This Naked Mind

The Blame Game 3.0: Alcoholic Genes

The Big Book claims that alcoholism “is limited to this class [of people] and never occurs in the average temperate drinkers.”

The idea is that alcohol is not a problem for normal people and that many people can drink and suffer no physical, mental, or social ill effects, implying that alcohol is not a problem for normal people. Since 87% of the population drinks,

with those drinkers ranging from the person who only drinks during toasts at weddings to the degenerate sleeping in the gutter, it is not hard to see why society struggles to understand this disease.

A.A. members describe themselves as a group of men and women who have discovered they cannot control their drinking.

While I don’t agree that alcoholics have lost control due to a physical, mental, or emotional defect, I concur that an alcoholic should be defined as someone who no longer has the ability to restrain their drinking.

I realize under this definition many alcoholics don’t recognize that they have lost control. Many more drinkers dwell in limbo. Usually, years separate the point where you start to wonder if you have a problem and the moment you accept it. Ten years after a tiny voice in my head began to question my nightly drinking I determined I had to stop denying it and change how much I drank. It saddens me to think of the damage I did to my body, the havoc I wreaked in my relationships, and the pain I caused my husband. I want This Naked Mind to be a life raft, a wake-up call well before we reach “rock bottom” and our drinking becomes unmanageable.

If about 87% of people drink, it seems fair to assume that the majority believe themselves to be in control.

To be clear, I am not saying that everyone who drinks has developed a physical and neurological dependence on alcohol. It is not that everyone who sips alcohol is addicted but that everyone who drinks alcohol has a chance of becoming addicted. Furthermore, the point of addiction or dependence is unknown to the drinker and is generally not known until the drinker attempts to cut back. The obvious problem is that you can’t know when you are in control. Nothing seems different, and in fact as humans we tend to feel in control until something significant shows us that we are not. Even then we will vehemently deny we have lost control.

The End of the Blame Game

Why is it hard for us to admit that alcohol itself is the primary issue? That alcohol, like any other drug, is addictive and dangerous? That life circumstances, personality, and conditioning lead some victims down into the abyss of alcoholism faster than others, but that we are all drinking the same harmful, addictive substance? That alcohol is dangerous no matter who you are? Have you heard the saying, “When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not unicorns?” Perhaps we need to take another look and realize the simpler answer makes more sense.

If you are not convinced, that’s OK. We will talk more about this. What is important now is that you entertain the idea that you might not be fully in control of your drinking. After all, you cannot solve a problem you don’t realize you have.

So that begs the question, when exactly did we lose control?

3. (#ulink_dd6b854a-ec0b-52d3-a4b7-b96b108b3f20)

THE DRINKER OR THE DRINK? PART 2: THE DRINK (#ulink_dd6b854a-ec0b-52d3-a4b7-b96b108b3f20)

“First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Dangerous Delight: The Nectar of Death

Allen Carr, an author and addiction expert best known for helping smokers overcome nicotine addiction, uses a perfect analogy for how addiction works: the pitcher plant.

This analogy is powerful, both in making sense of addiction in your conscious mind and in reconditioning your unconscious mind.

Have you heard of a pitcher plant? It’s a deadly, meat-eating plant native to India, Madagascar, and Australia. Imagine you are walking by a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, and you smell the doughnuts frying. It’s hard to resist the smell of doughnuts. A pitcher plant is like Krispy Kreme for insects. You are an unsuspecting bumblebee flying through the woods. Suddenly, you fly through blissfully perfumed air. It makes your little bee tummy start to rumble, and you want to get a taste.

You fly closer to the plant; it looks like a delicious treat of fresh nectar. It smells great. To get a taste you must fly inside the rim. You land in the nectar and start to drink. But you don’t notice the gradual slope under your feet. You are caught up in the moment, enjoying the treat. You begin to slide down into the plant without realizing it. You only notice the intoxicating nectar. Then you begin to sense the slight slide; gravity conspiring against you, but you have wings. You are confident you can fly out of the plant at any time. You need just a few more sips. The nectar is good, so why not enjoy it?

You think, as most drinkers do, that you are in control; you can leave the plant at any time. Eventually the slope becomes very steep, and the daylight seems farther away as darkness closes in around you. You stop drinking just enough to see dead, floating bodies of other bees and insects around you. You realize you are not enjoying a drink; you are drinking the juices of other dead and dissolving bees. You are the drink.

But can’t we have the best of both worlds? Enjoy the nectar and then fly away? Maybe you can put limits on yourself and monitor your intake. Tons of people can do this and do it well—for a while, until something changes in their lives, some additional stressor or a tragedy. Or perhaps nothing changes and, like me, you gradually find you are drinking more than you ever set out to.

All doctors and alcohol experts agree that alcohol is addictive. How many people do you know who drink consistently less over time? For the moment, let’s focus on “responsible,” adult drinking patterns. Sure, students are well known for binging while attending university, leaving the party-heavy environment of frat houses for steady jobs and family life can reset the amount they regularly drink. But once they’ve set their long-term patterns, isn’t it true that people tend to drink more, not less, over time?

We used to tease one of my friends because she was tipsy after half a glass of wine. Her low tolerance was the butt of jokes for years; however, when I saw her last week, she drank two large glasses at dinner and felt sober enough to drive home. Alcohol is addictive, and your tolerance increases over time. It’s a dangerous road no matter how little you drink or how in control you think you are. In fact, recent neurological studies demonstrate that the brain changes in response to alcohol. These changes increase tolerance, diminish the pleasure derived from drinking, and affect the brain’s ability to exercise self-control.

We will talk in detail about the effects of alcohol on the brain in a later chapter.

A Neglected Warning: The Homeless Drunk

Why aren’t we forewarned by the dead bees at the bottom of the pitcher plant? We have all seen people who’ve lost everything to addiction, who beg on the street with a bottle of booze in a brown paper bag. Isn’t this vagabond like the rotting bodies of the other trapped bees? Does this person help us to see the danger? Perhaps for a few. But most of us hide behind the arbitrary line we have drawn between “alcoholics” and “regular drinkers.” We don’t blame the addictive drug in our glass. Instead, we believe that there is something wrong with the addict on the street.

Thinking the alcoholic on the street is different allows us to believe ourselves to be immune. What has happened to him cannot possibly happen to us. We are not in danger of becoming one of “those” people. Of course, we don’t know his backstory, that he was a smart, successful businessman with a growing family. We don’t know how alcohol ensnared him, and he lost everything to the most accepted, deadly, and widely used of all drugs.

Let’s look at it a different way. We see the homeless man on the street like a bee views an ant that has crawled into the pitcher plant. The ant doesn’t have wings; therefore, he is not like me, the bee. I have wings; I am in control. I can escape whenever I want to. But in reality both the ant and the bee are in mortal danger.

The last time I was on the Las Vegas strip everyone, everywhere was drinking. I mean, hey, it’s Vegas. The drinkers came in all varieties, from giggling girls with the “yards” of fruity drinks to the bachelor-party boys with their 40 oz. beers. They were young, vibrant, and full of life. I watched them walk right by a beggar with his bed on the street. He had no food but clutched a bottle of alcohol hidden in a paper bag. It was clear to any passerby that drinking had destroyed his life. All of the “regular” drinkers looked directly at him. Many even gave him spare change.

But did they question the substance in their own cups? Did they realize they were drinking the same life-destroying poison as the homeless man? Did it prevent them from ordering their next drink? Sadly, no.

The Descent: When Did I Lose Control?

Is it so hard to accept that the youngsters, experimenting with alcohol, are like the bee landing on the edge of the plant and tasting the nectar? That the homeless man begging for food is just at a more advanced stage in the descent?

A recent study by the Prevention Research and Methodology Center at Pennsylvania State University measured the college binge drinking habits of students whose parents had allowed them to drink in high school. The findings demonstrate that teens who drink in high school have a significantly higher risk of binging in college. The study also confirms how much influence parental behavior has on teenagers and children. And it’s not just boys modeling their dads or girls modeling their moms. If either parent drinks at home, both the son and daughter are influenced.

Starting to drink in high school leads to more drinking in college.

Why? Because when the descent begins at an early age, kids enter the college years farther down the slope than those who waited until college to sample the “nectar.”

I didn’t realize how my drinking increased over time. I shut my mind to the fact that I was drinking more than I ever had anticipated. Are you drinking more or less than you did three, five, or even ten years ago? What about your friends? Are they drinking at the same level, or do they drink more as time goes on? When we realize we are drinking more than we want, we begin the battle to quit or cut back. But, like the bee in the pitcher plant, the more we struggle, the more stuck we become.

When does the bee lose control? When she begins her gradual slide downward? When she tries to fly away and is unable to? That’s certainly when panic sets in. But it’s clear she lost control well before she realized it, prior to the point she couldn’t physically escape. As Allen Carr theorizes, perhaps from the moment she landed on the pitcher plant, the bee was never in control.

When did you lose control? Was it the first time your spouse commented on your drinking? Or someone noticed the smell? When you drank so much you threw up, again, perhaps on your partner? When you got a DUI? Maybe you feel like you are still in control. I’m not asking when you realized you had a problem. That was most likely a definitive moment: another hangover, blackout, or even wrecking your car. Losing control is different from realizing you have lost control.

So when was it? Or are we always in control? No one insists we drink; no one holds a gun to our heads. But if we are in control, aren’t alcoholics also in control? No one forces them to drink. But that has to be different, right? Is it? Or are there just different levels of the same thing? From the outside no one would have guessed how much I was drinking. I was a “high-functioning alcoholic.” I didn’t lose my job or miss a single meeting because of alcohol. In fact, I excelled at my job and was frequently promoted. I didn’t drink and drive. There were few outward signs of how much I drank. Did that mean I didn’t struggle? Or that the alcohol wasn’t slowly killing me? On the contrary.

Perhaps it’s like the story of the boiling frog. A frog is placed in a pot of cold water, which is moved onto a hot stove. The water heats up, yet the frog does not jump out and save himself. Why not? It happens at such a gradual pace that the moment in which he should jump out passes. When he realizes he is boiling to death, it’s too late. Could it be that the 87% of adults who drink are like the frog? Are we all in the same pot of slowly boiling water?

So when did you lose control of your drinking? When you experienced a life-crisis related to alcohol? When you realized it was hurting your health, and you decided to cut back? No, it must have been before that because if you were truly in control, you would not have allowed any of those things to happen. When exactly was it? Can you pinpoint it? Chances are you don’t know when normal, habitual drinking became a problem. Can you entertain the possibility that you may never have been in control? That, like the bee, you are not in control of alcohol but alcohol is controlling you? And if you are certain you are still in control and can stop whenever you want to, are you certain you will still be able to next week? Next year? Are you willing to bet your life on it?

Finding Freedom: You Can Do This

You still have many questions. What about the addictive personality? What about the fact that some people have different backgrounds and reasons for drinking? What about our intellect—surely we are smarter than a bee? What about all the people who enjoy a single drink with dinner and never seem to slide farther down? What about all the people who actually seem to be able to take it or leave it?

We’ll cover these questions in future chapters. But for now, consider the possibility that since we are human, and since alcohol is addictive to humans, once we begin to drink we unconsciously begin the slow slide into addiction. Does this mean everyone descends at the same rate? Or that everyone reaches the bottom? No. Many will drink throughout their lives and never reach a point where they try to stop. Maybe this means they are sliding at a very slow pace, or maybe it means that the alcohol kills them before they realize they have become dependent. Many factors contribute to the speed of a person’s slide, and we will explore those factors in detail. Keep asking these questions. Critical thought is the key to understanding.

What is important now is that you can see that alcohol is an addictive substance whose nature does not change depending on who drinks it. This means that you are not weak. It is not your willpower or character that is lacking. You are as much at fault in the situation as the bumblebee that is instinctively enticed by the nectar of the pitcher plant.

Insects in the pitcher plant do not have hope. They don’t have the intellectual ability to understand, and therefore escape, their tragic fate. We do! We, as humans, have the intelligence and ability to understand what is happening in our minds and bodies. I know the pitcher plant is terrifying, but be hopeful. You can find freedom and it may be one of the most joyful experiences of your life.

When I found freedom from alcohol I felt euphoric. The realization dawned, and I cried tears of joy. You probably still believe alcohol benefits you in some way. So the idea of drinking less or quitting altogether is uncomfortable. I can relate. It is terrifying to think about giving up something you feel brings you pleasure or relief. It’s OK. When you understand the concepts in this book you will not feel any apprehension, only joy. Hope is stronger than fear. Try to maintain a hopeful outlook.