One Actor, Two Characters, Three Roles
In the story that is my life, there has always been one actor. It’s me, of course. I’m the main character and the role of that character has been in a state of constant change since my birth. I’m also a supporting actor in the lives of others. Sometimes I supply the means to a comedy, other times it’s a tragedy. When it comes to my recovery, as an actor I’m playing one of two characters: the alcoholic in crisis or the alcoholic in recovery.
Crisis Mode
As an alcoholic in crisis, my actions took a great deal of effort. For a long time, I had to work toward keeping my character in regular and scheduled inebriation, while at the same time providing a sober characterization to those around me. I wanted to make believe that I was a normal, average Joe that only drank on special occasions in an acceptable amount. In reality, I concealed the lie that I had been drinking in amounts that would make that average Joe gasp. As a liar, I had to risk multiple lies to satisfy previous lies, all to keep my character believable and avoid scrutiny, embarrassment or harassment.
When I had a bottle of liquor (preferably vodka) I would hide it. My concealment would keep prying eyes from measuring my consumption. It also allowed me to ultimately take pulls of the drink straight from the bottle quickly, just in case those unwanted eyes appeared. I’d have bottles hidden all over the place. Sometimes I hide them so well (in a drunken stupor) that I wouldn’t find them for weeks. What a feeling of elation when I did. It was like finding twenty bucks in my pocket, only this money was already spent on my favorite pastime.
And speaking of money (and lies, and drinking), I could easily justify the thousands of dollars I wasted on alcohol by simply including it in the family grocery bill. I would conceal my bottle in my cart, conceal my loading it into the front seat, and then conceal my taking a giant gulp before I would start driving. Once I got home, I would conceal my bottle before unloading any other groceries (after taking another drink, of course). Then I would unload the rest of the groceries, being sure to hide the receipt. A simple trip to the grocery store required multiple deceptions.
I would drink before going out in public. I would drink in public whenever possible. I would drink on return. I would drink until my body couldn’t maintain balance or consciousness anymore and then pass out until it was time to rub some pickled brain cells together and start it all over again.
My diet was horrendous. I either wasn’t eating or eating poorly. In addition to the poison I was consuming in massive quantities, I treated my physical being like crap. I was overweight and my health was sketchy. Ultimately it all accumulated into end-stage liver disease. While that was my wake-up call, it’s possible that without that mental smack-down I’d still be drinking to this day, and the consequences in every part of my life would be dire.
For decades I was a functional alcoholic. I didn’t have the relationship disasters, the legal troubles, and the reputation of a drunk. What I had was a fair amount of drunken intelligence combined with luck. Most of my drinking was done at home. I almost always drank vodka, since it didn’t leave an odor on my breath and the high was more of a numbing effect than the crazy that comes from other liquors like whiskey, tequila and rum. When I did go out it was generally alone to play pool, and I would never come close to leaving at closing time. I drove a soccer mom van. When under the influence, I drove the speed limit and obeyed traffic laws. Despite wanting to be drunk, I would frame my entire existence around the persona of being sober. In my journey through alcoholism, I was able to maintain that persona for a long time, but towards the end something had to give, and that something was my health.
Most alcoholics that enter into recovery have reached a bottom. That bottom in essence means that their drinking life has become so untenable that sobriety and recovery are more desirable. People will contemplate seeking help, but it doesn’t mean they will accept it. For every bottom there is potential for a deeper dive. Many will maintain sobriety for some time, but without the determination and dedication to long-term (permanent) change, they will return to the addiction life under the assumption that they have renewed control over their use and that they can return to a time when addiction didn’t exist. People that repeatedly lapse in their recovery often provide the flawed excuse that they have redeveloped a strength over addiction. This is why people’s bottoms are continually lowered to near death experience. It is why the ultimate bottom is death.
Don’t get me wrong, were it not for my liver failure I would have had a different bottom in the future. What had happened is the threat of a painful and imminent death raised my bottom from the depths it could have reached.
What are those depths? Loss of my marriage. Loss of my children. Loss of my place to live. Loss of my employment or qualifications to be employable. Loss of my reputation. Loss of any quality relationships. Loss of my spirituality. Loss of my freedom. Loss of my life.
The list goes on and on. Ask any alcoholic in crisis.
Recovery Mode
When I started my recovery, it was with a desire to be sober. I wanted to stop drinking. I wanted addiction out of my life. Now I had extenuating health problems, among other things, but that declaration of wanting was the first in many different psychological switches that were flipped in my head. Wanting something sets further action into play in order to achieve it. It necessitates a determination to change those things in my life that were precursors to my drinking addiction. These were things that enabled and encouraged my addiction, and that prevented me from making the decision to end my addiction.
Without a doubt the most difficult time in the beginnings of sobriety and recovery were the first weeks, then months. The support structure necessary to maintain sobriety was in its feeble stages of development. There were days and nights of white-knuckle willpower resistance to getting alcohol and drinking it. The dis-ease told me to drink just enough for relief, then just pick up sobriety later. There is pain, confusion and an overall rejection by the mind and body of the absence of poison.
At the start of recovery, there is a doorway I passed through with half of my life on one side and a new half on the other. That threshold is something I only want to cross once. If I pass back through, everything that was my life of addiction will be realized as if I never escaped it to begin with. And then it will get worse. But if I stay on this new side of it, and then forward and away from it, not only will the pull of what is behind that door lose its power, but my life in recovery will expand and grow in ever increasing amounts. The key is setting goals towards life recovery and growth in micro and macro increments while continuing to push forward.
There are people that keep a very messy house: dishes piled up sky high, floors rarely vacuumed or mopped, clothes and random stuff all over the place, and things stacked on every usable surface (you get the picture). If I’m that person, and I want to change my cleanliness habits and get things cleaned up, I can attack the whole thing at once, which is daunting and insurmountable, or I can take on one thing at a time, then once that is clean, I can move to another section while at the same time maintaining the cleanliness of the first section. If I’m resistant to the whole cleaning thing, but I still want to begin new habits of cleanliness, then the amount of cleaning I actually do can be reduced to a manageable size until the habit begins its formation. For example, in my dish stack I could clean three things and put those where they belong, and practice keeping those three dishes clean from here on out. After keeping those three dishes clean and developing a practice (habit), perhaps three other dishes can be added to the mix and moving forward ultimately getting and keeping the dish piles out of the dirty sink and into the clean cupboards.
This type of method can be translated into recovery but understand that it is not a method of absolute sobriety. Rather, it’s a method of development as a part of recovery. I’m not tapering off my drinking to try to get sober. Instead, I’m trying to create new repeatable actions in recovery that move me farther away from the temptations of breaking my agreement with sobriety. My house isn’t a complete mess because of my addiction. My addiction is a byproduct of a messy house that allows me to cover up and ignore its condition. Once I declare my desire to end my addiction, the next logical step is to begin cleaning up the things that addiction is covering up. Each part of my life that I clean up and keep clean moving forward, the less pressure that is put on me to have anything to escape from. Ultimately what’s powering my addictive behavior is a poorly kept life.
For my own recovery, seeking group therapy and recovery coaching was the beginning to clean up the messy house that was my mind. I learned that the greatest tools for my recovery were in developing my self-awareness, meaning I saw and admitted the mess. I learned quickly that it wasn’t just repeated drinking that led to my addiction. It was what had occurred in my life (and was still a factor) that made alcohol a necessary treatment for an extensive dis-ease. Knowing the emotional circumstances (and there were many) that were driving my escapism and sedation were the beginning of my awareness of them. I was aware that my house (my mind) was a mess but had little experience in how to clean it up, and just cleaning the whole thing at once wasn’t an option.
My first three dirty dishes, then subsequent dishes and then the whole sink and then the surfaces, floors cupboards etc. came with my determination to analyze the issues plaguing my mind and address them. I didn’t do this alone. I had people and groups to guide me. I had community support to encourage me. In time and with patience, I realized the value of this determination as the emotional triggers for my alcoholism began to erode. Each portion of my past that was causing me pain and discomfort could be discovered, realized, taken apart and given it’s proper place as an experience that could be learned from, rather than a permanent loop of resentment.
Resentments were the backing ailment of my alcoholic crisis. Some had existed for decades; some were recent and then some everywhere in between. These resentments were all based on a perceived betrayal in my past. I say perceived because my resentments are a one-sided perception. These could be unkept promises, abuse from a trusted source, violence against me, coercion and deception, or any other life-occurrence that I would continually replay in my mind with no satisfactory outcome. If there was an outcome that I would imagine, it would involve causing harm against other people to a degree that would likely get me thrown in prison.
Resentments are a reality of life. Many people have as many or more resentments as I have had and do not become alcoholics. But if an attachment is made between the mental and emotional relief that alcohol provides, and continual usage is keeping that relief in play, it’s likely that what was a recreational pastime will become a habit and then an addiction. This is why the idea that an alcoholic can just stop drinking is a misunderstanding of what all of the causes of alcoholism are in the first place.
Even after cleaning house, an alcoholic cannot return to drinking and be a casual user. There are inherent physical changes to the mind that cannot be reversed once the addiction has taken effect. A return to the behavior will result in a return to the addictive behavior. The depressive circumstances will return and be added onto. Then more drinks will be necessary, and the entire cycle will build rapidly. Alcoholism to the highest degree will once again be the lifestyle. Once that happens, the increasing level of poor decisions that accompany drunkenness will again increase the need for relief. This constant cycle of buildup leads straight back into crisis mode and resistance to sobriety.
Cleaning house exists throughout recovery. Obviously, a clean house gets dirty, making upkeep and maintenance a necessity. But the work to keep it clean once it has that fresh start is far less than what it took to clean it to an acceptable state to begin with.
With cleanliness comes workable space and renewed functionality. It is no different with the human mind. Cleaning out the clutter, junk, cobwebs, and ghosts with rattling chains, frees up room for building a mental structure that is totally different than what it was before and during addiction. It allows me to move forward and away from the crossover/threshold point of addict versus sober.
I believe that every addict can end their addiction by first wanting to end it. Following that up by seeking out support to gain self-awareness about the causes and effects of addiction is required action. Then taking further action to make changes to any degree is essential.
The Three Roles
From a fundamental perspective, an alcoholic in crisis or in recovery has three different roles that they could play.
Falling back into the entrapments of addiction is the first role that can come about from each of these characters. On the crisis side, addiction is already there, and substance abuse is a life-practice. What is undetermined is how bad things can actually get. What some outsiders could view as a bottom for an addict (finding it unbelievable that things could get worse), comes from a misunderstanding of what addiction is about. Addiction rules the mind; it is the addict’s God. The addict will sacrifice everything, including their life, to appease this false deity.
This is always a potential downfall for the addict struggling with sobriety. This time of uncertainty and doubt is a dangerous time, requiring as much external support to hold up the addict through this time. All it takes is one lapse to dive back into the addiction, resulting in the abandonment of any ground gained in sobriety.
The second role is maintenance. As I wrote above, I was able to maintain my persona as a functional member of society while at the same time capitulating to my addiction to whatever level it required. While this wasn’t easy, it was possible right up until the point that it wasn’t. Maintenance of my drinking habits, staying undercover when it was a problem, and keeping it measured enough that I didn’t fall into calamity was possible for a time, but not forever. Eventually my drinking would catch up with me.
It’s common for people to maintain sobriety in a current state, showing just enough determination to not go backwards, and not enough determination to move forward anymore. This is a safety zone for most people that feel they’ve done enough to keep themselves sober, and that is all that’s important. It’s my belief that if you’re not moving forward, eventually you are going to slide backwards. The pull of addiction is embroiled in cunning and deception, and it will act as a permanent magnet to its victims. While life maintenance alone may work for some time, it is a dangerous place to exist. Life is unpredictable and chaos is always looming on the horizon with the potential for catastrophe. A strong recovery is a support system for when life hits hard, and a growth system for when it is at ease. Living life in maintenance mode allows for that support system to weaken and decay, meaning in the case of a chaotic episode disrupting things, there is a greater chance that a return to addiction could be a more powerful draw. While it may seem that recovery moving forward is a lifelong daunting task, it is instead it is a lifelong developmental task that creates a better person, which in turn transcends to carry others to move forward as a part of it.
No matter if my actor is playing the alcoholic in crisis mode, or the alcoholic in recovery, the role I play that’s going to give me the greatest life benefits is the role of growth in recovery. Even if I fall into a period of maintenance for a time, my focus should be on finding a way to take that next step forward and keep from backsliding. It’s impossible to move forward and stay still, and it’s impossible to move forward and slide backward. If there are elements creeping into my life that have the potential for pulling me backward, then I have to move forward to leave those things behind.
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