First Step of NA / AA: We admitted that we were powerless over drugs / alcohol; that our lives had become unmanageable.
I am the first one I deceive
If I can make myself believe
The rest is easy
- "Devil in the Details" by Bright Eyes
For Part I, click here.
A Seemingly Straightforward Proposition
For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, the Twelve Step programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, as well as the spin-off behavioral modification programs, are peer-based programs of personal change rooted in character examination and spiritual development. If you’re particularly quick-witted, perhaps you’ve surmised that they involve 12 phases. The first of these, which is foundational in many ways, is worded like this: We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol / drugs; that our lives had become unmanageable.
For most addicts, a morass of pain, terror, rationalization, and denial whirl around this clarion call to reality. By the time that I entered treatment for the first time, I thought that accepting the First Step would be relatively simple for me: It was obvious that I was utterly out of control. After all, my heroin use dominated every aspect of my life. It was threatening my status quo on every level - medically, legally, academically, financially, psychologically, spiritually, familially, socially. When it came to opioids and benzos, I wasn’t floating down a raft on Da Nile. I had long accepted that I was addicted – I just told myself that there was no way out, a belief ballasted by the biological determinism that I subscribed to at the time.
There were still islands of reservation in the ocean of my acceptance of my addiction, I realize now. In particular, I found it hard to grok that I could never again indulge in what I considered the lighter chemical pleasures – alcohol, weed, coke, maybe an occasional Ambien – the ones that had been mostly unproblematic for me. But for the most part, I was desperate enough that I was willing to forsake those, too, if it meant an end to the suffering of my addiction.
The reason that I began Part I with a description of my benzo addiction is because – even though I identify primarily as an opioid addict – it is benzos that truly epitomized addiction for me. When it came to my opioid use, I retained some ability to plan, to ration, to exercise caution to ward off withdrawal or overdose or infection or arrest. When I was using benzos, by contrast, the disinhibition was so profound that it was almost psychopathic.
I once attended outpatient treatment with a bubbly blonde girl from suburban Long Island, "normal" in every way, who was there because she had stabbed her father with a kitchen knife during a Klonopin binge. It could’ve just as easily been me. In fact, I had once bitten my mom’s arm while she and my older brother were struggling to take my bottle of Xanax away from me mid-binge. On another night, I took handfuls of Xanax and Klonopin, borrowed my father’s car, and crashed it; afterward, I borrowed my uncle’s car and crashed that, too. Benzos turned me into a feral, raving monster, and the moment that the first milligram of Xanax hit, it was over; I had boarded a train to an unknown destination.
(Benzos, barbiturates, and alcohol also happen to be three of the very few substances whose withdrawal syndromes can kill you. They gave me grand mal withdrawal seizures, which threatened to finish me months and years after I had stopped using them. Without getting too off track here, suffice it to say that, if someone told me that they had to take a chance with either heroin or benzos, I would tell them to go with the heroin every time. No other addiction leaves as little of the original person left as benzos do; they frequently cause dementia and are often deadly when combined with alcohol or other depressants. TL;DR is: Xanax destroys. Xanax kills.)
Deeper
Back to the First Step. After some time in recovery, I realized that what I had initially believed to be honest, thorough submission to the powerlessness of the First Step had, in fact, been a fairly shallow and cerebral reckoning. It wasn’t hard for me to intellectually accept the overwhelming evidence that I was addictively out-of-control, that I couldn’t use mind-altering substances healthily or in moderation. However, admitting this was really only a partial fulfillment of the First Step.
Truly accepting the First Step is and should be a horrifying experience; it is a gut punch to the soul. It is understanding that you are as out of control of your behavior as if someone has a gun to your head and is dictating your next actions, as though there is an alien in control of your body. There is no refuge from this realization once it hits, no softening of it.
I remember a story that my mother, a criminal defense attorney, told me about a client of hers. Her client was a stay-at-home mom from a fairly well-off suburb of our city, who had temporarily curtailed her problematic drinking after her first DWI. My mother had gone to meet her client before her arraignment the morning after her second arrest. There, she found her client mortified, fully accepting of her alcoholism, and expressing genuine readiness to change – to go to inpatient treatment, long-term treatment, whatever was necessary.
“I can’t believe it happened again,” my mom’s client confessed to her in regard to the second DWI that she assumed she was facing (she had been blacked out during her arrest and in-processing, so she didn’t know for sure what she had been charged with).
It was my mom’s job to explain to this woman that she hadn’t been arrested for DWI: She had hit another car head-on while driving drunk and killed the person in it, a woman of similar age who was also a mother. She was being charged with vehicular manslaughter, and even a golden plea deal would mean several years in state prison for this woman who had just spent her first night in jail.
Embracing the First Step meant understanding not just that this could’ve been me, but that it would be me (I am tempted to write “will” rather than “would”; this is the profundity with which the First Step has settled in for me). It meant connecting my cognitive understanding of the extent and dangers of my addiction with a deep, visceral acceptance of my utter loss of control, an experience as terrifying as having a stranger cover your mouth and rip down your pants in a lonely stretch of alley or park. Without this intense, emotionally based response, the First Step lacks motivational potency.
For now, let me close by saying that for me, the powerlessness of the First Step has never been fully supplanted by the hope or actuality of long-term recovery. I have seen too many people trying too hard who fail at it nevertheless, and too many who succeed for a while who relapse and die. I don’t believe that this was simply their fault for failing to work the program properly.
For me, the enduring lesson of the First Step has been “playing the tape forward” whenever I consider relapse, remembering that the very worst outcomes of my past use, as well as even worse things experienced by my brothers and sisters in addiction, await me at the end of the next chain of events that starts with me using, which is the one point at which I might retain some control. True nightmares await me during my next relapse, and it is right of my mind and my body to remind me of that fact.
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