Recovery from addiction begins with the admission that one has a problem and the desire to do something about it, but, despite what nonaddicts say, it requires more than just will power.  For most of the years that I drank, I wanted to stop, but I could not.  I was on an elevator going down, and no amount of will power could make it stop.  I had awoken on many a hangover morning determined not to drink, but it never worked.  I had to surrender, to give up utterly, to admit that I was powerless over alcohol, to accept in my gut that drinking was not an option for me.  To do that, I had to discard all rationalizations, especially the illusion that I could control it.

Virtually no alcoholic will take this step until he or she has, in the jargon of alcoholism, hit bottom.  The elevator stops, and we have the opportunity to get off.  How far down this bottom is varies among individuals, but mine was fairly low.  Although I still had my family, a job, and my health, all were hanging by a thread more slender than I realized.  I may have had something of a life, but alcohol controlled it.  I was firmly convinced that I had to drink merely to survive, even if, paradoxically, I was committing slow suicide by drinking.  I needed to be clobbered, big time.

The jolt that changed my life was a seizure resembling an epileptic fit.  I passed out and came to in an emergency room.  It was not the first time, and, to this day, I don't know how many seizures of less severity I may have had, for I was, like most alcoholics, prone to mental blackouts. In any event, the seizure and a series of coincidences stopped the elevator and gave me the chance for recovery.  The main coincidence was that a doctor who happened to stop by the emergency room when an intern was treating me was knowledgeable about alcoholism and had contacts with a nearby rehabilitation center.  She insisted that I be held in a hospital room and arranged for a counselor to speak to me.  This doctor literally saved my life.  Though, in my insanity, I told the counselor that I was "too busy" to go (when a seizure had just nearly killed me!), I was admitted to the rehab the same day.

Recovery

I was a mess.  Before anything else could be done, I had to be taken through withdrawal (via decreasing doses of tranquilizers) from the "maintenance level" of alcohol that I depended on physically.  Although I thought I was perfectly rational, the staff psychologist later told me that they debated for days whether I belonged in the ARU (Alcohol Recovery Unit) or the psycho ward.

However, within a week, I was attending classes that taught patients about the dynamics of alcoholism, group therapy sessions, and, most importantly, the AA meetings that were an integral part of the rehab's program.  I began to eat reasonably well, had the first natural (not drug-induced) sleep in many years, and began to think a bit more clearly.  I began to feel pretty good.  The rehab made sure that I stayed "dry," and the staff did all they could to ensure that I would not relapse as soon as I was released – but they did not conceal the hard fact that not many remained sober.  Had I not been in a protected environment – I had signed an agreement to remain there for three weeks – I have no doubt that I would have started drinking again.  Yet I had been hit hard enough that my thinking about my condition had begun to change. 

Perhaps the first sign of change came when my boss at my job telephoned me at the rehab.  She wanted to know what to tell the people at work about where I was; most thought I had been hospitalized after an epileptic fit, though many knew what a boozer I was and probably suspected that alcohol had something to do with it.  I told her to tell the truth, and it wasn't because they would find out anyway but because I could not return and lie about where I had been – and why.

Although I won't underestimate the value of the rehab or the counselors in guiding me through those weeks, I soon realized that, once I got out, my chances of staying sober on my own were slim indeed.  I had tried control and will power on my own, and I was now clear-headed enough to admit that this approach didn't work.  This view was reinforced by the people I saw and heard at the AA meetings that were brought to the rehab or to which we were bussed.

When I left rehab, I felt better than I had in years, but I harbored a haunting fear. I had to stay sober, but could I?  One fact seemed apparent – fear must give way to hope.  Since the only real hope I had found in the rehab was from listening to recovering alcoholics tell their stories and seeing that they had managed to stay sober, I had to go to AA meetings.  It wasn't a choice, any more than not drinking had been a choice.  To hang on to the thin thread of hope and to conquer the mountain of fear, I needed to be around these people.

Fortunately, I had met, at one of the AA meetings we went to in rehab, a wonderful old gentleman who lived in my hometown.  He had gotten sober late in life and had an indefinable quality about him that made me trust him.  When I got out of rehab, he virtually appointed himself as my "sponsor" (a kind of AA confidant and mentor) – which was especially good because I was the type who was too timid and fearful at that point to ask anyone to assume that role.

I would have made it to random AA meetings by myself, I suppose, but he took me to all his favorite meetings and introduced me to people.  And the people and meetings were not as I expected them to be (the tone of meetings outside a rehab is somewhat different from that inside).  Nobody judged me, preached to me or lectured me.  They took alcoholism very seriously but laughed so heartily about some of the misadventures they had when under the influence that I thought they were nuts.  Yet I – who had never really felt that I fit in anywhere and had always been ill at ease among strangers – felt almost instantly that I belonged.  And, amazingly, they didn't talk as much about alcohol as they did about coping with life in a sober way.

Wisely, my self-appointed sponsor let me find my own way.  He didn't command; he suggested and gently prodded.  He understood that, like many an alcoholic, I had stopped growing emotionally and psychologically when I became addicted.  I was a teenager going on middle age, having been in an alcoholic fog throughout the years when "normal" people develop maturity. He himself had been through a lot (including the suicide of a son) and was still going through many difficulties (a mentally ill wife among them), yet here he was – sober, serene, and willing to guide me toward hope for myself.  If ever any mortal was put in my life as a guardian angel, he was that person.

Alas, he was indeed mortal, and he died shortly after I had been sober for five years.  By then, I knew how to cope with grief, for I had been learning in those years to accept life (and death) on its own terms.  I let myself grieve instead of burying the feeling or trying to numb it with alcohol.  The craving and the obsession had vanished years earlier anyway.  And the group, many of whom grieved as I did, gave me the strength to get through it and come out the other side.

Life went on.  Imperceptibly, in ways that I couldn't see myself, I was changing.  I continued to go to meetings (as I do to this day) and made many friends and acquaintances among sober people who had been through the same hell as I had.  They were, and are, a diverse crowd – men and women of all ages and ethnicities, from varying walks of life, of all religions (and none at all), with vastly different interests (and usually many of them) – literally a cross section of society. Were I to travel internationally, I dare say that I would find in AA a cross section of mankind.  We have only one thing in common – that, as practicing alcoholics, we failed at life and that, as recovering alcoholics, we are determined to make the very best of it that we can.

Not drinking is, of course, the bottom line.  However, recovery means infinitely more than that. Part 3 in this series explains what this "more" is.