A few years ago, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous for about six months. Although I was not an alcoholic, I had been picked up for drunk driving. It had taken three backup units to stop me as I raced down Anaheim Blvd. I had been at a gathering for the popular singles group, Parents Without Partners, and after a couple drinks of scotch and soda decided it was time to head for home. Immediately after that, I blacked out until the police caught up with me. I remembered nothing until a patrolman slammed me against a police car. I felt someone putting handcuffs on me and reading me my rights. Spending a night in jail after being strip-searched was one of the most agonizing and humiliating times in my life. Shame and confusion overwhelmed me. As I sat in the corner of the cell sobbing a girl young enough to be my daughter, lifted her head from a bunk she’d been sleeping on and barked at me to “stop being such a crybaby.” When I went to court, the judge dropped my charge to reckless driving with the agreement that I would do a year of community service and six months of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I found out from my pharmacist a few days later that Randy (another pharmacist) was going through a divorce and had failed to put a warning on a new anti-depressant my doctor had put me on to not drink while taking it. If I did, I would experience a blackout. He apologized saying he hoped it hadn’t caused a problem.
While gratified to find out that I wasn’t an alcoholic (albeit I was a confirmed party animal) I decided that I still needed to put my heart into the community services and time spent in AA. I learned a lot. I especially learned about a phrase I heard frequently, “hitting your bottom”. It literally meant the point at which the pain in your life from whatever you were addicted to became so severe that you had to change your life for the better or die. In my case, severely addicted to sex, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Since I knew now that I wasn’t an alcoholic (which remained the truth for the rest of my life; I rarely drink any alcohol simply because it doesn’t interest me) I was so gratified on that point that I didn’t realize that while in AA I lined up a long line of suitors/lovers. I needed a sponsor and collected several men who volunteered duty on that, a definite no-no. Alcoholics that I met at my meetings, while having reached their bottom and now didn’t drink, found that sleeping around wasn’t on their “don’t do list”. Me too as I began ticking them off by their astrology signs. Wherever I went I played what a friend of mine called, “Scarlett O’Hara at the barbeque”, a line from Gone With The Wind. Sexual interaction with men, whether it was flirting or actual sex, was the only thing that kept me from thinking about the horror of my teen years when my father initiated an incest relationship by raping me when I was 13 and asleep on the bottom bunk with a rosary under my pillow.
I look back on that period in my life with sadness. A friend of mine said, “Oh don’t worry about it. It was the 70s. Everyone was sleeping around.” It only brought more shame. “Sleeping around” was an ugly term. How could that have been me? I kept spiraling down towards my bottom thinking that my bottom, as with many addicts, was death.
How does one reach their bottom? What has to happen? Something profoundly traumatic is usually the only incentive. The father of my children, an alcoholic, reached his bottom at death. Even after five years in an alcoholic rehab center, he came out only to begin drinking again, saying the craving was even worse now, after five dry years. He died at the age of 47. His death affected me on a level so deep that I spent weeks sobbing, feeling that he was talking to me the entire time, staying with me every minute outside of work. I thought I would go mad as he followed me like a dark shadow that wouldn’t go away. One night I figured out what he was trying to tell me. I dug into my trunk and found our wedding picture. I put it on the dresser. There! Is that what you want? After that, I never felt him around me. But I still had many years to go before I hit my bottom.
I finally did when I married my third abuser, someone so sadistic that my therapist said I would never survive his cruelty. It was five years of hell. At the deepest, darkest, most cruel moment I finally began recovery. I had reached my bottom. Trying to crawl your way out when you’ve reached your bottom isn’t easy. A strong shell begins to form around you as you work your way through recovery. You become determined, no matter how difficult it is, to become healthy. After five years of recovery and having rid myself of my abuser, I looked back on it and wondered how I had lived through it. But live through it you will. There will be no warning bell saying, “This is your bottom”. There will be no intervention from friends. It’s as if that soul part of you finally recognizes the truth of what your life has become and becomes determined to change it for the better. You will know it by the way it grabs you, as if a strong hand has reached out and is shaking you so that you will know what has happened and that you are being given a chance to live a healthy life. Perhaps it is the hand of God who has watched you die inch by inch for so long and wants you to live. Never discount the power of a Higher Power.
