The last time I had a drink was on 17 September 1987. For many years prior to that I’d been what we loosely call a ‘functioning alcoholic’ (although in my case the label wasn’t very accurate, since I wasn’t functioning very well at all).
A functioning alcoholic is somebody who manages to appear relatively normal, despite being addicted to alcohol. Around 95 per cent of the people who fall within the addictive spectrum can still ‘function’ from day to day, regardless of whatever substance or process it is that they’re addicted to.
They may work and hold down good jobs; they may live in decent homes; and they may be in long-term relationships. To an outsider they’ll seem relatively okay, although if you look closely enough you can usually see the cracks. Depending on the severity of their habit, their life may consist of one long battle to patch up the problems caused by their addiction. They may function, but their life is full of behaviour that’s dysfunctional.
Alcoholics, for example, often find themselves on an endless carousel of drinking binges, drunken arguments, lost house keys, wasted money, minor injuries, broken promises, ruined relationships and mental anguish. For these people it’s an exhausting pattern and it may perpetuate itself for years, or even a lifetime.
Some addicts may manage to muddle through, relatively intact, while avoiding the worst of their problems, but they’re never far from tipping over the edge, and they’re unlikely to ever be truly at ease with themselves.
Sometimes the severity of a person’s addiction may wax and wane like the moon, increasing and decreasing depending on what else is going on in their lives. There may be short periods when they feel they’re doing well in life, and that their problems are being held in abeyance, but inevitably, the chaos returns and they usually end up going in the same direction: downwards.
In my case, my addiction to booze led me to a place where I’d drunk myself to a standstill. I’d abused alcohol to the extent where I had severe gastritis, and for some reason the only things I was comfortable drinking at one point were brandy and port – that’s a bottle of brandy and a bottle of port, every day.
Towards the end, even this wasn’t enough to satisfy my craving for booze. I’d top-up at weekends with beer and Jack Daniels. When I needed to hide things I’d down copious amounts of vodka, even though I hated the taste of it (I thought it didn’t leave a smell on my breath). I was no longer drinking because I enjoyed it – I was doing it because I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I was, to be blunt, a hopeless drunk.
So, how do you go from being a lunatic who can’t stop drinking, to somebody who wants to give up? It’s a difficult transformation because, unfortunately, the old adage is true that an alcoholic will never get sober until he or she wants to. This will only be when the consequences of not doing so are too great to live with.
If you’re an alcoholic, the thought of life without booze is incomprehensible: you’d rather die. But somehow millions of alcoholics and other addicts go successfully into recovery, which is a miracle in itself. In order to achieve this, what usually happens is that they finally hit what we call rock bottom.
‘Rock bottom’ is a phrase that you may have heard before, but there’s often a lot of confusion surrounding its exact meaning in relation to addiction. Typically, people understand it to be when an addict reaches the very pit of despair: the absolute nadir from which they cannot go any lower.
To some extent this is true in an emotional sense, but every addict’s rock bottom is different. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve lost everything. I’ve often heard it said in rehab circles that being addicted (whether it’s to a substance or to a process like gambling or anorexia) is like being on an elevator that’s going down towards the basement. Not everybody stays in the elevator until the final stop: some are lucky enough to get off at earlier floors.
Rock bottom is the point at which the emotional pain caused by the consequences of addiction becomes greater than the benefits. It’s when the positives derived from the using process are outweighed by the negatives.
You don’t need to be lying in the gutter covered in your own vomit to have hit rock bottom. It’s not defined by the material circumstances in which you find yourself: it’s defined by your emotional state.
In my case, rock bottom began with the loss of my job, a whole year before I finally quit drinking. I was still working as a salesman in the medical industry, but boy, was my life a mess. I had three raging addictions to feed: primarily to alcohol, but I was also hooked on tranquilizers and I had a heavy cigarette habit, not to mention raging codependency.
My problems had actually begun many years earlier, during my childhood. My father had a very traditional view about how a son should be, and I didn’t fit the bill. (Much later in life I realized that I was gay, although I didn’t understand this at the time.) From an early age, I wrongly felt that I was somehow ‘Less Than’ an ordinary person. It meant that by the time I reached working age I was full of fear – and for a while, booze and pills acted as the perfect medication to temporarily fix me.
By the time I was 36 I was married with a beautiful daughter, but I was starting to seriously unravel. At work, I needed a drink just to pluck up the courage to go and see a client, so I’d furtively drive to a pub out of town to slip down a few vodkas before lunch.
I was based in The Midlands, in central England, and my head office was in South London, so I had a lot of freedom to plan my own diary. In those days there were no mobile phones, so as long as I checked in now and then by landline, the head office was blissfully unaware that my working day revolved around booze.
I managed to keep up the façade for a long time, but it reached the point when I wasn’t even attempting to work anymore. I was too afraid. All I wanted to do was drink, and every part of my life suffered as a result. The guilt and shame I felt were immense.
When the phone call from my boss finally came, I knew what to expect: ‘David, we’d like you to come to London. We need to have a conversation with you.’
In my heart I understood that I was going to be fired, but I decided to try and keep up the pretence for just a little longer by attempting to dry myself out. The meeting I was due to attend was in three days’ time, so I had 72 hours to detox.
I went through three days of cold turkey, during which I tried to quit booze, tranquilizers and cigarettes, all at the same time. I didn’t know it, but for somebody who was physically dependent on three different substances, stopping so abruptly without medical supervision was probably the worst thing to do. But for three long days I existed in a twilight world of terrifying night sweats and uncontrollable shakes.
During the drive to London I felt awful – absolutely dreadful, in fact. When I finally got to see my boss I knew what was coming and I accepted it. He was succinct and to the point: ‘This isn’t a good fit. What we think you should be doing and what you think you should be doing are different things. We’re terminating your employment.’
Well, what I thought I should be doing was going to the pub every day (because I was terrified of life), so I can understand why they weren’t happy!
I was probably drinking about a half to a full bottle of vodka at the time, with an enormous amount of extra alcohol at weekends. But, like most alcoholics, I’ve no real idea how much I was drinking: it was constant.
I’d driven down to London in my company car, so the firm offered to drive me back home. During the journey I was exhausted and depressed, but even then if you’d asked me, I’d have fervently denied that I had an alcohol problem.
Being fired wasn’t a shock, but what happened later that afternoon definitely was. When I got home my wife opened the door and asked me what was wrong. I told her I’d lost my job… and the next thing I knew I was waking up in hospital! As I’d walked into the living room I’d had a grand mal seizure brought on by the physical toll that the withdrawal from drink and drugs had taken on my body.
At the hospital, the doctor had concluded I was either an epileptic, or another factor was involved. ‘When we brought you in, you had quite a high alcohol level in your blood,’ he explained. And that was after three days of being dry! I opted for being an epileptic (I’m not), because in my misguided mind it gave me an excuse for my behaviour.
The doctor put me back on tranquilizers and recommended that I didn’t drink (I interpreted this as that I’d be okay if I just drank shandy). For a while I got by. But eventually I needed to find another job, and, incredible as it may seem, I decided that I wanted to run my own pub! And that’s exactly what I did. I went to see a brewery and, being a salesman, I managed to convince them that I’d make a great publican. I even took part-time work in a pub to get experience.
Unfortunately, when I finally achieved my goal, it sent my anxiety levels off the scale because my real problem had always been dealing with people. As a salesman I’d had to do it two or three times a day at most – but as a landlord I had to deal with the public around the clock. It sent the stress factor from an imaginary 30 to in excess of 3,000!
So, how did I react? I drank and I drank and I drank. That’s when the daily bottles of brandy and port kicked in. My physical tolerance to booze soon completely disappeared, and I started drinking beer in the mornings as a sort of ‘wake me up’. I was drunk all the time, and began to have alcoholic blackouts, which are terrifying. They occur when you’re lucid and awake, but you’re in a kind of delirium and can’t remember a thing about them afterwards.
Finally, one morning during an alcoholic blackout I threatened my cleaning lady with a knife. A doctor was called, who in turn called a psychiatrist and a social worker. The psychiatrist told me that if I refused to go to a psychiatric hospital I’d be sectioned, so I agreed to go voluntarily so I could stop off for a drink on the way.
I arrived at the hospital carrying a glass containing seven shots of brandy. After that I just cried for two days. I’ve never felt so bad in my life – so hopeless, and so devoid of purpose. I thought the whole world was against me.
I was in and out of that hospital for the next three months, during which time I attempted suicide twice (once seriously, and once half-heartedly to try and win sympathy). On one occasion when they let me out for a weekend, I insisted on throwing a party at the pub. I got completely wasted. I started throwing bottles of ale at the wall in order to get attention, and when the police were called I threatened to punch them. I ended up face-down and handcuffed in an ambulance, with a burly cop kneeling on my back.
Eventually, the doctors told my wife to fear the worst. My addiction to booze was going to kill me. The psychiatric hospital said they couldn’t do anything else for me, and I was sent home. I was full of despair, fear, shame, guilt – and hopelessness. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I knew the game was up.
My long-suffering wife would no longer support me, the doctors had endured enough and didn’t want to treat me, and the police had had their fill of me too. Two days later I picked up the phone and contacted a self-help organization.
I’d finally reached rock bottom.
As I said earlier, the circumstances of every addict’s rock bottom are different, but the common factor is that it occurs when the pain caused by the addiction becomes so intense that they can no longer function as a human being. It’s an experience that differs greatly from person to person – not everyone’s rock bottom was as drawn out as mine was, although quite a few people will have been through an awful lot worse.
Its severity will depend on the addict’s age, the amount of time they’ve been addicted, and the way in which the addiction manifests itself. If an alcoholic started drinking in their teens, they’ll usually get to between 35 and 45 before the impact of their drinking becomes so great that they actually need to seek help – often because they’ve lost their marriage, their job and some of their health. They may also have crashed cars, got arrested or gone bankrupt (or been through any other similarly awful experience).
The pain of these consequences becomes so great that the person simply cannot bear to continue drinking; yet they cannot contemplate life without alcohol. It’s a terrible dilemma and it causes them to collapse emotionally.
In truth, the consequences of their drinking may have been outweighing the benefits for years, but they’ve failed to acknowledge it (this is denial, which we explored earlier). Rock bottom is the moment of clarity: the point at which the addict has the cognitive ability to finally understand what’s been happening to them – and it can be overwhelming. I’ve included my own story in this chapter not just to show what a horrible experience it can be, but also to show how for me, it was part of the process I had to go through in order to get better. Understanding rock bottom is important because for many addicts it’s what immediately precedes going into the recovery process.