Addictions and Answers
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Q: I am forty seven years old, my job is on the line and my wife says she is going to leave if I don’t stop drinking. I’ve tried to quit on my own, have even gone to a couple of AA meetings. The last one I went to, I was already drunk, got drunker when it was over. I am desperate. What would you do if you were me? A: In Question No. 1, I’ve described flying the Atlantic in a blackout and drinking my way into two hospitals in ten days. When I came to in the second, Dr. LeClair Bissell was sitting beside my bed. She suggested I go to a rehab. I knew so little about alcoholism I said to her, “What’s that?” When she told me, I laughed. “You actually think some bunch of holy rollers are going to turn me around in 28 days?” But there was something about her - something that saved my life - that made me believe her. I went. With the exception of one fifteen day relapse, been sober ever since. 28 days? Why couldn’t I have learned all I needed - faster - by reading a book? What happens at rehabs? Why do they work? On my radio show, I’ve often asked people who run rehabs, and I've asked many addicts who’ve successfully gone the 28-day route themselves. Most often, the answer is, “I don’t know why it works, but I left floating on a pink cloud. I can’t put it in words, the only answer I have-- it’s magic.” Not as dumb an answer as one might suppose. The important stuff that goes on at a rehab is indeed non-verbal. Ever read the lyrics to a popular song without the music? The words alone are flat, even silly. Put music behind them, they take on enormous power . . . magic. Patients at a rehab attend scientific and medical lectures on addiction, get pounds of literature on the subject, come away with hard, factual information about their life predicament. All this is fine, but the words merely reinforce what they already knew: this chemical stuff is bad for you. Cut it out, or it will kill you. What is missing is motivation to put that hard, factual information to work . . . the music. How do you stop, not only today, but for the rest of your life? It is the existential experience of going through the rehab live-in process with a bunch of other addicts and drunks that changes the self. The one I went to called itself, “a therapeutic community.” An apt name; we helped heal each other. This dynamic operates on an almost unconscious level, and has little to do with information, will power, cognition, science, medical fact, words or philosophy. You don’t have to understand it -- you don’t even have to be intelligent -- for it to work. Living there, being there; the music never stops. Let’s say you have a waiter, a poet and a stockbroker. There’s a war, and you tell them -- Run up on that beach and take out that machine gun emplacement. Fat chance. Click here for more |
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Last Update: 3/5/2001
Web Author: The Rainbow Company