The Dark Side Of Alcohol Addiction Doesn't Start With Alcohol. Why Some Become Alcoholics.
- 19 hours ago
- 7 min read
It has been almost two decades since I broke my friendship with John Barleycorn. That friendship was strong for the last thirteen years of it. After I met him, I only socialized periodically. Soon it became a weekly get-together, like good friends do. It was nothing to worry about, everyone I knew liked Johnny B. on Friday and Saturday nights. But it seemed like everyone else eventually outgrew him as I only got closer. We started hanging out a few times a week as well. But then one day he moved into my domain. That’s when you realize Johnny isn’t a friend at all. He is a mortal enemy whose intent is to take your life in the end. You were his mark before you even met him.
Very few become an alcoholic simply because they tried it, liked it and the substance became an unbreakable habit. Very few have the more than average drinking days of youth and become alcoholics. Many drink in college or in one tour in the military. But many of those don’t become alcoholics. Why? They leave the environment of drinking and the want for it leaves as well.
It was proposed decades ago that certain people have the “alcoholic” gene. The demon lying in wait for that first drink from the unsuspecting born addict, who isn’t aware of the opening of those floodgates. This is accepted as fact today in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. But about half the doctors are now questioning this theory. They are maintaining that the “disease” isn’t a disease but an emotional ailment that usually results from past abuse. And they seem to be right for I have never met an alcoholic who didn’t have an abusive past in childhood or adolescence. I’m sure a few exist, but I’m also sure they are the exceptions, not the rule.
I have described the inferno that I walked out of when I ended the friendship with John Barleycorn. The initial five-day detox. The emotional roller coaster of second phase to day forty-five, when the cravings are intense and constant. The journey through the long protracted phase that ended at year two. The day I claimed cure. I was cured and still am today. I reject the AA belief that I have a disease and am a forever addict. I am quite convinced that is why I am cured and over eighty percent of AA participants return to alcoholism in the end. When you think you have a disease, you are going to battle it daily in your mind. When you believe you’re cured, you can now reinvent your life and leave the addiction in the past.
At the end of month four in sobriety, I disappeared into the wilderness for several months into the mountains of California. No radios, no playlists and no media outlet of any kind. I cut myself off from the world and only returned briefly every week to ten days to resupply my backpack. I roamed from one trail to the next, going off trail for solitude. Many times I didn’t see another human for a week. I had only the sound of nature’s melodies and the companionship of the marmot and occasional wandering bear. I noted my thoughts in a journal, which still sits in a dusty storage locker over seventeen years later. Sometimes I pass through the town, pull it out and peruse the pages to remind myself of who I once was versus who I am today. I have pages in shaky ink of those first days of detox as well. Reliving those words makes me never want to call Johnny again.
When I was in my senior year of high school, I had the infamous fake I.D. It wasn’t much of a fake I.D., obtained at a photo shop for ten bucks with a heading of Personal Identification. You have to understand that back in 1985 no one really cared about underage drinking as long as you weren’t putting a car into the bay. And I was an avid weightlifter and had a shaved head for football so everyone assumed I was a Marine attached to the naval base in Norfolk. So rarely I was even questioned, and the time I was, I replied my regular driver’s license was revoked for too many D.U.I.s. And that actually worked.
Sometimes I was a clever kid.
With my outlawish ways I had procured a bottle of cheap vodka that I kept in an additional school locker that was vacant with my nunchucks and switchblade. All relics largely for internal show as no one knew about the hideout locker except me. That bottle was touched maybe two or three times in that year, but I remember distinctly why.
I had spent three years in a prior school in Cincinnati being severely bullied. Then I went home and got the same from my father. The reason the original one became my prior school was because one day I realized I was bigger than my father now and challenged him to fight. He backed down, realizing the slapped puppy had grown up to be a razor, sharp-toothed wolf that he could no longer control. I had to leave home a few weeks later to live with my grandmother, which was the ideal place to discern why my father ended up the way he was. I was in a new school with the same emotional trauma. I had social phobia and managed to isolate myself from everyone. For when you snub teenagers, regardless of the why, they are more than happy to return the favor. Those few times I opened that bottle was to counter the angst. It was just a little, few swallows at most, but that liquid fire burned away my unease.
So I thought.
The first drunk, I have described in other works as well, was at a high school graduation party. I really didn’t want to go to graduation but was forced to by that grandmother. I didn’t have any friends, but it just wouldn’t look right if I didn’t walk down that aisle as proper with a southern family member. I don’t remember why I went to the party afterward. I didn’t go to Homecoming or prom. Maybe it was a last ditch attempt at normality or maybe I just didn’t want to hang around my grandmother any more than necessary before I left her. But I handled the event by getting smashed and it went as well as the story goes for every first drunk when the lad doesn’t have the experience to know that combining massive amounts of vodka and beer will not be a formula for a positive outcome.
This was the contemplation over twenty years later in those crisp, snow-capped mountains, sitting alone and staring at the silence of Emerald Lake in the high altitude of the Trinity Alps. Everyone else that night was drinking for the celebration of the monumental completion of a major checkpoint of life. I was ill the next day from attempting to nullify the pain of it. I didn’t start drinking because I had an alcoholic gene.
And this is what Alcoholics Anonymous gets wrong and why they have such a dismal failure rate from those who attempt to leave John Barleycorn by walking through the rooms’ doors. AA misdirects the reason for the prior addiction. They tell the initial members that the alcoholism is a disease. It was a preconditioned addiction that they had no control over. When the real reason is never addressed, the person can’t be cured of the affliction. It’s like trying to treat the flu with a tetanus shot. It’s the wrong treatment. That’s why they contend that recovery is ongoing forever. Because the initial cause was never investigated.
Most never make it past the six month mark in the rooms. Of course they don’t. They are still living in a past trauma or abuse that was never rectified. They just keep regurgitating the alcoholic stories in the circle and chant the Serenity Prayer while they tell themselves they know they are sober today but couldn’t tell you about tomorrow.
Why did us alcoholic types want to drink? To deaden the pain of the past. Alcohol continued to be an anesthetic during my very painful, socially withdrawn early twenties. It relieves that self-view of being an outcast, whether you are around people or not. First, it was my coping drug when at get-togethers to alleviate that social anxiety. Then it becomes your companion as well to assuage it when you are alone.
If you spend enough years at it, then the day will arrive when you become physically addicted to John’s liquid potion. At that point you don’t think you can live without it. If you stop, then the detox symptoms will confirm this hypothesis. You will have to go through the stages of withdrawal, endure the intense and continuous cravings until they abate as well as that hyperemotional roller coaster until the ride ends.
At the end of second phase in recovery, I advise to recreate all the planes of your life to gain full cure. The physical, emotional and advancement of Self, whether career or otherwise. But you also must go back and solve the past. For the past is the reason the vast majority of alcoholics became that way. And this is where Alcoholics Anonymous goes very wrong. They don’t address it, they relive it every night in never ending toxicity that is nothing but constant reinforcement of negativity. This does not aid in a person’s recovery and they are right to a point. If the person doesn’t solve the past, he will always be in a state of recovery. Which is why the ones who stay sober, the very minority of AA members, aren’t being helped by AA, they are being impeded in progress. They will be stuck forever with a high chance of going back to their addiction. Because they still carry that pain from yesteryear and John Barleycorn still has that anesthetic to it. That’s why they don’t know if they will be sober tomorrow. Because they never resolved yesterday.
If you solve the past trauma or abuse, the want to drink will vanish. It doesn’t vanish immediately and neither does the emotional war when you confront your demons. It may take counseling or you may just read books by specialists, like I did. But once you bury those demons, you won’t have a desire to run with Johnny B. Sometimes those ghosts will rattle their chains from the attic. But they stay in the attic, not in your everyday life and most of the time they are quiet.
And so is John Barleycorn now. Because you placed him six feet under.
To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
(Usually free on KDP)
(Usually free on KDP)
For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK
(Usually free on KDP)
John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913
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