June 12, 2024 • 33 mins
2024 1034 A regular contributor to ChildrenOfChaos.net, Dan shares his story which includes a period in becoming sober without a recovery program, the dry drunk acting as a tornado in others lives, and the positive impact he experienced once he reached the Alcoholics Anonymous program.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Thanks for joining us today. I'm Tim. I'm an alcoholic.
(00:04):
Hi, and I'm Rusty and I'm an alcoholic and this is Children of Chaos.
Morning Rusty.
Morning.
Today I've asked our friend Dan to join us and Dan has shared several episodes with us through this podcast journey,
including the effects of addiction on the brain, levels of addiction, and the joy of sponsoring.
(00:29):
I would like to share more about our cast of characters, if you will, with our audience so that they become more relative in the discussion.
And so I am asking Dan today to share his story so that you have a little bit of background on Dan.
Thank you very much, Tim and Rusty. It's good to be here with you today.
(00:54):
You know, it's pretty amazing. Usually we tell our story in front of a group.
At least that's been the habit that I've had here in our AA community.
So sitting here around a table on a podcast is a little bit awkward, just a little bit awkward, but I'll do my best.
(01:18):
So I am Dan and I am an alcoholic and have been in recovery 31 years and have been sober 34 years.
And that's an important part of my story that I think I learned a lot about, both recovery and sobriety.
(01:39):
So I'll begin in the usual way. What was it like before?
I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a large family. I was the oldest of seven.
Mother and dad were really hardworking people. They were very good parents.
My dad drank more than he should and at times that caused some problems, particularly when I was younger.
(02:04):
But I didn't think anything of it. That was pretty normal. All the men in our family drank.
I was from a mixed marriage. That means in the ancient days when I grew up that my mother was German and my father was Irish.
And they were both Catholic, so that's what we called a mixed marriage.
(02:27):
And it was around the war, World War II, and that probably had some impact on that actually.
So I remember an uncle who always drank at the Bunt Society and I had no idea what the Bunt Club was
until I later realized that was a German-American club that was frowned upon during World War II.
(02:48):
So you can tell I'm avoiding getting to the story since I'm diverting with these side stories.
Anyway, I grew up in what externally is going to look like a perfectly normal family.
There were a couple of things that happened in my childhood that I think had a lot to do with my story.
Just one little thing is I remember when I was pretty young, probably about four, not any older than that.
(03:14):
And my mother was in the kitchen cooking and she dropped a knife and actually sliced the calf of her leg.
And blood was all over the place. And I remember feeling really very scared.
And she was cool about it and said, you've got to run over to your uncle's house,
tell him that I cut myself and we need to go to the doctor's to get it sewed up.
(03:38):
And my uncle's house was maybe 100 yards away, if that, maybe 50 yards.
But it was dark and it was snowing and heavily.
And I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to be in a blizzard.
I didn't think it for, but this is the story I'm telling when I look back.
But what I remember about that is being terribly scared, doing it, coming back and feeling incredibly brave.
(04:06):
Incredibly brave.
I probably had the biggest jolt of dopamine I've had in my life when I had that because I was a hero.
And that has a lot to do with my story.
I was a hero. I could save people or things or legs or whatever it is.
So that was one piece of the story.
(04:28):
The second piece of the story, however, was that same uncle that was a hero turned out to be a terror.
And we had an episode where we were playing again.
This could have been probably a year or two later.
And my younger brother, we were all playing in the hose, not hose, it was actually a pump.
(04:50):
And we were pumping water and throwing it on each other.
It was in the middle of the summer.
As I tell the story and look back on it, it looks perfectly idyllic.
It looks like a Norman Rockwell painting of five little kids running through the pump.
But what happened is my aunt got really pretty agitated about it.
And she hollered and screamed.
(05:12):
It seemed like there was a ruckus.
And she told me and my brother to go home.
And her three sons, who were our cousins, were taken in the house.
I went back and got cleaned up, got changed and so on.
And in about what may have been ten minutes, but it could have been an hour, I don't know,
(05:33):
my mother asked where my younger brother was.
And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. Isn't he here?
And she said no.
And so that started a frantic hunt for where did he go.
Now you've got to remember we lived in this little town, a thousand people.
Half the people were related to each other and the other half all knew each other.
There wasn't anything going on except for the story of the bad men who lived in the holler
(06:02):
down below the hill we lived on, like to steal little kids away.
And so I grew up with that story, whether it was true or not, I don't know.
In any event, mother and her sister were both a little bit hysterical
and they were panicked that we couldn't find my brother.
And we hunted. And I began to feel, and I remember feeling very guilty about this,
(06:27):
that I had a responsibility now to care for my younger brother.
When somebody said, I think it was my aunt said,
you're going to pay for this when your father or your mother comes home.
And that was a pretty normal wrong action that was very always done in the 40s.
(06:48):
And we found my brother and he was hiding in the coal bin.
This tells you how old I am. We used coal for heating and had to get coal delivered.
And there was a big room in the basement that kids never went into
because it was really scary and dirty and anybody would bet they would know you were in there
because you'd be covered with coal dust when you came out.
(07:10):
There was my brother who was a pretty scared little kid hiding in the coal bin.
Well, we got him out and got him cleaned up.
When my uncle came home, who was a coal miner by trade,
and therefore was always very scary when he came home because he was covered in black soot,
he decided he was going to teach my brother a lesson.
(07:32):
And he picked my brother up by an arm and a leg and he said,
don't you ever scare your mother like that again. If you do, and I have to give you the setting,
we lived on a hilltop that was on the edge of a quarry.
And the quarry had not been used in years, so it had grown over with a lot of trees.
(07:53):
But it was a very steep hill going down, you know, a hundred feet or so.
And my uncle took my brother, one arm and one leg, and swung him over the quarry
and said, if you ever do that again, I'm going to throw you away in here.
Now, as little kids, we were a little bit intimidated by the quarry, but that was horrendous.
(08:15):
And I remember feeling that I couldn't breathe. I was sick in my stomach.
That was just awful. And my brother was terrified.
My mother was terrified and she was angry. My dad was angry.
And we soon moved out of that area to another place because he felt my dad was quite protective
(08:36):
and said we couldn't live there.
I never thought much about that, except it came back in dreams periodically.
And when I was 50 years old, my brother called me one day and said he had been in psychotherapy
and was undergoing hypnosis and asked me if I knew anything about his being thrown over a cliff.
(09:01):
And I said I know exactly every detail and told him.
And he said I had never remembered that. I knew nothing about it.
But it looks like this may be a real deep root of problems that he's struggled with over his life.
So I go into that trauma history a bit just to say I had a perfectly normal childhood.
(09:26):
And as by all intents and purposes, even that level of discipline wasn't unusual,
although it was definitely disruptive to neurodevelopment of little kids.
I went along with grade school just great, just fine, high school just fine.
Started to drink probably in 16 or 17, just drank with friends.
(09:51):
Drinking was never an issue. We had it in our house all the time.
By the time I got to college, my dad had built a recreation room in our basement
where he had at least one and sometimes two kegs of beer on tap.
That was just great. We'd hold parties and we held parties in college there.
And that all seemed perfectly normal.
(10:16):
The only time I realized that I was getting in trouble with alcohol is at a fraternity party.
A couple of us worked in the chemistry lab.
So we took some grain alcohol out of the chemistry lab and decided it would be a cheaper way to get drunk.
And we used it and I drank a beer glass full of grain alcohol and beer.
(10:39):
And all I know is I passed out. I mean, I was out under the table.
And that night I drove a group of the guys home.
I told you we were in Pennsylvania, so there are a lot of mountains around there
and lots of switchbacks on the mountains.
And I actually came out of a blackout on a switchback thinking,
(11:01):
holy moly, I could have killed all of us.
And I didn't have any idea what that was. I certainly didn't think I had a problem with alcohol.
I had just used the wrong substance, which is also true.
I mean, I'm not denying it. That was a pretty adolescent thing to do.
(11:22):
Went through college, had lots of fun, enjoyed the college parties, drank too much, but never thought it was a problem.
I met my wife in college. We loved to drink together.
And left college, went to medical school.
In medical school, got in the habit of drinking every day.
(11:43):
Just at the end of the day to kind of settle down, I would fix a gin or something.
When McKay and I got married, we had our martini. We were really sophisticated.
So we had a martini every day after school or work.
Grown up, you know, we were only 24, living the life.
I never thought anything about that at all.
(12:06):
Our best friends who lived in the same apartment with us, also in my class in medical school, we tied it on all the time.
I mean, we didn't care whether it was the middle of the week or the weekend. The weekends were most of the time.
Never thought there was a problem.
Came back to this town where we live now and met my wife's family.
(12:30):
We got to know each other really, really very well.
And I loved them. They loved me.
And her father had a problem, a very serious problem.
And when we moved back to this town after medical school,
it became pretty clear that her father was dying of alcoholic cirrhosis.
(12:52):
And that's when I first began to be aware that this was not just a social thing that symbolizes growing up and living the good life.
This is a very serious problem.
And she and I talked about it some, but we, you know, we never dove into it at all.
And we continued our social, grown-up, living the life kind of drinking pattern.
(13:17):
And definitely associated with people who did the same.
In the 70s and 80s, something bizarre was going on.
It was the noontime drink.
And here I was in the medical field, and I was starting to have drinks with lunch, a beer or maybe or a cocktail.
(13:38):
And didn't think anything of it. Just didn't think anything of all of this.
We keep moving the story along, and I got into my mid-career in my 40s.
And at that point I began to actually realize that substance abuse and alcohol was a problem for a lot of people.
(13:59):
And I should know something about this.
And I worked with young doctors in training, and I began to, I went to a conference where I heard a physician
talk about how when she was in medical school and in residency, she was one of the best students in the class.
(14:22):
Best student in the residency.
During residency, she had several episodes I'll tell her about.
She began to tell the story that she lived a double life.
That she was a heroin addict and a high-performing medical doctor.
She had had three episodes of overdose in the hospital while on duty, and admitted to the intensive care unit,
(14:53):
intubated, and nobody could figure out what the problem was.
Nobody knew what she had. No one ever asked anything about her life.
And she was saying, here she was in the day as a medical doctor, and at night she was even prostituting to get the money to keep her heroin habit going.
(15:17):
She has since become a wonderful member of the recovery community and has done a lot of good in the world.
That scared the hell out of me.
Again, not that I have a problem because those weren't any of the things that I was involved in.
But I began looking around at the people I had a responsibility for in their education, and sure enough, it turned up.
(15:41):
Two or three people. One, we had a suicide, which was horrible.
Didn't understand that.
And then we had a couple of people who had to be fired for drinking.
And then I thought, I need to know about this, and that's when I went to that conference where I met this lady.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that about 10 percent of the folks I was dealing with were in serious trouble with alcohol.
(16:06):
And we began to learn about doing an intervention and getting people into treatment, learned about treatment programs, and so on.
I didn't think I had any problem whatsoever, although I began to realize about that time that I was becoming aware of things, my liver enzymes were elevated on an examination.
(16:28):
Why would my liver enzymes be elevated?
Second thing I realized is I was at times drinking when I was on call and couldn't respond appropriately.
Well, that was—why was I doing that?
Why would I—what do I drink?
I was beginning to become embarrassed that we were putting two bottles of wine out after every dinner rather than just one.
(16:52):
And that seemed like that was a lot.
And I began thinking that I needed to hide those so the neighbors wouldn't think we're drinking.
I didn't think much of that, you know, until I got into AA and began to realize, oh, that's what we do.
At this point, our son was in his teenage years, and I began to realize, what are we doing?
(17:16):
I don't know what he's doing.
And he got into some trouble with weed, and we couldn't imagine that happened.
And then I began to look in the mirror and said, holy cow, I'm not even around to know what's going on.
So one morning, I—K and I decided we were going to stop drinking.
She was very worried because of her history.
(17:37):
Her father did die of alcoholism right after we moved here.
And she was worried for herself.
And we had a friend who said, you know, your wife is drinking too much.
You need to do something about it.
No one ever said anything to me about me.
So we stopped.
(17:58):
And that was the eye-opener.
That was the hardest thing I had ever done except stopping smoking.
Smoking was much more difficult.
But I thought about drinking and what am I going to do instead?
What's going to happen here?
And it was hard.
It was really hard.
But I stayed stopped.
(18:19):
We both stayed stopped from about January 1st to April 15th.
And I was at a party and thought, well, I've been sober.
I haven't had a drink.
I can certainly have a glass of champagne.
And I did.
And I had no problem with it.
But within a week, I was drinking like I had never drunk before.
(18:40):
I was actually drinking vodka out of the freezer in eight-ounce glasses.
I didn't have any ounces.
I'd only have six.
But it was—it shocked me.
And I did that until about November.
What happened in November, we were at a dinner party, wonderful time.
I didn't think anything of the fact that our host had gone to put a child to bed
(19:04):
and didn't come back because he had fallen asleep in the bed
for maybe a little more wine and vodka than he should have had.
I drove home that night and didn't think anything of it.
The next morning, however, I woke up and was paralyzed on my right side.
My right arm was completely paralyzed.
And I thought, oh, my God, this is getting the best of me.
(19:27):
I've had a stroke.
Well, I did an exam on myself and realized I hadn't quite had a stroke.
What I had was Saturday night palsy.
And Saturday night palsy is described when alcoholics fall asleep on a park bench
and put the arm over the park bench and put pressure on the nerves
(19:49):
that come out of the arm, and the arm becomes paralyzed.
Usually, I become back to life in an hour, couple hours or so.
Well, mine didn't. It just kept flailing.
But that's what it's got to be.
So later that day, it began to come back, and I got used to my hand.
(20:10):
And then it hit me. It really hit me.
It said, if drunks get this thing you have, and you have it, you are a drunk.
I love these Aristotelian syllogisms. And it worked in that case.
So I thought, yeah, I have a problem.
And I have got to stop drinking.
(20:31):
And Kay was so supportive.
She basically thought that I stopped drinking for her.
Up until she died, she told people that I did not have any drinking problem.
I didn't have alcoholism.
She did, but I was the one that did AA for her.
We had a very good relationship.
(20:52):
So that's when I decided I had to stop.
Then the hell started.
Because at that point, I was really screwed up.
I had been to therapy a couple of times for several issues,
and it seemed that it was kind of like treating a cold.
But at that point, I became a dry drunk.
(21:13):
And I now know what a dry drunk is.
And I like to tell my story because I want to relate with other dry drunks
who have experienced the idea of getting sober, not drinking,
but not getting in recovery.
And that's the message here.
And I was not in recovery. I was dry, worrying about, thinking about alcohol all the time,
(21:36):
hating to go anywhere because I couldn't drink, just suffering.
Temperament became so bad.
I became irascible.
I was angry, resentful, hateful, just hateful.
When I think back at how I behaved, I just can't believe that was me.
It was awful. I was hell to work with.
(21:59):
In fact, one of the things that confirms that for me,
I left this town where I got sober and was gone for about 10 years and came back.
And I came back to work with some of the women who had known me before I left.
And I overheard two of them saying,
Do we really have to work with him?
I've heard his reputation is awful.
(22:23):
And the other one said, We'll make it through anything.
And I almost cried at that point, realizing that's what a dry drunk is,
running through like a tornado in other people's lives
because they have no peace, no serenity at all.
I told you that I worked with medical residents.
(22:45):
And about three years after I was in this dry drunk phase,
we got one of the residents in, two of the residents in recovery.
And one did very well, and the other one actually ended up overdosing on fentanyl.
But the first one told me that she needed support
(23:06):
and that the program she was in was not supportive.
Nobody knew about substance abuse.
And she needed, and she was very deliberate.
She came into my office and said, And you need to know about it.
And I'm going to tell you what I know.
And I thought, Woo, got to see, but I was interested.
And so she did begin showing me the big book and working through the steps
(23:29):
and talking about the steps, which I was interested in
because my subspecialty is behavioral change.
What helps people change?
What gets people to stop smoking or stop drinking?
And here was a program that appeared on the surface
to really help people stop drinking and stop using drugs.
(23:50):
Well, one day I was in one of my meltdown positions,
and she happened to walk in, and she said, I don't know what's wrong with you.
And I said, Well, it sure as hell isn't drinking,
because I haven't had a drink for three years.
And she said, Okay, so it may not be drinking,
but I do think you would particularly benefit
(24:11):
by going to AA meetings and working the steps.
And I said, Well, I'm very interested in looking at it,
because I'm curious. I'm an academic. I'm a researcher.
And so I'll certainly go and look at it,
and I've enjoyed reading the books,
but I don't see where it's going to help me.
(24:32):
So we made arrangements to meet, went to the meeting.
She wasn't there. There were a lot of people milling around.
I really felt very uncomfortable. I did not belong there.
After all, I had stopped drinking on my own.
My liver enzymes were back to normal.
Everything was hunky dory.
But I went into the meeting anyway,
(24:54):
and I walked in the meeting and saw ten people that I knew.
And I thought, So much for anonymity.
This is not anonymous at all. Whoever gave that idea?
And one of the guys came up to me and said,
Dan, I'm so glad you're here.
I wondered how long it would take you to get here.
(25:15):
So much for people not knowing there was anything wrong.
And that was the wonderful point,
because although I was very uncomfortable that evening
and tried to justify in my own mind
that I was only there as an anthropologist
studying in a unique tribe of people
that I identified more than I wanted to.
(25:36):
And after coming back three or four weeks
or maybe three or four months,
I realized I looked forward to going back only once a week.
I looked forward to meeting them.
Then something remarkable happened.
One of the guys who came in about the same time I did
was really screwed up.
I mean, he was somebody that I,
whose inventory I could take every time I saw him.
(25:59):
And he was really, really a dose.
And after about four months, his life was different.
He changed. He was a different person.
He wasn't always complaining and angry and drunkologging.
He was really interested in other people.
Talked about how things in his life had changed.
(26:20):
So I became really curious to him.
And after the meeting, went up to him and asked him,
I said, what happened? You're different.
And he said, I just finished my fourth and fifth step.
That blew me away,
because they were talking about these things,
and I had tried to intellectually understand it.
(26:43):
But I saw a phenomenon that was a miraculous conversion
in another human being.
And it seemed in his mind to be the direct result
of doing something that the program recommended.
At that point, I really began with earnestness,
working the steps.
(27:04):
And this young woman,
and I don't do anything normally in this program,
this young woman became my sponsor
and began showing me what she had learned.
It was really good for her,
because she was really getting it.
And it was very good for me.
It made a big difference.
And we decided, as we were getting deeper into the steps,
(27:27):
that that wasn't a good idea, that we needed to...
And she was leaving, going our separate ways.
From then on, I worked the steps.
I moved to another city.
I went to meetings very frequently.
When I moved to Philadelphia,
getting into the Salerno Group was the name of the group.
Salerno Beachhead was its name.
(27:49):
And I was really desperate for some connection and some...
I didn't really even know that it was a fellowship
or the spiritual.
I wasn't that far along.
But I found it in the book
and started to go to that meeting at noon,
and it was extraordinary.
It was all of the people at that meeting were academic people
(28:12):
at a major university.
And it was a really remarkable group,
incredible spirituality.
And so I worked with several people there
who sponsored me on and off.
There's a lot of moving coming and going,
and people would go to one meeting for a while,
(28:34):
and then they'd go to another meeting.
This is a very big city.
And then I moved from that location to another location
and began going to another meeting, again,
a new meeting every day in a church,
and met some of the most extraordinary people,
a spectacular sponsor, and I worked the steps.
And as I worked them, I got better and better and better.
(29:00):
As I began to get better,
I began to realize how bad I was.
I think that's the most amazing thing.
I can't tell a story of drunkologues
and arrests and jail time and so on.
I can only tell a story of when the conversion occurs.
We can look back, and what seemed minor, ordinary,
(29:22):
and normal behavior turned out to be absolutely awful,
unkind, uncharitable,
filled with gossip and backbiting
and lying for no reason at all.
I mean, just all of those little character defects.
And I must have spent years working steps four, five, six, and seven
(29:47):
because it kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper.
The one step six activity I realized is one day I realized
I had blown up at my wife for having thrown out something
I was saving in the refrigerator later.
And I really was mean and nasty to her.
(30:08):
And that's when I realized, oh, my gosh, what's wrong with you?
That is so totally unimportant on the big scheme of things.
And you love this woman dearly.
Why would you treat anybody,
let alone somebody you really care about, like that?
And that made me realize, oh, there's more to this
(30:31):
in character defects than alcohol,
and that the program, the spiritual program,
is what I've been attracted to and what has changed my life.
To this day, I go to a meeting every day.
I sponsor a lot of people.
If you don't give it away, you can't keep it.
I learn from everybody.
(30:53):
Everybody I sponsor is another teacher.
I belong to a recovery-related book club,
and everybody in that book club is a sponsor.
I mean, we have no problem finding each other
to talk about anything we need to talk about.
(31:14):
The most important thing is the daily, daily conscious contact
with God through prayer and meditation in the morning,
in the evening, throughout the day.
That spot inventory and that third-step prayer
and the serenity prayer, you know,
I think that probably is the most mental activity.
(31:35):
If there's one thing I do with my mental activity, it's that.
Over the past several years, I've been involved in helping
some young men who have fallen into the criminal justice system
and are headed to a life imprisonment, generally related to alcohol
and substance abuse, and again, I've learned more and more.
(31:56):
So pretty much that's my story.
It isn't very glamorous, but it is good.
I realized that when I stopped using alcohol as my crutch
to cover up my anger and so on,
I learned another thing and then I became,
(32:18):
I've always had been a workaholic,
but now I became one in spades,
and I've realized how that is an addiction as well.
Food is an addiction.
Anything that will take me away from looking at the ugliness
that I can be if I'm not in conscious contact with God
is what I'll turn to.
(32:42):
Thanks for listening.
This has been a production of ChildrenOfChaos.net,
and we invite you to share your thoughts with us via email
to comments at ChildrenOfChaos.net.
Children of Chaos is a forum to discuss topics related to
and in concert with addiction and recovery in America.
(33:04):
It's not affiliated with, endorsed, or financed by any recovery
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Any views, thoughts, or opinions expressed by an individual
in this venue are solely that of the individual
and do not reflect the views, policies, or position
of any specific recovery-based entity or organization.
Thanks for joining us today. I'm Tim. I'm an alcoholic.
(00:04):
Hi, and I'm Rusty and I'm an alcoholic and this is Children of Chaos.
Morning Rusty.
Morning.
Today I've asked our friend Dan to join us and Dan has shared several episodes with us through this podcast journey,
including the effects of addiction on the brain, levels of addiction, and the joy of sponsoring.
(00:29):
I would like to share more about our cast of characters, if you will, with our audience so that they become more relative in the discussion.
And so I am asking Dan today to share his story so that you have a little bit of background on Dan.
Thank you very much, Tim and Rusty. It's good to be here with you today.
(00:54):
You know, it's pretty amazing. Usually we tell our story in front of a group.
At least that's been the habit that I've had here in our AA community.
So sitting here around a table on a podcast is a little bit awkward, just a little bit awkward, but I'll do my best.
(01:18):
So I am Dan and I am an alcoholic and have been in recovery 31 years and have been sober 34 years.
And that's an important part of my story that I think I learned a lot about, both recovery and sobriety.
(01:39):
So I'll begin in the usual way. What was it like before?
I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a large family. I was the oldest of seven.
Mother and dad were really hardworking people. They were very good parents.
My dad drank more than he should and at times that caused some problems, particularly when I was younger.
(02:04):
But I didn't think anything of it. That was pretty normal. All the men in our family drank.
I was from a mixed marriage. That means in the ancient days when I grew up that my mother was German and my father was Irish.
And they were both Catholic, so that's what we called a mixed marriage.
(02:27):
And it was around the war, World War II, and that probably had some impact on that actually.
So I remember an uncle who always drank at the Bunt Society and I had no idea what the Bunt Club was
until I later realized that was a German-American club that was frowned upon during World War II.
(02:48):
So you can tell I'm avoiding getting to the story since I'm diverting with these side stories.
Anyway, I grew up in what externally is going to look like a perfectly normal family.
There were a couple of things that happened in my childhood that I think had a lot to do with my story.
Just one little thing is I remember when I was pretty young, probably about four, not any older than that.
(03:14):
And my mother was in the kitchen cooking and she dropped a knife and actually sliced the calf of her leg.
And blood was all over the place. And I remember feeling really very scared.
And she was cool about it and said, you've got to run over to your uncle's house,
tell him that I cut myself and we need to go to the doctor's to get it sewed up.
(03:38):
And my uncle's house was maybe 100 yards away, if that, maybe 50 yards.
But it was dark and it was snowing and heavily.
And I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to be in a blizzard.
I didn't think it for, but this is the story I'm telling when I look back.
But what I remember about that is being terribly scared, doing it, coming back and feeling incredibly brave.
(04:06):
Incredibly brave.
I probably had the biggest jolt of dopamine I've had in my life when I had that because I was a hero.
And that has a lot to do with my story.
I was a hero. I could save people or things or legs or whatever it is.
So that was one piece of the story.
(04:28):
The second piece of the story, however, was that same uncle that was a hero turned out to be a terror.
And we had an episode where we were playing again.
This could have been probably a year or two later.
And my younger brother, we were all playing in the hose, not hose, it was actually a pump.
(04:50):
And we were pumping water and throwing it on each other.
It was in the middle of the summer.
As I tell the story and look back on it, it looks perfectly idyllic.
It looks like a Norman Rockwell painting of five little kids running through the pump.
But what happened is my aunt got really pretty agitated about it.
And she hollered and screamed.
(05:12):
It seemed like there was a ruckus.
And she told me and my brother to go home.
And her three sons, who were our cousins, were taken in the house.
I went back and got cleaned up, got changed and so on.
And in about what may have been ten minutes, but it could have been an hour, I don't know,
(05:33):
my mother asked where my younger brother was.
And I said, well, I don't know. I don't know. Isn't he here?
And she said no.
And so that started a frantic hunt for where did he go.
Now you've got to remember we lived in this little town, a thousand people.
Half the people were related to each other and the other half all knew each other.
There wasn't anything going on except for the story of the bad men who lived in the holler
(06:02):
down below the hill we lived on, like to steal little kids away.
And so I grew up with that story, whether it was true or not, I don't know.
In any event, mother and her sister were both a little bit hysterical
and they were panicked that we couldn't find my brother.
And we hunted. And I began to feel, and I remember feeling very guilty about this,
(06:27):
that I had a responsibility now to care for my younger brother.
When somebody said, I think it was my aunt said,
you're going to pay for this when your father or your mother comes home.
And that was a pretty normal wrong action that was very always done in the 40s.
(06:48):
And we found my brother and he was hiding in the coal bin.
This tells you how old I am. We used coal for heating and had to get coal delivered.
And there was a big room in the basement that kids never went into
because it was really scary and dirty and anybody would bet they would know you were in there
because you'd be covered with coal dust when you came out.
(07:10):
There was my brother who was a pretty scared little kid hiding in the coal bin.
Well, we got him out and got him cleaned up.
When my uncle came home, who was a coal miner by trade,
and therefore was always very scary when he came home because he was covered in black soot,
he decided he was going to teach my brother a lesson.
(07:32):
And he picked my brother up by an arm and a leg and he said,
don't you ever scare your mother like that again. If you do, and I have to give you the setting,
we lived on a hilltop that was on the edge of a quarry.
And the quarry had not been used in years, so it had grown over with a lot of trees.
(07:53):
But it was a very steep hill going down, you know, a hundred feet or so.
And my uncle took my brother, one arm and one leg, and swung him over the quarry
and said, if you ever do that again, I'm going to throw you away in here.
Now, as little kids, we were a little bit intimidated by the quarry, but that was horrendous.
(08:15):
And I remember feeling that I couldn't breathe. I was sick in my stomach.
That was just awful. And my brother was terrified.
My mother was terrified and she was angry. My dad was angry.
And we soon moved out of that area to another place because he felt my dad was quite protective
(08:36):
and said we couldn't live there.
I never thought much about that, except it came back in dreams periodically.
And when I was 50 years old, my brother called me one day and said he had been in psychotherapy
and was undergoing hypnosis and asked me if I knew anything about his being thrown over a cliff.
(09:01):
And I said I know exactly every detail and told him.
And he said I had never remembered that. I knew nothing about it.
But it looks like this may be a real deep root of problems that he's struggled with over his life.
So I go into that trauma history a bit just to say I had a perfectly normal childhood.
(09:26):
And as by all intents and purposes, even that level of discipline wasn't unusual,
although it was definitely disruptive to neurodevelopment of little kids.
I went along with grade school just great, just fine, high school just fine.
Started to drink probably in 16 or 17, just drank with friends.
(09:51):
Drinking was never an issue. We had it in our house all the time.
By the time I got to college, my dad had built a recreation room in our basement
where he had at least one and sometimes two kegs of beer on tap.
That was just great. We'd hold parties and we held parties in college there.
And that all seemed perfectly normal.
(10:16):
The only time I realized that I was getting in trouble with alcohol is at a fraternity party.
A couple of us worked in the chemistry lab.
So we took some grain alcohol out of the chemistry lab and decided it would be a cheaper way to get drunk.
And we used it and I drank a beer glass full of grain alcohol and beer.
(10:39):
And all I know is I passed out. I mean, I was out under the table.
And that night I drove a group of the guys home.
I told you we were in Pennsylvania, so there are a lot of mountains around there
and lots of switchbacks on the mountains.
And I actually came out of a blackout on a switchback thinking,
(11:01):
holy moly, I could have killed all of us.
And I didn't have any idea what that was. I certainly didn't think I had a problem with alcohol.
I had just used the wrong substance, which is also true.
I mean, I'm not denying it. That was a pretty adolescent thing to do.
(11:22):
Went through college, had lots of fun, enjoyed the college parties, drank too much, but never thought it was a problem.
I met my wife in college. We loved to drink together.
And left college, went to medical school.
In medical school, got in the habit of drinking every day.
(11:43):
Just at the end of the day to kind of settle down, I would fix a gin or something.
When McKay and I got married, we had our martini. We were really sophisticated.
So we had a martini every day after school or work.
Grown up, you know, we were only 24, living the life.
I never thought anything about that at all.
(12:06):
Our best friends who lived in the same apartment with us, also in my class in medical school, we tied it on all the time.
I mean, we didn't care whether it was the middle of the week or the weekend. The weekends were most of the time.
Never thought there was a problem.
Came back to this town where we live now and met my wife's family.
(12:30):
We got to know each other really, really very well.
And I loved them. They loved me.
And her father had a problem, a very serious problem.
And when we moved back to this town after medical school,
it became pretty clear that her father was dying of alcoholic cirrhosis.
(12:52):
And that's when I first began to be aware that this was not just a social thing that symbolizes growing up and living the good life.
This is a very serious problem.
And she and I talked about it some, but we, you know, we never dove into it at all.
And we continued our social, grown-up, living the life kind of drinking pattern.
(13:17):
And definitely associated with people who did the same.
In the 70s and 80s, something bizarre was going on.
It was the noontime drink.
And here I was in the medical field, and I was starting to have drinks with lunch, a beer or maybe or a cocktail.
(13:38):
And didn't think anything of it. Just didn't think anything of all of this.
We keep moving the story along, and I got into my mid-career in my 40s.
And at that point I began to actually realize that substance abuse and alcohol was a problem for a lot of people.
(13:59):
And I should know something about this.
And I worked with young doctors in training, and I began to, I went to a conference where I heard a physician
talk about how when she was in medical school and in residency, she was one of the best students in the class.
(14:22):
Best student in the residency.
During residency, she had several episodes I'll tell her about.
She began to tell the story that she lived a double life.
That she was a heroin addict and a high-performing medical doctor.
She had had three episodes of overdose in the hospital while on duty, and admitted to the intensive care unit,
(14:53):
intubated, and nobody could figure out what the problem was.
Nobody knew what she had. No one ever asked anything about her life.
And she was saying, here she was in the day as a medical doctor, and at night she was even prostituting to get the money to keep her heroin habit going.
(15:17):
She has since become a wonderful member of the recovery community and has done a lot of good in the world.
That scared the hell out of me.
Again, not that I have a problem because those weren't any of the things that I was involved in.
But I began looking around at the people I had a responsibility for in their education, and sure enough, it turned up.
(15:41):
Two or three people. One, we had a suicide, which was horrible.
Didn't understand that.
And then we had a couple of people who had to be fired for drinking.
And then I thought, I need to know about this, and that's when I went to that conference where I met this lady.
The more I looked into it, the more I realized that about 10 percent of the folks I was dealing with were in serious trouble with alcohol.
(16:06):
And we began to learn about doing an intervention and getting people into treatment, learned about treatment programs, and so on.
I didn't think I had any problem whatsoever, although I began to realize about that time that I was becoming aware of things, my liver enzymes were elevated on an examination.
(16:28):
Why would my liver enzymes be elevated?
Second thing I realized is I was at times drinking when I was on call and couldn't respond appropriately.
Well, that was—why was I doing that?
Why would I—what do I drink?
I was beginning to become embarrassed that we were putting two bottles of wine out after every dinner rather than just one.
(16:52):
And that seemed like that was a lot.
And I began thinking that I needed to hide those so the neighbors wouldn't think we're drinking.
I didn't think much of that, you know, until I got into AA and began to realize, oh, that's what we do.
At this point, our son was in his teenage years, and I began to realize, what are we doing?
(17:16):
I don't know what he's doing.
And he got into some trouble with weed, and we couldn't imagine that happened.
And then I began to look in the mirror and said, holy cow, I'm not even around to know what's going on.
So one morning, I—K and I decided we were going to stop drinking.
She was very worried because of her history.
(17:37):
Her father did die of alcoholism right after we moved here.
And she was worried for herself.
And we had a friend who said, you know, your wife is drinking too much.
You need to do something about it.
No one ever said anything to me about me.
So we stopped.
(17:58):
And that was the eye-opener.
That was the hardest thing I had ever done except stopping smoking.
Smoking was much more difficult.
But I thought about drinking and what am I going to do instead?
What's going to happen here?
And it was hard.
It was really hard.
But I stayed stopped.
(18:19):
We both stayed stopped from about January 1st to April 15th.
And I was at a party and thought, well, I've been sober.
I haven't had a drink.
I can certainly have a glass of champagne.
And I did.
And I had no problem with it.
But within a week, I was drinking like I had never drunk before.
(18:40):
I was actually drinking vodka out of the freezer in eight-ounce glasses.
I didn't have any ounces.
I'd only have six.
But it was—it shocked me.
And I did that until about November.
What happened in November, we were at a dinner party, wonderful time.
I didn't think anything of the fact that our host had gone to put a child to bed
(19:04):
and didn't come back because he had fallen asleep in the bed
for maybe a little more wine and vodka than he should have had.
I drove home that night and didn't think anything of it.
The next morning, however, I woke up and was paralyzed on my right side.
My right arm was completely paralyzed.
And I thought, oh, my God, this is getting the best of me.
(19:27):
I've had a stroke.
Well, I did an exam on myself and realized I hadn't quite had a stroke.
What I had was Saturday night palsy.
And Saturday night palsy is described when alcoholics fall asleep on a park bench
and put the arm over the park bench and put pressure on the nerves
(19:49):
that come out of the arm, and the arm becomes paralyzed.
Usually, I become back to life in an hour, couple hours or so.
Well, mine didn't. It just kept flailing.
But that's what it's got to be.
So later that day, it began to come back, and I got used to my hand.
(20:10):
And then it hit me. It really hit me.
It said, if drunks get this thing you have, and you have it, you are a drunk.
I love these Aristotelian syllogisms. And it worked in that case.
So I thought, yeah, I have a problem.
And I have got to stop drinking.
(20:31):
And Kay was so supportive.
She basically thought that I stopped drinking for her.
Up until she died, she told people that I did not have any drinking problem.
I didn't have alcoholism.
She did, but I was the one that did AA for her.
We had a very good relationship.
(20:52):
So that's when I decided I had to stop.
Then the hell started.
Because at that point, I was really screwed up.
I had been to therapy a couple of times for several issues,
and it seemed that it was kind of like treating a cold.
But at that point, I became a dry drunk.
(21:13):
And I now know what a dry drunk is.
And I like to tell my story because I want to relate with other dry drunks
who have experienced the idea of getting sober, not drinking,
but not getting in recovery.
And that's the message here.
And I was not in recovery. I was dry, worrying about, thinking about alcohol all the time,
(21:36):
hating to go anywhere because I couldn't drink, just suffering.
Temperament became so bad.
I became irascible.
I was angry, resentful, hateful, just hateful.
When I think back at how I behaved, I just can't believe that was me.
It was awful. I was hell to work with.
(21:59):
In fact, one of the things that confirms that for me,
I left this town where I got sober and was gone for about 10 years and came back.
And I came back to work with some of the women who had known me before I left.
And I overheard two of them saying,
Do we really have to work with him?
I've heard his reputation is awful.
(22:23):
And the other one said, We'll make it through anything.
And I almost cried at that point, realizing that's what a dry drunk is,
running through like a tornado in other people's lives
because they have no peace, no serenity at all.
I told you that I worked with medical residents.
(22:45):
And about three years after I was in this dry drunk phase,
we got one of the residents in, two of the residents in recovery.
And one did very well, and the other one actually ended up overdosing on fentanyl.
But the first one told me that she needed support
(23:06):
and that the program she was in was not supportive.
Nobody knew about substance abuse.
And she needed, and she was very deliberate.
She came into my office and said, And you need to know about it.
And I'm going to tell you what I know.
And I thought, Woo, got to see, but I was interested.
And so she did begin showing me the big book and working through the steps
(23:29):
and talking about the steps, which I was interested in
because my subspecialty is behavioral change.
What helps people change?
What gets people to stop smoking or stop drinking?
And here was a program that appeared on the surface
to really help people stop drinking and stop using drugs.
(23:50):
Well, one day I was in one of my meltdown positions,
and she happened to walk in, and she said, I don't know what's wrong with you.
And I said, Well, it sure as hell isn't drinking,
because I haven't had a drink for three years.
And she said, Okay, so it may not be drinking,
but I do think you would particularly benefit
(24:11):
by going to AA meetings and working the steps.
And I said, Well, I'm very interested in looking at it,
because I'm curious. I'm an academic. I'm a researcher.
And so I'll certainly go and look at it,
and I've enjoyed reading the books,
but I don't see where it's going to help me.
(24:32):
So we made arrangements to meet, went to the meeting.
She wasn't there. There were a lot of people milling around.
I really felt very uncomfortable. I did not belong there.
After all, I had stopped drinking on my own.
My liver enzymes were back to normal.
Everything was hunky dory.
But I went into the meeting anyway,
(24:54):
and I walked in the meeting and saw ten people that I knew.
And I thought, So much for anonymity.
This is not anonymous at all. Whoever gave that idea?
And one of the guys came up to me and said,
Dan, I'm so glad you're here.
I wondered how long it would take you to get here.
(25:15):
So much for people not knowing there was anything wrong.
And that was the wonderful point,
because although I was very uncomfortable that evening
and tried to justify in my own mind
that I was only there as an anthropologist
studying in a unique tribe of people
that I identified more than I wanted to.
(25:36):
And after coming back three or four weeks
or maybe three or four months,
I realized I looked forward to going back only once a week.
I looked forward to meeting them.
Then something remarkable happened.
One of the guys who came in about the same time I did
was really screwed up.
I mean, he was somebody that I,
whose inventory I could take every time I saw him.
(25:59):
And he was really, really a dose.
And after about four months, his life was different.
He changed. He was a different person.
He wasn't always complaining and angry and drunkologging.
He was really interested in other people.
Talked about how things in his life had changed.
(26:20):
So I became really curious to him.
And after the meeting, went up to him and asked him,
I said, what happened? You're different.
And he said, I just finished my fourth and fifth step.
That blew me away,
because they were talking about these things,
and I had tried to intellectually understand it.
(26:43):
But I saw a phenomenon that was a miraculous conversion
in another human being.
And it seemed in his mind to be the direct result
of doing something that the program recommended.
At that point, I really began with earnestness,
working the steps.
(27:04):
And this young woman,
and I don't do anything normally in this program,
this young woman became my sponsor
and began showing me what she had learned.
It was really good for her,
because she was really getting it.
And it was very good for me.
It made a big difference.
And we decided, as we were getting deeper into the steps,
(27:27):
that that wasn't a good idea, that we needed to...
And she was leaving, going our separate ways.
From then on, I worked the steps.
I moved to another city.
I went to meetings very frequently.
When I moved to Philadelphia,
getting into the Salerno Group was the name of the group.
Salerno Beachhead was its name.
(27:49):
And I was really desperate for some connection and some...
I didn't really even know that it was a fellowship
or the spiritual.
I wasn't that far along.
But I found it in the book
and started to go to that meeting at noon,
and it was extraordinary.
It was all of the people at that meeting were academic people
(28:12):
at a major university.
And it was a really remarkable group,
incredible spirituality.
And so I worked with several people there
who sponsored me on and off.
There's a lot of moving coming and going,
and people would go to one meeting for a while,
(28:34):
and then they'd go to another meeting.
This is a very big city.
And then I moved from that location to another location
and began going to another meeting, again,
a new meeting every day in a church,
and met some of the most extraordinary people,
a spectacular sponsor, and I worked the steps.
And as I worked them, I got better and better and better.
(29:00):
As I began to get better,
I began to realize how bad I was.
I think that's the most amazing thing.
I can't tell a story of drunkologues
and arrests and jail time and so on.
I can only tell a story of when the conversion occurs.
We can look back, and what seemed minor, ordinary,
(29:22):
and normal behavior turned out to be absolutely awful,
unkind, uncharitable,
filled with gossip and backbiting
and lying for no reason at all.
I mean, just all of those little character defects.
And I must have spent years working steps four, five, six, and seven
(29:47):
because it kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper.
The one step six activity I realized is one day I realized
I had blown up at my wife for having thrown out something
I was saving in the refrigerator later.
And I really was mean and nasty to her.
(30:08):
And that's when I realized, oh, my gosh, what's wrong with you?
That is so totally unimportant on the big scheme of things.
And you love this woman dearly.
Why would you treat anybody,
let alone somebody you really care about, like that?
And that made me realize, oh, there's more to this
(30:31):
in character defects than alcohol,
and that the program, the spiritual program,
is what I've been attracted to and what has changed my life.
To this day, I go to a meeting every day.
I sponsor a lot of people.
If you don't give it away, you can't keep it.
I learn from everybody.
(30:53):
Everybody I sponsor is another teacher.
I belong to a recovery-related book club,
and everybody in that book club is a sponsor.
I mean, we have no problem finding each other
to talk about anything we need to talk about.
(31:14):
The most important thing is the daily, daily conscious contact
with God through prayer and meditation in the morning,
in the evening, throughout the day.
That spot inventory and that third-step prayer
and the serenity prayer, you know,
I think that probably is the most mental activity.
(31:35):
If there's one thing I do with my mental activity, it's that.
Over the past several years, I've been involved in helping
some young men who have fallen into the criminal justice system
and are headed to a life imprisonment, generally related to alcohol
and substance abuse, and again, I've learned more and more.
(31:56):
So pretty much that's my story.
It isn't very glamorous, but it is good.
I realized that when I stopped using alcohol as my crutch
to cover up my anger and so on,
I learned another thing and then I became,
(32:18):
I've always had been a workaholic,
but now I became one in spades,
and I've realized how that is an addiction as well.
Food is an addiction.
Anything that will take me away from looking at the ugliness
that I can be if I'm not in conscious contact with God
is what I'll turn to.
(32:42):
Thanks for listening.
This has been a production of ChildrenOfChaos.net,
and we invite you to share your thoughts with us via email
to comments at ChildrenOfChaos.net.
Children of Chaos is a forum to discuss topics related to
and in concert with addiction and recovery in America.
(33:04):
It's not affiliated with, endorsed, or financed by any recovery
or treatment program, organization, or institution.
Any views, thoughts, or opinions expressed by an individual
in this venue are solely that of the individual
and do not reflect the views, policies, or position
of any specific recovery-based entity or organization.
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