Alcohol Was My Solution

Some of the characteristics that helped me succeed were connected to the same internal machinery that could make life difficult. Drive could become obsession. Attention to detail could become control. The question I never thought to ask was: What is driving this?

For years, achievement answered the noise briefly. A deal. A win. Recognition. Money. Being needed. Then the feeling faded and I needed another one. More. That word appears quite a lot in addiction.

More proof. Surely eventually there would be enough. There never was. This is one reason addiction can hide so successfully in plain sight. I did not look like the picture I had in my head of an alcoholic. You know the picture. Park bench. Bottle in a brown paper bag. Life visibly destroyed. I had businesses. A family. Responsibilities. People working for me. I could function. Often very well. So whenever the possibility that I might have a serious drinking problem wandered into view, I could produce an impressive bundle of evidence for the defence. Look at everything I am doing. Look at everything I have built. Alcoholics cannot do this.

Except, of course, they can.

What eventually mattered was not suddenly adopting somebody else's beliefs. It was discovering that my own thinking had become an unreliable place from which to run absolutely everything. I had spent years trying to think my way out of a problem rooted partly in the way I thought. That was not going brilliantly.

The Twelve Steps eventually gave me a way of looking at that. Not just the drinking. Me. My fear. My resentment. My ego. My dishonesty. My need to control. My need to be right. My effect on other people. And eventually, what I could do differently. There are twelve Steps because stop drinking is not, by itself, a complete recovery programme. That distinction changed everything for me.

It also helped me understand something families understandably find almost impossible to comprehend. How can somebody love their children and still drink? How can somebody see the damage and continue? How can an intelligent person behave so irrationally? I used to think those questions proved there must be something fundamentally wrong with my love, my intelligence or my character.

Recovery gave me a more uncomfortable and ultimately more useful answer. The love could be real. And the thinking could still be badly wrong.

The love was real. The judgement was broken.