From the UK Sunday Times 5 June 2005

Conquering the demon drink

For Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald, rejecting Alcoholics Anonymous's
message of abstention was the first step on the long road to recovery


When you see an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting portrayed in a film or
on television, the hero or heroine stands up and says: "My name's
Bill and I'm an alcoholic." Then it fades out to lush music and you
don't know what happens next. Well, we attended AA meetings on and
off for 20 or so years. We met at an AA meeting. It is pretty much
the only option available to people with a drink problem. We are
convinced that what happens after the music fades away does not help
everybody.

AA's programme starts from the premise that alcoholism is an
incurable illness, that alcoholics have a mental and physical allergy
to booze, and that they are different from others. Their solution is
to label you an alcoholic for life, browbeat you into accepting the
label and insist that you give up drinking — they call it staying
sober — for ever. It's not sobriety they demand, it's abstinence.

After decades spent trying and failing the AA way, it is plain to us
that alcoholism is not a disease and is not incurable. It's a
behavioural problem, a self-harming problem. We are no longer
alcoholics. We got to the root of why we drank to excess and then
rebuilt our lives. Now we can even enjoy a glass of wine with a meal.

Alcoholics Anonymous started in the 1930s as an evangelical, non-
denominational Christian sect. It says now that it's not a religious
organisation, yet out of the famous "12 steps", six mention God. The
Black Book — the bible of the AA movement — hasn't changed in 70
years. You are not allowed to say the book is wrong, or to question
it in any way. You may ask questions, but only as though you are
consulting the oracle. There are large group sessions devoted to
discussing how wonderful it is. You are never to stop reading and
rereading it. From the beginning, we both felt this was wrong. For
us, lifelong sobriety — the ultimate goal of AA members — is not
recovery. It's a damage limitation exercise.

There is no easy way to escape the clutches of the bottle. We met at
AA in Ayr, in 1993. Three years later we eloped. Our honeymoon was a
£5,000 whisky bender. We moved to Cambridge, where Murdoch planned to
start a PhD. But our landlady threw us out after a drunken binge and
we were reduced to begging on the streets. That was our lowest point,
living rough amid the glittering spires where Murdoch had been an
undergraduate; no money for food or booze, wondering where we could
go from there. One night two nurses found us huddled on a park bench.
They took pity on us, bought us a cup of tea and found us a place in
a hostel.

From there, we began rebuilding our lives. We started writing our
life stories, trying to figure out what was causing our self-
destructive drinking. Going back to our childhoods, tracing the roots
of my anorexia and Murdoch's difficult relationship with his cold,
distant father helped us to see why we had turned to the bottle. We
spent a year figuring it all out while selling newspapers, saving
money and planning a return to Ayr. We wanted to come back reasonably
respectfully, with our drinking under control.

We had to believe in ourselves, and in each other. We had no other
friends. All doors were closed to us, nobody wanted to know, and
that's a hell of a place to be. Murdoch still does not see his two
children from his first marriage. At this point I was still speaking
to my son and daughter, our only family ties.

It was Elaine, my daughter, who arranged for us to come back to Ayr.
We moved into a rented flat and took whatever work we could find:
door-to-door market research around the suburban fringes of Paisley
with no car, no shelter, no toilet.

Slowly, things fell into place. I got up one morning and said `Wow!'.
It was as if a veil had fallen from my eyes. At last I realised why I
had been behaving like this. We took on a jobshare with a small
charity, then gradually Murdoch resumed his career as a financial
journalist and PR man that had fallen by the wayside. At first he
wrote a column for the Ayrshire Post, then edited a new paper,
Scottish Recruitment. It wasn't grandly paid, but it was better to be
writing for newspapers than selling them. Our life together, which
had always been defined by drinking, was becoming normal at last. We
had to relearn how to mix with people. After years on the margins it
was very strange to be invited anywhere, to be socially included. To
be treated with a bit of respect.

Today we have a great relationship with my son, John, 44, and are
very close to Elaine, 39. She was wary the first time she saw us
drinking — the AA message is so strong — but when we explained what
we were doing, it made sense. She soon realised it was fine. It means
she can come down on a Friday night, bring a bottle of wine and relax
with us. She has been very supportive.

Now, after seven years of hard labour, we have finally published our
book. We really believe that our own struggle would have been so much
quicker, and less painful, if we could have read a book like it. At
the time, we did not know another soul who had been through what we
were going through.

It wasn't until we came through the other end that we discovered that
the first doubts about AA's methods were voiced by the addiction
expert Dr Stanton Peele as early as 1964. We were delighted when he
agreed to read our book and described it as "a wonderful love story
and a challenge to conventional wisdom about how people can recover
from drinking problems".

So far we have found 12 psychiatrists, psychologists or clinics in
America that agree with our theory that alcoholism is a behavioural
problem and that it is possible to recover and drink in a controlled
way. At the same time, however, law courts are, in many US states,
including compulsory AA sessions in the sentences for drink-related
offences.

Another thing that alarms us is the way the AA 12-step plan has crept
into the private sector. One of the only good things about AA is that
it is free to whomever wants to attend. But now private clinics are
piggybacking onto AA, taking the programme and selling it back at
£3,000 a week for a six-week course. And then the NHS, unable or
unwilling to deal with the whole problem of alcoholism, sends a
percentage of its patients on these six-week courses. Who pays for
this? Us. If AA works for you, if you want to give up drinking for
life, that's fine. We are not telling anyone what they should or
should not do. But we do want to start a debate and open up choices.

Phoenix in a Bottle, by Lilian and Murdoch MacDonald is published by
Melrose Books, £16.99

Lilian and Murdoch's website:
http://www.alcoholicscandrinksafelyagain.com

Read the original article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1506-1639433,00.html