Spitting Teeth and Peanut Obsessions

Mike Runner brings a perspective to Wings Like Eagles that is unique and challenging. 

I normally cover topics relating to the horror of having someone else bring darkness into the home.  Mike covers the same topics, but from a completely different angle.  He was the one who brought darkness to his family.  Mike is an alcoholic.It is my hope that the perception of what we think we know about Family Crisis is shaken up a bit.  Because there is far more involved than we think.  Much can be understood by examining the other side, and I deeply appreciate Mike's willingness to help us gain understanding as he shares with us the mind as it is affected by alcoholism.

He isn't just an alcoholic.  He is an intelligent mind, has a bright, hopeful future, and he is my friend.  And this is his story.

Two out of my last three posts have been rather heavy.  The subject matter of alcoholism of course is very serious business and sometimes because of the subject or because of my own experiences my columns will be extremely dark.  What I hope I get across in even my darkest pieces, is that many other hopeless alcoholics and myself have found hope that before seemed impossible.  Everything I am able to write I do because I lived to tell my tale and I lived to do it with increasing hope and joy.  This one will be a little lighter.  

So, in the spirit of Christmas and the Holiday season...you might have had too much holiday cheer if:

• You complain about the small bathroom after emerging from the closet.
• You desperately hold onto the lawn to keep from falling off the earth.
• (Guys) The bartender tells you that your tie is sticking out of your zipper.

We have to laugh.  Many of us didn’t really laugh for many years.  The good news to those suffering is, once we are able, there is a lot of fun and laughter in recovery.  Note that I use the word “recovery” which means much more than just not drinking.  It means life changes.  Many of us know someone who has stopped drinking and has remained angry and bitter.  That is not what we are striving for.

Paraphrased, there is a line in the AA book that says we don’t want to shut the door on the past and pretend it never happened, yet we don’t want to dwell in the past either.  Remorse and fixing what you can from the past is a good thing that we need to do.  Having rampant guilt over the past with no game plan is a recipe to get drunk again or to stay in depression. 

I used to live in, “If only I had… “ or, “If only I hadn’t…”  Do your best to stay away from this type of thinking.  Instead, try things like “What can I do to help others today?” or “What can I do today to make a past mess a bit better?” 

Please understand what I am saying here.  If you box yourself in with negative statements you are going to get stuck.  If you ask yourself positive questions, your mind will start trying to find good answers.  What we focus our mind on is critical. 

I am grateful that I have both physical and mental reminders so I don’t forget my past.  On the physical side, I was eating a frozen cookie on Christmas Eve with my family and one of my front teeth came out yet again.  About 5 years ago, I am quite sure I was being particularly obnoxious at home one evening.  I got pushed and I fell.  To the pusher, I don’t think it was a very hard push as I was quite capable of falling on my own and I often did.  It certainly wasn’t intended to cause any damage, yet fall I did, straight through a metal table, chairs, and I have no idea what else.  So, I did what drunk people do, and went upstairs and went to bed.

I woke up from my intoxicated state at around 3am and went to look in the mirror.  I fell on a regular basis and often woke up with mysterious bruises on my body… common for an alcoholic.  Then you ask yourself, “How the heck did I do that?” and you have to make up some weird excuse if you have a significant other.  This was a bit worse as it is more difficult to cover a face.   The mirror was not kind.  Black eye, blood splatter, and one of my two front top teeth chipped right in half. 

My story at work the next day was hardly believable… I tripped on a skateboard that was left in front of our door by one of the kids.  How wonderful of me to try to blame the children. 

Off to the dentist I went, where I learned that you have to grind both front teeth down to the stubs and get two veneer teeth put on, or it would look strange.  Three thousand dollars later, I had new front teeth.  When one of them fell out about 6 months later, I had to pay the dentist $800 to put it back on.  Then, a friend asked me if I had tried super glue.  So yes, I now super glue one of my front teeth on every few months when it falls out.  It’s a much cheaper solution.  One time when I had a temporary tooth in, I was at a concert and it flew out of my mouth and hit someone in the face.  That was a bit embarrassing.  I then had to wait for the house lights to come up to root around underneath 3 rows of seats to find the fake tooth.  I will go into full detail on that interesting evening in a later column.

I don’t suppose any of this sounds terribly positive yet to me my fake tooth and other physical scars are reminders.  When my brain lies to me and tells me “things were not so bad”, I feel my teeth and look at a couple of scars and my thoughts quickly come back to reality.  I am an alcoholic.  When I drink, bad things will eventually happen.  That will never change. 

On the mental, my mind or spirit won’t let me forget as I have “drunk dreams” on a fairly regular basis.  I wake up in a cold sweat at least once a month.  This is a common occurrence for recovering alcoholics and I know many people who absolutely hate them.  I don’t ever want them to stop.  For me, drunk dreams are always nightmares.  They always entail me somehow getting in trouble for drinking, loved ones finding out and me trying to lie my way out of it.  There is normally police, jail, or a hospital involved.  I have always damaged something which for some reason is usually a parked car, a restaurant drive through, or some other stationary object that I have run into.  I am stuck.  The car won’t move and I am sitting there trying to get my story straight while waiting for authorities to arrive.  They are terrible.  They are the type of dreams that you wake up from and it takes you a minute to realize if it really happened or not.  When I realize it was just a dream I say, “Thank God!” There were other mornings in my past when I would awaken and hope that things were a dream, but they were not. 

Drunk dreams remind me of where I have been and remind me of where I could go again.  With alcoholism, if you don’t drink for even a long period of time and drink again you don’t start over but you take off right where you left off.  Normally in the past when I have stopped drinking for periods of time it takes me somewhere between two days and two weeks to be as bad or worse as I ever was before. 

It is called a progressive illness.  It does not stop when we stop.  It lies in waiting.  I have often heard it said that your alcoholism is doing pushups in the corner, waiting for you to come back.  We have to remember that it is always calling, always willing to take us back.

Alcoholics are absolutely amazing about saying to themselves things like, “Ok, now that I have learned some information I will be able to drink normally,” or “Now that so and so is out of my life I can drink normally because he/she was the cause of all my stress,” or “I have gone for a number of weeks/months/years without taking a drink so I have proven that I don’t need alcohol so I can drink again,” or “The host ordered expensive wine (or my buddy bought a round of beers).  It would be rude not to drink it.”  

There are numerous things like this that we tell ourselves.  I have told myself many of them over the years and have fallen right back into the pit of despair and helplessness.  We are easy to fool because we want to be fooled.  Our minds play tricks on us. 

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous tells us that it is the great obsession of every problem drinker to once again drink like a gentleman.  Nobody likes to be told that they can never safely again do something that most of the world can enjoy responsibly.  It just isn’t fair!  Fair or not, it is our situation as alcoholics.  We are allergic to the stuff.  It would be the same to say it was not fair to have a peanut allergy.  Yet, there is a difference, as people with peanut allergies probably don’t spend a lot of time justifying why they are eating peanuts.  Does anyone scream it is not fair that they are lactose intolerant?  We have a mental obsession and a physical allergy and can never safely drink again.  The “never drink again” part is unthinkable to us which is one reason we live in the day. 

If I can get through the day without drinking it will have been a good day.  I can worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.  I have a friend who even goes so far as to tell herself every day that she is going to drink tomorrow but will get through today.  It works for her.  One day at a time thinking works and it is today that we need to focus on.  It doesn’t mean don’t plan for the future, it means concentrate on what you can do about things today.  And this applies to anyone. 

I alluded to this earlier but I want to re-state it because it has helped me a great deal. For many of us, the questions we ask ourselves are lousy questions that will produce lousy answers.  If you ask yourself, “Why am I such a screw up?” your mind is going to try to search for an answer and it won’t be a good one.  The same can be said for “I am” statements.  “I am a lousy person.” Now your self-esteem is lower and you have an excuse to do lousy things because you are a lousy person. 

Instead, how about “I have done some lousy things in the past.  What can I start doing today to change those patterns?”  Big difference.  Start working on a new set of questions to ask yourself around the word “today.”  What can I do to help others today?  What can I do to broaden my world today?  How can I be a better friend/spouse/father/employee today?  What little piece of this big problem can I work on today?

Think of your own questions or use some of mine but use the word “today” in them.  After you come up with them, ask them to yourself first thing in the morning and throughout the day until they become habitual. The old saying, “yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery,” holds true.  Today is what we have.  To quote an old friend, “So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today.”