most of us in A.A. felt safely far away from such a fate when we were drinking. And probably the majority of us never came near the horrible last stages of chronic alcoholism.
But we saw that we could, if we just kept on drinking. If you get on a bus bound for a town a thousand miles away, that’s where you’ll wind up, unless you get off and move in another direction.
Okay. What do you do if you learn that you have an incurable, progressive, fatal disease—whether it’s alcoholism or some other, such as a heart condition or cancer?
Many people just deny it is true, ignore the condition, accept no treatment for it, suffer, and die.
But there is another way.
You can accept the “diagnosis”—persuaded by your doctor, your friends, or yourself. Then you can find out what can be done, if anything, to keep the condition “under control,” so you can still live many happy, productive, healthy years as long as you take proper care of yourself. You recognize fully the seriousness of your condition, and you do the sensible things necessary to carry on a healthy life.
This, it turns out, is surprisingly easy in regard to alcoholism, if you really want to stay well. And since we A.A.’s have learned to enjoy life so much, we really want to stay well.
We try never to lose sight of the unchangeable fact of our alcoholism, but we learn not to brood or feel sorry for ourselves or talk about it all the time. We accept it as a characteristic of our body—like our height or our need for glasses, or like any allergies we may have.
Then we can figure out how to live comfortably—not bitterly—with that knowledge as long as we start out by simply avoiding that first drink (remember?) just for today.
A blind member of A.A. said his alcoholism was quite similar to his blindness. “Once I accepted the loss of my sight,” he explained, “and took the rehabilitation training available to me, I discovered I really can, with the aid of my cane or my dog, go anywhere I want to go quite safely, just as long as I don’t forget or ignore the fact that I am blind. But when I do not act within the knowledge that I cannot see, it is then I get hurt, or in trouble.”
“If you want to get well,” one A.A. woman said, “you just take your treatment and follow directions and go on living. It’s easy as long as you remember the new facts about your health. Who has time to feel ‘deprived’ or self-pitying when you find there are so many delights connected with living happily unafraid of your illness?”
To summarize: We remember we have an incurable, potentially fatal ailment called alcoholism. And instead of persisting in drinking, we prefer to figure out, and use, enjoyable ways of living without alcohol.
We need not be ashamed that we have a disease. It is no disgrace. No one knows exactly why some people become alcoholics while others don’t. It is not our fault. We did not want to become alcoholics. We did not try to get this illness.
We did not suffer alcoholism just because we enjoyed it, after all. We did not deliberately, maliciously set out to do the things we were later ashamed of. We did them against our better judgment and instinct because we were really sick, and didn’t even know it.
We’ve learned that no good comes of useless regret and worry about how we got this way. The first step toward feeling better, and getting over our sickness, is quite simply not drinking.
Try the idea on for size. Wouldn’t you rather recognize you have a health condition which can be successfully treated, than spend a lot of time miserably worrying about what’s wrong with you? We have found this is a better-looking, and better-feeling, picture of ourselves than the old gloomy selves we used to see. It is truer, too. We know. The proof of it is in the way we feel, act, and think—now.
Anyone who wants it is welcome to a “free trial period” of this new concept of self. Afterward, anyone who wants the old days again is perfectly free to start them all over. It is your right to take back your misery if you want it.
On the other hand, you can also keep the new picture of yourself, if you’d rather. It, too, is yours by right.
5 ‘Live and Let Live’
The old saying “Live and Let Live” seems so commonplace, it is easy to overlook its value. Of course, one reason it has been said over and over for years is that it has proved beneficial in so many ways.
We A.A.’s make some special uses of it to help us not drink. It particularly helps us cope with people who get on our nerves.
Reviewing once more a little of our drinking histories, many of us can see how very, very often our drinking problem appeared to be related somehow to other people. Experimenting with beer or wine in our teen-age years seemed natural, since so many others were doing it, and we wanted their approval. Then came weddings and bar mitzvahs and christenings and holidays and football games and cocktail parties and business lunches...and the list can go on and on. In all of these circumstances, we drank at least partly because everybody else was drinking and seemed to expect us to.
Those of us who began to drink alone, or to sneak a drink now and then, often did so to keep some other person or people from knowing how much, or how often, we drank. We rarely liked to hear anybody else talk about our drinking. If they did, we frequently told them “reasons” for our drinking, as if we wanted to ward off criticism or complaints.
Some of us found ourselves argumentative or even belligerent toward other people after drinking. Yet others of us felt we really got along better with people after a drink or two—whether it was a social evening, a tense sale or job interview, or even making love.
Our drinking caused many of us to choose our friends according to how much they drank. We even changed friends when we felt we had “outgrown” their drinking styles. We preferred “real drinkers” to people who just took one or two. And we tried to avoid teetotalers.
Many of us were guilty and angry about the way our family reacted to our drinking. Some of us lost jobs because a boss or a colleague at work objected to our drinking. We wished people would mind their own business and leave us alone!
Often, we felt angry and fearful even toward people who had not criticized us. Our guilt made us extra sensitive to those around us, and we nursed grudges. Sometimes, we changed bars, changed jobs, or moved to new neighborhoods just to get away from certain persons.
So a great number of people besides ourselves were in one way or another involved in our drinking, to some degree.
When we first stopped drinking, it was a great relief to find that the people we met in A.A.—recovered alcoholics—seemed to be quite different. They reacted to us, not with criticism and suspicion, but with understanding and concern.
However, it is perfectly natural that we still encounter some people who get on our nerves, both within A.A. and outside it. We may find that our non-A.A. friends, co-workers, or family members still treat us as if we were drinking. (It may take them a little while to believe that we have really stopped. After all, they may have seen us stop many times in the past, only to start again.)
To begin to put the concept of “Live and Let Live” into practice, we must face this fact: There are people in A.A., and everywhere else, who sometimes say things we disagree with, or do things we don’t like. Learning to live with differences is essential to our comfort. It is exactly in those cases that we have found it extremely helpful to say to ourselves, “Oh, well, ‘Live
