Authors: Augusten Burroughs
And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it.
This can help others.
Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.
I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.
He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.
I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”
He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”
I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.
Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.
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E A
G
ood
M
ENTAL
P
ATIENT
I
F YOUR CAR WAS
making a thunk, thunk, thunk sound every time you hit the brakes and it was taking way too long to come to a stop, you’d go to a mechanic. But you certainly wouldn’t waste time asking him to “Check out the glove compartment light and also the power seat on the passenger side. And you know? Maybe you should also see if something might be loose in the trunk.”
But this is exactly what people frequently do when they see a therapist to help them resolve personal issues.
I know many people who speak of therapy with a degree of pride, as though being in therapy implies a state of superior self-awareness or is a kind of
Good Housekeeping
seal of approval for mental health. I was acquainted with one person who took a measure of pride in pointing to a building and remarking, “I think that’s the building where my therapist and her husband own a rental unit.”
If you’ve become pals with your therapist, that’s how you
know it’s time to terminate the therapeutic relationship with this particular therapist.
Friendship pollutes objectivity.
Some therapists will disagree with this statement. These are precisely the therapists to avoid.
The best therapists are brilliantly insightful and gifted at pattern recognition. And they are not your buddy. Your advocate, yes. Your squash partner, no.
It’s tricky because therapy is a business. So most therapists will encourage you to “make an investment” in the therapeutic process. In therapy, most issues take many months, if not years, to resolve.
In reality, I believe most issues can be resolved very quickly—as quickly as you can see the deeper truth of your situation.
One potential danger with entering into long-term therapy is that it’s very easy to spend the time “revisiting” traumas of the past in order to “work through” them. Which to me is a graduate school way of saying “wallowing.”
Revisiting painful experiences makes you experience the pain. When you need to move past something, this isn’t helpful. What is helpful is realizing you don’t need closure, you don’t need understanding, and you don’t need resolution. What difference would these things make if you had them?
Having one’s mother or father or past abuser admit to their crimes or even apologize for them changes nothing—certainly not what they did. Rather, such an apology would give you the psychological permission to “move on” with your life.
But you do not need anybody’s permission to move on with your life.
It does not matter whether or not those responsible for
harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it.
It does not matter.
All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now.
A good therapist can help by preventing you from spending time wallowing in the past and instead focus on organizing your future. A good therapist can also help you to think clearly when your head is too messy, which happens.
A therapist should be engaged with you and appear genuinely focused on what you are saying. They should be able to suggest connections they observe and offer concrete tools you can use to manage or solve your issues. If your therapist spends each session talking more than you do, especially if they are talking about their ideas or philosophies, this may be a sign of a therapist with some variety of messiah complex.
Likewise, your therapist should not be your audience. Your attempts to charm, humor, or otherwise ingratiate yourself to the therapist should fail. It is generally not helpful to have a therapist who thinks you’re really funny and enjoys your company.
Try to see the therapist as more like a hooker.
People can relax and be honest around a hooker because they don’t consider the hooker to be their equal. The hooker poses no threat and can offer no redemption. Any redemption you experience in the presence of a hooker—or a good therapist—is redemption you earned and were not given.
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AKE
Y
OURSELF
U
NCOMFORTABLE
(
AND
W
HY
Y
OU
S
HOULD
)
I
STARTED SMOKING WHEN
I was thirteen. But I didn’t consider myself “a smoker” until I had been at it for almost twenty years.
By then, I had tried quitting several times and failed.
Why did nothing work?
I tried the gum, the patch, the pills, going cold turkey. I would last for a few days—once, I made it through a full month—but inevitably, something would happen, the stress would be too much, and there would be a pack of cigarettes in my pocket once again.
This is exactly what I said to a friend of mine in the late 1990s when he asked me why I was still smoking. All the other smokers we knew had quit.
As I explained how each method had failed, he nodded. “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize you’d already tried everything.”
I saw on his face that he did not hold me accountable for my not being able to quit any more than he would blame somebody whose chemo had failed. He said, “I wonder if nothing worked because you started when you were so young?”
I told him, “Yeah, I’ve wondered the same thing because I know two people who didn’t start smoking until they were in college and when they quit, they just quit, boom. And when I tried doing that, it was totally impossible. So yeah, maybe if you start so young, that’s it.”
Then I saw with Windex clarity the truth: the patch didn’t work, the gum didn’t work, I’ve tried everything and everything has failed; and in the smug, small pleasure I took in saying that all these methods had failed me was my knowledge of, but refusal to admit, the truth that I alone had failed.
I bought time by pretending that it was up to the Method I chose to end my smoking for me. When one Method failed, I could continue to smoke, then try another—sliding all responsibility for my smoking and any health issues entirely away from me.
There was only one reason why I did this. It wasn’t impossible to stop smoking, it wasn’t painful or difficult. It was extremely simple, easier than smoking, in fact. No need to inconvenience my thumb by making it turn the wheel of a Bic lighter.
It was uncomfortable.
It was
only
uncomfortable.
And I didn’t like being uncomfortable.
Feeling like you cannot stand one more minute doesn’t mean you can’t. You can, actually.
It’s incredibly easy to stop smoking. And it’s horrifically uncomfortable. Then not
quite
horrifically uncomfortable. Then
it’s damn uncomfortable. Then it’s uncomfortable. Then it’s not as uncomfortable as it was at first. Then it’s not so bad. And then you don’t smoke anymore. And you don’t miss it.
Pain is interesting. I dislike it immensely but I’ve never experienced pain and boredom at the same time. Even when I had unending and severe pain in my lower back for several years I was never bored by the pain, though it exhausted me.
But discomfort seems to magnetically attract boredom and then act as a magnifying glass.
Pain can make you want to die. Discomfort can make you want to kill.
Chronic discomfort itself can be deadly.
When I was in rehab for alcoholism in April of 1995, one of the people I met spoke in a group therapy session about how this would be his fifth visit to a rehab hospital and it had to work this time.
As soon as he said that, I knew that “it” would not work.
And by “knowing” this, the implication was that for me, it would.
I don’t know whether this person remained sober but I relapsed and almost died. I had stayed sober for a year and a half, then started drinking when a friend began to die.
I had paid such careful attention to the relapse prevention,
learning about the triggers that can cause a person to drink, understanding how I could expect to feel after one month, two, six, nine.
I wrote and spoke frequently about my alcoholism and my cravings for the same reason people sometimes make noise when they walk through the woods: to let the predators know you are there; to keep them away.
As was suggested, I had visualized my “addict” as separate from me, a willful and destructive madman who wanted only to trick me and then bring me back to the bottle. I saw relapse as a dark figure that lurked in the unexamined corners of my life.
The powerlessness that is part of twelve-step recovery programs made me feel, I imagine, like a woman must feel when she is walking through a parking lot at night by herself.
Relapse had become a noun, not a verb.
So when I bought the alcohol and took it home with me and then sat at my computer, unscrewed the bottle, and began to drink, I was genuinely surprised that I never once lost control.
I saw then, I had prepared myself for something that did not exist. And failed to prepare myself for something that did: the possibility that I would ever again just decide, I’m going to drink.
It was as effortless as deciding on the spur of the moment to buy a pack of gum.
When I stopped the next time, it would be two years later and life or death. I would face this choice and decide, death.
Then, change my mind.
The way I stopped drinking this time was by not purchasing or consuming alcohol. And that’s all. Since I stopped drinking thirteen years ago, I’ve not had one craving for a drink. I’ve bought bottles of wine for others as gifts, but even when holding one of these bottles, not only have I not experienced the temptation to drink, but at the time I lacked even awareness of the missing temptation. I felt more like somebody who had never had an interest in drinking than somebody who very nearly drank himself out of existence.
I did not attend AA or see a therapist. I didn’t keep track of how many days had passed since my last drink, as I did the first time. And I did not plan or even consider that this “not drinking” would evolve naturally into so many years of sobriety.
The difference in my mind the last time I stopped drinking is that I decided I was going to spend my life writing.
Later, I engaged with the activity that preceded writing for me: photography. But my sobriety never wavered.
The change in my mind was this: the first time I stopped drinking, I was ambitious and wanted to get sober, then be sober.
The last time I stopped drinking, I needed to write. And then, I needed to build a life with the person I had met. I needed dogs.
I didn’t consider the quality of my “sobriety” this time, as I had before. I never felt the need to even wonder if I would ever drink again.
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INISH
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RINK
I
HAVE COME TO
believe several things about how to quit drinking. One is that AA was very interesting and helpful to me when I attended meetings in 1995 because it was comforting to see other alcoholics and to see how people who were so different could come together and express feelings and experiences that were so intimately similar.
But I don’t believe AA was useful in achieving or maintaining sobriety. It was interesting and comforting, but not of any particular use.
It’s important to understand what AA actually is. It’s not a company or an organization with a structure like the Salvation Army or Weight Watchers. It’s really composed of individuals who agree to meet at a certain place and at a certain time to listen to members discuss their experiences as drinkers and detail the problems alcohol has caused in their lives. Considering the lack of any staff or even chain of command, the
meetings are remarkably similar and structured. Multibillion-dollar retail chains suffer less consistency.
But woven into the philosophy of AA are certain concepts that I feel undermine sobriety. The first is the requirement that one admit to powerlessness over alcohol. And probably, this is—along with the spiritual “higher power” aspect—one of the more frequent struggling points for those new to AA.
My problem with admitting to powerlessness over alcoholism is that it isn’t true. It was always a choice, though in the very late stage of my alcoholism, I made the choice by rote, never even considering the option not to drink. By then, it was extremely uncomfortable to be sober. Physically and mentally horribly uncomfortable.
I actually think one must assume power in order to be sober. One must not give oneself the permission to drink or relapse that the powerlessness of being alcohol’s victim provides.
Another feature of AA is its slogans. Some, like “What you focus on grows,” are profound to a cosmological degree.
Others, however, I believe encourage drinking. “Progress, not perfection” and “relapse is part of recovery” are two such slogans.
AA is based on submission and humility and for this reason, alcoholics keep count of the number of days, then weeks, then months, then years, they have maintained their sobriety. As with all things in which there is a score, these numbers evolve meaning. Reaching a certain number is rewarded with a token; relapsing results in forfeiting all of one’s accumulated days and starting the count from zero again.
What I don’t like about this is that the score keeping introduces an unnecessary and potentially dangerous element of
currency
into sobriety.
In a program based on printed text—twelve steps, printed onto posters and hung on every wall of every AA meeting worldwide—and slogans, known to most members and frequently utilized in meetings, a statement such as, “relapse is part of recovery” becomes something close to an instruction. But if falling short of this, it certainly implies that a lack of relapse would be out of the ordinary.
So in a way, one exists within AA knowing they will at some point drink again because to not drink would be “perfection” and to drink would be a “relapse” and “part of recovery.” The price paid would be the number of days one was willing to lose.
All of this is a great deal of time spent in the company of alcohol, even if one isn’t consuming the stuff. Drinking alcohol with your mind isn’t freedom.
Talking about alcohol every day when you can’t drink isn’t going to work for everyone.
For this reason, AA strikes me not as the cure for alcoholism, but as the next best thing to drinking and the place to bide your time safely and without judgment until you do.
What has worked for me is to find something I wanted
more
than I wanted to drink, which was a fuck of a lot.
This is less a decision than a discovery. And it’s for this reason that not everybody will get sober.
My view that the way to stop drinking is to stop drinking is laughably simplistic on the surface. It’s “Just say no.”
It’s also true. The way to stop drinking is to want sobriety more. And then when you feel a craving, feel the craving until it passes. But don’t act on it—any more than you wouldn’t kill somebody you feel like killing when they cut you off in traffic.
Just because you want something doesn’t mean you have to have it.
I know how infuriating that is to hear.
Relapse is the temper tantrum you allow yourself to have when you forbid yourself from drinking.
To stop drinking, you stop drinking. You pour it out right now.
Everything else—all the books, therapies, and programs—are merely hand-holding. They all strike to accomplish the same thing: to talk you into not drinking.
I’m saying, if you want to stop, you will. But most do not want to stop enough to actually stop. And until there’s a medical fix, alcoholics will die as drunks.
To be successful at not drinking, a person needs to occupy the space in life drinking once filled with something more rewarding than the comfort and escape of alcohol. This is the thing you have to find.
You might not. Most alcoholics won’t.
The truth is that people who cannot stop drinking are people who, however guilty they may feel and however dire the consequences, have become so addicted to the drug and the experience that they prefer it to the remainder of their lives. While they may truly want to be sober, they want to drink more.
The thought that precedes a relapse—certainly in my case and I bet in others as well—is, “screw it.” Screw it is an idiom that means, “I no longer care.”
Taking a drink is the opposite of powerlessness. It is taking firm, decisive action to terminate a state of sobriety that feels less satisfying and less convincing than drinking has felt in the past or we imagine will feel in the present. It may feel like one
is powerless because it’s frustrating to be unable to authentically want the thing you really want to want. But don’t.
As a drug, alcohol is cunning. Because most alcoholics do have a measure of control over their drinking, often for many years. This changes, when it does, suddenly and profoundly. In late-stage alcoholism, the physical effects from abstinence are not only painfully uncomfortable but they can be fatal. At this stage, the alcoholic requires alcohol.
AA advertises a majority success rate. The advertisement is in the form of one of AA’s foundation documents. “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.” The implied efficacy brings to mind the question of, “Who’s ‘we’?”
The twelve-step program is frequently the first and primary course of treatment administered for a diagnosis of alcoholism, which is medically classified as a disease. I can think of no other standard medical treatment that is supported by little or no research and offers patients no statistical information regarding efficacy.
Still, many people swear by AA and have maintained lengthy periods of sobriety within it. For these people, the spiritual foundation and community of AA provide something that is, on the whole, more satisfying for them than drinking.
I don’t believe that AA has “kept” these people sober. They have, instead, found something that has enabled them to choose a life without drinking. Many members of AA credit the program with keeping them sober; but they themselves are the reason.
The myth that alcoholics are powerless and unable in any way to shape the outcome of their addiction is a fatal, deeply untruthful message. No alcoholic should ever feel powerless over alcohol.
Those who die were not powerless. They either chose alcohol or they slid passively into the inevitable outcome of drinking; they made a decision by choosing to take no new action. And it’s this choice that results in death.
That there exists a medically recognized
disease
that is typically treated through twelve-step programs that are based on vague supernatural components is shocking to me. If breast cancer or leukemia were treated in such a medieval fashion, there would be riots.
Ultimately, the treatment for addiction—until and if there is a successful medication—resides within the addict. You can’t spend time waiting for rehab to “work” or for something to “fix” you. These things can—and do—inspire you or encourage you.
You don’t need to take action to stop drinking. Drinking is an action: pouring the vodka into the glass, raising the glass to your lips.
To stop drinking, all you have to do is sit.
In 100 percent of the documented cases of alcoholism worldwide, the people who recovered all shared one thing in common, no matter how they did it:
They didn’t do it.
They just didn’t do it.
You absolutely can stop drinking today, right now.
The question is only, do you want to be sober more than you want to drink?
Very few people can answer this question truthfully and reply, yes.
I hope you’re one of them. Maybe you are.
I didn’t think I was.