Revisiting The Doctor’s Opinion

For those who are not familiar with the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Doctor’s Opinion was first published in the first edition of the book.  Here is one of the more striking passages, one that many alcoholics find gives them their first understanding that they are not alone:

Men and women drink essentially because they like the affect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks-drinks which they see others taking with impunity. After they have succumbed to the desire again, as so many people do, and the phenomenon of craving develops, they pass through the well-known stages of a spree, emerging remorseful, with a firm resolution not to drink again. This is repeated over and over, and unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.

Oh how familiar that sounds to so many who have wondering, “Do I have a drinking problem?”

The most critical phrase in the doctor’s opinion is this: “…unless this person can experience an entire psychic change there is very little hope of his recovery.”

I’m sure many of you have watched people relapse over and over, or maybe you have experienced that yourself.  The shift in behavior, attitude, and thinking that enables a person to get and stay sober is no small undertaking.  It is profound because, frankly, most humans do not change all that much in their lifetimes.  Our personalities are set, and we tend to live a certain way until the day we die.  No one with any sense of reality thinks this is an easy thing to do.  Most of our behaviors have been adaptive – reacting to parents, peers, life in general – although I would argue that many of those behaviors are actually maladaptive.

What does that mean? It means there is a very core self that holds tight to old behaviors because they feel like the only way to survive. Something,  at sometime, set in motion behaviors that seemed right in a certain context, but now continually lead us into trouble – trouble in relationships, trouble with emotional balance, trouble in careers, maybe even trouble with the law.

So while those behaviors might have made us feel like we were surviving stuff when we were 12 or 14, now they are just spinning us in a never-ending cycle of despair.  Life is not full when you live that way.

I remember early in sobriety I wanted that lightening bolt – the thing that would shift my consciousness so utterly that change would be easy.  How many of you are smiling at that?

So far, no lightening bolt. Although I have had major, dynamic shifts in thinking that seemed to come on suddenly, in reality they came after months or years of focusing on doing things differently. It’s sort of like when you practice and practice your game of tennis or your sonata on the piano, then one day it just really clicks and you realize, wow, I’m really doing it!  You didn’t suddenly become good, but when you hit that groove it can feel like you had a phenomenal breakthrough all of a sudden.  Nope. Work. And lots of it.