My father was no cartoon drunk. He never passed out on the couch or lost his job or went to jail. He sang me nursery rhymes and taught me to read when I was small, and when people came to dinner, he wore a nice tweed jacket and held the women’s coats for them. I loved him so much I thought they ought to make him a movie star.
The year I turned ten, he began coming home after work saying, “I need a drink. I deserve a drink.” He stared at the TV, bourbon in hand, saying, “This is my anesthetic.” One night at dinner, in the candlelight my mother hoped would teach us better manners, I made a child’s pronouncement on a subject now long forgotten.
“No,” said my father, and there was a bulge in his thickening jaw. I argued. “Don’t contradict me,” he shouted. It was the end of friendly dinner-table talks and the beginning of a father who dug his teeth into disagreements like a ferret, shaking and tearing at my words until my dinner ended night after night with slaps and tears and being sent from the table.
My mother sat in the candlelight with a pained expression on her face, but did nothing. It was as though a huge black dog that we all worked hard not to see had moved into the living room. My mother tried to limit my father to tomato juice and caught him secretly adding vodka. The tension spilled over onto us children.
My father shouted at me to improve my schoolwork. “You drive me to drink,” he yelled. “You’re lazy, and you’re sick in the head.” My mother said to me, “You’re selfish, you’re clumsy, you’ve got no visual sense, no sense of time.” Both of them hit me so frequently that I still flinch at sudden movements. I learned in my bones that alcoholics don’t have relationships; they take hostages.
For the first couple of years, no matter how bad the drunken dinner-time scene, I floated up out of sleep each morning with the sense that it was a new day. But when I was twelve I began to wake up feeling as bad as I had the night before. I spent that summer reading in my room, gaining fifteen pounds from eating chocolates stolen from supermarkets. I got into fancy schools and got thrown out of them, skipped grades and then was held back. I blamed myself for my father’s pain, for the breakdown of our relationship, for my failure to excel in school, for being an inexplicably bad girl. In high school, I wrote poetry, edited the literary magazine, played the lead in school plays, was a National Merit Scholar, stayed out all night, and nearly slit my wrists.
I escaped from home in the late Sixties like someone who’d done hard prison time, and plunged with delight into the world outside. I tried psychedelics, took part in union and student organizing, moved to the mountains, and wrote for an alternative newspaper. When the political community that had sustained me evaporated, I moved, seemingly effortlessly, to a big-city paper. In my spare time, I practiced Zen meditation.
My life looked good from the outside, but it didn’t feel that way from the inside. By the time I was thirty-five, I had white-knuckled my way to everything I thought would bring me happiness — a house, a job, a husband — and it had all turned to ashes in my mouth. I didn’t think of myself as a “child of an alcoholic,” yet I was living on blues power, depressed and unable to trust. I was a workaholic flake: late everywhere, speeding the freeways, my car perpetually running on empty. I was in a car crash that knocked me from my psychic moorings. My husband withdrew, and I spent my weekends crying and screaming at him.
Three years ago, when I was thirty-six and the numbness had become unbearable, I walked into a church basement for a meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics, clutching a list of meeting places obtained from the local alcoholism council. I thought I was embarking on a last-ditch attempt at personal healing; I later discovered I had joined a cultural movement that incorporates much of the spiritual exploration, group energy, folk wisdom, and effective anarchy that I had loved about the Sixties. But on first impression, it seemed corny, passive, and pious.
I sat in the back. A volunteer read aloud, “We welcome you to the Monday Night Adult Children Al-Anon Family Group and hope that you may find in it the help and friendship we have been privileged to enjoy.” We were asked to introduce ourselves by our first names, and I blushed when the crowd replied, “Hi Lily,” the secretary said, “Welcome,” and everyone clapped. The crowd wasn’t straight-looking — many were gay, some wore leather jackets over their T-shirts and jeans, and only a few wore business suits — but they acted as though they were at a Midwestern summer camp. Or was it a revival meeting?
On a bulletin board, I saw a cloth banner listing the Twelve Steps for spiritual progress adopted from Alcoholics Anonymous: “1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I stopped there: it didn’t apply to me; I’m a Buddhist, a feminist, and a big-time reporter, I thought. I’m not powerless, I don’t believe in any Power, and my life’s not unmanageable. But I stayed; a friend from work who had recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous advised me to forget the religion and go for the group support.
People spoke in monologues — part group therapy and part Quaker meeting — of their own lives and what they called “serenity,” something I had never valued in my life. Some rambled, full of pain; others spoke in aphorisms. Nobody gave advice, criticism, or help. One woman, who fit what I would later learn is a pattern of children of alcoholics, gravitating toward people with drug or alcohol problems, described herself as a “co-alcoholic” — part of that army of busybodies who marry alcoholics and then pour the bourbon down the sink or show up at the jail at midnight with bail money. She described the side effects of her attempt to control others: rage, exhaustion, denial, blame, a bitchy superiority, and a sense of personal failure.
We clapped again. Another volunteer then suggested that newcomers find themselves sponsors: “A sponsor is someone with more time in the program than you, who helps you work the steps.” Someone else read aloud, “Changed attitudes can aid recovery. . . . You may not like all of us, but in time you will come to love us in a very special way, the same way we already love you.” We held hands and recited something that ended with a rah-rah “Keep coming back! It works!” Mystified, I asked someone, “What am I supposed to do now?” She said, “It works by osmosis.”
Corny and weird as it was, I went back every week. I was desperate, and there was something intoxicating about listening to a whole roomful of people telling the truth.
Around the time I was awarded a plastic poker chip (more clapping, more hugs) for having attended meetings for six months, I noticed that some of my other friends were approaching forty and hitting a wall. The newspapers were running crack stories, and the country seemed to be undergoing a spiritual fracturing to which neither the Left nor the Right had an adequate response. Nancy Reagan just Said No, while her husband allowed the number of drug treatment beds to decline; the Left protested urine testing as an invasion of privacy and defended our right to do what we wish with our bodies. It all seemed to miss the point.
A rancher friend from the Great Plains, who wrote songs for one of the best-loved surviving rock bands from the Sixties, drank and tripped so much that one year he didn’t stack hay until after the first snow. A writer I knew disappeared up-country, smoking seven or eight sinsemilla joints a day. I dropped in one night on a friend, an elegant and beautiful magazine editor, and found her drunk and alone with her three-year-old son. Novels went unfinished, promises were broken, faces grew puffy. I was losing my faith in the Sixties belief that the road of excess necessarily leads to the palace of wisdom.
Corny and weird as it was, I went back every week. I was desperate, and there was something intoxicating about listening to a whole roomful of people telling the truth.
A few months later, my rancher friend hit town with a button on his denim jacket that read, “Clean, Sober, and Bored Shitless.” His Christmas letter announced that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and had taken what he called “The Big Cure.” “Those meetings are what church would be if churches let you come as you are, swear when you felt like it, and believe in whatever vision of The Other Party suited your spirit,” he wrote.
I congratulated and hugged him, but in my Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings, I still sat in the back and clung to my sense of personal superiority. Then one night, after a year of meetings, I heard myself tell the group, “I’ve been depressed for years, and there’s no reason for it.” After so many years of denying my suffering — and making it so much worse — I had told the truth. I blushed and then cried; I felt sure I would be ostracized for revealing how numb and exhausted I felt. Without knowing it, I had taken the first step: I had admitted my life was unmanageable. It was a radical and empowering moment.
The Twelve Step program for spiritual growth was originally adapted from a Christian conversion process by a failed New York stockbroker and hopeless drunk named Bill Wilson, who founded A.A. in 1935. The steps may seem arcane, but in essence they boil down to this: with group help, abstain from your compulsion — be it alcohol, sex, or chronic credit-card debt. Admit you can’t do it alone. Straighten out your relationships with your fellow humans by admitting your faults. Accept help from your Higher Power, defining him or her any way you want to. Do these things, help others, and your compulsions will lift as if by magic.
I began consciously working the steps shortly after I confessed my depression to my Al-Anon group. One evening I asked Carl, a bouncy drama student of twenty-four with streaked blond hair, to be my sponsor. In a coffee shop after a meeting, I told him, “I want to stop being so unhappy,” and I started to cry. He put his hand on my arm.
“Buy a spiral notebook,” he said. “Write down all the ways that you’re powerless over other people’s drinking, and over people, places, and things. Write how your life is unmanageable. Go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and buy the book called Alcoholics Anonymous — the Big Book. Start reading it.”
When things were going badly, I cried my way through two or three meetings in a single week, feeling something like the pain of thawing frostbite. I realized I had spent my life blaming myself for my father’s pain and had called myself crazy for feeling pain of my own. Meanwhile, I systematically filled my spiral notebook with thoughts on how each of the Twelve Steps applied to my own life, talking them over with Carl in our weekly session at the coffee shop. This went well until I hit step three: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
I told Carl I couldn’t do it. The A.A. Big Book said God didn’t have to be Christian — it could be anything bigger than my small self, like nature, my Al-Anon group, or a spirit underlying things. Yet the language of the Big Book was archaic, Christian, and patriarchal: God (and the book’s assumed reader) was male.
Prayer had repelled me since childhood, and so did Christianity, in both its lukewarm, liberal form and its coercive, fundamentalist form. But because I was so unhappy, I rewrote the Big Book’s suggested prayer (“God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt”) into a Buddhist form I could live with. Kneeling on my bedroom floor for the first time since childhood, I prayed, “Force of rhythm and meaning moving through all things including me, harmony understood by the Buddha and other enlightened human beings, I offer myself to you. . . . Please relieve me of investment in the illusion of the separate self.” It felt foreign; I felt humiliated and embarrassed. I went to sleep.
Surrender, like most religious acts, is a paradox. For years I had felt as though my heart were enclosed in a plexiglas box. The next day, I went to work with a warmth in my chest, as though someone were home there. Nagging internal voices accusing me of failure — what Twelve Step groups call “the shitty committee” — were temporarily silent. Had I unlocked self-love? Come in tune with The Great Way, or the Tao? Been heard by a personal god out there somewhere?
Another night, I read Carl step eight: “Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” Then I took steps nine and ten: “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”; and “Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” I paid off a man whose fender I had dented ten years ago, apologized to my brother and my husband for treating them as if they weren’t smart enough to run their own lives, and wrote a letter to an old friend, admitting I’d betrayed her. She still wouldn’t speak to me afterward, but I felt unburdened, because nobody held anything over me anymore.
My life changed in many small ways. I dropped my self-appointed role as chief therapist and manipulator within my marriage. I left the job I had worked at for a decade, a job I had stuck with out of fear — of displeasing my father, of not being famous, of being poor. I whined less about President Reagan and made amends politically by tithing to the Jackson campaign and to anti-Contra groups, and by writing letters to Congress on issues in which I feel complicit as an American. When it came time to take the eleventh step (“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him. . . .”), I began taking long, silent walks in the hills.
All this occurred without anybody’s telling me what to do or what to believe; every meeting closed with, “Take what you like, and leave the rest.” But slowly, as I read Al-Anon pamphlets and heard members talk about their lives, serenity became something I valued — by, you might say, osmosis. One night after a meeting, when I was feeling particularly happy, a woman — who turned out to be a nurse, six years older than I — nervously asked me to be her sponsor. “Buy a spiral notebook,” I told her at the coffee shop. “Go to an A.A. meeting and get hold of a copy of the Big Book.” And so I took the twelfth step: “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
I know some people, especially on the Left, who think Twelve Step groups encourage conformity and passivity. Perhaps that’s inevitable, given our generation’s cultural history: rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll splashed over our lives in one big wave that looked like liberation. But I know my friend Walter, an alternative journalist, didn’t experience liberation when he smoked so much sinsemilla that he couldn’t go to the garage without forgetting what he’d gone for. In true Sixties style, he first thought he had a premature case of Alzheimer’s, contracted from using aluminum cookware. Then a friend in A.A. suggested he lay off dope for a while, and he found that he couldn’t give it up by himself.
And yet — I won’t abandon drugs entirely; I know intoxicants can be sacramental. Last New Year’s Eve I sat with eleven close friends in silence, by candlelight, drinking champagne and eating a grape for each month of the coming year. It was the peak of an evening in which one friend had read her translations of Japanese erotic court-poetry, and we all had said things we would not have said sober. My husband and I still sometimes take Ecstasy and walk the hills, speaking to each other in a language deeper than the vulgate of the marketplace and the mortgage payment.
I like being where parts of the self, usually drowned out by conventional life, are heard. I still honor the impulses that lead me to use drugs to get to those parts. But I have to rein in my own romanticism and remember that a little intoxication goes a long way. For some people I know, drinking and drug use have not been gates to a spiritual life, but substitutes for it. Intoxicants have come to symbolize the freedom they crave in their off-work hours. They may not like what they have to do on the job, but within their homes, their families, and their bodies — the last unconquered spheres — they express what remains of their freedom: freedom to be left alone, freedom to buy, and freedom to party.
The resulting national epidemic of drug abuse and alcoholism is the product, I think, of a culture that offers so few sustainable, non-drug-related opportunities for interconnection, self-expression, and spiritual meaning. Religions have traditionally provided such opportunities, and my involvement with Adult Children of Alcoholics gives them to me in a non-dogmatic way. I have been able to rethink Buddhism and make it mine, and since I began going to meetings, I no longer have to be high to lie alone on a grassy hillside, listening to the sound of a hawk’s wings riffling the air.
For years, I lived my life on the assumption that if I could just figure out how to force other people to behave, I could be happy. Now, my life is not perfect, but Al-Anon helps me give meaning to that part of my suffering that is unavoidable. Talking and listening at meetings helps me accept the given world and helps me see the limits of my power to create my own reality. We have a prayer in Al-Anon: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I keep coming back; it works. After years of trying to stare down my problems, I go at them obliquely, and they melt. After years of locked combat, my relationship with my father eases. On the phone, I no longer listen like a little detective for slurred words; I no longer triumph when he stops drinking or get crushed when he begins again. I no longer send him furious letters listing every broken promise, every mean remark, every drunken embarrassment, and every blow.
Instead, we talk about writing. I stand up for myself, but with a sense of humor. When he’s emotionally absent, I get off the phone instead of trying to suck juice from a stone. I try to face my own life — this mysterious life that I influence, but do not control — instead of trying to live my father’s. In the process, I spontaneously recall moments of childhood grace.
The year I turned ten, I spent the day before Christmas with my friend Janet. Janet’s mother’s alcoholism was well-advanced — she sometimes passed out on the couch — and Janet was a little adult who ironed her own clothes and made her own meals. In the early afternoon it began to snow, and by nightfall, the highway between Janet’s house and my own was closed.
At first, I thought I would spend Christmas Eve with Janet and nobody would care. But my father called to say he would walk halfway to meet me. It was a long, cold way to go alone, but as I walked through the falling snow, from street lamp to street lamp along the soft, silent highway, I was not afraid. It was a beautiful night, and the snow, caught in the street lamps, sparkled as it whirled and fell. The memory is precious to me, a talisman that reminds me how much my father loved me. He was there to meet me halfway, and sober, and together we walked home.
This essay originally appeared in The Family Therapy Networker and is reprinted with permission. “Lily Collett” is a pseudonym; in keeping with the pledge of anonymity required of everyone in Twelve Step groups, people described here have been given different names.
The copyright is retained by the author.
— Ed.
