Alcoholics aren't addicted to alcohol but the escape alcohol affords
lilianan...@googlemail.com
My wife Lilian and I were alcoholics - destitute,
down and out, homeless and living on the streets
BY MURDOCH MacDONALD
On Saturday 1 June 1968, I was standing on the lawn outside the Senate
House of Cambridge University in England, clutching my newly awarded
degree, and posing awkwardly for family photographs.
The sun shining from a clear blue sky made the mediaeval buildings
seem to sparkle, and suggested that the omens for my future were
auspicious.
Approximate contemporaries who had recently preceded me at Magdalene
College included Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, and John
Simpson, world affairs editor with the BBC, but my subsequent career
did not mirror theirs, and the glittering prizes eluded my grasp.
So much so that just over a quarter of a century later I was again
standing outside the Senate House in Cambridge, With me was my wife
Lilian, It was about three o'clock in the morning one day in late
October, damp and cold.
We were destitute, down and out, homeless, and living on the streets.
We were both alcoholics, and had been on a bender for two weeks,
drinking day and night and sleeping, when we could, on park benches
and in bus shelters.
A few weeks before we had come to Cambridge from Ayr in Scotland,
where we met and got married (each of us for the third time). Our plan
had been for me to study for a PhD degree, but that all fell by the
wayside when we started drinking again, were thrown out of our
lodgings, and ended up as drunken vagrants.
Fortunately, we were rescued by two off-duty nurses from nearby
Addenbrooke's Hospital who found us a place in a homeless hostel at
222 Victoria Road.
There we spent exactly a year, trying to put the pieces of our lives
back together. To start getting our finances back on a firmer footing,
I got a job selling the local newspaper, the Cambridge Evening News,
from a stall in Market Square, Lilian taking over from time to time to
let me away for a toilet break.
We had both, individually before we met, and together afterwards,
tried Alcoholics Anonymous, but neither of us could accept their
notion that alcoholism was an illness or disease from which one could
only gain remission a day at a time through lifelong abstention from
alcohol.
After long evenings of discussion and reading psychology books
borrowed from the town library, we came to the conclusion that
alcoholism was not an illness or disease, but a self-harming behaviour
problem with its roots in childhood.
It was not alcohol that we had been addicted to, but the escape that
alcohol had afforded us. Escape from our lives, or aspects of our
lives that we had been unable to cope with.
We knew that if we identified and confronted our issues and demons
from the past, we would be able to drink safely and responsibly again
if and when we so wished.
So we started to write down our life story on an old word processor
that we had brought with us to Cambridge, and which had somehow
survived.
After a year in the homeless hostel, we returned to Ayrshire, where
there seemed to be better prospects of my finding employment, and,
indeed I was shortly offered some freelance work on a couple of local
newspapers.
And, after a couple of slips, we found that we were able to drink
normally again. No more benders!
We completed the first draft of our book, (now on a proper personal
computer) and found a publisher. It was called "Phoenix in A Bottle".
We sent a copy of the final draft to eminent addiction expert Dr
Stanton Peele in America, who expressed approval and provided us with
a blurb for the cover.
We set up a website, and people started e-mailing us from all over the
world. Mostly former alcoholics who agreed with us about the
inadequacy of AA and the 12-Step programme.
A few opponents asked why we opposed AA, and some asked why, after our
horrific experiences, we would even want to drink again.
We replied that we opposed AA because it was wrong, and it did not
work - only 5% of people who go to AA actually stay. And we wanted to
be able to drink responsibly again because alcohol (used sensibly) is
one of life's simple pleasures. And to prescribe lifelong abstinence
to an alcoholic is to treat the symptom and not the root cause of the
problem, and is just a damage limitation exercise.
>From selling newspapers on the streets of Cambridge twelve years ago,
I am now Business Editor of three local weeklies here in Ayrshire, and
am running my own successful PR business Fame Publicity Services.
I am now 60 years old, and, in career terms, I don't suppose that
either Alan Rusbridger or John Simpson need have any fear of too much
competition from me.
But Lilian and I are content today. I am happy in my work, and two or
three times a week we both still enjoy a bottle of wine with our
evening meal.
And I would like to think that, better late than never, I am at last
beginning to realise some of the potential that I had within me,
standing on the lawn of the Cambridge University Senate House back on
that summer day nearly thirty years ago.
And all because of our discovery that it is not alcohol that
alcoholics are addicted to, but the escape that alcohol affords.
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