Letter From London
Dear SOS:
My name is Nick and I am married to a recovering alcoholic named Fiona. I just discovered your web site and I have to say the FAQ section regarding the "strengths and weaknesses" of SOS and AA just completely connected with something I'm going through at the moment.
My wife checked into Farm Place, which is the original UK 12-step treatment centre, seven weeks ago. I was delighted. She'd made the decision on her own, researched the place, arranged the health insurance to cover her stay, and had the courage to do it.
She's been a drinker all her life, and was a wild woman when I met her - one reason I was attracted to her, in fact. Then, she also used to do a lot of coke - always to excess, which was the difference between us. But as the eighties ended and we got older, she shrugged that off, we had a kid, then she tried to stop smoking and her drinking started increasing.
Then she joined AA six years ago, and began a pattern of bingeing in between periods of sobriety that would sometimes last weeks. Last year she was sober for seven months, until her father's wake in Ireland, when she was pressurized to drink 'out of respect for her father' by the locals. Three months of alternating between drinking and meetings followed.
However, after seven weeks of recovery in Farm Place, seeing her once a week and talking on the phone, I'm having serious doubts about what's going on there. It seems like the alcoholic who checked in is being replaced by an AA Moonie. Everything is based around The Big Book, to the exclusion of everything else.
To begin with, she was in tears, she wrote me saying "please write and be supportive" then, she said, she just surrendered. Now she's hard, seems to be talking Therapspeak all the time, tells me " This all has nothing to do with you. You're not an alcoholic", has a fake smile as she listens to the kids talking when they visit, and is incredibly secret about anything going on there.
Since an her drinking was (she thought) secretive and obsessional, it seems to me that one destructive problem is being replaced by another. Her life story, it seems to be, is also being "moulded" to fit the accepted wisdom that it's all been one long downward plunge into oblivion. "The last few years, I was either hung over or drunk. I didn't know who I was" she said in a meeting the other day. That's just not true. In the eighties it might have been, but recently it would only truthfully apply to about ten days in any given month.
We've run a film production company together for the last few years. we've brought up two kids. We've done film shoots all over the world. We work together for twelve hours a day. She was hung over some mornings, yeah - but for almost as many of the last seven, she's been having 'sober days' and AA meetings. The Bad years were actually 1982-88, and earlier - before our relationship actually began, when she lived with other alcoholics and did things like burn down a hotel in NYC.
"Why didn't you punch me out and lock the door when I was drinking?" she said yesterday, angry. In the evenings - only ever during the evenings, with one or two rare exceptions - she would sometimes drink two bottles of wine and quietly fall asleep, at which point I would - rather than waste my time screaming or crying - relax, get round to calling friends, work on screenplays, and generally detach myself from a problem I felt only she could actually solve. The next morning she would often be remorseful and we would discuss what could be done, which is how she eventually ended up in a treatment centre.
Now that her life is officially described as ever-mounting hell, she is furious with me for being an Enabler. I am regarded as being a "Doormat" for putting up with all this. When I say that, in my memory and a lot of my friends' memories, I recall things as being not altogether that awful - in fact, pretty damn good - for the last ten years - I am of course regarded as being In Denial. AA has a guaranteed no-lose situation here, I feel, a bit like "if she floats she's a witch and if she sinks she's innocent".?.
Last week, a councilor warned her it might be a good idea to end the relationship with me, since it might be a threat to her sobriety.(The councilors are delighted with her progress since she gave in, of course). "I've got step 2" she told me a few weeks ago. "What's step 2?" I asked, later. She was furious with me for intruding on her privacy. I have been given strict instructions to attend Al-Anon meetings if there is to be any chance of us saving our relationship. The two I have attended so far were, of course, full of (rather bitter) 12-steppers and slogans and higher power discussions - which I feel is even stranger when being practiced by people who aren't addicts themselves, and presumably don't have that desperate need for a Big Defined Structure to their lives. As you can see, my experience ties in exactly with the way you describe the "one size fits all" psychic curriculum, which I think is succeeding in stopping her drinking, but with some pretty drastic side-effects. I'd like to know more about SOS. Do you run a Al-Anon-type thing for families? Are your meetings open, and if so, do they exist in London?
Finally, thank you so much for letting me read something that I can really relate to on the subject of addiction and recovery.
Regards to all of you SOS people,
Nick.