It’s the engine. The first drink. The drink that opens the door to the ones that follow, the ones that blur your vision and slur your speech and kill your brain cells and ruin relationships and land you in a strange bed. Or in the hospital. Or in jail.
The simplest, most basic truth of my disease is that if I don’t have that first drink, I can’t get drunk. Easy, right?
Not easy. Because the REAL truth is that it’s not the first drink that gets you drunk, it’s the thought that it’s okay to have that first drink.
Alcoholics Anonymous saved my life. It’s not the answer for everyone, and as a recovery coach I strive to explore and always embrace the many other pathways to recovery. But for me, AA worked when nothing else had. I knew how to stop drinking. I just didn’t know how to stay stopped. AA meetings taught me about identification and accountability and rigorous honesty. I was introduced to people like me...and to people who weren’t like me, but who felt, thought and drank like me. I heard myself in their stories, and I saw myself in their experiences, some of which I had yet to experience myself.
Alcoholics Anonymous also provided me with “textbooks” for my new “studies”. In addition to the rich library of AA literature, I was presented with a wealth of reading recommendations from amazing people who were inspiring me with their own recovery. We passed dozens of memoirs back and forth. I was obsessed with redemption stories...maybe more so with the ugly details of the active disease...the “crash-and-burn” before the “bottom”. The train wrecks.
I was introduced to the writings of Pema Chödrön and Thich Nhat Hanh. To Melody Beattie and Julia Cameron and Brené Brown. I was reacquainted with C.S. Lewis and I discovered Tim Keller. I inhaled “The Four Agreements“ and “The Power of Now”. I dove into “the work” of Byron Katie’s “Loving What Is”.
And I opened the pages of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Never could I have imagined that I would actually enjoy reading the Big Book. And re-reading it. Again and again. From the first preface to the personal stories to the appendices at the end, that book changed my thinking about AA, about the disease and about myself. My Big Book is worn, dog-eared, underlined and highlighted. I have dozens if not hundreds of favorite lines and passages, and a new one seems to jump out at me with every re-reading.
But I think my first “aha moment” was when I read that we alcoholics have “an allergy of the body coupled with an obsession of the mind”. That allergy causes us to react differently to alcohol than a “normal” drinker would. It triggers a phenomenon of craving that makes it astonishingly difficult to stop once we take that first drink. And the obsession of the mind is the voice inside that will always tell us that this time it will be different. No matter how far we’ve sunk, no matter what consequences we’ve suffered, one drink can’t hurt. Just one.
That one is the engine...
...and the train has left the station.
.