Mother Jones: Step By Step

Step By Step
1988 July/Aug
By Katy Butler

Working to overcome a childhood shadowed by alcoholism.

My father was no cartoon drunk. He never passed out on the couch or lost his job or went to jail. He sang me nursery rhymes and taught me to read when I was small, and when people came to dinner, he wore a nice tweed jacket and held the women’s coats for them. I loved him so much I thought they ought to make him a movie star.

The year I turned ten, he began getting off the train in the evenings, saying, “I need a drink. I deserve a drink.” He stared at the TV, bourbon in hand, saying, “This is my anesthetic.” One night, at dinner, in the candlelight my mother hoped would teach us better manners, I made a child’s pronouncement on a subject now long forgotten.

“No,” said my father, and there was a bulge in his thickening jaw. I argued. “Don’t contradict me,” he shouted. It was the end of friendly dinner-table talks and the beginning of a father who dug his teeth into disagreements like a ferret, shaking and tearing at my words until my dinner ended night after night with slaps and tears and being sent from the table.

My mother sat in the candlelight with a pained expression on her face, but did nothing. It was as though a huge black dog that we all worked hard not to see had moved into the living room. My mother tried to limit my father to tomato juice and caught him secretly adding vodka. Their tension spilled over onto us children.

My father shouted at me to improve my schoolwork. “You drive me to drink,” he yelled. “You’re lazy, and you’re sick in the head.” My mother said to me, “You’re selfish, you’re clumsy., you’ve got no visual sense, no sense of time.” Both of them hit me so frequently that I still flinch at sudden movements. I learned in my bones that alcoholics don’t have relationships; they take hostages.

For the first couple of years, no matter how bad the drunken dinnertime scene, I floated up out of sleep each morning with the sense that it was a new day. But when I was 12 I began to wake up feeling as bad as I had the night before. I spent that summer reading in my room, gaining 15 pounds from eating chocolates stolen from supermarkets. I got into fancy schools and got thrown out of them, skipped grades, and then was held back. I blamed myself for my father’s pain, for our relationship breaking down, for my failure to shine in school, for being an inexplicably bad girl. In high school, I wrote poetry, edited the literary magazine, played the lead in school plays, was a National Merit Scholar, stayed out all night, and nearly slit my wrists.

I escaped from home in the late 1960s like someone who’d done hard prison time, and plunged with delight into a new world. I tried psychedelics, took part in union and student organizing, moved to the mountains, and wrote for an alternative newspaper. When the political community that had sustained me evaporated, I moved, seemingly effortlessly, to a big city paper. In my spare time, I practiced Zen meditation.

My life looked good from the outside, but it didn’t feel easy from the inside. By the time I was 35,1 had white-knuckled my way to everything I thought stood between me and happiness-a house, a job, and a husband-and it had all turned to ashes in my mouth. I didn’t think of myself as a “child of an alcoholic,” yet I was living on blues power, depressed and unable to trust. I was a workaholic flake: late every where, speeding the freeways, my car perpetually running on empty. I was in a car crash that knocked me from my psychic moorings. My husband withdrew, and I spent my weekends crying and screaming at him. The world looked flat, and my heart felt enclosed in a Plexiglas box.

THREE YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS 36 AND THE NUMBNESS HAD become unbearable, I walked into a church basement for a meeting of adult children of alcoholics, clutching a list of meeting places obtained from the local alcoholism council. I thought I was embarking on a last-ditch attempt at personal healing; I later discovered I had joined a cultural movement that incorporates much of the spiritual exploration, group energy, folk wisdom, and effective anarchy that I had loved about the ‘60s. But that came later: on first impression, it seemed corny, passive, and pious.

I sat in the back. A volunteer read aloud, “We welcome you to the Monday Night Adult Children Al-Anon Family Group, and hope that you may find in it the help and friendship we have been privileged to enjoy.” We were asked to introduce ourselves by our first names, and I blushed when the crowd replied, “Hi Lily,” the secretary said, “Welcome,” and everyone clapped. The crowd wasn’t straight-looking-many were gay, some wore leather jackets over their T-shirts and jeans, and only a few wore business suits-but they acted as though they were at a midwestern summer camp. Or was it a revival meeting?

On a bulletin board, I saw a cloth banner listing the “Twelve Steps” for spiritual progress, adopted from Alcoholics Anonymous: “1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-that our lives had become unmanageable. 2. Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I stopped there: it didn’t apply to me. I’m a Buddhist, a feminist, and a big-time reporter, I thought. I’m not powerless, I don’t believe in any Power, and my life’s not unmanageable. But I stayed; a friend from work who had recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous advised me to forget the religion and go for the group support. A speaker-a businesswoman in a purple wool dress-briefly told us how her alcoholic father had pulled her out of bed in the middle of the night and beat her when she was a child. “When I first came here,” she said, “I had 500 self-help books and no self.” When she finished, we clapped for her, and then she called on raised hands.

People spoke in monologues, part group therapy and part Quaker meeting, of their own lives and what they called “serenity”-something that had never been a value in my life. Some rambled, full of pain; others spoke in aphorisms. No body gave advice, criticism, or help. One woman said, “In adult life, there are no victims, only volunteers.” Another, who fit what I would later learn is a pattern of children of alcoholics, gravitating toward people with drug or alcohol problems, described herself as a “co-alcoholic”-part of that army of busybodies who marry alcoholics and then pour the bourbon down the sink, or show up at the jail at midnight with bail money. She described the side effects of her bootless attempts to control others: rage, exhaustion, denial, blame, a bitchy superiority, and a sense of personal failure.

We clapped again. Another volunteer then suggested that newcomers find themselves sponsors: “A sponsor is someone with more time in the program than you, who helps you work the steps.” Another volunteer read aloud, “Changed attitudes can aid recovery....You may not like all of us, but in time you will come to love us in a very special way, the same way we already love you.” We held hands and recited something that ended with a rah-rah “Keep coming back! It works!” Mystified, I asked someone, “What am I supposed to do now?” She said, “It works by osmosis.”

Corny and weird as it was, I went back every week. I was desperate, and there was something intoxicating about listening to a whole roomful of people telling the truth.

AROUND THE TIME I WAS AWARDED A PLASTIC POKER CHIP (more clapping, more hugs) for having attended meetings for six months, I noticed that some of my other friends were approaching 40 and hitting a wall. The newspapers were running crack stories, and the country seemed to be undergoing a spiritual fracturing to which neither the Left nor the Right had an adequate response. Nancy Reagan Just Said No, while her husband allowed the number of drug treatment beds to decline; the Left protested urine testing as an invasion of privacy and defended our right to do what we wish with our bodies. It all seemed to miss the point.

A rancher friend from the Great Plains, who also wrote songs for one of the best-loved surviving rock bands from the ‘60s, drank and tripped so much that one year he didn’t stack his hay until after the first snow. A writer I knew disappeared up-country, smoking seven or eight sinsemilla joints a day. I dropped in one night on a friend, an elegant and beautiful magazine editor, and found her drunk and alone with her three-year-old son. Novels went unfinished, promises were broken, faces grew puffy. I was losing my faith in the ‘60s belief that the road of excess necessarily leads to the palace of wisdom.

A few months later, my rancher friend hit town with a button on his denim jacket saying “Clean, Sober, and Bored Shitless.” His Christmas letter announced that he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and had taken what he called The Big Cure. “Those meetings are what church would be if churches let you come as you are, swear when you felt like it, and believe in whatever vision of The Other Party suited your spirit,” he wrote. “On the morning of February 10, I had an exquisitely clear moment in which I surrendered to the fact that I not only can’t drink, I also can’t handle the uppers, downers, and all-around-towners which have skewed my life since the Sixties. The means (drugs) gradually superseded the ends (decency, community, peace, love). The party was over,” the Christmas letter continued, “but we didn’t leave. It’s time for me to take it the way the Lord made it. Turns out that isn’t half bad.”

I congratulated and hugged him, but in my adult children of alcoholics meetings, I still sat in the back and clung to my own sense of personal superiority. Then one night, after a year of meetings, I heard myself tell the group, “I’ve been depressed for years and there’s no reason for it.” After so many years of denying my suffering-and making it so much worse-I had told the truth. I blushed and then cried; 1 felt sure I would be ostracized for revealing how numb and exhausted I felt. Without knowing it, I had taken the first step: I had admitted my life was unmanageable. It was a radical and empowering moment.

I HAD BECOME PART OF A MUSHROOMING NATIONAL MOVEMENT. There are an estimated 23 million adult children of alcoholics in the United States, but in 1981, there were only 14 adult children of alcoholics groups registered with the headquarters of Al-Anon, an organization founded in the 1950s by wives of alcoholics. In 1988, there are more than 1,100 such groups, which typically hold meetings once a week. The size of those meetings has grown rapidly: the one sitting in a folding chair under the basketball hoops and the statues of Our Lady, needed to use a microphone.

In a parallel trend among alcoholics, AA membership in 1988 reached 750,000, up from 550,000 in 1983. In the last two decades, the movement of Twelve Step groups has grown beyond alcoholics and their relatives. Dozens of groups now apply the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous to other human problems-groups like Debtors Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Smokers Anonymous, Incest Survivors Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, even Unsafe Drivers Anonymous and, for procrastinating artists, Arts Anonymous.

All of the groups use the Twelve Step program for spiritual growth that was originally adapted from a Christian conversion process by a failed New York stockbroker and hopeless drunk named Bill Wilson, who founded AA in 1935. The steps may seem arcane, but in essence they boil down to this: with group help, abstain from your compulsion -alcohol, sex, or chronic credit-card debt, Admit you can’t do it alone. Straighten out your relationships with your fellow humans by admitting your faults. Accept help from your Higher Power, defining him or her any way you want to. Do these things, help others, and your compulsions will lift as if by magic.

I began consciously working the steps shortly after I confessed my depression to my Al-Anon group. One evening I asked Carl, a bouncy drama student of 24 with streaked blond hair, to be my sponsor. In a coffee shop after a meeting, I told him, “I want to stop being so unhappy,” and I started to cry. He put his hand on my arm.

“Buy a spiral notebook,” he said. “Write down all the ways that you’re powerless over other people’s drinking, and over people, places, and things. Write how your life is unmanageable. Go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and buy the book called Alcoholics Anonymous-the Big Book. Start reading it.”

When things were going badly, I cried my way through two or three meetings in a single week, feeling something like the pain of thawing frostbite. I realized I had spent my

life blaming myself for my father’s pain, and had called myself crazy for feeling pain of my own. Meanwhile, I systematically filled my spiral notebook with thoughts or

how each of the Twelve Steps applied to my own life, talking them over with Carl in our weekly sessions at the coffee shop. This went well until I hit step three: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

I told Carl I couldn’t do it. The AA Big Book said God didn’t have to be Christian-it could be anything bigger than my small self, like nature, my Al-Anon group, or a spirit underlying things. Yet the language of the Big Book was archaic, Christian, and patriarchal: God (and the book assumed reader) was male.

Prayer had repelled me since childhood, and so did Christianity, in both its lukewarm, liberal form and its coercive fundamentalist form. A personal god, I thought, was like a alcoholic father who would pretend to be loving and the you like, and leave the rest.” But slowly, as I read Al-Anon pamphlets and heard members talk about their lives, serenity became a value of mine, by, you might say, osmosis.

One night after a meeting, when I was feeling particularly happy, a woman-who turned out to be a nurse, six year older than me-nervously asked me to be her sponsor. “By

a spiral notebook,” I told her at the coffee shop. “Go to an AA meeting and get hold of a copy of the Big Book.” Any so I took the twelfth step: “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”

Somehow, the Twelve Step groups have fashioned an anarchy that works. Each meeting is autonomous and self-supporting-we pass the basket and pay about a dollar each to cover room rentals and administrative costs. Leadership jobs are simple-running the meeting, volunteering as a speaker, making coffee-and rotate every six months. People from all races and walks of life communicate freely because we do not discuss professions or specific religious beliefs. Donations from outsiders-even million-dollar bequests are refused. The groups own no real estate and take no positions on political issues. So there’s very little money, power, or fame to fight over, and the work of healing goes on, almost unnoticed by the public world.

I KNOW SOME PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY ON THE left, who think Twelve Step groups encourage conformity and passivity. Perhaps that’s inevitable, given our generation’s cultural history: rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock and roll broke over our lives in one big wave that looked like liberation. But I know my friend Walter, the alternative journalist, didn’t experience liberation when he smoked so much sinsemilla that he couldn’t go to the garage without forgetting what he’d gone for. In true ‘60s style, he first thought he had a premature case of Alzheimer’s, contracted from using aluminum cookware. Then a friend in AA suggested he lay off dope for a while, and he found that he couldn’t do it alone.

I ran into Walter recently on the street. He was back in town; he had joined AA and was working again. Over a Chinese lunch, he said, “I can still remember the day with SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] organizers in Jackson, Mississippi, that I first smoked dope. A woman friend there, an organizer, had just spent the night with a guy not her husband, and it just all seemed far out and all intertwined. I have to go back over my memories now, and separate out the drug aspect, the sensual aspect, and the civil rights aspect.”

I nodded. And yet, and yet, I won’t abandon drugs entirely; I know intoxicants can be sacramental. Last New Year’s Eve I sat with 11 close friends in silence, by candlelight, drinking champagne and eating a grape for each suggested prayer (“God, I offer myself to Thee to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt”) into a Buddhist form I could live with. Kneeling on my bedroom floor for the first time since childhood, I prayed, “Force of rhythm and meaning moving through all things including me, harmony understood by the Buddha and other enlightened human beings, I offer myself to you.... Please relieve me of investment in the illusion of the separate self.” It felt foreign; I felt humiliated and embarrassed. I went to sleep.

Surrender, like most religious acts, is a paradox. For years I had felt as though my heart was enclosed in a Plexiglas box. The next day; I went to work with a warmth in my chest, as though someone was home there. Nagging internal voices accusing me of failure-what Twelve Step groups call “the shitty committee”- were temporarily silent. Had I unlocked self love? Come in tune with The Great Way, or Tao? Been heard by a personal god out there somewhere?

After that, the other steps came easier. I brought more lists to the coffee shop in my spiral-bound notebook (four: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”; five: “Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”; six: “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”; seven: “Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings”).

Another night, I read Carl step eight:

“Made a fist of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” Then I took steps nine and ten: “Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others”; and “continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” I paid off a man whose fender I had dented ten years ago, apologized to my brother and my husband for treating them as if they weren’t smart enough to run their own lives, and wrote a letter to an old friend, admitting I’d betrayed her. My old friend still wouldn’t speak to me afterward, but I felt unburdened, because nobody held .anything over me anymore.

My life changed in many small ways. I dropped my self-appointed role as chief therapist and manipulator within my marriage. I left the job I had worked at for a decade out of fear-of displeasing my father, of not being famous, of being poor. I whined less about President Reagan and made amends politically by tithing to the Jackson campaign and to anti-contra groups, and by writing letters to Congress on issues in which I feel complicit as an American. When it came time to take the eleventh step (“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him ...”), I began taking long, silent walks in the hills.

All this occurred without anybody telling me what to do or what to believe; every meeting closed with, “Take what month of the coming year. It was the peak of an evening in which one friend had read her translations of Japanese erotic court poetry and we all had said things we would not have said sober. My husband and I still sometimes walk the hills and take Ecstasy, speaking to each other in a language_. deeper than the vulgate of the marketplace and the mortgage payment.

I like being where parts of the self, usually drowned out by conventional life, are heard. I still honor the impulses that lead me to use drugs to get to those parts. But I have to rein in my own romanticism, and remember that a little intoxication goes a long way. For some people I know, drinking and drug use have not been gates to a spiritual life, but substitutes for it. Intoxicants have come to symbolize the freedom they crave in their off-work hours. They may not like what they have to do on the job, but within their homes, their families, and their bodies-the last unconquered spheres-they express what remains of their freedom: freedom to be left alone, freedom to buy-and freedom to party.

The resulting national epidemic of drug use and alcoholism is the product, I think, of a culture that offers so few sustainable, nondrug opportunities for interconnection, self-expression, and spiritual meaning. Religions have traditionally provided such opportunities, and my involvement with adult children of alcoholics gives them to me in a nondogmatic way. I have been able to rethink Buddhism and make it mine, and since I began going to meetings, I no longer have to be high to be alone on a grassy hillside, listening to the sound of a hawk’s wings riffling the air.

FOR YEARS, I HAD LIVED MY LIFE ON THE assumption that if I could just figure out how to force other people to behave, I could be happy. Now, my life is not perfect, but Al-Anon helps me give meaning to that part of my suffering that is unavoidable. Talking and listening at meetings helps me accept the given world, and helps me see the limits of my power to create my own reality. We have a prayer in Al-Anon: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I keep coming back; it works. After years of trying to stare down my problems, I go at them obliquely, and they melt. After years of locked combat, my relationship with my father eases. I no longer listen on the phone for slurred words like a little detective; I no longer send him furious letters listing every broken promise, every mean remark, every drunken embarrassment, and every blow. I no longer triumph when he stops drinking or get crushed when he begins again.

Instead, we talk about writing. I stand up for myself, but with a sense of humor. When he’s emotionally absent, I get off the phone instead of trying to suck juice from a stone. I try to face my own life-this mysterious life that I influence, but do not control-instead of trying to live my father’s. In the process, I spontaneously recall moments of childhood grace.

The year I turned ten, I spent the day before Christmas with my best friend Janet. Janet’s mother’s alcoholism was well advanced-she sometimes passed out on the couch-and Janet was a little adult who ironed her own clothes and made her own meals. There were lots of grown-ups there that day, drinking and smoking in the kitchen. Janet cooked us a lunch of SpaghettiOs. In the early afternoon it began to snow, and by nightfall, the highway between Janet’s house and my own was closed.

At first, I thought I would spend Christmas Eve with Janet and nobody would much care. But my father called to say he would walk halfway to meet me. It was a long, cold way to go alone, but as I walked through the falling snow, from street lamp to street lamp along the soft, silent highway, I was not afraid. It was a beautiful night, and the snow, caught in the street lamps, sparkled as it whirled and fell. The memory is precious to me, a talisman that reminds me how much my father loved me. He was there to meet me halfway, and sober, and together we walked home.