How insidious a disease is alcoholism? Everyone knows by now that it can destroy lives and is hard to cure, but some lose sight of the ways in which it snowballs and grows — often when the person who has it doesn’t realize the extent of what’s going on.
A MUST READ for everyone comes from Dean Esmay (even for those who have clashed with Dean on the Internet over the years). It’s too important to be taken out of context, so here are only a FEW quotes and it MUST be read in full by everyone. In fact, show it to a young person after you read it:
One of the most insidious things about the disease of alcoholism–and it is a disease, despite the best efforts of thundering moralists to deny the science and the plain medical and biochemical facts–is that it plays on your character defects (which all people have) and, worse, it progresses slowly. Biochemically, it’s known to generally progress faster in women, for a variety of reasons that are understood (women are generally smaller, with consequent lower blood volume on average, and may also be able to conceal drinking better if they’re stay-at-home moms) and some of which undoubtedly are not currently understood.
What’s also well-documented about the disease, even symptomatic, is that the alcoholic will occasionally under go “dry spells” where they “prove” to themselves and others that they’ve got the problem “under control” by just not drinking, or by moderating their intake. I myself had such a dry spell 3-4 years ago, where I went about 100 days without drinking, trying a few meetings and then giving up on them because I hated them–the ones I got to were mostly pity-parties, which is one of the negative things you see at some AA meetings. I also did a lot of reading on alternative approaches, and tried some of them with mixed levels of success.
Dean then does what he does in his posts: he bluntly gives it to you between the eyes, except in this case he’s giving it to himself between the eyes. Here’s what he writes after detailing his first attempt to ditch alcoholism:
[W]hat I do regret is that I did go back to drinking, with firm intention never to get out of control again.
But, as is yet another symptom of the disease, I soon was back pretty much where I’d left off. What is quite typical of the progression, which typically takes 3-10 years in women and 5-15 years in men (or so I was told in the hospital last fall), is that you go through periods where you don’t drink at all, or where you convince yourself that you’re moderating successfully. You have instances where you do indeed don’t-drink, or succeed in your goal to drink less. But you don’t notice that the times you fail are increasingly more frequent than the times you succeed.
He reviews his personal history in some detail then writes this:
Then around 2003 or so I had stomach surgery that is now known to tend to aggravate alcoholism in some people. I can see why. It caused alcohol to hit my system much faster than in normal people. Yet at the same time, strangely, my capacity went up. You can see why that was a disaster. From 2003 to about 2005, my progression went from slow to extremely rapid, aggravated both by physical factors and severe isolation and career/school stresses. It also made me a bear to live with, and my then-wife struggled to deal with it, usually valiantly. I quit for a while on my own, but the obsession wouldn’t leave, the factors making me miserable didn’t change, and so I went back, and took up almost exactly where I left off.
No matter what, the disease gets worse and worse, and no matter how much you convince yourself that you’re getting better, you’re not getting better at all. You convince yourself that the problems you’re having, most particularly in your personal life, are the fault of everything and everybody (including yourself) except for the one thing that’s really aggravating everything: the alcohol.
This is only a small part of the highly personal and insightful post which is today’s MUST READ and MUST be read IN FULL by all readers.
LINKS OF INTEREST:
Alcoholics Anonymous
Al-Anon/Alateen
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.