We beat the bottle - without AA!

By Jennifer Cunningham

The Herald newspaper, Glasgow.

12 May 2005


At the end of May, Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald will sit down to a
meal at home in Ayr and open a bottle of wine to toast the
publication of their jointly-written account of their recovery from
alcoholism. Like the archetypal alcoholic at the AA meeting, they
pull no punches in describing the desperate state they reached on
their worst, very nearly fatal, bender.

They woke up in the middle of the night on one of Cambridge's large
greens, aching and cold, to discover the slug of gin they had been
keeping to ward off the morning bleakness had been stolen, with the
remains of their money. Two young nurses, on their way home from a
party, were asking if they were all right. Alarmed at the state of
this middle-aged couple, the nurses pooled their own remaining funds
to buy them cups of tea and a shared hamburger, and found a hostel
willing to give them a bed for the night.

"We probably would not have survived the night if they had not come
along," says Murdoch, quietly recognising just how close the call had
been.

That night was the culmination of a two-week bender which had begun
when, with the unshakeable but completely unfounded confidence of the
alcoholic with a new idea, they had gone to Cambridge, where Murdoch
had been a student 25 years earlier, with the thought that he could
undertake a PhD. After confessing to their landlady that they had
alcohol problems, they were evicted summarily as soon as they started
drinking, and Lilian's account of the ensuing weeks trudging round
the town finding a bed for the night, a meal, the next drink, a bench
where they would be left in peace, is an object lesson in survival
technique.

Ten years on, Murdoch runs a PR business from their house in Ayr,
which is full of bedding plants waiting to fill hanging baskets. The
journey back started with 12 difficult months in the Cambridge
hostel, during which a job selling newspapers on a street corner was
a big step forward. They also went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
and found initial friendliness followed by a cold-shoulder treatment
following a relapse. Lilian also provoked anger with her
determination to question and discuss some of the principles laid
down in the Big Book – the AA bible.

While in the hostel, they started to examine why they had such a
problem with alcohol, and Lilian started to write the story of her
life. Gradually, she realised that her unhappy childhood in
Lochwinnoch was the root of many of her problems. Her father valued
respectability above everything else and her mother, who had been
orphaned and brought up by a resentful grandmother, was always
telling Lilian she was too fat. Early marriage and motherhood was not
the blissful escape she had imagined and she added her own
restrictions by dieting until she became anorexic. Then she
discovered that after a couple of drinks, she would allow herself to
eat normal meals.

There were many years of excessive dieting and problem drinking
between then and reaching the depths in Cambridge. The recovery
process for both her and Murdoch – whom she met through an alcohol
counselling service – entailed reading up on psychology and piecing
together their shattered selves.
At the end of it, they decided that years of AA meetings had
prevented them moving on rather than helped their recovery.

Now Murdoch says: "We can drink safely, if we choose to. It tends to
be a bottle of wine with a meal and we avoid the gin and the lager we
would drink on a bender."

Their book is partly Lilian's account of her early life and their
downfall and recovery in Cambridge, and part a critique of AA's
uncompromising philosophy. It will be published on May 31, just days
before today's 70th anniversary of the founding of the fellowship in
1935.

Their main criticism is that most services for people with alcohol
problems direct them to AA. They want a recognition that it does not
suit everybody and a much wider range of options ought to be
available.

As Murdoch says: "Alcoholics Anonymous and drug treatments can be
useful in that they give you a buffer zone, but we think they are
wrong because they are only treating the symptoms, not the problem.
We can only talk from personal experience. We are not saying we know
everything. All we can do is put our personal experience forward and
suggest the significance of it. We want to open up discussion. AA
stemmed from an evangelical group and at the time, 70 years ago, it
was great. If it was a normal, developing, progressive, organic
movement, open to new ideas and to change, it would be a marvellous
movement.

"Everyone's different, and if people want to stop drinking and go to
AA, that's fine. We want AA still to be there, but we also need a
recognition that we have moved on. The only things that are common to
everyone are the symptoms: we all have the shakes and we all get the
jitters."

The MacDonalds believe that AA has seriously impeded progress in the
treatment of alcoholism. They argue: "Ideas which would have proved
harmless in a small group, have, when promulgated by an international
organisation that has been accorded a near monopoly in the field of
alcohol treatment, served only to virtually halt any progress or
advancement of knowledge and understanding being made in that field
since 1935. Countless hundreds of thousands of sufferers from
alcoholism have been unnecessarily denied the opportunity of making a
real or, in our view, radical recovery."

They acknowledge the original good intentions: "It was enlightened
for its time. Back in 1935, people with alcohol problems ended up in
prisons or lunatic asylums, but it seems now that the lunatics have
taken over the asylum. The actual programme has not changed in 70
years," adds Murdoch.

Alcoholics Anonymous refuses to discuss the MacDonalds' claims. Its
Glasgow spokesman says: "Alcoholism is a disease. I have a mental
obsession with alcohol and a physical allergy to it."

Lilian suggests that if it is any sort of disease, it is a mental
one. "When you get taken into hospital, you don't go into a general
hospital, but a psychiatric one. The truth is staring everybody in
the face. You get people sitting in AA with their arms full of cuts
that they have inflicted on themselves."

Barry Jones, professor of psychology at Glasgow University, whose
specialist area is alcohol abuse, says: "It is recognised that there
are different types of problem drinkers and different treatments.
Many people who engage with the 12-step or AA model fail. Many do
well with cognitive behaviour therapy and some fail. The trick is to
match the right sort of problem drinker to the right sort of
treatment.

"If people say the AA programme does not allow them to understand the
reasons for their alcoholism, that is probably the case, but it is
also possible someone who is out of control finds that the best way
to control his drinking is to believe in a higher power.

Many people have difficulty believing the AA rhetoric that one drink
is a violation which will lead to uncontrolled drinking. Equally, to
believe problem drinking at the age of 35 is the result of childhood
experiences is probably not helpful, though it might be a reason for
early problems. For most people who drink a lot later in life, it is
nothing to do with childhood and there is a danger in that sort of
generalisation."

Dr Peter Rice, consultant psychiatrist for NHS Tayside, says: "There
are many different routes into alcohol problems and many different
routes out. For some people, particularly women, traumatic early
family experiences are a very important factor, but we also see many
people who had happy early lives and whose initial use of alcohol was
moderate, who also fall into alcoholism."

His advice to people interested in AA is to shop around, as meetings
vary widely.

"Phoenix in a Bottle" by Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald; Melrose Books,
£16.99.

www.alcoholicscandrinksafelyagain.com

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