If You Suspect You Might Have A Drinking Problem (An Open Letter)

I have written this to describe my experiences of the past 14 months as I have worked to resolve my drinking problem. Everyone is different and I do not propose to be an expert on this topic, but I have my own personal experience and I am sharing it in the hope that it might help someone else to solve this problem and change their life.

I have now been sober for 14 months without a drop of alcohol. This is not a long time as compared to over 25 years of heavy drinking, but I also know something else: I am totally confident that I will never drink again.

In that 14 months I have made it through two football tailgating seasons, over a hundred business lunches and dinners, numerous trips to Germany where beer flows like water, parties, picnics, Super Bowls, a Caribbean cruise, several family vacations, ups and down in life, etc. All things that I thought “required” alcohol.

Fortunately, I did not have some event that caused me to hit “rock bottom”. (I could have had many rock bottoms but I was lucky). Some people need to lose their job, lose their family, kill or seriously injure someone in a car accident, end up in prison, or many other horrible things that alcohol (or drugs) can cause in order to gather the will to quit. Some people think that “bottom” is the only thing that can make a drinker quit for good. I have met many people who proved to me that this is false, you can make such a decision without going through the horrors. But in some ways it is tougher to take the first step.

In every other way, it is much easier to skip the “rock bottom” step and I hope that this letter helps at least one other person to avoid the lost job, lost marriage or prison route to sobriety.

Last October, I made a firm decision to quit and I followed through on that commitment. But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit that I had similarly tried to control my drinking or quit at least 100 times before.

Why was I able to quit this time as compared with the previous 100 attempts? This is a very good question. The only answer I have come up with as to is that this time I was really ready to quit for myself alone. I was truly 100% sick and tired of the way alcohol affected me and I wanted a different life. All the other times I was, in some way, not really ready to control my drinking. The bottle was still in charge. I tried many tactics: I’d only drink on weekends, only drink after 5pm, only drink at parties (almost anything can become a party in such a plan), only drink beer, only drink wine, only drink hard liquor, only drink things I didn’t like the taste of (I know it sounds nuts but I was nuts), only drink every other week, quit for a day, quit for a weekend, quit for a week, quit for “this vacation or event”. I tried every way to quit in the world to stop drinking except the way that eventually worked for me.

If you are reading this and you know someone that has a drinking problem and you want to help them, you must understand that you are at a severe disadvantage. This is a condition of the mind more than a condition of the body and it is nearly impossible to bring another person to a mental place where they can admit that alcohol is causing more pain in their life than the pleasure it brings. Because a drinker can hardly imagine life without alcohol. It is with us at many points of our thinking and decision making process. We make plans around alcohol and drinking, not all of the time but enough.

If this does not sound like you at this point but you still think you might have a problem, I am not going to tell you that you are OK with your drinking, I will only say that you don’t have the same problem that I was facing so my experience may be of little value to you. I do know people who can go for long periods with nothing at all, then they “binge” and drink to pass out. This is obviously a problem, but not the problem that I have experience with. For 25 years I drank to excess. I often did not get "drunk" but I was always under the influence. For many of those years I drank daily, sometimes starting at 6am and going till 2am the next night. I am not proud of this but it is the truth.

As a problem drinker, you probably associate most of the “fun” you have in life with alcohol in some portion and are worried that without alcohol you will become a dull, bored person with no joy in life. You probably think that there are some things where you will always have to drink to enjoy. I know I worried about that, and I can assure you it is false. You will enjoy life more when you quit, at least that has been my experience. Even that Caribbean cruise and college football tailgating.

I first started drinking in High School. I don’t feel that it is necessary to recount the whole story but I drank to blackout on a number of incidences. Other times I just got really drunk and did stupid things that put my life at risk. I drove many times when I had no business on the road, and it would not have taken much to have had a series of events happen that would have changed my life for the worse. In college, I made good grades at a top Engineering school, while drinking heavily. It was a joke that I would study with a bottle of Jim Beam next to my desk.

As I got into the business world, and specifically into sales, drinking is a daily part of business life. At least that’s what a drinker thinks. And for people who do not have a problem controlling it, drinking is a wonderful part of life. The occasional party or business dinner and a few social drinks to move the business forward are great. But I was never able to do that—for me it was five, ten, fifteen drinks. Into the late hours, with not enough sleep, feeling like crap the next morning when I should have been at my best. Then repeating the same behavior each night. And I was very successful, and I thought drinking was part of the success.

I rationalized that with my talent, the drinking was part of who I am, and that even at 50% I was still more capable than most others so it wasn’t necessary to control myself.

I know this is getting long so I’ll get to the point: One Friday last October I was driving down the road. I hadn’t had a drink in two days and was in one of my “quit drinking the rest of the week” attempts. Rush Limbaugh announced that he was going to a Rehab Center for his drug addiction to resolve his problem. This for some reason got through to me. I called two people that I am close with and told them that I was not going to drink one drop of alcohol until Rush came out of treatment. (Telling these people I had made this decision helped me).

I told myself that after thirty days, I would decide whether I would drink again in a more controlled manner or stop completely. I did not have the luxury of taking the time off from work to enter treatment, but since Rush was going in, he was in there for both of us.

I did not attend AA (although I will talk about AA later) but I was clearly at the first step of their program. It is a very simple concept:

I admitted that I had a drinking problem and that I wanted to do something about it. I can tell you that if you are really at that point then you can fix yourself. If you are not at that step, then there is nothing that anyone can do to help you and I hope that you stay alive, and intact until you reach that point.

After about a week of sobriety, I stopped thinking about alcohol very much. I threw myself into work and tried to start losing weight as well. By the second week I made the decision: “I WILL NEVER DRINK AGAIN” and I wrote that in my journal. I recognized that a bottle of booze is an inanimate object that is simply poison to me and that it cannot force itself into my body. I have the control over whether I use my arms to bring the poison to my lips. And I choose not to allow that to happen ever again.

I have noticed that there is an inner “voice” that I have (he stays fairly silent now) that in the beginning used to put thoughts in my mind like: “surely you can just have one, you’ve been good”, “it’s a beautiful Fall Day, surely you could just do the social drink”, “you’re in the Caribbean for Gods’ sakes, shouldn’t you at least have one Margarita to celebrate your sobriety”. When my mind lets the inner voice talk, I quickly reassert control and think about the serenity that I have found since I quit drinking.

I need to stop writing now, the family is waking up, but I will write another letter tomorrow morning which describes these 14 months and what other tactics I have used in my sobriety.

I hope that this helps at least one other soul out there. Feel free to post questions or suggestions.

Chapter 2. If You Suspect You Might Have a Drinking Problem

As I said previously, I am sharing it in the hope that it might help someone else to solve this problem and change their life. There is also a another reason for sharing my experience, it is my way of giving back some small part of what has been given to me by others. If I can help one person to find the peace that I have found by helping them to explore their addiction, it will have served its purpose. And writing this is a way to help crystallize my own thinking on what has worked for me, and what has not.

If you are out there and worried about your drinking, the first piece of advice I gave yesterday was to make a decision to stop drinking for at least a long enough time to make a final decision about whether to quit for good. At this point you only need to admit to yourself that alcohol is something that you cannot manage as well as you would like, and that you are going to do something about it.

I will again make the disclaimer that this is MY experience, and I do not have so much pride as to think that I have one way that will work and that all others ways are wrong. Now back to our story, where I had made the decision to quit and I was in the first 30 days of sobriety (Rush was still in his rehab center).

Nothing much eventful happened through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I was spending a lot of time reading about goal setting and self improvement, and I was a different person through those holidays. I actually did not have any urges to drink and it was a wonderful season.

Near the end of the year, I was talking with a friend who I knew from past experience was in AA. He knew I had quit drinking and he asked me whether I had been to an AA meeting. I told him that I hadn’t and that I didn’t really feel like it would do anything for me. He told me that I should keep an open mind about it and that I might find value there.

He told me something that stuck with me. He said that I appeared to be doing well in my sobriety but that I was not out of the woods and that I would never be 100% safe. He told me that I needed to build up a layer of resistance around myself that was so thick that the worst possible scenario of events would not cause me to resort to drinking. My paper-thin resolve was not going to be enough to see me through this problem.

I disagreed with him somewhat, because as an alcoholic we tend to know everything, and be right about everything, but I did make a goal for myself after the new year to attend an AA meeting.

So, on January 6, I went to my first AA meeting at a place near my house. It was pleasant enough and the people at that meeting were friendly. For the first time, I was able to tell my story to a group of people who understood exactly where I was coming from. It was stunning that you could be so open and free with things that you would never tell another living soul, and yet here you are in a room full of strangers and you spill out part of what is inside you. And there are others there that nod their heads, and hug you and give you encouragement because they have been there before you.

I made a deal with myself that I would go to at least 30 meetings over the next 90 days and see what I could learn. I live near Atlanta, so I decided to go to one of the main AA places, and I found a group of people that are from all walks of life, on a given day 50-100 of them. This became my home group and I have been to a lot of meetings.

I would strongly urge any person who feels they have a problem with drinking to attend an AA meeting in their area. There are many types of meetings, in my experience there is a short reading for the day from one of the AA books, and then you just go around the table and share your thoughts on that topic. If you don’t feel like talking, you pass, simple as that. In the group that I am in, there are people there who have been coming for twenty-five years or more and they have seen it all.

There are many things that I received from the people I met at AA.

First, and most important to me, I lost a sense of loneliness that I had always carried but not known that I was carrying. Let me explain. This is not the kind of loneliness that comes from being alone. I always had people around me, and I was not alone physically. I was alone in my problem. I did not realize fully that my drinking problem is a “normal” thing for millions of people, and that I was able to grow from their experiences as well as my own. I did not need to lose my family to hear that story repeatedly. I did not need to lose my job, I could hear others explain that pain to me from all walks of life. I did not need to go to prison—I talked with people who are just out of prison.

I also talked to people who were just like me, in that they did not hit a hard “bottom”. This is both a curse and a blessing because some will say that you need that terrible pain seared in you to keep you from thinking you have been “cured”. So, the first thing I got from AA was the knowledge that I am not a freak, that I have a problem shared by many, and that everything that I have done wrong isn’t close to as bad as it could get if I start drinking again.

Just hearing the emotional stories of people who had quit, and who are now coming back to AA and admitting that they had started drinking again is enough for me to build my armor against a relapse. I learned that one can learn through the experiences of others as it pertains to alcohol, and there is intense value in doing so.

The second main value that I got from AA is spiritual growth. I had not given any real thought in over twenty five years to God, and my relationship to him. The AA program is built upon the concept of a Power greater than ourselves who helps us with our problem. I have always believed in a Creator and so this part I was OK with.

Now let me say right now that, at least at the AA meetings I attended, there is no one going around checking up on people and keeping tabs on what step you are on, and how well you are doing. In that respect, this is a self-paced program, you move at your own speed, you pick out what works for you and you leave the rest for later. That was my approach. I did not dismiss anything out of hand as incorrect-- I just looked for ways to apply what they were saying to what I believed.

It is time for me to do some other things this morning (I think I will go to an AA meeting) so I’ll close for know. Sometime soon, I’ll write the next part of this. Thanks for reading this far…

RobFromGa

Note: Someone asked about Non Alcoholic beers. I stayed away from them for the first six months, but then I saw President Bush drinking one on his campaign plane, so I figured what the heck. In the past eight months, I have had probably four occasions that I have drank three or four of them and it has not been a problem for me so far. I have not brought them home by stocking the fridge with NA beers and chugging a twelve pack every night. I also do not go to bars and drink them while everyone else gets plastered, that would be tough to handle for me. But if I am in a setting where a few NA beers are appropriate, I drink them and I don’t think it has harmed me. Your mileage may vary.

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