‘I was probably legally drunk for five years’

The names of those featured in this article have been changed to protect their identity.

At one point in her life, alcohol had cost Jane everything.
Outwardly, Jane was functioning. She was going to work. She coached Little League. Her children went to private schools. She appeared to have it altogether. And whle she did enjoy going to the bar and didn’t hide her drinking, nobody ever approached her suggesting to her that she had a problem.
She now knows, however, she was doing everything as a functioning alcoholic. Everything she did she was doing it while drunk. And, she was doing it all without thinking she was doing anything wrong.
“I wouldn’t even go to my kid’s Little League game if I didn’t have a flask,” Jane said. “I planned everything around (drinking).”
Jane grew up in an alcoholic home. Drinking was just what you did.
Her father, a Green Beret, was an alcoholic. So was her mother. She has two siblings that have died due to alcohol-related incidents–one kidney failure and cirrhosis of the liver—and one in a drunk driving accident.
Jane went to college, was employed and never missed work.
“I was functional,” she said. “But it catches up with you.”
Losing it all
Jane said she never realized how much she was drinking until she stopped drinking.
She recalls she would go out with friends to eat, and while they would sip one drink during dinner she would have four or five.
While she never once got a DUI, Jane never got into a car without something to drink. While living in Texas she would have a flask handy for drives through dry counties because she felt she’d never get caught with alcohol.
“Alcohol was my solution to everything,” she said.
Things eventually spiraled for Jane. There were times she would be somewhere for work and would misuse company funds. She recalls being in Atlanta meeting some people at a bar. Instead of next flying to the destination she was supposed to go to she flew them to San Francisco to continue the party. She made up stories on her expense reports to justify the cost.
“I’m very blessed that I was good at my job, because I should have been fired years before,” she said. “I would just go out and not think about the consequences.”
Alcohol put her in situations most people only see in movies. She has had guns pulled on her. She has had knives pulled on her.
“I just put myself in very precarious situations, which a normal person doesn’t do,” she said. “I’m thinking nothing of it.”
Alcohol both drove Jane into bad relationships and cost her relationships. Now on her fifth husband (“I didn’t keep them long,” she says of the previous four) she once got married while drunk in a bar to a man who turned out to be a known criminal. It is that marriage that not only eventually drove her into bankruptcy, but also led to her son—only 16 at the time—to leave the home.
“He couldn’t take it anymore,” Jane said. “He had had enough of my dysfunctional relationships.”
Things continued downhill for Jane after her son left. It was around a year later that she slowly lost the ability to function. She couldn’t get out of bed. She couldn’t focus. All she really could do was drink. She was miserable.
Jane decided she would quit drinking on her own. If I don’t drink, she rationalized, I won’t be so depressed.
It didn’t last.
No long after, although Jane had sworn off bourbon—hating that alcohol because it was what her father drank—she picked up a bottle of Wild Turkey and drank the entire bottle. She followed that up with a trip to the bar. It’s the night she hit rock bottom.
When she got home, she gave up. She fell to her knees and begged the God of her childhood to help her.
“I couldn’t go on anymore,” she said. “That was a turning point for me.”
It was also the last time she ever had a drink. Thirty-eight years later she is still sober, thanks to a phone call she made to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the early morning hours after getting home from the bar.
AA members came to her home, where they detoxed her with orange juice and honey.
“They passed me around like a football, and I bought into it,” Jane said, “because I was done.”
Meet John
Unlike Jane, John did not grow up in an alcoholic home.
Like Jane, he started experimenting with alcohol as a teenager—as many teenagers do.
John’s alcoholism was a slow build. As a teenager he only drank on the weekends. After he left home at 18 he started drinking more often. Before long, it was a daily thing.
“The last five to seven years of my drinking, I don’t think I could have passed a breathalyzer test at any time of the day,” John said. “I was drinking at least quart of bourbon every day.
“I was probably legally drunk for five years.”
Also unlike Jane, John did have someone tell him they felt he had a problem. John did a lot of sailing, and a man he sailed with observed John’s actions—including sitting around at 6 a.m. in the boat drinking—and told John he believed John had a problem with alcohol.
John disagreed.
“Not me,” he said.
John eventually decided to quit drinking not because of decisions he was making, but because he was spending 40 percent of his income on alcohol.
When he decided to stop, he went into what are known as delirium tremens (DT),  a life-threatening form of alcohol withdrawal.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, long-term heavy alcohol use sets up a tug-of-war-like effect in your body. Alcohol is on one side, slowing down central nervous system (CNS) activity. Your CNS controls your body’s automatic processes like breathing and heart rate. Alcohol is a depressant, so it slows down this activity. Your CNS is on the other side of the rope pulling back by increasing its own activity to keep things running. Over time, your CNS adjusts and sees that increased activity level as its new normal.
If you suddenly stop drinking, it’s like the alcohol side letting go of the rope. Suddenly, your CNS doesn’t have to pull back against alcohol to keep activity at a proper level. But your CNS can’t bring its activity level down quickly. That means your CNS is much more active than needed, to the point that it negatively affects automatic body processes. This causes DTs.
John’s DTs got so bad he was hiding behind his living room couch having hallucinations, swinging wildly between being hot and cold, shaking and vomiting while urinating and defecating himself. He was scared to move.
John called AA (“I don’t know why, because I didn’t know what they did,” he says) and they told him to go to a meeting. John had never asked for help for a thing in his life, and he still wasn’t completely convinced he was an alcoholic.
On the road to recovery
There’s an old joke in AA that if you take a drunken horse thief and remove the alcohol, you still have a horse thief.
John relates to this, because while he was attending AA, everything else in his life was still wrong. This continued for five months. John said he was disgusted with the “behavior of the guy in the mirror” when he drank, but was still just treading water.
“I finally just got to the point where I was either going to go back out drinking, or I was going to ask for help,” he said. “Fortunately for me, I made the correct turn and asked a man for help. He guided me through the program.”
One thing is for certain: the only way AA works is if the person attending the meetings wants to get better.
“You can tell them how detrimental this drinking is, but until you really want help, you just don’t hear what anyone has to say,” John said. “Once you realize you not only need, but you really want, what AA has, all of a sudden everything starts making sense.”
There is a chapter in the AA Big Book that stressesthat word—if—you want what is offered.
Therein lies the rub.
“Everyone wants their problems to go away. Everyone wants to get out of jail,” Jane said. “The second part of that is ‘and are willing to go to any lengths.’ That meant I had to do something. I had to look in the mirror. I never looked at me. That is what AA helped me do.”
Jane stopped blaming others, life circumstances, etc., for her issue. She wanted help. She needed help.
“I had to make a decision. I was either going to keep doing it my way and die an alcoholic death, or seek this higher power through taking the steps of AA,” she said. “I was shocked to find out how wonderful it worked, because I didn’t think I’d ever get well.”
John, who is also 38 years sober, lost jobs, a wife, friendships, his children, and other relationships due to alcohol.
More than that, he said, he lost respect for himself.
John refers to the AA Big Book when he quotes a line that reads “frothy emotional appeal seldom suffices.”
“All the people in the world begging you to quit, or losing jobs...‘if you don’t quit I’m leaving I’m taking the children (doesn’t work). So it was like, ‘OK, wife and children or alcohol,” he said. “‘Yah, the alcohol looks good.’”
Reflecing on those decision, John had reached the point he wanted help as well.
What is AA?
On its own website, aa.org, Alcoholics Anonymous defines itself as a fellowship of people who come together to solve their drinking problem. It doesn’t cost anything to attend AA meetings. There are no age or education requirements to participate. Membership is open to anyone who wants to do something about their drinking problem. Its primary purpose is to help alcoholics to achieve sobriety.
It was founded June 10, 1935, in Akron, Ohio. Four years later, on April 10, 1939, the book Alcoholics Anonymous was published, presenting the now-famous 12-step program for the first time. AA currently has in excess of two million members and is active in 180 countries.
The 12-step program that Bill Wilson wrote is used by more than 200 different organizations including gamblers anonymous, narcotics anonymous, over eaters anonymous and many drug and alcohol treatment centers.
There are five active AA groups in the Southern Black Hills, including in Custer, Hill City, Hot Springs and Pringle. Scheduled meeting times and locations can be found in the Black Hills Live section of the Custer County Chronicle. There are approximately 100 members of AA in the area. There is also a club house, the Alamo Club, in Custer that is dedicated to the support of alcohol and drug addiction recovery programs.
It is important to note AA is not a religious organization. While AA’s program incorporates spiritual elements, it is open to people of all religions, including agnostics and atheists. AA is not affiliated with any religious body and does not promote or oppose any religious beliefs.
“Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell,” Jane says. “Spirituality—AA—is for people who have been to hell and don’t want to go back.”
Most who enter AA get a sponsor, a more experienced member who provides guidance and support to a newcomer (sponsee) as they work through the 12-step recovery program. Sponsors share their own recovery experiences, offer encouragement, and help the sponsee navigate the steps of the program.
Both John and Jane point out they don’t use the word “disease” in AA, instead calling alcoholism a “spiritual malady.”
The reason, Jane said, is because using the word disease may give those trying to recover an easy out in their battle for sobriety.
“When I have girls come in that I try to sponsor they’ll say, ‘Well, I’m not responsible, because I have a disease,’” Jane said. “Well, I had cancer, and I was responsible for getting treatment for it, so you’re responsible for taking the steps and learning how to live your life differently.”
Jane said once someone puts the booze down, they are just scratching the surface of recovery. She recalls the hole in her life she felt, and questioned whether she could be happy without alcohol.
“Anybody can quit drinking. It’s a matter of not drinking and being happy,” she said. “I didn’t know how to be happy.”
Recovered
“We have recovered from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body,” Jane says or herself and John.
Both John and Jane know they can never touch alcohol again, and that’s just fine by them. They are happy, enjoying sobriety, and helping others find their sobriety as well. Both are AA sponsors, have made amends, followed the steps and have repaired relationships and gained back loved ones they lost.
“My children are in my life. I have grandchildren who have never seen me drink,” Jane said. “I’m able to say to another girl, not what she must do, but ‘I know how you feel. I’ve been there. Let me tell you what I did to get better, and if you’re interested, I’ll show you how to do it.’”
John says he has found a way of living that should be normal to most people, but was elusive for himself and other alcoholics. He was living for himself, he said, and that outlook and approach to life has changed.
“My relationship with people has changed. My relationship with my creator has changed. It’s all been for the better,” he said. “I just can’t imagine my life getting any better than it is.”
Jane said she was always a “people pleaser,” and as such, felt she was the opposite of selfish. She knows now that isn’t the case.
“I thought an alcoholic was an old drunken man in a rain coat with a brown paper bag living under a bridge. That wasn’t me, so I wasn’t a drunk,” she said. “I wasn’t my father and I wasn’t my mother. I was still functioning. It’s the delusion denial of ‘there isn’t anything wrong with me.’”
Jane said AA works, but reiterates it’s more than just not drinking and going to meetings. It’s that quest to find relief through growth that the person in the program used to get from drinking.
“It’s all about honesty, humility and gratitude. If I can try to use those three spiritual principles to the best of my ability, I can’t have a bad day,” Jane said. “You can’t be hateful if you’re grateful.”
If your drinking is a problem, visit aa.org. You can also call Jane at 850-261-7824 to potentially join a local AA program that works for you.