My history with alcohol

I don’t like getting too personal–although of course I do by implication in my chosen topics and opinions often–but it seems appropriate, today, the day when even non-drinkers get drunk, to meditate in public on my drinking.

For some years, regardless of how I might define the term myself, I have been physiologically an alcoholic.  I have drunk enough on a daily basis that I got withdrawal symptoms if I skipped a day.  Not serious symptoms, not DT’s, but enough that it always made more sense just to drink than to not drink.

For a long time I was the guy at the party who, given an open bar, would consistently overdo it.  Otherwise, I’d have a few beers every night, and maybe a bit of gin to wash it down.

As my tolerance and disposable income grew, so too did my consumption–mostly at home, but I was no stranger to a few bars.

At a certain point, I got Barry McDonough’s “Panic Away” kit, which helps you deal with panic attacks.  I have only had one, at an extremely hard point in my life, but I believe in collecting tools, and this was one I wanted, since I did not want to be that helpless again.

The essence of his method–and by the way I recommend this to anyone who deals with anxiety on a regular basis; it is worth the money–is to accept the anxiety, and ask for more.  Rather than moving away from painful emotions, you move to them, you kill them with kindness.

I got to thinking: this has to apply to more than anxiety, and decided, when I drank, to direct my attention to my dark places, to the emotions I could not process sober, could not confront sober.  I figured if I was going to be drinking anyway, I may as well make it useful.

I did this for a year or two–I honestly don’t remember–and made progress.  At a certain point, I realized I needed to do Kum Nye seriously, and figured signing up for the eKum Nye program would help, even though all the exercises it covers are already in the books.  I figured correctly, as it gave me a more formal structure for my practice.  In theory it was unnecessary; in practice it was.

It is an interesting fact that my two Kum Nye books are literally the only books I have carried with me since I was a teenager.  I bought them in a New Age shop in Rancho Bernardo, California, back in the 1980’s.  I think I knew they were useful, but I always feared them. I feared them, since I knew that with emotional release a lot of really shitty emotions would come up.  They did every time I started the process.  It was like sticking my finger in a light socket.  I knew I needed to do it, but lacked the recovery skills to keep doing it often enough to get through it.  I was alone, because of my life history–which among other things involved getting yanked from every place I developed an attachment to throughout my childhood–and because my traumas isolated me, as indeed they do everyone who has suffered in particular ways.  It is a defining symptom of unprocessed trauma.

But my drinking therapy got me far enough that I was able to combine it with Kum Nye, and that has been the situation for the past six months or so.  About 4 weeks ago, I decided to quit drinking, and have reached a point where I go days without drinking.  It is always hard, because I have opened up many emotions, and they come to me, and I am unprotected.  But I am developing the ability to recover, and I can say that today I can feel a point coming where the role alcohol played–the important, beautiful, needed role–is no longer needed.  It propped me up, kept me from falling, but now I can stand on my own two feet.

This is a wonderful Christmas present, one that has taken a lifetime of work.

I will share a dream I had last night.  There was a drag racing track, with a very unusual feature: a right hand turn.  You had to make the turn, THEN accelerate with all the power those engines have.