What I learned at Al-Anon

Failing to save my marriage was the beginning of my education

Al-Anon is the 12 step program for people who are in love with an alcoholic. In How I got My Wife To Quit Drinking, I explained that it was my children who yanked me out of denial about my wife’s alcoholism. But they didn’t know what else to help me do about it, so I spoke with several people in my life whom I respect. They advised me to attend Al-Anon.

So I did.

Alcohol was not her problem

The work I’ve done in my life on addiction has revealed a few things that were true for me. The most important is that addiction to drugs comes from a desperate need to regulate negative emotions.

When we’re kids, we experience lots of things. We develop coping mechanisms. We’re ingenious that way, and very resourceful.

But eventually the childhood solutions become adult problems.

These adult problems must be worked out. It’s not a choice. We’re biologically hard-wired to resolve our past traumas by reliving them from a position of control.

We’re all dope addicts, in a way. Our bodies produce dopamine for our brains and it guides our behavior.

Relationship Chemistry is when you find a person that activates the dope production mechanisms in your body and floods your brain with the pleasure chemical. It’s your body telling you, “This is the person who will heal your childhood wounds.”

There is wisdom in your body. It is pointing you in the direction you must go, but it gives you no guidance on what to do when you arrive. So we wind up spinning in the same emotional eddies, circling around different Lovers who really all just represent them same thing: a projection of our own hopes for emotional salvation.

For some of us, the pain of emotional regulation is so damn difficult that drugs do what others cannot: make the pain of these negative emotions go away for a little bit. It can be the difference between an unbearable life and a tolerable one. And it comes at the cost of damage to our brains, our bodies, our relationships, and everything else in our lives… but we don’t necessarily count those costs until long after they’ve been paid.

When I went into Al-Anon, I thought the problem was my wife’s drinking — but it wasn’t. Alcohol was not her problem. It was her failed search for a solution.

Her real problem was managing negative emotions. For her to succeed in her 12-step program, she was going to have to learn new techniques for emotional management to replace the numbing that the alcohol provided.

That’s no easy task.

Give up what I’m getting from her drinking

The best thing about groups like Al-Anon isn’t the books, or the steps. It’s the other people you meet that have been down a road that might look a lot like yours.

I chose an all men’s group, because my qualifier was my wife and there were going to be aspects of my story that I needed to talk about without the additional static of being observed by women. One of the guys there counseled me thus:

Mentor: For your wife to get sober, you’re going to have to figure out what you get from her drinking, and cut yourself off from that thing.

Me: What I get out of her drinking? I hate her drinking! I wish she would stop! I’m not getting anything out of her drinking!

Mentor: I’ll say this just one more time. Figure out what you’re getting out of your wife’s drinking, and cut yourself off from that thing, or you will unconsicously sabotage her efforts to get sober.

I didn’t like thinking that I was harboring some secret desire for her to keep drinking, because I was benefiting from it. What I wanted was to be absolved from all blame for whatever it was in my life and my marriage that I wasn’t happy about.

Blaming her drinking would be ideal in this respect — at least to the extent that it would grant me moral absolution.

The problem was that it wasn’t true. I was getting sex from her drinking, and I was loathe to give it up.

Still, the advice I got from Al-Anon seemed pretty solid, as difficult as it was. So I decided to try it.

I made myself a promise that I would no longer have sex with my wife unless she was stone-cold sober. What I discovered was that we had no idea how to have sex as sober people. Our entire sex life was connected to alcohol, and a sober sex life was going to require extensive relearning and a level of explicit communication that I never thought was possible.

What I learned next partly explains why.

Married to a teenager after 20 years?

One of the most memorable exchanges I had at Al-Non went like this:

Mentor: You’re an asshole.

Me: What do you mean? I’m trying to be a better listener for my wife. I’m trying to help her figure out what she wants. I’m trying to be a better partner, to improve my marriage by supporting her decisions.

Mentor: That’s what makes you an asshole.

Me: No, I think that makes me the opposite of an asshole!

Mentor: That’s wrong. You’re an asshole because you’re treating your alcoholic wife as if she’s a grown up.

Me: She IS a grown up!

Mentor: No she’s not. What age was she when she started drinking?

Me: A teenager. Maybe 17 or 18.

Mentor: When an alcoholic is drinking, they stop developing. They’re stuck at the developmental stage they were in when they started drinking. So your wife is developmentally still a teenager, and you’re expecting her to be able to think and reflect and behave like she’s an adult.

That makes you an asshole. Because your wife is a brain-damaged drunk, and you can no more expect her to be capable of rational thought than you could expect her to fly around the room like Peter Pan.

You think you’re all enlightened because you’re doing your listening-partnership-marriage-counseling crap, when in fact you’re trying to “partner” with a brain-addled emotional teenager. It’s not fair to her. S he has to get sober and heal her brain before she’s capable of any kind of partnership, and that could take years.

Me: Fuck… you’re right.

That was the first thing I learned at Al-Anon: that I was placing unrealistic expectations on my wifer that she could not possibly hope to meet because I had some mythological idea of a “equal partner” trapped in my brain. I learned that for me to be of any use to my wife in her journey to sober up, I was going to have to treat her like the developmental teenager that she was.

So I changed my approach.

I told my wife, “For the time being, I’m making all the decisions. You’re only job is to get sober. I will still keep you informed. I will listen to your reactions and consider the consequences of my decisions on your well-being.. and as of right now you have zero say in anything except your own recovery.”

She was indignant, and she showed it.

“Why do you get to make all the decisions?” she objected.

“Because you’re a brain-damaged drunk and your judgment is not to be trusted,” I told her.

She thought for a few seconds and she admitted, “You’re right.”

That was the first time I’d felt that she’d turned the corner — i.e., that she’d visited rock bottom and she wasn’t going back.

My wife sobered up. Our marriage dissolved, anyway.

The only advice worth taking

Lots of peopl who had never experienced my situation had lots of advice for me about what I should do. They were all full of nonsense.

When I started on my journey of self-improvement, I looked around for men who looked to me like they were worthy of respect and admiration. I wanted to find role models who had lives like I wanted to have — the ones who made me think “I want some of what he’s got.”

To benefit from their advice, I made a rule for myself. I would try anything they suggsted as long as it was prefaced by a phrase something like “When I was in a situation similar to yours, here’s what worked for me… .”

It was the advice of those men that sent me into Al-Anon in the first place, because it was something they found helpful when they were in a similar situation to mine.

That doesn’t mean their advice would necessarily work for me, too. It only means that what worked for them is worth trying.

What works for me could be different from what works for them, and that’s OK. The point is that when I find people who have found a success I admire, I figure it’s because they’ve made decisions that led them to that success. It behooves me to find out which of those decisions might apply to me and test them in my own life.

Any advice that is not informed by the experience of “Here’s what worked for me…” isn’t the kind of advice I want in your life, and the people who giveme that type of “advice” are probably not those with the success I want to emulate, anyway.