More About Alcoholism and the Cascade of Depression – Ben T.

I'm going to be my friend Ben, and Ben is multifaceted. He's a whirly ball champion, laser tag. No, in all seriousness, Ben and I go back a few years. We used to belong to the same home group, and he is a very important and vital cog in that group. He is totally dedicated, committed. I mean, he is like a walking big book. I mean I can't think of a better way to put it. You always see him working with others and he eats, sleeps, and drinks this stuff and it is a great honor that he's going to be here tonight and I'm excited to hear his story again because I've heard it. So I'd like to introduce Ben. Let's give him a warm welcome. Thank you. Hi, my name is Ben Thorpe. I'm an alcoholic. All right, relevant info. Sobriety date, May 28th, 2006, birthday January 16th, 1982, home group, Mount Vernon, men's meeting, heavy hitters. Been sober three years. It was about three years in between me picking up my first white chip and me picking out my current white chip, and I had three involuntary hospitalizations, so probably not a coincidence there. I don't know where to start. Well, to say thank you for asking me to speak. I appreciate it. And to say thanks to you. To say thankyou to Daryl because the truth is you make this job really easy. If the goal is to tell a newcomer about the insanity of alcoholism and the really beautiful simplicity of recovery through the steps, you nailed it. You really nailed it, and it's been a pleasure to know you at the time that we've been doing this together. And I can identify with a lot of what you said, and you'll hear a lot of Daryl in my story too. And so I guess I'll just start at the beginning. My goal is really just to tell you how I got here and how I happen to be here tonight is a long journey that basically includes a lot of stuff that I didn't want to have happen and then a lot of knowledge that I got from other people. So I didn'T bring a lot to the table tonight, just my experience. I was born here in Piedmont Hospital in an ice storm, which was a nice warning of things to come. I grew up with two very accomplished parents who really test that theory in the big book that few people can live effectively by self-propulsion. They both seem to do it pretty well. And for the first 12 years of my life, I was pretty certain that they were my higher power. And as you become a teenager, that rapidly collapses and all sorts of other things quickly become your higher power. And so around 7th or 8th grade I decided, however consciously we make any decisions at that age, that I was going to live by two rules. And I was gonna break all the others, but the two rules I was gunna live by are 1. That absolutely everybody has to like me. And 2. Is nobody can know that absolutely everybody have to like them. and so it's an interesting set of rules to live by and the result actually provides you with what we now call character defects but were at the time pretty effective coping mechanisms for getting through high school and so that was how I started I excelled at certain things and was terrible at other things and I was happy to emphasize the things that I was good at and diminish the importance to everyone of anything that I struggled with. I was not an athlete, I was sort of a nerdy kid, but I tried to make that seem like it was cool and rebellious to the best of my ability. I found an avenue for that in the debate team in high school and I doubt there's anybody else in the room that was on a debate team and if they were, there you go. And I was going to say if they weren't, they probably wouldn't admit it in front of a room full of people, but I mentioned that because it ends up being something I have a lot of success with and it's also sort of my first experience of a community where I feel like I belong and that ends up being important later on and I feel when people tell their stories I hear different examples of that. Maybe they're on a sports team maybe they're involved in a church, maybe it's a job or being in the military That's something that they really feel like they fit with. Maybe it's trafficking drugs. I don't know. It depends, but everybody finds a certain thing that they fall into where they really feel at home, and for me, it was that, and that ends up being important later on. So I do start drinking in, I don' t know, junior high or high school. I don''t remember my first drink. I remember stealing drinks from my parents when I was in junior high from their liquor cabinet. A lot of airplane-sized bottles happened to disappear around my house, but I was not a major drinker in high school. With my first drink, I didn't have the experience of elation that some people experience with their first drink. And so I don't remember it. I do remember my first blackout, though. I went to my junior prom with a girl I was maybe a little bit obsessed with. And by any objective measure, she was not paying sufficient attention to me on our date. So I decided to get a nice large Dixie cup of Jim Beam, which I'd never had before. and I instantly woke up the following morning. And so that was my first experience of a blackout. I learned after I woke up, you know, soiled with my own vomit in a bed that I had no idea how I got there, that I'd put on something of a show the previous night. But given that it was a bunch of 17-year-olds in the room, I felt more appreciated than like I was being insulted. I had been the center of attention and everyone but the girl that I was on a date with seemed to enjoy that. So, you know, I can joke about this because actually we're friends today and I was able to make that amends. And, you Know, that's part of the beauty of the program. People are much more forgiving than we would often expect them to be. So moving on from high school, I go to college and a thing happens where I essentially get away with the trick that I played, which was not wanting to play by other people's rules. Because of the success that I had in the debate activity, I was successful in the college admissions process, despite having fair to middling grades at best and having been suspended. You know, all these other things that generally make a college record look bad were compensated for by the success and other things. So I got to leave Atlanta and go to the Northeast with the feeling that I could always say, I told you so. And so I carried an overabundance of confidence to college. And in that first year, you know, unless you had access to class attendance records, you couldn't tell the difference between me and anyone else. I drank a lot on the weekends, a little bit during the week, and I really enjoyed myself. I had a great time. I enjoyed the freedom. I enjoyedthe sense of meeting tons of new people. I was incredibly social. I ran with a bunch of different groups of friends. And I reallyenjoyed my first year in college. I went to work out in California. The summer after that, I was at a party in Berkeley, and I had over that summer what I think I would accurately describe as a spiritual experience of the chemical variety. And for me, that was like the way a lot of people explain their first drink. I felt like, you know what? This is something I could do on a pretty regular basis and kind of stop thinking about anything else. And so to the extent that we're asked to become a seeker when it comes to God in this program, I became a seeker of experiences like that, you know. And so I headed back to school and I entered into what I thought at the time was a period of sort of extreme depression that I had no responsibility for. I think in retrospect it's probably just some karma of really bad behavior. But I was a mess and it was really the first time in my life that I was a mess in a way that I couldn't cover up, that there were friends of mine that I was close enough to that I had to tell them that I Was struggling because I was. I spent a lot of days just lying in bed and having no idea why. I'd probably been out drinking late the night before, and so part of it was a hangover, but part of it Was just I had lost the ability to just put a smile on and go out and be the person that I thought that I WAS supposed to be, and there was a lot of shame that came with that for me. And so it's probably sort of a good point in the story to say that I didn't say very much about my family before. Essentially, my mom's side of the family, there are very few non-alcoholics. My mom is a non- alcoholic, but her father is, her sister is, now her son is. She sometimes says her husband is. And, so there's a lot of alcoholism on one side of the famil and a lot of mental illness on the other side of the family, and a lot of suicide on the other side of the family. And so for me to experience this sort of cascade of depression as a 19-year-old kid away at college, I was terrified. I was truly terrified. Sorry, I get kind of nervous thinking about that. I was truly terrified that I would be the next person in my family to kill myself, and that it was something that I didn't have any control over. and that sense of powerlessness kind of washed over me and I didn't have a means of dealing with it so instead I went with the only tools that I thought were effective with alcohol and other substances that made it feel okay to be in the situation that I was in and the next two years are really just sort of a downward spiral into the hopelessness of alcoholism There are a lot of sort of random events in there that capture that. I was at a New Year's party in Los Angeles one year. I'd blacked out by about 9.30, around 11. They had to call an ambulance because they didn't know if I'd slipped into a coma or what was going on with me. I woke up the following morning next to a guy with a gunshot wound and was still so drunk I thought I'd been shot. And that's sort of strange, but let me tell you, That was the last hospital I walked out of in less than 72 hours. So I got back to school, and it was this up and down. I would put things together for a couple months at a time, and then things would come sort of crashing around me. And by the end of what would have been my junior year in college, it just was not working. I couldn't fake it anymore. I'd gotten very good at all the things that were necessary to stay in school. I was very practiced at when and how to withdraw from certain classes. I knew how to deal with the system but I couldn't keep it up anymore and part of that was I had become over the course of these two years increasingly socially anxious and I got to the point where somebody would yell at me from across the quad to say hi and I thought it was all crashing down I mean, I thought they were the cops I thought some frat was after me because whatever I might have done I was constantly scared I was constantly scared. And, you know, I'll never forget just about the night before I dropped out, I was hanging out with a bunch of friends, breaking the law, and one of them was explaining to me the story of how the previous night he had seen me asleep on a bank of trash cans on the third floor of a building in which I did not live. And that was strange to me because I had woken up in bed that morning. and uh and so one of my other friends said well do you like not remember like when you drink do you not remember what happened a lot of the time and i mean i was i was blacking out the equivalent of like a part-time job every week at this point and so it was a really it was it was like he asked me if i'd pay sales tax like it was uh it didn't make sense to me that people don't black out because all these guys drink a lot and i apparently was the one that was you know just losing a lot of time. And so it scared me, and I knew it was coming down, but I was not content to just say here's how screwed up my life is, and so I sold myself my family and my friends this bill of goods about how I was going to move out to Los Angeles and I was gonna become a screenwriter. I love movies and that seemed like a sufficient qualification I had some friends that were out there doing that, and let me tell you, I was so committed to succeeding in the entertainment industry that I didn't even make it to Hollywood without going to rehab. I ended up heading to this rehab in Arizona that was, you know, pretty much just what you'd expect. It was sort of a spa-like environment and I felt safe, honestly, for the first time in a couple years. I definitely wanted to stop drinking. I definitely wanted to control my use of any kind of substance but I did not get, at that point, the nature of the hopelessness. If I had, I probably would not have gotten into a relationship. And so I move out to L.A. shortly later. I'm followed by my rehab girlfriend. And it went about how you'd expect, honestly. Maybe it went better than you'd expected. I don't know. I mean, I actually stayed dry most of the time that I was in L. A. they told me to go to AA obviously and I went to about two meetings and I don't know I had some harebrained scheme that that was not a good way to stay sober instead I should write a screenplay about rehab and of course that does not get written nor does anything else and I basically spend the next year dealing with the continuing drama of this relationship and I wish I could even sort out her part and my part. The truth that I know today is that not a single thing went wrong in that relationship in which I was not very, very complicit. It was just it was a relationship between two sick people and all the whole catalog of emotional trauma that goes along with a relationship between two six people occurred in that relationship. And I was deeply damaged by it. I continued with all the depression that had been going on at school, and I was essentially a suicide waiting to happen. And it got to a point the day after Father's Day in 2004 that I actually made an attempt on my life. So when you go to the emergency room to deal with the physical consequences of a suicide attempt, they involuntarily hospitalize you. So I'm in the hospital at Cedars-Sinai, and you know still it's amazing to me the degree to which I can just talk myself out of things and I said well I'm going to get this help, I'm gonna get this help, no problem, let me out bandage is still on, letmeout and they do and I leave LA I'm actually going back there next week and I haven't been back since so it's a little bit of the full circle in terms of the way I'm thinking about things right now but I come back to Atlanta and I engage in a couple weeks of absolute depravity to distract myself from the fact that I just attempted on my life that I just attempted suicide the day after Father's Day when my father lost both of his parents and ultimately both of us both of brothers to suicide I can't I'm glad I'm not the person today that did that. So a couple weeks of that, obviously not a sustainable solution to the problem, so I get shipped off to Boston to a psychiatric hospital. Let me tell you, for a kid that grew up fairly convinced that he was going to go into politics, getting shipped to Boston the week of the Democratic National Convention to be put in a psychiatric hospital is a bit of a blow to the ego. So I get put in, and essentially I get put into this diagnostic program where you pay them a lot of money. They figure out why you have everything that they can treat in-house. And you know what? That sounds like a resentful comment. But the truth is, they had me read all the diagnostic criteria for every disorder known to man. And I just, I fit the bill. I mean, there was rarely a psychological symptom that was described that I was not at that point experiencing. So, you know, I can criticize them, but they were not, you know, they were following the letter of the law. So I end up in treatment there doing these day treatment programs, going to a few AA meetings that are basically connected to the hospital, focusing on depression treatment, focusing own individual counseling, not focusing on alcoholism. By this point, it's sort of unquestioned that I have an alcohol abuse problem, a chemical dependency problem, but we're not talking about it in terms of alcoholism the way that we talk about alcoholism in AA. So needless to say, that falls to the back burner. I focus on the things which I believe a human power can treat and I end up constantly obsessing about alcohol and drugs. And the result of that is I eventually get resentful enough at one of these doctors, that I decide the appropriate response is to go to a liquor store and get good and drunk at him. I have actually been doing relatively well up to this point. I was just about to get an apartment and move out of this halfway house that I was in. And it all comes crashing down. One day of drinking, and I decide that night that I'm going to drive to a casino in Connecticut. and about one-fifth of the way there, I flip the car, get in a terrible single-car accident. I, of course, am totally unharmed for some reason. I get the car off of the road on its three wheels and do what any good alcoholic would do at that point, I call triple A. And unfortunately, I was unable to give them any sort of directions given that at that moment I didn't even remember the casino that I was planning on going to. And so the cops show up first, I get arrested, my car gets taken away, I have to call an ex-girlfriend who lives in Boston to come get me out of this state-y police station, and a number of hospitalizations follow. Over the course of the next two months, I would essentially stay sober for a week, go out and get drunk and put myself back in the detox because I knew that I wouldn't be able to stay sober if I stayed out of the detox I go in that detox four times in the two and a half months before my court date, I go into my court date I escape any major consequences and I'm now at the point where this is like a very comprehensive psychiatric institution And they have a bunch of different residence halls for, they got one for alcoholism. They got one that's like a halfway house. They've just got, they've got them for all sorts of stuff. I've now been banned from all of the relevant ones. And so they won't treat me unless I'm an inpatient. And I've been banned from the alcoholism place. I've be banned from the halfway house and so they decided to put me in a long-term psychiatric ward that's primarily for schizophrenic patients that had been there for, you know, in excess of 10 years. I will say that is a serious, serious wake-up call. I felt at that point, and it's hard to even recall the degree to which I felt this, but I felt, at that moment, like I was destined to spend the rest of my life in a psychiatric institution. Overmedicated, unable to essentially defend myself, I felt like that was what my bright, shiny life had turned into. They said I could leave for only one purpose, and that was to go to AA meetings, and all of a sudden I was very excited about attending AA. Having totaled my car, I took public transportation all around Boston, and I really got exposed for the first time to the hope that we find in Alcoholics Anonymous. I started to experience the power of identification with other people. I met people that were 20 years sober that when they took me aside and we talked about our situation, I'd be talking to some doctor who said that 20 years ago he'd been committed to a psychiatric institution institution for precisely the same reasons. And that at the end of the day, what was wrong with him was he had a serious case of alcoholism that was remedied by his involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous. And so I began to experience those little glimmers of hope. But at the same time, I was not having any of the involvement with God or with AA as a spiritual program. I grew up in a secular household. I believe the people that succeeded in the world lived on self-propulsion. Like I mentioned earlier, I believe that people didn't succeed in the world, relied on God. And I believed it was a fiction. And, you know, I say that absolutely believing in the power of God today, but that is how I entered Alcoholics Anonymous, was not even necessarily as an atheist or an agnostic, but just somebody who felt like God was not relevant to the way successful people live their lives. and obviously that sets up certain barriers to working with Steps and so I didn't get particularly interested in the Steps at that time I got a sponsor, he was a great guy I listened to him essentially for life coaching advice but wasn't getting involved in the steps some months later I decided largely to just get myself away from this psychiatric institution because I felt like any time I slipped up it was like back in the you know, I was on a different cycle but I was on a cycle also. I felt like I should come back to Atlanta and I did and I got to say only in retrospect do I realize the incredible luck that I experienced on coming back to Atlanta. I started going my folks live up in Roswell I started going to some meetings at the Alpharetta group they some dudes invited me to this barbecue that they were having I heard a guy speak from out of nowhere I got the willingness to ask that guy to be my sponsor he's my sponsor today and is absolutely one of the main reasons that I'm sober today. The way in which he works the program, the way in Which he's taught me to work the program is, I have to, I mean, it saved my life. Absolutely saved my Life. So that said, I spend the next eight or nine months getting about two months going out for a couple days, getting about Two months going out for a couple days, which I'm sure some people in this room have experienced, is an absolutely miserable existence. To sit in an AA meeting knowing that you're not getting out of it what a lot of people are getting outofit and knowing thatyou absolutely cannot drink safely, that you cannot live the active alcoholic life and enjoy it even a little bit is a very, very depressing life. But I just felt like I couldn't do it. I felt likeI couldn't swallow the steps because I didn't believe in God. So what ended up happening is in, I guess, April of 2006, I just decided to walk away. I felt resentful because I felt like too much was being asked of me. I thought like I couldn't, like I was being asked to manufacture this belief in God for the purposes of, it was almost like fitting in. That was my perception at the time. And so I got in this big conflict with my sponsor and I walked away. And I had no tools, not a single tool for living in the world. I knew that if I was out in the World, I would get drunk. I new if I got drunk, I couldn't predict a single one of the consequences. And my folks live on kind of a farm out in Roswell And I just went and I locked myself up at my parents' house. I'm a 24-year-old kid who's starting to think, well, maybe I'm just going to be one of those guys that lives in his parents' basement for the next 20 years or so. Maybe I'm not just going interact with people ever again. Maybe I can't be at peace out in the world. I can'T even envision it. And they're good enablers, so I could probably get 20 years out of them. And, you know, what happens, of course, is that my mind goes with me. And after a few weeks, I start thinking, You know what? I mean, if I'm here, I may as well drink. I'm safe from a lot of the consequences. And so I do that extraordinarily manipulative thing that many of us have done to people that love us before. And I say, I can drink here. I can drank elsewhere. I'm going to leave it to you. I end up drinking there. and shortly thereafter I'm in the emergency room because I took a bunch of pills and then I'm at Ridgeview for three days and let me tell you, I remember what it felt like when I walked out of Ridgeview I was absolutely certain that I would never drink again absolutely certain, I had it here to eternity and ten days later I was drinking because that's the insanity of alcoholism that'stheinsanityofuntreatedalcoholism And I came back, and for whatever reason, this relapse took me to Kentucky. And I thought a lot about killing myself. And it was basically on my last day of drinking, I did everything that I ever did on a day of drink all in one day. Whoa. Yeah. And so, you know, that's incomprehensible demoralization, I think it's the word in the book. And so I make it back to Atlanta, and for whatever reason, my just approach is this has to be simpler. It just – it has to been because if it's not, if it stays this complex, if it stay about me having to figure it out, I am just never going to get it. I'm never going get it, and so I called up a friend of mine, another guy that's sponsored by my sponsor, And I went over to his apartment, and I just said, God, I just want a day. I don't want to do this. I just don't wanna do this anymore. And the reason I went up to his house was because he had led a meeting some months prior on the third tradition. And he basically expressed to me what he expressed in that meeting and said, look, you're making it way, way, too hard on yourself. You have an honest desire not to drink today. Accept a little direction, and you're gonna get through the day not drinking. And, uh, I tell you it worked. It just, it just worked. I, I set things right with my sponsor. I started working with him again. I'm so glad I did. It would have been so easy to say that just didn't work. Uh, I'm going to go find somebody else and I'm gonna start fresh. And I'm so glad i didn't do that because the relationship that I have with him today is one of the dearest relationships that I had in my life. Um, we began on the steps, uh and in truth for me to talk about life and sobriety, all I really have to talk about is the steps. I admitted that I was powerless over alcohol, that my life had become unmanageable. This powerlessness wasn't the type of powerlessness that just says when I drink these things happen that I can't control. It's that I cannot control anything about my relationship with alcohol. I will obsess until I drink unless there is some intervening power. That was the basis of step two. I did not know a God to believe in. My sponsor did not spend a lot of time with me talking about what kind of God I wanted because he didn't really care at that point. He wanted me to understand that the process worked, that at the 11th step I might have a God I needed. But that for now it was important to have an open mind, to be totally honest with him about what reservations I had, and to be willing to trust the process. With that I took the third step and began on the fourth step. I had sat on the fourth step The whole period of time That I'd been in AA I had treated it like a monster I had thought that there were all these things on it That I refused to look at The reality was And I find this is true with everyone I've worked at The stuff I did not want to look At on my fourth step Were things that I thought about every day The only way to rid myself of them Was to put them down And to dispense with them In the fifth step and in the amends I struggled I was thinking about it this afternoon. I struggled to recall a lot of that stuff that happened in Boston. This was stuff I used to think about every day for hours. I'm free of it. I'm absolutely free of it, and that's only as a result of the steps. We got into six and seven, which I love to talk about. If anybody ever wants to talk about six and seven, I'll give you my number and we'll talk about it. I love discussions about six and seven because in truth that is where I will spend the rest of my life. I will spend the rest of my life slowly and painstakingly letting go of the little things that get between me and a God that I desperately want to understand but don't. Eight and nine I had behaved in ways that made it make sense that I wanted to go hide in a house and never come out and never interact with people. I'd behave shamefully I'd destroyed relationships I had become a person that even in my sickest moment I could identify as becoming a bad guy and I thought that that couldn't change and making those amends I realized that I was no longer the person that had made a lot of those mistakes I realized the person that behaved that way behave that way because he didn't have any other way. He didn't have any other power to call on to say this isn't how it's done. We should do these things differently. We should interact with people differently. We should have different kinds of relationships. We should care for our parents instead of scorning them and diminishing them at every opportunity. And making those amends and then living up to those amens where it's been necessary has been a real linchpin of my recovery. And then in 10, 11, and 12 I want to save some time to talk a little bit about 12. In 10 and 11 I stay or I get more accountable. I don't do that perfectly. There's no saint in me. There just isn't. I experience every bit of human instinct, every one of the character defects, or if you will, our sins which is the line from the 12 and 12 I experience every last one of those I don't have a way to just throw them out on my own power I only have the ability to see more and more of them and ask for more andmore help with them from a God that I'm coming closer to over time 12 is in truth I think where we get the real relief the ultimate relief I've had the good fortune over the course of the past three years to be in some relationships sponsoring some guys that have stayed sober. I've also had the Good Fortune to sponsor some guys that haven't stayed sober I can tell you that the ability to see no matter how far down the scale I've gone that my experience can benefit others gives purpose to the whole variety of things that I described earlier, which would still be painful if they didn't have any use. I also get to belong to a fellowship. I talked earlier about debate. That was a community that I loved, loved, loved being a part of. AA is that community for me today. I do get to live and breathe AA in large part because so many of my friends are in the fellowship and in large parte because I just love what we're doing here. I absolutely love that a newcomer can come in and in a matter of months can be transmitting a message to another alcoholic. I love the way that chain works. I'm so happy to be a tiny, tiny part of that because it truly makes me feel like I belong. And I don't know about anyone else in the room, but for me a sense of belonging is very important. I can contort that. I can turn that into something about recognition or attention or any variety of things, and those are issues that I'll continue to struggle with to some degree, hopefully lesser, for the rest of my life. But the truth is I get to experience not just moments but whole days and sometimes whole weeks of a sense of purpose that allows me to be essentially at peace with myself. And for me, that is absolutely a revolution in consciousness. I mean, I don't think from day to day about how much I hate myself. And that was the ever-present thought for me, ever-parent thought for before I was fortunate enough to find my place in AA. And a lot of that comes from the peace that I get out of a relationship with God. Everybody experiences God differently. I had no idea what my God would look like at the outset of the steps. And in retrospect, I'm not really sure that it mattered one bit what I knew about God at that point. Because what I absolutely believe is that the steps have allowed me to clear away enough of myself that there's something deep down within me that was always there. And so I want to close by reading something out of the big book, which is one of my favorite passages. And if there's somebody in here that struggles in their relationship with God that doesn't think that they can produce a relationship with God that can keep them sober. I hope that they don't worry when they hear this passage. Yet we had been seeing another kind of flight, a spiritual liberation from the world, people who rose above their problems. They said God made these things possible and we only smiled. We had seen spiritual release but liked to tell ourselves it wasn't true. actually we were fooling ourselves for deep down in every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God it may be obscured by calamity by pomp by worship of other things but in some form or other it is there for faith in a power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself we finally saw that faith in some kind of God was a part of our makeup just as much as the feeling we may have for a friend sometimes we had to search fearlessly but he was there he was as much a fact as we were we found the great reality deep down within us in the last analysis it's only there that he may be found it was so with us we can only clear the ground a bit if our testimony helps sweep away prejudice, enables you to think honestly encourages you to search diligently within yourself then if you wish you can join us on the broad highway With this attitude, you cannot fail. The consciousness of your belief is sure to come to you. The consciousness of my belief slowly comes more and more to me every day and it's only as a result of you people. Thank you very much.