6. Psych

Amidst this swelling of excitement and pride surrounding fitness, I experienced a setback, as the system of law and order pumped the brakes on my accelerating plans. The clear path to victory over my flaws, of drinking and sloth, could be obtained through the Church of Iron: free weights, squat racks, and my trusty old aluminum bike. I felt empowered, emboldened to tackle my problems and defeat them. I had the illusion of control.

However, the court proceeding directed me to alcohol counseling and probation, which did not concern me at first. I needed to make an appointment with a substance abuse counselor and get things sorted out. Clearly, I could show the drug and alcohol counselor my progress, and sell them on my new zest for life, then be on my way.

I contacted someone that I knew from my initial recovery who had righted herself and become a drug and alcohol counselor, and I thought surely she could rubber stamp my progress chart so that I could send a report to the state for verification and maybe a back rub. Instead, she made an appointment for me with another counselor, probably realizing that I wanted an immediate approval to continue on my own path of recovery and self-discovery.

In my meeting with the counselor, I answered all questions honestly, giving scores between 1 and 5 for how I was feeling, including honesty about my bouts of depression. The interview seemed to go well, with much banter and chatter, and were I applying for a job it seemed I would have received an offer. To my surprise, the next day I received an order to do a 28 day inpatient program. My heart sunk, thinking this would derail my coaching, fitness, work, and family life that was just beginning to mend. The first stitches of repair would be ripped apart again. With small children, I believed that I could not leave for a month to dry out because that would be out of the household, and I had already been dry for a month while waiting for instructions from the government.

I sought a second opinion, from a more formal organization, this time from an esteemed medical center, not a strip-mall rehab clinic. The motivations of the rehab center, I surmised, was to get clients in the door to make money. AA meetings only took donations, and didn’t send invoices like 28 day inpatient and outpatient programs. As the saying goes in AA, “Some of us are sicker than others” and I was less sick. My resolve to quit raged within and I wanted to get back on the bike. During this time my attendance at AA meetings surged because I needed to show the world that I meant what I said, even though no one was watching or listening but me and my immediate family.

On several occasions I joined the AA group at the detox center. To get there I needed to hitch a ride with another AA member. Each time my “taxi” arrived I spoke with the person in recovery and realized how lucky I was. My family remained intact, while theirs were separated. My house payments were on time while they struggled to make rent. My job paid well, and they bounced between multiple jobs trying to make ends meet. Returning to the detox center felt strange after waking up stupefied in there a short while ago. I still saw the Coors Light billboard out the window and had to laugh at its ironic placement.

By then I had a sponsor who I didn’t particularly like. The dogma of AA lived loudly in him. He knew the Big Book verbatim and had an absolutist approach, with five years of sobriety under his belt. He wielded those five years like military rank over my month of sobriety, which irritated me, particularly because he was younger than I was, as well as unmarried and without children. I found it difficult to relate to him beyond the desire to stop drinking, which is of course the entire point of AA. I tried to recall the saying: “Principles over personalities,” which meant to ignore our differences and focus on the common intention to be sober and thereby virtuous. He too had issues with religion but could allow for God’s existence, so long as it wasn’t the Christian kind. That we shared, but his anti-Christian stance exceeded mine. Simultaneously, I was trying to allow a bit more of the Triune God back into my life, for a little while anyway.

That was the period when I attempted to find a home in an Evangelical church, accepting the invitation of some willing neighbors who wanted to save my soul. Their good intentions brought me into their fold but as soon as the people started raising their hands and closing their eyes, I felt a disturbance in the force. Then after a few weeks, the pastor’s sola fide and sola scriptura sermons seemed odd to me, and the concert style of service turned me away. I attended a Celebrate Recovery meeting, which was a Christian AA group, but felt it was a more emotional copycat of what AA was already doing, just with an Evangelical angle.

Why would that bother me? Why would I care? Because I didn’t like the idea of Christians taking and making everything into their own image. The 12 steps of AA had been moved into the Church and the word Jesus was added to the steps, along with obligatory Bible study. This seemed to me the way that the whole Christian religion had spread from the start, by taking other things, like pagan holidays and rituals, and experimenting until they found the malleable way to hammer them into Gospel-fitting shapes. I felt like Lieutenant Dan on Forrest Gump, railing against the constancy of “Jesus this and Jesus that, have I found Jesus yet?”

Hence my attempt at finding God through the Evangelical path did not last long, since my high sensitivity to so many things averted my attention. I had all these hangups about Christianity that reared up almost as soon as I entered an Evangelical church. These same concerns and misgivings, these doubts and disdain, came up whenever I entered a Catholic church, too. I could start the day with a clear mind and heart oriented toward belief and within thirty minutes of Mass all of the old reasons I had stopped believing were back in full force. Even by tuning the radio dial and accidentally landing on a Catholic radio station I would roll my eyes since the unspoken motto seemed to be All abortion, all the time. The only issue that seemed important to Catholics and Evangelicals was abortion, with a side dish of gay marriage to gnaw on.

The noise of the world continued and since I could find no message of love in the Christians, and the love seemed hermetically sealed inside the Church walls to a homogeneous set of believers. Love your neighbor meant love your Christian neighbor and forget the rest. The pursuit of money and power among the faithful appeared as egregious as among the faithless, with new vehicles and pools and hot tubs and RVs and ATVs frequenting nearly every driveway and backyard. The Prosperity Gospel made a mockery of it all. I abandoned my attempt to be re-born a Christian.

I gravitated back toward progressive politics and typically landed somewhere in the middle, since I found both extremes of the right and left to be indefensible. The battle cry of moral relativism from the faithful rang out against the leftists for allowing all manner of sin to be validated, with an abstraction of Aristotle vs. Rousseau occurring in a daily title fight for the winning worldview on the internet.

Whenever I entered the real world armed with ideas and opinions, usually from a book I’ve read, the world quickly disarmed me with its mayhem. I would abandon my soft convictions and retreat to a “live and let live” mentality because that was a safe space, to use the modern term for cowardice. If I could avoid offending anyone, I could then be left alone to find my own truth.

This is what I pursued in getting a second opinion on the state of my alcohol abuse. In my next visit, I decided to not answer any of the questions factually and instead paint the rosiest picture of my life imaginable. I was on two anti-depression medications and exercising seven days a week. I was attending AA meetings and not just sitting there, but speaking and contributing. I made all of this known in the meeting with the two counselors. These claims were not lies, but I exaggerated the joy I was feeling so they would not recommend a 28 day inpatient program again.

At one point in the interview, I said, “I spoke with a friend last week who was hungover from a weekend of partying, and I told him that I was feeling great. I wish I’d made this change long ago.”

My salesmanship failed because at the end both counselors left the room and came back recommending a 28 day inpatient program. As soon as those words left the senior counselor’s lips, I felt shock. The words struck me so hard that I felt dizzy and thought I might fall out of my chair. I could hardly hear anything that followed and it seemed that perhaps this was some kind of panic attack, which I had never experienced. Stranger still, I felt outside of my own body for a moment, like I was somehow in the air around myself but not with myself. This floating experience felt drug-induced, but I was sober. Again I felt the presence of a soul or essence departing me and returning. I suspect my face must have dropped like a stone, because once I collected my spirit and body together again the bearded professorial counselor said, “I gather you are not pleased to hear the recommendation.”

I was not pleased. And I told him so, saying that I was making the change and working hard toward something solid and positive. My children and wife needed to see this in action, hear the mea culpas, and witness the work-in-progress. I could not leave for a month to explore my addiction which I had already accepted.

The counselor recounted my anecdote about the conversation with my friend, who had been hungover from partying. To my surprise, the counselor implied that I was missing the nightlife and my old habits. I could not believe my ears, as in my attempt to convey how I did not miss drinking, he construed the message to mean that I wanted to be drinking. At that point I realized what being inside “the system” meant, grokking it entirely, as if Franz Kafka was sitting in the room and nodding, saying, “Now do you get it? See what I meant in all those stories?”

Again, I immediately assumed that this was about money rather than helping people. The counselor needed to collect bodies in seats for his programs and I was fresh meat delivered by the state unto him. And if he recommended inpatient rehab, I would have to partake and pay for inpatient rehab. Long ago, from a surgeon, I had heard the phrase, “When you go see a surgeon, you will be recommended surgery.” That held true for surgeons and just about every profession I’d ever encountered, from car dealers to lawn care to Pampered Chef agents to New Age religions to organized religion. This premise certainly held true with my own company’s salespeople who would go to great lengths to tailor any message that could complete a sale. What you need, is what they are selling. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or at least that was my position, when in reality the protocols in both of my assessments likely recommended rehab for someone who had driven drunk while twice over the allowed blood-alcohol content and had a history of excessive drinking. I mean, there was my own behavior to inspect as well, but my will and ego wanted to drive this bus myself.

My reaction to the recommendation may not have been fair to the counselor, but I argued them down to an outpatient program before they signed off on the report, which would go to my probation officer. And I never did join an outpatient program, having dragged my feet for two years on it, claiming AA as my program, and eventually even dropping out of that in order to focus on my family, my coaching, and all manner of intense exercise that I felt purged the toxins and animus from my body, in a kind of self-flagellating way. The miles lengthened and goals ossified into must-have experiences on my calendar. This focus on exercise replaced books, travel, woodworking, writing, reading, as the centerpiece of my life. The hierarchy of my life was sobriety by whatever means followed by fitness, family, marriage, and career. This seemed the right ordering at the time.

I did find one book to fly solo with during that time, which was Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind. That little book contains great arguments against drinking in a modern way that is totally non-religious in nature. She has made a little gift to the world in this book to shatter the illusions about why we drink, such as to have a better social or sex life and how for the most part, drinking does more to tear down your life than to improve it in any way. Without a doubt, drinking has destroyed more families and careers than anything else in my social circles. Nothing even comes close. As Homer Simpson once said, “Drinking is the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.” Except in reality, the solution part is just escapism, and burying one’s head in the sand.

The hardest part about quitting drinking in our society is the ubiquity of the message to drink. If you have never tried to stop, I would dare you to try it for 3 months and see how much you notice the billboards, ads, and commercials that steer you toward it. Then there is events that are fully geared toward drinking - sports, concerts, backyard barbecues, dinners, tours, neighborhood fires, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, going away parties - nearly all social gatherings have an element at play. And the funny thing is, if you’ve been playing along in that world for a while, you are brainwashed into thinking that refusing a drink will be rude, or look awkward. Once you start saying “No” you will soon realize that no one cares, and if anyone does care that you aren’t drinking then they are likely a problem boozer who hasn’t realized it yet. Furthermore, you suddenly meet the many people who don’t drink at all and find a new kind of bond over abstinence. It’s amazing how people open up if you say, “No thanks, I quit drinking. It wasn’t doing me any good, so I had to make a choice to cut it out.” Rather than it throwing a wet blanket on people and parties, in my experience people open up and share stories of their own struggle or a family member that has also quit.

In five years of non-drinking, the most pathetic ad I’ve seen from the beer industry to promote drinking as a way of life was from Michelob Ultra, where a robot is exercising like mad among normal people. The robot is freakish to the normies, as its muscular metal body outperforms them all, but the obvious point is that the robot has no personality. Then at the end of the commercial, the robot is jogging past a pub where everyone is laughing and enjoying life while having tall glasses of Michelob Ultra (which is comical in itself, as the beer is 99.9% water and has no flavor). A caption appears on the pub window saying, “It’s only worth it, if you can enjoy it.” This is a very subtle and cruel insult at people who are trying to quit drinking or have taken up exercise to help them stop drinking. I was a bit shocked as it even struck me as, “Wow, I’m just a robot, exercising all the time now instead of drinking with friends.”

When you are in sales, the goal is to sell. I’ve known that from the working environments I’ve been in and around. But the lengths that the beer and liquor industry goes to in order to make alcohol “cool” is unparalleled. This Michelob Ultra ad is just another derivative of the great South Park commercial that mocked the beer industry’s constant push to marry fun with drinking. The South Park ad shows image after image of sex, cars, women, fun, vodka, expensive things, bikinis, posh hotels, money, tuxedos, threesomes, Vegas, more sex, and then at the end comes the platitude of “Please Drink Responsibly,” which is in direct contradiction to everything that was in the ad. I even think back to the indoctrination of beer ads in the 1980s where the humor in the commercials made us kids talk about the ads at school, with Joe Piscopo, Spuds Mackenzie, Bud Bowl, Bob Uecker, John Madden, and Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini team. That was all long before “The Most Interesting Man in the World” came along showing how you could only be interesting with alcohol.

The deck is stacked heavily against those who want to stop. In fact, I recall the backlash against the Joe Camel ads and people saying it was government overreach to stop that campaign for cigarette companies targeting kids. But I can tell you this: in 4th grade, my friends and I at school liked to cut out and tape up pictures of Joe Camel in our lockers at school, because we thought he was cool. We didn’t admire the Marlboro Man for his ruggedness, we admired Joe Camel for his cars and ladies and overall playboy lifestyle, and I’m not even sure we knew why at that age. Whatever it was, the marketing worked and by age sixteen we were all smoking Camel Lights.

I’ve heard the argument that “you can just ignore the ads.” If you are a drinker, I dare you to stop for 3 months and let me know how ignoring the ads went for you. Good luck on that.