Fixing how I felt

AT a meeting I attended recently, this question, “What makes an alcoholic?” was put forward as a suggested topic for discussion. At first, I silently came up with a ‘smart’ remark along the lines of, “Drinking a lot.” As the meeting progressed, and people shared more valuable insights than the answer I had initially come up with, I began to reflect more thoughtfully on the question posed. What does distinguish an alcoholic from a normal, or even a heavy drinker? I don't believe that it is simply the drinking, either the quantity or the frequency. The Big Book makes it clear that this is just a symptom of a deeper, underlying malaise; “Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.” (BB p.64).

Perhaps there are as many views on this question as there are people in AA. For myself, I think that what makes me an alcoholic is that I turned to alcohol to serve a purpose it never could and was never intended to. All my life I have keenly felt an emptiness, an incompleteness, a sense of insecurity that just nagged away at me from the inside and would not go away. In my younger years I was not aware of this in a way I could articulate, even to myself – and if I could have done, I certainly would not have admitted it to anyone else. But the fact was that I just couldn't stand the way I felt and had to find a way to fix it. I tried various methods to address this unpleasant feeling - aiming for success in any number of endeavours, seeking praise and recognition, money, relationships, and on and on. None of them worked, at least certainly not for long, and I began to become quite disillusioned with life.

Then I discovered alcohol, and all the stars finally lined up. At last, this is what I had been looking for all along. That empty, incomplete feeling was finally fixed. Or so it seemed. Looking back now, I believe that the effect of alcohol was such as to obliterate, rather than fix, that empty feeling but at the time I wasn't about to split hairs like that. I just wanted more alcohol. Was it any surprise that I returned again and again to something that seemed to work such wonders? And why was it, when I first came to AA admitting that I had a problem with alcohol now, that when confronted with the idea of giving it up entirely for the rest of my life, my response was, “You can't be serious!”

Thankfully AA had what I really needed. The letter, which Bill W received from Carl Jung, explains my dilemma this way, “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.” (The Language of the Heart p.280) Perhaps the alcoholic's restless search isn't so far off base after all. We just chose the wrong Higher Power.

STEVEN, Buxton