This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Addiction

Chapter 3

The First Step

Admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable

So the doctor proclaimed me an alcoholic, God Bless him!

However, he also refused to give me any medication like diazepam to taper off alcohol and become sober enough to start recovery!?

He said he didn’t want me to get addicted to them!

He did, however, suggest that I drink water with my wine!!

Like,  I was going to do that!

I was the most chronically addicted to alcohol person who was going to start drinking water with it, a person who hadn’t gone near water in months.

This is the typical insight of medical professionals to alcoholism.

I could have done this, in a parallel univesrse, and still had DTs due to the drop in alcohol drunk, and those could have resulted seizures that might have killed me.

Did he know this?

When we arrived home we realised that I had seen another doctor, a locum during the summer, filling in for another doctor, who suggested week’s course of diazepam, to help with withdrawing from alcohol as I had considered quitting then, before the severity of my alcoholic psychosis increased and I never left the house after that.

He also seemed concerned that I would become addicted to this type of medication. Were both of these doctors just conceding that I was an addicted type of person? If so, why weren’t they suggesting treatment?

They seemed more bothered about the potential to become addicted to medication but not as worried about the fact I was already completely and utterly  addicted to alcohol.

I think I had less than a week’s supply and that would have to do! I counted the pills, there were four and a half pills left. Would that be enough!?

Emma booked me an appointment at a local addiction treatment centre and I was to contact Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

I was to phone the AA helpline where I would talk to an AA member, that was the plan.

I hadn’t really thought that there was any AA in the UK. I had heard of AA in American movies but had not realised that there were meetings nearby. In Swansea, Wales!

It was like there was some strange portal in the Universe, previously undetected.

I spoke to a guy from Cardiff called Jack, who was a recovering alcoholic.

He seemed strangely familiar to me, I’m not sure why?

He convinced me that I was not only an alcoholic but a chronic alcoholic and the craziest cat he had spoken to in quite some time.

Somehow in my damaged brain it was helpful to be classified as a chronic alcoholic as that meant I was really way over the line of alcoholism and that it was beyond discussion or debate.

I took his diagnosis of my craziness in good faith too.

Months of psychosis says it all really.

It was strangely comforting to realise the alcohol had created most of this madness and there was a hope abstinence from alcohol would bring back some sanity.

The strangest thing was I felt he knew me and I knew him, that I was a madder version of him in some way.

There was some undefinable connection.

Maybe it was the psychosis but it felt like we weren’t in the normal dimension of life but in some parallel or slightly separate dimension. In a quiet room, to the side of the staged production fo life.

It felt really weird to have connected with another human being in a way that didn’t make me feel freakish and full of shame.

He wasn’t looking down on me, he was identifying with my plight in a way the others had not.

He knew me, where I was coming from.

He had been there, where I was now.

Just maybe not as crazy!

He was offering a solution to what had seemed an insurmountable problem, he had suggested the hope that all was not lost.

He was offering a solution, which no one else had, the so-called professionals.

He had this insight, this lived experience, which was compelling.

He urged me to go to an AA meeting.

It was urgent that I did. I would probably die without sobriety.

It was what he had done and it had worked for him. He had been in recovery nearly twenty years.

He said that if I did what he did, I would get what he had. Freedom from alcohol and a sober life barely conceivable to me. It would all be one day at a time. That was the way it was for him.

Life, one day at a time, was bearable and manageable. he urged me to do the same.

I liked his straightforwardness, candour and plain speaking, even if it scared the life out of me. .

I resolved to go the following night, Christmas Eve, 2005.

Image by James Henry Johnston – https://www.artfinder.com/product/talk-back-to-me/