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I was at a meeting the other night where we read some recovery literature that talked about alcoholism as a progressive illness. I nodded my head and listened, but I was yawning a little bit.
Of course my alcoholism is a progressive illness—my drug and alcohol addiction got worse every day for about five years in a row. There wasn’t one stretch of time where I saw improvement. Zero months. Zero weeks. Zero days, even. It was a steep decline that went from two beers a day to 50 opioids, 10 beers and sleeping pills a few years later. If my drug and alcohol usage were a stock, you would have sold right away because there was no growth, only losses and losses and losses.
So I don’t need to be convinced about drinking and drugging getting progressively worse. If I ever started back up again, I would be back to where I was in 2008 within a month or so. I can either stay stopped or not be able to stop. It’s my choice at this point.
But then somebody shared a slightly different take that I hadn’t fully considered before. He shared about how it wasn’t just his alcohol and drug usage that progressively got worse before he got sober. He said he lied more, spent money frivolously, aggressively dated in an unhealthy way, abused nicotine and caffeine, ate too much one day and nothing the next… his list went on and on, and the key thing, he said, was that just like his drug and alcohol usage, none of those things went through any improvement at any time, either. So the progressive illness was bigger than alcohol and drugs. In fact, it sure seemed like the black hole that mood-altering substances had become for him was pulling almost every aspect of his life into it, and each one of those things got progressively worse, too.
The point of his share was what happened on Day One of sobriety. He stopped drinking and drugging. But he said he still had terrible relationships with food, money, caffeine, nicotine, sex, love, sleep and a bunch of other things that were still roaring out of control in his life. It’s not like stopping alcohol suddenly also automatically stops you from deteriorating in all of these other areas, he said.
I wasn’t yawning any more. In fact, I sat up. I had that same idea, that the only real problem was alcohol and drugs, and if I were able to stop drinking and drugging, then the other stuff would all begin to improve, too. There’s some truth to that… but I realized within a month of not drinking that the work had only begun. I found myself leaning on caffeine and nicotine more than I ever had, and I found myself sleeping 12 hours one night and none the next. I found myself struggling to process frustration, to put the kids to bed without blowing my stack and a slew of other bad attitudes and behaviors.
It was around that time that I heard someone say for the first time, “To get sober, the only thing you have to change is everything.” It began to dawn on me that the entire foundation of who I was had been rotting for 5-10 years, and it wasn’t just my substance abuse. I was getting worse as a friend, a husband, a dad, a son, a brother, a driver, a person walking around the grocery store, everything.
And let me tell you, when it came to nicotine, caffeine and food, I was shocked that I had been able to stop opioids and alcohol in the recent past… and I couldn’t just stop the other stuff. I had so much work to do, and that continues to this day. I still have a progressive disease that is relentless. Luckily for me, that doesn’t involve going from two beers a night to four beers a night and then eight beers a night and so on.
Now, it’s all the causes and conditions that led me to substances that still wake up with me every day. I still roll out of bed thinking I am very smart, and very entitled, and that the world should bend toward me. The old line you hear at meetings is that our disease is always out in the parking lot doing pushups, and I think that’s true beyond the booze and drugs. It wants me to be sick and suffering, and then turn back toward the addiction stuff to sooth myself.
That meeting was a good reminder that everything about addiction for me is a progressive illness, and that I need to do everything possible to make it… what would be the word? A regressive illness? Sure, let’s go with that!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
My wife, an Al-Anon, told me I was narcissistic and self-centered.
My reply was, "That's okay, as long as it doesn't affect me."
(Credit: Grapevine, June 2008, by Steven R. of Eureka Springs, Arkansas)
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