Tom P.'s Recovery Story
Drinking wasn’t a problem for me, it was the solution of life’s problems — until two trips to the bughouse complicated things. Thereafter I got the alcohol mixed up with barbiturates, amphetamines, paraldehyde, codeine, and a few other chemical answers. And then, five years of failure in All Addicts Anonymous led me to the remarkable insight that the Program is true.
It never occurred to me that I was heading for big trouble in life. I had an ordinary childhood. I was one of two children, and although I was mixed up now and then and alternately scared and aggressive as most kids are, I had a good time and got along. In high school I was a “success.” I played football and did a lot of activities — you know, the personality act — which I enjoyed and felt satisfied and self-assured about.
During high school I got rid of my religion. It seemed the thing to do. The smart crowd were doing it, and you could tell that the teachers were on that side. I felt advanced, and modern, and sort of scientific. It seemed right to me. I had no notion that I was setting myself up for trouble later on.
In college, all of a sudden I was nowhere. Things didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand why, but nothing added up, and nothing went anywhere or even pointed anywhere. I struggled around at the University of Illinois and finally went over to the University of Michigan, and there, after quite a bit of flaking around, I got it together again. I became the editor of the humor magazine, and began to do the same sort of “success” act that I had done in high school. I made the junior and senior honor societies, became involved in the boy and girl scene, and began to drink.
Drinking for me, right from the start and for many years afterward, was not a problem; it was the answer to a problem — actually, the answer to a number of problems. I had always been shy and uneasy with people and had had to work hard to overcome this trait; my popularity had been built on top of it and in spite of it. But with a few drinks in me, I was not uneasy with anybody; I felt good, without having to work at it. I always worried a lot about a lot of things. With a few drinks, I didn’t worry. At times I used to be really fearful about where I was going in life and what was going to happen to me. I was seriously bugged by it. With a few drinks, I wasn’t afraid, and I wasn’t bugged.
After I got out of school, got married, and went to work, booze and drugs became a prominent part of my life. I drank every day, and I drank quite a bit, but there was no problem — rather, it was now, as it had been from the start, the answer to my problems. I hated to work, but I had to work in order to get money. The drinking, which started at noon, made the working life tolerable. I was in the advertising business, and many of my colleagues drank. I just fell into a way of life that involved a lot of drinking daily. My wife liked to drink. We did plenty of private drinking, and we also did the usual things, parties and socializing, with a lot of drinking mixed in with it all. But if anybody had said I had a problem, I would have laughed. At that point I guess I didn’t have a problem. Exactly when I went over the line I couldn’t say. It was some time about the fourth year after my marriage.
The amount I drank every day increased slowly but steadily. Occasionally it occurred to me that I was drinking and drugging too much, and I would slow down for a few days. I began to be sick in the mornings, but I got used to that. I began to make more and more money, and again I seemed to be a sort of “success.” Life seemed good to me.
We moved from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland and finally down to New York where the big money was, and by the time we arrived in the East I was drinking about a fifth of liquor a day, going to bed every night on three to four and a half grains of nembutal, and getting started every morning on twenty to thirty milligrams of benzedrine. I was drinking this way not to get drunk. I got drunk weekends. During the week it took a fifth a day just to keep me functioning. I worked very hard in New York. I loved the work; it made me feel important. And I loved the money. The amount of booze and drugs I was running on did seem quite a bit out of line, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The idea of quitting, or even cutting down very much, seemed simply fantastic. I couldn’t imagine living any other way; life without booze and drugs, without a lot of booze and drugs, seemed a mere impossibility. I was working ten and twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week.
And then suddenly, on the twenty-ninth day after my twenty-ninth birthday, the whole show blew right up in my face. I had some convulsions at home on the Fourth of July weekend. When I came out of the convulsions, I was off my rocker. They rushed me off to a mental institution, where I stayed for ten weeks, with a diagnosis of manic-depressive syndrome. I returned home and to work with instructions not to work such long hours and not to drink at all, ever.
I guess I stayed sober for two weeks after I got out of the bughouse, and then I very carefully had one drink every day for six weeks. That proved to me (and to my wife) that overwork and not booze and drugs had made me crazy, so I went back to drinking and drugging on a modified schedule, which quickly developed into an unmodified schedule, that is, the old routine of a fifth a day with benzedrine and nembutal, as before.
A year later I was back in the bughouse. This time I got metrazol shock treatments, and this time I took it seriously that I was in big trouble. After the period of treatment, the doctor I was working with sent me to a Twelve Step Fellowship, where I got clean and sober and began to stay clean and sober. This was in 1941.
I liked the Twelve Step Program. I liked helping other people. I liked everything about it except the God business. I couldn’t buy that. I figured no intelligent man could, but I thought I could get along on the friendships and the meetings and the activity.
For one year I didn’t drink. But then I did drink. I thought I would have myself a little “slip” — and if that didn’t work (and I was prepared to believe it might not), I figured I would go back and be a “success” again on the Program like I had been before.
My slip lasted longer than I had planned, but at the end of six weeks I was ready to go back to Twelve Step meetings, and I went back and began trying to work it the way I had worked it before. But it didn’t work. I went into a pattern of being sober and clean for a few weeks and then drunk and drugged-up for a few weeks. That went on and on. Somewhere along the line I began depending heavily upon barbiturates, amphetamines, codeine, and a little paraldehyde when I couldn’t get anything else.
The years went by; I couldn’t do my work. I was writing radio shows and doing well at it, but I couldn’t stay on the job and kept getting fired. At last there was a period of almost unrelieved drinking and drugging, with a lot of very batty mental phenomena and a lot of almost totally irresponsible behavior. I kept going to Twelve Step meetings all this while, because I did see that those people had the answer, even though I didn’t seem to be able to connect with it.
And then, I don’t know how it happened, but sometime in the fall of 1946 something turned over in me. I didn’t see any lights flashing and I didn’t have any emotional experience, but very quietly the Program thing began to make sense to me. The God thing began to make sense. On October 10, 1946, I had my last drink and my last drugs. I have been sober and free from drugs ever since.
The power of the Twelve Steps just wore down my insanity and my self-will. I reached a point where I couldn’t argue against it anymore, because I didn’t believe my own arguments anymore. I had heard too many people, too often, say that God was the answer. I began to believe it. And that was my salvation.
I had been around the Program and falling on my face all those years, and people kept saying to me, “You are too arrogant. You have got to surrender.” I didn’t know what in the hell they were talking about. I thought, “What is this surrender business? I am as beat up as most people and more beat up than some that are doing all this smart talking about surrendering. What am I supposed to do, sign a treaty, or hand over my sword like Lee at Appomattox, or what?” Finally after months and months of repeated failure and disaster, I did begin to see that there was something in me that wouldn’t give up, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
I still don’t know exactly what happened when the turn came. I just quit fighting, and at the same time, without any great excitement but quite clearly, I began to see that the Program was true. I don’t know how, but I began to value the truth. I began to hope and believe in it. I saw that the truth and my sanity were somehow related to each other, and that without the truth I would stay crazy. It is a very practical thing. I don’t know why I didn’t see it for so long a time.
I began to live by the Program in a new way. Before, I accepted as much of it as I could understand and as made sense to me. I left out big chunks which seemed to be not my style, and what I did take I took as a necessity, as a trip laid on me. Now I began to work the whole Program, not because I had to but because I saw it was true — and good for me. The fighting phase and the split-bet phase were over. I accepted the whole thing at last. I certainly do not mean that I did it all or did it well, but I got my back under the whole load. Where before I snarled over split hairs and quarreled with myself and everybody I could induce to quarrel with me over large issues and small, now I accepted the whole package and everything it implied — and lo and behold, it was sweet and good in a way I would never have dreamed possible. At last I did see a little bit of what surrender means. It has something to do with not fighting the truth. It is a secret of admitting defeat.
Trying to live by the truth, trying to be honest, began to be the biggest thing in my life. It still is. Everything — absolutely everything — turns on it.
I began to try to be honest in my relationships with myself, honest in business, honest in my marriage — with revolutionary and transforming results. It was not easy; sometimes it was like a series of surgical operations, with a shock level that terrified me. There were periods when I wondered whether I could endure it. But a strong, steady, unwavering power began to grow up in me and to prevail through smooth times and rough. It was the power not to break down, sell out, or do unworthy things under pressure. It was the power — how precious it is! how dearly bought! — to weather the storms.
Not to look good or to shine or to cut any kind of a figure, but to stand fast in rough weather, without lying to myself or others, without running, without drinking or drugging, without betraying the Truth which is my life.
I was sick — mentally sick for a while, pathologically anxious and depressed — and physically sick for a very long time, about five years, after I stopped drinking and drugging. And I had a hard time earning a living. But the turn had come, and no amount of misfortune or suffering or sickness could alter the fact. My physical and mental recovery progressed very, very slowly, but at last the time came when the anxiety and the depression flickered out and disappeared, never more to return. The physical sickness — mostly allergies and illness coming from a damaged liver — began to subside. And I returned to the land of the living, bearing with me a priceless treasure from my long sojourn in the land of the living dead. I brought with me not just the belief but the sure knowledge that God indeed does help those who help themselves, but more important, he helps those who are so sick and so beat up that they can’t help themselves.
All you have to do is ask.
And the one thing that puzzles me most now is this: Why did I — why would any human being — have to go through that whole long agony, over all those years, in order to get around to something so simple as just asking? I think that this is not only the mystery of my own life, but the mystery of our whole race. We do seem to be willing to endure almost any kind of suffering, rather than ask a favor of the Power who created us.