. That's a gift.

We talk a lot about our Higher Power in AA, how using the "tools of AA" give us a good sober life, but I have come to believe there is a lower power busy in the world, too, and it looks to me like addiction is one of the best tools in its own tool kit.

When we were drunk we were said to be wasted, smashed, polluted, destroyed, fucked up, tanked, hammered, soaked, wrecked, pissed, blind drunk, boozed, fried, loaded - and the list goes on. There are actually nearly 200 historical words used to describe someone who is drunk. None of them I've found are complimentary.

But when we arrived in AA and heard the word "alcoholism," it was no longer a judgement, it was a diagnosis. We weren't crazy when we kept on drinking after all, we were sick. What a relief it was to learn that.

The long-established picture of the broken down drunk living in a cardboard box beneath a railroad bridge seems to be branded on the brains of everyone in a drinking society. Young alcoholics use that image to reassure themselves every time they pick up a drink that they're obviously not an alcoholic. 

What isn't common knowledge is that image of the drunk in the cardboard palace is actually living out the final stages of our disease. Ours is a progressive disease. We don't start out as late stage alcoholics. 

We start out looking like social drinkers, although drinking a bit on the heavier side of that description. We soon progress to having sporadic problems from our drinking (social embarrassments, run-ins with the law, family problems), but unless we die in a traffic accident or domestic "incident," or speed up our progression by using other drugs in addition to alcohol, we can continue our "social drinking" for quite awhile.That's life in Stage One Alcoholism.

Stage Two gets uglier. That's when our "hangovers" become actual alcohol poisoning. That's when we start to reek of booze. No one wants us around anymore, so we isolate from family and society. That's when we might try to stop drinking and find that we can't. That's when suicide starts to look like a viable solution for our problems.

Stage Three is the short one. It ends in 

(a) "wet brain," where we drool in our soup, wear adult diapers and get locked away in a mental institution for whatever length of life is left to us. Or (b) death. 

An alcoholic death is an ugly death to have - or to witness. But it's the probable outcome for an alcoholic who continues to drink. 

Our disease wants to isolate us, take away everything we hold dear, and then kill us. If I'm right about our "lower power" also being at work in the world, booze shows itself to be a great  tool for that nefarious purpose.

Sadly, after a while in AA, we can so easily resort to our one-time thinking about drinking. And we can start to place conditions on our priceless sobriety like "I'll stay sober as long as ... "

Yes. I've actually heard people in the program say that, basically telling their Higher Power not to allow anything bad to happen in their lives - "or else."  Such thoughts totally ignore the unchangeable nature of our illness, our biochemical predisposition to abusing alcohol once it's in our systems. 

As our Big Book states:

We know that while the alcoholic keeps away from drink, as he may do for months or years, he reacts much like other men. We are equally positive that once he takes any alcohol whatever into his system, something happens, both in the bodily and mental sense, which makes it virtually impossible for him to stop. The experience of any alcoholic will abundantly confirm this. 

All of our AA's literature stresses that above point. And we'll hear it in meetings, too, in statements like: 

Once you've soaked a cucumber in vinegar long enough it changes and becomes a pickle and will never be a cucumber again. I soaked me in alcohol long enough to become a pickle. I can't go back and become a non-alcoholic again ... 

The very first time I drank I had an alcoholic blackout, so because I now know that not all alcoholics have alcoholic blackouts, but NO non-alcoholics have them, I clearly was born with my disease just waiting for me to prime the pump.

For the next twenty years of my life I kept priming it and continued to experience all the rewards for that behavior - divorce, single-parenthood, driving drunk, wrecked car, court, etc. - but like most of us I believed I could eventually learn to manage my drinking. 

I couldn't, didn't, and now know for sure there's no hope for any alcoholic to ever "learn" control over their addiction. 

Oh sure, we might experience one night at an important occasion of being able to white-knuckle our hand around only one drink that evening, but that's not control. That's an obligation to that one event. And even then, with the boss in attendance or an angry spouse eyeballing our glass - there's no guarantee we'll be able to keep it to one drink until that occasion is over. Over time, after a diet of endless defeat, we seldom bother to try.

I've seen dozens of people come to AA, get sober, make huge progress in gaining good and productive lives, and then start to grumble and gripe a bit in meetings. Life isn't perfect. Their dog died. They lost their job. Their partner left them. 

Soon, because life isn't perfect, they begin to show up  infrequently in meetings (including their home group). They then no longer showed up in meetings where they were formerly regulars. Silence follows about them for awhile. Then the dreaded AA grapevine confirms they've picked up a drink. 

The pattern is a familiar one and it always ends badly, often fatally. The lucky ones return to AA and, as those who know me have often heard me say, they never return with a story about how great it was when they were back drinking again.

But here's your good news  - once alcohol is our of our systems our decision to pick up a drink is just that, a decision, and it's one we never ever again have to make. We can, instead, hang on to our decision to remain sober.

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