Surrender
By: Kate Smith
Tags: Addiction Recovery, Alcohol Recovery, Alcoholism, Alcohol Addiction

Crossing the threshold from active addiction to recovery

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

In my 30 year drinking career I went through the revolving door from drinking to abstinence and back again more times than I can count. I’ve had hundreds of ‘Day 1s’ when I swore off alcohol, vowed that I would never drink again, cried and made promises to myself and to others but (so far) this Day 1 has stuck. This time I seem to have crossed the threshold and been able to shut the door of active addiction firmly behind me.

But the door is not locked and nor can it be. Just as I can only say that I am recovering, not ‘recovered’, I cannot assume that my last Day 1 or my last ‘rock bottom’ is behind me. Whether I want her or not, Addict Kate is coming along for the ride. I cannot dump her at the side of the road like a piece of unwanted baggage, but I can work to prevent her from ever getting into the driving seat again. This means I need to see her, listen to her and accept her as a companion on this journey. If Addict Kate gets ignored, she gets antsey and from there, things can escalate quickly.

On my last Day 1, I woke up with a body and mind smashed by a 36 hour bender, having drunk enough alcohol to likely kill someone who has never developed tolerance for the toxin. Most people know what a hangover feels like, but only addicts know the torment of having fallen back into the coils of addiction. It’s a toxic (literally) quicksand of self-hatred, remorse, self-pity, confusion, fear and desperation.

I probably knew only two things clearly at that point. The first was that I didn’t want to live like this anymore. I had to find a way off the wheel, or it was going to kill me. This was a familiar feeling of utter dread. I had said as much at my very first AA meeting back in the early 2000s and suicidal thoughts had recurred at various times through the subsequent months and years, always connected to drinking. The links between mental illness, suicide and alcohol addiction are well known. A recent Australian study* states that alcohol use is one of the strongest predictors of suicidal thoughts and behaviours. Alcohol is implicated in over a third of suicide deaths. Leaving aside the risk of a suicidal act, active addiction is a kind of slow burning death wish; whether you realise it or not, you are in the process of snuffing yourself out.

The second was knowing that I did not have the power to get off the wheel by myself, that I needed help. It’s almost laughable now how obvious this had been for such a long time. My many half-filled journals were a repetitive litany of benders followed by pages and pages of promises, ’insights’, inspirational quotes and vows to be alcohol free usually written in bold and surrounded by a heavy black border. Most of these journals came to sudden halt on Day 9, or Day 23, or Day whenever my addict mind managed to persuade me that despite my best efforts, and all my promises, now was a really good time to have a drink again.

Addict Kate would say that even if now wasn’t a really good time to have a drink, then sooner or later I was going to drink again, so it might as well be now, and ‘fuck it’ why not stop struggling, have a drink, and deal with the consequences later and after all it’s Friday, you’ve worked hard all week, you’ve been off the booze for ages, and you deserve it. Addict Kate can always find a good reason to have a drink and she says ‘you must be mistaking me for someone who gives a shit’ to any talk of consequences.

I did not find recovery through AA and for a time, I was actively anti AA (more on that later). Nonetheless, although I did not do so consciously at the time, I had to take the first two of the 12 steps to start on the path to recovery:

1. To admit that I was powerless over alcohol — that my life had become unmanageable

2. To believe that (only) a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

I railed against these for years. I refused to see myself as powerless; as a feminist, I saw myself as powerful. My life had not become unmanageable, I managed to succeed in my career, to make a life on the other side of the world, to buy a house, to run a business, maintain relationships, climb mountains, even to get married. I was not insane, I just had a drinking problem and what or who was this power greater than myself? It better not be God, because as a recovering Catholic, I rejected the idea of God.

I was deluding myself.

It was obvious that I was powerless over alcohol. Once I started to drink, I did not know where it would take me, when I would stop or what I might do in the meantime that would hurt myself or others. I had a wafer thin veneer of control. In the latter stages of my drinking, once I had left my ad agency job, most of my drinking happened when I was at home, alone. I only occasionally got drunk when I was out socially, or when friends came round, but I virtually always got drunk afterwards. The drinking afterwards was ‘a reward’ for having been ‘good’. I became good at planning when I would drink or at least when I would start to drink, and particularly at coralling my drinking away from my work, but I was almost never able to control when I would stop.

AA will tell you that alcoholism is a progressive disease — always getting worse, never getting better. Measured by volume and frequency, the last 10 years of my drinking were ‘better’ than the previous 20. The main reason was that I was no longer living alone. The man I love was a daily witness to my drinking, and I knew that my drinking frightened and hurt him. But although the guilt slowed me down, it couldn’t stop me. When I drank, my drinking was as bad as it had ever been. I would drink until I fell asleep, or passed out. I would sometimes wake up in the morning (often on the sofa) and drink more. I would drink until either there was no booze left, and no way to get more, or until I was physically unable to do so, or until some switch in my brain finally said ‘enough’. It was a terrifying, uncontrolled rollercoaster over which I had zero control.

It’s perfectly logical to ask, why then I would pick up a drink in the first place. What I’ve learned in recovery is that the impulse to drink, even the decision to drink, started way before I actually picked up a wine glass. Addicts are propelled not by a desire for pleasure but by a compulsion which is neuro chemically based. “Studies consistently report alcohol-related neuroadaptive changes … the brain regions affected include the reward system, the stress system and the prefrontal regulatory system”*. Prolonged alcohol use hijacks and rewires critical pathways in addicts’ brains in ways that make it hard, sometimes impossible, to stop drinking, and stay stopped.

My life had not become completely unmanageable but it was hard and stressful to manage and I was haunted by the fear that, next time, some drunken nudge would totter the whole shaky structure and everything would spiral out of control. I was like the Wizard of Oz, hiding in his little cubicle frantically trying to project a facsimile of a normal life.

I never became a daily drinker but I thought about drinking constantly — whether I could drink, when I could drink, how I could justify drinking, how much I should buy, how I could try to hide how much I was drinking, where I could hide the bottles and on and on. It was exhausting. When I emerged from a bender, like John Cusack being spat out on the New Jersey Turnpike in ‘Being John Malkovich’, I would worry about what I may have done while I was drunk — who did I text or call and what did I say, what kinds of inappropriate social media posts may I have made, what appointments did I miss, what kind of mess had I made that I needed to clear up. I would scrub my teeth, gargle mouthwash, eat gazillions of breath mints, put on make up and pretend that everything was fine while trying not to be overwhelmed by waves of self-loathing, fear and shame.

When drunk, I did things that I would never contemplate doing while sober. I don’t think I will ever fully rid myself of the shame I feel about some of these. When I am in my ‘right mind’, drinking and driving is something I would never do but I did often while drunk. I remember driving down Marylebone High Street sometime back in the early 90s with one eye closed because I was seeing double. When my flat mate asked me the following morning how I had managed to get home, I looked blearily out the window of my flat to see my car parked up on the pavement at a 45 degree angle. When I drank, I was literally not in my right mind.

Somehow I managed to avoid getting a DUI until 2006. I was driving drunk back to my home in Seatoun from the supermarket, late at night, having gone to buy more booze. Less than a kilometre from home I came across a car that had been driven into a fence. The police were on the scene and a young officer came across when I stopped. I wound the window down, and he smelt the alcohol on my breath. I ended up in court, was convicted and lost my licence. I got off lightly. It is sheer luck that I never hurt or killed anyone, I so easily could have done.

The insanity of all this is painfully clear. Drinking had become a source of torment to me, and yet I could not stop.

Gabor Maté defines addiction as: ‘any behaviour that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in and therefore craves, but suffers negative consequences in the long-term and can’t give up.’ People who have little experience or knowledge of addiction can tend to think that addicts are self indulgent pleasure seekers who lack self-discipline, that we could stop if only we wanted to badly enough.

But no one chooses to become an addict, and I have yet to meet anyone who enjoys their addiction. By the end, the feeling of pleasure was momentary at best, and the feelings of anguish were permanent, only temporarily overridden when Addict Kate would start campaigning for the next binge.