My SOS One-Two-Three

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My SOS One-Two-Three

By Marty N.

Four years ago yesterday I had my last drink. Today, on the fourth anniversary of my sobriety, my wife and two boys and I went out after soccer practice to a local Mexican restaurant and celebrated with lemonades and root beers. Afterwards I cleaned my toolbox in the garage, and then read my youngest a portion of The White Seal by Kipling for bedtime. Now my wife is correcting her Oakland third graders' reading homework, and I'm in bed next to her trying to put the how and why of my sobriety down on my laptop.

I had a lot of help and support getting here. My boys, especially the oldest, helped to get me across the threshold of Kaiser to seek help, and have been enthusiastic supporters of my sobriety all along. My wife and I went through some very rocky times along around year 2 and part of 3, but we have come out on the other side. She considers my sobriety the biggest gift she could have had, and from her I hear a series of stories about other marriages where the man drinks and maybe also abuses the wife and kids, and all the problems they have, that we don't, thanks to my sobriety. She makes me feel good.

My biggest debt, though, is to SOS. SOS showed me the basic human respect of not presuming to know all my problems in advance and of not having a ready-made formula to fix me up. Instead of trying to sell me a panacea or recruit me into a cult, SOS laid back and let me find my own feet. With a cunning that it took me years to discover and to appreciate, SOS understood that the only program for recovery that works for you is the one you fashion for yourself because you really want it. SOS for me has not been a ready-made off-the-shelf treatment program, but rather a safe and rich environment in which I could devise a treatment for my own self. Safe, because I have learned in these meetings that no matter what I say and reveal about my inner hurts, no harm will come to me. Rich, because by listening to the other participants and reading the literature, I have available to me a wealth of insights, tools and methods for overcoming my enemy within, and for leading a sober life.

It probably took me six months of going to two SOS meetings a week, and going to four or five Kaiser meetings on top of it, before the coin dropped in my head and I "got" the fact that I was an alcoholic. Prior to that time I had believed that to be an alcoholic was to be a bad person, or a moral weakling; and this impression was reinforced by my peripheral acquaintance with the literature of AA, with its emphasis on "character defects" and its rituals of blame and shame. As long as this was my concept, I knew I was not an alcoholic, because I knew that I was not a bad person and that I was not a moral weakling, or lacking in will or resolution of character. What I finally got clear is that I was organically damaged, either by heredity or by acquisition, and that my body did not process alcohol the same way as normal people did. My body lacks the "stop" switch that naturally and without effort of will quenches normal people's desire to drink as their blood alcohol levels rise. That limiting circuit is absent or broken in my system. As a consequence, I can never safely drink again. Although I am liable to clean up the messes I made while drunk, like anyone else, I am as blameless for my inability to control my intake as an incontinent is for his inability to control his output. We just don't have the mechanism.

Around the time I came to this realization, I had a client who suffered from Duchenne's syndrome; he was wheelchair bound, unable to control his functions, and most of his bones stuck under his skin at odd angles. Yet, though he could barely write and could not keep his head up for long, and had at age 29 outlasted the average life expectancy of persons with his condition by more than a decade, he had a clarity of mind and a ferocity of spirit that all who knew him admired. In the brief contact we had before he succumbed, following a traffic collision, I came to see that the disability of the sober alcoholic is a feather-light cross to bear, by comparison. All that we cannot do in our lives is drink alcohol or use drugs. How many would gladly trade their disability for ours!

Once I 'got it', once I understood and accepted that I was an alcoholic, the rest came easier. Over the course of the following months, I pieced together for myself a self-treatment program that perfectly suits my individual history and situation. I would like to share it, in a few words, with others on this list, by way of passing along some of the helpful points that others passed down to me.

Number one, I try to do something every day to remind myself that I am an alcoholic and cannot drink or use, no matter what. Jim C. makes a big point of this in all his writings, and his Triumph workshop constitutes the nuclear-strength version of such an everyday denial-buster. (We also have the Journal of Sobriety for those who like to work with pens and pencils.) At first it was drinking decaf in the morning, instead of caf, that reminded me. Then I started taking B-complex vitamins to restore my depleted body chemistry, and swallowing those horse-sized pills every morning definitely jogged my brain. Moreover, the vitamins turned my urine neon-yellow, so that the reminder repeated itself throughout the day. Then I mentally associated tooth brushing with affirming my alcoholism, and that worked for a time. Lately I've been using my participation in this email list as my Daily Do. A few months ago my wife took a weight reduction class, and the instructor there, in a very similar vein, gave them a long list of healthy eating practices and told them they had to do Something Of Something ("SOS") every day. So, having an everyday ritual of affirmation, a daily denial of denial, is a very "SOS" thing to do.

Number two, I try to participate regularly and actively in SOS meetings. Fortunately our meetings are small enough where you cannot sit behind a pole and daydream. This was hard for me at first, as I was not accustomed to revealing feelings or speaking about myself in meetings, and I resisted it. Even after four years it sometimes takes me nearly the whole meeting before I can open up inside and share. One of my Kaiser counselors pointed out once that our feelings are one of the few things in life that we can change by merely talking about them, and this is true for me. If I am feeling lonely or depressed, or stressed, or ashamed, or guilty, I can unload the poison from those feelings by sharing them with the group. This helps to relieve emotional stresses that might drive me to drinking. Sometimes just saying "Hi, I'm Marty, I'm an alcoholic" in front of my friends at the SOS meeting is all that I need to do. Often it's the things that come out of my mouth unsuspected that help me change, more than the things that come into my ears. Participation in meetings also helps me regain basic social and psychological skills, stunted during years where the bottle was my best and only friend. Active participation strengthens my ability to empathize with others, and my ability to ride out and accept my own feelings without panicking and reaching for an anesthetic. In these and other ways that I am only beginning to understand, participation in SOS meetings has helped me not only to stay sober, but also to recover from the damage I did myself during my three decades of active alcoholism.

Three, I've discovered for myself that the famous Sobriety Priority is a hell of a useful way to analyze what I do in life. As Jim C. has written so many times, we prioritize sobriety as a separate issue so that we do not drink or use, no matter what. When I drank, almost everything I did had drinking connected to it as a separate issue. Now that I am sober, almost everything is related somehow to sobriety. I can view the flowchart of my life as a series of decisions, some of whose branches tend to lead toward sobriety and others toward relapse. Tiny decisions, such as whether to look at a highway beer billboard, can involve a battle between my sober self and the addict within me for control of my eye muscle. Which conduct is correct? The Sobriety Priority decides. Big decisions, such as whether or not to encourage that old flame who comes into town, set off the same battle for control of a different part of the anatomy and have to be resolved by the same principle. The Sobriety Priority is a bright line through the blooming, buzzing confusion of life. There are a few days when I find my brain doing this kind of analysis, applying the Sobriety Priority, hundreds of times. You might be amazed at the kind of problems the Sobriety Priority algorithm can analyze and solve!

Taken together, my One, Two and Three form a closely knit matrix of support for my sober life. Both my mind and my feelings are engaged. My personal program involves both my inner and my outer relations. There's something sober I do twice weekly, something sober I do daily, and something sober I can do anytime or all the time. So, as near as I can figure it out, that's how I've managed, after thirty plus years of drinking, to get sober and stay sober for four.

And now I promise to shut up and never again to post a 'share' this long, except maybe on my next anniversary, if I make it that far. Thank you all for your support along the way.

(Posted 10/2/96)

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