01/08/2020
Please read this preamble by Kristi Coulter before you read the article đ
"Resurfacing this piece from earlier in the week because I'm seeing firestorms in some circles over Holly Glenn Whitaker's critique of AA's principles and messaging, along with speculation that she is a "dry drunk" for criticizing AA, espousing feminism, and getting sober via other methods. I have been in Holly's shoes in the past and have a few thoughts which I'm sharing in the hope they will help someone who may be struggling to get or stay sober and feeling vulnerable to bullying or fundamentalist thinking. (Reminder that I'm just a writer and sober person, not an addiction professional.)
First, here's what I think you have to do to get and stay sober--or rather, here's what *I* had to do:
1) Stop drinking alcohol. Completely. (Moderation and harm reduction are end goals for some people, and that's fine. I'm talking about sobriety.)
2) Over time and with a sense of friendly curiosity, explore the role alcohol played in your life, and find other ways to deal with the needs it was filling, the pain it was masking, etc. Also, start to notice how some of your unhelpful drinking behaviors--like self-shaming, or all-or-nothing thinking--still pop up even though the alcohol is gone, and develop new, healthier cognitive skills. In my experience all of this is an iterative, layered process. You go deeper as you're ready to, and as you change in sobriety, you revisit the subject to make sure your strategy fits who you are now. The idea is to build a life and a skill set where drinking alcohol is no more necessary than, I dunno, eating bags of turnip peelings.
3) Have some community of sober people you can talk to, who can help you build and maintain your new life and who you can help in return.
4) Buy a SodaStream. Don't be like me and lug 2-liter bottles of seltzer home from the supermarket for six months, going "Ugh, these are so heavy, poor me, my groceries weigh too much" the whole time, until you remember that the SodaStream is a readily available product that pays for itself in about five seconds.
I could get fancier about it, but basically I think that's it, and #4 is PROBABLY optional. I do not think you have to hit any particular 'bottom' to decide you're done. I don't think you have to label yourself any particular way, or even be sure you're an alcoholic. (I started using the word for myself mostly because it's a shorthand everyone understands.) I *know* you don't need to meet some artificial criteria of 'bad enough' to quit. It's a liquid. You get to decide to stop putting a particular liquid into your body for any fu***ng reason you want.
Now, here are some ways you can accomplish the above:
1)You can join a step-based group like AA or Secular Sobriety or Refuge Recovery and absorb its teachings to the letter.
2) You can join a step-based group and decide which elements resonate for you and which don't, based on your feminism or atheism or whatever, and leave those elements behind.
3) You can incorporate some teachings of a step-based group into your life without actually joining one.
4) You can go to group or individual therapy.
5) You can join online groups for people in recovery or seeking recovery.
6) You can pray to a higher power, in or out of a group.
7) You can read books and blogs by people who've gone before you, and write about your own recovery to help those behind you.
đ You can take medications like Antabuse or Naltrexone that are designed to help people either reduce their consumption or stop drinking entirely.
9) You can work with a doctor to treat mental illnesses that may have contributed to your drinking or be causing suffering in your sobriety.
10) You can take up meditation as a tool for learning to co-exist with your feelings and thoughts without automatically reacting to them.
11) You can go to in-patient or out-patient rehab based either on step-based programs or some other methodology.
12) You can use exercise and creative pursuits and rest and nature to manage stress and fill your life with meaning and beauty.
13) Amazon has the SodaStream, or you can probably get it at Costco or Bed Bath & Beyond or I don't know where all. You'll be clear-headed; you'll figure it out.
14) You can do literally ANY of the above in ANY combination that works for you, because it is YOUR sobriety. Yours.
I did 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 (half-assed), 12, and eventually 13. So far it's working for me. I'm glad to know that 1, 2, 6, 8, the whole-assed 10, and 11 are out there as options in case I need them in the future. I hope someday there is one miracle pill that just NAILS it, because addiction is not a moral issue and you don't get virtue points for working harder than everyone else at sobriety. That said, I'm glad I had to do it the slow, hard way, because I needed to do this work and it has largely been a joy. But that's me, the kid who loved homework, so take it with a grain of salt.
Finally, a word about the concept of a "dry drunk." This is an AA-coined term meant to describe a person who has quit drinking, but not done anything else to make a new life or understand the role of alcohol in their old one. There are at least two other common variants--not found AFAIK in the AA literature, but individual interpretations of the original definition--both of which I've seen flung at Holly. One is that if you express anger or other negative emotions, you're a dry drunk. (When I published "Enjoli," strangers were LINING UP to tell me I was a dry drunk for being angry about patriarchy.) The other is that if you got sober through ANY method other than AA, you're a dry drunk. (I met some of these people too.)
Now, I could point out that I didn't get sober to LOSE access to the normal spectrum of human emotion, or to become a grinning handmaiden of the patriarchy. I could also point out that there are to date NO significant, double-blind studies showing that AA is any more or less effective than any other route to sobriety. They can all work. They can all fail. But here's the bigger point: people who use 'dry drunk' as an attack term fu***ng suck and they do not belong in your life or your recovery. I don't care if you ARE having trouble moving past the quit-drinking phase of recovery: you still don't deserve to be shamed by the very people who know how hard it is to get sober. And if you HAVE evolved in recovery and are bopping along happily in life, it's even more ludicrous to be labeled a dry drunk simply because you pulled from columns 2-14 instead of column 1, sort of like cancer survivors who had chemo telling cancer survivors who had radiation that they only THINK they're well, or Christians insisting that Jews and Muslims are going to hell. In my experience, the vast majority of AA folks do NOT subscribe to such rigid thinking or bullying behaviors, but every population has its jackasses. Do not let the sober jackass contingent bully you off your own thoughtful path. Just walk on by.
TLDR:
Many ways
Experiment at will
Ignore mean fundamentalists
Get the SodaStream
It's all going to be worth it
I promise
So, so worth it
I didn't believe it either
But it's true"
~ Kristi Coulter
Women who drink too much need help. But we donât need to give up our power.
