My name is Cat and I’m an alcoholic. I realize I risk a lot by saying that outside of a meeting, there’s a lot of social stigma attached to the label “alcoholic”. Most of that stigma is embedded in our culture and often because of the unfortunate behavior of the active alcoholic— those who are still drinking and not in recovery—and the effects of that behavior in their lives and in the lives of those around them. I know my family struggled to understand my disease despite their best intentions and efforts. Thankfully, I had the support of those who had recovered in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).
AA is a spiritual program of recovery from alcoholism that most people in society are at least familiar with or have heard of. I suspect that when a lot of people think about AA, they imagine skid row bums in trench coats holding paper bags meant to disguise booze bottles staggering down the street, or the panhandlers so common at underpasses on the frontage roads of the Big I. Many people think of famous actors who admit they’re in AA. The reality is that AA is comprised of people from all walks of life, socio-economic backgrounds, races and ethnicities. Some come to the rooms of AA because their marriage is falling apart, and others were ordered to meetings by the courts. However they get there, alcohol has become a problem in their lives.
What alcoholics have in common is the disease of alcoholism — a mysterious illness that compels a person to drink alcohol— despite the fact that once they begin drinking, they cannot stop and do incredible, destructive things when they are drunk or in their obsession for alcohol. Historically, society has vilified alcoholics, labeled them morally deficient or weak-willed, and treated them with disdain or punished them in myriad ways. Arguably, alcoholics make it difficult for society to deal with them. They can be mean, belligerent, and hostile, “dangerously antisocial” as AA’s book calls them.
The failure rate of the program is extraordinarily high. Estimates are that by five years of participation in the program, two-thirds have “gone back out,” meaning they are no longer sober. At ten years, two-thirds of those who were sober at five years have gone back out. Many do come back to the rooms (we call them “retreads”) but the vast majority end up dead, in mental institutions, or in jail. But as dismal as these estimates are, they are better than the sobriety rates garnered through any other approach—bar none—including the medical community’s. Make no mistake about it: alcoholism is a fatal illness that no one has a cure for.
It seems a bit counterintuitive that alcoholics can help other alcoholics achieve sobriety—pretty much like the blind leading the blind—but really, someone who doesn’t have the disease is blind with respect to the alcoholic’s experience with the disease. Who better to help an alcoholic than a recovered alcoholic who understands what it's like to be alcoholic? The reason for the failure rate of other approaches is that they don’t get to the root of the disease. They only treat the symptom, not the cause. I’ll get to that later—first a little history about AA.