Intellectual Roadblock

WHEN I FIRST CAME into Alcoholics Anonymous, I was confused to hear speakers refer to alcoholism as a disease.

My whole background offered only one summary for uncontrolled drinking. And that was the moral conclusion that drunkenness was a sin of gluttony. A thousand things could explain why I got drunk, but nothing could excuse it.

I think that the therapy offered in AA was the clue to the little I know about alcoholism as a disease.

The first thing told to me was that it is the first drink that makes me drunk. Don’t take the first drink and the physical side of the problem will be taken care of, they said.

Then I was told to go to a lot of meetings. The constant presence at meetings practically anesthetized my thinking about that first drink. The speakers at the various AA groups so filled my mind with nonalcoholic thoughts that my mind became sober.

Finally, I was told to ask God in the morning to give me the help not to take that first drink for that day. And in the evening, the prescription said, I should thank Him for the help given. And this pattern, when accepted, became a sort of gyroscope, for me, keeping my life aimed in the right direction.

Because I had a fine university training, it took me a long time to understand the program. A well developed frontal lobe of the brain can be a frightful roadblock on the pathway to sobriety.

But keeping away from that first drink, meetings every night, and the daily prayer assignment, honestly fulfilled, led me to an understanding of the “unprofessional”–but sound–therapy in AA.

I was told to drink liquids often. (I only had to be sure there was no alcohol in the liquids.) I was told to check the body-building tonics that friends might give me. I needed “iron” in my blood, but the bottle’s promising label might indicate I was getting a percentage of alcohol that would turn “easier living” into a compelling drinking bout. “Easy does it” for me became a formula for physical well-being as well as mental equilibrium. And “one day at a time” took most of the pressure off my nerves.

The meetings crowded my mind with good thoughts. And the–at times caustic–“evaluation” of my ideas by fellow AA members deflated my ego without producing a spiritless flat tire. The big inventory of Step Four, here I made a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself, and the little inventory of Step Ten, where I continued to take personal inventory and when I was wrong promptly admitted it–established honest thinking and kept it honest.

And the untold joys of Step Eleven, which rejuvenates the drunk, without making him childish, have never ceased. For when I sought through prayer and meditation to improve my conscious contact with God as I understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for me and the power to carry that out, I found my scattered life being drawn together by an invisible thread, and the personality–which had been not only split, but fractured–was made one again.

I fell on my knees and in that humiliating fall I found the strength not merely to rise again, but to walk with my head up, up toward Him who was my strength.

And the confusion of my mind about the disease of alcoholism began to clarify into an understanding of this important truth: total intellectual admission that I was powerless over alcohol was the mental surrender necessary for victory over the insane thinking that I could take that first drink.

Whatever medical men may tell us about the physical condition of an alcoholic’s body that makes it allergic to alcohol, I know now that I will never have difficulty with alcohol unless I drink it.

And the moral deterioration (which is the third product of alcoholism) was arrested because. in carrying the message, I had no authoritative script or staff of office, but only my life–all of it–to make it meaningful and persuasive.

The disease of alcoholism is the strangest of diseases, for where is there another for which the patient makes amends in order to be well?

The mental obsession, and the physical allergy followed by spiritual deterioration, are clearly evident to me in this disease.

I had a physical and moral condition that has been solved by AA. Speaking for myself, were I ever to drink again I would have a moral problem with a physical condition.

When doctors come up with the pathology of alcoholism we will be better informed, but hardly more enlightened than we now are through AA.