An alcoholic could be called an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.
The drinking alcoholic believes that he is the center of the universe and the rest of the world revolves around him. At the same time, he has no confidence and lives in fear. In sobriety the alcoholic joins the human race and becomes a participant in life.
The now sober alcoholic has work to do.
Father Vaughan Quinn lays down a blueprint for a positive life—not only for the alcoholic, but for everyone. The major stumbling block to happiness, he says, is preoccupation with self. The happiest recovering alcoholics are those who have not only quit drinking, but have changed their attitude about themselves, others in their lives, and the world around them.
The Reverend Vaughan Quinn, O.M.I., is an alcoholic. He is the executive director of Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center, an alcohol treatment facility in Detroit and Memphis, Michigan.
The person who is given over to alcohol is very negative and the hallmarks of that are worry, anger, self-pity, and depression. One or two of those negative emotions can totally immobilize a person. In that state, he is unable to make any lifegrowing, mature, unselfish decisions for himself. The rest of the world is pushing his buttons. Continually working out of a negative situation because of guilt, that person is continually forced to act in a way that is tremendously manipulative of other people. He tries to ingratiate himself with other people by his presence, doing all kinds of good things excessively and compulsively to gain other people's approval.
Alcoholism is not a symptom of other, deeper character disorders. It is a primary disease with its own etiology, symptomatology, and fatality, if nothing is done about it. Alcoholism is a chemical problem. There are millions of people who drink. The effect of alcohol on alcoholics is totally different from what it is on social drinkers, and measurably so, speaking clinically and pharmacologically.
Alcoholics adopt a cluster of behavior patterns to protect their drinking and their position in life so that they don't go below the threshold of pain. So the lying comes in, the sneaking of drinks, the egocentricity and the narcissism, the "to hell with the rest of the world" and "me, me, me" attitude. All of the self-centeredness comes in because the people who are closest to us reflect back our own self-disgust and we respond in anger. That has to change. We have to learn to deal with those people differently. We cannot play the same games we were playing with those people before. When the alcoholic quits drinking, he's got a lot of work to do because of the cluster of behavior patterns he adopted for self-protection while the drinking was going on.
The real purpose of sobriety is for the alcoholic to change from a selfish to an unselfish person. The whole business is to turn the negative into something positive. Author Father John Powell says, "If our basket of life is filled with nothing but worry, anger, self-pity, depression, resentments, and hostility, that's the way we're going to relate to people." The philosophy of recovery, and here I'm making direct reference to the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, is being able to change all that negativity into a positive acceptance of the human condition. There cannot be anything negative about it. There cannot be any crying, "Poor me, poor me, I can't drink. Everybody else is able to drink but I'm not."
The cause of the fear and pain that block every human being—not just alcoholics—from growing is preoccupation with self. The further a person regresses in the addiction process, the more he becomes self-occupied, self-centered. His world becomes no bigger than himself.
The goals of recovery are freedom, happiness, peace, and serenity—that is quoted directly from the philosophy of AA. That cannot be arrived at as long as there is any amount of alcohol or addictive drug, any type of foreign chemical in the system. The first step is to free the person from dependency on chemistry so he is able to experience the growth process that gives life some zest. This demands continued therapy, regular attendance at AA, so the person doesn't slide back into the old negative frame of reference. It's a pity today that we find so many people—and I even see them in some AA groups—who find their comradeship, their fellowship, their sense of belonging, by being negative, by voicing what I call proclamations of protestation. They are not being present to one another, reflecting back one another's goodness and dignity and sense of divine origin.
I feel very strongly that the AA philosophy and the whole recovery process consist of sharing how we get well, sharing with other people the experiences of the present and the hope of the future. That hope is the personal commitment to the not yet certain. None of us has answers to what is going to happen five years, or even five days, down the road.
Through the philosophy of recovery and the philosophy of AA, there are people who live in the now and enjoy a meaningful, purposeful life in an enthusiastic way. That is the reason AA is so successful. What makes a person stop drinking is always a negative thing, and that's valid. I'm going to lose something. I'm going to lose my health, my liver, my spleen, my wife, my car, my job, or in my case, my priesthood. That's valid for the initial stage of recovery.
But the human brain is a thinking brain, and we can always rethink things and look into our memories for the positive things. All of a sudden, after the pain, the guilt, the shame, the remorse disappear—and they all do, in time, or we'd all be looking for a bridge to throw ourselves off—all of a sudden, it's "Well, drinking really wasn't that bad" or "I think I can do it a little bit differently." This is fatal because the person has started a rationalization process that is going to defeat him in time.
What keeps a person in continued conditioning therapy, which is AA, is the realistic appreciation that life is better because of the fact that they're not drinking, not using drugs. There is more joy, more enthusiasm, more purpose. It's just a better, more positive lifestyle.
AA could stand for Altered Attitudes. A person changes from being negative into being positive, so that he becomes part of the solution instead of part of the problem. He stops reacting negatively, stops crying about what a despicable world it is, stops being a prophet of gloom and doom. The toast is burned. The coffee is too cold. The sidewalks are too narrow. The eggs are too greasy. The beautiful mountains are blocking the view. That type of world approach is very dangerous in the person who is recovering from alcoholism. What that signifies is that the infantile part of the ego is again assuming directorship of the universe. Those negative feelings will lead the alcoholic back to drinking.
When we talk about deflation in the recovery process, we're talking about the infantile part of ego. The alcoholic starts with the attitude that says, "I am king and I want what I want when I want it. Everybody else darn well better do what I want, and my wish is everybody else's command." This is an attitude he brings with him from infancy—"His Majesty the Baby." He really gets to believe, although he never really articulates it, that the sun rises and sets on him, that his own goodness and well-being are paramount. Another part of that ego deflation has to focus on tolerance of frustration. Alcoholics are notorious for waving at a taxi in a rainstorm. The taxi driver doesn't even see them, so they go in and drink for three days. Low tolerance to any type of frustration has to be worked on. That's why the "one day at a time" philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous is very effective. It does away with sabotage concepts in which a person tries to do much more than he's capable of doing and sets up a situation where he is doomed to fail. Alcoholics also have a mania for doing everything in a hurry. We want everything to happen right now, yesterday. It takes stick-to-itiveness in general daily living, which has to be worked on, to gain serenity and peace.
Now, what is every bit as important is that the other side of the ego, which not all people are aware of, has to be built up. That's the part that deals with self-worth and self-respect, the part that deals with a sense of divine origin, the part that deals with being created on this earth for a purpose, the belief that "I am a good person." To bring out that good is certainly the purpose of AA; it isn't just looking at the negative. We know that negative things brought us into therapy. After that, what keeps us in therapy is that life has become more beautiful and there is a lot more enthusiasm.
Basically, that's what alcoholics look for in drinking. They look for the great romances, the great coups, the sense of peace, belonging, and unity. Those drives are valid. The alcohol brings total regression into their lives. That basic drive has to be directed in a more positive way so that they can participate in some significant, meaningful, joyful experiences. There certainly would be no purpose in stopping drinking if life just became as tedious and boring as it was before. The reason alcoholics drink is to change the way they feel. If a person still feels very negative, if he's not experiencing any of the positive fringe benefits of the recovery program, then he ultimately will go back and say, "Well, heck, is this all there is? I might as well just drink again."
So in the process of being involved in the AA program, that part of the ego that is involved with omnipotence, low tolerance to frustration, and impatience is deflated. The part of the ego that deals with self-worth and self-dignity has to be inflated. This part grows through service to other people, through being able to love them unconditionally, without measuring everything on a scale, without receiving any gifts in return, without the attitude, "I'll do this for you, if you do this for me. Here's my gift, and if you don't do this for me, I'll take my gift away." There can be none of that. We must learn to appreciate other people as they are, without any conditions whatsoever being laid on.
It's a continuing process of growth and change to appreciate the world, to be present to the world, to see the sacredness of things, the sacredness of other people, the sacredness of creation.
Everybody who reaches out for help has three problems: they cannot love themselves; they cannot accept themselves; and they cannot forget themselves. In AA, what we talk about is learning to accept ourselves, feeling self-worth, dignity, and self-love. This is brought about by positive actions. If a person is doing negative things, he'll suffer the negative feelings that are the consequence. The alcoholic must accept the fact that "I am a recovering alcoholic. There are certain parameters I can deal with successfully, but there are certain things I cannot do, either." The alcoholic cannot use mood-altering drugs of any nature because that would bring back the negative attitudes and make the positive sense of self-worth disappear.
Self-love deals with the journey a person takes in AA, and the morality of AA means a journey of recovery in relationship to other people. How am I getting along with the world? If we're dealing well with other people, then we receive good, positive feedback. The inventory steps of AA are there to bring out the goodness, to bring out the beauty, to bring out the lovableness, to bring out the positiveness, to bring out the creativity, to bring out the uniqueness, to bring out the fears each individual has. It's not a laundry list of all the mistakes that a person has made in life. It's intended to help a person find out what makes him tick so he can be himself and not try to be somebody else. Many people try to copy other people. They stay miserable that way. When we do copy somebody else, we invariably end up compulsively copying the negative aspects, not the healthy aspects, of that individual.
People are an unrepeatable mystery of God's creation. They're a unique creation and that's what they have to respond to, by saying yes to God, yes to the world around them, by allowing the world to challenge them and by not taking everything so seriously.
We must forget about ourselves and be about the business of being of service to other people. That is built into the mechanics of AA, through alcoholics helping other alcoholics and contributing to meetings. The only way a human being finds happiness is by getting rid of self-preoccupation. We alcoholics must rid ourselves of this selfishness or it kills us. We can't do that by ourselves; we need the help of God and other people.
What the fellowship of AA (the word fellowship means "a group of men and women called together by God") offers to the individual is an opportunity to be of service to other people, to carry that message to suffering alcoholics who are coming to the program for the first time. That gives a person a terrific sense of self-worth. What suffering alcoholics bring when they come into the fellowship is a tremendous amount of worry, anger, self-pity, depression, resentment, and even hatred, blaming other people for all the negative things that happen in their lives. There is a tremendous amount of hostility.
The whole program of AA is spiritual. It makes people aware of the spirit that is in them, a spirit that will bring them self-worth so they can experience freedom, happiness, peace, and serenity in relationship to other people.
AA is not a program in which you climb a mountain and contemplate your navel. The spiritual conversion that takes place after surrender means there's no more fighting. The person takes enough time inside himself to experience solitude and to develop peacefulness. Hostility then changes into hospitality. The person is able to perceive the stranger coming toward him as "a bearer of gifts." That's a spine-tingling phrase. This process is very difficult because it is a change in life's vision, a tremendously different approach to life. It really means a spiritual change inside the person so that other people are no longer a threat. The person doesn't go along with paranoia all the time, wondering who is out to get him. He is not continually blaming everybody else if good fortune is not happening to him. He develops a solidarity so that he is able to open up his heart, to allow other people to be present to him and share his gifts. He sees the approaching person as one who has many gifts. In the peace and happiness and tenderness the program talks about, he is able to appreciate that other person for the dignity that is in him as a bearer of gifts.
There are no more power relationships. Power relationships are taking relationships, grasping relationships, egocentric relationships. What is in it for me, me, me. I want what I want when I want it. I use other people to get what I want.
What we have in AA are relationships built on total disarmament, brought about by the common denominator of alcoholism. The only thing that's required of anybody who comes into the group is the desire to stop drinking. All of the competitiveness that we hang on to in the world, which separates us from other people and makes us different, all those little trophies we have, all those little titles before and after our names, our positions, and everything else, all of that is dropped. What brings us together is humility because of what alcoholism did to our lives. In a humble way, we become teachable. We're able to be humble enough to be taught by whoever comes to the table. We're open to them. The relationships are no longer taking relationships. They are giving relationships. In power-struggle relationships you have two people competing, each trying to force his will over the other person.
In AA the real winners, the real livers, the real laughers, the real lovers, the real creative people, the real people, are not afraid to go out and take risks and live meaningful, purposeful lives in service to other people. They don't have to direct other people all the time. They allow other people to be themselves, appreciating the goodness that is in them. The easiest way to stay sick and miserable your whole life is to make yourself responsible for other people's getting well, to make yourself responsible for other people's changing. The job is to allow people to flower at their own rate. That's what AA is. That's why it does not have any rules and regulations. Through AA a tremendous number of people are able to experience meaningful and purposeful lives.
Happy and successful recovered alcoholics are action-oriented. That's very important. If people are in AA and still living in the past, it's very debilitating. If people are there to find out why they drank, that's a total waste of time. They drank because everybody drinks. The effects of alcohol on them are different from those on social drinkers. The group that does well is able to laugh at themselves, is able to forget about themselves, is oriented to the future, is able to take risks, is able to make themselves vulnerable to situations. That's because they're not holding themselves responsible for the rest of the world's getting well.
When I talk about sobriety, I don't mean it has to be a party twenty-four hours a day. We all get knocks in the head. But at least we can avoid regressing, blaming everybody else and not living in the now. Some of the saddest people I see are those who come into my office and are emotionally on the edge of their chairs. I can see by what's emanating from them that they are living a situation created by what somebody did to them years ago. They have been allowing that person to live in their head rent-free for years, and they are totally immobilized. They can't talk about anything else. Their experience has made them very bitter. In positive recovery we've got to look upon our experiences by asking, "Are they going to make us bitter or are they going to make us better?"
The impact of AA is measurable in our relationship to other people. Are we able to be more kind to them? Are we able to be more tender to them in the way we make ourselves present to them, the way we listen to them and look at them? It's always in relationship to other people because this is where we live out our lives. It's also always in the now, and not what happened years ago. We should be at tables of AA sharing with other people how we get well. What are the joys? What are some of the hopes? What are some of the fears, real fears, that are going on right now? Then we can make an act of faith. That means a personal commitment that things will get better if we apply ourselves. It is not talking about what happened years ago. That really has no significance to what is going on now. The horror stories, the war stories abound. We all lived them and certainly it can be all right to identify that there was a loss of control, that there was a conflict between behavior and values. But what gets people well is sharing what we have now, the freedom and the joy and the happiness. When new people come to the AA program they see that. They see people laughing and relaxing and having a good time, and they say, "These people have something I want." That's important. The emphasis should be on the positive, on what's going on right now, today.
The alcoholic in sobriety can fall into two traps—pride and anger. Pride is totally taking credit for the gift of sobriety and everything else in his world. This is a type of person to whom even God will remain silent, the person who has a pride-filled heart and says, "I'm a self-made man. I've got sobriety now because I am the cause of it. I brought it into my life and I'm doing it my way and my way is working." That person is in a very hostile frame of reference to the rest of the community, to the rest of the world, and that frame of mind definitely will bring on much aggravation and many negative reactions. That person is saying sobriety is not a gift. "I am in total control of it and I am the singular efficient cause of the sobriety in my life." The sense of unstoppability in that person still remains. I have seen catastrophe and chaos in people's lives because of this. They stopped drinking and the desire was arrested for a while. Then, once again, the infantile ego came out: The sense of omnipotence, the sense of being all-powerful, the "I can do anything" attitude took over. This is a negative reaction to the human condition, one that always precedes an alcoholic's drinking.
Anger is a very real emotion. We all get mad, and that's all right, as long as it's expressed and dealt with. That's one of the redemptive factors of the AA philosophy. AA is a place where a person is able to express anger appropriately. The anger that goes unexpressed gets buried or repressed and always comes out later on, in another type of neurotic behavior that will be negative and detrimental to the person's sobriety. Anger is all right as long as we direct it to the right place, which is to ourselves, because we are responsible for doing something with our emotions. The emotions that come upon us are not always something we bring on ourselves, but they're very real, and we must do something with them. If not, we'll regress to the cluster of behavior patterns that we had before we got into AA and project the anger and blame at the people around us, most often toward the people who are closest to us. So AA presents a very good check valve for that. We can express the anger at a meeting. Once the anger is expressed, it's defused and can be dealt with in a positive, constructive way.
I am an alcoholic. There are certain things I cannot do. There are certain things I've got to do. I've got to do those things. Not my way. I've go to do what the book says, what other people say. Humility. Teachableness. I will allow myself to be taught.
God has created us in His own image and likeness because He loves us, and no matter what we do in life, He continues to love us. A cardinal of the Catholic church was once asked what was the most profound theological doctrine he had difficulty accepting. He said, "It is the fact that God loves me just the way I am." That is reality. We have to take time to really perceive that because so many of us have been brought up in the conditional way. If we are good, God will love us; if we are not good, God will punish us. God does not punish us. In His very nature, all God can do is love us. All He can do is hold us in His hand and love us. That's why He created us. He created us so that we would be able to reflect back the beauty of His creation in the twinkle of our eyes.
God isn't a General Bullmoose, up there counting everything that goes wrong. That's not what he is. So many people come to the AA program and sit around and talk about how inaccessible God seems to them. It's because they're not really opening themselves up to His work of re-creation. If we really want to see God in His creation, all we have to do is make ourselves aware of what's really going on at an AA table. Here we have men and women from all walks of life and every race, belief, creed, sitting around talking about values, spiritual values—freedom, happiness, self-worth, dignity, the presence of God in their lives. It seems very strange that in our society, in our Western culture, we think we are going to get God before he gets us, that there is some prayer we can use to change God. It is quite narcissistic when we sit back and say, "Well, I'm going to pray now. I'm going to change what God is going to do." God loves us first, and even when we get the notion to pray it is still His spirit that is working in us, bringing us back on our journey to self-worth, to our own ground center, bringing us to where our spirit is. God is not a machine up in the sky that's going to zap us. He loves us. We share the same broken human condition. We are all sinners. We need His forgiveness. He is our Father.
I think that prayer is essential to AA. A person must develop the discipline of prayer because that puts him in a relationship to the loving Father. So many of us lie when we pray. We've been given all kinds of prayer books, all kinds of rituals. Say all these words and something magical will happen. Nothing magical is going to happen. What we do when we pray is talk to our loving Father, who loves us and knows exactly what we need in life and is willing to give it to us—if we are willing to get out of the driver's seat, if we are willing to give up our self-preoccupation. We're continually worrying about all of the negative things that go on, when we can look around and start to see the beauty and get in harmony with our own sense of divine origin that's in us, that harmonizes with the rest of creation. The whole Western culture is trying to influence God. That's such an egocentric trip. It defies any proper explanation.
Life takes discipline. Growth takes discipline. Growth takes stretch marks. People don't like that. AA meetings are tremendously important—to sit with other people, to talk about how we really feel at a particular time. What's important is what happens inside of us in between meetings.
A lot of people turn meetings into rituals. They go nineteen times a week to get out of the house so they don't have to look at other areas of their lives. Some of these other areas are our own capacity to deal with a sense of inner peace, our own sense of solitude, our own sense of silence, our own sense of prayer. We have to pray in a positive way, in a love relationship to God, our Father, who loves us. That means expressing to Him exactly how we feel. If it's anger, it's anger. That's quite all right. And if it's depression or if it's despondency or if it's a sense of nonvalue, that's all right, too. At least we're expressing that to our heavenly Father. To be able to say that is neat. "Here I am. This is what you created." Then listen. So many people just rattle off a bunch of words. You have to listen, too.
God can touch us in five different ways. He can touch our minds and put new ideas in our heads. He can touch our wills. He can touch our imaginations. He can touch our emotions. He can touch our memories. He can bring back a good thought or memory, which can motivate us to do something. But we have to listen. We have to take the time for the silence. We have to take time to meditate. In the last decade there has been a lot more interest in using meditation to get a sense of our own dignity, a sense of our ground center, a sense of our purposefulness in life.
AA is not activity for activity's sake. If a person wants quality sobriety, he should take a quiet time each day. Do some reading. Put himself in touch with God—sharing the feelings, not just words. What really ruined prayers is when we invented the printing press and made people think that if they said all these prayers they could influence God. That's ridiculous. God loves us. What we have to learn to do is respond to that love in a positive way, and we respond to that love by being of service to other people, by sharing the love He has given us with other people, unconditionally.
I get upset when people don't realize the gifts they have, when they don't realize the beauty they have, when they don't realize the lovableness they have, when they don't realize the uniqueness they have, which other people are screaming for them to share. They sit around AA tables or Al-Anon tables and just talk about negative things that happened years ago. That is not giving faith, hope, and love to other people. Young folks coming to AA now are screaming for something to believe in, something to hope for, some reason to love. Often we play games because we're old-timers, like talking about what happened to us in 1965 when we were drinking. I think we're doing them a terrific disservice. I think we're insulting their intelligence. I think we're insulting their emotions. I think that we owe an awful lot more to the sacredness of our recovery, the most sacred thing we have, the gift of sobriety.
Many alcoholics think they're the only people in the world who go through the traumatic experiences of loneliness, not having a place where they're really accepted, feeling they don't belong anywhere. Everyone else in the world has those feelings, too. It's just that we in AA are blessed with people and places where we can learn to be of service, to start having some joy.
The goal of quality sobriety is to say yes to life. That means allowing life to challenge us. When we are paranoid and fearful, we are totally preoccupied with self. That's the pain that blocks us from growing. We can't see anything. We can't see anything in front of us at all. Any type of challenge brought to us becomes a threat. What sobriety is about is joyfully to be able to say yes to life, to say yes to God, to say yes to responsibility, to allow life to challenge us—and that means that we don't take ourselves so seriously. We're all going to make mistakes. None of us is perfect. The program doesn't demand that of anybody. At least life is zest-filled and it has some enthusiasm. When I lead AA retreats, the one question I ask people is, "What makes you enthusiastic? What makes you happy?" And somebody says, "I love playing the piano." "When was the last time you played the piano?" I ask. He says, "Four years ago." That's a tragedy.
We're given so many gifts in AA. We're given opportunity. We get to where we start looking at the real values of life. All the tools are there, plus the fellowship. Life is not always going to be fantastic. It's not always going to be joyful. We all have pain, sickness and death. How are we going to respond to that? Are we going to allow life to challenge us?
If we want the good things to happen to us internally and spiritually, that demands action on our own part. We have to take the first step in faith. Then it starts making some sense. Many times people say, "I can't do that." The word can't is a cop-out.
Today I played hockey with the Chicago Black Hawks alumni. I am fifty years old and all these guys drilling that puck at me are twenty-eight years old. If I were to analyze everything beforehand I'd say, "My God, you're crazy." To be able to play means I run six to seven miles a day. I have the goalie pads on five times a week to practice. We were playing for a little boy who has cystic fibrosis. It gave me the feeling that I'm contributing. If they had scored ten goals on me, it would have been the best thing in the world for my humility. But I went out and gave it my best shot. And we won. The puck hit me sometimes and I never saw it, but I looked good. Everybody was screaming and clapping. I thought it was really great. If I sit back and say I can't do this, I can't do that, I can't do the other thing, then I'm not going to have any sense of celebration in my heart, any sense of self-worth, or have a positive world vision.
You can contribute to life. You can put smiles on people's faces. That's what's really meaningful. If I were back drinking, with a negative approach to life, I wouldn't be doing any of those things. To say yes to life is to get out of ourselves, get rid of the self-preoccupation, realize that God really loves us and wants us to listen to the messages He's giving us so that we can make this world a better place to live in. Too many people are afraid to live. Do not be afraid to live. You're going to make mistakes. So what? God forgives these mistakes. Live, because the gift we have is the gift of life.