It's an inside job

My last piece of work introduced some thoughts on stopping drinking and the beginning of sobriety. In many ways it was inadequate, but the main thrust of my argument was that once beyond the point of human resources there is little hope for the problem drinker who is deeply damaged. There is no stepping back over the line that we have crossed, back into normal and enjoyable drinking. Not if we are hopelessly struck with the stuff. Some people can summon what is needed and return to better times. But these people - if they are to be believed are either a rarity or not in the same position that we are! The thing that I tried to point out was that most problem drinkers will think that they can reverse their problem, and that, is part of the problem itself. This kind of thinking, where an individual has all the evidence in their hands, and who still thinks that they are in control of their life and alcohol, is damaged and dangerous. The evidence was clear to see and yet ignored. Drinking when not wanting to, drinking in response to an unknown urge, not being able to resist even when pitting all of the will and thinking, toward resistance. Or subtle twists in thinking that lead back to drink when you were trying to think 'positively' and head in the other direction. This was evidence! You can fill in the details from your own life for yourself. In doing so you will have been led to certain conclusions, vague as they may be. If you are to go on and enjoy life then you will have to concede the need for help and an alternative approach to what you have probably been thinking until now. As many recoil from the word God it was not my plan to fire both barrels of the spiritual shotgun your way. It was suggested that the way of the Spirit could include anyone who had an inclination and who was desperate enough to look that way. If we had come to the point of no return with our drinking where else were we to look? It is not my intention here to preach religion or conversion, only to attempt to show the fallacy of our living alone and with a debilitating problem that cannot be solved through thinking, but by through being something else. Naturally my words will turn toward God. Do not turn away from that word. Instead open your mind to your own visions and ask yourself what you have always needed God to be. Then read on without the baggage that will inevitably weigh both you and I down. Also that word sobriety means different things to different people. If a drunk has stopped drinking then technically they are sober and in sobriety. But my suggestion was that any drunk can stop drinking - the art is staying stopped and enjoying life. So I will qualify the

word sobriety by saying that it denotes a quality of living that is stable and enjoyable to the extent that is is productive and that we want more, not less of it. I do not use the word sobriety in the sense of being perfect and never having another problem. Sobriety is an attitude toward one's self and our fellows and something that happens when we have started to change. Of course making pronouncements on such a subject is always charged with energy and dare I say it - suspicion. Some people will listen to one person with respect and treat another with contempt even though they are saying the same sort of thing. This is the way of things when discussing affairs of the heart, religion or spirit. And especially the way of things when a person thinks that they are being preached at. This is not my intention and I would only be walking straight into a minefield if I was asking you to follow me and my plan. That I have not done because fundamentally I need exactly the same help as you do. We are in the same boat, we cannot slug it out alone. Leaning on someone with emotional weight might get them to listen but it wont make them change their minds. In part 1 I asked you to weigh up the evidence concerning your ability to draw back from drinking and the abyss, and to consider whether your problem had progressed in its nature and intensity. It is from that point that we can see the hopeless nature of our problem. Many will dare not look at this. We cannot force them. If you were bold (or desperate enough) then you will have thought about where you went from there and thought about the yearning deep within your nature that I called Spirit. It has been a vital part of human experience to engage with this mysterious part of ourselves. Doing this has proved to be the saviour of many hopeless drinkers. The fine detail and wording of your new way is in your hands. Suffice to say that forgiveness, mercy, kindness, sharing, are the bonds that hold us together as we turn the corner in our life's. We need healing so we ought to accept the things that make healing possible. If medical help is needed also, then so be it. A good doctor or therapist is worth their weight in gold! In order to walk away from our old life we must weigh these things up and be bold with our reflections. This type of reflection will not harm us, although it may cause discomfort or even pain. It is the price we begin to pay in order that we might survive. And so, where were my previous protestations leading? If you agreed that your best thinking and your mightiest efforts have got you no-where then you are either finished or there is life in front of you. If there is life in front of you - how do you live it? If you know that

fighting alone is useless in the face of worsening odds then what are you left with? The short answer is some kind of spiritual happening or more struggle. If we are to engage with this thought then how are we to engage with it? To this end I have written this short accompaniment to the introduction laid out in Part 1. In Part 1 it was important to lay down the basic principles upon which a new life might be lived. The reiteration of hopeless struggle against our own buckled minds was the starting point from where we could ask ourselves about the 'line'. Beyond the line there is no hope of return. The 'line' is where most people fail in their attempts to stop drinking for they cannot or will not understand their own limitations and resources. There is no inner resource as summoned up by our will that can defeat a drinking problem. I have said it enough and shan't labour the point here. As I have said, those who are most successful with stopping drinking are those who are open to Spirit and change. Because of the nature of Part 1 it was not feasible to prolong the argument towards God. There was little use in banging the tambourine at that time. Now there is. We seek some kind of vision of God because it is too difficult to live without it, too hard to struggle on alone in the desperate loneliness of problem drinking. This perhaps is our starting point but I hope that it becomes the great force for good in your life. We could of course, choose to fight, pridefully, and in a noble manner. The bone-yards, divorce courts and prisons are full of such sluggers. I dedicate this short essay to that greater idea and to our sobriety. Toward God or the world No modern history book is complete without the mention of the emerging middle classes, those with 'new money' and new ideas. This goes hand in glove with the great unrest among the masses as they fight for their freedom, are released from serfdom and begin to see the unfairness and inequality of their situation . This 'emerging' class is supposed to be symbolic of change and progression and a positive representation of social turmoil and upheaval (unless you are a communist of course). Alongside the rise of these people, supposedly came the great values of humanism and reflection upon the powers of reason and self. With this we are told that God fell from the sky and we have been struggling ever since to hoist him back aloft. The general unrest among the great 'unwashed' is also captured in their fall from grace and faith, bought on by 'modern' urbanisation and the disintegration of 'traditional values', to which they were sadly not immune. And as we see the endless polarisation of wealth and resource we also see the individual learning to strive for survival, wealth and position. Work we are told, 'will set us free', suspicion and

cynicism will keep us safe, and spirituality is a weakness of character. And so we 'moderns' have learned that God is not as powerful as politicians, medicine, electricity, guns and bombs. We are in a bit of a spot and we know within ourselves that when we are in trouble, toward the Spirit is usually not our first move! But we should not think ourselves any different to any other time. Everything I have said could probably be said about every age. Was it not the same for the biblical prophets who railed against the moral shame of their people or the renaissance artists and thinkers who saw in the human what used to be seen in the divine? Or perhaps those of the enlightenment who in understanding that they were indeed reasoning and thinking for themselves, believed in nothing else and finally nailed down the coffin lid on religion and its beliefs. It is not a new problem but we tend to think it is. The point is that as people seek their freedom from many and various forms of cultural, religious and political oppression, there is naturally a change in reference point for our values and what gives us worth. We do however, always tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It seems to be part of human nature. In seeking to have more control over our lives we have variously seen the future in machinery, ethical codes, ideas, our own ideas, thinking stuff, doing stuff, mending stuff, taking stuff and just stuff in general. In seeking more happiness within our own ideas and thoughts, we as a race became more unhappy. It is natural to want to be an individual without too much external pressure determining who and what we shall be. But these things cannot be avoided. We are always shaped by the world around us and in conjunction with our own inner desire and possibility. So what am I trying to say you might rightly ask? What I am saying is that as we have lost our visions of God, so also we have lost our own pain and unhappiness. To the point that we don't even know what to call them any more! If we have lost our madness how will we ever find our sanity. This is our dilemma and one which I must reiterate time and again, for our sanity cannot be in a separate place to our madness. That would be like saying smoke is in a different place to fire or water to steam, this is a vital starting point when dealing with all illness of the heart. Because at the middle of our search for peace is the illusion that peace is a commodity, or an answer to something. And the delusion that we can buy it, work it out or find it like we can find our lost keys. Our dis-ease coupled with our desire for so called independence has driven us to the edge of our reason. We have been blinded by our self absorption, social and cultural

inequity and pride. Why do we need religion, God, charity, when we can pay for therapists and medication or point the finger elsewhere if need be? Yes these are tough questions for us in this time and place. We are confronted with the difficulty of naming our ailments and ourselves. What words shall we use? Dysfunction, addiction, obsessive compulsive and the rest perhaps? Nowadays if we take one biscuit from the wrapper then eat the hole packet that tells us that we are addictive personalities, when 30 years ago we would have been greedy! Valentino and the great lovers would have been sex addicts and Helen of Troy and Menelaus co-dependant. Categorisation is one thing, being happy with it is another. The human desire of naming everything and then sticking them in neatly wrapped boxes has caused us more problems than enough. We as a developed people have come to the point where we have more words in our dictionary's than ever before, can be more precise with language than ever before and yet can hardly say a word about who we really are. Our words have become empty to us. If we are to name things and explain ourselves then our words must come in the form of a relationship and not in an empty speculative proposition or category. Reference point As we use ourselves as our own point of reference we will inevitably only come up with references that are self defeating and lacking in conviction. Especially if you have accepted that your own thinking has got you no-where. So what will our point of referral be? Will it be the psychiatrist in whom we put our trust but who can only refer back to us what we have just told them in our own garbled fashion. Will it be the strict moral code that we have picked up from somewhere or other or even formulated ourselves and still can't seem to stick to. Or will it be faith in the ideal world in any of its many forms; knowledge, reason, effort etc? There are of course, many self-help programs, doctors', therapists' and help centres that are very noble and dedicated in their work. My question is not their skill but our damage. If our drinking and suffering is a spiritual problem then the answer must also lay in that place. And so we can start to narrow down our options. There is nothing wrong with using human resources my point is that they are ultimately limited and cannot deliver everything that we need. Looking to overcome our deepest problem by just finding stuff out or thinking differently will not solve our drinking problem. Not if we are far over the line. All the knowledge in the

world will not stop us drinking if we cannot first want to stop then find hope and means. It is about the means of stopping that I have been talking. Some things are practical in their nature, like not going to bars or not spending to much time alone trying to think things out. But other things are more hard to grasp, like believing, trusting and allowing ourselves to be who we should be. If we are to find a point of reference by which we begin to be guided from then it has to be something other than our thinking or reasoning alone. We have proved to ourselves time and again that we cannot cope. We must find something else in the spiritual realm. That or just hang on in there. You choose. The other side of the coin then is that our illness or dis-ease is just a freak of nature, a quirk in genetic mutation that has condemned us to drink ourselves silly day in and day out. It must have sprung out of the depth of some dodgy evolutionary process that scientists have not yet isolated. Maybe we should put our trust in the future generations of biologists and hope that our grandchildren can benefit from there findings. As for us we will go down with all hands on deck. This is our fate. I am making a point. Do we face towards God, whatever that really means to us, or towards the world. Where are we to put our faith. What are we to call our problem. From where will we get the language that makes sense of our situation? How we see ourselves against things tends to tell us what way we will lead our lives. We may be wives, brother's, father's, auntie's and so on, and to these relationships we put value and a certain way of behaving. But when a drunk is out of control it doesn't matter how much these things mean or how good the reason is, we will eventually let them all down and hurt them many times over. But it is in how we see ourselves against them that gives us a point of reference and value. This is a clue in our search for a sober life and a spiritual understanding of things. If for example, we see ourselves in emotional relation to the doctor then we are patients waiting for diagnosis and prognosis. If we see ourselves in relation to science then we are waiting for breakthroughs in genetics, medicine or the like. If we see ourselves in relationship to the knowledge and understanding of facts then it is our duty to learn more. If any of these relationships can heal from the outside what we cannot from the inside then it is our duty to follow our conscience. If they cannot then we need to think again. However, if we see ourselves in relationship to the Spirit or God, however we define that, then we see ourselves as in the hands of energy, guidance, love and much needed depth of

healing. If you have seen the hopelessness of your situation regarding not being able to pull yourself back from the brink then this must be your path. And yes, only desperate people dare look this way, the rest look toward the world because it is what they have been taught and because it costs them less in pride and humility. That is not to condemn them. I know this pathway all to well. Relationship What we believe about ourselves is the answer to many of our riddles. As our drinking progressed and our thinking deteriorated to accommodate an increasingly intolerant view of the things around us, we too, have come to see ourselves as defective and somehow wrong. Over time this kind of thinking turns into a belief and when this happens we are virtually prisoners within our own heads. This is the point of drumming home the first part of our reflection. If you are over the line you are over the line. Nothing that you can think will last for long and no amount of positive affirmation will set you free from that belief. We need help of another nature and dimension. What we have been hiding within our thoughts has neatly covered up our true nature as caring, forgiving and spiritual beings. As the faade of our personality and life has fallen down around us we have been exposed and found wanting. Not because we were truly bad people (although there might be an element of spite in us all) but because we were truly lost and didn't know how to cope. Our drinking eased the pain somewhat and then caused us more pain. As we tried to struggle free we sunk hopelessly deeper into a world in which we found it easier to give in rather than fight. And so eventually we gave in, because of the progression of our deluded thinking it was easier that way. Then unfortunately we found ourselves so lost that there seemed no hope anywhere. This is a lie. Do not believe it. As we reflect on these questions it is natural to ask what we will now believe in. Where will be our new focal point. Will it be in the world or in the Spirit? Our intellectual superiority and our social 'progress' has smashed down every citadel that God once dwelt in. Science has told us how superstitious and uneducated we are. Our peers have laughed at us for even mentioning the word God. And so now when we need so much help on a level that we barely understand, we have no-one left to ask. But these reflections, however painful they have been, have brought us to the point of

making a decision. A decision is a choice between one thing and another - a choosing between possibilities and actions. It follows that in order to have choice we must have things to choose between. A choice between what was and what can be. And if a we can be something else, how can we be that something else? Do we choose between our way or another way, between the human centred or Spirit centred. Can we be humble enough to accept the possibility of some kind of spiritual life and can we say to ourselves yes I will give it a go. After all we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you don't like what you find then you can have your old life back free of charge. A desperate person will come to terms with the language and accept the possibility of change. The price might seem high to start with but what is the cost of the way we are living right now? This is not a once and for all thing although many people will tell you so. We human beings seem more prone to uncertainty than to certainty so do not worry about the lurking notions in the back of your mind that say that you are making a mistake. These 'doubts' are natural and an energy that can be used in the forming of ideas and faith, whatever that will mean for you. The mystery of faith is not something to be feared or derided. It will give us meaning where before there was little or none. Our defeat at the hands of alcohol has left us few real options. So if we are to choose the world in the sense of anything purely human centred or centred around our unaided reason then we must be aware of what we are letting ourselves in for. Similarly if we lean toward the spiritual life then we must know that all will be well with us but that there will be a cost. The cost will be our old attitudes toward ourselves, others and the world about us. This will not change all in one go and we will be led into it in such a way that whatever we become will fit us just as it should. But what we are asked to let go of, sooner or later we will have to let go of. This is what people sense will happen and this is also why many of them turn away. Do not make the mistake in thinking that you will not like what you will become. The contrary is true! Paradoxically it is our relationship with others that will define our spirituality and our striving. When a person turns toward God for renewal they are almost invariably pointed back towards the world and the people around them in order that they might live a different life with different values in mind. For God's plan for us seems to be interwoven with the need to help others and make their life's easier. But is this not just turning toward the world you might ask? Yes it is, but it is turning toward the world with God's eyes to look through. Then we will start to see the picture that we could never see alone. Then we will see the 'line' and what we have to do in order to avoid calamity. We will begin to see that our

broken relationships and painful way of looking at the world were fuelling our drinking. Of course there are other factors involved of which we will probably remain ignorant. These factors that are beyond our knowing and definition but will be taken care of once we are on course with the spiritual life. Our part is to turn our faces toward the new way and to give it our best. Sometimes our best is 2 out of 10 and sometimes it is 10 out of 10. As long as we are trying we will be OK. Our drinking problem will be in the hands of someone or something that can keep us safe from it. Our part is to let that happen. To turn it over, to not hang on. Summary In trying to come to terms with your problem drinking you have been confronted with certain truths that cannot be ignored. These were laid out in Part 1 as an inability to stop drinking when you pitted all your strength against the problem and a deteriorating mental capacity which had no way of thinking its way out of the situation. These symptoms were easily definable and progressive in their nature if an honest appraisal of your history was forthcoming. This might have led you to certain unavoidable conclusions in being convinced of your hopelessly damaged nature and the need for outside help. If we believed that our unaided inner resources were ineffectual but had hope that a way out of the darkness could be found then we were faced with a decision as to the nature of the help to be sought. A decision is a choice of possibilities. We had to see what we were choosing from and why. Was it to be our own will power and a fight to the end, helped perhaps, by a decent therapist, doctor or support group? Or was it to be in the radical form of a spiritual transformation that has a practical basis? In effect we are choosing between what we have had or are doing and what we want to be and can be. If you are to slug it out then don't take anyone down with you and seek all the help that you can get to cushion the inevitable blows that are coming your way. To live an authentic life you must follow your own conscience - but remember - your own conscience has also been under the cosh of alcohol. We cannot trust ourselves unless we can start to see ourselves through another medium. Namely the Spirit or God, however you envision that reality. If we are to choose God then we are choosing to travel toward the light. To let God in is to say that I want, I wish, I will, the same as God wants. It naturally follows then - what does God want? Is our new life to be filled with destruction, revenge, and pain, or love, forgiveness and peace? And so to move forward that is to move forward with the visions of

what we can be with God's help and guidance. To want to keep a clear conscience - to trust in providence - and to give to the world around us because it is the best thing to do within the grace that we will know; these things will we build our sobriety upon. In order to ask God into our life's to dispel our destructive weakness and give us direction it is prudent to make some room for this to happen. The guidelines for this were laid out in Part 1 and are a simple and effective way of starting out on the spiritual path. The need for doing this is because we as people carry so much baggage that we can't seem to think straight about anything that means anything to us. We also need to show, if only ourselves, that we mean business. For some reason this does not work very well when done alone. A trusted friend or advisor is a great help. There is stigma around such practice, being as it is quite near to confession. But our aim is not to be religiously observant but to have a viable tool that will help us keep a clear conscience and on track with staying sober. We undisciplined people also need a means of being disciplined and simple routines will provide that. I have assumed throughout that the reader has been deeply damaged and is in need of more help than they can muster themselves. If that is not so then I hope that these words will get you thinking about things anyway. To take the spiritual path in response to a a spiritual problem is to be in search of God. To have a change of heart and mind is to realise that our thinking, actions, spiritual wrestling and change of direction are all wrapped up in our relationship with God and what we do with God in mind. What we are led to do, and our giving, seeing and loving - however faltering - are God's will. We have not lost our freedom but gained it. We have not handed anything over or given away our right to choose, we have only started to co-operate in the Spirit. Part 1 was written for the first timer in order to help sum up the fundamental things that a problem drinker might be having trouble with. The practical suggestions at the end of the book assumed that the reader had in some way been thinking about some kind of new basis of living. It was not feasible in such an introduction to talk much about God. And so I have included this accompanying text also as an introduction into making a decision about the spiritual life. It is my experience that serious problem drinkers who refuse to look at alternative solutions to their drinking and who insist on slugging it out with alcohol eventually fall prey to a miserable existence. I hope then that this short introduction will lead you into more reflection on this most important subject.