>Most of the addicts I've known are pretty reprehensible characters.
>Emotional parasites, always willing to dump their problems on you.
>Addiction is an easy excuse for bad behaviour. Nobody is making you buy
>that drink, or jack up. I usually steer well clear of them. Isn't that a
>justifiable discrimination? Should we not discriminate between those who
>help us and those who abuse us?
>- --
>Jim heartfield
Oooch, ouchh, ooch. Said like the father of some prominent future addict.
Jim, the world is filled with parasites, as well as whining white boys who dump their problems on other folks, many of them are non-alcoholics and drug addicts.
My best friend Susan, who stuck by me for almost 20 years of alcoholism, got her BA in Mental Health, and still thought you could just not take a drink. So the prejudice is deep. And counterproductive. I don't mean directly. I rarely drank around Susan, she was not an enabler in any way. And we rarely talked of such things. She trusted me because I'm one of the most trust worthy people around, when I'm not drunk, and then still, I mostly was only hiding my own self destructiveness.
But I must admit, after awhile around AA, hearing people talk about all the terrible, dishonest things they used to do, it was hard for me to believe they would suddenly, say, stop stealing, cause they quit drinking. But that's just a piece of the story.
AA is about a million different things. I haven't been going lately, but I went almost every day for months. I felt many different things at different times, and some of them may have been true, most of the time. And more.
>I don't know much about this, but something bothers me about framing people
>as damaged, "recovering" but never recovered. Is there any critique
>of/alternative to this?
>
>Doug
>
There is an alternative, right in AA. I got sober in 87, went to the
required AA meetings, then after the 28 day outpatient program, went to an
AA meeting and bought a Big Book. Bad mistake. Never went back.
Unfortunately, I never really talked to any people, so I didn't know that
some of them, like me, were devout NON-Christians, actually at that time, I
was militantly non-Christian. I started drinking again less than a year
later, not as badly, that took about 8 more years. I'm not saying leaving
AA lead me to start again, I think having little support while I should
have been changing things in my life was significant though.
So I went out, but I still had significant benefit from treatment, even if I was eventually doomed, as I believe I was, if I continued to drink.
The second time I quit, encouraged by the courts, was Aug. 96. I was also instructed to get into thearapy for four months and required to go to four AA meetings a week.
Both times, I loved being sober, but the second time, I had to seek help on a long term basis, through AA. And, because of a great woman named Callahan, I also stuck with therapy, weekly, for over a year. I think I needed both these things to happen.
I lucked out all around. I happened to hook up with a late night meeting full of AA misfits. All the meetings are different. All the people are different. The Big Book says it is based on SUGGESTIONS ONLY. Some folks ignore this, some embrace it, and edit, critique, re-interpret, and just generally, take what you need, and leave the rest.
At one point, my friend Stella (exotic dancer and leader of Pagan Holiday, defender of domestic abuse victims and the rights of sex workers), and I, tried to get the meeting to stop ending with The Lord's Prayer. We lost the vote, but the whiny baby guys who won, quit coming to that meeeting anyway, which was a shame cause they were part of the core that could be relied on to get out the coffee and lock up for the night.
But if we'd have had the votes, we could have done anything. The inmates really do run the asylum, which is the real triumph of AA. You lead a meeting, you pick the topic, whatever. Therapists, sex-changes, medication changes, petty tyrants at work to be dealt with, a lot of really young kids with well-off, drug abusing parents, cult-liike devotees, laid back, grateful people who want to be there, cause someone was there for them when they showed up all nuts, you can find anything you want at AA.
I didn't socialize for months. The 8 o'clock meeting at the same clubhouse was a real social, clique-driven meeting. Very much a boys club, though there were plenty of women at those meetings. People were still mentioning when Elton John used to come around. Had I somehow fallen into that meeting-groove, who knows what might have happened. I'd probably be dead or in jail.
I eventually got to know Stella and a few other people, I never worked the Steps, but I saw the point. I think I've been doing the famous fourth step most of my life. Inventories, amends, guilt, been there, done that.
A lot of the stuff in AA was designed to knock down the kind of affluent, white, male arrogance that would have been legitimate when you look at the first members. Just cause people are alcoholics doesn't mean they have to be too stupid to realize this, and adapt.
The droneing repeat of 12 Steps and (real yawn) 12 Principles starts to make sense when suddenly you're running the meeting and you don't know what to do. Happens all the time at those small, late-night meetings I'm still fond of. The easy ritual is comforting too, when you show up dazed from the roller-coaster ride your emotions are on after you've given up the keys to oblivion. As Callahan says, half the battle is just keeping your seat-belt on.
It was good for me to not know anyone for a long time. I didn't need any human handles to attach my cynicism too. One isolated and early instance of socializeing found me sitting in a Waffle House for hours, talking to a woman who'd been around and sober for awhile. It turned out see was having problems with a married man in the program that she was having an affair with. I did not want to know about these things. As always, my stubborn idealism was offended.
I don't really buy the disease concept that AA supports. That is that we have some sort of allergy to alcohol. I do think a "psychic shift" is needed to overcome a long time addiction. Getting to talk about a Higher Power was very liberateing for me because I have strong, ambiguous beliefs, that are not welcome in many settings, religious or atheist, that I could thrash out in AA to my hearts content.
BTW, lots of people use their last names all the time. It's someone else's last name you're not supposed to use. And you can claim to be a permanently recovered problem drinker who was abducted by aliens if you want to. If someone says anything, you can tell them to fuck off, or find another meeting. No big deal.
I didn't go to the meeting space near my house cause it was full of serious
Christians and you couldn't swear. You could smoke though. Which I did,
and unfortunately still do. But I gave up smoking to go to a room where
you could say, Hi, I'm the bastard, cocaine-shooting son of fucking Ronald
Reagan, and be welcome. I've heard about meetings where you can't declare
a drug addiction cause it's about alcohol, but I've never actually found one.
>Still, from what I've seen of the way 12 step models work, they are clearly
>symptomatic treatments--that is they treat the symptoms, rather than the
>underlying problem (errr sliding toward essentialism there, ey?) in the
>same way that cold medicine modifies the discomfort of the cold without
>ever getting at the root cause of the cold.
>
I remember telling my mother I wanted to see a shrink when I was about 12. Use to fantasize about confinment. Stayed in my room for years. Luckily I liked to read.
When I was away at school and some friends called and told my parents I needed to get help, mostly cause of booze, though we were all shooting up an assortment of drugs, my father told my mother he didn't want to pay for someone to tell me it was all his fault. I did see someone for a short time and that slowed me down, but I quit taking my dad's money.
Talked to my dad for the first time in about 25 years earlier this year, he was still trying to get me to release the part of the big house that was the only thing my mom got out of a 20 marraige and jointly run business. He has a life-estate, so in essence, he wants to continue ripping off his first(now dead, died broke) first wife and kids even after he dies. Pretty sad. I must say though, he made me scornful of money and compassionate for the under-dog.
Depression and dispair can be overcome. But first you've got to stop trying to kill yourself. Me, I belong to the Church of Donny Hathaway, the prophet of Fractals, and I finally gave in and really profited from anti-depressants. Though now I usually forget to take the afternoon one. High on gratitude, something that's sorely needed in this world of self-righteousness,boot-straps, and boot licking. They talk about it a lot in AA. Slogans, sometimes that's as much as you can handle
>Rudy uses in-depth
>>ethnographic interviews and participant observations in order to ask how
>>people learn to become or create an identity as an alcoholic. AA and the
>>twelve step model figure prominently in the process, as you probably know.
>>There is a tendency in these groups to insist that everyone is an
>>alcoholic, so even Rudy who clearly identified himself as a researcher was
>>constantly quizzed about his drinking habits and was told that the only way
>>he could participate was if he read a stack of literature on AA and
My guess is they were fucking with this guy.
>This just
>so shamed local politicians that it opened the floodgates for discussions
>of alternatives (while they continued to shut down publicly funded rehabs).
>
This was Cathy I believe. I've meant a whole bunch of Canadian medical professionals at the Triangle Club(where Elton goes). Apparently they're sent to some program near by as part of a deal to retain their jobs and licenses. One guy told me it was cause they didn't have any good treatment programs at home.
One fellow really pissed me off. Apparently this program makes these guys get a job that puts them among the people. He was working at a fast food place, he was talking about how much he resented it. The scorn towards his fellow workers was real apparent. Had I been on steadier footing that day I'd have pointed out that he might try to appreciate their situation and total lack of health coverage, or something like that. It sure would have been a help at keeping him sober. Frankly, I hope the bastard drinks himself to death. But I knew it would come out an attack, which most people in AA avoid most of the time, which is in itself unique
>Sedgwick essay she mentions
>how "recovery," which one is always in according to this model, is a
>matter of the day to day "micromanagement of absolutes."
>
I do like keeping my absolutes randomly arranged.
Happy, Joyous, And Free at Last. Ya wanna make something of it?
smooches Paula
Oh yea, I forgot to tell you about Callahan. She was the second person I tried. When I told her I couldn't afford to come every week, she said, come back next week and tell me what you can afford each month. I went back and told her a hundred dollars. She said fine, come every week, I think that's important right now.
I think the fact that neither she, nor AA, was "only in it for the money" was real important. To me anyway. And you hear young kids talking all the time about the role of insurance money in defining their treatment. It feeds the kind of dispair and cynicism that is poison to recovery. I had to make another attempt to grow up, and this time, she assured me, "you don't have to do it alone." I understood that she meant this on a lot of levels.
It's funny. I had, and still do carry health insurance, but it never occured to me to go through them. I called around for recommendations for sliding scale providers. Despite the fact that $1200/yr is a chunk a change on my income, and, I'm very frugal, shall we say, at least now that I realize there's a person that needs to be taken care of living here.