Says he, We
A.A.s surrender to win; we give away
to keep; we suffer to get well, and we
die to live.I am in the public
information business. I use that
phrase or designation because if I say
I am a college professor everybody
always has a tendency to run the other
way. And when they learn that I am a
specialist in English, they have looks
of--horror for fear they are going to
slip up and say ain't. I often wish I
sold shoes or insurance or fixed
automobiles or plumbed pipes. I would
have more friends.
My story is not a
great deal different from others—
except in a few specific details. All
the roads of alcoholism lead to the
same place and condition. I suppose I
have always been shy, sensitive,
fearful, envious, and resentful, which
in turn leads one to be arrogantly
independent, a defiant personality. I
believe I got a Ph.D. degree
principally because I wanted to either
outdo or defy everybody else. I have
published a great deal of scholarly
research —I think for the same
reason. Such determination, such
striving for perfection, is
undoubtedly an admirable and practical
quality to have, for a while; but when
a person mixes such a quality with
alcohol, that quality can eventually
cut him almost to pieces. At least it
did so to me. I began drinking as a
social drinker, in my early twenties.
Drinking constituted no problem for me
until well after I finished graduate
school at the age of thirty. But as
the tensions and anxieties of my life
began to mount, and the set-backs from
perfection began to increase, I
finally slipped over the line between
moderate drinking and alcoholism. No
longer would I drink a few beers or a
cocktail or two and let it go at that.
No longer did I let months or even
weeks go by without liquor. And when
drinking, I entered what I now know
was the dream-world of alcoholic
fantasy. Then for about five years of
progressively worse alcoholic
drinking, of filling my life and home
with more and more wreckage, it looked
as if I were going to ride this
toboggan of destruction to the bitter
end.
Maybe I didn’t get as bad as
some of the others. I must confess
that I never went to teach one of my
classes drunk or drinking, but I've
been awfully hung over. My pattern was
to be drunk at night, boil myself out
to creep to work in the morning, drunk
the next night, boil myself out in the
morning, drunk again the next night,
boil myself out the next morning. I
may not have drunk as much whiskey as
some, but there isn’t anybody whose
drunk any more Sal Hepatica than I
have!
Now there are all kinds of
drunks: melancholy drunks, weeping
drunks, traveling drunks, slap-happy
and stupid drunks, and a number of
other varieties. I was a
self-aggrandizing and occasionally
violent drunk. You wouldn’t think a
little fellow like me could do much
damage, but when I’m drunk I’m
pure dynamite. I'm not going into any
of the details--the University can
fire me yet!
I came to believe
actually that life was not worth
living unless I could drink. I was
utterly miserable and sometimes
desperate, living always with a
feeling of impending calamity (I knew
something was bound to “break loose”).
And to do away with such a fear, I
would try a little more drinking, with
the inevitable result —for by this
time one drink would set up in me that
irresistible urge to take another and
another until I was down or hung over
and in trouble. In the hung over stage
I would vow never to touch another
drop, and then be drunk the next
night.
I knew at least that there
had to be some changes made. I tried
to change the time and place and
amount of my drinking. I tried to
change my environment, my place of
living—like most of us who at one
time or another think that our trouble
is geography rather than whiskey. I
even entertained the idea of changing
wives. I tried to change everything
and everybody, except myself--—the
only thing I could change.
I did not
know that it was physically impossible
for me to drink moderately. I did not
know that my body's drinking machinery
had worn out, and that the parts could
not be replaced. I did not know that
just one drink made it impossible for
me to control my behavior and conduct
and my future drinking. I did not
know, in short, that I was powerless
over alcohol. My family and my friends
sensed or knew these things about me
long before I did.
Finally, as with
most of us in A.A., the crisis came. I
realized I had a drinking problem
which had to be solved. My wife and a
close friend tried to persuade; me to
contact the only member of Alcoholics
Anonymous we knew of in town. This I
refused to do. But I agreed that I
would stop drinking altogether,
maintaining stoutly and sincerely that
I could and would solve this problem
“on my own.” I would feel much
better doing it that way, I insisted.
I stayed sober for two entire weeks!
Then I pitched a lulu of a terrible
drunken affair in which I became
violently insane. I also landed in the
City Jail.
I don't know exactly what
happened on this bender, but here are
some things that did happen which I
was told about subsequently. First,
the officers who had come out to my
house did not want to take me in--but
I insisted! Also, I insisted that they
wait in the living room while I went
back to the bedroom and changed into
my best and newest suit (with socks
and tie to match), so that I would
look nice in jail! I don't remember
the ride downtown, but when I came to
the jail corridor, I didn't like the
looks of the little cage they were
shoving me into, so I took issue about
that with three officers and indulged
in some fisticuffs with all three of
them at once--each one of them twice
my size and armed with a gun and a
blackjack. Now what kind of thinking
and acting is that? If that isn’t
insanity, or absurd grandiosity, or
some sort of mental illness, what is
it? Because I yelled so loud and made
so much noise, I ended up downstairs
under the concrete in a place they
call solitary. (That's a fine place
now isn't it? for a college professor
to spend the night!)
Two days later
I was willing to try A.A., which I had
only vaguely heard of a few months
before. I called at the home of the
man who started the A.A. group in my
town, and I went humbly with him to an
A.A. meeting the following night.
As
I look back, something must have
happened to me during those two days.
Some forces must have been at work
which I do not understand. But on
those two days —between jail and
A.A.—something happen to me that had
never happened before. I repeat, I
don't know what it was. Maybe I had
made a decision ”—just a part of
Step Three (I had made lots of
promises but never a decision)--though
it seems to me that I was at the time
too confused and fogged up to make
much of one. Maybe it was the guiding
hand of God, or (as we Baptists say)
the Holy Spirit. I like to think that
it was just that, followed by my own
attempt to take the Twelve Steps to
recovery. Whatever it was, I have been
in A.A. and I have been dry ever
since. That was more than six years
ago.
A.A. does not function in a way
which people normally expect it to.
For example, instead of using our “will
power,” as everyone outside A.A.
seems to think we do, we give up our
wills to a Higher Power, place our
lives in hands —invisible hand s—stronger
than ours. Another example: If twenty
o thirty of us real drunks get away
from home and meet in a clubroom
down-town on Saturday night, the
normal expectation is that all thirty
of us will surely get roaring drunk,
but it doesn't work out that way, does
it? Or talking about whiskey and old
drinking days (one would normally
think) is sure to raise a thirst, but
it doesn't work that way either, does
it? Our program and procedures seem to
be in many ways contrary to normal
opinion.
And so, in connection with
this idea, let me pass on what I
consider the four paradoxes of how
A.A. works. (A paradox, you probably
already know, is a statement which is
seemingly self-contradictory; a
statement which appears to be false,
but which, upon careful examination,
in certain instances proves to be
true.)
- We SURRENDER TO WIN.
On the face of it, surrendering
certainly does not seem like
winning. But it is in A.A. Only
after we have come to the end of
our rope, hit a stone wall in some
aspect of our lives beyond which we
can go no further; only when we hit
“bottom” in despair and
surrender, can we accomplish
sobriety which we could never
accomplish before. We must, and we
do, surrender in order to win.
- We GIVE AWAY TO KEEP.
That seems absurd and untrue. How
can you keep anything if you give
it away? Rut in order to keep
whatever it is we get in A.A., we
must go about giving it away to
others, for no fees or rewards of
any kind. When we cannot afford to
give away what we have received so
freely in A.A., we had better get
ready for our next “drunk.” It
will happen every time. We’ve got
to continue to give it away in
order to keep it.
- We SUFFER TO GET WELL.
There is no way to escape the
terrible suffering of remorse and
regret and shame and embarrassment
which starts us on the road to
getting well from our affliction.
There is no new way to shake out a
hangover. It's painful. And for us,
necessarily so. I told this to a
friend of mine as he sat weaving to
and from on the side of the bed, in
terrible shape, about to die for
some paraldehyde. I said, “Lost
John”-that’s his nickname-“Lost
John, you know you’re going to
have to do a certain amount of
shaking sooner or later.” “Well,”
he said, “for God’s sake let’s
make it later!” We suffer to get
well.
- We DIE TO LIVE.
That is a beautiful paradox
straight out of the Biblical idea
of being “born again” or “losing
one's life to find it. When we work
at our Twelve Steps, the old life
of guzzling and fuzzy thinking, and
all that goes with it, gradually
dies, and we acquire a different
and a better way of life. As our
shortcomings are removed, one life
of us dies, and another life of us
lives. We in A.A. die to live.
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