I was confused and was angry. And I thought, my God, there must be millions like me — like us — families of alcoholics who suffer as much, maybe even more because we are sober. Husbands and wives who feel trapped, caught in a situation they can’t control, a situation which has no viable solution…
Barbara Mahoney, commenting on: A Sensitive, Passionate Man (1974)
It will never happen to me.
Claudia Black, Co-founder of ACA
No one is genetically miserable. No matter our current circumstances, we all have the capacity for a joyful life. I’ve made it to 99 in no small part because I have stubbornly refused to give into the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of ageing. For the vast majority of my years, I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the experience of living. Being alive has been doing life — not like a job but rather like a giant playground.
Dick Van Dyke – The Times, November 2025
Every time we get very drunk, we lose about 10,000 brain cells. About a million to two million more that are severely damaged will wither if we continue drinking to excess. We can irretrievably lose up to 30 IQ points over a career of excessive drinking. Isn’t that astonishing!
The result, commonly known as „Wet Brain“ — Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (WKS) — is a severe neurological disorder caused by a thiamine (Vitamin B1) deficiency, most often due to chronic alcoholism and/or malnutrition. It leads to confusion, memory loss, vision changes, and impaired coordination, and can become irreversible if untreated.
While many highly functioning alcoholics — a group to which I belong — can continue to operate for many years seemingly without debilitation or a fall-off in the quality of our professional output, continuous heavy drinking effects our ability to be present, emotionally and spiritually, and eventually catches up with us in terms of our energy levels and our enthusiasm for life.
Towards the end of my twenty-six years of drinking and using, I didn’t have quite as much energy. I wondered what the matter with me was. After all, I exercised and everything. The delusion prevents us from recognising that the debilitation in our performance — as a rule, we alcoholics are very focused on performance — might have something to do with our drinking.
In the 1970’s, Barbara Mahoney described, in her ground-breaking book, how terrifying life becomes for the family of an active alcoholic. We see what happens to the spouse (in this case wife) of an alcoholic. Not only has she the kids to look after, the schooling and sporting activities, she now has an extra kid to look after, in the form of her spouse.
The children are embarrassed by the terrible scenes they see at home and ask questions, whenever he would threaten her or worse, such as „Is Daddy really going to hurt you, Mammy?“
She makes the point that at least her husband could get away even if he stumbled out of the house and went to work all day, drunk. At least he got away, but she was there the whole time and, eventually she would drink too or act out otherwise, just to make the unbearable situation bearable.
The spouse who is non-alcoholic is as sick emotionally as the active alcoholic or addict. They’re very sick and they need treatment. Usually , if both don’t enter treatment, neither she nor the active substance addict gets well.
The substance addict is deeply ashamed and feels guilty about what he’s doing, and he cannot help himself. But he can’t stand the inner barrage of shaming and self-recrimination, so he projects his own anger at himself onto his spouse.
He says: „If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t drink! You’re the one who makes me drink.“ And uses this kind of rationale so that eventually the spouse begins to feel „Maybe I am the reason. Maybe it is me! If only I could change and treat him differently, he wouldn’t drink.“
In this manner, the spouse has become very neurotic and sick themselves and needs help.
The alcoholic or addict, on the other hand, begins to develop the one symptom that cannot be avoided, which is a personality change while drunk.
Increased tolerance — a typical attribute of many alcoholics — is dangerous. This was not my experience, as my system would completely shut down at some point. I simply fell unconscious. This is the culmination of what is called a „blackout“.
If there was an average of one such blackout per month over the twenty-six-year period, that makes for just over 300 blackouts. Only a fool would believe that the average was that low. To all intents and purposes, I should no longer be alive. Yet here I am, writing this piece.
The classic alcoholic can develop such a tolerance that she is the last one standing at the end of a night out, often proud of the fact that she can drink all comers under the table. Even for such people tolerance often eventually goes to zero and all of a sudden, we can’t drink at all.
One of the physiological hallmarks of an alcoholic is that, while for most people alcohol is a depressant, for the alcoholic it is a stimulant. As long as the alcohol level in the blood is on the rise, we will perform better, our motor responses are better, we can interact socially with far less anxiety, etc.
A „normal“ (nonalcoholic) person typically gets worse on all these counts. The people who claim that they do get better performance when they have a few drinks tend to be people who will adapt chemically to alcohol.
The trap here is that we often feel under pressure to perform well, so we become increasingly reliant on alcohol to maintain performance. The subjective view of our performance may not always match the objective view of our loved ones, employer, associates, etc. (A great way to assess this, if in doubt, is to ask someone to make some video footage of you towards the end of a long night of partying and then watch it, while still hungover, the following day!).
That will only add to the ever-present sense of guilt and shame.
We’ve become a chronic drinking culture. How many people are alcoholics and don’t know it? Approximately 29 million Americans aged 12 and older (approx. 10% of that cohort) experienced Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), based on recent data from 2022-2024 surveys. This total comprises roughly 16.7 million males and 11.2 million females. Less than 10% of those affected typically receive treatment. That means that 90% of alcoholics remain untreated until they reach the end of the line.
Some of these poor unfortunates are probably reading this (or other material) right now and denying to themselves they have any problem. Something may be gnawing deep down inside, and they may admit to themselves that really, they are drinking too much. But a drinking problem? No way!
AA estimates current membership at 1.5 million members in the USA and Canada combined. The Twelve Step approach has, over the course of ninety years, shown itself to be a feasible and practicable solution to those alcoholics and addicts who wish to become free of this terrible bondage.
It is also worth noting that there are now almost 20,000 rehabs for alcohol addiction in the US alone. While some people do benefit from such treatment, the recidivism rates are appallingly high. Bad for the clients, good for the „revolving door“ business model.
I always told myself; I drink because it’s enjoyable. I have it under control, can quit anytime. Unknowingly, I was lying to myself. I really couldn’t stop, but as long as we keep going, we never have to prove that.
What is the worst aspect of it, looking back over a career of active addiction? Is it the damage we do to ourselves, is it the damage you do to our partner or our kids, the squandered opportunities to grow and mature personally and professionally? These musings are terrible because of the real harm we have caused and the ever-present feelings of guilt and shame.
What brings us to „hitting bottom“ and to the turning point? What really happens is that most of us have a solid set of high values and our active addiction brings us into — what Dick van Dyke, now over fifty years in recovery calls — „characterlogical conflict“.
By this he means that our behaviour stands in conflict with our values. But we’re really in a grip of something we cannot do anything about, without help. This incongruence is a constant wellspring of guilt and shame. These are what eventually brought me to the doors of AA and Twelve Step recovery over twenty years ago.
Asking for help goes against the grain of every fibre of a person who, like me, has experienced trauma as a child. Our response to the trauma is to decide that we never need help, that nobody can be trusted, and that we must manage everything on our own. In behavioural psychology, this trait is known as „hyper-independence“.
I knew deep down inside that my (long deceased) parents would have been ashamed of me if they saw what had become of me. Of course, that is the projection of my own deep sense of shame. At first glance this deep sense of shame might be viewed as the product of the behaviour of the hopeless alcoholic or addict, but we are now beginning to recognise that it is, in fact, the cause.
That shame is what we took from our childhood experience. That, then, is increasingly becoming an integral part of the recovery process, — the topic of healing from developmental or childhood trauma.
I was one of those people who was bound to be trapped and didn’t know, just had no way of knowing. What started out as my solution became the harsh reality of bondage. That’s why I’m writing about it now. There are ways of transcending the pain and loss of trauma and addiction. There is a solution.
This solution involves walking a spiritual path of self-actualisation as set out in the original Twelve Steps of AA in 1939. The first phase of recovery takes us to a place of neutrality with respect to whatever substance or process addiction we have been using, to a state of stable, sustained abstinence.
Then the real work begins. When we go deeper, as practised in fellowships such as ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) — the name is somewhat misleading because it is for anyone wishing to recover form the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family — we begin to identify, work through, and transcend those old wounds of childhood.
Here we may also require professional help, ideally from people — themselves living in recovery — who master any of the many new trauma therapy modalities, somatic practices, and mental fitness programmes developed over recent decades.
This is the cultivation of Emotional Sobriety. Like any true transformation, it is made up of 20% insights and 80% daily practice. My experience is that it begins with awareness, then compassion, then learning how to regulate our autonomic nervous system, and finally adopting new behaviours.
As Bill Wilson, a co-founder of AA pointed out: „We cannot think our way into new ways of behaving, we can only act our way into new ways of thinking.“ Recent research in the field of neuroscience bears this out. New action is the secret to success. Through it, we get to rewire our neural networks. We re-write the script.
What does Emotional Sobriety look like? Here are some of the main characteristics:
We are free of resentments, jealousy, and envy — have worked though pain and loss, and are now free to forgive quickly.
Our emotions are not so turbulent that they cause us to act out. The spikes of low lows and high highs of the past have been replaced with a more even, calm disposition, without in any way taking away from our capacity to feel whatever presents.
We are able to make normal everyday decisions without our vision being unduly influenced by our emotions.
We are able to identify and live by a set of personal values without compromise to emotional pressure, expectations, or attachment to outcomes.
We are able to enjoy life as spiritual principles would dictate — such as being able to identify when fear would have us engage in destructive behaviours, to regulate ourselves in the moment, and switch to the higher frequencies of the Sage within — and respond to stimuli with loving kindness.
We are happy for others when they do things better or quicker than we can do or have done.
Our emotions are in sync with our intellect, and both are in sync with the higher energies of the Great Spirit (Sage), however we understand or don’t understand that concept. Some call it intuition.
We can live freely without being emotionally subservient to, or domineering of, others.
We can move freely between the emotional states of child, adult, and parent.
We derive genuine, healthy pleasure from helping others without insisting on specific outcomes, or thoughts of reward, money, prestige, or reputation.
We are now following our bliss, trusting the process, taking full responsibility for the precious gift of life we have received.
We are creative in our approach to life, a life enhanced by a sense of humour, an appreciation of beauty, and wonder at the mysterium of its nature.
We have shifted from the old paradigm of „I’m OK if…“ to the new paradigm of „I’m OK even if….“ as so eloquently described by Dr Allen Berger in one of his many inspiring books on Emotional Sobriety.
