Alcoholism

What made my childhood much easier was the fact that I had grandparents nearby who did not seem to struggle with alcoholism or poverty or depression. They were good people who seemed to rise above all the stupidity we are capable of. In fact they helped my mother make ends meet on a few occasions, and they always seemed to come to the rescue when we were in a jam. I felt more often than not that my grandparents were like my real parents, and my mother was like some big crazy sister who loved me a lot but was still trying to figure things out.

And from a young age, the lesson they kept quietly teaching me was that alcoholism was a demon in our family. It ran in our blood, and had ruined cousins, uncles and sisters. And the best way to avoid this fate was not to start at all.

And for my part I promised myself that I would never drink, or smoke, or do drugs.

And I never did.

A lot of people may not believe me, but I have never so much as sipped a beer, or taken a drag from a cigarette. And there is my problem. Everyone who knows me knows that I don’t drink, and I feel like I’ve put myself in this box where I will never drink.

This was fine for my early 20s, and in some ways I felt superior for not having blown hundreds of dollars at the bars, or woken up with hangovers, or been so drunk I couldn’t remember what happened to me. I have always been in control of my life, and that is something I take pride in.

But I also feel like there is this whole side to life that I may be missing out on, and that maybe I should relax these rules I’ve created for myself. I feel that a lot of people can’t relate to the fact I don’t drink, and I also would sometimes really like to be able to have a beer with my friends and be their equal, and not this always-sober outsider. A few weeks ago at a champagne brunch with friendly strangers who didn’t know I don’t drink, the waiter poured me a glass of champagne, and when they toasted I held it up and looked at it for a long time before I realized my wife was staring at me.

What to do?

Dear What to Do,

Testing yourself for alcoholism is like testing yourself for flammability. You’re probably not. But what if you are?

“Given the fact that alcohol-dependence seems highly heritable,” why take the risk?

Why not instead ask what needs alcohol might satisfy, and then find other ways to satisfy those same needs? Why not seek safe, life-enhancing alternatives to drinking? Why not read Abraham Maslow and design your life around the quest for peak experiences?

We raise our glasses and drink ceremonially to sanctify some event or passage. We all drink from the same bottle. By imbibing the same drink, we are joined; it is a kind of sacrament. You can mime the gestures but something pulls you to fully engage. Of course it does. This is not just about getting a little champagne in your mouth. It is a powerful ritual.

My suggestion is to find even better ways, more direct, honest and compelling ways to have this same ritual bonding and expression of shared esteem and purpose. I suggest you make this a lifelong pursuit. Make it a way of undoing for good the perhaps multigenerational history of alcoholism in your family.

This way, if those who dispute the role of genes in alcoholism are correct, and behavioral factors are more important, then you will still be doing something to eradicate certain behaviors that were leading to case after case of alcoholism. You will be finding something that members of your family have a particular need for, and satisfying that need.

Look for something that seems cool but not too cool, something you’ve always wanted to do, something you’re drawn to, that’s maybe a little outside your normal range but not totally kooky and weird.

For instance, it may be possible to participate in the ecstatic communality of a sweat lodge. I don’t know. Maybe a sweat lodge would be too weird for you. I don’t know how much facial hair you have, or what your body mass index is. I’m just saying, identify the underlying principle and then find something that suits your social tastes.

That there are things wrong in the world, that there are things so awful in this world that knowledge of them drives us to want to blot them out of consciousness. Read today’s piece by Noam Chomsky, for instance, for a reminder of how thinly “normal American life” veils our history of brutal atrocities.

How are you supposed to think about these things and not feel as though you are going mad? How are you supposed to have a conscience and not feel trapped by history? How are you to take all this in, as a young person? How to reconcile knowledge of evil done in one’s name with the innocent desire to believe in one’s country, to identify with one’s countrymen, to feel strong and patriotic and confident about the future?

These, too, are legitimate questions. So, my friend, I urge you to take seriously the genetic and environmental risk factors for alcoholism, and actively seek ways to have ecstatic experiences in this insane world without killing yourself. Adopt adaptive behaviors that don’t make things worse.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

I do want to marry and have children. Thus I’ve spent a fair amount of time on self-reflection, either on my own, in a therapist’s office, or on the phone with my sister. I’ve spent several years sifting through the finer details of my relationship with my father — yep, he’s emotionally distant and critical, has an on/off problem with alcohol, you know the drill. So now, I have all this knowledge about me, about my relationship with my father, about why I play the role that I do in my relationships, etc., etc. I’m grateful for this knowledge. However, I want this knowledge to do something for me, because, frankly, I’m really starting to bore myself.

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.

Mary dropped out of college, and subsequently led an alternative, tree-hugging kind of lifestyles. She smokes prodigious amounts of pot and is an alcoholic. She is married to a man, “Mike,” who I think of as a real brother, but he drinks a lot, too (although he does not smoke weed). They seem to have a master/slave type dynamic. Mary would cut her arm off for him — and for me, for that matter. He often is irritable with her. And it’s hard for me to not be, as she is, well, almost childlike and, frankly, boring to talk to after she’s swilled several beers and gotten good and stoned, which is every night. Literally, she talks about yard work, what she ate for lunch, what mundane things she’s going to do or did do, and so on. She isn’t into reading, seems to have almost no curiosity about the world. I often don’t know what to talk about with her so I find myself sitting in stupefied silence while she babbles on. To compound matters, I am renting a small studio apartment from the two of them, as I can’t afford anything better, and if I can’t make rent, they let it slide.

Even worse, my sister runs a landscape maintenance business and I have been working as her assistant about once a week as I struggle to launch a translation business (takes a lot to reinvent myself in this new profession and this also is very discouraging — to be mowing lawns after struggling so hard to attain that damned doctorate). In my first year here, when I was drinking heavily myself, I often felt suicidal, but what stopped me was the pain that would inflict on my mother, and also on Mary. I have, thankfully, pulled out of that dark place and am now “merely” depressed. I miss the identity my former profession gave me, and I hate Mary’s neediness. I had to really work to create some personal space for myself — Mary and her husband would love me to hang with them virtually every night as they are largely bored with each other. Mary makes noises about cutting back on drinking. The pot is something I don’t see her ever giving up. I doubt if she’ll go very far with the cutting back on drinking because it’s what she and Mike do. He even distills whiskey. And he’s big and can drink without getting as drunk as Mary, who is slender and pot-addled, as well.

I think I could deal with all this, though, if I had a job that provided me community. I miss teaching. I miss being independent. I am not a gifted technical translator thus far and have tried to get work at the local community college and in various staff positions at the local university. I’ve tried for several office jobs and nonprofit jobs. I think my three postgraduate degrees and my age make me unemployable in this economically distressed area. I feel like I have no identity of my own, and that I am living in some kind of nightmarish limbo. Most of all, this situation with my sister oppresses me. I never realized how much socialization I used to get from my work. I am, in fact, a social person, outgoing and personable. But without going to bars and drinking, I don’t know how to get that fix and so now I spend a lot of time alone, and while I like my own company I feel like part of me is withering. Yes, I am tutoring on a volunteer basis for the community college that won’t hire me, and I’m working out at the local recreation center. These help, but I don’t have friends of my own. I never thought I would be in this situation. I never thought I would find it so hard to branch out.

I guess what I’m asking for is how to deal with this? I halfheartedly fantasize about moving to China and Korea and teaching English as a second language, not because I want to teach English as a second language (which I did for a couple of years way back in my globe-wandering days). I would miss my two cats, and I’d feel bad for deserting my mother and Mary, who are both so thrilled that I moved back here, but that’s about it (not that that’s a small thing). But I miss teaching, I miss having colleagues and a professional identity and a life of my own that has nothing to do with my family. I could also try to find something of a writing/editing nature in a bigger town — Portland or Seattle. I also think, well, if I could be successful at this translation gig, then that might be enough — especially if I could attend professional conferences now and then.  In short, I don’t know what to do about my current lot in life.

Floundering

Dear Floundering,

It sounds like you are experiencing depression and a kind of “social death” as a result of your unemployment and return to the family. So your life task now is to regain your social life, to locate, in this temporary wasteland, people among whom you can again exist vividly. You need people who can actually see who you are. Since you are largely about ideas and knowledge, you must be around people who can see those ideas and that knowledge. The way you accomplished that in the past was to have a job, but you may have to find other ways to accomplish it now. That is OK. Many people are having to do this. Our culture is being rearranged in certain fundamental ways. There will be much support for this, as millions like you rearrange themselves culturally and geographically. We will see in the years to come a new definition of “job” as we find new ways to acquire necessities and also new ways, outside of “jobs,” to define ourselves socially and “be seen for who we are.”

Here is the bottom line: The people around you now do not see you. You have become invisible. That is the source of your anguish. It is also your existential condition, but we will get to that. For now, it is vital to note that your family cannot see you. Your twin cannot see you. You do not exist in their eyes. What they see when they look at you is something of their own creation.

Deprived of your social identity by unemployment, exiled from a place where you had standing, you have returned to the condition of childhood and its murky, undifferentiated selfhood.

You have disappeared.

It’s weird, isn’t it? We return to the family, thinking we will be seen, but we are not seen. Rather, we disappear.

I must say, I think part of the reason we resort to alcohol and drugs in such situations is that the threat of nonexistence causes us to panic. Ideally, we ought to understand that this panic is merely the recognition of our essential condition. We need not panic. We are merely being brought back to reality — the reality of our groundless, shifting, temporary existence; the reality of our mortality and smallness. Our panic is occasioned not by some calamity but in fact by the arrival of truth and the loss of an illusion.  So, while you fight to regain your social identity and find some comfort in it, do something else as well: Welcome this groundlessness and discomfort; make friends with it; meditate upon it; it is your existential condition.

The world of languages is the land of the traveler. So in a more practical sense, here is what I suggest: Seek out other language people. Seek out people who will get your Russian puns. Go to movies in Russian. Place ads in the paper for work as a Russian tutor.

Also: Define your mission. Give it a clear purpose and an end date. You have come here to help your mother in her final years. That is why you are enduring this. With your mother’s death, your chief reason for being here will also disappear. So plan for that. Begin looking in Portland and Seattle for jobs. Don’t worry, you don’t have to take a job yet. But begin looking.

What makes it so hard to be seen today? Does it not seem to you that our world is one of constant distraction? Does it not seem that the attention of people is not on us but on their devices? As they peer into their devices, do we not lose something of their attention? Are we not jealous of all that attention being sucked up by devices? Do we not mourn the death of their seeing us, the death of being vivid and central in others’ sight on the street?

We wish to be seen and now we are competing with many devices for the attention of the passerby.

So we post videos of ourselves on the Net. If the Net is where the attention has gone then that is where we must go to be seen.

Those are some things to think about.

Now, as an addendum, here are some things I read as I was thinking about your situation. I found them interesting, so I’m just putting them here at the end. Perhaps you will find them interesting too.

On the effects of unemployment and depression

Here is something interesting on  the Loss of Work Contacts and Depression:

“According to an Institute for Work and Health Issue Briefing, researchers conclude that the loss of social contacts with colleagues has a more harmful effect on the unemployed than the loss of income (Helliwell, J.F., Putnam, R.D.,September 29, 2004, “The Social Context of Well-Being,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.) Workers who have abruptly lost their jobs have also lost their social support system and are forcibly isolated with their stress.”

Also this on Unemployment as social death: “Long-term unemployment affects many facets of a person’s life besides their income. According to Ernest Becker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Denial of Death, losing our role in our culture is a kind of social death (1973.) In a culture that values hard work and believes that anyone can get ahead who is not lazy, long-term unemployment is a shameful prospect. The person has lost the social contacts once enjoyed in the workplace and has lost the sense of playing a role in society at large. Besides the self-doubts raised by rejection after rejection from employers, the long-term unemployed person faces rejection from society as a whole. Accusations that the unemployed spend their days loafing on their couch and collecting unemployment checks are not uncommon and are a defense of the American core belief that people who are poor only have themselves to blame.”

An interesting text on Lady Gaga and social death, among other things. And, So, What’s Work? (See the section on “connectedness.”) It comes from Dr. Elijah Levy  of the Thinking on Things Institute.

Though this may seem a little tangential, I was touched by this and it made me interested in seeing the movie “Losing Tom.”

And finally, though this may seem even more tangential, here is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. writing on  “psychological death.”