Addiction and Recovery
By Bob Gaydos

    For those looking for a New Year’s resolution that can actually be challenging to keep and potentially beneficial if done the right way, I offer some thoughts I shared last year when I first heard about Dry January and some new ones.

    You hang around with an experienced group of people for any amount of time, with any luck, you learn a few things. 

     I’ve been writing a column on addiction and recovery for more than 15 years. In that time, I have been fortunate to have many conversations with members of Alcoholics Anonymous who have decades of sobriety. They have freely shared some of their experience and wisdom with me.

      One bit of AA wisdom goes like this: “People who don’t have a drinking problem don’t have to control their drinking.”

       Hmmm. So why are social media and news feeds filled daily with stories on “Dry January”? Why the sudden interest in non-alcoholic beer and no-booze cocktails? What’s the big rush all of a sudden for, reportedly, thousands of people to decide to see if they can not partake of alcohol for the month of January? Last year, one poll said 41 percent of respondents planned to partake of Dry January. I couldn’t find a report on how well they did, but clearly, not drinking alcohol for one month at least is suddenly chic. 

  For what it’s worth, alcoholics, or rather, those who insist they are not alcoholics, have been taking the post-holiday challenge forever in valiant efforts to prove to themselves and (mainly) others that they can control their drinking. Often, they’ve failed. Rehab February. Others have attempted to give up drinking for Lent, for the same reason and often with the same results.

     But this is different. This is people, many apparently younger people, supposedly deciding that it might be in their best interest to abstain from or at least reduce their alcohol intake, at least for the month.

     Given recent reports on an upsurge in alcohol consumption (particularly by women) during the pandemic, an increase in alcohol-related deaths and a myth-busting report which concludes that “no amount of alcohol” is ever good for your health, going dry or easing up on alcohol for a month sounds like a reasonable idea for anyone.

      But there are risks involved and if you’re intrigued by the idea of stopping or controlling your drinking there ought to be rules. For starters, what is your purpose? Is it, as previously mentioned, to prove you don’t have a drinking problem? If so, you need to tell other people what you’re doing so there is accountability and, crucially, protection, in case a serious alcohol problem does exist. 

  Going through withdrawal symptoms from avoiding alcohol on one’s own can be painful and dangerous. Be aware of the symptoms and get professional help if they begin. Your effort may have failed, but it might have saved your life.

     If, on the other hand, the purpose is truly to see if life can be just as interesting and fun without alcohol always being involved, again, don’t do it alone. Get some friends involved. Plan alcohol-free activities. Try some of those fancy new alcohol-free “mocktails” the Dry January movement has spawned. If you’re really serious, maybe focus more on exercise. Try to get more sleep. See if you start to feel better physically and emotionally.

     Drawing again on some AA wisdom, the key to succeeding, whatever your goal, is to be honest and realistic. Whether you’re trying to not drink for a specific month or just cut back, if you find yourself drinking or thinking you’d really like to be drinking in spite of your stated goal, by all means start over again. But be aware of any recurring pattern. There may be a problem.

      On a positive note, if Dry January results in a more responsible general approach to alcohol consumption (as brewers and distillers are obliged to promote), it has to be good for society’s overall health. Excessive alcohol consumption contributes to a multitude of societal and health problems as well as highway and other accidents.

    Fad or not, the movement would also go along with the effort by health agencies and providers to remove the stigma and shame often attached to alcoholism by getting rid of the word “alcoholic,” which still conjures up negative images for many people. Today, people are diagnosed with alcohol abuse disorder, mild, moderate or severe. (Sober members of AA still call themselves alcoholics with no shame attached.)

   According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use disorder “is a medical condition characterized by an impaired ability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences.”  That’s the “drinking and trouble” connection members of AA often talk about.

      On the basic issue of stopping drinking and trying to keep things simple, AA’s Third Tradition states that “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

     Adding that touch of reality necessary to recovery, an AA friend asked, “Who would have a desire to stop drinking other than someone who drank too much and got in trouble over it?”

     With sincere hope for the success and good intentions of anyone participating in this year’s Dry January, that’s a question to keep in mind for anyone planning on a just plain February.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.

Addiction and Recovery
By Bob Gaydos

    You hang around with an experienced group of people for any amount of time, with any luck, you learn a few things. 

     I’ve been writing a column on addiction and recovery for about 15 years. In that time, I have been fortunate to have many conversations with members of Alcoholics Anonymous who have decades of sobriety. They have freely shared some of their experience and wisdom with me.

      One bit of AA wisdom that I’ve thought about recently goes like this: “People who don’t have a drinking problem don’t have to control their drinking.”

       Hmmm. So why have my social media and news feeds been peppering me daily with stories on “Dry January”? Why the sudden interest in non-alcoholic beer and cocktails? What’s the big rush all of a sudden for, supposedly, thousands of people to decide to see if they can not partake of alcohol for the month of January? It’s suddenly chic?

   Alcoholics, or rather, those who insist they are not alcoholics, have been taking the post-holiday challenge forever in valiant efforts to prove to themselves and (mainly) others that they can control their drinking. Often, they’ve failed. Rehab February.

     But this is different, from what I read. This is people, many apparently younger people, supposedly deciding that it might be in their best interest to abstain from or at least reduce their alcohol intake, at least for the month.

     Given recent reports on an upsurge in alcohol consumption (particularly by women) during the pandemic, an increase in alcohol-related deaths and a myth-busting report which concludes that “no amount of alcohol” is ever good for your health, going dry or easing up on alcohol for a month sounds like a reasonable idea.

      But there are risks involved and if you’re intrigued by the idea of stopping or controlling your drinking there ought to be rules. For starters, what is your purpose? Is it, as previously mentioned, to prove you don’t have a drinking problem? If so, you need to tell other people what you’re doing so there is accountability and, crucially, protection, in case a serious alcohol problem does exist. 

  Going through withdrawal symptoms from avoiding alcohol on one’s own can be painful and dangerous. Be aware of the symptoms and get professional help if they begin. Your effort may have failed, but it might have saved your life.

     If, on the other hand, the purpose is truly to see if life can be just as interesting and fun without alcohol always being involved, again, don’t do it alone. Get some friends involved. Plan alcohol-free activities. Try some of those fancy new alcohol-free “mocktails” the Dry January movement has spawned. If you’re really serious, maybe focus more on exercise. Try to get more sleep. See if you start to feel better physically and emotionally.

     Drawing again on some AA wisdom, the key to succeeding, whatever your goal, is to be honest and realistic. Whether you’re trying to not drink for a specific month or just cut back, if you find yourself drinking or thinking you’d really like to be drinking in spite of your stated goal, by all means start over again. But be aware of any recurring pattern. There may be a problem.

      On a positive note, if Dry January results in a more responsible general approach to alcohol consumption (as brewers and distillers like to promote), it has to be good for society’s overall health. Alcohol consumption contributes to a multitude of health problems as well as highway and other accidents. It would also go along with the effort by health agencies and providers to remove the stigma and shame often attached to alcoholism by getting rid of the word “alcoholic,” which still conjures up negative images for many people. 

     Officially today, people are diagnosed with alcohol abuse disorder, mild, moderate or severe.

   According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use disorder “is a medical condition characterized by an impaired ability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational, or health consequences.”

     That’s the “drinking and trouble” connection members of AA often talk about.

      On the basic issue of stopping drinking and trying to keep things simple, AA’s Third Tradition states simply that “the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.”

     Adding that touch of reality necessary to recovery, an AA friend asked, “Who would have a desire to stop drinking other than someone who drank too much and got in trouble over it?”

     With sincere hope for the success and good intentions of many a Dry Almost Over January, that’s a question to keep in mind for anyone planning on a dry February or Monday or maybe next Tuesday …

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com.

Addiction and Recovery

By Bob Gaydos

The absence of in person meetings lead to relapses, a study suggests.

   “Don’t drink … and go to meetings.”

    “Meeting-makers make it.”

    Those two bits of advice — “suggestions” as they are officially considered — have been welcoming newcomers to Alcoholics Anonymous ever since the group was born 86 years ago. 

     The message is simple: Alcoholics, especially those new to recovery, are more likely to get and stay sober if they keep regular contact with other alcoholics in recovery. The “all in the same boat” philosophy. “We” get sober, especially if some of us know how to do it and can guide others. Fellowship. Coffee. Hugs and handshakes. Easy does it.

      Then came COVID. No more hugs. No more handshakes. No more coffee. No face-to-face support and fellowship. And for some, no recovery. Or worse.

       According to a recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, alcohol-related deaths increased by 25 percent in the United States in the first year of Covid. Researchers from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) looked at mortality data to compare the number of alcohol-related deaths among persons aged 16 and older in 2019 and 2020. Deaths were considered to be alcohol-related if alcohol was listed as an underlying or contributing cause.

          The report found that the number of alcohol-related deaths, including from liver disease and accidents, jumped to 99,017 in 2020, up from 78,927 the previous year. That 25 percent increase is compared to an average increase of 3.6 percent annually for the previous 20 years. Perhaps not surprisingly, in response to the pandemic, many Americans drank more. They binged more. And more of them died because of it.

           The researchers cited the stress of living with all the changes and restrictions of Covid, including isolation, as a major factor in the increase in drinking and deaths. Of course, isolation and feeling stressed are major reasons many alcoholics drink. Recovery is largely about dealing with stress and other people without drinking.

         In addition to the Covid-related stress in general, it became more difficult to seek help at rehabs. Hospitals with recovery programs were swamped with Covid patients. The researchers say many people got discouraged and just put off looking for help.

            And for those meeting-makers, there were no more meetings. At least not in person. The researchers also said they assumed many people in recovery relapsed because they couldn’t access any in-person support, including from 12-step groups like AA.

           To be sure, Zoom meetings proliferated online and many AA members found themselves staring at their smart phones or iPads, communicating with alcoholics across the nation and, indeed, across the world. The messages were the same, just not in person. Make your own coffee. Hug your cat. It was new and, for many, a welcome lifeline.

         But for many others, this wasn’t enough. Having been resourceful about managing to get a drink, a lot of alcoholics in recovery did manage to figure out how to have meetings in person, safely.

         In New York’s Mid-Hudson region, some began meeting in their cars in parking lots. Once the weather warmed up, groups with venues that offered private space began meeting outside. Bring your own chairs and coffee. Meetings sprang up in parks throughout Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties. If there was a park pavilion with a large crowd of people sitting quietly and sipping coffee, there was a good chance it was an AA meeting. The restrictions or requirements changed with Covid. Masks, sanitizer, and social distancing were common place.  It wasn’t the same, most agreed, but it was far better than not meeting at all.

      COVID is not yet gone. It seems to keep reinventing itself. Local AA groups continue to adapt as well, most now meeting indoors, with or without masking and distancing rules. For many, the coffee pots are back. Zoom meetings continue.

      But the importance of in-person contact is not lost on many members.

       “The meetings are where I get my medicine,” says F.G., a longtime member from Orange County. “I need to see the faces,” he says.

        More personally, G.E., an Ulster County resident, says he was within months of 25 years of sobriety when he stopped going to meetings and eventually relapsed. Then Covid arrived. Back a couple of months now, he says, “I must treasure my sobriety. I have to respect it. I thought I could do it without the personal contact. I couldn’t. Now, I really enjoy the fellowship.”

       At least one study suggests there’s a compelling reason to continue to do so.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Addiction and Recovery

Note: In light of the recent testimony and controversy over the youthful drinking and behavior of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, I thought I would post my most recent Addiction and Recovery column on alcohol-induced blackouts on this blog.  I hope it answers some questions.

By Bob Gaydos

 There are two enduring views about alcohol-induced blackouts:

1. They don’t exist. They’re just an excuse for inappropriate behavior.
2. They exist, but they’re just a harmless, often humorous, occasional price to pay for a night of fun.

Both views are wrong — dangerously so — for the same reason: Denying the existence of blackouts or minimizing their significance could lead to serious consequences (health, legal, personal, professional) for the persons experiencing them and others. If you’ve experienced blackouts or know someone who has and are not concerned about them, you should be.

To start with, blackouts are not the same as passing out. That’s a common misconception. People who drink too much and pass out stay put. They wake up in the same place they passed out and remember, maybe with a hangover, how they got there. People in blackouts can wind up in different states, strange beds, wrong apartments or behind bars when they come to and not know how they got there. “How did I get home last night?” is a common question for blackout veterans. “Where’d I leave my car?” is another.

Many recovering alcoholics who recall their drinking history in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings point to blackouts as one of the “healthy fears’’ that help them stay sober. After all, it can be frightening to find out about some reckless behavior that happened apparently in a blackout and to wonder what else may have happened without your being aware of it.

Some local examples:

— Jordan, a 50ish man from Orange County, who has been sober more than five years, says he once spent a four-day business trip in Texas in a blackout. Airport-to-airport. He did come out of it briefly, he says, to call his boss on Day 2 to tell him he wasn’t feeling well.

— Whitey (all names used are fictitious), who drives for a living, says he regularly drove between New York and Virginia in blackouts.

— John, retired in Sullivan County and sober more than two decades, says he’s positive he was fired from an excellent job because of remarks he made to his boss’s wife while in a blackout.

— Marie, a chef sober less than a year, says she has no recollection of a phone call in which she was extremely rude and insulting to her husband’s sister, other than what her husband and sister-in-law told her. She’s embarrassed by the incident.

— Sunshine, a nurse sober half her life, recalls with a mix of horror and shame coming out of a blackout “as a guy was trying to have sex with me.” She says she fought him off. But she didn’t immediately stop drinking.

That’s often the case — not stopping drinking despite risky or embarrassing consequences. As an isolated incident, a blackout may not signify anything except drinking too much, too fast. Something you might want to avoid because of potential embarrassment or worse. As a pattern, it could be a sign of a more serious problem.

While it’s not just alcoholics who experience blackouts, the connection between blackouts and alcoholism or alcoholic use disorder is real and knowing some facts about the symptom could help dispel some of the myths and avoid more serious problems.

For a long time — most likely from whenever humans first discovered the mood-altering effects of wine until modern science started doing research on the brain and behavior — blackouts were regarded as just one of the possible side effects of drinking alcohol. A little fuzzy memory. No big deal. Just drink less.

When researchers began studying blackouts, however, they soon discovered that persons experiencing them didn’t have just a little amnesia. Rather, they had no recollection of certain events and, try as they might, even when told the details many times over, they had no memory of them. Their subjects didn’t forget, researchers concluded; they never formed a memory in the first place.

The prevailing accepted science, as cited by the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse and other similar agencies, is that persons experiencing a blackout can function and appear to be “normal” to others because their brain is operating on stored, long-term, procedural memory, but the short-term memory of what they are experiencing never gets to the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes long-term memory. Alcohol — especially a lot of it in a short period of time — short-circuits the process.

According to the NIAAA, “As the amount of alcohol consumed increases, so does the magnitude of the memory impairments. Large amounts of alcohol, particularly if consumed rapidly, can produce partial or complete blackouts.”

More about blackouts:

— It’s not what you drink, it’s how much alcohol gets into your bloodstream and how fast it gets there. This means it’s possible for anyone to black out if he or she drinks enough alcohol quickly enough.

— People who have a low tolerance for alcohol are not necessarily more likely to black out. On the other hand, those with a high tolerance for alcohol are often able to drink heavily and carry on conversations, drive, etc. while in blackouts.

— Women may be more susceptible since they tend to be smaller than men, meaning each drink has a greater effect on the body’s blood alcohol content.

— Drinking on an empty stomach can make blackouts more likely, again because of a more acute impact on the blood alcohol concentration.

— People sometimes have glimpses of memory of an event, but not total recall. These partial lapses are called “brownouts.”

— Blackouts are the product of consumption of an amount of alcohol that affects motor coordination, balance, impulse control and decision-making. This is bad enough when someone is not in a blackout, never mind being unable to recall any risky, self-sabotaging behavior that may have caused serious harm to others.

— Some researchers suggest that people in blackouts, operating on procedural memory and little more, have little impulse control and are more likely to do things they would not otherwise. (See examples above.) This presents embarrassing, sometimes dangerous situations for the person in a blackout, family, friends and even strangers.

— Blackouts are often the unrecognized explanation for someone’s uncharacteristic actions. “Why did you (say/do) that last night?”

— Because of a shortage of evidence-based science on the subject, there is considerable difference of opinion on the use of blackouts as a defense in criminal trials.

So, what to do if you have blackouts? Take them seriously. Maybe talk to a professional health provider who knows about them. While blackouts are not solely the result of years of heavy, alcoholic drinking, they can be a sign of an existing or potential alcohol problem. Even one or two — perhaps the product of binge drinking in college — should be enough to cause concern since not being aware of what one has done is not considered acceptable to most people.

Being the unaware “life of the party” may be tolerable as a one-time experience, but repeated bizarre behavior of which you have no memory is nothing to laugh at.

rjgaydos@gmail.com