Surrendering to Booze, Not to God: Addiction as a Neurological Imbalance

By Charlie….   

I was a binge drinker for two decades, going several months between binges that lasted from a few days to, in the end, almost two months. I was hospitalized about a dozen times, and retried AA as many. I was often told by emergency doctors that my blood-alcohol level was so high that I should have been dead. I had a DUI that cost me about $15,000, and I was lucky I didn’t hurt or kill anyone.

In early 2009, I went on a two-month drinking binge while living in Mexico with my boyfriend. He could no longer offer me any more “last chances,” and, flying back to Canada, he left me there alone. The day after he left, I drank so much I crashed into a stone floor, split my forehead, eye, and lip open, lost a front tooth, and fractured a rib.

I always blacked out during my binges. I woke up the next day in bed with concerned neighbours and a doctor hovering over me, the usual hangover, withdrawal symptoms, and multiple injuries and bruises. My neighbours had called the doctor, essentially saving my life. I weighed eighty-eight pounds, I soon learned, from hardly having eaten for weeks. I could scarcely recall anything from the previous two months.

Something woke me up that day—today I joke that it was that hard knock on the head. Although AA had never worked for me in the past, I dutifully went to AA meetings every night for my remaining month in Puerto Vallarta. I could have gone home to Canada, but I didn’t want to fall into the same patterns of being coddled by my codependent mother. I wanted to show everyone at home that this time, finally, I could solve my problem on my own. And I wanted my boyfriend back, but he had taken me back many times before, so that wasn’t as big of a worry as might be thought.

Most of all, at the age of almost 49, I wanted my life back. AA helped immensely for a month, because I was almost all alone in PV. I liked the camaraderie, the daily routine, and I think because people were from all over North America, they embraced me. Most importantly, I learned one thing in that month of meetings: the word surrender. No, absolutely no way was I going to surrender my will to a god I didn’t believe in, but damn it, I surrendered to booze. Complete, utter surrender to alcohol. I realized, once and for all, that I could not win the battle against alcohol. I have loved the word surrender in that context ever since. It sounds very easy and trite, but it was much deeper than that for me. It was kind of spiritual, in the nonreligious sense. Surrendering to booze was my ray of light. Since doing that, I have never once had a craving for alcohol.

When I returned home, I continued to go to a couple of AA meetings a week for four or five months, but soon, the same sense of wrongness I had often experienced in the past began to overtake me. I just didn’t fit in, no matter that I tried dozens of different meetings. I had read the Big Book several times, but I found it condescending and underdeveloped—very 1950s. I constantly wondered why they didn’t update it. Nowhere did it discuss the psychological and neurological aspects that so fascinated me. I could not make myself believe in a single step except Step 1, no matter how hard I tried.

Seven months after my “clean” date, we moved to a wonderful new city. I have never been to an AA meeting here, and I don’t have any need for them. I continue to feel occasional persecution because I’m not an AAer, especially from one friend of ours who’s been in the program for 20 years (which I’m fine with—I’m delighted when it works for people). I do not and cannot call myself an alcoholic because there is no alcohol controlling my life. We don’t usually call someone an addict who has been clean for ten years, so why would we use the term “alcoholic” for someone who no longer drinks or thinks about it?

For years, throughout my addiction, I knew I was different. I wanted to know more about my addiction on a neurological level. I recall being in my 20s, when I first suspected I was an alcoholic, and looking up Alcoholism in my set of World Book encyclopedias, where I was shocked and fascinated to discover diagrams of the brain and what happens biochemically to the neurotransmitters when excessive quantities of alcohol get in their way. Of course, it took many years of relapsing before I finally got sober. I began going to AA in the mid-’90s, but because my beliefs were so different from others there, and because my binge drinking allowed me to sometimes go months without a drink, I kept rejecting AA and thinking I could be a casual, social drinker. That proved not to be the case. Each time I picked up a drink, I promptly ended up back down the slippery slope of alcoholism. In that sense I was just like millions of other addicts.

I don’t believe alcoholism is a disease, and I don’t believe it’s inherited. It was a joy to find your blog, Marc, because I believe addiction is a kind of neurological imbalance, a combination of childhood experiences—not necessarily bad ones!—and innate brain wiring and chemistry. A classic but complicated “nature and nurture” combination. For the record, I was never abused in the slightest as a child, I came from a loving home, and there were no alcoholics in my family. I don’t blame my parents; it was the ’60s and they raised us the best they knew how, given the times. I attribute my addiction to the following:

1) My parents’ constant urging for me to be a high achiever (in no way do I blame them for this!), which exacerbated my perfectionist tendencies (I think many addicts are perfectionists)

2) Having a high-strung, emotional, highly sensitive personality

3) Being the eldest child with a chronically ill younger sister, with a lot of responsibility and expectations inadvertently placed upon me

4) Being a bit of a social misfit in my teens and 20s

5) Discovering in my 20s that alcohol was a sure way for me to keep my weight down. I wanted the pure alcohol inside me, not dulled by food, so I rarely ate when I drank.

All these factors contributed to my alcoholism. I strongly believe there is no one single, simple cause of addiction in a person, but that it’s a complex combination of “nature and nurture”.

I have often felt so alone in my journey, yet I’ve always known on an intellectual level that that could not possibly be so. Thank you for a place to share and to see, at last, what I have always known — that there must be thousands of others like me. I never got this feeling from AA.

Today, at the age of 52, coming up to four years of sobriety, I have my life back. In fact, my life is completely transformed. I am happy, healthy, a nice 110 lbs., I hike for an hour four times a week and swim once a week, I have a beautiful home, a loving relationship (with the same guy), and in 2011 I was a finalist for the top award in Canada in my profession. I am no longer an alcoholic, and I never say I am “in recovery”; dwelling in the past is only destructive. I believe I got my life back because I not only surrendered to booze — recognizing that I could never have just one drink — but because I finally truly acknowledged addiction as a neurological imbalance.

Disclaimer: I believe AA and NA work for thousands of people every year. But it tries to be a one-size-fits-all organization, which ultimately doesn’t fit for some of us.