Keeping time

Time, we are told, is the fourth dimension.  It is also an important aspect of our efforts at moderation.

“One day at a time” is, as we all know, the mantra of recovery, and for good reason.  It breaks down what could be an impossibly formidable challenge into bite-sized chunks.  You don’t wake up every day confronting a lifetime of sobriety.  The  enormity of that could be enough to lead you back to drinking or using that very day.  Instead you have only the task of navigating the modest stretch of waking hours between now and bedtime.  Tomorrow is out there, but it doesn’t exist yet and so you don’t have to think about it.  You just concentrate on what is immediately at hand: today.

I have a personal theory that a good indicator of how stressful somebody’s life is the unit of time they are using to measure it.  As mentioned above, taking it a day at a time is the approach of somebody facing a challenge.  Living hour to hour is where you find, for example, somebody who has a loved one in the hospital.  And then you have how my wife described life when we, already the parents of one two-year boy, brought home our undiagnosed twin sons.  We were not prepared, psychologically or even logistically, to be the parents of three small children.  She remembers those first weeks as a minute to minute proposition.  A good minute was when nobody was crying and there were no diapers to change.

(I have to acknowledge that “taking it a day at a time” is the also watchword of the laid back and the chill.  But, as appropriate as that attitude may be for a vacation, it does imply that even thinking about the future is stressful at some level.  It hints at more than small degree of avoidance and also strikes me as a misguided attempt at denying that there are such things as consequences.)

But the ‘one day a time’ approach can also be a double-edged sword.  Yes, it makes the intimidating more manageable, but it also elevates the implication of each day.  One day of drinking, according to some programs, offsets and therefore obliterates months or even years of sobriety.  Have even one and you have to hit the reset button.  You’re back to zero.

Moderation, by dispensing with a standard of purity, strips each day of its power to send you back to the square marked ‘Start Over.’  One immoderate day does not mean that you are no longer a moderate drinker.  But a string of immoderate days is another matter.  And so measuring time when you’re a moderate drinker means using a dual approach.  What you do on any particular day still matters because after all each day is still the arena in which we make our choices.  But the impact of any given day, barring any particularly dire consequences, is how it contributes in a larger context.  Yes, you may have gone over your limit one day, but how did you do the next day or the day after that?  You shape your identity as a drinker through separate decisions that accumulate over time.

This is why we talk about our weeks when we have our meetings.  That’s also why we have two guidelines and not one for monitoring our consumption: a per session number that is critical especially for those who binge, and a weekly number that provides important guidance to the habitual drinker.  Measuring things over a span of seven days allows you to smooth things out, as it were, and yet is a short enough period of time to keep you focused.  If you were measuring yourself over the course of a month you could conceivably convince yourself that you can let yourself go for a while because there’s plenty of time later on to make up for the excess.  I think we know how that would work out.

Measuring my drinking on a weekly basis is like running a seemingly endless number of laps.  Sure I may have had a good week but that week is now behind me, and I need to pay attention to the next set of days ahead of me.

The most dangerous time of the year

With Thanksgiving just over the horizon I thought it would be a good idea to discuss that celebration and the holidays in general.  It’s helpful for us to recognize that these next five to six weeks were meant to be a challenge to any and all restrictions we try to impose on our appetites.  In this country we have extended and then placed a blaring commercial overlay on to a religious observance that is really just a re-branding of the Roman Saturnalia, a year-end bacchanal during which restraint was cast aside.  If there is anything positive about this for those of us who struggle with our drinking, it is this: now, more than any other time of the year, is our chance to observe that we are not alone.  Now we can go to parties and see the people who can’t resist another cookie, and then another, or yet another piece of candy.  We can go to the malls and see people who can’t stop shopping.  This knowledge hardly absolves us of our responsibility to manage our drinking.  This is not supposed to be like that feeling many of us have had after going to an AA meeting when we say to ourselves, “Well, I’m certainly not as bad off as that guy!”  It’s only meant to erase that sense of shame that comes from feeling that you aren’t ‘normal’ about something.  Everybody is abnormal about something, and this is the time of year to put that on display. As John Lennon put it, “Everybody’s got something to hide, except for me and my monkey.”

So anyway, here are a couple observations and thoughts:

Pay attention to yourself: In our group meetings we talk about what we call ‘mindful drinking’.  This is the practice of paying attention not only to how the drink feels or tastes, but also to how you feel after the drink.  In other words, savor the drink you have rather than worrying about whether you’re going to let yourself have another one, and more importantly, keep track of how you’re behaving.  Take yourself off autopilot and check on how you’re doing.  Step back and observe yourself.  Are you starting to slur your speech? Are you getting a little too animated? Are you interrupting the people you’re talking with even more than you usually do? Are we using our inside voice?  Although counting is critical, a better guide in social situations can be to ask yourself beforehand how you want to act at that occasion and then use that as your guide.  You need to watch your interior thermostat and know when it’s time to slow down.

OR

Pay attention to others: Get over yourself.  So you’re not going to have five or more glasses of wine today.  You’re drinking aren’t you? Enjoy those drinks, and seriously, be thankful for them.  Rather than wallowing in whatever small measure of deprivation you’re feeling because you’ve decided to moderate your drinking, focus on the people you’re with for this celebration.  How are they doing? What’s going on in their lives? And if you’re with family, well then, just accept that…

Families are complicated things: Family settings can be triggers for drinking for both positive and negative reasons.  I drink when I’m around my family because raising a glass is how we celebrate being with each other.  I love my brother and sister and their families and drinking is part of the warmth that’s in the room when we’re together. That’s not to deny that I also observed and then adopted a habit of daily drinking in part from watching my father do the same. (I say ‘in part’ because I can’t blame my habitual drinking on my Dad.  Every day that I drank I was choosing to do so, even if I was unaware of that making that choice.)  As for those of you whose families are a source of serious pain or discomfort, I can’t presume to know what that is like.  It’s easy for me to say that drinking never solves those issues, or that by loosening inhibitions  it can lead to things being said or done that are not exactly festive.  Perhaps the best way to frame it is to recognize that for people trying to moderate their drinking, family gatherings can be as treacherous and toxic as a bar.  Both are settings that make you want to drink and then keep on drinking.  In these instances sometimes the best strategy is to minimize your exposure by limiting the time you’re there, if possible.  Arrive late, leave early.  Make the best of it and don’t make a mess of it.

Embrace your new ally, food: Food, and the abundance of it, can be your ally this day.  It’s there to absorb your drinks and to help your body metabolize that alcohol.  It can also be a timing mechanism for you: How many drinks will you have before the meal?  Or, you can decide that once the meal is done, your drinking is done as well.  You are going to pair food and drink not just for taste but for timing as well.  So if there’s wine in your glass or on the table, that doesn’t mean you have to finish it. And finally, if you feel like indulging yourself, you can’t possibly argue that the only option was another drink.  A lot of other days you could perhaps make that case, but not Thanksgiving.  Have another piece of pie.

Have a great holiday everybody.  And by the way, I will be giving thanks to Moderation Management.

Bet you can’t have just one

I did something interesting, and somewhat challenging, the other night.

I had one drink.  That’s it.

As an habitual drinker my challenge when I started participating in Moderation Management was skipping a day, or two or three.  I gave myself the gold star, the ‘attaboy’, when I put up a zero as my drinking tally for the day.  When I did drink, and by definition these would be social occasions,  I would usually stay within the guidelines but the number tended to be something greater than one.

Recently, I’ve been interested in the challenge of stopping after one.  And it is a challenge, a fact that both intrigues and irritates me.  After five plus years of successful moderation one would hope that the simple act of saying “Hey, that’s enough,” would be, well, just that simple.  But it’s not.

To a large extent moderation is a process of cutting the linkages we have established in our heads between drinking and a host of other activities and settings.  Our patterns of behavior, whether as habitual or binge drinkers, are really a network of associations we have built between alcohol and the rest of our lives.  We have decided along the way that drink is the perfect companion for certain foods (or perhaps any food for that matter), or the prerequisite for a ripping good time or a required ingredient for any social gathering, not matter how small or brief.  We can’t imagine coming home from work and not having it there waiting for us.  We can’t conceive of not having a glass while we watch a movie or a game, or prepare a meal.  The list goes on and on.

But perhaps the most significant link that we need to break is the one that exists between each drink.  When we say that we’re “going drinking” we engage in a bit of linguistic self-deception.  “Drinking” is not like other similar verb forms like “running” or “swimming.” In those other activities, unless you’re not really in shape, you start, you do it and then you stop.  It is a continuous state of activity.  But if we take a closer look at what is happening when we drink, if we put it under the microscope, we see that there is a gap between each drink.  There is a moment when you have to decide whether you have another or not.  Unfortunately a lot of us handled this decision by configuring our Drinking Settings by clicking on the tab that says “Have another.”  We put ourselves on autopilot and lost the sense that there is a choice being made.  Our task is go back and un-click that tab.

There is a school of thought that says that our problems with appetite control, whether it’s money, sex, food or drink, are a function of evolution.  We simply aren’t wired for a world of abundance, for a world in which food doesn’t disappear because the jackals came during the night and finished off the carcass.  That may well be the case.  But just because I’m descended from them doesn’t mean I have to act like a caveman.  I can stop at one because I know there’s plenty more waiting for me tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.  I have to manage abundance rather than anticipate scarcity.

It’s not all about being in the present

“Being in the present” has become one of the mantras of our time.  You often hear it  as an aspiration: “I want to be more present for my children” or “I need to stop worrying and just be more in the present”.  Certainly being less distracted and anxious are worthy goals, and as I’ll discuss in a later post, learning to reside in the present moment is part of a moderate life.

But changing your habitual drinking patterns requires that you step outside the present and realize that all your actions exist in the three different dimensions of time. They exist first as future possibilities, and therefore as something for which you can develop plans.  They then become the present and at each of those moments you can remember your intent and apply it right then and there.  And finally they become parts of the past, things that happened but whose ramifications can ripple out well into the future.

Alcohol advertising encourages you as drinker to live for the moment, but every drink has a future, present and past.  The half-life of alcohol is not merely a matter of B.A.C. but also of the multitude of other consequences, some of them pretty dire, that can follow in the wake of a night of drinking.  Thus, for example, a party for a moderate drinker is not just something that begins as they walk through the front door and ends when they leave.  There is planning involved (Did you eat something beforehand? Do you have a strategy for interspersing alcoholic drinks with something non-alcoholic? Do you have some way of recognizing that you’ve hit your limit?)  Then there is the party itself during which you have to be aware of how you’re doing.  And then there is getting home, and then the morning after.  Anything that happens after you’ve left is, in a real sense,  just as much part of the party, since they make up its aftermath and the goal of moderating is to make all parts of your drinking experience as non-problematic as possible.  One of the remarks we often hear from people who are just starting to moderate is that they find particular satisfaction about being able to wake up feeling good the next day after a party.  This sense of well-being is not just a matter of not being hungover, but also being able to remember the evening and feeling none of the anxious shame that arises when you wake and start asking yourself questions such as “Did I really say that?” or “What happened after 11:30?”

There is plenty of research that indicates that people with addiction issues are far more ‘present’ oriented than others.  It’s the attitude that says “give it to me now and I’ll worry about later when later arrives.”  Those of us who have issues with drinking have some of that in us.  But inclination is not the same thing as fate.  We don’t have to be that way.  We can learn to step back and look at our choices from different vantage points.  There was a woman who attended our meetings in S.F. who would ask herself the following set of questions: “What is going to make me feel better two hours from now?” “What is going to make me feel better at the end of the day?” “What is going to make me feel better tomorrow when I look back at today?” These are the questions that forced her to step outside the present moment, and that was undeniably a good thing.

Keeping your balance on the slippery slope

Moderation, whether we’re talking about drinking, or the more contentious political issues of our day, requires that we re-examine the concept of the slippery slope.  The idea that one thing inevitably leads to another and thence to a logical and unsatisfactory conclusion is the argument used to marshal support for all sorts of inflexible positions.  For example, if you limit access to assault rifles then inevitably people won’t be able to buy hunting rifles.  If you allow abortion under certain circumstances, you have then opened the door to unlimited access and promiscuous sexual anarchy.  And so it goes, on and on.

Similarly, the abstinence movement, most notably AA, maintains that a single drink can often be the first link in a long chain that will pull you back down to your former habits and patterns.  I am not denying that we can all slip back to our old ways.  But there is a great difference between acknowledging this as a risk and viewing it as an inevitability.  We all know how increased tolerance and appetite can pull us from one a night to two and then on to three and beyond.  But there are ways to break that slide.

One of the best is to have one or two non-negotiable rules that set boundaries on your drinking.  Mine is never to drink by myself.  (Just to be clear about this, I can drink if you’re not drinking, I just can’t drink if you’re not there.)  Another good example is never to drink two days in a row.

A non-negotiable rule has no loopholes, no exceptions; the fewer the words, the better.  Never two days in a row. Never alone. Never with Bill. Never on weeknights.  They could be tattoos, but not legal documents.  And you cannot start making exceptions to them since once you start that you’ve opened the door to subsequent revisions and exemptions, and over time you will have a ‘rule’ that looks more like the tax code and less like one of the Ten Commandments.

And so there is a bit of a paradox here.  You have to accept that the slippery slope exists, but in doing so develop rules for yourself that prevent it from determining where you wind up.  Yes, it’s there, but you don’t have to slide all the way down.

What do you tell yourself?

Moderation begins with waking up.  You’ve fallen into some habits and you’re no longer paying attention to what you’re doing.  So what is it you tell yourself about your drinking?  Stop and listen to what you’re saying.

Do you tell yourself that it’s an ethnic or family thing?  In other words is it a matter of fate?  I remember actually dressing this excuse up in quasi-academic garb and rationalizing my daily consumption as a legacy of ancestors who drank beer and wine as safe and nutritious alternatives to the drinking water of an earlier age.  Sometimes a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.

Do you tell yourself that it’s a reward? And if so,  is it a celebration or compensation?  It can’t be the former everyday or else it loses its meaning, and if it’s the latter then perhaps you should examine your life more closely, because this raises the interesting question as to why you think you need a reward on a daily basis.  And if you do need a reward, is your appreciation of what the world has to offer so narrow that the only thing you can think of is a drink?

Are you one of the people who says that they’re self-medicating?  This one always makes me uncomfortable.  I’m not a therapist but when somebody says this at our meetings I’m always wondering whether they’ve just picked up on a catch phrase of the day, or are they really medicating themselves, since that implies to me a persistent and nagging pain or discomfort that should be brought to the attention of a professional.

But above all the important thing is to tune in on what’s being said.  Because if the rationalization has started that’s your indication that part of you is at least acknowledging that there’s a problem.  Otherwise why would you be bothering to justify your drinking? And don’t expect successful restraint to silence the conversation.  Even after five years of moderating it can still feel like a chatroom opens up in my head when the topic of drinking comes up.  And interestingly enough it’s not the occasions when I’m not going to drink that stir up the debate, but instead the anticipation around an evening out that gets things going.  I can be walking down the street thinking ahead to a night when the ‘right’ number of drinks feels like it should be three and who logs on first but the whiny version of me who easily feels deprived.  That guy feels cheated because there’s a limit being imposed.  The rational Paul who knows that three is actually a pretty good number, and one that certainly allows for a good time, is always slower to chime in and the pragmatic Paul who knows that restraint in the present pays dividends in the immediate future is always MIA at first as well.  Fortunately for me the whiny Paul gets out voted, and two drinks tends to shut him up anyway.

So what does your inner conversation sound like?

Moderation Anonymous

There tends to be a bit of anti-A.A. talk at our meetings.  There are people who have been and didn’t care for it, and there are people who never went but just never liked what they’d heard about the program.  Others may have been in A.A. for a while but are now considering a return to drinking.  People say that they aren’t comfortable with the business about a higher power or the notion that you are powerless before alcohol.  Occasionally, and actually a little too infrequently, somebody will cop to another significant reason: in MM you get to drink, or at least admit that you do.

But if our attendees are, at best, ambivalent about the alcoholic part of A.A., we are much more enthusiastic about the second A: anonymous.  We use somewhat the same convention when we introduce ourselves; we don’t label ourselves as ‘alcoholics’ but it’s all on a first name basis.  We agree that what is said in the meetings stays in the meetings.  As any facilitator who has handled a distribution list will tell you, there is a great deal of sensitivity about email confidentiality.  All I can say is, thank God for the BCC tab on the distribution header.

One has to recognize that there is a certain amount of prudence to this caution.  Public disclosure that you are trying to moderate your drinking implies, at a minimum, some sort of issue, although the amount of drinking that constitutes one person’s threshold for being concerned may not even register with somebody else. Having people know this about you could jeopardize opportunities for employment, promotion or acceptance.

And yet, there is an important distinction between staying anonymous and keeping things a secret.  On the one hand, it makes sense to protect oneself against a world that can be unfairly judgmental.  But on the other, if you keep something on the down low only you know when you’ve slipped up.  There is a boatload of scientific evidence that shows that people do better on a program of self-regulation if they make themselves accountable to somebody else or to a group.  If you don’t have to face somebody else then evaluating your performance is just another round of interior negotiation, and we all know how well our ‘baser’ instincts can summon all sorts of wonderful rationalizations for our actions.

(Well, that’s it for now.  There is plenty more to say on this subject, but I’ll pick it up later.)

The Thirty: a word of warning

A reader has suggested that I post the following caution regarding The Thirty:

If you are drinking heavily,  stopping suddenly can pose some serious threats.  The withdrawal symptoms can be deadly.  If you are a heavy drinker and want to do something about your drinking, that’s great.  But talk to your doctor first.

Remember, the Thirty isn’t some mountain that you climb so that you can say afterwards that you did it. It’s a tool to help you learn how to control your drinking for the rest of your life.  So take the long view.  You can achieve the same reduction in your ‘numbers’ by tapering off, and for many heavy habitual drinkers that’s a far better approach.  Start shaving off the drinks.  Take it step by step.

This isn’t A.A. We aren’t into the epiphany, the fall-to-your-knees-and-receive-grace moment of redemption.  You don’t have to hit bottom.  You just have to start rolling your number of drinks downhill.

 

The Thirty

If you come to a Moderation Management meeting one of the terms you’ll hear is “The Thirty”.  This is a 30 day period of abstinence that is a key, but not mandatory, part of the program. The idea is straightforward.  There are clearly a lot of benefits from taking a break from drinking. First, and most obviously, if you have been drinking excessively this will be good for you physically.  Whether your drinking is a daily proposition or consists of episodes of over-consumption, it’s a lot of work for your body to break down all that alcohol.  It’s pretty great to wake up in the morning clear headed, and there’s all the more reason to do it if you can’t remember that feeling.

Second, a period of abstinence lowers your tolerance, so that if you do resume drinking it doesn’t take as much to get a buzz.  The Moderation Management consumption guidelines that may have seemed so restrictive before now seem pretty generous.  It can be particularly instructive to savor those first drinks and notice just what kind of dosage two or three drinks really represent.  Finally, a Thirty could teach you that sobriety ‘suits’ you.   You could decide that drinking just isn’t worth the hassle any longer and that the period of abstinence was actually far preferable to what you were experiencing before. That’s a wonderful outcome if that’s what you discover.

But the “Thirty” is not a magic bullet, and it is not an act of penance.  I frequently hear people at our meetings say that they are doing a Thirty after a particularly heavy bout of drinking, or after a weekend where there were ‘ramifications’.  I understand that the motivation to do something about one’s drinking often has to begin with some sort of crisis.  But just stopping for a while can turn out to be merely an interruption and not the start of a new relationship with alcohol.   In order to be effective the Thirty has to be an educational experience.  For an habitual drinker this is the chance to develop the coping mechanisms or tactics that will keep you from having that first drink on your ‘dry’ days when you do return to the world of drinking.  For a binge drinker there are two ways to approach a Thirty: the first is to keep your usual social schedule, but without the alcohol, and the second is to hibernate, after a fashion, thereby removing alcohol from your life by removing yourself from your social life.  It should be pretty obvious which one is more instructive.  But there is a more fundamental challenge for binge drinkers when it comes to a Thirty.  For an habitual drinker like myself the Thirty is a Big Deal.  You go from a life where going one day without a drink seems impossible to a whole month without a drop.  Quite simply you have to learn how to deal with those urges to drink that will arise during your daily life when you resume drinking.

For a binge drinker there isn’t that same direct immersion in mastering the skills you need as a moderate drinker.  In fact, by definition,  you NEVER  have to face your particular challenge which is to learning how to turn down the next drink because you never had the first.  If you’re one of the non-hibernators, the education you get is largely vicarious: you get a chance to see what your friends are like when they’re trashed, and hopefully that gives you an idea as to just how charming you are under the same circumstances.  You also realize that going to the bar or the party and staying ‘dry’ is not the prison sentence you imagined it might be.  It’s important to remember that we over-estimate how amusing we are when we’re drunk and under-estimate how interesting we can be when sober.  Finally, the Thirty can give a binge drinker a chance to scout the room, as it were, to find new role models.  Somewhere in the party or the bar is somebody who’s drinking and behaving responsibly.  Find them and use them as examples of how you want to behave when you do start drinking again.

Always there for you

We have a tendency when thinking about self-improvement to frame it as a battle between our better natures and our slovenly traits, a competition between our ‘good’ and ‘bad’ selves.  Yet it’s not that simple.  Many of the improvement campaigns that we applaud in ourselves, or admire in others, derive a lot of their energy from less than noble sentiments. Losing weight is, in a lot of cases, an obvious example.  Nobody does this to promote world peace.  Putting aside those who face serious health consequences, a lot of people diet simply because they want to look better.  The same goes for a lot of exercise regimens.  Your exertion and discipline produce this slimmer version of yourself, but the motivation for that effort began with vanity.

Now, unless you are really drinking a lot, a moderation plan is not going to get you the same public reinforcement as dieting and exercise.  People may say, “Oh you look great, have you lost weight?”  but very rarely will anybody exclaim, “Oh wow, you look great, are you drinking less?”  But that doesn’t mean that you can’t enlist some of your less admirable feelings in the cause.  After all, nobody looks their best after a night of heaving drinking.  Looking better is one of the side effects of feeling better.

Competitiveness is another trait that can provide support to your moderation plan.   For example, I have decided, on occasions when we are out with another couple and the husband is prone to indulging himself, that I am going to frame the evening as a secret competition in which I am comparing myself with him to see who can be more moderate. Of course he’s not aware of what I’m doing but hey, guess who wins and gets to feel better about himself every time I play this game?  It’s pretty immature, but the little man inside me still likes the victory, no matter how contrived.

Also, as an “out” moderate drinker I have to be aware of the disapproval I would get (and all behind my back, mind you) if I were to overdo it.  And so, in service of my moderation, I enlist that old adolescent fear about what other people think of me.  As a sentiment it’s no more admirable than it was when I was fifteen, but it works.  In fact it’s always worked.  So, what is it that has always worked for you?  Please don’t take offense, but I’m betting it’s not your humility and generosity.